Irony, While the Strike Is Hot
a few pages of hope from Simon

So you've probably heard by now that the writers are on strike. You'll be hearing a lot more about that from Sera because, well, she's on strike too — but thanks to some exhaustive negotiations, I managed to persuade her to stay on at Very Hot Jews (she's getting a bigger cut of our merch, especially the keychain and underwear concessions, as well as a massive royalty bump when we finally hit syndication). Whew!

In any case, I've been meaning to send out a quick entreaty to the other writers out there. Just because you can't work on your shows doesn't mean you have to put your creative genius on hiatus.

Why, you can finally start researching that massive tome you've always wanted to write on the history of scrimshaw.

Or perhaps pen a cheeky roman à clef about the kooky world of TV production! We know that in your mind you're already casting Ryan Gosling or January Jones to play you ... come off it.

Jeez, you could just blog while catching up on your backlog of TiVo'd procedurals. It's what I do most of the time, and I'm technically still at work.

Oh, there is something else you can do that's a smidge more relevant to your profession. Aspiring TV writers who hope to be successful enough to go on strike one day: You should be especially attentive. Put down that copy of Us Weekly, swig that Macchiato, and peep this.

Dec. 15 is the deadline for the Other Network Comedy Writing Contest. Which means that if you have an original comedy property to write and/or shoot, now's the time.

What's the Other Network Comedy Writing Contest, you ask? Well, if you hadn't been paying so much attention to Suri Cruise's diamond-studded pacifier and daydreaming about being wealthy enough to turn your own baby into a sociopath, you'd already know. But that's cool, I'll hip you to the deets, as they say during story meetings at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

Some of the smartest, most enlightened comedy people in town are looking at original comedy submissions. The contest was started by Greg Miller and Beth Lapides of the amazing Un-Cabaret (where comics and comedy writers showcase their most personal work — it's a million miles from those topical-gags-in-front-of-a-brick-wall clubs); the judges have worked on shows like, oh, The Simpsons, Sex and the City, SNL, The Office and many others. They know their shit, and they wanna see yours.

Past winners of the contest (now in its fourth year) saw their work read by top execs at Comedy Central, got (useful) notes from showrunners who expressed interest in being attached to the projects, got hooked up with top agents and managers and, for all we know, had sex with Charlize Theron in a bathtub full of champagne*.

Yes, there's a nominal fee to enter. I don't want to hear any whining about that. Do you think these folks should pay to administer the contest themselves? Are they beholden to Us-wielding acolytes for some reason? No, I say. Pay up and be glad about it.

You can see all the rules on the contest page. Go here for details.

At the very least, it'll help you focus some ideas. Be honest: Do you really have the patience for that scrimshaw book?

*sex with Charlize Theron not guaranteed to all winners. Nor is anything else.

Dracula Is the Reason for the Season
A Halloween Sermon by Simon

If you grew up in the '60s or '70s, Halloween triggers a certain, shall we say, fervor that simply can't be matched today.

Don't get me wrong — nowadays the jack-o-lantern celebration is more seamlessly exploited than ever, making tons of money as children shell out for Harry Potter costumes and adults shell out for Britney Spears costumes and everyone buys those bags of "fun-size" chocolate bars that weigh as much as a sack of topsoil. There are Halloween fairs and Halloween stores and sexy Halloween parties for the grown-ups and Halloween promotions and Halloween movie marathons on AMC.

Then, at the stroke of midnight, it's full tilt toward Thanksgiving.

Wearing costumes, being spooky, eating so much candy that your molars sing like Zatoichi's sword ... America loves it all.

And I'd be the last person to bemoan the "commercialization" of the holiday. But when I was a kid it had a certain, well, religious intensity.

Y'see, I was one of those kids who dreamed about Halloween all year long. This was in part because I was the weird kid who spawned the weird adult I'm proud to be today. But I believe it's also because I grew up in the Second Golden Age of Monsters.

The greatest monster movies of all time were made in the '30s and '40s. I'm talking about the Universal classics, natch: Frankenstein and at least a few of its sequels, Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man and assorted lesser-known treasures.

