Depending on your opinion of things like Myspace and "bling," you might find ChaiSpace cute, cool, hilarious, or a disturbing reflection of the modern world.  You also might see it and rush immediately to customize your own Hebrew Hammer layout.    

Who blings Hebrew style?  Have a look.  The last thing I expected to encounter at the intersection of Hip-Hop and Jewish iconography in cyberspace 2.0 was a Messianic Jewess putting her sequencer to work to create Mike Oldfield-meets-Delerium tunes.  Outstanding.        

A video made the night before scabby British songbird Amy Winehouse appeared in court in such a disheveled state that even Carla Sosenko's bubbe got concerned shows the singer wandering around talking unintelligibly for five minutes and then smoking crack from a pipe.  Now we know why Amy Winehouse looks like a crackhead: it's because she smokes crack. 

[Note: This is a response to Izzy Grinspan's anti-beard polemic.]

Mountaineer plus prophet: Jim James of My Morning Jacket

A hipster beard isn’t supposed to be sexy. It’s post-sex. Sex is over; the only body part we’re looking to stroke is our beard. We’re onto the next thing.

We’re not hiding behind these beards. They’re more of a revelation than a dodge: look, here is how hair grows on my face. There is some red, and some grey, and some odd patterning. In a sensitive culture, beards may merely be declaring, “See, we’re at least this different from women.” And that’s enough.

The hipster beard has evocations of the madman, the mountaineer, the hippie, the pioneer, and the prophet. We’re not exactly any of those guys, but we like to think we’re descended a little from each.

A beard is a sign of authority, especially familial. Dads have beards. But we’re not dads. In fact, in many cases our beards themselves are the closest things we have to actual dependents.

A little stubble may be the by-product of laziness, but a real beard takes real commitment. You need to work through the itchy stage, and come to terms with the fact that you will be classified as “bearded.” Others will work though deep issues through what they see in your facial hair. There’s some trimming involved.

The headband keeps the sweat out of his mustache: Inspirational face-furI admit I’m a fashion follower, rather than an innovator. I like doing things while they’re cool, and maybe a little bit afterwards. I know my place in the curve. It would be too lonely at the front of it. Being part of the sanctioned now is fun. In this way beards are both an assertion and renunciation of individuality.

Now, when I see young, arty men bopping around the city without any facial hair, they look wrong to me, naked. I want to counsel them to start growing. Heed the fashion pendulum, even if it is largely based on a contrast with what came before—jeans were low, now they’re up; shoes were pointy, now they’re round. What’s the Biblical origin story, if not the ultimate contrast? Before there was chaos, now there is meaning. All beards are religious.

Which way does your hipster beard point tonight? Nowhere. Just to itself.

The hipster beards won’t be here long. They might be gone already. So while they’re around, on their cyclical and cryptic mission, it is important to welcome them. They are like comets—a streak of wonder where usually there is empty space.

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY:

Izzy Grinspan explains why beards are creepy.

Marjorie Ingall loves her some man-hair.

The excerpt herein is from my humor book, Oh, the Humanity! A Gentle Guide to Social Interaction for the Feeble Young Introvert, which was published in October by TOW Books. I was interviewed on this very site a few weeks ago, actually. You might find it helpful to read a conversation with a writer you've probably never heard of before diving into his equally obscure book. Sorry for the hard sell.

The portion below deals with tactics for wriggling out of deadly conversations. Some of you will find these bitterly familiar.

People Are Strange
Those lyrics are most commonly associated with Jim Morrison of the Doors, and you probably know the song even if you’re not a fan of classic rock or haven’t seen the ’80s biopic starring Iceman. But people are strange, not to mention frustrating. If we all walked around in sandwich boards that revealed our inner thoughts, we would know from a distance if a woman disliked her sister-in-law or if a man had fulfilled his dream of wearing a sandwich board. Unfortunately, we usually don’t know what we’re in for until we’ve entered into a conversation, and by the time we realize that we’re in the presence of somebody we should have avoided, it’s too late. But that doesn’t mean you’re defenseless. Before we look at specific types of undesirables, let’s touch on some general strategies for extracting yourself from an unpleasant conversation.

Call upon your biological urges. You usually can’t walk away from a conversation without at least some sort of slipshod pretense, and hunger’s a good one. If someone’s wearing you down with their reminiscences of gift certificates they’ve received over the years, you can excuse yourself with, “I think I’ll get myself some of those tasty appetizers” or, “Sounds like they’re slaughtering additional chickens. I’m going back for seconds.” Unfortunately, all the other person has to do is counter with, “Delicious! I think I’ll join you” and you’re stuck. That’s where going to the bathroom comes in. It’s an incontestable excuse that begs no follow-up. It’s rare that someone declares his intention to use the facilities and in response hears, “Really? Are you a fan of toilets?” or, “Delicious! I think I’ll join you.” Of course, people are generally squeamish about bodily functions. They just don’t want to know. If you’re worried that your restroom excuse is too transparent, simply concoct something anatomically obscure and unsettling.

