runaway

yesssss!!!!!!

2007-02-19T17:09:57Z

do you realize how long i've been waiting to see this headline???

U.N. urged to take action on asteroid threat

radio edits

2005-08-02T19:42:06Z

Frequent collaborator and styling DJ Odin Smythe asked if I have any official information on how to make radio edits out of songs -- i.e., how to take the curses out, and which curses to take out. He's doing one song for our friend Vern, a.k.a. MC I Might Be In Your Girl's Crib, who's gonna be on Power 99, and is better known to the rest of the world as the cousin of Kamal from the Roots....but is a superforce all his own.

So, if you're curious, here's the official FCC ruling -- which, as far as i've read, doesn't give any single order about it, but name-drops Philly, and has a lot to do with Howard Stern.

and here's an
an article about radio edits which includes an interesting bit about an Eminem song which edits out derogatory words for black people, but not gay people.

From my limited research, as far as i can tell -- as long as you take out the obvious ones and do it with style, making everybody think that it doesn't sound offensive, you're doing your job.

Also -- here's the official Wikipedia article about it. Much cooler, though, is a list of fictional curse words, including several made-up ones, and "Belgium" (hitchhiker's guide forever!).

birthday party / performance / free alcohol!!!

2005-06-22T15:30:33Z

hey everyone!

it's my 27th birthday, i'm in new york for a few days, and i've got an urge to rock out that i just can't sedate. it's totally free, the most intellectual and fun gathering of attractive people in the tri-state area, and there's an hour of free alcohol after the show, so what's standing in your way?

i'll be doing some solo poems, some new stuff, and some special guests might just show up.

feel free to bring friends. or just make some there.

The Leopard Lounge
corner of 5th St. and 2nd Ave. (upstairs)
Tuesday, June 28
8:30 pm

a very merry unbirthday to YOU,
matthue

and by the way -- i just saw the funniest jewish online movie EVER, courtesy of the weirdjews group. it's at http://www.ounetwork.org/ncsy/ncsy202.wmv , and i am a total dork for forwarding this out but y'all are probably just wasting time on Myspace anyway.

dear san francisco....

2005-04-29T07:24:22Z

so i'm finally going to get my stuff out of san francisco. and figure out the rest of my life, too.

i'll be back in a week or two. but i'm supposed to pick up a big box of my manuscripts (to the goldbergs, yom kippur a go-go, and other stuff) from the mission by May 5 or else they're going to throw it all out...

is anyone out there who can pick it up for me???

i promise i'll make it worth your while.

hot tin roof

2005-03-03T08:54:46Z

tonight's a quiet night in the valley. i was supposed to go to my friends' excellent band's show, but it was too far / i stayed on the phone for hours making the most of those after-nine long-distance minutes / "lost" was on TV.

you know. the important stuff.

tonight is the kind of night where i just feel like calling up any friend i've ever had and reminiscing about memories they probably don't even remember. driving from providence to new york city in the rain. ravaging the whole foods in westwood for kosher sour-cream potato chips, and buying a bunch of green apples instead. the first time i bought miriam goldberg and her girlfriend clove cigarettes at the drug store at 5th and south because they weren't old enough -- and, what the hell, i probably owe miriam an apology for using her last name in my book, too.

i don't think it's raining, but there's a slow trickle of water down the drainpipe outside my window in LA.

i kind of like it.

disney vs. the black hats

2005-03-02T09:02:47Z

so...once every eight years, the jews finish their one-page-a-day study of talmud and start all over again. today was that day, and here in the City of Angels, the siyum was held, ironically, at the Disney Concert Hall.

or, i guess, not so ironically. one speaker made a joke about it, but that whole walt-disney-anti-semitism joke went over somebody's head. there were all these speeches, which i shouldn't have been surprised by but was, which were basically telling us how learning was good. it was all these hugely famous & wise rabbis, and i would've rather listened to them actually *teach* instead of just talking about it. and then in New York this one guy stood up and finished the last page of talmud, and everyone on the live-camera feed jumped up and started circle dancing, and then -- slowly -- grudgingly -- people in LA started dancing too, and it got frenzied but then the Disney Hall escorts had to run in and tell everyone to stop.

awesome. truly awesome. i was in shock.

