In December, minimalist soul duo Silk Rhodes released their debut, self-titled album to great acclaim. Steeped in smooth vocals, soulful 1970s melodies, and enigmatic messages about the human experience, their sound is a cross between Prince and The Delfonics, with a touch of 90s R&B—or, as Rolling Stone put it, “the soundtrack for a roller rink on a cloud.”

27-year-old vocalist Sasha Desree (AKA Sasha Winn) grew up in New York City, attended LaGuardia High School, dropped out of SUNY Purchase, then headed to Baltimore where he met producer Michael Collins. They created their first full-length album in Collins’ Honda CR-V, which was set up as a “studio on the go.” They invited anyone and everyone to contribute to the recording process as they drove around Baltimore, and across the country.

Desree spoke with me from the apartment he shares in Los Angeles with Collins about looping, Silk Rhodes’ unique recording process, and why New York is no longer a stomping ground for young artists.

Check out their new video for their debut single, “Pains” here.

How do you feel about the vibes in L.A. vs. New York? Which pace do you prefer?

Living in New York can seem unnecessary after a bit. I’ve been bouncing back and forth now between Oakland and L.A. for the past year. I grew up in New York, lived there for 20 years. Then I went to Baltimore and made music.

Being from New York, your identity as an American is a bit different than the average American. That being said, I think the West Coast is more my pace. I’m a slow and steady kind of person. I’ve noticed that the similarities between L.A. and New York are things I don’t like… They’re both cities that are run by some sort of publicity beast. There’s a machine that’s working and running there and you can smell it. You can sense when it employs people that don’t know that they’re being employed by that machine to do its bidding.

What was your early creative life like in New York?

The community I grew up in [on the Upper West Side] was radical and that’s what it represented to me. As I grew up and explored New York more and more, it seemed as though being radical was not only not a priority for the people in New York, but New York itself made it hard for that to happen. It’s a hard place for artists to live and make enough money. It seems like these cities, more than being places to really live, are like market places. The Union Square Farmers’ Market for example—all of the sellers have farms upstate and they work on their things and bring them to New York and sell them—and then they leave! That’s kind of how I’m starting to feel about New York. Bring the things there, share them, but don’t stay forever.

Just contribute to the big machine and then bounce! There is a weird script-y element to New York and LA.

Totally. And I do love the vibe in East L.A., but these are the cities that write the script for the media all over America. And it seems like things come to California first. This is where the trends are made and then brought to the rest of the country. So it’s very interesting to have that insight here. But New York and L.A. inspire me to dig deep in film and music, and I realize how important those channels are.

Silk Rhodes has a very 1970s soul/funk-inspired sound that incorporates this really minimalist melody. Can you elaborate on your style?

Our connection with 70s soul music really began when we were living in this house together in Baltimore for about a year; that’s where this project gestated. We were listening to some more recent R&B music coming from many kids who had been previously making indie-pop or experimental pop-electronic music, and it seemed like they were still hiding behind the technology or tons of reverb. The emotionality of it was sort of clandestine. You go back and look at 70s soul, the vocals are right there, in front, and the words are equally important. It’s message and groove-driven music. Going back to that 70s sound in terms of the nostalgia was important to us, but also really clearing it out so it was super minimal. There’s nothing but emotions and the words for you to take in as the audience.

I grew up listening to my dad’s jazz records, a lot of John Coltrane, as well as Prince and 90s R&B. As we’ve gone back and found the lost 70s soul, there’s something in the vocal harmony that is so beautiful, and sometimes imperfect.

You guys had a very interesting process recording this record. Most of it was recording on the fly, driving around Baltimore and inviting people to join you. That spontaneity of recording music—do you see this as an anomaly these days, where albums can be so doctored? In listening to your album, even the placing of the tracks sounds spontaneous, but at the same time it has this common thread; this thread of human experience.

In the studio, you try to recapture that solace you get from being alone in your room. So you write it down, record a demo, and then you’re in a studio where you only have so many hours and things can feel a bit rushed. With our recording experience, we… allowed the studio to be anywhere. Be it your room, your car, or anywhere… Sometimes we would have a room full of people in there while we were working on a song, helping think-tank style coming up with ideas for lyrics. And we’ve always been inspired by our friends and the people around us. One of the things that keeps us moving around is that we want to be continuously inspired by new, different people, and we love to meet people who are making things.

Would you just pull over and open up the doors and start blasting music and chatting with people?

We connected in the world of spontaneous creation. We recorded it all over the place while in transit. And it could be anyone. One time these kids were in a gas station trying to sell us weed in Baltimore, and we told them we didn’t want to buy their weed but if they needed a ride we’d do that, under one condition: that they would make music with us all the way there. And they did.

