Let my people go: Ancient Egyptian prison scenePassover is a time to commemorate our freedom, but as New York Magazine points out, perhaps no one understands the meaning of the holiday more than the Jewish inmates at Otisville Prison. The Jewish prisoners, who number about 60, hold a yearly Seder at the medium-security facility in upstate New York. Unlike the ancient Israelites, who were enslaved by Pharaoh against their will, the inmates at Otisville are mostly white collar criminals. Still, prison chaplain Gary Friedman argues that the Seder allows the men to celebrate freedom, at least in the metaphorical sense. “The Haggadah has a line that reads ‘Tonight we are all free men,’ and for the duration of the Seder, they are.”

This week's New York magazine is the annual "Reasons to Love New York" issue. Last year, Jewcy mocked. This year, we were asked to contribute:

Last year, Michael Weiss, an editor at the hip online magazine Jewcy.com, thought that our list of “Reasons to Love New York” was, to use his word, “malnourished.” So he solicited his friends to come up with their own. Their reasons ranged from simple, straightforward appreciations—“Because New York has the highest per capita rate of beautiful women on the planet”—to decidedly backhanded ones—“Because even the most obnoxious, shallow, empty-headed dickwads around here are at least pretty intelligent.” We asked him to solicit more for 2007. Here’s what he and his readers/friends came up with.

80. “Because understanding the dullness and poverty of contemporary art is made easier once you know that it gestates in Chelsea. But mostly I love New York because there are few places that can make you suspicious of high proportions of 'cool' people, where everybody has an informed opinion about Proust or Gravity’s Rainbow, owns records by Brian Eno or John Cage, and endorses the politics of Noam Chomsky. Once such refinement is revealed as canonical, you’re in a great spot to do the work of locating the space where something truly radical might emerge.”
—Josh Strawn, lead singer of Blacklist

81. “Because of the Partisan Review crowd and how the Ansonia reminds me of Bellow’s Seize the Day. Because of the British expats in Brooklyn Heights who try to blend but still occasionally talk as if Zabar’s were located somewhere east of Suez. Because of the late senator Pat Moynihan and the fishbowl-size Bloody Marys at Sarabeth’s (oddly related in my mind). Because Morrissey just decides not to show up at the Garden one night and everyone’s cool with it. Because the subway series extends to presidential races, too. Because my older sister took the Preppy Killer’s high-school-yearbook photo and knew then he was no damned good.”
—Michael Weiss, your humble compiler

82. “Because when I’m on the subway trying to read a book about zombies, and a man gets on and starts talking really loudly about how he’s found Jesus and Jesus is what’s kept him from performing fellatio on the side of the BQE, and I say to him 'Excuse me, I’m getting toward the climax of this book, so do you think you can ‘reel it in’ a bit, like, you know, ‘take it down a notch’?' he nods and says, 'Why, certainly, I meant in no way to disturb your reading pleasure,' and continues his spiel in a delicate whisper.”
—Eli Valley, cartoonist

I was all set to blog about this unbelievably insipid WaPo profile of Dennis Kucinich's unbelievably attractive wife, when, wouldn't you know it, New York mag's Michael Idov beat me to it.

If you've got ten minutes to spare, trudge your way through the warrens of puff-piece cliche about a homely non-starter candidate and the gorgeous New Age-y soul that binds him to his Elle cover model wifey. Or, if you've got five seconds to spare, read this:

Enough of this, seriously. The only reason Kucinich isn’t a viable candidate — in the Perot-of-the-left sense — is the media’s across-the-board insistence on depicting him as a woodland creature. As a culture, we love the underdog but hate the hangdog — as soon as somebody doesn’t look like a winner, we gang up and cull him from the herd. Highlighting Kucinich’s wife’s looks is, oddly enough, just another way of humiliating him, and everyone from the far right to The Daily Show is equally culpable. Somehow the fact that this guy was mayor of Cleveland at 31 tends to be forgotten. Our mayor is five-feet-seven too, and no one other than Diane Sawyer has a problem with that. Then again, billions of dollars tend to add an invisible couple of inches wherever inches can be added.

In the bullying media's defense, Jerry Springer was mayor of Cleveland* once, and who cares at how old?

* No, he wasn't. Cincinnati. 

