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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Post-Open Mic Post

exhausted. shrilled. my body feels like a piece of wood that's been left in the sun too long....

but so exhilarated. josh was profound and michael was hilarious and elana's cover of "samson" was beautiful and elisa albert's reading was searing and brilliant and jeremiah kicked me in the ass and made me realize, i need to pray more. and harder. and like my life depended on it, because it does.

plus, dvora said that she'd breakdance next time. (i know, officially it's just breaking.) and there's actually going to be a next time. i'm excited.

Saturday in Philly!

The wonderful Alex DiFiori made a great poster for the Saturday show. Go here to see the original graphic, print out a zillion copies of them, and give them to all your friends (or at least to Dr. Pavel, the president of Central High School at Ogontz & Olney Aves. -- see if it makes his eyebrows shoot off his face). I love the graphite-pencil look. Old school, like when people did tests in No. 2 pencil (and hell yes, I still write my books longhand).

Word Jam. Music Jam. Gooseberry Jam.

Tonight at the 92Y Tribeca, I'm hosting the (hopefully first) open mic! Jeremiah Lockwood of The Sway Machinery is playing a set, and Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia, will be reading. A few months ago, it was one of those Shabboses where I'd ODed on writing, and now that I couldn't write anymore, I just wanted to read manically. So I took Elisa's new book, which I'd been wanting to read for a while (her first collection made me actually like Philip Roth, a feat which I'd deemed impossible), and started reading.

And I didn't stop.

The sun was coming up, which seemed particularly noteworthy considering the novel's content. It's a funny, wry, more-wise-than-it-seems look at a girl who finds out she's dying. It's not at all what you'd expect, which is odd to say, considering we basically have every expectation in the world loaded up in our heads when it comes to dying. But the agony of going out to eat with your parents after a brain scan, and the sort of perverse joy in ordering the most expensive thing on the menu, is one of those tiny details that is meaningful and beautiful and terrible all at once -- and that's exactly what you'll find from her.

Sign up for the open mic at 7:30, and have a quick drink with me. Show begins at 8:00 promptly.

Also, the director's-cut commentary to Chapter Four of Losers is up! Read about stealing lines from hip-hop songs, gay teenage bartenders, best friends dying on you, censorship in Candy in Action, and featuring a special music video courtesy of Ludacris.

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.

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