We made some of our best music on porches and during drives in Baltimore, in a motel in Iowa City. We got into this hotel room at 11:00pm and we decided the only way to really get the full night’s limit of the hotel was to use it as a studio as well.

I’ve heard a lot about musicians using looping techniques more and more, but I don’t get it. I know you did this for this record. Can you explain?

Basically you add make multiple layers to a song very quickly. You can do what one might do when recording multiple tracks, but you can do it quickly. So each time it repeats, you add another layer and it can manifest a complex sound very quickly. But I think there’s something really beautiful about doing it all with the voice. There’s something about when you play an instrument and you can get the same thing out of it in terms of expression as you can get with the human voice.

How did you get into music?

The first song I ever sang was actually a Yiddish lullaby. I grew up singing folk songs and political songs from the sixties. I started singing soprano and training opera in middle school, and then as my voice changed I started writing more music. I play keyboard, bass, drums; a little bit of everything. And then of course, a lot of the stuff I’ve done uses heavily looped vocals. Looping has been a real hotbed of creation for us.

I went to college at SUNY Purchase and then I dropped college and kept one teacher. I found this amazing teacher/mentor named Joel Thome, who was Frank Zappa’s musical director for 20 years. He was the sweetest man I’ve ever studied under, or worked with in music in general, and he really expanded my horizons. It really got me into astrology, the occult, and the connections between that and vibration and music.

I moved back to New York and met with Joel once a week for two years. Both my parents are professors actually, and I’m really interested in the mentor system. That was the original form of teacher-student relationship. I’m anti-institution in general. I think that now, the ideal situation is one where both parties are teacher and student, constantly switching between the two. A free-trade agreement.

Catch Silk Rhodes live in New York on January 10.

(Image: Michael Collins and Sasha Desree (right) of Silk Rhodes, courtesy of Theo Jemison.)

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Attention, Lovers of Schmidt: now is your chance to win a date (OK, a day) with Max Greenfield! The New Girl actor (and perennial Jewcy fave) is offering potential wives fans an opportunity hang out, work out, and visit the New Girl set in L.A. All you gotta do is make a donation to Chrysalis, a nonprofit dedicated to breaking the poverty cycle “by providing homeless and low-income individuals with a chance to rebuild their lives through employment,” and you’ll enter the draw to win.

The contest is being run through Omaze, which is sort of like Kickstarter for do-gooding celebrities. (Earlier this year, J.J. Abrams offered a fan a walk-on role in Star Wars: Episode VII; right now you can enter the draw to win a backstage hang with Bono, which sounds more like a punishment than a prize to me, but I guess it’s all for a good cause?) Anyway, there’s a variety of prizes for different levels of Schmidt-inspired giving, including SWEAT BANDS (yes), “We Built this Schmidty” apparel, and—for a cool $25,000—lunch with the man himself.

May the Schmidt be with you.

(Photo by Jason LaVeris/Getty)

Related: Network Jews: Schmidt from ‘New Girl’
Watch Schmidt Recite The Shema On Fox’s ‘New Girl’

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Jews aren’t good proselytizers: circumcision, long prayer sessions, kosher dietary restrictions—not to mention a few thousand years of persecution—do not exactly endear Judaism to strangers. But what Jews are good at is writing comedy. In the quirky new web series Jewvangelist, creator and actor Becky Kramer explores what it would take for a young rabbi to recruit new members to the Jewish faith.

The show focuses on Rabbi Leah Levy’s campaign to refresh the family synagogue, which is rapidly losing members. After an almost too coincidental bicycling accident with a Mormon missionary, Levy (played by Kramer) realizes that promoting conversion is the key to replenishing her congregation. Levy is joined by her goofy cantor friend, and along the way they pick up a hodge-podge of friends from various religious backgrounds. Our heroine has a villain, of course—her ridiculously evil twin brother Asher, who is a rival Rabbi and wants to sell the building.

While the plotline may pique your interest, there are some flaws that should be addressed: the acting is weak at times, and the story relies on a number of absurd coincidences. There is an excessive amount of sexual innuendo and it tends to be a little out of place.

But all that is ok. After all, Jewvangelist is only a short web series. And what the show does right, it really does right. The writing is witty and the production quality is flawless. Each episode is about 12 minutes long, which means the entire six-part first season can be watched in a little over an hour. I rarely found myself heartily laughing at the jokes, but the characters are loveable and I found myself rooting for them to succeed. The show also promotes religious and cultural tolerance—a message we need to keep hearing.

As with many Jewish productions, you’ll laugh a little, cringe a little too, and wonder why you’re still there halfway through. But when it’s all over you’ll leave feeling warm and satisfied, even if you’re not entirely sure why.

