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.)

The post Spotlight On: Minimalist Soul Duo Silk Rhodes appeared first on Jewcy.

YidLife Crisis is a new web series that grapples with some of the great quandaries of contemporary Jewish life: Should Jews continue to practice archaic traditions? How do we define Jewish culture, which bears the influence of nationalities from around the globe? Also, how much badonkadonk is too much badonkadonk?

The series consists of four raucous, five-minute episodes written and performed by Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, two Montreal-born actors who play Chaimie and Laizer, respectively. Each episode follows the two thirty-somethings as they grapple with their secular Jewish identity, revel in iconic Montreal restaurants, and extol the virtues of schmaltz (an absolute must, when it comes to smoked meat). This would be sufficiently wonderful on its own, but Batalion and Elman deliver something even better: the series is performed almost entirely in Yiddish.

Batalion and Elman studied Yiddish at Bialik High School in Montreal. Years after graduating, they connected in Los Angeles and began brainstorming ideas for a project that they could work on together. They knew they wanted to create a Yiddish web series, but not because they had lofty goals of preserving a “dying language.” As comic actors, Batalion and Elman were drawn to the vitality and rhythm of Yiddish, which has played an integral role in shaping humor and comedy in North America.

“I think a large part of what we’re doing here is a form of preservation of culture, but it’s not based on some sort of pure altruism,” Batalion explains. “It’s based on the fact that we just thought Yiddish was funny. Jamie and I are big fans of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and that kind of comedy is built on a Yiddish style that’s coming out in English, but it really owes royalties to the Yiddish language.”

Initially, they planned to recreate classic Seinfeld sketches in Yiddish, as a homage to the language that lends its flavor to their favorite sitcom. But they soon realized that they could do more than borrow material from an existing show. Batalion and Elman applied for and received a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation, an organization that promotes Jewish culture in Montreal. Then, with some translation help from Batalion’s father, the duo started to write their own Yiddish scripts, which explored their concerns as young, secular Jews.

“The grant led us to realizations that we had about how the show could be deeper than just redoing Seinfeld sketches, “Elman says. “We could actually use the content of what we’re going to talk about in the show as a way of reaching out to other communities, and as a way of explaining our narishkeit, our Jewish neuroses, to the non-Jewish world.”

And what is it, exactly, that occupies the minds of the YidLife guys? Food, for one thing. (“It’s a Jewish show,” Elman says. “What else are we going to be doing?”) Each episode is set in a beloved Montreal eatery, as Chaimie and Laizer chow down on their favorite dishes and engage in Talmudic debates on matters of great Jewish import, like the optimal method for making bagels. They chat about beautiful women, naked selfies, and the merits of a big, um, posterior (the series is rated “Chai plus,” thanks to its racier content). It’s amusing to watch the guys work words like “badonkadonk” into Yiddish dialogue, but their lighthearted banter belies an earnest contemplation of modern Jewish life, with all its inconsistencies and hypocrisies.

In the first episode, Laizer is gorging on poutine—a very treyf Canadian specialty made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy—as Kol Nidre soars in the background. In another episode, Chaimie takes Laizer to task for eating at a Greek restaurant. “After what they did?” he cries. “200 BC? Forced conversion, temple desecration? I can’t eat this crap.” He does, in the end, after Laizer reminds him that most of his favorite “Jewish” foods—latkes, bagels, challah, Danish—were borrowed from other nationalities who, to put it lightly, had fraught relationships with the Jews. In the same episode, Laizer questions the value of continuing to practice ancient Jewish rites, like circumcision. “Is your mother Jewish?” he asks Chaimie. “Then by Jewish law, so are you. So why the schmekle chop?!”

“We’re dealing with everything with humor,” Batalion says of YidLife. “But some of the topics that are broached are fairly serious. I mean, atonement, circumcision are pretty serious acts. It’s not just that the act is serious, but the implications and the discussion about identity is a pretty serious discussion. In some way, Jamie and I grapple with it every single day.”

“I want to clarify,” Elman cuts in. “I don’t grapple with Eli’s circumcision in any way, shape, or form.”

Yiddish might seem like an anachronistic choice of language for a series rooted in a very twenty-first century medium, but it works. During the filming of YidLife’s first episode, Batalion and Elman performed their dialogue twice: once in English and once in Yiddish. The French-Canadian staff of the restaurant where they were shooting watched the English take with little reaction. But they started cracking up when Batalion and Elman performed the sketch in Yiddish.

“They were laughing the whole time we were doing the Yiddish, even though they couldn’t understand a word of it,” Elman says. “And in fact one of our camera guys—he’s a French-Canadian guy—was laughing during the take. I said, ‘Why is this so funny to you?’ He said, ‘Oh, it just sounds funny. It sounds like Seinfeld.’ And we knew right away that we were doing it right.”

Related: New Web Series Celebrates Poutine, Lactaid, and Jewish Angst—in Yiddish
Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’

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30-year-old Manhattan native Josh Ostrovsky, AKA The Fat Jew, is a thrice-kicked-out-of-college performance artist with 1.3 million followers on Instagram. He’s what your parents might call a meshuggeneh—but a very rich one. The 6-foot-2 humorist, known for his vertical ponytail and absurd public antics, gained mainstream notoriety last summer when a video of him leading a group of homeless people in a Citi Bike ‘Soul Cycle’ class went viral.

Only in America can The Fat Jew be everything that The Fat Jew is: over-indulgent and borderline-psychotic, but with an original, twisted wit that has companies like Virgin Mobile paying him big bucks to sit in a bath of ramen noodles. With an “anti-how-to” book in the works and scripted shows sold to both Comedy Central and Amazon, The Fat Jew is more than just an Instagram sensation—he’s the CEO of an ironic personality cult based on utter insanity.

We met at the DMV on 34^th st and 9^th ave, where Ostrovsky takes meetings and “gets things done” thanks to the roomy seating and arctic air-conditioning (and also because he can scream on the phone about anything). Post-interview, I got him to do some killer yoga poses outside Penn Station, where we breathed in the glorious fumes of passing buses and a halal cart.

