Got rabbi?

In 2002, I went on tour with this crazy Australian Jewish punk band called YIDcore. We played a Jewish punk-rock ball at Wesleyan, some New York gigs, possibly Yale?, and one or two other places. I'd always hoped they would pull me on stage to sing "Just One Shabbos" with them (editor's note: this version), which never happened, but just the feeling that it could, that it might, was incredible enough to burst my chest open.

I received this email this morning:

Found an old t shirt of yours :)

Loved it after you left it at Wesleyan and wore it to death, I now think it's time to donate to fabric recycling, unless you want it back?

San Francisco in 6 Hours

I was in Ashland, at the Oregon Shakespeare Theatre, near where they filmed The Goonies and Short Circuit. Their airport only had one gate. The plane wasn't taking off. To be precise: It was leaving 1 hour late, which means my connecting flight would be 4 hours late. I would get into NYC at 1:30 AM and have to get home from there. I asked the flight attendant: Could I take a red-eye, stay in San Francisco for the day, and land at 7?

She gave me permission.

Heshy picked me up from the airport. We only had an hour before he left for work, so we did everything fast, even the used bookstores. He found a used copy of Yom Kippur a Go-Go, which somebody'd written a really sweet and meaningful dedication inside. I took a picture, but I'm not sure if it's kosher to share it, or if that would be too invasive.

Luckily, there was a ton of graffiti to distract us.

And some of the more boring variety:

But that's also the church I lived across the street from when I first moved to town.

In high school, I wrote stories about how my friend Adam was going to be a computer engineer and change the universe. And then it happened. I waited for him in this communist coffee shop while I wrote a picture book. I'm not just being conservative, it really was a communist coffee shop.

Then Adam picked me up and drove me around Bernal Heights. I think I spent more time in cars that day than I did in 5 years of living in San Francisco. He dropped me off at the rabbi's, and then I took a look at the new digs. I took tons of pictures of the rabbi's night garden, but none of them came out. Like much of San Francisco, I guess, you just had to be there.

Mendel and the new shul! It's actually a garage and it is so punk, yet paradoxically, so clean. They basically saved my life several times over when I lived in SF. Not to mention my soul. I'm overdue to give them a donation. If you've got a couple extra bucks, please donate too -- they give out free Shabbos meals to anyone who shows up.

Then we all made a mess together. And then the rebbetzin came to tell us to clean up, but I couldn't stick around. I was running late for my flight.

Paris Hilton Is Responsible (and Jewish)

The awesome Jewish poetry magazine The Blue Jew Yorker has its new issue online today. It probably seems like I'm telling you to go read it because of my poem, "The Other Universe of Paris Hilton," which takes place in an alternate universe where Paris is responsible and Orthodox Jew (and she always wakes up to pray at exactly the right time before sunrise), and I'm a drunken heiress.

But that wouldn't be one-tenth of it. Legitimate (and goood) poet and professor Charles Bernstein gives this very Addams Family-like gothic poem called "Rivulets of Dead Jew." There's a furious poem called "It Takes Awhile" by Heather Bell, and Samuel Menashe, who's basically a living legend of poetry (don't believe me? read the MJL article), has a new poem, "Adam Means Earth," which is as brief and brilliant as anything he's ever written (and that's saying something):

I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what’s in a name
READ THE REST >

But my favorite might be this tiny little poem by Gary Levine. It's a love song to his siddur.

It goes wherever I go
My little blue worn siddur
Tattered and well used, cover bent and dog eared.
Wrinkled from praying in the rain
On the way to shul on Pesach day
Wine stains on page 178 & 179
Made while standing making Kiddish by a hospital bed

READ THE REST >

How I Wrote a Film Script in a Week (drugless and caffeine-less)

Over Shabbos, I read my screenplay.

I know -- three logical responses to this:

* So what? You wrote it.
* What, you don't remember it?
* It's been, what, a month?

And the answer to all three is: Actually, I'd completely forgotten it existed in the first place. I'd spent five months trying to write this script, and writing something -- a thing that, at times, I thought was the script -- only to realize, once the producer (also known as the guy who's bankrolling this whole affair) had flown to Spain to meet with the director and was deep into plotting out WHICH character should be in exactly WHICH place, and whether scenes that were supposed to be filmed out deep in the country would be filmed in the suburbs or a vacant lot in the city, that the movie they were going to be making....well, it was going to be a completely different movie.

