Star 156 Productions

Evil Squirrel

2009-10-11T01:58:59Z

www.imeem.com/star156

2008-07-22T07:21:28Z

"My 911"

2008-06-02T19:50:41Z

In 2006 Marko Sakren was looking for someone to talk about the occult for a movie he was doing and I recommended Christian. You can see Christian sitting at the table in the SSLOTO Lodge about 49 seconds into the trailer but in the actual movie he is filmed doing a purification, consecration and Star Sapphire plus an interview with the director.

Christine Sangiovanni
Star156

The following is from the film's website:
http://www.my911movie.com

An autobiographical tale from Las Vegas filmmaker Marko Sakren, "My 9/11" tells how a 1980 psychic drawing foretold the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, as well as subsequent natural disasters. The story also tells how this filmmaker recaptured his life after it, too, had collapsed as a result of 9/11 and how the making of this movie led to a startling conclusion about our country's leadership.

"My 9/11" is a documentary edited with artistic touches inspired by that 1980 psychic drawing. The film is not rated. No profanity. No sexual content. A truly enthralling artistic work that needs to be seen to be believed.

Congratulations Miron Rafajlovic!

2008-05-23T17:58:31Z

A great friend and collaborator, Miron Rafajlovic, has released his new website. This multi-talented performer/composer is featured on the "KOOZA" soundtrack as well as many other jazz and world music albums.

Check out his site and support the arts!

http://www.mironraf.com/

From all of us at Star 156 Productions Inc...Congratulations Miron!!

"Satan's Circus" still traveling.

2008-05-19T22:22:12Z

Entertainments association with the base and debauched has been around since the beginning. Early forms of entertainment were reveled as celebratory and pure by its practitioners and as pagan even satanic by the "religious" of the time. Laws in the 1600's forbade public performances of circus and variety arts as corrupting influences upon the good citizens. Entertainment was thought to incite the masses to laugh, drink, smoke, gamble, and generally have a ball.

This must be prohibited at all costs!! (the author shouts facetiously)
It is harder to impose the guilt of the Judeo-Christian construct if no one is taking it seriously. Jehovah MUST be feared at all costs...in order to secure tithing to the church and impose laws that will benefit the goals of the "Moral Majority". Even if that group is neither.

But there is a loophole. One small pinprick which compromises the most uptight person.
Since the beginning comedy has been subversive, antiauthoritarian, and irreverent.
This is as true now as, "In the Beginning...".
And I have been face to face with this specimen on a daily basis. In "KOOZA" we clowns offer up a hefty helping of irreverence and social misconduct. Acting as "Lords of Misrule" we pull people up onstage, mock them publicly putting a magnifying glass up to them and their insecurities for our own and everyone else's amusement. It's always funny...when it's NOT you. Even last night at a punk bar here in Philadelphia a guy sitting across from us recognized me from the show and came over to speak with us. He said, "You and your buddies (the other clowns) are awesome. He's snorting coke, the other guy's doing nitrous, so funny. I couldn't believe it!"

This same section of our act can cause a few hundred ( of two thousand five hundred per show) people to groan with disdain and sit stiff lipped wincing a mere twenty feet away from us. But the reactions change show for show and can almost never be predicted. Does this make us change the act? No. Why should it. Playing "safe" to the most mediocre common denominator does not push boundaries. At one point in the show I've started singing Snoop Dogg's ,"Sensual Seduction" in reference to a passionate homosexual display on stage. It has been getting huge responses because people either know the song because they own it OR they are forced to hear it a million times on Top 40 radio. "BUT THERE ARE KIDS PRESENT!" one might proclaim. Yes, but kids now a days are more exposed to sex, drugs, and everything else by the age of ten. These same kids are more likely to get the reference than some of the parents.

The kids laugh. The parents laugh. The senior citizens laugh...or fall asleep.
We hit more than we miss and this is because people love the relief they get from a good old fashioned belly laugh. Belly laughs can be caused by everything from insightful observations to a sharp kick in the balls. That release with laughter causes physiological changes in the breathing and circulation of the body and is intoxicating in its own way.
This is why it is dangerous. Intoxication can be seen as the Devil's Lust or the Love of God.
Or how about that old softy romantic scientific atheist idea that it is all just chemical releases in our bodies that interact with our brain to cause a feeling that is enjoyable, attributable to no one other than the living organism experiencing the compositional interchange. OOOH! Now I'm getting hot!!

The point is that no matter which dogmatic funhouse mirror you put the circus and the industry of amusements up to...people will still fill the house and pay money for the sweet release that great entertainment gives.