What’s a day in the life of the Fat Jew?

I wake up, sometimes in my bed, sometimes face down in Queens. I don’t know how—sometimes I just end up in Queens. I’m like, where I am? Oh yeah, in fucking Queens. Cause like, how did you get to Queens? I can imagine how I got to Brooklyn, but how did I get to Queens? I basically avoid doing adult shit at all times.

What about when you have to pay your bills? Do you sit down and do that?

No, I have an intern. Chu Chu, my bisexual Filipino intern. He goes to the New School and gets college credit for this. I sign some paper and write him a performance review.

I spend most of the day just thinking of awesome shit to do. Now I have a book deal, so I’m doing that. It used to be that just Virgin Mobile would pay me to fill a Jacuzzi up with ramen and sit in it.

How did it get to the point where Virgin Mobile wanted to pay you to sit in a ramen Jacuzzi?

Because brands are just into crazy shit now, because the kids are into that. There’s so much shit on the Internet; nothing is ever crazy enough. At this point I have a loyal following of runaways, weirdos, and goths.

You’re like their god.

Totally. A brand will say: “You have a big following of gothic Hispanic millenials, which is a demographic we really would love to try to target,” and then they’ll just pay me to do some shit. At this point, they don’t even care; I can pretty much do whatever I want. If I want to fill a hot tub with gazpacho, that’s fine—if I want to rent a Ferrari and throw a cheetah in it for no reason, down—they don’t care.

Does that surprise you?

Yeah, it wasn’t always this way. Even five years ago they didn’t really get it, now they do.

Well, now you’ve built yourself up to the point where people besides freaks know you.

Totally. It’s not all just goth Dominican teens. Now there are moms and dads.

And you must have all the Jewish girls on your shit thinking you’ll be their big Jewish baby daddy.

Yes—I’ve got Rachels and Laurens for miles. I’m the Magellan of Rachels. I also have a lot of Liats and Yaels; got it all.

And now you have a book deal. Cha-ching.

Yeah, so now I’m getting paid to basically write, so I’m trying to develop my methods. I’ll light a bunch of scented candles and sit naked and work on my book.

It’s basically going to be the anti “how-to” book. I’ll tell you what you shouldn’t be doing; you shouldn’t use a Doritos bag as a condom with a rubber band—it’s not going to work to prevent pregnancy. I’m like the fuck-up older brother you wish you had who could have told you what not to do. If you wouldn’t have done it, your life would have been amazing. I’ve professionally made bad decisions; so learn from that.

Did the book people contact you?

A bunch of people reached out and said I should probably be writing some of this shit down. At this point there’s so much ridiculous shit, and the world needs to see this. I’m basically the new James Joyce.

You sound like Kanye right now.

Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. He’s like, ‘I’m the new Shakespeare meets Steve Jobs meets Hilary Clinton,’ which is a dope thing to say. Like, what? But me, I’m basically the new Shel Silverstein—who by the way, my mom fucked.

No way.

Swear to god. In like, 1970.

What’s the deal with your TV show?

I sold a show to Comedy Central. It’s basically about what you’re asking me about. When you take a piece of social media and the end result is me in a nacho cheese fountain with Tyrese—how did I get there?

And sometimes the process leading up to that is not that hilarious—it’s kind of dark—it has a Louie element to it. Sometimes it’s fucking weird. Basically when you’re of the Internet and you don’t do one thing in particular—like, I’m not solely an actor or a writer—you can kind of do anything. Stella Artois just flew me to Cannes to pour rosé on myself and stand around.

So everyone was just super rich and doing crazy shit?

It was just so ridiculous. These Saudi dudes found me and were just like ‘we want to be around him!’ and inducted me into their entourage. I ended up on a yacht party with them, and they told me to come to the back room. So I assumed it was going to be a room full of gold bullion and missiles, and whatever they do in Saudi Arabia, and there was just a live ostrich, and they said, ‘look at it.’ You couldn’t even touch it; they just wanted people to look at it.

Did you always think you’d be famous for just being you?

Yes, sort of. I felt like it would come around. This is still relatively a new thing. Even 10 years ago, to be famous, you had to be on a reality TV show.

Instagram has really skyrocketed your fame.

Initially I thought Instagram was the wrong medium for me, because it has so many rules. I got kicked off three times, and the last time I protested outside their offices and chained myself up. And then I was like, maybe this isn’t right for me—I can’t put up my crazy photos. But then I realized that toning it down a little bit was opening me up to a more mainstream audience. I just can’t put up photos of birthday candles jammed into somebody’s dick hole, lit. That’s won’t fly, but I can still put up kinda crazy shit. Crazy enough for most people.

When you put up tweets from certain celebrities—are they real?

A lot of the tweets are fake. I had some 16-year-old build a program that generates super-authentic looking tweets. Some of the celebrities who I’ve made fake tweets for have come up to me and said they were ridiculously awesome. Like Snoop. He said, “Yo, I’ve seen some of your fake tweets, and I wish I was tweeting that stuff.” There were a couple he wasn’t feeling, but he was much more up on it than I thought.

Now that I’m writing a book, everything is just for inspiration. I’ll put up on Twitter, “If you’re under 20, and Puerto Rican and want to go boogie boarding today, meet me at the beach.” And 12 kids will show up, and we’ll just chill. And that could be inspiration for a chapter. I also do some serious stuff; I run a soup kitchen in Brooklyn.

Are you serious?

No I’m just kidding. Come on; stop. I mean someone should do that, but not me. Also, my dog has a popular Instagram. I’m running a full-scale business of insanity. A sex toy company in Belgium recently hit me up and asked me to be the face of their company; they said I could have a custom toy. Last year we released 1,000 shirts to homeless guys with my face on it. My mom, in her old Jewish woman accent said, “I think I just saw a homeless man in a shirt with your face on it.”

