Behind the Scenes at B&H Photo

We're huge fans of B&H Photo and Video, the famous camera shop run by Hasidic Jews in the center of Manhattan -- one of the best shops in the industry, frequented by photo nuts and Hollywood camerapeople. And today, this news is hitting the web: Somebody purchased a used camera there with a used memory card. On the card was a roll of photos taken behind the scenes of a friendly -- but notoriously publicity-shy -- operation.

Linhberg, who bought the camera, posted the photos on his blog. His site seems to be running slow, so here are a few, courtesy of PetaPixel, who reposted them:







We speculate that it might be part of a covert campaign for the new reboot of the science-fiction series Little Fuzzy, which has also included ukulele love songs and stuffed animals. Because, well, Hasidim are little and fuzzy.

Reading Blind

So that reading I did at Freerange with Michael Showalter last week...

(It actually wasn't only Michael Showalter. I should stop saying that. Koren Zalickas and Alison Espach were there, too, and they were both great. Koren has 2-year-old and is about 25 months pregnant and holds herself in from cursing all day. She read from this nonfiction book she wrote, and she channeled herself amazingly -- she just let the cusses fly. I think everyone needs to get a little unhinged and childlike at times. I used to do that with performing, but now I mostly just jump on the bed with my kids, during those times when I don't have to be the responsible one.)

But. Michael Showalter was there, too, and it was great. I started off. I was the first reader in the series, and I might have been the first reader ever in the club -- it was Freerange's debut show in the space -- and I didn't think to check how much lighting there was. And there was none. The awesome Daniel Zana shot footage, and I don't sound nearly as bad as I imagined, but there's still a bunch of me squinting at the paper and wondering What language is this written in?. More than my regular reading, I assure you.






And Daniel, by the way, is the director of the amazing movie The Vinyl Frontier, which is premiering in a few weeks in New York:




Some people stopped me in a bar afterward to say that I was great, and that did tons for my ego. (Thank you, people in bar.) Although I still cringe. Bomb just wrote a great write-up of the night in which they said that this was my first time reading nonfiction since 6th grade. It wasn't -- I mean, I did a speaking tour for my memoir, which I haven't read from since -- although I might have said that on the mic? Oops. Sorry about that. But thank you for coming. No, I mean it. Thank YOU.

L Magazine, Michael Showalter, and Surviving Memoirs

If you're click-happy, there's a new interview with me in The L Magazine today. It's mostly about my memoir but  there's some good stuff about the 1/20 movie, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the perils of writing about yourself and your dating life before you're dead (and before you've quite stopped dating).

Have you ever written anything that you'd like to take back?
I always sort of wish I could rewrite the past. That’s why I write memoirs. It’s a whole process of saying something and then regretting it and getting embarrassed and then thinking, wow, I’m glad I got that out so I never have to think about it again. And then you do readings, and then it’s a whole new world of embarrassment.

This is all, I should say, in preparation for my reading tomorrow night in NYC. It's at 7:00 at Pianos, 158 Ludlow St., and here is the cast:

-MICHAEL SHOWALTER, comedian, actor, writer, director and author of the most recent Mr. Funny Pants (Grand Central, 2011). http://www.michaelshowalter.net/
-MATTHUE ROTH, author of the memoir Yom Kippur a Go-Go, the novel Losers, and the feature film 1/20 (currently in post-production). As a slam poet, he's filmed for HBO and MTV. He lives with his family in Brooklyn and keeps a secret diary at www.matthue.com 

-ALISON ESPACH, author of the most-recent, critically acclaimed debut novel The Adults (Scribner, February 2011). http://www.alisonespach.com/
-KOREN ZAILCKAS, author of the internationally best-selling and socially-charged memoir Smashed (Penguin, 2005) and its follow up Fury (Viking Adult, September 2010). http://korenzailckas.com/

-Hosted by Founder & Executive Director of Freerange Nonfiction MIRA PTACIN (www.miraptacin.com) 

See you there?

Liveblogging Passover

The holiday of Passover starts at sunset tonight, right? Not really. In our household, Passover started about a month ago -- due partly to the fact that my wife is crazy & obsessive, and partly to the Hasidic idea that you're supposed to start cleansing the specks of hametz out of your life, both physically and spiritually, thirty days before the holiday starts.

But 24 hours before Passover is when it starts to kick in hardcore.

Come back all day. I'll be doing my regular MJL day-job from home, but I'll also be updating with all sorts of crazy stuff that's going on in my house, in the neighborhood, and in the spiritual realms (I think).

