Serious fireworks turn something into nothing, very suddenly, and do it repeatedly until (only) nothing is left. Life should thereupon feel scrubbed and new. Socially, fireworks are a generously wasteful gesture–a potlatch–like publicly burning one’s money in a sincere way. Audiences must feel that the event honors their presence. Of course, they are stunned, overmastered, blitzed, sent. Such is the fireworker’s humble ministry. I love setting off fireworks, which I do for less than twenty minutes once a year, after thinking about it a great deal.
I seldom enjoy professional displays, which are academic. They expect to be admired. You know: ooh, ahh. Forget that. Think sob, scream. When doing fireworks, never consider beauty, which will take care of itself. Contrive only intensity. Fireworks should not be something that people watch, but something that happens to them.
My wife Brooke Alderson’s and my annual Fourth of July party began about fifteen years ago at our country place (a third-hand trailer at the time) with a few friends and some bottle rockets that I’d scored in Chinatown. It grew, last year drawing over 200 friends and neighbors. For a while, I bought in bulk from a Midwestern outfit that ships to interstate-trucking depots. Today, I patronize a savvy, passionate dealer named Joe. My partners Eric and Kate and I make a road trip to Joe’s cinder-block bunker in a bucolic field each spring. Joe has taught us different uses of “black match” (gunpowder-impregnated cotton fuse wrapped in waxed paper) and electrical “squibs” (which, with wiring, enable battery-powered instantaneous mass firings at a distance). There is so much more to learn, but we’re taking it gradually.
I haven’t tried to get professional-grade ordnance. We use the “C”-class that is legal in some states. Except for forget-about-it “A”-class complexity, the main difference is size, which can be compensated for by grouping units, exploiting features of the terrain, and, above all, keeping the show close to the audience–which contributes a bonus frisson of fear.
The main types of display fireworks are rockets, fountains, and tubes (mortars). “C”-class rockets, which we launch from PVC pipes stuck in the ground, are generally unsatisfying. Most sacrifice bang for color; some do the opposite. (All share that lovely takeoff, whoooshh.) We use them for filler. Best are “cakes”: bulky bundles of tubes that shoot “flaming balls,” as it says on their labels. At different altitudes, the effects include many-colored banging, whizzing, darting, showering, corkscrewing, shimmering, and whatnot. We like to pack the air with cake phenomena–sort of all-over sky painting–for a long spell. Some of the cakes we use are named Oriental Thunder, Blinking Dragon’s Breath, 37 Shots Shining Star, Millennium, Wild Boar, Insanity, Magic Whirly, Vendicator [sic], Star Gate, Drinker of the Wind, Black Cat Warp Speed, Super Stallion, Gold Strike, Dagger Falls, and–most mysteriously–Dayton Night.
Our nine-year-old house tops a slope that descends, from the porch, through a distance of one hundred feet in tiers and across a lawn to a stream which, for the past few years, has been swollen into a virtual lake by beavers. (The beavers surely loathe the Fourth; living on our land rent-free, they can jolly well put up with it.) From the stream, a meadow extends one hundred and twenty feet to the base of a wooded mountain. We do most of our show on the lawn–with, this year, six front-line all-purpose crew members, a rocket man (hi Seamus!), three reloadable-tubes people, and Eric supervising. Last year, we involved a nearby big willow (more about it later) and the stream itself (a homemade barge loaded with fountains for a curtain effect); this year, we expanded further to small cherry trees and the entire meadow. Next year, the mountain. The offered loan of a gut-quaking gunpowder cannon has been accepted. You can’t beat a narrow mountain valley for acoustic enhancement, by the way.
Reloadable tubes include the exuberantly flashy Critical Acclaim and the indispensable Violence Ammunition, which produces very loud, hard bangs. Applying lessons from Joe, we have learned to remove the propellant from VA projectiles and to fuse the warheads for use on the ground.
The largest “C” tubes are preloaded, one-shot mortars, pretty expensive, that launch with heavy thumps, “break” (explode) impressively, and yield the high, colored blossoms and cascades that most people think of when they think of fireworks. Joe despises them as uneconomical, but if you don’t give folks some of what they expect, what kind of host are you? We used to finish with large tubes. Now I like them as a false finale, relaxing the audience into the ooh/ahh mode, and thus setting up the knockout that I’ve lain awake for months scheming.
Saturns. Everybody who knows any small fireworks knows the bricklike launchers of twenty-five or one hundred little plastic rockets that scream upwards erratically and go bang. Rule of life: You cannot have enough Saturns firing simultaneously. It feels crazy every year at Joe’s, loading up on so many of one item. But I’m girding to really go for it next year: a colossal, shrieking wall of ripping fire that gives an intimation of satiety–too many Saturns. My friend Mark’s auteurial dream of a show is just, say, fifty thousand Saturns and good night. That would be quite cool. We might need to call two hundred ambulances from the nervous hospital. But I bet Mark that we can get a heartwarming, though brief equivalent with a mere three thousand. We’ll see.
