Who I'm Worshiping Now

I've oft been accused of fickle hero worship. Of course that's hogwash. Anyway, here's...

WHO I'M WORSHIPING NOW:
Can you name all seven?



































It's the Greeks, Blacks and Cats edition!


HINTS for people other than Buffy and Brian, who should be able to get a least five each without hints:

1. Proves great work is worth percolating.
2. Cat and Sal would otherwise be awkward.
3. Bm-sh-bm-sh-bm-sh-bm-chicky-chicky: TRENDS.
4. So you think you can...
5. Actually does have motorboat, huge ole house.
6. I forgive the AmEx ad.
7. Seen here worshiping me.


Check out the last edition of Who I'm Worshiping Now.

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Days of "\ ä \"

A Pronunciation Guide for Gentiles

Stephen Colbert's genetic lineage testing gave him a 75% shot of being Jewish. But the 25% must have won, because as he plugs his 1-888-OOPS-JEW Days of Awe atonement line, he says:

R\ä\SH H\ä\SH\ä\N\ä\
(RAH-SHAH-SHAH-NAH)

and

Y\ä\M K\i\P\u\R
(YAHM KIH-POOR)

As do many gentiles, even those with Jew friends like me or Jon Stewart. I understand. It's weird.

We American Jews make this more confusing by our own ambivalence. We vascillate between old-timey Ashkenaziphilic Yiddish and the ancient/modern Sephardiphilic Hebrew.

It is sometimes said (by Brian), that all rappers are either enunciaters or slurrers. If the two great Jewish languages were rappers, let's just say Hebrew would be the enunciater. Thus the more formal, upright Hebrew pronunciations:

R\o\SH H\ [a'] \SH\ [a'] \N\ [a'] \
[ROSH (rhymes with "roach," not "posh") HAH-SHAH NAH]

and

Y\o\M K\E\P\u\R
[YOME (rhymes with "tome," not "Tom") KEY-POOR]


But when I was a kid, everybody I knew used Americanized Yiddish names for the High Holy Days:

R\ə\SH\ə\ SH\ə\N\ə\
[RUSHA SHUNNA]

and

Y\u\M K\i\PR
[YUM KIPPER]

Got it? Is my poor use of diacritical marks helping?

Seems nowadays nobody but old American Jews use the Yiddishized "Yum Kipper," so I've adapted to the Hebraicized "Yome Key-poor." But the Hebrew sounds too formal for me for New Year's. I still say "Rusha Shunna."

Here's one everyone says right:

SHANAH TOVAH!

WOOHOO! 5768!

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Harvest Porn

You know you want it.



In each and every one of my first five seasons of gardening, I tried to grow tomatoes and--to greater and lesser extents--failed.

The first year I planted my pots of sorry-ass Sweet 100s on a balcony in Brooklyn with only morning sun. Needless to say, the maters sucked. The next year, I grew glorious heirloom beefsteaks in a sunny community garden plot--and found the two-pounders smashed on the ground by no-good kids just before they ripened.


In my real garden in Oakland, my first year's tomatoes succumbed to verticillium wilt. The beautiful vines turned yellow and then brown and I watched, hapless, helpless, hopeless. The next year, to avoid the dread disease, I planted in ginormo pots. But in my greed and haste, I put two plants to a pot, and by mid-summer they were starving.







Last year, one plant succeeded: a hybrid of acclaimed Italian sauce variety San Marzano called (SO appropriately) Super Marzano. But I didn't want just a bunch of damn paste tomatoes. I wanted big, pornographic heirlooms to slice into a caprese.

So perhaps you'll pardon a bit of horn tootage; I have journeyed from the edge of despair back to faith.

This year I grew EIGHT MILLION* tomatoes:





*Statement should not be taken literally.



Post Script

This has nothing to do with garden porn (well, not much anyway), but I didn't want to give these pictures their own post. I took them at a car show we somehow ended up at in SanJo. I shouldn't pretend not to know: we ended up there because DJ Big Man 808, of the Bay Area Record Rockers, Brian's crew, got us free passes. His brother is the king of car shows and judged the Car-Hopping Contest, a hydraulic olympics.




But I really want to talk to you about the skanks. These of course are the charming young ladies (the youngest looked fifteen) who pose in hoochie outfits with the cars. I did not photograph them posing, as many guys did, because I wanted to capture their humanity. They are seen here walking, standing around and all too human.







What bothers me so much about the skanks--well, many things--but what bothers me most about them is that cars and skanks have nothing to do with each other other than the fact that men want to ogle both. I find this infuriating.

Why should anyone get to have such absurd fantasies fulfilled? And at the cost of another person's dignity, no less. I would love to have a gardening video narrated by The Game wearing a wifebeater and pulling the red Bloods bandanna out of his back jeans pocket to wipe the sweat off his brow as he transplants seedlings--but I don't expect to have this fantasy provided. It just wouldn't be right.

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*!POP!* Culture Report

David Montero said he feared pop culture was on the decline. I scoffed. I told him there was lots of great new hip hop--although Brian, responsible for bringing said hip hop into our home, Eeyored it and agreed with Montero and Nas that hip hop is dead.

What about Game's "Olde English," the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful song ever? (No, ever. It's not up for debate.) And that Timbaland beat for "The Way I Are" is so awesome that yesterday I played it on my pretend iPod in my head for 35 minutes on the elliptical. (I ain't got no Visa/I ain't got no Red American Express. I burned like a whole muffin's worth of calories!) Even the unbearable ego of Kanye West has managed to turn out two hot new tracks, I told Montero with irrepressible optimism. He's been in Pakistan, so he wasn't up on all this.

