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I was out to breakfast with my brother-in-law, who told me he really liked my latest Hevria piece. I thanked him, then immediately regretted it, because how do you thank someone for memories that aren't yours? This is how it goes.
Tonight while writing a post for Hevria, this amazing new group blog about art and G-d and Jewish stuff, I had to look up something in my own old blog at Diaryland. I got swept up in the tsunami of ego and started reading all these old entries, parts of a self I barely remembered.
The last entry I posted was about the novel I'd written that had just come out, Losers. Almost all the chapters are named after Cure songs, and I was writing liner notes to them, one by one (the chapters, not the songs). In one of the notes, I got lost mourning for a song that I could never find, one that my best friend put on a mix for me before he died:
Another Cure chapter. The song "A Night Like This" is a beautiful song in its own right, track 8 on "The Head on the Door," which some poet-friends in Melbourne performed a track-by-track jam of poems influenced by the songs. But there's another Cure song that my best friend Mike put on a mixtape for me that was just Robert Smith's voice and a brilliant string section and tympani drums that's called something like "Other Nights Like This" -- the handwriting was scratchy. I never remembered to ask him, and now it's too late. Now the tape's broken, and I keep googling the first words, but I can't find anything.That was 2008. Before I had kids, before I had a job or style or a pager (I still don't have a pager). At that point, it was already three years since I'd spoken to Mike. It wasn't until tonight that my ex-roommate, dear friend and how-does-she-do-it-and-with-kids-too-type person Andrea saw my whoa-remember-this post and found it on Facebook.
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Today was long and intense, and almost entirely devoid of adults, and after I put the kids to bed -- we read the last chapters of Baby-Sitters' Club #3, Mary Ann Saves the Day, the graphic-novel adaptation, which has an amazIng scene (which I can only guess was not in the original, as it was wordless, and well-paced and utterly beautiful) where Mary Ann goes to visit her mother's grave and lies down on it -- and I emailed Itta and asked if she could bring me something from the restaurant when she gets home. I was so in the mood for restaurant food. sometimes you need food that you didn't cook, that no human being has cooked, that's fresh and warm and comes to you via a server and some cutlery that someone who's not you will wash (or, alternately, that's plastic and that you can just throw out).
Then I zoned out, except apparently I think I might have zoned out more than I warranted, because instead of writing I watched Sherlock -- a gorgeous episode, and one that I didn't think would come together at all, and in the end it totally did.
And that last scene, where Sherlock really wants to dance with someone and then he almost does and then he thinks better of it, a quick cut, and he's alone outside, hit a little too much home for me.
I really do want to write a great Disney movie. But even though the latest (Frozen, it's so incredible, I nearly had an artistic breakdown watching it just wishing I could make something that good and at the same time that inoffensive), where they (very minor spoiler) replace the girl/prince love story with a sisters/best friends love story. But I think what I really need to write, or to experience, is a movie where you learn that yourself is good enough? And I'm not sure if Disney will ever be capable of making that. I'm not sure if I'll ever be capable of writing that.
Tomorrow is my wife's due date. Or, as I've started saying it, her officially-overdue date. Feels so weird, that the world could change so radically at any given moment. And then I remind myself about what the Alter Rebbe said, that the world is created anew from nothingness at every moment, and I realize that all of us only exist by some whim of some Supreme Being anyway, so enjoy the sameness while we can. I feel like I'm hovering at that moment of Tron right before he gets sucked into the computer and everything turns to neon. Like stuff is nowhere near as cool as it's about to be, but I should appreciate the natural colors and relative boringness while I still can.
maurice sendak is dead. i think this might be the thing that finally keeps me off facebook today. person after person mourning. when did it become a thing to post that someone's dead? i guess it's one more thing to identify ourselves with. one more way to build our personality out of other people's bones.
and here i am, doing the same thing.
i'm not sad -- i mean, he lived a full life, and he knew it was his time and he loved it, and he laughed at death, and now he's with his boyfriend, and hopefully happy, but it still ensaddens the hell out of me.
here's Carole King singing "Pierre." I'm still not listening to music because it's sefira, but let's see if this gets me out of it.
