Friday Fragments Flashing at Random: A Bio for Binder? Three Rings for Kelly Miller? ... Cirque Dogs and Favored Elephant Trainers ... Step Right Up!

It’s a smorgasbord out there, and most of it’s as tenuous as a tent show half pitched in a windstorm half matured ... You proceed at your own folly.Paul Binder, now that’s he’s free of the life he likes the most, might think about penning his own bio. Man’s a scholar, say I, although, interviewed last week on NPR’s "On Point" by Tom Ashbrook, the Big Apple Circus man implied lack of faith in all bull men save for one named Bill Woodcock, whom you know, had his Anna May cavorting in the Big Apple Ring — until Ms. May seemed in the mood for retirement, at which time Bill told Paul, that’s it for me too. Now to NPR (national polite radio) said Binder, “He had a way with them [the bulls] that was wonderfully humane.... We felt there was nobody who was at the same wave with elephants as Bill Woodcock.”...

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Sunday Morning, Looking Back: When Hollywood Came to Santa Rosa, I Made a Movie with Bette Davis

This originally appeared on November 25, 2008While they cluttered the library grounds with poles and cables, platforms and light fixtures and smoke machines, I felt a rare privilege that magical October evening walking around the premises, eager and ready to be a part of it all. What chaotic excitement! Trucks loaded with costumes and props and tools along the street. People from Hollywood everywhere, walking this way and that with all sorts of things they needed to do their jobs. Ramps being laid out over which cameras would roll ...They were shooting a film starring Bette Davis, at a time in her life when she was struggling to revive a foundering career. She had accepted a very daring role and threw herself into it full force.“Santa Rosa...

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Friday Flip Flops to New York: “Birdhouse Factory” Sends Critics Flying High; Variety Cools to Return of Wintuk

It’s all about how to cast circus skills in a newer context, that’s what’s up in the Big Apple at the moment, and where New Yorkers can examine two alternate forms — circus theatre and circus ballet.Chris Lashua’s intricately clever Birdhouse Factory, which premiered in San Francisco in 2005, has grabbed the favor of a few adoring scribes, reaping flat-out raves. “Engrossingly entertaining,” sighs the unequivocal Lawrence Van Gelder in The New York Times, finding this one worthy of a parade of adjectives from “evocative” to “excellent.” Birdhouse performs a limited six-week run at the 499 seat New Victory Theatre in an intermissionless 90 minute package. Like a typical reviewer tossing praise at the nouveau troupes, Van Gelder spends most of...

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Antonioni’s “The Passenger” Dignifies a Question: Is Cinema Superior to Stage?

The Passenger, whose compelling naturalistic score consists entirely of the sounds of life itself, places us in the restlessly unsettled mind of Jack Nicholson, nearly lost in the Saharan desert — lost spiritually. He is David Locke, a television reporter questioning his work and the meaning of it all. He has little will to go on, and so, seeking a new destiny, he fakes his demise by assuming the identity of a chance fellow traveler following the latter’s untimely death.That precarious act, perhaps Locke knows, will lead to his end, and he seems no longer to care — even given the attention paid him by a beautiful woman, played by Maria Schneider, whom he meets along the way and with whom he falls in love. She offers to help him escape his...

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Midweek Midway L’Amyx ... Pachyderms to Porcupines for the Savvy Feld? ... John Ringling North II Rides the Jomar His Way ... Step Right In! ...

Hold your horse (or nose) -- Here Comes the Porcupine! Kenneth Feld may be prepping Backup Plan A in case the elephant abuse charge against his circus ever goes to trial and he is found legally insensitive. Right now on his Over The Top unit, he’s got this show-off porcupine that rocked one Windy City critic. “Granted, the oversize rodent didn’t actually do a great deal,” reported Chris Jones in a very fav Chicago Tribune notice. “He stood there. A clown showed up with a balloon and, well, you can guess the rest. But it worked for me ... I’ve seen dogs, cats and parakeets do circus shtick. The porcupine bettered them all.” ... Wonder if the critter is a runaway from Cirque du Soleil’s long-discarded early-day menagerie, which once harbored...

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Circus in Real Time: The Greatness of Gatto, the Pitfalls of You Tube

When I witnessed a juggler I had never heard of, during a performance last November in San Francisco at Cirque du Soleil’s memorable Kooza, my breath was taken away as it was when I was around 10-years-old and saw another legendary manipulator in his heyday, and instantly developed impossibly high expectations of circus performers. The juggler to whom I allude proceeded from out of the most magical Cirque mist to mesmerize me with an exhilarating display of impeccable dynamism and craft, with a routine of non-stop mastery and power that built club by club by ball by ball to a fiery transcendent finish. This, World, is circus through and through. Seated next to me was an elderly woman, evidently just as awed as myself, who sighed, “that’s the...

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Friday Flip Flops: Endangered Elephant Rides ... Banned from White Tops Land? ... Cirque du Soleil Might Be Soaring Over Tokyo ...

As one after another U.S. business or banking entity tumbles or stumbles, circuses are likely to suffer even more. A Wall Street statistic, Lehman Brothers, into bankruptcy courts September, has not the $50,000 to spare that it so easily handed Big Apple Circus last season to spring for youth groups getting in free ... Turns out BAC relies on a whopping $7 million per year from private funding to produce a $22 million annual budget. .. No more hiring for a while and no salary raises, says BAC ... The times they are a hurting ...New York bars the elephant rides that seem to be keeping some shows clinging to life support. And who stronger to the defense than the CFA, which spells Circus Fans Association of America. Since when was the CFA a defender...

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A Risky High Wire that Cirque du Soleil (Recklessly?) Walks ...

I’m not schooled in business matters, only have a lifetime of impressions, and I of course don’t have access to the books of Cirque du Soleil. I do know that: (1) the man in charge, Guy Laliberte, who relishes total power, only recently sold 20% interest in the show to some government owned firms in Dubai; (2) From a comment by Joe Brown posted on Sawdust Nights, of three new shows Laliberte opened this year around the world, only one, Zed in Japan, has drawn positive reviews (I read a rave by a Canadian critic calling it a masterpiece). Zaia is filling up only 30 percent of the seats — hard to believe — and, talking about hard to believe, the new Criss Angel magic show called Believe in Vegas IS hard to believe. In fact, it has turned critics back to critics and doting Cirque fans into critics;...

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