Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

This evening, desperate for any distraction from what I am convinced is incipient frostbite in my toes, I found myself reading over Rolling Stone’s 2005 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Now, I realize this is an activity rife with potential for annoyance. For legions of musicians and music lovers, Rolling Stone occupies a top ten spot in The 500 Most Pernicious Developments & Influences in Music History, along with such profound debasements and abominations as the double-necked guitar, the umlaut, Scandinavia, jam bands, and sad white people without drug problems. I should have expected my ire to be raised, and to some extent I did - but I was unprepared for the sheer and unprecendented bankruptcy of Rolling Stone’s beliefs, the terrifying glimpse into the fetid depths of Hell I was afforded by perusing the magazine’s top ten.

Number one was of course “Like a Rolling Stone,” which I’ll leave alone until I someday produce my manifesto on how Bob Dylan’s canonization by a generation of chest-thumping burnouts reliving the glory days when they “stopped the Vietnam War” has obscured the fact that as his social relevance diminishes, his early music begins to resemble a whiny Jewish boy inflicting stream of consciousness poetry and wheezy harmonica playing upon an unwilling public. Number two was “Satisfaction,” which is a choice about as perfunctory as double-mitzvah Friday night sex.

But it’s number three I really take issue with. Now, keep in mind that this is supposed to be the number 3 best song thus far in thousands of years of human artistic development, a song that according to Rolling Stone is better than “Waiting in Vain,” “Spanish Bombs,” “Maggot Brain,” Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and thousands more worthy musical masterpieces. This is a song that is merely two away from the very shining pinnacle of man’s creative potential.

The song: I-fucking-magine.

Yes, that “Imagine”, that insipid ditty marked by a hammeringly jejune piano figure and a breathtakingly childish vision for world peace, that banal ode to mediocrity that inspires hippies the world over to link hands, shed a few hopeful tears and sway (scientific research has recently discovered that this is how hippies, a hive organism, exchange genetic material), that mockery of all that is good and holy in rock and roll which should have served as the defense’s entire case in Mark David Chapman’s murder trial. That fucking “Imagine.”

Here’s what Rolling Stone had to say for itself:

John Lennon wrote “Imagine,” his greatest musical gift to the world, one morning early in 1971 in his bedroom at Ascot, his estate in Tittenhurst, England. His wife, Yoko Ono, watched as Lennon sat at the white grand piano now known around the world from films and photographs of the sessions for his Imagine album and virtually completed the song: the serene melody; the pillowy chord progression; that beckoning, four-note figure; and nearly all of the lyrics, twenty-two lines of graceful, plain-spoken faith in the power of a world, united in imagination and purpose, to repair and change itself.

…

Lennon knew he had written something special. In one of his last interviews, he declared “Imagine” to be as good as anything he had written with the Beatles. We know it’s better than that: an enduring hymn of solace and promise that has carried us through extreme grief, from the shock of Lennon’s own death in 1980 to the unspeakable horror of September 11th. It is now impossible to imagine a world without “Imagine.” And we need it, more than he ever dreamed.

Oh Jesus. It always has to be about September 11th. The fact that the song is an unmitigated assault on the ear, or that its writer was dead 21 years before the World Trade Center fell, or that it is arguably a greater crime against humanity than Osama’s most fevered of wet dreams, apparently provides no obstacle to the subjection of yet another generation to John Lennon’s pablum under the mantle of post-9/11 cultural shock. Aren’t terrorists scary enough? Do they have to a fucking theme song, and do I have to fucking sway along with it?

But the most offensive assertion is that “Imagine” is John Lennon’s “greatest musical gift to the world.” Now, I like much of the artistic output of John Lennon, and I mourn his passing as much as the next guy - only for me, John Lennon died in 1969, not in 1980. So since we’re in a bit of a listing groove, I’ve compiled a non-authoritative list of Ten of John Lennon’s Musical Gifts to the World That Rank Far Above “Imagine.”

1) “Yer Blues”

2) “A Day in the Life”
3) “Happiness is a Warm Gun”
4) “I’m So Tired”

5) “Sexy Sadie”
6) “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey”
7) His response of “it can’t get no worse” to Paul McCartney’s “have to admit it’s getting better, it’s getting better all the time” on “Getting Better”
The silly backmasking on “Revolution Number 9″
9) Onstage nose blowing, Hamburg, 1960
10) Vibrant post-Indian-food bowel movement at the Maharishi’s sleepaway camp, Rishikesh, India, 1968

I would go into my further outrage over “Hey Jude” squeezing in at number 8, but ever since the army informed me that I have an unusually rapid heartrate, I’ve decided to try to moderate my outburts of rage, justified though they may be. So I’m going to meditatively smoke nargilah, listen to Blue Lines, and stare off into space. Then I’ll go to bed.

