trules rules

A Love Letter/Wake Up Call to LA Theater and Actors’ Equity

Posted By: Eric Trules in american culture - los angeles - theater - trulesrules On: February 25, 2015

Here we go again. Just like the rabble-rousing “Waiver Wars” of the mid 80s — union meetings, passionate and heated rhetoric, mano-a-mano infighting — all about the well-being, membership, management, and dare I say, survival, of Los Angeles’s vital 99 seat theater scene. Check it out. As of this writing, there are 5834 members of a closed Facebook group called “Pro99”, created by 24th Street Theatre’s Jay McAdams and stating: “Pro99 is a community group who supports preserving 99-seat theatre in Los Angeles.” (www.facebook.com/groups/348992575287472/). It’s a big deal in this town, run primarily by the film and television entertainment industry,…

The Modern Crusades: Militant Islam & Collateral Damage, 2 Inhospitable Bedfellows

Posted By: Eric Trules in american culture - american empire - anger - annihilation - genocide - islam - politics - racism - trulesrules On: January 10, 2015

First, let me say that I finished this piece just days before the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. “Je suis Charlie”, and I have not changed a single word. On Friday, January 2, I read, with distress, in the Los Angeles Times‘ “Year in Review” a grim and disturbing piece entitled “Militant Islam’s 2014 March”. In it, Carol J. Williams recalls, in shocking detail, the disturbingly violent assault of extreme religious Islam on both the East and the West: “In April, Boko Haram abducted more than 270 Nigerian girls and dispatched them to sexual enslavement. As the year drew to a close, the Pakistani…

An Homage to “Teachers”

Posted By: Eric Trules in 1960s - american culture - baby boomers - Bar Mitzvah - education - rate my professors website - retirement - teaching - trulesrules On: December 28, 2014

General Constance Greene. Lieutenant Colonel Joan Colaprete. Those are the names of the two “teachers” in my life. Both high school English teachers. Both members of the legion of “teachers” we all hopefully remember from our childhoods throughout the course of our lives. Both were strong and unrelenting. Both eccentric and inspiring. They set the bar high so their students could rise. They got the best out of us. And they planted the seed in me, for the hunger to learn. I use the word “teacher” as an homage to the great John Steinbeck, the Mark Twain of the mid…

How Would YOU Feel If YOU Were Clayton Kershaw?

Posted By: Eric Trules in american culture - Baseball - heroes - trulesrules On: December 11, 2014

It’s bad enough having to drive by Dodger Stadium four times a week on my way to work. Down Academy Road, along Stadium Way, onto the 110 South. Past Chavez Ravine, where the Dodgers have played since 1956. Who needs to be reminded, right? Certainly not many of us in LA. I mean, not only did we fold to the hated Cardinals again in excruciating season-ending ignominy, but this year we did it even a series sooner, in the “pre-lims”, in the NLDS best 3 out of 5. Yep, we blew it again, 3 games to 1. The real…

Hubris and the LA Sports Gods

Posted By: Eric Trules in american culture - Baseball - los angeles - NY yankees - sports - trulesrules On: October 13, 2014

I’m a native New Yorker. A sports junkie. I grew up worshipping the New York Yankees of the 50s and 60s. The Bronx Bombers. Mickey Mantle. Whitey Ford. World Series champs year after year. We took their winning for granted. Came to expect it. When the Yankees didn’t win, it was an aberration. Sure, ok, we were spoiled and conceited, and we knew the rest of the country hated us and our team, but we just… didn’t care. By the time Derek Jeter starting winning championships, I was already a fading fan. And now, with “The Cap”‘s 2014 retirement, I…

I Will Never Buy an iPhone

Posted By: Eric Trules in american culture - technology - trulesrules On: September 12, 2014

I know it’s the best device out there. “The best cell phone ever.” Everyone on the planet tells me so. They all have one. My wife has one. Her best friend has two. And when the iPhone 6 comes out today… or maybe tomorrow, Rebecca will have three. The iPhone 4s, the iPhone 5s and the goddam newest one too. “How ’bout you sell me one of the old ones?” No way, Jose.” “Why?” I ask in dismay. “I don’t know. I just looove my I-phones. I like to collect them.” “C’mon, what about your iPhone 4s? “No.” “But…

A Baby Boomer’s Belated Blog to George Will

Posted By: Eric Trules in 1960s - american culture - baby boomers - politics - trulesrules On: August 13, 2014

Dear Mr. Will, Hello. How are you? I am sorry that it has taken me so long to write to you. Almost 25 years, I suppose. I see that you are a very popular man to attack on The Huffington Post these days, what with your recent “controversial” article about sexual assault on college campuses, where in the interest of full disclosure, I have worked for the last 28 years, albeit only as a “crazy theater professor” at the University of Southern California, which I’m not sure qualifies for true condemnation or contempt in your morally superior world of intellectual…

Childhood Heroes, Part 2, Cassius Clay aka Muhammad Ali

Posted By: Eric Trules in american culture - baby boomers - boxing - childhood - sports - trulesrules On: August 1, 2014

Cassius Marcellus Clay. The “Lousiville Lip”. “The Greatest” heavyweight boxing champ of all time. “Floated like a butterfly, stung like a bee!” My second boyhood hero… long before he became known as the most famous man on the planet, Muhammad Ali. In 1960, when i was 13 years old, 18 year old Cassius Clay burst onto the national sports scene by winning the Olympic gold medal. He was brash. Talented. Faster than lightning. And he couldn’t be beat. With the help of loud mouth and equally-brazen sportscaster, Howard Cosell, Clay brought entertainment, poetry, and show biz back to the dismal…

July 4th: Re-Discovering America Through Immigrant Eyes

Posted By: Eric Trules in american culture - art from the fabric of my life - immigration - indonesia - marriage - trulesrules On: July 6, 2014

Re-posted from The Huff Post, June 21, 2014 I brought my wife-to-be here to Los Angeles from Indonesia on August 3, 2001. We’d met on the magical island of Bali, “Island of the Gods”, a little over a year before in the early summer of 2000. After I’d returned to LA, we e-mailed each other for several months, she in “broken English”, after which I went back to visit her for almost a month around Christmas and New Years. We traveled across the island of Java together, taking night buses through the drenched green rain forests for 10 hours at…

Woodshop, for Dad

Posted By: Eric Trules in childhood - family - father's day - gardening - gratitude and appreciation - trulesrules On: June 14, 2014

my father used to be a carpenter a master craftsman a cabinet maker extraordinaire he’d turn these perfect round cherry wood salad bowls on his lathe dove tail smooth fitting mahogany joints on his meticulous router pull his whining De Walt table saw over huge planes of wood that would magically become with his love and care and endlessly detailed patience kitchen tables with white inlaid formica tops custom built wall units complete with knotty pine bookshelves for the World Book Encyclopedia and antique scrolled top desks with french wire netted doors that were sanded smooth as a baby’s…

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