Darshan, Part Deux.

Read Part One First, won't you?

So: Darshan. The Light. Spiritual It-ness. Direct transmission. It took having the high holy bajeebers freaked outta me by an actual High Holy to realize I've had my own lil' tap in the Divine Keg it all along. I got this megaswig, right? And once it settled in, I found it tasted oddly... familiar.

Here's my disclaimer: you ain't hearing this from on high, so you might find it a little... simplistic. It's all very layperson-y and basic. I may be a lot of things, but nobody ever called me an avatar. I enjoy a nice meet-and-greet with those masters -- like Mother Meera, about whom I rapped in Part One -- who traverse lofty realms. But, perhaps not coincidentally, I live at sea level. And write really violent shit, like, eight hours a day. So, nutshell: I'm not exactly Floaty Guru material. That's okay - jumping face-first into the dark side of human nature's a necessary job too. Also, fun. The swag is terrific. Free glass eyeballs! But I digress.

Anywho. Here's when I realized I actually had understood Darshan all along. I was turning left into Gate Seven at Warner Bros. The moment was profoundly rote. Swim around in purse for wallet; swim around in wallet for ID card. Meantime, hit button to roll down window, whilst hitting other buttons to turn up music to compensate for the traffic noise. And I accidentally turned the music up a little too loud, and I idly thought, as the sound swept over me, "That's what angels sound like."

No, really. I'm, first of all, not fucking kidding. And also, I am going to embed a youtube video so you can check it out.

So I park my car, and I sit there and hit "repeat" and listen again. And I think: yup, angel. That's what they sound like. I'm pretty sure.

I know - subjective. One woman's Celestial Voice Of Revelation is another chick's Whatever. But I turned this over and over in my head. Thinking that the quasi-religious overtone of it couldn't be an accident. I mean - do I believe there are little Jewy toga-clad harpists flying around singing at God? Um, nyet. But there's a reason the feeling this sound evokes in my body gets instinctively named "angelic" by the lightning-quick name-factory in my brain. Because something in me... opens up. It's a physical feeling. In my chest. Like a book flipping wide, and in the center is my heart. Things start to tingle. I wake the fuck up. I am being visited by something fierce and I know it. Suddenly, where I was crunched up... there's space. Even if I'm resisting, good music finds a way in.

Which: Darshan. Right?

And then I flashed on this night many years ago. The deets are a little too personal for this blog - I'm saving the really dramatic shit for my book deal, I'm sure you understand - but long story circumcised, I was miserable, driving way too fast down Pacific Coast Highway at night with the windows down. Rage was my co-pilot. I was contemplating all manner of bad ideas. So what I did was just... not get out of the car. I drove all the way past Malibu. The thing that kept me tethered to the Here - and, most important, to some shred of common sense (if not the speed limit) - was the song blasting out of the speakers. It was a pop song. U2. Nothing too intellectual. It said what it meant, and then Bono wailed for a bit, and then there were guitars. I drove like a maniac, and the cold wind slapped my hair against my cheeks, and I guess there were no cops on the PCH that night, and eventually the music found its way into me and I calmed down. If Bono'd decided to go all Thom Yorke and make a concept album, it totally would not have worked. If that song had tried to be clever instead of passionate, I would have been doomed.

Fonder memory: a futon on a floor, facing a window, sometime after 4 a.m. College. Me and this guy I liked, lying there in perfect stillness. (We were sober, if caffeinated.) Watching the sun come up while that old Peter Gabriel live double-album played. I think of those couple of hours as the center of the frantic whirlpool of those years. Every baby butterfly in my belly - remember being 17? Remember the constant inner-monologue about how every single everything was wrong with you? - miraculously lulled to sleep.

Like most members of the human race, I've pulled a couplea stunts in my day. Dived into some dangerous/unwise/illegal acts. Generally because I was looking for a way to get at the locked-up stuff inside. And having tried a lot of methods, I can tell you that the most reliable way to get there is music. I dunno, maybe Steve Jobs really is some kind of diety, because I realize now that when I let the Light in, it's often through my iPod.

The song I listen to driving up the coast that magnifies its deliciousness.

The mix Sukha made for my birthday last year, to bring me new love. That worked in 48 hours flat.

The six songs I've heard five zillion times each by now that I put on shuffle when I'm working on my movie script.

The scratchy ancient Chopin recording that is the music equivalent of having buckets and buckets of flowers poured all over you.

The CD I bought in China the week my goddaughter was adopted. The song that haunted me for months, a symptom of a problem I didn't know yet that I had. The CD that got me through the worst month of my life, a prickly, sticky rope in the fog. The songs that are blankets I wrap around myself when I'm lonely. That They Might Be Giants ditty my friend in junior high serenaded me with that sometimes comes on the radio, a time capsule breaking open and spilling out mirth. That song I heard at that Starbucks that one time that stunned me - so I forgot to ask what it was, and I am still fucking looking for it six years later, and it eludes and eludes and eludes me. The song I played driving to the most important meeting of my career. The song my friend recorded when she was still with that other man, that makes me shiver knowing that the worst situations make the most beautiful melodies.


Darshan; n: a glimpse of the divine. And here I was thinking I was secular-Jewly, while I'm pulling the Light lever on a near-daily basis. Taking it like vitamins. Or Ativan, frankly; people always ask me how I can stand commuting to the Valley, and I always just say, "That's why God invented iTunes."

I shared my lil epiphany with some friends. They tried to add to it: "Isn't it even better when you dance around, too?" "How bout those amazing singers in Baptist churches - isn't music better when it's, like, about Jesus?" "What about when you yourself are singing, when the music's coming out of you?"

Nah. Details. Give me a floor and a couplea cheap earbuds and I'm good.

