Word: clowning
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What do you want to be when you grow up? Ah, the classic childhood question. "A clown in the circus," I would reply to relatives at family gatherings. Well, it is now 1996, and I am twenty years old--a clown in the circus is just not where I am headed. That's okay, I assure myself--no one is expected to know the precise academic and professional course his or her life will take at such early stages in the game. Correction: No one outside of Harvard is assumed to possess such foresight. But amid the red-bricked buildings...
With an extensive slide show, he illustrated the distinction between "heroes" and "clowns". The clown, he explained, is the part of the human spirit that was pushed aside "when you went to the first day of school... ready to rock, ready to roll, and everyone was looking at you. Because you looked weird...
...story itself is not so complex. In a town by the sea, children are being abducted. The culprits are the diabolical Krank (a menacing Daniel Emilfork), his midget wife, his six identical brothers (all played by Dominique Pinon, the heroic clown of Delicatessen), and a pulsating brain named Irvin that floats in an aquarium. All are genetic experiments, and Krank has been aging prematurely because he is unable to dream. His solution is to set up an H.G. Wellesesque laboratory where he can try to extract the dreams of young children, unfortunately without success. Krank's henchmen are the fanatic...
...Mallrats, Smith puts a clown face on the college-age glums. Life is awful, so let's go shopping, cruising, trashing. The movie's presiding goddess is a trash totem--famously troubled ex-teen Shannen Doherty as the primary lust object. A '50s teen pic for the '90s, Mallrats focuses on the attempts of Brodie (Jason Lee) and T.S. (Jeremy London) to win back their girlfriends on--eek!--a game show. But plot be darned; it's the texture, coarse but colorful, that counts--the pungent bustle of the action and Smith's wackily convoluted dialogue. The humor is gross...
...Bruce Nauman exhibition was co-curated by Neal Benezra of the Hirshhorn Museum and Kathy Halbreich of the Walker Art Center. Although Nauman appears as his own subject in a number of his works, the clown in Clown Torture is not the artist, as Hughes wrote. Also, the sculpture From Hand to Mouth, a part of the Hirshhorn's collection, is not a cast of body parts of the artist but of his first wife. And finally, the parallel between that sculpture and Duchamp's With My Tongue in My Cheek is noted in Benezra's catalog essay, though...