Watch the first episode here:

Related: New Web Series Celebrates Poutine, Lactaid, and Jewish Angst—in Yiddish

(Image via Kickstarter)

The post Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Ever wonder what would happen if three veterans of the Jewish music scene got together to form a folk-pop-indie trio? Look no further than Distant Cousins, a.k.a. Dov Rosenblatt, Duvid Swirsky, and Ami Kozak.

Swirsky and Rosenblatt, the founders of popular Jewish bands Moshav and Blue Fringe respectively, started collaborating with Kozak in 2012 to explore a different side of their musical identities. It proved to be a good choice: the band’s music, often characterized by rich harmonies and feel-good beats, has recently had several major successes. Their song “Everybody Feels It” was featured in a German soda commercial, “On My Way” was in a Macy’s Labor Day ad, and “Are You Ready (On Your Own)” has a staring role in the soundtrack of This is Where I Leave You, the new film starring Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, and Jane Fonda.

I spoke with Dov, Duvid, and Ami recently about how Judaism influences their work, whether they’re actually distant cousins (they’re not), and what makes this newest musical venture unique. Their new self-titled EP is out this week.

How did you guys first meet?

Duvid: We were all playing the same Jewish music scene. I’m in a band called Moshav, Dov is in a band called Blue Fringe, Ami was in and out of bands. Dov and I played shows together on the East Coast.

Ami: I was a little younger. So I was watching their bands.

Duvid: I think we were always fans of each other. I was living in L.A. and Dov moved out a couple years ago, and I think from a distance we all wanted to work together since the first time our bands connected. Then Dov and I got together and wrote a song. Dov was like hey, this guy Ami is in town, he’s great, he’s talented, we should get him to help out with the song. The next thing we knew we turned into a band.

Ami: There’s this really nice collaborative scene in L.A. Everybody’s always collaborating on random projects here and there.

What inspired you guys to drift from your Jewish music roots?

Dov: I think that each project serves its own purpose, and that as songwriters, you just have a lot in you that needs different outlets. So it’s less about graduating from a certain scene and more about just having a different outlet… I have this mainstream pop song that we want to work on, and this is the perfect outlet for that.

Ami: And the community that we came from was very supportive of the music we were doing in separate projects. And also there’s sort of the career element… as you get more into songwriting that isn’t necessarily Jewish-themed but is more general, it has more reach.

Dov: One thing that also stems from that is this exciting sort of challenge of trying to get people to your shows… in the Jewish music scene, a lot of the time there’s already an event taking place, and people are going to be there, to meet, to eat, and there’s a band there, you know? Now we’re going out to these venues and really challenging ourselves to build the fan base around the music as the main attraction.

Duvid: Just to make it clear, we are so grateful and thankful and respectful of the audiences we have, be they Jewish or gentile, and don’t look down at all on where we come from.

Right. But it’s a bit more difficult without having that built-in community. 

Ami: I think they’re coming along for the ride, though. Those same people from our community are coming out to shows now. We’re just sort of adding to the mix with people from outside the community, I think, because the music has that appeal more broadly.

Do you see influences from your experiences in the Jewish music world in Distant Cousins’ music?

Ami: I think we are always a product of our influences. It can’t help but find its way in, in the sense of just how we relate to each other as a band. It’s a nice, sort of profound way that we can have an understanding, even though we all come from different backgrounds. There’s something about the Jewish values and that commonality that helps us, in the creative process, to understand each other. When you’re co-writing songs and talking about deeper ideas and trying to get something meaningful across, it’s helpful to have that background to inform our opinions on all sorts of things.

Duvid: I think the Jewish music scene, whatever that is, has really expanded today. Artists like Matisyahu and even the bands that we’re in, Moshav and Blue Fringe, push the boundaries of what that means. I’ve always wondered what Jewish music is. I think anything I’ve been involved in, and definitely Distant Cousins, we’re just trying to do the best work we can. This project specifically is really song-based. We want the songs to stand up by themselves without any support from any world. The fact that we’re Jewish seeps into it just because we are… We’re just writing the best possible songs we can, something that’s going to make us feel good and then we hope that it’ll make other people feel good.

How did the name Distant Cousins come about?

Dov: Well, it obviously evokes a familial vibe, and that’s how we all met, through our other bands, and it really did feel like this large extended family. Coming up with a name happened out of a demand, because one of our earlier songs was being used in this other movie, Coffee Town, and we didn’t want to be credited as ‘Swirsky, Rosenblatt, and Kozak,’ so we needed a cooler name.

What are some of your musical influences?

Ami: Mine are Dov Rosenblatt and Duvid Swirksy.

Duvid: They range, and that’s one of the exciting things about this band, too. I feel like each guy comes with his own bag of influences and abilities… I grew up in Israel with a lot of my parents’ records from the 60s—people like Dylan and Neil Young. I feel like Ami is way more into pop music.

Dov: He introduces us to a lot of stuff.

