Showing posts with label Flying Wallendas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flying Wallendas. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Circus accidents



The Wallendas and the queer melancholy that trails behind the circus performer seem to be a recurring obsession. I hate circuses. As a child I hated them, and was thought odd. It was that smell, the smell of shit and failed animals. Living in a small town, the circuses I saw were moth-eaten and tawdry, which is perhaps what it's all about anyway. Elephants tied up. Lions waiting for a lunge that never happens. Mean alcoholic clowns. Oh, the clowns especially - they are a nightmare.

There is YouTube footage of Karl Wallenda falling to his death from a tightrope suspended between two high-rises in Rio de Janiero or somewhere, I mean the real thing - it couldn't be faked, he falls. It's the end for him. And his grandson or great-grandson Nik Wallenda keeps on trying for it. One wonders at the symbolism. Trying for a fall, or, like a compulsive gambler, going on and on until he loses everything.  Craven cowards that we are, we still risk death each time we walk out the door. Or don't walk out the door. We don't test it, don't push the risk, unless you count too many sour-cream-and-onion chips or hours spent sitting in a chair.




"Fails" are great tests, tests of character I mean, and most of us fail them. It's just too painful, everybody watching. Everybody has their own particular bag of fails. Mine is my writing. After years and years of refining my craft, publishing hundreds of book reviews and thousands of newspaper columns, my dream "came true" and I published a novel - then two - then three - and then - they didn't sell. Nobody told me, you see, that the novels had to SELL, because part of the dream for every writer I know is automatic Fame and Fortune. Surely this just happens all by itself?

Fail.

It's sad, and infuriating sometimes, but it's not going to happen for me - the movie version, I mean, because luck just does not stick to me. Like Peter Pan's shadow, it keeps coming unstuck just as I start to get somewhere.  Real trauma is something quite else, and I am able to put this aside and enjoy my life to a degree I never thought possible a few years ago. So is the fail entirely a fail?




Nothing can take away from me the bizarre and ongoing discovery, the process, the burrowing in. Now that I have YouTube and Wikipedia and cool things like that, it's unending. It's labyrinthine, and more odd than the human condition itself, which I both love and loathe. I am drawn to those on the fringes, because I have bloody well given up on being acceptable to anyone but myself (so there), even while seeing that other people's oddness, like mine, might be offputting. As Steinbeck used to say, it's shrimp ice cream.




I saw someone's blog the other day - God, it was beautiful and elegant, like the rooftop penthouse of some gleamingly expensive apartment building in Manhattan, all sort of skyline-y, and the entries were all so gracefully ordered. It just had Professional written all over it. The screaming harridan in me, the rotten mother I carry around in my head, began yammering, "WHY CAN'T YOU BE MORE LIKE YOUR SISTER?", or words to that effect. In other words - your blog sucks, Margaret, stop pretending, start writing like a grownup and maybe THEN you will sell a few copies.

Oh really?

29 rather than 24?

I might as well do whatever the hell I want. Yes, and while still admiring someone else's truly stunning masterpiece of a blog, full of beautifully polished entries on topics of major interest, instead of quirky things on circus accidents and other stuff that usually involves making a lot of gifs.




You shouldn't go on YouTube late at night and watch circus accidents.  It's not fun for all ages. It's not fun for anyone. You'll find falls and wipeouts and awful cat maulings (serves them goddamn right, I'm for the cats). You'll find some where you're not sure the person even survived. After one particularly awful motorcycle crash, the emcee pleads in a nakedly urgent voice that if there is a doctor in the house, PLEASE, come forward NOW. "This is not part of the show." Then he dismisses the crowd, who are almost completely silent.

Is it something Roman about us, a colosseum leftover, something untamed, do we like a thrill, do we like to watch a thrill, THEIR thrill, or do we secretly hope in the most shameful part of ourselves that something in fact will go terribly wrong? For in a circus, it's hard for things to go just a little bit wrong.



Then there is the sideshow. These still exist in the small backwoods circuses that probably operate on the fringes of the law, though they supposedly emphasize feats of strength or daring rather than freakish characteristics. If we see someone walking on his hands now, our response is  likely to be, "Wow, that's pretty amazing," marvelling at the fact that his disability really isn't very disabling after all. But back then. . . back then, when "abnormal" children were generally not allowed to draw their first breath, when people afflicted with "madness" were "put away" so we wouldn't have to see them, the freak show must have been a visceral nightmare.




This is two or three seconds of Todd Browning's 1932 masterpiece, Freaks. For years I avoided it because I was put off by the title (which makes better sense once you've seen it - it's more of a quote, something screamed at the performers by the prima donna aerialist) and was a little frightened of the whole concept because it starred REAL circus performers, "human oddities" - but then one day curiosity got the better of me.

