A glowing review of my book unbidden

Quite flattering.




Charlie Chaplin once said that busking (Street performing) was the most honest form of entertainment in the world. You perform a show and then the audience gets to decide what it was worth, if anything.


The idea of making ones living by collecting retroactive admission appeals to only the rarest of individuals. In order to succeed in this lifestyle as well as being incredibly talented in their field of endeavor one must also be brave, emotionally tough as nails, resilient, adaptable, confident, funny, engaging, charming, sharp-witted, quick-footed, and barking mad. I believe with all my heart that Martin Ewen must be just such an individual.


I was first aware of Martin Ewen about 10 years ago. I found him holding court with Butterfly man, Taxi Tricks, and a handful of other full frontal, hard core, world weary, street performers, over on performers-dot-net. Unlike most mimes who only want to regale you with stories of harrowing escapes from invisible boxes, Martin A.K.A. 'Lurk' would unload on a nearly infinite number of topics with clarity, humor, tremendous intellect, acerbic sarcasm, and whimsy. Literately, I was smitten. In my opinion, whips can only aspire to be as sharp as Martin Ewen.


Martin could often use hyperbole and superlatives to paint prose so blindingly purple it should not be read without wearing the proper safety equipment. But, unlike the high school student who produces prose of this ilk that made you want to pull your eyes out with a writing implement, Martin produces a shade so lovely you would paint your house with it.


So when the legendary Nick Nicholas told us all about Martin's new book in this thread I immediately procured a copy and put it at the very pinnacle of my vacation reading list.


Well, last week while I was in the wilds of Maine with my family eating Lobstah' and sailing the bounding Atlantic I pulled up Panto Demascus on my protectively weather sheathed Amazon Kindle Reader and fell into the outrageous alphabetical memoir of the tall man with the white face and the tanker's helmet. A clown who is not only unafraid of the 'C-word' but makes it respectable. A misanthropic mime who drinks like a fish and talks like an "untethered fire-hose". To use the word brilliant to describe this short tome would not be an overstatement. I loved it, the best $2.99 I have spent in a long time. If you have ever wondered what it must be like to travel the world with nothing but the props in your kit and the clothes on your back and still manage to have a great time - you need to read this book.

Nagasaki Circus

This is chapter 14 of

Panto Damascus, One Clown's Alphabet.

But in another form, a puppetstavaganza, narrationonic form, unlike the written word but based on the written word which itself is based on what I loosely like to call my lifestyle,

Chapter two; Barcelona.

C h a p t e r   T w o

BARCELONA

I'm in Barcelona, sharing a small room with a one-legged American with literary pretensions. Still, even two-legged people need crutches or at least a self-inflated narrative of one sort or another to hold themselves up. I forgive him, which is big of me, I'll admit.

I arrived in my shared room in the middle of the day, leant my stilts against the wall and noticed his artificial leg leaning against the other. He was still asleep, or pretending to be. I knew that feeling, the disappointment of the inevitable roommate.

I quickly left for a short walk and coffee, returning an hour later to find him sitting up and prepared to banter. He confided that when traveling and overhearing an American accent, he cringes, afraid of the potential crassness of his countrymen. I mentioned an American two doors down, who was reading Hemingway (to try to reassure him), but he pooh-poohed both the writer and the reader by implication as lightweight. I told him he was full of insecure, elitist bullshit and he's been face down on his bed ever since.

Barcelona's a tough city. Every day you can find tear-streaked tourists numbly trying to comprehend that they've just been shown a knife and robbed of their wallets, or had their bag stolen from beside them at the Railway station, or, less seriously, been sold hashish that is in fact Junkie Turd.

There's this buxom princess on the Ramblas who approaches unsuspecting marks, grabs their hands and pushes them onto her breasts. While her victim is in momentary shock, she pickpockets him and hands the goods to a guy who passes behind her while she does it. It's a beautiful move, with just the right amount of cruelty, dark humour and venial heartlessness.

To walk the streets with all the money you have in the world sitting in your back pocket can be scary, but (more than for most I suppose) my occupation is a sort of insurance. When a Clown is robbed, as I have been, I have only to go out onto the street, gather a crowd, entertain them briefly, and again have funds to continue my haphazard existence. Obviously harder some days than others. To be more precise I am a Clown on stilts, removed from the ordinary man by a metre. I totter...I dance...I make mischief.
I am, in sort, a professionally unhappy pantomime, which is maybe why I snapped at the one-legged chap's dismissal of Hemingway as lightweight. I ask you—really—as if there is a point. As if intelligence is related to happiness. I don't want to sound cynical—I admit life is pointless, but so is death, and while life may be temporarily pointless, I have a suspicion that death is permanently so. But life contains a range of experience for intelligent and dull alike that you cannot not at least attempt to enjoy. As I write this, I am aware I am a jaded cheerleader on the game's periphery.

I meet my friends (fellow performers) and we wander around feeling like fringe-dwelling rascals. Alone afterwards, the strange barbarism of Barcelona reasserts itself. The old woman absently chewing on a piece of bread as she stands on the footpath, gazing dully through the laundromat window, her urine running down from under her ragged dress and following me like liquid fingers as I walk away from her down the hill. The other woman, who suddenly, violently exclaims as she swivels, swings and with her open palm venomously slaps the wall beside her, transfixed with rage, glaring at the wall at the point of impact. Or the man I wished I hadn't seen, his face deformed yet smooth, one side tear-dropping down his neck, his brown eyes numbed to the startled disgust that springs involuntarily from my first glance. He walked quickly past me and ominous childhood dreams crept back. I was scared for myself.
Proof that life's worth living?

There shortly came a time I lay down in the room with the one-legged American where I had more sympathy, empathy and respect for the legless existence.

I was approached after my streetshow on the Ramblas by a well-dressed Spaniard who asked what I cost for a night's work. This, I realised, was my first European gig. I had worked nightclub and corporate and arts festivals at that point, so quoted X worth of the local currency.

Indifferent to the size of my fee, this gentleman secured my address and told me I'd get picked up the following evening. I was only told it was a nightclub and it was a little out of town. I went home chuffed at this new development, my limb-deficient roomie was still sulking, no words were spoken. A sedan came well before sunset the next evening and took me out to the coast somewhere.

The nightclub was isolated on the waterfront with its own breakwater and jetty for luxury yachts to dock. It was big, many theme rooms, some roofless. It was a major investment, I came to learn, some large corporate hospitality expense tax write-off, and the guy who ran it had been the man who approached me on the Ramblas.

I approached him; he grinned, shook my hand, nodded respectfully, called someone to show me a dressing room and issued my instructions.
'Do what you want.'
This guy was effortlessly cool. A Spanish Fonzie with that European calm self-satisfaction us New-Worlders cannot match.

I looked around. One roofless theme-room in the complex was 12 feet deep in foam with Gaudi-like pillars and ceramic tiling. There was a cozy little house bar, an enormous multi-level main room, tropical rooms, industrially-styled rooms, a casual restaurant area facing the sea.

I got ready and went out and did my thing. I went long, why not? I like my elevated position. I roamed and danced and played and hid and ridiculed. There was a lot of ground to cover. I worked three hours, then dismounted, cleaned up and went to visit the boss in the house bar to get paid and secure my ride home.

The advantage in dealing with advanced coolness is that it challenges you to expand your own cool. The boss thanked me for a job well done, ordered me a drink and pulled out a billfold. I thanked him for the opportunity to work in such a stunning venue. He replied with a little history of the place and just as he did so he put my fee down on the bar between us. I did not take my eyes off his, staying attentive to him, undistracted by my fee between us. It seemed like the coolest thing to do, and basically polite.
He paused, smiled at me, another fluid movement and his billfold again was in his hand, he made some general complimentary remark and while doing so, doubled my fee. I smiled and looked away. We were playing. It was a great game.

He handed me a roll of drink tickets—not two or three, not five or ten, a roll of about 60 drink tickets—and suggested I go enjoy myself and get back to him around dawn to arrange my lift home. That I did.
Personally, I enjoy multifaceted venues, because I can spend my recreational time observing. It doesn't look out of place that you are isolated when you move purposefully, so I ambled from room to room. I knew nobody, and as long as that continued I could pretend to be a thin, preoccupied Spaniard.
I tend to react more manically and physically the more I drink. I presume it's something to do with the seduction of risk-taking behaviours.