• “Hate to cut you off, but my membranes are lathering.”
• “Sorry, I need to void my pus nodes.”
• “I’ve been coughing up sussudio all week.”

Bring in a third party. Some people are so hungry for closeness that they won’t even let you get your name out before presenting you with your half of a heart locket. They exchange poems with prisoners about things like freedom and incompetent public defenders, and they’re not 100 percent sure, but they think the person who sent them an e-mail regarding “vigara schoolgirlz who wants 2 gag on your best hippo cock” is probably their soul mate. No rhetorical maneuver will detach these needy people. And yet, you’re not really special to them, either. You’re just a human who, for the moment, is keeping them from being dragged away in the undertow of their loneliness. You are easily substituted, and you can swap yourself with someone else. If you’re at a social function, it’s not difficult to find someone else, but you can’t just flag down an acquaintance and say, “Listen, Heather, I have to separate myself from this horrible, horrible person. I propose you talk to him.” The trick is to make the switch seem beneficial to both the person you’ve recruited and the person you’re retreating from. Then, as they explore their common ground, you can bow out with a clear conscience.

ALISSA: Heather, come here for a second. Remember when you studied Celtic folklore for a year in Ireland? Well, it just so happens that Brad here also spends most of his paycheck on masseuses who are willing to “finish the job.” I’ll let you two get acquainted. I’m surprised your paths haven’t crossed already.

Reinforce the positive. Even if you’re with someone who hasn’t made the best impression, it helps to end on a supportive note. You never know when you might need a professional contact or want access to someone who really frightens you. You’ll score extra points if you encourage the person in terms of something he or she mentioned earlier in the conversation:

• “Well, it was nice meeting you! Thanks for all the unsolicited recipes for placenta.”
• “I’ve really enjoyed our chat! Ecoterrorism seems like a dynamic field.”
• “Hey, it’s been a pleasure! I’ll be sure to pick up that DVD you recommended next time I’m in the mood to watch people old enough to be my grandparents fuck people old enough to be their grandparents.”

On that repellent note, I'll thank you for reading. (And what would any excerpt be without an Amazon link?)

 

 

 

As someone who's dutifully stayed away from the Harry Potter series, I can't really see what all the fuss is about over Dumbledore's preference for the company of wizards over witches. This is perhaps because it was round about the time I heard someone refer to Tom Cruise as "so far in the closet, he's in Narnia" that I alighted on the somewhat natural parallels that exist between children's fantasy and gay themes. What I mean to say is this: What made-up magical realm of your adolescence can you cite that would have been downright hostile to jazz hands or California wine country? The Freudian uses of enchantment are well documented, and I'm sure there's some graduate thesis being written on the subject -- if it hasn't already.

Indeed, Oscar Wilde is considered by some to have been a better children's author than he was a playwright (though I find this judgment absurd). An openly gay English professor at, I think, NYU supplements his income by ghost-writing the admittedly non-magical and hard-boiled Hardy Boy stories. He's copped to infusing them with homoeroticism. When asked by a friend of mine if he didn't worry that this might make for inappropriate reading material for the 10-14 year-old set, he replied: "The reader is not my problem." Roald Dahl meets John Waters.

Anyway, try Google image-searching "wizard" and see what you turn up. A random sampling:

 

A smattering of cultural moments, both high and lowbrow, from today's news:

Making his wife proud: Beckham's new Armani ad • David Mamet talks in New York Magazine about his “surprisingly positive” new play about election season.

• Posh Spice says she’s proud to see her husband’s package “about 25 feet tall” in his Armani ad.

• The Golden Globes, um, happened.

• On his personal website, New York comedian Bill Dawes publishes a heartbreaking and extremely weird story about his three-year romance with amnesiac "Project Runway" contestant Elisa Jimenez.

• Joshua Ferris, whose novel Then We Came to the End was recently declared the only non-disappointing book of 2007 by the LA Times, has a melancholy short story in the current issue of Tin House.

I'm seeing American Gangster, the Ridley Scott film about Frank Lucas, the Harlem don who used to smuggle dope out of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War in military coffins. The film is based on Mark Jacobson's New York magazine profile of Lucas, which is of the caliber of journalism that Ron Rosenbaum talks about in wistful, romantic tones.

Here are a few clips:

"That's because with Blue Magic, you could get 10 percent purity," Lucas asserts. "Any other, if you got 5 percent, you were doing good. We put it out there at four in the afternoon, when the cops changed shifts. That gave you a couple of hours before those lazy bastards got down there. My buyers, though, you could set your watch by them. By four o'clock, we had enough niggers in the street to make a Tarzan movie. They had to reroute the bus on Eighth Avenue. Call the Transit Department if it's not so. By nine o'clock, I ain't got a fucking gram. Everything is gone. Sold . . . and I got myself a million dollars.

[...]

"There was a lot about Bumpy I didn't understand, a lot I still don't understand . . . when he was older, he'd lean over his chessboard in his apartment at the Lenox Terrace, with these Shakespeare books around, listening to soft piano music, Beethoven -- or that Henry Mancini record he played over and over, 'Baby Elephant Walk' . . . He'd start talking about philosophy, read me from Tom Paine, 'The Rights of Man' . . . 'What do you think of that, Frank?' he'd ask . . . I'd shrug. What could I say? Best book I remember reading was Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers."