Ami: It keeps the music always pushing, keeps it going forward and feeling fresh. And it helps keep the production current, too.

Dov: I’m a big Elliott Smith fan, but his stuff is usually really dark, and then I also love old Motown, which is all this fun, good pop music, so I think that’s something that we are constantly trying to do for ourselves in our songs: make it really fun and positive and yet not too shiny and shimmery, and still hold on to some of those more mysterious, dark elements.

Ami: The challenge is authenticity. We want everything to be authentic and honest, and if that means we’re going just a little darker, that’s totally fine. That’s still within our wheelhouse. We just want to do what feels natural and authentic and honest for all of us. Duvid keeps us in check about being too cheesy.

Duvid: I’m like the cheese-o-meter.

What genre would you guys classify yourselves as? 

Ami: When people ask me that, I say some combination of indie, folk, and pop. Folk because there’s a lot of harmony, a lot of acoustic stuff sometimes, pop because we have fun, light tunes as well, and then indie just to cover the bases. We get experimental with production and homemade sounds and stuff like that.

What makes Distant Cousins unique compared to the other bands you guys have been in?

Dov: Something I love about this band is that each one of us has all of these different skills. We’re very self-sufficient which is kind of refreshing, because the three of us all write, sing, perform, and produce. Ami does the real engineering, producing, mixing and all that… I think nowadays especially, it’s so crucial that we don’t have to go to a big studio, we don’t have to rely on other people even as far as getting the music out. We’re appreciative and grateful that we’re in this situation, where the three of us can just take it from A to Z together.

Ami: There’s a certain trust, I think, of each other’s instincts, which makes collaborating really smooth. And egos are out the door.

Dov: I think some of these things are just so ingrained in us, but that is to me such a Jewish value. You’re encouraged to debate and to challenge and it’s not about ego. It’s about getting to the bottom of it, getting to the truth, trying to get the best song possible. So we keep each other in line and say, “that lyric is cheesy, we can do better.” So hopefully we can all hold on to that as a band.

Isabel Fattal is a sophomore at Wesleyan University majoring in the College of Letters. She is an opinion columnist at the Wesleyan Argus, and a former intern at Tablet Magazine.

(Images courtesy of Distant Cousins.)

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We’re super-excited about the debut of Jill Soloway’s new TV show Transparent, which started out as a one-off Amazon studios pilot, then got picked up by the book/entertainment/cat litter behemoth for development into a complete season. Episode one premieres on September 26. (Shana tova, indeed.)

Earlier this year Batya Ungar-Sargon offered high praise for the dark, comic family drama set in L.A.:

They say we are living in a golden age of television. If that’s the case, Jill Soloway’s new pilot deserves its own unit of commerce. Ruby? Sapphire? It’s a cut above the rest, and it’s fucking amazing and you should drop everything you are doing and watch it right now.

In the pilot, patriarch Mort (played by Jeffrey Tambor) tries—and fails—to reveal his transgender identity to his three children. Judging by the trailer for season one, though, it’s clear that Mort is officially out of closet. Meanwhile, his kids are dealing with their own emotional/professional/pyschosexual dramas. Who’s the most well-adjusted? The most repressed? Tune in and find out!

Also! There’s a great profile of Soloway in this week’s New York Times Magazine, where she speaks frankly about her fascination with gender stereotypes and sexual identity. Turns out there’s an element of autobiography in her art: her own father came out as trans in 2011.

Soloway has cycled through a lot of emotions about her father’s revelation since that phone call three years ago, but the first one she felt was relief. “No wonder I was so obsessed with these questions,” she said on a Sunday morning in July, sitting at the same table where she took the call. “Not even deep down. I think out in front these gender questions were part of our family — the discomfort with traditional roles of masculinity and femininity in our house.

Read on here.

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Who says you have to be a high school graduate to go to Brown University? Well, in most cases you do, but Gabriel Kahane is an exception. The 33-year-old “indie-classical” musician and composer goes beyond musical genres in every way possible, particularly on his new album, The Ambassador.

L.A.-born, New York bred Kahane recently found himself back in his birth-state, enraptured by the architecture and history of a city that gets a bad rep for being transient, superficial, and bottomless. The Ambassador focuses on the little known history of L.A.: its buildings and stories; its hopefulness and tragedies.

I met up with Kahane at Littlefield in Brooklyn before a recent show, as he was rehearsing with his three-piece orchestra. He crooned poetic lyrics while playing the piano, and was quick to jump on and off stage to direct the band towards a more “perfect” sound. Afterwards, we spoke about his inspiration for his new album, the restrictions of musical categories, and his newfound interest in architecture.

How does someone without a GED get into Brown University?

