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.

1/20 at the Guadalajara Film Festival (photos!)

This week was the Guadalajara International Film Festival, and 1/20, the film I wrote, was an official entrant. Guadalajara is basically the Sundance of Latin America. It's a clearinghouse for everything artistic, political, and a combination of the two, which 1/20 ended up being. Gerardo, the director, is from Mexico, and this was his triumphant return, riding into town on the back of a donkey and all that.

They assailed me with stories of champion drinking and famous-people elbow-rubbing and guerrilla advertising. I started complaining that they left me behind. They reminded me that they had lots of important business meetings, too, which I would have either been too scared to walk into in the first place or vomited with nervousness as soon as they began. "This is why you write the stories," they said. So I settled into my bed and felt better about myself.

Yeah, guerrilla advertising. There were 2,000 films showing in Guadalajara, and exactly one film hung any sort of posters. Sometimes they were minimalist and subtle:

And sometimes they were not.

I think my mind is officially blown, just thinking of my name in another language hanging on a poster on a wall in another country. Once, an anthology I was in got translated into Turkish, and it was so cool, seeing a few words I recognized ("challah," for one) interspersed with entire sentences that I didn't recognize at all, but that I wrote. At least this time, they didn't have to translate the title.

Here's Berwin, the producer, with Damián Alcázar, who's one of Mexico's most famous actors. I don't recognize him, mainly because I basically don't know any actors who weren't on an episode of Doctor Who (ask my coworkers if you don't believe me), but he's in The Chronicles of Narnia and some Gabriel Garcia Marquez film adaptations, which is sort of the dictionary definition of awesome.

And here is an award of some sort, I think.

Or maybe it's a statue? At least there isn't food on the tables behind. Then I'd really be jealous.

Kid Crying Isn’t Real Crying

The morning started out good. First, I woke up at 7:30. Miracle! The kids went to bed late, and then my baby mama and I stayed up late, and I was sure I was going to be zombieied today. No such luck. I soundly ignored my vibrator-but-not-the-good-kind of an alarm clock, heard the baby singing in her cot, and jumped up to get her. Five minutes later, she was soundly clamped on a maternal boob*, the 3-year-old was clamoring awake, and I was simultaneously packing lunch, getting dressed, getting her dressed, and trying to say the morning prayers.

Our older kid is an impossible dresser. First of all, she has a new favorite color every day, and she will only wear that color. Secondly, she has of late developed an aversion to wearing anything below her waist. Also, she is militantly against eating anything until two minutes before she has to leave.

So you can imagine my surprise when she sprints straight for her clothes drawer. She hands me a shirt (weather-appropriate!) and pants (that match!), and patiently waits for me to tie her shoes. I slam down my upstairs prayerbook — I’m up to the point where I need to put on a tallis and tefilin, and that is downstairs — and yell back over my shoulder to her, “Come on! I’ll make you breakfast or you can play with your toys or whatever!” I touch ground at the first floor. Whereupon I hear her voice over my shoulder, wafting down from the second story: “CARRY ME!”

Dude.

Could you not have asked me thirty seconds ago? That’s thirty seconds, one flight of stairs climbed, that I’ll never get back.  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Just walk down yourself.” After all, she’s been climbing stairs for years. She’s a stairmaster.

And the mouth flies open. And the crying starts.

I don’t know if you know about kid-crying. It’s not like grownup crying (or even like teen-angst crying, which I am way more used to). It’s a combination guttural yell, swallow, choke, and burp. It’s totally tear-less, at first. In fact, behavioral scientists in my imagination have hypothesized that kid-crying is genetically related to crocodile crying, which is to say, it’s not actually sadness-related or pain-related at all, but is instead a technique specifically designed to lure in sympathetic victims until they’re in biting distance.

Actually, I think kid-crying brings on real crying if you do it long enough, thus preparing your child for a bright future as a stage actor with the rare talent to cry on command, or possibly as a manipulative future ex-girlfriend to someone exactly like yourself. Did I say that aloud? Okay, moving on.

