How do you handle negative reviews?

A new-author friend just emailed me to ask about a negative review. (I'm not saying which friend, or which negative review {actually, it was more a not-entirely-loving review than a negative one, if you ask me...but I will be telling you about this book in the months to come and how amazing it is, so just stick around.) I should be embarrassed or chagrined by the question -- yes, I am your go-to guy for questions relating to bad reviews -- but by this time, I'm pretty okay with it, and besides, the sheer amount of amazing stuff that people have said about Kafka is reason enough for me to owe the universe some karmic feedback.

So, here it is, my advice for dealing with negative reviews.

• get it out of your mind. see what i did, starting the email with something else? [note: I started the email talking about something else.] there is SO MUCH FREAKING STUFF going on in your life, and so many people are going to be reading your book and thinking good things that you won't have time for the naysayers. Get a jump up. Start disregarding them now.

• make it drive you harder.So 10 people won't buy the book from reading that review. Write to a blog or a smaller site that passionately cares about your subject matter. Force yourself to do more publicity. Publicity is the most important part of bookselling, and it's the part authors hate most. Combat that feeling! Bring it on. 

• Here's the thing about reviews: They don't matter. There was just this major study of books featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. They discovered, being featured only sold a couple hundred copies at most. Think about anything that's only reviewed inside. Think about anything that isn't the Times. Yeah, it doesn't really matter.
  
• Way more effective: The aforementioned smaller sites with readers who are actually passionate about what you're writing about. And, like, PEOPLE. Ordinary people. People who aren't consumed by a zillion books every day. these are people who will love what you write, and who will tell their friends about it. love sells tons more copies than a review. even a good review. there are still people who care about books in this world -- not all books, but a few books -- and those people are the reason that books are still in business.

"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.

Kafka in Swedish! Kafka in Romanian!

Brief nuggets of awesomeness. Here is a piece of press about Kafka in Swedish.

Matthue Roth säger att han kan räkna upp miljoner skäl till att han valde att förvandla några av just Kafkas berättelser till en barnbok. Hans nya ”My first Kafka” om ”bland annat gnagare och jätteinsekter är nu omskriven lite varstans, av exempelvis New Yorker-bloggens Kelsey Osgood som gillar bearbetningen och noterar att det inte är något nytt att barn fascineras av otäckheter.

And a longer one in Romanian.

Volumul "Prima mea lectură din Kafka" cuprinde fragmente din trei povestiri ale scriitorului ceh de limbă germană Franz Kafka (1883-1924), pe care autorul american le-a rescris sub formă de versuri – „Metamorfoza”, „Excursie în munţi” şi „Cântăreaţa Josephine”. Versurile lui Roth sunt însoţite de ilustraţiile în alb şi negru ale graficianului Rohan Daniel Eason.  Prima strofă din „Metamorfoza” prezintă  schimbarea prin care trece Gregor Samsa, personajul principal al poemului în proză: „Gregor Samsa urât adesea a visat /Într-o dimineaţǎ s-a trezit/Că într-un gândac s-a transformat”. În 2005, M. Roth a publicat prima lui carte, „Never Mind the Goldbergs”, căreia Librăria Publică din New York i-a oferit titlul de Cea mai bună carte
.

(Goldbergs! They said Goldbergs!)

And Brain Pickings, one of the most gorgeous blogs out there, wrote a lengthy and really complimentary piece about it that talked a warrantedly lot about Rohan's illustrations and called my text "hauntingly beautiful."

And my comic-artist friend Mat just visited, which meant we stayed up late and played games and drew some mini-books, which I'll try to post tomorrow, if I can get them scanned. That's all thanks over and out.

Heeb Magazine + Kafka

The generous folks at Heeb Magazine just put up a review of My First Kafka, and they seem to like it:

[T]here’s a sense of childlike wonder that permeates even the strangest of Kafka’s parables. That’s a tricky proposition to pull off effectively –especially for Roth, who is tasked with the unenviable job of transposing Kafka’s prose into child-sized morsels. Fortunately for weird kids (and their weird parents) everywhere, Roth is more than up to the task, reconstructing three of Kafka’s works into the sort of stories that would fit nicely alongside the Shel Silverstein’s stranger works.

