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american culture

July 4th: Re-Discovering America Through Immigrant Eyes

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…

childhood heroes, part 1, mickey mantle

june 10, 2014 i’ve been blogging a lot about my childhood lately. my first discovery of anti-semitism on valentines road (https://www.erictrules.com/blog/blog/there-was-a-horse/). my horrendous, forced-upon-me  bar mitzvah at temple sholom (https://www.erictrules.com/blog/blog/bar-mitzvah-blues/) . a lot of pain, a lot of negativity, blah blah blah. we all have it. so what? can i really transform the microcosm of my own pain into the universality of art? make it the story of other people’s pain and suffering? like o’neill? arthur miller? tennessee williams? the 3 greatest american playwrights. not that i’m a great american playwright. i’m not. but… i’m a theater prof, and a…

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…

bar mitzvah blues

5/17/14 today, a scorchingly-hot, sunny california day in LA, i went to my friend’s son’s bar mitzvah. sheldon mandel, let’s call the friend… or the son. doesn’t matter. a double jewish name, with a particularly challenging first name to bear, for whoever of the two was the name bearer. what were the parents thinking? sheldon? so obviously a name of head turning, of eye-rolling, of clucking… in modern-day america anyway. but perhaps also … to some… maybe the parents… a name, too, of… tradition? a name of weight and beauty… hebrew, jewish, american tradition. brought me back fifty… three years….

There as a horse

may 7, 2014 there was a horse. a golden palomino. ginger. like her color. a perfect, golden palomino. no bridle, no saddle, just naked and free. across the street on valentines road. on the bolson estate. tall oak trees, green grass, and a golden horse. she would come up to the fence and let us pet her. or sometimes, feed her apples. whenever she felt like it. she was there before us. the first horse i remember. probably the first i ever saw. ginger. we were the newcomers. 1953. i was six years old. my sister had just been born…

on the bus to palookaville

it’s another nocturnal and nefarious crime caper. naturally, i’m with my uncle harvey, the black sheep of the rosenberg clan and “the con” in my documentary film, “the poet and the con”. we’ve stolen a bus. not ken kesey’s bus. no merry pranksters here. something like the team bus for the lakers, or maybe the ascendant LA clippers. but donald sterling’s not on the bus. who the fuck would want that scumbag, racist b-ball owner, after the un-civil comments he made this past week that inflamed the whole multi-cultural nation? certainly not us. my uncle’s two accomplices in crime, “mo…

on retirement

“RETIREMENT”… with guaranteed income and/or a pension doesn’t exist in our country anymore. And SOCIAL SECURITY simply isn’t enough. The basic “contract” with workers and has been “broken”. “Work long and hard and you will be guaranteed a financially secure “old age” and “retirement”. Sorry, that’s an idea of the past. Yet WHY is it that US postal workers, can retire at 55 years young? And union Teamsters, who are guaranteed 75% of their working salaries after they retire – for the rest of their lives – WHY are so well taken care of? While the rest of us hard-working…

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…

dancing with L

i saw her first
on the BMT line
the RR to be exact, heading uptown from 23rd to 57th street
she’s sitting… diagonally across from me
wearing bright red and white candy striped pants

act three?

you know, of a play? which logically and dramatically follows its 2 predecessors: first, act one, which brilliantly sets up what’s at stake for the protagonist. followed by act two, in which the play develops with tension & suspense, as it builds in “rising” action, when finally, you have, “act 3”, the climax and resolution of the play. if it’s a good/happy ending, the play is called a comedy. if it’s a not so good, bummer of an ending, the play is called a tragedy. in either case, act 3, the “falling” action and… the end of the play. now…

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