I had a pass that enabled me to go anywhere. I passed guards who glanced at me indifferently and went out onto the breakwater to play. Great, three-pronged concrete shapes were piled deep in a line out into the bay. I bounded from prong to prong and clambered around happily. I pondered some time staring out to sea. I had a pocket full of money and as first European gigs went, I considered this a gift. I was drunk.
On the way back in, I mis-stepped and rolled my ankle with my full weight. A white flash of pain followed by nausea and an ominous throb. I stayed where I was for a good 30 minutes—I should have gotten ice on it sooner. I hobbled in, went back to my dressing room and convinced myself it wasn't broken. I was going to have to rest it for days until the swelling reduced and the bruising subsided enough for me to wear stilts again.

Eventually I got a ride back, embarrassed frankly at my inebriation, downplaying the injury, hard to do when you cannot use a leg but easier if you happen to be seated in a car. I assured my designated driver I was fine being dropped off a couple of blocks from my hotel at the nearest main road as he had suggested. I pushed my stuff out, thanked him and he pulled away.

The sun was out but not yet fiercely hot. I was exhausted, throbbing, hungover, but strangely cheerful. I slung my bag over one shoulder, my stilts over the other and commenced hopping.
Laden hopping is not easy. I rested frequently, leaning my stilts against a wall and watching the curious glances from the early Sunday morning passers-by. I took it about thirty yards at a time. It took close to an hour.

The hotel was quiet. I stood panting at the base of six flights of stairs. I needed a shower but I needed to be horizontal more. Those six flights cut deep into my reserve tank of stamina.
I got to my shared room. The one legged gent was sleeping, his crutches and artificial leg propped up against the wall next to his bed. I propped my stilts up similarly and fell into bed.
I stayed in that room the better part of 4 days, going out for nearby food once a day. My one-legged roommate had no pity. I'd showed him none and my condition was temporary. I admired his nonchalant use of his fake appendage, if not his personality. He checked out after three days.

It was five days until I could work again, realising how precarious a physically-skilled occupation can be when coupled with recklessness. At the time that was merely an observation. I'm still unsure whether I've really learnt that lesson. 

From my Book 'Panto Damascus--One Clown's Alphabet'

Hardcopy

Kindle 

I'm huge in Germany!..relatively

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/panto-damascus/16310889

US Kindle

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005E1JXF8

UK Kindle

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German Kindle

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Chapter one: Auckland Royal Easter Show

C h a p t e r   O n e

AUCKLAND 

THE ROYAL EASTER SHOW

DAY ONE

Woke up with an opaque foreboding. Remembered it was the first day of the Easter Show.

I’d flown in the day before from Australia.

Got up off the floor at my friend Nick Nickolas’s place and went to the bathroom to remove inexplicable bat-shit from my hair. Reheated two-day-old coffee in the machine and had a cigarette. Got a lift from someone nicknamed ‘Porn Star’ to the gig as Nick was still sleeping and had blagged off till 7PM.  

I arrived and was ushered into a small dressing room with lit mirrors and an incongruous bath, to be shared by four of us. Next door, eighty-four teenage Girl Guides giggled and squeezed into costume pre-song and dance, and then one hundred geriatric crooners descended, harmonising randomly backstage.

I got elongated—stilts, whiteface, flying helmet, the full variety entertainer disguise—and went out among farmyard animals, cowboys, candy floss, Ferris wheels, steer roping, towing fire engines with your teeth, Polynesian bands, spa pools, climbing walls, paintball shooting demos, Michael Jackson impersonators, sausage rolls, a cat show, cheese displays, halls of mirrors, horses, hydrangeas and the general public.  

And in that one bright shiny moment scores of atrocities both globally and locally were committed beyond imagination and mention. One of which was a large pond in front of the stage. Who put that there and why? A goldfish-infested security measure? The only guaranteed comedy was the St John’s Ambulance caravan where you could peek at head injuries (fairgoers are forever falling over and landing on their heads). 

More tomorrow... 

DAY TWO

Woke up stoically fatalistic, bordering on good cheer. Got up off the floor at Nick’s place and went to the bathroom to inspect various organs that had been sewn onto my body as I slept. 

The sky was blue and cloudless, melanoma farming weather. Drove in, passed the stage where thirty-four ten-year-old girls were singing,

‘Thank God I’m a country boy.’ 

Backstage and the entrance to the dressing rooms was full of another contingent, these all 50-plus and dressed in lavender singing,

‘You are my sunshine.’