My favorite part is the description of Rohan's illustrations, though: "His ‘Nobodies’ in Kafka’s “Excursion into the Mountains” call to mind Maurice Sendak’s eponymous “Wild Things”, transforming what was originally a passage about Man’s isolation into a whimsical adventure with imaginary friends. Similarly, his Gregor Samsa-bug in “Metamorphosis” is at once monstrous and sympathetic."

Okay. My day is made. Now I'm gonna go and read and stay up all night.

You, on the other hand, can read the review or buy the book (and then stay up all night with me, if you want).

HelloGiggles, Automatic-ally

Hey, so HelloGiggles.com featured my new book Automatic as their Item of the Day yesterday!

Besides being (actress-slash-singer-slash-Hitchhiker's Guide wunderkind) Zooey Deschanel and (producer) Sophia Rossi's website, they also feature particularly awesome writers such as Julia Gazdag (who wrote this piece) and Apocalypstick (who's just great), and it's a place that I actually read, which makes it particularly astounding for me to see my book in the same graphic space that I'm used to seeing things that are...well, not my book.

[A]fter blazing through the whole book in one sitting, I sat lost in a puddle of memories I had forgotten I experienced.
I love this book. I also love that even though you can get it for a kindle or as a pdf, you can also get a real life copy that’s handmade. And for $4.99. Including shipping. That’s way more than worth it. I don’t even understand that pricing. I’ve paid $25 for books that didn’t touch me as much as this one did.

Here, read the rest of it!

Kindly Ones to Keep Us Company

I got a review copy of Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones -- a massive, 982-page paperweight of a novel about a (fictional) SS officer during the Holocaust -- and didn't immediately read it. Although the novel won one of France's major literary awards and was hailed in Europe, it's still, well, Europe. The American reviews soundly thrashed the thing, calling it bloated and pretentious and severely scatological in its humor. And then there was the size of it:

Finally, a few weeks ago I sat down to conquer the thing. It actually came at an opportune time: I had to run out of work to go to the doctor's. (I'd gotten a tick in the middle of winter, and even though I live in Brooklyn, a city without any trees or bushes or nature, I decided I needed to make sure I wasn't dying of Lyme disease.) I could run down to the medical center and wait for a walk-in. This sounded to me like the prospect of hours with nothing to do. What better time to dig into a monster such as that?

So I had this period of time, roped off, with nothing else to fill it. I dove in and started to read. And I discovered: The Kindly Ones actually is sort of compelling.

The story follows the narration of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a man with no pretense of brevity and a truly OCD mind. The story is by turns relentlessly brutal (explosion after explosion, battle scenes in plenitude) and severely nitpicky. When Aue is given the chance to kill Jews, you get the sense that he thinks of it, not as ethnic cleansing or mass murder, but as an innumerably complex problem to solve, and one more thing to analyze. And the man can analyze: he goes off on ten-page digressions about statistical models and mid-20th-century medical culture. Single paragraphs fill pages, and sometimes when you come to a paragraph break, a chorus plays Hallelujah in your head.

It's cheapening the story to chalk up Aue's neuroses to the author's need to portray the hyperactiveness of the German Nazi methodical mind. At the same time, however, reading this book really illuminates the intricacies of someone obsessed with detail, and how the humanity of humanity can get lost in the process. Aue, at various points in the book, destroys his family, embarks on an incestuous relationship with his sister, and argues -- regretfully, it seems -- that the more accurate tally of Jews killed in the Holocaust is closer to five million than six. There is also the aforementioned scatology: Aue is obsessed with vomiting and bowel movements, both his own and other people's. One of my favorite lines from Publisher's Weekly's review puts it best: "Nary an anus goes by that isn't lovingly described (among the best is one surrounded by a pink halo, gaped open like a sea anemone between two white globes)."

It's not a sympathetic portrait of Nazis by any means. But it's a thought-provoking one. I don't know if I'd actually want to read this book given the choice between it and, oh, just about any other book about the Holocaust (or not) out there. But for those with the curiosity -- and the time to spare -- it's an intriguing perusal.

Free Losers, and Stories for Drunk Baseball Fans

First of all: I'm doing a special deal thing. Order Candy in Action from me, and get a free copy of Losers along with it.

And here's a great reason why. The folks at Stanton Park Review have kindly reviewed Losers. It was pretty awesome of them to do so. The site was inspired by Chuck Palahniuk -- specifically, the idea that "What people consider to be good books are the ones that comfort and lull us to sleep. No, drunk baseball fans don’t want to hear about a kid dying of cancer but if you read them a story about consensual fighting or about waiters pissing in soup or about a guy being gutted in a swimming pool, those baseball fans, they will shut up and listen. Given the right stories, those drunk guys, they will really love books."

