She-mix-ni Atzeret

Tonight starts Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, the final round of Jewish holidays -- for this month, anyway! Here's a little mix that I stumbled into putting together, song by song. This morning at synagogue I was getting ready for Shemini Atzeret, which starts tonight, looking ahead in the prayerbook -- you know, like peeking at the ending. One thing I always forget is the Prayer for Rain, Tefilat Geshem, which is the beginning of the rainy season in Israel. Which immediately stuck this song in my head. It's not exactly a part of the traditional liturgy, but I've been singing this song longer than I've been praying:

The celebration kept coming, and so did the songs. The new Y-Love video, the first song from his upcoming album, is out today. (And the album has a shout-out to my book! And it features Andy Milonakis, who's the weirdest and most original thing on MTV right now.

And, just to tie everything together, our house guest just wandered through the room and heard the song. "Oh!" he said. "Is that the new Drake video?" I had no idea what he was talking about. "I thought you'd know," he said. Apparently, the platinum-selling hip-hop artist Drake has a new single, too, and in the video, he and his companions are drinking Bartenura Moscato D'Asti -- which my older daughter calls "blue wine" and which is the only kind of wine my mother drinks. It's bubbly and sweet and basically like alcoholic soda. It makes family meals tons more fun...and is there any wonder that it's the beverage of choice among Jewish soul singers?

Once again, here's the money shot: Happy Shemini Atzeret!

Stuff That Counts

Every year I make these "12 steps to a better matthue" lists. This year I decided not to. Decided there should only be one item on the agenda this year: Spend more time doing stuff that counts, less time doing stuff that doesn't.

Right now I'm doing mindless Internet stuff. But doing it in the kitchen as Itta cooks. Counts, I think.

1/20: The Official Sub-Page

Just as a matter of site stuff: I added a page here for 1/20, the movie I wrote. (It isn't the film's actual website, which is more comprehensive and informed; this is just sort of reminding me that I wrote a movie, and anyone else who winds up on that page too I guess.)

And Kayla Dempsey, who plays Yvette, and I were just interviewed yesterday on the punk variety show Rew & Who. Kayla bursts out with some a capella Janis Joplin because she is incredible. Rew is pretty amazing, too. I mostly just giggle and prevaricate. Here's Part 1. Edit: Here's Part 2! With Kayla singing Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz." She is so amazing.



And because I'm not quite ready yet to stop talking about it constantly: I wrote a new book! It's about my best friend dying and the R.E.M. album Automatic for the People and the first time I fell in love. Check it out and review it. You can even maybe buy it, if you've got $2.

iRIP

Q: Why is it that Steve Jobs is dead at 56 but Robert Mugabe and Gaddafi and Assad and all the murdering despots are alive and well?

A: Dammit, don't you think this is a question for G*d? Wish I could tell you the definitive answer. I'm kind of lucky i'm not a rabbi.

Steve Jobs wasn't the greatest human being in the universe. If someone would've asked me before today, I'd say he did a lot of crappy things for digital rights and content creators. He also did a lot of great things. Far be it from me to speak loshon hara about the dead.

But why do bad things happen to good people? Why is my best friend dead? Why do complete scumbags and idiots get paid tons more than I do? How does a dork like me wind up marrying someone well-put-together and coordinated like Itta? Seriously, it's all divine providence. You just gotta trust that the divine bureaucrats know what they're doing.


(Question from my mother-in-law. The title is hers, too.)

Yom Kippur Jury Duty

So I need to tell you, it's really weird being called onto a jury the day before Yom Kippur. When I tell people, they've mostly been quick to freak out about the religious rules about it -- mostly, that I'll be in court until an hour before the holiday starts, and apparently you're supposed to have a great, grand feast the day before Yom Kippur. In the exact words of the Talmud (I don't remember; I'm totally paraphrasing) -- "Anyone who stuffs his face the day before Yom Kippur, it is like he fasted for two days."