I was definitely somewhat of a fuck up in high school. I was in some ways a ne’er-do-well, and in other ways a very high achiever. I was a nationally ranked chess player and had acted professionally in operas and plays, but just couldn’t really get my shit together academically; partly out of boredom and partly out of some ADD that prevented me from learning study skills… I ended up going to New England Conservatory for a year as a jazz pianist, and found it pretty myopic, intellectually. After my first semester I started to think about transferring elsewhere; I ended up playing a concert at Brown and briefly dating someone there, and sort of fell in love with the campus.

I decided on a whim to apply as a transfer student… I wrote this impassioned letter, in addition to the regular application, explaining how my hubris had led to my failing out of high school. I included all these ancillary materials in my application; like a book about chess, to which I had contributed a chapter, as well as musical materials. The year that they accepted me, they took 100 too many transfer students; they made an error in calculating the matriculation rate of the freshman class—so I probably shouldn’t have gotten in. It was basically a fluke.

Tell me about the inspiration for your album. Why did you choose to focus on L.A.?

Starting in 2007, I began to return to L.A. frequently as an adult. I was born in L.A. but I didn’t grow up there… I had sort of adopted the dogmatic antipathy for L.A. that a lot of New Yorkers have—and also having spent my high school years in northern California, I was primed to hate L.A. Going back there as a young adult, I was pretty vulnerable, and I found myself getting in touch with the 90 per cent of Los Angeles that wasn’t the film and TV industry; the Los Angeles that aches constantly.

I was reading Joan Didion and Mike Davis for the first time, and I just saw the layer immediately beneath the veneer, and then it was about four years later that BAM commissioned me to do a new piece, and right around the same time Sony Masterworks starting courting me. I began thinking about BAM and the kind of work that they do; their Next Wave Festival tends to have a strong visual component.

While in L.A., I took a drive to the airport at 5 o’clock one morning, and decided to take service roads. I felt really overwhelmed by the pathos of the city; its failed aspirations, the beauty in decay, the weird poignant beauty of a city that has trouble remembering to have memory, and so I decided around then I wanted to do something on Los Angeles. That fed into a more specific interest in architecture. I intuitively felt drawn to the architecture, but I didn’t know exactly why.

So you weren’t always into architecture?

No, it’s a very recent thing for me. I just found myself really drawn to the buildings. When I’m in L.A., I stay in this small servants’ quarter that’s attached to a house that Rudolph Schindler heavily remodeled. I was living and working in this house built by one of the great modernist masters, but then I started thinking about the extent to which there are two L.A.s: the L.A. of film and fiction and TV, that is experienced through mediation, versus the very vulnerable, physical, tactical city; the city of the 1994 North Ridge earthquake, the city of raging fires in Malibu, the city of Joan Didion’s Santa Ana Winds. Architecture sets up the intersection of these two L.A.s because architecture is aesthetic, it is mythology—but buildings are vulnerable, they burn down, they crumble. I could draw from film by thinking about buildings as film locations; I could draw from fiction as scenic locations; from history, and so on and so forth.

What was the research component like?

I watched a lot of movies; I watched Die Hard many, many times. I’ve come to believe that it’s a very, very important film. It’s the apotheosis of commerce and well-crafted entertainment meeting in a perfect marriage. It also made Bruce Willis a star. I jest a little bit; I did watch a lot of old films, tracing the trajectory of noir from the early adaptations of Raymond Chandler novels, up through the Cold War noir of Kiss Me Deadly, to the neo-noir, Blade Runner set in the Bradbury Building. I read a lot of detective fiction, histories, and critical theory, and spent a lot of time in L.A. just walking and driving. I made a list of 25 addresses; initially I was going to write 25 songs—I ended up writing 20 and put 10 on the record. I would just visit all of these addresses and sit in the places and meditate on their history.

You write from multiple perspectives, which indicates a strong literary background. You also seem very keen on writing on themes, not so much personal/romantic hardships like many others musicians. Can you speak to that?

A lot of artists/song writers focus on confessional themes, and I think that’s something that becomes tiresome to some people, and then they look elsewhere… I think that there comes a moment where you want to have the lens go elsewhere. And having written for the theater, and continuing to write for the theater, that’s an imperative. You have to be able to look inside someone else and find that negative capability for empathy. There are writers who inform in subtle ways the kind of work I’m trying to do. Among them, the German novelist W.G. Sebald, who for me just defies categorization. He creates this tapestry of beautiful prose… Anne Carson is someone else who in a different way achieves the same thing. She’s known mostly as a poet, as a classicist; Autobiography of Red, it’s a predominately a verse novel, but it’s so much more than that. So that kind of stuff that knows no bounds, that was important for me with this record.

You pull from so many genres—classical, indie, pop, and rock—in a way that is difficult to categorize. But in music, people want to label you, like you’re the “classical-indie guy.” How does that make you feel?

