Tag: Jim Moore
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.
And I wasn’t. After a few years of following the re-emergence of Pierre Etaix, my plans of seeing him live were derailed by a Friday night bike repair class. Priorities, priorities. (Yes, we were actually working on derailleurs.) Luckily, intrepid blogger / photographer / videographer Jim Moore was playing Superman to my Clark Kent and covering the event for his required-reading blog, vaudevisuals.com. Here’s the video he shot.
“Live performance in a defined public space is our last bulwark against two-dimensional images taking over reality. Theater may turn out to have been only a brief interlude between ritual and electronics; be glad you’re here to see it.” — Erika Munk
James Agee once wrote a famous book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was about tenant farmers who were in fact guys but certainly not famous, so I was going to title this post Let Us Now Praise Three Guys Who Aren’t Famous Either but Should Be for All the Cool Work They do Promoting and Chronicling Clowns and Variety Artists — but that title was already taken.
When I run into Hilary Chaplain, an old friend and fellow New Yorker, my usual greeting is “Oh, I didn’t know you were back in the country.” As a popular theatre clown with a one-woman show and as a teacher of clown and physical comedy, Hilary is in demand at festivals and variety theatres all over the world. It was on these travels that she became acquainted with Spy Monkey, and her enthusiasm about their work led not only to this guest post, but also to her bringing them to New York to conduct workshops. You can read more about Hilary here, and if you’re anywhere near New York next weekend (Dec. 8–11), catch her show, A Life in her Day, as part of the Voice 4 Vision Puppet Festival at the Theatre for the New City. —jt
Jim Moore, whose photography I wrote about in this early blog post, has a new show of clown photos opening tomorrow at Manhattan’s Cornelia Street Café. Since I realize most of you aren’t anywhere near New York City, I’m planning to have a glass of wine in your honor at tomorrow’s opening — one glass per missing blog reader — provided the wine’s free. I also thought I’d show you some of what you’re missing with this preview of photos from the exhibit.
Jim Moore, colleague of and paparazzo to a generation or two of street performers and new wave vaudevillians, has a new photography exhibition in New York running through next week. You’ve probably seen Jim’s work even if you don’t know it, and many of you also saw him in the Academy-Award winning documentary, Man on Wire, where he swivels his head with the best of them. (BTW, this movie is available on Netflix instant play.)
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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