Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

I’ve never been a big fan of the Iraqis. As America’s most recent jaunt into that delightful sandbox has amply demonstrated, Iraqis aren’t even worthy of that tenuous, European-oil-interest-applied ethno/national identity, being an artificial nation of squabbling tribes who start blowing up each other’s mosques approximately five minutes after the downfall of their brutal strongman, like a peculiarly Middle Eastern variant of fireworks. They haven’t contributed much of anything to world society besides a body count and a few billion oil barrels, which contrary to the apparent beliefs of certain Western governments do not constitute a valid reason for the existence of a country, ever since they chased out their ancient Jewish community with a heartwarming, Nazi-style pogrom in the Jewish quarter of Baghdad. The only good things I can attribute to Iraq are its (former) role as a counterbalance to its wacky neighboring state, and its invasion of Kuwait. And I’ll only give it that because the only thing more irritating than anarchic/dictatorial Arab pseudo-states are the tiny and grossly wealthy Arab oil states, who can’t seem to think of anything better to do with all that money than build artificial islands in their harbors, erect massive and pointless buildings, and engage in child slavery - and assuage their guilt for all that drinking and whoring by funneling billions into the pockets of their more religious, AK-toting co-religionists.

But the Iraqis have just performed the ultimate transgression. They executed Saddam.

Too early.

Yes, yes, I understand that they can be a tad bloodthirsty as a society (or lack thereof), and I’m sure if I had lived under the Ba’athist thumb for decades I would be itching to get a rope around that fat neck too and let those blood-soaked leather shoes swing, but would it have been impossible for them to wait just a few more days?

I don’t ask for no reason. You see, Chris and I have a tradition in which, upon the death of someone we dislike, we exult and dance. When Yassir Arafat met his untimely end (untimely because he wasn’t stillborn), we clasped hands and twirled and hopped around the room while giggling like schoolgirls in a sheer, morbid fit of glee. But Chris won’t be in Israel until the 4th of January. Which means that, because the Iraqi people couldn’t hold off for less than a week, we have been cheated out of an exuberant celebration that is rightfully ours.

My only consolation is that Chris will be in Israel for three weeks, and death seems to be in the air lately. I mean, they can’t keep Castro hooked to that life support system forever, if only because Cuba doesn’t have that much electricity, and there’s a certain former US president whose number is up (Nixon…dead; Ford…dead; Reagan…dead; you are an aberration), so we’ll keep our fingers crossed and our dancin’ shoes at hand.

But really, I’m in far too fantastic of a mood to get as angry about this as I should.

I was rummaging through some files salvaged from the old Kosher Eucharist z”l tonight in order to find an old drawing of mine to show a friend, and it occured to me that perhaps our (admittedly limited) audience would like to see evidence that my artistic bent, such as it is, extends beyond mere crude cartoons. So I decided to upload a drawing onto the blog, and then my dear mother was nice enough to scan for me one of my favorite drawings from my high school days. Enjoy and stuff.

My aunt commissioned me a couple years back to draw portraits of my grandparents when they were young, so that one is of my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, Red Army veteran (on Sakhalin, no less), tinkerer and all-around inspiring guy. He died before I was born, but they say I inherited my looks from him, although as my mother will eagerly tell you, nothing more useful than that.

That’s the aforementioned high school drawing, which I drew from a glossy photo book of people with dreadlocks over the course of a good few 3rd period study halls…the scan is a little wonky, but I think the image comes through well enough. I was constantly drawing in high school, not so much for any particular artistic impulse, but because it got me a lot of attention, and who doesn’t love attention?

I take it all back. Everything I said about snow you are to disregard. It snowed like mad all afternoon and evening, and I weathered the storm in a cafe, and then there was a romp in the park, and there was a certain young lady, and snow is awesome and may it fall every day.

