Okay. After all these years I have my own El Jay. The horror, the horror! Suzanne Perez moved me here after some group kept hacking my other web page. Sue is learned in this stuff, and fixing my web page has been a cool trick, since she's in El Salvador working off a stolen WiFi signal. (You da bomb, chicka!) I'll post a blog here soon. Honest!

Cirque

This is the only picture I have left of me spitting fire. It was taken on Boulevard Montparnasse sometime in 1972 or 73, when I was 22 or 23 years old. Fire blowing was once the greatest of the street arts in Paris. In the old days, a fire blower would begin his act with what was called "les trois allumettes," or the three matches: he would light three wooden matches and stand them up on the sidewalk. What followed was called a "baritanne," in which the fire blower talked to the crowd while collecting change. This was often a set of jokes, insults, taunts: it was improvised public oratory at a very high level, since once he blew the flames the crowd left. You blow fire using regular old kerosene; you had to spit it hard through very tightened lips to get it to mist in order to ignite. I liked to jump up and fall down into a crouch because my friend Paillette believed the body movement caused an upward air draft that lifted the flame higher. I could get fire up to two stories. But there were legends of a guy who blew a mix of gasoline and ether (which he used to slow the burn so the gas would not come back at him and burn his face off) and who could get a flame to come out his mouth and rise up six or seven stories in the air. A real good fire blower is beautiful and awe-inspiring. I blew fire in and out of various itinerant groups for about seven years.

The other thing you can see from this picture is that I was spitting fire with a beard. Dumb, dumb, dumb! One night, also on Boulevard Montparnasse, I was showing off like a narcissistic prick (see the bodybuilding page), and just as I dropped to one knee with a lovely flame coming out of my mouth, the wind changed and my beard, which was soaked in kerosene (Dumb, dumb dumb!), went up in flames. I had second-degree burns on my face and had scars for many years after.

Bodybuilding

Some people say that bodybuilding is for narcissistic pricks...



They're right!



But so what!




Okay! Like, I totally meant all that as a joke. It would be foolish to think that body builders have cornered the market on vanity. It is a kind of inverted narcissism to pretend to be "above" going to the gym or to think that being an "intellectual" casts itself naturally in opposition to being hyper-muscled. A famous academic once famously said he wasn't nervous addressing his colleagues because he realized he was "the smartest person in the room." People in my profession are plenty narcissistic.

These pictures and the others on this site were taken at the Florida Sunshine Classic on March 18, 2006, exactly one month before my 56th birthday. I dieted down, with the guidance of Cliff Gross, to about 2% bodyfat, which means I went from 180 pounds to about 160-62 the day of the show. As I write this (September 10, 2007) I weigh about 195 and am trying to get over 200 before cutting down for the show in March. I took a year off to gain mass, but it is slow and my body is not really helping. Now I'm training with the amazing Debi Laszewski (bitch goddess!), who is mean to me like Sluggo is to Mr. Bill on a weekly basis. My body is thickening and gaining a shape it never had before this. And here is the greatness of the sport, not to mention the place where the narcissism fades into a kind of beatitude: you create and give shape to living flesh, using your own body as something like a canvass. Ultimately, body building confronts the sublime mystery of how we turn chicken, fish and vegetables into ourselves. This is both humbling and exalting. But if you haven't done it, I can't explain this to you.