If you've seen The Flying Karamazov Brothers on The Tonight Show, Seinfeld, Live From Lincoln Center, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, or live on or off Broadway, you're familiar with their brilliant, high-energy juggling and jesting jams. Their back-to-the-future show L'Universe (pronounced "looneyverse") makes real magic by mixing 21st century technology, developed with and by physicists and engineers at MIT, with musical medieval artistry. They've earned positive reviews coast to coast, from The New York Times to The L.A. Times, and lots of papers in between. They've even got an Obie (1980), and their own Hirschfeld caricature.

Our reporter's seven-year-old daughter wanted to meet the FKBs after their show, but her mother led her out of the theater explaining that professional performers don't do that sort of thing. At the exit the child turned her mother around, pointed at the stage, and said, "Yes, they do." There were Paul, Mark, Howard, and Roderick signing autographs, chatting with kids, kissing babies, and generally acting like human beings. So we knew it was our job to offer them the crowning achievement of their long career – a Door interview.

Print media can't capture the physicality, rhythm, and beauty of their performances, but we can butcher it and turn it into some nice reading material. The Flying Ks revel in profound silliness, from slapstick to language games. When an audience member tossed Howard Patterson a piece of bologna to juggle during "The Gamble," he moaned, "Oy, the irony. Being forced to juggle tref on shabbas." After the laughs he deadpanned, "If you understood that, why aren't you in shul?"

Catch their performance schedule at www.fkb.com.