I tell her, come on, it’s fine, I can make you breakfast if you want, and we have those new organic Puffins that actually taste good and that you love. The onslaught continues. I ignore her. My day-job beckons, after all. Not to mention G-d. So I wrap myself up in tefilin, grab my downstairs prayerbook, and start prayin’ like there’s no tomorrow.

She keeps crying.

There is a thump. A rhythmic thump upstairs, of clumsy wheels guided by clumsy feet. “What that?” my older daughter demands, and I can hear my wife explaining that the baby just got a walker.

“I want a walker too!” That sentence doesn’t actually end, per se, so much as the too fading into another wail.

And then a pause. “You got the baby a present and if you got the baby a present than you will get me a present too,” she says — and you’ll notice, of course, that there is no breath in between the crying and the talking, no wiping away of tears or swallowing of mucous that comes with real crying; it’s been crocodile yells this whole time — “What present did you get me, Mama?”

Alright, there’s no getting out of this. None of that parenting-book stuff we try to adhere to, where you try not to connect the presents with the temper tantrums, either as a reward or as a punishment. A tantrum is a tantrum, and both work and preschool are calling. In a few minutes, she will trundle down the stairs, on her own, and show me her brand-new baby hammock.

But for now, I close my eyes. I pray. Not drowning out the chaos of our morning, but becoming one more voice in the chorus of it.
_____
* — Yes, she’s still breastfeeding, although we have to supplement. Read here if you’re not yet entirely sick of the whole boob-sucking debacle.

Young Adult Author Plot

The Teen Author Festival was last week, and Scholastic held a big reception for all its local and visiting authors. Which basically meant getting a bunch of us in a room and standing back while we plot together and come up with ways to take over the world.

You think I'm joking?

That was part of a little project that the Scholastic online folks had us do, during a break in signing and scarfing down pizza and orange soda (no pizza for me, since it wasn't kosher, which meant twice as much orange soda). They started a sentence and asked us to finish writing it. Here's what we all said:

While I waited my turn, I searched frantically to make whatever I wrote especially relevant to Losers. As a way of promoting my book? Well, yeah, sorta, because I'm so bad at that. Not sure it actually came across. I'm also not sure, in retrospect, that was the best thing for the stereotypical-looking Jew to write. But, hey, I drew a dinosaur too.

San Francisco in 6 Hours

I was in Ashland, at the Oregon Shakespeare Theatre, near where they filmed The Goonies and Short Circuit. Their airport only had one gate. The plane wasn't taking off. To be precise: It was leaving 1 hour late, which means my connecting flight would be 4 hours late. I would get into NYC at 1:30 AM and have to get home from there. I asked the flight attendant: Could I take a red-eye, stay in San Francisco for the day, and land at 7?

She gave me permission.

Heshy picked me up from the airport. We only had an hour before he left for work, so we did everything fast, even the used bookstores. He found a used copy of Yom Kippur a Go-Go, which somebody'd written a really sweet and meaningful dedication inside. I took a picture, but I'm not sure if it's kosher to share it, or if that would be too invasive.

Luckily, there was a ton of graffiti to distract us.

And some of the more boring variety:

But that's also the church I lived across the street from when I first moved to town.

In high school, I wrote stories about how my friend Adam was going to be a computer engineer and change the universe. And then it happened. I waited for him in this communist coffee shop while I wrote a picture book. I'm not just being conservative, it really was a communist coffee shop.

Then Adam picked me up and drove me around Bernal Heights. I think I spent more time in cars that day than I did in 5 years of living in San Francisco. He dropped me off at the rabbi's, and then I took a look at the new digs. I took tons of pictures of the rabbi's night garden, but none of them came out. Like much of San Francisco, I guess, you just had to be there.