Mmm…

Massive Attack with Horace Andy - “One Love” - from Blue Lines

I’m sure many of you are expecting one or both of us to come out with a long, thoughtful post detailing experiences shared and lessons learned during the heady days of Kosher Eucharist Does Israel 2007, but honestly, a lot of it is hazy. Come to think of it, that actually brings me to a lesson learned: separately, Chris and I may be mildly functional members of wider society, but together, we are bitter, misanthrophic alcoholics. Except we also giggle a lot.

I bet Hemingway giggled more than he let on.

But really, I can’t think of much beyond that. So as a shorthand method of helping our readership understand the nature of the time we spent together in Israel, I present a complete list of the movies we downloaded and watched over the course of those three weeks, usually while staggeringly intoxicated:

- Lady and the Tramp
- The Jungle Book
- The Lion King
- Sleeping Beauty
- The Land Before Time (which, by the way, is HEARTBREAKING. Seriously, revisit it. How did we watch that as kids so often and not wind up horribly socially maladjus…oh no, I think we’ve just achieved a breakthrough here.)
- Cinderella
- 101 Dalmatians
- Robin Hood
- Aladdin
- Mulan
- Zombie Flesh Eaters

Doesn’t that really say it all?

Oh, okay, one more lesson learned. Gin + Schweppes Bitter Lemon? Goodbye gin & tonic, hello handy surrogate for the love of a woman.

Yeah, so neither of us have posted in awhile. I’ve been busy with a number of things, chiefest among them being in pain.

You see, during Chris’ last weekend here in the Holy Land, we rented a car with noted clubber of baby seals Mobius and headed north. During the last day of our misadventure, we made a stop at Har Megiddo, frequent ancient battleground and reputed location of the coming ultimate battle between Good and Evil at the End of Days.

So naturally, with one of us being a Child of Israel, and the other numbered among that great horde of theological Johnny-come-latelys, it was decided that we would battle to the death at the very pinnacle of the Megiddo tel.

Of course, since God is on my side, I quickly took the lead. But then my opponent, in an unprovoked display of violence calling to mind atrocities from Cordoba to Kishinev, kicked me as hard as he could in the shin with his shitkicker cowboy boot.

Now, almost a week and a half later, my shin is still bruised and swollen, speckled with scabs where blood welled through the wound, rendering walking for more than a few minutes at a time an unpleasant proposition at best. I would go get it checked out by a doctor and maybe score some opiates, but since I have neither money nor health insurance, I’m just going to suffer through the healing process without medical expertise or the sweet release of drugs.

Naturally, my thoughts turned to revenge for this undeserved crippling. So, in keeping with the loftiest of Judaism’s moral teachings, I decided that it would only be fair to attempt to inflict the same kind of pain upon my tormentor.

So I did what I do best. I made a voodoo doll.

I figured four needles in the shin would be a logical starting point. But to really bring home the pain, there’s nothing like a little fire.

You feel that, Mr. Kicky-Pants?!

When I was getting songs for my “Israel Trip 2007″ soundtrack, I searched “Eilat” on the iTunes store. I came up with one song by a jam band with a stupid fucking hippie name like “The Zen Rapscallions” or “Buddha’s Jesters” or “The Tao of Jimmy Buffett.” It was, as far as I could make out, about a lesbian relationship that failed because one of the women valued wealth over the relationship, or something. It wasn’t about Eilat, the guy just kind of said “Eilat” once, at random, in the middle of the song. So I went to Eilat the other day. I originally meant to go on to Petra, but for various reasons I decided not to, with the result that I just kind of… hung around in Eilat for about twenty-six hours. The highlights:

- The airport is on the road… like, RIGHT THERE ON THE ROAD. You could stand on a bench and throw a peach pit and probably hit a plane.

- All of the signs are in Russian, except for the ads, which are in French.

- Like many cities, Eilat has a “hey, don’t just let your dog poop anywhere” sign campaign. Like no other city, Eilat has entrusted the creation of these signs to someone who is either unskilled at photoediting or has no familiarity with common breeds of dog. The result of this is signs featuring a GARGANTUAN Boston Terrier*. Seriously, the dog on these signs could eat a breed-standard Boston witout batting an eye.

- Seriously. Russians. Ev-a-rywhere.

- Almost no one was in the actual water. An enormous number of people were sitting around near it, some were even looking at it, but I probably saw ten people in it.

- There are road signs that just say “Egypt” and “Jordan” with an arrow.