Love, Michael

The story of my life thus far has been one of escape. Not escape from responsibility, love affairs gone awry, illegitimate children, the Mafia and the myriad other regular hellhounds on the trail of the geographically restless (although I’d prefer to avoid all of those things too), but from an evil far more pervasive and insidious, a demon whose pestilent fingertips reach to almost every corner of the globe. He is known by many names to the many different peoples who have found themselves choked in his icy grip, his inevitable comings spoken of in hushed, worried tones as mothers gird their children in armor of cotton and down and fathers stoke the furnaces to prepare for the approaching onslaught. But there is no true preparing for the sheer might of Cold. There is only the choice between huddling meekly before him, wrapped in scarves and ski goggles as his frozen precipatory minions lash at your face and color your cheeks, or running from him to those few places where the sun reigns triumphantly over steaming forests and scorched wastelands which allow no entrance to the forces of frigidity.

I made my choice. I ran.

After my storied escape from the dim, ice-and-caribou-choked wastelands of the Far North, I went to New Orleans, a city wholly Caribbean in climate, temperance and shocking crime rate, cheerfully stagnating under an encouraging canopy of palm trees, shielded from the armies of Cold by mile after mile of fragrant swamp. But just when the 80th day of deliciously, cripplingly tropical weather had lulled me into a false, sweaty sense of security, my foe launched a sneak attack from the air, turning the sweet summer rain into an instrument of his own fiendish design, ushering in a frigid monsoon season of 40-degree temperatures abetted by constant, skin-numbing downpours. That endless cold rain half-destroyed New Orleans for me - soon God would decide to punish the Jews for the Disengagement by sending His Appointed Messenger Katrina to finish the job.

So I found myself in the Middle East, which like New Orleans featured encouraging flora, not to mention fauna - nobody imagines a laden caravan of camels slowly wending their way to Samarkand, or wherever it is camels go, through four-foot drifts of snow. Surely, I thought, in a country 60% barely-inhabitable desert, that I could finally find the respite I craved and bid eternal farewell to my nemesis.

I was wrong.

It is cold in Jerusalem. It is very, very fucking cold. Night temperatures hover just above freezing. Winds howl through the empty streets. Rain pours from the sky, turning the airy golden stone which has inspired so much poetry to a drab, water-stained, Soviet gray. And now they say, it will start snowing later tonight and into tomorrow.

One might think I could deal with one freak snowfall and some inclement weather. But Jerusalem apartments are built as if Jerusalem was a sun-baked Mediterranean city on the fringe of a great desert - which it is, about 8 months of the year - instead of a city which knows the frozen kiss of Cold. There is no central heating. There is no un-central heating. There is no insulation whatsoever. Every excessively large window, every poorly-sealed balcony door, every tile floor is a Trojan horse allowing entry to cold air, from which there is no escape. No sweater, no blanket, no wool socks can keep it out, it will find you, it will chill you to the bone, it will make your days a struggle to keep your teeth from chattering inside the walls of your own house. It will make you suffer.

Snow will only make it much worse.

If I live through the week, I’m moving South. I don’t care if I never see another leaf or another blade of grass in my life, at least I will be free.

ZombieBabesAGoGo: which one of us porked a jewess?
RastafariKeebler: Is it different? Does Hava Nagilah play and gelt pour of their ears like a slot machine payout when they achieve orgasm?

3 billion Christians (except the Orthodox ones) woke up today to a bright Christmas morning, eager to spend the day in the warm and loving embrace of their families and friends, exchanging gifts and holiday cheer.

But for one young Israeli, the morning was bereft of that brightness, and not just because Jesus doesn’t love him since he’s Jewish. An oppressive gloom descended over the land, squelching all joy and happiness, as if Death himself extinguished the flickering candles of merriment with his bony fingers. For on this morning, James Brown was called to the next world by the great Funky Drummer in the sky.

“Please, Please, Please”

I heard the news from Harry before my usual morning CNN browsing. His IM popped up on my screen, the bleakly cruel letters spelling out “James Brown is dead!”, lacking any hint of the portent due to an announcement of such shattering proportions.

“Try Me”

“NO!” I replied. It simply could not be. James Brown survived the ’60s, the ’70s, disco, a legion of sample-hungry rappers and a persistent PCP habit. James Brown would not depart from this world quietly, without notice and without pomp and circumstance. I fell to my knees on the cold tile, begging a cruel and unheeding God to take me instead. I am but a simple Jew, the world has no need of me - but in this era of global fear and torment, it certainly has need of Soul Brothers.