Were your parents really chill growing up?

No, they were uptight doctors. Then they retired and moved to Santa Fe and got so weird. They’re all leather bracelet, bolo ties, denim, and cowboy boots.

I think they’re swingers. They’ll smoke a quarter of a joint, walk the dog for two hours; they’re very Santa Fe. There’s a lot of Jews there. It’s kind of like pre-Boca. My parents retired when they were 50. You go to Santa Fe to tide you over for 20 years. Ten years ago my dad was wearing sensible Rockports and doctors gadgets.

Do you think that has to do with you being so openly insane?

I think it helps. But he’s fucking Russian, like for real. The idea for him, that what I do can be something someone does for a living—for him it was literally like, ‘I don’t even know what you’re saying, what are you trying to do?’

And then one day—I used to be in a rap group called Team Facelift, and we laid a lot of groundwork for shit that people do now, like Riff Raff and Odd Future, we rapped with transvestites, we were on MTV a whole bunch of times. We did all these spots for The Hills, and after that, a check came to my house. I was out all night at a rave, and he opened the check, and it was a Fed Ex thing for $15,000. And I think at that moment he realized I wasn’t just a psycho.

I’m sort of being taken seriously, and sort of not, and it’s so fucking weird, everyday. And that’s all I ever wanted. I wanted everyday to be different. And every day is massively different—except that bowl of cereal in the morning.

You have to have some daily rituals.

I smoke cigarettes a lot. So that happens everyday. The writing is going to be a bit more foreign. They’re going to give me an advance check, and I’m renting an office building in Detroit. Fifteen stories, completely abandoned, but with all the shit in it—dazzling—for $8,000 a month. I’m going to do it for three months. One floor to write my book, and others to do whatever I want. I’m going to turn it into a factory of fucking insanity. I’m going to have a whole floor of garbage, sand, kiddie pools, nectarines… It’s sort of a twist on people renting a cottage in Montauk to write their book; I’m getting an office building in Detroit, because why the fuck not?

What’s the best thing about being Jewish?

Jewish summer camp. There are basically no Jews who don’t go to camp. I learned every single thing I know at Jew camp. I haven’t learned one thing since the day Jew camp ended. How to unhook a bra with your teeth, how to do a roundhouse, how to jerk off on your top bunk so silently and with so little motion that they guy doesn’t wake up on the bottom. I was so Jew camp scene; I went to Eisner Camp.

And your name was inspired from a counselor at camp, right?

Yes, him and this famous pornographer, NYC legend, Al Goldstein. Him and that dude were my inspiration. They were just fat, loud Jews who gave no fucks. Like ‘most people are gonna hate me, but I’m going to do whatever I want.’

What’s the worst part about being a Jew?

Having a dick that looks like a rock shrimp. Also being an old Jew. If you’re an old Christian dude, you can get old, get a motorcycle, and still do killer shit. But the older you get as a Jew, the more you’re just in bad shape. All you talk about is the humidity and how expensive New York is. You just can’t help yourself. As much as I know that I don’t want to be like that, it’s in the genes. Can’t escape it. My parents are always taking about the weather. So not looking forward to that.

I think being an older Jewish woman is cooler. But I’m not down with the chunky-funky necklace Jewish mom jewelry scene. My mom will wear a chunky necklace that looks like it’s made out of found garbage, and it’s like $8,000 from some Dutch artist. It literally looks like trash. So Santa Fe.

What would be your pre-electric chair meal?

I’d want an oil drum full of chopped liver, and cigarettes. If I could chain smoke and be eating chopped liver—kill me; take me now. If I had one more option, I’d probably have a Chilean seabass in a wasabi reduction with a saffron risotto. And a nice vintage Shiraz with hints of leather, oak, and fruit. I’m super tasteful.

http://youtu.be/24jiCZpdNZI

(Images by the author)

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Yelena Akhtiorskaya, 28, is the author of Panic in a Suitcase, a novel spanning 15 years in the life of a family of Ukrainian emigres struggling to adjust to life in the United States. The Nasmertovs live in the Soviet immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where the tension between the past and future is acutely felt by all—and exemplified by a visit from Pasha, the famous poet uncle who remained in Ukraine. In 2008, 15 years after Pasha’s visit, his niece Frida—now a medical student—travels from New York to Odessa for her cousin’s wedding, a journey rich in wry observations about displacement, homesickness, and culture shock.

Panic in a Suitcase has received rave reviews from The New York Times (“crisp and gorgeous”), the Washington Post (“genius”), Vogue (“a virtuosic debut”), and many others. (And this morning Akhtiorskaya was named by the National Book Foundation as one of their “5 under 35” for 2014.) Earlier this summer, Michael Orbach talked with her about writing, misery, Brighton Beach, and Russian literature in translation.

What’s the story behind Panic in a Suitcase?

A lot is based on my life. It’s kind of a composite of a few things: one is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being. And the third idea was about a character who chooses not to emigrate. I love Russian-Jewish immigrant novels and that whole tradition, but they don’t entirely speak to the way it is now, or not the way it was with my experience. I wanted to explore the way we romanticize the old country and the authenticity of it.

When did you move to America?

I came in 1992. I feel like I can’t say I grew up in America; I meet Russians who moved to California or Ohio and they’re so Americanized. I grew up in Brighton Beach where I spoke Russian wherever I went.

I think that’s why everyone says they hear an accent. I shouldn’t have one, but I do, because I stayed in Russia. Growing up in Brighton Beach was kind of like growing up in the 1950s. It’s like Brighton Beach Memoirs mixed with Requiem for a Dream. Wholesome and Jewish, but at the same time lots of wandering the streets and drugs and all this desperation. The parents are working really hard to rebuild their lives and the grandparents are watching over you, but it’s easy to fool the grandparents.

Did you disappoint your parents by not becoming a doctor?

