(my) circus: that petrol emotion

music: Archer Prewit: Way of the Sun Reisha was visiting this week, and so I had little interest in keeping up with the blogosphere. I'm having a field day this morning trying to plug the vacuum of post-companion depression and am enjoying catching up. Amanda's Inertia 30 performance project is well underway (30 performances of 30 minutes a piece in 30 days in 30 discrete locations). Check out the underscore collective blog for the roving reports. As Christopher Swift might say, "Communication. Rhetoric. Performance!"

Reisha and I witnessed a lot of less intellectually stimulating yet thoroughly entertaining performances this week: 80s prog rock at the Carousel Lounge, an amateur strip show at an unnamed gay club on 5th, and disgustingly grandiloquent domiciles perched on the west hills of Austin ("look ma! I'm rich!"). Perhaps the most intriguing or disturbing performance, however, involved immaculately clean farm animals. Wednesday evening we went to the opening night of the Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus show, which was, in a word, sad. In part, the sadness was because the circus seemed so out-dated: the music reeked of the eighties, as did the aesthetic in general. And part of that sadness came from me, no doubt, because the troop that hit Austin this year was apparently the blue troop, the one known for lots and lots (and lots) of singing (and singing and singing—never a moments rest from SINGING!). It's like American Idol with animals occasionally shitting on stage, but with lip-synching and a wee-bit of racist and sexist clowning routines. Anyhoo, on the other side, this sadness was not reducible to simple nostalgia; it was hard for us to figure out, and I've been thinking for a few days now about what it was that left me feeling mildly unnerved as we exited the arena. There were moments of sheer delight (trained goats and pigs during the opening extravaganza), terror (anything that "Crazy Wilson" did) and honest to goodness fun (the main clown David Larible is quite talented), but throughout the overly long display of tour-abused streamers and Las Vegas-style gyrations on the backs of horses and elephants, one could sense a sort of desperation. Perhaps these folks were feeling as if they were going through the motions for the last time, that they represent the "last generation" of the grand ol' days of the circus?

For me, an obvious example of the sadness was Slyvia Zerbini's act, which I'm sure delights a large number of folks, but had me all giddy inside for the wrong reasons: here's a ninth generation circus performer who has worked up an act involving white horses and trapeze maneuvers. She emerged from the bowels of the arena with a team of horses to Yanni or Enya or something musically floaty like Yanni and Enya, then slithered to a perch which was then dangled in the air where she defied gravity for a while, then she was lowered and with a whip made the horses move around in formation under dim, "magical" lights. Then, about seven minutes into this routine, the perch lowered again in the center ring and she was lifted up in the air while the ringmaster began singing this colossally clichéd song: "Come together. . in the light we are all one . . . the horses are running." Or something like that. In any event, each of these performative elements were designed to stir a latent patriotism and feeling of "unity" over a peculiar feminine, fantasy like aesthetic—not too far off from the unicorn scenes in Ridley Scott's Legend (maybe the circus should enlist Jon Anderson to sing during this act?). Oh God, it was so terrible, this hodgepodge of hoke! I loved it!

Zerbini's act doesn't quite work, then, and seems to be symptomatic of "trying too hard," as if she's bringing out the precious family china for a quick snack. In this respect the act does represent a kind of nostalgia, at the very least an homage to the days when one needn't combine two acts to keep the audience entertained (or three acts, if one thinks about the schmaltzy singing of the ringmaster). Yet, in the context of the circus as a whole, it's almost as if the circus wants to squeeze out Barnum's contribution, that the circus is striving to push beyond its working class roots toward an "upper class" aesthetic, a Las Vegas style display—like all those fancy homes in the Austin foothills--that no longer celebrates community ("Come together . . . ") in terms of a display of people doing amazing things, but only in terms of the people's things (". . . the horses are running").

There was no soul to this circus. This is the source of sadness; you cannot will soul, a sense of authenticity and genuine enjoyment (or even jouissance if you will), even by peddling excess.

If I turn again to the sadness I brought to the circus, I am led to confront my own childhood memories (I think I was eight the last time I went to the Ringling Bros. circus), which are certainly joyful and nostalgic; wouldn't it be fun to be there again, in eight-year-old land, just for a day? But I'm also caused to reflect on my own empty displays. I packed an awful lot of show and tell into this past week; I just purchased a new home for all my stuff; I've spent hours unpacking and decorating the condo, and will soon do the same for my office at school. I'm drawn, obviously, to my own conspicuous sense of style. The "three ring thing" is no doubt homologous to my public (and in some sense private) style, as well as the last three years of my life, my approach to the career, indeed, the whole enchilada (I wanted to write "shabang," but William Hung's American Idol cover of "She Bangs" has ruined the word forever). Well, I hope others sense more soul than sadness . . . .

Gee, that's maudlin. I didn't mean to get all "sad clown" writing about the circus. So next time I'll work on something along the same theme of spectacle and soullessness, but more upbeat and about Carrot Top's muscle-bound quest to repress his homosexuality . . . .