Last night, the Orthodox Union called me in a frizzle -- they wanted to run an article on Inauguration. Did I have anything to say? Could I have anything to say?
I don't know how well-acquainted you are with me, but, uh, yeah. Throw me a party, and I will fill the house with ruminations on the Obamanation. I wrote about it once, in this book about chicken soup and Democrats, and I didn't think someone would be nice enough to ask for more. But here's what I said.
I have a friend, an underground playwright, who hates Obama. He's convinced that, six months after Inauguration, nobody's going to notice anything different from the past eight years of George W. Bush's administration -- we'll be paying just as many taxes, our troops will still be mired in war, and everything will be much the same. Nothing will have changed.
But he was one of the first Philadelphians in the poll booths.
Why? "Hope," he said. "The man's all about hope. He believes in something. It's a nice change from all the politicians who believe in nothing."
I should not be getting this excited over a cover, but please believe me, it is hard to contain myself and restrain myself from writing more. Today at work I received a huge box of somethings, which is usually computer parts or promotional keychains or some bizarre food product.
I am utterly fetishizing the cover, and I don't feel apologetic about it at all. Richard, my publisher, said that if I could get a new cover done, and it didn't cost them anything, they'd do it, and the comic artist Fred Chao pulled through amazingly. (His own Johnny Hiro: Half-Asian, All Hero is a remarkable book...and, as I keep pointing out, he tied with Joss Whedon for the most Eisner nominations this year, which in itself testifies to how much geek cred he should be going on right now.)
And, boom, we have this.
I love the split-screen cover. The quote from Melissa Walker on the front, if you can't read it, says "Part James Bond, part Bond girl, Candy is one unforgettable heroine!" And the rose bleeds across the spine and onto the back, which is great. The title font stretches off the cover, kind of that old-school Superman logo feeling, but in an understated way, like a natural evolution after the credits to "Smallville"...and just the sheer number of drawings that Fred uses (there's another one on the back of Candy looking badass with a hair dryer) is astounding. Especially in this world where most cover designers choose one picture from a clip-art file and paste it around the book a bunch of times....with the amount of Candys that Fred drew for the cover, he might as well have made a whole comic. Hey, there's still time.
The spine, though, is what really gives me shivers. The way that Candy in Action snakes down with little circles and blips is just crying out for another book to stand next to it. It's stirring up all these primal urges within me to write a sequel. And, dammit, I just might.
Have you ever worked on something for forever, fallen asleep with your head on the keyboard, and then realized that your nose had somehow hit the SEND button? It's half past noon on a Monday, the morning having long gone and evaporated, and I realized: holy crap, I wonder if there's a new G-dcast. Most of my work comes in the early stages -- working with the G-dcasters, writing scripts and talking through doubts and beliefs and names and dates, coordinating recording sessions. And then talking with the animators about what to draw. It's kind of like writing down a few lines of conversation, leaving it alone, and when you come back -- poof! -- somehow it's a comic book.
Or a cool little three-minute movie.
Here's Rabbi Katie Mizrahi talking about the Ten Plagues. And some really neat bulldozing frogs.
My editor, the ever-loving David Levithan, asks -- well, pretty much everyone who's ever sent him an email to pass on a list of the top ten albums of the year. This year, because it's the tenth time doing it, he's asked us to compile a list of the ten best of the past ten years.
I know I am damning myself to doom. I also know that it's 3:30 AM, I just spent five hours wrestling with medieval commentators on the Bible, and I'm not thinking clearly. (I just had to remember to delete two albums because they were actually books.) So, with that in mind, here are my almost-weigh-ins for this year and this decade. Please, if I've forgotten anything mercilessly important, let me know -- and a gadillion thank-yous to you Twitter and Facebook people who jogged and jagged my memory.
THIS YEAR
The Sway Machinery, self-titled Mirah, (a)spera Tender Forever, Wider Jeremy Jay, A Place Where We Could Go Y-Love, This Is Babylon Nine Inch Nails, The Slip The Roots, Rising Down TV On the Radio, Dear Science Northern State, Can I Keep This Pen?
