I will now relay to you the plot of Cirque du Soleil’s Wintuk, which plays each holiday season in the 5600-seat WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden.

ACT ONE
During a preamble, which includes a plea that no pictures be taken throughout the performance, something is stolen by a short guy with a ballet dancer ass who is wearing a striped green-and-black sweater. Some police officers in skin-tight bodysuits (these say POLICE on them) appear. They are on bicycles. Although they cannot apprehend the suspect from their bicycles, they refuse to dismount. There is a lot of crime in this city, which looks to be located somewhere between Norway and Mongolia. The city is filled with giant, frightening dogs, who roam about aggressing passers-by.

Most people choose to skate through this town, so that they are not assaulted by dogs or by thieves. Amid all this brutality, a boy and a girl begin to flirt. They make friends with a homeless woman. She is friends with a homeless crazy person who lives in a trashcan.

The thief steals someone’s pants. He is forced to climb a dangerous rope to retrieve them. And a rich man passes through downtown, with sad results; his packages are stolen.

A policeman, still on his bicycle, plays a frightening whole body version of the five-finger fillet on the thief-just like the android in Aliens, but using only his bicycle tires.

A woman juggles because she is lonely and no one will talk to her.

Why is not not snowing, even though it is winter, the young boy wonders. That is because there is no more snow ever, he is told. Something bad has happened to the planet.

Then some huge fucking terrifying birds show up to indicate that things are only going to get worse.

ACT TWO
The children, who have moved beyond flirting and into the stages of devotion, leave the horrible city and go north to the land of winter. This place is a monarchy, where status is determined by the strength of one’s floor routine. The queen of this land is extremely flexible and is forced into outrageous positions to retain her authority.

There are a number of Asian people who live in this country. They are forced to dress identically in identifying gold catsuits so that they are desexualized, although there are Asian men of lesser status who are marked by their Flash Gordon-esque vests with ridges at the shoulders. Oddly, these outfits bare their breasts.

Some very scary giant walking bags of trash show up and try to abduct the young girl from the city and to kill everyone. They are murdered.

The burglar shows up to steal things but is confronted with his identically-clad (and identically-assed) twin. They have hot gay sex, using some giant bouncy exercise balls. They crawl all over each other! They have been so lonely! But, for their interest in homosexuality, the Flexible Queen punishes them by commanding them to wear skirts.

There is a police raid upon the land of the north. Everyone is chasing everyone. More burglars arrive. More and more police arrive.

Then, two women descend from heaven. Using interpretive dance, they urge the people to repent.

The huge scary birds return. Enraged but unable to speak, they frantically flap their wings. Is it a warning? A threat? As the curtain falls, we hear the screams of rural villager and city person alike.

Pete Doherty was forced to exit a concert in Germany after angering the crowd by singing Nazi favorite “Deutschland, Deutschland Ãœber Alles.” Met with boos and badfingers, Doherty “moved on to the next song but his manager pulled him off after his fourth song. ‘After that, we could no longer guarantee his safety,’” said the program manager for the station broadcasting the show. I guess it’s not exactly irony that singing a song associated with genocide might provoke violent rage in those who condemn it, but it’s something… something there ought to be a German word for.

Depressed people have a hard time seeing fine detail, according to a Yale study. This is apparently a result of “a shortage of a neurotransmitter called GABA; this has also been linked to a visual skill called spatial suppression, which helps us suppress details surrounding the object our eyes are focused on — enabling us to pick out a snake in fallen leaves, for instance.”

It’s not like we couldn’t have seen it coming. But I guess the hubris of building fake islands in the shape of the the earth’s continents didn’t give enough people enough pause. (Or indoor ski slopes in the desert. Or the reports of slave labor. Or the frequent lightning strikes on the Burj Dubai.) But one man, one very wise man was calling out a warning long before most. Now, now, as the hot Arabian sun turns all our wings to ashes, we must pause during our long plummet and say: You were right, Bruce. We should have listened. We all should have listened far more closely to Iron Maiden lyrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3yzEfqgbOo

The purpose of the press, writes an excitable James Fallows, “is supposed to be giving reality a better chance.” But who the hell wants that? I’d much rather be informed about how many times my president uses a certain word. Turns out it’s a lot! [Insert audible frustrated sigh here.]

A study entitled The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and its Environmental Impact found that we waste 1,400 calories per person per day which is enough food to sustain a very thin or small or old person or a regular biggish man-person if two people team up and waste food together. This is insane given the USDA’s report that one-in-seven Americans did not have access to enough food last year. This sort of information, like the Times telling us that “many numbers of people use food stamps now: sadface,” doesn’t stay in my head because math is hard like reading books and shoplifting candy is so easy.