Now and then, I sense our use of fireworks crossing a line into art. I try to suppress the thought, which threatens crippling self-consciousness. I keep reminding myself of my earliest and still perhaps only insight into the pyrotechnical sublime: “Shoot off everything you have as fast as you can.” A no-bidding corollary: “Absolutely no dead time.” A half-second pause between fireworks is an abyss in which is glimpsed death by boredom. If art can handle the pace, bully for art.
The arts that fireworks are closest to are music and painting–the pure structuring of time and the optical field–both of which operate automatically on any perception we have that is susceptible to them. I made an instructive, arty mistake this year, expending many person-hours of wiring and splicing to prepare a ten-second effect in the meadow: ranks of Critical Acclaim and Violence Ammunition warheads detonating in the grass from the mountain to the stream. Mark and I crouched in the dark as, keeping the beat, he handed me wire leads and I touched them to a battery. I had envisioned a barrage rolling toward the audience. The percussive aspect was gratifying–and would have been more so if I hadn’t missed connecting one of the ranks. But people didn’t much get the visual idea, surely because their gazes composed the explosions frontally, in pictorial space. Middle ground (between near and far, and properly the domain of sculpture) is a headache in fireworks as in landscape painting. Only Van Gogh ever did major things with it, by accounting for its every dip and veer with cobbled strokes. Give me a ton of money, several miles of wire, and a huge crew, and I’ll do you a Van Gogh.
The finest fireworks tour de force I ever saw (only on TV, alas) was the Eiffel Tower on Millennium Eve. There had to be hundreds of thousands of charges set off in geometric patterns and syncopated rhythms: classicist. (As a northern type, I’m a romantic, but teachable.) I mentioned that masterpiece to Joe. He tensed up. “Fuckin’ French,” he said bitterly. “The best. We just think we do it.” The example gave me the idea of loading our big willow tree with cakes (Niagara Falls–white balls and spark showers) fused in overlapping sequence and aimed to bounce around in the branches. The tree appeared to disintegrate in concatenating fire. This is the one stunt we do that I am perfectly happy with. This year, we duct-taped Snow Storm fountains into two hawthornes near the mountain, to enchanting effect. Look for more of those next year.
I recently heard an eyewitness account of New Year’s fireworks in Naples: how the city blazes with amateur stuff for hours, then the official show erupts all over the magnificent bay. I am proud that this fits my own instinctive pattern. At Brooke’s and my party, inexhaustible heaps are set out of small and medium rockets, firecrackers, minor tubes, Roman candles, flying spinners, sparklers (the multistage, spitting kind), and novelty items (such as little boats which, afloat on our pond, putt forward, shoot cannons, and launch helicopters). People may help themselves all day. Age restriction: ability to use a Bic lighter. Small kids radiate bliss that disarms leery parents. O.K., ten-year-old boys can be a pain (vide Lord of the Flies). This year, I passed one who was twisting rocket fuses together for a multiple launch and heard him growl, “They will feel my power.”
How much does all of this cost? I was tickled last year when some people formed a pool to guess, and their low figure for the show alone was $5,000. Three of us, splitting the bill, had spent a total of $1,300. Never underestimate Chinese productivity. Of course, we must escalate each year. Maybe someday I’ll hit the reset button and begin again with bottle rockets on the porch.
Isn’t it dangerous? (I hear you, reader.) I eschew cherry bombs, M-Sos, and anything else paramilitary. Fireworks should destroy only themselves. Slight burns are the worst peril with what we use–barring extraordinary misfortune which, in fifteen years, has yet to occur. Well, during the show this year an outsized Roman candle, brand-named Brilliant Envoy, fell over and fired into the crowd. That was sobering. Observing with horror from across the stream, I marveled at the alacrity with which human beings can remove themselves from the flight paths of flaming balls. Whew. And once, years ago, my sister Mary was soldiering in the front line as usual, when her hair caught fire. Someone whopped her about the head until the flames went out, and she returned to duty almost without missing a beat.
It’s incredible in the front line: infernal fire, smoke, noise, and scampering bodies. Fireworks condense the fun parts of war, without the bad. Occasionally, a rookie freezes up or skedaddles. Few of us, including me, have ever seen our show. I’ve viewed a couple of volunteer videos and some photographs. I was interested, but for anyone to step back and record the event seems to me misguided. Fireworks are a participatory experience, like sex. Be there or be square.
People who think they’re being funny call me a pyromaniac. I resent that. Refer to me and my kind as pyrophiles, if you please. Or else, Pyro-Americans.
The political content of the Fourth should be kept freshly in mind: kicking English ass. Every rocket is targeted spiritually at old George Three. Last year, atop the bonfire that instantly follows our show, we flew a vast Union Jack painted on muslin by Hannah Harvey. Seamus dug that. English guests at the party took it a mite queasily. I assured them of our benevolence. I quoted Winston Churchill: “In victory, magnanimity.” And Ulysses S. Grant: “If we have to fight, let us do it all at once and then make friends.” (Notice: all words of one syllable. Amazing writer.)
I suppose that, psychologically, a defiant devotion to something illegal, morally woozy, or just foolish–fireworks no less than drugs or art–is neurotic in a particular vein. It may express stubborn loyalty to the person or persons who, when we were children, conveyed to us that we were, or even perhaps ought to be, bad. I have ideas about myself in this regard.