Chengwin vs. Chunk: Notes on the Bowery Cockfight

Lafayette and Houston, downtown New York City. Its a brisk fall day, and the crowds are gathering. When I show up there are small masses on either side of Lafayette, maybe a hundred or two, already filling the sidewalk and slowly spreading to the asphalt. No one knows exactly why they are here. Chengwin vs. Chunk said the email, a half-chicken half-penguin versus a half-chicken half skunk. There were pictures on a website some sort of street theater, big suits for each character, staged battles around the city. But all very vague, very few seem to even know who is responsible for it all.

The crowds continue to mass, Lafayette fills up, the cars trickling through the people single file as people scream and cheer for no particular reason other then that they can. Where are the characters? Where is this event? People climb the lampposts and coat the parked cars, looking for a view of the unknown. They come marching up from the Bowery, horns and drums, screams and chants from the cheerleaders. The confusion is delirious and liberating. The band keeps marching and the crowd just follows, onto Houston, stopping traffic. 

"Chunk! Chunk! Chunk!" 

The crowd begins to take sides as the march turns south on Broadway, capturing Manhattan's most famous boulevard in an impromptu street festival. The tourists gap, and stare, the braver and more celebratory joining in. 

"Chenguin! Chenguin! Chenguin!"

The characters are here, dancing through the midst. Their cheerleaders and bodyguards follow, hyping the crowd, taunting their opponents. The marching band keeps the beat, the mass stays in rhythm as they dance and stomp past Prince Street, Prada, Dean and Deluca. The horns of stopped traffic echo, at this distance, in this crowd they sound celebratory. 

At Spring we turn, en mass, heading east, the direction of real traffic. Back to Lafayette, this time turning south and halting.

The location is clearly deliberate and well chosen. From Spring southward Lafayette runs downtown. To the north it runs up. Relatively few cars ever make that turn south on Lafayette, its as close to an empty street as you'll find in the center of Manhattan. Ideal for an urban takeover. 

The crowds spills onto the block, the march turns into a street fair, and pushes towards a game. In the end it's more performance, but only by a matter of degrees. Two pairs of large goal posts, complete with two humans each inside wait the crowd. A huge inflatable rice shaped ball emerges. There are referees and there are Chenguin and Chunk. No one is quite sure what is supposed to go down, but the ball moves, hand to hand like a crowd surfer at a punk show. The crowds cheer their favored player, the referees blow whistles. All the trappings are there, the only thing missing to make this a game is a set of rules. No one knows what's supposed to happen, what they can and can't do, what the goals are. This is play, big play even, but it is not a game.

Not that anyone cares. Here on this block, in this crowd is a state of temporary autonomy. A small scale urban takeover, a space liberated from the limitations of day to day life. It might not be a game but what the Chenguin vs. Chunk organizers have created is structure that brings the participants into its own world much the way that a good game will. The ordinary rules no longer apply, in a game they are replaced with new rules, in this performance they are replaced not with rules but with suggestions laid out by the organizers. 

Numerous techniques were used by the organizers to make their event a success. The email was well written, calling a crowd. The marching band is a classic crowd regulation technique. It gets everyone moving to the same rhythm, synchronized into one mass. The melody then sets the mood, upbeat or solemn, its the band that plays the song, the crowd just follows. The routes where clearly well chosen, using the traffic patterns to direct the route and establish the final playing field. 

In a sense the organizers where able to get inside the OODA loop of the city itself, allowing a large crowd to liberate themselves from the rules of daily life without for an incredibly long time before the cities response systems could activate. The OODA loop itself was conceived by the controversial military theorist John Boyd. It stands for "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act", and represents a way of thinking about how people form their reactions to events. Boyd, a star fighter pilot, saw getting "inside" an opponents OODA loop as a way towards victory. Someone inside another's OODA loop would be acting on situations before their opponent has been able to complete their course of action, leaving the opponent at least a step behind, constantly unable to produce the correct counteraction. 

With Chenguin versus Chunk, the organizers used several simple techniques to keep ahead of the official reaction. Once they had built the intial crowd they swiftly synced everyone up and got them moving. By the time the police could produce a reaction to the traffic stopping gathering at Lafayette and Houston was gone. Same for the shut down of Broadway, it lasted long enough for the crowd to experience the takeover, but was taken off the traffic grid before the city could react. 

It was only at the playing field, that street just south of Spring, that the authorities caught up, and then only after quite some time. Police emerge and boom, the event is over. The characters gone, scattered in the wind, the crowd dispersing. The coalescence, the temporary autonomy, gone. In many ways the scene echoes back to an older, more famous fight between two male chickens. In his classic essay "Deep Play, Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" anthropologist Clifford Geertz leads off by describing a police raid on a village cockfight. It is only through the act of fleeing the police along with the rest of the villagers that Geertz is able to connect with residents of the town. Before the run he was an outsider to be ignored, afterwards a participant in village life. 

Geertz goes on to use the cockfight, truly a big game in Bali as its rules encompass entire kingroups, as a means to an extensive analysis of Balinese culture. In the process he makes a strong statement about the validity of studying games:

"Bali, mainly because it is Bali, is a well-studied place. its mythology, art, ritual, social organization, patterns of child rearing, forms of law, even styles of trance, have all been microscopically examined for traces of that elusive substance Jane Belo called "the Balinese Temper." But, aside from a few passing remarks, the cockfight has barely been noticed, although as a popular obsession of consuming power it is as least as important a revelation of what being a Balinese "is really like" as these more celbrated phenomena. As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it is men."

While Chenguin versus Chunk, lacking rules, never quite becomes a proper game, I'd like to suggest that it points to something further then Geertz. That big games are not just ways to view culture, but also as means to be change it. That they are potentially political acts, ways to learn and impact the environments we live in.