Mendel and the new shul! It's actually a garage and it is so punk, yet paradoxically, so clean. They basically saved my life several times over when I lived in SF. Not to mention my soul. I'm overdue to give them a donation. If you've got a couple extra bucks, please donate too -- they give out free Shabbos meals to anyone who shows up.

Then we all made a mess together. And then the rebbetzin came to tell us to clean up, but I couldn't stick around. I was running late for my flight.

Anne Frank on Purim (photo)

From my sister-in-law, a vintage picture. I don't know much about it, except that all these kids are wearing Purim costumes, and that one of them is Anne Frank.

(Which, yes, calls up all these feelings -- both the feelings caused by her amazing book, as well as this article about my book about her...)

Breastfeeding Sucks

On the Kveller blog, and in our personal lives, I've been freaking out a bit. Cholov yisroel formula has been embargoed by the FDA, and I've been doing some of my rare journalism to figure out what's going on.

One thing that parents are best at -- and yes, readers, I'm talking about you, and I'm talking about myself as well -- is trying to tell other people what to do.
Maybe it's natural. Maybe it comes from being parents. You're forced to order your kid around. So, why shouldn't the rest of the world do what you say, too?

Kveller recently ran a story on a shortage of baby formula in the Hasidic community. As can be expected, it was summarily attacked, on here and on my way-too-sharey Facebook page. Mostly, it was that knee-jerk "a-ha!"ness of parents who see a mention of bottlefeeding and leap to point out the wrongness inherent in a parenting style not their own.

Breastfeeding has become a badge of honor. A few months ago, when a brand of formula started advertising itself as "the healthiest choice," tons of parent bloggers (myself included) pounced on it. In parent-heavy environs like Park Slope, there's a type of bottle that actually advertises that the milk inside is breast milk -- which is so self-righteously snotty, conceited, and straight-up ill-willed that it's a good thing I wasn't drinking breast milk when I heard about it, or I would've spit it across the room in shock.

My wife is an ardent supporter of breastfeeding. And our baby drinks formula.

Both of our babies started out on a boobs-only diet. In both cases, however, we had at one point to face the reality that she just didn't have enough milk.

My wife was the first to admit it. The fact that I'm saying this is a testament to her openness and honesty. Not to get all sexually-bifurcated on you, but if this happened to men, we would never talk about it. I mean, the male gender invented the term "pissing contest." If someone were to tell us that a part of our bodies were insufficient? A check-outtable, oversexualized part? Forget it, we'd never step outside again.

But my wife, she knows how to face reality. Her mother is one of the top lactation consultants in Australia and a mother of seven, and she had to supplement feeds for all but one of her children. There are a million things that can cause a situation like this -- stress, exhaustion, genetics, or simple dehydration. Or it could be something more sinister. For us, it was one of each.

When our daughter was 6 weeks old, my wife got a virus. It led to her becoming dehydrated, which caused her milk supply to crash. She was in bed for days. I had to get all Michael Keaton on her, playing at being a single father, jumping rooms from the baby to her and back again. I can't imagine how my mother-in-law (or anyone else) dealt with newborn twins. (Actually: Maybe by getting stressed out and losing some of her milk. Duh.) It was hard. She recovered, but her milk supply took months of hard work to build up again. For our second child, the reason was less dramatic, but we had to face facts. There simply wasn't enough.

We were hard workers. We were vigilantes. We only wanted what was best for our babies. We had homebirths, only fed our kids organic food (my wife made most of it herself), and I read the bejeezis out of every parenting book I could get my hands on. That was the hardest part of this recent formula shortage, and the frustrating lack of answers from the FDA -- we'd decided to only give our baby cholov yisroel formula, since we believe it's especially important on a spiritual level.

So yes, breastfeeders and overachievers, I'm with you all the way. I'm on your side. I hear what you're saying.

But sometimes, you need to just shut the hell up.