My mom used to say every day, “Please just reconsider, it’s not too late to go to medical school.” I think the fact that she no longer says that, or not as regularly, means she must be proud. It is hard to tell. Ideally, you become part of the tradition of Russian writer-doctors—Chekhov, Bulgakov, Tsypkin. I’m considering becoming a clinical psychologist. This summer I took an intensive statistics course… I can’t tell how much of it is for me and how much for my parents.

I know you went to Columbia for your MFA, what happened afterwards?

I really needed to make money, but I didn’t want to work. There were some dark times. First, I worked at The Strand.

Like every other novelist.

It was the only place I could get a job, but it didn’t last long, then I moved to New Orleans. My friends from high school were there and I thought it would be a good break from New York, but it was too joyful. Then I moved back here and I got a job at Columbia University Medical Center on 168th Street.

Uh, shouldn’t you be happier?

Do you know how to do that?

No, but I haven’t written a novel that’s gotten great reviews.

If you know how to be pleased with yourself, you will be, but if you don’t, you won’t.

You are so Russian.

My friend says that my capacity for misery is greater than anyone he’s ever met.

You should drink more. I think you need a hug.

Maybe that’s true. People usually say that on the phone but people are scared of giving me a hug.

Do you prefer to read in Russian?

It’s much harder for me to read in Russian. I read poetry in the original but for the fat novels there’s [translators] Pevear and Volokhonsky. It’s necessary to take Babel in Russian, but luckily he spawned two of my favorite American short story writers: Grace Paley and Leonard Michaels.

What do you like about the Russians?

Russian writers are like Russian people: there’s not a lot of bullshit. I can relate to the inherent darkness, the pessimism, and all that misery. They get to the essential stuff pretty much right away.

What is the essential stuff?

Life, death, love, time. Russian poetry in particular cuts through to the heart of you in a way that is very not-American. I have to make a distinction: it’s a Russian quality, not a Jewish quality, and I don’t have it. I can’t help but make the joke. I don’t have the Russian thing where it’s really pure, dark tragedy. I can’t help but write in a funny or crooked way, even though at core there’s the darkness.

It’s very dark for you?

Being a writer you spend most of your time holed up in a room by yourself trying to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s not a very positive occupation. It doesn’t correlate to optimistic fun-in-the-sun-Frisbee time.

I noticed that you have some lovely passages about the sea.

I go back to Brighton Beach every weekend to swim in the ocean. That’s when I’m not in the miserable mode. I have a very good relationship with the sea. It’s like my home.

Read an excerpt from Panic in a Suitcase over at N+1.

 (Image: Riverhead Books)

Related: Anya Ulinich on Autobiography in Fiction, Drawing, and the Perverse Pleasures of OkCupid
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

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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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Michael Orbach caught up with her recently to talk about autobiography in fiction, drawing, Bernard Malamud, and the perverse pleasures of OkCupid.

So your new book begins with your lead character blaming the U.S. State department for her sexual awakening. That’s actually coincidental since I blame the U.S. Department of Agriculture for my own belated sexual awakening…

[Laughs] Actually I would like to stop you right there—it’s a novel, not a memoir, so I don’t want to discuss my own sexual awakening. It’s definitely semi-autobiographical. It’s informed from my own experience, there’s no question about that, but it’s not straight out of it. My life is much more boring.

I think some people are writers who write stuff because they’re very interested in what happens to them; other people aren’t like that. I can think of many writers who write about places they’ve never been to. Some people can’t do that. I need a personal connection to the material.

What was the genesis of this graphic novel?

My first novel [Petropolis] came out in 2007 and I wrote another one, and it was just not good. I didn’t entirely like it; I showed it to my agent and she didn’t exactly love it; my editor didn’t like it. After that, I was in a kind of bad personal state. I couldn’t get myself to start writing another novel but I was doing a lot of drawing and doodles. I haven’t drawn for ten years and then a freelance illustration job fell in my lap. I found that drawing was soothing. I showed those drawings to my agent and she said maybe this was my next project. I have never done any comics before—I didn’t grow up with comics. And I haven’t read that many graphic novels. The graphic novels I did read were basically literary fiction or memoirs: Persepolis [Marjane Satrapi], Fun Home [Alison Bechdel], and stories by Adrian Tomine. I read them the same way I’d read any fiction. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all.

But when I was telling stories with drawing, the space constraints of a comic panel or a speech bubble actually helped me construct a story. When I write fiction it tends to sprawl. With handwritten text, there is the issue of space constraint. It forces you to get the story out. It was an easier process in a way. Do I wrap up a scene or extend it? The choice was obvious; I have to say what I have to say, or draw it all over again. It gave me a kick in the pants as a writer. It made it more vivid. It was a good experience overall.

How long did this take you?

I started it in May 2012 and I finished it last summer—less than a year. I sold it to Penguin on proposal and they gave me a few months. I was really rushing. Drawing takes up a lot of time; the first draft was completed in a few months. I did 16-hour days, it was crazy. I work at home and my kids would be like “There’s no food!” and I’d be like “Here’s twenty bucks, go to the grocery store.” I was disappointed that I didn’t have time to perfect the drawings. Writing is finite, there’s a stopping point when you can’t improve, but with drawing it’s much more ambiguous. I’m much more judgmental of my artwork than of my prose. I would have loved to have more time to make the book more more beautiful. On the other hand, when it was finished, I was happy because the speed gave the book a kind of urgency. The momentum is more intense because the pace is intense and it’s matched by the quality of hand-written text.

I love the dialog. Did some of that come from your own experience on OkCupid?

Yes, I have that in common with my character. I spent my whole adult life in a marriage; I was married at 21, and I had a kid when I was 24 and another one when I was 28. I stayed in this marriage for 15 years. I never dated; you don’t “date” when you’re in college, you “meet people” which is different. I was absolutely fascinated by the whole dating thing; I met people whom I never would have encountered in my normal social circle. All these crazy different stories.