PAUL MAGID: So, how old are your kids?
THE DOOR MAGAZINE: No, I have to ask you some questions. Does juggling always lead to hackey-sack?
MAGID: Juggling and hackey-sack are completely separate. Some people have smart hands, some people have smart feet, and some people have both. It's really just practice. You're not born with an innate ability to juggle. Well, some people are, but very few. It's mostly practice.
DOOR: Is there a spiritual side to juggling?
MAGID: Yes. Juggling is about perservering. It's about the relationship you have with yourself and how much you can do. It's very spiritual because you come right up against your own limits and see how far you can push them. What's gratifying about it is that you can conquer something that you couldn't do before. And juggling requires ambidexterity, which frees up a lot of space in your mind – especially spaces that don't tend to work with each other. The hands drive the lobes of the brain, in some ways. There's a little joining space between the two lobes and when you suddenly have the hands working together, it opens up that area for a freer flow of information. A pianist also has that same thing going on where they're in contact with another part of the world that a lot of people aren't aware of.
     Juggling is a metaphor for the universe, too. Everything is in relationship to each other and in balance – usually round things in some sort of gravitational relationship with other basically round things, moving in space and being moved around. You could think of G-d as a juggler keeping everything going, keeping all these balls in the vast space of the universe. Juggling opens that up to you. A juggler is holding a mirror to reality.
     Words are poor pictures of this experience. Juggling is musical, part of that innate spirituality that just exists. The only way to have symmetry in juggling is with rhythmic precision, music.
DOOR: That seems to contradict the dominant feeling in our culture that juggling isn't an art. We tend to see juggling as juvenile, fringe behavior – the kids in the park do it. If Americans accepted juggling as an art form, would it change us?
MAGID: Yes. One great thing about juggling with other people is that it teaches cooperation. It's not a competitive sport where you're trying to best the other person. You're trying to do everything you can for the other person so that you both can survive. You don't want the balls to fall on the ground, so you give the best pass you possibly can. It's about communicating, reconfiguring, criticizing, and ultimately the goal is to work in sync to complete the design. Juggling teaches a completely different message than what we see on TV. We're not trying to be better than the other person or get on top. What we're trying to do is cooperate on all levels.
DOOR: Is that why juggling is associated with subversive politics? I was thinking more of all the teaching jobs there'd be for jugglers. You know, after school juggling lessons instead of piano or violin.
MAGID: Juggling in itself isn't a subversive act. It opens up the brain and gives you a new sense of reality. There has always been a tension between a magician and a juggler, because a juggler presents the truth. A magician as a performer is about deceit. He's hiding things. He's not doing anything that he's saying he's doing, it's all about what he's getting away with. A juggler is going, "Look! I'm really doing this! Honest, I'm doing this, oh my God, please believe me, I'm really doing this!" A juggler spends a lot of time to accomplish what he or she is showing you. It's real magic. It's something going on in front of your face that's true.
     Juggling is about truth and cooperation. It opens up your brain and your heart. It's hard for a juggler to buy into right-wing politics. Left-wing politics aren't necessarily about truth, but right-wing politics require deceit.
DOOR: Well, there's one truth for the upper classes, and another truth for the masses.
MAGID: But the underlying message is that there's one truth, one right way to do this, and we're the people who know what's going on. They have to deceive people. It all leads back to Rome and Constantine and all that crap.
DOOR: Einstein said there are only two ways to live your life. One, as though nothing is a miracle, the other as though everything is a miracle. Is juggling a miracle? Physics? Both?
MAGID: You put effort into making something that you couldn't do before, something difficult to accomplish. You're making things happen in a physical way that wouldn't normally happen. Balls wouldn't ordinarily travel in that way. They would fall to the ground. You're making them work in symmetry in a beautiful way, the only way it could work. It's a lot of hard work, which is no miracle, but when you're doing it, it is. That you've done it is a miracle.
DOOR: And it requires the resistance of gravity to create that beautiful thing.
MAGID: Yes. The limitations are so important. We used to say that juggling is dropping.
DOOR: Hmmm. That could apply to almost any creative endeavor. So if juggling is such a beautiful and spiritual thing, why aren't more religious people juggling? Why do religious people seem to have such a hard time having fun, in general?
MAGID: Because I think they're trying to sell something other than real spirituality a lot of the time. They're selling their own agenda. I think a lot of people are in a "spiritual" racket, promoting their job. How are they going to get by otherwise? This is what they do, especially those guys on Christian television. It's a job. They're making money, and that's how you make money. You sell stuff. There are all sorts of spiritual racketeers in every religion.
DOOR: Um, The Door is published by a foundation that investigates shady televangelists.
MAGID: Oh. They must have a lot of work to do. Those guys are evil. Of course, you know – I'll be honest here – the Christian religion is baseless, as a religion. It's a religion based on lies.
DOOR: Uh oh. Don't hold back on our account.
MAGID: They can't support it. It's full of deceit on every level. Look at the beginning, with the god, Jesus. He's a complete Jew. He never thought of himself as anything else but a Jew. If anyone had told him that he was god, or that someone was going to worship him... he woulda ...
DOOR: When people tried to bow down to him he told them, "Don't do that."
MAGID: No Jew is supposed to bow down to anybody. It's an awful thing that's been foisted on the world. It's destroyed so many people and cultures. It's like a virus. It's horrible. They're probably not going to publish that.
DOOR: You'd be surprised.
MAGID: I think there are actual religious disciplines that are good. I'm Jewish. I feel good about being Jewish. We've gone through a huge evolution, and none of our heroes are perfect. They're all completely flawed, and generally do horrible things.
DOOR: That's all in the record.
MAGID: That's all completely out there. We don't make people look perfect. It wasn't Jesus that made stuff up. It was these other people who were basically making a job out of it. It was also, very specifically, created as a way of control.
DOOR: After Constantine converted?
MAGID: There were three stages of Christianity – the initial stage of a Jewish sect, and then there was Paul and his minions who made it into this much more popular, pagan-friendly religion, and then there was Constantine who said, OK ...
DOOR: ... we can use this ...
MAGID: ... I can use this really well. That's when it turned into an evil thing, and it's never looked back since then.
DOOR: Well, some people look back. You guys look back when you juggle. You're like medieval minstrels. Well, absurd existential medieval minstrels, or maybe court jesters. Do you feel a historical connection to minstrels and jesters?
MAGID: Absolutely. We feel like we're part of a huge tradition. There are hieroglyphs of jugglers 4,000 years ago in Egypt. The jester and the juggler tell the truth. We're saying what is and we're doing what is. We go to great lengths in our show L'Universe, a collaboration with MIT media lab, to show people that we're still actually doing the "tricks." There's no deceit at all. We spent a year with the MIT people creating the tools and practicing the show. When we're creating a musical note it will sound bad if we don't practice it. We use computerized materials, but we're the artists making the decisions. The jester always presents the truth. Everyone can't say the truth because of fear, but the jester is allowed to because of his position. If all of us were jesters there wouldn't be so many politicians and right-wing Christians around.
DOOR: Are there many women jugglers?
MAGID: Yes. There are amazing women jugglers – and more all the time. On the island of Tonga juggling is a women's sport.*
DOOR: How is The Brothers Karamazov connected to juggling?
MAGID: We chose it because Howard was reading the book during the summer of '74, and we needed a name. We had been picked up by Mary Sullivan, the niece of Ed Sullivan, and we thought this was very important. We were sitting in the dust outside our van, sleeping, getting ready to go to the World's Fair in Spokane the next day, and we didn't have a good name. Howard was reading this book, and it seemed like the characters had some relationship to us. The Brothers Karamazov is about the profane and sacred. It's spiritual, and it's very funny.
DOOR: I think so too! But I'm usually wrong.
MAGID: In this country it's taught as a very serious novel, but in Russia it's comedic.
DOOR: Fyodor Karamazov is an outrageous guy, but very real. So how do you decide who gets which name for the act?
MAGID: We try to match the characters with some aspect of the juggler using that name.
DOOR: Is it offensive to you when people use the verb "juggling" to describe life?
MAGID: No. We think "juggler" is everybody's job description.
DOOR: Is it just my perception, or are there a lot of juggling Jews?
MAGID: Jews have been juggling for a long time. One famous story in the Talmud is about a juggling rabbi. On Sukkhot, people are supposed to be joyful, so there's a tradition of rabbis playing the fool to help people rejoice. This is about our humanity, our flaws, and about living life now. We're not waiting for pie in the sky. What's important is what's happening right now. The story is about Rabbi Gamaliel, head of the Sanhedran, going to the temple and juggling eight torches. That would be very, very difficult to do. I think someone exaggerated the story a tiny bit. But that happened well over 2,000 years ago. There's a lot of juggling going on in Judaism. There's a tradition called the "bodkin." The bodkin is a fool who breaks up a solemn ceremony, like a wedding. The bodkin is supposed to make the bride laugh. I've been a bodkin a few times. It's a great job, and juggling is part of that job. There's a strong tradition in Judaism of letting go of seriousness and enjoying being the fool sometimes. It's important to be able to enjoy life. People have somehow mixed up morality with the lack of joy. We should enjoy people and have a fun time, but instead we make all these lines you can't step across.