Ashland, Oregon

Oregon is exactly the kind of place it is in The Goonies: clean and pleasant and charmingly run-down, like a well-lived-in shack or a fraying pillow. I came here to do poetry and ended up falling in love. That 12-year-old adolescent love, just like Goonies, where you'll do anything, just because it's there. I'll tell you all about it.

But first, let's get some mood music. Play this loud:

Ashland is a town of 18,000. It's tiny. Maybe not so small, but I live in New York & can't be trusted.

And it's beautiful. And spooky. Tell me this picture doesn't make you want to dig for hidden treasure & do the Truffle Shuffle:

I landed late Sunday night. It was three hours later for me than anyone else. Rabbi Mark and Claudia picked me up from the airport. Whereupon lots of information was exchanged, but the two most vital things: (a) that Zalman Schachter-Shlomi, the Hasidic rabbi turned Jewish Renewal guru (who's the father of a bunch of my friends and whose books continue to blow me away) was also coming to town tomorrow, and (b) that his wife Catherine was the Log Lady on Twin Peaks. Catherine kindly offered an autographed photo. I never actually said "yes," because no sound would come out of my mouth. I was swooning.

I woke up jetlagged at 4 A.M. By sunrise there were deer on the lawn. Mottel challenged me: "Pic or it didn't happen." Here is the evidence.

Ashland is known as a New Age capital. Here's a Unitarian church (a gay one, I think?) that was having a Purim service.

Wherever in Ashland you are, you're never far from the Rogue Mountains. Here's Claudia and me walking to the corner store.

And here's the corner store's marijuana section. (Pot is legal for medical use in Oregon.)

(I've never smoked, and I still think that pot is dumb, and I realize I'm basically the only one on earth who does, although it is great to have it legalized for medical use. Annyway.)

The room where I stayed was amazing. The whole place was kind of like a shrine.

Next: San Francisco. With special guests Frum Satire and a whole bunch of kids!

A Puppet Purim

This week, we got ready for our new Purim video, which we're getting prepared and mixed and psyched to show you. It's a big first for MyJewishLearning, where diversity is always important. We've worked with actors and filmmakers from all types of backgrounds before. But several of you have complained that we've been conspicuously human-centric in casting for our videos, and that we've never used puppets before.

Well, we've heard your voices and we've decided to do something about it! Together with Ora Fruchter and Chistopher Scheer, we're putting puppets back on the map. Follow the jump for some behind-the-scenes shots from the making of our Purim movie, starring the classy Mr. Dingo...and an adorable little troublemaker named Joey.


All puppets have a union-mandated coffee break every 15 minutes.

Yourself in the Third Person

If you haven't noticed, I've been even more random and scattered than usual, working on the G-dcast Purim movie, one article that might be as long as a book, and a book that's actually going to be shorter than that article (yes! new book! at least, I think so, which is why I'm mentioning it inside parenthesis inside a post about something else instead of writing it in five-inch-high letters across the main page of my website), and then Jewniverse, the daily email for my day job, which I really should start talking about more than I do -- considering I work on it for 8 hours a day and all.

While writing new stuff, the rest of the world sort of does its own thing. Which is why I only find out weeks later that there's a big old feature on the movie I wrote.

They interviewed the three principals of C Malo Producciones, the company that made the movie, including Gerri del Castillo, the director, as well as Berwin, the producer, and Bruno, who we called the ninja but was officially the assistant director, even though he really was more of a ninja.

Here's my favorite quote:

“The objective was to build a rebellious film, very independent, but at the same time innocent, which rescues the lethargy of living in the periphery where the most interesting thing a person can do is to cut her hair into an intricate mohawk or build an inescapable internal universe to escape violence and total alienation.”

which comes from Gerry, who kind of talks like that. And his first language is Spanish (his second is Castillian). He says these things in English that I hear the first time, but take my brain about ten minutes to digest.

And this profile makes me miss him terribly. Here, go read it.

