Bøger af Jeff Gross

We used to say that with ten clowns you could take over the city. It was Paris, the 80s, when for some reason a handful of artists came together, painters, writers, magicians, clowns, and created a new Golden Age, an artistic movement centered around the street theater scene in Beaubourg and Saint Germain des Près. Later, the clowns would become the lead acts in Cirque du Soleil, so high was the level of talent, and I would end up writing screenplays with Roman Polanski and making films. But this was before any of us were known, when we were still struggling on the razor's edge of meaning and purpose, when the magic was still around every corner.

January 1, 2000, a Shinto healer fresh off the plane from Japan delivers an ancient, world-saving scroll to the UN, only to discover that on January 1, the United Nations is closed. Wise in the ways of the universe but unschooled in the ways of New York, the healer, the most balanced man in the city, manages to attract all the most-distracted, least-balanced people around: Chrissie Luna, the metaphysical makeup artist with the ticking biological clock, Reverend Y, the African-American ex-heavyweight contender turned spiritual leader of the Church of Apocalypse, Profanity-Allowed, and Karl-Heinz Retter, the suicidal Swiss dwarf dog-walker with dreams of world hegemony... The prophecy said that the scroll would be unveiled when the time was right, when things couldn't get much worse. The only question: how much worse did they have to get?

In the 1980s a thriving street theater scene in Paris was the center of a large and immensely talented international artistic community, all sorts of performers, clowns, magicians, jugglers, mimes, determined to set the artistic world on fire. An endless party which brought a splash of color to the center of the city. When the best acts were performing, you could hear the laughter blocks away. Some of the acts ended up as the leads in Cirque du Soleil, your author ended up writing three screenplays with Roman Polanski, but this was before anyone was known, when we walked the razor's edge of meaning and purpose, trying our best to survive, to live an alternative life that made sense.