Carla Sosenko – Jewcy

Pussies on Parade, Perfect for Father’s Day?

Carla Sosenko — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 03:25:33 +0000

Been feeling like there’s something missing from your life? And might that something be a calendar featuring doughy Jewish men? On motorcycles? Holding cats? And did I mention that they’re naked? (The men, not the cats. Well…the men and the cats.) Look no further! For just $20, you can get a year’s worth of Hebraic hotness in the Semites on Bikes’ “Kitty Porn” calendar. The SOBs are a self-proclaimed group of "12 nude, middle-aged, mostly out-of-shape Jewish men discreetly covered by cats." Um, yeah. Want in on the foreskin-free action? Send an email to Semites on Bikes to order your calendar today. It might just make a great Father’s Day gift. If your father is gay. And weird. (Proceeds go to the Humane Society of Baltimore.)

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“It’s Complicated” With Political Facebook Status Updates

Carla Sosenko — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 07:32:11 +0000

Status update: Carla Sosenko is fascinated by the unwitting political discourse of Facebook status updates. We’ve had a presumptive Democratic presidential candidate for less than 48 hours, and Anne L. Fritz is not happy. I haven’t seen Anne in months, but I know she’s pissed because her Facebook status update told me so: Anne L. Fritz says 16 out of 100 women in the Senate, 76 women out of 435 Members of Congress and 0 women out of 43 presidents is no reason to celebrate. Bari Cayne isn’t happy either, but for different reasons: Bari Cayne can't believe the Democrats just lost another eight years in the White House. Not everyone agrees with this assessment. For example: Alyse Livingston is feeling the change in the air. It's about time. The Facebook status update has always been a way to clue in your friends (and peripheral friends and frenemies and sometime hookups and exes) to your (arguably) notable comings and going. Usually they’re of the basic variety (Jane Doe is daydreaming), and often they wink at cultural phenomenons in a hipstery (i.e. snarky) way or shamelessly self-promote. But something funny happened on the way to the election: Status updates got serious. Or at least more civic-minded. Out of my 166 friends (OMG, is that an acceptable amount? Too low? When did admitting your number of Facebook friends start to feel like copping to your number of sexual partners?), five were related to the other night’s election events alone. Add to that a handful of oblique and/or vague update references that *could* be about the election. (I’d need someone smarter than I or the update author to know for sure.) My own status just days ago (even though I used to be a Hillary girl) said, “GObama, go!” (So very clever.) One of today’s updates was from my friend Joe, who had the luck (or misfortune) of winding up directly below Anne. Looking at the juxtaposed updates made it hard not to think of my friends as sparring: Joe Tirella thinks today is a great day for America. As in, “Joe Tirella, unlike Anne L. Fritz, thinks we have plenty of reasons to celebrate.” Of course, that’s not what he meant. In fact, unless Joe, who is not connected to Anne on Facebook, were scouring my friend list, he wouldn’t even know about Anne’s pro-Hillary leanings, or about Anne’s existence, for that matter. Meanwhile, Kathy Erich Dowd is shocked (and relieved) the Democratic primary is finally over! I kind of feel the same. But: Carla Sosenko would vote for any Democrat over right-wing establishmentarian gasbag McCain any day. I better go update my profile.

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Brad Pitt + Coen Brothers = Awesome

Carla Sosenko — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:23:26 +0000

Burn After Reading is the latest effort from Joel and Ethan Coen, arguably two of the most prolific, original and unexcitable (even in the face of an Academy Award win) filmmakers of our time. The movie’s big draws are Coen darlings Frances McDormand and George Clooney, as well as an up-and-coming young lad you may have heard of named Brad Pitt. But the entire ensemble is rife with talent: Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich and character actors like Juno’s J.K. Simmons and The Visitor’s Richard Jenkins round out the cast.

Add the cumulative talent of the stars to the zany trailer — which promises the kind of romp the Coens are known for (more Fargo or Lebowski than the adaptation No Country) — and this film becomes pretty damn hard to wait for.

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Clip: Are Galifianakis and Showalter the Most Indie Comedians Ever?

Carla Sosenko — Sat, 31 May 2008 06:51:30 +0000

This so-farfetched-it-could-be-real clip features Zack Galifianakis as himself — well, as someone named Zack Galifianakis who also writes for Utne (and Philippino Digest!) interviewing Michael Showalter, a.k.a. Widge Wemnin, the “most indie rocker of our time.” He’s so indie, in fact, he doesn’t even play music. Like, ever.

Silly? Totally. But also sort of spot-on. It’s not so hard to imagine Widge selling out McCarren Park Pool sometime soon.

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Clip: Bill Maher Takes a Skeptic’s Look at World Religions

Carla Sosenko — Thu, 08 May 2008 03:10:36 +0000

Our next president shouldn’t be a person of faith but a person of doubt. So says Bill Maher, one of the country's most outspoken doubters. His new film, Religulous, directed by Borat’s Larry Charles, follows the irreverent humorist as he travels the globe talking to people about God and religion. Maher and the crew employed self-described guerrilla filming to get their shots (at the Vatican, at the Wailing Wall), and the prospect of watching them in action seems too good (and controversial and potentially offensive) to resist.

While the film didn’t hit its anticipated Easter release, it's currently slated for a June 20 opening. Here’s Maher talking to Larry King about the film.

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Clip: Ari Libsker Discusses Stalags, His Documentary on Holocaust Porn

Carla Sosenko — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:24:28 +0000

Joshua Suzanne, proprietor of the East Village’s Rags-a-Go-Go, likes to talk to people who wander into her shop. And she likes to videotape herself talking to them, and to post said videos on YouTube. Luckily, she had her camcorder poised and ready when Israeli filmmaker Ari Libsker came a’calling. What emerged was a strange but compelling, accent-inflected (hers: Massachusetts, his: Israeli) conversation about Libsker’s new documentary, Stalags, which opened at the Film Forum last Wednesday.