[...]

Of the dozens of smuggling operations he ran from Asia, Frank still rates "the Henry Kissinger deal" as an all-time favorite. To hear Frank tell it, he and Ike were desperate to get 125 keys out of town, but there weren't any "friendly" planes scheduled leaving. "All we had was Kissinger. He was on a mercy mission on account of big cyclones in Bangladesh. We knew a cook on the plane and gave $100,000 to some general to look the other way. I mean, who the fuck is gonna search fucking Henry Kissinger's plane?

". . . Henry Kissinger! Wonder what he'd say if knew he helped smuggle all that dope into the country? . . . Hoo hahz poot zum dope in my aero-plan? Ha ha ha . . ."

Cute.

Gabriel Byrne: buttoning that top button might go a long way towards avoiding transference issues.HBO's buzzed about new series, "In Treatment" -- about a therapist, his clients, and his own therapy -- offers an interesting variation on the usual TV series rhythm we all know and love. Instead of one episode per week, the show will air every weeknight: each episode a therapy session with one patient, including, on Fridays, the therapist in therapy himself!

The show is adapted from a smash-hit Israeli show called Be' Tipul ("In Therapy").

Since we (Jews and the Jewcy staff, both) know a thing or two about therapy -- insert Portnoy and/or Freud and/or Woody Allen reference here -- we felt we should watch the show (consistently, because consistency is key) and work through some of our feelings about it. But not our feelings about our feelings, because that would be fucked up. You should never have feelings about your feelings.

For those of us still deep in mourning for the philosophical miracle that was "Six Feet Under", watching "In Treatment" may serve as a healing balm, much like actually being in therapy, but without all the, you know, talking and shit. Critical response has been mixed. But whatever. How did it make us feel?

 

Continue reading...

Alan Sacks is the original Sweathog. A buttoned-down N.Y. producer who relocated to Los Angeles to be closer to the happenings of the late ‘60s, Sacks helped create Welcome Back Kotter by drawing upon his tough childhood in Brooklyn. We talked to Sacks about the inspiration behind the Jewish Holy Trinity: Kotter, Epstein and Horshack.

How did you create the show, where did it come from?

I was inspired by a couple of things, both of which happened around 1956. That was a pivotal year for me. That was the year "rock n roll" was invented by Alan Freed ...

Another fine Jew.

Yeah, exactly, too bad he's not around to be interviewed. But yeah, Alan Freed came up with that phrase "rock n roll," and all summer long I was listening to him over the airwaves, his top forty countdown on Saturday morning. I'd be in the schoolyard with a lot of my Italian friends, Vinnie Barbarino and Joey Caluchi ...

Wait, did you just say Vinnie Barbarino?

Right.

So the John Travolta character was based on a real person with the same name?

Right ... No wait, his real name was Joey Barbarino.

Oh.

I mean Joey Caluchi. Yeah, Travolta's character was really based more on the other friend I mentioned, Joey Caluchi. You know, Joey Caluchi's other claim to fame is he was the first person ever whacked by Sammy the Bull.

That's great. I mean, that's horrible, but that's great.

(Laughing). And Sammy the Bull went to my elementary school.

So you were saying?

So we would listen to Alan Freed's top forty countdown show, and it would come over these little Motorola portable radios that we had. Well, during that same year, three movies came out in very close proximity to one another: The Wild One with Marlon Brando; Rebel without a Cause with James Dean, and The Blackboard Jungle. These were movies about juvenile delinquents. When we went to see The Blackboard Jungle, it began by showing what today they would call an inner city high school, though it was just a Lower East Side or Brooklyn type of high school; and they had guys dancing over the main titles with each other and suddenly Bill Haley's music came on - "Rock Around the Clock" - and it was the first time we ever heard music beyond those small little radios, we heard this huge music coming over the speakers, this rock n roll, and it became like tribal, we started banging our chairs, you know, throwing things, destroying the theater and they had to shut down the movie. That stayed with me my whole life. So I always thought when I came out here to California, I was going to write and create a television show about that moment, the tough things that I grew up with in Brooklyn.

The other thing that inspired me was a series of films called the Bowery Boys about these east side kids, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, these tough kids from New York.

These were mostly Irish kids, right?

Yeah, mostly Irish kids, but I think Huntz Hall, he might have been Hebrew, I think so, he might have been.

You kind of identified with him when watching it?

No, I didn't, I identified with Leo Gorcey, who was the tough, short leader of the pack, even though he was Irish. Huntz Hall was Jewish, and was played with a big nose, and he was, you know, the goof.

Ok, so you had this idea, and you pitched it to the networks?