So, yeah. I'm pretty proud to be included.

Check it:

Matthue Roth's Losers is a fun read from start to finish. The main character, Jupiter Glazer, is a Russian immigrant who is trying to negotiate the pit falls of his first year in high school. Aside from the normal social awkwardness of high school, Jupiter has to deal with a bully named Bates who is determined to turn him into a human pancake.

keep reading

Lady Fight Comics (and Other Embarrassing Names)

So I wrote a very short comic story, and it's officially been released in an anthology! I actually haven't seen a hard copy yet, but it's out, so I figured the shout-outs should begin -- especially since we just got our first review, and it's a good one.

My story, "Cacta," is an intro to a bigger story about a girl who gets cactus-based superpowers, a set of superpowers which is both way more cool and way more awkward than it sounds. Anyway, the reviewers liked it:

"The art on this one is very solid, with a rather striking splash page...My favorite part of this story, however, was not the super heroics, but our young heroine's inner dialogue as she struggles not to flaunt her deeds at school the next day."

I'm counting it as a solid vote in my comic writing ability, even if my first and last names both got misspelled in the review. The other stories have more than a fair helping of ass-kickery, and it's pretty awesome to be included with them. My one caveat: I'm a little uneasy about the title of the anthology, Lady Fight Comics, although I suppose it's technically the exact opposite of saying that girls can't fight. (I actually tried to propose another story for it called Lady Fight Club, but that got shot down...probably deservedly so. Although, if anyone wants to illustrate a short comic script about 1950s housewives and Fight Club, give me a holla.) The issue is out, now, in comic shops and on IndyPlanet: order it here.

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.

The Poison Eaters by Holly Black

I wasn't going to blog about this for another few months, since it's not going on sale until February, but Holly Black's new book The Poison Eaters has had me on the edge of my chair since the subway ride to work 3 hours ago, and it keeps pulsing in my head like a vein about to aneurysm -- it's that mercilessly good. The first story, "The Coldest Girl in Coldtowm," is kind of about vampires, but they're more like zombies. They're bloodthirsty, teeth-baring, flesh-chomping...which is actually what vampires used to be like, back in the Old World.

I almost always hate short stories. Short stories that are plot-based ignore the main character. Short stories that are character-based are almost exclusively the domain of characters stumbling around in search of a plot. Here, character and plot are suffused, and there's a hyperactive emotional terseness that creeps up on you and freezes you in place. This happens the exact moment that we learn the truth about vampirism in this world -- it's transmitted by blood, but it doesn't take hold of its victim until she tastes blood herself:

It took eighty-eight days for the venom to sweat out a person's pores. She only had thirty-seven to go. Thirty-seven days to stay so drunk that she could ignore the buzz in her head that made her want to bite, rend, devour.

Aaah. In the first three pages, our perception of the main character switches from a slut to lovesick to cold, calculating, a kind of teen goth-girl Artful Dodger in fishnets. And that's just the setup. The execution is...well, an execution.

Can I tell you how much I can't wait to finish the rest of this book?

There. I just did. February be damned.

Losers: A Critical Analysis

The new PresenTense magazine is out, and with it is a review of Losers that's more like a critical analysis. I didn't know this was going to happen until it showed up on my doorstep, and now I feel gleeful in the way, I guess, that authors do when people read way more into a book than you ever thought you were writing into it:

It is easy to empathize with Jupiter, the awkwardly-named main character of the novel who struggles through adolescence. Jupiter—who immigrated to Philadelphia with his family as part of the Jewish mass exodus from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—is concerned with his ever-present Russian accent, preoccupied with the opposite sex, and keen on hiding the fact that he lives in a working-class neighborhood.

The book starts with the seemingly innocuous line, “I lost my accent over a long weekend in ninth grade.” For Jupiter, the question of language is central to his self-perception, where the key to being popular is speaking proper English. Despite his best efforts—and some success —in “sounding American,” he nonetheless faces barriers in his quest to fit in. Indeed, Jupiter’s attitudes toward the spoken word formulate one of the more poignant themes in the novel.

(read more)

Gentlemen, by Michael Northrop, will scare your underpants off.

