Nothing Short of Brilliant...

Dearest Friends,

This brilliant video is called "Le Flâneur" and I found it while burrowing into The Rabbit Hole Called Pinterest yesterday.  I know I am very late to the party, but it is so very addictive, isn't it?  However, I do find it very inspiring as well and find that more people are finding their ways to my shops!

Nonetheless, let me clear my head of Pinterest Fog for a minute!  The video is by a very talented young man named Luke Shepard, a student at The American University of Paris.  I watched the video a few times (We also LOVE the music of The xx and his images are perfectly timed to it!).  I was amazed to read that the video is composed entirely of photographs!  I also saw that he has a Kickstarter project where he is raising money to make another film, only this time to include other monuments in Europe, also filmed at night.  My friends here at The Tearoom know that I do love the night-time and when Mr. V and I visited Paris, we kept a very strange schedule indeed whereby we arose late in the morning and were some of the last to have our breakfast in the little breakfast room in our hotel (we hope we did not annoy our very sweet hostess too, too much...she was so very nice!).  We walked around the city for a lot of the day, but in the afternoon, we would come back to the hotel and have a long nap.  We would then arise again, have a late dinner and walk the streets until midnight...one o'clock...after...  Maybe because we lived in Washington at the time, we were always very aware of our surroundings, but I will tell you that we felt much more at ease walking in Paris at night that we did in DC.  We were enchanted by Paris after dark and I feel that Mr. Shepard perfectly captures much of what we saw and how we saw it.

Won't you please consider checking into his Kickstarter site and making a contribution to what I am sure will be another beautiful film?

ow.ly/dneLE

Luke Shepard

The Flâneur

If you are unable to make a contribution (life is so hard for so many at this time, Mr. V and myself included), won't you please help by chatting about his video on your blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Pinterest or just by sharing it with your friends?

In the great synchronicity of life, it no longer surprises me when similar references to many things stack up, one on the other, coming from random places and planting themselves at my doorstep.  Only yesterday, I finished reading "The Flâneur" by Edmund White.  On the dustjacket, he says "A flâneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure..."

Mr. Shepard and Mr. White have given us definitive examples of what it is like to just wander and be open to the grand surprises that await us in Paris, and in fact, everywhere...