Truant, but truthful

Tons of stuff to update, and I am totally truant. There have been a lot of people saying a lot of really nice things about Automatic, and I should write about them. But first I need to say a really nice thing about someone else: The amazing Ethan Young's first full-length graphic novel, Tails, is finally coming out! You can, and should, order it now. It's about being an artist and a vegetarian and an Asian geek with fantasies about turning into a superhero and living in New York City.

Oh, and I show up occasionally in the book.

And, totally separate, my sometimes-editor David Levithan compiles a best-of music list every year, and polls his coterie. His most recent list was just posted. Here's my entry:

Matthue R Goes Camp 

Weird thing: There's not much punk/loud stuff on here. I mean, Wild Flag, but that might be a vote for my past. I think that the most exciting stuff I'm finding is stuff that I'm just starting to give a second thought to? Also, other thing: A lot of the albums here are free mixtapes that the artists give away online. I mean, I love the hip-hop community.

most essential: Childish Gambino, Camp

and:
2. Wild Flag, Wild Flag
3. Frank Ocean, nostalgia, ultra.
4. Shondes, Searchlights
5. Regina Spektor, Live in London
6. Roots, undun
7. Nicki Minaj, Pink Friday (which I know didn't come out this year)
8. Girls in Trouble, Like You, Like Me
9. The Amy Winehouse uncollected-songs album.
10. House of Balloons, The Weeknd

Just in case you're curious, NONE of my albums made the Top Ten. Am I really cool, or just really out of touch?

Saturday Night Sukkah

Just when you thought Yom Kippur was over -- I mean, it is -- Sukkot shows up and blows all your expectations out of the water. There's a Hasidic custom that on the night Yom Kippur ends, after bellies are stuffed and children are put to bed, you get out your toolkit and wooden planks and palm fronds and you start building your sukkah.

So Saturday night, still in my Yom Kippur clothes (minus the white robe of a kittel that I spent all the holiday in, which my 2-year-old still insisted was a "papa dress"), I descended into the murky spider-lined depths of our garage and started fishing out the fake-wood panels that our cousins in Crown Heights had bequeathed us -- yes, the cousins with a zillion kids, the ones who also always have a gabillion guests over to every meal. They're the sort of consummate entertainers who are so stunningly perfect that you'd totally hate them...except that every time you're at their house, they make you feel so welcomed and loved and, well, stuffed with food. That's the genealogy of our new sukkah.

And then Saturday morning, when my kids woke up and came into the kitchen for their cereal, something weird was taking up the whole of the view through the back windows.

If it doesn't look 100% done to you, congratulate yourself, you sukkah expert! I finished the frame, but then my wife had a catering job and she had to move all the food (that's food for 150, if you're curious) through the 2-inch margin between the sukkah and the wall. So I deconstructed a little -- I am an author, after all.







Sorry for the gratuitous tushy shot. But there you go. Now you can only mildly make fun of me for my nonmechanical construction abilities.

It still wasn't fully done, though. We had to get schach -- the natural wood/tree/foliage sort of thing that covers the sukkahmy friend Ethan (a harmless and inquisitive friend, who happens to be an amazing comic artist, who's not Jewish, and has no clue about all these tabernacle things we're building). For that, we had to go into the wilderness of Coney Island Avenue, the main street of Flatbush, where a 12-year-old boy selling lulavs and etrogs heard me asking someone for directions, and summarily wriggled in between my potential navigator and myself. "You need schach?" he said. "I got some schach for you." He proceeded to give us an address -- a corner of two streets, where, he promised, "this great guy" would be standing outside with bushels of schach.

Ethan, like any right-thinking person, was dubious. But, after all, this was our adventure. So we trekked across Flatbush, and there was a synagogue, and there was our man. And, long story short (the long story involved some very Do the Right Thing-type lines from our 12-year-old hustler, a fourth-story sukkah, and an ATM search) -- we got our bamboo sheet.




And there you go. You have a new story, and I have a new sukkah. My older daughter's been talking all week about how she's going to sleep in the sukkah. I kind of don't believe her, if only because she never actually sleeps.

Ethan Young and me fight over comics

Ethan Young, who does the fabulous online comic Tails, asked me to fill in for a while as he reaches the end of his first book. It's hard following a comic with a bunch of straight-up words, but we're talking about our comics obsession, so maybe that will help. Also, I ended up being a character in his comic, which (hopefully) lends my entries some DVD actors'-commentary credibility...

Anyway, go read it.

Maybe I’ve just been spoiled. Reading comics — especially reading someone like Neil Gaiman, or Alan Moore, who spend hours detailing the minutiae of how each panel looks. Yes, just mentioning their names is a cliché, but it’s obvious that they were both the kind of kids who read each page of a comic a hundred times as kids. They really appreciate the graphic design of a page; you can go over the panels and margins of, say, ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ and find something new each time.

That’s what I want my books to be like. The ones I write, the ones I read, the ones I buy. I know my prose-books won’t get that way until I start self-publishing, or until I get really big — Scholastic doesn’t let their mid-range authors anywhere NEAR the design computers — but a boy can dream.

And, in the meantime, I’ve still got my comics to read. And my omnibus Sandman to obsess over.

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My Comics Debut

Granted, it's not me writing Uncanny X-Men, but it's on the other side of the camera. It's from Ethan Young's excellent e-comic Tails, which you can read free here. (You can actually start on the chapter I'm in and not miss out on too much -- here's the first page -- and then go back and read from the start. Because it is amazing, and highly recommended.)



See? Even when I'm in Australia, New York finds a way to claim me. The temperatures in Melbourne are about the same as the temperatures in New York -- 35 degrees in both places -- but, believe me, it feels a lot better here.

Ethan (SPOILER WARNING) used to live downstairs from us. He designed this card for my daughter's first birthday, which I'm still ga-ga about. The Yiddish was added by his roommate. Check it out and marvel:

Ouch. Sorry for the pun.

Everybody Wants a Tail

Not to get too furry on you people, but my friend, collaborator, and ex-housemate Ethan Young's comic Tails just got written up in a big way in Comic Book Resources. Like the reviewer said: "It's a largely autobiographical comic about dating and cats. None of those things sound like something I'd be interested in....but yet in less than two dozen pages, Young charmed me with his drawing style and his jubilantly downtrodden protagonist."

It's an appropriate sentiment: people can write stories about the most esoteric things and make them universally-relatable, and people can write stories about walking down the street that no one in the universe will relate to or care about. Ethan falls squarely in the first camp.

(And Ethan and I are working on something together, too...I can't say what, yet, except that it's nothing like you expect and it's going to be awesome.)

Here, check out a page -- and then go read the rest: