Noted blogeuse Annie, as in “Annie, get your,” as in Jewbiquitous, wanted to know why I spelled it “Balestinian” instead of “Palestinian” or “Qassammy Davis, Jr.” According to… oh, probably Michael, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Syria (including its left arm, Lebanon) has a phonetic quirk whereby they don’t use the voiceless bilabial stop, /p/. When pronouncing loanwords, for example “Palestine,” they tend to use the voiced cognate, /b/. This leads to some hilarious minimal-pair hijinks, such as:
“The plight of the Palestinian people” becomes the amusingly accurate “the blight of the Balestinian beoble.”
“All-h be praised” becomes the delicious “All-h be braised.”
And so, since I’m kind of an ass, I refer to Those People as the Balestinians.
Have we ever talked about how much I hate hippies? Because I so do. Not really the little, harmless ones with a lot of canvas clothing who go on “alternative breaks” to teach poor kids how to plant an organic garden. Those hippies are kind of cute. The hippies I hate are the aggressive neo-hippies, full of sound and fury, signifying shrill indignation at every turn. You’ve met them - the boys have Che t-shirts, and the girls have unattractive skirts and dreadlocks. They’re always furious about something: sweatshops, meat-packing plants, Iraq, the patriarchy, the weather, something. To converse with them is like being trapped in a room with Upton Sinclair, if Upton Sinclair had questionable hygiene, adult acne, and poor research methods. The vast, vast majority of them never do anything about the issues. Sure, they shop at American Apparel (occasionally), join “Peace for Palestine” Facebook groups, wear “Gay? Fine by me” t-shirts (sweet Liberace’s ghost, how I hate those shirts, they’re so patronizing) and make sure to ruin Thanksgiving by talking about how World War II was an imperial exercise and turducken is murder, but they stop there. They don’t want to change things, they want to be angry and nag everyone so they can feel anointed and self-righteous. If the world did change, they wouldn’t be the underdogs, and their prim, repetitive carping wouldn’t be a voice crying for justice in the wilderness that is Portland.
I hate ‘em. And many of them are so, so, SO incredibly shortsighted, to wit: “I believe in an end to the patriarchy, a woman’s right to choose, gay rights, and freedom of expression. I really love the Polyphonic Spree. And I believe in the rights of the Balestinians and hope that they will be victorious over the Imperial Zionist Apartheid Nazi war machine.”
Whoa there, princess. You can’t find a society more patriarchal than the Balestinians. If your little friend Arugula Mae were to move to Ramallah, all she’d be choosing is which heavy fabric to completely cover her body in. She’ll have it better than your gay cohorts, though. They’ll simply be killed immediately to reduce the shame brought on the family by Ahmed’s lisp. And don’t get too attached to your signed Dave Matthews Band LP, because, sad to say, kiddo, fundamentalist Islam forbids music. Cheer up, though! You’ll get a lot of time in standing in front of bulldozers, since, considering the taboo against alcohol, you’ll never be too hung over!
This never occurs to them. Anyway, to get to the original story I wanted to tell, I have this ex-girlfriend. Let’s call her Tzipi. Tzipi and I only ever argued about global politics, nothing else. For example, China pisses me off. I don’t like the governmental oppression, I don’t like their bellicose attitude towards Taiwan, and I don’t like communists. She used to live in Hong Kong, loves China, and doesn’t think my “Better Dead than Red” tattoo is cute. Predictably, we had a similar clash over the West Bank Wall. We were both horrified – she by the wall, and I by the absence of a lid. Anyway, Tzipi goes to college in North Carolina, and one day the Campus Socialist party (I’m serious) built a G-dd-mn wall on campus so that the students could understand the terrible hardship of the Balestinian people. She says it’s amusingly short – apparently the socialists shared too much of their food and didn’t get enough protein to last through the construction of a significant wall. So, unsurprisingly, people started to spray-paint various anti-Israel and anti-Jewish things on the “abartheid wall.” This pissed Tzipi Goldman, president of North Carolina Hillel, off, but the school wouldn’t do anything about it because it was “free speech.” It wasn’t anti-Israel, it was pro-Balestinian. Anyway, Tzipi’s Israeli friend – we’ll call her Valentina because I honestly don’t remember her name, snuck over there in the middle of the night and spray-painted on the wall, in Hebrew, “The State of Israel will last for a thousand years.” She came by later in the day when the hippies were puzzling over it and said, “oh, I can read Hebrew! It says, let’s see, ’send the Jews back where they came from!’” And do you know what those hippies did?
Not only did they miss the joke entirely, they liked it so much that they painted a decorative border around it so that no one would paint over it.
ואמר
אהה אדוני
הנה לא ידעתי דבר
כי נער אנכי
ויאמר אדוני אלי
אל תאמר נער אנכי
כי על כל אשר אשלחך תלך
ואת כל אשר אצוך תדבר
And the word of the Lord came to me saying,
“Before I created you in the womb I knew you,
Before you left the womb I consecrated you,
I appointed you a prophet for the nations.”
And I said,
“Ah, Lord!
See, I know not how to speak,
For I am a youth.”
And the Lord said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am a youth.’
To every place I will send you, go,
And all that I command you, speak.”
(Jeremiah 1:4-7)
I know that many of you doubt that the Lord has bestowed upon me the mantle of prophet, but I am unsurprised, O Israel, for I know your ways - as it is written, “For like a stubborn cow Israel has balked, therefore the Lord will graze him on the range like a sheep.” Hearken to me, for I have proof of my prophetic status - the Lord has revealed to me a vision of the future.