Q: Why is it that Steve Jobs is dead at 56 but Robert Mugabe and Gaddafi and Assad and all the murdering despots are alive and well?
A: Dammit, don't you think this is a question for G*d? Wish I could tell you the definitive answer. I'm kind of lucky i'm not a rabbi.
Steve Jobs wasn't the greatest human being in the universe. If someone would've asked me before today, I'd say he did a lot of crappy things for digital rights and content creators. He also did a lot of great things. Far be it from me to speak loshon hara about the dead.
But why do bad things happen to good people? Why is my best friend dead? Why do complete scumbags and idiots get paid tons more than I do? How does a dork like me wind up marrying someone well-put-together and coordinated like Itta? Seriously, it's all divine providence. You just gotta trust that the divine bureaucrats know what they're doing.
(Question from my mother-in-law. The title is hers, too.)
I wrote this story. I was sort of saving it for a while, waiting for something big to happen. And then it did.
It's almost Lag B'Omer, which is making me hella nostalgic for the Stern Grove Chabad party in Yoko a Go-Go
for those who gathered there at sunset there
were promises of a sin-free life at stake
I didn’t want that
I just wanted to say hiapparently everyone had the same idea
fighting to get closer to the kever
I wanted to tell them
I’m only here for the rabbi
<< read the rest >>And because good things always come in threes (famous people dying, wise men...uh, whut?) I should also tell you that the new G-dcast Shavuos video is up and atom:
We love Regina Spektor -- I think that's been safely established. She has this Russian lion-in-pajamas thing going on where she's singing playful little lyrics in a soft singsongy voice, and then the moment comes (and this moment, in all her songs, it happens) -- catching you by surprise, with your pants down, just when you thought it was safe to curl up next to her -- and suddenly the song is all teeth and fangs, roaring down your door, throwing a wicked metaphor or a twisted simile, rocking and thrashing violently, the way only a piano player can.
It always happens, in every song. Sometimes it's a sudden switch of language, to French and Russian in "Apres Moi," or the drop of a delicate Jewish metaphor that you know she wrote thinking she'd be the only one to get it, but we're here, Regina, and we're listening, and we get it, too. And sometimes it's just the way she leaps into the microphone, ready to eat it, and gives the song a whole new energy.
This is Regina Spektor. Her new live CD+DVD, Live in London, was just released. It has 20 tracks, including a Guns 'n Roses cover (!) played with her string orchestra (!!). And each of those 20 songs are loaded with that moment, the moment of the bite.
I will admit to skepticism. I'm not one to fork over needed cash for an album full of songs I already have. But, along with the new material (including the song "The Call," a beautiful track which Spektor recorded for The Chronicles of Narnia--which made me do a doubletake; a Russian Jewish indie-rock hero recording a song for a Christian-fundamentalist fairytale adaptation made by Disney, the most massive corporation there is?--but she sells out in the most graceful and cool and still-righteous way there is, and it's a great song, and anyway, you can buy this recording and not have to give Disney any money) and the redone classics ("Eet," above, is electric, and "Dance Anthem of the 1980s" is awe-inspiring, especially Spektor's beatbox) all make it worth your while.
Okay. Deep breath.
But that singular spark of Spektor's -- the bite that I was talking about before -- it marks this disc especially. A few weeks after this recording, Daniel Cho, Spektor's cellist and musical director, drowned and died. And that eerie precedence fills every moment of this concert with a loaded, creepy, and beautiful foreboding. When you're playing a song with just a piano and some strings, there's a delicateness to the music, a sense that, if anyone were to stop playing, the song would fall apart. Maybe I'm just reading too much into this recording and this night, but I've been in bands before, and I know how much you're leaning on each other at every moment. And it feels like -- this night, or this moment, or something -- everyone's ready for something to break...and everyone is ready to catch each other when it does.
