Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

For Harley, with love, and abundant cynicism:

If by the end of this mix you have not wholly internalized misogyny, you’ve proven yourself a feminist so steadfast in your conviction and ideological purity that you make Betty Friedan look like Betty Crocker. This mix would make Valerie Solanas reappraise the merits of the X chromosome. This mix would turn Rita Mae Brown into a man-identified woman. Think of it as trial by ordeal.

On to the music! 19 tracks, beginning and ending with the most eloquent of hip-hop’s misogynists, Jeru the Damaja. To give you an idea of the dominant tone, the name “Jezebel” appears in no less than three songs.

Play “Mixogyny” in sequence:

1) Jeru the Damaja - Da Bitchez

Jeru claims in this masterful polemic against the fairer sex that he’s not a misogynist, but true misogynists, sort of like Jews and gays, can effortlessly identify one of their own.

2) Elvis - Hard-Headed Woman

The King doubts the queens.

3) Capleton - Good in Her Clothes

This rousing dancehall number is actually a paean to the virtues of modesty, but as we are all aware, implying that so-called virtuous women are, well, more virtuous than their more exposed sistren is as much an affront to feminism as glass-based architecture.

4) The Soulmates - Pussy Catch A Fire

Maintaining the Jamaican groove, the Soulmates conduct a thorough investigation of the flammability of man’s favorite orifice.

5) Parliament - Handcuffs

Parliament is willing to take drastic steps in the name of love, and they don’t care if they look like a chauvinistic kind of whatever. Quite possibly the sweetest invocation of the threat of chastity belting ever captured on tape.

6) D’Angelo ft. Method Man and Redman - Left & Right

The ever-dependable and ever-stoned dynamic duo, Method Man and Redman, gleefully skewer D’Angelo’s falsetto-wafting loverman act with the crudest come-ons this side of your alma mater’s Pi Kappa Alpha chapter, and also a somewhat inexplicable Happy Days reference.

7) Del tha Funkee Homosapien - Money For Sex

Del, in keeping with a venerable hip-hop tradition, views women’s perfectly natural desire for economic security with considerable ambivalence.

8 ) Niney - Look Pon Pussy

“Wouldja look ‘pon that? Damndest thing I ever saw! Looks…kinda like the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi…”

9) Amy Winehouse - Fuck Me Pumps

Women can be misogynists too (and really, they should know best). Amy validates the patriarchy by affirming that if you, like the news, get pressed every day, you may well be a skag. And really, she should know best.

10) Bob Marley & the Wailers - Adam and Eve

Remember next time you hold up Bob Marley as a revolutionary radical prophet that he once blithely sang “Woman is the root of all evil.” That’s so Peter Tosh of him!

11) Fleetwood Mac - Black Magic Woman

Peter Green, typically, fears the potent magick naturally flowing forth from the yoni of every wommon.

12) Frank Zappa - Jewish Princess

If the Bnai Brith lodged a protest, it must be good.

13) Funkadelic - No Head No Backstage Pass

Funkadelic lays down the debasing LAW.

14) Lauryn Hill - Doo Wop (That Thing)

In the drunken, shrieked words of my Papist compatriot, she has a voice like an angel. A motherfucking angel.

15) Dizzee Rascal - Jezebel

It may sound like a cautionary indictment of a certain type of young woman, but it’s really just chauvinist propaganda.

16) Raekwon (ft. Ghostface Killah) - Wisdom Body

When I get a bitch, I got a bitch. I also considered the wonderfully coarse “Ice Cream” off the same album, notable for Ghostface’s use of the rare Biblically-inflected pick-up line: “Your whole shell, baby, is wicked like Nimrod.” Ay yo, peep it, I know you love Sefer Bereishit.

17) Run-D.M.C. - Dumb Girl

Rappers were railing against the scourge of gold-mining women even in the mid-1980s.

18) Vincent Foster - Shine Eye Girl

Reggae artists share the same concerns as their spiritual descendants in hip-hop. Vincent Foster stresses the importance of fiscal responsibility in relationships.

19) Jeru the Damaja - Me or the Papes

And right back to Jeru, who responds to the controversy engendered by “Da Bitchez” with…yet another scathing denunciation of pink-toned materialism. Also featuring DJ Premier production at its finest.

Now isn’t that mix the most compelling argument for misogyny since Oprah’s vanilla-flavored ascendancy? Don’t you just want to run right out and repeal Roe vs. Wade?

Doesn’t that sound like a pleasant, late-Fifties-era sitcom? Something that helped shape an evening of quality family entertainment in its slot between My Wacky but Ultimately Deferential Wife! and Flash Gordon versus the Communists! Alas, none of those three shows exists (although I badly, badly wish they did.) My Samoan Flatmate!, much like Liquor Run Follies and The Shouting Bad Words Hour, is not a sitcom, but my life.

Caveat: My Samoan flatmate is a very, very kind and pleasant person.

Qualification: She is utterly bizarre.