You see, I haven’t been sleeping well lately, either because of the avalanche of stress, disappointment and heartbreak threatening to bury me, or, more likely, because I ran out of arak to use as a nightcap (see my previous post to discover what happened to my arak). When I don’t sleep well, I dream excessively, mostly about mundane topics. But last night, it was different. Last night, the Lord spake unto me.
I dreamt that I was at the wedding of my friend Mayer and his lovely fiancee Tamar. Mayer, a barrel- and hairy-chested Alaskan, provided me with a couch to sleep on when I had no other, and proved a tireless nargilah-smoking compatriot, a fellow arak imbiber, a study buddy for our (excellent) Bible and English Literature class at Hebrew U, and, most importantly, a cultural sophisticate who could see as I could the deep and abiding brilliance of ’70s-vintage Israeli musical film Kazablan. In return for his boundless kindness, I gave him the gifts of appreciation for Joss Whedon’s unfortunately canceled space Western Firefly, for dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and for trip-hop act Massive Attack (he appreciated my description of their oeuvre as “freaky sex music”).
Anyway, Mayer’s dream wedding went off without any major hitches - as I said, my dreams tend to be rather literal (unless they’re about zombies). When it ended, I got out of bed and shuffled, half-asleep, to my computer. I saw that Mayer was on AIM, and proceeded to tell him of my dream while it was fresh. He asked me how the wedding went, and I informed him that it went fine, but that the dream had also featured one strange detail: in the synagogue in which the wedding took place, one had to make a 90 degree turn in the aisle before reaching the chupah. We discussed the possible metaphorical import of such a detail; I suggested that it was symbolic of the 90 degree turn one must make in life before stepping under the chupah and entering the contract of matrimony, which demonstrates at least that those two years of an English major provided me with the ability to construct meaning on the fly.
Mayer apparently thought the dream, and its mysterious 90 degree aisle turn, was interesting enough to pass on to his fiancee, who had a most interesting reaction. Mayer furnished me with a transcript of the conversation, which follows:
TAMAR: Holy fucking shit, I’m so scared. That’s creepy as hell. MAYER: Why? TAMAR: Great Neck Synagogue is famous for its 90 degree aisle. Remember?
I, of course, have never seen, nor been near the Great Neck Synagogue. I didn’t even know Mayer and Tamar were getting married there.
There is only one conclusion that can be reached from this.
I am a bona fide prophet.
And so I will prophesy, and my voice will disturb the empty spaces of the South and the mountains of Judah, it will bring mighty winds upon the calm waters of the Galilee, it will darken the white stones of Jerusalem and it will shake the very cedars of Lebanon.
And ladies: you know prophets be fine. The prediction of the raining down of destruction and retribution upon God’s people Israel is such a turn-on.
New Orleans has never really been in the first world, per se. Two hundred years after the Louisiana Purchase, when New Orleans and most of the Great Plains came into the Union (which is an odd pairing, really - millions of acres that will directly be filled with tidy, useful farms and tidy, useful Lutherans yoked onto a bowl of gin and French whores), the city still runs with the giddy inefficiency of a colonial capital. As you might imagine, this has been exacerbated by the hurricane. We went from being a relatively well-run and desired colony - roughly Curacao - to being a barely remembered, held-out-of spite colony - the Ellice Islands, or perhaps Comoros. The phones barely worked - I tried to call 911 to report a fire, and it was busy. Six times. The leaky fire hydrants disgorged thousands of gallons of water, which was no great waste because the water was full of either sketchy bacteria or the colossal amount of treatment chemical they put in to stun the bacteria. Also lead. Everything was coated in a fine, ineradicable dust. Everyone was sick all the time. Road signs were either absent or ignored. No one ever knew whether or when anything was open. Audubon Zoo mailed me something in December and I got it in April.
A few months on, things are better. We’ve clawed our way up the charts to sort of a French Guiana level - we can vote, occasionally, and things work a lot of the time. The water is far from tasty but not actually toxic. The police have enough leisure time to pull you over for not wearing a seatbelt (I hate seatbelt laws, and I also hate when people don’t wear their seatbelts, so I am never happy about the situation). You can have relaxed phone calls, instead of rapid-firing information so that you can get it across before the connection fails.
What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, my awful shower. The graduate student dorm and the building that housed the radio station and navy took on too much water to be worth saving, so they tore them down and installed temporary buildings on the site for students to live in. They greatly overestimated the number of people who would need housing, so whole floors of real dorms are lying fallow, but by G-d they bought those temporary buildings and people were going to fucking live in them, come hell or high water. (Get it?) So. Imagine a FEMA trailer, widen it a little, take out the kitchen, put two end-to end, stack two atop those, put another unit like that across the way (for a total of eight units) and connect them with some stairs and little decks made of pressure-treated wood, and there you have it. The Particleboard Palace. The Bitchin’ Pad. Discount Living. The interior is a vision in particleboard, fauxrmica, and that weird hard-pack industrial carpeting. The fusebox is in the living room. Since I’ve lived there, the shower has leaked into the bedroom either twice or three times, depending on whether maintenance actually fixed it the first time and it broke again or whether they just lied. The sink is persnickety in a way I honestly don’t know how to describe. The temperature on the heater/AC must be changed with pliers. I saw insects there in varieties and volumes I had never seen before, including a beautiful yellow moth and a tiny but terrifying spider with ceaselessly working mandibles. (It could jump, too.) There have been three tornado warnings since I have lived there, including one scary enough that me and my dad went and crouched in the garage. I can’t use the phone indoors, because the building is coated in corrugated tin. It has a rich, crisp odor, which one of my friends identified as “the poison they put in pressure-treated wood to kill termites.” The poison, incidentally, is chromated copper arsenate. The copper kills fungus, the chromium is an ultraviolet-resistant fixative, and the arsenic kills insects. also people. “Housewives prefer chromated copper arsenate - three, count ‘em, three toxic metals for the price of one.”