I kinda can't believed I just typed that, it's so damn simple. But it's true. That's the entire deal: music brings in the light. I thought maybe there was a difference between the feeling of "this is right and things will be okay and I am part of something larger" that you get when listening to, say, Bill Withers singing "Use Me" (not emolicious enough? Um, Death Cab for Cutie singing "I Will Follow You Into The Dark"?)... and the feeling you get from the Real Holy Deal bathing your crown chakra with pure two-hundred-proof Darshan Juice straight from India. Can you blame me? Everyone always looks so swoony in the movies when they get whammied by the Light of the Divine.

But I just got whammied last week, so I can tell you: there is no difference. They're the same. I mean, maybe music isn't the thing that does it for you. Whatever that thing is - as long as you're not molesting anybody, obvs - go with it. 'Cause the thing you are waiting for is already here. Dive in, my Highly Attractive friend. Quit waiting for the lighting bolt. It's a marketing ploy. The good shit is exactly what you always knew it was. So eat it up, scrape the sides of the container with your spoon, get in there with your fingers. Don't hold back, and don't hold out for the next thing. There ain't one. I am here to tell you: the tools we were already given are, as far as I can tell, the only tools there are.

This isn't bad news - it's my very favorite kind: practical news. There is no next party: we are at the party: therefore, let us party! Apparently, if there is a God, he's got a sense of humor. He doesn't just zap folk in schul. He zaps them through baseball and the roar of V12 engines and the distant, holy sound of Kanye West.

And if you're like me (and I have this instinct you are - at the very least, you're Very Hot), you've got this amazing Darshan spigot at your disposal. Actually, spigot is far too crude a metaphor for the vast selection. It's like a massive Darshan Microbrew Bar, with a long row of Light on tap. Pick your flavor. Chug.

I mean, think about that. A tiny slice of what I think of as God (that's right, I said it) can be purchased for 99 cents and downloaded to your mp3 player. We live in miraculous motherfucking times, my friends.

Darshan.
(a little illumination by Sera)

Last weekend, my lithe, blonde, dancerlicious friend Sukha rang me, breathless with excitement.

Sukha: Do you want to come with me to UCLA to get Darshan from Mother Meera?

Me: Um... yes!

Sukha: I'll be at your house in ten minutes.

Me: Great! Let me find some pants!

Are you wondering what Darshan is? So was I. She may as well have been speaking Sanskrit. Actually, she was. But she sounded really, really stoked, so who was I to turn down the chance to go get... whatever the fuck it was were were going to go get?

From the gods of Wiki:

Darśana (Darshan, Sanskrit: दर्शन) is a Sanskrit term meaning "sight" (in the sense of an instance of seeing or beholding; from a root dṛś "to see"), vision, apparition, or glimpse. It is most commonly used for "visions of the divine," i.e. of a god or a very holy person or artifact. One could "receive darshana" of the deity in the temple, or from a great saintly person, such as a great guru.

We pulled up the sparkling UCLA curb late-late, which didn't bother me at all because I had no idea what was going on anyway. Sukha, however, seemed keen on getting in and feared we would be turned away. So we took off our shoes and ran through the unexpectedly muddy grass, up the hill to the Bradley center. We showed up to the thang a lil' dirty, a lil' sweaty, but no one seemed to judge.

They let us in to what turned out to be a large, carpeted room filled with chairs. At the front of the room, a little stage. On the stage, a big green chair. On the chair, a lady in a lovely sari. Mother Meera. She is Indian, obvs, and extremely holy - an actual avatar, apparently - and UCLA is a stop on her ongoing world tour. (I learned these pertinent deets after the adventure; for some reason I can't entirely explain, I didn't really want to ask S what exactly was going on. I was enjoying just... going with it.)

The gist: you sat your ass down, got quiet, did a little inner whatever-ing, praying or thinkifying or blanking pleasurably, and eventually (we waited about 2 1/2 hours) your turn came and you got in front of Mother Meera.

The big moment: you kneel. Touch her feet. She touches your temples. When she lets go'a your temples, you look into her eyes. You hold each other's gaze until she looks down again.

That's the whole cannoli. It takes like 20 seconds, max.

So, I did it. I had no expectation that anything much would happen. People all around me, though, were quietly, meditationally squeeing. This lady is a big deal. Whatever she's tapped into, it allows her help others by a method that includes staring down hundreds of people a day without ever losing her zen; she's serious business.

Anyway, I got up there, I knelt in front of her, she touched me. I was a little nervous all of a sudden. It felt like... fingertips. So: not magic. Not that I was trying to be skeptical. I'm just reporting. It was nice. In a brief, gentle, fingertippy kind of way.

Then I got the cue. So I lifted my head, and I looked in her eyes.

Hello, fierce. She kind of freaked me out. Perhaps I expected mushy and lovey? Like a Jewish grandma? But she was casual as a heart attack. Time stretched out, and she just looked at me, and we were very much the same, and we were very foreign to each other, and she was very much wiser than me, and she knew a lot that I may never know, and had something to give to me and was giving it to me right then; and I had this sense of her telling me I'm willing to do this for as long as it takes and it made me wonder just what it was she was doing because it must be more than just looking, and then, loud and clear, something inside me was going, what the fuck are you doing trying to crack me open like that, no no no! And then it was over.

I got up and walked back to my chair. I felt pretty good. Calm, because I'd been meditating on and off for the two and a half hours leading up to the twenty seconds. Amused with myself, because it's not too surprising that I'd balk at the intimacy of that amount of searing eye contact from so advanced and over themselves a person. ( Or, possibly, if you subscribe to that particular magazine, from the person-ish incarnation of a goddess.) So... I went and sat down and thought for a little while about how I am an eminently freak-out-able person. Whereas the lady in the green chair is the photo negative of shakeable.

I wasn't bummed, because it wasn't like I'd spent weeks anticipating the moment I received the whatdoyoucallit, and then I got up there and screwed it up by getting kind of scared of the goddess lady. Quite the contrary! I pulled on my inner lab coat and started making notes on my inner clip board. The subject is highly open to new experiences. But quickly detaches from the mood of the crowd. Also, in the face of being peered into at an alleged soul-deep level, subject went all doe-in-headlights. She is so not as chill as she thinks she is.

