Drunken Pumpkin

Damn it . . . Don’t you dare ask God to help me.

To her housekeeper, who had begun to pray aloud
actress
died May 10, 1977

The Mesmerizing vid that Jeff posted yesterday is of someone (don’t know who, if you do I’d like to know) performing Dynamic Manipulation, or Contact Juggling. The first term is what Michael Moschen calls it. Moschen took some tidbits from old vaudeville acts and expanded it to the incredibly beautiful performance material seen in the vid. On the trivia front concerning Moschen and dynamic manipulation, in the film Labyrinth it appears that David Bowie is doing this stuff, but in reality it is Moschen’s hands in Bowie’s sleeves. If you have the Labyrinth DVD you can see Moschen performing under these less than ideal conditions, and clearly getting upset by the fact that he is unable to achieve his normal level of performance. And in other trivia, Moschen is the fellow that taught Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller, how to juggle.

Years after Moschen unleashed this frighteningly complicated performance material on the world James Ernst published the book Contact Juggling, which outlines how to do the stuff that he and Moschen do. Now, if any of you juggle, you know that pretty much anyone that can throw and catch a ball can juggle. That is not quite the case with Contact Juggling. Any variation in your movement and the whole thing collapses. Again, if you juggle, the difference between toss juggling and contact juggling is similar to the difference from juggling three balls and juggling five (if you don’t juggle trust me, that shift is a giant leap) where anytime you move slightly out of sync, you’re screwed.

In trivia on Ernst, Moschen was initially a little peeved about the book, but Ernst does credit him, and he realized that it isn’t so much the knowledge of how to contact juggle, it’s the dedication to do it that most people lack. Ernst is also a game designer, and publisher of Cheapass Games, an outfit that produces, umm, inexpensive games.

Okay, that’s enough for now, I’ll talk about some art a little later in the day.
Stay tuned.

I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.