Something tells me people don't eat in courtrooms. I don't know this for sure, but I feel like I'd remember it if I saw someone on Ally McBeal or Law & Order crunching on some Dipsy Doodles. (Or, on Ally, probably unpeeling a suggestive-looking banana.) I actually don't know at all what to expect, beyond the specifics of the trial. Officially, I'm not allowed to share it with you, but let's just say I found it strange that they still accepted me as a juror -- considering my new book came out last week, and I told them all about the accident at the center of the story. *whistles*

I know I should have tried to get out of it. Believe me, as a small nonprofit employee who writes a daily email and a father of two, it's really freakin' hard to make the room in my life for it. (And I guess you could make the case that Idid try to get out of it -- see above, the part about my book.) The real kicker came when I asked a lawyer-friend, and he said, "You'll get off without a hitch. They never choose Orthodox Jews for a jury." And now I sort of feel like I'm the first Hasidic Jew who's ever served on a jury, and I've gotta make a good run of it, or else everyone will think Hasidic Jews are draft-dodgers. Jury-dodgers. Whatever.

But as the trial date gets closer and closer, I find myself getting both more apprehensive and more excited. Partly it's that I'm going to be put in charge of somebody's future, someone's fate, and maybe a lot of money. Partly that it's reflexive. Just like this person's going to be standing in front of us, I'm going to be standing in front of God, defending my lifestyle choices and excusing my slip-ups and asking for another shot.

I don't think any of this renders me partial to the defendant or the plaintiff. Or maybe it does? That's all any of us can really do, right? -- take our life experience and apply it to our verdict. I'm talking about the New York District Court case, and to my own divine case.

So I probably won't get to have my pre-Yom Kippur feast this year. But I have a feeling it'll still be meaningful. Plus maybe I'll meet Lucy Liu?

I Just Nullified My Sins, and Now I Can Do Anything

I've been going to synagogue every morning this week, which is rare for me. I used to skip synagogue all the time because I slept too late, and then it was because my kids were up too early. I never got to see them any other time because of this full-time-job thing (you know, the one that enables me to write stuff like this, and for you to read it)...so mornings seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that, and let my wife sleep late (bonus points).

But this week I've been getting into the swing of it. Putting aside my religious snarkiness, and telling myself that I've got a four-day weekend for Rosh Hashanah, and I'll spend plenty of time with the offspring then. Also--I'll say this quietly, because I really don't want to jinx it--the kids have been sleeping later.

Also, services have been keeping me on my toes. It's not just the normal routine of praying and saying amen. There are different things you do every day. All week, before services we've been saying selichot, this really intense 15-minute-long prayer where you recount all the bad stuff you've done this year and then ask G-d to forget about it. And then tachanun, which is another confessional sort of thing, not to be confused with Catholic confession, because when we take account of our slip-ups, we do it directly to G-d. And then the shofar blasts at the end of services, which are supposed to literally scare the living sin out of you.

And then, this morning, hataras nedarim.

If you're saying what?, rest assured, dear friends, so did I. We all gathered round a makeshift rabbinical court -- that would be three of the old dudes at the synagogue, because according to Jewish law, basically anyone can be a judge (well, sorta) -- and we all recited this liturgical thing that listed all the oaths and promises we may have inadvertently made, and asked them to nullify those things. I'd never done it before. Or maybe I just don't remember? But now that I have, I sort of feel the infinity of infancy. Like I've sworn away all my oaths and all my sins, and now I can do anything. I just have to not think about taking a nap or checking my Google Reader stream.

I have this irrational idea in my head that, just because I wrote a book with Yom Kippur in the title, I'm some sort of authority on repentance. Whereas the truth is, I'm probably just an authority on how to mess up really badly, and on a grand scale. But that's what the High Holidays are most fundamentally about, I think -- coming face to face with the stuff you've done wrong, and trying to make it better. And then, being able to do anything.

R.E.M. Broke Up and So Did I

I wrote this story. I was sort of saving it for a while, waiting for something big to happen. And then it did.

R.E.M. released the album "Automatic for the People" in 1992. I was 14. I was about to fall in love. My best friend was about to fall into a coma. I hadn't learned how to play air guitar yet, but I was about to. And every song on that album was screaming my name. Automatic: Liner Notes for R.E.M.'s "Automatic for the People" is part journalism, part memoir, and part sitting-around-and-agonizing-over-how-great-things-can-be. From Northeast Philadelphia to running away to Athens, GA hotels and the seedy underbelly of Veterans Stadium, Automatic is about a time when you fell in love way too easily -- with people, with music, and with the insanity of your own life.