Sukha, to contrast, looked all dreamy and silken, like she'd been whacked upside the head by a basket of soft furry kittens. But then, unlike this Very Hot Bloggeress, she meditates daily; her every chakra was squeaky clean and ready to receive the divine news flash.

Sukha's aura.

In the car on the drive home, Sukha repeatedly assured me that the light of Darshan gets in despite one's resistance. If it couldn't, who the hell could it reach? Humans are by and large ridonkulously resisty buggers.

Sukha and I went out for tomato soup and nori rolls and talked about men, of course, and I was in a great mood; it's not every day I get to gatecrash an event like that.

Sukha: Do you feel it?

Me: Feel what? Like, it?

Sukha: Yes, it.

Me: Honestly, no, not really, but I feel great so no worries. This soup is really good.

But Sukha disagreed with my notion that nothing specific had been wrought within my being. At one point I said something wry and eyebrowy that involved looking her in the eye. And she squealed with joy, "You got the light! You're all full of the light! You have so much light you're just going to have to give it to people!"

Well, good news, my loin-wrenchingly attractive readers. I'm giving it to you.

Because I figured it out this morning, guys. I figured out how the light - excuse me, Light - gets passed around. I figured out what the Light is, in my world. How it works, how it's transmitted, the whole friggin' enchilada. I figured it out as I was turning left into the Warner Bros. lot and fishing for my ID card with my free hand. It just - BAM. Hit me.

I think this may just be time-release Mother Meera groove in action.

I'm gonna lay it on you in Part Two of this post.

(Don't worry, there's really gonna be a part two. It's mostly written already. I just split them up so this wouldn't be miles long. I ran into this writer at Hugo's on Riverside the other day. We were both getting breakfast in lieu of writing scripts for our respective TV shows. Anyway, he said, "I used to read your blog, but it's always so long and cryptic." So, though Josh won't be reading these words: tune in for more next week.)

Things I Love.
An off-the-top-of-my-head list by Sera.

1. Supplements you drip into your Fiji water that turn it crazy colors which freak out the people sitting near you in the park. Like: dark green? That’s not a color you want to see in someone’s water bottle. But I’m chloro-loading, baby.

2. The fact that every now and then, something wildly popular is actually worth the hype.

3. Bulldogs: when they roll upside down? Gravity makes them smile.

4. In the cheese section at the grocery store … so very many cheeses. Yes, I am lactarded. I don’t care. I’m willing to suffer.

5. The paradox of laser-clear-eyed brilliance and total-fucking-batshititide that is being a visionary. Well, more to the point, the people who document true visionaries, so my friends and I can watch movies about what they did. And go weepy bananas in the theater.

5. Watching Simon sing his fool ass off.

So, it took me a minute to get to bloggin’, but I must mention that we had a Classic Rock Singalong the other day, on the occasion of Simon’s twenty-somethingth birthday.

It was pretty awesome. For instance, VHJ inner-circlite Mollie wore this super-skintight red zip-up Dickie Girl cover-all situation that made her look like a poster girl for the war effort, or an ad for motor oil, or a zipper fetishist’s wet dream. She led us in a rousing rendition of “Hotel California.” It was a sort of post-postmodern "Happy Birthday Mr. President" moment.

What Molly looked like: a faithful recreation.

What else? Simon rocked out. That’s the major headline. I drank beer with his ravishing Jewess bride and her striking sister, and as the evening wore on and our inhibitions wore off, the singing got louder and louder. I keep telling you, these Singalongs have a cleansing effect. They’re like primal scream therapy, but hipper.

That’s the news from the Very Hot front. We’ve been singing, having birthdays, imbibing, sucking the marrow out of summer. There’s no soul-rattling politico-religious wrap-up to this entry. It was really just an excuse to post a couple pix and shout-out our dear, sweet, panty-snappingly hot Sime. More soon. Ish.

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Cherubim and Sera-phim: The Marvels of Comic-Con
by Simon

Where have we been, these Jews you love? What have we been up to?

Well, double duty, baby. Sera's been busy cooking up some mind-blowing shit that will be rocking your screen soon enough. Sime's been turning out all manner of commercial ephemera and prepping The Classic Rock Singalong (which goes down this Sat. night, 8/16, @ M Bar in Hollywood; please join us, Angelenos). And they've been dreaming up some other stuff too, which is all, like, ultra-classified.

But the purpose of this – our first post since, what, the Harding administration? – is to share my delight and pride at seeing Sera's panel and other public appearances at Comic-Con.

See, I've always known Sera was a superstar, and Jules and I met her back when she was a mere poppet, working in a not-very-satisfying job and writing genius works in secret. So to see the world embrace her fantabulosity makes me about bust a button.

And boy, was there some embracing at Comic-Con. Julia, Jo, Jim, Mollie and I dutifully filed into a gargantuan auditorium to watch her on the Supernatural panel (moderated by Entertainment Weekly's Alynda Wheat and also featuring series creator Eric Kripke, writer-producer Ben Edlund and a couple of actors whose names escape me); and yeah, OK, a lot of the chiquitas in that capacity crowd were screaming for the boy stars in a way that recalled Beatlemania or Hitchcock's The Birds, but the true aficionados were also palpitatin' for our girl.

Afterward, folks started lining up for autographs ... so many, in fact, that Comic-Con closed the line. And the seemingly endless throngs who trudged cheek-by-jowl through the convention center (including us) had to content themselves with viewing the signing ceremony on the Jumbotron.

Those of you who were part of that great wave of genre-loving humanity know what I'm talking about. If you weren't, imagine, thousands of fans crammed together so tightly that they make a giant hall look like a really small space, most of them dressed as Princess Leia (in near-naked Jabba-slave mode) or Spiderman or the octopus lady in The Little Mermaid.

Her Majesty's loyal subjects.