Got to our room, switched on Cookie the Clown’s TV, watched cricket. The TV broke. Cookie the Clown said it overheated, so I waited ‘til he went out, then put the TV in the fridge for twenty-five minutes but it didn’t help. 

I have to stilt-up for the parade at 3PM every day. A brass band, four indiscriminate cheerleaders, three dancing girls (formal, lycra, sequins), five dancing girls (informal, casual attire), four assorted human stuffed animals, cowboys driving a ute. It’s hot, sweaty, thankless work, and if not for the occasional hysterical infant there would be little light on the horizon as this is but Day Two. 

These are the best days of my life.

DAY THREE

Woke up, gradually focused on a prize sow’s pristine off-pink buttocks and realised I’d somehow slept over in the animal pens at the show. Squealed a quick apology and left. Made it back to Nick’s place by late morning, He gave me some valuable tips on various animals’ erogenous zones and how to deal with jealousy when you’re not an alpha male (‘focus on another species’). 

Went back to the Easter Show for Day Three. It was raining and a Monday, I put my stilts on and went for a walk. In order to lance the collective tedium contained within the stallholders and roustabouts, I chose to personify a bleak, unforgiving, emotionally insolvent, utterly bored, angry and dangerous pantomime. It was like a startling revelation crossed with a suppressed memory. 

There was a middle-aged Polynesian woman with one eye focused several latitudes shy of the other working at a hot dog stand. She flirted with me by waving a tomato sauce-dipped hot-dog in my direction while crooning in Tongan. Disregarding the danger I accepted the hot-dog. I think she muttered some rude thing because her workmates almost fell into the deep-fryer laughing. The hotdog was average. 

A guy sat in a stall for ‘Putt Putts’, toy boats that sail in small circles in the bath. He didn’t engage anyone. He just sat there reading a book as a handful of his product clacked around a tub. He had a sign that read, ‘Putt Putts—$10 each or 2 for $25’. I suspected he was not entirely committed to retail.

In the strongman tent today a large man towed an aircraft carrier 10 metres by a piece of dental floss clenched in his teeth. We drove home. Nick cooked, we ate and watched insufferable pompous twats reward each other for irrelevant renditions of third-hand fiction designed as both product placement and misdirection from life’s pointless, purposeless futility. Otherwise known as the Oscars. I immediately started writing a screenplay about an individual whose principled stand and integrity brings a large multi-national corporation face to face with its immoral past and transforms it into a cancer-curing, non-profit organisation.

I call it ‘Debbie Does McDonalds’.

DAY FOUR

Woke up. Hunched painfully up on the balls of my feet while making clucking noises, I hopped towards a saucer of seed in the corner. After giving myself a bloody nose pecking at it, I remember the hypnotism session with Nick the night before and get up. We have weapons-grade coffee, read the paper, check internet, discuss obscure philosophies, laugh heartily at the failings of others and head off to the Easter Show. We stop briefly to assist a throng of blind people crossing an intersection on their way to their annual scratch and sniff movie. 

Some of us have thumb-tips for magic, padded groins like Porn Star, or personality, but others rely on makeup. Cookie the clown (more later) and I both put on our clown-faces while Nick lounged about producing inexplicable things from mid-air. Cookie is a fellow droll, into multiple revenue streams but still finds time to do dying cancer kids’ birthday parties.

‘Happy birthday, kid—It’s your last.’

Between sets, Nick chauffeured Cookie and me up nearby One Tree Hill. Two painted clowns in the backseat, one American style, one European, up to this hill (only 5 minutes away) where you could see the whole city, Rangitoto, Manuerewa harbour, Manakau harbour, the showgrounds.

Back at work, in the animal tent, the sow and her 8 piglets slept oblivious in the sawdust. There are various forms of Rodeo at the show and Cookie and I had come to label anyone paralysed or in a wheelchair for any reason ‘Rodeo Clowns’. I played with them and let them ride between my legs. It’s one of those all inclusive sad/bitter/proud things in a wheelchair that one can do with tall Clowns.

I spent the rest of the day being comically useful and dancing when the mood took me. 

DAY FIVE

Surrounded by hostile forces, naked, with the entire cast of Bonanza pointing and laughing at my lacquered genitalia, I woke up. I had been placed into the still warm chest cavity of a recently killed cow as I slept. Sun dappled though yellow leaves of the large oak outside. The coffee this morning was so strong it coated one’s entire digestive system in caffeine plaque. Hyperactive yet strangely sedated we proceeded to Day Five of The Royal Easter Show.

