I over did it at yoga. Hips are supposed to be supple not crunchy. Or maybe it was the seven Coronas with Rocky at Edward’s on Artist Night (Tuesdays for you kids who know not of ye ol’ four buck burger). I really like Julie, though, our Creative-Writing-Student-Princeton-Smart-Waitron. I also met Kendra, another grad student from Columbia who I mistook for a dude. Sorry homie . . . Whatever. I missed JAM’s show. I missed Tigger’s perineum piercing and Lance’s lance and Bob’s big floppy brestacles. Grrrrrrrrrr. Angry Bell Man! Well, here’s a link to some photos from Salt Lake . . .

http://www.peterjphoto.com/html/galleries/burles.html

. . . and some self-deprecating writing . . .

. . . is there any other kind?

Tee-Tees One:

Last we stalked, I was telling you of how the downtown set tend to (or at least used to before text became sacred (read : profitable in any other media)) take anvant-writing, chop it up and mix it with other material . . . either by the same author or not. I refuse to use the “D” word, which Derrida coined only to have Yale students abuse until it had nothing to do with the philosophy whatsoever. This is one of Annie Weisman’s pet peeves and she will be the first to tell you that it’s not about structure; it’s about authorship. Duh.

This proclivity for cutting and pasting scripts was that of the Belgian director who mounted Jesurn’s PHILOKTETES in Europe. The title-character was played by none other than Ron Vawter, legendary member of The Wooster Group. We lost him to the High-Five Holocaust (AIDS) that ravished the landscape of geniuses the way Stalin did the artists and free thinkers in Mother Russia.

The director pulled from André Gide’s adaptation of the play as well as Henier Müller’s and, of course, Jesurun’s. People who saw it said that the director’s intention was a little off. My guess is that he thought of it as the ultimate production seeing how Vawter’s sickness was the perfect metaphor for the protagonist’s dilemma. Debatable. But the height of tragic irony did not occur in the actual performance but on the return voyage. For, if I have the story correct, Ron died on the plane home.

Now, I have been hearing a great deal about Kate Valk’s performance in EMPORER JONES. I am anxious to see it . . . as soon as I can reconstruct my hips or get sober, whichever comes first. I also think Kate deserves all the kudos the New York Times can provide. However, to those of you new on the scene or hailing from other walks of life who don’t know Ron Vawter, take a stroll over to Kim’s Video and see if you can scare up his JACK SMITH/ROY COHEN piece. Then rent SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA for Spalding Gray at the height of his powers. Oh, to top it off, get your hands on SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL where you can track the downfall of culture in this great country of ours.

(This story is based entirely on ginkgo biloba so if I embellish or got the facts wrong I mean no disrespect . . . especially to the deceased. Feel free to provide corrections in the comments section located here next to the basement of my brain. Unless you go by the handle of Michael Deitz, in which case you should make like a tree . . . and get outta here.)

Segment B/Tee-tee Two of these nocturnal emissions is not nearly as informative nor is it a quite such a downer. So buckle up! It’s gonna be a bumpy ride . . . we’re headed to Career Suicide ;-)…