What happened exactly was, the day I sent it away, I wasn't completely happy with one of the minor characters. And that character ended up having their own movie. And that movie...well, 15 pages came out that day.

The producer -- who, ordinarily, has a reputation for being a calm and reasonable gentleman -- yelled at me over an international number. His voice sounded more like the Matrix than an actual voice, but the meaning was still clear. "WE. NEED. A. SCRIPT."

"Seven days," I begged. "Give me seven days."

And, in those seven days, all the thoughts that I'd been pushing to the back of my head for the past of those five months came rushing to the front of my head, and the sides of my head, and filling the rest of it, too.

So I wrote it. Put it aside for a week. Realized the ending was wrong, and that there needed to be a scene that there wasn't, and rewrote that part. And, with that, I handed it over to the people who know much more about the visual moving image than I ever will.

That was a month ago. Friday night, everyone else crashed out early, and I found myself wondering what had happened to my main character. And I found myself reading it. The entire thing.

I used to read parts of Never Mind the Goldbergs when it came out. Candy, too. Losers, I haven't read at all. But I've never actually

((yeah, i'm not sure what happened to the end of this...but i figured it was important to post.))

The Smell of Non-Kosher Food

I spoke to Stephanie, who was coming out of the very tasty (and very not kosher) Tartine Bakery, on 18th and Guerrero Streets in San Francisco. She'd just gotten an iced coffee, and she was complaining about it.

Stephanie: Every time I walk past this bakery, I'm reminded of that Gemara that says that God's going to ask if we enjoyed all the pleasures of this world. And I'm going to be like, no, I didn't, because the pleasures of this world weren't kosher.

Me: I used to read this book of Chinese stories when I was a kid. One of them was about a poor student who lived above the fanciest restaurant in Peking and each night, he would sit by the window and eat his plain rice and smell all the good-food smells. Then one day the restaurant owner noticed him and asked what he was doing -- he had the entire apartment to eat in; why was he by the window? The student said that the smell of the good food made his rice taste better.

The owner was furious, and brought him to court. He contended that the student should pay him for the past year's worth of meals. Now, most families in Peking couldn't afford to eat in the restaurant. Couples only went there on their anniversaries, or special occasions. One meal there cost a month's wages. For the cost of a year's meals, the student would have to pay for the rest of his life.

After hearing the case, the judge asked the student, How much money do you have? The student got terrified and said, only 5 copper coins. It was the only money he had in the world -- for his rent, his tuition, his rice.

The judge told the student to take them out. He did. Then the judge ordered the student to toss them from one hand to the other. He did. The restaurant owner, unable to conceal his glee, rubbed his hands together.

Then the judge said to put the coins back in his pocket.

"What!?" the owner burst out. "Those coins are mine!"

But the judge shook his head no. "Just as the student stole the smell of the food from you," he said, "the sound of the coins will be his payment."

candy, cooking, and what not to do at parties

before i forget, let me tell you that Candy in Action is signed, sealed, on its way to the printers, and you can pre-order it from me or from amazon through that link there. if you order through on amazon by clicking through my page, i get a very tiny percentage, so yes, it's cool if you do that. if you order through me, of course, mention if you'd like to have me write anything special.

a mere few hours before shabbos, and we are both in the kitchen cooking up a mad storm. as if there were any other kind of storm, especially in cooking. we have carrots so big, i almost stabbed itta's stomach with one. no hard feat, of course, since it's getting bigger than christmas, and hard to avoid, especially when carrying armfuls of spices with names like Pottery Barn colors.

last night at the Jewcy party, i spent a good deal of the night getting drunk with marty from ROI 120, and having him introduce me to people in the most abrupt of ways:

MARTY: "Hey, this is Izzy. She's the one who pays you and tells you when your stuff is shit."
ME: Oh. (pause) Was it?
IZZY: (longer pause) Erm, what was your name again?
ME: Matthue. Matthue Roth.
IZZY: Oh, no. Mostly not, anyway.
Me: (sigh of mostly relief)

toward the end of the night, i pitched them what i remember as being a sequel to my memoir in maybe a hundred and fifty columns. i remember being really excited about it, but i wasn't the person whose reactions i should have been watching.