Some of her wacky traits are just garden-variety odd. She yells at the TV during Dancing with the Stars (the New Zealand version, which ensures that I’ve never heard of anyone.) She has long, loud phone conversations while standing right in front of the bathroom door, ensuring that her mixture of Samoan and English will be further punctuated by other people’s excretion noises. She has attached a feeble vine to the living room wall with pins, so that it looks like a bizarre allegory of the Crucifixion for the edification of the other house plants. She has a cyst on her eye that may allow her to look into the future. I could handle all this. Child’s play for someone who used to live in the “Turtle House.” But My Samoan Flatmate is no slouch when it comes to eccentricity. She doesn’t stop at ocular deformity or exhorting the hydrangeas to repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. These are merely warm-ups.

MSF is an elementary school teacher, which has corrupted her speech into something that frustrates adults. Whether or not you agree, however eagerly you respond, regardless of how fervently you express a wish to do as she suggests, she will repeat everything she says at least three times:

MSF: Can you move your shampoo out of the shower floor? I’m afraid I’ll trip on it.

Me: Okay.

MSF: It’s quite dangerous to have something in the floor of the shower.

Me: I’ll move it in just a second.

MSF: Maybe you could put it in your room. Or on the shelf in there.

Me: Okay.

MSF: It’s just that when you put your face under the shower, you know? I’m afraid I won’t see.

Me: Sure.

MSF: It’s quite dangerous.

She sacked me with this non-versation before I even got upstairs. I kept moving towards my room, trying to imply that I only had time to change my jacket and then I really had to go to my Hebrew lesson, but she was implacable. For reference, another example of something that is “quite dangerous” is the placing of the cut-out circle of tin from opening a can directly into the recycle bin. She spent five minutes one day explaining to me how I should put this circle in the bottom of the can, and then bend the open end shut, sealing the fateful disc within. Or maybe I could not open the can all the way, but leave a tab connecting the can to the cut-out. But still close it. Because it’s quite dangerous. People could cut themselves. On the edge. Of the can.

MSF believes in the equitable division of labor, which is why she came up to me with two small grocery bags of trash, each of which was about a third full, and asked me (six times) if I would take one out in the morning and she would take the other.

MSF insists that the microwave door be left open at all times when the microwave is not in use.

MSF Does not understand that there are liquors aside from whiskey:

MSF: Is that your whiskey in the freezer?

Me: It is mine, but it’s gin.

MSF: Your whiskey will freeze.

Me: No, it won’t. Gin is usually kept in a freezer.

MSF: Whiskey will get on everything. The bottle will break when it freezes.

Me: Gin doesn’t freeze in the freezer. It has too much alcohol in it.

MSF: Really? I never knew that about whiskey.

She was actually correct, because the freezer at the house is so cold that it did freeze my gin into a weak, hard-to-pour slush.

The most ominous thing MSF does is save eggshells. There are a few neat stacks propped in a carton on the counter, which is odd enough, but the other day I found an entire shopping bag full of eggshells in the pantry. I have never actually seen her eat an egg. She does not add them to the compost. She does not seem to fill them with confetti and break them on her friends’ heads at Easter. She does not paint them with elaborate Ukrainian designs. She hoards them, for when they are needed.

The Clash garnered the title “The Only Band That Matters,” and for the last few years of the 1970s, they very nearly were. The band fulfilled the promise of its name with the visceral patois punk of their debut album, drawing energy from the riotous street-level alliance between skinhead and dreadhead, a white-hot white riot informed just as much by Big Youth’s Screaming Target as by the Ramones. No other band would, or could, rail with equal ferocity against the dreary employment and stagnant career mobility facing lower-class British youth (”Career Opportunities”) and the slicked-back trebly rootslessness of touring Jamaican reggae acts (”White Man in Hammersmith Palais”). The Clash’s punk burned not with the safety-pin-pierced, amphetamine-fueled rage of the Sex Pistols, but with the rumbling, woofer-rattling, Babylon-incinerating dread roiling within reggae’s dark heart, dread sooty with the ash of a nation in flames. Never Mind the Bollocks was a fist through a window; The Clash was a fist in the air.

And then, of course, after the hard rock excursion Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the Clash dropped London Calling, an album which screamed iconic from its cover to its last fading note. A maelstrom of disparate musical styles, revolutionary rhetoric and snatches of Americana, it is a testament to the Clash’s deific powers that they not only spun Cadillacs, Federico Lorca, Stagger Lee and dreadlocks into a cohesive artistic statement, but created one of the greatest albums of all time. It deserves its own post. It deserves its own book.

After London Calling, the Clash could have announced an album of sea chanteys and inspired only breathless anticipation. Instead, in the biggest of an endearing series of “fuck yous” to their record company, they announced the release of a 3 LP set for the price of a single album.

Enter Sandinista!

