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Dance Dance Revolution!

Happy Jew Year, you luscious hunks of readership you. On the first mewling day of this baby-fresh year I went to visit Sime and Lovely Wife Julia. Armed with a bottle of bubbly and a screener of a Very Important Movie which we never got to because of the yakking and the noshing and the sipping and the kvelling, I plopped onto their comfy leather couch and launched into a tale of Just Where I've Been for the last week.

I told you before about Esalen, the shiny butterfly paradise by the sea – so replete with Human Potential. The week of Xmas, I slid up the 101 and back into the arms of my Big Sur hideaway for seven days of organic food, crazy hot springs action, sleepless nights whispering with my NYC Shiksa Queen roomie "P", and several hours a day of dancing my ass off. Not just any dancing - ecstatic dancing. Dance as a spiritual practice. That's right, I said it: when I get jiggy, I'm not just being Very Hot and Jewish, I'm also being Deep. I'm Tapping In. I'm Communing. I'm doing loads of stuff just begging to be capitalized and hyperlinked.

Man, dancing is the shit. Not, like, choreographed dancing. That kind of dancing is, well, hard. It makes you feel stupid if you can't get it right, as Sime will tearfully confess if you ever get him started on his adolescent "performance workshop" phase. It might make you look stupid even if you do get it right. Britney Spears spent a lot of time with choreography, and we all know what that led to.

My kind of dancing is more about gettin' loose to the beat at hand. Sweating it up with like-minded revelers who just want to reach that feeling of not being in their heads for ten or fifteen minutes of the long and harried day. Grooving like I'm alone in my living room, except with a bunch of other people also jigging their way through their own private Idaho. Like the Classic Rock Singalong, 'cept you don't even need a lyric sheet.

Maybe you want me to say I've found the cure - the cure to stress, and feeling separate from one's peeps, and loneliness, and sorrow. Maybe you want me to say the cure is dancing. But I am not here to lie to the Very Hot. Therefore I will tell you the truth. Here is the truth:

I have found the cure. The cure is dancing.

This is especially fortuitous as Sime and I have been endeavoring to come up with a good catchphrase for the new year. A curmudgeonly writer friend of mine, a Spicy Hebe With Dreadlocks, fired me an email declaring he was "all about the Hate in '08." His first target: Diablo Cody. You might be next.

This alarmed me. Because it is easy to slip into the hatin'. Not just when a chick with the hipster-ironic version of your backstory nails a massive hole-in-one with her first screenplay (worry not, dear reader; I live by the golden rule: don't hate the player, hate the game. And, since I don't hate the game, we're right back where we left off in my admittedly difficult to follow train of thought). It's easy to reach for a big bloody bag of O, Negative in the absence of something to hold onto. Hence the need for millions of Starbucks, one on every corner. The cynical bastards of the world require a black, bitter cup o' overpriced joe to nurse along with their vehement disdain.

The Very Hot Jews wish for you to avoid the Hate in '08. We love you too much to see you flail down the shame spiral of mysanthropy. So we're sharing our new slogan with you - Simon declared it, after I told him of my mystical Esalen adventure (which, by the way, also involves being busted by Institute authorities in the middle of the night for doing something I cannot tell you about on this blog because, well, I'd rather you use your imagination but I will say:

1. It wasn't illegal but was definitely frowned upon in that location and context, and


2. The other busted individual was another dancer and even Jewish, which I know would matter to some of you if you knew what we were doing which you don't so go wash your brain out with soap).

This isn't going to be much of a reveal, considering all of the above. But the VHJ would like to gently but firmly suggest you Dance It Out In '08.

Seriously, my brothers. Obviously, my sisters. We Jewy types can talk a thing to death. Poor horses - maybe if they were kosher our people wouldn't spend so much time beating dead ones. If you're like me, on any given day you can Freud yourself into a self-reflective stupor before your first hit of latte kicks in. You can Jung yourself silly. You can dive into your worried mind and turn every damn stone, then freak out over each tiny pillbug of insecurity revealed beneath.

A certain amount of this is a good idea. The unexamined life, etc. Also, if you didn't worry at all, something bad would surely happen that could easily have been prevented if you'd just let your neurotic imagination run wild for a few minutes. Sure, Joan Didion would call this magical thinking. But as your mom will gladly remind you, the worrying brain acts as a giant backwards magnet that repels disaster.

Plus, some of us – like for instance both halves of this here blogging duo – need to camp out in our hot little minds so that we can produce scripts and ad copy and other written things that pay our mortgages. Our calling requires extended rappelling into the scary, solemn, Stygian reaches of the grayest of gray matter. Not to get all neo-Cartesian on your ass, but, as Simon likes to say: We think, therefore we are ... paid. (Or, if you like, Cogito ergo fork over my sum.)

So, yeah, I'm not entirely disparaging the notion of living like a hermit in one's own head, as Death Cab For Cutie so alterna-rockishly put it.

But. You have a body. You're in it right now, like it or not. You may regard it as a brainstand or head pedestal, but it still requires loving care. You don't get to dump it for a sleeker model. You don't get to leave it and go flying around visiting Jennifer Love Hewitt, at least until you get hit by a stray bullet and die without getting to tell your family something real important. It is sitting there right now, a dumb lump of muscle and bone and possibly THC-saturated adipose tissue, listening to all your thoughts. I'm sorry, but it is. That's why your back does that ow-y thing when you're stressed. That's why your shoulders have meandered up into your ears and why when you can't pay your bills you weirdly discover you also can't take a shit ... look, enough examples, I don't really want to get quite this into your business.