Not every guy I met was somehow interesting or entirely insane, like the guys in the novel. The novel does its fiction thing—even if based on reality, everything is kind of exaggerated and tweaked… But still, it was a really interesting experience for me. Doing online dating as a writer, I couldn’t help deconstructing the way people misrepresented themselves online; even if they are trying to say one thing about themselves, they said another. The way they write about themselves and what they include or choose to exclude, it’s very telling. You learn to read between the lines.

I never looked at OkCupid like that, but I probably should.

I’m almost tempted to do a sociological study of OkCupid profiles and what people do. Our relationship with our photographs for example: we all have something we think is our best feature and our worst feature and we take pictures accordingly. Or something that’s meaningful and sentimental and we put it in our profile, but it’s not necessarily our best picture or looks like that you, or that you’re visible in. Another interesting thing is the language people use and what we chose to include in our reading lists. We don’t put down our favorite guilty pleasure, we put down the kind of stuff that we think will attract the kind of people we want. The men OkCupid matched me with usually “loved” David Sedaris and Charles Bukowski. There’s a list of three writers that the guy who doesn’t actually read books likes to use. No man ever likes any women writers, except for Sylvia Plath.

I’m going to my OkCupid profile to add a female writer now.

Add one who isn’t Sylvia Plath. You can so get the chicks.

Our interview is on hold, while I add Margaret Atwood.

She’s okay. Put Lorrie Moore in there.

Alice Munro?

Yeah, that’ll help.

If I get laid because of this interview…

You can buy me a drink.

I waste a lot of time on OkCupid, but you really made something useful out of it.

To me it was not a waste of time. I waste time professionally, I’m a writer. I gather material. It was fascinating, especially the way people answer some of the questions. Probably 90 percent of men answer the question “Are you smarter than most people?” in the affirmative. I get matched with a certain sub-set of men: basically, educated New Yorkers. And lot of them are white people, and I guess white men think they’re smarter than most people. I wouldn’t date anyone who said that he was smarter than people. What kind of thing is that to say?

I liked how you picked up on the question OkCupid has about whether people with low IQs shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. They should rename the site OkHitler.

How many over-educated hipsters actually say yes—that the world would be a better place if people with low IQs couldn’t reproduce? It’s really crazy.

In the book, Lena has this moment where she has a nightmare about Philip Roth and picks Bernard Malamud instead. Can you talk a little about that?

Lena has a nightmare about Philip Roth on a Greyhound bus. I had a good dream about Roth on a Greyhound bus, he was really nice to me, but narratively speaking it needed be a nightmare. Malamud is a great artist—his writing is so fine. I like him as an artist better than Roth—but I identity with Roth’s autobiographical characters more. But although I identify with them, I also think if Roth and I met he wouldn’t have given me the time of day. He’d dismiss me. I relate to Alexander Portnoy but I’m not supposed to, because I’m a woman. It’s complicated with Philip Roth… Anyway, sometimes things in novels aren’t put in to be straightforward; it’s not like Lena picking Malamud over Roth. it’s just a sequence.

The story “The Magic Barrel” spoke to me so much because it’s about an existential crisis and desperate scramble for meaning and love. I really related it and I got a kick out of the parallel between the marriage broker’s Magic Barrel full of girls and OkCupid. It’s just a nice framing device for the book. Lena is similar to Leo [the lead character in “The Magic Barrel”], but Leo becomes depressed and is pretty passive. He gives up and mopes around his apartment and finally finds the girl he falls in in love with in an envelope of photos, right in his apartment. But Lena is a woman and women tend to be proactive about fixing their fate. They get off their ass—if things aren’t good, let’s make them better. Especially immigrant women; they’re kinda into survival of all sorts. Lena’s actively searching, rather than throwing up her hands and saying “There is no such thing as love and meaning.” She thinks there might not be, but she doesn’t give up and then she finds it.

Related: Russian as an American Language: A Conversation with Anya Ulinich
Graphic Novelist Liana Finck on Yiddish Letters, Teen Angst, and Becoming a Book Person
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

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With a curly gray wig and pink, comically smudged lipstick, Gary Spielberg (no relation to the legendary filmmaker), 26, is ready to rock, “Baba Fira“-style.

“Baba Fira” is the Russian Jewish grandmother persona that Spielberg created for his popular YouTube series in February 2012. In these parodies, Baba Fira force-feeds her 21-year-old grandson Olivier (a popular Russian potato salad), then nags him to lose weight in order to attract a good wife. In spite—or perhaps because of—her guilt-inducing tirades, Baba Fira has amassed 813,747 YouTube views, and comments like “Entertainment at its best! Subscribed!” are ubiquitous.

On a recent summer day, I sat down with Gary to discuss his Russian-Jewish background, comedic inspiration, and future projects. He made me erupt in laughter several times (which I’m normally not quick to do) by effortlessly shifting into Baba Fira’s high-pitched voice and lovable character.

Why did you choose to direct and act in Russian-inspired comedy?

Well, I emigrated with my family from Kharkov, Ukraine to New York in 1990. I was two-years-old at the time. And I later grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn—which is a very Russian populated area in New York. Obviously, Russian culture was a significant part of my identity. Growing up, I originally considered becoming a lawyer and even went to a high school specializing in teaching law. But I later became much more interested in film making and made a big career switch by going to Brooklyn College’s Film School. I took many screenwriting, producing, and directing classes, but I never took official acting ones.

What inspired you create a parody of the Russian babushka in particular?

I used to love prank calling my Russian friends and pretending to be their grandmother. I would yell things like, “Oh my God! Where are you?! I’m going to tell your mom!” These prank calls were very successful! I always scared my friends. And, of course, that was fun to do. I also wanted to create a Russian version of the popular Sh*t New Yorkers say meme that was popular on YouTube.

