"His memoir reads like virginal masturbation"

Such an intense and flattering review of Yom Kippur a Go-Go on Goodreads. I asked, and received, permission to repost it.

I just came across the review today, and also came across this news, that the Lusty Lady -- the worker-owned co-op strip club which figures prominently in the book (but which I still haven't {and, well, never will} set foot inside), is closing. It's weird; one more element of the San Francisco I used to live in that won't be there anymore. I wonder what Armistead Maupin does about this stuff? Anyway. My skin still kind of crawls when I talk about this book, primarily because it's all about all the stupid stuff I did when I was younger (when a book is fiction, you can pretend that, well, it's fiction). But I've also never felt closer to it. Here you go, guys.

Amanda said to you: YOM KIPPUR A GO-GO I spent all day devoted to Matthue Roth's memoir, in such a matter that I became him and when the book ended I was left in a deep sucking void. My own life is slow to raise up and greet me now, so I clicked on the computer and yes, sent him an email. A short email. I was inspired to ramble onwards, giving him my own memoir in return, but wrote three sentences and one Kudos. Growing up, I've always read. I've adored books, libraries, the smell of musty pages, the quiet refuge, the chance of seeing more of the world than this small isolated town could ever offer. I've only wanted to really meet one other author out of all the books I've devoured soundlessly. My hopes are realistically dashed--Kurt Vonnegut will be dead before the planets align, and really, what would I talk about with a man so many years my senior? But Matthue? I see myself hanging out with him, just another misfit in his cast of characters so profoundly opposite of everything he is trying to cultivate within himself. I'd delight in all the things he could teach me about religion, specifically about being a Jew and with the same amount of zealousness follow along into the genderfuck San Francisco scene. His memoir reads like virginal masturbation, with such a sexual tension brewing with only self-release to be had. I can't believe he remained a virgin throughout his time in San Francisco, my age and innocent. It only added to the depth of his experience, to be a witness to such depravity and sexual embrace without fully understanding the complete release that sex brings.

I Snuggle Up Close to Regina Spektor's "Far"

This is the best birthday present I've gotten all year.

Regina Spektor's third proper album, Far, is like that cynical older cousin who you love to sit next to at family functions. Totally funny, mostly good-natured, and both angry and delicious -- angrilicious? -- like the kind of person who says all the things you want to say but don't.

And -- uh -- says them all in cute, random metaphors and rhyming couplets and sweet, sweet melodies.

After the meandering intro of "The Calculation" -- a good, mid-tempo, semi-funked-out song about relationships, technology, and emotional indifference -- we get a virtual onslaught of Regina with the instant hookiness, smileyness, and spine-tingling anticipation of the piano chords that lead into "Eet."

The song might be named for its homonym, or it might be the way Spektor writes down her own whimsical non-word singing on paper. Then, when the drums come in -- "You spend half of your life/trying to fall behind/using your headphones to drown out your mind" -- the song becomes simultaneously triumphant and snarky. And it's especially victorious when you consider it's a song about hipster kids who are so preoccupied with looking cool that they forget how to dance. (That's what I think it's about, anyway.) Really, it's a self-defeating argument -- by the time you're done analyzing, you're hopping up and down in your desk chair, anyway.

A few weeks ago, I posted from Regina Spektor's new video, "Laughing With." It's been seized upon and passed around a fair bit among the bloggy folks, but I don't think any of us have really given as much credence to the lyrics as they deserve.

No one laughs at God
When the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
When it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from the party yet

So freakin' true. And yet, if this wasn't being sung within the context of an MTV video with cool effects and a Harry Potter-like Cloak of Invisibility, we'd probably freak out and call the writer a zealot or a fundamentalist.

But Spektor always likes to close her songs abruptly, which drove me crazy when "Better" was on the radio, or when I listened to her songs out of sequence on my iPod's Party Shuffle (which, btw, I love saying, because I never actually use shuffle at parties, but I always feel like being at a party when I'm walking down the street and I select that option) -- but which, taken on its own, is both wise and satisfying. The closing line of "Laughing With," which fades out together with the song -- "No one’s laughing at God/We’re all laughing with God" -- is kind of the perfect paradigm of this. It's winking at the listener and pulling the rug out from under our feet at the same time.

"Two Birds" is the natural offset to "Laughing With," a parable about two birds that don't trust each other. The chorus, "I'll believe it all/There's nothing I won't understand/I'll believe it all/I won't let go of your hand," speaks to our natural tendency to distrust each other, to get cold and clam up and retreat into our own little worlds.

To one extent or another, artists are all recluses. We hate other people. We distrust them and fear them and don't want to trust our ideas with them, preferring instead to remain in our own little universes that we draw and write around ourselves. Again, witness the "Laughing With" video...or just try to talk to me while I'm writing in my notebook. And then, on the other side of the spectrum, we're trying more than anything to understand the way people work, and get inside their heads, and to create a song or a story that's bigger than ourselves.

I think what I love most about Regina Spektor is that she really gets both of these things. And both of them, she does so well.