I'm just saying. Your body is a wonderland and you're totally missing the ride.

Hey, at least it isn't a picture of John Mayer.

2008 is unlikely to be quiet and contemplative. There's an election coming up - you can tell by the look of horror on Simon's face. Gas prices are still zooming (and you know by now I mean that less in terms of shelling out at the pump and more in terms of all the kids coming back from the war minus limbs. Or not coming back at all). Most of L.A. is gonna be out of work soon if this strike doesn't resolve. Apple will come out with something new and shiny you need to have. Beyoncé will release something loud and cursedly catchy. JLo will have her babies and the ruckus caused will only be superceded by Jamie Lynn having her baby. (BTW, WTF with THAT story? I leave civilization for a week, and when I come back not only is Benazir Bhutto dead, but Britney's sister is preggers by some old, disgusting fucktard who is inexplicably being protected from public stoning?!)

Anything could happen at any time, people. And everyone I know has this uneasy sense that in '08, if it can happen, it will. Get flood insurance. Get fire insurance. Get meteor insurance.

Or hey, maybe I'm projecting. Maybe 2008 is merely unlikely to be cool, calm and collected for moi. My industry is in a supercalifragalistic clusterfuck; I'm elbow-deep in a bunch of time-consuming projects; I'm suddenly, out of nowhere, developing crushes on living and eligible humans in my close vicinity (as opposed to comfortably rolling my eyes at every dude I meet, because when you're as busy as I am it's easier to apply your idle crush-ology to that pillhead doctor with a limp on that show where he's all mean and sexy all the time); the gaping maw of the VHJ blog will never cease demanding wordy sacrifice; my goddaughter is orbiting ever closer to adolescence, a situation which requires constant vigilance; I don't want to fall behind on the Y:The Last Man comics; and if I don't stay on top of things with Mojo, he'll eat something that makes him fart like a hurricane.

So, shit's gonna happen. And when it does (and when it doesn't, even) I'm gonna Dance It Out. So is Sime, and if you're lucky you'll get to watch, because his "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" dance is legend. Most of my friends will be Dancing It Out too. Are you one of my friends? If you are, do this for me: pull up your iTunes or go to your radio or whatevs, and play that funky music, Person Of Whatever Race(s).

It doesn't matter if you're tired, if you threw out your back chasing your diabetic cat around with a syringe in your hand, or if you're in a wheelchair and can only dance with your arms and your eyebrows. It doesn't matter if your only prior experience on the dance floor was swaying imperceptibly between chugs of Heineken.

This isn't a competition. It will not be televised. No British suckwads will wittily deride your efforts. It's for you. It's a way to be down with reality for a hot second. Reality feels like loud sounds all around you that you cannot control so you might as well enjoy. It feels like that noise's percussion vibrating your soles. It's other people's smells and their secret vulnerability that peeks out to say yo when you move with them. It's the stick of sweat on your nape, the ache in your knees, the jagged impulse that wants your pelvis to swing thataway, ASAP. It's a world populated by lots of other ordinary miracles like you, moving through their days in the best way they can, trying at worst not to cause bodily injury and at best to feel pretty damn great. You don't want to dance, you say, because your dance is lame? Let me rephrase the question: You think you're the only one of us trying to be all perfect? I sympathize, but you oughtta know - perfection is sooooo '07. In '08, we dance.

You will likely feel self-conscious, at first. Even if you've knocked back a coupla gin fizzes or called in your ancestors with a wand of white sage or whatever you use to launch the rocket of disinhibition. You'll be hyper-aware of your "stock" moves. Nighmarish recollections of teenage embarrassment might caper before you like red-eyed demons. But gradually, the part of you that really wants and needs to move will show up and go all Saturday Night Fever and your body will take it from there. And the euphoria that rushes out of the center of your being? That's the real hotness, as opposed to the coiffed, airbrushed and artfully scented substitute the world tries to sell us 24/7.

Dancing is the human equivalent of pressing Ice Crush on your blender. Juices get stirred. Everything blends and gets smooth. And, yes, you become more and more delicious.

That's your mandate. Go forth and Dance It Out. You're not allowed to be cynical of it till you try it twice. When have we led you wrong? The VHJs exist to aid you. We're bringing you gold here.

Happy 2008. Batten down the hatches. See ya on the dance floor.

Sincerely Yours, The Very Hot Jews.
(by Sera, flying solo while Simon jetsets through... Michigan, I think.)

This is not part two of the post on Dreaming About Kissing Hot Writer Man. That will come soon, i.e. when I can muster the level of concentration necessary to write it.

This is, instead, a sweet little post about sincerity. No, really. Stop laughing.

I was a teenager in the 90s. The age of grunge, and the Scream movies, and just generally a time in which deep emotion was expressed through eye-rolling, sarcasm, and the layering of flannel shirts. Occasional whining was also allowed (think Winona Ryder in... every movie she ever made). If you were actually yelling about something, you were advised to look down, whereupon you'd doubtless discover you were holding an electric guitar and the yelling was singing and the guy standing next to you was Stone Gossard.

I get the sense irony hasn't exactly gone out of style. So allow me to be way, way uncool and step over that steaming, java-scented pile of cynicism and over to the frolicing happy gnomeland of sincerity.