At 2 and a half hours, with 36 tracks sprawling out over three records, Sandinista! made the lengthy and stylistically diverse London Calling look like an EP. It was nominally the Clash’s dub album, but to call it so would overlook the stylistic pandemonium etched into the wax: rap, ’60s soul, political disco, rockabilly, rock, waltz, cocktail music and haaaard reggae (and that’s only disc one). But in their admirable effort to make as much Clash music as possible available to fans, the band overreached slightly; nobody really needed to hear the snarling “Career Opportunities” recast as a sing-along by the children of Clash organ player Mickey Gallagher, and drummers generally aren’t singers for a reason.

So the conventional critical wisdom about Sandinista! is that somewhere in those three discs lies a truly classic Clash album. This may be slightly unfair - most of the songs on the album have at least something to recommend them - but for the purposes of this post, we’ll go with the conventional wisdom. I have endeavored to divine the location of the musical Avalon hidden in the sea of Sandinista!, a fat-and-”Lose This Skin”-free version of the Clash’s most controversial album. And no, I didn’t just pick all the dub songs.

Play the Ideal Sandinista! tracks uninterrupted, in sequence (52 minutes):

1) Police On My Back

A hard-charging rocker that, save for far more reggae-inflected production values, would fit in perfectly on The Clash, “Police On My Back” is a killer opening number.

2) Corner Soul

The Clash at their melodic best.

3) The Crooked Beat

A sequel of sorts to “Revolution Rock,” “The Crooked Beat” is another loving Clash paean to the redemptive power of reggae. It’s also arguably the sickest drum and bass Topper and Paul ever laid on wax. Subwoofer a must.

4) The Magnificent Seven

And you thought Run-D.M.C. was old school? Keen observers of the musical scene, the Clash realized that the still-nascent rap developing among New York City’s black youth was the wave of the future. In keeping with other early rap milestones like “Rapper’s Delight,” nobody has any idea what the fuck the lyrics are talking about. Italian mobstah shoots a lobstah!

5) Something About England

Just good old-fashioned Clash songwriting.

6) Somebody Got Murdered

My pick for the second-best rock track on the album, after “Police On My Back.”

7) The Equaliser

In an album chock full of experimentative dubs, “The Equaliser” is the most successful, combining a potent political message, swirling violin (an instrument rarely heard in the genre) and the shuddering echoes and electronic bloops which constitute the hallmarks of dub.

8 ) Washington Bullets

Not only the most pointedly political track on the album - an indictment of the United States’ hand in various brushfire conflicts and revolutions around the world - but also the only Clash calypso song I’m aware of.

9) Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)

More proto-rap!

10) One More Time

One of the several Mikey Dread-assisted reggae tracks on the album, concerning that most classic of reggae topics: misery and the youth.

11) Charlie Don’t Surf

I reckon this song is in reference to the notorious surfing scene from Apocalypse Now. If Charlie did surf, it would be to this song.

12) Living In Fame

A declamatory Mikey Dread toast graces this version of “If Music Could Talk,” offering advice everyone could stand to take to heart: “If you say you a selector, you have to have good selections.” Not only is it a great track, the mysterious query at the end (”Who holds the key that winds up Big Ben?!”) makes it the perfect album closer.

Taste is of course subjective, so to encourage reader participation, I’d like to hear some other versions of the ideal Sandinista! I know at least a couple you own it, so drag it out and make your choices. Try to keep it to 12 tracks or less (i.e., one third of the album) and pay attention to sequencing. Then report back! It will make me happy…

Dear stoners:

I know I may have misled you in the past. I know that you comprise a cult whose initiation ritual is “taking a monster hit out of Frodo,” or whatever you’ve named your pipe, but I want no part in your glassy-eyed communions. I do not want to burn incense to your gods, I do not wish to kneel before your spiky-leafed savior. Please do not mistake me as “one of you.”

We share a hobby. This does not make us friends. I bet we also both like puppies, the milk after a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and oxygen. These are not the makings of a friendship. These are not even the makings of a conversation.

I do not want to be your friend. You do not have friends. You have smoking buddies. If you’re having trouble distinguishing, here’s an easy test: Do you know your friends’ last names? No? They’re smoking buddies.

Do not mistake an interest in buying weed for a general interest in weed. I do not want to hear your “high” stories. I do not want to hear about the one time you did crazy rips out of your friend’s vaporizer. I absolutely do not want to hear the name “Amsterdam” escape your lips. You are not a jukebox. You are a vending machine. If I wanted a jukebox, I would make like the Fonz and hit you.

I have no use for your secret codes, and neither should you. It’s not tea, it’s weed. It’s not 1947, and you are not Jack Kerouac. The police are not tapping your cellphone for slinging a few dime bags, Escobar.

I do not want to hear about your nugs, nor their dankness. If your buds are especially sticky, please keep this information to yourself.

Please stop giving your varietals of weed names, especially names inspired by Grateful Dead songs. I am not interested in knowing if the green stuff in the bag is Maui Wowie, Purple Haze or White Widow. There exist only three varietals of marijuana: “bad,” “good,” and “very good.”

