Abstract: In SYDNEY, NOVA SCOTIA, on 8 August 1902, preparations were well underway for celebrating the imminent coronation of Edward VII Local businesses, large and small, would be represented by floats; veterans from the recently ended Boer War would march; all would be led by several prominent local bands But the highlight of the parade was to be the miniature steel works on wheels drawn by six and four horse teams, presented by the Dominion Iron and Steel Company [DISCO] One local newspaper reported that: "The employees of the Steel Company will march over the bridge 1500 strong The employees have spent over $6000 in getting their feature in shape "i The parade took place the following day

Abstract: New York City's ticker-tape parades are messy events, always organized at the last minute because they celebrate the news of the moment in a theatre of popular memory, on a stage we call the Public Sphere. They always reenact parades of the past, celebrating heroism of an often, though not always, military sort. A New York ticker tape also reenacts a periocular civic ritual. It is the mayor's privilege to announce one-and the business community's privilege to step in and fund the festivities. They are synthetic festivals, miniature collective portraits of a city at a particular moment in history, heavily documented time capsules awaiting the scholar with an eye for state theatrics and invented traditions. Officially the city's celebration of welcome and gratitude, ticker tapes have always depended on a consortium of private-sector power brokers for sponsorship. For the Gulf War, like the Super Bowl or the Olympics, the sponsor's audience was global. Looking back at the final act in the Gulf War trilogy, following Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the details of New York's "welcome home" ticker-tape parade remind us that war and the festival atmosphere within which war is waged are inseparable frames for analysis. There are several stories to be told concerning New York City and the 1991 43-day war in the Persian Gulf. One concerns the collaboration between the office of Mayor David Dinkins, an official commission appointed to organize the "welcome home" celebration, big business, the fashion industry, and the mass media-a choreography of public opinion in a dance of state aesthetics, patriotism, and public relations. Another story concerns American flags and yellow ribbons, shop windows, and front yards-spontaneous festive displays throughout the urban environment right down to patriotic extensions of the body itself. Both stories converged in June 1991 when many people felt an impulse to dress up and mask themselves, to form the crowd witnessing New York City's "Operation Welcome Home" parade. Both raise questions about the origins of homogeneity: the impulse of people to lose them-

Abstract: In the course of this Diaghileff season at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, I at last had an opportunity of seeing Parade, the work of Cocteau, Satie, and Picasso, the production of which in 1917 had been the subject of so much discussion. Although I had played the music on the piano, seen photographs of the scenery and costumes, and was intimately acquainted with the scenario, the performance gave me the impression of freshness and real originatity. Parade confirmed me still further in my conviction of Satie's merit in the part he played in French music by opposing to the vagueness of a decrepit impressionism a precise and firm language stripped of all pictorial embellishments.'

Abstract: Abstract What does it mean to speak of phantasmagoria? In his French & volution Thomas Carlyle, we find, obsessively figures the bloody spectacle of civil insurrection as a kind of spectral drama-a nightmarish magic-lantern show playing on without respite in the feverish, ghostly confines of the “Historical Imagination.” Witness, for example, his description of the storming of the Bastille, as seen through the eyes of the Jacobin leader Thuriot: “But outwards, behold, 0 Thuriot, how the multitude flows on, welling through every street: tocsin furiously pealing, all drums beating the genera: the Suburb Saint Antoine rolling hitherward wholly, as one man! Such vision (spectral yet real) thou, 0 Thuriot, as from thy Mount of Vision, beholdest in this moment: prophetic of what other Phantasmagories, and loud-gibbering Spectral Realities, which thou yet beholdest not, but shalt!”1 The same phantasmic imagery occurs again in the account of the September massacres.

