Orthodox and Undercover

So I kind of wrote an article about Losers, but it ended up being mostly about me. Go fig.

Six years after my first punk show (The Dead Milkmen, at the Trocadero, $6 if you were under 21) I showed up at a synagogue one Friday afternoon, wearing jeans that were ripped at the cuffs and the only sweater I owned. I stopped checking my email for 24 hours once a week, spent my Shabbos nights reading in the dark of my apartment's living room, and that was it. They say you're supposed to become Orthodox slowly, like wading into a cold pool. I jumped in over my head, and only started sinking deeper. Not that I was losing my individuality or anything—my t-shirts were still geeky and tight, I was still at the gay clubs and the punk-rock shows; I just made my Thursday nights longer and took the next night off.

I don't know what I could have been the poster child for, but I was the poster child for something. When all my other friends who wrote moved to New York, wrapped themselves tight into graduate writing courses, I moved to San Francisco and started teaching myself to write at open mics with a bunch of lesbians, all of whom I had crushes on, and none of whom would look my way. They were the best senseis of all. Michelle Tea, who had about as much in common with me as I had with a hamburger, told me to write about what I was obsessed with. She said to write about whatever I goddamn well wanted to write about.

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Is God a Person?

From today's emailbox:

When you think of G_d, do you think of an "entity" (I know it's not the right word, hopefully you get what I'm trying to say) with a distinct identity, or as a bit more "formless"? More like a being or more like a force or power?

I think of God as an entity. I know I'm anthropomorphizing, and in my head, I'm always correcting myself -- think of it as the equivalent of an English teacher who knows how to speak textbook Shakespearean English but goes home and speaks in Ebonics. Further, in our tradition, there are some times when it's okay to actively anthropomorphize God -- when we say that God took us out of Egypt with "an outstretched hand," for instance. When we say that during Passover, is anyone thinking that a giant hand came down from the sky and just scooped the Children of Israel out of the desert?

But there's an interesting midrash that asks the question, when the Torah says in Genesis that we were created in "God's image" -- what, it asks, is God's image? By God's very nature, there's no such thing as God's image. God doesn't look like anything. Or, on the other hand, God looks like absolutely everything.

But then there's another midrash that says that, yes, God does have hands -- as well as arms and toes and a nose (possibly a Jewish nose, possibly not). Humans really were created in God's image...only, God's image is the original. Our hands are the smallest, weakest representation in the physical world of the metaphysical image of an actual Hand of God. There's something called a hamsa in Jewish mysticism that's a representation of this hand...and it, like many other mystical amulets, is meant to remind us of that greater world.

There's a line in one of my poems that says that I learned to picture God as a girl with "long, long hair and a short, short skirt," which gets all the righteous folks a little bit nervous. But it's just what I was thinking -- that I can't talk to anyone with the candidness and the openness that I used when flirting. (Uh, I wrote it before the marriage-and-kids part of my life.) Because, in the half-nervous and half-say-anything immediacy of flirting, you're talking about anything you can to keep her interested, you're not worrying about censoring yourself or holding back and, in that immediacy, you lose the withholding-ness and only say true things...and that, I've always thought, is what prayer should be like.

Of course, once it makes its way to God's ears (again with the anthropomorphizing), God's no more a hot girl than God is an old dude with a beard. But it's somewhere to start from. Just like we can't thank God enough for every aspect of Creation (yeah, by the way, thanks for creating the wood planks on the floor solid enough so that I'm not falling through it...oh, look, I just moved to another part of the room; thanks for creating that part solid enough, too), there's no way to adequately envision God, physically or mentally or eschatologically or otherwise. And so, to thank God, we grasp a few words and hope it's enough. And in order to communicate with God, we reach out for whatever medium we can find, and hope that's enough, too.

i passed god a note..,

I turned to a blank sheet in my notebook. Very quietly, and very
delicately, I detached it from the spirals. I started to write a note.
And when it was done, I folded it up tight, sealed it with a tiny rip,
wrote God on the outside. I nudged the person in front of me, Consuela
Cortez, and gestured to her to pass it on.

She shook her head disbelievingly, but she passed it to the person in
front of her anyway. He glanced briefly at what was written on it,
then sent it to the person on his right, who then passed it forward
again. Before long, it reached a girl sitting in the front row—a girl
I'd never seen before in this class, but who was more familiar than
even my mother or father. When I turned away from her, I couldn't
describe her and I couldn't remember a thing about the way she looked,
except that she was beautiful.