I arrived late, conveniently missing thousands of schoolchildren by mistake. Cookie the Clown did Clown-cover; I got my three hours in later in the afternoon. There was a mid-twenties Rodeo Clown today, going downhill. He must have had a souped-up battery in his chair and he whipped between my legs faster than any Rodeo Clown has previously, and that’s after twenty years of Rodeo Clowns.

I patted a horse; it didn’t mind. I sewed six rubber gloves to the front of my costume, filled them with custard, and lay down with the piglets but they were having none of it; the mother became riled and scared onlookers by crashing, foaming and howling, in her nearby cage.

An older gentleman operated a toasted nuts stand, ‘Cashews $2 a bag’. He looked like he’d been sentenced to death. He hadn’t had a customer in five days and he’d got the thousand-yard stare of the doomed retailer. You could wave things in front of his face, he didn’t flinch.

Nick took Cookie and I up to One Tree Hill again, Cookie in the front seat and me in the back with my head out one window and my legs wearing stilts out the other. It’s the halfway point and we’d planned an ‘Over the Hump’ party tomorrow. It’s physically tiring and I was beginning to suspect I was mentally ill.

DAY SIX 

Flayed by a lifetime of embarrassment, I thought the ‘Over the Hump’ party would be audio casual, a doddle, mildly recreational. Instead, I was bamboozled, hijacked, taken hostage, brainwashed, led astray, bullshitted, fed lines, stitched up, falsely encouraged, patronised, ridiculed, autopsied, preserved and cremated. 

The day itself went much like the others; I tried as fully as possible to dilute Cookie the Clown’s deplorable work ethic with the sweat of my brow. I patted the horse again and strangely it was more wary today than yesterday.

Whilst striding round tall and sardonic, I found a mannequin wearing a sleeping bag, and had a heart-rending, pathos-ridden relationship with it. No-one noticed.

Cookie the Clown, wearing a yellow wig, white face and large shoes, had the ignominy of having his six-year-old daughter see how he made his living. She wept. We all wept.

After work, the ‘Mind Barracudas’ at the party—Dave Sheridan, Nick, Phil, Andy and the Ghost of Christmas Past—had me sniveling in my cups as they craftily reminded me of favourite toys I’d lost and missing pets. Then they made excuses and went to bed and I spent time rigging an explosion of cheese the first time anyone used the bathroom. Tomorrow is the beginning of the Easter weekend and numbers should get ludicrous. 

Wood chopping, chainsaw races, mustache competition for woman, high pitched scream comps for men, Little Black Sambo pancake races, all the wholesome multi-cultural texture of a nation truly in tune with its amalgam of Newcastle coals and bamboo. The moment I lay my head on a soft surface all this mental flotsam ceased. 

DAY SEVEN 

I woke up, my head encased in a cage containing, in a separate compartment, a rabid starving possum. Nick stood by with a shotgun in case of emergencies. We puffed on coffee and glugged down cigarettes. Easter Friday. Christ died for our sins and all the bars are shut and you can only eat candyfloss.

Checking to see that the fridge was well-stocked for the evening, we turned our backs on domestic affairs and hopped into Nick’s magic-mobile. There we morphed into the professional show business personalities and quick-fire, nimble-witted, verbally dexterous artistes for which we are so well-respected and so handsomely paid. The car wouldn’t start so we morphed back.

The car started, we sighed and morphed again. The car leaked charisma all the way to the show.

The showgrounds were well stocked with bipeds. Many, many bipeds. More than all the other days together. Children and the elderly were trampled to their deaths as crowds surged from one hot-dog stand to the next. People stepped on bodies for toffee-apples. Fights broke out. Body parts were torn off the dead and used as weapons. In midstream the current was so strong that weak children spent the day being swept along recursive eddies.

Stilts are fun in dense crowds because your feet are at shoulder height and all you have to squeeze past people are two thin legs. The disadvantage is that you will never see the banana skin that matters. Or the pulpy potato chip, the bull, sheep, goat, duck, horse, rabbit or pig shit, the vomit, or the entrails thrown from the Gypsies’ tent.