Kosher Cooking in Melbourne

Just in case you weren't ready to have your mind blown, turn back now. You might think Darth Vader is narrating, but it's my uncle. (I mean that as a compliment, I promise.) And you can spot glimpses of my brother-in-law as well as my soul brother, local (Melbourne) Jewish celebrity Bram Presser, ex-lead singer of YIDCore.



OK -- I laugh, and you kind of need to laugh, but this video is awesome. Partly that kosher cooking has gotten sophisticated enough so that a competition like this (a) exists, (b) is taken seriously, and (c) people are paying money to go to a swanky theater (that isn't even a Jewish theater) to watch the competition. I mean, sure, they do this kind of kosher cooking contest in New York (and my wife reports on it)...but in Melbourne? Go you people.

I really should be rooting for my bro, but DL, the wife of my chevrusa, is also involved. It's hard.

The Red Skull Scares Me

Confession time: Captain America has never been my favorite superhero. I'm a Marvel boy, tried and true, and even though the X-Men have my heart and most perfectly embody my geekiness, the Avengers, the team that banded together around Captain America and have him as their leader (more or less), are probably my favorite superhero team.

So, as you might imagine, I'm watching the news and the previews of Captain America: The First Avenger pretty intensely.

I don't know if you caught the Super Bowl (I didn't) or the TV commercials (I've been trying to), but there was a spot for Captain America, and it's online. It starts as standard superhero fare -- there's this kind of wimpy soldier who gets put through the ringer, an explosion or two, he get stuck into a tube and comes out all steroidy and pumped up...

And then this guy whips on screen.



The Red Skull scares me. No, more than that: He freaks the hell out of me. It's bad enough that most supervillains have names like Doctor Doom or Darkseid and can blast nuclear endorphins out of their palms, but this guy is an actual Nazi. He shows up in comics wearing a swastika armband. He peppers his speech with references to "the annihilation" and "the future Reich." In a few of the more noiry comics, his I'll-get-you speeches include personal reminisces of him and Hitler.

And this is what I was reading as a ten-year-old.

The Red Skull has always been a serious character. His "skull" used to be a mask, but at some point it became his skull. More recently, he was shown (in Ultimate Avengers) giving a superhero's wife a choice between stabbing him to death with a fork or throwing their infant child out the window. (She chose the latter. He did the former anyway.) He's dabbled in genetic manipulation, social manipulation (he's been elected president and been one of the richest businessmen in the United States) and mind control. He rarely just takes a gun or a bomb and blows up Fort Knox. Instead, he just messes with our heads, which is worse, or quietly plots genocides. He's not just evil. He's creepy.

What do you think -- is the Red Skull just pushing our buttons? Or is he pushing the boundaries of what's socially acceptable?

Last-Minute Preschool

You probably already knew about this -- so, you know, feel free to scoff at my misfortune -- but if you (a) have kids and (b) they’re old enough to go to school, you sort of have to apply to schools before they’re allowed to go there. I don’t know what I was thinking (maybe that we just drive up and drop the kid on the doorstep, like the proverbial stork, but with a 3-year-old?), but apparently I wasn’t thinking very much at all.

So right now, we’re going through the radical first step in sending our toddler to preschool. Which is to decide which preschool to send them to.

I was raised going to public school, but since then, a few things changed. I became Orthodox. Then I married into a pretty hardcore Hasidic family–and by “hardcore,” I mean that I now have relatives I’ve never directly spoken to, because they are women and I am not. For someone like me, who’s always been committed to public education and whose parents and sister work in public schools, it’s a big leap to send my kids, not just to a private nursery school, but to 12 years of a rigorous religious education, followed (probably) by seminary and yeshiva and some sort of religious-indoctrination camp.

But: We are, indeed, Hasidic Jews. And public schools don’t exactly have classes with titles like Intermediate Yiddish and Medieval Commentators to Jewish Scripture. If you’re committed to a lifestyle, you gotta go all the way.