- Apparently you can see Saudi Arabia from the seashore? So, I focused on the farthest hills I could see in that direction, and I had fun. YOU HEAR ME, SAUDI ARABIA? I LOOKED AT YOU AND HAD FUN, AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU AND YOUR METEORITE AND YOUR SAGGY, INBRED “ROYAL” FAMILY CAN DO ABOUT IT!

- They have an underwater restaurant! The fish watch you eat! Disinterestedly, but still! I spent a few hours talking to the owner’s daughter, which was very pleasant in its own right and also got me some free beer. It was an interesting conversation because she learned English in school and isn’t really quite fluent, but she still said “fuck” all the time. Also, they have portholes over the urinals so you can look at the water as you make water, which is fun in a “someone in a passing boat can tell I’m holding my stuff” kind of way.

- Oh, sweet merciful heaven, the bathroom at the bus station. You have to go outside, follow signs around the building, go downstairs through a broken turnstile, and then… look, human anatomy as I understand it precludes what I saw getting where it was from a standard posture.

- The Bus Back: In front of me are an Arab couple whose phone incessantly rings. Behind me is a Latin American man who keeps pushing the back of my seat. Catty-corner across the aisle is a terrified-looking Asian woman. Directly across from me are two thirteen-ish girls and a five-year-old boy, unchaperoned, who keep, keep listening to Fergie songs on their phone.

Oh, Eilat.

*Now, I love Bostons. I had one when I was growing up, and she was without a doubt the stupidest thing I have ever loved. (Loved, not gotten drunk and hooked up with.) You see, Bostons have a genetic bear-trap that’s activated when they get too inbred. If two Bostons that are too closely related are bred, the puppies’ skulls will close too early, and their brains don’t have enough time to grow, and so they are just amazingly dumb. Mine used to run into the wall, and also when it rained would go stand in the middle of the yard and bark and howl at the sky, as though she were remonstrating with God. Anyway, can you imagine an army of those enormous Bostons? Especially if covered in armor, and genetically tweaked so that they breathed fire? We could have Syria cleaned out in one bloody, adorable week!

Well, I’m in the Holy City, and I just spent the last hour explaining to Hymie here how “The Lion King” is an illustration of the divine right of kings and the orthodoxy of Salic Law, and then screaming “fuck you, you fucking Jew” as he tries to force-feed me arak.

“We already listened to this song.”

“Fuck you. Lauryn Hill has a voice like an angel, even if she is as crazy as a shithouse rat. LIKE A MOTHERFUCKING ANGEL.”

and I managed to have the most awkward toilet-related experience since an unfortunate incident in Florida. (Look, if you’re going to have a bidet, you should label it, in big red letters, BIDET, all right? Just a sign that says THIS IS A BIDET so no one is misled.)

So Mikeleh and I are somewhere in Jerusalem, and we go into a coffee shop to use the can. There are two doors, and each has a kind of ambiguous person-shape on it. So Mikeleh goes into one. I realize that he went into the women’s room, so I assume there was some reason, so I wait outside for someone to come out of the men’s room. After a while, I try the door, and open it to reveal an attractive young woman fixing her clothing.

I retreat.

She leaves, and I go into what may or may not be the men’s room, “settle,” and someone immediately opens the door.

Sigh.

The detritus of a cold and rainy Shabbat, circa 2 AM:

Empty bottles of Tuborg: 6
Empty bottles of vodka: 2 (to be fair, they weren’t full at the beginning of the day)
Half-empty bottles of arak: 1
Empty bottles of Hebron Grenache Rose “wine”: 1
Empty bottles of Super Drink-brand Charedi soda: 2 (”Cocktail” flavor makes an excellent and aesthetically pleasing mixer, especially if you are too effeminate to drink straight liquor, as we are)
Choco-vanilla halvah consumed in drunken stupor: entirety of 1 enormous block
Pomela rinds used as hat: 1
Blows sustained to pomela rind while on Chris’s head, “to see if it worked”: 6
Future Tales from the Eucharist storyboarded in semi-drunken stupor: 1
Amount of times Chris was heard to remark “This is good, Jew” regarding my poor man’s concoction of rice, chickpeas, tomatoes, corn and Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning: 3
Number of national anthems sung in deep, stentorian voices: 4
Number of national anthems sung in “The Reilly Voice”: 1
Episodes of various cartoons watched: many
Hours of sleep, starting at roughly 6 PM: 8
Exits made from the apartment: 0

I know this might be hard to believe, but when Mikeleh and I lived together, I used to do things deliberately to annoy him. Unsurprisingly, when he syarted to frum out, this got a lot easier. I found that I could keep him at bay with a pork rind, much like a vampire with a crucifix, and so I would chase him hither and yon with one. I justified this by telling people I was exercising him. I also learned that “Jew” could be inserted into a number of words to make fusional compounds, for instance:

“Where are you going?”

