11/14
total recall

it's bad enough that you spend your entire life writing a 300-page book, and THEN you have to condense the story to a one-page summary. it's like the star wars trash compactor scene, only with your BRAIN.

last night at the Library, i met rachel, who went to central high, started after i graduated, and is now legal to drink in bars. time warp! time warp! we spent about 3 hours trading NCSY stories, cause how many public-school graduates were in Orthodox youth groups as a young, impressionable 14-year-old? it's weird, cause i've been doing so much recall from that time for the memoir, and i NEVER think about high school anymore.* and suddenly, it's catching up to me with a vengeance.

i left her and erez, and headed back here to do some more novel compressions.

squash. squash.

____________
* -- well, except with all the weird Friendster people finding me.

11/12
i'm writing my first memoir. and i've never had so much fun with bad memories before.

hey, tomorrow is the preview of erez's film that i'm in! and on tuesday, i'll be performing live with him! see you on 42nd street.

or in my dreams. whichever comes first....

11/10
do-it-yourself falafel

i'm back at erez's. only, without erez. nobody knows where he is, or where he'll be. in the meantime, we're planting orchids. jared's room looks like a pot-growing factory, UV lights and piles of flowerpots, only they're for actual flowers. he has no windows. it's a good thing.

and i finally started on a nonfiction book today! i still need hella help with it -- so, if you can think of any nonfiction stories in my life that you've been a part of, let me know -- but i hit a beginning that doesn't need 20 pages of explanation. i think i'm terrified of explaining my life. if i talk about meeting a girl, i have to explain the weird circumstances that we met, the even weirder circumstances of the person who introduced us, and the psychopath stalker-murderer who spent 6 months chasing her. and that's just the background.

dude, itza and i found the coolest ever do-it-yourself falafel place today. it's on 6th avenue, three bucks, and there's a falafel bar. i'm not kidding.

11/09
moony

i feel like i'm not accomplishing enough. 2 weeks on this coast and i still haven't met any agents who want to rep my novel. and the jewish children's hip-hop album looks farther away than ever, since erez is all fascinated by our show in times square, and isn't working on anything else. it's true, it's going to be great publicity, but it feels insubstantial, temporary -- and i don't have much time here -- and i want this album to bowl over the entire jewish world.

shabbos, though, was awesome. we saw moonrise in prospect park, a whole crowd of yuppies stopped to stare, frozen in their tracks. it was yellow like a Twinkie, so big it filled the sky. later that night, aaron and i were on flatbush avenue, ducking into movie stores to keep warm, and we saw the eclipse. we stared at the moon. we swore we could see the shadows moving.

and then there was the hasidic open mic....

11/6
calling all angels!

new york feels draining. too much to do, and too much of it is paperwork. cleis has been talking to me about doing a book, and i have to assemble all my loose writing into something nonfictional. and i have NO IDEA how to write nonfiction. within the confines of a story, i know everything blends together, facts oscillate and mix together, and everything relates. but in real life, i start talking, and i can go in any direction. there's no end to a story. it's like going on a roller coaster, except without getting inside the roller coaster first. does that make sense?

tonight i saw m.c. paul barman. it's incredible. the man talks so amazingly white. not only is he the whitest rapper in the world, but while his words fall on the beats constantly, he can't dance or even acknowledge the presence of beats. and he wears flumpy clothes. not hip-hop flumpy. just FLUMPY.

hey! if you can think of any stories that i've ever told you that should go in the book, let me know.

11/06
crackaoke

i did poetry + karaoke = fun tonight at the bowery. hosted by the inimitable dan nester and the equally malleable reggie cabico, who performed pirouettes during a particularly fecund rendition of "the tide is high."

o dear l-rd. i don't know what ANY of the adjectives in the last paragraph meant.

i did my poem "daughter," which segued almost too well into "dancing in the dark." i've always wanted to be bruce springsteen onstage. i think i sang too loud, shouting more than singing. but i did fall to my knees three times. and george the doorman left his post to come onstage and hold up a lighter. how come nobody does lighters during poetry? san francisco, we need to implement karaoke into our poetry scene.

i mean -- please?

also: if you're at all into experimental music, my friend CJ just put up an entire album here. this is a boy who once wrote a 20-minute electro-pop love song for America and the movie Titanic, so be warned. i can't wait till i get a hi-speed connection and i can actually listen to it.

11/05
i hate it when ani songs still make sense.

i'm not sure what i'm doing. i'm in philadelphia, erez said we had a meeting with this big jewish programming director thing, and poof, now we don't.

although i *might* do poetry karaoke tonight at the bowery club...

11/04
up late, working on my novel, thinking about way too much. this is the curse of being your own boss: that there's never a quitting time.

and, no matter how overdone your work is, nobody's ever gonna fire you.

11/03
phillycitation

i took the train into philadelphia. got off halfway, in the far northeast. i always got shit for living in the northeast, because it's half ghetto and half suburb, even though it's inside the city. but i didn't realize how far the northeast went out.

or how far the bus lines ran. in san francisco, the whole city is seven miles square. we travelled 20 or 30 miles, still in the northeast, zooming over miniature hills glazed over in a donutlike orange and brown leaf-covered frosting. g-d, it's so beautiful. last night in new york, the city felt so metallic. we had dinner while filming this documentary about shomer negiah and the street ended in a bridge, cold steel highway tunnels jettisonning between the williamsburg apartments.

four of us, plus the camera crew -- erez and me, and then two girls in long skirts, the directors of the film. we were all obviously jewish, all obviously not fitting into the williamsburg idea of being jewish. we staked out a corner of the restaurant (after not being sure if we were allowed to sit together cause, you know, satmar hasidim.) we filmed for about an hour. tahlia and i kept whispering SEX whenever we had to say the word, which was weird, cause we were talking about not having sex. shira was the best, a good-natured melange of rolling her eyes and giggling at our ridiculousness. erez just rubbed his beard, on top of his game as usual.

philly is gonna be crazy tonight. but you'll have to email me for the details. cause i'm not giving away *everything*...