When you see Freaks, you enter a strange world. Fully half an hour was edited out, or censored out, so as rich and strange as it already is, it might once have been much more rich and strange. You have to see it more than once to really appreciate the fact that it's about a community, a very tight-knit one where there is solidarity and protectiveness and intense loyalty to one another. All the things we're lousy at in today's fragmentary society. There's oddball humor, scenes which are not so much meant to shock as to inspire a headshaking wonder, and - as with most great movies, up to and including Gone with the Wind - a love triangle.

I could do a whole post on Freaks, in fact I might at some point, and I was not even aware until just now that my recent viewing of it on TCM probably triggered this whole awful doomed circus search. Unlikely as this seems, the movie isn't "dark" or "disturbing" or "macabre" - none of those terms apply, as most of the troupe are good-humoured and seem to enjoy their work and each other. I will say though that it is plenty weird and a little crazy, demonstrating an over-the-top exuberance unfettered by any bounds of propriety. Only the ending turns dark, terribly dark, and only because somebody dared to mess with one of their own.





 



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Saturday, April 27, 2013

My God, my God: the falling Wallendas




I don't know what it is about me. Just me? Look at reality TV. We all have this instinctive inner urge to ogle, to goggle. Other people's disasters fascinate us.

I was tempted to (but didn't) post a horrific 15-second YouTube clip of the patriarch of the Wallenda family attempting to walk a wire stretched between two high-rise buildings. He lost his balance, slipped, fell and hit the pavement. But even that isn't the worst part. Two guys are just standing around talking. Obviously they saw what happened - wouldn't the whole world be watching this incredible stunt? - and it doesn't even occur to them to try to help.  In the next second, twenty people run frantically toward the now-expired body. But what was up with those two guys?




Just looking at a picture like this makes me queasy.

How could anybody find it enjoyable to watch this? For that matter, why did people used to (and still do, I hear) attend executions of death-row criminals? Why do we go to movies that scare the bejesus out of us, even pay good money for it?




Here are the Wallendas walking the wire at Detroit's Shrine Circus in 1962. They always worked without a net. Nets were for amateurs and sissies.  I never attended the Shrine Circus (I hated that smell of animal dung and the sweaty frightening clowns), but I could have. I lived close enough to Detroit that when the ground rumbled, our teacups began to rattle. In this photo, it's obvious already that things are going perilously wrong. The quivering symmetry of the first shot is coming undone.




What happened? Post-disaster, one of the Wallendas claimed it was the man at the top of the pyramid. Quite simply, he lost his grip. With all that weight on both sides, a deviation of a fraction of a centimeter meant doom. It must have happened that night.

Obviously a few reporters were there, smoking cigarettes, taking swigs from hip flasks as they covered the most boring public event of the year. But suddenly, the cameras couldn't snap fast enough.






An interjection. There's something funny about these two pictures. That banner behind the woman was supposed to be horizontal. Here it's wildly askew. Someone tilted their camera, obviously, to make the shot look more dramatic. Here (below) is the same shot, rotated to normal: obviously the woman wasn't careening down at an angle, but being carefully lowered on a wire. The position of her hands makes that obvious. Like anyone who parachutes, an aerialist would be prepared for an eventual/inevitable fall, and certainly would NOT fall feet-first!
The more I look at this, the more I see the essential phoniness and dishonesty of the press. If the woman were actually falling, she would not be looking down at the ground at this angle. The corrected shot is almost like another picture. Her legs are relaxed and dangling, whereas her arms are flexed as she holds on. For shame, Detroit News.






Call this the Day of the Jackal. The carnage was laid out for everyone to see. The Detroit News went on and on about it, pages and pages. Were there video clips? I think so, but not on YouTube. I've seen a couple seconds of it on documentaries about the Wallendas. It's horrendous.





This catastrophe put Detroit on the map and was the biggest thing to happen to the entertainment industry since Milky's Party Time.

But think of the audience.

Think of the sickening screams, the horror, the disbelief. the bizarre part of the mind that insists, "Oh, it's all part of the act" (like people today, caught in terrorist attacks, who without fail say afterwards, "I thought I was in a movie").





And the children. It wasn't common then to explain anything to them. (Still isn't, if you ask me.)  If we didn't talk about it, it just went away. Imagine the racing heart and overwhelming dread, that little spot of horror deep inside, never healed, just crouching there, while the adult wonders why he has heart disease, why he's so afraid of  heights.

Couldn't that buried trauma, like a tiny earthquake vibration gradually growing stronger and stronger, eventually crumble the core of a human being? Couldn't it? We call it "psychosomatic illness". I call it the human sickness, the thing that might just finish us after all.





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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Flying Wallendas, Niagara Falls, and me




I can't watch this, but can't take my eyes off it either. Know the feeling? Even though I KNOW they got through it safely.

This time.