12 Steps to a Better Matthue

I wrote this last year. Stumbled across it on the Intertube. I don't know how I got there, but it feels like a sign from somewhere. I hate reruns, but this one's pretty intense. I hope you like it.

Oh, yeah -- we hit it again. Two parking tickets this morning, and one's more than $100.

Man, this Rosh Hashana is shaping up to a great start.

I flipped. It's not pleasant to say, but I felt steam coming out of my nostrils and ears. There was a very small phone, and I started yelling into it -- to a friend, who really didn't deserve any of it. I mean, he didn't write the tickets.

"How do you do it?" I asked my friend. "You're always growing." It's true: he's always talking about how he's waking up at 5:30 a.m. instead of 6 in order to get more stuff done, or the vegetable patch he's tending on his balcony, or new recipes for cobbler (I don't even know what cobbler is).

He told me: "It's hard to perfect your butterfly stroke when you're struggling to keep your head above water." And I feel like this is hitting pretty much everyone I know right now. How do the Lehman brothers (assuming there are brothers, and that they're Jewish) focus on being better people? How do we keep from going bankrupt? How does the girl I know who just tried to kill herself work on the abstract idea of "improving herself"? How do I start helping out with the cooking and the laundry when I'm in the office for 8 hours, the subway for two more, and there's this book I wrote that I'm supposed to be promoting?

Pretty much the only one I know who's having an easy time of it is my editor David, and that's because he's being played by Michael Cera in the movie of his book. Okay, stop. Not to pick on David (L*rd knows he's pick-on-able), but he could probably tell me about problems of his own. Problems that seem at least as dire as the $160 worth of tickets we racked up today...or the innumerably worse sin that I keep on committing by telling the rest of the world about it.* Everyone's in a different spot in life. And even each of us -- we're in a different spot than we were last year, or last month, or 5 minutes ago. And we don't do penance in Judaism. Instead, the idea is to constantly be moving up -- ratzu v'shuv, we call it. One of my friends just moved to the South last year, met an amazing rabbi, and blasted through Rosh Hashana. This year, he got fired and she's skipping it. I was better at doing a lot of things last year than I am this year...and I can say that having a screaming 7-month-old got in the way of some of them. (Sayonara, complete-and-uninterrupted morning prayers.) Most of them, though -- well, I spent some time trying to do the perfect butterfly stroke, and some of that time trying to sink myself.

Every year I put together a top-12 list of ways to a better Matthue for Rosh Hashana. Last year, it took me till Simchat Torah. But here's my Rosh Hashana resolution for this year: Try to stay in the moment. Don't worry about things until they're right in front of me -- but, as much as I can, try to see everything that's front of me, and try to keep them from turning into things to worry about. When Zusha came to the Ba'al Shem Tov and mourned that he'd never be perfect, the Ba'al Shem Tov told him, "Try to be less like me, and more like Zusha."

This Rosh Hashana, I'm going to try and be more like Zusha.

And I'm going to be better about seeing what's in front of my face.

* - It's true. Lashon Hara, or gossiping, is one of the worst things you can do to a person. I'm praying as I write this that her good humor, together with the faint possibility of teaching people a constructive lesson through it. D'oh.

Kosher Zombies & Vampires

Are zombies kosher? Or, more specifically, can zombies keep kosher? Asks a friend, the amazing comic writer Ashley-Jane Nicolaus:

Long story short, a friend of mine moved to a new place next to a really really old Jewish cemetery - so that got us thinking, if the zombie apocalypse were to happen, are brains kosher? Inquiring minds need to know...

I'm no kosher expert, but a few decades of eschewing the swine have prepped me with a little background knowledge. Not to mention thoroughly geeking out with random books of Jewish law.

So here's the deal.

You can actually eat the brains of a kosher animal. Well, some kosher animals. My mother-in-law (who, I should note, is a native Australian) LOVES cracking open fish skulls & sucking the brains out. (I'm a vegetarian & i think she does it to psyche me out. It doesn't work.)

