Word: circusing
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...Fellini really did run away to join a traveling circus. He was sent home within a few days, but his heart stayed there. In a Fellini film, life is a circus without surcease. Come inside, children of all ages, where (in Amarcord) the snowflakes are as fat as pancakes, where (in The Nights of Cabiria, 1957) streetwalkers dance like schoolgirls and (in Juliet of the Spirits (1965), God may be waiting for you in the attic...
Where can these warring sexes find equality and transcendence? Only on the stage, or at the circus, or in the movies -- in the gaudy popular arts from which Fellini's gaudy, sophisticated art emerged. A girl might dance with her cartoon hero made flesh; stokers on a great ship might feel a little better hearing the friendly competition of high notes from opera stars many decks above them. And for Guido in 8 1/2, it is the knowledge that on celluloid he can do anything: reunite lovers, reconcile families, turn dream into drama and * lead all life's players...
...both Limbaugh and Stern make the circus-cum-marketplace of ideas quirkier, livelier, more bracing, more free, more American. Limbaugh, Greenfield rightly says, "highlights how overwhelmingly banal the normal public discourse is. You get ingots of predigested mush that pass for political debate, and here's Rush with some sparkle to him." One could argue that the Rialto is already plenty gross and strange enough without any help from Stern, but he does manage sometimes to turn the vulgar sublime. One could also argue that the ascendance of such meretricious infotainers suggests something less than flattering about America...
...trappings of a media circus. Sissy Spacek showed up at a Beverly Hills, California, press conference urging health-conscious Americans to "start screaming at Congress and the White House." Mariel Hemingway spoke her mind to the New York Times on the issue of pill dosages and potency. Whoopi Goldberg, Randy Travis, Laura Dern and friends sent a videotape to Washington that included a shot of Mel Gibson being dragged from his home in handcuffs, saying "Gee guys, they were only vitamins!" A BATTLE ROYAL JELLY, proclaimed one headline writer. THE FDA'S WAR OF THE ROSE HIPS, wrote another...
...nearly value-free definition of what constitutes music a satisfactory basis for an aesthetic? Was Cage the great artist his admirers proclaim, or was he merely an ersatz Dadaist, proudly parading around in his emperor's new clothes as he pursued a whole-grain, crackpot anarchism? "Rolywholyover A Circus," on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles through Nov. 28 and due to travel to Houston, New York City, Japan and Philadelphia over the next two years, provides some answers...