Not that I haven't been known to affect a fairly convincing Sylvia Plath glower when the weather turns crisp. There's something about fall that's innately depressing. I chalk it up to the influx of cold, the sooner sunset, and the traditionally Holocaust-heavy Yom Kippur sermon (with special bonus discussion of how the current Israel situation is shittastic) that you have to sit through when you're really, really hungry. Summer's all bye-bye, and with it that lazy feeling of entitlement: of course you're doing something - you're enjoying the weather!

I live across the street from a non-descript apartment building that seems to house a large number of Orthodox Jews. I suspect it's some kind of co-op situation, with a synagogue/preschool on the ground floor, lots of yarkulka'd men and women in long, unflattering skirts, and ancient big wheels in the yard. If I could read Hebrew without the vowels, I'd be able to tell you what the sign over the door says, but alas. Let us live in the mystery.

The thing about the Jews across the street is that they sing their asses off at the slightest provocation. Friday night, Saturday night, mysteriously important non-Sabbath-related nights, holidays, and potentially also just for the fuck of it. Classic, nasal Chazan type singing. LOUD. Till, like, midnight. And lately there's also been some bangin' and some poundin', and I walked Mojo by their place the other day to discover a nice plywood Sukkah in their yard. Ah, yes, of course, Sukkot. Forgot about that one. The redheaded stepchild of Rosh Ha'Shanah and Yom Kippur.

Sukkot makes me happy. Why? First, because it carries itself with charmingly little gravitas. Build a tent, shake a palm frond, sniff a thingy that's not quite a lemon. In Day School, Sukkot always called for lots and lots of crafting. Long construction paper chains fashioned to hang from the rafters. Plus drawings involving glitter. It wasn't about a New Year in which you were kindly advised to do way fucking better than last; it wasn't a Day of Atonement marked by endless crazy praying of the beat-your-chest variety and, in my family's case, Mom fainting from low blood sugar. It was about making fun art.

So, the sight of that Sukkah stoked me. Shook me out of my traditional High Holiday snit. Gently coaxed me to notice the general yumminess of Santa Monica in fall. October (sorry, rest of the world with your shitty weather) is Indian Summer here in Los Angeles. Balmy in the sunlight, curl-up-chilly at night. I think of it as flavored-Starbucks-latte-appropriate weather. Perfect for walking. And so last Sunday I took the opportunity to do my own hemi-quasi-Jewish ritual.

In fairness, it's only really Jew-adjacent. Well, call it Jew-inspired. It's this simple yearly thing I do right after the High Holidays, aka those Holy-ass Days I don't particularly enjoy. What I do is get through the HH one way or another. This year, I skipped services and instead helped throw a disco. I recommend that for all of you who, like me, are made jaw-achingly depressed by the HH. Yeah, I know, apples and honey, fresh start, blah blah. Some of us find the HH as viable as the Hannukah/Christmas season when it comes to lying on the couch feeling all Jean Paul Sartre about the world. So - I wait till they're over, and then I do all the contemplation. I'm a good little contrarian. Here's what I did:

Got up, tossed my laptop in a bag, leashed Mojo, and took an early morning walk to the Mom and Pop cafe five blocks up. I passed the plywood Sukkah, and actually gave it a happy little wave. And then I counted my blessings.

Yep, that's the yearly post-HH ritual:

1.take walk;

2. count blessings

(3. now with special bonus French Bulldog!)

Mojo, enjoying quality time with his bone. We know: he's hot.

I know, counting blessings sounds so lame-alicious. I'm with you. I'm kind of embarrassed to even write it, because I know all you bitches are sitting there with your ironic glasses and your ironic haircut and your vector-line-drawing tattoos, judging me for my cringe-worthy Chicken Soup for the Soulness.

I can only deal with it myself by keeping things really simple and not at all Oprah-y. So: no gushing. Just: I am stoked to live in Santa Monica. I am stoked to have such a great writer job. I am stoked to not have a traumatic brain injury that knocks 40 IQ points out of my head, thereby ending my great writer job which would cause me to lose my apartment in Santa Monica. That sort of thing.

Mojo and I took the patio couch. The weather was fantastically room-temperature. The coffee was just bitter enough. (Yes, fine, I'll go ahead and quip it, "like my men." Happy?) The horror script I was working on hummed right along with pep and vim and an appropriate number of eviscerated corpses. The other patrons were using their indoor voices, which I appreciate. The fountain in the center of the patio tinkled soothingly, as if to say, "I am rocking the ace feng shui, my brothers." Mojo curled up next to me and fell asleep, and I thought: I want for nothing. I'm totally blessed up to my eyeballs. Whatever comes my way from here on out is pure, sweet icing. The irony coiled deep in my bones, in my darkest proteins, somehow deactivated, and I just sat there, sincerely liking my life in the way you like someone in grade school that inspires you to work on their valentine for two whole weeks. Wow, I thought, I'm feeling so happy. I'm so... sincere. This is awesome. Also, I'm really glad no one's here to see it.

Later that day, things kind of devolved, but that's to be expected. (What can I say. I'm not just Jewish, I'm Polish Jewish. I'm never surprised by entropy.) Sometimes you get a perfect moment, and when you do, I think you should at least blog about it. Especially when your secret motive is to subtly start a revolution of sincerity that's not syrupy or fake. More like wabi sabi sincerity. Caffeinated sincerity that occasionally falls off the wagon and smokes half a pack of cigarettes in four hours. You know: no-bullshit sincerity.

Up with no-bullshit sincerity, people! Try it for a week. Report back.

How I Crashed My Immune System

by Simon

I know quite a few people who live in perpetual cringing terror of catching some nasty bug. They don't shake hands (some give a non sequitur "namaste" gesture instead, while others prefer the Clintonian elbow grab); they have a dispenser of antibacterial liquid rigged into their sleeves like James West's derringer; and they swallow a daily bolus of mysterious, system-enhancing supplements.

I'm not like that; I maintain my health with the time-tested virtues of a positive attitude, gallons of coffee and at least seven hours a day resting on my divan watching premium cable. But sometimes I slip. I'm now enjoying day six of a delightful cold, and I blame it on too much of a good thing.

That good thing? Trayf, my friend.

Cards on the table time: Julia and I don't just celebrate our birthdays. We celebrate the entire birth month (and I've lately been lobbying for the birth quarter, but I don't think I have the votes). My birth month, a veritable orgy of comestibles and libations, came to its 1812 Overture of a climax with a meal at Cobras and Matadors, a tapas joint with a menu that can induce fainting spells in your average gourmand.

Faithful readers of this blog know of my fondness for pig meat. I have written passionate verse in its honor, and thoughts of its golden hue, crisp yet pliant texture and explosive bursts of fatty, salty flavor on the tastebuds forever distract me from whatever task is allegedly at hand. Still, I was half-joking when I asked Julia if she thought it would be possible to have a meal consisting entirely of The Other White Meat.

Some joke. Here's what we had, I kid you not:

• Bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with Cabrales and almonds, in a honey-port reduction


• Bacon-wrapped prawns on toast points in a garlic cream sauce


• Serrano ham and Manchego sandwiches on Catalan bread


• Albondigas (veal-pork meatballs)


• Breaded pork loin stuffed with bacon and ham

In addition to this pork-ucopia, we inhaled socca cakes in honey, beet salad with goat cheese and an onion conserve, a bottle of great wine and several glasses of killer sherry. It was an epic culinary debauch, and I delighted in watching Julia's customary gesture of food-induced ecstasy — her eyes rolling back in her head — almost as much as I enjoyed stuffing my face.

Then we got home and rolled into bed. Then I rolled out of bed. Then I tried to sleep on the couch. My head felt funny. My stomach rumbled ominously. I was visited by the ghosts of St. Augustine, Edith Piaf and Buddy Hackett, none of whom offered much encouragement. No sleep was forthcoming.

Julia is at pains to point out that among the first symptoms I experience with a cold is denial. I try to pawn it off on allergies or some damn thing, because admitting that I'm about to plunge into a vision quest of sniffling, coughing, throat-clearing and general whiny misery is too much to contemplate.

In any case, my immune system crashed like the L.A. power grid during a heatwave. Also, there was a heatwave.

Sera suggested the possibility that God was punishing me for my excessive flouting of the Chosen Peeps' dietary laws. I reject this hypothesis for several reasons. Among them:

1. Julia didn't get sick, and she ate all the same stuff.
2. Why hit me now, when I've been consuming the cloven-hoofed for ages?
3. I don't believe in God.

The question is this: Would I go back and substitute a healthier meal in order to dodge this bout of stuffed-up bullshit? I would not.

And that's what makes me the trayf-lovingest Jew in all of Christendom.

In fact... I could totally go for some bacon right now.

Just Think About It—No Rosh

There will be dancing, courtesy of incredibly hot DJs from both coasts.

There will be drinking, with cocktails augmented by thematically appropriate sponsor Pom Wonderful.

There will be schmoozing, courtesy of Jews and their Chai-curious friends.

There will be incredible nosh from new catering phenom Provision L.A.

It will go down on Tues., Sept. 18 at The Echoplex, in the basement of the fabulous Echo in Echo Park.

It is Dip't in Honey, a dazzling night of Rosh Hashanah debauchery and introspection co-sponsored by Reboot, Very Hot Jews, Pom and local public-radio giant KCRW.

Another thing the event will feature: New Year's resolutions from you. So submit 'em, baby! Let's hear what you've got. How are you going to expand your horizons, deepen your soul, soften your heart and harden your resolve? These Jews wanna know.

So mark your calendars, put Yellow Cab on speed dial and burnish your dancing shoes, and we'll see you on the 18th.

Ahoy Vey! Or, Will "Death to America" Be the "Yo Ho Ho" of the Future?

Last week, the Very Hot Jews celebrated the birthday of our dear friend Jim "Dinda" Dinda. His yogadelic babe lady-friend, Mollie, consulted Julia, Wife Of Simon, about how best to party up this auspicious event.

Dinda and Mollie, Wondercouple, enter le limo

If you know Julia, you will be unsurpised to hear her one-word suggestion: "PIRATES!"

And that, dear reader, is how the VHJs found themselves in the back of a cheesetastic, neon-veined, star-bespangled stretch limo, crawling through rush-hour clusterfuck on the I-5 toward that pirate mecca, Buena Park.

Remember when limos were a symbol of wealth? We remember thinking of them that way — when we were wee tiny Jewfants. But then everyone rented one for the prom and realization dawned: if any kid pulling 10 hours a week salting fries at McDick's can scrounge the dough to rent one, how rad are limos, really?

