I Snuggle Up Close to Regina Spektor's "Far"

This is the best birthday present I've gotten all year.

Regina Spektor's third proper album, Far, is like that cynical older cousin who you love to sit next to at family functions. Totally funny, mostly good-natured, and both angry and delicious -- angrilicious? -- like the kind of person who says all the things you want to say but don't.

And -- uh -- says them all in cute, random metaphors and rhyming couplets and sweet, sweet melodies.

After the meandering intro of "The Calculation" -- a good, mid-tempo, semi-funked-out song about relationships, technology, and emotional indifference -- we get a virtual onslaught of Regina with the instant hookiness, smileyness, and spine-tingling anticipation of the piano chords that lead into "Eet."

The song might be named for its homonym, or it might be the way Spektor writes down her own whimsical non-word singing on paper. Then, when the drums come in -- "You spend half of your life/trying to fall behind/using your headphones to drown out your mind" -- the song becomes simultaneously triumphant and snarky. And it's especially victorious when you consider it's a song about hipster kids who are so preoccupied with looking cool that they forget how to dance. (That's what I think it's about, anyway.) Really, it's a self-defeating argument -- by the time you're done analyzing, you're hopping up and down in your desk chair, anyway.

A few weeks ago, I posted from Regina Spektor's new video, "Laughing With." It's been seized upon and passed around a fair bit among the bloggy folks, but I don't think any of us have really given as much credence to the lyrics as they deserve.

No one laughs at God
When the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
When it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from the party yet

So freakin' true. And yet, if this wasn't being sung within the context of an MTV video with cool effects and a Harry Potter-like Cloak of Invisibility, we'd probably freak out and call the writer a zealot or a fundamentalist.

But Spektor always likes to close her songs abruptly, which drove me crazy when "Better" was on the radio, or when I listened to her songs out of sequence on my iPod's Party Shuffle (which, btw, I love saying, because I never actually use shuffle at parties, but I always feel like being at a party when I'm walking down the street and I select that option) -- but which, taken on its own, is both wise and satisfying. The closing line of "Laughing With," which fades out together with the song -- "No one’s laughing at God/We’re all laughing with God" -- is kind of the perfect paradigm of this. It's winking at the listener and pulling the rug out from under our feet at the same time.

"Two Birds" is the natural offset to "Laughing With," a parable about two birds that don't trust each other. The chorus, "I'll believe it all/There's nothing I won't understand/I'll believe it all/I won't let go of your hand," speaks to our natural tendency to distrust each other, to get cold and clam up and retreat into our own little worlds.

To one extent or another, artists are all recluses. We hate other people. We distrust them and fear them and don't want to trust our ideas with them, preferring instead to remain in our own little universes that we draw and write around ourselves. Again, witness the "Laughing With" video...or just try to talk to me while I'm writing in my notebook. And then, on the other side of the spectrum, we're trying more than anything to understand the way people work, and get inside their heads, and to create a song or a story that's bigger than ourselves.

I think what I love most about Regina Spektor is that she really gets both of these things. And both of them, she does so well.

Secret Muppet Vineyard

Our awesome filmmaker friend Sonja Kroop and her puppet Krumpet just entered a contest to get a 6-month gig as the social networking director of a wine factory. If she wins, she gets to live on a vineyard for six months -- plus, she is insanely talented as a director. To vote for her video, go to the Murphy-Goode Wine site and vote for it. (You have to give your email to confirm, but that's the only thing they use it for.) Or just watch it here -- and, yes, I'm pretty sure the only reason she made that Manischewitz joke is so I'd post it:

G-dcast: Good Rebellion & Bad Rebellion

This week's G-dcast makes me really happy. Not the idea of Korach rebelling, or the whole thing where the earth itself swallows up 250 people...I just think it looks really cool. And I wrote the curriculum to be all about good rebelling vs. bad rebelling.

Or, like axiom I once heard: In other religions, if you question authority, they call you a heretic. In Judaism, if you question authority, they call you a rabbi.

The Poison Eaters by Holly Black

I wasn't going to blog about this for another few months, since it's not going on sale until February, but Holly Black's new book The Poison Eaters has had me on the edge of my chair since the subway ride to work 3 hours ago, and it keeps pulsing in my head like a vein about to aneurysm -- it's that mercilessly good. The first story, "The Coldest Girl in Coldtowm," is kind of about vampires, but they're more like zombies. They're bloodthirsty, teeth-baring, flesh-chomping...which is actually what vampires used to be like, back in the Old World.

I almost always hate short stories. Short stories that are plot-based ignore the main character. Short stories that are character-based are almost exclusively the domain of characters stumbling around in search of a plot. Here, character and plot are suffused, and there's a hyperactive emotional terseness that creeps up on you and freezes you in place. This happens the exact moment that we learn the truth about vampirism in this world -- it's transmitted by blood, but it doesn't take hold of its victim until she tastes blood herself:

It took eighty-eight days for the venom to sweat out a person's pores. She only had thirty-seven to go. Thirty-seven days to stay so drunk that she could ignore the buzz in her head that made her want to bite, rend, devour.

Aaah. In the first three pages, our perception of the main character switches from a slut to lovesick to cold, calculating, a kind of teen goth-girl Artful Dodger in fishnets. And that's just the setup. The execution is...well, an execution.

Can I tell you how much I can't wait to finish the rest of this book?

There. I just did. February be damned.

Losers: A Critical Analysis

The new PresenTense magazine is out, and with it is a review of Losers that's more like a critical analysis. I didn't know this was going to happen until it showed up on my doorstep, and now I feel gleeful in the way, I guess, that authors do when people read way more into a book than you ever thought you were writing into it:

It is easy to empathize with Jupiter, the awkwardly-named main character of the novel who struggles through adolescence. Jupiter—who immigrated to Philadelphia with his family as part of the Jewish mass exodus from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—is concerned with his ever-present Russian accent, preoccupied with the opposite sex, and keen on hiding the fact that he lives in a working-class neighborhood.

The book starts with the seemingly innocuous line, “I lost my accent over a long weekend in ninth grade.” For Jupiter, the question of language is central to his self-perception, where the key to being popular is speaking proper English. Despite his best efforts—and some success —in “sounding American,” he nonetheless faces barriers in his quest to fit in. Indeed, Jupiter’s attitudes toward the spoken word formulate one of the more poignant themes in the novel.

(read more)

Press Release: Michael Muhammad Knight & Matthue Roth: Live in NYC

Just finished doing up the press release for my and Michael Muhammad Knight's reading at the 92Y Tribeca. If you know anywhere that might want to write about this, then please let me know!

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Michael Muhammad Knight, author of the Muslim punk novel The Taqwacores, and Matthue Roth, author of the Orthodox Jewish punk novel Never Mind the Goldbergs and the memoir Yom Kippur a Go-Go, will read together at the 92Y Tribeca on July 8.

This event, the first of its kind, will feature both authors onstage individually and together, reading from their work and talking about what it means to be religious, and what it means to be punk. The film version of The Taqwacores (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html) will be released later this year.

Michael Muhammad Knight & Matthue Roth
92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson St.
July 8, 2009
7:00 PM
free!