Paul Magid interviews the other Karamazovs for The Door
(PAVEL: Roderick Kimball, DMITRI: Paul Magid, ALEXIE: Mark Ettinger, IVAN: Howard Jay Patterson)
ALEXIE: Juggling is all about being in the flow. It's about finding the center of the moment, and being in that moment, so that you can catch anything, and throw it. Anything. And it's all about music. I like music. The sounds that the clubs make in our hands is the way we stay in tune with each other. We want to be totally in sync, in rhythm with each other. It's not so much a visual thing, but a sound thing – the sound of the clubs hitting the hands.
DMITRI: But what do you think about it in a spiritual way, Mark?
ALEXIE: Juggling is one of those activities, like chamber music combined with adventure sports, that not only puts you totally awake and alive in the moment, it also puts you in tune with the people you're doing it with. Conversation is back and forth, but juggling is simultaneous, so when we're juggling together we are trying to find that non-verbal communication that pulls our spirits in line with each other. Sometimes it happens on a more intense level than others, but that activity is driving in that direction. It's a kind of devotion, being the best you can be and relating to the world and the people around you.
DMITRI: So Howard, any words about spirituality and juggling?
IVAN: Juggling takes place entirely in the moment. It is more about living in the exact moment in which you are, and doing nothing besides what you are doing than anything else is. It's also the case that while juggling you are tracing an infinity sign in front of your heart chakra. Juggling is a form of meditation similar to transcendental meditation, but in TM you set up a standing wave primarily in your linguistic and auditory cortex. In juggling you're setting up a similar standing wave in the brain using the manual cortex – the sensory cortex for the fingers and eyes – and the control cortex for the fingers and eyes, which is an enormous percentage of the brain.
     It is like other meditation forms, but in some ways more compelling because it uses so much of the brain simultaneously, and harmonizes the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. In its presentness, in the way in which it exists only in the time in which it exists, it's probably closer to Zen than to any other discipline.
     Particularly in "The Gamble," that piece of juggling where I accept objects from the audience to attempt to juggle. I get three tries to keep them in the air until the count of ten. It's really not about how well I juggle, it's about how well I'm able to meditate at that particular moment. If I can do nothing with my brain except juggle, I can pretty much juggle anything the people give me.
     If I start using my brain to think conscious thoughts, like, "Hey, I'm doing great," or "Ouch, that hurts," or "Oh, I'm almost done" I'll often fail to do it.. The goal is ten counts, but if I aim for ten, then at nine I start thinking, "Oh, I'm almost there," so I aim for 13, generally. I've been doing "The Gamble" for over 25 years, and one would think that I would be slowing down, but during the course of this run I've been batting about .800. I won eight out of 10 gambles. My lifetime average is about .600.
     It felt like I was hitting the meditative state more reliably, and I did some things that astonished myself and the other members of the cast, just getting my conscious mind out of the way and letting my mind, soul, and body do the being-in-the-moment thing. So that was pretty great.
DMITRI: What do you have to say about juggling and God, Rod?
PAVEL: I need a more specific question. That's a very vast topic.
DMITRI: OK. Do you like juggling? That's all we really need to know.
PAVEL: Everybody likes juggling. For some people juggling serves as an anchor. I may or may not be one of those people.
DMITRI: That's a little vague. Do you think there's juggling after death?
PAVEL: Yes. 'Cuz many people have died, and they're still juggling.
DMITRI: Their spirits are juggling?
PAVEL: No, they're not; they died. We're juggling.
DMITRI: Juggling goes on.
PAVEL: Well, yeah. Jugglers don't die, they pass.

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