It wasn't just my idea. It was also Gabe Kaplan's, who played Mr. Kotter on the show. He had an act all about kids he knew in high school, and I had my experiences with my friends and we combined the two. Like "Epstein the Animal." He was a character in Gabe's stand-up routine. He was the toughest kid in the neighborhood. We liked the idea of having a tough Jew, cause there are some, you know. Gabe's joke was, "This kid was so tough that all the other parents would take their kids off the street one hour a day so Epstein could run out and walk through the streets." So that was kind of what Epstein was based on. But [Michael] Eisner, who was then head of programming at ABC, said I think we should make Epstein half Puerto Rican and half Jewish. My personal feeling about that was I didn't know any half Puerto Ricans and half Jews, I didn't quite buy that idea, but I also knew that he wanted to contribute creatively, so I said, ok, let's go with this. As it turned out it was a great idea, it gave us a wealth of material, a wealth of jokes. And the irony of it is I have a cousin who moved down to Florida and she came to visit about seven or eight years ago, and I hadn't seen her in years, and she'd married a Puerto Rican guy and her last name is Gonzales now, and her children are half Jewish, half Puerto Rican, so in fact I have cousins who are in reality like the fiction that I created.

Kotter lives!

More than even that. I had no idea I was going to become a college professor. I'm teaching now seven or eight years, I forget, and that's accidental, I didn't plan it, I didn't start out to be a teacher, I'm not in retirement, I didn't say ok I'm a teacher now, it just happened, you know. So the irony is I became a teacher and my students love the idea that I created Welcome Back.

So do you divide them into different characters from the show - and do they act like those guys?

No, but they like to think they do, they have a big joke like that. (laughs) But you know, it's funny when you say that because when I went to my high school reunion in Brooklyn, I'd lived in Hollywood so long that when I got there I half-expected it to be this huge event with klieg lights and like a red carpet, that was my frame of reference. As it turned out, there was just the old gym, and the whole school packed in there and I felt out of place. But then, everybody started coming up to me and asking me who they were. "Was I Barbarino?" "Was I Horshack?" They all wanted to know which one was based on them.

Were any of them?

No, because it was mostly from my junior high school. I turned it into a high school for the show.

Did any people actually want to be Horshack?

Errr, I think some people did (laughs). Yeah, I think so.

Who picks Horshack as the person to be?

I think people who are happy being the nerd, you know, the person satisfied about being a goofball. I wouldn't want to be Horshack.

You wouldn't?

No, no, (laughs), he was a goof.

It's funny, because in terms of Jewish identity, he's probably the most interesting character. He seems very Jewish.

But I never wanted him to be Jewish, I didn't want the nerd, the complete nerd to be Jewish, the stereotype, you know. That's the one thing about being Jewish that you get typecast as, and that's not necessarily, you know, who Jews who are. Jews are cool!

But in some ways it seems unavoidable, like maybe you were making fun of that idea. I mean, he's got the name, which sounds kind of Polish-Jewish...

"Arnold, hi, I'm Arnold Horshack."

And the accent, and the nose...

He's Italian, and the accent was Robert Hegyes trying to do Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. But, I understand what you're saying and people interpreting that. Still, I always found that a little offensive that people felt that.

I don't mean to be offensive.

No, you're not being offensive at all...

But I got to ask you a couple of things about that, because, one, in Dustin Hoffman you've got ...

Yeah, yeah, right.

...a Jew playing an Italian, I always think Jews and Italians are so alike anyway, it's like...

Right!

...it's like Jews are decaf Italians.

Exactly, that's funny.

So I wonder if on some level Horshack was an unconscious projection of negative feelings of how Jews are seen.

My own negative feelings?

Maybe, or Gabe's. Was he your character more, or Gabe's character?

Gabe's. Though I always thought Gabe himself was a nerd. So maybe it is Gabe. We're analyzing Gabe now! (laughs)

Well, it's easy, you know, what's he gonna say? He's not here. We should call him up and get him on a three-way conversation.

I spoke to Gabe this morning.

Maybe we should check in with him and give him like a little P.S. at the bottom. You know, like "I'm anyone but Horshack." We'll talk about that later. But one other thing about Horshack - I was remembering what I think is one of the final episodes where he gets married...

Yeah.

Isn't there a moment where they need something for him to step on at the wedding, a glass...

Did he step on a glass ... oh, yeah yeah yeah, I remember that now, right.

I think it's something other than a glass because they can't find one. I can't remember now.

I can't remember.

So he must be Jewish.

(Sounding defeated) Right.

Like he came out of the closet at the end of the show...

Well, he wasn't Jewish for the first two years. (Sighs then laughs). You know, Gabe and I have been talking about developing a movie and in the movie we've talked about Horshack coming out.

Of the closet? Not as a Jew, but as gay?

Yeah.

I like it. Because that was the other thing about him you always wondered. He seemed a little too attracted to Mr. Kotter all the time. You know, "Ewww ewwww ewwww, Mr. Kotter!"

(Laughs) Yeah, right.

Interesting. So what about the rest of the Sweathogs? What are they doing?

In my mind? Creatively?

Yeah.