What the hell was I talking about? Oh, yeah, my awful shower.
So as I’ve lived there, the shower knobs have gotten harder and harder to turn, to the point that to turn the shower off I have to put all of the force my wee body can muster into turning the knob. Last night, the hot tap finally bested me. I spent fifteen scalding, naked minutes trying to turn off the shower. Couldn’t do it, but I did manage to reduce the flow. I went to go ask my friend Small Cajun (aka CHUNK) if she thought this was a “maintenance emergency” that I should call in or not, but along the way I got to eating pistachios, and then we went to a bar, and then to another bar, and then one of our friends got arrested… anyway, I forgot to ask her and got hammered, so when I got back the Particleboard palace was a hothouse. I was, as mentioned, drunk, so I turned on the air conditioner and went to sleep. This morning, everything in the unit was coated with a fine, springlike dew. I took a shower, and this time I couldnt even kind of turn off the hot water, so it’s just going, full steam ahead. The linoleum in the bathroom has begun to warp. The veneer on the particleboard is beginning to peel. I am not strong enough to turn off my own shower. I am a bad tenant of a trailer.
Star has greenlit “Yo’ Mama Wednesdays.” Each Wednesday, Kosher Eucharist will post a BRUTAL yo’ mama joke. Feel free to adapt them to grandmothers, as well. To start us off:
Yo’ mama so white, she tells “Your Mother” jokes.
And now, please enjoy the Official Kosher Eucharist Yo’ Mama Wednesdays Theme Song, the Pharcyde’s “Ya Mama”!
So my co-blogger Mikey, hereafter referred to as “Star,” tells me that he’s promised you dear readers an explanation of my relocation for however long to New Zealand. It’s probably not as exciting as you hope. I am, All-h willing, graduating from college in December, qualified to do little more than draw alarming parallels between my family and the Tudors (the similarities are striking, except that we’re poor.) As expected, people aren’t lining up to pay me to explain the English reformation to them (I can’t imagine why). So, I need a place to live. My mother [played by Catherine of Aragon], G-d love her, lives in a federal housing project for the disabled (its name is, more or less, “Sunny Day Real Estate,) and though I do love her, the thought of running the Tard Gauntlet every day just to get home daunts me. I also love my father [played by Henry VIII]. However, I hate where he lives (Plano), and I passionately, fervently despise his common, common-law wife, a belligerent, chunky ogress of a woman [played by Anne Boleyn, and if All-h is merciful will eventually share her fate.] Her bitchy teenage daughter [Edward VI, the Protestant Brat] adds a further impediment. I could stay in New Orleans, but this would involve paying astronomical rents and working in the service industry.
Does anyone remember the last time I worked in the service industry? I worked at the GAP in the pretentious, faggy Northpark Mall in Dallas over Katrinamester. It was miserable, the people were humorless, the Christmas music was shrill, secular, and unceasing, and I could never remember how to work the register. I drank before I went in, and then in the car on my lunch break. This is how I learned that you can mix Southern Comfort with anything, including more Southern Comfort.
So, faced with these unpalatable choices, and aware of my lifelong desire to travel, made a decision. I [Bloody Mary, Counter-Reformationist, Prot-Burner, and Hysterical-Pregnancy-Haver Extraordinaire], would go to Australia. It was perfect! It was far away, it was exotic, and it was full of white people who spoke English! Huzzah!
Then I learned that a New Zealand work visa was three times longer than an Australian one. I realized than New Zealand was even more remote, and that fewer of the animals were poisonous, so I started reading up on it.
And I fell in love. Real love, too, not “haven’t been laid in a while” love.
New Zealand:
-has a transsexual member of parliament
-has a Hungarian Rastafarian member of parliament
-has a bizarre native ecosystem that almost entirely lacks mammals
-is home to ENORMOUS INSECTS CALLED WETA THAT CAN BE UP TO EIGHT INCHES LONG
-occasionally has to shut down major roadways because “the Maori are doing something”
-has fewer people than Dallas-Fort Worth in an area the size of Britain
-has legal prostitution
-once had a gigantic predatory bird called the Haast’s eagle that may have eaten people
-broadcasts stories on the national radio about women having sex with aliens (yes, they did)
-is where my beloved kiwifruit are grown
and so much more.
I had to go.
So I got my visa application. One of the questions was “Have you ever been involved in war crimes or crimes against humanity?” I told my friend Nora that I had written “I fucked a fat chick once” in that blank, and she
a) said “Oh my G-d, who?!”
b) actually thought I had written that on my visa application. Needless to say, I didn’t (fuck a fat chick or tell New Zealand that I had), my application was accepted, and on February 9th, I am (temporarily [maybe]) outta here!
And it was, er, a seminal experience, to say the least. For those of our cherished readers who operate outside of death metal’s sphere of influence, GWAR (I don’t think it’s an acronym, but it is always screamed) is noted pretty much entirely for its live performances, in which the members of the band dress as monsters, slay noted public figures in effigy, and douse the audiencewith various fluids. It is, quite frankly, pretty fuckin’ sweet.