“I’ll Go Crazy” (Live)

A part of me still refuses to believe it. James Brown built an entire career on theatrical death. The small part of my heart that still can aspire to hope wants to believe that this is only the biggest act of all, the closing, show-stopping finale of a long and storied career, that when all the solemn-faced dignitaries and politicans and musicians are gathered in the church before the flower-draped casket to pay their final respects, the Godfather of Soul will rise up before them and launch into a blazing rendition of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”

“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”

What can I even say about James Brown? What can my words possibly add to his golden legacy? This is the man who, along with his legendary rhythm section, reached up to the heavens and brought funk down to the masses like a veritable Prometheus of booty-shaking. This is a man who has been leaving his mark on American music since 1956, moving bodies with his unstoppable showmanship when the rock and roll revolution was just beginning to brew in the dancehalls and record stores of America.

“Cold Sweat”

If papa had never got his brand new bag, if we had never been made to feel nice like sugar and spice, Eddie Hazel would never have melted a generation of minds with “Maggot Brain,” George Clinton’s Mothership would never have ascended, and Bootsy Collins would have been just an anonymous bass player, never having bought that first set of 9-inch-heeled go-go boots and star-shaped sunglasses. Vicki Sue Robinson would never have turned the beat around, no bells would have been rung by Anita Ward, and Cheryl Lynn would never have extolled the necessity of being real. We never would have suffered from fear of Public Enemy’s black planet, and hell never would have been raised by Run DMC. The world would be a different, darker, more funkless place.

“I Got the Feeling”

And on a more personal note, the tragic events of December 25, 2006 mean that I’ll never be able to fulfill one of my long-held life goals: to serve as the emcee of a James Brown show. There can be no better job on the face of this earth than to spend ten minutes warming up a crowd with a nonstop litany of “Put your hands together for the HAAAAAAAARDEST WORKING MAN IN SHOW BUSINESS, that’s right, he’s SOUUUUUULLLL BROTHER NUMBER ONE, the very GAWWWWWDDFATHER OF SOUL, MISTER DYNAMITE HIMSELF, give it up for JAMES BROWN!”

“Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”

Naysayers and those who wish to disparage the Godfather’s legacy, who believe it or not you will see over the coming days, will tell you that James Brown hasn’t released any truly brilliant material since the early 1970s, that he was a drug user and a wife beater. That may be true, but it misses the point entirely: the mere fact of James Brown’s continued existence under his ever more flagrant pompadour was enough, through sheer force of radiating waves of funkiness, to make the world a better place. It was not about the man himself or what he did, it was about what he represented: pure uncut soul.

“Make It Funky”

I take solace in the fact that if there is a God, and he does indeed preside over a heavenly host, that host is now led by James Brown himself, declaiming from the pulpit as in his memorable turn in The Blues Brothers, exhorting each and every soul in the next world to get up, to get on up, to get on the scene, like a sex machine.

“Get Up (I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine)”

Farewell, Soul Brother Number One. Thanks for always making it funky.

And on this special day, may our thoughts turn to the true meaning of the holiday: a commemoration of the day Santa saved the Jews from the reindeer, by plying them with eggnog and flashing lights, before leading the Three Wise Men and the Eight Maids a-Milking to to North Pole to make toys.

L’chayim!

Harry: “I’ll teach you how to say perineum and mucus plug in Hebrew.”

Harry sure knows how to show a boy a good time.

Although for some reason, the thought of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda thoughtfully stroking his neat little beard as he pondered what the pioneering New Jews would call a “mucus plug” in the Holy Tongue amuses me.