And seriously, peeps, one of the best things about Comic-Con is that the true fans of these shows and films don't just know the stars. They know the names of the people who toil away on their laptops, fueled only by specially fitted latte-dispensing helmets and muffins that have been crumbled into mouth-ready bites by a team of nubile interns, conjuring the fantastical scenarios of ghouls and vampires and ninjas and superhero vixens we depend on to make life remotely palatable.

And even in that constellation of scribes, our Sera shines brightest. If you ask me.

The Center Cannot Hold.

A remembrance from Simon

This is about the day I went to the Center for the last time.

Oh, I should explain what the Center is. Y'see, in my family – for pretty much my entire life – that word signified more than just the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center on Burbank Boulevard. It was the hub of our community, our secular schul, our arts academy, sports center and hangout away from home.

I trundled into the place in diapers for day care and spent a staggering number of hours there until my teens. I made misshapen family gifts in arts and crafts classes, donned funny hats and greasepaint for rough but enthusiastic musical comedies, shot the shit with other kids and even tried my hand at improv comedy. But the Center was also where we gathered in the auditorium for political talks and bought tchochkes at the Purim Bazaar. And did every other damn thing. Most importantly, it connected us with dozens of other families - the Paleys, the Mintzers, the Shares, the Diamonds, the Beckers, the Jampols, the Browns and so many others - that formed our lifelong mishpuchah.

In the ensuing years we stayed in contact with most of those families, through tragedies, triumphs and time's other tidbits. But the Center? It became less of a hub and more of a concept. I left L.A. at age 18 and didn't come back for ten years; when I returned to the Valley Cities, the Center was no longer a center of my life. I'd stop by for an event now and then and find the place had fallen into a certain musty desuetude. The air conditioning was poor. The upkeep was spotty. The well-intentioned organizers of Center gatherings often didn't set up enough chairs, and they always seemed to throw the refreshments together at the last second without the slightest inkling of what human beings might want to consume at all, let alone at the same time. It became a trifle depressing, though the idea of the place still glowed in the furthest reaches of my consciousness.

At last, many years on, the time had come for the operation to move to a new location in the deepest valley. A farewell brunch gathered the tribes in the poorly cooled auditorium, in front of the very stage that had been the fulcrum, for me, of a thousand pre- and post-pubescent dramas (scripted and otherwise).

There were round tables. Mailing list forms. A refreshments area groaning with a random array of recently unfrozen cakes, midcentury coffee urns and cartons of Minute Maid orange juice. (What, no sardines or diet Fresca?) Reminiscences and photo ops. A wake, in short.

I felt ambivalent about even showing up, and a few old Center pals I spoke to in the days beforehand said they did too. I expressed these mixed feelings the old-fashioned way: by rolling in super-late. At one of the round tables, fanning themselves gloomily in the sweltering heat, I spied my parents and siblings. My dad, the first to see me creeping up, flashed an inimitably dark "join the fun" expression, much the mien one might expect to see on the puss of a dear old friend one chanced upon in some stifling ring of Dante's Inferno.

Dad, a Center president back in the '70s, glumly assented to appear in a group photo. Various luminaries of the organization were extolled from the podium. We heard about matching contributions for the new Center. Then my brother, ever the thoughtful time manager, suggested we make our way to the other side of the building, where a videographer was recording testimonials from Center stalwarts.

We trudged down the hallway I'd traversed hundreds of times in my life. We passed the room where I'd made construction-paper assemblages; the room where we had naptime, stretched out on mats on the tile floor after our graham crackers and apple juice; the room where I'd rehearsed songs from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown when my voice was changing. The rooms of my first true socialization, my first creative experiments, my first romantic stirrings.

"Sime," my mom said, having dipped her Madeleine in the tea of memory, "I could just see you running down this hallway, with your full diaper."

"You mean just now?"

When we arrived at the surprisingly dark videography room, they were finishing up with someone else. I went to use the bathroom; when I flushed the urinal it overflowed, sending a symbolic flood cascading over the deteriorating floor. I reacted with a kind of wounded hostility: For fuck's sake, I know they're moving out, but this is just pathetic.

Then we made our way into the videography room, wherein the only chairs were only big enough to house the tuchuses of preschoolers. You could sit in those, the videographer lady said unhelpfully, or you could maybe sit on a table.

I was about ready to just go out to my car and drive away at that point, so fully had I let the half-assed planning and crumbling interiors become a scapegoat for my sense of loss about the place (and, via the transitive property, the salad days of my youth). But instead my brother and I hustled back to the auditorium (in which, I shit you not, somebody was by now at the microphone singing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"), grabbed some adult-sized chairs and schlepped them back down the eternal hallway of my childhood and into the underlit videography room.

They arranged the five of us in a line and the little red light on the video camera went on. And then something happened.

The memories came tumbling out.

First my parents described the early days, the "red Center" days when progressive, secular Jews were a thorn in the side of the conservative Jewish establishment; when Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, poverty and feminism galvanized these suburban liberals. My siblings remembered their adolescence there, playing music and making friends. And I talked about the kaleidoscopic experience of growing up amid the songs and stories and possibilities ... and kind of lost it.

It was the first time the five of us had said a lot of this out loud, at least at one time, but it flowed like some kind of jazz threnody, a stately groove with bits of elegantly laced improvisation. We were alternately laughing and weeping, spinning yarns and riffing and eulogizing.

This too was like a wake. But the good part of the wake, when everyone's had enough bourbon to start telling the real stories.

The Center is moving and it won't be our Center. I'm off at the other end of the city, and the rest of the family, though still living in the Valley, has become a hub of its own. But other stories, other childhoods will start at the new building. I hope they're as indelible as the ones we unspooled on that last day.

Laura Kightlinger: Half-Jew, More Than Half-Hot


We get it, America: There's too much ranting in the blogosphere. And we think you'll agree that our Semitic scribblings tend, by and large, to be more kvell-y than kvetchy.

But as we're more than tangentially connected to the world of TV, we do feel qualified to air a loud complaint against the cancellation of a truly funny, original show: The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman.