But that's not what you want to know. If you want to know about zombies, you want to know about REAL HUMAN BRAINS. Well, humans -- or any part thereof -- is not permissible to eat, regardless of whether you're talking about kosher-keeping humans or non. (You really wish that whoever started the blood libel rumors had Google access to give them a clue.) In order for any animal to be kosher, it has to have cloven hooves and chew its cud. So basically, if you're a kosher zombie, you are screwed.

One additional consideration: Kosher vampires are screwed as well. In the process of making meat kosher, the animal's body has to be completely drained of blood. So you know how, on Buffy, when Angel and Spike became good guys (or impotent), they had to drink the blood of animals? (Just kidding. You don't actually need to know that.)* Animal blood is out, too. I suppose there's a case to be made that, when a life is at stake,** Jewish laws such as kashrut don't apply. Then again, zombies and vampires aren't technically alive, are they?

If you're curious for more, you should probably check out Are Dragons Kosher?
__________
* -- I believe a similar thing happened in Twilight, but I've mostly blacked it out.
** -- Notice how I avoided a pun about stakes? Joss Whedon is rolling over in his grave.***
***-- Apologies. I know Joss Whedon is not dead.

Favorite Book

Q: What is your favorite book?
A: It changes. Right now, either Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson, which I've read a bunch of times, or Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, which I still haven't read. I started it a year ago and I'm almost halfway through.

JDate and Superheroes

Our dear friend JT Waldman alerted us to this cool little wink to the Jewluminati. This week, DC Comics -- the company that publishes Superman and Wonder Woman -- is completely rebooting its line of comics. What does this mean? Watch this video, and you'll know more than you ever wanted to. (Don't worry. It's funny.)

A totally minor caveat: The video isn't overtly Jewish at all until 1:27. Then, for the final 3 seconds, it retcons the entire video into being nothing BUT Jewish.

Oh, I know JDate is an easy punchline. But I have to confess (as someone who's never been on the site), it does what it's supposed to do. My sister met her boyfriend on JDate, and they're getting married this weekend. Did you notice there's absolutely no sarcasm in this post? JDate really does work magic.

A Wish, An Excerpt, and Some Music

Today is my grandmom's birthday. Here's a link to a poem I wrote about her. It's called Dizzy.

I learned what Halloween as the same time I learned what Mischief Night was. My parents left all the lights on downstairs that night, and they closed all the blinds. I smiled to myself. It was like our private family hideout. Why didn’t home always feel like that? But their mouths were grim. In the morning, broken eggs streaked the windows of the houses on our block. The tree on the corner was mummified in toilet paper. I had nothing but my mind to connect the dots between last night and that morning. Halloween for me wasn’t about ghosts and candy; it was about the shadowy strangers who liked to threaten you from the shadows finally stepping out of the shadows.

Best Reason for a Border Crossing

The cast and crew of 1/20, the movie I wrote, were invited to speak at New York Law School last week. I wasn't there, but Ayako Ibaraki and Kayla Dempsey were. Gerardo, the director, was Skyping in, which is why he looks like a talking head from Futurama.

Also, if you're in Mexico City, 1/20 is showing at La Casa Del Cine this Monday, August 24. Admission is free, so if you really want to see it, you can buy a plane ticket and count that as your admission. (Plus, bonus, Mexico!)

C MALO PRODUCCIONES Presenta la cinta: “1/20” El documental “1/20” muestra la perspectiva de México desde unapunk inmigrante japonesa orgullosa de los Estados Unidos.  No hay subtítulos, porque la sutileza de las demandas de actuación se centra en la audiencia.  La presentación es suave e infantil como una nueva forma de rebelión contra las convenciones cinematográficas.   La generación de “1/20” ha rechazado todas las reglas, mientras que secretamente busca el sentido en una cortina del nihilismo. La presentación de “1/20” se realizará en Lacasadelcine.mx el miércoles 24 de Agosto a las 9 PM. ¡LA ENTRADA ES LIBRE! ¡NO FALTEN!

Meanwhile, I'm still pretty lost in my new memoir. (In a good way, I think.) (Uh, mostly.) With fiction, you're creating a story, and every part of it--characters, plot, setting, accidents--goes toward building the story. When you write nonfiction, you're dealing with stuff that already happened, and trying to magically change those things into a story. Even if you already know what the story is, you don't necessarily know what needs to be there for the story to happen. So you can -- hypothetically -- write a chapter that's 15,000 words long, and then realize that it doesn't belong in there at all. And then you just hit DELETE, or tuck it into your back pocket and think it might be good for another story someday, and then you just carry on.