The sort of pathological need to categorize comes from a cultural discomfort with emotion. People are actually really uncomfortable taking things in and judging them for themselves. This is not limited to music, it happens in all of the arts. The need to categorize is a short-hand for what something is going to make someone feel, and that’s something that I obviously reject. I sort of wish that people would never use these genre-monikers.

But in writing about an album, don’t you have to describe the music? I mean, how do people know what they’re going to hear without some sort of categorization?

To me, the thing that creates unity is storytelling. What all of these songs have in common is that they tell stories. And for me, that transcends questions of style. I think that when listeners read about music, what they really want to know is if something is going to make me feel or not; is it going to make me think or not; not does it fit neatly into some preordained category that ‘I know and like.’

I’m sure it’s something that will continue to irritate me forever, but I do also think that we may be on the cusp; it feels like in the past five years there’s been this narrative of genre-bending, genre-less, etc. At a certain point, even from a crass, economic standpoint, whoever is the head honcho at “X” website is going to say these headlines no longer do well with clicks. And people will have to start figuring out new ways to attain order. So maybe it will go away.

Out of all the song titles, is there a place whose story resonated the most?

Yes, getting to know the story of Latasha Harlins and her tragic death. She was shot and killed in a grocery store when she was 15-years-old by a Korean woman over a bottle of orange juice. It’s a story that is wholeheartedly part of the fabric of black, contemporary history. It’s something that Angelenos know about, but it’s not really a story the rest of the country knows; and generally not the story that white people know. And the parallels with the Trayvon Martin shooting are many.

What are you listening to now?

This new Sylvan Esso record, which came out about a month ago. That record has been on repeat since it came out. I’ve listen to some other new music that hasn’t spoken to me that much, but that record really captured my attention in a real way.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on another piece for the Public Theater. I wrote a piece for them in 2012 entitled, “February House.” I’m also in the process of doing research for a piece for them on Alcoholics Anonymous. And then there’s the stage version of The Ambassador, which is happening at BAM in December. And I’m making some very preliminary plans for writing an opera.

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Praise be! The television Gods/Jeff Bezos have smiled upon us and picked up Jill Soloway’s wonderful pilot Transparent for a complete season.

Last month our own Batya Ungar-Sargon offered high praise for the dark, comic family drama set in L.A.:

“They say we are living in a golden age of television. If that’s the case, Jill Soloway’s new pilot deserves its own unit of commerce. Ruby? Sapphire? It’s a cut above the rest, and it’s fucking amazing and you should drop everything you are doing and watch it right now.”

In the pilot, patriarch Mort (played by Jeffrey Tambor) tries—and fails—to reveal his transgender identity to his three children, who are all too preoccupied with their own psychosexual dramas to give him space to speak. It’s brilliant, compelling, witty television set in Los Angeles’ creative (and often very Jewy) middle-class—a milieu that Soloway loves and satirizes in equal parts. We can’t wait to see how it unfolds.

http://youtu.be/dHpXcmiEIyM

Watch the full episode here.

Related: Must-watch: Jill Soloway’s New Amazon Original Pilot, “Transparent”
The Newest Best Thing on the Internet: Wifey.tv

The post Jill Soloway’s Pilot ‘Transparent’ Picked Up By Amazon For Complete Season appeared first on Jewcy.

They say we are living in a golden age of television. If that’s the case, Jill Soloway’s new pilot deserves its own unit of commerce. Ruby? Sapphire? It’s a cut above the rest, and it’s fucking amazing and you should drop everything you are doing and watch it right now.

A dark family comedy about sex and self, “Transparent” is “Girls” meets “Parenthood,” with some “Louie” mixed in. The plot revolves around a classic Jewish L.A. family, including divorced parents Judith Light (sublime!) and Jeffrey Tambor (almost unbearably good, equal parts vulnerable and funny), and their offspring: Jay Duplass as Josh, a music producer who we meet in bed playing with the boobs of a blond cutie; Amy Landecker as Sarah, a housewife we first glimpse hurriedly rushing her kids to school; and the astoundingly good Gaby Hoffman as Ali, a depressive twenty-something with big ideas and no money. The kids are touchingly close, and they are called in by Tambor for a family summit in which the truth he plans to tell them ends up buried, rather than revealed.

The show is equally compassionate and disdainful towards its characters, both distant from and reveling in their upper-middle-class lifestyle. (“If you don’t raise five grand for Tu B’Shevat, Dana Goodman just implodes,” quips Sarah’s erstwhile lesbian lover during school drop-off.) But it also seems to be asking viewers whether to accept or deny the father’s accusation that his children are selfish and unable to see beyond themselves, especially since the carefully guarded secret of this family’s patriarch—his transgender identity—has seeped into his kids’ psycho-sexual lives.