Those Wallendas. They never quit. We know this cuzzadafact that that Wallenda guy, that Nik Wallenda I mean, is going to do it again, going to walk over Niagara Falls on a wire, or at least try to, just to prove he's a Wallenda and that Wallenda-style risks are still alive and well in 2012.

Or not?

I can't find video of the Wallendas' tragic seven-person-pyramid crash at the Detroit Shrine Circus in 1962, but I did find a photo that gives me the old-fashioned willies.




In this photo, one of the most disturbing I have ever seen, Wallendas are crashing to the ground because they always work without a net.  Two people died right before everyone's eyes while the crowd gasped, murmured and groaned. To the Wallendas, dying seems to be an occupational hazard.




Niagara Falls stunts are almost old hat, but we haven't heard of one for quite a while now. To me, Niagara Falls wasn't a tourist destination but just a place my parents dragged me to once or twice a year to visit my cousins, because my Dad's sister (Aunt Mae) lived there. About all I can remember of those early visits is the Maid of the Mist, a big ungainly boat that turns around once, and going in behind the falls to watch the polluted water rushing down.




Niagara Falls was like a giant flush toilet: it stank, a smell sort of like rotten orange peels mixed with diesel fuel and dirty feet. I remember that smell even more vividly than the tacky, slightly smutty souvenirs they sold in the stores on Lundy's Lane.

All this got pretty much packed into the back of my brain, because those memories weren't any more pleasant than most of my childhood recollections (though, curiously, a couple of my siblings insist that I really was happy, my father wasn't like that at all and nothing ever went wrong). Then during our recent trip to Ontario to take part in my mother-in-law's memorial, my husband's brother suggested we drive to Niagara Falls for the afternoon.

NIAGARA FALLS? Wasn't that zillions of miles away? Didn't I have to be car-sick for hours in the back seat of a stifling car to get there? Didn't I have to hear my Dad sniffling up nasal spray and clearing his throat for seventeen hours?

Apparently not.




When Al mentioned Lundy's Lane, a whole sluice of memory was released, smelling about as good as the falls. My Dad getting drunk and bellowing on and on about growing up in Niagara Falls, which his transplanted-Cockney family nicknamed Niffles. The way he always got beat up for being a "chirper" and the way he studied boxing and bested all of them, and the old Italian guy who endlessly sang the same song, and the World War I songs and English music hall ditties that got branded into my brain because I heard them seventeen thousand times. Because I was the youngest child by thirteen years, and because everyone else had left, I was his only remaining audience. When not assuring me he wished I had never been born, he regaled me with the same boring bullshit over, and over, and over again.

We were a sort of family wax museum, all our sins seamlessly sealed over in a way that was remarkably lifelike, so Niagara Falls was a natural location because nothing ever changes there either. Parallel to this great roaring natural wonder, everything was transparently fake. These trips were treats, mind, and we looked forward to them. We had to. It was our cousins, and you had to like visiting your cousins or there was just something wrong with you.




So how does all this connect to Wallendas flying through the air? Niffles still seems to attract a sleazy kind of curiosity even after all these decades. We want to watch Nik Wallenda go up there and attempt this suicidal stunt because, in an awful sort of way, we want to see him fail.  It feeds the worst in us, the rubbernecking curiosity that causes people to stare at car accidents. We feel ashamed of ourselves, but not enough to stop looking. But we also feel, deep down, that it serves him right if he falls because trying stuff like that, taking risks like that, is downright indecent. It seems to be pulling bad luck and curses right down on your own head.




The family patriarch Karl Wallenda died in the most naked, public manner possible as he tried to walk a wire stretched between two highrise buildings in Puerto Rico. He simply fell. Video exists, but I can't post it here. I did watch it, and it sickened me the way he fought the wind at midpoint, swayed perilously, tried desperately to balance himself (you knew what was coming just before it happened), then - let go.



Exactly one day after our visit to Niagara Falls, we heard a startling news story: on a beautiful sunny day, in front of hundreds of tourists, a man climbed up on a railing high over the top of the Horseshoe Falls, and jumped. Had we gone there only a day later, we would have seen it.


Bizarrely, the man went over the falls and survived, and even pulled himself out of the water on his own. Rescuers bore him away to the hospital, but he survived with relatively minor injuries.


Suicides, stunts, plastic ornaments, waxworks, all that water roaring down. How did I feel after all those decades? Did I have any epiphanies as I stood at the rail and reflected on my memories from the past fifty years?




There was something different, but at first I couldn't tell what it was. Then it hit my limbic system: that smell! It was gone. No more rotten fruit and stinking underwear.

The spray that atomized from the roaring falls, casting eerie suspended rainbows into the sunshine and saturating the front of my jacket, smelled pristine and fresh as a stream in the Garden of Eden.


 


Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look