Circus and the City

Come one, come all to the Circus and the City at the Bard Graduate Center! See how P.T. Barnum’s circus evolved in to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey! See the advent of the circus parade with its menagerie of animals (including elephants), carved figures and floats (prefiguring the Thanksgiving Day Parade). Learn how the circus influenced the birth of a whole new form of graphics and poster art including wood engravings and chromolithograpy producing the famous circus ads that look so much like watercolors and owe a debt to the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. Barnum’s Roman Hippodrome the Largest Place of Amusement in the World, Occupying the Entire Block between Madison and Fourth Avenue…was how one read.  See an advertisement for the circus in Yiddish and understand how the circus as a non-linguistic form of entertainment transcended the language barriers of an immigrant population. Learn how the Hippodrome preceded Madison Square garden and see the photographs of the lusus naturae, “human wonders” which included both born and made freaks like a bearded lady and a creature covered with tattoos. See General Tom Thumb’s outfit, his tiny pants and miniature fiddle. See the film of Tiny Kline swinging l000 feet in the air on her Iron Jaw! Remember how the circus influenced Fellini’s imagination in films like La Strada and 8 1/2. Appreciate the European influence, the clowning from commedia dell’arte and acrobatics from gypsy culture! Come one come all!

The Sessions

Photo: Fox Searchlight Pktures

Like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,  Ben Lewin’s The Sessions is based on a real story about a disabled person with a well developed inner life and ability to communicate. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was more severe since it dealt with a French journalist who suffered from locked-in syndrome. In The Sessions the central character Michael O’Brien (John Hawkes) is a poet and journalist whose story “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” becomes the basis for the movie. O’Brien who was afflicted with polio as a child lives in an iron lung and yet still has desire and an as yet unfulfilled capacity to express it. The commercial film industry loves stories of disabled characters who overcome tremendous odds. The Miracle Worker, the story of Helen Keller, was, of course, the Ur example of the heroic overcoming of disability. But we are in another age of therapy and sexuality—both of which themes help to propel The Sessions to a higher level. However, before O’Brien attempts either of these he confesses his desire to lose his virginity to his priest (William H. Macy). Due to the fact that O’Brien travels around on a gurney, he can’t fit into the usual confessional. The breaking down of this wall prefigures a key element of the plot in which Cheryl (Helen Hunt), the sex surrogate O’Brien hires, eventually crosses the line, having a counter transference that results in her falling in love with her patient. Of course, who asks a priest for permission to have sex out of marriage in the first place?  Taboos are being broken all over the place, not the least of which concerns disabled people and their suitability as sexual partners. Amidst all the expertly handled emotion around the mechanics of sex (though O’Brien has never been able to move his hands and hence masturbate, he can have erections), the movie is laugh-out-loud funny. When asked if he believes in God, O’Brien says “I would find it absolutely intolerable not to be able to blame someone for this.” When O’Brien asks his caretaker why she uses the word “dick,” she says “Penis sounds like some vegetable you don’t want to eat.” In many ways The Sessions is a classic tear jerker, but a terrific one due to its ability to meet to be sexy and funny and profound—while taking on a plethora of bodily frailties and functions that most directors and audiences would rather turn their gaze away from.