Why have monster films been so underwhelming of late, despite massive effects budgets and the doting attention of "serious" filmmakers? Because the desire to either shock with gore or tickle with kitsch (I'm looking at you, Stephen Sommers) has overshadowed what made the Uni monsters great: feeling.

The Frankenstein Monster, Dracula and the Wolf Man are tragic, dude. They're outcasts, exiles, prisoners of cruel fate. They feel longing and love, regret and even ennui. And yes, rage — but that wild destructive power has a context. Feel me? Lycanthrope Larry Talbot desperately seeks a cure for his nightmare condition. The Monster wants a friend. Dracula feels the dread weight of immortality crushing what little joy he can still feel. The Mummy wanders forever in search of his lost love. And the Hunchback? Don't even get me started.

For me, the Golden Age monsters were the highest of high art. I soaked it all up: the shadowy cinematography, the innovatively grotesque makeup, the vaulting score music and, most of all, performances that blended pathos and irony, melodrama and melancholy.

These flicks were hits when they came out, but when they were re-released in theaters and shown on TV in the '50s and '60s, they were welcomed into the cultural mainstream. They became domesticated into comedy, into music, into pop art; they were part of the family.

On the other side of the coin, Disney opened the Haunted Mansion when I was a kid; Famous Monsters magazine was a must-have subscription for geeky boys; and William Castle's amazing spookfests were making the TV rounds. Floating candelabra, wheezing pipe organs, walking skeletons, sinister laughter and portraits with moving eyes were the apotheosis of the form.

All of which is to say that for me Halloween was a time for the exaltation of all things creepy. I set up elaborate "haunted houses" to frighten the local kids, with demon claws descending on fishing line and mangled corpses fashioned out of old clothes. I had extensive collections of plastic fangs, tubes of "Vampire Blood," top hats and cloaks, which I donned to distribute mini-Snickers as ominously as possible to the courageous Spidermen and ballerinas who dared to ring the family doorbell.

Long after the Halloween decorations were gone from the neighborhood houses and local drugstores, my surroundings remained monster-friendly. An array of posters and photos from classic fright films adorns my office even now. Today might be the day I share my monsters with everyone, but where I live — by which I mean in the cobwebby corridors of my eternally eight-year-old imagination — it's always Halloween.

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The Very Hot Top Five List.


The Very Hot Jews are today's special guest stars at Susan Henderson's LitPark, "where writers come to play." We have composed a Top Five list to edify and inspire you in these dark times. So won't you clicky-clicky, you hot little thang?

And as long as we're here, continued good wishes and best hopes to all the folks fighting and fleeing the flames in SoCal. One of our "top five" entries notes the power of the Net; here's a perfect example: You can help folks out just by clicking here.

Fire and Rain
by Simon

The sky is grey and creepy. Fires are consuming multiple corners of our state, and we Jews are hiding indoors. It's pretty terrifying to think that in these techno times we're still about as helpless as our primitive ancestors: only a change in the winds can stop the devasatation.

Needless to say, our hearts go out to everyone in the path of those flames.

Even if you don't cleave to magical thinking (and that includes "The End Times"), it's tough to resist the pull of apocalyptic narratives. I mean, Cali's burning, Nawlins is flooding, ice caps are melting, the Constitution is being eaten by political termites ... seems there's very little in the way of good news.

Which is why we take our joy where we can get it.

photos by Josh Pickering

I had a blast of communal pleasure so powerful this weekend that I'm still recovering. And since I was a co-producer as well as a presenter/performer, I'm now feeling a kind of bummerific post-partum low that isn't particularly helped by smoky air and particulate matter. But man, have I got some new memories to cherish.

I'm speaking of The Classic Rock Singalong, which had its club debut on Saturday night at M Bar in Hollywood. With the help of musical director and mensch supreme Josh Pickering and an array of wonderful guest players and singers, I translated what had once been a house party into a public gathering.

The band played hits from the past several decades (you name it: Beatles, Monkees, Neil Young, Carpenters, Journey, Bad Company, Cheap Trick, AC/DC, Blondie, Bon Jovi, Human League, etc.), and the audience sang along, with the assistance of lyric sheets.

