Tag: Ben Robinson
I’m betting this has happened to you: You find an affordable place to rehearse, perhaps in a neighborhood that you can also afford to live in. Other artists who work large gravitate there. Pretty soon it becomes a pretty interesting neighborhood. More restaurants open up, maybe a couple of art galleries, and before you know it, it’s trendy. Everyone wants to live there… and many of them have a lot more money than you do. This of course is not lost on the real estate industry. Rents rise, not just a little, but by tenfold, and before you know it, you and your fellow artists can’t afford to live or rent space there so you move to the next neighborhood you can afford, a bit farther off the beaten track, a bit farther from public transportation, a bit seedier, maybe a bit less safe at night. And the process repeats… from Soho to Tribeca to Williamsburg to Bushwick to Ridgewood to small towns along the Hudson River…. change the names for your city, and there you are.
The Return of Marcel Perez!
The DVD and Companion book
Ben Model / Steve Massa
reviewed by Ben Robinson
THE MISHAPS OF MUSTY SUFFER
Starring Harry Watson Jr.
We live in an age of accomplishment, of bigger, better, and the only. Circus and humor are hardly immune to this credo of the modern age. Enter Circus Oz. What this reviewer thought was an allusion to the L. Frank Baum novel is, in actuality, a clever twist on the land from which the troupe is based, Australia. Oz stands for “Aussie,” which here becomes their own mystical land.
Ben Robinson’s decades of writing credits include the book Magic & the Silent Clowns and a recent article for this blogopedia, Keaton the Conjuror, where you can also read more about his long and fascinating career in magic.
Ben Robinson is both a master magician and an historian of magic, author of Twelve Have Died: Bullet Catching, The Story & Secrets and of The MagiCIAn: John Mulholland’s Secret Life, as well as numerous articles for major magic publications. Just last month, Ben’s decades-long research into the use of magic in silent films came to fruition with publication of his latest book, Magic and the Silent Clowns — a subject that had received scant attention until Ben’s work. Concurrent with that, Ben helped curate a fascinating show at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image entitled Magicians on Screen, including both a magic performance by Ben and a lecture-demo on the subject of magic and the silent clowns. In fact, Ben had first proposed the idea to the museum back in the 80s. Patience is indeed a virtue — though persistence sure helps! This blogopedia is very pleased to be able to share the first chapter from Magic & the Silent Clowns, and to be able to match Ben’s enthusiastic prose with a few video clips.
TRANSLATE THIS PAGE
Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin