Courtesy Brooklyn Vegan.
Harmonies, hula hoops, and honking horns. On Friday I caught Sufjan Steven’s performance of The BQE at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), joining some 2,000 fellow aging hipsters decked out in glasses and corduroy and armed with iPhones. If we all disappeared in a Moscow-type tragedy, would Apple sales dip? In the opera house lobby I nearly bumped into BAM regular Lou Reed, thrillingly and neatly bringing my Velvets/Warhol thread full circle. (Apparently Reed and Laurie Anderson attended the evening before, so he was coming back for a repeat performance.)
Sufjan’s composition, commissioned by BAM, is an ambitious addition to his geographic interpretations Illinoise and Michigan (two entries in his Fifty States Project). Sonically taking on Robert Moses’s gritty highway with a thirty-piece orchestra.
Clashing strings and horns evoke swelling traffic jams. Flutes zip through the score, changing lanes with ease. Sufjan paired the music with an abstract film and live hula hoopers. The result is equal parts beautiful, quirky, and a love letter to Brooklyn. With Super-8 shots of neighborhood landmarks and signs—there’s the bright yellow storage building near my house; look, the ugly new loft going up—recognition draws you into the piece.
The BQE is part of a history of orchestrated city interpretations. And there is certainly an Eamesian and Koyaanisqatsi quality to Sufjan’s footage, but I was reminded immediately of the 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which uses the railroad to track the daily life of the city in much the same way as the BQE organizes Sufjan’s Brooklyn. (See Mitchell Schwarzer’s Zoomscape.)
In program notes the musician muses on the mash up of car wheels and hoops:
Perhaps a creative exegesis of the hoop might begin to unravel the bureaucratic mysteries of the interstate roadway, the automobile, and the Hula Hoop’s unlikely nemesis: Robert Moses. A renowned critic of idle recreation, Moses often orchestrated his park projects around more competitive, athletic endeavors: mammoth swimming pools, diving boards, baseball diamonds, and tennis courts. These hefty, utilitarian designs were modern responses to Frederick Law Olmstead’s romantic topography intended for less strenuous activities: afternoon strolls, Sunday picnics, and, perhaps, Hula Hooping. Of course, there was nothing natural, bucolic, or egalitarian about Moses’s park designs: blocky, boxy cement landscapes that resembled more prison yard than public park. Indeed, his roadways often took this aesthetic to the extreme. Like most highway projects of the time, the BQE was an execution of bullishness mixed with economic fastidiousness, a project that championed commerce, cars, and the commuter work force in spite of the “disorderly” charm of Brooklyn’s network of villages and neighborhoods, settled long before the automobile.
Although the triad is almost too much to watch at once, all parts came together at for one brilliant moment: five hula hoopers twisting their hips in unison, speedy road music, and film of driving at night. The conceit drops away leaving only rhythm and motion.