While we’re on the subject, “skunky” is in no way an appealing adjective. You smell skunky. The weed smells like marijuana.

If you are a dealer, it is in the very poorest of taste to ask your customers to share some of the product they have just purchased. When I buy a Coke at the corner store, the guy behind the counter doesn’t ask for a sip. You are a dealer. You can get your own fucking weed.

Do not ask me when I come in if I am a cop. Not only is this insulting, it’s pointless. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with police procedure, but generally undercover drug cops are not required by law to reveal their identities when questioned by suspects. If there is an undercover cop in the apartment out of which you sell weed, you have not outwitted him if you demand to know whether he is a cop. If there is an undercover cop in the apartment out of which you sell weed, you are already fucked.

Get it through your cannabis-addled skull: Jerry is dead. Not only is Jerry dead, he is entirely decomposed. No, it would not be awesome to dig him up and smoke him. Take off your bootlegs.

Reggae music is not yours because you smoke weed any more than Tuvan throat singing would be yours if you had a taste for boiled yak.

Enormous tie-dyed sheets imprinted with fanciful grinning creatures and posters where the image is composed entirely of weed leaves do not constitute a consistent aesthetic. They do not constitute an aesthetic at all. Put up a painting.

Not the Dali melting clocks, you burn-out motherfucker.

Your apartment smells like stale weed and armpit. Spray air freshener costs 20 shekels.

And finally, in the consistently relevant words of Redman, your weed got more seeds than ODB.

Fuck you.

—

This post brought to you by:
Ghostface Killah ft. Method Man, Redman and Cappadonna - Buck 50

In two years of college replete with an ever-mutating rogue’s gallery of drinkers, smokers, snorters, queens, Jews, Papists, naked Papists, Texans, naked Texans and malevolent force known only as “Reilly,” few heroes emerged. In fact, few people who could be relied upon to get through one meeting with visiting parents without crying, fighting someone or garnishing at least three sentences with the word “buttfucking” emerged.

But there was one hero. The rock around which our substance-addled eddies swirled, the Alice B. to our vodka-swilling Gertrude and Ernest, the bass player - the Minotaur. A backwards-hatted Italian square of jaw and torso, the Minotaur could drink and smoke all of us into a tear-soaked corner and still muster up more than enough fortitude to carry the ladies home. The Minotaur kissed girls on the hand and boys on the cheek and made it seem classy rather than Gallic. The Minotaur, armed with only a vintage teardrop-shaped Vox bass and a level gaze, mediated the many conflicts that inevitably arise when drummers are forced to provide beats for the Wicked, also known as lead singers.

The Minotaur’s room always - always - had candy.

And the Minotaur’s discerning taste led me to more than few discoveries in film, comics and music - among them one of my enduring favorites, dub-fiending Bristol trip-hoppers Massive Attack. We were relaxing in his room, ganja doubtless having been smoked, he put on “Karmacoma,” and I was hooked. So this Massive Attack-related post goes out to the Minotaur and all the Butterfinger, marijuana and gentlemanliness he represents.

I was recently discussing Massive Attack with Harry - specifically which of their albums is the most compelling, or in music geek’s terms, kicks the most ass. While we agreed that 100th Window wasn’t worth owning for anything beyond completeness’ sake, Harry favors the churning-rock-over-inky-electronica aesthetic of Mezzanine, whereas I could spin Blue Lines ten times in a row without growing tired of it. But the standard Massive Attack debates - whether Blue Lines or Mezzanine is the better album, whether the band is more at home in dub and soul or electronica and rock, whether No Protection, Mad Professor’s dub remix of Protection, actually exceeds its source album in quality - all overlook the secret weapon that makes every Massive Attack album worth multiple listens: reggae singer Horace Andy.

Massive Attack deserves boundless credit for both exposing Horace Andy beyond reggae aficionado circles and for sensing the darkness pulsing under many of Andy’s best 1970s Jamaican recordings and its applicability to trip-hop’s musical and cultural principles. Andy’s shuddering falsetto, as compelling today as it was in the early ’70s, invariably transforms the Massive Attack songs on which it appears into album highlights: the nervous “Spying Glass” from Protection, the breathtaking “Angel” off Mezzanine.

But as universally admired as Horace’s work with Massive Attack may be, his solo output still remains chiefly the domain of reggae cognoscenti, which is a tragedy. So Kosher Eucharist aims to rectify the situation both by exposing our (admittedly few) readers to a sampling of Andy’s classic records and by giving them an appreciation for how many of the Massive Attack tracks he appears on are direct covers or heavy quotations of his vintage originals. We’ll go in order of album:

The clattering dub-hop of Blue Lines’ “Five Man Army,” a precursor of sorts to the band’s most stunning track in this vein, “Karmacoma,” quotes from, count ‘em, three Horace Andy oldies: “Cuss Cuss,” “Money Money” and “Skylarking.”

