Tonight, walking through midtown Manhattan from west to east, I was taken in by a gorgeous elevation of colors. Red, blue, green, purple, slowly up the facade of a hotel at 55th and Broadway, the Dream Hotel. The shifts of color so unhurried and attractive, the windows made so unfamiliarly gorgeous under the colors, that I paused for several minutes… to see if I could understand why I was pausing. One association I made was to the significance of light shows for arena rock, and how central illuminated bedazzlement (need I add: in and through many senses?) can be to the rock spectacle. Light overtaking darkness is a Johannine/biblical notion, learned also in a technology of rockish ritual.

Indeed, can we overlay a rockish and spiritual phenomenology by positing the following: A built light lights building? A created light lightens creation? Or as Styx counseled in 1975, “Light up.”

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York