Mollie swears she asked for a "businessman" limo. To which the dispatcher said, "Sorry, they all have neon. But you can turn the neon off if you want."

Well, ultimately, we didn't want. Our desire to seem sophisticated or even (can you imagine?) businessman-like was squelched Godzilla-style by our need to bling out like video hoes on MTV2.

We wanted each pink 'n' green ocean wave detailing the side of our pimp ride to blaze proudly in strip-club-billboard-reminiscent glory. We fiddled with the radio — NPR? Who, us? Perish the thought! — until we found something with a bassline powerful enough to destroy an entire generation's ability to hear low tones.

Then we settled back into the plush pleather seats and popped open a bottle of Dom (which Sera used to wash down about 75 traffic-headache advils, because that's just how she rolls) and we watched the light show in the plastic ceiling, feeling a little more like a rapper on the way to the Vibe Awards than we ever had before.

Hebe Goddess Julia pours the bubbly while limo rattles alarmingly over freeway.

Every two minutes or so, we turned to one another with a look that said, "We are SO blogging about this."

And when Sera's phone rang and it was her agent calling to say she had a meeting with some British people about a thing, the limo erupted with cries of "She's on the phone to her agent! In a limo!"

We're that lame.

But hold on. Even our towering achievements in geekery cannot hold a candle to the epicenter of corn that we were even then approaching. Because B-Park's PIRATE DINNER ADVENTURE? It's the Buckingham Palace, the Kremlin, the Enterprise Bridge of Lame.

Have you been to Medieval Times? We haven't. But we imagine the PIRATE DINNER ADVENTURE falls squarely into the same category of faux historical Disneytainment replete with athletic yet not quite hot enough actors slumming it till they can score a brownie commercial and move the fuck out of Buena Park.

Here's what you need to know about the PIRATE DINNER ADVENTURE:

1. Pirates? Check.
2. Dinner? Technically.
3. Adventure? Not so much.

Your section, where you are served wilty lettuce salad and chicken and steak stew or chicken and shrimp in weird sauce, has a color. That color corresponds to the vest and pantaloons of one of the slick-chested actor-pirates. We were purple, and our pirate, sorry, was The Black Pirate. We don't feel too bad about reducing him to a purely racial descriptor, actually, because he didn't feel too bad about putting on some weird Jamaican-African mishmash accent and randomly singing "Daaaay-o!" (as in "The Banana Boat Song") for no reason while swinging from ropes attached to the "Pirate Ship."

Purple The Black Pirate was the smallest yet most handsomely built of the five color-coded pirates, and also the one with the superior skills. He was a real gymnast, leaping and tumbling and splatting gracefully. Hot. Very hot.

Jules LOVES pirates.

They served beer, and we lost the narrative thread, but we're fairly kind of certain there were wenches, and a kidnapped princess, and mean pirates as well as noble pirates. There was definitely a trampoline. There was some "American Idol"-style belting that showed a fearless indifference to pitch. A flintlock stage pistol was ocassionally discharged, as if to say, "SLUMBER NOT, YE COORS-BESOTTED TOURIST SCALAWAGS."

At one point, Blonde Frizzy Wench dropped her hoopskirt, revealing a raggedy Tinkerbell ice-dancer leotard, and proceeded to climb up a long swath of silk suspended from the ceiling. She did limber gymnast things while twirled up in the silk far above the drunken heads of the audience, prompting our pal Chris and his wife to exclaim, "Cirq du So Gay!"

There were moments that made it all worthwhile.

Yeah, that's kind of un-PC too. But we freely admit that we're totally that kind of gay on a Liberace-naked-on-a-bearskin-before-a-roaring-fire-flanked-by-supple-young-men-in-thongs-painted-on-velvet scale, so we're allowed to call things gay.

All Sera's pix came out this badly, but you get the gist.

Then Purple The Black Pirate did a triple aerial somersault off the trampoline ... and the other pirates caught him in a big canvas rucksack.

Simon leaned over to Sera and, in his best scared-little-boy voice, asked, "Mommy, why are the pirates putting the African-American man in a bag?"

It wasn't until five minutes later — when "dessert" (apple pie? Who can say for sure, but it sure was sugary, and lumpy, and some among us had multiple servings) was served and we beheld the pirates engaging in some serious stage combat consisting of knocking Purple to the floor and then kicking and beating him in eerily Rodney King-esque fashion — that the bigger picture became clear to us.

There is something very wrong with our culture.

Duh, you say? Well, Mr./Ms. High And Over It, we have one question for you. Seen any pirate movies lately?

Yes, we too would pay good money to watch Johnny Depp perform The Azusa Phone Book Letters A Thru G. We're not disparaging you for that. We're asking you to examine your thoughtless glamorization of pirates. Follow us here for a minute.

What we fear and what we fantasize about occupy adjoining neighborhoods in that kooky metropolis known as the Unconscious (not "subconscious," people — the psyche is not a high-rise). The things that fully creep us out invariably become domesticated. Witness the Frankenstein monster, a lurid and grisly being whose reanimated lumberings first scared the high holy crap out of moviegoers in 1931. By the late '40s the poor schmuck was a foil for Abbott and Costello.

A similar fate has befallen practically every squirm-inducing boogeyman, from vampires and zombies to muggers and serial killers. All drawn into the housebroken fold of genre spoofs and T-shirt slogans. All shiny rubber balls on the pop-cultural blacktop.

