Word: circus
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Last week another jam project was under way near New York City, in Toto's Green Haven Inn, founded in Mamaroneck by the late famed circus clown. Mixed aplenty, Sunday-afternoon sessions were open to any expert jazzman. Four Sundays of it had built a typical jazz following, equal parts suburban jitterbugs and reverential male grownups. In every audience there was at least one know-it-all who bothered the players with technical questions, and one high-school editor who inquired: "Do you think real jazz is on the decline?", whereupon everyone grabbed for his drink...
...millions of Americans every gaudy, traditional aspect of the circus is little less than sacred. Last week those sanctities were seriously threatened. Modernist Designer Norman Bel Geddes, who conceived General Motors' famed Futurama at the recent New York World's Fair, arrived at the Sarasota, Fla. winter quarters of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's circus to begin a two-year modernization of "The Greatest Show On Earth." Mr. Geddes quickly assured the press that nothing newfangled would be done with clowns, elephants, acrobats. He gave a few hints as to his intentions. Next year, he said...
...Institute's Rouaults, ranging back to 1891, showed the pious painter's long preoccupation with circus clowns, tortured Christs, brutal judges, violent nudes, all painted in slashes of black, and brilliant, jewel-like reds, blues, greens which recalled Rouault's early apprenticeship to a stained-glass worker. Boston's plushiest Brahmins viewed the paintings with no murmur of disapprobation, even for a wrenched, very nude Red-Haired Woman, which was one of the high points of the show. Boston's Sanity in Art Society kept mum. Thus had James Sachs Plaut put critics to rout...
Pacing the entire show to the blare of a circus band, Mystery Man Dante whirls through a seething inferno of prestidigitatorial feats, makes stooges disappear right and left, introduces bouncing chairs, eerie levitation, mysterious cabinets, live stock of every description, and even produces beer right out of empty barrels...
...Chaplin. His dance sequence after getting bopped on the head with a shovel, and the nonchalant feat of accompanying the Fifth Hungarian Rhapsody with his razor while shaving a frightened customer are as good as anything he did in the era of "The Kid" and "The Circus." Naturally he plays Adenoid Hinkel, the Phooey of Tomania, superbly. But here he is moving in a strange and discordant world of realistic and bitter social satire that just doesn't fit in. And when at the end of the picture he steps out of both roles and delivers a long and stirring...