Yeah, okay, Chanukah is over, and it went by on this blog almost entirely without mention. Sue me, ever since I fell off the path roughly 23 seconds after arriving in Israel, I’ve been a pretty bad Jew. I mean, the last time I was in a synagogue was Pesach, and then only because Dave dragged me by my ear, and I shun all of those Let’s-Build-A-Meaningful-And-Inspiring-New-Jewish-Identity-For-The-Young-People-Through-Poetry-Reading events (because, well, I have toenails that need to be clipped, and failing that, space that needs to be stared into), but I try. I successfully remembered to light Chanukah candles six out of eight nights, which is a 75% success ratio, and frankly, if all good and noble human endeavors were met with a 75% success ratio, the world would be a better place. So I did my fucking part - stop judging me, dosim, because your emperor never wore clothes at all.

But look at me digressing like a fiend. What I want to say is, despite my minimal affiliation of late with religious life, I know a way to brighten up a Chanukah. The best way. Which way?

Zombies!

Thus, my Chanukah present to Harry, who unfortunately spent the holiday in bed suffering from back problems (read the whole story at The View From Here):

If drawing a cartoon of one of your best friends, armed with a Desert Eagle and a katana, blowing the head off a decayed zombie so as to cheer him up in a rough moment isn’t the very embodiment of the Jews’ holy mission on the face of this Earth, well, fuck it, call me Abdullah, I’m switching camps.

“Love in Vain,” legendary bluesman Robert Johnson’s second most famous song, features a curious lyrical idiosyncrasy which probably whizzes unnoticed by the ears of casual listeners: the first word of the song is “and.” When you really think about it, and really thinking about music is essentially all I do, “And I followed her to the station / with a suitcase in my hand” is one of the more effortlessly mysterious ways to start a song. It leaves you slightly disoriented, in the middle of the action, wondering what, exactly, happened before the soulless guitar master found himself at the station, his woman’s suitcase in hand, saying goodbye to the blinking lights on the back of a train.

I could probably ruminate for several paragraphs about the historical and cultural significance of that “and,” how it, much like the blues itself, signifies that the story being told is only one middle act of a tragedy much wider in scope, but if I’ve taken anything from my Songbook entries so far, nobody is interested in musical ruminations except me and sad-eyed Nick Hornby fans who have more fulfilling relationships with Marquee Moon than with actual living people, so I won’t. But don’t think that my invocation of “Love in Vain” was, well, in vain. I’m going somewhere with this.

You see, being the student of American musical history that I am (scholarly 20-page paper on the frequency of the “road” literary motif in blues music and southern black culture? Yeah, I wrote it), I’ve always had a bit of a Robert Johnson fetish. In the summer after graduating high school, I went with a few of my irresponsible friends (and one of their little sisters) on a middle-of-the-night excursion to the pitch-dark farm back roads of Wisconsin on a hunt for a crossroads sign to steal. With the help of the able-bodied Sweeney and one huge pair of pliers, we successfully liberated a beautiful specimen from its ten-foot-high wooden captor, threw it into the back of the van, and drove off cackling madly into the night, flush with adrenaline and caffeine. The Devil must have been busy on that particular evening, for he failed to appear. I made a shrine out of the sign in my fantasically well-decorated freshman year dorm room, and when people asked I explained that it was in honor of Robert Johnson and Papa Legba. Surprisingly, I still made a lot of friends.

So I’ve decided that the next step in my fetishism, provided I don’t think of something worth selling my soul at the crossroads for between now and finishing this post, is going to be an attempt to add resonance and mystery to my stories by starting them with “and.” Because a story, of course, should not a self-contained unit, but rather just one more chapter in an ongoing saga with no beginning and no end. Deep, right? For example:

And I was taking a little iPod-assisted constitutional around the city today, as I often do when I simply have to escape from the seeping frigidity of this hole of an apartment, when I was accosted by a somewhat sodden middle-aged man with a black nylon kippa and an Israeli flag lapel pin. He gripped my shoulder, which is a surefire way to gain my ire since I do. not. like. being. touched, I reluctantly removed my interaction-shielding earbuds, and he launched into an American-accented spiel:

Crazy Man: Excuse me, do you know how to get to the Messianic synagogue in the area?
Michael: Uhh…
Crazy Man: It’s a little bit shady, it’s in a building and around some corners and up some stairs, really kind of hidden, like an asshole.
Michael: Buh?
Crazy Man: It really is like an asshole. We all have one, but damned if you can find it.
Michael: Eeehh…
Crazy Man: Well, thanks for your help. Have a good day.

