La Nuit Blanche

La Nuit Blanche : an annual celebration of the arts and culture, and a closing more or less of the summer season. A nuit blanche, much like a noche en blanco (Spanish) or notte bianca (Italian) is an all-nighter, roughly translated, but is more of a public event. Last year I went to a notte bianca at the Università di Pisa during the student protests when they’d taken over some of the university buildings. One of my friends in Pisa who lives in Madrid just wrote to me about his city’s Noche en Blanco (a cultural event). This time, I got a French sampling as many restaurants, stores, and museums stayed open either all night or much later than usual from Saturday, October 3 into Sunday, October 4. The streets were filled with people, more predominantly young (and drunk) as the night progressed. My friends and I set out with a booklet describing all the arts and cultural events happening that night, but wound up spending the evening wandering (or «flâner-ing») around. (Flâner is a French verb which was the mot-du-semestre, word-of-the-semester, in my Harvard French course this past spring. It means to wander about, generally in a city, just observing and enjoying the setting with little purpose. The English, being more productive, never bothered to create an equivalent word for this.)

My French evening began at a restaurant in the Latin Quarter where I had a very good, typically French three course meal, starting with my chèvre chaud (warm goat cheese) salad (and a typically French bottle of beaujolais wine for the table). From here, I braved the cuisses de grenouille, frog legs, to discover that they a. are remarkably good, and b. actually do taste like chicken! I finished the meal off with some profiteroles in an exquisite dark chocolate sauce-- this coming from a person who’s not unusually fond of chocolate, thus I assure you it was quite good-- and a café to help carry me through the night.

We proceeded to wander about, frustrated by the extraordinary length of the lines everywhere we went. We watched some unusual, "artsy" outdoor films projected onto various buildings as we wandered through downtown Paris. Just before 1am, we spotted people walking in our direction with ice cream cones in which the ice cream was served in a flower-like presentation. At a run down the cobblestone streets in my heeled boots (which carried me well through the night, I’ll have you know! Little sacrifice for the fashion this time...), I just slipped under the half-closed door, followed closely by Sunita, Koyel (two MIT ‘09s in Paris), and Declan (an Irish guy in my PhD program). Dominic (a South African in my PhD program), who dined with us and spent the earlier part of the evening out in Paris, decided to call it a night shortly before the mad glace dash. Glace, by the way, means ice cream. As does helado (Spanish) and gelato (Italian, duh.) While we’re at it, I’ve been studying a bit of German nightly as of late, so there’s also Eiscreme. That should take you around most of Western Europe. Essential vocab here.

Back to the streets of Paris: our wanderings soon took us to l’Église Saint-Eustache, a church whose chairs had all been stacked on its side wings to allow people to lounge about across the floor and watch the modern art presentation which, in this church, was a giant video loop of an international arrivals gate. The interpretation was that it was supposed to be a sort of representation of the gates of heaven, which was actually quite creative, I thought. It also held extra significance for me viewing it as a foreigner myself. (It still has yet to fully sink in that I am the outsider in my world now, probably because most of my friends are foreigners and native English speakers here.) The French are really into this blending of the old and new arts, like placing a giant video screen above a beautiful altar in a Gothic church and using a modern media and everyday people and events to represent a religious theme. Looking around me to notice a gay couple lying arm in arm nearby on the floor of a Catholic church to appreciate the modern art was a very interesting scene, one I doubt you’d find many places outside of Paris. However, I would have to say that overall, this presentation was very tasteful, thought inspiring, and one of the better results of the regular French effort to meld modern and traditional arts and culture.

As the night wore on, we stopped for drinks and wandered through the Cluny museum. We ultimately made it back to the Luxembourg Gardens which were, at last, without a killer wait for entrance. Inside, a several story high disco ball was set up «to give the people of Paris a starry night.» I absolutely loved just the French-ness of that logic! Much like Paris-plage (translation: Paris-beach)-- an annual summer event from mid-July through mid-August when the city of Paris carts in tons of sand to build numerous sand-boxes along the Seine, complete with beach chairs and boardwalk stands, to bring the beach to the people of Paris who can’t afford to get a vacation out to a real beach-- on la Nuit Blanche, the city of Paris figured that even if there is a wretched amount of light pollution in Paris, adding to it in a certain, regular pattern (relying particularly on the standard cloud cover) through the world's largest disco ball (well, actually, I have no idea how big the world's largest disco ball actually is), they might create the illusion of a starry night sky. So this is where my tax money is going to go...

Finally, we found the church whose Nuit Blanche exposition made the night entirely worth the sleep deprivation: In Saint Severin, a ring of speakers set up across the center of the church (whose floor had also been cleared of all its seats). From each speaker came only one or a few voices which all joined together to form an incredible, ethereal harmony as they sang Gregorian chants. My friends and I all lie down in the center of the ring of speakers and listened, entranced. We let the speakers run through the full loop several times. The effect was phenomenal, more moving, haunting, powerful than anything any of us had experienced for quite some time. I was dying to know just what our, and our fellow listeners, brain activity looked like during the experience. I don’t think we quite know enough about brain waves and general patterns of activity to really gain much knowledge from the scans, but as a simple matter of curiosity I’d love to know how the brain’s response to that musical experience compares to its response to other powerful, pleasurable experiences. How much of the effect was due to the unique quality of the human voice or the setting within such a lovely, beautiful, old church? Would the effect be equal with synthesized music? With string or brass instruments? In a setting other than a church or religious environment?

Soon enough, the boulangeries (bakeries) began opening for another business day and, as the clock approached 7am, la Nuit Blanche drew to a close. It was a lovely Saturday and, mirroring most of my experiences in Paris, involved much wandering, a bit of frustration and, on the brink of throwing up one’s arms in surrender to the city, a discovery of something absolutely wonderful and most satisfactory, though not (as it never is) precisely--or at all-- what had initially been sought after.

Crawling into bed as the sun’s rays began peeking in from behind my blinds (the sun rises quite late here), I’d have to say that I most thoroughly enjoyed my first Nuit Blanche and the company with which it was spent. Here’s to Paris and the next four years!