Pirates were the bad guys of the high seas. Basically, they sailed around looking for ships to hijack and rob — and after said plunderings, they'd either kill or impress into extremely non-Disney-like indentured servitude every hapless shmoe on board. They set fire to people's property and went a-rapin' and were, in general, horrible, nasty, sadistic sociopaths. You know how "cutthroat" is tossed around in those family-safe Pirate-ride flicks? Well, they actually cut people's throats.

In fact, they were what you might call terrorists.

Yet now everybody loves pirates. Really. Like, more everybody than the everybody that once loved Raymond. Folks line up around the damn block for those increasingly unwatchable Gore Verbinski blockbusters. Every little kid has "Dead Men Tell No Tales" underoos and a plastic cutlass with matching scabbard and Anaheim-style eye patch. Hot babes on MySpace advertise their upcoming pirate-wench appearances at comic book conventions. And people like us think nothing of slogging through rush-hour traffic for a pirate party in the O.C.

Just as others happily trek to nearby Medieval Times, where jousting and mead and pageantry erase the brutally violent, religiously extreme, disease-ridden nightmare of medieval history.

Which begs the question: what will the popcult funhouse of the future offer with its rubber chicken and bottomless pitchers? Ladies and Germs, we tremblingly present the Buena Park TERRORIST DINNER ADVENTURE! All singing! All dancing! Only when the bombs explode, no one will die. And there will be a trampoline. Oh yes, there will be a trampoline. And the grand finale involves a hydraulic stage full of syscrapers and a couple of airplane props. Sure, NOW it's too soon. But wait a couple of centuries. Or decades.

That's totally fine with us, just let's call it what it is. And also:

Just know that the time will come when the cool costume to dress up in and do wicked fight choreography will have jackboots. Five hundred years from now, if the Earth hasn't been all blown up and shit, party people might well pilot their space scooters to the Buena Park NAZI DINNER ADVENTURE. Sing it with me now! Yo, ho, yo, ho, death to all the Jews...

We're just saying.

It's kind of all the same: Celebrating brutal lawlessless as quaint and cute. Serving watery beer. Selling souvenir weapons. Beating up the one Black guy in the cast.

Look, even the most casual reader of this blog knows we love, live and breathe pop culture. But looked at from certain angles, it's ... oh, what's the word?

Totally whack. As in take-serious-shit-and-trivialize-it-whack. Take terrorists, make dinner theater. Take children, make them giant sexualized stars, then revel in their subsequent inevitable downward spiral into not-cuteness, drug addiction, the marrying of squicky backup dancers, calculated public underwearlessness, and other deathly serious what-have-yous that we blithely mock, never once considering that at the core of the chewy tabloid nugget lives a massively fucked-up young human whose pain gives us pleasure.

Damn, that was a long sentence.

Also: gross. Just, gross, people, gross like the sweaty, anachronistic tattoos on the naked backs of the color-coded pirates. Gross like Mojo's rubber chew toys after he coats them with French bulldog saliva. Gross to the tune of "Springtime for Hitler." Gross like taking the smoking, bone-strewn ruin that is human history and turning it into a fun theme park.

We'll resume our mountaintop Jeremiad about the sickness of our national conversation in just a moment ... right after we check in with defamer, Perez Hilton and Dlisted, and pop onto the phone for a quick reservation. We want to check out that Medieval Times. We hear the slave boys do a great little uptempo number, right after the one Black knight in the cast gets thrown off his horse.

Hurry!

Go here for a larger image

Not to stress you out, but the time is now to make your rezzie for our second-seder extravaganza on Tuesday, April 3.

This is your big chance to actually have fun at a seder. Eat gourmet food (it's gonna be spectacular, and worth the cash), drink wine until you see animated Chagall images unfurling on the walls, experience the deeply entertaining stylings of those pictured on the flyer (most of whom can be found on MySpace, so you can make new friends before you even arrive), and soak up our ridiculous hotness.

If you are in any way shape or form living in, visiting or within a day's drive of Los Angeles, you really should make the pilgrimage. We believe this event is part of a fascinating, wonderful, humanistic, open-minded, philosophically bright, funny, sexy and soulful transformation of Jewishness. It's the next chapter.

We ache to see you there.

P.S. You can see a brand-new video from event participants and acclaimed self-help authors Ronna and Bev here. Words fail us.

What Do We Have To Be Happy About?
(by Sera)


First things first:

Mojo, as I mentioned before, had his munitions factory surgically removed last week. The vet sent him home in what I've been calling The Conehead but which is technically referred to as an Elizabethan Collar. When Mojo wears it, he becomes a bat with fucked-up sonar. He runs into things, he drags the bottom edge on the ground and then scares himself with the noise, he looks at me with a mix of self-pity and confusion: Why hast thou forsaken me?

So we decided to take it off him with the stern warning not to lick his nuts (or what's left of 'em) and lo and behold, he understands English including the vernacular for testes, and he's totally left himself alone.

Are you already bored of me talking about my puppy? If so, sorry. Sorry your heart is so ice-cold that not even the sight of this perfect manifestation of cute can thaw you.

In case you're wondering, the shaved bit on his arm is from the IV. And the look on his face? Well, that's 'cause we done took his jewels.

