Kabuki meets Punch and Judy meets Disney the Nazi.

 

What I find hilarious is that the TPP got fast-track this week. Meaning it can't be abridged when it comes before the senate. A corporate rapist bill designed to sodomise all opposition to corporate profit. And the courts also decided this week that the torture report, containing scenes of rape of children since purged by the CIA, will never become public. Thus negating any opportunity for the public to have any say about torture in their name. But the big story this week was one lone convenient political pervert among many. The righteous juice flowed, not only huffing but also puffing transpired. Business as usual. I feel it used to have the dignity of Kabuki, political theatre, but now it's simply a punch and Judy show for indignancy junkies happy with the next cheap fix.

........

Oh and I can hear what your thinking [if you're like me.] "you are just a recursive whiner sucking of the indignancy teat at a level below the usual simply because you were afforded a classical education like all the other aspiring white middle class males of your generation who puff themselves up on their molehills and beat their chests between trips to Target." Tis true, tis true. However there's this... Good old Ireland, famous for exporting close to diabolically cheerful alcoholism throughout the world and famous also for breeding heavily and sending every runt into the priesthood to fiddle the books or children for voting overwhelmingly to let people of indiscriminate genders commit themselves into unions recognised by the state and the tax dept and divorce lawyers. I will overindulge in the alcoholic porridge you call stout and vomit into the nearest gutter just to proclaim my humility and your moral superiority... and because I need to rationalise my behaviour on a daily basis.

Live streaming arts

Starting in 7 hours the Happy sideshow freak circus, now known as the World Sideshow are performing a premier of their impeccably wry, mischievously ironic and genuinely spectacular show in Australia and are selling internet tickets and streaming the show.

What a grand experiment! Tickets $7

click here  to watch the intro film, buy a ticket and watch the show live.

 

21st century dangers

It used to be once you hit your bedroom alone you were safe.

now, as every-ones connected to everyone, dependent on RSS or passive facebook spoonfeeding there's the danger of babbling to a presumed audience.

I'm trying to control them but refuse to regret them.

....

I'm getting on and I have to pay my dues. I have debts that can never be repaid. Bob Maclaren was an early friend, I've known him from teenage on, he cared for me. He would quietly follow me as a friend as I took walks while we were both on tour, about 20 meters behind me just to make sure he could fish me out of whatever suicidal impulse I gave out to. I only recognised this after turning round after a long walk to find him there. It astonished me to have earned a guardian angel. I was a funny guy who never recognised I was loved. Later on Nick Nickolas and I toured NZ and I can remember regretting that if I wasn't heterosexual and we both weren't such smelly pointless fuckups we'd have made a good couple. I lent on people, I've always lent on people. I was unique but I've always needed foils. The street theatre world became my greater foil and I subverted it and succeeded. Nick and Bob admired that however they had either work ethics or larger plans. I just wanted strangers to love me and laugh and it was an easy science. Over decades i realised the laughter of complete strangers only ever brought me back to neutral, which was to me a form of joy. I had no-where else to go but the best friends in the world. You can't imagine having friends who bent the world cheerfully to their ends on a daily basis. My definition was whatever was invested in me was a waste of time. I was a romantic masochist and my friends had their own lives to lead. I would like to acknowledge that they, and many other secondary fellows, are the foundation of what I am today, whatever that's worth. Cheers.

What insurance is

The guy who invented insurance was a thin guy who monetized fat to other thin people.

Regarding Bostons Busking Kerfuffle

Background


Faneuil Hall/ Quincy Market has been a busking institution for over 50 years, one of the few American venues.

The latest development is that management want amps down to round 70 decibel level.
A $2500 yearly fee
One stock money line shared and parroted by every performer.


This is both a gambit and a bait and switch. It's been proven in court a number of times I believe that in America it's illegal to charge for busking permits. 

But a Golden Goose is a Golden Goose and freedom of speech means buskers have to let the psychiatrically impaired rant about Brian of Nazareth or beat a cows skull with a succession of pre-frozen squirrels or simply stand on the pitch for 30 mins grinning as they remember their last firm bowel movement. 
That's what Disney and Rocky Balboa enshrined when they wrote the constitution. 

The corporate pros don't like this and the performance pros don't like it either. 
The bait and switch kicks in the moment fees of any sort are applied because at this point, whatever excuse is used it can be very quickly established that performers are performance vendors and as such no better or worse that the other vendors with actual tangibles rather than hooks, stock lines and finale sinkers. 
You are either individuals expressing yourselves in public as the law permits or you are engaged in business and the moment you cough up a fee you are implicitly agreeing that it takes money to make money and lose all those privileges you need to continue the only argument you have. 

The gambit here is pretty straightforward. The $2500 is an initial negotiation position. 
In the wine and coke world of the third tier real estate management world where you have to either throw someone off your balcony who you hadn't previously paid for sex or get a series of articles published about your laughable half-brain and it's interactions with the actual world the ideal way to manage is to use a big broom. 
$2500 is a big broom. 