I tottered into the show-jumping arena and jumped all the fences. Just flicking my legs over before the competition, with a grandstand in full fettle providing raucous support. It was Easter so I got a few good crucifixions (a stock pantomime pose of mine) in as well.

Cookie dressed in his clown cowboy costume today. It’s sad to realise that he’s probably one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t need help. He hypnotises chickens as a hobby. He has three. He actually convinces them they’re chickens.

I did the parade, played with the animals, watch men sprint up twenty-five metre poles, watched fast cowgirls barrel-race, danced to Polynesian music, made cynical faces at all the wrong people, did flicky one-trick-pony stuff with my legs. Stole two ice-creams, one plate of noodles and some popcorn (people don’t seem to believe the stilt-man will just walk off with it). Then it was over, the laughter faded, the happy children but memories. Life one day shorter and for what? 

DAY EIGHT

Woke up, tired, very tired, my body wanting to decompose quietly and my soul to be kept in a potted plant. Still, at this stage, routine takes over and I fixed my rictus grin. Nick had bought a ‘Sleepwalking’ sleeping bag with legs and feet, and hands free for opening cans of baked beans in the next squat he’ll inhabit in London (that much sweat in one waterproof sack!). At 11:30AM it ejected him with a loud belch.

I was there with the car keys and we went back to the Royal Easter Show.

A national opposition politician was going to skydive into the fair today (gosh, I’d vote for him), in tandem with the only guy that mattered, the bored professional skydiver tethered to the politician as he plummets to meet his constituency. It was called off due to inclement weather. I was furious.

By now I’m doing a lot of stock material. The Polynesians still press $5 bills on me and tell me to eat. The goats are still there to be stampeded. The pigs are understandably wary. The chickens are still unconvinced regarding road-crossing. I don’t mess with the horses, too much history. 

I stroll about; people seem to be urgently in search of distraction. I oblige; I’m not happy either. Nick gets rained out on his first scheduled show and spends the afternoon turning others’ sunny dispositions into sour backgammon-loser refugee mindsets. I don’t gamble.

I work the Rodeo instead. Hard men and woman used to compound fractures, faces worn by constant sunshine rather than weekends in garden bars. Horse-wise, dog-knowledgeable, hamster-friendly, stilt-wary till that crust is broken, then it’s a chuckle-athon. Sad people, really.

The same human squirrels sprinted up the twenty-five metre poles, different horses jumped over the same fences. I’d been checking with the Saint John Ambulance on a daily basis to find out whether anyone had lost an eye yet. (It’s not a proper party until…)

We had drinks after work. What else is new? Still, it was a sort of carnie bonding session. A perfect opportunity to find a woman who would ingest weed-killer to give you a two-headed baby. 

DAY NINE 

Four people lay in crumpled heaps on Nick’s living-room floor, but only one wore a sleeping bag with legs with ‘Sack with Attitude!’ written on it. I went and bought steak-and-potato pies for everyone; Nick inhaled his in his sleep. I followed up with badly-cooked eggs and bacon, raw mushrooms and coffee, but Nick was hard to muster this morning. He’s acting like a pony with colic, all pensive and brainless. The sleeping bag has taken a strange hold on him. He says he can feel it against his skin when he’s not wearing it. He wrestled out of it at 1:15PM and we eventually drove to work.

Today’s theme was drizzle. Drizzle on the parade, drizzle on the shows, the animals, the public, the stalls, the arenas, the rides, all was drizzle. 

I wore my brand new disco stilt-pants; they look like liquid silver and really freak out the miniature pony. I wandered about in the rain while not lounging about the dressing-room listening to Porn Star (Gareth, Master of Fire and Steel) go on and on and on about the abnormally large penis that inhabits his perpetually leather-clad groin. He sometimes grabs it through his trousers for emphasis. Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day and I intend to cut it off and go fishing with it. 

Nick continued to acquire credit via backgammon. Cookie the Clown has gone professionally mute—I fear I am a bad influence on him, he no longer seems happy. We swapped ideas for a movie (starring us) involving mini-golf, looking at the job boards at social welfare, perhaps being sent on a quest by the International Clown Council to find a fresh new gag and save the world. Gee, we were bored.

Once again the parachuting was put off. I liked the idea that, for the last three days, a leading politician’s put himself in a small plane with a big idea, buzzed the showgrounds at altitude, then gone home unrealised. Maybe tomorrow. 

