the corner office

I'm a hermit these days, meeting up with friends hardly ever happens, and clubbing is largely a thing of the past for me. The Beloved scheduled an outing for us, though, at the Red Room with P and L - a new alternative club with an 'upmarket' flair, according to the flyers.

Rather decent. I was rather into the goth-industrial scene in my lesser 20's, and my happiest memories are of gritty clubs in the inner city, real urban jungle stuff. Clubs in basements, castle-like monoliths, the 3rd floor of an abandoned office building, abandoned warehouses, hell, even the old Joburg gas works. Places with atmosphere, goths and punks and metalheads and rivetheads and sundry social debris all being the kinds of people our parents warned us about. So I've always been sceptical of this whole 'northern suburbs alternative clubbing' thing. I never quite got how people in 2-grand outfits could be taken seriously in any meaningful outside-the-box societal context. Not that I feel too strongly about taking any particular stands against society for longer than a day or two at a time, necessarily, but when you are 'rebellious' you do not hang out in upmarket clubs in the 'burbs. It's just not right.

But I'm mellowing with age, and the Red Room impressed me after all. The usual 'niteclub' off the foyer of some little hotel. This time round, a rather obscure place the far side of Honeydew, the sort of place that was a 'country inn' until urban sprawl caught up with it (to me, anything outside the circle highway in Joburg is still the 'country', but it's not really true anymore.) I digress...

The club is completely covered in red carpet (hence the name), plenty of seating, busy but not crowded. Also, and this is a good thing -- none of the more hardcore than thou attitude that's infested goth/industrial/alternative clubs in the last few years. A good mix of alternative music, Indie, and 80's classics. Jeez, I danced for the first time in (well, years, probably). One doesn't turn down the opportunity to shuffle about to the Cramps or New Model Army these days...

The mix of people mirrored that, and (this is what surprised me), most of the folks seemed to be late 20-somethings, early 30-somethings. Less angst, less BS and pretension, and more people gettin' down and enjoying themselves. It's slated as the new 'Le Club' (Le Club was an inner city legend, with many personal fond memories for me), so if I'm too old and the world's too different to head into Joburg City Centre to git down, then I suppose the Red Room's the place to go.

We ended off the evening with a Bimbos raid, the only fast-food chain that's 24/7 in Joburg. Of course, being the only place open at 3 in the morning, and most people wanting munchies at that time of the morning not really caring about the quality of what they're buying... the food can be a gamble.