This punishingly funny half-hour series on the IFC sprang from the brilliant, sick mind of Laura Kightlinger, who gained national attention as a cast member on Will and Grace and Lucky Louie and whose deadpan standup routines have delighted us for years (and whose smoldering hotness has long haunted Sime's dreams). She claims to be half-Jewish, which is reason enough to put her on the ol' Heeblog.

On the show, she plays a spectacularly self-involved aspiring screenwriter who makes a staggering series of bad decisions, frequently in collaboration with her best friend, the equally narcissistic Tara (Nicholle Tom). Rather than rabbit on about it all day, we'll just offer you a couple of tasty tidbits:






See what we're sayin'? That's some funny shit (and that's the great Mary Kay Place as Jackie's mom). The show's improv-friendly vibe and anything-goes approach to subject matter have also prompted fantastic work from such folks as Ray Wise (as a right-wing radio commentator) and Sally Kellerman (as herself - and please, call her Sally Kellerman), not to mention inspired cast regulars like Azura Skye, Patrick Bristow and Jeremy Kramer.

It couldn't hurt to contact the people at IFC and urge them to revive this fantastic show: programming@ifctv.com. And no matter how that noise plays out, you'll want to grab the DVD toot sweet.

In the meantime, though, you can check out Laura's bizarre and hysterically funny faux-reality "Cat Demon" shorts (featuring stellar work from Laura herself and her fellow national treasure David Koechner) on FunnyorDie.com. You can also periodically catch her at the amazing Uncabaret.

You Deserve to Sing.
An invitation/invocation from Simon

What's a pragmatic, empirical, non-mystical, irreligious, secular Jewboy to do?

I'm generally the most skeptical dude in the room when my tousle-haired Cali friends start spewing some Age of Aquarius doo-dah about the coming transition in human consciousness. If I happen to hear a TV preacher yappin' about the End Times, it makes me giggle. But there are moments, my Very Hot darlings, that give even a hyper-rationalist like me cause to pause.

Like this dream I had the other night.

It was a typical low-level anxiety nightmare, one of those sweaty mini-disaster flicks of the unconscious. You know the kind: normal space-time is like existential quicksand and accomplishing the most basic tasks is fraught with absurd difficulty. In this case, I was trying to find my car and walking around in circles. And then, in the midst of my hyperventilating despair, I had a realization.

It was pretty much this: Wait a minute ... this is one of those low-level anxiety dreams.

Textbook lucid dreaming, people. Once I made that connection, I simply pointed to an area behind me and said, "The car is over there." And it was. (To my delight, my dream ride was a shiny new red VW bug, not the Pleistocene-era Nissan Sentra, currently bedazzled with birdshit, that is my waking-life model.)

Then I opened the door of the car and said, "While we're at it, there's going to be a briefcase full of money on the front passenger seat." And there was.

The dream was pretty much over then. I had made my point.

You don't have to be a psychoanalyst to agree that cars and cash in dreams don't stand for cars and cash. And whatever it ultimately means when one has a successful lucid-dreaming experience, it felt like a breakthrough.

Controlling the content of a dream is rather like taking the helm of a starship and finding that it's no more difficult than riding a Big Wheel. And the feeling of not only infinite possibility but unlimited potentiality is thrilling.

I awoke, how you say, pumped.

My life has not irrevocably changed since that revelatory sleep-space adventure. But it has caused me to reflect on the ways that we hold ourselves back. How can I share with some of you the opposite of holding back?

It's a humble offering, but it's the best I can do: If you're in L.A.*, come sing with me.

You know you love to sing. It's fun. It feels great. But even as we're surrounded by karaoke bars and TV competitions that purport to invite Joe and Jane Six-Pack onto the stage, it's always about whether you're good enough. It's always "Don't quit your day job." Either you're a world-class undiscovered superstar with incredible pipes who can wrestle a classic soul anthem into submission with your crazily overwrought melismatics, it seems, or you should shut the fuck up.

It's kinda like saying nobody should be allowed to have sex except porn stars.

Well, here's what I'm saying: Singing is your right as a human being. You are fully entitled to express your joy in being alive, however fleeting that joy might be, by lifting your voice in song.

And our little party, The Classic Rock Singalong, is the place to do it. Sera's written about it in this space before, so a lot of you have already gotten the lowdown. But here it is in a nutshell: classic pop hits, the ones that you know from the radio and sing in the shower. A great band and a bunch of cool singers on stage leading the songs. A book of lyrics for everyone. The entire freakin' bar wailing their hearts out, borne aloft by power chords and (with some sober exceptions) the disinhibiting effects of liquor.

It's seriously fun, like a lucid dream. See you there?

*If you're not in L.A., why not have your own Singalong? All you need is a few musicians, a bunch of friends and a couple of bottles. I guarantee your guests will remember it (if they remember anything) as one of the best parties ever.

Oh, L.A., How I Heart Jew.

(a mash note from Sera)

A few weeks ago, I was at a meeting with a couple of exec-y types, chatting about movies. We'd narrowed it down to one movie in particular, a theoretical one based on some manga they'd sent me (that's "Japanese comic-booky-type novels" for those of you born before the year 1990). I said, "You know, I'd set the movie in Los Angeles." They were like, okay, cool, we were thinking the same thing, we want to shoot it here, but can we ask you - why do you feel it should be set here? And I was like, "Duh, L.A. is made of magic."

That's where I lost them.

They were nice guys, though, so they weren't all snide and elitist about it. The more recent transplant gave me a surprisingly candid, sad look and said, "If there's magic in L.A., please show it to me, because I haven't found it."

