Matthue Roth's Blog, page 131

Thank G-d I Didn't Name This Book "Kosher Jesus"

Okay, this is a big time for Jupiter. Next week, there's a new Jupiter story coming out -- chapter two of Enemies, the sequel to Losers, if you're keeping track. (If you aren't keeping track, Enemies is sort of a scavenger-hunt novel, where each chapter shows up in a different place -- chapter one is in this anthology, for instance.)



So I just got asked for a biography, and I wanted to include the title of the first story. I know I should really have it memorized, since I wrote it and everything, but you know that's not how these things always play out. Plus, the editor was British, and I'd originally titled it "Girl Jesus on the Uptown Train" and she didn't know what uptown meant, or that trains are what we call aboveground subways in Philadelphia (actually, we call it The El, but I knew nobody would have any clue what I was talking about if I wrote that)....anyway, we called it something like "Girl Jesus on the Inbound Subway," or maybe it was originally "Inbound Train" and we switched it to "Uptown Subway," and I'm not even sure if "uptown" should be capitalized in the title since it's sort of a preposition--



(And this is the way anxious people think. And I am an anxious person.)



(And there really is a reason I used "Jesus" in the title. You'll find out, eventually. But I can't spoil all the stories at once.)



So I turned to Google. Basically just searched my name + Jesus, and to my great surprise and immense pleasure, found a bunch of reviews about it. Which I didn't know existed at all for maybe almost a year, and  which I incredibly apologize for not blogging about sooner.






This one is just awesome, in which my story is called "swift" and "beautifully written" and "with a stinging twisty bit at the end," and that's not even the nicest thing she says about it. (Spoiler: I now have a couch to crash upon in London any time I want to.)

And I freaking got picked for Short Story Saturday! I wish I could say it was just because it was Shabbos and I was off the Internet, but, no, this was months ago. "I love how troubled and prone to fantasy he was." I think they're talking about Jupiter but I know they're really talking about me.





Okay, sit tight. The next chapter hits soon in Apiary magazine, which will be (a) online and (b) free, and which will (c) feature Bates, who is Jupiter's gay death-metal best friend/antagonist/confidante. I'll let you know exactly when it's up. And if you haven't read "Girl Jesus," I'm pretty sure there's at least part of it in the preview on Amazon.



And, bonus, double update: This is the cover of Cornered, which will have the next Jupiter story! Okay, end of excitement. Yeah, right.

Patrick Aleph Rocks My Religion

For someone whose life is writing on the Internet, Patrick Aleph still has a lot of secrets.

Aside from running the alterna-Torah site PunkTorah, the "online minyan" OneShul, the collection The G-d Project, and a bunch of other sites, Aleph is an astoundingly prolific blogger and YouTube video-maker. As a convert, his perspective on Judaism -- and on Jews -- is that of both an insider and outsider, and his observations on Jewish life and belief are often reflective of that. The things he loves, he loves. And the things he finds disquieting or hard to swallow -- well, he doesn't have any hesitation about making note of that, either.





If you've never encountered Aleph before, or if there's too much of his stuff out in the universe for you to know where to start, here's a great place. He's just released -- for free -- an e-book collection of his writings, titled, appropriately,PunkTorah, named after both his punk do-it-yourself principles and his website. The two dozen or so essays touch on everything from the actual nuts-and-bolts of Jewish practice to the more aesthetic and eschatological wtf-nesses of belief (how weird is it that we believe in an intangible, invisible G-d who doesn't actively interact with humanity, anyway?). And he really isn't afraid to break boundaries or mess around with tradition: In one piece, Patrick talks about working with queer Jews, self-proclaimed Jews who've neither traditionally converted nor been born into the religion. And the next piece is titled "Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From Chabad."



Actually, his essays are almost all amazingly-titled. OK, let me just give you my five favorites:



* Indie Rock Is My Shacharit Siddur
* Alterna-frum
* Walgreens and Tempeh Reubens Brought Me Closer To God
* Star Wars and Andy Warhol: PunkTorah's Non-Jewish Influences
* Diary of An Angry Convert



Full disclosure: Patrick cites me in a few of the essays. But I didn't remember that until after I was almost finished writing this, and I still think it's a pretty damn great book. And it's free, so you aren't wasting any money -- or any trees, for that matter.

