Just before Christmas Steve Worth sent me a comment about the new histories of the circus and of magic by Taschen, and I just spent some time looking at them on the Taschen book site. Wow, very nice! Very pricey, too... over $200 for both books; too much for my budget. Even so, they're worth a mention here. I get a million ideas when I look at stuff like that.
One of the ideas has to do with something I might have mentioned before, viz., that LA (and every town with cultural aspiration) desperately needs an arts district, or, more specifically, an arts street like the one in Edo depicted by Hiroshige above and below.
I prefer an arts street on the old Japanese model, with open store fronts and raised stages for hucksters to hype what's inside.
Here's (above) a ground view of the same pedestrian street. My preference is to limit the stores to crafts theater: marionettes, puppets, ethnic dancers, magic shows, circus-style acrobatics, small-scale live theater and the like. It would be great if movie theaters and contemporary dance halls were close by, but this street should be reserved for up-close entertainments of a more traditional Japanese sort.
Here (above) you can better see the small stages and balconies reserved for the barkers. I don't see any stairs, so I wonder how customers were expected to enter these shops.
The second floor (above) would offer a superb view of the street and shops.
The facades should all be Japanese, but I picture some of the entertainments as being old European (above).
Some would be European, but most would be Japanese, or at least Asian. Here's (above and below) a couple of pictures of modern-day Hanoi's "Long Water Puppet Theater." Things like this would work well on the arts street.
Do the puppeteers really work underwater?
Many thanks to Craig, who sent me this video clip (above) in a comment. According to Craig the puppets are on long, hollow poles with strings inside, and the puppeteers are standing behind the silk fence in the background.
Old European magic shows (above) are second to none in their appeal to the weird and exotic, so I might throw some of them in there too.
Man, I love magic shows!
I love carnival shows (above), too. Is their any way to integrate American carnival with the Japanese theme? Maybe not.