So one day, in February of 2012, I called my friend Ari Barkan, to act as ‘grandson Joseph’ and another friend to film. We all went to my grandma’s apartment in Brighton Beach when she was out for a doctor’s appointment. I then quickly did an outline for all topics I wanted to cover in the video: Babushka worrying about her grandson’s lack of a serious girlfriend, demanding that her grandson eat grenkie (Russian French toast) and then later pointing out that he’s getting fat, and criticizing her grandson’s “impractical” acting profession. When we shot that video, and I got into full Babushka mode by putting on a house robe, wig, and makeup, I literally became a different person. It was as if I really was a Russian Babushka! In those moments, all of my personal experiences with my own Russian grandmother resurfaced and the Baba Fira character was created. Everyone in the video just improvised and went with the flow. Barely anything was scripted.

I was very close to not releasing the first Baba Fira video. I personally didn’t find it so funny because I wondered “can anyone else relate to this but me?”  I only ended up releasing it because I felt bad that my friends invested so much time in it. I felt very gratified when one of our Baba Fira videos became the second most viewed video on Reddit in Russia, after a political video with Putin speaking.

That’s very cool! Tell me about the Brooklyn Russian Vines.

I started it in November 2013. They’re more like Instagram videos, which are 15 seconds. The best part about these video is that I am able to introduce more characters! I joke about random things that Russian parents and people in the Brooklyn Russian community would say or do.

I promised that I would post at least once or twice day and keep the audiences coming back. And so far, that has worked out very well. The response that we got was amazing. What I love most about this project is when I get a message in my inbox from strangers saying that one of my videos “really uplifted them” or that they were “having the worst day ever, but the Brooklyn Russian Vines changed that.

My favorite character in the Brooklyn Russian Vines is “Yana,” who is a slight caricature of the 20-something Brooklyn Russian girl. Is she based on the girls you date?

Sometimes. I really tend to pick up on little things and mannerisms from any girl that I meet. I’m talking to you right now and I could be picking up on something. I also notice how Russian girls interact with each other on Facebook and social media. I take note of their statuses and their hashtags and what that might say about their general habits.

Being able to riff on small, everyday things that most people don’t even notice is part of being a good comedian. Speaking of which, who’s your all-time favorite comedian?

My favorite comedian is definitely Russell Peters. I want to emulate his work, since he also gears toward an immigrant and first-generation-born audience. He makes great jokes about growing up in an Indian home and many non-Americans can relate to his material. He’ll mimic a conversation that he has with his parents. He’ll say things like “Dad, I’m not feeling well,” and the dad will overreact and say “Oh my goodness. You have fever! We must take you to the hospital!” Russian parents can also be just like that, and I love how this humor connects all kinds of immigrants together. Watching someone like Peters motivates me to get into stand-up as well, though it’s obviously a different monster than directing and acting.

Do you specifically aim your comedy to a Russian-Jewish audience, or to the broader Russian community?

I try not to make specific Russian-Jewish jokes because I think that everyone in the Russian community should be able to relate to my material. I have many non-Jewish friends and I want everybody in the Russian community to find my vines enjoyable. But, okay, maybe there’s just one Yiddish phrase that I use in my videos: “Kishin tuchus!” (“Kiss my butt!”) My mom and grandma always say that to me when I want something but can’t have it. “You want so-and-so? Kishin tuchus!”

You recently led a Birthright trip and will be going again this winter. How did you get involved with the organization? How do you view your Jewish identity?

I first went on Birthright two years ago and had a blast. I even made a Baba Fira video during the trip and got my fellow Birthrighters to be in it! After that initial trip, I really wanted to go on Birthright again as a leader of the group. I even became a prime advertiser for the EzraUSA subdivision of Birthright, which attracts many young Russian Jews. I ended up recruiting 275 applicants to the program.

And after I got involved with Birthright, many other organizations targeting young Jews—like Hillel campuses in New York—heard about me and asked me to perform Baba Fira skits at their events. I now volunteer for young Jewish organizations like Ezra USA. The Jewish community in New York is a very generous one and I strongly believe in giving back. I also believe in maintaining my Jewish identity and having a Jewish wife! We’re a small breed and we need to keep strong.

What’s next for Baba Fira?

The next video project is going to be like a “Russian Cooking for Dummies.” In this weekly YouTube series, Baba Fira will show everyone how to cook Russian food. I love to cook and learned a lot from my own grandmother. So, I’m excited that this series will be both educational and entertaining, and also hopefully expand to an American audience as well. Stay tuned and learn how to make really good borscht!

But, other than that, Baba Fira’s biggest future project involves making a movie. The premise is Baba Fira traveling with her grandson Joseph across America, as they get into lots of hijinks. I met up with some writers at Comedy Central to discuss it. There’s definitely potential to make Baba Fira bigger and reach a wider audience.

I know we spoke a lot about the fictional “Baba Fira,” but what is it like having a real Russian Jewish grandma?

My grandmother is very cool. She was a medical surgeon in Ukraine. And she also, of course, makes great and abundant food. I love when she makes kakleitki—Russian style hamburgers.  But she’s also on my case a lot and will ask the same questions about my personal life multiple times. And she’ll be blunt with her opinions. While this tests my patience, it has also helped me to become a better person in general. My grandmother’s tough love has definitely prepared me for the rest of the world’s criticism. Now, thanks to my Babushka, general criticism doesn’t really bother me. And I’m starting to cherish my grandparents more than ever because I know that they won’t always be around. While they’re still here, I’m asking them as many questions about their past as I possibly can. I listen to all their incredible, miraculous life stories and even plan to eventually make a documentary about them. Aside from the lighthearted and funny aspect of my Baba Fira videos, I hope that that they’ll also encourage my generation of Russian-Americans to become more aware of their roots and appreciate the very wonderful craziness of having babushkas and dedushkas (grandfathers) around.

To meet Baba Fira in person, check out the Annual Brighton Beach Jubilee Festival on Sunday, August 24.

Rebecca Mordechai is a graduate student in English Literature and a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

(Images supplied by Gary Spielberg.)