6:30 A.M. My alarm goes off. Tonight the holiday really starts, but today is the Fast of the First-Born. As the designated first-born son, that means that I've got to get my butt in action and get to synagogue. Or I could sleep 5 more minutes.

6:45 AM. Yes, I am still in bed.

The reason I have to get to synagogue, today of all days, is in order to participate in a siyum, or the completion of a study of a book of Talmud. In Jewish tradition, certain fasts can be alleviated if there's a reason to have a party. The easiest and most dependable reason to have a party is when someone finishes studying something significant (most commonly, Talmud). If I don't make it, then I will not eat anything until the seder tonight, when I drink 4 cups of wine -- 2 of them before any food is consumed.

Which could make the seder a totally different and wacky experience.

But it also could mean I'd put the pass out in Passover.

6:50 AM. OK, OK. I am going to synagogue. But I really should get dressed first.

8:15 AM. Prayed fast, prayed hard. I called the rabbi last night to ask if there was a siyum at synagogue. He said there was, and also, there was an article about me in last week's Forward. Which I did not know, and is also an awkward thing to hear -- especially when the first sentence that struggles to get out of my mouth is, Do you know anything embarrassing about me now? Yes, I live a weird life. Here's the rabbi finishing his Talmud volume:

He tells us a bunch of stuff about what time to bring sacrifices to the Temple. And he tells us: When we think about the Talmud, the Talmud thinks about us. It sounds inspiring enough for me to tweet it. Under his breath, a man next to me whispers, "I don't want to know what the Talmud thinks about me." And now we can eat!

Somebody brought schmaltz herring, macaroons, and Slivovice. (I pass on the herring.) I also get asked if we have any room at our seder. Our seder has ballooned from 8 people to 15, but I say I'll ask Itta what she thinks. Remind me to do that.

9:15 AM. I run down the street and dump our last chametz trash bags in the public dumpster. On the way back, I see our neighbors, sitting on deck chairs and eating bagels on the porch.

The father waves me over. "You want one?" he says.

I am chametzed out. I am still stuffed from last night, when we had unbelievable vegan heroes at Sacred Chow and I ate enough seitan and legumes and stuff to keep me protein-ified for 14 days of Passover. (Not that being a vegetarian on Passover is hard, but still.) One other thing: They are wearing rubber gloves while they eat. I could make fun of them, but I'm sure they have plenty of things to make fun of me right back. Really, it's just awesome that they care that much.

9:55 AM. There goes the last of our chametz.

10:17 AM. OK, folks. In the general New York area, the last time for eating chametz is T minus zero minutes. (I'm not exactly sure the reason in Jewish law, but I always suspected it was to have enough time to...uh, get rid of it. Gastrointestinally.)

Goodbye, bread. It's been lovely to know ya. Next up: We burn the last remains of chametz! With fire!

11:01 AM. Today's Jewniverse is out! Yes, I am actually working, too. I added a last-minute link for this awesome handy handout about how to set your seder plate which we released together with Moishe House and Birthright, and which I really wish I'd printed out when I was near a printer that understood what my computer was saying. In other words: You should print this out and have it near your seder plate. And I will wish I was you.

12:05 PM. So, guess what I smell like right now?

1:40 PM. After that particularly inspired bit of pyromania (and, by "inspired," I mean "inspired by Beavis and Butt-head"), I sat down to focus on work for a bit. In my new hametz-free lifestyle, it's harder to concentrate, since I'm used to chewing with one hand and typing with the other two. Maybe it's that I need my mouth to be moving, whether I'm talking or writing? I don't know.

In any case, burning the hametz was fun. My older daughter kept running close to the trash can (I love, love, our Oscar the Grouch-inspired trash can, by the way), peeking in, and then running away, while the baby squashed matzah into the grass a safe distance away. We didn't need much tinder (just a paper egg carton). Then again, we didn't have much hametz -- just the traditional 10 pieces of bread that we hid around the house last night, wrapped in old newspaper.

Those big scratchy sticks you see are our lulavs from Sukkot. There's a tradition that you save the lulav to burn today, along with all your hametz. They burned pretty quickly, and let out a smell like sage, which was a nice contrast to that smoky, lung-clogging malodorous odor that you'd expect. (We save our etrogim, by the way. They dry out nicely, and they look sort of like the etrog equivalent of dried flowers.)

The fire went up pretty quick and died out pretty quick. And, in a puff, that was that. No more hametz in the house. No more hametz in my body. It actually felt pretty cleansing. Now we're in Passover-land for real.

And then -- yes, bosses -- I got back to work.

Jupiter Is Back (or, A New Book! Sort Of)

I'm publishing a new book! Well, in a way. Here. First, check out the new teaser site for Enemies:

Ready? OK. So here's the story.