My wife -- who, it should be noted, is both more comfortable with these things, and smarter than me -- told me to chill out. (She says that a lot.) In the time from my first IM (from work, of course, which went roughly: Matthue: School deadliens R like 3 wks ago!?! what do we do???) until I got home, she’d called up a dozen relatives and half a dozen schools, established that we were in hot water, but not entirely washed up, and that many schools were understanding of first-time parents and had flexible acceptance schedules.

In the meantime, since learning that we still had a choice, we’ve been trying to prepare ourselves for that eventual choice. We’re scheduled for a bunch of interviews, and we’re still  scheduling a few more. We’ve both made lists of the top three things we want in a school. (Well, my wife has. I’m still working on it.)

Here are hers:

1. The school shouldn’t care about surface Orthodox stuff (like asking “Do you wear stockings all the time?” or “Do you own a TV?,” even though we don’t) above basic things, like teaching the rudiments of kashrut, or having caring and involved teachers.
2. It doesn’t have to be a Lubavitch school, but it should have some sort of Lubavitch influence (She and her family are Lubavitch Hasidim).
3. It should be a place where people are warm and friendly (which seems like a given, but it never is).

I haven’t figured out mine yet, except that I’m really determined to find a school with a good secular studies program. Not like those scary Jewish day schools that start from first grade in grooming and prepping their kids to get into an Ivy (not like I even necessarily want my kids to attend an Ivy–we’ve seen what happens when Orthodox Jews show up in those schools), but one where English classes read real books and science is more than just “rain makes the flowers grow.”

Graffiti in Prague

When I lived in Prague, My friend K. and I used to do graffiti. You can call it stencil art or tagging or whatever, but in Eastern Europe, they say "graffiti," and that's what we called it in Philly when I was growing up so that's the word I'm saying.

Right from the beginning, K. set a few rules. 1: No tagging on architectural magnificence. We only did old Communist buildings, the kind that looked like gray Legos. And one or two places downtown that were similarly horrific. 2: As I had no idea what I was doing, I was basically her apprentice -- I was to lay low, hold the stencils, and wait for her to start with the spray paint. As we went, I sprayed a bit. But mostly I liked being the assistant. Like I was one step between the artist and the art appreciator: just doing my best to beautify and weird-ify Prague for the rest of us.

I'd lived in Prague since January. We started tagging in late June, right around my birthday. I knew the city well by that time. We'd do it late at night, when nobody was around. Once we squeezed into a train tunnel and almost got caught. I was really skinny. K. was really small. We were safe, but I remember the lit-up faces of those old people on the way home when they saw two kids where there shouldn't have been any. Almost as if they were in a submarine and we'd popped up underwater.

I don't have any pictures of our actual piece, but Aviva wrote to me about posting the Moshiach Oi! video, and somehow graffiti came up. And then I remembered that this whole part of my life happened. Weird, the things you can forget.

(Thanks to Aviva for reminding me, and for digging up the carrots in Prague images.)

Eating Pork in New York

It was close to midnight, the latest I've been out in months. My friend Fred Chao had brought me to a comedy show in Chinatown, which led to some drinking in Chinatown, which led to us wandering around the streets of Chinatown with our heads full of stories and our bodies craving warmth. It was a weird feeling to get lost in those streets -- most of New York is a neat, orderly grid, but once you hit the Manhattan Bridge, Canal Street turns into a sudden mountain, half going up and half going straight down, and you're never quite sure when a street is going to splinter into three different streets and when it's going to dead-end in the middle of a block. (It's twice as cool because Fred's a comic artist and his story Johnny Hiro: Half-Asian, All Hero, which takes place on these very streets, has just been excerpted in the 2010 Best American Comics.)

In the middle of all this, Fred and I both realize that we are massively hungry. My stomach muscles, through a few years of this, have grown accustomed to being both kosher and out late. My stomach growls, I reply that we are out on the town and that there are no kosher restaurants around, and it quietly sulks to itself in a corner.