I finished reading an interview with Norman Mailer that’s in last week’s New York Magazine on the plane back to Nashville, and it’s fascinating and fairly bizarre. He thinks weird looking fish are cosmic mistakes. Still, part of me kind of wishes he would come out and say something seriously whack-o that would be really interesting and controversial, instead of the whole ‘technology is evil’ crap that, frankly, I got plenty of in high school. Anyway, here’s a little bit of Mailer’s thoughts:God: uses a Mac

Much of the world’s present-day cosmology is based on such works of revelation as the Old and New Testament, or the Koran, but for me, revelation is itself the question mark—not God’s word, but ours. I confess that I have no attachment to organized religion. I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks. I also see animals as His artworks. When I think of evolution, what stands out most is the drama that went on in God as an artist. Successes were also marred by failures. I think of all the errors He made in evolution as well as of the successes. In marine life, for example, some fish have hideous eyes—they protrude from the head in tubes many inches long. Think of all those animals of the past with their peculiar ugliness, their misshapen bodies, worm life, frog life, vermin life, that myriad of insects—so many unsuccessful experiments. These were also modes the Artist was trying—this great artist, this divine artist—to express something incredible, and it was not, for certain, an easy process. Sometimes a young artist has to make large errors before he or she can go further.

Full story

If you’re looking for another and perhaps more accessible look at who/what God is all about, try the awesome and incredibly comprehensive Walking with God curriculum available as a free download from the Ziegler Rabbinical School website. I’ve only spent significant time with the Modern Jewish Thought section, but it’s pretty amazing. Doesn't involve any fish, though. Bummer.

New York's Daily Intelligencer caused an avalanche of mail (well, at least one letter) featuring the polite menace of English residents on Greenwich Avenue, who, in an effort to protect small enterprise from the creeping enroachments of corporate America, have lobbied to rename the block "Little Britain." After having this novel special relationship solidifier mocked by DI, one roast-beef-and-warm-beer shopowner wrote in that such a honorary retitle is no different than Koreatown or Little India or what have you, to which came this reply:

Is Koreatown an official designation for which local businesses lobbied the city? Or is it merely a descriptive term for an area that has a lot of Korean businesses? We suspect the latter. (Anyone know officially, for any of those neighborhoods?) But here's the point: Even if Koreatown is an official designation, it's also clearly a descriptive term. Has anyone ever colloquially thought of that slice of the West Village as "Little Britain"?

No, but not even Martin Scorsese still thinks of Mulberry Street as Little Italy, unless bubble tea is the late-discovered delicacy of the mezzogiorno.

The real cringe-making travesty of "Little Britain" is that this is also the name of a painfully unfunny BBC sitcom which trafficks in the kind of catchphrase yuks well-parodied by Ricky ("Are you havin' a laugh?") Gervais on Extras. "Little England" is a much apter designation for square inch conquest of our Atlantic cousins, what with its connotations of the loss of empire and the dimnished grandeur of the scepter'd isle.

Then again, I happen to think it's a sign of progress that old metropole has gone from Lord Palmerston at the Travellers to Nick Denton at Balthazar. (Only trouble there is, that's in SoHo, not the West Village.)

Ms. Nussbaum's on a roll these days:

Over the course of the show, Tony’s sessions with Melfi have taken on many metaphors. They are like sessions with a hooker: She takes his money and plays a seductive role. (In one sequence, he dreams her office is a bordello.) They are like sessions with a priest: She hears confessions and guides him toward meaning. They are like sessions with the FBI: By talking to her, he’s betraying his family, putting his livelihood at risk, and violating omertà.

But most unsettlingly, they became a metaphor for our relationship, as viewers, with the show. Like Melfi, we began openhearted, proud of our empathy, and thrilled to have a character so rich to explore. Then came the counter-transference, the audience crushes, the endless articles on James Gandolfini, sex symbol. And slowly, as years passed, one could feel an insistent chill, even as Melfi herself receded into the background and message boards flooded with fans aping mobspeak. The violence was growing more intense: the assassination of Big Pussy, then Adriana, that brutal scene where Ralphie killed a pregnant stripper (a brilliantly sick sequence that caused a wave of viewer protest), the curbing of Coco. Dread, not excitement, began to feel like the show’s signature emotion.

Exhibit A: David Edelstein's Spider-Man 3 review:

Spider-man 3 is the latest quasi-religious comic-book superhero epic to demonstrate that with extreme power comes extreme spiritual torment, that there are grave psychological dangers when the mask (in the Pirandellian sense) supplants the face, and that the practice of throwing around insane amounts of cash while getting absurdly rich off “tent-pole” studio franchises can make even an ecstatic horror maven like Sam Raimi a little flabby.

Translation: "It's hard out there for a Christ figure." 

Exhibit B: Sam Anderson's The Yiddish Policemen's Union review:

If you should ever have the good fortune to match wits with me in a game of chess—and if so, let me congratulate you here in advance on what will surely be one of the more confidence-boosting episodes of your life—you’ll find that, as soon as we’ve exchanged our rooks and bishops and knights, and our queens have committed mutual regicide, and we’re left with a handful of pawns and kings scattered over the board like loose change, something curious will happen: My life force— the potent concoction of vim, vigor, piss, vinegar, and other vital fluids that I’ve been spritzing your way all game in an effort to distract you from my blunders—will drain out of me and soak into the carpet, and I’ll get sullen, and refuse to move, and then make long enthusiastic speeches in sign language in an attempt to knock over the board, and after a while, if the game keeps going, I’ll consciously slow my heart rate until I slip into a vegetative state.