Hypothetically, I mean.

Books for Bullies

I promise, I'm not going to turn my blog into a collection of reviews. There are things I really honestly want to tell you about my OWN life, not some wacky fictional characters in my imagination or something like that.

But Brianna at TeensReadToo.com had really really cool things to say about Losers:

This was a good read. From the very beginning, I sided with Jupiter, of course. It wasn't fair to him that he always got picked on because he wasn't from around there and had a different accent. I loved how he decided to change when he got tired of always being bullied. It made sense to transform himself when he was starting a new high school. Not everyone knew who he was, so he could really be anybody that he wanted to be. I thought that was a really brave thing of him to do.

My fave part: "I definitely think bullies should read LOSERS so that they can understand what the people being bullied are going through - and maybe, just maybe, they'll understand that it's not right."

Amen. And, here -- read the whole dang thing.

Every Day Is Yom Kippur

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a writer named Adi Elbaz. She'd just finished Yom Kippur a Go-Go and wanted to talk to me. Could she do it? And could she do something with it?

She just wrote a really, really sweet piece about my book. It's here. This is just a bit of the awesomeness contained:


Lonely (Wo)man of Faith in a Modern World

In many ways, Yom Kippur A Go-Go  is the story of Hava Aaronson, or me as a 12th-grader: the story of to-thine-own-self-be-true-ing against the odds. And the odds are even stronger when you purposely seek them out, as Roth does: when you consciously make yourself a stranger in a strange land, no matter how appealing its social ethic. Because Roth’s story of religious tribulation takes place, almost entirely, in the anything-goes wastelands of San Francisco’s Mission District, where, as an Orthodox Jew, he—not the chick doing performance art with her own menstrual blood—is the freak. 

Read the rest >>

We also had a pretty intense email interview. I'm not sure if she'll use it for something else, or I might ask if it's ok just to put up here.

Why We Pray What We Pray

I became Orthodox under the guidance of someone who advised me to run from it. Rabbi Dr. Barry Freundel, the rabbi of the Kesher Israel Congregation in Washington D.C. -- whose name you might recognize from the 2000 presidential election, when he was constantly quoted as "Joe Lieberman's rabbi" and asked deeply-thought questions like, "If a nuclear war breaks out on Shabbat, will Senator Lieberman be allowed to help out in the ensuing battles?"

In addition to being a rabbi, he holds advanced degrees in chemistry and biology, and is a fiendishly rational thinker. While many people are attracted to religion through mystical stories and supernatural powers, for me the draw was the exact opposite. I was already totally nuts. I needed something to ground me, a rational set of rules to lead my life by. I started by going to Rabbi Freundel's weekly halacha shiur -- a three-hour class about everything from washing your hands before getting out of bed to whether one needs to tie tzitzit on a rain poncho to what happens if you start eating a ham sandwich, realize it's not kosher, then get a craving for macaroni and cheese -- are you allowed to? (Yes: because ham doesn't fall under the category of kosher meat.) "Run the other way," he said. "We are competists." I'm a masochist. It just made me hungry for more.

Anyway. Rabbi Freundel has a new book, Why We Pray What We Pray, and it's a doozy. The book is an excellent field guide to Jewish prayers, perhaps the most well-conceived and fully-realized book on the subject in English to come out in years. (And just so you don't think my opinion is weighted, he is also the man who forced me to type up 112 pages of notes about tefillin. Five times.) What the book lacks in scope, it makes up in depth -- choosing just six different prayers, giving their history, previous incarnations,

Which might sound boring under someone else's wing. The first chapter is dedicated to the Shema -- and Freundel picks apart its history step by step, discovering that, in its 3000-year lifespan, the prayer once included several other parts of the Torah -- and things that didn't even come from the Torah, including the second line of its present incarnation -- as well as one whole Torah portion (this part was ultimately excised, on the grounds that it would take too damn long for normal people to get through) and the entirety of the Ten Commandments. Later chapters go through other prayers, some of which (like "Nishmat") have just become known as long and sort of meandering in the present liturgy, others (such as "Alenu") have become sing-songy and equally meaningless for us. This book is an adventure in the best way, a book that makes us love words again.