TEN YEARS
Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs Amy Winehouse, Back to Black Regina Spektor, Begin to Hope Ani Difranco, Knuckle Down CocoRosie, La Maison de mon Reve OutKast, Love Below/Speakerboxxx Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose Kanye West, College Dropout Architecture in Helsinki, Fingers Crossed Liz Phair, Liz Phair (i know. i know. but it just keeps showing up.)
Back on Nextbook: Blanket Statementstein revolutionizes jam-band music for punks (not to mention synagogue fashion fause pas), Y-Love loves Obama, and Nosson Zand comes off tour with Matisyahu for his solo debut:
Blanket Statementstein is a band that shouldn’t work as well as it does. When you put 12 hippies on stage, you don’t expect them to play their instruments in sync, much less make actual music. Not even their name makes sense.
Collected on stage, the band resembles the kitchen of a Manhattan apartment during a particularly crowded party. But there must be some Nightmare Before Christmas-like magic that makes everything turn out perfectly at the last second. The violinist in the knee-high cowboy boots is perfectly in time with the drummer, for whom Animal the Muppet is probably not only a musical guide but a fashion icon.
Through it all, lead singer Ahron Moeller — who sometimes wears a junior high school gym uniform, and sometimes dresses as Alec from A Clockwork Orange — acts as a barely-in-control MC, introducing the numbers with random stream-of-consciousness thoughts as well as occasionally kicking a rhyme or a hip-hop verse.
Dmitriy Salita is a Ukranian-born, Brooklyn-raised boxer who, at the age of 26, has an undefeated record over 26 career bouts. He's also an observant Jew. A recent documentary, Orthodox Stance, has just been released on DVD -- it's available at regular DVD stores or at IndiePix, and it follows Salita over three years of his always chaotic and often inspiring career. MJL had a chance to speak to the director, Jason Hutt, who spent three years of his own life chasing after Salita on an unending junket of press conferences, training, and fights, punctuated only by the once-a-week time-out for Shabbat -- often spent in hotel rooms, where Salita's omnipresent "religious trainer" cooks him improvised dinners by cutting up vegetables on a George Foreman grill.
Where did you discover Dmitriy?
My parents live in the DC area and in September 2002 my mother clipped an extensive article on Dmitriy from the Washington Post. Because I had been a highly competitive Jewish athlete myself and had recently moved to Brooklyn, she thought I'd be interested in the article. It mentioned that Dmitriy was affiliated with a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Brooklyn, so I called the Chabad rabbi I knew from college and asked if he would contact Dmitriy's rabbi for me.
After reading the article and meeting Dmitriy, I was really interested in these diverse and wholly original characters and cultures—an elderly African-American trainer, a Hasidic rabbi, a Las Vegas boxing promoter—all intersecting at Dmitriy...as well as the diversity of Dmitriy's experience as a Russian immigrant, religious Jew and top boxing prospect.
I had no idea what the film would be like. I just knew I wanted to see how Dmitriy experiences these very different worlds, and one day share that experience with an audience.
It seems like there are three forces competing for prominence: Dmitriy's boxing, his Judaism, and his Russian identity. The third often gets lost between the first two, but there's still a huge Russian presence in the film--from Dmitriy's stoicism to that scene in the Russian synagogue where people say he's never going to find a wife. Was it hard to get in with the Russians?
I shot Dmitriy wherever he went but his family, except for his brother Michael, were definitely camera shy. You can actually see this in the film when Dmitriy’s father is interviewed by Russian television at the Times Square press conference. You can see and hear how nervous he is in the spotlight—literally and figuratively. So, while I wanted to shoot more with Dmitriy’s family, I had to respect their feelings so I didn’t push it. Of course, when the shooting was finished, Dmitriy told me that his father was finally feeling comfortable with being filmed!
Dmitriy is very much a Russian immigrant, but he’s been here since he was 9 years old. I think you’re right about his personality being very Russian but he grew up in Brooklyn, and when you grow up in New York—whether you’re white, black, Russian, Hispanic, Chinese, whatever—I think you kind of end up being interested in many of the same things, while maintaining your family’s culture and identity at home.
Because I had been a highly competitive Jewish athlete myself and had recently moved to Brooklyn, she thought I'd be interested in the article. It mentioned that Dmitriy was affiliated with a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Brooklyn, so I called the Chabad rabbi I knew from college and asked if he would contact Dmitriy's rabbi for me. 