Best morning subway ride EVER. Last night, I finished (yes! finally! finished! for real, this time!) my screenplay, and I didn't have anything to do on the subway. So I read Michael Northrop's Gentlemen, which tied for my #1 score at Book Expo this year with the advance copy of Poppy Z. Brite's gay New Orleans food couture mystery. So good that I wrote an Amazon review. Yes, I couldn't help myself.

Small-Town Horror Meets Classic American Fiction

The thing that dawned on me, reading this novel, is how little a percentage of horror books actually involve capital-H Horror. Stephen King isn't about googly-eyed monsters and crazed psychos -- or, at least, he isn't about that so much as he's about the most basic human reactions. Fear. Anxiety. Loss. Regret. That's what separates, say, "The Catcher in the Rye" from "The Road" -- in other words, a really well-done non-horror story from a really good horror story.

And there's a lot of Stephen King in Michael Northrop's book. Actually, it reminded me more of Michael ("The Hours") Cunningham. For much of the book, the main plot moves slowly, but interesting, well-developed and well-savored. Almost every page there's a side story that made me want to tell the person next to me about what I was reading -- like how Tommy threw a desk across the room in order to distract a girl he liked, or the summer of the two Jennys. And Micheal's language (the narrator -- whose name was misspelled on his birth certificate, not the author) is so graceful that when he suddenly becomes "typical guy"-ish and talks about throwing a punch at his teacher, you're blown away. Not because it's out of character, but because it makes him so multi-dimensional and real.

Then, of course, there's the scary stuff. And Michael (the author) seems to know his way around both scary stuff and the more Gothic parts of small-town America: the secrets people keep and the way that dark seems to swallow up the country after twilight. As the novel moves on, the simple question of whether or not their teacher has a dead body no longer feels like the point of the book -- it's more about Micheal, his friends, his town, and the darkness that's inside him.

Losers: More Bullies, More Books

Things you find out by Googling yourself -- or, rather, things you learn when you're trying to find your new book's listing on Amazon: there's a book by C.J. Bott (don't know him, but awesome name) called More Bullies in More Books that seems to be exactly that. A compendium that lists all books that have bullies in them, and the relationship between the bullies and the bullied.

Jupiter Jason Glazer and his parents left Russia seven years ago and now live in an empty warehouse outside Philadelphia. Now in junior high, Jupiter wants to avoid the insane bully Bates and find a way to fit in. For him, his first step is to lose his accent.

My reaction is split pretty evenly between (a) Rock!, (b) People are doing book reports on me!, and (c) How many errors can you fit into one sentence? Not in a nitpicky way -- it actually cuts pretty well to the point of the book.

But, ok, there are several facts in those three narrow sentences that...well, aren't facts. What are they? Whoever gets closest wins something cool. What, I haven't decided yet. Just email me or post it to my Facebook or something...and, no, saying that Bates isn't certifiably insane is not one of the inaccuracies. He is totally, completely, mentally and in all other ways insane.

Vote for Mold!

Awesome open mic last night, courtesy of Mimaamakim, the Stanton Street Shul, and -- unexpectedly -- Yori Yanover, author of The Cabalist's Daughter, a sort of 24-meets-Apocalypse Now-meets-the-Apocalypse novel about the Lubavitcher Rebbe dying, his followers creating a clone, and the clone turning out to be a girl. It's always awkward to meet someone whom you've just written about. Square that when it's onstage in front of a bunch of people. Factor in any potential uncomfortability that might come about if the book wasn't a good one. Fortunately, it was, and fortunately, Mr. Yanover is just as large and funny and unhinged in real life as he is on the page -- and even more Douglas Adams-dik -- and so all was good on the Lower East Side.

OK, and now:

Vote for my poem "Mould" (that's "Mold" to you Americans out there) as the best in Melbourne! First do the super-fast registration, and then vote for my poem! (Or whichever poem you'd like to vote for. Not to play favorites. Ahem.)

A very short review of "Dollhouse"

What did you think of Dollhouse?

I liked it -- I mean, I think I did?? It started slow. Red flag in my brain: this is why Firefly got canceled. If you don't start with a bang, you lose people on TV -- and this is starting with a timid, lo-energy conversation in an office.

It cut to a motorcycle chase. Good intentions, but not as good as it should have been....