Oh. Well, like I said, Horshack is coming out. He's a beautician. A hairdresser. This past week he was getting married in San Francisco. Not that that matters to me at all. I think that's great. And let's see ... Barbarino ... he's just gotten out of jail. He's written a memoir about the Sweathogs and he's sold the movie rights and he's a millionaire in L.A. And Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington is like, you know, still like one of the cool, ultimate brothers. He's still going to basketball games, still shooting hoops, he's very stylin'. He's a music producer, he's into music, and he's playing keyboards.

And Epstein?

Oh, Epstein, he's like on his fourth wife. And he's a butcher.

Is he still in the neighborhood?

Yeah, he's still in the neighborhood, he's a butcher in Brooklyn.

And the ladies like to drop in?

Oh yeah!

Jeff and Eric Rosenthal at The Real deconstruct Jay-Z's shout out to all the muthafuckin' Israelites. Word.

 

Serena van der Woodsen and Dan Humphrey, sittin' in a tree: She loves him despite their minimal differences!

 

 

Tonight's finale of the strike-shortened first season of 'Gossip Girl', the buzzed-about CW show based on the ubersuccessful series of young adult novels about the lives of rich Manhattan private school kids, promises to be a doozy. Will Blair Waldorf's life of privileged partying come screeching to a halt when she finds herself knocked up? Is the putative baby's daddy bad boy Chuck Bass or floppy-haired Nate Archibald? Will Lily van der Woodsen sacrifice her daughter Serena's happiness to pursue her fated luv with Serena's Williamsburg-bred boyfriend Dan Humphrey's improbably youthful dad Rufus? Did the actress who plays Serena really get a nose job right before the series started filming? (Well, yes.)

 

Some or all of those questions might get answered on tonight's show, but this one probably won't: what is up with the show's insistence that almost everyone in its purview, including those downtrodden Humphreys (they have to live in Brooklyn!) is so incredibly WASPy?

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. After all, much has been made of the show's inclusion of two mostly-mute characters who fans have unceremoniously dubbed Black Girl and Asian Girl. And of course there's Dan's alternative love interest Vanessa Abrams, who lives on the Lower East Side and is sort of brownish. But as writer Jonathan Liu puts it, it's the dearth of Jews among the students at Constance Billiard which makes the show's portrayal of the scions of Manhattan's ruling class (even) less believable: "I doubt that an all-WASP elite actually exists anywhere anymore." Times magazine interview-lady Deborah Solomon even specifically took the show's creator Josh Schwartz to task about this, quizzing him, "Why are the characters uniformly white, with old-money names like Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen that hark back to a time when high society was not integrated? Why are there no Jewish characters?"

"It’s interesting, because on 'The O.C.' I went out of my way to make those characters Jewish, not what you would expect to find in Orange County. But in New York, weirdly, I failed. I was working off of the source material," Josh explained. Well, fair enough (though the show does diverge from the books in a million other ways). If that excuse doesn't work for you, you can always go with Meghan McArdle's explanation for the show's "anasemitic" quality: "Media executives are leery of portraying rich New York day schools, or the entertainment industry, as being chock full of Jewish people for fear of encouraging the stereotype that Jews control all the media and the money in this country." Hmm!

Of course, a huge part of GG's addictive charm lies in the fact that it in no way resembles present-day New York -- the prep school fantasyland it depicts seems almost to be set the 60s, but with cel phones. For me, at least, this is what makes the show such an escapist pleasure. But even if just for superficial reasons, some of the show's fans mourn the Semitic sex appeal of Schwartz's last hit. Musing about the charms of Dan Humphrey, a gal of my acquaintance sighed: "Well, he's no Seth Cohen."

I suspect that many readers will find this article by Mark Morford laughably alarmist. Its argument is that American students are now so dumb that within a generation or two, none of them will be able to perform even relatively simple tasks like operating a TiVo or following the instructions on a Hot Pocket sleeve. Think of the children, missing episodes of “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” or dying by the dozens of third-degree cheesy burns! And if that doesn’€™t scare you, how about a future in which these kids are responsible for, say, air-traffic control, structural engineering, and oncology research? Yet the general public continues to shrug and ask, like the ur-nimrod Alfred E. Neuman, “œWhat, me worry?”€ To put it another way, they focus on climate change instead of primate change—the environment, not the rapidly devolving Morlocks who inhabit it. 

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It’€™s not the kids’€™ fault. They’€™re merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don’€™t arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they’€™ve ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.

The piece is generally on point, but there are two flaws I’€™d like to consider. The first is more than anything a fashionable tic: The conservative administration is both a pro-war bogeyman and an anti-sex bogeyman, which means it needs an unending supply of slavish, ignorant cannon fodder, but opposes the one means—other than robotics, I guess—by which to get it. This is a classic case of having one’€™s paranoia and debunking it, too. If you’re interested in an infinitely more nuanced approach to the idea that our education system is intentionally flawed, John Taylor Gatto’€™s your man.

My second complaint is more serious, and it has to do with the dangerously seductive concept of “€œgenerational relativity.” I first encountered this idea in a review by Joyce Carol Oates of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood:

Adult anxiety about youthful literacy is the social conservative’€™s favoured mode of anxiety about other, more alarming predilections of youth, as “€œA Letter to the Rising Generation”€ by Cornelia Comer, which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, makes clear:

The younger generation, she grumbled, couldn’€™t spell, and its English was “€œslipshod.”€ Today’s youth were selfish, discourteous, lazy, and self-indulgent. Lacking respect for their elders or for common decency, the young were hedonistic, “shallow, amusement-seeking creatures” whose tastes had been “€œformed by the colored supplements of the Sunday paper”€ and “the moving-picture shows.”€ The boys were feeble, flippant, and “€œsoft”€ intellectually, spiritually, and physically. Even worse were the girls, who were brash, loud, and promiscuous with young men.

All this, in 1911!

That “€œpunchline”€ reveals a mentality which, at least as far as this subject goes, is utterly incapable of simple distinctions. In 1911, being discourteous€ might have meant slouching or leaving your shirt untucked. In 2007, it more likely means cursing out your teacher with language all but unknown to kids at the turn of the century. Newspaper cartoons in 1911 included Winsor McCay’s “€œLittle Nemo in Slumberland” and, just a few years later, George Herriman’s immortal “€œKrazy Kat.”€ The idea that there are diamonds of that water in the rough of today’€™s “€œshallow amusements” is just a lazy insult to taste.

I think these examples illustrate my point. Just because the complaints are alike in kind doesn’€™t make them anywhere near the same in degree. The boys in S. E. Hinton’€™s The Outsiders don’t have much in common with the droogs in Anthony Burgess’€™s A Clockwork Orange, and the failure or refusal to acknowledge this is an abdication of adult responsibility. Things fall apart. The question isn’€™t whether youth culture gets worse but how best to forestall the inevitable. To that end, we can do without the Theory of Generational Relativity, which makes light of the problem because it’s afraid of looking uncool. If adults have lost confidence to such an extent that they care what kids think, the little terrors have already won.

Give me your headless, your poor: The Cloverfield poster No time to read The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Sunday New York Times, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, and New York Magazine during your morning commute? Don’t worry – we’re here to help you convince those around you that you’re a big ball of erudition.

Start by wondering whether your conversation partner saw the intensely disapproving review of Cloverfield in the Times this weekend, and quote Manohla Dargis’s final line: “Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.” Burn!

Then point out that Anthony Lane in The New Yorker seemed to like the movie, even though he said the film’s gimmick—it’s a monster movie shot entirely on a camcorder held by one of the kids fleeing the monster—was “a bit pre-millennium.”

And, finally, address the real monster in the room—not the film’s 9/11 imagery, because duh -- but a little film everybody was really excited about back in the summer of ’99. “Remember The Blair Witch Project?” you might say, and then, if you’re feeling saucy, “Yeah, me neither.”

Last week: Teen Angst Edition

A new movie showcases the Heras of Jewish comedy:

To remember and to honor the contributions of six famed Jewish women comedians was the goal of the Jewish Women’s Archive, based in Brookline, Mass., in creating their documentary, Making Trouble. The film grew our of plans to host a gala celebration, “So Laugh A Little, An Evening of Jewish Women’s Comedy,” in New York City in March 2005. Contemporary comics Judy Gold and Jackie Hoffman performed at the show and their work, combined with archival footage, got the Archive staff thinking. “We thought, ‘there’s a history here and a tradition that they belong to,” says Gail Reimer, one of the Archive’s founders and its current executive director. “Something had to be done with the material. It was too good. So we decided we should make a film.” Of course the Archive had never taken on such a project, but no matter. The idea perfectly reflected the organization’s mission to research, preserve, and transmit the history of Jewish women.

Here's Gwyneth Paltrow discussing her physical "transformation" in "The Good Night":

...as Dora, the protagonist’s waking-life girlfriend, Gwyneth is barely recognizable: pale, with a cape of dense brown hair, bundled in shapeless cardigans. “It was me physicalizing my New York Jewish half,” jokes Gwyneth. (Her rep as a shiksa goddess notwithstanding, the actress is in fact, as a friend likes to call her, “Gwyneth Paltrow, the descendant of ancient rabbis.”)

I won't get into the absurdity of an actress sans eyeliner being labeled "barely recognizable." And "descendant of ancient rabbis" sounds a lil' nebulous. I mean, shit: aren't we all? But whatever. She's clearly Jewish enough for Hitler, and that, friends, means she's Jewish enough for me.

Question is, does dressing down and attaining moderate fugliness make one feel more Jewish? Or just look more Jewish? I suppose it's a method issue.

Ronna and Beverly are loud, opinionated, and wear too much lipstick. Watch as they harass an innocent bookstore employee while publicizing their new book for Jewish singles, "You'll Do a Little Better Next Time." Yes, these yentas are fictional (yet eerily reminiscent of my mom's friends), and if you love them as much as I do, there are many more chapters in the Ronna and Beverly saga to enjoy. Here is one of the best.