Last year, an editor named Liz Miles asked me if I'd ever written any stories that were a little funny and a little edgy. Hey, I said, I do edgy for a living.

A few months before, my awesome agent-at-the-time, Suzie Townsend, had sent around my manuscript for Enemies. It wasn't a direct sequel to Losers, my last book, but it had the same lovable Russian hacker/geek/girl-anti-magnet, Jupiter Glazer. She'd tried to sell it with remarkably little success. Most publishers were reticent. The few candid ones told a remarkably depressing story: They weren't buying books for teenage boys. Most Young Adult (marketspeak for "teen") fiction was selling to girls. Guys were either buying adult books, or they weren't buying anything.

I took a chance. I sent Liz the first chapter. She liked it.

And now it's the first story in her new anthology, Truth & Dare, which is coming out next month in the US (but which is available on Amazon now!) and also in the UK with a much bubblier Britpop cover.

  
butwaitthere'smore...
So that's just the beginning. Chapter 2 is going to be published in Apiary this spring. And the other chapters are going to be pouring out, bit by bit -- five chapters are in upcoming anthologies. One is already out. It's sort of like a scavenger hunt, except that we're all on the same page.
Thanks for reading this! And, hey, thanks for paying attention to Jupiter and to me in the first place. You rock the rock.
(And one more thing: if this isn't too desperate a plea, please like the Enemies page on Facebook! And send the page around to everyone you know! It's pretty easy, http://bit.ly/heyjupiter. I know it's ridiculous to hope that, if a million people click "like," then Scholastic or someone will publish it. But I'm a ridiculously hopeful person.)

Downtown Seder

Last night was a culmination of good fortune, good luck, and -- as always -- my wife running late. The good fortune came in the shape of a dinner invite on the night after we finished cleaning our kitchen for Passover. The good luck was our good friends Miriam and Alan from the band Stereo Sinai inviting us to the Downtown Seder. And the running late ... well, we just won't go there.

The Downtown Seder is a creation of Michael Dorf, half postmodern religious ritual and half cabaret. Rock stars and stand-up comedians and various random famous people are each assigned one step of the seder. And then it's you in a room with bands like Stereo Sinai, comedians like Rachel Feinstein (who was on Last Comic Standing with our boy Myq Kaplan), half-band-half-comedians like Good for the Jews, and Dr. Ruth. Yes, I said Dr. Ruth.

DID YOU HEAR ME? DR. RUTH WAS AT MY SEDER.

(Yes, she's that short pink dot in the picture. We weren't sitting that far, but she is short, 4'7". My Holocaust-survivor grandfather who's 4'11" looks down at her.*)

And she read the Four Questions, too. Granted, she was not the youngest one in the room (she'll be 83 years old on June 4) but she did it, and she did it up. Backed on a bluegrass guitar by C Lanzbom, she sang the first question solo, and then instructed the audience to accompany her. "If you sing with me," she said in that undeniably adorable German accent, "I promise that you will have good sex for all the days of your life." And if we don't? "Remember," she told us, "I used to be a sniper in the Haganah."

Did I sing? You'd better believe I sang.

A few of the guests were esoteric. Others were total crowd-pleasers. Here's Stereo Sinai, courtesy of my cheapo camera-phone:

Their take on the Son Who Doesn't Know How to Ask a Question was one of only two all-out dance numbers (the other being, of course, Joshua Nelson and the Kosher Gospel Choir) -- but each act was so well-thought-out and cool and unusual that I kept wanting to call someone and let them listen. I'm not a bootleggy type of person, but I wish I had a bootleg of last night. I kept wanting to write things down. I kept wanting to remember them. Joshua Foer* summed it up: "Our tradition demands not just that we eat matzah, but that we interact with it and explain it." Or, to paraphrase Faulkner: Not only is the past not dead, it isn't even past.

Because we're Hasidic and don't get out much, this is probably the closest I'll ever come to a non-religious seder. Boxes of Manischewitz matzah on the table. Behind us, Rachel Feinstein was getting down with woman in a severe Florida-retirement hat decked with flowers. The singer of Good for the Jews was wearing a ruffled tuxedo shirt.

Yes, it was bizarre having a seder a week before Passover starts. It was bizarre having matzah on the table in Manischewitz boxes instead of knitted sleeves, and celebrating with two hundred people I'd never met. It might have been a celebration of freedom, but it was also a celebration of getting down.
_______________
* - Who also referred to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, as "the great cognitive scientist," which probably nobody else cared about but which absolutely made my night.