and then this dude swept onscreen with an accompanying keyboardist -- you know those "one-man bands" from bar mitzvahs? the kind that always put the cheesy drum track on and play jewish songs over it? -- and you'd think, with 100,000 people in the audience, they could've brought in a real drummer....well, there *were* a lot of rabbis onstage.

and everyone was being very staunch and severe -- misnagdish is what we call it -- and then finally (finally!) they had one hasidic rabbi come onstage, payos bouncing and so were his cheeks, to give the dirge. he stepped back from the mic and yelled SHMA YISROEL! and everyone yelled SHMA YISROEL! back. we had to. it was hypnotic. a hundred thousand jews all yelling shma yisroel together....it should have been droning, but it wasn't. it was the noise of a hundred thousand different ideas of what god is. nobody yelled it the same. even there, in the concert hall, you could hear people finishing the elongated last syllable, "echooooo.....d!" at different times.

then he yelled HASHEM HU ELOKEINU! seven times in a row. and everyone did that, too. you couldn't not do it. it was incredible, beyond incredible. and even when they went back to the stupid keyboard singers and lecturing rabbis, the air was still tingling from the electric surge.

and i'd been going on basically no sleep after a crazy all-night recording session with cj during which we got one song (one!) finished and two more (two!) almost down. and, after i. pointed out that i seem to only write about food, all of my verses seem to have some sort of culinary reference.

and, ok, in looking for the CD of those tracks, i just realized i am only wearing one sock.

i'm going to go look for my sock.

and by the way, our favorite Bitch Magazine is having an auction to raise money to keep printing. you could win michelle tea doing astrology readings or lynda barry cartoons....go check it out!

matthue @ 2005-02-03T10:17:00

2005-02-03T15:13:48Z

waking up in brooklyn: it only seems to get colder, and i always thought it was a 2-way street. the sun is no indicator of anything. it could be as bright as a nuclear explosion, and your snot will still turn to icicles by the time your feet touch the ground.

not that your feet aren't already touching the ground when you sleep on a futon.

today: we are going to monsey. i'm bracing myself for the bus with a mechitza separating the boys from the girls. i'm bracing myself for the yiddish-onlyness of it. kind of wary of a suburb that is filled with only orthodox jews, but you only live once, right?

and the only real thing i can visualize is a street lined entirely with kosher restaurants, and me running from pizza place to pizza place, so overjoyed that i can eat everything that i NEED to eat everything.

bad poetry contest

2005-01-11T19:54:58Z

to write a vogon-inspired poem.

o writing group, this could be your next exercise...

http://aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=19112

poet laureate

2004-12-16T04:03:17Z

from P&W:

Arnold Schwartzenegger To Select California Poet Laureate

come ON. i know so many talented people who are reading this right now, you all have GOT to apply.

especially sherilyn...you need a job and you've lived in CA for over ten years....

let me know if any of you do, ok? i'll pray for you.

in the literary world...

2004-12-15T05:31:54Z

so you know how everyone's all like "matthue, the unorthodox jew"? and you know how this website is unorthodoxjew.com? so my friend tobin is doing this book called "unorthodox jews" that she asked me to submit to and, bleh, i just can't cut it with her crew. this is the 4th rewrite i've blown. possibly because she's trying to write about how judaism has stopped being relevant as a religion and is only a culture, and my thesis of living is basically the exact opposite.

(i mean, how many of us count watching "fiddler on the roof" or eating matzoh as a cultural experience? i have more authentic cultural experiences waiting for a fucking Greyhound bus.)

i got my first anthology in the mail! it's a poem in the book "bottoms up" (see link on right) which is all sorts of steamy sex writing. and a poem about me not having sex. but i'm right in between daphne gottlieb and michelle tea, which, really, is a fantasy of how i'll be remembered by a future generation.

and my editor got interviewed by nerve.com! and it's a good interview, too -- with just the right amount of name-dropping and zoe trope adoration.

annnnnnnd i am about to send the page proofs of the memoir out. except for the title, which we still don't have. cutting it close? hell yeah!

in the non-literary world, i. and i just consumed more indian buffet food than is fit for any human being to have ingested. mmmmmmmmm, but damn.

matthue @ 2004-12-09T03:16:00

2004-12-09T08:14:26Z

not EVEN jewish.

