In light of all the presidential campaigning overload that we’ve endured until the present, I thought it was appropriate to bust these photos out of the archive.
I took them at Bryant Park during a 2003 Howard Dean rally when he was running for president. You may recall a few weeks later he got over zealous at another rally (brilliantly satirized by Dave Chappell) and his campaign went into the toilet. He is now the chairman of the DNC.
This was truly a unique and odd experience. The idea was to come by around noon and paint the backdrop for the rally, something colorful and indicative of the good, hometown creativity NYC is known for.
It ended up taking all day for the organizers to figure how to rig the 40 ft. wall with out snapping it in half. So with a lot of free time and a hot summer day it wasn’t long before I made a beer run. You can imagine we’re all kicking it with beers in hand surrounded by just about every democratic politician from all five boroughs and we’ve waited all day to paint this wall. Needless to say it was a little surreal, especially since it was being taped live on C-span. We finally got word that we could do our thing while the band was playing the opening act but that we had only 15 minutes to do it…We finished our 24 oz Corona’s,(in paper bags) and with a good buzz on we basically attacked the wall using Howard Dean’s slogan “Take Back America” as our inspiration. It is not hard to imagine that afterwards there was some outrage, mild controversy and tons of news paper fodder because, well the wall was killed with throw ups. I think it still looks cool but perhaps not the message they were looking for …And the real shame is that we never got the chance to do a proper production. With a line up of CYCLE, CRO, KEO. SP and NOAH that could have been an ill wall…maybe this election year?
Posted on June 03, 2008 at 10:47 AM | Previous Entry | Next Entry | Entry List | Email Entry | Digg
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Way too often people come up with an idea and put it together without consulting a real rigger, and then the people working the show have to try to figure out how to fix the design errors. It could have been done much better with different materials. I work stage and have seen it many times.
A friend told me the reason Howard Dean was yelling at that famous rally was because his microphone was off. He had to yell for the people attending the rally to hear him, but to people watching the news it looked like he was just yelling, they didn’t know his mic that went to the P.A. system was off.