As the pilot unravels, we see the siblings responding individually to the truth their father fails to reveal. They seem somehow to intuit that the masculine center of their family is in flux, or perhaps, was never quite there. Ali goes in search of a trainer in the park for an old-fashioned dose of discipline in its modern masquerade—a punishing workout. Josh finds himself in the lap of someone quite the opposite of his blond bedfellow, a woman with big curly hair and large floppy breasts who tells him to get comfortable. He lies down on the floor (in the exact position in which we first see Sarah’s son), and lays his head near the woman’s crotch. Is he looking to replace his emasculated father? Or perhaps searching for the mother figure he senses waiting to emerge? And Sarah finds herself reignited by her college girlfriend, seeking out her less hetero-normative former self. The kids do see their dad for what he is, if only unconsciously, evidenced by their search for a father—or mother—figure. And Dad, too, has something to learn, should the series get picked up.

In addition to being smart and sexy, “Transparent” is also genuinely funny. “Dad’s not getting engaged—he’s too much of a pussy-hound,” says Josh on their way to the summit. “Really he’s a Marcy-hound,” Ali corrects him. “Haven’t the last six been Marcys?” (I won’t ruin it, but when the three kids try to pronounce the Jewish last names of the Marcys, hilarity ensues).

With characteristic aplomb, Jill Soloway gives us something to wonder about, something to be surprised by, something to be aroused by, and something to laugh at. A lusciously downcast soundtrack lends the whole thing a distinctively Soloway melancholy; one senses that things are not going to be OK, but somehow, it’s better that way. The only weakness is the portrayal of minorities—Ali’s black trainer and Sarah’s lesbian ex-girlfriend seem a little too close to a white liberal’s fantasy. But perhaps Soloway means this as a critique of her characters, who put these individuals to use in satisfying their cravings. We’ll only know if the show gets picked up by Amazon, so watch it and say yes to “Transparent”!

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On a Season 2 episode of Shahs of Sunset, Bravo’s reality television glimpse into Persian American life, Jewish cast member Mike Shouhed struggles with introducing his non-Jewish girlfriend to his family. After some encouragement from his brother David (a dentist, obviously), who brushes the meeting off as a “little hurdle” to overcome, Mike brings the Italian-American Jessica to his parents’ house for Shabbat dinner. He explains to the off-screen camera that it’s an effort to fulfill the nagging maternal directive to marry a nice Jewish girl and have babies—just, of course, minus the Jewish part. Mike does his best, but can only meet his mother halfway.

Kiddush is perfunctorily recited by Mike’s father, and white nylon yarmulkes briefly grace the heads of the men in the room. The camera zooms in on a bottle of Manischewitz on the table. After some initial tension post-motzi, Jessica impresses the Shouhed family by knowing to kiss both cheeks, a customary Persian greeting. Her career path as a nurse is also promising—as Mike explains, “Persians love professional degrees.”  

As a viewer, it’s unclear what the bigger issue is for Mike’s family–that Jessica isn’t Jewish, or that she isn’t Persian. After all, Mike’s Jewish observance doesn’t seem to go much further than an impressive respect for his mother and regular attendance at Shabbat dinners. As the only self-identified Jewish main character currently on the show, Mike’s storyline follows a well-trodden arc of success and assimilation. For him, the requirements of a Persian and Jewish partner are almost interchangeable—it’s a matter of ethnic belonging and continuity rather than religious priorities.

Shahs of Sunset, which follows the life and times of high-rolling Persian Americans in Los Angeles—Tehrangeles, they call it—as they navigate life, love, and partying, is yet another incarnation in the Jersey Shore trend: American ethnic enclaves mined for reality entertainment. Unsurprisingly, the Persian American community is less than pleased about what it sees as a cheap exploitation of negative stereotypes of cheap wealth and overdramatic behavior.

Yet while much has been said about that controversy, not much attention has been paid to the treatment of religion, and religious difference, on the show. The women on the show are all Persian Muslims. G.G., Mercedes, Lily, and Asa enjoy working and living in Los Angeles in varying industries, from real estate to swimwear. Except for Asa, the self-described Persian Pop Priestess who flings off her chador as part of her performance art, there is little discussion of how Islam plays into their identities—although there is much discussion of what it means to be Persian.

Mike and Sammy, both in real estate, are identified as Jews, although Mike is portrayed as more identified than Sammy (who also demoted to a supporting character in Season 2), attending Shabbat dinners and openly declaring that his Jewish mother is the most important woman in his life. Reza, who is openly gay, is torn between the Muslim and Jewish sides of his family (more on that later).