Christian Fitzharris
STAR 156 Productions

**Historical material referenced from "No Applause-Just throw money" by Trav S.D. 2005 published by Faber and Faber Inc.**

Philadelphia Review

2008-05-19T20:26:49Z

A Soleil surprise: Traditionally offbeat Cirque goes traditional

By JONATHAN TAKIFF
Philadelphia Daily News
takiffj@phillynews.com 215-854-5960

HAVE YOU grown accustomed to Cirque du Soleil spectaculars that seem less like a circus and more like a surreal aerial ballet or Asian action movie fantasy? You know - shows that come saddled with some convoluted, mystical plotline (at least in the program book) about the quest for truth, beauty and humanity?
Or maybe you've come to think of Cirque for its permanently installed mega-productions in Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla., where the tens of millions of dollars spent on high-tech stage machinery often dwarfs the mere mortal performers.

If so, the most intimate and circuslike of Cirque shows, newly landed in Philadelphia and called "Kooza," will really surprise you, thanks to a creator named David Shiner who's steeped in traditional, one-ring circus arts.

"I wanted a more traditional show, a show created around the artists, not on all the stuff around them," explained the writer/director recently. "I wanted to take the high-tech out of it, to really get back to the basics."

The costumes are still magnificent, sometimes offbeat and occasionally a bit unsettling (unless a Broadway-style chorus line of skeletons and a carpet of dancing rats is your idea of dreamy).

The world-conscious music coming from the traditional, circus-styled bandstand also is true to the Cirque performance-art school. This time, the score mixes a rock core with the spicy rhythms of Latin America and India, and featuring a singer Shiner first heard in Mumbai.

But listen closely. Some of the lyrics are in English this time, not that otherworldly Cirque-gibberish!

Clowns also have more to say in this one show, in recognizable speech, than this fan has seen collectively in seven or eight Cirque shows. "We're playing in the U.S., so why not talk in English?" said Shiner.

Another difference this time, the plotline can be boiled down to a one-line essence: Innocent, kite-flying fella waves a magic wand over a box; out pops a jester and we're off to the circus - a particularly terrific circus - where acrobats and clowns rule the roost. (But no chickens, or elephants, or tigers.)

By the way, "Kooza" comes from the Sanskrit word kaza which means both "box" and "treasure."

Born in the U.S.A.

David Shiner is U.S.-born - a rarity among the high creative ranks for the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil enterprise - and is best known in the States for his clowning in the film "Lorenzo's Oil," his guiding role as the original Cat in the Hat in the Broadway musical "Seussical" and especially for the two-man, all-mimed show with Bill Irwin, "Fool Moon," "that we played for three engagements on Broadway in the '90s, and still talk about reviving a fourth time," Shiner said.
(Irwin, by happy coincidence, is also here in town, through June 15, world-premiering a show at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, "The Happiness Lecture." He and Shiner have agreed to do a "talk back" panel discussion, "Not Just Fooling Around," after the matinee June 7. Admission to the chat is free for all.)

Like Cirque's French Canadian founders, Shiner also started out a street performer, though in Boulder, Colo. And like them, he's been quite the globe traveler.

When he couldn't find good work and appreciation in the U.S. for his funny business, Shiner moved to Paris in 1981, first working in the streets and then landing jobs clowning in traditional, one-ring European circus troupes - France's Cirque de Demain, then Germany's Circus Roncalli (about which he speaks in especially reverent tones) and then with the Swiss National company, Circus Knie.

Welcome to the Machine

Shiner first made a Cirque connection doing a two-man show with a company principal, Rene Bazinet. He formalized the relationship in 1990, joining the cast of Cirque's fourth show "Nouvelle Experience," which spent 19 months on the road and a year planted in Las Vegas. "It was actually the very first show they took to Vegas, for a tented engagement on a hotel parking lot [at the Mirage] that just went on and on and on."
Now, of course, Cirque du Soleil has five permanent shows playing the gambling town in customized mega-theaters and two more installations in the works, including a magic-centric show opening in September at the Luxor called "Chris Angel - Believe," and an on-again/off-again Elvis Presley tribute that hopefully will come together and as well as their amazing Beatles-themed show, "Love."

There are also 10 more tented Cirque shows floating around the world, and plans to expand the empire even more, with three big shows just for Macau, the resort destination off the coast of Hong Kong.

Shiner agrees that those permanent Vegas ventures are "amazing" to behold but "a daunting task" for a director - and not really where his head is at.

