The Great Escape

 This is a nice interview with Yours Truly, which also is the first to mention the Illuminated Showman blog by name. Thanks to The Music.

TheMusic.com.au

THE GREAT ESCAPE
Paul Ransom has always wondered where a contortionist’s bendy spine may take them. He finally gets to ask La Soiree’s Captain Frodo.
Whenever anyone says ‘contortionist’ the first thing that springs to mind is, well, y’know, I mean, do they, would they? Have you? The man on the other end of the line laughs and teasingly responds, “It’s best left to the imagination. I do make a comment about that and do a quick demonstration during my tennis act, so…“

The contortionist in question is Captain Frodo, a Norwegian-born, Melbourne-based blogger, philosopher and bendy showman. As part of the record-busting nu-circ juggernaut that is La Soiree, Frodo has shoved himself through tennis racket heads and travelled the world.

“It is a pretty obscure thing,” he admits of his incredible, double-jointed career. As the child of a professional magician though, a life on the stage was always likely. “I guess every kid thinks their dad can do everything, but my dad kinda could; producing candies at parties and all that sorta stuff,” he recalls. “So yeah, I wanted to be in the show even before I even really knew what that was. I just knew that you went out on stage and stood around for a while. Only later I realised you actually had to do something.”

Encouraged by his father, the young Frodo developed his own magic act based around torn up newspapers. However, before long a developing Houdini obsession led him to contortionism. “I just wanted to do an escape act,” he explains. “Before that I hadn’t been aware of the full range I had with my shoulders and so the first performance I did that was contortion-based was an escape from a straightjacket my dad ordered from America. It was only later I realised that some of that stuff I was doing inside the jacket was actually more exciting than the escape.”

If it all sounds like a vaudevillian throwback, perhaps it is. As Captain Frodo would have it, “I can’t help but see a similarity to the ‘20s, the golden days of circus and the Depression that came afterwards.”

Either way, the astounding success of La Soiree shows no sign of abating. Having already broken Opera House records and had their Melbourne Festival season blow out past six weeks, the burlesque cabaret circus continues to connect with audiences. According to Frodo, it’s because it’s more real. “You don’t have to suspend your disbelief like you do in a theatre. It’s very visceral,” he argues. “Perhaps in hard times people can enjoy the freedom that you see in the show. Y’know, it’s like anything’s possible.”

As an erstwhile philosophy student (and creator of The Illuminated Showman blog), Frodo clearly thinks deeply about being on stage. “Finding myself in an occupation that, when people first hear what you do, they go, ‘But do you have a real job?’ I wanted to demonstrate that what we do is actually as deep or as shallow as you make it.”

Flanked by fellow freaks such as David ‘Bath Boy’ O’Mer, Mario: Queen Of The Circus and lycra diva Le Gateau Chocolat, Frodo is in no doubt about the undiluted power of real entertainment. “With the world becoming more digital, people realise, ‘Ah, that’s how it feels’. Y’know, you sit there, the lights go down and master showmen give you the most polished ten minutes of their life and it’s an experience that happens now.“

WHAT: La Soiree
WHEN & WHERE: Until Thursday 29 November (extended season), Forum

Paul Ransom

Learned pigs and Fireproof Woman

Based on Ricky Jay's book of the same title, this special was made up of a combination of magic, juggling, amazing feats, stunts, and performances, including a musical performance on wine glasses, a human calculator who could determine cube-routes of numbers in her head, and an antique acrobatic clockwork doll.

  Andrew Anthony Sylvester

This is an hour long variety show, cheesy but with some great stuff in there including Ricky Jay, Steve Martin, Michael Moschen, Jamie Turner. It reminds me of a Muppet show episode.

Ricky Jay is one of the world's great sleight-of-hand artists. He is also a most unusual and talented scholar, specializing in the bizarre, exotic, and fantastic side of the human species. The youngest magician to have appeared on television, Jay has become well known for his astonishing stage show as well as for his cameos in such movies as Glengarry Glen Ross and, most recently, Boogie Nights.
Jay's unparalleled collection of books, posters, photographs, programs, broadsides, and, most important, data about unjustifiably forgotten entertainers all over the world made this unique book possible. An investigation into the inspired world of sideshows, circuses, and singularly talented performers, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women is history of the most unusual -- and irresistible -- sort.

Postapocalyptic Teller

A strange post-apocalyptic dream starring Teller.