Reading Why We Pray, I sometimes wished that Freundel, and not some boring dictionary-like rabbi, wrote the lines of commentary underneath the prayers in my normal old prayerbook. Then I changed my mind. Those little two-line insights are good for ignoring on a day-to-day basis, and jumping right back into the prayerbook. These stories are at their best for actual reading, for paying attention to and for diving into. As Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Lord Sacks says (in this superb video), Jewish people are great at being kind to others and at studying, two of the three pillars on which the world rests. The praying part -- taking these words that we say every time we set foot in a synagogue* and giving our prayer meaning, a life beyond our lips, and a meaning above the dullness of mundane routine -- is what we need to work on.

And here, folks, is where it starts.

____
* -- every time we set foot in a synagogue and it's not for a disco Bar Mitzvah party, I mean.

Happy Bleedin' Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday, named after Leopold Bloom, the main character of James Joyce's Ulysses and patron saint of 21st-century literary snobs everywhere. (I write this as a proud literary snob myself. My own history with Ulysses: I took it out from Northeast Regional Library on a summer loan in fifth grade, spent the entire summer reading the whole damn thing and not understanding any part, oblivious to the sexuality and the social motifs, and bloodly loving every minute of it.)

For more information on Bloomsday and Joyce, check out the Jewniverse that I wrote about it. And please notice Joyce's own depiction of Leopold Bloom to the right. Contrary to everyone's hopes and dreams and chagrin, Bloom isn't actually Jewish, by the strictest measure of Jewish law, anyway, as well as by his own estimation -- the character was born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, and converted to Catholicism to marry that feisty Molly Bloom, but still keeps getting mistaken for a Jew.

The occasion of Bloomsday, of course, means that I need to do everything possible to let everyone in the universe know about it. There are tons of Bloomsday events going on, from marathon Ulysses readings at North Carolina's Old Books on Front St, Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum, and elsewhere...and online, of course. There's a special Twitter adaptation called @11lysses going on right now, and it is frighteningly brilliant, and a worthy successor to Joyce's on inscrutability:

11ysses James Joyce 

And o’#bloom the bloody freemason slopingprowling through Michan’s land, with his cod’s eye counting all the guts of fish #theprudentsoul

9 minutes ago 

11ysses James Joyce 

Thirst I wouldn’t sell for half a crown, bluemouldy and #begob could hear it hit the pit of my stomach w/ a click as I quaffed my cup of joy

9 minutes ago 

11ysses James Joyce 

Sitting atop his boulderstool rubbing his hand in his cauliflowereye: broadshouldered deepchested redhaired #thecitizen #workingforthecause

9 minutes ago 

Go read the rest of it now! And go wish everyone you meet a happy Bloomsday. They won't know what you're talking about, but they'll appreciate it.

New X-Men Trailer, with Added Holocaust

Fox Studios released four new clips from the new X-Men movie last night. If you've followed my posts about Magneto's history as a Holocaust survivor -- or if you've seen the opening sequence of the first X-Men movie in 2000 -- you're aware of his loaded and complicated history. But what follows might be the creepiest rendition ever of the two words that, for many of us, defined growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Is that wildly improper? Chillingly appropriate? Too intense and emotionally-loaded to simplify to one thing? I'm voting for a mixture of all three.

Lag Time

It's almost Lag B'Omer, which is making me hella nostalgic for the Stern Grove Chabad party in Yoko a Go-Go. Well, part of it, anyway. And for the holiday, the good people at the Forward have printed my poem "Bar Yochai (Ai Yai Yai)" in honor of the festive season:

for those who gathered there at sunset there
were promises of a sin-free life at stake
I didn’t want that
I just wanted to say hi

apparently everyone had the same idea
fighting to get closer to the kever
I wanted to tell them
I’m only here for the rabbi 

<< read the rest >>

And because good things always come in threes (famous people dying, wise men...uh, whut?) I should also tell you that the new G-dcast Shavuos video is up and atom:

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?