I warbled a few lead vocals, as did wonderful guests like Mary Birdsong, Quinton Flynn, Maureen Mahon, Josh and others. But the most magical moments were when the person on the mic stopped singing and all you could hear was the crowd. I walked to the very back of the room a couple of times and saw nothing but ecstatic pleasure on people's faces as they wailed along. I'll never forget it.

There were several highlights, but "Total Eclipse of the Heart," that dazzling epic of pop sturm und drang, may have been the apex of the evening.

Accolades have been pouring in ever since, but this note was perhaps the most satisfying — and most relevant for the purposes of this blog: "Weird as this might sound, the whole thing reminded me of Chabadniks singing songs around the Shabbat table. Same sort of joyful, communal abandon. Or maybe we were just a bunch of drunk 40 year olds belting out songs that reminded us of being in junior high."

I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who helped put this unforgettable experience together, and to everyone who was there holding a candle aloft instead of cursing the darkness.

We're going to do another one in December; if you're in L.A., please join us. In the meantime, stay cool — and let's hope for a quick and decisive change in the winds.

You can pitch in to help victims of the Southern California wildfires by going here.

My Neuroses: Collect 'Em All!

(by Simon)

How's this for a non-bombshell: I hate going to the dentist.

No, I mean really. I have sleepless nights beforehand. And despite an oral-hygiene regimen (I brush and floss regularly and even go after the plaque every now and again with a tiny, steel-tipped implement of torture) that is a vast improvement on the days when I munched peanut brittle in bed and used the toothbrush exclusively to clean my voluminous collection of die-cast Civil War figurines, I always anticipate the worst news from the cheerful octogenarian of the Tribe who's been my mouth-care specialist since I was a lad.

When I say "the worst news" I don't just mean an expensive and painful (and painfully expensive) new procedure that will entail drilling, bleeding and cement.

I mean news that comes in a glowing red box borne by a phalanx of winged demons who reside deep in my psyche. News like "We will be knocking out all of your teeth with a sledgehammer today, and you will wander the streets mumbling like Gabby Hayes," or "We will be replacing your lower jaw with a hinged piece of balsa wood, so you might consider never being photographed again."

Do you get the picture? We're talking about neurosis here, the kind of phobic tumble into unreality that (unlike, say, voices that tell you to kill) generally seems quaint and funny to others.

Perhaps it's because I go to the same dental practice (and pretty much the same aforementioned cheery practitioner) I've seen since I was a tot, when inspection of my choppers was so darkly terrifying that I had to be pried from the family sedan with a crowbar. The walls of the children's practice were then (as they are now) plastered with happy cartoon stickers. The kiddies who'd had their cavities drilled were invariably led to the "treasure chest" of toys, where their swollen faces hovered over a sea of plastic doodads from which they were to select a consolation prize for the oral invasion they'd endured.

Back then, I'd have preferred to climb inside that chest and hide until it was time to go home. If claustrophobia hadn't been one of my other neuroses.

Anyhoo, I went to the ol' Riverside-Coldwater Medical Building yesterday under a particularly ominous cloud of trepidation, as I'd been experiencing some pain in a tooth and I hadn't had X-rays in a year.

Oh, perhaps now's the time to explain that I have such a powerful gag reflex that I can't even look at a tongue depressor. So dental X-rays are, for me, about as appealing a prospect as waterboarding would be to a housecat.

In fact, I had to interrupt the dental hygienist repeatedly as she made the rounds of my molars, what with the ol' reflex kicking in.

You would think, from all of this nightmarish anxiety — prompted by an experience most people consider routine (and some even find pleasant) — that I were going to see this doctor:

...instead of this one.

Okay, so it was a LOT of worry over nothing. No X-rays required. No work required. And here's the real upside, and reminder of why I still go to see Doctor N after all these years: What a mensch! Gentle, patient, good-humored, he always manages to disarm my closely guarded, ancestral horror with a few deft and haimisch words, the last of which are usually, "Please say hello to your family for me." He is a very cool Jew.