Truant, but truthful

Tons of stuff to update, and I am totally truant. There have been a lot of people saying a lot of really nice things about Automatic, and I should write about them. But first I need to say a really nice thing about someone else: The amazing Ethan Young's first full-length graphic novel, Tails, is finally coming out! You can, and should, order it now. It's about being an artist and a vegetarian and an Asian geek with fantasies about turning into a superhero and living in New York City.







Oh, and I show up occasionally in the book.



And, totally separate, my sometimes-editor David Levithan compiles a best-of music list every year, and polls his coterie. His most recent list was just posted. Here's my entry:



Matthue R Goes Camp 



Weird thing: There's not much punk/loud stuff on here. I mean, Wild Flag, but that might be a vote for my past. I think that the most exciting stuff I'm finding is stuff that I'm just starting to give a second thought to? Also, other thing: A lot of the albums here are free mixtapes that the artists give away online. I mean, I love the hip-hop community.



most essential: Childish Gambino, Camp



and:

2. Wild Flag, Wild Flag

3. Frank Ocean, nostalgia, ultra.

4. Shondes, Searchlights

5. Regina Spektor, Live in London

6. Roots, undun

7. Nicki Minaj, Pink Friday (which I know didn't come out this year)

8. Girls in Trouble, Like You, Like Me

9. The Amy Winehouse uncollected-songs album.

10. House of Balloons, The Weeknd



Just in case you're curious, NONE of my albums made the Top Ten. Am I really cool, or just really out of touch?

HelloGiggles, Automatic-ally

Hey, so HelloGiggles.com featured my new book  Automatic  as their Item of the Day yesterday!

Besides being (actress-slash-singer-slash-Hitchhiker's Guide wunderkind) Zooey Deschanel and (producer) Sophia Rossi's website, they also feature particularly awesome writers such as Julia Gazdag (who wrote this piece) and Apocalypstick (who's just great), and it's a place that I actually read, which makes it particularly astounding for me to see my book in the same graphic space that I'm used to seeing things that are...well, not my book.

[A]fter blazing through the whole book in one sitting, I sat lost in a puddle of memories I had forgotten I experienced.
I love this book. I also love that even though you can get it for a kindle or as a pdf, you can also get a real life copy that's handmade. And for $4.99. Including shipping. That's way more than worth it. I don't even understand that pricing. I've paid $25 for books that didn't touch me as much as this one did.

Here, read the rest of it!

Automatic, the Real (Well, Paper) Version

So I wrote this book. It's a short book -- 15,000 words, or about a quarter the size of your average novel.

The book's on Kindle and as a pdf for pretty cheap, $1.99. I'm an old-fashioned sort, though -- I really like reading things in my hands. So I handmade a version of Automatic, which you can buy right here, and see photographs of below.

It's called Automatic, and I think it's really amazing. It's about my best friend and I, growing up as nerds in a  rough neighborhood, and falling in love and going crazy and listening to R.E.M., and him dying. (Spoiler, but it happens pretty early.)

The printed version is a little more expensive than the electro one -- it's $4.99, including postage. It also includes a free download of the ebook. And, until New Year's, I'll throw in one of my Def Poetry Jam-approved poetry chapbooks.*

You can order it on PayPal right now:

So, it's a good deal, right? But you're asking, is it hot? Because you're like that. And it's okay to ask.







The front features a cutout cover. The inside front and back covers are hand-lettered by me.
















Inside, the pages are printed in a font that's easy to read (I could kill some of my favorite books for having ugly chapter headings) and large, but not too large. 










I also play with the text a bunch. You'll see. 









(It's blurry because I'm using the camera on my $25 cellphone, not because the words are. Promise.)





Seriously, just $4.99. And you'll get an ebook to read right now, while you wait.






* They aren't really Def Poetry Jam-approved. But I was on Def Poetry Jam, and I read poems from the chapbooks, so I'm going to be a bit presumptuous and say that counts.

