Word: barnumism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...progression of technical jobs. As a boilerman on a passenger liner, he devised a contraption to direct sea breezes into the stifling engine room. In the mid-1920s, while tasting formal training at New York City's Art Students League, he contributed drawings of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to the National Police Gazette. Moving to Paris ("Why do I live in Paris? Because in Paris it's a compliment to be called crazy."), he began the miniature circus of wire sculptures that he kept adding to for decades...
...portent, reassuringly innocent in presentation? A comic strip rendering of a myth dredged up out of the collective unconscious and splashed so boldly on the screen that the audience is awed into acceptance by its sheer audacity? Or is it, finally, just an act of primal showmanship, a Barnum-like invitation to admit to ourselves that we are all members of the great fraternity of suckerhood and simply revel in the release of cultural inhibitions that admission sometimes encourages...
...This is where reality ends," intones an artful codger togged up as old Father Time. Indeed, for the visitors he greets, the mundane is exorcised for a few hours by a free-form fantasia of mummers, monsters and midgets, pirouetting puppets and Barnum spoofery. All this is encased in The World of Sid & Marty Krofft, a spectacular amusement center that opened last week in Atlanta...
...does not seem sufficient to hang such a big dream on. Lawyers for the four Beatles had uncommonly long, closed meetings most of last week in Los Angeles, and were adamant about discussing none of the details. A West Coast promoter and part-time Barnum named Bill Sargent has offered the group $50 million for a reunion. Said Paul: "The only way the Beatles would come together is if we wanted to do something musically." The others say nothing. It has been this way since the group disbanded, brush fires of hope fanned a little, then stamped...
...tent, glowing in the night like an amber mountain, is a cheerful atavism, a reminder of a time when Americans huddled happily on benches under canvas, eating cotton candy and peanuts and staring at the marvels occurring in the three rings before them. Now the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus ("the greatest show on earth") plays only indoor arenas, driven to cover by the extraordinary expense of raising the big top and creating its own city wherever it goes. Only 18 American circuses are still under canvas, and most are little more than carnivals with a tired tiger...