The Week That Was
Or: How I tried to beat last year’s Def Poetry Jam taping week in the main categories of: [A] Good showerheads (beat it),
[B] Cities-in-a-row (beat it) and [C] Glamour (oh, beat it)
Anyway, last week was ages ago, and half a dozen naps by now. But for the record, the whole thing kicked off with a gig at the Bellagio, which is a hotel in Las Vegas, which is a city in Nevada, which is an island off the coasts of Utah, Arizona, and Los Angeles.
I made a video (40 seconds) of the famous Bellagio fountain, and I sped it up—a lot—to see how steady I really hold a camera, and so you won’t have to listen to the entire Pink Panther Theme. Click HERE for the flick.
In the middle of the trip I did nonstop stuff. I taped for Season Six of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam (my fourth time on); I sat around a fire pit in Napa on the night before the grape harvest with the president of CBS and wondered why his shoes weren’t more exclusive; I was given erotic origami as a good luck charm; I got a tour of a man-made cavern/dungeon; and I woke up in the guest room of someone who once carried that 5-ringed Olympic flag into an Olympic stadium.
And I didn’t kill an owl. Which I had done before (not kill an owl). It reminded me of the first time I didn’t kill an owl, back when I was thirteen and bow hunting with my friend Jim in the abandoned outdoor set of the TV series The Little House on the Prairie. All those log cabins were actually constructed out of corrugated tin painted to look like log cabins, but the point is: we saw a big old owl and didn’t kill it.
The supertrip wrapped up bizarrely at the world’s largest annual marketing convention in San Francisco. I made a sped-up video (1 minute) of this spectacle as well, but to truly understand my mindset—my vision—you need to imagine the Moscone Convention Center as Level Four of The Inferno, and those two guys on the escalator as Virgil (on the left) and Dante. Van Morrison is on the soundtrack, the Prince of Darkness is unsettlingly all-white, with a spatula, and I traverse the entire terrain diagonally, with no cuts, from the Gates of Hell to the loading dock, which represents another Level, or possibly rebirth, but anyway: I was immediately asked to leave.
Click HERE for the flick.