"The Hills" may be the ultimate in guilty pleasures. With all the fights, gossip and fashion, how could you resist? Apparently, the New York Times can't resist either. Their style blog got a hold of Whitney Port and sat her down for an interview, during which they offered her a job after she commented that she was getting "too old" to be working at Teen Vogue. Gawker didn't seem too happy with the Times blogger's gushing affection for Whitney, or his spontaneous job offer, but I say, why not? If starring in a reality TV show gives her enough cred to be called a "style muse" then why shouldn't she move on to a more prestigious gig? And if that doesn't work out, she can always come work for Jewcy!

Joey Bishop's dead.

Reviewers often claimed that Bishop played a minor role, but Sinatra knew otherwise. He termed the comedian "the Hub of the Big Wheel," with Bishop coming up with some of the best one-liners and beginning many jokes with his favorite phrase, "Son of a gun!"

The quintet lived it up whenever members were free of their own commitments. They appeared together in such films as "Ocean's Eleven" and "Sergeants 3" and proudly gave honorary membership to a certain fun-loving politician from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration gala Bishop served as master of ceremonies.

Bummer. And I'm more of a Sammy man myself.

 

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hits theaters in May, and the new Vanity Fair has a long, oddly bloggy article about how very rough it's been for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, two of the highest-grossing filmmakers of all time, to make the first Indiana Jones movie since 1989's Last Crusade. Yes, it's been a long, trying process for filmmakers and stars alike -- Harrison Ford, at 65, says he hadIt was 97 degrees in the New Mexico desert that day: Movie stars' jobs are hard! trouble getting back into Indy's psyche, not to mention his uncomfortable outfit. “It’s a very bizarre costume, when you think about it ... It’s this guy sporting a whip, who’s off usually for someplace really hot in his leather jacket.”  Also, they're pretty sure everyone's gonna pan the movie: Lucas says he knows the critics "already hate it. So there’s nothing we can do about that."

Crystal Skull is set in 1957, so the villians are now Russians instead of Nazis. But -- nerdgasm alert!-- the film might also feature a more exotic breed of bad guy.

  "No one outside of the filmmakers will know for sure until May 22, but it would be pretty cool if it turns out that Emperor Palpatine had dropped a crystal skull on Earth. Or maybe one was left behind by the skinny dudes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Or maybe it’s, like, E.T.’s cell phone. :)"

Star Wars meets Indiana Jones! Also, emoticons meet Vanity Fair! Weirdness.  

 

 

Eat your heart out, Zero Mostel.

Hat tip: Will. 

Mr. Eugenides sent this along after his guest editorship expired. You can thank him.

Words I thought I’d never say: The new Adam Sandler movie (trailer below) looks kind of…good. And not totally-competent-romantic-comedy good like The Wedding Singer, or look-at-me-I-can-do-indie good like Punch-Drunk Love. Don’t Mess with the Zohan, about a Mossad agent who fakes his own death so that he can pursue his secret dream of becoming a hairstylist, might actually be funny.

This is probably due in large part to Sandler’s co-writer, Judd (Knocked Up ) Apatow. But I think it’s also because this might be the first time a mainstream comedy has tapped into Israel’s inherent comic potential.

Americans tend to find the hallmarks of Israel’s pop culture—the tight jeans, the Euro-disco music, the machismo—completely hilarious. Then again, we’re equally amused by any country where men wear tight pants. But what makes Israel funnier than, say, Spain, is the lethal military gloss over the entire nation, and the fact that everyone’s Jewish, which in America has become a kind of lazy shorthand for comedy.

Borat has pretty much killed the genre of jokes about how non-American males are more comfortable with their bodies. Years of bad news have made it difficult to say anything truly funny about Israel’s military situation. And Keeping Up with the Steins may have tossed the final scoop of dirt on the coffin of Yiddish shtick (OMG she said "shtick"! FUNNY SOUNDS!) But when you combine those three elements, you get something new. Something fresh-feeling. Even if it stars Adam Sandler.

 

[Note: The following is an opinion piece on the creepiness of hipster beards, those scraggly face-warmers sported by young, underemployed, flamboyantly-dressed men in cities across the nation. For a defense of these beards, see Andy Selsberg's response.]

An early specimen: This was FOUR YEARS AGO and people's chins are still hairy

One of the most disturbing moments of my (admittedly boring) childhood was the day my dad shaved his beard. When he walked out of the bathroom, all three of my brothers burst into tears, demanding to know what this smooth-faced interloper had done to our father. I was old enough to understand the transformation, but I still felt shaken. With a beard, he’d looked authoritative, serious, almost Solomonic. His nude chin bespoke an entirely different man: someone young and frivolous, more likely to flirt with strange women than to arbitrate disputes over Lego ownership.

For the past year or two, I’ve revisited this shock almost every time I walk down the street, only this time it’s the converse: how did all the boys turn into my dad? It might have started with Will Oldham’s near-Freudian bush-face on the cover of 2003’s “Master and Everyone,” an achievement in hair-growing so monumental that it nearly eclipsed the record itself. It might have something to do with Devendra Banhart, psych-folk, and the need to have a chin as goaty as one’s voice. Wherever the hipster beard came from, I wish it would go away. I think my dad is pretty great, but I’m a little freaked out by how much my boyfriend is starting to resemble him.