The Way of the Showman

The way of the showman
is the way between
Between real and imagined
Between the illuminated entrance
and the "Exit Only" sign

Along the midway
there are rides, carousels and carnies
You choose which one you get on
Some rides go round and round
and round and round
When you get off are back where you started?
Some says that is going nowhere
But you don't get on a ride
to go anywhere.
You get on for the experience.
You don't enter the carnival
because you want to get to the end

Or as T S Elliot said:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Life is a Carnival
You don't know what's waiting
around the bend by the ghost train
Or behind the sideshow tent
But you know
it's gonna be interesting,
weird and beautiful -
In its own unique way.

Such is the Way of the Showman
Join us
You will love it

Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants

I first saw Ricky Jay on the Paul Daniels show. The routine he performed was a card throwing routine. He threw playing cards with great precision and force. I was amazed I had never seen anything like it. I later found out he has also written a book on the subject; Cards as Weapons.

I was first made aware of this remarkable show when a friend in Edinburgh sent me a DVD taped of a tape of a tape... This is a great combination of well crafted patter, remarkable skills, unusual feats and solid showmanship.

I hope you enjoy it.

So You Want to be a Writer

I really like Charles Bukowski's poetry. This is a poem about the fire inside, advice to those who want to tread the Way of the Showman.
Or as the person posting the clip below says in his description:

"This is Charles Bukowski telling Charles Bukowski how to write like Charles Bukowski."

I dont know if I believe you need to have a starry furnace in your belly to find a purposeful existence from expressing them through art. If it makes you happy, its a start, and if you persist it will eventually make others happy too.

so you want to be a writer

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

{via BrainPickings}

Showmen, turn on immunosystems

Here at the Illuminated Showman we are very interested in the Placebo effect. We do believe that this strange and highly interesting phenomenon of self healing is an important key not only to the origin of Showmen but the genuine healing properties of showmanship.
The early Shamans, which we believe to have been proto-showmen using the very special and intimate connections of showmanship to actually heal the sick. The shamans role was that of healer, spiritual leader or guide so a mix between priest and doctor as well as a form of sacred entertainer. {You can read more about this Showman / Shaman link here the power of tricks, truth in reality and deception.}

I do believe that an understanding of the nature of the Placebo effect will explain in one big swoop why the whole arsenal of alternative medicine has some effect in healing people. The theory below, that there might be an on/off switch controlled by our minds that can turn on a full immune-system response or not seems to shed some light on a possible mechanism for this strange effect.

"There is a simple explanation, says Trimmer: the immune system is costly to run - so costly that a strong and sustained response could dangerously drain an animal's energy reserves. In other words, as long as the infection is not lethal, it pays to wait for a sign that fighting it will not endanger the animal in other ways."

As unique performers we do not have the luxury of being able to take sick days. During a run of shows at a festival we cant ring in and say we cant make it. Often, particularly in smaller companies or for certain in solo shows not showing up is not an option. SO I have myself experienced that I might feel a little under the weather during a season but as soon as it ends it becomes a full blown flu or something akin to it. There are even cases when I think I am well as can be only to find the first week of my holiday being hampered by a bug of some sort. If what the researchers below is true it would explain this phenomenon of "sickness on days off".
From an evolutionary stand point it makes a lot of sense to get sick, or to "give in to" the sickness when some stressor vanishes. The mechanism would of course have been more important when the stressor was a dangerous mammoth hunt, where not only your own life and those of the hunters was in danger but the possible starvation of the whole clan.

{It turns out that this idea was first proposed by Nicholas Humphrey which has recently been featured on this site.}

 The article below is from the {New Scientist}

Evolution could explain the placebo effect

 {06 September 2012 by Colin Barras}

ON THE face of it, the placebo effect makes no sense. Someone suffering from a low-level infection will recover just as nicely whether they take an active drug or a simple sugar pill. This suggests people are able to heal themselves unaided - so why wait for a sugar pill to prompt recovery?

New evidence from a computer model offers a possible evolutionary explanation, and suggests that the immune system has an on-off switch controlled by the mind.

It all starts with the observation that something similar to the placebo effect occurs in many animals, says Peter Trimmer, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK. For instance, Siberian hamsters do little to fight an infection if the lights above their lab cage mimic the short days and long nights of winter. But changing the lighting pattern to give the impression of summer causes them to mount a full immune response.

Likewise, those people who think they are taking a drug but are really receiving a placebo can have a response which is twice that of those who receive no pills (Annals of Family Medicine, doi.org/cckm8b). In Siberian hamsters and people, intervention creates a mental cue that kick-starts the immune response.