Massive Attack - Five Man Army

Horace Andy - Cuss Cuss

Horace Andy - Money Money

Horace Andy - Skylarking

Protection’s “Spying Glass,” a melancholy lament about Babylon’s refusal to leave peace-loving Rastas alone, gives Horace Andy’s original a swirling remix without straying fundamentally from the source.

Massive Attack - Spying Glass

Horace Andy - Spying Glass

Which brings us to Mezzanine’s “Angel,” perhaps Massive Attack’s finest hour. Andy’s falsetto, never before sounding as chilling as it does here, lifts a pulsating, sinewy bassline into a gloriously apocalyptic midsection and then, with a mantra of “Love you love you love you love you” brings it right back round again. Without a doubt one of the finest recordings of the 1990s. But how many people know that the nucleus of “Angel” lies within a relatively innocuous Horace Andy song from the early 1970s, “You Are My Angel”? Well, now you do.

Massive Attack - Angel

Horace Andy - You Are My Angel

And here’s to hoping that the follow-up to 100th Window, rumored to once again feature Horace Andy and be slated for a 2007 release date, lives up to the promise of Blue Lines and Mezzanine.

I’ve tried to studiously ignore the Jewish-Israeli Blog Awards. They incite discord and strife within our e’er-so loving and tight-knit community, and they reward and promote topic-free writing and a suffocating flurry of political commentary by amateur pundits whose main source for information is Little Green Footballs. But now that Beyond BT has elected to go the Shas route and opine that a vote for them is a vote for God - next year’s JIBs will doubtless be wracked by controversy when SerandEz are found to be distributing talismans from the Baba Sali’s grave in exchange for votes - I’ve decided that something must be done. The JIBs, and their winning blogs, purport to carry on with the aid of Ha-Kadosh Baruch-Hu himself - yeah, I see that בס”ד up there - but nobody has thought fit to actually ask the Lord what his feelings on the matter are.

So, possessed as always of an investigative spirit, I took two tabs of the very finest blotter acid and embarked on a voyage to the King of Kings’ celestial abode. Barely ten minutes had passed before I felt a sense of profound peace and fulfillment descend upon me, and my eyes and ears were filled by the radiant Presence of the Lord.

“…God?”
The booming reply seemed to shake the very firmament.
“‘Sup?”
It turns out the T-shirts were right. The Lord, by all sonic indications, is indeed black.
“So…uh…You must be the big cheese. Hashem. Ha-Makom. Ribbono shel Olam. The Lord of Hosts. Adonai and I. Haile Selassie?”
“None of those. Ever since I’ve embraced the Noble Eightfold Path, I’ve distanced myself from the names I was once called.”
A beat of awkward silence passed between us.
“So…uh…You converted to Buddhism, huh?”
The Lord kissed His teeth, or at least produced the equivalent sound effect.
“Yeah, I mean, I’ll be the first to admit it…even a cursory examination of history shows that the whole ‘God/human’ relationship wasn’t working out well for either of us. You transgressed, I smote, it always ended in tears. I even sent my only begotten son to save you, and you let that one slip through your fingers.”
“So You mean Jesus–”
“No. Why does everyone think it’s Jesus? Remember all that London graffiti circa 1967 about how ‘Clapton is God’?”
“I’ve heard tell.”
“Well, he was.”
“Was? But he’s still alive.”
“Have you heard ‘Clapton Unplugged’? He’s certainly dead to me.”
The Lord’s critical pronouncements thundered with the sort of finality that would make a Pitchfork Media reviewer wet his skinny jeans.
“Granted. But You’re the master of the universe and You couldn’t think of a more effective way to transmit Your message than graffiti? No lights in the sky? Rains of fire? You know…old-school flavor?”
“I gave you Layla, didn’t I? Besides, you people are perfectly willing to accept that a gaggle of fragrant Galilean fisherman could be apostles, but not London graffiti artists?”
“Good point. But I have to tell You, God, us Jews always kinda thought You…you know…had our backs.”
The Lord snorted mightily.
“Oh. Yeah. I have your backs. Right. Remember the Holocaust? I stopped meddling in you hook-nosed Shylock motherfuckers’ affairs after you managed to let your second Temple get burned down.”
“Profanity isn’t very Buddhist of You.”
“4000 years of vengefulness and jealousy is hard to shake. But I’m trying to follow the Buddha’s teachings and break the cycle. Right speech. Right action. Right view. Right intention.”
“Oh, like kavanah?”
“Will you stop being such a fucking Jew about this?”

I cleared my throat uncomfortably. Clearly, and somewhat perversely, discussing religion with God wasn’t getting anyone anywhere, and God’s revelation of his anti-Semitism, while perfectly logical, placed me on an awkward footing. I decided to gingerly press forward with the intended topic.

“So…God…You’re aware of the Jewish-Israeli Blog Awards, yes?”
“Motherfuckers spammed my inbox.”
“Right…well, if you don’t know, they’ve advanced to the final round, and one of the blogs - Beyond BT - has implied that a vote for their blog in the finals is in accordance with Your Eternal Will.”
“What?!”