So I went off about, you know, blah blah, various iconic movies set in L.A. I referenced the many books of Francesca Lia Block, a Very Hot Jewess who made her name describing the flowering freeway vines, canyons and hot dog stands of the city in postmodern, punky fairy-tale terms. I talked about landing here at 17, in awe of Venice Beach, the turbaned roller-blading guitar player, the chainsaw jugglers, the entertaining crackheads, the murals, the punk girls with straw-stiff candy-cane hair, the surfers with impossible underwear-model bodies, the glittery red snake of Mulholland, the sculpture garden at UCLA that is awesome whether or not it is midnight and even if you are not tripping on acid. Basically, I blabbed until they shrugged and conceded the point so we could move on.

But their eyes were still clouded over all smog-like, and I don't blame them. Being a grown-up sucks ass, man. You get up, hit traffic, hit work, field a zillion phone calls, attempt to mitigate your stress level, then hit more traffic upon leaving. Especially city denizens like these two gentlemen I was talking to - they have to do drinks meetings all the time, so their evenings are clotted up with trips to trendy WeHo eateries on streets made perilous by paparazzi SUVs ready to kill for a single snap of Heidi Montag, whoever the high holy FUCK she is.

I know how those two gents feel, in that I live exactly one mile from the beach and have visited said beach exactly twice in the last three months. It is easy to be fooled into thinking that Los Angeles is just what those high-and-mighty people from, oh, everywhere else on planet Earth say it is: crowded, sprawling, smoggy, fake, centerless, cultureless, magic-free.

But they're wrong, and I'm right. I remembered this the other day, quite by accident. Here's how it happened:

Hiatus was ending. I was about to go back to work, whereupon I'd be expected to report to an office and act more or less like a grown-up five days a week until May of 2009. It was my last chance before the first day o' school to do the following: pamper myself; get a much-needed pedi; go to Barnes and Noble and sit on the floor flipping through lots of books I have no intention of buying (or, full disclosure, of reshelving); travel ridiculous distances by car to indulge random food cravings. So: I ventured deep into the wilds of Hollywood.

First, I went to the best Thai restaurant ever. It'll fool you from the outside - it's in a strip mall, next to a storage facility. But enter, and you are greeted by a ten-foot-high trash-metal sculpture of Elvis, and that is your first clue that you have come somewhere special.

I'd say go at night, for kicks, because a tiny, sexy man in a Nudie suit performs several shows each evening. He is known as Thai Elvis. I have a huge crush on him. There's also a guy who wears bowling shirts cut out of holographic-shiny material of the type most often used in the manufacture of stripper thongs. He does impressions, notably a poignant Kermit the Frog, all competent, all with the unwavering, morose expression familiar to everyone who calls L.A. home: the look of the failed actor. But anyway, enough about them; during the day it's all bright and sunshiny in there, a bunch of lightning-quick waiters talking to each other through secret-service earbuds.

I go there for this dish they call Morning Glory. I don't know if it's really the stuff that grows in your grandma's yard. It is green and stemmy and crunchy, made with lots of garlic and chili and I don't know what else, I can only assume sweet sweet crack because I will happily drive for an hour to get the stuff when the urge hits. Sometimes I'll mention to a friend or a coworker - oh, I'm thinking of going to this Thai place I like for some dinner, they have this vegetable dish ... and they'll get this dreamy look and go, "Are you talking about Palms Thai? The Morning Glory? Who the fuck knows what that stuff really is, but I ate it every single day of my pregnancy, and now the twins are geniuses."

So, that was lunch.

Then I went to a Korean spa to have the entire top layer of my skin scoured off my body by a small, brusque lady in a transparent black bra and panties who speaks zero English. In a room surrounded by naked old ladies, staring at my naked self.

Yeah, it's not the sexiest place to go for a massage, but you know what? Fuck that. I live in Schmancyville, I make a decent living, if I really wanted to I could go to one of those very very nice cushy hotel spa places. In fact, I do, once in a while; but when the classy, oh-so-corporate Burke Williams brochure talked about a treatment where they'd beat my ass with wheat stalks and I'd come out all smooth and fresh as a baby, I was expecting some kind of serious, borderline-kinky Russian-bathhouse exfoliation. Instead, a bored lady wisped soapy water on me with plastic car-wash fronds. Meh. I'm about the real thing, bitches.

Which you can actually get, in L.A. If you seek it. You receive my meaning? You getting the magic, yet? It's not everywhere in America you get to lie on a massage table and have someone leave no inch un-buffed (I betcha they skip the boobs at The Four Seasons - but don't boobs need scrubbing and oiling as much if not more than the surrounding skin? I mean, you gonna wax the car but skip the hood ornaments, people?), the chatter of half a dozen Korean ladies floating over your head? I love that - I love it when I don't speak a word of the language. No one will call an HOA meeting, or ask me to give them notes on their script, or fail to mention our dinner together is in their mind a date date, or on the other hand say they'll call and then never ever ever call, ever. My Korean buff lady is awesome, she makes no promises, she scrubs me, turns me over, washes my face with a little squirt of a cleanser called Naive, kneads my scalp so adeptly that I instantly forget I have anything in my life to stress out about, and hands me a tip envelope. Relationship over.

From there I was led to another room for a massage on my newly-exposed fresh and silky skin. Again, this massage was not polite. There was climbing on the table, and there were feet involved. Oh, don't be a pussy. Everything's clean, guys. And effective. Errant vertebrae snap back into line. I get off the table ready to produce twenty-two episodes of televised entertainment.

Are there Thai restaurants and Korean massage grottoes elsewhere on this green earth? But of course. Maybe there are even Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. If so - run, don't walk. I mean, you'll be risking a tummy-ache so intense you'll mistake it for organ failure, but it's worth it.

Sera and Dinda, suffering after a delicious meal at legendary Roscoe's.

These are just the outlines of my magical L.A. constellations. There are lots more, of course. I would do a whole series of posts about this, except... let's be honest, I totally won't get around to it.

Instead, I conscripted Simon into service. He's a lot cooler than I am. He lives on the cool side of town and goes to cool restaurants people like me haven't heard of yet because he has yet to email me about them. I called him and asked him to finish this post for me, which he has done in natty bullet-point fashion below. I like that. It serves to jog the brain. Inspires one to ask oneself, "what does my bullet point list look like, and why have I been ignoring it in favor of whining like a little bitch about traffic?" Maybe even nudge one to include one's Very Hot pals on one's next adventure into the secret heart of L.A., where celebs fear to tread.