“The kosher store.”

“Oh, the Jewpermarket?”

“Yes, the fucking ‘Jewpermarket.’”

“Bring me some Jewp*. And a book about the Jewpernatural. And try to look Jewbilant.”

This was hours of fun for me, because au fond I am a sadistic six-year-old - specifically, a sadistic six-year-old with an eating disorder. I love to eat. It is my favorite activity. It edges out sleep because I’m conscious to enjoy it; it beats sex because I don’t have to worry about someone else’s feelings or stand in a ridiculous position because of an inconvenient height difference; and it’s more fun than saying bad words because “pig-fucking ringmeat son-of-a-bitch shitass addle-brained buttcunt” is only fun for as long as it takes to say, but the taste of a good meal lingers. Ever since I’ve been gonna come to Israel, Mikeleh has been raving about the food. The fruit. The hummus. the falafel. The Balestinian children kabobs. Naturally, I expected this to be another bout of Jewish lies, like global warming, heliocentrism, and the non-existence of zombies.

Well, for once, dear readers, I was wrong, so write it in your diaries.

Mikeleh greets me at the airport with a Coke and a bag of Bisli. The Coke is make with real sugar, not high fructsse corn syrup, so it actually tastes good. Bisli is… okay, those crunchy round noodles they give you at Cinese restaurants for soup? Imagine that those are more delicious and surprisingly filling. The bag features two people who appear to have birth defects (cartoon characters traditionally have four fingers, guys, not six) and the ominous warning “Protect from Sun,” which now that I think of it might be just a warning about skin cancer, but the contents… mm. Num. So then we get to the house, where there is fruit and beer. Goldstar is a delicious beer, and I will not hear otherwise. The strawberries were the best I have ever eaten - imagine you’ve only ever seen Lifetime movies and then you watch “Gone with the Wind.”

Later, I got a falafel pita. There are no words. I had to sit down. I didn’t know food could be that good without sour cream.

Now, I’m trying Super Drink, which I have a hard time not writing SUPER DRINK! The grapefruit Super Drink was delicious. Now I’m trying the “Cocktail” flavor. It… bewilders. It’s blue, and somehow you don’t taste it as long as it seems you ought to. I don’t know what kind of cocktail it’s supposed to be. Maybe I’ll mix it with arak and see if that unlocks its superpower-generating capabilities. Arak, by the way, is kind of bad - imagine if absinthe had a stronger taste and no cachet for being illegal. The bottle offers “a true Lebanese experience,” which I assume means that if you send in a proof of purchase a Syrian comes to your house and orders you to shoot at some children.

Get it? It’s funny because Lebanon is awful.

Anyway, I can’t wait until Mikeleh gets up and we can go eat more! Also see a historic and beautiful city.

*Jewp is Tradition brand kosher ramen, and is is supremely delicious. It costs many times what regular ramen does, though, because kosher things are more expensive than clam extract and powdered leek (both of which I have seen in Ramen ingredient lists.)

and so far I have:

- lunged too hard to retrieve my suitcase, fallen onto the baggage carousel, and been pulled several feet

- walked through the Garden of Gethsemane

- discussed tits in the Garden of Gethsemane

- seen the Wailing Wall, and been asked for money at it

- somehow broken a toilet near the Wailing Wall

- said “bevashaka” for everything, because it’s the only courtesy word I can remember

- realized what Mikeleh was raving about with Israeli falafel (it’s amazingy good)

- been to the obscure but lovely but disturbing Armenian Museum

- exited the Dung Gate, and made the proper jokes

- HAD AN AWESOME TIME

I have spoken to the bank and withdrawn money.

I have found my phrasebook.

I have done laundry and, under the insistent and watchful eye of my father, packed it neatly, g-ddammit in a green suitcase.

I have made a soundtrack CD that only has one reggae song and is among the best mix CDs ever.

I have set out traveling clothes.

I have taken leave of my mother, and also obtained from her presciption sedatives for the plane, that I might pass the journey in a drooling and quiescent haze.

I have flossed.

I have purchased a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, to read in the airport.

I have gotten Mikeleh’s fucking potato flakes.

In roughly 24 hours, I will be in eretz ha-kodesh, the Promised Land, Zion, the State of Israel, the holy city Jerusalem.

And I will put the “ho” back in “Holy Land!”

This is part one of a multi-part series, a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of both treating sex as a game and having really bad taste in wine…

story: chris & michael
pencils and inks: michael
scanmaster: ben