I heard what seemed to the sound of a cosmic keyboard clacking, followed by several minutes of increasingly irritated grumbling. Then the Lord returned, His voice a pillar of whirling flames.

“They think this shit is what I want? They think this is what I created the universe for? And I fuckin’ quote:

“‘I was reviewing the Parsha Friday morning and I realized that I hadn’t informed my Partners in Torah chavrusa that it was a double parsha. My chavrusa loves to learn and each week he reads *every* Art Scroll note and translation on the parsha.

I gave him a call around 10:15 to tell him. He said that he was just sitting down to learn and he noticed Behar was short and he wondered if perhaps it was a double parsha. At exactly that moment my call came in to tell him that it was a double. Pretty cool.’

“They think I don’t got anything better than manufacturing mundane coincidences to do with my time? Motherfucker, we got weed up here!”
“…I see. Tell me more about this Noble Eightfold Path. But, uh, first, God, do You have any picks for the JIBs? Which blog would You shine Your countenance upon?”
The Lord grumbled.
“A contest in which a fiercely mediocre, Reader’s Digest-worthy cartoon and a dozen blogs by American Orthodox Jews who are just so refreshingly unorthodox win every year? Who’s supposed to win, that Kike With Cap guy? And you want my picks?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
The Lord released a long, hissing breath.
“Alright. JSpot.”
“Really, Lord? But I think they’re quee–”
“The Lord is down with downtown,” said the Lord, sweeping away 4000 years of religious certitude with one slightly inelegant play on words.
“Okay then, Lord. But one more question. Since You’re a Buddhist now, what would You, the unfathomable entity who brought the universe into being, want to be reincarnated as?”
“Art Blakey. God out.”

And His Presence left me.

There you have it, J-Blogosphere. The word of the Lord.

I have vomited so hard it came out my nose in more countries - and on more continents - than I’ve had sex in/on.

Also, I can’t put my little cross graphic up because apparently the Control key doesn’t work this computer.

My parents, my three or so remaining friends from high school, and I have a deal struck: officially, I was never a teenager. After I exited St. Mary’s Catholic Glorified Day Care at the end of fifth grade (a strange period of my academic life since my fifth grade teacher actually lived with us for a while, and stranger because he was an ENORMOUS man who had almost died of malaria in the Gambia), there are just a few brief clips of me rolling around in blood during a high school production of “Dracula,” and then we cut right to me trying hard drugs the first year of college. I was not a teenager. My voice never once cracked, I never had acne, I never masturbated, and I never said “Mo-om!”

Why have we made this deal? Because teenagers are horrifying. I’m not quite old enough not to have some kind of atavistic horror, every time I see a flock of them, that they will consider themselves my peers and try to talk to me either about his or her mom, who is such a bitch, or about this one time when they had three Zimas (each with one Skittle in the bottom for flavor) and got SO trashed and got to second base (I am convinced that no one knows what the bases are) with some other teenager, nominally of the opposite sex, but with the same eyeliner, skinny jeans, and shrill vocal inflection. Teenagers in Wellington are so studiedly androgynous that soon, like penguins, the only absolutely certain way to tell their sex will be autopsy. Unlike penguins, however, I have no unrealistic yearning to cuddle them.

This afternoon, while walking down the street waiting for it to be late enough in the day to indulge a vice, I got jammed behind an agglutination of teenage boys.They were spread out enough to seal off the whole sidewalk, and my feeble efforts to go around them were frustrated. We turned a corner, so I was now downwind, and JERKING FUCKING CROESUS, these boys had put on the hair product. It was like making out with The Fonz. There was probably enough spray/pomade/aspic on their scalps to wax the floors at Versailles. I began to feel faint, and I thought, “I can’t die asphyxiated on a public street from the coiffure-fumes of some whelp who doesn’t even remember ‘Kids Incorporated.’ It can’t end like this!” Mercifully, they were distracted by something and piled into an Asian grocery store. A nervous Vietnamese family died that I might live, and it reminded me that my plans were unfinished.

You know how little girls plan their weddings from the time they grasp what a wedding is until they embrace a bitter, sexless spinsterdom? That’s me with my funeral. I’ve been planning it for years. It’s gone from such staid visions as “a standard funeral Mass, except my hands will be holding a bowl of candy, and the first person brave enough to take a SweeTart inherits my fortune,” to the impractical and possibly copyroght-infringing “my eulogy will be narrated by Dixie Carter, but her voice will emanate from my own Animatronically enhanced corpse, which has been nailed to the lectern,” to the Billy Idol tribute in which my bier rotates to the sound of “You Spin Me Round Like a Record,” but with the word “corpse” dubbed in over “record.” I have tried to find a doctrinally valid loophole allowing showgirls to assemble in the church and see me off with a kickline. I have tried to find a mortician who is willing to dress me in a high-quality Nixon mask. I have priced a Gwar concert. I must beat the woman of my father’s acquainatance who had an Elvis impersonator do her funeral. You are all, of course invited - bring a bottle and a slicker. Things could get wild.