Because ultimately our point here is that our city is a veritable onion of magic. There are layers galore, for anyone who is willing to drop the 'tude and embrace the perfect weather and beautiful light and vast ocean and 90-something languages and impressive cache of competent tattoo artists that is the city of angels. So, here's Sime's House Blend of magical goodness:

• Red-tailed hawks, Griffith Park coyotes and twilight owls.
  


• Ancient stone steps that lead up to overgrown, abandoned estates. (NOTE FROM SERA: Harry Houdini used to live in one of them!)
  


• Seedy-looking, neon-lit clubs blasting live salsa music through the wee hours.
  


• Snowy peaks and sunny beaches visible from the same hilltop.
  


• The afternoon parade of dogs and owners on the winding hilltop streets.
  


• Neighborhood bars that play old monster movies with the sound off and have a DJ spinning vintage hip-hop.
  


• Tacos off the truck ... just outside the bar playing the monster movies.
  


• Naked pool parties that somehow end up as philosophy seminars, and vice versa.
  


• Funky little art galleries curated by chatty women who turn out to have been legendary punk rockers in the '80s.
  







• Getting lost in some neighborhood and stumbling on a soccer game in progress: fierce Latino kids in uniforms flying at each other.
  


• The sound of a train chuffing through the rail yard when the air is thick with night-blooming jasmine.
  


• Sitting on a concrete ledge and eating kettle corn at the farmer's market between the pupusas bar and the kim-chee booth.
  


• The way the downtown skyline powers up at night like a parti-colored electric grin.
  


• Standing on Fairfax or Silverlake or Ocean with a cocktail buzz on, feeling a mellow breeze on your skin and not wanting the night to be over quite yet.
  


• That sense of infinite possibility that swings up like the lantern moon just when you surrender your plan for a quiet evening.
  

So corny. So poetic. So outside the circuit of expensive car - expensive restaurant - expensive home. But the magic is there if you're ready to let it scrub you clean the way a fierce yet tender Korean lady works over a weary pilgrim from the distant shores of TV land.

All you have to do is get lost. In your own backyard.

I Just Blogged To Say I Love You.

Dear Hotness That Is Vous,

Hey. It's Sera. I know, I know. It's been way, way too long, hasn't it?

I went halvsies on this here blog o' hotfulness with Simon Of The East, and here I sit in Santa Monica, having blogged not a whit in so long you've probably taken us off your bookmark list in betrayal and despair.

It's like this, folks. There was a strike; and then I went back to work and it was, let us say, very slightly busy; and then I was done and I got to go on hiatus, but it was this tiny hiatus compared to the hiati to which we who write for your couch-bound entertainment are generally accustomed. Just under a month, which is nothing to sneeze at, I know - I have friends with their own businesses who haven't taken time off in three years, and I have friends with kids who haven't had a day to themselves since the friggin' nineties. But still, it was only just long enough for me to take care of business.

What business? I'd love to share, because what's a blog for if not to digitally toot one's own metaphorical horn, but I can't. I'm uber-Jewlicious in my level of superstition, and all the shit I've been rocking is mid-rock. There was a point last week - Tuesday going into Wednesday, to be precise - where I got so in the zone I worked all night and straight through the next day. Don't feel bad for me, it was bliss, to just dive in the creative deep end because I want to rather than because I'll get fired/production will shut down/my professor will give me an F.

Sometime in the next few months, I'll either post about what/whom I was working on because things bloomed in fantastical fashion, or I'll have fallen on my face and have a hilarious cautionary tale with which to entertain you.

The one little thang I can tell you 'bout is that I got invited to contribute to a lush and deviant collection of gothic erotica curated by Susie Bright. It'll be out in time for Hannukah, I do believe. Because I apparently don't get enough of it at work, I wrote about a demon. I think I was a disgruntled nun in a past life.

So, yeah, I'm a slacker and I suck and maybe I remind you of your deadbeat dad who always said he'd call but almost never did. But, like your dad, beneath my charming, possibly drunk exterior, I really do love you and have the best of intentions.

xoxo,
Sera

Let's Get the Hell Out of This Desert.
Some Disorganized Passover Thoughts From Simon

It won't be the same watching The Ten Commandments this year, what with the guy who played Moses having passed on. ("I guess we can take his gun now," said a less-than-reverent friend. "Oh, too soon?")

But we've got plagues of our own to worry about; didn't you see that ABC debate? Some people aren't wearing flag pins!

We've been so damn busy, in fact, that my family didn't even get around to planning our seder until a few days ago. While Julia and sister Jo normally undertake the Charoset preparation, this year we opted to outsource to brilliant local cateress and VHJ Lisa Feinstein, whose Provisions offers an enticing, original Pesach menu (full disclosure: she's also a client. But I wouldn't steer you wrong).

This year, as ever, a lot of us will participate in a ritual that celebrates freedom. And as always, we'll be asked to consider the ways in which we're still somehow enslaved – to our obsessions, our emotional baggage, our chemical dependencies and other bad habits.

Like every year, we'll be enjoined to recall our people's past sufferings and – at least at our table – to consider how we are obligated to witness and, if possible, alleviate the sufferings of Jews and non-Jews alike, everywhere in the world.

We'll parse the symbolic importance of the items on our seder plates, and the youngest child (ever more precocious and performance-oriented) will charmingly enunciate the four questions about why this night is different from all others.

But I've got a question of my own (I can't help it – I'm the youngest sibling myself): How will this year be different from all others?

I ask because I'm experiencing something strange and unbidden, something attached to and yet wholly separate from the dark, anxious meandering that has marked the last several years. Like I've been wandering in the desert but see, in the distance, the possibility of a shady sanctuary.

