I knew that the light show in town was going to be a dull affair, I'd read what folk had said about it on social media. Still nothing could quite have prepared me for how truly insipid and utterly pointless the installation called Navigate would be. This was being put on by the Council to mark the start of the Hull town council's latest £24million trick to pull in punters by calling itself Yorkshire's Maritime City, frankly they need not have bothered... and if this is a measure of what we can expect then they should give up now and go lie down in a darkened room.
We'll start in Queen Victoria Square with something called Zenith, supposedly an "immersive sonic landscape of the sea". It was eight or so silly lights and some indistinct noise that might have been music or just random noises on a looped tape. It put me in mind of a dismal 1970's disco.
Next and not moving far at all is something called Meridian: four beams of light from the City hall. Wow! Just wow ... maybe a Gee! as well but mainly just wow ...
Oracle I posted before in its daytime slumber. It gets no better illuminated. It too had some rumbling noise to go with and the white light points to the direction of the wind. But as the Bard sang so many years ago you don't need a weatherman to know which way the money goes ...
The crowning inanity award has to go to this automated drum machine outside Holy Trinity church, going by the name of Pendopo. I read that its metallic percussion was inspired by east Asian drums and not by the thought of easy money from a Council lacking two brain cells to rub together.
The most impressive light show, however, was nothing to do with this tawdry pathetic nonsense; the church behind was all lit up in varying hues but hardly anyone paid it or Andrew Marvell any mind. I'd like to see those lights from inside the building, through those massive windows, now that might be worth the bus fare ...
Still it didn't take more than ten minutes to see what little there was to see and the trip wasn't a totally wasted journey as I managed to do my shopping in Tescos and get the things we could only get from town.
Forgive me for smiling but when it comes to dull your town is not even in the running. We took our granddaughter to see the New Year's eve fireworks from the London City Hall roof -- the ones fired off at 9 p.m. for the children. There were two, small, expanding globes of light and then nothing but the loud grumbling from all the family's gathered in the cold and now trudging back to their cars. :-)
ReplyDeleteOK you win. I recall one November when the mayor was turning on the Xmas lights and there was supposed to be a firework display. Folk moaned that it lasted less than five minutes.
Deletep.s. Despite the look of the installation, you got off a good picture or two. Congrats!
ReplyDeleteI do like your takes on the church.
ReplyDelete