David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 10

Heroin Christmas🎄❄️

The Gramma bit always cracks me up.

Cristastamuses!🌲🎄⚠️Remembering the War of the Trees

A Holiday Tip for Gentile Schoolteachers with Jewish Students🎅🏿🕎

This is always a fraught time of year for grade-school music teachers: they wanna sing Xmas songs, most of the kids wanna sing Xmas songs. But they know that the constant wintertime Othering grinds away at the Jewish kids. (It’s even worse when teachers try to “include” you be singing the “Dreidel Song”; that song is crap, and we know it. The Xmas songs are way better.)

Back during the pandemic I eavesdropped on the most brilliant piece of classroom third-rail navigation I’ve ever seen in my life, and I wanna share it here again, for any that need help (esp. in what’s become an extremely fraught year for Jewish kids in America).

This was early in the pandemic, when our community was pretty locked down (my kids didn’t have in-person school for 400+ days). My daughter was then a third grader, and I was sitting nearby during her Zoom music class (we’ll leave for another day any discussion of the crime against humanity that was “grade-school Zoom music class”).

A few slides into the lesson, the teacher show a picture of an unremarkable middle-aged White dude, “Mitchell Parish.” 

Who the heck is Mitchell Parish? Well, he was born in Lithuania, and brought here by his parents, who were Jews (my daughter immediately perked up; Jews! Like us!) looking for a better life. Mitchell Parish was a popular songwriter in New York in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s—and he wrote the lyrics to …

*advance to next slide* 

… “Sleigh Ride”!  

*kids sing “Sleigh Ride”* 

*EVERYONE IS A WINNER!*

My daughter felt seen, gentiles got their Christmas carol, and no one had to sing the goddamned “Dreidel Song.” 

So there’s the trick to getting to sing Christmas carols in public school in what has been the worst year for Jews since 1945:

Start out with a brief bio of the Jews who wrote your Xmas song

You could do a whole Winter Concert—featuring “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and “Run, Run Rudolph”—on just a single bio slide: All four of those classics were written by the same Jew (the inimitable Johnny Marks, whose Jewish brother-in-law was the guy who created Rudolph to begin with).

( SPOILER ALERT : A ll your favorite Xmas songs were written by Jews ; you’re welcome).

A Musical Xmas Gift for the Final Night of Xanukah! ♬♫♪🕎🎄🎅🏿

I’m a mixed Jew (i.e., one raised in an interfaith family, and raising my Jewish kids in one now). I’ve lived in the American Midwest for my entire life (which is kind of a double-Diaspora).

I think these songs—which I wrote and recorded nearly 20 years ago now—possibly capture that experience more purely than anything else I’ve ever written.

Another Dark Xmastime (FUN FACT: I wrote this during my first year as a fundamentally unemployable stay-at-home dad; for years my children believed it was an accepted part of the broadly accepted Xmas Music Canon.)Dreidel Bells (FUN FACT: The beat here is an original GameBoy running an early German Nanoloop cartridge. Both voices are obviously me, but the filters for the robot voice badly overburdened my old iBook, causing significant lag–which is why Mr. Roboto struggles so badly to hit his marks.)DreidelDreidelDreidel (FUN FACT: The beat here is a vintage analog Boss DR-55 purportedly once owned by Poe, crammed through a heavy-metal distortion stompbox.)

Know Some Nerds? Wanna Give ’em Books as Gifts?

I write horror, SF, and DIY stuff—occasionally in book form. If you want autographed/personalized copies for your lovelies this holiday season, I can help!

Here’s the rundown on what I’ve got on hand:

Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred: Seriously Geeky Stuff to Make with Your Kids: Just like the title promises. A weird range of projects: Tickle boxes that shock you, PVC didgeridoos, sock squids, and more. Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers : Again, we like titles that make description redundant. These are oddball little homebrew instruments and effects: an electric ukulele, a synth or two, thumb pianos, lofi audio effects, etc. There Was No Sound of Thunder: A Time Portal Novel : Fresh out of college Taylor lucks into a cushy job in human resources. Now he’s tangled up with dishonest bosses, domestic terrorists, meth dealers, the “Problem of Too Many Hitlers,” and threats to space-time integrity. What’s a fella to do?There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House (a cosmic horror novel): Downtrodden Glenn and his none-too-bright sidekick Lennie work for a crooked real estate baron flipping houses in downtrodden Detroit. But this latest flipper has some odd geometry, a really off library—and a knack for keeping itself occupied.