The first half didn't seem like a Joss Whedon show at ALL. then the second half was totally Joss Whedon. The show feels a bit manufactured, like it's something they're getting paid to make, whereas Buffy was something that the actors and writers needed to make, whether there was fame and fortune or not...but it was still a pretty damn good action-adventure 45 minutes of my life. The greater plots feel the most forced of all. But last night, the resolution to the kidnapping and the trauma-that-wasn't-really-a-trauma....damn. All of us - me, Itta, house guests - were shaking when we got up afterward.

(And no, we didn't watch it on Shabbos....thank you, Hulu.)

Jennifer Blowdryer: How to Write the Great American Novel on Food Stamps

On Jewcy, I interview Jennifer Blowdryer, who might be my favorite person in the world who ever made me inadvertently homeless. Two days before I was supposed to get to New York City and rent her (swoon) East Village apartment for two months -- a block from the Bowery Poetry Club, two from ABC No Rio, and right down the street from the most amazing graffiti in the country -- she told me that some Long Island girl in a bar had offered to pay her five times the going cost.

Somehow, with her writing and her sense of humor, I was okay with that. Eventually.

Okay enough to cover her new and hilarious short novel, The Laziest Secretary in the World, for Jewcy:

Jennifer Blowdryer revels in those truths about ourselves that we'd rather not hear. While that is ostensibly the job of every writer, few do it with such grace, aplomb, and lack of restraint. Part Emily Post and part Morton Downey, Jr., Blowdryer's subjects are punk-rock Artful Dodgers and Malcom MacLaren-worthy bastards, lovable and loathable in equal doses, people who take a free drink when they're given one and scam one when they're not.

The protagonist of her latest book, The Laziest Secretary in the World, is named Latoya (she's white). She's alternately pathetic and brilliant, a powerhouse at drinking, social analysis, and anything that involves the bottom-most echelon of pop culture. Latoya could write for McSweeney's but instead makes fun of tabloid celebrities. She daydreams of the limitless variety of frozen dinners, having an unlimited cash flow, and of being interviewed on a daytime talk show, answering difficult questions with, "Merv, even if I had a million dollars, I would still buy Butterfingers and M&Ms. I mean, what could possibly replace them?"

READ MORE >

Matisyahu: Return of the "King"

Although I can't actually remember whether he played "King Without a Crown," that iconoclastic first single that a friend swore was going to condemn him to one-hit wonder status forever, it didn't feel like Matisyahu's brief history was being reinvented last night. On the seventh of his eight-night Hanukkah stint at the Music Hall of Williamsburg (insert the appropriate jokes about how Shabbat makes Orthodox Jews late for everything here), he played a more-than-two-hour set that was alternately pensive and meandering and quietly grooving and straight-ahead all-out rocking.

Matis's music has always lived in the space between worlds -- the secular and religious, the contemplative and the party vibe, the reggae and the rock. (Here's an article about his new work, just to get you caught up.) Last night, the wings of the place were filled with Hasidic Jews who wanted to come to the show but were avoiding the dancing, and the tiny two-steps-up division served as a makeshift boundary for them. The crowd was all over the place -- I was skeptical that it would be mostly Orthodox Jews, and afraid that it would be mostly hippies, but most of the folks there were just regular people. Good-looking people, too, as opener Mike Doughty pointed out repeatedly in his set*.

The couple in front of us were these Asian-Australian cool-kid transplants who wouldn't have been out of place at the Yeasayer show down the street, which gave me hope that (a) the one-hit wonder thing isn't happening, and (b) his music really isn't as insular as my default listening position (jumping on the furniture around the house, payos bopping, shouting out Aramaic phrases at the top of my lungs) might give one reason to think. And when a hippie did finally pop up, it was onstage -- this dreadlocked kid going wild on a whole array of percussion instruments, doing intense and admirable things to a tambourine.

Which brings us to the music. The band started playing before Matisyahu came onstage, which in normal circumstances I always think of as an egotistical pretense -- the crowd raves, the band builds up, and the singer ascends to his place of glory. But when Matis came on, there was none of that -- it wasn't like he was ignoring it, but more like he was unaware that it was happening at all.

The band launched into "Sea to Sea," which I always used to call "the Amidah song" before I looked it up on Amazon twenty seconds ago -- it's the song that opens his live album, which is the band doing their low bass funk thing while Matis sings the Hebrew words that introduce the silent devotional. It was faster than the album version, and the band was putting in everything, and Matis was holding his own but not going crazy.

Turns out he was just building up.

