It's the morning (er, afternoon) after Nuit Blanche. 

For the first time in five years I managed to make it through the night. Carried over the threshold of sleep at 3AM by Daniel Lanois' feedback-soaked guitar riffs, I am now officially hard core.

My feet aren't talking to me, though. After more than 12 hours of walking around the city with a twenty pound backpack full of camera gear, it feels like they've been used to drive posts into holes. 

But that's okay. While I still have plenty of things to say about the event, this year I didn't leave with any regrets. I travelled fast, solo or duo; started in the way-out areas that are hard to reach, wore my most comfortable shoes (look ma, no blisters) and generally followed all of my own advice to good effect for once. The end result was that I got to see pretty much everything that I wanted to see, and while plenty of the projects were the usual disappointing or questionable stuff, the few that shone through more than made up for the shortcomings.

My shortlist of the bests this year:

Best all nighter: Later that night at the Drive-in with Daniel Lanois. Although there was a little repetition in the wee hours of the morning, come on... who can really complain about what basically amounts to a twelve hour show from someone with this level of talent? (To which I must add, the performers who accompanied him were fantastic. So thanks to his son Bob for talking him into it.)

As predicted, it was possible to see a palpable effect-- just as it was possible, later in the evening, to get close enough to the performance pit to draw the shiteye from security. (And how many concerts can you walk to the front and shoot without a press pass?)

One caveat: splitting the sound feed so that different channels went to different speakers was an interesting idea... however meant that the speaker balance in certain parts of NPS was brutally loud. Concrete surfaces do not fine sounding boards make. Anyone sitting on the south side of the reflecting pond or walking past the massive echo channel at the eastern entrance to NPS likely sustained hearing damage from the raw decibels reflected.

And therefore you must suffer to attain it?Best way to keep warm: standing around the ring at Flux & Fire in the parking lot of Lamport Stadium. A collaborative effort from PR warrior Christine Irving and the makers at Site3 coLaboratory in Toronto. Sensors on a small central platform allowed soloists or pairs to control bursts of fire from a ring of 16 gas jets. (Often with such force that the pilot lights blew out. Watching guys run around with bbq lighters to restart these every few minutes was amusing.)

Although the maximum number of users at a time was two, not a family or group of 4 kids as previously advertised (doubtless due to safety reasons), it was physically heart-warming to see parent/child duos get up there and play.

"Daddy! We made fire!"Best use of a vehicle: Auto Lamp by Kim Adams. I wish every vehicle on a rotating dais at an auto show was this cool. (It would make a good playa vehicle too: lots of ventilation...)

Best way to scare children and adults alike: Coulrophobia by Max Streicher, a trio of distorted inflatable clown heads made from recycled billboards, jammed into an alley between buildings on Yonge.

Welcome to my nightmare. No, not the clowns.NB regulars will note that the event always features one giant inflatable thing each year: pills, a locust, a giant bunny, a massive rotating blue colon... all interesting or fun, but few evoke the often claustrophobic madness of city life and Nuit Blanche like this trio of distorted nightmares, jammed into an alleyway off a street jammed with people.

Look behind youuuBest installation: Aurora by experimental architect Philip Beesley and collaborators. Hands down the best conceptual installation this year. Science, technology and art all rolled into one cutting edge biomechanical package... and by locals no less. I'm happy that we ship art of this caliber overseas to indirectly represent Canada... but could we have more art of this level at Nuit Blanche too please?

Overheard beneath the feelers: "It's like the soul tree from Avatar is channeling Darth Vader!"Most interactive: Naught Hear by Gareth Brennan, Kevin Tweedy, Graham O'Brien, Jonathan McGregor and Craig Seeley. I'm listing them all out because they deserve credit for this construction yet some reason I can't find their project on the Nuit Blanche website. A late addition with a clever play on words? (Update: Lead designer Kevin Tweedy tells me that this was a secret project funded by one of NB's corporate sponsors.) People had a great time with this octopod composed of voice tubes-- whispering secrets to or having conversations with random others across the circle. This project definitely broke the ice and brought a lot of strangers onto the same wavelength. One little boy around eight years of age even started loudly demanding girls' phone numbers. 

And the boo urns awards go out to:

Biggest waste of line: Interactive Landscape Dune in Lower Bay Station. "Interactive landscape of light"-- really? Interactive, yes. (You had to clap, bash or smack the spines to get the lights to react.) Landscape, no. More like three bristling beds of plastic-stemmed lights along one side of a giant subway platform. A footprint of maybe nine square meters-- landscape only in the imagination of a miniature train conductor or prisoner in a generous cell. We waited an hour in the cold in a line for that? Anticlimactic. But hey, we got a free subway ride out the other end of it.

Most likely to piss off the people who have the unfortunate job of cleaning up after it: Bus Stops.

BUS HOUSE... BUSH E... sure, it makes sense at 3am, but pity the clean up guy come morning...Biggest "PASS!": Wait Until You See This on Yonge Street. A rat-maze-framed line up to stand ironically waiting to go through a curtain to peek through another curtain and to maybe, just maybe, see something worth waiting in line for? Uh, no. If I have to waste time in line, I'll take the non-ironic queues.

Fire art. The real fire kind. Warning, flaming of another sort followsBiggest GMTFO moment: The Anglican Church on Huron Street that had nothing but religious art in it. The transcendental fire theme promised was nothing but an allegory for the holy kind. I'm sure we weren't the only night-weary travellers sucked into the sunday school at the rear for cookies and coffee and bland friendly chat. (And me with a hoodie that said 666 on the front. "I wonder if they have kool-aid." BAHAHA.)

Pic unrelated. NO REALLY LOOK BEHIND YOU.Some general observations and suggestions for the future.

Good: As an idea, the Nuit Blanche app showing "hot spots" was useful. (Also amusingly ironic. At five AM the hottest spot was Hart House, a bore zone in previous years. But that's what nekkid door greeters on campus will do for you, folks. "Art? Who cares, they've got beer and titties! Let's go!")

Bad: the same app crashed frequently and showed inaccurate location info.

Good: Following the Renegade Parade via its twitter feed... until the Parade got shut down.

Bad: the official Nuit Blanche twitter feed spamming my inbox with hundreds of texts worth of repetitive promotional blurbs recycled wholesale from the website and facebook page. SnnuitblancheTO... say something original, something useful or just #stfu.

Good: better access to late night food. (And I mean real food, not novelty donuts or leaden street poutine.)

Bad: the accompanying drifts of litter; bottles and garbage piled high on garbage cans; thousands of flyers and billets on the streets. I know I've said this before, but Toronto... you're a disgusting lazy slob.

Good: letting the Flux & Fire crew operate a beer tent type area alongside the fire installation, with beer provided courtesy of a steamy local brewery and all proceeds to the project. (Gotta pay for 12 hours worth of propane bursts somehow...)

Bad idea: letting corporate standalone "projects" infiltrate. Please, take your CRUZE and GE Philips pseudo installations and stick them where the ultraviolet don't shine. (If you could recycle all the AMP can litter too that would be great. mmmk.)

1850 by Sandra Rechico. Irradiating our faces on the ultraviolet beach.Good: Improved subway service. Thank you TTC.

Bad: Construction on King E meant no streetcar service across towards the Distillery. It wasn't announced or mentioned; most travellers on that vector found out about it the hard way. It probably also cramped the attendance for the night for that corner of the zones.

Good: the street closures. Bad: the street drunkards.Good: closing Yonge Street. More room to dodge the puddles of vomit that way.

Bad: making outlying community hubs smaller and reducing the number of projects in certain areas... most notably Trinity Bellwoods and Liberty Village, both of which were much better hubs last year and during Nuits prior. Liberty Village in particular has plenty of room for more projects and is served by more reliable TTC service via the Exhibition or King West streetcars. (Both of which were more reliable than Queen West streetcars, which I would not even consider for transportation during the peak hours of Nuit Blanche.) This year Liberty Village had only a handful of projects and so was nowhere near as lively as last year... pity, since it is a great area for a late night art crawl overall. Either cut off the remote areas and centralize projects completely, or make active and viable hubs like past years please.

Arty Gras?

On a personal note, I won't waste time again hitting Queen Street West unless something really promising or large-scale is set up there. Other than Janet Morton's impressive recovering of the Beatrice Lille building in Femmebomb (2007), I can't think of a single year that Queen West has lived up to its art-scene hype. Galleries use NB as an excuse to stay open all night; locals (and non) use it as an excuse for a street party.  There are some good pieces hanging in the windows and on the walls of some of these galleries (not to mention stapled to the lamp-posts and hoardings and in the alleys nearby)-- but the simple fact is that I can check these out on any adjacent day of the year. Sad to say Queen West is permanently off my list of places to spend Nuit Blanche time.

Poop couture...Oh and did I mention that the annual roundup of flushable couture in the HBC display window -- and I mean frocks literally made of bumfluff-- sadly upstaged a lot of the stuff I saw last night?

Ennui Blanche

In the wee hours, when consciousness folds down to a few thin layers, what Nuit Blanche reduces to is this:

Multiple stoners doing interpretive dance moves to crunchy (nigh undanceable) Neil Young tracks at 4am in Nathan Philips Square.

A cold wind tearing down signage and chasing out performers at the Distillery and portlands. 

A steady ache in the feet and lower back - mitigated only by the distractions of good company and questionable art.

It's quite possible that much of my ennui has more to do with Toronto (too many people in the form of packs of fricking slobs) than with Nuit Blanche itself. After all, it's a free event. So did I get my money's worth?

Yes indeedy...

A full set of images from Nuit Blanche 2010 can be found here.