But of course, our neuroses are always doing push-ups in the corner, aren't they? They have at least six months to get me geared up for my next visit.

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.

Existential Threats
Yet another rant by Simon

OK, campers — time for today's thought exercise.

Pretend, just for a moment, that the President of your country is a total douchebag. A smirking bigot who milks religious prejudice for political gain. An anti-Semitic, homophobic jerkwad who treats indisputable scientific and historical facts as, at best, untested hypotheses. A tyrannical hyena who fecklessly utters terrifying threats against sovereign nations. A power-mongering shitheel who's gutpunched a modern country until it staggered backward in the direction of the Middle Ages.

I know, I know. But try to picture it. Stretch that long imagination of yours!

Got it? Good for you. Now let's say that a seriously huge, badass foreign power has decided that your President is a threat to the security of the region and, indeed, the very globe. You might even be inclined to agree; fact is, if President Scumbucket choked on a lamb shank or a pretzel or something, you'd be unlikely to slip on a black armband.

But here's the catch: The danger posed by your leader, the big foreign government declares, necessitates that bombs fall on your neighborhood, your electricity grid, the closest hospital, the little market where you buy vegetables, all nearby sources of potable water, the buildings housing ancient treasures of your civilization, TV and radio stations, etc. Perhaps one of these bombs will fall right on your home, scattering the limbs of your relatives and pets into an interspecies jumble.

As much as President Creep makes your gorge rise, you might be thinking that this is not the preferred way to bring about regime change.

So as the weird reverberations of Ahmadinejad's visit to New York begin to subside, as the Liebermans, Podhoretzes, Cheneys, Bushes and other bloodthirsty excuses for human beings populating the political class amp up their demand for military strikes right now just in case Iran might one day build a nuke, I want you to forget about the leaders for just a moment and pretend you're just somebody who lives on a street in a city where bombs might go off.

Speaking personally, even if I believed our weapons could surgically scrub only evil leaders off the planet without collaterally singeing the flesh of the innocent, I'd still be agin it. America should finally hang up its illegal-foreign-intervention jersey once and for all. It was always wrong, and now it isn't even accomplished competently. But the fact is, our bombs aren't as smart as our leaders say they are. They can't tell a Caligula-like dictator from an apple-cheeked schoolchild, and guess which one is better equipped to survive an explosion?

Once again, I rant about this because we Jews are going to hear a lot, right in the wake of making our yearly amends for tiny wrongs and insults, about how Tehran going up in flames is somehow good for the Chosen. Even though Jews will be among those blown to bits by those righteous explosives. Even though Jews will suffer reprisals from idiot terrorists who glory in the extension of the war against the Great Satan. Even though Jews will be blamed by certain parties for how it all turns out, regardless of what we do or say.

Once again, with my full throat, with the flying, curly locks of all my Semitic forebears urging me on, I say: Fuck you, Neocons. Fuck you, Joe and Norman and Dick and George and fucking AIPAC. Go to hell. Even those of you who are nominally Jewish are not good for the Jews.

Once again, I say that if I really thought that being a Jew meant I had to go along with this destructive nightmare I would become an Episcopalian. But it doesn't. Jews have been great, strong voices against misguided militarism for eons. It's time for us to speak up, VERY LOUDLY, against a new, disastrous war in Iran.

Paging Dr. Sandman

Hi, guys. Whatcha been up to? I've been dreaming my ass off. Usually, I leave that to Simon. I generally wake up with only the vaguest notion that my brain was doing something off in the corner while I slept the sleep of the dead. But not lately. Lately I have full technicolor dream recall.

I think it might be because I'm writing something about dreams for my job. I've been ruminating on the twisty logic of dream images, reading about the unconscious mind and its weirdnesses. Perhaps it's unsurprising that I've remembered a disproportionate number of dreams lately. And so I've found myself doing the thing that I do when I recall my dreams: trying to figure out what the high holy fuck they mean. What can I say - I took Psych 101 in college, but I was kind of hung over that semester.

