And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [17]
When I arrived at Fifth Avenue, though, and looked up at the spires of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, I realized I had found just the place. A paramount Manhattan landmark with not much milling out front (since tourists were generally allowed inside); a sacred site, moreover, all the better for profaning with a disposable crowd. Crossing Fifth, I started around the structure from the north, following it to Madison and coming around the south side back to Fifth Avenue. I wanted a line, but it would be too risky to have it start at the front doors, since the cathedral staff that stood near the door might disperse it before it could fully form. But on each side of the cathedral, I noticed, was a small wooden door, not open to the public. If a line began at one of these doors, it could wind around the grand structure but keep staff confused long enough to last for the allotted five minutes. I stood at the corner of Fiftieth and Fifth, pondering what should happen after that. Flash mobbers were mostly people like me, downtown and Brooklyn kids, a demographic seldom seen in either Midtown or church. I loved the idea that Saint Patrick’s might somehow have inexplicably become cool, a place where if one lined up at the side door, one might stand a chance of getting in for—what? Tickets to see some stupidly cool band, I thought; and in the summer of 2003 the right band to make fun of was the Strokes, a band had been clearly manufactured, Monkees-like, precisely for our delectation. It was settled, then: the mob would line up from the small door on the north side, wind around the front and down the south side. When passersby asked why they were lining up, mobbers were to say they “heard they’re selling Strokes tickets.”
Having settled the script that Thursday afternoon, I started back down Fiftieth, only to see a man walk out of the side door. He was a short man with curly hair tight to his head, and he wore a knit blue tie over a white patterned button-down shirt. Without acknowledging me in any way, he walked to the curb and then stood still, staring up at the sky. Back at Madison, I saw that since I last was at the corner, the stop-light had gone dark: an uncommon city sight. As I headed south down Madison, weaving through accumulating traffic crowding crosswalks, more people began to trickle out of the office buildings, looking dazed, rubbing their eyes in the sunlight. A woman dressed as Nefertiti was fanning herself. Customers lined up at bodegas to buy bottles of water. I thought I would walk south until I got out of the blackout zone; by Union Square I realized that the blackout zone was very large indeed, though it was not until I got back to work, walking the eleven flights up, that I was told the zone was not just all of New York City but most of the northeastern United States. Having spent my last half hour envisioning my own absurdist mob, I had suddenly stepped into a citywide flash mob planned by no one, born not of a will to metaspectacle but of basic human need. The power returned within the week, and MOB #7 went on exactly as planned; but to gather a crowd on New York’s streets never felt quite the same, and I knew my days making mobs were dwindling fast.
DOWN: BOREDOM REDUX
I wrote of boredom as inspiring the mob’s birth; but I suspect that boredom helped to hasten its death, as well—the boredom, that is, of the constantly distracted mind. This paradoxical relationship between