Exploring chaos and spectacle, designed events and disaster, celebration and siege.
7.4.08:
Or at least, that’s what it felt like, late last night, down on the waterfront, Brooklyn Bridge, with thousands of others, running, milling, surging. But with courteously neat umbrellas, mind you!
Police everywhere. Flashing emergency vehicles. War-like conflagrations.
Raining, slicked streets, mist and smoke, big crowds…c h a o s !
Monsters exploding powerlines…
Just like JJ Abram‘s (tim.girvin.com/jj-abrams ) NYC disaster film Cloverfield (http://blog.girvin.com/transformer-virus) | (only now, part 2). (original Cloverfield viral trailer story)
Hand held, the fourth, NYC, 10.00pm, South Seaport, the Brooklyn Bridge.
Hey, what’s that — over there! Run!
Run to it, I do: spectacle.
What’s intriguing about the modeling of this celebration, the 4th — and the US tradition of celebrating our warring victory of independence — and I suppose, many others that involve fireworks, is that — in a way — they do just that.
They are what I’ve just described. They represent a kind of beautiful disaster, they are pretty versions of aerial conflagration — and to the Chinese that invented them, or the Greeks before the western advent of gunpowder, fireworks are entirely about siege — and the craft of attack, an arranged and choreographed version of spectacle and chaos, made pretty, in re-minding.
I will comment, however, that trying to take a subway OUT of the South SeaPort, NYC — WAS a disaster movie in the making!
all the best —
tsg | tribeca:nyc