Fred is not so disciplined. "I know a great place right around here," he says. And then he suddenly vanishes around a corner, disappears, and takes me along with him.

I don't usually sit with people in restaurants. I feel too much like a second-class citizen. Everyone else is pigging out, eating great-smelling food (and food always looks better in non-kosher places) and you're smiling to yourself and telling them, don't worry, you're really in the mood for ice water.

But it's late, and I haven't seen Fred in a while, and I don't want to kill the conversation. So we take our seats.

"What should I have," he asks me. "Meat or seafood?"

Is this a test? A test from God?

"I'm always weird about seafood," I say. "Not just the kosher thing. It just feels like, is that stuff really dead? Was it ever alive?"

"Okay," he says. And so he turns to the waitress and orders the pork soup.

Wham.

I manage meekly to say: "I'll just have a cold drink." And I dash for the refrigerator.

Okay. But the truth is, I'm curious about trayf. How it looks. The way it tastes. The animals it comes from. And I've also been way curious about real Chinese restaurants, the kind that real Chinese people eat in, because I've always suspected that the places where white people eat, kosher or not, are faking it, the same way that Jackie Chan exaggerates his accent in the Rush Hour movies.

Almost immediately, they bring a plate. It's just a pile of bean sprouts, with a little lemon slice sitting on top. Is that supposed to be a salad? Fred ignores it. He's like that with salads, though.

Then the bowl comes out, and it's huge. He didn't say "large" or "small," but this soup is the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. There's a stack of those special Chinese-food spoons upside down, in the same holder as the soy sauce and hot sauce. I've never seen that before. Fred takes one, and he breaks into his chopsticks, holds them close to the ground and whittles them twice, to throw off the splintery pieces. He dumps the sprouts into the soup, explaining that that's what you're supposed to do, which I never would have guessed.

And then he starts eating.

He alternates with the spoon and chopsticks, working his way through the meat and noodles. I ask him what that meat is, and from time to time he explains. The pink stuff floating on top is nearly raw. The chef does that in order to show you how fresh the meat is. Underneath, pretty much all the meat is brown or gray. There are a few marble-spattered parts, which Fred says are tendons. And then there's a white bumpy substance, which he thinks (but isn't sure) are the stomach lining.

Stomach lining! "That's gelatin!" I say.

"Are you sure? I thought gelatin was the hooves."

I frown. Instead of ice-water, I have opted for a beer, and it's hard to recall the basics of whatever I've read on animal slaughter. "You might be right," I say. "My family-in-law makes this Yiddish food thing out of cow hooves. It's these yellow cubes. I think they're called gullis?"

"Oh yeah! My family makes something like that, too," said Fred. "It's called," he said, and here ends the tale of charming culture-mixing, because he said something in Chinese that there was no way for me to understand, much less transcribe the next morning.

He scooped the last of the soup-meat dregs into his spoon with chopsticks and slurped it up. Then I let him have the last of my beer -- call me a fundamentalist zealot, but I get squeamish about pork-breath in my beer bottle -- and then we were out. 

Thanks to No-Frills Recipes for the pork pic.

Jerusalem Suicide Bomber Monster Movie

I just wrote about this Jerusalem of the Future contest for MyJewishLearning, but right before I posted, I found this. The title of this post is a bit of a spoiler, but keep watching till the end. KEEP WATCHING.



What does it MEAN!? Who made this? If anyone knows, please tell me. I'm baffled and astounded and, like, not sure whether I should be offended or wowed. I'm leaning toward the second.

Matthue's David's Music Poll

David Levithan is my occasional editor and sometimes back-and-forth fan (I love his stuff, he says he loves mine, which I'm pretty okay with trusting him on). He co-wrote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which you've probably seen, too. Also -- much less well-known than his film work -- he runs this funny yearly blog in which he asks people to list their favorite albums of the year. Here's what I came up with.