I've had a good dose of "the usual": trying to dial a phone, but I just can't get the numbers right; going someplace else but inexplicably ending up at my therapist's house; getting a tattoo I instantly, vehemently regret; discovering that a dead loved one has been alive all this time; and, of course, the one where I wander down to the ocean and everyone's taking their clothes off and jumping in. (Yes, I know that one's about sex; even I got the memo on water imagery.)

Dream of this tattoo, wake up screaming.

I've had dreams lately that have proved fantastically useful. I've plagarized them for work, for one thing.

And I had a dream where I ran into a writer who's in the middle of a ginormous and daunting project - a guy who'd slipped my mind for months. (In my defense, he lives in New York, which is really, really - check a map - really far away.) I woke up doing the "I shoulda had a V-8" head slap and emailed him copious good wishes. Because God knows that when I'm the one gnawing a hole through the outer limits of my brain (did that metaphor work? I'm thinking no) trying to write something hard, I like to be reminded that someone out there assumes my work is going passably well. So, file that one under Dreams Leading To Mildly Menschy Behavior.

And I had this other dream, about this other person, and in the dream I was beating the shit out of her. I didn't check the credits, but my guess is - directed by Tarantino. It goes without saying (I hope) that in life I rarely punch people so hard my hand goes all the way through their sternum. But in the dream, I was a total cartoon ninja supreme. I was scary. I was She Whom You Shouldn't Have Fucked With. It felt awesome and queasy, like a roller coaster ride at an amusement park known to occasionally kill a customer or two. And I woke up not angry but the opposite: in this zenlike state of blissful calm, fully aware for the first time that I really. Don't. Like. That person. At all. And therefore have a great excuse to use that new word I've been hearing tossed around, "frenemy." How awesome is that word? Wish I'd had it in high school. Coulda applied it to everyone!

And then. Oh, and then. I had this dream.

In the dream, I run into a male acquaintance. Someone I know casually. You know, a friendofafriend. (Quick, someone coin a shorter word for that.)

We're on some mazelike studio lot, don't know which - kind of like in waking life, where I've gotten lost on every lot in Los Angeles. I once walked around the Paramount lot for a fricking hour trying to find my car. And no, it's not that big. Anywho. He walks me to my car. We give each other a friendly hug. And then, out of nowhere, incredible, movie-caliber kissing ensues. If that kiss has really happened? Top five of my lifetime so far. No joke.

It bears mentioning that this gentleman has been entirely off my radar in real life. You know, the Radar Of Bangability. Never once thought about it.

So, naturally, I wake up feeling all tingly, and, well, slightly obsessed with that particular man. But more important to you, oh faithful Blog Reader, I woke up asking myself the appropriate question, which is, "What the fuck was THAT? What did it MEAN?!"

I've decided to stop at nothing to answer that question. But let me tell you, it's not simple. There are just so many rows to hoe when it comes to interpreting the Unconscious As Auteur. I asked a lot of people, and I got a lot of contradictory opinions. Then, I remembered this is a tangentially Jewy blog, and I emailed a real life rabbi. Posed the question to him: what's the proper Jewish way to interpret dreams?

I have so much to share. I'll tell you all about it... in our next installment. Unless there's an installment in between, which could happen. But point is, I'll be getting back to you, with rabbinical fruits of wisdom. In the meantime, enjoy your nap.

5768

Great to see so many foxy Jews at the Dip't in Honey par-tay at the Echoplex. For those of you who couldn't attend, you missed a devastating spread from Provisions (the apple tartlets! the red velvet cupcake tree!); Jill Soloway's rockin' PowerPoint slides, which mixed sumptuous imagery with stirring messages; Mocean Worker's spontaneous DJ duet with a shofar blower, which was pretty much the essence of Reboot; Paul V's devious mash-up mixology; thought-provoking materials from PJA, Mazon and other forward-looking organizations; and lots of joyous schmoozing among a cross-section of sexy chaverim.

Thanks to Julie and Mitchell for the use of the hall, to Jane for organizational wizardry, to Lisa for going all out in the sweets department, to Adam and Paul for rocking the tunes, to Jill for inspiring visuals, to POM for bringing the juice, to Neil of Gilly Flowers for a typically wicked centerpiece, and to everyone else who helped make it happen. Can't wait for the next throwdown — it's always great to see your pretty punims.

