G-dcast: Amish Beards Are Coming

Not to overwhelm you with posts this morning, but there's a new book of the Torah to talk about. Existentialism, bondage, and Amish beards...and that's just in the first minute.

Candy in Action: The Cover Story

Today on Melissa Walker's blog, she quizzes me about the cover of Candy in Action. Candy's publisher, Soft Skull Press, shared a bunch of the old cover versions and some of the original designs that inspired my editor Jody and I. If you've ever wanted a behind-the-scenes look at cover design, it doesn't get more behind-the-scenesy than this.

(And -- extra added bonus feature! -- here's the very first cover of Candy, which we talk about in the article, but which I stupidly couldn't convert into a normal file. But oh, do I have good powers of persuasion.)

"The moment that my publishers accepted the Candy in Action, I knew what the cover was going to look like. It wasn't even a matter of, what do I want it to look like. I just knew. It was going to be a sleek, glossy cover with black widescreen boxes at the top and bottom. Then the center was going to be a bright, vivid picture of the Los Angeles coast at night, taken from overhead--all neon lights and a million sparkling house parties--and then a black silhouette of a girl doing a kung-fu drop kick over it. That, uh, never happened.

"The publishers didn't ask for my input. I gave it to them anyway. My first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was with Scholastic. At most big publishing houses, if you're a first-time writer and you're really nice to them, you get to say 'no' once, and they might listen to you. I said no three times--I was a total diva. They were cool with it each time, though.

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You Should Have Seen His Bat Mitzvah

Here's the wonder that is Athens Boys Choir. The name is deceiving -- ABC is actually a hip-hop group of one, and that one happens to be a mild-mannered boy named Katz who was born a girl.

I first heard of ABC when I received his CD -- with possibly the most hilariously understated cover you can imagine -- to review for B*tch Magazine. His lyrics tend toward the risque, although he's frequently more playful than offensive (on his latest single, Fagette, he shouts out "girls with the chubby chubbs/and the boys who ain't got no butts")....but, the opposite of every hip-hop sensibility you've ever encountered, this is probably the tamest rap video ever.

It's a composite of videos from Katz's bat mitzvah.

Or, as the intro puts it: "In 2002 I came out as a man. But before I could do that, I had to become...a woman."

Thence follows some of the trippiest '80s retro Bar Mitzvah footage that the human brain can wrap itself around. It's a one-man pitch for the next book in the Bar Mitzvah Disco series.

What I love most about it: how it's so nice. And how even the requisite Jewish kitsch is sweet: ""Now my bubby wanted a doctor to marry me/You got two Ph.D.'s/one in fine and one in sexy!"

The Sway Machinery Cover the Torah

Jeremiah Lockwood, the venerable proprietor of the band The Sway Machinery -- a side project of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Antibalas, and Tom Waits's band -- blasts out, as warned, with the second G-dcast of the week.

It's abstract and moody and kind of the opposite of anything we've ever done. It's courteously animated by the fabulous Liesje Kraai, of They Might Be Giants movie fame. And it kidn of reminds me of that Dr. Seuss book that came out after his death, My Many Colored Days -- which, instead of trying to jive with Dr. Seuss's own style, skews radically against it, possibly even for the better. In any case -- my favorite G-dcasts are always the ones where I have nothing to do with the animation. This one, I've had the least to do with of all -- and, true to form, it's one of my favorites.

Jeremiah closes out the book of Leviticus, the third book of the Torah -- and I am so wildly exhausted and dizzy and I can't believe that we're more than halfway through this one year tour. And if you're up for a retrospective, here one is....

i found a tiny tiny baby bird

Itta: matthue!
can you help me for a sec?
i found a tiny tiny baby bird
and i need to find a number to call to speak to someone...
me: call 311
Itta: well, online it says to call wildlife and fish something
an agency
a gov agenc
me: (718) 482-4922
me: let me know if it doesn't work!
Itta: i'm on the phone to someone, thanks
Itta: it's dead
you'll see it when you get home, it's amazing
but sad
me: what happened?
Itta: i found it on the ground
and i didn't even know what it was
so tiny
so i bent down and looked closer
and it looks like alitle alien
so i put it in a bag
and brought it home
and looked online for what to do
i thought i saw it move
but it's dead
me: you did the best you could
you did good

Lag B'Omer: The Lag Blog, Pt. 2

aLast night: campfire was every bit as awesome as we wanted it to be, except the kids were asleep. This was probably better for all concerned, because Boruch and Itta were doing musical stuff, Karen was tending the fire, and I would have been grabbing all three of them by the scruffs of their collars and held them in the air and not let them walk anywhere because there were ticks and an open fire pit and I am pretty much the typified neurotic paranoid parent who never lets my daughter out of the house, except to stand in the sun for 10 minutes twice a week to get exactly her recommended dose of vitamin D. Yeah.



This morning: Taking the Monsey Bus back to the city. Monsey being the place that it is [thanx, Chaviva], I expected the bus to be packed with every sort of Hasid -- the roly-poly kind, the diamond kind, and the opens-three-hardcover-books-on-your-lap-at-once kind -- but found that, pleasantly, it was filled with every sort of Jew, like a mini-Israel crammed into the narrow borders of a Greyhound-type bus. Hot girls in tight pants with sunglasses bigger than the circumference of their faces. Yarmulke-less balding dudes with cell phones that look like Star Trek phasers. And, yes, the roly-poly Hasidim.

At one bus stop, there was nobody waiting except for two pint-size boys in identical white shirts and argyle vests, heads shaved except for their payos. They couldn't have been more than five and six, respectively. As the bus rolled to a stop, the driver joked to the person in the front seat, "You think they're going to 47th Street?" -- a wink and a nod to the street where all the Hasidic diamond merchants work.

The bus pulled over, and a passenger leaned out. "Where you headed, boys?" he asked, then repeated the question in Yiddish. "Monroe," they replied -- saying the word like it had never referred to a president of the United States, much less pronounced in English. They moaned the M through their noses, rolled the r, and hooted the o from the apex of their mouth, not the back, owl-like.

Next to me, two men talked about their respective kids, all of whom had gone to Meron the night before for the holiday. My traveling companions were both old, and both Orthodox, but, you know, casual Orthodox -- colored shirts, knit yarmulkes. Their kids had gone Hasidic, with twenty grandchildren each and wives in burqas, the whole deal. But they talked about them like rebellious teenagers. Their crazy bonfires, the crazy praying. It was pretty utterly awesome. It inspired me to crank up the Sonic Youth on my headset all the way, startling the hell out of the dude sitting next to me, who was learning Talmud out of three books at once.

We're taught that a plague killed off thousands of Rabbi Akiva's students because they did not treat one another respectfully. I feel like the massive party that happens in Israel every year -- and like, in some small way, my bus ride -- are all tikkunim, or healings, of that rift.

And the trip took under an hour -- less than the time from Brooklyn to here! If the bus ride is this exciting every morning, I think we may have a new neighborhood to consider.