In this hectic world you need sometimes to pause and simply smell the stench of death. :)

 Did a lot of work on Rumples Crypt this week.

I think it's funny that I took my original idea of an actual Clown Tomb that consisted of an actual clown car inside a crypt that successive dead clowns ashes were added to upon their deaths and found a way to make it happen from my laptop.

[If anyone's got some high end, unused lap or desktops lying around.....*waves enthusiastically*]

For about ten years I'd canvased Clowns at festivals pestering them for possible permission to be given a portion of their ashes for my project. At one point the whole thing was going to exist in Toledo, I had a downtown block of land potentially on offer.

Knowing the director of the International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center [Greg DeSanto] I knew I'd have no trouble sourcing a vehicle.

Then my own premature imminent death eclipsed the project .

Thanks to my families general sense of optimism and some deft knife-work over nearly 9 hours on the table by a surgeon with bad knees who still goes on skying holidays! [we had a comically acrimonious relationship]....I'm now 8 years later, prepared to pick up the project.

The world has changed and my powers with it so I'm going with a digital Mirth Mausoleum.

Other old men devote their time to gardening or a favorite pet or virulent right wing opinions at volume.

I'm potting about creating crypts for dead clown friends, and also, in the background, creating precursors for some of my living clown friends.

If this gets fully out of hand I'm going to have to set up a fund-me to interview people and create poised prefabricated crypts, my own included

[WHICH I BET A THERAPIST WOULD TELL ME IS THE WHOLE POINT]

Anyway...before I excuse myself to go outside and shout at clouds as those my age are want to do I'd just like to say.

It's nice to have a hobby. Rumples Crypt

Martin's Mirth Mausoleum-Dead Clowns

 

I can't say it's finished because...well..people die.

[And Pepe and Pat Cashin are unfinished and I refuse to be rushed]

But here's my personal collection of dead clowns

Mirth-Mausoleum-Dead Clowns

How busking fits into the Placemaking movement Pt 2

 

Pt 2 of Nick Broads interview with with Ethan Kent, Director of PlacemakingX, an international network of urbanists

..talks about the political situation in which busking exists,& how we can convince cities that enabling informal busking should be one of their goals

Informal buskings urban advantages 

How busking fits into the Placemaking movement

 Nick Broad: Who created busk.co which is the most cohesive online tool for street performers providing a one stop QR code / stripe banking account solution to our increasingly evolving cashless society.
[Plus other lesser things]

Well anyway he consistently explores buskings potential and contemporary role in society and publishes articles and interviews.

I like the size of the net he uses to cover the topic. Below is his latest and an example of the potential street theatre has in finding, increasing, developing and integrating in more granular ways with current and future urban design.

 

 

How busking fits into the Placemaking movement 

Passive Aggressive?

Sometimes I lack patience. I’m sometimes irked by those who for reasons known only to themselves...or should I say THEMSELVES..want to engage in conversation or direct me to help stage the epic movie they are starring in every mundane millisecond of their lives.

Why yes I am passive aggressive thanks very much that’s very perceptive of you.
Pretty much passive yeah.

Active would be galvanising mobs to drain the throats of govt and corporate leaders across the steps of their various institutions.

I think sardonic panto’s letting everyone off lightly and furthermore I should be remunerated generally with a little more gusto considering my restraint.

 

 

Tony Montanaro-Mime Legend.

 

Tony Montanaro died in 2002
He was one of the most imminent mime practitioners of the 20th Century.
He performed globally, had been taught by both Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux and founded his own performance training institution, the Celebration Barn Theatre in Maine, a theater and school of mime, improvisation, storytelling and other performing skills that to this day is a beating heart for performance creatives from the US and beyond.
He had a vast and deep performance background. I'd heard that at one point he'd been employed to work with Marlene Dietrich on her movement skills.
I can only presume her representative studio [Paramount Studios] paid him to cure her of her natural gait which had been perhaps akin to a drunken Clydesdale who constantly broke furniture on set.
It might be even be said that her famously poised and general clarity of movement could well have been a bandaid of Tony Montanaro's design.

