rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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Turkey Day in the Time of Corona

        Frozen turkey’s in the oven since last night. Special Trules recipe. Last employed almost forty years ago, on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South in New York City, in my clown loft, when my parents were still alive, in the early 1980s. Slow roast. Get the bird to stew overnight in its own juices. Guarantees a moist, delicious feast. Or least it used to, as I said. Let’s see. Forty years is a lonnnnnng time. The times, they have-a changed. Indeed. Bob Dylan, the sage himself, is almost 80. I’m 73. I’ve lived in sunny California…

TEDx Fulbright 2015 in LA, Sept 26 @ the Broad Stage

I’ve had the good fortune and privilege of traveling abroad twice as a Fulbright Scholar – once to Islamic Malaysia in 2002 shortly after 9/11, and a second time to Bucharest, Romania in 2010. The first time I was a Fulbright Senior Scholar, the second, a Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Studies (Theater).  Unlike most academics, I was not  a “lecturer” per se; rather I was  a teacher of theatrical workshops in solo performance, improvisation, and clowning. Both Fulbright grants offered extraordinary experiences, for me personally, and I hope too, for my students and colleagues in each of these unique…

The “R” word

5/13/14 (On what would have been my mother’s 93rd Birthday; she died in 1999) It used to be the “C” word. C-c-c-ommitment. Normally a young man’s word. Why ever get married, settle down, have a family, limit your (sexual) options? What about freedom? Opportunity? Spontaneity? Improvisation? Living in the moment? Be here now? What about the 60s? Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll? I’ll tell you “what”. Life is what. It has a way of catching up with even the best (free-est) of us? Leaving us older, lonelier, less and less healthy and attractive with each passing year. Maybe even…

Henry Miller

How did my main man, Henry Miller, outcast and misfit of Brooklyn’s 14th ward (Williamsburg), American literary giant & “pornography”/anti-censorship pioneer #1, and one of the most unique and creative voices of the 20th century, become a lost man of American letters? Certainly American academia and its politically correct sister in crime, post 60s American feminism, have cast him out… as misogynist public enemy #1. His rants, his books, “Tropic of Cancer”, “Tropic of Capricorn”, “Black Spring”, “The Colossus of Maroussi”, “The Rosy Crucifixion” (Sexus, Plexus, & Nexus), “The Air Conditioned Nightmare” (his condemnation of 1940s American materialism, “modernity”, and…

ripples in the pond

beware. this is a story of curmudgeonliness turning into beatitude. let’s start with the first. it’s the merry month of may. time for college graduations. i never go. never went to my own, never will. you know the routine: 1969… the me generation, protest, stick it to the man. my parents made me go to the college i never wanted to go to, just to save the dough. i certainly wasn’t gonna go to make them happy. i was socially inept, volcanic, and generally, i had a hard time making it out of adolescence. i didn’t need a diploma, recognition…

mountains and ocean and hollywood sign… and yet?

look to the right, exactly 90 degrees from the terraced hillside back deck of lucretia gardens, and there are — the san gabriel mountains — gently looming over the hazy glendale flats. turn 180 degrees back to the left and there’s — the glassy silver rim of the pacific ocean, dividing the big sky of another multi-colored california sunset from the slightly high-rise sprawl of snarky century city and the equally-hazy flats of LA’s toney west side. turn back another 90 degrees to the right, and there, straight ahead, is the white dome of the griffith observatory, the shrubby tree tops of tom mix hill (of legendary silent film cowboy lore), and lo and behold… the iconic hollywood sign itself.

confessions of an ageing rage-aholic, part 2: the mad prof

and… i aim my RAV 4 directly at mike. he sees me coming and his eyes start bugging out of his head. captain of industry, huh, mike? mike tries to maneuver out of my way, practically falling off his tan beach cruiser. i hit the brakes to a full stop… about 2 inches from mike’s front wheel. mike looks terrified. he should be.

lenny, me, and the “N” word

“well, you see, ms jones, i was using a metaphor for the disempowerment of the gypsy people of romania. a metaphor for the dispossession of the entire roma people. i was actually standing up for the underdog people of the world when i said that “the gypsies were the niggers of europe”. just the way john lennon and yoko ono said that “women were the niggers of the world”. just the way lenny bruce used the words, ‘nigger. niggger. nigger. fuck fuck fuck. nigger nigger nigger. fuck fuck fuck.’ they’re just words, ms jones. understand? nigger, fuck, cunt, pussy. words! just words! but we load them like guns. and we shoot them off at each other. and some of us can use them. and others of us can’t. how are we supposed to know, ms jones? who’s to say who can say which words to whom? i didn’t call anyone a ‘nigger’. i don’t hate black people. i didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, ms jones. if i did, i’m sorry. i already apologized to everyone i could think of. why won’t fucking white liberal rachelle get the fuck off my case, ms jones?”

me and isabelle huppert

it’s the most highly anticipated performance event of the new season. isabelle huppert in “4.48 pyschose”. the first presentation of UCLA live’s “international theatre festival” at the freud playhouse. that’s not “freud”, as in sigmund “freud”. no, this is pronounced “frood”, some impossibly obtuse and pretentious uber-european pronunciation that only the most sophisticated and in-the-know art patrons and culture vultures would venture saying aloud. the 2005 fall LA arts and culture season has already produced “dead end” at the ahmanson, the unwieldy and anachronistic dinosaur of a show that has filled the theatre’s former orchestra pit with hundreds of tons…

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