A More Detailed Take on White Night

I wrote this in my journal, and not my blog. This is why I should never be allowed to do things - any things; you name the thing, I will agree that I should not do it - in parallel tracks. My dream of one day being a railroad track? Dead. My aspiration towards one day being a parallelogram? Kaput. I can think of no other things that a parallel. Here are some words I wrote, for you, my secret friends:

France was fun, and uniformly hassle-free. The expected pitfalls – rude Paris waiters, long lines at museums, tedious political discussions with earnest British co-hostellers – all failed to materialize, and except for one miserably rainy night, the weather was unimpeachable. I had time to take a couple of long, aimless walks, as well as for extended visits to the Louvre and Musee D’Orsay, and a couple of nice cafes. I happened to be in town for Nuit Blanche, a four-year-old Paris street festival that brings pretentious, occasionally incomprehensible new art together with pot-smoking, wine-swilling French youth. In Paris, incidentally, it is impossible to be unemployed. Men are merely spending some time away from professional opportunities to give fuller attention to their awesome ponytails, while the women are taking a sabbatical to ride the metro and look wistfully at fellow passengers, advertisements, and the little metal poles they have to steady yourself on. In conclusion, France is the only place where the entire population is just shy of an actual job offer from being a classics professor at a small, Midwestern college with a horrible football team. C’est la vie boheme!

I think my favorite, and the most generally indicative, part of Nuit Blanche for me was the 15min. film being projected over and over again, from dusk ‘til dawn, onto the wall of the building opposite my hostel. The film - entitled The Dukes of (Industrial Age Misogyny) Hazzard Ride Again!!1[sic]!! – was silent and consisted entirely of a 30ish woman in a long-sleeved mesh shirt and panties running away from the camera man through a power plant. She was running in slow motion, so you know right off that the cameraman has an early advantage, an advantage he entirely squanders by taking a number of breaks to film close-ups, split-screens, and shots that seem to be shot through a great deal of humidity, which I imagine would prove hazardous to the efficacy of the power plant if it wasn’t some sort of special effect. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. In case you were wondering, yes, all of the special effects shots were of random pieces of machinery in the power plant.

Also there was woman lying on top of some sort of big, cylindrical power supply device, dead, half wrapped up in a body bag, with a blood-pressure cuff attached. A no-less than two minute shot was devoted to the metrics on this cuff. For the record: Systole: 0. Asystole: 0. Dead!

SPOILER ALERT!

The film ends with the woman – the mesh shirt and panties one from the opening acts - doing standing-up ab work-outs of some sort in front of the camera. There is a cycle of close-ups of her abs, her eyes and her lips. In the penultimate cycle, we see a drop of blood run from the sad young lady’s lips. Bummer!

The best part, and maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, is that the whoever was in charge of Nuit Blanche had shut down an entire street to allow as many people as possible to sit, in the middle of the street, drinking French bier, and watch cycle after cycle after cycle of this masterpiece.


Nuit Blanche (Night of Self-Loathing) is set up as a series of walks through the center and innermost outskirts of Paris, each walk leading from one free, open-all-night installation or museum exhibit to another, to another, to another. Many, many cafés and stands are open all night, as well as the Paris metro system. It’s a pretty neat idea, especially as a lot of corporate sponsorship has started to flow in – the festival costs each Parisian taxpayer the price of half a cup of coffee (espresso, cappuccino, or mocha?), according to an official brochure I was handed by a young gentleman at Chaletet Des Halles. The gentleman then tried to sell me some grass.

Around 4am things started to get a little iffy on the not-getting-a-bottle-thrown-at-your-head front, as all the college professor types returned to their underdecorated, over-sculptured flats and drunk, angry Paris youth took control. I saw a fight break out between a guy in a van and a guy specializing in drunkenly pulling people out of vans and punching them – guess who one. Making things a little more dangerous was the apparent absence of police officers for the whole affair – there were a bunch of what appeared to be privately hired security people, but by the time things got rowdy, they were clearly stretched beyond their capacity.

I had a train to catch at 8 something in the morning, so I skedaddled to my hostel and read in a common area until the sun came up, which was fun, as I was occasionally harassed by members of the Swiss high school group who were taking up much of the hostel, all of whom cycled through four or five languages in which to ask me for a cigarette before settling in English. One of these guys passed out on the floor near my table while waiting for his friend to use the vending machine – his friend decided to leave him there, which was a move I tacitly endorsed. A few minutes later the security guard came by and told me, in French, that I was going to have to do something with my friend. I told him he was mistaken, that my only friend was adventure (I couldn't tell him about you, my secret friends, for obvious reasons), and we shared a good laugh. Then he showed me his cellphone's phonebook, to indicate that he had many, many friends. C'est la vie.