So me and my escorts (a small Cajun and a large Cajun) get all dolled up for the show in our best duds (read: we tried to wear themost out-of-place-at-a-death-metal-show things we could, so things such as chinos, a denim onesie with attached culottes, and a pink t-shirt reading “I Love Latin Boys” were deployed) and head downtown. We stalled a lot, because frankly the opening bands on a death metal tour are probably best avoided by all but the most unwashed of heathens.
And unwashed they were. Sweet sweaty hell, have you ever been to one of these shows? I mean, I’m known far and wide for my love and acceptance of all mankind (okay, all white, Judeo-Christian mankind [okay, myself, Michael, and sometimes my mother]), but these people were, unabashedly, the most unwashed, most unwisely-tattooed, most “fragrant” group of people I’ve seen since Ani DiFranco came here on tour. I kept looking around and thinking “My goodness… how unemployable these people are!” I seriously felt like trying to writing a monograph in the style of a 17th century English explorer - “The moft Remarkable Cuftoms of the Mettal-Heads, a primitive Tribe of the Diftant Ifles, with Special Emphafis on the Adornment of the Organs of Generation.” My companion, the Small Cajun, waxed maternal: “Some of these girls would be so pretty if they’d only do something with their hair.” The Gwarites were surprisingly polite. Few experiences are more disorienting than having a 300-pound man in a Goregasm t-shirt with food in his beard courteously excuse himself as he dreadnoughts past.
So yeah. Freaks. The opening band - “Red Chord” - finished, and the roadies started installing the set and props for GWAR. The theme for the show was some sort of Ship of Doom, replete with evil infants, demon boobs, and decorative bones strewn hither and thither. Amusingly, the stagehands had set out drinks for GWAR to refresh themselves with during the show. They had chosen lemonade and fruit punch. Anyway, GWAR comes out, and in sequence they start with the blood-, bile-, heroin-, and semen-dousing of the audience. I’ll skim over the details of the majority of the show, if only because it’s hard to do justice to the concept of papal evisceration with mere words. At one point, we moved into the thick of the crowd because we were slightly out of the range of the blood spray and we wanted to truly earn our GWAR chops. Our efforts were rewarded: not only did we get a close view of Mohammed-in-effigy’s face being skinned (peace be upon him, of course,) but we found ourselves well within range of the BLOOD CANNON.
I repeat: the BLOOD CANNON.
After the show, we noted that the blood and bile (or semen, or zombie juice, or whatever) has combined to give our skins a blue-green cast… AS ON A ZOMBIE. So, as anyone would, we spent about half an hour in the garage taking zombie photographs, and then went home and scared our friend Nora to death. Two showers later, I still have blue-tinted patches on my body, and my beard may never feel really clean again.
My friend Harry has carefully cultivated an online persona of professional hater. The late View From Here Podcast, alav ha-shalom, for example, was an epic compendium of Things That Suck According to Harry. Harry is a fierce cultural critic, fearlessly knighting into the Order of Suck gay-bashing Charedi Jews, hipster DJs MisShapes, Asian garden beetles and any and every loathsome black heel mark on the sparkling white tile floor of tolerability. No man, woman, living creature or abstract idea is safe from Harry’s discerning eye.
But if you hang out with Harry, you’ll find that beneath his rough, brown and fuzzy exterior, there is a wealth of delicious, brightly colored love (guess who just ate a kiwi). That’s right. Harry loves things. Among the recipients of Harry’s elusive affection and rare seal of approval are hummus, kubeh soup, his wife Ziva, comic books, melodic power pop, dogs, Israel and martial arts movies. But there is one greater, overriding love, a love for the ages, a love (and burrito) supreme. What is it?
Zombies.
Yes, Harry loves zombies. But Harry is not content merely to love and cherish the walking undead, he feels compelled to spread their Gospel, to walk the earth as a zombievangelical, illuminating, and feasting on, the minds of the living. And I am one of Harry’s victims.
It started out innocently enough, a discussion about the merits of shambling traditional “Dawn of the Dead” zombies vs. agile, vicious “28 Days Later” zombies-on-crack here, a plot outline for an Israeli zombie movie there. But it was inevitable that the minor flesh wound of zombiemania Harry bestowed upon me would blossom into a full-on zombifying infection, forcing my loved ones to ruthlessly dispatch of me before I went for someone’s brain (while crying. Of course while crying). And the catalyst? When Harry loaned me World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Written by Max Brooks, the progeny of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, World War Z provides a completely straight-faced future history account of the worldwide conflict against a rapidly-spreading zombie infection, as told in interview format by the survivors of the war. It’s chock full of clever and relevant political commentary, and also lots of zombie violence, and I will throw caution to the wind and resoundingly declare my eternal geekiness by declaring it fucking awesome.
And how I am sure that even as I write this, my blood coagulates in my veins and my rotting flesh begins to fall from my face? I know because I’ve begun to have zombie dreams. Like last night, wherein I dreamed that I was in a village on the edge of a forest where an uneasy truce with the zombies who occupied the forest had degenerated into a fullout brainmunching zombie battle (with mechs). I know it doesn’t make sense that zombies would agree to truces, but my subconscious has never been particularly coherent. Then the dream cut to a scene pretty much stolen from the book — I was in a submarine with a girl I know (although I don’t remember which girl, actually) and we watched, horrified, as a veritable army of the undead walked along the seafloor moving inexorably to land and certain carnage.
I think I liked it more when my dreams were excessively literal.
