I forgot to put them in last night's supermegalinkdump, but I had a few articles in the Independent in the month I was away:

* A profile of Ellen Cassilly and Frank Konhaus, the brains behind last year's incredibly successful Rousse project;

* Another development piece, this one on a new building on Durham's east side seeking to cater to local artists;

* A short write-up on Brooklyn's traveling postmodern vaudeville circus, the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus which turned into cultural criticism for some reason.

What brings us to the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, or to any circus—or any place outside the smoothly produced, tightly controlled entertainment that mass culture provides us with, whether we want it or not—is a flirtation not with disaster but instead with transgression, with random chance, with the possibility of something finally happening that hasn't been carefully stage-managed and planned out. We're yearning, all of us, to see something really real: There are so few places in America where one can still find it, and they are always either huge and horrible catastrophes or else marginal, strange happenings—as marginal and strange as a vaudeville-burlesque-comedy-rodeo-circus on a Sunday night in downtown Raleigh, N.C.

The essential character of the circus has never been the lion tamer or the knife thrower or the trapeze swinger: It's the clown, who with his juggling and his pratfalls and his complete disregard for the basic tenets of decent, civilized society shows us (in case we've forgotten) the possibility of escape from the usual rules and the same played-out scripts—a much-needed taste of liberation, of freedom from ubiquitous control.

At least there were some nice accompanying photos.