Translation: "I just finished Nabokov's The Defense for the first time. It was great!" 

"Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy." Woody Allen more or less got it right decades ahead of it not feeling so wrong anymore. Though now it's not just the cognoscenti grabbing ankles:

The survey, released last year, showed that 38.2 percent of men between 20 and 39 and 32.6 percent of women ages 18 to 44 engage in heterosexual anal sex. Compare that with the CDC’s 1992 National Health and Social Life survey, which found that only 25.6 percent of men 18 to 59 and 20.4 percent of women 18 to 59 indulged in it.

But have you read Toni Bentley's The Surrender? Is the question. That I'm asking.

Apparently, anal sex is more frequent among older, married couples, which only reaffirms my take on hazards of early marriage. Oh, and now more men are getting rectum-rammed -- or "pegged" -- by their all-too-willing female penetrators and claiming the act wards off prostate cancer. So does Propecia and you might actually grow hair with that.

Courtesy of New York magazine, which won't be reporting next week that ingesting semen reduces the occurrence of ovarian cysts.

Where was this content when I guest-edited Wonkette and might have kept my first (paid) blogging job?

New York magazine's cover story this week -- a litany of reasons to love your favorite major metropolis -- struck me as pretty malnourished. I loved the concept, though, and asked my fellow Jewcers to weigh in with their own points of Gothamite pride. Here's what they came up with:

Joey: Because you're a self-loather... Here's why people from Los Angeles, the city of my birth and residence, love N.Y.: Because they've internalized the relentless contempt for L.A. that prevails in the rest of the country. The haters say we have no culture, no community, and that, as Billy Joel said, one square foot of New York pavement has more character than all of Los Angeles. So to self-hating Angelenos, heavy with false consciousness, New York is the anti-Los Angeles. You'll see them alleviate their shame and cultural inferiority complex by proselytizing on behalf of the N.Y. Times over the L.A. Times, and loudly proclaiming their love of New York at least once a week. Not me, though. ¡Arriba L.A.!

Izzy: Because on a Friday night at 1 AM, South Williamsburg is swimming in mink hats. Because every time you go into a restaurant south of 14th Street, they’re playing the Belle and Sebastian song that kept you sane throughout high school. (This is also a valid reason for hating New York.) Because you can learn basic Spanish in less than a month — sooner if you live near a bodega with a litter of adorable, language-barrier-defeating kittens in back. (El gato tiene seis gatitos! El gatito negro y blanco es muy piqueño!) Because even the most obnoxious, shallow, empty-headed dickwads around here are at least pretty intelligent.

Michael: Because New York has the highest per capita rate of beautiful women on the planet. Even if this winter weren't as pathetically mild as it is, no amount of layered clothing would distract from the happy truth that the gentler sex here is possessed with exquisite looks because they're intelligent looks. Forget your bleached, plasticene bimbos out West, your anorexic models stalking the runways of Milan and Paris. Our femmes are seductive where it matters most -- in the eyes and mouth. A city of high finance and glossy media had damned well better made a fine art out of communication, and this is how New York women get you to fall in love with them. The wry smile across the crowded subway car, the caustic remark about the fucked-up order at Starbucks. There's an old New Yorker cover featuring Miss America contestants, all states indistinguishable examples of glowing dentition and affect -- except New York. She's dark, scowling and all business. Pretty much. Wish they all could be.

Craig: Because of the professionalism. It was early in the summer before 8th grade that I started my first job as a Host in a Lake George restaurant upstate. It was a week later that a disgruntled waiter first asked me if I was an idiot for not knowing where the extra napkins were through nicotine-stained teeth. How my lack of clairvoyance into the whereabouts of a crate of wholesale restaurant supplies reflected on my intellect was beyond me. Throughout all the jobs I held throughout my high school and college years, I learned quickly that while you may’ve been with the company for over a decade, fourteen years with Toys “R” Us does not a “professional” make. It wasn’t until my arrival at the William Morris Agency a year ago that I learned the real difference between age and seniority. In New York, where people are rewarded for their talent and experience (and not necessarily their cashier prowess), even a small town bumpkin can have a voice – provided he’s got something worth saying.

Amy: Because of posers. New Yorkers have amazing style. There’s nothing better than catching someone just sitting on a bench or standing on a street corner in a great outfit in a great pose—someone whose picture you could snap and publish in an ad or a magazine, not just because their outfit is great, but because their stance seems to perfectly define their character. And best of all, it’s usually a character whose life you’d want to try for a day.Because of Nolita. The best place to find posers. And the best neighborhood to shop in if you want clothes no one else will have.