The Same Thing, Only Not

Here's the same exact interview I posted yesterday -- only, in Russian this time.

Мэтт: Да, безусловно - я считаю, что чудо здесь в безграничных средствах массовой информации . Возможность найти все, что угодно в любом виде. Опасность в Интернете, которая беспокоит родителей в том, что произойдет, если нажать на ошибочное Youtube видео и просмотреть порно? G-dcast - совершенная противоположность.

Thanks to Tanya, who is awesome -- and who started translating Losers into Russian. Now, what does Jupiter's name look like in Cyrillic??

20 (or 10, or 21) Questions

Brina, who runs the Young Adult New York website, has just posted one of the most intense interviews I've ever done. You'll see her format, and you'll be confused, and then it will all make sense -- she asks the author a question, and the author responds and then asks her a question, and it keeps going like that for twenty questions. So the interview's actually ten questions, I guess -- except that (a) both answering and asking reveal some surprising things about both of us, and (b) I manage to sneak an extra one in toward the end, as a precursor to my Sandman question.

Me: What are you working on now?

Matthue: I can’t get Jupiter out of my head, and even more the other characters [in Losers]. In one way Jupiter is about growing up with my best friend who just died, and then I wrote/am still writing this book about his death which is kind of about me and Anne Frank hanging out. … I don’t know if anyone will like it but me, but it’s my heart. I just took my heart out and stuck a bunch of knives in it and this is what I got.

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G-dcast: The Interview

CK from Jewlicious just posted an interview that he conducted with me and Sarah Lefton about this little website we made called G-dcast.

The wonder of this is that it’s such a mediumless medium. It’s anything you want it to be. The danger of the Internet that parents are worried about is, what happens if you click on the wrong Youtube video and watch porn? G-dcast is almost the opposite. It’s like, you see a cartoon, which you think is going to be funny and snarky and irreverent — which, hopefully, it is — and then it ends up being a little bit hopeful and inspiring.

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Speaking of which: New episode today! Courtesy of the Orthodox hip-hop M.C. Y-Love:

Hard Core Religion

The L.A. Times ran a piece a few days ago on Muslim punk-rock teenagers, which mostly served as an excuse to run a non-dairy-creamer story on how Muslim kids are wrestling with, and sticking to, the faith.

The story is told from the point of view of Hiba Siddiqui, a 17-year-old girl in Texas, who's in a rebellious spot (she's not praying 5 times a day or dressing in hijab), but still trying to make sense of her religion. Her room is a pastiche of Rumi books and Nylon magazines.

There are a lot of perfect moments in the story -- a girl quoting Muslim rapper T.I.P. in her speech for Muslim Student Association president; a quote from a song in a book, "Muhammad was a punk rocker and he rocked that town." Another girl confronts her mother with the amazing book The Taqwacores, a Muslim punk-rock novel by Michael Muhammad Knight (which actually kick-started a genre of music) that offers insights like the following:

I stopped trying to define Punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. . . . Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from the truth.

But the article's failure, in my opinion, is the same thing I encountered with (sorry, egotism) people writing about my Orthodox Jewish punk-rock book Never Mind the Goldbergs -- it's a lot easier to say "look! kids are rebellious! and still trying to be religious!" than it is to look at the intersection of the two and ask out why it's going on, or what it means. I mean, I'm a journalist too, and I know that the best stories are supposed to tell themselves, and the writer shouldn't let opinions creep in. Hiba sounds like a fascinating person, and I'd love to hear more of what she thinks of herself -- not just that she decided to friend Muhammad Knight and some taqwacore bands on Myspace.

YA New York: 20 Questions with Matthue Roth

This was actually a pretty cool interview.

Me: Can you tell us a little bit about Losers, the book, not the people?

Matthue: Basically, my first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was my kind of idealized fantasy of the person that I’d like to be, if the person I’d like to be was a seventeen-year-old girl. … Jupiter is everything that I was at seventeen, although more so: He’s totally socially awkward, has relationships that exist entirely in his head, and he lives in a factory.

Question Two

Matthue: What did your bedroom look like growing up?

Me: I moved a lot, so I had a lot of different bedrooms, but one thing stayed the same throughout, which is that I plastered my walls with photographs of my friends; since I only had two or three friends at a time, the same people would often appear in the pictures.

Question Three

Me: You didn’t live in a factory growing up, but you did live in Philadelphia. What was your childhood like?

Matthue: I always wanted to live in a factory. I actually really wanted to move into the basement, which was a big area that had a few couches and a lot of pillows and some seventies furniture that no one had used for years. I thought the wall would be filled with books and the floors would be filled with gigantic Lego sculptures. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid.

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Out of the Extraordinary

Today on Nextbook, I wrote an article about the brilliant Motown funk of the Israeli colony of Dimona, a Hasidic hip-hop duo with their own soul band, and Matisyahu's new opening act, who isn't Jewish (actually, he's from Somalia, currently residing in Toronto) but whose name, K'naan, sort of has a Biblical ring to it, and whose mind-bogglingly good song "In the Beginning" definitely does. Click here to download the track, or listen to a bunch of stuff and read the whole article:

Dimona is a small village in the Negev, half an hour south of Beersheva. It’s an incredibly small town, less than three square miles, and since it’s in the middle of the Israeli desert, it doesn’t get much in the way of tourists. Mostly, Dimona is known for two things: its nuclear power plant, and its community of Black Hebrews, a group of African-American émigrés who left Chicago, followed the revolutionary leader Marcus Garvey to Liberia, and ended up immigrating en-masse to Israel in the late 1960s.

The community is featured sporadically in Jewish newspapers, mostly as a wacky story about unconventional Israeli immigrants. The thing most reporters don’t usually write about, however, is the town of Dimona’s unlikely profusion of pop and soul singles in the 1970s.

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