“Building” is the third video from the Long Afternoon’s “Signifying Nothing” album. You can see it below and on YouTube.
The video is being released on October 21, 2009, to coincide with the 42nd anniversary of the attempt to levitate the Pentagon. On October 21, 1967, some 50,000 people set off for the Pentagon during a protest organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. According to participants’ accounts, “it took them about an hour and a half to walk two miles across the Memorial Bridge and down a service road to the north parking lot where a second rally was scheduled. At the other end a group of hippies was trying to exorcize the Pentagon. The brainchild of Abbie Hoffman, the plan was for people to sing and chant until it levitated and turned orange, driving out the evil spirits and ending the war in Viet Nam. The Pentagon didn’t move.”
Perhaps not, but never has the theatre of the absurd been so effectively deployed in the service of public protest, at least not in the U.S.A. Once again, source images came from the Prelinger Archives at archive.org.
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