"I cut my teeth in the one-ring circus, so it's got a special place in my heart. That's what 'Kooza' is celebrating. It's really about the artistry of the performers, the emotion they create."

Cirque, his way

For sure, there's some staggering, spine-tingling stuff in this show, starting off with three very young female contortionists who twist themselves into unbelievable sculptural works. It hurts just to watch. Shiner calls this magical routine "like watching living jewelry. It's just so elegant."
The director/writer also is very high on the silver-sequined and otherwise dazzling Anthony Gatto, calling him "the best juggler in the world. After I saw him, I had to have him for the show."

And how about that pair of fearless, gravity-defying guys who run, jump and skip rope inside and atop two wheels spinning at the ends of a giant rotating pendulum? They don't call it the Wheel of Death for nothing.

Shiner agrees.

"It's terrifying, a great act, so dangerous. The momentum on that huge spinning thing is so great. It's so easy to go flying off, and the dismount, if you do it wrong . . . "

While he offers some input on the acrobatic acts, Shiner's training and interest really come to the fore with "Kooza" 's clowns. For a change, the Cirque funny guys aren't just time killers meant to distract us while the set is being reconfigured. These merry pranksters seem central to the show's devil-may-care spirit, often working on the edge in an old school, slapstick, Keystone Kops-meet-the-Three Stooges vein.

Confetti flies everywhere and so do people. A fluffy dog does a nasty deed that could easily upset the ticketholders. A slimy pickpocket artist works his con on a hapless victim pulled out of the audience.

You're glad it's not you.

Not all's funny business

All went well in our conversation until I dared to ask Shiner if spectators pulled out of the seats by the clowns were authentic ticket buyers or "plants" - part of the show. Suddenly, he became agitated.
"I can't tell you that," he declared. "You don't really want to know that, now do you? Asking me that is like asking a magician how he does his tricks. These are wonderful secrets that you like to keep that way. I won't spoil anything for the audience."

Shiner also argued that it would be disrespectful to the clowns to share their business. "In the U.S., we tend to dismiss clowns as simple characters in baggy pants, big shoes, a fright wig and a big red nose. But in Europe, and with Cirque, clowning is a highly respected profession for an artist and a highly refined art. Truth is, it takes years for these guys to come up with a great 10 minutes of material."

But that's not to say that the clown bits (or the other acts) in "Kooza" are fixed in stone. "I encourage the performers to keep trying different things, especially at matinees when there are lot of kids in the audience," tipped Shiner. "Children are more generous with their laughter, and more forgiving when something doesn't go exactly right." *

Kooza in the Philadelphia Area

2008-05-13T01:19:15Z

The sound track for Cirque Du Soleil's Kooza was released last week. The music is great.

You can take a listen to one of the songs here:

http://www.myspace.com/supremegrandmasterdragonclown

Kooza has opened in the Philadelphia, if you live in the area come out and see the show. It is a story of the Hero's journey "Cirque Style".

The Mentalist’s Handbook

2008-04-30T00:29:07Z

SCHOLAR endorses "The Mentalist’s Handbook"!

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

In August of 2007 I was contacted by author Clint Marsh through this My Space site.
He had listened to my metaphysical hip hop and was interested in utilizing me for the release of his upcoming book, "The Mentalist's Handbook" published by Weiser.

He rushed me a copy of the transcript of the book and I read it in November. The focus of the book concerns all things astral. This is the perfect introduction to the exploration of the psychic worlds. The exercises are clear and easy to apply. The material is completely approachable and practical. Great illustrations help convey the different sections as the pages fly by.

The book will be published this June through Weiser and pre-orders are be taken now through Amazon.com and through the author's site at www.wonderella.org

My endorsement adorns the back cover of the book...

"I no longer have to direct seekers to the dusty classics of mentalism.
The Mentalist's Handbook is a classic unto itself in a fresh 21st
century style."
--SCHOLAR, the Rapping Occultist

Please support this book and continue to enjoy my music.
Thank you!

"Love is the law, love under will."

SCHOLAR
www.myspace.com/scholar

star156 @ 2008-04-20T11:28:00

2008-04-20T15:30:04Z

Clowning on "Better Connecticut"!

Well Connecticut has been fun!

The most positive consistent audiences ever.
I was happy to help a Connecticut favorite TV anchor learn how to apply clown make-up.

Check out the link for this weekend!

http://www.wfsb.com/video_legacy/15925090/index.html

Cheers!
Christian

But wait! There's more....about me!