With mime you have to remember the art itself is very philosophical, perhaps even more philosophical than it is physical.
As such it often attracts more than its fair share of metaphysical charlatans who tend to be bitter and brittle and poor and arrogant and acerbic.
Much like myself.  

I met him in 2000 and he gave me the greatest compliment.

It was at a festival of performance workshops held in Philadelphia called Motionfest.

I had been given free all inclusive admission because I was a known overseas mime and Americans are a warm and hospitable and generous tribe no matter what anyone might say. 
Honestly I wouldn't have gone otherwise, I'm the sort of performer who really can't admit to need to learn much from anybody.
Unless I'm having issues with my modem.
I was in my 40's and pretty much stylistically calcified.
Still, this was a Tony Montanaro mime workshop.
It was like meeting the Pope if the Pope could make things out of nothing! [.....hold on a minute?]
And I'd already worked with the Pope at an outdoor mass I'd crashed back in NZ in 86.

We were a group of 12, mainly youthful with a smattering of intermediates and seniors, tracksuits, sweat pants, casual gym attire except for me.

Tony Montanaro walked in, we all dutifully formed a half circle and he introduced himself.
It was part introduction, part soliloquy, part lament, part naked statement of fact.
He stated that this class would be a basic introduction to movement and personal expression.
He asked forgiveness, he was old and had been teaching rooms of enthusiastic young idealists for decades.
The decades had shown him that very very few of them progressed much past an intermediate stage. 
He confessed that years of teaching had taken it's toll and his enthusiasm for teaching itself was increasingly harder to maintain as for him it was rare to see anything in anyone he hadn't seen already and that ideally teaching itself should be a voyage of discovery.

Then he looked straight at me  and we locked eyes and he tilted his head and said.

"You're Interesting."

Ta DA!

Ah yes, the old Brooks brothers suit and 'Do I look like a fucking People Person?' T Shirt trick.
This photo was taken 5 minutes ago with the same combo I wore back a quarter century  past.

Why I reject the subscription model Substack/Patreon etc.

 [Not making an argument in the classical sense. Making a personal existential statement.]

Substack, create 1000 true fans and have them subsidise your lifestyle via a calcified regular stipend.

Yeah nah.

Patreon, ‘please support my creative endeavours with an arbitrary small sum monthly.’

Nope.

Subscription models are viable but lack honour.

There’s no honour in the assumption that your fiscal gratitude remains a robotic constant.

If you lack the time to be grateful but retain the means to set and forget that gratitude, what does that say about the quality of reciprocity you have to lend?

Here’s a donation button, you can donate anytime and any amount and feel genuinely connected at each contribution.

[maybe even get a personal email recognising and thanking you]

Street performance was one of, if not the only vehicle that preserved and maintained an old honour system that predates capitalism.

An audience or a client of an artisan would inspect the piece at its completion and judge its personal worth to them.

That transaction itself, as defined by those that received it, defined the quality of not only the object or experience BUT THE RELATIONSHIP.

In performance you owned your gratitude by reciprocation. You didn’t have to, which made the fact you did a chosen moment.

Oh noes I hear you cry, the artist/artisan risks all. What if the oligarch takes the ornate woodwork and pays a pittance?

Here’s what happens, it’s human nature and politics 101. The aristocrat gets the first object cheaply however the artisan thereafter is pointedly otherwise engaged and the status of the cheapskate withers in the public commons.

Relationships blossom with clients that base their transactions on heartfelt gratitude.

And it worked. It worked in every country I have visited.

The concept of maximising your revenue streams via exploitation of a one time point of purchase carried forward indefinitely is the putrid heart of late stage capitalism laid bare.

Yeah nah.

Apart from commissioned projects my art has always been an invitation to discern and laugh and forget and be intrigued.

If you have disposable income and gratitude it’s my pleasure to accept what’s on offer.

If you are on the bones of your ass and your weight lifts momentarily and I see that then that’s a currency to me.

I’m honoured. It’s an honour system after all.

So here’s a link, no-one’s watching, as Justin Case, who used the truth as his moneyline at the end of his show, would say.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, if you can afford it and you liked my work then contribute towards my next show.

Whatever you do Ladies and Gentlemen.........don’t lie to yourself.”

https://martinewen.com/basement.html