Obama vs. Romney III: The Honeymooners

Rachel Maddow made the point on MSNBC that contrary to what Romney had said, Syria is not Iran’s "route to the sea." Her comment was followed by graphic illustrations which showed that both Iran and Syria had coasts. Al Sharpton, on the same MSNBC show, offered the fight metaphor in his scoring of the debate, saying that at every moment Obama was about to deliver a knockout punch (one example was the president’s counter that sure America had a smaller navy than in l917 and we also don’t have bayonets and horses), Romney clinched. Of course the breaking news story was Romney’s turn around on Afghanistan.  “Romnesia” is the diagnosis President Obama has offered for his rival’s condition. Now Romney agrees with Obama that US troops should come out of Afghanistan by the end of 2012. “People can accept changing your mind,” Sharpton said, “but not at the cost of my behind.” If Obama vs. Romney II was a dramatic comeback for the president, the third and final debate was characterized by a growing feeling of almost effortless humor--not only in the commentary, but particularly in the antics of the challenger. In comedy the clown has a straight man. On The Honeymooners, you had the stolid Norton and the outrageous Ralph. Romney tried to be the straight man, not challenging, but agreeing, trying to calm down his adversary, but he turned out to be the clown. One can’t help wondering if Romney hadn’t gotten taken away by buffoonery of the Al Smith dinner. SNL's campaign send up where interviews with a series of voters reveal an electorate that neither knows who is president, who is running or how long they are running for may have also set the tone. Debates can somehow bring out moments of brilliance in one or another candidate, but this final debate, centering on issues of foreign policy, was notable for its intermittent, though comical effusions of ignorance on the part of the Republican candidate for president.

The Middle Class

Sinclair Lewis

Both President Obama and Mitt Romney insistently use the term “middle class.”  But what is the middle class? Is a lawyer or doctor who may earn six figures a member of the middle class? Back in the 50’s, 60’s and even 70’s professionals earned more money than the so called middle class, made up of teachers, skilled laborers like plumbers, government employees, electricians, carpenters and owners of small businesses. But by the 80’s the gap between the professional class and the upper class had begun to widen. Salaries of heads of industry dramatically increased as did the sums earned by successful Wall Street professionals (hedge fund managers and partners in major investment banking firms like Goldman Sachs). So when the candidates today refer to the middle class, they are actually referencing a demographic that contains a large swath of American society. A fireman and a brain surgeon are in theory both members of the middle class. Back in the 60’s, middle class was considered a pejorative term. Middle class and bourgeois were used interchangeably and as baby boomers, who were once protestors, will remember no one wanted to be a member of the bourgeoisie. The last thing the flower children of the 60’s yearned for was the shingled house with its white picket fence—the house that those who were foreclosed in the sub prime frenzy only dream of getting back today. After Main Street, Sinclair Lewis wrote Babbitt, a satire of middle class ideals and “Babbitt" became a word. The Free Dictionary defines Babbitt as “A narrow-minded, self-satisfied person with an unthinking attachment to middle-class values and materialism” or to quote Nicholas Berdyaev the Russian philosopher and author of The Bourgeois Mind, “But even when the triumph of mediocrity was complete a few deep thinkers denounced it with uncompromising power...Carlyle, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Leon Bloy, Dostoievsky, Leontiv, all foresaw the victory of the bourgeois spirit over a truly great culture on the ruins of which it would establish its own hideous kingdom...With prophetic force and fire these men denounced the spiritual sources and moral foundations of middle-classdom and repelled by its ugliness thirsting for a nobler culture, a different life looked back upon Greece or the middle-ages, the Renaissance or Byzantium.” 

And Here’s Johnny!

Johnny Carson was so smooth that he stepped out of history into oblivion. Like the average parent, his legacy is only carried forward by his children, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and the other late night talk show hosts. This is where Johnny Carson differed from Shakespeare whose legacy will probably be carried on as long as consciousness exists in the universe. Before Carson we had Jack Paar, but he was sui generis and exists in the minds of a few aficionados. A good comparison would be the other confreres of Shakespeare, minor Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights like Webster and Marston. But there was something Shakespearean about Carson too, if you look at Johnny as Prince Hal and Ed McMahon as a real life Falstaff, roaring “And here’s Johnny.” And then there was Carnac the Magnificent, the famous alter ego who made intermittent appearances, in his big floppy hat, a mixture of Rembrandt and one of the great Vogue models of the 50’s. Johnny was not like the celebrities of today. You heard about Joanna Carson and his other wives, but he was curiously private, for someone who was such a dominant presence on late night television right up until 1992, when he retired from The Tonight Show and slipped into obscurity. Andy Warhol famously said that everyone has 15 minutes of fame. Johnny had 30 years, before his star burnt out.