Limited Offer: Autographed and Personalized Books!

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such a arrangment, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.

Know Some Nerds? Wanna Give ’em Books as Gifts?

I write horror, SF, and DIY stuff—occasionally in book form. If you want autographed/personalized copies for your lovelies this holiday season, I can help!

Here’s the rundown on what I’ve got on hand:

Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred: Seriously Geeky Stuff to Make with Your Kids: Just like the title promises. A weird range of projects: Tickle boxes that shock you, PVC didgeridoos, sock squids, and more. Junkyard Jam Band: DIY Musical Instruments and Noisemakers : Again, we like titles that make description redundant. These are oddball little homebrew instruments and effects: an electric ukulele, a synth or two, thumb pianos, lofi audio effects, etc. There Was No Sound of Thunder: A Time Portal Novel : Fresh out of college Taylor lucks into a cushy job in human resources. Now he’s tangled up with dishonest bosses, domestic terrorists, meth dealers, the “Problem of Too Many Hitlers,” and threats to space-time integrity. What’s a fella to do?There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House (a cosmic horror novel): Downtrodden Glenn and his none-too-bright sidekick Lennie work for a crooked real estate baron flipping houses in downtrodden Detroit. But this latest flipper has some odd geometry, a really off library—and a knack for keeping itself occupied.

Limited Offer: Autographed and Personalized Books!

Our Most Important Thanksgiving Traditions 🦃💀

1. “What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

I wrote this essay a few years back, as a little bonus for the folks kind enough to have subscribed to my newsletter.  A good friend, Chris Salzman, was gracious enough to make something pretty of it. I relish the opportunity to reshare it each year, and I’m doing so once again.  Every word here is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.

You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:

“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…

(read more: IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)

2. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”

THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.

I repost this every year, because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But it is, in my humble, a damn-near perfect gag. That’s saying something, because I find single-camera laugh-track situation comedies almost entirely unbearable to watch. If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)

3. “…your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs; we will sell our bracelets by the road sides…”4. ♬♫♪ “Caught his eye on turkey day / As we both ate Pumpkin Pie … ” ♬♫♪

I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV-related.

I hope your T-day is good and sweet.  Gobblegobble!

Recommended Consideration: Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast

These aren’t always great and I don’t agree with everyone he features (in fact, I super-duper disagree with ever listening to some of these nutbags). But Rubin is a always a wonderful and honest interviewer, so the episodes are often quite revelatory about art and human thinking (at the very least). 

This one with  Rory Sutherland is quite good and worth your time (even at 3 hours!)

I also really like the two-parter with Tyler Cowen. The first half is also on YouTube (embedded below) while the second isn’t (maybe because of copyright? It’s dedicated to Cowen talking about and offering samples of music he finds interesting and is available here):

VERDICT: Extremely interesting, and honestly worth the time, despite extreme length. 

$10 will erase $1000 of Medical Debt in Michigan RIGHT NOW! 💸

We are facing a lot of terrifying problems right now: climate disaster, civil unrest, labor injustice, opioid abuse, the profusion of hate and extremism.

Most problems cannot be solved by throwing money at them. Medical debt is one that can.

I’m collaborating on a project to erase $1 million of medical debt in Michigan.

Fortunately, because of the way this debt is bundled, it’s possible to buy it extremely cheaply on the open market, for just a penny on the dollar (i.e., $1 buys $100 of bundled medical debt). If bill collectors buy that debt, they will hound the debtor for the full value of the debt, even though they only paid 1/100th of that.

But if we buy the debt, we can just forgive it and clear the books for someone who had some bad luck and didn’t have the insurance to cover it.

Incidentally, in Michigan this burden hits Black communities especially hard; buying and erasing debt here is thus a “Good Deed twofer”: one donation relieves a family’s economic woes AND strikes a blow for racial and economic justice.

A bunch of you have already given (we’re over 76% of the way to our goal!), and that’s amaaaaazing! The more you give, the more we can forgive. THANK YOU!

Eliminate Medical Debt in Michigan TODAY!