And he patted me on the shoulder and disappeared around the corner. I stood there for a few moments, pondering the import of this encounter and realizing that it had transpired entirely without me saying an actual word, then I put Sizzla back on and returned home as quickly as possible, fearing what other apparitions might appear out of the mists of a rainy Jerusalem Shabbat afternoon.

I would say that from this moment on, I’ll always associate Messianic Jews with assholes, but then again, I already did.

My friend Zev is in town with his family and a tour group from his home synagogue in Dallas. Zev, a fellow Tulane refujew, also chose to weather out the Semester of Katrina at the Hebrew University, and became an integral pillar of the Tulane community in exile - if I was the wacky uncle of our motley little group (and I’d like to think I was), Zev was the ever-slightly-exasperated father figure. He let me sleep on a mattress on his kitchen floor when I had no other place to go, I saved his ass in his Israeli Foreign Policy class by essentially rewriting his 20-page final paper to a form somewhat resembling the English language (I love Zev, but he has no facility with words). Late in the Semester of Katrina, Zev found out that his beloved Tulane had, in a cost-cutting maneuver, completely did away with almost the entire engineering school, including his program, without giving engineering students either warning or enough time to transfer to other schools before the registration cutoff. Essentially, Tulane not only cut dozens of degree programs in the middle, but blackmailed those programs’ students into staying at Tulane and paying tuition for another semester (because you can’t transfer to another school without being enrolled in one). Zev, needless to say, was displeased, and left Israel last January in something of a terminal funk - a funk unlifted by his transfer to the wilds of the Country Music Capital of the World to attend Vanderbilt after his Tulane blackmail semester.

But now Zev is back in Israel for a couple weeks. And we’re (attempting) to have a grand old time. I accompanied his family and his synagogue group to the Old City last night and did my tour guide thing for him and his father, and his family was kind enough to invite my disreputable-looking ass to the group dinner at the fancy-pants David Citadel hotel, the second-swankiest hotel in West Jerusalem, a study in marble and…well, some more marble, and very high ceilings. I saw Joe Lieberman lighting Shabbat candles in the foyer - yes, boys and girls, the Senator from Connecticut really is a Jew. The food was pleasant enough, if a bit short of the expectations engendered by all that marble, but we wound up at the same table as the synagogue’s rabbi, a man whose size, bearing and fog siren of a voice all conspired to set off the “incorrigible blowhard” alarms in my head. Tight, polite smiles abounded, as they often do at dinner tables dominated by incorrigible blowhards. But Zev’s family are undeniably lovely people, full of a delightful combination of Jewish and Texan charm, and I am indebted to them for getting me out of the house and into a five-course meal.

But that’s not even the best part. Zev came bearing gifts from Exile:

1) An enormous tube (not box, a tube) of mashed potato flakes. I cannot exactly describe why, but American mashed potato flakes are one of my comfort foods, and they are impossible to find here. Oh, there’s “puree,” which is the Israeli equivalent, but eating “puree” is sort of like staving off a hankering for Chateaubriand with No Name Steaks, if I may be permitted to draw a comparison between top shelf cuts of meat and dehydrated flaked potato product. But it gets even better…

2) Zev served as the mule for my Chanukah present to myself, the new 3-disc, fully remastered, special edition, Criterion Collection Seven Samurai. As Chris (or Flannery) might say, I think I just came a little.

And now, as I decide whether I will curl up on the couch and shiver for the rest of the day, or venture out into the driving rain for a Coke, I leave with you a screencap taken from Seven Samurai which serves as a powerful reminder of one of life’s most fundamental truths.

Ain’t no booty like Jewess booty!

Some of you may recall my recent epic struggle with the Israel Defense Forces. The last you heard, I was awaiting a call from the thrice-cursed Harpy she-warrior Keren that would inform me whether or not I was to be drafted in December, and hoping for a deferral.

