Nuit Blanche

I went into Paris on Saturday with a bunch of friends from school for "Nuite Blanche," a big contemporary arts festival and general party in Paris. We started at the Hotel de Ville because that is where they were handing out maps. If I had been flying solo I probably would have missed this minor detail and blundered around in ignorance all night, but there were females along so that hazard was avoided.

The neon squiggles on the Hotel de Ville (City Hall) are the words "Love Differences" in a bunch of different languages. When I was on that bridge in the picture I turned back towards where I was standing as I took that picture, and got this picture:

Okay, so not exactly that picture. I took two pictures, mushed them together, and edited them to death for 15 minutes. It was already dark at that point so my camera was having a hard time. The picture is slightly brighter than what I saw in real life and also less pretty. And it is more blue because I forgot to change the white balance before I took the picture. Rats.

Anyway, we got our maps and boldly went were lots and lots of people had been before and many more would be after us. The first exhibit scared me at first because it there were guards at the door and the people going in looked like the seriously artsy type. I, on the other hand, was in jeans and an EP 700 Club shirt.

We entered the room and, sure enough, there were serious-looking people milling around and pondering some black silhouettes on the wall. Then I saw that the silhouettes were moving! This greatly increased my interest in the spectacle, whatever it might be. When I finally got into good gawking position, I realized that there was a camera hidden somewhere in the front of the room that was filming the people in the room. But not constantly. It would film for a couple of seconds in color, then freeze one second of movement in place and turn that one second of film into black and white while it continued to film the action going on. The result was multiple layers of action frozen in time. And if you moved around a little, you would soon see four or five versions of yourself on the wall.

The people were slowly milling and observing their artsy selves on the screen when this bozo started doing crazy antics.

My friends joined in too, and the artsy people even managed to crack a smile.

That was definitely the coolest thing we saw all night. After that we saw some decapitated metal dinosaurs that got salvaged from an abandoned amusement park and several hundred alarm clocks stacked on shelves, all set for 7 A.M. We also saw a series of short videos of people who have immigrated either to France or Germany. Each one was asked to share one thing they brought with them from their homeland. It was really interesting, especially the guy who demonstrated how to make his amazing anti-hemorrhoid medicine. He showed us the water bottle of the stuff that he keeps on hand and promised us that if we drank it too we would never have hemorrhoid problems again! In all seriousness, it was very interesting to see the things that people found important. As a foreigner myself, I can identify.

We got home at about 11:30, which is much more reasonable than average. Nuit Blanche gets done at 7 A.M. The problem is that the RER doesn't run between midnight and 5 A.M. and we had no interesting in being out that late! All in all, a very memorable evening.