Nuit Blanch
02/10/05 16:39 Filed in: Kids
I didn't
really manage to fathom what Paris Nuit Blanche is
all about, but it seems to be an excuse for all night
concerts and keeping some of the cheaper galleries
open all night.
The evening was like Cuba St Carnival, but less focused, and it's not as if Wellington would let anyone have an event that went all night, because we don't do that stuff in small provincial villages.
There were crappy buskers, like the puppet master on stilts jerking a 'puppet' accordion player totally out of time.
Crowds of youths hung around pissing in the street and shouting. Alcohol was everywhere. Teenies were getting smashed not on alcopops and beer, but on elegantly bottled French red wine.
I went to Jardin Les Halles and watched this Kraftwerk-meets-Moby DJ belt out some techno Brasilian multi-media that had the throng jigging. A spastic hippy percussionist woman played bongos, shakers, clackers and all manner of drums without ever really syncing to the song. She jived around and worked the audience like a superstar, which she wasn't. Every now and then a guest drummer would come out and wack a few beats, which only highlighted how bad the hippy was. Then a slender woman in a raincoat stood in the centre of the stage with a microphone, and I thought she was about to sing. But, no, she vocalised silently into the mic. Then she started walking AND talking, so clearly she worked in TV. It was a reporter doing a piece to cam right in the middle of the stage right in the middle of a song. And the cameraman didn't like it so he made her do it again. And again. Then he called up a kreig light to shine on her face and she kept walking around the stage recording her piece, and it only took maybe fifteen minutes while the stage show went on behind them.
Thumping base that buzzes on the soles of your feet and shakes your spine. In the rising cool night air, heavy with doobies, nearly naked dancers - men and women - would come out on stage and wiggle themselves pleasingly in chorus lines or alone for a minute or two, then disappear forever.
Elsewhere a laser radiated from a tent onto the side of an apartment block, illuminating an inexplicable series of photo slides, to the sound of techno-whale grunts.
I missed the metro home and spent ages at taxi stands without any luck. There were special night buses, but no one seemed to know which ones left from where or how often they left. I heard you could get info and buses at St Lazare. It took nearly an hour to walk there past women waiting in doorways and along streets stinking like urinals, trying to flag a taxi the whole way. The first time I've felt unsafe in Paris. St Lazare at 2am was like the New Orleans stadium, the hull of slave ship, only drunker with no kids or actual death. Crowds surged toward buses, which were overflowing. They were so stuffed full, people had their faces squeezed up against windows and doors. There were long queues just to see the information signs about which bus went where, and desperation at the actual information booth. Panicked crowds of twenty or thirty would suddenly run together to reach departing buses with the losers falling beneath their feet. I decided it would be easier to walk.
I tried standing outside flash hotels to get a cab, with no luck until the Paris Hilton - I was trying to think why that sounded familiar -- when a big Mercedes taxi swished up and carried me home. It would only have been forty minutes walk from there anyway, but I was tired and sore and it was after 3am.
The evening was like Cuba St Carnival, but less focused, and it's not as if Wellington would let anyone have an event that went all night, because we don't do that stuff in small provincial villages.
There were crappy buskers, like the puppet master on stilts jerking a 'puppet' accordion player totally out of time.
Crowds of youths hung around pissing in the street and shouting. Alcohol was everywhere. Teenies were getting smashed not on alcopops and beer, but on elegantly bottled French red wine.
I went to Jardin Les Halles and watched this Kraftwerk-meets-Moby DJ belt out some techno Brasilian multi-media that had the throng jigging. A spastic hippy percussionist woman played bongos, shakers, clackers and all manner of drums without ever really syncing to the song. She jived around and worked the audience like a superstar, which she wasn't. Every now and then a guest drummer would come out and wack a few beats, which only highlighted how bad the hippy was. Then a slender woman in a raincoat stood in the centre of the stage with a microphone, and I thought she was about to sing. But, no, she vocalised silently into the mic. Then she started walking AND talking, so clearly she worked in TV. It was a reporter doing a piece to cam right in the middle of the stage right in the middle of a song. And the cameraman didn't like it so he made her do it again. And again. Then he called up a kreig light to shine on her face and she kept walking around the stage recording her piece, and it only took maybe fifteen minutes while the stage show went on behind them.
Thumping base that buzzes on the soles of your feet and shakes your spine. In the rising cool night air, heavy with doobies, nearly naked dancers - men and women - would come out on stage and wiggle themselves pleasingly in chorus lines or alone for a minute or two, then disappear forever.
Elsewhere a laser radiated from a tent onto the side of an apartment block, illuminating an inexplicable series of photo slides, to the sound of techno-whale grunts.
I missed the metro home and spent ages at taxi stands without any luck. There were special night buses, but no one seemed to know which ones left from where or how often they left. I heard you could get info and buses at St Lazare. It took nearly an hour to walk there past women waiting in doorways and along streets stinking like urinals, trying to flag a taxi the whole way. The first time I've felt unsafe in Paris. St Lazare at 2am was like the New Orleans stadium, the hull of slave ship, only drunker with no kids or actual death. Crowds surged toward buses, which were overflowing. They were so stuffed full, people had their faces squeezed up against windows and doors. There were long queues just to see the information signs about which bus went where, and desperation at the actual information booth. Panicked crowds of twenty or thirty would suddenly run together to reach departing buses with the losers falling beneath their feet. I decided it would be easier to walk.
I tried standing outside flash hotels to get a cab, with no luck until the Paris Hilton - I was trying to think why that sounded familiar -- when a big Mercedes taxi swished up and carried me home. It would only have been forty minutes walk from there anyway, but I was tired and sore and it was after 3am.
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