He moped on, But what about rock and tv and...Well, said I, what about that Killers song that goes, I don't shine if you don't shine and Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert with their own shows? Maybe it's just the first time I've descended from my mountain lair of intellectual superiority to pay attention, but this moment in pop culture seems just great to me. Fandamntastic. Seriously, do you watch Best Week Ever?

Of course I was positioning myself rather dangerously.

The very next day there was this adorable call-and-response on Wild 94.9:

Baby where'd you get your body from
Tell me where'd you get your body from
Baby where'd you get your body from
Tell me where'd you get your body fromI got it from my mama
I got it from my mama
I got it from my mama

At first I couldn't imagine who was responsible for this schlock. I should have put it together immediately that only will.i.am.shameless could make such a horrible, horrible song with a super catchy beat and only Fergie could lower herself enough to sing, All of this stuff right here/I got all this from my mama. As if family shit isn't crazy enough, now we have to bring in this creepy sexiness inheritance idea.

It didn't get better when I heard the new Justin Timberlake/50 Cent song, which sounded like a good idea at first. This track had "matchmaker" written all over it. By which I mean not that it sounded like it should have been on the "Fiddler on the Roof" soundtrack, but that it sounded like a pairing strategically designed by a focus group for audience maximization rather than an organic creative collaboration. I can just imagine some Yenta at the studio thinking, Fitty needs to reach more middle American white kids and Justin needs better hip hop cred...
Oh well.

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Globalidatin

When my friends, and even my own kin, are turning up with people named Assaf and Mehr on their arms, from Tel Aviv and Lahore, respectively, or contemplating a move to Montreal to be with a canadien airplane mechanic, I have to wonder: has this globalization thing gone too far?

Brian's from Anaheim, and what with the OC/Inland Empire beef, I didn't know if our relationship could make it. When it's 85 degrees and he's wilting from "the heat," I still wonder, Is this going to work out? Are we just...too different?

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Thirtynothing

I'm turning thirty. What's that? Aren't I six months shy yet of twenty-nine? Oh sure.

But have you ever noticed how shocked and unprepared people are when they hit decades? Ten is fine. (Double-digits!) Twenty is yippee, I'm an adult. After that, decade birthdays are all too often taken as crushing reminders of failed hopes and mortality.

But isn't the real problem that these birthdays take people by surprise? ("Shit! I'm forty! I sort of vaguely thought I was still in my twenties.") This is very startling, and engenders feelings of panic. ("Jesus, I need to get my shit together.") So I'm getting ready for the big three-oh starting toDAY. 542 days should be enough for me to come to grips with everything I haven't accomplished, and maybe accomplish some of it on the side.

So here I sit, almost thirty and acutely aware of it. You may be almost thirty, too. Or possibly almost forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty. (If so, thanks for reading a kid's ramblings!) So I beseech you, start freaking out about it now. In fact, I'm going to start anticipating fifty now, too. It's like saving for retirement, easier if you start young.

I'd like to start anticipating eighty, but that's a bit of an optimistic presumption. Then again, if I start anticipating eighty now, surely I couldn't feel anything but lucky to make it there.

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You Can Do Sidebends or Situps

“You might be in danger of losing your butt.”

Whoa. I’ve been on a bit of a buff-bridesmaid fitness kick lately, but the possibility Brian now proposes had never crossed my mind.

Buttie and I go back a long way. She burst onto the scene at John W. North High School in ’94, provoking giggles from the guys in my French class when I was called to the blackboard. (Confused about what was so fucking funny, I frantically erased and rewrote my French verbs several times.) Later the same semester, Buttie was grabbed on the stairs en route to the same French class. The perpetrator was a cute senior, a football player and—it merits mention, because butts are racial—black. I was a white freshman aspiring to coolness and, though taken aback, supposed it was a compliment.

Buttie snagged me a man in college. Oh sure, Brian’s probably stuck it out the greater part of a decade thanks to my good character, but it was Buttie that caught his eye in the dining hall of Berkeley’s Clark Kerr dormitory.

So it's worrisome to hear him now, saying, "I just don't want you to be on the J. Lo track." Apparently J. Lo has lost her butt. I hadn't noticed. But then, maybe she was ready to pass that butt torch to Jessica Biel. I can sympathize.

It was when I moved to New York after college that Buttie really started to seem like a liability. I could barely turn a corner in Brooklyn without hearing, "DAMN, where'd you get all that ass from?" One day I was harassed ten times just walking the few blocks to and from my apartment and the Hoyt/Schermerhorn A stop.

Not only did I become terribly self-conscious, I turned into a racial profiler. (I'm not going to dance around the truth here: almost all the guys who harassed me were black. No less an authority than Mixalot himself notes that "the average black man" will surely take an interest if you "pack much back".) I realized how bad the situation had become when I registered a youngish black guy approaching from a side street, and then felt great relief when I noticed he was carrying a coffee--placing him solidly outside the hindquarter harasser demographic.

These days, it's not so bad. I hear it now and then in the Bay. When we were at Hip Hop in the Park last month, I was too busy admiring a ten foot cardoon plant to notice a rapper freestyling for a camera nearby. Brian had to break it to me that Buttie had entered the guy's flow, calling up all the old ambivalences.

I don't think Brian has any reason to worry. Buttie is tenacious, and I'm really not the athletic type. Anyway, I suspect I could be a Nicole Richie stick figure and still have a badonkadonk. I checked in the mirror this morning and she there she was, undiminished.

Even if I could, would I banish Buttie?

Nah. She is me.

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