Michael Rubens's Blog, page 6
September 9, 2012
Exciting author appearance at exciting book launch event!
What are you doing at 4pm on Sunday the 16th? Coming to the book launch party for my new book, Sons of the 613! You’re welcome!
The event is at the fantastic Book Court bookstore, 163 Court Street, Brooklyn.
Activities:
* Drinking of Wine
* Me reading a short excerpt from the book, saving you the trouble.
* Drinking of Wine
* Awkward book signing, where I’ll likely freeze and forget the names of several people I’ve known well for years and try to cover it by writing something like, “Dude — hope you enjoy the book!”
* Wine.
Hope to see you there!
[image error]
June 25, 2012
June 15, 2012
Regarding the spritely flying fish
Consider the ethereal beauty of the flying fish, a creature of both sea and sky, as it limns a graceful poem above the gem-starred waves before vanishing once more to the grey depths. Okay, great — now cover that mofo with salt and roast it. We’re going to eat it.
At Robataya
[image error]
June 13, 2012
First Review of My New Book
You know how sometimes you should be writing, because you’re supposedly a writer, but instead you’re just sort of pretending that you’re writing, in that yes, you are sitting at your computer and typing, but what you’re really doing is surfing the web and Soogling? (Self Googling. See what I did there? Soogling. Do itashimashite). So yes, I was Soogling, or more precisely, Toogling (Title Googling. Bu ke qi), and low and behold I came across what I believe to be the very first review of my new novel, Sons of the 613.
The review comes courtesy of an anonymous teenager (I’m guessing about the teenager part, but I think you’ll agree that I’m probably correct) and is posted on some subpage of the website for the Duxbury Free Library Program in Duxbury, MA. I will excerpt it here in its entirety, misspelling of my name and all:
Sons of the 613 by Michael Rubins
I read this as a galley book. It’s gonna be published in Sept. 2012. It’s about this kid named Isaac who is getting ready for his bar mitzvah, but his parents leave for Italy and make his older brother, Josh, in charge of the household. Josh is mad macho and believes Isaac has to become a man not so much through memorizing the Torah as doing all sorts of crazy challenges. Hilarity and bizarre situations come next….. It’s not really appropriate for a middle school read, but it’s pretty hilarious in a blitzed out way….
I have to say, that’s a pretty even-handed, fair and accurate review, and I’ll be lucky if the rest of them are so kind. Thank you, anonymous (probably) teenager.
[image error]
June 12, 2012
The Semi-Informed Cultural Critic
…i.e. me.
I was asked to participate in an episode of Waterfront Cities of the World, a program on DiscoveryHD World. The show explores great waterfront cities like Tokyo, Istanbul, Bangkok, etc., and they’re doing an episode on New York for the 2013 season. It will feature several high-profile New Yorkers who know what they’re talking about, and will also feature me, unless the producers make a wise decision and eliminate me in post.
Anyways, I ended up biking around Central Park with the charming host, photographer Heidi Hollinger, who speaks French, English, Spanish, Russian, and Finnish, for God’s sake, which just seems gratuitous. We pedaled our rented bikes behind the cameraman and audio guy, who were both perched in the back seat of a pedicab piloted by Vasali, a young Russian immigrant with piercing green eyes (his motto, according to his card: “You Drink, I’ll Drive”). Heidi did her hostly duties, querying me about what it’s like to live, work and strive in New York City, what it’s like to be surrounded by so much talent and energy and culture, the upsides and downsides of life here, and so on, and I did my best to offer an honest opinion on those matters without revealing that I have about as much cognitive firepower as a carp. Heidi and Nicolas Boucher, the Quebecois director, quickly established that I don’t speak French, and between takes they would have rapid-fire exchanges in that language, probably along the lines of, “What do you mean, ask it again? It’s like trying to converse with a platter of soggy poutine!”
So, subscribers to DiscoveryHD World: keep an eye out for me sometime next year, speaking with authoritative confidence regarding topics far beyond my knowledge and intellectual capacity.
