Are you sick of Christmas yet? The tawdry lights, varnished commercialism, snowy cliches? Has the inner cynic in you roused like the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem?
Then this story is for you. Via the Washington Post:
To celebrate the Sackler Gallery’s 25th anniversary, Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese artist famous for his Olympic pyrotechnics display and his gunpowder art, plans to ignite a daytime fireworks show on the Mall that riffs on the Christmas tree lightings taking place around the country.
…“I’m thinking about it as reversing a typical Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Instead of seeing lights at night, you see black smoke during the day,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “I’m imagining that after the explosion, the smoke tree will look like a virtual tree. I’m hoping it will look like an ink painting.”
But things didn’t go quite as planned on Friday, as this Talking Points Memo video shows (Youku version for those in China after the jump). The Raw Story tells us in perfect understatement: “But as you can see from the video, the tree refuses to be defeated.”
Refuses. Victory for Father Christmas. Defeat for those jaded souls who — do they not? — deserve — no, needed — this slice of satisfaction. Oh, what the hell, the war is over. No bang, just a whimper.
While I’d love to think this was another Jewish conspiracy gone awry, the intention was never to blow up the tree!
I was there, this was no failure. No one was trying to blow up a tree.