Fact of the matter is $2500/ $1000/ $500 will leave one or two or three still standing. Those people will bargain the price down, and then move onto the next item on the agenda which is the mind-meltingly absurd idea that everyone use the same cloned hatline like imperial performance stormtroopers some corporate bedwetter surrounded by yes-men and his drug problem thunk up between the inhale and wiping his nose. 
Guy's a genius, a legend in his own bathroom. 
Why not just automate performance? 

So that indicates that some of the hatlines are getting annoying, like bilking annoying, just as the amplification thing indicates the noise levels are getting annoying. 

As much as performers at these high end semi-corporate venues think they can manage each other, they can't, they have no authority, they lean on security who lean on whatever the problem is. 
There are exceptions but in most cases an unregulated envirionment degrades and convulses in a cycle. 
This is obviously a convulsion and the only way to deal is to manage the convulsion. 
The management have gone for an adversarial position. As templated and unimaginative as a third of the street shows that annoy them. 

Far better to embrace the street element and produce a festival that gives locals something to aspire to or copy. 
From our perspective the sad truth is you can't stand on principle if you've given them up for short cash and convenience and from the corps perspective the best of us are a unique feature but outnumbered by selfish shitheads with amps and bad attitudes. 
and so it goes.

Feet on the Street: The Grounded People

 Sometimes I see a hedge that's been cut back. It only takes a couple of days before it flowers [here in the tropics]



The Flowers remind me of street theatre, good luck killing a convention older than the Romans.



iframe width 480 height 270 src https://www.youtube.com/embed/7kUjDr0ZQaQ frameborder 0 allowfullscreen> /iframe>

Dubai, Day Two, Post three, Peer groups.

The prime reason I went to Dubai was to reconnect.

The gig itself had an alarming number of red flags, new market, no contract, first additional request asking if I could fly myself there, payment being 10-15 days after the gig.

Normally most of these, even in isolation, would be enough for me not to bother.
I'll admit I'm a career masochist. I'm proud of my mind melting gigs inflicted from within and without, however variety is key and your ideal trainwreck of a gig should catch you somewhat by surprise rather than being a series of obvious guillotines strewn in your path.

What countered all these misgivings were my peers who all spoke well of the company. Peers are powerful that way.

We are all tribal Apes, street performers form short-term tribes for cash and fee and various over-lapping peer groups form with the performers themselves

Rugged individualism is admired but without social skills no tribe will take you. You offer them nothing.

My peers have all failed more than your average person.
You don't get a reality-manipulating wrinkle-exploiting street show out of a box.
It takes a thousand shows, each containing mistakes made and lessons learnt.
Mistakes that teach us we're at best 49% full of shit rather than the average 51%
Additionally shared pitches and shared focus let you learn via others mistakes as well as your own.
Leaving some of us happy with our success but mindful that ignorance was a constant companion and that life was ongoing.
Man were we ever merciless towards the brittle though. Ego annihilation was the way we shook hands.


Nothing eclipses the rush of bathing in applause.
The best of us recognised that didn't mean much other, with certain tricks, you could reproduce that effect.
The worst of us equated that with a missing childhood nipple and made camp upon that tit to dispense wisdom.
Me? I'm a vacillator, I aspire to be half full of myself.
Laughable. 

So end of day three there was a get together, three festivals, three casts, one Irish pub.
Todd Various, Windyman, Jay of the Jay-Show, Gazzo, the Atari show dude from Argentina and myself got there first. Just a knack we have coupled with innate social enthusiam I guess. I bought the first round, Atari didn't care what i chose so I got him a cider, lesson learned, a teachable moment. Know what you want.

The anecdotal olympics began. We joined tables together on the astroturf, there were increasing numbers of us, a pond and a Duck.
I met some new people who's names I've forgotton but who's faces I remember, Stuart, the producer arrived earlyish with his wife and they hung for a modicum before presumably retiring to whatever  lavish batcave middle eastern clients afforded them. [Jesus martin, be nice, BE NICE]

Flying Dutchmen arrived, as did Gavin Hay and the subterraneally droll Kim Potter who's dry wit is so powerful he has to avoid produce sections at supermarkets lest he dehydrate things via proximity.
Chris Lynam, the pent-up-rage-Clown was there, he's mellow in real life. Silver turned up and that was a treat because we worked out we hadn't seen each other in 23 years, [which is just over three generations in clown-years] I gave him a memory he'd forgotten which is always satisfying. Andrew Elliott appeared out of no-where. We had both been weary philosophers decades ago and it was pleasing to see we'd each survived and grown more comfortably into ourselves.

It didn't get messy, it was just a bunch of guys and gals at a bar who'd worked out making your own reality was more fun that renting.
Jovial, pleasant, however this evening was the reason I'd taken the gig and my heart soared like a duck. That's a metaphor, the actual duck was still there and represented if anything insomnia and entitlement and total lack of flying and so was kinda useless.