Recently, walking along an industrial stretch of Gray’s Inn Road between Holborn and King’s Cross station, I passed a group of teenagers with a menacing, thickset dog in a studded harness. They parted to reveal the entrance to a lush green community grotto planted with flowers and traversed by a ramshackle wooden bridge. The garden was a jewel coloured sliver, a parallel world that surfaced unexpectedly through a seam in the concrete, a reminder that magic exists. It was a glamour bomb.
Glamour bombs are subversive interventions into the fabric of the real, portals to glamour worlds. They don’t require complicated or stagily esoteric ingredients. In Manhattan’s Hamilton Heights district, where I used to live, homemade glamour bombs abounded. For example, anonymous sidewalk novena candle arrangements surrounding flower bouquet filled chalk outlines. Mysterious, portable kiosks hung with plastic 25 cent supermarket coin dispenser toys, selling tropical, neon syrup drizzled shaved ice. Ornate graffiti tags.
What is a glamour? Wikipedia describes it as a form of magic which affects vision and makes objects and places appear different than they are. W. Black’s “The air filled with a strange, pale glamour that seemed to lie over the valley”, accents the anonymous, out-of-nowhere quality that traditionally characterizes glamours, and their association with subtle shifts in light and atmosphere reminiscent of a piece of coloured cellophane passing over the sun, or a klieg lamp. In its modern incarnation glamour often refer to the big budget movie world, whose magnetic, mind altering concoctions are presided over by a glittering mirage, a faerie court of celebrity stars. Not all magic is life affirming.