So let this post serve as a warning: be wary of Harry (it’s easy to remember because it rhymes). If you aren’t, you’ll wind up like me, determinedly shambling forth with the zombie armies waiting only for the taste of the hot brains of my next victim. Be afraid.
The best part of having your own blog again, a part which excites me every time I remember it, is that you can post whatever you damned well please. No longer limited to the Jewish subject matter I made myself stick to while writing for Jewlicious, I can write lengthy treatises on music, rant about hummus, or repost amusing conversations I’ve had with my mother.
You know what? I think I’ll do that right now.
My mother and I are very similar — my boundless cynicism, anomie, irrational romantic streak and foul mouth, after all, did not arise in a vacuum, but were passed down onto me by my mother like other families pass down fine china or grandma’s jewels. We never had the money for things like that, so I had to make do with a jaundiced worldview. I think it shows in the way we communicate, like, let’s say for example, when we discuss my sullen high school years…
MY MOTHER: You didn’t enjoy much of anything then, from my perspective. Other than…oh, never mind, water under the bridge. ME: Shut the fuck up. MY MOTHER: Is this the way to talk to your mother? ME: Is this the way my mother taught me to speak?
(brief pause, following by breaking out into song)
Is this the little girl I carried?
Is this the little boy at play?
I don’t remember growing older
When did they?
When did she get to be a beauty?
When did he get to be so tall?
Wasn’t it yesterday
When they were small?
Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset… ME: Sorry, I have certain showtune triggers in my brain for some reason. MY MOTHER: You are such a fucked-up child.
But seriously folks, contrary to all indications, we have a pretty healthy relationship. And contrary to popular belief, I don’t frequently break out in showtunes. Only sometimes. Only when the situation calls for it.
I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of acoustic covers of songs, and especially of the motivations behind them. It seems all an enterprising young man has to do is cultivate a bit of stubble, wear a blazer over jeans and a Wings ‘76 T-shirt, grab his six string, cast his eyes downward and launch into an earnest solo cover of a popular song that was much better the first time around, and really emote — and suddenly, mysteriously, as if a raspy, rough-around-the-edges cover of “Little Red Corvette” emitted a subsonic signal audible only by human females, women start shedding clothes. To wit, sometime around my freshman year of college, everyone was solemnly listening to, and solemnly having drunken sex to, Ben Harper’s acoustic cover of “Sexual Healing,” as if its ragged edges (and I love me some ragged edges) even approached the slinky curves of the original.
There’s only one kind of music in which the lyric “I’m hot just like your oven” is appropriate, and it’s not crunchy acoustic folk-soul.
There are, however, worse sins than the latest “heartfelt” unplugged retooling of another artist’s song. The lowest circle of Hell is saved for those musicians who have performed “heartfelt” unplugged retoolings of their own best songs, the chiefest offender among these being of course Eric Clapton. Middle-aged hippies-turned-yuppies, businessmen whose CD collections consists mainly of “Hell Freezes Over: The Eagles’ Greatest Hits” and sensitive teenage-and-twenty-something girls may have nodded and foot-tapped blithely along as Clapton, the man once called God, plodded through his tepid acoustic version of “Layla,” but all I heard was the sound of the butcher knife as Clapton hacked, sliced and shredded his once-formidable legacy into bloody chunks still twitching on the killing floor.
But I digress (slightly). I’ve also never been much of a follower of David Bowie, who always struck me as something of a walking, singing example of the triumph of aesthetic over substance, strutting about in orange wigs and eyeliner, burying what were objectively simple pop songs in more glitter than a six year old girl’s macaroni-noodle-based preschool art project. I tended to be surrounded by Bowie fans once I got to college, unsurprising given that the people I hung out with also tended to appreciate things like Rocky Horror, John Waters movies and I Love Lucy. My beloved friend Flannery underwent a process somewhere between a Pavlovian response and actual levitation upon the full-frontal revelation of Mr. Stardust’s Thin White Duke in The Man Who Fell to Earth. But despite that fertile soil of Bowie fandom, I never did fully bring myself to care about what, exactly, Ground Control felt the need to inform Major Tom.
Given all that, Seu Jorge had two major points against him when he graced the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic and then an entire album with solo acoustic covers of Bowie tunes - translated into Portuguese, no less. By all rights, Seu Jorge should have been nothing more than a faintly amusing aside in a film I wasn’t particularly fond of.
But that’s not how it turned out. Maybe it was because I’m a sucker for things Brazilian and Portuguese, an unabashed bossa nova devotee since the first day I heard Getz/Gilberto. Or maybe it’s because Jorge is a good-looking black man and…uh, nevermind. But for whatever reason, I was knocked over by his simple, sweet samba versions of Bowie classics. And I thought about it for a little while, and I realized that what Jorge had revealed with the aid of his voice and guitar is that, when you scrape away the caked-on layers of glitter, mascara, hair dye and sexual ambiguity, David Bowie has written some truly lovely songs. There was a true gem lurking under the theatrical bluster, the sugary strings and the lyrics about girls with mousy hair hooked up to silver screens of “Life On Mars?”, and all it took was a guitar-slinging, Portuguese-English-dictionary-sporting favela kid to bring it out.
Of course, as thankful as I am to Seu Jorge for bucking the trend and proving me wrong, at least in this isolated instance, that still doesn’t mean that if you’re a skinny white kid with an acoustic you have any grounds to attempt a cover of, say, “Let’s Stay Together.” I don’t care how many panties get thrown up on stage.