Abstract: Yesterday was the 4th of July in New York City. I spent most of the day in Central Park, watching the parade, the flora and fauna of the most racially diversified city in the world. Those of us who live here accept that diversity; we accept the fact that here the human species is a hybrid, its beauty comprised of many colors and shapes whose origins are indistinguishable and irrelevant. We agree, in other words, to see human evolution as a street fair, as something that happens before us each time we accept the blending of genetics and culture that is the New York experience: something ongoing, spontaneous and constantly in a state of self-creation. Given this definition, New York's supremacy as a modernist center of street photography is of course not surprising. But this town is a smorgasbord: the clear and delineated genealogical orders of more homogenous cultures are nowhere to be found in this urban sprawl, where one city block exhibits more nationalities and mixtures thereof than entire countries in the Old World. WeeGee and Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt and Lisette Model, Robert Frank and William Klein, Roy de Carava and Walter Rosenblum have all tried, in various ways, to make sense of this unruly human comedy on film, to frame and arrest its intractable flux. Ex-street photographer Joel Meyerowitz and critic, historian and curator Colin Westerbeck, in their new book Bystander: A History of Street Photography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), tell us the story of these rubberneckers from the Big Apple, and place them in the context of their counterparts worldwide. Not surprisingly, most of the major street photographers - whether artists, photo-journalists, social reformers or amateurs - have been spawned (born or trained as artists) in either New York or Paris, those cities where the streets, by virtue either of politics or sociability, have taken on a life of their own. And all of the best known imagemakers in this tradition - Robert Doisneau and J. H. Lartigue, Jacob Riis and Alice Austen, Ray Metzker and Andre Kertesz, M. Alvarez Bravo and the Seeberger Brothers, Charles Negre and John Thomson, as well as lesser-known snapshooters like Chusseau Flaviens and Count Giuseppe Primoli - are represented here in this long-awaited book. The text, mainly written by Westerbeck after many years of ongoing conversations with Meyerowitz, chronicles the stories of these artists and their relationships to the street life they loved. Beginning with an introductory chapter placing the origins of modern street theatre in the chaos of the French Revolution, the book discusses the barricades and their legacy in the cafes, department stores and public forums of nineteenth-century Paris. This chapter is brief, and Westerbeck's sources are writers Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Fournel, Gustave Flaubert and artist Constantin Guys rather than their more obvious counterparts, the Impressionists. Painters, in fact, are strangely absent from this tale, which moves rather abruptly from general information about public and private life in the heyday of early Parisian modernism to more precise discussions of individual photographers or movements (like the Farm Security Administration of the Depression era and the postwar Chicago school). Interspersed with Westerbeck's well-researched and well-written commentaries (sometimes small within the text, sometimes large in separate portfolio sections) are numerous photographs, mainly in black and white, both "classic" images and quirky additions to the canon, that delight the eye with a selection of frozen moments wrested from the narrative flow of the human sideshow. Bystanders comes off essentially as a coffee table "textbook," as an attempt to generalize about a particular aspect of the photographic tradition that is vast, influential and as yet undefined: the foundation upon which all subsequent discussions of this topic will be built. One can haggle about individual points or sections: the chapter on William Klein, for instance, called "An American in Paris," is accompanied almost exclusively by pictures of New York, and some of Westerbeck's comments about the photographs (his concurrence that Klein "abused his negatives . …

Abstract: A scanning of Richard Trexler's provisional checklist of theatrical performances in fourteenthand fifteenth-century Florence reveals two types of Christmas dramas: Nativity plays and Magi plays.1 This should come as no surprise, given that the Christmas holiday lasts until Epiphany. When we examine the dates of these recorded performances, however, we notice an unusual pattern. While the Magi plays, as expected, are listed as having been staged at Epiphany,2 none of the Nativity plays recorded by Trexler were staged during the Christmas season; instead, they are listed in connection with the parade of floats commemorating St. John's day (24 June) and are associated with the youths' confraternity of the Archangel Raphael, also known as the confraternity of the Nativity.3 It would seem that there were no Nativity plays staged at Christmas! Such a conclusion is, by all means, untenable. Several reasons may be advanced for the absence of Nativity plays at Christmas in the official documents examined by Trexler. One is that these plays were the rule, not the exception, during the Christmas season. Many churches, convents, and confraternities must have staged some type of dramatic or theatrical re-enactment of the Nativity, from actual plays to tableaux vivants, and therefore no one considered them especially memorable. Another is that these plays were of a private devotional nature, not official public displays of civic pride, and as such they did not find their way into civic records. When they were performed in conjunction with a civic celebration, as in the case of the parade of floats associated with the St. John's festivities, then they became memorable and appropriate for mention in personal or public records.