Related: Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

The post Spotlight On: Gary Spielberg, A.K.A. Russian Comedy Sensation Baba Fira appeared first on Jewcy.

Inspired by this historic, poignant correspondence, comic artist Liana Finck—a Fulbright and Six Points fellow whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Forward and Tablet—wrote a graphic novel, also called A Bintel Brief. Slate‘s Dan Kois describes her style as “sharp, evocative,” and reminiscent of Ben Katchor and Roz Chast. I spoke with Finck talk about art, becoming a book person, and the making of A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York.

So, basic question: how’d you get to A Bintel Brief?

It started as a grant proposal for the Six Points Fellowship. I decided to become a serious comic book artist after college, and I gave myself one year. I had a Fulbright grant that was going to last less than a year, so I needed to finish a great comic. I was planning this amorphous, ambitious first novel and when the nine months were almost up I realized it wasn’t going to be finished and I needed another grant that would give me another year or two. I wanted something less ambitious and more limited, so I wouldn’t have to figure out how to locate and bare my soul. I was being calculating; jadedly I thought, “I can pretend to be the version of me that I’m not.” I can pretend to be this nice Jewish girl from the suburbs and write this small, nostalgic, non-intellectual Jewish story. If I could’ve sold my soul and done something that wasn’t me, that’s what I would have done with A Bintel Brief, but I really fell in love with it long before I finished the grant proposal—I fell in love the minute I started reading the letters. Once I read the letters I wasn’t jaded anymore.

What spoke to you from the letters?

They’re very simple and at the same time they’re seething with emotion. I’d always felt apart from the people I knew, especially people who were artists. I think I had a lot of feelings when I was a teenager and in my early twenties and I related a lot more to books and art than to people. I was expecting these letters to be things that I didn’t relate to, because they weren’t literature in my mind; they were in the human camp. But I did relate to them. Reading them made me realize that I wasn’t actually a high art person in an ivory tower; I was just a person who seeks human intensity.

Do you think that’s a part of growing up?

I think when you’re in your teens and early twenties—at least for me—you are a much more intense person than a full-fledged adult. I felt like I was miles away from other people with their small talk. I couldn’t find humanity in them. Just in Chekhov, etc.

I used to like books about people, but not people.

It’s so strange. I’m still like that, but I think it’s a delusion. We refuse to see humanity in people because we are so scared of them. They are layered and full of veils and contradictions. I used to think I liked it because only smart people could understand it, but I’ve realized that I like it because it’s abstract, and not trying so hard to make sense of all the feelings and mysteries. Abstraction does not lie.

It was The Catcher in the Rye’s anniversary last week. I re-read that book five times before I really got it—

I keep on seeing people reading it, I look at this guy and think, “He’s a brute of a Wall Street stock broker,” or “He’s a gangster wannabe,” and then I’ll see he’s got Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket. It changes everything. That’s the best feeling, seeing Catcher in the Rye in the back pocket of a pushy guy in a loud suit. I have to read it again. I read it when I was a young teenager and then an older teenager. I liked it but I don’t think it changed my life. I didn’t understand parts of it, and I wasn’t a book person yet.

When did you become a book person?

I became a poetry person at 13 and then a book person at 17. I stayed a poetry person until I was 21 and realized I wouldn’t be a poet because the poetry world seemed like a storm of ice crystals. I think I was always a story person, fairy tales and kid novels, but poetry was something totally different. When I was seventeen I realized that there were books that had the things I loved about poetry. I had a teacher who recommended great books to me when I was a junior in high school, and I started to read modernist novels like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Much earlier, my mom had given me [Vladimir] Nabokov and [Isak] Dinesen; I loved them the way I loved fairy tales as a kid, then I rediscovered them as puzzles as I got older.

Does your art mimic the puzzled thing that you liked in poetry?

I think working on art is a puzzle in of itself. I tried to be a poet and abstract painter when I was in college because that was the kind of art that really moved me, but I realized I liked abstract art and poetry because, looking at and reading it, I was doing a lot of work in my head that the artist or poet generously left unfinished. I’m not that generous in my work. I like to figure out the puzzles myself, and give the reader something more packaged and dogmatic.

What’s your favorite piece in the book?

I liked the first stories I started. I did more drafts of those, and was able to figure out slowly what the mood of the story was—time was my friend. I’m also fond of the blue parts [between the stories], I made those pages after I made the stories. The stories are adaptations—which is a limiting, tricky form to work in—you keep having to ask yourself, “Why does this letter need to be transmuted into comics?”—but also a safer art form. You aren’t telling your own story, so if the story turns out badly it’s not a reflection on your soul. Working on the narrative between stories gave me a very small, safe venue for telling my own semi-autobiographical story. I felt so free when I made it. It was also the least ambitious work of fiction I’ve ever tried to make, and working on it taught me that dry ambitiousness is NOT my friend.

One last question: Why did you draw Abraham Cahan with a heart-shaped face?

Because my mom used to draw heart-faced people on my lunch bags as a kid. She said I had a heart-shaped face. Cahan was a total brain-man. In creating A Bintel Brief, he tried to access his heart and he succeeded; he turned his brain into a heart. Sometimes I’m afraid his head looks like a turnip like the guy in Howl’s Moving Castle. Afraid is not the right word. The right word is delighted.

Image: © Liana Finck, reprinted from A Bintel Brief, published in 2014 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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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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Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, a.k.a. Mirah, emerged in the early 2000s as a leading figure in the Olympia, Washington lo-fi scene that produced artists like the Microphones, Beat Happening, and the Blow. In the decade-and-a-half since, she’s earned scores of steadfast fans and critical kudos with her ever-changing, always-earnest music and her restlessly creative collaboration. (Recent examples include a joint effort with Thao Nguyen, of Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, and a concept album with Spectratone International that’s entirely about insects.)