There is a simple explanation, says Trimmer: the immune system is costly to run - so costly that a strong and sustained response could dangerously drain an animal's energy reserves. In other words, as long as the infection is not lethal, it pays to wait for a sign that fighting it will not endanger the animal in other ways.

Nicholas Humphrey, a retired psychologist formerly at the London School of Economics, first proposed this idea a decade ago, but only now has evidence to support it emerged from a computer model designed by Trimmer and his colleagues.

According to Humphrey's picture, the Siberian hamster subconsciously acts on a cue that it is summer because food supplies to sustain an immune response are plentiful at that time of year. We subconsciously respond to treatment - even a sham one - because it comes with assurances that it will weaken the infection, allowing our immune response to succeed rapidly without straining the body's resources.

Trimmer's simulation is built on this assumption - that animals need to spend vital resources on fighting low-level infections. The model revealed that, in challenging environments, animals lived longer and sired more offspring if they endured infections without mounting an immune response. In more favourable environments, it was best for animals to mount an immune response and return to health as quickly as possible (Evolution and Human Behavior, doi.org/h8p). The results show a clear evolutionary benefit to switching the immune system on and off depending on environmental conditions.

"I'm pleased to see that my theory stands up to computational modelling," says Humphrey. If the idea is right, he adds, it means we have misunderstood the nature of placebos. Farming and other innovations in the past 10,000 years mean that many people have a stable food supply and can safely mount a full immune response at any time - but our subconscious switch has not yet adapted to this. A placebo tricks the mind into thinking it is an ideal time to switch on an immune response, says Humphrey.

Paul Enck at the University of Tübingen in Germany says it is an intriguing idea, but points out that there are many different placebo responses, depending on the disease. It is unlikely that a single mechanism explains them all, he says.

Beat Magazine interviews the Captain

[Captain Frodo] puts on a master class of physical comedy, as if the black and white films of Buster Keaton had come alive and actually were funny.  

JACK FRANKLIN, Beat Magazine

The following is from an interview with yours truly from Beat Magazine in Melbourne in preparation for La Soiree's season in Melbourne starting October 11th with its first preview.  (reading the direct transcription of my words from an interview they do sound convoluted... They would benefit for some editing...)

David O'mer from La Soiree.

"La Soirée (rebadged from its Spiegeltent days of La Clique) is an absolutely wonderful, horrifying, impossible, astounding joy. It is a circus to stretch the sensibilities, a sideshow that has been given a full reign. It is as bawdy as it is sinfully beautiful. It is a true cabaret, not some grubby burlesque but a good old-fashioned variety show with full frontal nudity, coarse language and adult concepts are all expected, sometimes before you even make it to your seat. A rotating cast of miscreants form the rogue’s gallery that passes for a cast, each bringing a unique talent to bare in front of an ever more shocked and shrieking (with laughter or approval) audience. From the famous Bath Boy with his tight, wet, denim acrobatics through to the corpulent showstopper in spandex, Le Gateau Chocolat – no two acts are the same or even remotely similar to anything you have seen.

The show is about the personality of each performer: Captain Frodo, Frodo is his real name by the way, could be called just simple contortionist but that would be huge undersell. He first performed aged ten alongside his father, a magician, and the years of performance and showmanship shine brightly. He puts on a master class of physical comedy, as if the black and white films of Buster Keaton had come alive and actually were funny.   

“I had been doing contortion stuff for a long time and you need to find your own angle on everything,” he says of his act. “Because of the stuff I have been given by nature, my act is a very visceral experience for people. People find it very challenging to watch. When you are doing it as a street show and people haven’t paid and are committed to sitting through something, then if what you do is too challenging to watch they cover their kids’ eyes or walk away. So to develop a character that is a bit slapstick in they style of Chaplin is a good thing since in that context ,if somebody gets a brick in the head it’s funny where as in real life it is a tragedy. So I have found a way to present something that by its very nature makes people uneasy and makes it palatable.
If you can get the crowd on your side, they will go with you much further than they thought. When you do take the crowd with you, when they give up their apprehension, their pleasure and excitement is shocking and exciting to them.   “There might be people that disappear hankies, squeeze through tennis rackets or juggle knives better than us but the acts in this show transcend their talent so that it becomes about a story and a character, transporting the crowd to places they wouldn’t even have thought they would enjoy – it might have sounded vulgar or repulsive to them – but we change the rules to make it safe to enjoy.”   BY JACK FRANKLIN

La Soirée will be delighting those brave enough to attend at The Forum Theatre from Thursday October 11 through to Sunday November 18.