(You know how the music that you're listening to influences what you're writing? I'm pretty sure it works the other way, too. Ordinarily I'd choose something happy and poppy, like Mista Cookie Jar, but I'm working on this story that's dark and moody and angsty. And so:

Most essential album
Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
I'm not even from the suburbs. I've never lived there and have no way, save a few memories of reading The Outsiders, to verify whether it really is this bleak and beautiful. But this album is.

Other essential albums
Nikki Minaj, Barbie World (or any other non-Pink Friday mixtape)
The Roots, How I Got Over
Regina Spektor, Live in London
Kim Boekbinder, Impossible Girl
Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
They Might Be Giants, Here Comes Science

Best moment of music:
Nicki Minaj switches between four different personas and about seven completely different vocal styles in under a minute during her guest appearance on Kanye's "Twisted Dark Fantasy." There are so many distinctive styles of genius in that moment, I can't even begin to fathom it. I think it's influenced my whole best-of list.

Best album of 2010 that wasn't actually in 2010: The Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack. Overflow from last year. Only realized it was awesome this year.

Best new album of 2010, according to my 3-year-old: The B-52's, Cosmic Thing. It's a new discovery if you were negative 20 years old when it came out.

Zealots and Bullies

So right now I'm on vacation in Chicago. Weird to do a trip where we're just visiting people and not Having Meetings or Running To Do Insanely Complicated Things In An Unreasonably Short Amount of Time or something of that sort. But before I turn my computer off and vacate, I just needed to share these two little parting gifts:

The Jewish Press, which is the biggest Orthodox paper in New York and which all my Hasidic Cousins actually read, wrote an article about art in the Orthodox world. More specifically:

A nascent community of religious artists - including the Orthodox African-American hip-hop musician Y-Love, poet Matthue Roth, novelist Tova Mirvis, and the novelist and playwright Naomi Ragen - are all working to create a more art-friendly and embracing religious model.

It is so, so unimaginably cool to be cited as an example of how people can be Orthodox and artists and how it doesn't have to be some big religious crisis. This is my favorite part of the article, though -- apparently, before Yeshiva University introduced its business school, everyone thought it was a crazy idea:

In 1977, a fake ad in Yeshiva University's yearbook made fun of the idea of a business school at the university. The mock ad promised that a school of business "will be opening its doors to all students who cannot cope with liberal arts."

The rest is at the link.


And the Scholastic blog came out with a post about bullying, and how to deal with bullying, and what to do about it. And that, no surprise, one of the best ways to cope and not just be damaged by it is to read about it. They suggest a bunch of resources, and one of the recommended titles is 

Losers by Matthue Roth: This off-the-wall novel introduces readers to Jupiter—a Russian immigrant learning to deal with high-school life in America. With dead-on deadpan humor, Matthue Roth makes everything illuminated about American teen life—like Borat as directed by John Hughes.

Okay. Now I've got some Sears Tower to climb. Shabbos and out.

Na Nach Nachman Punks

I kind of love this video, but I'm not sure how I feel about it morally. It's the Moshiach Oi! guys (your favorite Hasidic punk-rock band and mine) rocking out and sticking Na Nach stickers to public buildings, signs, and a car.



On one hand, the song is great -- if you like loud, raucous, energetic punk music, that is. And it's all structured around the mantra Na Nach Nachma Nachman Me'Uman, which, according to Breslov Hasidic folklore, will make depression fade away. On the other, it is, uh, vandalizing public and private property. I'm not necessarily opposed to it on a personal level (I used to be a street stencil artist, which we called "doing graffiti," and I've busked in public places more times than I can count), but is it a bit of a chilul Hashem, a public embarrassment, to go stickering while looking like religious Jews? (There's also some graffiti tagging, though I'm assuming that was on the house of a consenting party.)

Or maybe I'm just getting old and, perish the thought, conservative. What do you folks think?