When I was in Junior Congregation services at OCJCC-BI in Philadelphia, we spent Tisha B'Av -- the holiday that's the anniversary of the Temple's destruction -- watching depressing Jewish videos. Some of them (Shoah) conveyed the appropriate they're-dead-and-it's-sad response from my 12-year-old self. Some of them (Schindler's List -- specifically, the scenes of Oskar Schindler in bed with the naked bouncing-breasty women getting all pogo-stick on top of him*) left, uh, a different image in my head.
The London-born, Jerusalem-based poet Danny Raphael just laid down some rhymes of remembrance. It's only 2 minutes long -- and, back in 8th grade, I wasn't very open to appreciating hip-hop -- but I'd like to think that I would've appreciated this.
* -- It feels like heresy to say, but as a geeky barely-teenage boy who'd just seen Jurassic Park (loved it) and was expecting something I could do a Hebrew School book report on, it was unexpected, to say the least. There was plenty of stuff that depressed and inspired me, as well, but when I left the theater that day, the sole image that stuck with me was not a skeleton-thin man behind a barbed-wire fence but a full-bodied woman who touched off a strange chord of both attraction and haunting in my spread-wide-open impressionable mind.
Now, this isn't to say that I disapprove or disagree with the film. I think the only people who wouldn't say Schindler's List is a work of art are either anti-Semites or jealous (the latter category includes all you film-school snobs). The most common feedback I get from my book about becoming religious is that it'd be a great story except for all the cursing and sex. Real life is real life, and portrayals of life are going to contain stuff that isn't exactly ready for prime time. Was I ready for it as a kid? I don't know. Although, on the other hand, most of my formative life-changing experiences were things I wasn't ready for. And this would be the footnote that's longer than my actual blog post.
In Jewish practice, on the thirtieth day after a person dies, the mourners observe sheloshim -- a lessening in severity of the mourning practices. It's kind of weird how we have different prescribed levels for
Tonight and today is the sheloshim for Shula Swerdlov, a 3-year-old girl who was killed in a horrific hit-and-run in Jerusalem. The tragedy was immense. Not only because of the nature of the accident -- the driver of the school bus, reportedly a felon with 31 previous traffic accidents, ran her over in view of her 8-year-old brother, then immediately drove away -- but also that Shula's parents are Chabad emissaries, and constantly give up the beds in their relatively small apartment for thousands of guests on their way through Israel. Some were friends, or cousins, or just people they happen to meet. When my wife and I moved to Israel for yeshiva, we camped out nights in the Swerdlovs' office, checking our email each night, updating my blog and writing a novel because they didn't think twice about giving sketchy people like us a key to their place of business.
You can check out the comments section to see how many people were reeling from her death. But what you should really check out is the community's response:
* A massive toy drive, collecting Hanukkah toys for disadvantaged children -- in spite of the idea that most Chabadniks don't give gifts for Hanukkah. Check out the link for phone numbers, drop-off points, and other ways you can contribute.
* There's a custom that, when someone dies, we start writing a Torah in their memory. I'm not sure why exactly -- I've heard that it's a reference to when Moses wrote the Torah at the end of his life, or for the everlastingness of the Torah itself, how it's called a "Tree of Life" and all that. A Torah was started in Shula's memory, and you can help sponsor the writing by buying a letter in the Torah -- either a letter of your name, or a letter of a name of someone you want to honor.
* The song "Since You Died," by the Dismemberment Plan, has been in my head all day. Like few others, singer Travis Morrison conveys both the intimacy and the distance -- and the un-understandingness of it all -- that comes with thinking about a dead person.
Here's a cool and poignant little short film about going to a genizah, a sort of cemetery for books. A Torah scroll has been damaged in a flood, and the young rabbi of an elderly community packs up his congregation and takes them to the genizah section of their local cemetery. It's a little bit touching and a little funny.