Libsker’s much-buzzed-about film explores the popular literary genre of Holocaust porn that emerged in the 60s. The booklets (stalags) were a huge hit among Israelis, particularly the children of survivors, who were led to believe the tales of buxom Nazi prison guards raping and torturing captured American soldiers were for real. (Indiewire has a pretty in-depth assessment of the phenomenon in its review of Libsker’s film.)

Libsker tells Suzanne he was motivated by a desire to know what could have possibly made this sexy but sadistic (or masochistic, depending on how you look at it) genre so popular in Israel. Time Out New York’s David Fear posits a more specific corollary question: “The insane popularity of this pulp-porn among Israelis makes you wonder: Was this the result of a society searching for catharsis in smut, or the largest case of Stockholm syndrome ever diagnosed?”

Libsker’s topic is inarguably fascinating, and the New York Times review of the film criticizes only its brevity. (It’s just too short — 63 minutes — to do the topic justice).

Nestled among racks of second-hand shirts, the filmmaker and the shopgirl manage to have an important little chat about a topic that is as disturbing as it is titillating. And in an interesting twist, Libsker tells Suzanne that those wishing to view a YouTube clip of his film can do so on his Web site, www.stalags.com. Go ahead and try. YouTube removed the video for use of the words “sex” and “Holocaust.”

Stalags plays at Film Forum through April 22.

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Sacha Baron Cohen Gays Up Wichita

Carla Sosenko — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:33:17 +0000

If you're unfortunate enough to join the growing ranks of stranded air travelers, cross your fingers for the mother of all diversions: Sacha Baron Cohen was recently spotted in the Wichita airport filming his latest faux doc, Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt. (So far the only other credited cast member is Real World alum Trishelle, as herself. Watching a flaming Austrian reporter get into trouble with a trashy fame whore sounds like it has the comic potential to outdo even Borat's kidnapping of Pamela Anderson.)

Check out the prankster king doing what he does best — unleashing his squirmalicious hijinks on the public without breaking a sweat. (And keep your eye on the guy behind the guy, Bruno's apparent Azamat. You go, boy.)

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Clip of the Week: Jewish Mothers Behaving Badly

Carla Sosenko — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:00:38 +0000

If Ab Fab's Patsy and Edina had been born as kvetchy Jewesses with Boston accents, they might have been Ronna and Beverly. The comedy duo (a.k.a. Jessica Chaffin and Jamie Denbo) are taking their Jewish-mothers-behaving-badly act on the road, stopping off at NYC's UCB Theatre this Thursday. Check out this clip (featuring Ugly Betty's Ana Ortiz as Beverly's "girl") and watch as Ro and Bev prep for Passover in all their Atavan-fueled, self-involved glory. Paint the Jews in the best light it doesn't, but would it kill you to laugh a little?

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Clip of the Week: Night of the Living Jews

Carla Sosenko — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:30:02 +0000

As Passover approaches, let us take a moment to remember those Jews we’ve lost—you know, the ones who consumed “matzoh with a dark history” and were transformed into the living dead only to be hunted down by the goyim they preyed upon. Wait. What?

Add Hasidic Jews to any situation and it instantly becomes funnier—that’s the theory behind Sam Falconi and Oliver Noble’s Night of the Living Jews, a Heeb Magazine–produced film about Jewish zombies who use their lethal peyos to attack gentiles. The film premiered in October, though if you happen to live in Australia or Canada you can catch it this spring. It features Melissa Leo, Homicide vet and star of the Sundance darling Frozen River, as Jewish Mother Zombie. (It could have been worse—she could have been cast as Bagel Zombie.)

Will the zombies be taken down by the power of a bacon double cheeseburger? You’re going to have to watch to find out.

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We Have Ways of Making You Laugh

Carla Sosenko — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:32:31 +0000

“120 Funny Swastika Cartoons” certainly sounds like an oxymoron, but who knows better how to turn beets into borscht than the Jews? In We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross takes what is arguably the most reprehensible symbol in history and turns it on its head by making it silly and commonplace. The outcome? A woman performing oral sex on a swastika, a mermaid learning to goose step and white mice with a Nazi flag above their mousehole. Gross’ idea is that by making such a loaded image ridiculous, we strip it of its power. As he says in his afterword, “If something is humorous, you can’t get angry at it; nor can it inspire fear.”

Gross’ drawings run the gamut from goofy to bawdy to inscrutable in that way New Yorker cartoons can be. Some evoke spontaneous laughter while others just elicit a perplexed “huh?” But no matter your reaction to the drawings themselves, it’s hard to deny the effect of seeing them as a whole. As I viewed Gross' cartoons, the swastika lost its ability to turn my stomach and make the hairs on my arm stand up. Looking at a kitty cat with swastika-shaped whiskers really did somehow make it less terrifying.

Not everyone loves what Gross has done, of course. HuffPo's Doree Lewak says, "There's tacky and then there's poor taste. The category for this book fits several pegs below the latter." And the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, worries the book could be an affront to survivors (like him). The Jewish Week article about the book features both Foxman and a rabbi (the author of a book called Taking the Shoah on the Road) who thinks humor is necessary to healing. It's hard to fault those who find Gross' book offensive or think making fun of something as repugnant as the swastika is simply not something we should do — or worse, that trivializing it somehow puts us in harm's way. We can only hope that Gross is right — that our resilient laughter is far more powerful than the swastika could ever be.

Want to see more of the cartoons? Radar has a gallery.

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