Nuite blanche Paris with the Los Carpinteros

We are now in the oh-my-heavy-tummy moment of the day—pre-café crème, after too many dinners that could not be missed last night, whether out of business, good education, or sheer debauchery. It all opened last night for one extravagant and costly evening. If one was not wearing high-heeled shoes, one could have potentially rented a green-and-white bike and cycled all around town to see what there was to see—which constituted hundreds of art pieces. There were ladders suspended in the sky, James Turrell’s blue-lit buildings (mistaken for cheesy restaurants), and churches imposed upon with theatrical lighting, which in turn triggered all kinds of surprisingly religious candle-lighting responses from the visiting New Yorker atheists. The piece Carpenters presented at Nuit Blanche was pretty lush—The Transportable City—a cluster of large tents shaped like buildings from Havana, lit from the inside. We had been setting it up for the last two days, through drizzle and freeze-your-cookies-off winds, in a part of town called Bercy. The installation will probably remain alive for part of today, though I’m not sure if it will last into the evening or if the winds will have already taken it away. The work served as a hideout from the rain for the New Yorkers during their visits and provided plenty of hide-and-seek joviality for kids, who charged in to open all the zips and safety pins of the Cuban cloth housing. For our little troop—the Cuban artists responsible for the work Los Carpinteros, and myself—Nuit Blanche was a matter of dinner after dinner. The aperitivo has yet to be invented in Paris—just terrine! We were invited by the Maire de Paris to Hôtel de Ville, then to a dinner next to the Pompidou Centre, hosted by French gallerists. A dinner with the owners of Yves Saint Laurent. And then we were pounced upon with a surprise dinner by the New York gallerists, Mr. and Mrs. Sean Kelly. It would have been rude to refuse any of them, so we decided to try attending all the events, taking a bite from every plate. Paris was swamped with intellectual invaders, all ravenous from cycling for miles. Finding a table without a booking was impossible. Having been turned away from several overpacked restaurants, the New Yorkers only became more determined to find a seat and watch us artists eat. The only restaurant with a free table happened to be the same one where we had a dinner reservation later in the evening with the French gallery. Assuming this would allow us to attend both dinners smoothly, we sat down. However, the French waiters were pissed off at us for speaking English in France, and the New Yorkers were offended by the fact that money could not buy politeness. So, to spite the waiters, the Americans ordered hamburgers, and to spite the Americans, the waiters produced the hamburgers two hours late. By the time the food arrived, so did the French gallerists, who were waiting for us to order. Rather than making excuses or disappointing anyone, Los Carpinteros and I ended up having two dinners at the same restaurant at the same time—eating with the New Yorkers upstairs and with the French downstairs. We made too many excuses to go to the bathroom, sneaking up and down the stairs to juggle two conversations and two meals accordingly. It was like a slapstick comedy and ended deep into the night, long past midnight. However messy the overfeeding, it produced results—discussions regarding The Transportable City's acceptance onto a Florentine square are taking a positive turn. To avoid more dinners, in a few hours, we are heading by train to a lonely studio in the midst of the French countryside.