I’ve never been much of a drinker. Considering what I’ve seen so far in my life, especially my life in Israel, this is an affliction shared by a lot of Jews (Chasidim and American yeshiva students nonwithstanding), and one I’ve never been able to get past. Most of my experiences with drinking to excess have ended poorly, like the infamous incident towards the beginning of freshman year wherein Chris and I went to a party in full makeup, and I proceeded to get intoxicated to a point where I thought it sounded reasonable to mix cheap whiskey roughly 50/50 with grenadine, making a sticky red cheap whiskey-flavored syrup approximately the color, consistency and flavor of Hunter S. Thompson’s blood. Note to impressionable readers: this is in no way reasonable, and I paid for it during the night, when I got up, leaned over the side of the bed and expelled a diluvial proportion of pink, grenadine-enhanced vomit, which left a massive and permanent stain on the floor (Chris and I named him Geoffrey).
However, I also have a faulty memory, which I will attribute to the drugs (with whom I formed a much more cozy relationship than I did with their legal, liquid cousin). So it was that I found myself several days ago in the company of a perpetually unwise friend of mine and a bottle of arak, preparing to drink a small celebratory toast to our Israeli media debut (which is a story not worth going into).
I should briefly interject that arak, the regional favorite of the Middle East and the greater Mediterranean, is a potent, foul-smelling concoction flavored with anise (compare to the Greek ouzo, the Turkish raki and the French pastis). Nearly undrinkable straight up, upon being mixed with water or ice it takes on a mysterious milky hue and becomes almost palatable. I like it, anyway. Traditionally, however, it’s meant to be slowly slipped as an accompaniment to a selection of salads and spreads, not rapidly guzzled.
But then, I was never one for tradition.
Somehow, and the fact that my normally domineering self-control was pushed so readily aside disturbs me, that celebratory toast turned into the entire bottle, in the space of about half an hour. And that’s when I did something I’ve never done before. I blacked out.
I woke up past midnight in bed, fully clothed, and entirely confused as to what exactly had transpired. So I called my drinking “buddy,” who informed me that I had gone to the bathroom and then announced I was going to sleep, which is, so he says, exactly what happened. He then left on a mission to buy a coat at the mall, but instead fell asleep on the bus and woke up at the last stop in Gilo. I also had a message from another friend thanking me for allowing her to come over and use the Internet. I had no memory of this transpiring, but I checked my cell phone text messages and I had indeed affirmed that she could come over. She says when she came, nobody answered the knock, whereupon she walked in and saw me passed out, and proceeded to use the Internet for the next four or so hours. She claims I got up several times to use the bathroom but paid her absolutely no mind.
Of course, the idea that I would suffer complete temporary amnesia bothers me, as I like to be in control of my mental faculties, such as they are. But what bothers me even more is that this is the first time I’ve ever blacked out, and I seem to have done absolutely nothing to take advantage of that situation. I didn’t make any embarrassing phone calls revealing my undying love for anybody, I didn’t rob a liquor store, I didn’t drive at 200 km/h the wrong way through a residential neighborhood, and (to my knowledge, anyway) I didn’t impregnate anybody. The only result of my binge drinking was a crippling headache and a terrible fire in my belly.
That is so lame.
And unless ten years from now I meet a child who has my nose, loves reggae and has a birthday nine months after mid-November 2006, I will never forgive myself.
Alright, here it is, the first of the hopefully many posts in which I talk about songs I love, with songs included. You lucky, lucky people. In this one I touch upon the enduring concerns of the human condition: dub reggae, love, and dub reggae as it relates to love. Because everyone can appreciate that.
****
Jacob Miller - “Baby I Love You So”
King Tubby and Augustus Pablo - “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown”
The story of “Baby I Love You So” is really the story of two songs - the actual Jacob Miller song itself and its somewhat perversely much more famous dub version, “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown.” Like all reggae listeners who progressed beyond Bob Marley (fewer than you would think), especially reggae listeners possessed of a lackadaisical disposition (as many as you would think), it was inevitable that I would begin listening to dub, reggae’s seemingly unambitious little brother, music tailor-made for staring at the ceiling.
Like any other genre, dub has its landmark albums, its Maggot Brains and its Electric Ladylands and its Freak Outs (although dub albums, landmark or otherwise, tend to kill a touch more softly than those titans), and King Tubby and Augustus Pablo’s icy, austere and echoing King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown is an invariable early way station on the road to dub obsession (dubsession?). So named for its marriage of producer King Tubby’s mixing board voodoo and Augustus Pablo’s spare melodica lines over rockers reggae (itself an offshoot of reggae in the mid-’70s), dub cognoscenti consistently rank it one of the best dub albums ever released, and almost nobody debates that its title track is the finest example of dub’s splintered, ghostly aesthetic ever put to tape.
Naturally then when I first got the album I obsessively listened to “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown,” playing back the track again and again, enchanted by the echoing rimshot that opens the song and by the first brief snatch of the fragmented vocal line, a “Baby, I…” pregnant with its own lacking resolution, finding it only at the end of the song when most of the instrumentation drops out, leaving behind in its wake only a shuddering “I…I love you so.” I badly wanted to hear the original song, the song that seemed to teasingly reveal itself from beneath swirling layers of reverb and echo like half-glimpsed figures reaching out from a dense fog. But it’s not so simple with dub – good dub is so effective precisely because it builds itself around what it lacks, because it takes away most of the elements through which we engage with songs (the vocals, the melody, the lead instruments), releasing them only in jagged, distorted shards, coded letters from missing persons. The palpable tension dub creates is created by the knowledge that something is lacking and incomplete, created by the desire to fill the spaces – but that doesn’t mean the desire should be acted upon. Like a woman enhanced to an impossible stature by day after day of consuming fantasy who turns out to be only a pale imitation of imagination in real life, sometimes the song behind the dub is best left to the realm of dreams and speculation, lest the dub itself be robbed of its power to entice. Sometimes, the imagination is more beautiful.
But of course, that’s not a hard and fast rule, and it proved untrue in the case of “Baby I Love You So.” After more than two years in which I logged probably hundreds of listens to “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown,” I finally learned that the songs on which many of the dubs on the Meets the Rockers album were based had been released in their original form. Unbeknownst to me, the singer who occasionally drifted into the mix throughout the album was Jacob Miller, the leader of reggae band Inner Circle (who, years after Miller’s untimely death in a car accident, would pop out and record the hit songs “Bad Boys” — yes, the song from “Cops” — and the somewhat disturbing “Sweat (A La La La La Song)”). After becoming a devoted Rasta, Miller had teamed up with Augustus Pablo and King Tubby to release a short solo album of roots rockers songs, Who Say Jah No Dread. The album, consisting of six perfect songs and their respective King Tubby dub versions, included “Baby I Love You So,” which, astoundingly, proved every bit as good as its feted dub counterpart.
Its brilliant and vaguely unsettling melodica-punctuated backing track intact down to the galvanizing snare drum hits, “Baby I Love You So” reveals the full vocals so tantalizingly glimpsed in “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown.” Helping matters is Jacob Miller himself, one of the most compelling vocalists of the reggae era, and the lyrics themselves. I’ve never been in favor of lyrics that overcomplicate matters of the heart – true love is more apt to be bluntly stated than it is to be obscured by metaphor and flowery verse. Statements of love are heavy burdens carried with difficulty and often dropped unceremoniously – when we truly mean them, we dispense with the poetic trappings and deliver them straightforwardly, we need to, for otherwise we would be unable to stand up straight under the mounting strain. When we truly love someone so, we’re less likely to compare them to a summer’s day than we are to admit sentiments akin to, “Baby, I’ll be slaving every day / night and day I’ll pray / that love will come my way,” as Jacob Miller does. The way he says it, Augustus Pablo’s melodica sighing in the background, I believe it.
But the frequent, perhaps inevitable, pitfall of investing oneself so heavily in 2-and-a-half minute slices of perfection, especially ones like “Baby I Love You So,” is of course association. Can one possibly avoid associating his favorite songs with people or places important to him? I find that the practice of having your favorite songs serve also as the soundtrack to your life and your feelings is fraught with danger on multiple levels, but it’s nigh-impossible to appreciate music solely on an intellectual level (and I am massively distrustful of people who do) — and perhaps our favorite songs wouldn’t be such without their accompanying baggage. But it does tend to color our approach to and relationship with those songs in ways we may prefer it didn’t. I associate “Baby I Love You So” with someone who was an important presence in my life when I first started playing the album, and as a result the song itself no longer is merely the long-awaited resolution to “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown,” which would probably have been enough, but also a window on a certain time and a conjurer of certain feelings.
Certainly those specters of feelings raised by a song enable us to engage with it in a much more fundamental manner, particularly when those feelings are fresh, but feelings are often transitory, subjected to daily turbulence and liable to completely shift over time. That’s already a discouraging enough proposition, since we’d often prefer that our feelings remain static, tied in as they are to our very identities, but it gets murkier when the songs are thrown in. In the event of divorce, who gains custody of our favorite songs, ourselves or our feelings? We can’t rid ourselves of associations, but when our attitudes toward them almost inevitably sour, how will it effect how we hear those landmark songs of our lives? When my feelings change, can I ever hear that deep four-note piano pickup at the beginning of “Baby I Love You So” again and feel the same thrill? I’m not sure, and I’m not sure it’s fair, because if anything in life should be constant, it’s love for a great song. But perhaps like all love, it’s best to be thankful for it and appreciate it while it lasts. If it doesn’t, it’ll still always be great ceiling-staring music.
First things first: I know this layout isn’t nearly as exciting as one might hope, but be assured that it’s temporary. No, I won’t be painfully cobbling together, through a lengthy process of trial and error, a more fitting layout. I’m outsourcing.
You see, recently I was lunching, as I often do, with a certain prominent Jewish blogger (let’s just say he’s a fresh-faced iconoclast redefining Judaism) and complaining, as I often do, about my frustration with the state of the, ahem, New Jewish Media, particularly the recent content at my longtime base Jewlicious. Lunch turned somewhat Faustian when said prominent Jewish blogger made me a proposition: in return for my becoming affiliated with his greater Jewish media empire, he would raise the dead. He would host and build one of his generally-excellent designs for the resurgent Kosher Eucharist, in its shiny new home at www.koshereucharist.com, as opposed to the somewhat less memorable koshereucharist.iq9.com.
As Igor Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat” reached its crescendo on the stereo of the cafe in which we sat (okay, actually, it was Pink Floyd’s “The Division Bell”), I mulled over this generous proposal. On the one hand, reviving the Eucharist would mean again having a platform on which I could pontificate about things that (gasp) were not Jewish in nature and provide an escape from an increasingly stale-seeming Jewlicious (although I note I have nothing against Jewlicious or its founders itself) - but on the other, it meant being part of the same blog circle as that syrup of ipecac drizzled over the pancakes of Jewish blogging, JVoices. It was a difficult decision, but encouraged by the support of my biggest fan (IT’S NOT MY MOM - oh, who am I kidding?), I agreed, and I signed a contract using my own blood as ink. Or I may have just sent an IM saying “Let’s do it,” my memory of the matter is fuzzy. Immediately afterwards, I called up my previous partner in literary crime, the colorful-haired-and-mouthed Chris, to ask him whether he would return to his lofty position at the helm of the great celestial vessel that is the Kosher Eucharist. Much to my pleasure, he jumped at the chance, provided that he be allowed to use a nom de plume, a rather inexplicable “Constantine”. So here we are, masters of our own online domain, and, as I have said, on a mission from God.