I promised myself, this election season, that I wouldn't get sucked into the vortex of political obsession. A lifetime of disappointments dotted with half-hearted victories – and culminating in the dumbshit dystopia of the Bush years – had persuaded me that laying my bleeding heart in the center of the highway as a ritual sacrifice was no longer an option.

I had just about comfortably settled into what I regarded as a Mature Middle-Aged skepticism, and thus could regard all electoral jousting from an armored remove. Exhibit A? An entry from this very blog that promised, "Your candidate is a sociopath." So much more fun. So much easier. So much less painful that having a dog in the race.

Then along came a candidate who got me believing.

So about this strange flowering of hope in the Bush-bleached desert of my soul. It's forced me to admit some things to myself. That as much as I've decried the politics of fear, and as much as I've turned the mighty X-ray of my dialectical mind on "hope" as a trope, I'm just as fearful as anyone.

I'm afraid that if I open myself up to the blinding rays of what could be, a trap will spring shut on my flesh and spirit. I'm afraid that if I dare to believe in a candidate who seems to speak for the best in us rather than the worst, I'll find myself deceived. That a Pharaoh or a Karl Rove or a James Earl Ray or some operative in a black helicopter will end it all with a bullet or a conspiracy or a conspiracy of bullets. For all the invective I've leveled at the fearmongers, I've been a loyal consumer of fear.

Here's the thing: Hope is the opposite of fear, it's true. But hope isn't just a big soft hand that lifts you onto a fluffy carefree cloud, far above the whirring blades of despair. Hope is an invitation, whether the hearty roar of a fired-up crowd or just a sexy whisper from the universe, to leave the dreary confines of one's grey cell of detachment. To come out and play. Hope will ring the doorbell, but you've got to drag your sorry ass outside.

I am 43 years old. During the sweltering, chaotic summer of my birth, three extraordinary kids drove down to Mississippi to stand up for a more inclusive vision of democracy. The loyal exemplars of traditional values, fine Christians all and fiercely protective of their local heritage, repaid the efforts of these hopeful Americans with a fusillade of bullets. The martyrdom of this trio fell hard on two California Jews who were soon expecting their third child, the one who'd later be tasked with the four questions at the Passover table. They gave me Andrew as a middle name, in honor of Andrew Goodman, a young Jew who sacrificed everything to extend the blessings of liberty.

I wasn't quite four years old when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Once again, the hopes of forward-thinking, open-hearted people were shadowed with anguish. And what followed might fairly be called forty years in the desert.

And in the decades since, so much destruction. So much betrayal. So much enslavement to triviality. In such a world, isn't hoping for better just a burden? Let's just hide in the bunker, catch up on some TiVo'd triviality and gird ourselves against the wicked, wasteful world with a Costco-sized supply of contemptuous wisecracks.

But then, wouldn't you know it, the doorbell rings.

Maybe you saw this video of a fantastic poem by an incredibly promising young writer/performer. It moved and delighted me because it cut to the heart of this dilemma I've been kvetching about.

Here's the part of the Passover story I'm focused on this year: Getting the hell out of the desert, and how seriously scary that is. How much easier it would be to stay in Egypt, to be gangsta-hard and stylishly cynical, rather than make the long, hot, sweaty, hopeful trek. How tough it is to believe that the angry red sea of the status quo will give way for us, no matter how resolutely we march. But also about how impossible it is, when hope rings the doorbell, to pretend you're not home.

Have a beautiful, meaningful Pesach. On this potentially liberating holiday, I greet you with all of my tenderly, tentatively hopeful heart.

In Sickness and in Health

Presenting a couple of Very Hot Jews.

They were married around this time of year 58 years ago, and they remain, to me, a model of nuptial loyalty and companionship.

They are there for each other. This is the irreducible kernel of married life – not flowers or neckties or nonstop lovey-dovey. The "in sickness and in health" part of those vows is no joke when you spend your entire lives together.

Mama recently had some (long-awaited and much anticipated) surgery and Dad was there, just as she was there for him during his procedure not long before. They are wise enough to know they also need outside help, but each remains a pillar for the other.

And that matters a lot – not just for them, but for a lot of other people, too.

The cake actually reads "Keep up the good work."

Julia and I just celebrated our anniversary as well. The date marked two years of marriage but also 17 years together; having both survived ill-advised early hitchings, we coasted along in unwedded bliss for 15 years. But the same principles apply, I'm happy to say.

We went to the movies and then to a fantastic restaurant, where we drank rosé bubbly and looked moonily at each other and ambled (with much hilarity) down memory lane. 17 years have truly flown by, and it's because we're having a blast together.

But the thing that I realize with increasing clarity? The best, the absolute most sterling and precious thing about a long-term relationship? Being known. Not having to explain. Anticipating and being anticipated. The way one's reflexive bullshit collapses in the wake of a wry look from the other. Hearing something on NPR in one's car and knowing the other is laughing at it in her car. The mere thought of doing all that work to be known, ever again? Exhausting beyond belief.

photo by Josh Pickering

And as we get older we succumb to the vicissitudes of aging and must of necessity fuss over each other. We will (and do) talk of pills and doctors and exercises and the diminishing keenness of our senses. Sunrise, Sunset. In sickness and in health.

For as long as possible.

More to Come. No Joke.

Sime's wife hates practical jokes. She says she finds nothing practical about them. Maybe there's something to that, especially as concerns Internet communications; you've come to trust the Web as a semi-reliable provider of news and information, and suddenly it's crawling with prankish faux-stories designed to give the unwary an aneurysm.

So trust us, it's no April Fool's Day joke when we tell you that we regret not having posted an update lately and that we will soon. We could give you the usual litany of excuses – workload, international intrigues, those little two-tone pills that also give you terrible dry mouth – but by now you should know that we're just not very consistent. Call us pisher. But soon enough you'll be seeing a pipin' hot new post from your fave Hot Hebrews. Abso-freakin'-lutely.

Oh, and we're converting to Mormonism.