Wait, actually this beard is kinda sexy: Kristofferson Not everyone has a bearded dad, obviously. But if you’re young enough that your facial scruff qualifies as hipster accoutrement and old enough that it’s not just pubertal bragging, then your parents probably came of age during the golden era of stubble liberation. In April 2005, the New York Times explained that beards are hip because they’re subversive. Fair enough: fringe forces often have fringed faces. Beards can signify passionate devotion to a fundamentalist cause and/or the inability to toe the social line, making them quite literally countercultural: look at Osama Bin Laden or the Unabomber. The Brooklyn beard might well be a symbol of wild-eyed pre-modern weirdness, an unruly protest against the uniformity of our flat globalized age. But the Times was thinking more of Kris Kristofferson’s chin in the 1978 movie Convoy. It’s hard to be nostalgic and subversive at the same time.

Of course, there’s nothing categorically wrong with re-heated trends. It’s just that in laying claim to the beard during their own youths, the boomer generation stripped it of its powers. The untamed mountain-man beard at least suggests some kind of feral intensity. Once filtered through the dad matrix, though, it becomes by definition unsexy. The virtues it implies—responsibility, maturity, prudence—are certainly all fine things, but they don’t make a girl’s pulse start to rise when spotted walking down Broadway. Whether or not we’re evolutionarily wired to like dependable men, we’re culturally programmed against anything that reminds us too much of the previous generation. And without his clothes, a bearded guy looks like the gamy dude in the line drawings illustrating the erotic boomer bible The Joy of Sex, which makes him shorthand for all sorts of disturbing primal scenes. (Oldham, as always, is a total genius: in bearding up like Freud, he somehow both presaged the trend and pinpointed exactly the kind of anxiety that goes with it.)

No matter how obscure or obscuring, fashion is always about sex. Someday, all you beardos might have kids who depend on your hairy chins to make sense of their little worlds. But until you’ve reached that point, it might be wise to shave once in a while. Nobody wants to feel like she’s making out with the scratchy symbolism of her parents’ generation.

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY:

Andy Selsberg defends the face fluff.

Marjorie Ingall loves all male body hair, whether it's facial or dorsal.

 

Where's Strawn when you need him?

Hat tip: Will, my fellow Trot. 

Not a Supporter of Adolph Hitler: Cinema's Will SmithRecently, Will Smith caused great controversy when he stated that all human beings, including the likes of Hitler, seek to do good in the world.

In an interview for the Scottish paper The Daily Record, Smith said:

"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'. I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.”

Not surprisingly, these comments have enraged many people who believe that Smith had trivialized the actions of Hitler and the Nazis. The Jewish Defense League, to take an extreme example, issued the following statement in response:

"Smith's comments are ignorant, detestable and offensive. They spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis. His disgusting words stick a knife in the backs of every veteran who fought so valiantly to save the world from those aspirations of Adolph Hitler. Smith's comments also cast the perpetrators of the Holocaust as misguided fellows rather than the repulsive villains of history they truly were."

The JDL ended their statement by calling on movie theaters and their patrons to boycott Smith's new movie I Am Legend; challenging Barack Obama (a friend of Smith's) to repudiate the comments made by the actor; and threatening to confront Smith if ever the chance occurs.

In response to such outrage, Smith issued a perfunctory statement explaining that he was misquoted and that he really believes that Hitler was “a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet.”

It seems to me that the controversy surrounding Smith’s original comments revolves around a basic misunderstanding of the actor’s words. Smith did not say that Hitler was good, or that his actions were good, rather he said that Hitler thought he was doing good. As the old saying goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Don’t believe Smith, then take Hitler’s own words for it: In a speech to the Reichstag given 1936 Hitler said, “I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work.” A person who believes that he is fulfilling God’s will is indeed a person who believes that his actions are ultimately good.

Note to the JDL - Will Smith is no Mel Gibson. The man was simply making a correct if mundane statement about the man who led his country to infamy. There was nothing anti-Semitic about the actor’s observation: I am sure that Smith would have said the same of Bin-Laden, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Ganges Kahn.

As far as I am concerned, the only off component to Smith’s comment is his assertion that Hitler just needed “reprogramming”. Unlike computer programs, people’s values and believes are not something that can be easily changed. Furthermore, there something very cult-like (Scientology anyone?) about the notion that people can and ought to be programmed in the first place. Perhaps Smith has acted in one too many sci-fi movies. Other than that, I have no qualms with the man.

Sullivan thinks the Stewart/Colbert moment will ebb:

This moment will pass, of course. One gets a sense that it may be peaking already. For satire to work well, it has to let off the collective steam of a nation. It needs a po-faced, Cheney-style establishment to mock. As the religion-drenched era of Republican hegemony wanes a little, the satirists begin to become part of the establishment themselves. Colbert’s presidential run may be a step too far. Perhaps, in retrospect, these last, ragged months of the Bush administration will come to seem the high-water mark of the Colbert-Stewart tide. But it’s been a joy while it’s lasted.

Al Franken's mock presidential run was a publishing stunt too far, if you recall, which you probably don't.