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Located in downtown Brussels, Belgium, L’Archiduc is a hip, U-shaped Art Deco jazz bar with a dark history and a buzzer at the steel front door (which must be rung to gain entrance); opened in 1937, L’Archiduc was popular with Nazis during the occupation, though people do not talk about that much now, instead preferring to discuss the jazz ghosts who haunt the walls and famed 1929 piano at the center of room: Miles Davis, Django Reinhart, and Stan Brenders (icon of Belgian jazz, former owner of L’Archiduc); what sort of barflies would populate L’Archiduc at 4 a.m. on a random Thursday morning (while Scott Walker howls on the stereo), you may wonder; well, I will tell you: my old college friends, Shelly and Travis (who arrived that afternoon from Paris and London; Shelly is writing a book on the history of espionage in France; Travis slept with 17 women his freshman and sophomore years of college; walking back from a sushi restaurant one chilly night in October of our junior year, Travis confessed that he was gay, and had known since he was twelve years old; when I asked Travis why he’d kept it a secret for so long, he replied: “It was easier that way”), Francisco (a Chilean film projectionist who gave me an autographed copy of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”; the autograph belongs to Francisco, not Ms. Klein), Anique (who learned English while studying for a year in Canterbury, and subsequently has a British accent when she converses in English; most of Anique’s family, who are Polish, were killed during the Holocaust; Anique’s great-grandmother survived by starting a fire while making soup in one of the camp kitchens; she fled with six others during the commotion; Anique’s mother is a noted sexologist in Brussels; both Anique and her well-known mother see the same astrologist, religiously), Julie (who works with the deaf, and explained to me that American Sign Language is different than sign language used in Belgium; sign language used in Belgium is different than sign language used in France; I do not know if the Flemish have their own sign language; Julie is also a puppeteer at the famous marionette theater, Toone); there were others, but I will never know their names; these include the drunken, stumbling, elderly woman, who kept saying “I am from Maine” (with a Belgian accent), the flamboyant cripple with the V-neck Cable sweater and a cowboy hat who kissed everyone in the bar on the lips, the cool Moroccan who chain-smoked Gauloises by the piano, the Adidas-clad Japanese B-boy who nodded to the music with closed eyes, and the shy peroxide blonde who snuck over to the piano and began to clumsily, beautifully play “We Are the Champions”; Queen never sounded so fragile and dreamy; that pre-dawn moment—when everybody in the bar looked with tired eyes at the piano-playing girl, and we all wanted her to play well, to astound us, even if her fingers were not up to the task, and we clapped like lunatics when she self-consciously stopped mid-way through the song—made me feel both at home and grateful to be a tourist; believe me: at L’Archiduc, smoke still gets in your eyes.

~ by tinyfacts on November 18, 2008.

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Tags: 1929, 1937, Adidas, American Sign Language, Art Deco, bar, Belgian, Belgium, Brussels, Canterbury, Chile, Chilean, Django Reinhart, English, espionage, Europe, France, Gauloise, gay, Holocaust, jazz, L'Archiduc, London, Maine, Miles Davis, Naomi Klein, Nazi, Paris, Poland, Polish, Queen, Scott Walker, sexologist, sign language, smoke gets in your eyes, Stan Brenders, sushi, The Shock Doctrine, Toone, We Are The Champions