Carnival Yarns

Carnival’s back in season: your reporter attended The Vampire’s Assistant with his 13-year-old issue the other week, beholding the divine Ms Hayek as the bearded lady, John C Reilly as bloodsucking ringmaster and Willem Dafoe as, well, Willem Dafoe. A week later it was Johnny Patterson, The Singing Irish Clown at the Project, a delightful dramatisation of the titular character’s life and times rendered as a rollicking vaudeville ballad of graveyards, geeks, freaks and showfolk, somewhere between Fellini and Shane MacGowan, or the tune on Frank’s Wild Years where Tom Waits pastiches John McCormack. We await Uncle Tom’s turn as Old Nick in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus with great interest.

Most of us have wanted to run away with the circus at some point. The colour and romance of the carnival has lit up the work of Tim Burton and Tod Browning, Nick Cave’s ‘The Carny’, Fellini’s La Strada, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, the Jim Rose Circus and the 1947 classic noir Nightmare Alley, a seminal influence on Connecticut-born outsider artist Joe Coleman, who fashions himself as a sort of Burroughsian PT Barnum.
Barnum himself, contrary to popular belief, was not a huckster, but a populist. Okay, he may have pulled the odd hoax such as the Cardiff Giant, but his maxim was not the often misattributed, “There’s a sucker born every minute”, but The Customer Is Always Right.
“Men who drive sharp bargains with their customers, acting as if they never expected to see them again, will not be mistaken,” he said. “They will never see them again as customers. People don’t like to pay and get kicked also.”
Barnum also advocated perseverance and graft rather than dilletante flitting or the short-order scam.
“A constant hammering on one nail will generally drive it home at last, so that it can be clinched,” he said. “When a man’s undivided attention is centered on one object, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once. Many a fortune has slipped through a man’s fingers because he was engaged in too many occupations at a time... Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business. We are all, no doubt, born for a wise purpose. Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed.”
Barnum’s long gone, but the show goes ever on.