Around the World in 212 Days with Ken Feit

Ken Feit performance poster courtesy of Jef Lambdin

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My October series honoring the 72nd birthday of the late, great "itinerant fool" Ken Feit included a post on his incredible travel journals, reproduced in the form of three PDFs. At the time I mentioned that I was still missing the holy grail letter, the one about his most ambitious trip, a seven-month, around-the-world journey that took him and San Francisco street juggler Ray Jason from the U.S. to England, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Russia, Japan (via the trans-Siberian Express), Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia (including Bali), China, Australia, New Zealand, and French Polynesia. Phew!

And now thanks to Barbara Leigh of the Milwaukee Public Theatre, we have that 22-page document and, with a bit of serendipity, a "new" poster (above; click to enlarge) of Ken unearthed by my old buddy, North Carolina mime performer and movement historian Jef Lambdin. Yahoo!

What was amazing about Ken's adventures was his total openness and his genius for quickly getting to know some of the most fascinating people — many of them performing artists — wherever he went. I travel a lot, and do my best to go beyond the artificiality of the pre-fabricated tourist experience, but I definitely feel like a gringo in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt compared to Ken.

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In Java, performances last for nine hours, in Bali for four hours, and the audience generally falls asleep or steps out at times. The trick is to know when to wake up, generally around 2:00 AM when the clowns come on the scene; the performance ends at sunrise.

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These are travel journals, not just performing arts research, but within its pages you will find adventures encompassing the Edinburgh Fringe; Russian circus; Japanese bunya, noh, and bunraku; Filipino tribal storytellers; Balinese dance and masks; Chinese opera and circus. And stories galore. One of my favorites was told to Ken by an octogenarian lumber merchant who was on Ken's official tour of China (only way to go in those days). He had lived in Shanghai from 1936 to 1941 before immigrating to the United States:

Once he was dining with a Chinese doctor when there was a knock at the door. There stood a man with a bandaged head and a bandaged object in his hand. Unwinding his head gauze revealed that his ear was missing; he was holding it in his hand. The doctor upon examining the ear sent him away telling him that the ear was too old and withered to sew back on. The man bowed politely and left. An hour later there was another knock. There stood the same man holding a fresh ear in his hand.

Ken's comment: "Thereafter I wore a hat in China."

Ken passed on another story to me from this same elderly Chinese gentleman, one that doesn't appear in this letter, but which I still remember: Here he was, returning to his native country after nearly four decades away. When they reached Shanghai, he decided to go see if the building housing his old office was still there. He did, and it was, so he went upstairs. Lo and behold, there was the same office door, and it still had his name on it.

You can't make this stuff up. Read and enjoy!




Click here for all the Ken Feit posts.

Book Report: "Fool," a Comic Novel by Christopher Moore

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The only chance you or I will have to see Bill Irwin play the fool in King Lear (see previous post, below) would be a visit to the NY Public Library for the Performing arts, whose Theatre on Film & Tape Archive offers a second chance to see most of the major shows mounted in New York, as well as a few regional offerings. (Not guaranteeing they'll have it, though.) Meanwhile you can have a lot of LOL fun by diving into the wacky antics of Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel, Fool, a loose and raunchy retelling of King Lear from the fool’s point of view.

Moore is a top-selling comic novelist who very much enjoys being outrageous. His novel Lamb, for example, recounts the missing early years of the life of Jesus (aka Joshua), as told by "Biff, the Messiah's best bud." Not surprising, then, that his bold imagination does not cower before the monumental status of what many consider to be Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. It’s not that he doesn’t respect Shakespeare, because he does:

If you work with the English language... you are going to run  across Will’s work at nearly every turn. No matter what you have to say, it turns out that Will said it more elegantly, more succinctly, and more lyrically — and he probably did it in iambic pentameter — four hundred years ago. You can’t really do what Will did, but you can recognize the genius that he had to do it. But I didn’t begin Fool as a tribute to Shakespeare; I wrote it because of my great admiration for British comedy.

Christopher Moore

British comedy cited in his afterword includes Monty Python, the Goons, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Douglas Adams, Nick Hornby, and Eddie Izzard.

Moore does not buy into the traditional view of history, where great men, usually with noble motives, lead us poor commoners forward for the greater good and, if they err, the flaw is tragic, not endemic. Au contraire. This is the underbelly of history, where the mighty are totally corrupt, totally in it for wealth and sex, and anyone who can manage it beds everyone they fancy, with varying degrees of mutual consent.

Into this mess of greed and carnality steps one Pocket, Moore’s version of Lear’s fool: "The castle’s awash in intrigue, subterfuge, and villainy — they’ll be wanting comic relief between the flattery and the murders.”

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“The fool’s number is zero, but that is because he represents the infinite possibilities of all things. He may become anything. See, he carries all of his possessions in a bundle on his back. He is ready for anything, to go anywhere, to become whatever he needs to be."

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You don't need to have seen or read King Lear to follow and enjoy Fool. Like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, the story contains the major events and some of the language from the source, but with plot twists more radical than anything in Stoppard's more faithful take on Hamlet. Not only does Fool borrow elements from other Shakespeare plays, such as the three witches, but the fool's clandestine machinations are what drives the altered plot forward, starting with him conceiving and writing Edmund's treacherous letter. And (spoiler alert) it is eventually revealed that the fool and his apprentice Drool turn out to share an ancient bond to Lear’s own family saga.

Moore's writing is continually witty, and he delights in juxtaposing famous passages from the original with his own more down-to-earth language. Lear famously rages against the storm — "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!" — and then turns to Pocket to say "It’s really fucking cold out here.” Or when in the opening scene Lear tells Cordelia "you’ll get nothing for nothing; speak again," the fool is quick to interject "Well, you can’t really blame her, can you? I mean you’ve given all the good bits to Goneril and Regan, haven’t you? What’s left, a bit of Scotland rocky enough to starve a sheep and this pox river near Newcastle?"

I'm not so sure Moore sustains the momentum for all of his 357 pages — some of the riffs do get repetitive, sometimes he tries too hard to show how clever he can be. The end result is not necessarily great literature, but it is a funny and breezy read, a thought-provoking, weird-sister concoction that is equal parts Shakespeare, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Kurt Vonnegut, and Lenny Bruce.