This is how bad my misanthropy is getting:

I woke up this morning and I was cold. It’s late fall, and houses in New Zealand aren’t so much “insulated.” (Protection from the elements is for pussies and Australians, apparently.) I thought to myself, “I wish I were seeing someone. Then the bed would be warm.” Not “Then I’d have someone to share my adventure in WACKY POLYNESIA with.” Not “Then I would have someone to drink with.” Not even “Then I’d be having sex.” No, my chief requirement of another person was that they generate a moderate amount of heat. I have officially reduced human companionship to the role of an electric blanket.

If there’s only one thing you take away from reading Kosher Eucharist, I want it to be this basic tenet: “Women are not people.” But if you have room for a second nugget of learning, it should be that the day upon which the dead will rise from their graves as hungry, indefatigable consumers of the flesh of the living is not only inevitable, but approaching. And so, gentle readers, in a burst of kindness provoked by gin and the fact that every single person who could give me any work to do is out of the office today - at a planning meeting and bowling outing - I have prepared a guide. These are the cities that are, for whatever reason, most vulnerable to zombie attack:

Wellington, New Zealand: I would NEVER have moved here if I’d known how vulnerable the city is to zombie attack. The Central City is very population dense, and pinned between hills and the harbor. The only three escape routes are through the densely populated Hutt Valley; the road up towards Porirua, which is also fairly well-populated, and the ferry to the South Island. If the zombie infection entered via Auckland or the port at Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, the most likely points of ingress for the North Island, the zombies would move steadily southward, thus reaching the Hutt Valley and Porirua before Wellington and trapping residents of the city. The ports of the northern South Island could be expected to - reasonably - close themselves to North Island boats once the nature of the infection was made known. Furthermore, the surrounding towns, suburbs, and outlying neighborhoods are moderately closed off: by the time we knew the zombies had reached Kilbirnie or Johnsonville, it would be too late. The only reasonable hope would be to get across the Rimutaka ranges into the Wairarapa wine country to the east - and that’s a long shot, since the road out orginates in the Hutt Valley.

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Red China: It’s hard to imagine a city more vulnerable to the risen dead than Hong Kong. With a population desity high enough to make any misanthrope burst into tears, it’s already cruising for a bruising, but the zombies will be aided by geography. Hong Kong SAR is connected to mainland Commiewood by a relatively narrow strip of land. Beyong that, the majority of the population is on the Kowloon Peninsula or Lantau Island - so, zombie infestation either around the border between the SAR and China or at the head of the Kowloon will block escape. The extensive and regular ferry service between the various islands will probably doom them: none of the islands, nor the Kowloon peninsula itself, can hope to get enough warning to close the wharves in time - and even if they did, they would almost definitely lack the weaponry to turn back a defiant ship.

Mexico City, Mexico: Mexico City is situated in the bowl of a former volcano, atop the ruins of ancient Tenochtitlan. The surrounding mountains that, ideally, made the city a defensible capital trap two very dangerous things in the modern world: air pollution and zombies. Furthermore, the outlying areas of the city are the poorest, forming a ring of shantytowns, blocks of delapidated housing, and areas that are essentially favelas. A zombie infection that started among these poor would move through their neighborhoods rapidly, escaping detection by the authorities, and encircle the rest of Mexico City. In additon to having central Mexico City surrounded and the few exits blocked, the zombies would then also enjoy the advantage of holding the high ground.

Manhattan, New York, United States of America: No, no, a thousand times no. High populatuion density, but this time an island. Connected to the mainland and Staten Island by a number of bridges and tunnels, Manhattan has no hope of quarantine. Sadly, Manhattanites will find that they very pores that let the undead in will all but seal shut when they try to escape. Accidents, zombie swarms, potential government action to quarantine the island, and simple traffic will prbably seal all the bridges within an hour. The Staten Island Ferry will almost undoubtedly stop early too - no public transport employee makes enough money to risk a zombie rescue. This leaves only the tunnels, will will become an immediate death trap. Limited retreats, poor visibility, and various nooks and crannies ensure that most, if not all, of those who take to the tunnels will fall to the zombies.

Mecca, Saudi Arabia: This isn’t just wishful thinking. Mecca is almost certain to experience a zombie attack. With millions of yearly pilgrims - thousands daily - coming to hang out with God-in-a-box-in-the-sand, from a broad swath of the globe, the odds are sharply in favor of one of them bringing the infection with him. The city is apparently centered around the mosque compund, with many of the residents crowded into the old city. Admittedly, escape routes into the desert or to Jeddah or Medina will not and could not be closed as throughly or abruptly as they could in other cities I’ve discussed, but the ability of a couple of zombies to infect a monumental number of people during the hajj warrant a place for Mecca on the list.