Season 2 sees both Mike and Reza struggling with issues of Jewish identity and belonging, though in vastly different ways. Mike hesitantly introduces Jessica to tadig, the crunchy rice which is the ultimate symbol of Persian cuisine. In the end, her Italian ethnic identity is close enough for Mike—an unexplained conflation of ethnic and religious identities. In the season’s finale, he asks his family for their blessing, and with his own “freedom of choice” (Mike’s own language) that his parents have given him by leaving Iran, he chooses to marry a woman outside his race and religion—a non-Persian and non-Jewish woman. His own immigrant parents only want happiness for their son.

Reza, the breakout star of the show, is the most vivacious, likable character of the bunch. The product of a Muslim-Jewish intermarriage (Muslim mother, Jewish father), he was raised primarily by his mother after his unfaithful father abandoned the family when Reza was young. He is proudly gay, which, despite initial reluctance from his family, seems to be widely accepted in their traditional Persian community. Despite identifying as a Muslim, Reza admits in Season 1 that he’s never been inside a mosque, adding that he’s been to plenty of bar mitzvahs so he might as well be Jewish.

While the show’s treatment of Judaism certainly leaves a lot to be desired, it at least gets airtime. Throughout the first two seasons of Shahs, Islam was mentioned only a handful of times. Muslim celebrations are either presented as completely secular or constructed as Persian, and not Muslim, events. While Iranian Jewishness is packaged as novel to viewers, Muslim Persian identity seems to have been scrupulously avoided.

For Reza, then, religious affiliation is marked by whom one parties with the most. His in-between status (there is no patrilineal descent here) is revealed during his first trip to Great Neck, NY, where we see his difficult relationship and (eventual on-screen reconciliation) with his father’s side of the family. Reza describes the Long Island enclave as an all-Jewish Persian Utopia, in many ways the suburban other to glitzy L.A.

Reza, bearing a carefully selected parve cake (the scene in Bruce’s Bakery where Reza asks repeatedly if the cake is dairy free is perhaps my favorite from the first season), approaches his father and asks for an olive branch. The two embrace and cry, but the reunion is marred by Reza’s grandmother, a ninety-plus matriarch who is not pleased that her grandchildren are, as she says, “goyim.”

Religion is a double sided sword on the show—harmful when divisions are enforced (such as the punishment for exogamy) but a unifying force when there is food to share and holidays to celebrate. Difference between Persians of varying religions is not a fundamental division, but a matter of generational conflict that can be solved with a family reunion, a good cry, and a healthy dose of American multiculturalism.

In Season 2, Reza brings the entire gang to Great Neck for Rosh Hashanah dinner, in an attempt to make further inroads with his Jewish family. Mike, the resident Jew, explains that Rosh Hashanah is the time to start fresh, and that the group should bring large gifts to Reza’s uncle Hooshang, who graciously agreed to host his nephew’s entourage. (Mike also explains that he had to ask special permission to miss Rosh Hashanah with his family. His mother must have been so upset.)

This pared down celebration of the Jewish New Year, with minimal ritual (a quick shot of apples and honey and a random cousin making a shortened kiddush is all the Jewish content we get) and no synagogue attendance (if anyone does go, it isn’t mentioned) allows for Reza to fully reconcile with his old grandmother, portrayed until now as a rather terrifying personality—perhaps the scariest on the show to date. In a classic Shahs ending, everyone makes up in time for late-evening cocktails.

Perhaps it is quixotic to demand nuance from reality television, but this pop-culture-fan-turned-academic would have loved to see a fuller treatment of religion and ethnicity, how young Persian-Americans are creating their own identities amongst the classic divisions of American society, and how especially Persian Jews are demanding their role on the current American Jewish scene—a scene that is dominantly white and Ashkenazi. While you ponder those possibilities of these Jewish Shahs, you might as well enjoy the tadig.

Previously: Learning Farsi with ‘Shahs of Sunset’
‘Shahs of Sunset’ Mega-Mansion Can Be Yours for Just $58 Million

The post Shahs of Sunset’s Jewish Problem appeared first on Jewcy.

It looks like anti-Semitic Elmo—last seen getting arrested in Times Square last month—has headed out West, seeking greener pastures and fatter wallets. According to Michael Wilson, a writer for the New York Times’ City Room blog, the 48-year-old former pornographer was spotted at a San Francisco playground, then sent Wilson a bizarre email saying he was posted up at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, making bank:

“Why?” he wrote. “I am the only cartoon character.”

As if to drive the point home, he attached a picture of a pile of cash beside plates of sushi. “Feasting on sashimi,” he wrote.

Watch out, Los Angeles—he’s headed to you next.

Ranting Elmo Finds Prosperity Out West [New York Times] Previously: Anti-Semitic Elmo is Back—He Got Arrested in Times Square Today
Why Anti-Semitic Elmo is Creepier—and Less Funny—Than We Had Thought
The Growing Anti-Semitic Elmo Crisis

The post Anti-Semitic Elmo Heads Out West, Boasts of Cash and Sushi appeared first on Jewcy.