I talked to the vet the day after the surgery. He's a family friend, an earnest, excitable Polish immigrant running a pet hospital in San Bernardino. Judging by the waiting room the day I was there, San Berdoo boasts a highly inappropriate per capita share of the nation's pit bulls. They're cute when they're puppies, those li'l killing machines. It's all fun and games 'til somebody eats a toddler. My point is, Dr. Z's not only a nice Polish man, he also takes his life into his hands every day to serve the populace of SoCal and its cornucopia of hellhounds.

Anyway, so I call him the day after the surgery, and I go, "Mojo's just lying there. Is that normal?"

And Dr. Z goes, "He just had his testicles removed. What does he have to be happy about?"

This struck me as an incredibly Polish thing to say. In fact, "What does he have to be happy about?" was pretty much my parents' mantra about all things and people throughout my childhood. Sort of like — well, we survived the war, but it isn't like life's a fucking Chuck E Cheese.

There's an awesome Polish restaurant just down the street from my house, and they kindly provided me with another perfect example for you, dearest blog reader, of an Incredibly Polish Thing To Say. They recently hung a banner to advertise their happy hour drink specials. It invites passersby to the "Is Anybody Really Happy Hour?" The first time I saw it, I immediately called my mother. She cracked up, out loud, for approximately 0.8 seconds, which on the Polish scale of amusement falls somewhere between Tickled Giddy and ROTFLMAO.

I've been trying to parse the differences between the morose Jew in me and the morose Pole. It's a strange exercise. Both cultures wear this "We're bound to get fucked again" attitude like a waterlogged parka. I know Jews are all "Yes, shit happens, but why does it always happen to us?" But that specific tenor of We've Been Fucked Repeatedly feels different to me from the uniquely Eastern European brand of Yes, Of Course I'll Have A Vodka, Because Life Is Exactly As Shitty As Usual.

When my parents emigrated, they didn't go back to Poland for 25 years. That's because being Jewish in Poland is kind of like being Black in Lynchville, KKK County, Red State, USA.

I came with them on their first trip back to Poland. I was in college at the time. I watched them swallow down a pretty intense internal conflict: they were nostalgic for the country of their youth, but the country of their youth had treated them like shit. They'd been beaten up and called dirty Jews. Their own parents were trying to move on from the un-move-on-from-able: their friends, their cousins, everyone who didn't flee Poland in 1939? All dead.

So, suck city. The 'rents didn't feel at home in Poland when they lived there, but it remained the closest thing they'd ever had to a home.

Sime and I have written a lot in this here Hot Blog about the attributes shared by all us Jewsy types. My brother read it, and then called me to say he thought I had it wrong. "You and I have more in common with all those kids whose parents jumped the Mexican border than with Jewish families who have been here for three or four generations."

I've been thinking a lot about that. First of all, Ben usually talks about poker and chicks, so I was a bit surprised by the sudden introspection. And second, well, he's onto something.

I've always had a lot of Immigrant Kid friends. Perhaps this is fairly common in California, but my brother's comment prompted me to examine my relationships with all those I.K.'s. And I realized there's a reason we gravitate towards each other.

We know what it's like to grow up in two cultures at once — one at home, and one that began as soon as we stepped off the front porch.

We've been teased mercilessly for our difficult-to-pronounce surnames (no, Gamble isn't the last name I was born with. The name on my driver's license includes a "w" that is pronounced "v," an "i" that is pronounced "ee," and a "cz" that is pronounced "ch").

Whether or not our parents had money, nearly all of us were raised with the understanding that nothing we got came easy, and that our parents had to work way harder than their American colleagues.

We are almost always punctual. We experience great anxiety if we're running late. In general, we're trying to keep it together and be perfect in every way.

We are the force that Americanized our parents. And generally speaking, we yanked them in directions they were deeply ambivalent about.

We can talk to a wide variety of people flavors. Rich, poor, more or less melanin, jocks, geeks, we learned early to pick up social cues and blend.

We sound totally American. We are totally American. Some of us even look like regular old white Americans. And when you talk shit about someone's funny accent or clothes or customs, we may say nothing. But inside, we are taking it very, very, very personally. We would like to kick you in your stupid face.

Not you, of course. You'd never do that. But stupid people.

I went to that Jewish Day School — you know, when they showed us pictures of Auschwitz in the first grade? But I just gotta be honest with you here. I never felt like I fit in with all the other Jewish kids. I know, I know, I'm writing a blog about Jewishness. I'm supposed to be writing about how you and I and our Jewish pals in Tel Aviv and Tehran and Beijing are all hilariously similar, all slightly varied recipes of the same fantastic chicken soup.

But now you and I've gotten to know each other a bit. We've joined forces in celebrating the lusciousness of Rachel Weisz's breasts and Aimee Bender's prose, we've basked in our shared boredom in schul, we've swung bats in synchrony at the Very Hot Jew Perpetual Hitler Burning Effigy Piñata.

So it's time to deepen the convo a notch. Talk about the ambivalent shit. It's time for me to tell you that when I'm in a big crowd of L.A. Jews, I don't always feel like I belong. I feel like my history is vastly different from most of theirs. (That even includes Simon. Obviously, we share many traits and get on like a house on fire, but there are also a lot of things about my background that I have to go into some detail to explain to him. And vice versa. And yes, maybe we could explain things more simply if we had the conversation before the tequila came out, but come on. Like we want to talk without our dear friend, Watermelon Margarita.)

Want to hear the funny part? I can only imagine you do. And by the way, thank you for hanging with me through so many paragraphs with no jokes. You're swell.