[image error]
May 24, 2012
On discovering someone else’s underwear in my gym locker.
There’s a small gym where I work — two treadmills, a stationary bike, an ellipse machine, some free weights — and I pop in there a few times a week and grimly endeavor to stave off the ravages of time.*
The gym has a little locker room with two showers and a bank of eight standard-issue gray lockers: tall, thin, with the requisite eye-level shelf. Yesterday, after my ravage-staving-off, I opened my locker and came face-to-crotch-seam with a pair of underwear, and it was not my underwear. I said some bad words and hurled the underwear onto the bench in angry disgust, and then turned back to my locker. Oh, for f***’s sake, the idiot also put his jeans in there, and his shirt, and his…uh…his belt…and, uh…
(Brief pause while my tiny brain does some simple arithmatic).
Oh dear.
This means I now have to walk over to the underwear, sheepishly pick it back up, then carry it back to and replace it in the locker, which of course wasn’t my locker to begin with. I fully expected the owner of said underwear to walk into the dressing room, sitcom style, just at the moment I was standing there with his Hanes briefs pinched between my thumb and forefinger. If that happened I figured I had two basic routes to choose from:
1. Haltingly attempt to explain what had happened while awkwardly returning the underwear to the locker.
2. Say, “Hi!”, then bury my face in the underwear and inhale with great vigor and zest, while staring fixedly at the owner.
Discuss.
* Also, I’m very vain and when it’s just me and the full-length mirror I like to do a little shadow boxing and discreet flexing. Although it’s never really just me in there — it’s me and the security guards, watching via the security cameras. I hope I provide at least a little bit of amusement during what must be an otherwise rather drab day.
[image error]
May 20, 2012
Me with a 102 degree fever, chatting with CNN’s Howard Kurtz
I spent a week in LA doing LA-y sorts of things, during which time I managed to pick up some kind of very enthusiastic pathogen, something resembling the black plague but worse. When I got back to New York I decided to dedicate myself to some really focused, bed-centric sweating and shivering. At some point during the week I got an email asking if I’d like to come in and chat with Howard Kurtz, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, because he’d read my Salon essay and wanted to interview me about it. Yes, cough cough gack, I cough cough gacked, that would be great. In the end they were kind enough to send a very nice limo to pick me up at home, put enough makeup on me to make it appear that I still had a pulse, and then drove me back home again so I could suffer for a few more days. Howard was very nice and we had a great discussion both on and off-camera. Or perhaps that was all a fever-induced hallucination. Evidence suggests that in real life he’s not half chicken.
[image error]
May 15, 2012
On missing the point
I recently had an essay in Salon regarding my time at the Daily Show, and how the job often put me in close contact with people I expected to hate (folks of the deranged right-wing persuasion, for the most part), but whom I’d often end up liking as people despite myself. The essay might best be summarized as a modest plea for mutual understanding, a request to look beyond someone’s political beliefs to see the human being behind the ideology.
Several friends informed me that the comments section was a bit of a horror show. I assumed that they meant I was being attacked there — perhaps for offering comfort to the enemy, or for being naive, or for writing about the subject from the privileged position of someone who had never really suffered at the hands of folks with harmful ideas and offering those nasty people a sort of unearned and cheap grace. Or perhaps for the general sin of being a fucking idiot. All of those would probably qualify as valid criticisms.
As it turns out, I am mentioned in the comments, or at least in a few of them. For the most part, though, it’s 100+ posts of people calling each other assholes. Yes, I get it, comments sections are about the lowest form of human discourse, ranking somewhere south of the things people shout at hockey referees. But one can’t but feel a sort of wry amusement (here defined as “a reflexive sentiment experienced as a sort of emotional prophylactic to avoid feelings of overwhelming sadness”) upon seeing people respond to a call for tolerance by assaulting each other online.
[image error]
April 27, 2012
I have an essay in Salon today:
The Daily Show Guide to My Enemies
The original title, BTW, was “We Have Met the Enemy and They Are Sort of Not So Bad.”
[image error]