2008-03-03T08:24:28Z

Star 156 Videos

2008-02-29T21:18:52Z

Mambo Christine walks you through an Erzuli Freda altar setup.

2008-02-05T06:41:43Z

Behind the Scenes of the Radio Interview.

2008-01-30T21:13:26Z

I really like the way this video turned out. Getting a little bit better with the camera, still have a lot to learn.

ENJOY!

Christian Fitzharris, (aka SCHOLAR)
"FM Clown" Behind the Scenes

Christian Fitzharris on the Morning Drive: KEZR 106.5 FM

2008-01-29T21:42:55Z

Warning Clown on Radio.

Christian Fitzharris (aka SCHOLAR, Rapping Occultist) Cirque Du Soleil clown in Kooza, is interviewed by Bill and Marla in the Morning, on KEZR 106.5 FM San Jose, CA. and KSCO 1080 AM, Santa Cruz, CA

http://christian.fitzharris.com/

New Song by SCHOLAR

2007-11-19T00:33:57Z

Check out the new SCHOLAR song:

D swingin'

http://www.myspace.com/scholar

Magick and Imagination Workshop - San Francisco, CA

2007-10-18T21:40:07Z

Christian Fitzharris aka Scholar
Coming to San Francisco
MAGICK AND IMAGINATION
Tuesday. December 11, 2007 at 7:00 pm

The practice of Magick is strengthened and supported by your imagination. The greater and more vivid your imagination is...the more effective and concise your magick will be!

This class will teach specific techniques that are immediately applicable to the practicing magician of every path. You will have fun learning some of the great tools used by actors, writers, and clowns which can be applied to ceremonial magick and powerfully transform your personal magickal regimen.

This class will be taught by Christian Fitzharris an initiate of the following mystery schools: The Golden Dawn, The Ordo Templi Orientis, The Free and Accepted Lodge of Freemasonry, The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, and The Shriners of North America.

Mr. Fitzharris is a professional Clown with Cirque du Soleil in the touring show Kooza and a prominent occult hip hop artist who performs under the name, "SCHOLAR".

For more information please email: info@star156productions.com

This class is not to be missed! This is your opportunity to learn new tools, keep your magickal practice growing, and have fun at the same time.

WELCOME! We need YOU!

2007-10-11T04:14:58Z

Welcome to the exclusive STAR 156 Productions, Inc. Live Journal.

Some say they are un-moderated but we are SUPER un-moderated! **

The most unmoderated LJ out there!

You want to bitch!

You want to praise!

You just want your voice heard!

Put it here!

It is time YOU are heard!

BEAUSEANT!

**(Except for what I put on the profile. Please review)

Pristine and SCHOLAR's Diet Program

2007-10-10T20:33:17Z

star156 @ 2007-10-09T22:53:00

2007-10-10T06:00:23Z

Dear Brothers, Sisters and Friends,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

In this newest episode; Frater Zandor achieves the holy grail of membership solicitation (after a relentless wine and cheese campaign,)and acquires the 49th member into his "Magickal Lodge"...Take a listen and share in his joy!

Love is the law, love under will.

Cheers,
SCHOLAR

http://www.myspace.com/scholar

Vegas Boys

2007-10-03T22:40:13Z

Promo Clip for Cirque du Soleil
Kooza

Approximately 500,000 people and counting have seen this show to date!
Pretty amazing when you think it is only 4 months into the tour.

Closing in Toronto October 21, 2007
Opening in San Francisco November 16, 2007

Three Home Town Boys

Christian Fitzharris - Clown
Joshua Zehner - Clown
Anthony Gatto - The WORLD'S BEST JUGGLER

How do you do the "Great Work"

2007-10-02T03:37:59Z

93! Brothers, Sisters and Friends,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

How do you do the "Great Work"?

Let me know.

Love is the law, love under will.

Much Love and Respect,

Christine

Autumn Equinox 2007

2007-10-01T04:05:07Z

Serpentine Splendour Lodge RIP

2007-09-27T21:00:41Z

star156 @ 2007-09-04T16:50:00

2007-09-04T23:51:31Z

One Man's Magical Journey

2007-08-11T22:23:10Z

Listen in order to the magical journey of why SCHOLAR Proclaims:
THELEMA IS DEAD!

www.myspace.com/scholar

LJ
NEPOTISM
TRUST
HONEST DISSENT

and then you will know why Thelema is DEAD!

STAR 156 PRODUCTIONS, Inc., THE LEADER IN OCCULT ENTERTAINMENT!

The opinions of SCHOLAR does NOT necessarily represent that of STAR 156
or it's Officers.