On her newest LP, Changing Light, Mirah is solo in more ways than one: in 10 songs, she examines from several different angles a bad breakup that sent her reeling from the Pacific Northwest to Brooklyn. The album that resulted—out on vinyl this week—is her most mature work yet. Ironically enough, I caught up with Mirah a few days before she and her new partner went on their honeymoon.

It’s kind of funny that you just got married, considering your album out now is basically a breakup record.

Just goes to show how how long things take in this business! Or how fast I am; I don’t know. Take your pick.

I mean, do you see Changing Light as a breakup record?

Well, honestly, I put that in the one-sheet because it was the easiest, most concise phrase, and I hate describing myself or my music. Like, when I sit next to somebody on a plane and they’re like, “What do you do?”, I immediately turn into this brat who cannot answer the question, and feel like sort of a loser for not being able to describe what I do after all these years of doing it.

But anyway, calling it a breakup record is not inaccurate, but it’s not particularly illuminating, just the same as calling me a “singer-songwriter” is not inaccurate but not particularly illuminating. Because, you tell me: “singer-songwriter”—what kind of music is that? Really, I’m asking you the question right now: does it sound like one thing, and everybody who gets called a singer-songwriter sounds like that?

No, it’s more like a job position. 

Right. So, the job of my record is to be a breakup record, but I feel like there’s a lot more to it than that.

Well, what else would you want a listener to know?

Just that there are many angles to every experience, various positions for viewing each aspect of our lives… I’m actually trying to say that when you turn the mirror on yourself and really do your work, it makes turning the mirror outwards so much more effective, and you can do all of your work better, and all of your relationships will probably end up being deeper—including your relationship with yourself.

You recorded this album in a number of different places over a number of years. Do you hear all those times and places on the record?

It’s similar to my experience performing a lot of songs live—even really old songs: I’m standing on stage, wherever I am, singing a song, and I can still picture these glimpses of my life at the moment when I wrote the song. And I’m not stuck; I’m not like, “Oh, God, still trying to work through that stuff from 15 years ago!” It’s actually kind of nice; it’s a very interesting way to remain in contact with my own experiences.

How do you think your music has evolved since your last album, 2009’s (a)spera? 

You’re asking me, “You’re 39 now. Do you feel like you’ve finally grown up, or not?” Is that what you’re asking me? [Laughs.]

Well, the new record sounds very adult to me. 

Well, that’s good. It’s something that’s been a bit of a struggle for me, with my identity as a kind of round-cheeked, smiley, sweet-voiced person who doesn’t really dress like a grown-up. I don’t do the, like, “woman” thing very completely; I think I’m perceived more in a girlish way. But, like, I am a grown-up; I am about to turn 40. So, I’m glad that it finally sounds like I am, because I feel like maybe I finally am.

I think that I’m a better songwriter than I was when I first started out, and I totally value every step along the way. I’ve had some phases of listening to old records and feeling a little embarrassed—like, “Oh, my voice sounds too much like I’m a little kid,” or, “Oh, I can’t believe I put in that lyric”—but now I can look back on my discography and be like, “That’s cool that I decided to do that. I might not make that decision now, but I’m so glad that’s in there.”

You recently moved from Portland, where you were still closely identified with Olympia’s lo-fi/K Records scene, to New York. How do you think that relocation has affected you creatively? 

The move was spurred on by the breakup. I just needed to leave; I needed to just have new everything around me, and I had to leave a lot behind… I had this really positive experience of living in Olympia for a bunch of years after I finished college, and getting to work on these large-scale projects with people—all different kinds of projects: musical ones; rock operas; big, weird fashion shows; parades; secret cafes. We had fun, and we did really interesting things, and we couldn’t have done them without each other.

But after a certain number of years, I started to feel like although we were still close, we’d all sort of started focusing on our own projects, and we were supporting each other in those, but there was more of a sense of individual movement, rather than community movement. So, there just came a time when I decided that I wanted to, and could in fact, move on—move away. It’s been a really positive experience, my connection to the Northwest and my community there, and I’m also really happy about having moved and moved along.

Let’s talk Jewish stuff. Did your parents raise you with a sense of Jewish heritage? 

Yes—my parents also raised us eating macrobiotic foods, and when I was really little, we were really Jewish and really macrobiotic, and then as the years went on, we got less macrobiotic and less Jewish. I mean, less observant. We would do Shabbat every Friday when I was little, but by the time I was in middle school, we totally weren’t doing that and we were totally eating cheese. But yeah, there was definitely a sense of the identity. My mom isn’t Jewish; I admit that to the Lubavitcher guys on the subway platforms during Passover… But when they ask me if I’m Jewish and I want a free menorah, I just say yes. So, it’s like the privilege of being half and half, I guess: sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. I’m also queer and I married a cisgendered man, so I’m, like, a multi-identity person.

Probably your most explicitly Jewish song is “Jerusalem.” What inspired you to write it? 

I had been requested to contribute a song to a Hanukkah cassette compilation, and I was fishing around for some inspiration. I had this close friend in Olympia who had been doing some research about Hanukkah, and he was telling me about how the conflicts that were going on were actually really bloody; it’s not just some cute story about the miracle of oil. And then I just started thinking about that. It’s like, OK, the Jewish people have experienced a lot of oppression and violence being perpetrated against them throughout history, and we know this. And then, I just feel like the situation with Palestine and Israel, and the violence that’s perpetrated against Palestinians—the whole situation is just like, how could we do that? And unfortunately, it’s not a unique case—I mean, it happens in families, it happens in communities, it happens in nations, this experience of being abused somehow, and then becoming an abuser.

Do you hear any other Jewish musical influences in your work? 

There are some really beautiful Jewish melodies which I’m so glad are part of my heritage. I listened to some of those from when I was a baby, and I hope they made it in somewhere. But it’s hard to say: what did I listen to more when I was a baby, Hebrew prayers or Stevie Wonder? Stevie Wonder, is the answer. So, I like to think that some of that melodic sense made it in there, and that that comes out.

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