DAY TEN

The last day.

A lot of the animals were sad because they’d made good friends with children and after today they had to go back to farms where they might be used for meat. 

You know, if the Palestinians and Israelis could just get together over a Ferris wheel…share candy floss, win pointless stuffed animals, grin aimlessly…

The whole shell of the Royal Easter Show split open today to reveal a seedy underbelly full of colourful figures of note. The potpourri of old-timers with decades of experience with this tattered cultural icon was so dense with the rich seedy aroma of old money and an agricultural sense of ‘Breadbasket of the Empire’ that it was all I could do to keep my rancid personality in check in the face of their secure self-satisfaction.

Suffering from sensory overload, too many abstract exclamations, very little makes sense apart from the sleeping bags. I now have my own and have outfitted the family. Where was I?

I drove back home, remembered lost luggage and repeated the journey. Left my laptop on a horse float and remembered to drive back to grab it off the fender before the rain started. I was all messed up and humourless. Crying children under my belt, squealing animals, ten days of roving relationships, various reliable bands and Public Address Systems. The multitude of fast food stalls and political parties. Sick of it, I was going to bed. But enriched by an event that’s my country’s cultural staple. 

----------------------------

25 more where that came from at

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/panto-damascus/16310889

Transitioning from service to product. Book pimping.

So I put my book up on Lulu last night.

This would be it here...


It spent an eight month phase being edited. Then, after my further input in response to editing notes it was gone over again. A cover was designed and signed off on and then it was proofread and the editing notes checked once more.

It's just some stories. I tell stories because I've led a storied life.

It exists now, whatever theoretic potential I may have had as a writer has taken it's first actual step from the comfort of my internal padded room into a vast auditorium which I suspected is crammed with critical souped up equivalents of woodchippers, their gaping maws beckoning.

Lulu is like a test run. The mainstream is Amazon however to do that properly requires formatting for a variety of digital mediums. I will wait to see if Lulu sales can accomplish that being done professionally.

The interesting thing is that now I have something I can use to experiment further in my curious opinion of the internet being like the street and street theatre and I can start to try to build an audience.

My online audience up till now have been residual street performance brethren plus a small amount of folk who's relationship with me has sprung from my online community background over the last ten years.

I figure I will have to put effort into sustaining relationships. One aspect of street theatre and performance in general is a certain ambivalence towards your audience. Myself especially in that I'm disdainful of them as a central characteristic of my clown.  With street theatre it doesn't matter, you can always get another crowd. You only need the one in front of you, not crowds you've had before or those in the future.

I think this is a major difference, this past, present, future tense view of things because the internet is a perpetual present tense. Your 'presence' is a perpetual 'now'.  I need to remember that.

I can now continue with my online series of 'how to create an audience online' in non theoretical terms because I have something less than abstract to work with.

interesting.

First publishing outlet, more to follow, feedback required.

The South Island NZ, Sometimes I miss it.

This is the West Coast, where my parents grew up. We'd holiday there most years visiting relatives.

It's just rained, that's where the waterfalls come from.

I get my manuscript back to day and as I have my bookcover ready I will spend the time, whatever it takes, to publish on Lulu for soft cover, hard copy and Amazon and smashword for digital versions as soon as I get it.

The last few days I've been practicing formatting so while i know there will be some frustration I've dealt 

 with some of it already.

So to publish, then the marketing begins. My ambitions are minimal. I want to afford to pay the editor and for myself I'm looking to be able to purchase a beanie hat with a propeller on it and a full tank of gas for the car, my car only has a 5 gallon tank.

Final signed off on Book Cover

Sign off also on the editing by this coming wednesday - just a final readthrough by a couple of people to check and then it's formatting for kindle and softcover.

The context index will be interesting too. Not content with one there will be three index's I hope the kindle version can deal with it really smoothly. Three versions, The alphabetical order, the order I wrote the stories and the order i visited them.

Because each tells it's own story in a subtle way. Anyway that's next.

Cover of my book!

excerpt...Queenstown

C h a p t e r S e v e n t e e n

Queenstown NZ

Queenstown is nestled at the foot of a range of mountains named “The Remarkables” for good reason, towering over Lake Tekapo in the South Island of NZ. Anyone who believes that faith can move mountains should come here and pray, then perhaps lower their expectations a tad.