Just so you know

4:42 a.m.: Phone rings. It's Berwin. He gets disconnected after 5 seconds. In the morning, I realize he called back twice after, at 4:43 and 4:44. I also realize my phone was shut off, and the vibrate is not working.

(Berwin, if you don't know, was my only friend to come to my wedding. We'd hung out 3 times in our lives before. He said, "Australia? Cool!" and then showed up a few months later. He also, btw, is a professional clothing designer, and did all the characters' wardrobes in Candy in Action.)

In the morning, he calls while I'm bathing Yalta. Tells me "I would like to commission some art" and that's all I can listen to before (a) the phone jolts out of my hand and into the water and (b) Yalta grabs the phone, which is her newest favorite food and (c) all three in tandem.

Later, he clears it up by telling me that he wants me to write a screenplay for him and proceeds to list three movies, one big political event, and two band names that are supposed to be the movie's substance. Uh, yeah. We're having an official meeting tonight at this rock show in Greenpoint. The band's name escapes me, but it sounded like someone I was supposed to know about but, of course, don't. I'll let you know details when I do...if, you know, I ever understand this kind of thing.

Swimming in Music

Okay, my new music column is up -- which discusses the infamous "Bart & the Hasidim" episode of "The Simpsons," among other things -- but, as a warning, I'm going to go on about the Sway Machinery again.

First, though, Pink Noise, the opening band. Because singing always sounds better in ESL, and nobody does English as a Second Language better than Israelis. And a screaming Israeli woman? You don't get better than this stuff. A four-piece band, Israeli-born, New York-based, when they climbed onstage, each one of them seemed like their own Israeli expatriate stereotype -- one guitarist was bald and buff; the other, Itamar from Balkan Beat Box, personable and shaggy like a dog; the drummer, tightly-composed and withdrawn; and the singer, whose hair was like a wild weeping willow tree and whose mouth could open wider than her head.

The first two songs were very sleepy, very cerebral, sounding kind of like Julee Cruise's backing band at the bar in Twin Peaks. And then, all of a sudden, the singer started playing heavy-metal riffs on her bass, and the rest of the band was trying to keep up, and she was yelling freaky war whoops into the microphone, adapting English words for the purposes of the song that sounded almost-correct-but-not-quite, like a love song called "Ailment." (At least, I think it was called "Ailment.")

They blasted through most of an hour's set in the same fashion -- a short, quiet song, and then they'd rock our heads off. And just when we were finished being surprised, they got off the stage and let the headliners on.

Just in case you missed my chat with singer/guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood around Rosh Hashana, when he performed (literally) a service to a sold-out audience of about 3000, the Sway Machinery is this project wherein Lockwood researches and resurrects old, sometimes obscure, often haunting and consistently mind-blowing cantorial melodies. And he performs like a man possessed, moving in jerky, premeditated, swaying movements, as though he's only partially in charge of what his body's doing.

But last night was a whole new level of possessed-ness. I've never seen him in action with a full brass section before, and it makes such a difference. It seems like it should be lopsided -- a band with a guitar, a drummer, and three horns -- but they don't sound that way at all, like a gospel choir with a ton of voices and just an organ. Jeremiah's voice and the brass makes an excellent call-and-response, and lest you've never heard nigun, you can see the immense power of a wordless melody belted out with little else but the sheer power of religious devotion.

And, if Jeremiah and co. don't happen to be touring near you, you can run to their music page to learn more...or, of course, there's this website with surprisingly good resources on niguns.

Space Time Continuum

In my new Nextbook column, I rave about the Hasidic POWER ROCK band Yood, the Middle Eastern dance-pop band Electro Morocco, and ZZ Top shout-outs on The Simpsons:

There’s a strange phenomenon among people who become Orthodox—they seem to enter a time warp. Their clothes, their colloquialisms, even their musical choices become frozen in a single moment, like Rip Van Winkle or Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Every time they talk about bands or movies or commercial jingles, they're back at the moment they stepped into their proverbial DeLorean.

Eliezer Blumen is one of those people. He’s been living as a Hasidic Jew for the past twenty years, and to the casual eye he’s a standard-issue Hasid: white shirt, bushy beard, well-worn hat. The trademark vest he wears (more Montana mountain man than Boro Park shtetl-fabulous) hints at something less ordinary, but it’s barely noticeable—lots of Hasidim have their dress quirks, a bright-colored scarf or the occasional pair of rainbow-striped socks.

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