Well, of course Keren didn’t call, despite her multiple promises to do so. So a couple weeks ago I strode in, as usual, to the Lishkat Giyus and demanded information from her Kerenship. The conversation went something like this:

Me: You didn’t call me.
Keren: Sorry!
Me: So?
Keren: I’ll have an answer today, I hope, or definitely tomorrow. I’ll call you.
Me: Do you even know why I’m here?
Keren: Um…
Me: Did you know that I asked for a deferral?
Keren: No…when did you do that? Nobody told me.
Me: Last week. I asked Avishai. He called you and told you. I was standing there.
Keren: No he didn’t.
Me: ……….So, can I get a deferral?
Keren: (not actually entering anything in the computer) Yes, I’ll try to see if we can get one for you. I’ll call you.

Well, of course, Keren didn’t call. And the fact that she had been stringing me along for a week with “I’ll call you” without even know why I had been showing up every day didn’t fill me with much hope.

So I called the Jewish Agency guy who had gotten me into this mess in the first place, and asked him to help me with a deferral. He refused. Swell dude.

And then one day a letter arrived in the mail from the Lishkat Giyus. I feared that it was my tzav giyus (draft order) for December - but it turned out to be something else entirely. It read, in somewhat incomprehensibly flowery Hebrew, “I am honored to inform you that the qualified authority, after fundamental study of your request, has decided, according to to the Law of Security Service of 1986, to grant your request for an advancement of your draft.”

WHAT?

I mulled over this curious turn of events for awhile. Then I remember that when I had received my mysterious August 2007 tzav giyus, I applied for an advancement of that draft date to March 2007. Then Keren had informed me that the August 2007 order was a mistake and I would “probably” be drafted in December. But obviously, as far as the Lishkat Giyus’ computers were concerned, I was still being drafted in August, with a request for advancement granted.

I got to thinking, always a dangerous state of affairs. I came to the conclusion that going to the Lishkat Giyus everyday wasn’t helping me, since they couldn’t even get straight whether I was being drafted in August or December, much less help me with my request for a deferral. So I decided that I would disappear. I wouldn’t answer any unknown numbers on the phone, I wouldn’t show up at the Lishkat Giyus again, I would completely fall off the face of the earth as far as the army was concerned.

And so here I am, four days after all my buddies got drafted on the 17th, when I was “probably” supposed to be drafted (according to Keren). The phone hasn’t rung. Nobody’s knocked on the door. It seems that the army has completely forgotten about my existence.

And right now, that suits me just fine. Now I can hang out with my friend Zev who arrives today, and with my esteemed co-blogger who arrives in but two short weeks. I can get a little work done. I can draw. And for at least a few weeks, hopefully, I won’t have to have a single dealing with the Lishkat Giyus. Yay!

Recently, in addition to our cafe-related exploits (see previous post), malevolant being from another dimension and perennial Lucy-esque football yanker Mobius introduced me to British-Jewish R&B chanteuse Amy Winehouse with the memorable endorsement, “She’s totally filthy, but you’ll love her music.” Mobius, who shares my deep love for all things obscure and Jamaican, understands my taste and fairly regularly turns me on to new shit - if it wasn’t for him, my music collection wouldn’t include MF Doom and Ghostface Killah, which would have been a tragedy. And he scored another hit with Winehouse, a 23-year-old drunken Jewish Princess with a voice of solid gold and a talent for writing memorable, if somewhat eyebrow-raising lyrics. One of the songs on her first album, written to a jilted boyfriend, contains a tidy justification for infidelity funny enough to overshadow, well, the whole infidelity thing itself. It can be summed up something like this…

I cheated on you, but
a) I was attracted to the guy with whom I cheated on you because he looked just like you, and furthermore,
b) I was thinking about you when I came, and it’s your fault anyway, because
c) You left me alone and horny.

It’s fucking airtight.

Her new album also has a song imploring her flatmate to stop allowing said flatmate’s boyfriend to smoke all the weed in the house. If it wasn’t for the materialism, alcohol abuse and the manic, infidelity-inspiring sex drive, I daresay this would be a woman after my own heart.

Anyway, nobody was more saddened than me, a soul/funk/R&B devotee, when the bottom seemed to fall out of the neo-soul movement a few years back. So I’m naturally excited to have found a great new R&B album, especially when the tribal connection is thrown in. And so I’ve been proselytizing, particularly of course to Chris…

RastafariKeebler: So I’ve discovered a new musical artist you may enjoy. She is called Amy Winehouse, and she’s basically a skankyfilthynasty British Jewish girl who happens to also be a great soul singer.
RastafariKeebler: Sample song title: “Fuck Me Pumps.”
RastafariKeebler: She’s notorious for getting drunk and beating the shit out of people.
ZombieBabesAGoGo: I AM DOWN.
RastafariKeebler: Thought it might be up your alley.
ZombieBabesAGoGo: YES.
ZombieBabesAGoGo: Jewesses.
ZombieBabesAGoGo: Our shared vice.
ZombieBabesAGoGo: It tends to injure us both.

The best thing about having friends is sharing.

So with that in mind, I share with you a choice cut from Back to Black, the latest album from me and Chris’ latest addition to our Holy Pantheon of Jewesses (which also includes Fran Drescher and Susanna Hoffs from the Bangles).

“Some Unholy War”

Delicious!

Zohar Argov - “Ha-Perach be’Gani”

“Ha-Perach be’Gani” is not one of my favorite songs. It doesn’t haunt my dreams, it doesn’t stir my blood, it doesn’t set in motion the dangerous impulse to shake my hairy Jew-boy thang. When I’m stoned and seeking complementary tunes, it inhabits a space at the very bottom of the list, along with…well, to be honest, I scanned my entire iTunes folder, and Zohar Argov, out of hundreds of albums, happens to be essentially the only music I have that doesn’t complement marijuana - a slightly embarrassing fact, perhaps, but ultimately immaterial. The most credit I can give to “Ha-Perach be’Gani” is that I have a certain affection for it, fed by my dueling ironic and non-ironic senses of appreciation for all that is Israeli culture. But the lack of the enthusiasm that has colored my previous Songbook entries isn’t going to stop me from telling what I think is a funny story about the song and, more importantly, about myself.

It starts, as so many of my stories do, over breakfast with noted consumer of the flesh of unborn children and Yankees fan, Mobius/Dan. “Breakfast” is actually a slightly misleading term, because although Israeli breakfast was what Dan ordered, the meal took place around 2 PM, which is when homeboy rolls out of bed. In all fairness, I used to keep a similar schedule, but then it became apparent that the combination of my mostly sedentary lifestyle with a lack of sunlight resulted in me sprouting mushrooms.

I digress.

We were at one of Dan’s favorite cafes, notable mostly for its staff of non-threateningly cute Israeli girls whose taste in music veers slightly away from the cafe-stereo norm - you may not have ever considered the possibility of The Division Bell being a welcome relief, but then, you’ve probably never heard Israeli radio. On that particular day, the girl behind the counter had put on a Zohar Argov mix CD, and was sashaying back and forth singing along. Dan, the fiercest enemy of Israel’s cultural output this side of Tehran, made a sour face. I turned to the girl, who was far too cute to have her taste in music so rudely dismissed by somebody who used to go to Phish concerts, and said, “He doesn’t like Zohar Argov.” She gasped in mock horror.

I attempted to explain to Dan the extent of his transgression, and that Zohar Argov is the kind of iconic shit-disturber that would normally win his respect, in the simplest terms I could: “Dude, you can’t fucking dismiss the Mizrachi Elvis.” Argov, the son of destitute Yemeni immigrants (including an alcoholic father), possessed a combination of a good voice and a better sense of timing that allowed him to tap into the discontent rumbling beneath the surface of Israeli society, the growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of cultural disenfranchisement among the Mizrachi (North African and Middle Eastern) community. His songs were innocuous love songs, but their Middle Eastern strains and Argov’s own distinctly Mizrachi pronunciation of Hebrew served as rallying point for the Mizrachim, affirming the value of their heritage and their potential to contribute to Israeli society - and they shattered the Ashkenazi domination of Israeli radio and television. Muzika Mizrachit went almost overnight from derided “bus station music” to the national music of Israel, where it continues to exert a profound influence on artists today. Zohar Argov never produced anything on the level of “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” but the impact of his music on the Israeli cultural landscape was comparable.

How did Argov deal with his newfound status as “Ha-Melekh” (the king)? He spent the next several years of a rapidly waning career coking and horsing himself into oblivion, dying in 1987 at the age of 32, making him the only musician in Israel suitable for the biopic treatment, an honor he received in 1993 with Zohar (is it in my DVD collection? Of course!).

But onto the song itself, probably Argov’s most iconic. Its synths and its oddly Spanish horn chart immediately set off several cheese alarms, but yet somehow it is undeniably, in the words of Argov to his songwriter Avihu Medina in the Zohar movie, “a son of a bitch of a song.” Maybe it’s Argov’s impassioned performance, maybe it’s the sheer sugar-coated lyrical extravagance of the chorus (”You are my world at dawn, you are mine all day / you are my world at night, you are the dream / you’re in my blood, my spirit and my heart / you are the sweet fragrance, the flower in my garden”); whatever the reason, it works for me.

So when the song came on the mix CD in the cafe, spurred on by the dourness of my companion and the exuberance of the cute cafe girl, I naturally started singing along: “B’yom aviv, bahir va’tzach, otakh ani zokher / u’kvar me’az, heitev yada’ti she’lo avater / ki li hayit b’vat ‘eini b’khol yom v’kol leil…”, making extra sure to employ the guttural Mizrachi ‘ayin Argov uses on the word “‘eini.” Cute Cafe Girl’s mouth dropped open and she exclaimed, wide-eyed, “No! No!” Not because I’m a bad singer, mind you (although I most certainly am), but because she was simply floored that I, an Ashkenazi Jerusalemite American, a group notoriously ignorant of all things Israeli, was singing along with Zohar Argov. We sang a few more bars, then she came up me and said “You are awesome,” and presented her hand for a high-five.

I gave my smuggest grin to Dan. He grumbled cantankerously, but behind the grumpiness, I could see that he had begun to realize his mistake. Sure, you can dismiss Israeli culture, but spending a little time getting to know it leads to smiles and high fives from cute Israeli girls. And that surely is worth a little hit in your street cred.

I’m on my way to Dallas for “holidays” with the “family.” I spent last night in New Iberia, Louisiana, at the home of my friend CHUNK - Small Cajun from the “Urban Gwarfare” post. The house is lovely and clean, in a housing development with a gate and, for some reason, a little pretend Arc de Triomphe in a clearing. CHUNK and her Small Cajun Mother are excellent hostesses, providing liberal amounts of food and booze. CHUNK’s brother - Large Cajun - has a Ms. Pac-Man machine. There is, in fact, only one thing keeping this house from being the ideal getaway.

They have the most depressing pets in the world.

Right as I wrote that sentence, Zombie Cat threw up about seven feet from me.

Zombie Cat is a white cat that has apparently been dead for a year. He has an emaciated, skeletal little cat body with a huge head and an extra tuft of fur at the end of his tail. His fur always looks somehow greasy, as if he had been lightly brushed with cooking oil. His chief activites are walking around the house yowling at ten-second intervals and hanging out in the bathroom so he can stare at you - yowling - as you go. CHUNK claims that he will sit in his littlerbox for hours, only to emerge with enormously dilated pupils and bite her.

The other Depressing Pet is Miss Belle Rose, the Fungus Pug. Miss Belle Rose is a perfectly ordinary middle-aged pug - friendly, plump, and prone to snorts - except that about a quarter of her skin is covered with an odd black fungus. Nothing the CHUNK family can do will really check it, but it doesn’t seem to affect her physical health. It depresses her, though, because the Pug Fungus makes her smell bad and people are reluctant to play with her. I make sure and give her a cuddle when I come by. Pug Love is almost worth smelling like Pug Fungus.

Almost.