Re: Generation
Gap?
From: Harley
Category: Category 1
Date: 10/25/98
Time: 10:13:18 AM
Remote Name: 38.14.58.44
Comments
There's
definitely a gap. With the decline of sideshows, there were very
few of us, who had real memories of them, to carry on.
The Jim Rose show, and
all of its clones and offshoots, have had to make up their style based
on a different kind of memory. So they have a different kind of flavor.
And it's not based in an oral tradition, where the material is passed
down directly from generation to generation. It's been a kind of
sidestepping, and that's the gap.
And there are so many
people in the world these days, that many disaffected young ones beg for
attention by doing their best to becom
e
geeky. And so the show becomes a "personal statement" about a way of
life, rather than a once a year event that reinforces the normality of
the rest of the year.
But "bizarre" skills
have been around for five thousand years of written history, and are not
about to die out. The presentation just changes shape to fit the times.
People like us were working before sideshows were invented (1853 by
Gilbert Spaulding), and we'll be around when tents have become obsolete,
tragic though that will be.
Jim Rose has also given
the business a different kind of marketing, far more targeted than was
previously possible. Posters on walls in turn-of-the-century America,
can't keep up with the type of machines that have been produced by the
recording industry and the Disney's of the world.
