But here are some pictures, courtesy of the lovely S, of a giant robot elephant parading last Sunday in Horseguards, er, Parade.
What you can't see is that the Giant Robot Elephant was towing a live band behind it, which was playing Dramatic 80s-Style French Synth Music, making the whole experience slightly akin to having overdone it on the mushroom vodka at an open-air Jean-Michel Jarre concert.
In a good way.
I missed most of the four-day Sultan's Elephant show, so I don't really know what it was all about, but luckily the London Bloggers were out in force. So you can watch an experimental video at Annie's, see some arty pictures at longcat's, get your Marquez-magical-realism analogies (and celebrity sightings) at The Complex Christ, and look at proper professional photos at the London Daily Photo.
Oo, we bloggers like a shared experience, it makes us feel like a huge...errr...internet...bluebottle with...um...thousands of eyes, buzzing annoyingly in the Established Media's...hair.
But that could just be the mushroom vodka talking.
tags: sultan's elephant
21 comments:
I want to see that surreal elephant too! [sulks]
erm...mushroom vodka?
Speciality of the house at Glastonbury festival, Taiga. Best not mixed with other specialities of the house.
Where can we get some of this mushroom vodka?
oh... that elephant was the coolest thing i've ever seen...
rumour has it that it's going to be in france (calais) in september... i'm very much considering going...
but i'm getting tired of asking excitedly whether anyone saw it and then having to give an explanation... as words cannot discribe the experience...
(thanks for the link)
x
I am so looking forward to being back in London. Massive elephant parades and mushroom Vodka.
There is an enormous white sparrow outside my window in Norfolk, even as I type.
Oh no, it's a seagull.
I've been worrying that I was wrong in calling the giant elephant a 'robot'. I believe Asimov's First Law of Robotness is 'can it shoot lasers out of its eyes?'. In which case, the elephant was not a robot. However, it did shoot water out of its trunk, as demonstrated in picture 3. Can anyone help?
I don't think this displays any of Mr Asimov's Laws of Robotics.
It was probably a Mechanoid.
Of the sort that develops a fault, rampages and crushes everyone in its path, probably.
Dammit. Why does Cambridge never get giant (might be) robots?
We did have some singing bins a little while ago, though. And benches that sheltered from the rain. Not that I saw them. And they seem to have been removed now [sigh].
Woah, singing, self-propelling bins - scary. Meanwhile, The Curve has found a bin in Barcelona that looks like R2D2.
I nearly saw Giant Robot play in Helsinki last year, but the BA strike put paid to that.
The elephant was not a robot. It was an elephant. A giant, puppet elephant, yes, but somehow more elephant than robot.
On Friday, they were spit-roasting a pig in the house in the elephant's belly. I realise that sentence might look like a first attempt at English to many, and admittedly should not be regularly taught in TEFL classes, but hog-roasts atop giant elephants are pretty special when it's sunny and you're hungover. It was like the wilder, first-draft, prog-rock version of what Dumbo must have been thinking about when he got juiced up.
Send the show to Washington, and see if they can still hate the French. Or see if they shoot it down with an outsize Heath Robinson gun. Either way, it'd be a spectacle.
On a side note: is it wrong to think that 30-foot tall marionettes in green dresses are quite hot?
Wow, that must be the only time the words 'spit-roast', 'prog-rock', 'TEFL' and 'Dumbo' have ever featured in the same paragraph.
But quite apart from that, I guess it's perfectly fine to fancy the 30-foot marionette if you are yourself an enormous French puppet. Are you?
I'm only trying to get you a googlewhack, if such a thing still exists.
Telling you whether or not I'm a 30-foot French puppet would, I'm sure you'd agree, give you *far* too many clues to my identity.
It would certainly eliminate some (if not all) of the candidates I currently have in mind.
I would very much like to read the CNJ's report of an enormous linen-clad French puppet ambling amok through the back streets of NW5, though.
Well I've still got my money on that Bengal tiger I saw hungrily eyeing up Jonathan Snow as he rode past on his bike.
You mean you've discounted the immense Panda that's been bothering Tessa Jowell and Roger Lloyd-Pack? More fool you. It even made the Ham & High.
Is it possible to "amble amok". I do hope so...
er...that last one would've been me...
Well I only recently moved it from the unlikely pile to the implausible pile. Now I will have to rethink all the Roger bothering animals especial ones that amble amok. And there are more of them than you would think or not find unsettling.
A robot elephant, you say? Tcha. They did better than that in the 18th century you know. Nothing but real live pachyderms for that lot.
There's something quite nineteenth-century about a giant mechanical elephant ambling amok (new favourite phrase) in the streets of London, though. Puts me in mind of the Mechanical Turk, zoetropes and other wondrous not-really-a-machine things.
Bit late but... Wikipedia's Sultan's Elephant entry has 4 pics by my friend. Aw/yay.
Post a Comment