The funny part is, when you add up my Morose Jew DNA and my stressy Immigrant Kid childhood and my Existentialist Polish influence ... you get a pretty happy chick. Weird, right? I mean, it's not like I'm Little Miss Sunshine, but I'm not the Gay Proust Uncle, either.

Either the depressed Pole/oppressed Jew gene spontaneously mutated, or all their hard work being bummed finally paid off, because I seem to possess an unusually high amount of the "fuck it, this'll all work out somehow" hormone. I'm one of the most optimistic people I know. And I'm a writer. It's almost ... eerie.

I revel in discovering people's quirks. I love to hear folks speak broken English. I could write scripts full of cholas and Pakistanis all day. There is no cuisine I will not sample. Okay, well, I hear there's this nomadic people subsisting on rancid yak's milk, so maybe I'd draw the line there.

No, actually? I'd drink it. Life's short. Perhaps it is delicious.

All this is just to say: What about you, Jew? Do you feel like you belong? Are you One Of Us? What do you feel like you're One Of? That's what I want to know. What's your particular flavor?

And why aren't you shouting it from the rooftops?

Because "What do you have to be happy about?" is not a rhetorical question. That's what I discovered when I started writing about my very hot self right here. I discovered that when you stand up and declare yourself — it feels fuckin' hot.

Sleep Is the New Sex

Of all the many kinds of abuse and addiction now available — because America is the greatest country in the world — Jews are most predisposed to prescription pill abuse. This is in part because we tend to view physicians as deities and will greedily swallow any bolus that comes in a little amber RX bottle.

We're also likely to gulp down sleeping pills, because we worry a lot and the wee hours tend to be when the little anxiety factory we call the brain starts mass-producing visions of loved ones dying in flaming wrecks or hangnails turning into metastatic cancer.

Not that we Yids are alone. According to the Prescription Access Litigation Project (PAL), the folks behind the Bitter Pill Awards, the top five prescription sleeping pills raked in $2.7 BILLION in 2005. "Sleep is the new sex," reads a quote on their site from Arthur Spielman, director of the Center for Sleep Disorders Medicine and Research.

Of course, sleep was designated the new sex waaaay back in 2006. By now, slumber has probably been knocked off its steamy perch by, oh, I dunno, knitting or vomiting or watching preteen girls eating spaghetti with chopsticks on YouTube. Nothing's the new sex for long.

The point is, Americans are popping Ambien and Lunesta and other yummy bedtime remedies like crazed toddlers tasting the Skittles rainbow. Which would be just fine if the drug didn't apparently cause them to rise from their pillows and somnambulate into their cars, embarking on joyless joyrides to they know not where. Frequently they go the wrong way on one-way streets and crash into lightposts; when the cops finally pull them over they seem blissfully unaware of what's going on and have no recollection of the incident afterward.

Yep, "sleep driving" is now a frequent occurrence. UNCONSCIOUS PEOPLE are padding out to their Ford Foci and snoozing their way onto the nation's roadways. The problem has become acute enough to cause the FDA — which, as a Bush agency, is normally inclined to allow pharmaceutical companies to boil children alive if they so desire — to step in.

Now this class of drugs will require special labels, lengthy supplementary instructions and possibly concerned facial expressions from Walgreen's dispensary employees. All of which will satisfy the 10-second news cycle but begs the question: What difference do these warnings make if, after reading them cover to cover, you pop an Ambien, slip under the ol' duvet and an hour later are barreling through the Holland Tunnel, stomping the accelerator with your footie pajamas?

To be fair, many of the worst instances resulted from folks mixing the current generation of sleep-inducers with booze, antidepressants and other mood-altering wild cards. But plenty of ordinary, directions-following patients also ended up driving, cooking, terrorizing planeloads of passengers and doing other wacky things while in the throes of a dreamless, pharmacological oblivion.

Upon reading about this, we Jews at first experienced the same mix of incredulity and opportunity that no doubt caused frissons in the ranks of the nation's comedy writers. But a clammy, dystopian light bulb of rationality quickly took its place.

The ephiphany was something along the lines of: Well, this explains everything.

It explains the narcotic political culture in which we plod on down an infinite corridor of corruption, aware we should be outraged but somehow unable to scream.

It explains the snooze-button salon of celebrity worship, wherein the world's dumbest pretty people sit on our chests like well-scrubbed succubi, commandeering our psyches with the rapacity of prospectors in the Gold Rush.

It explains the nightmarish papering over of every last vestige of space with advertising, the sponsorship of all things, the branding of every square foot until there is nothing that doesn't serve the message of some corporate giant.

It explains the syringes in the ocean, the chromium-6 in the water, the melting of the ice caps on which the polar bears are scrambling to escape the onrushing waves, the general cheerful flushing-down-the-loo of the world that sustains us, all permitted with the drowsy insouciance of a Lunesta road trip.

Welcome, in other words, to Sleep Culture. We've all just been dozing — yet still active enough to participate in our own impoverishment. Just ambulatory enough to drive to the polling place to vote for the vague smiling face that swore to protect us.

We are the Manchurian Citizen.

And you know who'd really appreciate it if we woke the fuck up? The polar bears.

The problem, of course, is that coming to terms with this waking horror really, really makes you want to down a couple of sedatives with a tankard of vodka.

So if you see us zooming over the 405 tonight, don't bother waving — it's our naptime.