Happy New Year everyone. I'm gearing myself up for a couple of big posts, some of which I've been thinking about for quite a long while. I feel if I write that here, I'll have to put them up, as otherwise I'll be a blog tease - if there is such a thing.
But first things first: Fireworks. I was in Berlin for New Year (called Silvester as it is the name day of a pope from the fourth century AD). It's a great city and has lots of anarchic tendencies, which I really appreciate. This really came to the fore at midnight on Jan 31st, where all over Germany everyone goes out on the streets and lets off fireworks. They don't go to organised events where you are all safely held behind barriers (like the Brits on Nov 5th), no, they turn up with huge sports bags filled with the scariest looking rockets and boxes with names like Teufelbox "devil's box" and just set up at the corner of the road and proceed to let them all off, one by one. As it is dark and cold, most people are quite well wrapped up. As it is New Year's Eve, most people are somewhat inebriated. And so the whole thing has a very anarchic feel to it: You'll see what I mean hopefully when you see the pictures.
And then there's the fireworks. Semiotically they clearly symbolise the fight against the darkness of winter and the need for humanity to hold back the dark and bleak feelings of the season. They are signs of man's attempt to demonstrate his control over the sky at night. They explode in a variety of colours and are uncontrollable in the way they light up the sky and which way they fly. And they are to me, undescribably beautiful, precisely because of the anarchic sparkling shapes they write across the sky.
So now the pictures. I hope you'll agree with me that this feels quite scary when you see it as an image.