Casting the Losers Movie

I got asked by the folks at the My Book, The Movie blog to draw up a dream cast for my book Losers . Since casting movies with 14-year-olds is sort of an impossible feat anyway, I decided to throw all the rules out the window. Half my cast is dead. The other half are way far away from being fourteen years old. Here's a snip (or read it from the start):

Hollywood would probably want Jupiter to look like Christian Slater in Heathers. I'm going to go with Ewan McGregor, though -- five years before Trainspotting, with his hair a little shaggier and his eyes a little more feral.

His best friend, Vadim, in my head was always an Igor type. (Except, of course, that in Russia "Igor" is a name that real people actually have, and one of my best friends is named Igor, so I need to watch the references around him.) He's cool in his own way, but we'd probably have to prettify him up, so instead of, like, a 14-year-old Kyle MacLachlan who isn't quite ready to star in Blue Velvet, we'll probably have to go with what can only be described as a Wesley Crusher-type.



Read on ----->

Oh, and I talk a little about the process of making the movie 1/20, from the writer's point of view anyway, which usually doesn't mean much, since they try and keep the writers far, far away from the production -- except that I snuck my way onto the set running for coffee and stuff. Fun. Illicit fun.

Me: It's great to see you here. But why did you move to C...

Me: It's great to see you here. But why did you move to Crown Heights?

Ari: To show the people of Gotham that their city doesn't belong to the criminals and the corrupt.

(I promise, this wasn't a setup. It just popped up in the middle of a conversation.)

A Day at the Movies

Today was the first NYC screening of 1/20, the movie I wrote! My whole family was there -- my kids, my parents. It was wonderful. I was more uncomfortable than ever. It's so hard to see something you wrote and not be able to stop and change the lines before you recite them. When I read live, I'm always rearranging the words on the page so they sound better coming out of my mouth. Watching a movie you wrote, you're like rubbernecking at your own accident. (Not that i was reciting them in the first place.)

(And honestly, I think the movie turned out amazing. Such good actors. The director makes everything look beautiful, even electric toys with their guts hanging out. Not to mention the city of Washington DC. But I keep hearing my lines, and thinking, did I really write that? No. Once the music's left your head, it's already compromised.)

I think i'm a lot more successful at being a father than being a writer. Not that I'm that good at either one, but being a father, you just screw up and you have to keep going. Being a writer, you're never sure if what you're doing is good enough, so you just keep redoing it, until someone rips the pages out of your hand and gives them to a publisher.

And I should say, thanks to Rew Starr and her posse for making the showing so successful. And for making me feel at home at a theater with that many animal heads hanging on the walls.

Hasidim on Halloween

So yesterday was Halloween, a holiday that causes me no end of consternation.





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You know how the Official Jewish Community is always talking about being Jewish on Christmas, and feeling peer pressure, and not knowing how to deal with it? Well, Christmas is easy to ignore -- all my non-Jewish friends are non-Christian anticapitalist anarchists of the Occupy Wall Street variety, anyway -- but Halloween is not. Creepy music! Costumes! The macabre! Back before I was religious, it was a religious holiday.

Yesterday, the Kveller staff asked me for any Jewish-related Halloween memories. I started writing something. Then I changed my mind and drew it as a cartoon instead. You can read the whole thing over at their blog, if you want. Can I recommend that you do? I'm pretty proud of it.

Caught Rapping on Video

Aaaaaah. I hate the way I look on video. But I do rap, and that's something of a consolation, right?

Yesterday the amazing and I got interviewed about 1/20, the movie I wrote and he costarred in. We were promoting the first New York City screening of the film -- which is happening on Sunday, November 6 (see below). He was a really good sport. And we saw each other for the first time since filming, and (now I'm going to sound like a grandparent or something) he's at least twice as tall as he was when we shot it, and he's been up to all this other stuff. For instance:


New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens 'It's Gay To Smoke'

That's right. SAWYER IS ON ONION.TV. (And it is totally offensive, and hilarious. Sawyer comes in at 1:55 if you're squeamish.)

And, yes, we're going to be screening the movie live! It's at the Branded Saloon in Brooklyn. It's a "brunch screening" at noon, whatever that means. Come and figure it out with me.

(Oh, and here's Part 1 of yesterday's interview, which I'm putting on the bottom because I fidget a lot at the beginning. I know. Diva.)

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