So where have we been? For those of us who are new to our, ahem, zany antics, Kosher Eucharist was a short-lived webcomic starring a somewhat reticent Jew and a somewhat hormonally-charged, volatile Catholic, characters that were IN NO WAY based upon myself and Chris, that transmogrified into a blog in which we commented on politics, history, Israel, Judaism, Catholicism, our university (Tulane) and our shared love, Fran Drescher. The last time our loyal readers heard from us, circa midsummer 2005, I was on a summer vacation in Israel and Chris was…I think he was living with his dad in Texas or something, I forget. Now, more than a year later, and in the wake of a major hurricane which wrecked our home city and scattered us to the winds, I’ve permanently moved to Israel and am less than a month away from my supposed induction date into the IDF (which is, objectively, not the best time to be taken by inspiration and restart one’s old blog), and Chris is a month away from graduating from college, after which he will visit Israel for three weeks before moving somewhat indefinitely to New Zealand. Why New Zealand? I’m not entirely sure, but he can explain for himself.
Fortunately for you, we’re bursting with ideas for how to restore Kosher Eucharist to its former glory and beyond. Including, inshallah:
- A regular feature, admittedly somewhat inspired by Nick Hornby’s “Songbook,” in which I will post an MP3 of one of my favorite songs and discuss music, history and my feelings as they relate to the song. That’s right. I’m going to be talking about my feelings. I thought I’d try something new.
- Erratic posts, once I’m drafted, about the fun times I’m sure to have in my capacity as a weapon of war in the arsenal of the Israeli military.
- Chris’ thrilling travelogues from Israel and New Zealand and points inbetween. I’m looking forward to the report on wacky New Zealand pizza chain Hell Pizza.
- What I hope will become a weekly feature with Official Kosher Eucharist Mascot Flannery (the world’s Jewiest Catholic girl), Fridays with Flan, in which Flannery will demonstrate for us relevant and timely words in American Sign Language, such “Jew” and “vagina.”
- Chris’ perennial dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in the Holy See.
- And, as always, our shrill rantings about how fat and unlovely we find Suha Arafat, the Grand Dame of Gay Paris.
I’m so excited I could get off the couch.
Now, to go finish those cartoons I hope will be incorporated into the final design of this fine blog, whatever it may be…hint, hint, oh noble benefactor!
War haunts our borders. Smoke chokes our skies. Tempests drown our shores. E. coli infests our spinach. The world of men crumbles as chaff before the gale, and as one mankind cries out for redemption.
The Lord has heard the lament of His children. As promised, the Lord has sent forth His anointed.
Don’t get too excited. The Lord is still saving the Son of David, who may or may not have been here before, for a rainier day.
But He has sent to His people prophets, as it is written: “I will put my words in his mouth and he will speak to them all that I command him.”
A voice cries out in the blogosphere, prepare the way of the Lord.
That’s right. Michael and Chris have returned on the chariot of fire known only as the Kosher Eucharist, and this time, they’re on a mission from God.
Repent, sinners, for the time of reckoning is upon you.
Michael and Chris have been on the mountain. They have heard the Word. Ho, let he who thirsts come to the waters and drink of them and be sated with sarcasm and profanity. And let the wicked and those who forsake His way taste only the briars and nettles of reproach, and face the whirling abyss of scorn.
Noted blogeuse Annie, as in “Annie, get your,” as in Jewbiquitous, wanted to know why I spelled it “Balestinian” instead of “Palestinian” or “Qassammy Davis, Jr.” According to… oh, probably Michael, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Syria (including its left arm, Lebanon) has a phonetic quirk whereby they don’t use the voiceless bilabial stop, /p/. When pronouncing loanwords, for example “Palestine,” they tend to use the voiced cognate, /b/. This leads to some hilarious minimal-pair hijinks, such as:
So, last night I went downtown to see which band?
The best part of having your own blog again, a part which excites me every time I remember it, is that you can post whatever you damned well please. No longer limited to the Jewish subject matter I made myself stick to while writing for Jewlicious, I can write lengthy treatises on music, rant about hummus, or repost amusing conversations I’ve had with my mother.
I’ve never been much of a drinker. Considering what I’ve seen so far in my life, especially my life in Israel, this is an affliction shared by a lot of Jews (Chasidim and American yeshiva students nonwithstanding), and one I’ve never been able to get past. Most of my experiences with drinking to excess have ended poorly, like the infamous incident towards the beginning of freshman year wherein Chris and I went to a party in full makeup, and I proceeded to get intoxicated to a point where I thought it sounded reasonable to mix cheap whiskey roughly 50/50 with grenadine, making a sticky red cheap whiskey-flavored syrup approximately the color, consistency and flavor of Hunter S. Thompson’s blood. Note to impressionable readers: this is in no way reasonable, and I paid for it during the night, when I got up, leaned over the side of the bed and expelled a diluvial proportion of pink, grenadine-enhanced vomit, which left a massive and permanent stain on the floor (Chris and I named him Geoffrey).