Rain in New York is never pretty, except when you're inside.
Last night they put Murphy to sleep. Murphy was my best friend's cat. His mother said it was like losing another part of Mike. One of the reasons I think cats are creepy is that they don't always recognize you -- or, at least, they don't always act like they do. After Mike died, every time I saw Murphy, he'd slink across the room like he was avoiding me. I wanted to tell him, it's ok, we're suffering together. He just wanted to suffer alone. Basically the same way I was with everyone else.
Mike's parents are going to have pawprints made and put them next to his grave. I said it sounded nice, in a Coptic Egyptian sort of way. I got off the phone and put on Velocity Girl, his favorite band, loud. Itta was cooking. She couldn't hear the volume. Yalta started to dance, so I did, too, but only because I didn't want her to stop.
Just found out that one of my closest friends had a baby. Two weeks ago. I don't blame them for it; I can totally understand the need to hibernate. But, especially with the wicked weather and the way the cold has been slowly making its play, I'm starting to remember just how easy it is to fall out of touch with people. Here's my resolution for the season: I will not forget the rest of the world. I won't.
The producer of our film just forwarded this to the production staff. It's small, but I think it's sweet. I know it sucks to turn every Hollywood death into a Grand Statement (or, as is more usually the case, egotism), but I was blown away that he wanted to keep working on his TV series after the cancer diagnosis. It's like, 98% of acting might be being a celebrity or flirting with tabloids, but behind that facade are some people who really sincerely believe in their creative juices.
In an interview following Patrick Swayze's untimely death, Jennifer Gray recently stated:
"When I think of him, I think of being in his arms when we were kids, dancing, practicing the lift in the freezing lake, having a blast doing this tiny little movie we thought no one would ever see. My heart goes out to his wife and childhood sweetheart, Lisa Niemi, to his mom, Patsy, and to the rest of their family."
This is Israel: Yesterday I was on a "nature trail," which, without doubt, is an Israeli euphemism for X-treme Sports. In Philadelphia, there was a nature trail that swept around a few meadows and groves of trees and dovetailed into a new housing development that had chopped away the rest of the forest. Here in the Golan, the phrase "nature trail" indicates a trail of barely-there rocks, the plurality of which are equal to or smaller than the width of your foot, jutting out of a cliff.
About an hour and a half in, without warning (and, certainly, without any semblance of sanity) the narrow trail of rocks which we've been precariously balancing ourselves upon gives out, replaced by a handful of metal rungs plopped into the side of the rock bed. Horizontal surfaces as we know them cease to exist, and there's a 20-foot drop into a steam that's 25 feet deep.
It's extreme, alright. But it’s also that particularly Israeli brand of springing total insanity upon you without warning, a reminder that for every anxiety-filled border crossing there's a mountain with a view that will knock the fear of God into you, and for every bomb around the corner, there's also a tiny 3000-year-old synagogue with immaculate stone buttresses around the next corner.
This afternoon we visited Tsfat. It was supposed to be a 30-minute drive, but we kept passing graves. There's a weird code to Israeli gravesites: many tzaddikim, or righteous people, are buried outside of cemeteries—in their own mini-graveyards, or in the middle of nature trails, or just on the side of the road. (One hopes that those ever-lovin' nature trails were not the cause of most of these tzaddikim being buried there, but since the stories about tzaddikim always seem to involve granting miracles, impossible journeys, and staring death right in the face, you have to allow for the possibility that, sometimes, death will not just stare idly back at them.) Some of the graves have domes over them, which indicates their more-exalted-than-normal status. Others, for a similar reason, are painted a turquoise shade of sea blue. I don't know if either or both of those things intimate something specific, or whether there’s a general hierarchy, but these are the things I’ve learned here in a very short time.
That, and that gravesites sometimes make the best concert venues.