Bikini Kill - Carnival

Lyrics: 

This is a song about the seedy underbelly of the carnival
The part that only the kids know about
This is a song about 16 year old girls giving carnies head
For free rides and hits of pot

I wanna go, I wanna go
I wanna go to the carnival
But it costs $16 yeah
I wanna go to the carnival
But I know it costs $16 now

Round, round, round...
Gonna lose $20 while I'm there
See the girls with the feathered hair
They're wearing plastic, not real leather
Boots that go way up to there

Round, round, round...
It's by the Lacey mall,
That's where you'll find me, yeah.

Freak Cards

These gorgeous trading cards of famous freaks are the creations of symbolist painter Gail Potocki. Most posters and cards made of freaks seem to only use them for their sensationalist value, these paintings on the other hand transcends their physical uniqueness.
The printing of the cards was done by the Century Guild and I believe there still are copies available. Click over and check them out here.
Gail Potocki also has a book out called The Union of Hope and Sadness which is worth checking out.

{via coilhouse.net}

What if money was no object?

Coney Island anno 1952

This is a sweet surreal or possibly impressionistic look at Coney Island. Great footage from behind the scenes and from before the crowds of the amusement parks and beaches arrive to the heated girls shows packed with people at night.

The Venice Film Festival Prize-winning documentary Coney Island, USA (1952), narrated by New York wit & journalist Henry Morgan, without totally trashing Coney Island is the first film to really get round to a bigger dose or reality than might be expected of a tourist film.

Throughout it retains an air of the macabre, weird dolls & mannequins, shouting barkers, eerie angles of whirling rides like the Virginia Wheel & the Cyclone, the screaming of frightened funseekers, hairy arms tearing tickets, the promise of being half-killed, humanity swarming like insects as Henry Morgan narrates with venomous irony, "You & I in the sun, you & I alone."
Shots are speeded up, blurry, distorted; the music rises in an industrialist beat shifting into happy carny sounds shifting into suspense notes. 

Verging into horror documentary, the attitude of grotesquery never quite warns you away from Coney Island, but is a lot more honest than any earlier film, showing everything except the outright prostitution & pickpocketing.

{via Weird Wild Realm}

Kurt Vonnegut on Writing

The advice in this clip is specifically aimed at writing a short story. The lesson we Showmen can take from it is by thinking of the short story like an act. In the Showman's work the act is the short story and the full evenings show; a novel.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

{via Open culture}

And finally some thoughts on the structural shapes of stories and acts. DO take some time to ponder the similarities and what you can add of story to your act. It will greatly improve your understanding of your act. Further I would recommend thinking about your favorite acts, be it contortionists, magicians, acrobatics, handstands, clowning, stand up comedy - be it what it may - look at the act again with Story in mind and see what you learn...

Jung, Ferris Wheels & The Meaning of Life

I have seen many people die because life for them was not worth living. From this I conclude that the question of life's meaning is the most urgent question of all.

Albert Camus

If you are willing, and you have to be since you are here to take this complex journey through the sublimely meaningful to the outright idiotic.

“Life is crazy and meaningful at once. And when we do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest scale. There is then little sense and little nonsense either.”

"Which element we think outweigh the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is – or seems to me – not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: life is – or has – meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle”

C G Jung

The truth about Milk - Cow and Human

There is no better person to express the duality of the meaningless and meaningful than the showman. The jester can be the mirror which shows us that the deep and the shallow are all part of the same swimming pool. How deep it is depends on which end you jump into.
At the Carnival the duality of life's meaning and emptiness are like the full cream milk straight from a cow's udder or a mum's breast. If left to stand the fat separates out and floats to the surface. By stepping through the Carnival Gates we buy the ticket and take the rides. The rides shake us, roll us, and wriggle our bodies and our minds until the the separated mother's milk inside us all once again blend with the rest. On the gravitron, the Ferris Wheel and the Carousel the ridiculous and the vital becomes one again. Mechanically shaken by carnival rides some of us get so shook up the fat and the skimmed milk fuses so totally that it might never separate again. It balances us  like the  homogenized milk we buy in the corner store. The Carnival has the potential to heal us for life.

The world viewed from a Ferris wheel.