Anyway, over the last week I ate and drank 4,700–6,300 calories each day paid for by other people and their families and now actually feel something. The poor people are banging around under the door in the floor and I’m recalling all sorts of things about them because at an art show I ran into a young hipster photographer friend that I only thought had gotten more attractive-looking but had actually LOST WEIGHT from real-life poverty. Like, he’s not even going to Art Basel.

So even though it’s a thorny issue and I’m not suggesting pounding door-to-door in Williamsburg or the LES doling out a basketful of charity tubers dressed in little gingham waistcoats, I think all of us should go check up on the “most likely to be hungry” amongst our friends. Especially if they didn’t make the best of career decisions and did rash mongo things like “go into print.” Besides, you can just grab everything that’s just shy of rancid in your fridge and drown it in a pot to make a hot cheap meal. If you use a little corn starch, the gruel gets to be murky, JUST LIKE REAL FOOD.

“All the wise heads will tell us that 8 or 9 percent unemployment — maybe even 10 percent — is the ‘new normal’, and that only irresponsible people want to do anything about the situation. So what I see is years of terrible job markets, combined with political paralysis.”
-Paul Krugman makes me reconsider the wisdom of getting out of bed this morning. Or any morning, for that matter.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Today in The Poetry Section: Three poems by Jennifer L. Knox, including Baywatch and Short People.

Baywatch

Like songs that say only
I like it like that or
I want my money back or
Back that thing up. “Dogs
peeing on people = funny.
People peeing on dogs = not
funny.” That’s a joke I stole
from a really dumb movie
I will remember-unlike my
mother’s birthday-
for as long as I live.

Short People

When Emperor Hirohito told the Japanese people it was time to surrender, he never used the word surrender. Instead, he talked about how everyone had done their best, tried so hard, etc. His speech was broadcast over loudspeakers hung outside on electrical poles. People had never heard Hirohito’s voice before-they thought the Emperor was God. He spoke in the highest level of formality-using words so antiquated, ordinary people couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. So imagine: suddenly, one day, a disembodied voice we think is God’s starts talking to people in the streets in booming Shakespeare-speak. “What the heck’s God saying?” the people ask. A man wearing big glasses translates: “He’s saying we all did a really great job…” he pauses, furrows his brow, “but I think He wants us to give up.” This is what most of Randy Newman’s songs are about.

Saving Wasted Breath

It was a surprisingly easy find at 5 a.m., in Anaheim,
but I’d be less a sore thumb in clown drag: a bruised boob
in a new white suit (pulled the tags off with my teeth).
If those blockhead Canadian cops get ahold of me,
they’ll beat me ’til their knuckles bleed. Mongoloid Todd’s
a tougher fit-the gate was locked at Len’s House of Large
Sizes, so we threw his blood-soaked duds off the pier
and he climbed in the trunk bare ass-been there two hours.
When I stop for gas, I’ll buy him a t-shirt and underwear.
Even back there, his psycho talk’s louder than the radio. God
only knows what he’s got in the golf bag. Marina warned me
how the border guard’s pits stroll from car to car like sharks,
hunting through their open mouths. And that was it. No
shit she never sapped out and said “Stay,” but the “Go to hell”s
and “You stupid fuck”s and all the rest I never earned
but sure deserved-nix on those sweet nothings too.

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of two books of poems, Drunk by Noon and A Gringo Like Me. Her new book, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, is forthcoming from Bloof Books next year. Her work has appeared three times in the Best American Poetry series, as well as in the anthologies Best American Erotic Poems and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present.

You may contact the editors here. (PS: Here is another great poem by the author, called Chicken Bucket.)

Here is grainy footage of an aerialist falling 40 feet to the floor at some mall in California. She sustained wrist and pelvis injuries, making it okay to say that this is probably the worst part of the whole story:

The 26-year-old woman slipped while hanging upside down from a solid metal hoop suspended from the ceiling during the finale of the show “Hunky Santa and the Candy Cane Girls” Saturday evening, said Ray Pierce, owner of Hollywood Aerial Arts, the firm putting on the performance.

Also, is it terrible that I keep watching it over and over?

Here’s a solution to your recession worries: Japanese poems! “Working on a haiku is the perfect anecdote when life’s financial challenges mount. Compose one in your head when you’re stuck in traffic or as you’re waiting in line at the supermarket to pay with your ever thinner wallet.”