Singapore: All the disadvantages of Manhattan; all the perils of Mecca. Singapore is a major transportation hub for Asia and the Pacific, and the amount of travelers both to and through Singapore from so many areas make it a very likely candidate for early infection. A collection of islands, the population is centered on the main one. Remember how Manhattan’s several bridges might be choked off? Singapore has two, and they lead into Malaysia. If the federal Malaysian government or that of Johor state sense a problem in Singapore, they could easily close or destroy the bridges right away as an act of quarantine. The population density of Singapore is, of course, terrifying.

There are others. Delhi is another hub with a high population and areas of slums. Jerusalem is surrounded on three sides by hostile residents of the Balesdinian Derridories, to whom I would frankly prefer the zombies, and has a lot of alleys and tangles in the Old City and madate-era developments. New Orleans is itself. The best plan, really, is to move to Siberia, or the Australian outback, or the American West, or the Yukon. Fortify a homestead, with several lines of defense so a retreat is possible. Secure supplies of food and water. Load your guns. Watch. Wait.

Let it never be said that I’m not a man of my word, or that I never did anything for you.

Source.

You know what we here at Kosher Eucharist really hate?

Immigrants.

But you know what else we really hate?

Women.

But even more than them?

Scorpions, Lebanon, human or animal feces, the poor, Oliver Cromwell, Presbyterianism, Israeli bureaucracy, American bureaucracy, New Zealand bureaucracy, other people’s pubic hair, Star Jones, the mind-numbing oeuvre of Alban Berg, bad hummus, Cathy, Bright copper kettles, warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with string…

But especially? Nazis.

Today is VE, or Victory in Europe, Day, which commemorates the surrender and destruction of Nazi Germany. By May 1945, Germany and Japan were the only Axis powers remaining. Italy had switched sides once it realized that its army was full of Italians and, consequently, had no hope of holding off an Allied invasion. Austria was more a decoration than an actual source of power. The Balkan fascists had been crushed by the Russians and their own countrymen. Balestine, The Little Axis Power That Couldn’t, Iraq and Iran had gotten infected with the fascism they cherish to this day, but had fallen to the British. Hungary kept fighting the Soviets, for some reason, but it was a feeble attempt. Battered, abandoned, its founder dead, Nazi Germany surrendered May 7/8 (depending on where you were in the world,) 1945.

Long story short: Krauts lost. Let’s drink! In fact, let’s drink…in theme.

United States of America: Enormous natural resources? Check. A president who’s disturbingly socialist, but nonetheless an excellent wartime leader? Check. A population ready to kill some Nazis? Check! For America drink a boilermaker. Use Tennessee whiskey or Kentucky bourbon, and a nice, solid American beer. Do it the real way, dropping the shot into the beer and downing at one go.

Great Britain: Britian withstood the greatest destruction it had known since the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the seventeenth century, and still helped nail the coffin lid down on the Germans. Solid, brave, and dependable, they were the last bastion of civilization in Europe. For Britain, and for the Queen, have a gin and tonic, a very English drink that gives a nod to the Empire as well.

France: Go hit a French person. They did not help.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: The only time in human history Communists have been useful. The Russians got mad, and they got even. Ain’t no one better at killing Nazis than a bunch of pissed Russians with some tanks. Granted, the Russian invasion of eastern Europe led to a generation of Communist opression and almost sparked nuclear war - but they killed a lot of Nazis. Have a White Russian, but don’t mention The Big Lebowski. Ever.

The Netherlands: What’s special about the Dutch Resistance? What makes it more important than, say, the French Resistance? It existed. They’re a little country, but they’re scrappy. Have a Flying Dutchman. It’s like a martini for hypoglycemics! Make a gin martini as you normally would, but use Cointreau instead of vermouth.

Denmark: Okay, so they didn’t resist so much, but they snuck the Jews into Sweden! Drink a Tuborg, a Danish beer botled in Israel.

New Zealand: New Zealand had been opposed to European fascism for years, and declared war on Germany almost immediately after the invasion of Poland. New Zealand had, by far, the highest combet casualty rate of any of the Commonwealth nations - over twice Great Britain’s and almost three times Australia’s. Within New Zealand, you should drink a “Speight’s - Pride of the South” beer, but failing that, a nice New Zealand wine.

Australia: Australia’s contribution to the war effort contains an event dear to my heart: the invasion of Vichy Syria and Lebanon. The French AND the Syrians AND the Lebanese AND the Nazis all losing a battle at the same time! Have a Foster’s. It’s crap, but it’s Australian for beer.

Canada: Canada, the calmest, most polite, most reserved country ever, still understood the need to kill Nazis. Have a Molson. It is a crisp Canadian brew.

You should be drunk by now. If not, start looking up which countries joined the Allies during the eleventh hour - Argentina, I’m looking at you - and drink something for them. They deserve it more than France.

Courtesy of the Shaolin Academy of American Poets:

How many trash collectors, do you think, find a corpse (or at least a body part) in the trash at some point during their careers? My guess is “practically all.”

In a fair fight, no weapons, closed arena, how many six-year-olds could you take?

For me, I think I could take an enormous number sequentially, but about four six-year-olds working in concert would finish me.