Pillow Fight!

Today Parque Tres de Febrero, in front of the Planetario building (Palermo), descended into pure feathery chaos, as Argentina’s 1st ever flash mob event took place – a ‘Lucha de Almohadas’. Basically, a massive outdoor pillow fight between a group of total strangers, arranged over the internet.

There must have been thousands there*, pillows in hand and ready for the fight, and possibly almost as many taking pictures and videos with their cameras. I brought both camera and pillow, and did a little bit of pillow fighting, and a little bit of pillow recording, sometimes simultaneously

*EDIT: Update – Clarin newspaper on Sunday (whose front page photo of the pillow fight is no way as good as mine above ), estimated that over 3,000 people attended the pillow fight, with no injuries (although I saw at least one very bloody nose). That’s a lot of pillows!

For those seeking instant gratification…

If this post is too long for you to read it all, and you only want to see one thing, I URGE YOU TO SCROLL DOWN TO THE FINAL YOUTUBE VIDEO (it is the fifth embedded video), which is of a ¨horse¨being ambushed by crazed pillow-wielding maniacs. It is hilarious. Trust me.

For those that would like the full experience, I hope you enjoy my story of the day told in in photos and videos…

Calm before the (feather) storm

Pillow Fights are a dangerous business

And they need to be closely controlled. With tape.

(Does he, to the right, think that pickaxe vs pillow is a fair fight?)

Battle plans are made

Early Skirmishes Occur

Kids will be kids…

^[1]

The old guy in the short video above, kitted out in a karate costume, was trying to take on all 3,000 people singlehandedly, before the event started. Obviously he’d watched one too many Bruce Lee movies. Did you see the one where he killed 9 men with a single swing of his pillow?

The ‘Guerra de Almohadas’ of Argentina Begins

And battle rages on…

And on…

^[2]

And oon…

^[3]

And ooon…

^[4]

And ooooon…..

Every war has its casualties

Be they shoe… (this man was pillowed to death. All that remained is shown in that harrowing picture)…

^[5]

…or horse! The horse above was in the middle of an interview with the media, quite normal really. Do pillow fighters have no manners? (sorry for the bad camera work!)

What goes up…

…must come down…

Get it? Feathers….down…? OK, bad joke, sorry!

Palermo Park ends in quite a state

As you can see, it all ended in a big old mess. Hundreds of pillows bursting all over the place also played havoc on me and my allergies, but still, it was amazing fun, for me, and the other thousands of people there. It lasted well over an hour, and probably a lot more than that (I gave up and went home, there is only so many unexpected blows to the back of the head a man can take), but I’m guessing it will take Parque Tres de Febrero and the Palermo ^[6] parks people a lot longer than that to clean up. Sorry guys.

If anyone else that reads this went to the Pillow fight, please post your experiences below in the comments, and feel free to link to your blog with comments and pictures, or YouTube for videos or whatever. And if you link to this post, I of course cordially invite you to ‘trackback’ (sorry for the netgeek blogspeak). Until next time, pillow fans…

Postscript: How the Buenos Aires Pillow Buzz Began

I first noticed the plans for this crazy event in a blog post by Diva, one of my favorite BA bloggers ^[7], pointing to the blog that had the idea ^[8] and organised the whole thing. I knew immediately I had to go, because I like to hit random strangers with pillows, only modern society is not usually so forgiving to such tendencies. However, I thought it was likely to be a small affair with maybe 100 people max turning up. How wrong I was to be!

Soon after I saw that Global Voices Online had posted a link ^[9] to a post in a well-known blog (outside of the Buenos Aires Blogosphere), Blogher, by Liz Henry ^[10], talking about this event, so at this stage it had basically gone ‘international’. What’s more, that blog post drew my attention to the fact that the Buenos Aires City Government blog ^[11] had posted about the upcoming Pillow Fight too! That’s some real official recognition, and obviously this was going to be bigger than I thought. Another post from Buenos Aires Weekly ^[12], yet another great Buenos Aires blog, confirmed the news was spreading fast.

Soon after it actually became real news! Argentine newspapers and Buenos Aires ^[13] media all over the shop started picking up on the story, in order: 26 Noticias ^[14], Clarin Suplemento SI ^[15]!, Perfil ^[16], Clarin newspaper ^[17], Infobae ^[18], and even the very respectable La Nacion ^[19]! After 20,000 people had visited her blogspot blog, organizer Marina Ponzi then decided to get a new website ^[20], and even started to claim that this was no longer a flash mob event, even though the name of the new site suggests so. All a little confusing, but it didn’t stop the press buzz rolling…picking up some online Gridskipper goodness ^[21] as it went…

And then, the pillow fight REALLY hit the big time: I posted about it in this blog ^[22] the other day. That must have driven at least, oooh, one more person to go along

It was interesting for me to watch this internet meme ^[23] grow in front of my very eyes, as described above, and then be there as the event ^[24] occurred, so successfully, all starting from one simple idea and a free blogspot blog. And thanks, of course, to Marina for that idea