October 05, 2007

Oh hey! Guess what? Laura and I left the puppy at home for an evening and went down to Nuit Blanche Saturday night. We kinda chose to forget what an awful mindfuck of an evening that turned out to be, but this week the Globe and Mail reminded us that — yes! Toronto is a shithole of pretension and bad taste.

The crowds had tripled, the art had dwindled. Everybody was stuck in traffic human or vehicular, the whole night. The city was in total immobile gridlock. And where was the art? Every now and then, you’d pass a gallery that was open and it would be so jammed with people you’d be exhausted just contemplating working your way in. (link)

We biked around the city so we had an easy time getting around, but man, was the experience ever disappointing. Compared to the orgiastic joy of the busker festival we went to in Montreal this summer, Toronto’s Nuit Blanche was meaningless and dehumanizing. The busker festival felt immersing and welcoming — a joyful celebration of performance art and community; Nuit Blanche, on the other hand, felt isolating, overcrowded, commercialistic, and full of artistic pretension (but no actual art).

After three hours of walking aimlessly through packed streets and finding nothing to hold our attention, we rode our bikes to the CN Tower at midnight and climbed above the city. From the top of the tower the city looked quiet and endless. Lights extended all the way past the horizon, the ones far in the distance wavering maddly. There was barely anybody around, so we stared at the lights for hours, drank sugary water, and giggled.

The CN Tower, though a tourist trap by day, was the only redeeming point of the night.