Dick Clark's Rockin' Rosh Hashanah

Yo, my peeps! What year is it? A new one, we're told, although your loyal ultra-secular pals freely acknowledge that we don't really spend much time cozied up with the ancient calendar. In the past, we further admit, our Rosh Hashanah activities have been limited to the pro forma get-togethers coordinated by our relatives.

So it's a new thing for us to be co-sponsors of Dip't in Honey, the Happy Jew Year spectacular set to go down at L.A.'s Echoplex next Tues. night (9/18), also brought to you by Reboot, Pom and the fine folks at KCRW.

But we're getting into the spirit, and we hope you will too — not only by attending, if you happen to be in town, but also by submitting your holiday blessing/wish/invocation, which will appear on a big screen as DJs Mocean Worker and Paul V lay down the smokin' grooves, Provisions LA's Lisa Feinstein serves the primo treats and scores of attractive Jews (and sundry chai-curious gentiles) sip on tangy, holiday-appropriate Pomtinis and shake their groove things.

So: Send us the good word, chaverim, and when we say we'll see you next Tuesday, be assured we mean it in the nicest possible way.

Today Marks an Important Anniversary.

So, it's Sept. 11 again, and it seems like an appropriate time to remember something that happened a few years ago.

Well, yeah, that too. We mean, six years ago, when we were all clammy with fear and despair and body counts were rising and dire reports were raging and the newscasters and Republican politicians tried very hard to conceal their boners, we had an inkling this date would, you know, go down in infamy.

But 9/11/01 was also the day Sera and Simon's better half, Julia, had a date to drink tea together, and they decided — amid the shockwaves of that rough beast smashing into America's Jerusalem — not to cancel. Chado Teahouse was closed, even though they said they'd be open, so Sera and Jules proceeded to Elixir, where their disbelief was mingled with conversation about a host of other topics. The sense that "everything has changed" hadn't yet sunk in.

Sera came back to Julia and Simon's dingbat apartment in North Hollywood and they watched cable news reports of the unfolding nightmare; Simon, newly stricken with Hepatitis A (a delightful story in its own right), was stretched out on the couch, viewing the horrible footage with a literally jaundiced eye.

But despite the surreal terror of it all, there's a nugget of sweetness at the heart of this dreadful memory. Because we all became much closer, dearer friends that day.

Indeed, it was such a milestone in the history of our bonding that Sera came over to Julia and Simon's house five years later to commemorate the anniversary. And on that night, in addition to recalling the disorienting events of that prior 9/11, we proceeded to celebrate our friendship anew with quite a bit of champagne.

Out of that joyous round of toasts on 9/11/06 came a great deal of squealing, uproarious laughter and the first tenuous steps down the road that became this blog.

As we've mentioned in the past, Sera and Simon first envisioned a book, but stupid, stupid literary people were for some inconprehensible reason not prepared to cut us an enormous, debt-annihilating check. So, after a couple of weeks, we turned the scribblings engendered by our bubbly blowout into the nascent Jewy bleatings you've come to know and love.

So, to reiterate: 9/11 is, in addition to everything else, the anniversary of the birth of the VHJ. It's also a sacred holiday that honors a miraculous friendship for which we're hugely, incredibly grateful.

In a way, it was a foregone conclusion that right-wingers would see the fiery death of thousands of our people as an opportunity to shove their wretched Christo-fascist vision down our collective gullet. And it was probably inevitable that terror alerts would eventually become fodder for Jay Leno and that the "war" would simply be a new frame for the standard U.S. policy of blowing up whatever stood in the way of the oil supply. The solemnity of those first freakish hours and days gave way mostly to a bitter but not entirely un-hilarious comprehension of the frailty of our own system and the venal unworthiness of our so-called leaders.

But what are you gonna do, lay down and die? Not these Jews.

We don't laugh at the tragedy so many people are reliving today, but we go on laughing in spite of it. And we're able to do so in large part because we have some fantastic fuckin' friends.

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.