The Philosophical Ferris Wheel

From the top of the Ferris Wheel we get a new perspective. We feel ourselves enclosed in a colourful steel cage dangling on a slowly spinning orbit through space. We are alive. Butterflies swirls around our bellies becoming one with the corn dogs and cotton candy imbibed just before getting on the ride. For some the whirling of the carousels and Ferris Wheel makes the butterflies and corn-dogs dream of freedom and with a feeling of neausea they threaten to escape back into the world.
We feel life in our guts. But from our new vantage point atop the world we see the world as it is without us. For a second, whilst holding back the vomit coloured butterflies the world below becomes the primordial savannah. The beings below are grazing. Flowing like chaotic rivers and streams around the midway. The real roar of lions from the Menagerie tents fuses the unconscious dream with the reality below. Clanking of orbital machinery, clockwork wiggles of wooden skeletons adorning the ghost train and the melancholic cries of a child lost in the throng. A little hand wet with tears reaching up towards you as you descend, wet blue eyes with a quivering lip searches, longs, for nothing more than closeness, nothing more than a smile, and a large pair of arms to scoop him up and say everything is going to be alright. I am here now.

View from inside the first Ferris Wheel

I am here now.
So are you.
In that moment the world below goes from nothing to something. The grazing herds of mindless animals stumbling through life with little to no reflection vanishes and for the first time there is connection, reflection, recognition and conscious meaning. From the vantage point of your metal cage on the Ferris Wheel you complete the creation of life, with your mind melded with the lost child you give the world verifiable existence. Life no longer just exist, it knows that it exists.

Amongst the spokes of the giant wheel the cosmic meaning of consciousness becomes overwhelmingly clear, "Man is indispensable for the completion of creation, he alone has given the world its objective existence - without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads taking in the worlds through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being." {Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections.}

Conciousness

It is consciousness that gives the world it's meaning. "Without the reflecting consciousness of man the world is a gigantic meaningless machine, for as far as we know man is the only creature that can discover 'meaning'."

In this last quote Jung suggests meaning to be made by man for man, that is to say it is artificial. Much like the Showman's creations. Can we from this extrapolate that the creation of meaning in Big Tops is as real a meaning as we will ever find?
I believe so.
Meaning is what is experienced as meaningful by groups or individuals. There is nothing more to it. Meaning is, like truth, not something that is but something that happens.
The answer to the meaning of life is not to be found in scientific journals for it is not a scientific question. Instead we can say it has no answer and at the same time many answers all of which are absolutely and irrevocably true. Every answer springs from the mind of someone who have considered the issue at some length. It is based on human interpretation and conjecture created by our consciousness and according to Jung in his memoir it is a myth. In its search for meaning consciousness creates a myth, a myth of meaning.
This is what consciousness does, so it is what we do. We do it because we can't not do it.

Brotherhood of Illuminated Showmen

SO this is a goal for the Acolyte Showman.
An important part of his education and study is to get himself to a point where his own consciousness, or heart in the terminology of the Brotherhood of Illuminated Showmen, creates his very own myth of meaning. Meaning is like fire it can spread.
The young Showman's myth must be like the Greek myths and Norse Viking mythology. Not something to be shrugged off as childish or less than religion or philosophy, but as a firm foundation for well balanced, happy and always creative Showman.
"He who stands on firm foundation can move the world with the fulcrum of their mind." {
In the symbology of the Brotherhood the voice of individual consciousness is a little candle. It is a fire but since the newborn myths are mere whispers at first it is but a candle. They are shy and insecure in the face of strong personalities, childhood encounters with religion, secular organizations or media. Only by engaging in the Creative Process guided carefully by Crowds and fellow Showmen can one learn to discern the tiny whisper of a voice that comes from the heart. The sheer peal, almost inaudible at first slowly comes to ring true. First only fragments. Like single freestanding acts. But as the Acolyte Showman gains experience he creates more acts, each one building on the one before, each one containing new truths and insight that rings true to him. The pinnacle in the evolution of meaningful Showmanship is symbolized by a star. It is no longer a little candle, a mere whisper of unintelligible hopes and aspirations but a roaring giver of energy. The kind of powerhouse that fuels worlds.
As his Craft develops so does the Man. When the Show is deep the Man is deep. Before he goes through the Final Initiation his Acts have become a show. The Journey Man's Master Piece have become a fully fledged Seed Show and the Master Showman has mastered the most important lesson; to create a Myth for himself strong enough to be a fulcrum to change the Hearts of Crowds towards Good.

Why is this exploration so important? and if meaning is 'man made' and not something inherently in nature would it not be better to admit to life's meaninglessness?
I don't think so.

"Meaninglessness inhibits fulness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness." Whilst Meaning has an inherent curative power. "Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything." {Jung}

" What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? to answer this question at all implies religion. Is there any sense then, you may ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is no only unfortunate but almost disqualified for life." {Einstein - The World as I See It."

For the weighty reasons stated above it is of the utmost importance for all Showmen to not only seek to create their own meaning but also use their unique position as communicator to help others find theirs.

"There is grandeur in this view of life." {Darwin}

On a personal Note

I do love to arrive into a new town to meet up with my fellow carnies. As I exited the spiegel tent last night and walked to the porta loos It struck me just how much I love the back stage areas of festivals. I spend a substantial amount of time of my life in these temporary places. Empty carparks or gravelly sportsfields gets transformed as techies, roadies and roustabouts pull tents, carousels, the Ferris wheel and bars off the back of rickety old trucks.
Within days the non-descript place is transformed into a brand new thing, an area where different rules apply - it becomes a Carnival.
A perimeter fence is put up to delineate the transfigured space. Like a church contains one type of sacred space, the carnivals edge marks another. A place where everything which is human is flaunted and celebrated.

The backstage area here in Brisbane has a spot in the fence where it is possible to peek over. Every time I see someone raise up on tippy toes to catch a glimpse of the magic world behind the scenes it warms my heart.

Watching this little boy sneak a peak at the English Gents melted my heart.

 I also wonder what they see.
For the world of the circus that they normally see is the shiny facades the ornate paintings and colourfull banners and posters. This is the beautiful side. Backstage we sit on plastic chairs, eat take away food, drink powder coffee from styrofoam cups. The artists are warming up on a children's puzzle play mat laid down on a dusty almost grass-less little patch. Temporary structures and gaffa tape holds up a fat plastic hose coming from the noisy industrial sized air-conditioning unit.

I wonder if the Crowds peeping in are disappointed or if they realize that it is in environments like this the Carnival Dreams presented out the front, inside the Spiegel tents and Big Tops are born. In the dirty, chaotic and temporary world where artists are cramped in. Minds both similar and and very different meet. Fleeting encounters with other creatives. People with open minds, but (mostly) not so open their brains fall out do their art, get drunk and talk about ideas as if they were already real.

It is from this stuff dreams are made.

The Front

The Back

Edith Clifford

"Edith Clifford was born in Boston Massachusetts on November 22, 1886 of John Clifford and Emily Rivers-Clifford, who emigrated from England to the US before Edith's birth. Clifford began swallowing swords in 1899 at the age of 13 after learning from sword swallower Delno Fritz."

Swordswallow.com

"Swallowing swords takes a steady hand and the willingness to hazard the occasional sore throat and pierced esophagus. And fortunately for those readers who won't risk the taste of broadsword, the folks at the Sword Swallowing Hall of Fame are compiling the histories of sword swallowers past and present.
Some of the best photos in their archive date back to the 1800s, when sword swallowers like Edith Clifford, who learned the art at the age of 13 and could swallow 24 swords simultaneously, razor blades, bayonets, and saws. When she was a veteran, Harry Houdini witnessed her act and described her routine as such:

"The sensation of her act was when the point of a bayonet 23 1/2 inches long and fastened to the breech of a cannon was placed in her mouth and the cannon discharged with the recoil driving the bayonet down her throat."

{io9}

In this video sword swallower Dan Meyer swallows Edith's saw. It is the original saw seen in the photographs above and below.

 

"In the spring of 1919, Harry Houdini visited the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus to see one of Clifford's performances where she swallowed a bayonet that was shot down her throat with a gun. By this time, she had been sword swallowing for over 20 years. Clifford's show so impressed Houdini that he wrote about it in 1920 in his book "Miracle Mongers and their Methods": "The sensation of her act was when the point of a bayonet 23 1/2 inches long and fastened to the breech of a cannon was placed in her mouth and the cannon discharged with the recoil driving the bayonet down her throat"."

  Swordswallow.com 

[Via Cyriaque Lamar, , and Turn of the Century]

Soul Dust - The Magic Show of the Mind

This is a beautiful theory by Nicholas Humphrey

"Consciousness is a magical-mystery show we stage inside our own heads -- a show that paves the way for spirituality, and allows us to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in the "soul niche."

"Why a magic show? Why would an organism receive enjoyment from the feeling of existence? Well, the beings that enjoys existence would develop a will to live."

"Rather than being an aid to survival, consciousness provides an essential incentive to survive. Enchantment is itself "the biological advantage of being awestruck." Or, as the poet and Pooh creator A.A. Milne put it, "It's awful fun to be born at all."

Pic By Humphrey

{matt ridley}

Humphrey lays out his ideas of consciousness as a magic show that we put on for the enjoyment of our selves in the book Soul Dust: the magic of consciousness.

What exactly is the redness of a tomato, the salty taste of anchovies, or searing pain of a burn? Humphrey tells us it is a kind of magical recreation, a show that you lay on for yourself inside your head. In response to the stimulation of your sense organs you create an extraordinary art work for your mind to look at. A simulacrum of sorts.
But the show you put on does more than just recreate the outside world, it steeps it in subjectivity. It makes it not the world but your world and further, storing it in your head adds to the personal dimension as we colour it with emotion. The experience enters your head and is shaped by the previous experiences you have stored in your mind's magic show. Each experience is shaped and re-framed by the show they are slotted into. Like how water stays water but takes on the shape of the jug you pour it into.

What is the purpose of this show in the mind?

2D Penrose triangle

The reason your mind creates a show for you is to sell you the world and to interpret it for you in a stimulating and meaningful. A theater is not a replica of the world it is a place where scenes from the world are acted out to comment and enrich the Crowds by watching it. We go to be entertained and educated. The crowd wants to experience the added magic of watching a symbolic representation. Such it is with our minds Magic Show. It attempts to persuade us emotionally to enjoy the Show of the world. It is one part of our brain staging a show for another part of the brain. A little like the illustration below.

Origins of the show

Sensations have always been a kind of show. It has been a bodily representation of the world around us.
From the very first floating single cell organisms in the pre-cambrian waters beginning to register light and respond to changes in the water pressure as bigger predatory species swam by there has bee some sort of interpretation of the stimulus. What the organism feels is not what happens on the outside. In this way the mental world is fundamentally a representation of the world.
In the very beginning the change of light or pressure might have simply triggered a physiological response such as a flutter of the body to illicit movement and escape or perhaps to get closer to the stimulus. The next step would then be for the organism to be able to delay or choose which response to take to the stimulus. For this to happen the process becomes internalized, or privatized. It was no longer just an instinctual one step response. It would benefit the organism greatly to be able to choose its mode of outward behavior depending on the individual situations. To do this the internal theater had to begin. A very rudimentary representation of the outside world would be needed for the organism to choose. The stimulus would not just be objective anymore but highly subjective, since the immediate needs to stay alive are absolutely based on the subject experiencing the stimulus. 

"Sensation has always been theater of sorts. Its been been theater from the start but it was not magical theater. "

Once the theater of outside stimulation has begun, the leap towards being able to let the scenes run without the actual physical stimulus triggering it is not too great. Becoming what if? Rather than it is.
If the organism now instead of acting instinctively and immediately on the sensory input, one can easily imagine that the original evolutionary use for a reaction to stimuli would become outdated and needing a different response. For this to be possible the responses should become internalized and later evaluated for best possible response.

Why this theater?

Just how does this Theater pay off in terms of biological survival? "How can watching the show be genuinely life enhancing?"
In the process of becoming and remaining conscious, in the simple pleasure of being there, we discover a new purpose.

“The great object of life is Sensation - to feel that we exist - even though in pain - it is this "craving void" which drives us to gaming - to battle - to travel - to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”

Byron

Why, you might ask, would an organism develop enjoyment from the feeling of existence? Well, the beings that enjoys existence would develop a will to live.
Natural selection makes things that are important for the continuation of life pleasurable. Take sex for instance, or eating and drinking. So here we have a case for our consciousness making our experience of the world around us awesome.

From Nicholas Humphrey's book soul dust

The sensations we get from seeing the red of a tomato are actually formed in us. They are not inherent in the tomato itself. What we experience as red is simply a refraction of light at a particular wave length. But since every time we see a tomato we feel the effects of the red, deliciousness we begin to connect the two. In this way we now experience that the tomato is sending out something, and that something is more than just sitting there, it is indeed like a kind of communication, this at least is our experience of it. Like the tomato is sitting there showing us how red and delicious it looks.
So strictly speaking the world just sits there, but through our experience of it we feel like it is speaking to us, it is enticing us and stimulating us and this is a pleasurable process. We basically enchant ourselves into loving life. 

Drugs

We watch the Magic Show in our minds and through it fall deeper in love with the world. This is why we love the world around us more whilst on mind altering drugs. They enhance our mental representations and all of a sudden the colour of a tomato or the complex details in the bark of a tree becomes staggeringly beautiful and interesting. We get the feeling that the world is sweetly shouting its beauty and its multi level existence to us. The world is always talking to us, giving us the feeling it is revealing but a tiny substrate of its nature but on drugs its shouting.
The experience of perception blows children away and can make them stop in their tracks to study a browning leaf or a bit of silver foil from a cigarette packet as if it were the greatest treasure.
As we get used to the experience of perceiving the world we begin taking it for granted and stop noticing the magic, the novelty wears off.
This is the catch 22 of being a Showman with a novelty act; once people have seen you, the novelty wears off and you become 'just' an act. But put us in a different show, change costume and alter your patter and all of a sudden the experience for the Crowd becomes Novel again, this is what drugs do to us; they enhance our experience of the world. 
With or without drugs we enhance the world and our experience of it. Our Magic Theater gives significance and glow to everything in the world and this is why we feel so connected to it. It transforms the world into an awesome place. "All the more astounding because of the intimate connection we feel we have to it."
Watching a fire or a swirling pool of water we sometimes get knocked back by the immense beauty of it and our sense of union with it. This happens because in the simple act of perception there is an awesome Magical Theater production enhancing the world. 

We are constantly blown away by the feeling that the universe speaks directly to us, like in a way we are the only or at least most significant spectator to it and so say all of us. We are all the focal point of the universe and we are all creating its awesomeness in our minds, in fact that is the fundamental principle of consciousness; a Magical Theater of the mind to please and enchant our souls.

In this view we find individualism, but that is not the end. For as we experience the awesomeness of a sunrise we are immediately closer to the thought of what does this feel like to others. So in this way the creation of awe in us connect us to others and engage us in sharing the awesomeness of the world. From here comes The One Who Face the Other Way.

Interview with me...

I was asked a little while ago to do an interview with Map Magazine for our La Soiree season in Brisbane. It turned out that it was an email interview, which means they send me some questions and I write down the answers. Then they cut and past those into something. To the right is what they printed and this is what I wrote...

Q&A for map magazine

Please answer the questions with approximately 20 word answers where applicable. Thank you!

NAME: Captain Frodo

OCCUPATION: Incredible Rubberman

WEBSITE: theilluminatedshowman.blogspot.com.au

age?

36

where were you born?

In the beautiful fjord lands of Norway.

what was the performance that first made your world come alive?

My father is a Magician. With a dad that actually could do anything made me want to be like him.

describe yourself in ten words?

A philosophically minded Showman making people laugh and think.

what gets you out of bed in the morning?

At the moment my 4 week old daughter Saskia.

what is something you discovered this month?

Having a baby changes everything you ever thought about the world, yet the world goes on as if nothing happened.

the last thing that made you smile & why?

All these questions asked at this particular time in my life begs just one answer – my little girl.

what is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?

As above, Chaplin’s The Kid, Chaplin’s grandson James Thiérrée’s Au Revoir Paraluie, The Black Rider with music by Tom Waits.

 

what’s your idea of complete happiness?

Going to bed with a book, falling asleep before finishing page one. Dreaming the book and later realizing my dream was better than the book.

 

when was the last time you did something for the first time?

I have been paving our bush property with rock from our own quarry. Mixing cement, using a scotching hammer and feeding my baby.

tell me about passion … ?

It’s the fire in your heart that illuminates your journey. It’s contagious. The job of a Showmanis to pass on enthusiasm.

what makes you different?

I make a living squeezing myself through two tennis rackets and sitting on a tin can.

what scares you?

At the moment, America.

Imagine going to work in a flight simulator controlling a drone bomber on the other side of the world. You kill a bunch of people, destroy a neighbourhood then rush off to pick up your daughter from drama class…

I find it truly frightening.

what’s worth fighting for?

A meaningful life, and (as the beastie boys reminded us) - the right to party.

tell me about creativity …?

To be creative seek out inspiring art, ideas and experiences and then express what that makes you feel and think in whichever way you can.

your biggest inspiration?

Those that do stuff others call impossible and the guy that carved an Eiffel towers that fit inside the eye of a needle.

what is the world you imagine?

A world where Illuminated Showmen plant Seeds of change crowds and show by show they make the world a better place.

what are your words of wisdom?

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams it is still a beautiful world.