LOSERS is here! Visit the site. Order the book. And check out the neighborhood. For a limited time, buy Losers ($11 with shipping) and get a free bonus zine with a new Jupiter story!
11/13/2007 ChabadCon '68
one of the many goodies on sarah's photoshoot that happened on sunday, when our neighborhood got flooded by the aforeseen men, and approximately 5000 others, for Chabad's annual convention. we started out giving Sarah and Bill a tour, and then met up with Gedalia, who's British but spent his formative years here, and was more excited than anyone about anything ever before when he took over. it was truly remarkable. he showed us where the lubavicher rebbe used to receive visitors in an 8-hour line, and he showed us the "phone room" -- a room with 200 telephones where people would listen to the Saturday night speeches. He was 10 years old in England, waking up at 5 a.m. Sunday morning to hear them broadcasted through the wires....dude, none of us are lubavitch, and all of us were feeling our jew pride rising in our chests.
also: i was just officially blurbed by yale press from my review of The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague!
11/09/2007 candy, cooking, and what not to do at jewcy parties
before i forget, let me tell you that Candy in Action is signed, sealed, on its way to the printers, and you can pre-order it from me or from amazon through that link there. if you order through on amazon by clicking through my page, i get a very tiny percentage, so yes, it's cool if you do that. if you order through me, of course, mention if you'd like to have me write anything special.
a mere few hours before shabbos, and we are both in the kitchen cooking up a mad storm. as if there were any other kind of storm, especially in cooking. we have carrots so big, i almost stabbed itta's stomach with one. no hard feat, of course, since it's getting bigger than christmas, and hard to avoid, especially when carrying armfuls of spices with names like Pottery Barn colors.
last night at the Jewcy party, i spent a good deal of the night getting drunk with marty from ROI 120, and having him introduce me to people in the most abrupt of ways:
MARTY: "Hey, this is Izzy. She's the one who pays you and tells you when your stuff is shit." ME: Oh. (pause) Was it? IZZY: (longer pause) Erm, what was your name again? ME: Matthue. Matthue Roth. IZZY: Oh, no. Mostly not, anyway. Me: (sigh of mostly relief)
toward the end of the night, i pitched them what i remember as being a sequel to my memoir in maybe a hundred and fifty columns. i remember being really excited about it, but i wasn't the person whose reactions i should have been watching.
11/04/2007 my name is reynolds, and this is syran. we rap.
i've gotten two requests to lay down verses on albums in the past week. which is hella cool -- even if they don't both come through, it's still got my hip-hop motor grinding again.
rumble, rumble.
meanwhile: just got literally hundreds of copies of Goldbergs in! if you buy one from my site in the next few days, i will totally throw in massive amounts of extras. and itta will thank you even more massively for clearing a path to the office. although every story i've written in the past six months involves a cave, one way or another. symbolism? or is it my subconscious trying to tell me that i'm too messy? you decide.
My family's way of saying "things could always be worse" was saying, "We could always be in Russia." Last week, one of our friends, 17 years old, stayed over on his way to learn in yeshiva in Russia. He was bubbly and excited. It was his first time in the country his family had come from, and everything about it thrilled him -- a new country, a new culture, the prospect of talking to people who'd never spoken to a real Orthodox Jew before.
Last Thursday, Russian police shut the yeshiva down. They rounded up everyone in the building, confiscated their belongings and cell phones, and threw them in prison. While they were allegedly making arrangements to send the kids to Israel, according to Shmais:
The 13 Bochurim were held over Shabbos is a cell 8x15 [feet, I think] that is meant for 4 people! There were two wooden slabs in the cell and a hole in the floor that was meant to be a bathroom. When the Bochurim finally got food at 2:00am on Shabbos morning most of them were so nauseous from the conditions that they couldn’t even eat!
UPDATE: Ok! According to the family, they just landed in Israel. But, damn, whatever happened to the Russians liking Jews again? Was this a glitch in official documentation? Cause putting underage Americans in a jail cell for a 24-hour period doesn't sound like a diplomatic glitch to me.....then again, Russian bureaucracy inspired more than one Communist manifesto.
