The street is littered with chairs and traffic barriers. The sky is full of advertisements. Cabs have given way to pedestrians and somehow there’s more room to maneuver in Times Square?
There’s something a bit misty about this photo of the five-block stretch of Broadway that’s now closed to cars to create a pedestrian mall. Tourists and curious locals can finally stop in the middle of the intersection, safely, and do what they’ve always wanted to do in Manhattan: watch soda ads repeat forever on jumbotron monitors.
The whole scene is at once romantic and bent like a Charlie Kaufman flick, but it’s also alien and vast, like a golf course on Jupiter.
There’s something about the chairs, lined up like so many pews in church or chaise lounges on Myrtle Beach. If there’s some sacredness to this space, it’s evidently wrapped up in the worship of awesome global lifestyles; including Levi, ABC, Coke, Corona, LG, and Starbucks (but oddly, I don’t see a McDonalds in the photo…). Maybe it’s the church of New Year, where once every twelve moons high shaman Dick Clark shows the mob his (cryogenic?) poker-face and altarboy Ryan Seacrest blows air into wine through a straw, transubstantiating it into champagne.
The plastic tubing of the chairs reminds me of summers in the backyard, barefoot in western Pennsylvania and western Kentucky. I remember watching my brother slide off the far end of a wet banana and into the damp and scratchy grass. I wish someone had brought a wet banana to Times Square. That would’ve been something to see.
It’s lovely viewing pictures of people responding to a city in a novel way. It’s like nobody had ever really seen the place before, and now they’re seeing it through kaleidoscope goggles.
I just wish there weren’t that ugly suggestion of people prostrate before the altar of commercial hegemony. I mean, really! Sitting down and passively watching commercials (uninterrupted by programming!) is just mysterious, no matter where you are.