Busk Break is an ongoing field recording series documenting live performances by busking musicians and other street performers.
Angel the Balloon Man makes an awesome octopus
Angel the Balloon Man, with friend..If you’ve been near Pack Square on any tourist-heavy day, odds are you’ve seen a swarm of enraptured children and bemused adults watching Angel the Balloon Guy at work. With deft, well-practiced movements and an artist’s detachment, he warps, twists, deforms and inflates globs of inflated rubber into an attention-grabbing hat, a surrogate puppy or pet dragon, and a monster-slaying/sister-hitting sword. Raised by his first-generation-American immigrant family who had ties to the circus, and eventually trained by Ringling, Angel has spent decades working on his craft.
Here, he whips up a gigantic octopus balloon animal like it ain’t no thang.
What you might not know about Angel is that he’s also got a soft spot for his fellow buskers, and has been filming his own busker videos for the past four years (two years longer than the Busk Break project, that is).
The backing music for this video is “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” written by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth back in the vaudeville era, and performed in 2011 by local busker Sparrow.
Steve Shanafelt used to think he was a writer. Lots of other people thought he was a very good one, and they paid him to write everything from news articles to erotic comic books. Then, a few years ago, he started to realize that writing was just one very tiny piece of the puzzle. He started recording podcasts, producing field recordings of busking musicians, making short video series and learning how to make websites. Along the way, he learned lots of ways not to manage businesses and how to promote those businesses online. Now, people pay him surprisingly large sums of money to show them some of the things he's picked up.
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