From there they blasted through "Youth," which gave the crowd the requisite recognizable song before launching into the meat of the set. It leaped between hard, driving guitar rock and more chill, rhythm-propelled stuff. At times it didn't seem like songs so much as ideas, Matis and the band tossing freestyles at each other. At one point, he was alone on stage with Shalom Mor, an Israeli oud player who flew in especially for this series of concerts, and a harpist, and -- after nearly an hour spent beatboxing-free -- he dropped into a fast beat.

That was the pace of the entire show. Usually, you see a band play three songs, and, boom, you know what they're about. Here, every twenty minutes it was a completely different concert. I started to get bored during the first extended jam (although it might have just been annoyance with the cloying pot smell that suddenly sprang from half a dozen different places...damn Hasidim), and then the guitarist started plucking a pop song, the drummer jumped in, and Matisyahu started freestyling over it -- well, not exactly freestyling so much as an impromptu rendition of the liturgical song "Yibaneh Ha'Mikdash," which roughly translates to "building the Temple."

I think the best songs alive are cover songs. Maybe it's because they stick around forever; maybe because they're the songs that are so good that they're addictive. That is, I think, where prayers com from. They're essentially cover songs that we perform every day.

I couldn't tell you why, but "Yibaneh" is the moment I realized that I really love what Matisyahu is doing. I've never been that big a fan of reggae, and though I've warmed to Jewish music, I still mostly feel like Jews and I live in two different worlds: they don't get me, and I don't get them. But that moment when he was screaming out the words -- words that most of the crowd probably didn't understand, and even more of them weren't paying attention to the meaning of -- I felt like I was in the middle of his lyrics and like I understood. There's a midrash that says that the Third Temple isn't going to be built by the Messiah; that we're going to have to start building it ourselves. Not to be *too* cliche, but it seems like Matisyahu's doing exactly that.



___________
* -- who is an amazing musician in his own right, and has a huge archive of concerts on mp3 here. I might write about his set later, but we'll see.

A travelogue to Philadelphia rooftops

Briefly: I'm going to be performing tomorrow at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia! Opening for the retro-Catskills lounge comedy band Good for the Jews, and guest-starring Adam Brodsky.

Also: awesome new review of Losers:

Matthue Roth’s novel is about the character and the voice, and it rocks. It’s hilarious. It’s more than a little crazy, yet manages to ring true. There are universal life truths in here among Jupiter’s escapades, and you’ll find yourself rooting for Jupiter wholeheartedly. And the writing! Even funnier. Descriptive and gritty and captivating. Matthue Roth can write. I already loved his book Never Mind The Goldbergs, so I expected this to be awesome, and it was. It’s a coming of age story that also falls into the madcap adventure category occasionally, and the result is a lot of amusement minus brain rotting. This is a short novel that packs a lot of punch and will provoke a lot of muffled laughter. Highly recommended.

This one's been putting a mad grin on my face all weekend. As if my sixth-grade English teacher's Xmas party, in which I had beers with a bunch of my former junior-high school teachers and watched this guy (yes, it was late) dislocate his butt...I seriously wonder how I'll ever be able to say that New York is more exciting than Philadelphia.

And there is an amazing roof deck on their house, which looks out on the Schuylkill River and the Center City skyline and a Matrix-like ocean of other rooftops, and I'm already too far into writing the sequel to Losers to decide this, but somewhere in Jupiter Glazer's life, he is going to end up being chased atop this very rooftop deck.

I'm live!

My book is live! My new novel Losers just got a really nice writeup in Booklist. I'm not allowed to say what it says, but I can tell you it was pretty rocking (although they give away 2 pretty major spoilers, blegh.)

I'm live too! If you live in New York, come see me this Wednesday! I'm doing a free show at the New York Public Library, Jefferson Market branch (that's the big one in the West Village), Wednesday 10/29 at 6:00. I'll be reading from my new novel Losers, and possibly dropping some surprises. It's the night before Mischief Night, and I'm going to be spending the actual mischief night at a literary banquet in Philly, so this is going to be the night when I get it all out.

Not to mention the other readers. It's hosted by my editor, David Levithan, better known as the man who puts the words into the mouth of, uh:

Also appearing: Coe Booth (loved by the New York Times), Christopher Krovatin (adored by the band Deicide), Katie Finn (I met her at a picnic; she's cool) and other folks.

And, not to overload you, but G-dcast is live! This week, I'm the host -- go to G-dcast (remember the dash) to see it, or look below: