He- Hah [What Kind Of Clown are You?--Questionaire]

Enid Welsford spent most of her academic career at Cambridge studying the fool as a social and literary figure. Her 1935 book The Fool: His Social and Literary History remains the foundational taxonomy — buffoons, court jesters, sacred madmen, and the rest, traced across centuries of European culture.

I've built a short quiz from that taxonomy. Eight questions. It will tell you which kind of fool you are.

The result is not a flattery. Welsford's categories are historical, not therapeutic. Some of them are not comfortable to land in.

What Kind of Clown Are You? →

Welsford herself is not available for appeal.

Vampires overview.

I've studied the socio-political world from many angles, in many cultures. I've studied applied anthropology, jungian theory, world history, child development and investigated a raft of psychiatric disorders individual and collective and have concluded after weighty consideration that apart from one or two logistic issues and some currency concerns world peace and prosperitys fulcrum rests on that we each need to buy someone else a pony.

D List Delicious.

Tokyo Dome is iconic. It launched Cheap Trick's career and in February 1990 the Rolling Stones played there. In March the same year, just after the Stones, I performed there and was also projected onto the famously big screen for the fans, 'cept there were no fans and instead of a concert it was a public culmination of a Japanese government waste reduction plan and the camera operator was bored and spent time tracking me stalking the unwary on the big screen.

The "TOKYO SLIM IN DOME" event was the centerpiece of Tokyo's 1989–1990 waste reduction campaign, held at Tokyo Dome in March 1990.

It drew over 50,000 attendees for interactive exhibits, talks, and demonstrations promoting waste volume reduction, recycling, and efficient incineration to combat Tokyo's landfill crisis during the late-1980s economic boom.

Activities included hands-on workshops for residents and businesses, media-promoted pledges for the "3Rs" (reduce, reuse, recycle), and displays on garbage processing technologies like incinerators amid overflowing dumps.

The event capped a year-long "TOKYO SLIM" push that began with posters at stations and led to annual "Tokyo Waste Meetings" from 1991, reducing per-capita waste by promoting charged bulky waste collection.

Ongoing Implications for me as an outside artist

I may be relatively unimportant, but you know how Japanese Rugby fans are famous for cleaning their sections of stadiums worldwide after matches and carry their own rubbish out for the good of everyone?

I'm deliciously D-list, but I'm part of that. That was at one time my Tokyo Dome Jam.

As one of the worlds more experienced mercenary clowns I have Ballroom consciousness .

All this Ballroom talk's got me all reminiscent.

Twenty three and working in Japan at the beginning of my Corporate Clown period.
The year was [mumble-mumble]. The first major undersea cables had gone online linking Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. With great clarity it was named the H-J-K submarine cable system.

over 4,600 km at 560 Mbps capacity using fiber-optic technology

To celebrate, the most famous and largest Ballroom in Japan was rented. The Peacock Ballroom at the Ginza Tokyo Imperial Hotel.

The Imperial Hotel was founded in 1890, then redesigned by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1915 and 1923, and reimagined again in the period 1968–1970s.

The Imperial Hotel, Ginza, Tokyo

It's like if opulent and swanky had a baby and force-fed it superfluity.
[today's word on my education channel]

With stilts over my shoulder, I walked in through the front door.

I asked for a clown-nose in the lobby in my rider.

The Peacock Ballroom

The hotel's flagship event space is the Peacock Ballroom — Kujaku Hall.
The full room runs to about 2,400 m², subdivisible into West, East, and South blocks, each with ceilings around 6.2 m high.
Banquet or standing, it seats several hundred or subsumes over 3,000.

The Peacock Ballroom, full configuration

Two of the three subdivisions — same room

Performance  ·  The Brief

• Representing Hong Kong.
• A short raised platform, roughly 12 ft / 3 metres square — contained, observable, safe.
• Three such platforms in three corners of the room, each presenting a celebratory exhibit for one of each nation.
• One-metre peg stilts. Height: somewhere between 11 and 12 feet.
• White face. American WW2 flying helmet.
• Dancing with unselfconscious abandon to Iggy Pop.
• Two or three twenty-minute sets.

I knew it was incongruous. I was surrounded by titans of industry in the highest-status ballroom in the country, dancing to music I enjoyed — because much like Hong Kong and undersea cables, I too was the future.