It's where bungee jumping was invented and young and old and the occaisional twitching parkensons patient can safely jump or get thrown from a bridge tethered to a rubber band.It also hosts the famous shot-over marine jet experience where high powered jetboats tear up the Clutha inches from the rock walls that define the gorge. Additionally tourists tethered to experienced para-gliders go wafting off cliffs to soar over the town squealing. There's a summer luge run down brushed concrete tubes within the town’s borders, and come winter the nearby ski fields kick off. It's an outdoors-person’s dream, and if you like nights spent by the fire there's no better backdrop.

The local population seems at all times to be outnumbered by tourists. Every day looks like the day after Christmas, the visitors proudly wearing Kiwi clothing freshly unwrapped.

A hundred or so years back, gold was found in these parts. Now it's just flushed through the place via busloads of tourists and a large, churning backpacker population. It's interesting to visit certain cafes of an evening to witness the calm, almost post-coital vibe created by those whose bodies have faced what must have felt like certain death, jumping off some hundred-foot bridge with a rubber band attached or some cliff with an instructor attached or gone whizzing at excessive speed inches from sheer walls of rock in a jet boat.

Nick Nickolas, a Covent-Garden-forged, rollicking street magician friend and I had cavorted our way down-country from Auckland at its other end. He drove, I kept tally of the improvised commemorative crosses denoting road fatalities. He was going to get certified as a cliff jumping parachutist and I, as always, was simply at a loose end.

The structure of my life was contained within my clown’s performance and nowhere else, and I tended to be a free associating blunderbuss that my performance friends adopted for interesting company and perhaps, in their own twisted and generous and thus far heterosexual way, because they loved me. I certainly loved them, , in much the same way a leper, diseased and self serving, might get a platonic crush on a nun. My performance friends also tended to be fantastic people to drink heavily with. Leashless, the lot of them.

Both Nick and I had a couple of weeks to kill before that chestnut of a gig, The Christchurch International Buskers’ festival. We were both regulars there, had been since its inception.

The Queenstown pitch was a small pedestrian mall, full of upmarket tourist shops catering to predominantly Asian tourists buying wool-related products. The flow was pitiful—the place would be empty and then one or two people would pass down, and it was odds against whether they'd make it twenty feet before being drawn into a shop. It was a challenge, the longest slow-build test, in which you might work for thirty minutes to gather and keep a minimum of ten people for an audience. The slow build is one of my talents—I can exist in character without attention. My clown justifies its existence easier than I do, pointless boredom being more comfortable with makeup and stilts. Still I struggled, managing one or two shows an evening, earning just enough for the required liquids, beer and petrol. Marking time.

Tourists are displaced by nature. I suppose I should identify with them but I don't. My ideal is to perform in places where my gift transforms ordinary places in people’s everyday lives into something briefly uplifting, and the production of unexpected laughter in public places has been my chosen vocation.

To illustrate:

The most profound compliment I ever received was a shy man who sought me out after my show in a large city and meekly admitted that he had not left his house for some time but had forced himself to re-enter the world that particular day. He thought it important enough to admit to me that I had made him laugh, and what's more, he was driven to seek me out and thank me for showing him he still could. Moments later hidden down an alley, I wept—I actually sobbed with the joy of mattering.

Tourists are already divorced from the everyday. To them, I'm simply ‘entertainment’, competing with all the other experiences that are strands of a quilt their disposable incomes invest in to briefly disguise their lives’ modulated captivity. Still, in Queenstown I did what I could in the county of my birth to defiantly add my tiny thread to their patterns, and in turn I forsook gratitude for amusement and got paid whatever my shallow distraction was worth.

Much like Queenstown itself this story could be a pointless, aimless distraction. Although, some crisp morning as you sit alone by the lake, gazing up to the towering mountains surrounding you with the shale that flows from them as the mountains themselves melt, on a timescale that renders our species as predominant and relevant as lint, the enormity that surrounds can make the seemingly unremitting cacophonous culturally and personally exformative static of your own bipedal computer, as it tries to grasp meaning within and beyond itself, briefly cease.

Insignificance can in its own way be liberating, and I believe within laughter lies this shared, celebrated truth. Dignity dashed, unforeseen circumstantial twists, sudden departures from routine. These are all clues.

That I can share this thought is, if anything I suppose, my point.

We are not here long.