How Jewish Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

weakend

2004-11-01T09:01:26Z

god, it's sunday night, and i never thought i'd make it through the weekend. i keep thinking something's going to change -- the doctors will suddenly discover, they messed up, read the machines wrong, he's actually safe in bed and i can see him as soon as i get in.

our imaginations can be such fucked up places.

today i found two pennies lying next to each other on the ground, just like Death in the comic book. she saved them, and the depressive poetry kid that was following her around said, are you saving them for when somebody dies? she said, no, i just might need to buy some ice cream.

last night i let my roommates take me to all these halloween parties, miles of beautiful plastic people in their twenties. i kept feeling lost. there were famous people dressed as normal people and normal people dressed as famous people, a girl in a Li'l Kim one-piece with her breast hanging out who asked me questions about my payos and it would have been such a great experience but my brain was rolling around so drunkenly, and i was so half not in this world. we drove from party to party and i collapsed crying in the back seat, calling up mike's house in philly, letting it ring and listening to the message over and over again. cause i know, before we know it it's going to get erased, and there's no tape, even, just that electronic signature of his voice, deleted without so much as an empty tape.

and i keep wanting to yell at people. they keep using the past tense. what he said. what he wanted. tonight on the phone with his mother, i was crying and then saying FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU over and over in my head....you're using the past tense, it's like you're giving up. it's too hard to give up now. now that we're so close. now that we're so fucking close.

and he's never gonna get better, is he. that's when god really knocks the battle out of you. when people die quickly, no pain, just a complication as old as your body. and just as inexplicable.

i don't know why these things happen. i don't know what killed him.

and i keep fucking thinking that i'm right and they're wrong and he's going to come back to life.

so, fuck you. he isn't dead.

later in the comic, of course, Death did buy ice cream.

i took the pennies and slipped them in my pocket. i might need to use them later.

members of the press! where are you??

2004-10-26T20:37:22Z

hey, members of america's media! are you out there?

do you want a press copy of my book? can you get a review somewhere??? let me know your info and i'll try to hook you up!!!

thanks, y'all.

matthue @ 2004-10-14T11:04:00

2004-10-14T18:10:30Z

back in hollywood.

at last, a place where they know how to ignore the elections in style.

san francisco sunday!

2004-09-28T23:18:43Z

my dear friends,

as the jewish holidays wind to a close, we join matthue en media res on his
glorious return to the city of his dreams. join him for a round of apologizing
for past sins, and look forward to a whole new round of sins.

this sunday, you can hear all about them in verse form, and you may try and
persuade him to tell you something about his brand new book "Never Mind the
Goldbergs," out january 15 from scholastic books....

K'VETCH
featuring matthue roth
this sunday, october 3
8:00 p.m.

at Sadie's Flying Elephant
corner of Mariposa and Petrero Sts.
in the Mission
one dollar admission

(take the 9, 22, 27, or 33 buses, or BART to 16th st. and walk...damn! can you
believe i still remember all the routes?? muni should give me a free brown vest
or something)

questions? hit me back here.

and thank you for listening.

love,
matthue

the first ten days

2004-09-28T00:13:00Z

the jewish year started ten days ago -- well, twelve now, but let's pretend i've been living in a vortex called the San Fernando Valley.

dennis asked how my yom kippur went and i told him how AWFUL shul was -- mostly the rabbi's sermon, which went on for an hour, starting with five (count 'em) cheezy shul jokes, and culminating in a rant about how courageous president bush is and if we allow gay marriage, the next thing you know, people will be trying to marry monkeys and have sex with them.

that would be about the point that i walked out. what the hell does that have to do with repentance? i'll tell you: there's this vein -- it pops up a lot in orthodox jews, and manifests in other people too -- where, when you say "repentance," the first thing they think of is how OTHER people need to repent toward THEM. i'd had so much trouble finding things i could really focus on repenting for this year (i'm not an angel, but this year, i was, ummm, actually pretty tame, except for the few loshon haras where i sent my tongue flying out of control) and so i walked outside and spent an hour in the porous midday sun trekking around LA and trying to find another shul to finish praying in.

"how was yours?" i said.

he told us he was almost ashamed to say he had a good yom kippur. i was like, no, wait -- mine was great.

great?

i felt so empowered. i never realized, you actually *could* stand up and walk out of shul. i felt the murky sweat evaporating out of my body like so many bad chemicals and food. and when i finally did get to pray, it was on my own and with me in control of how fast it went and how much time i spent on the words, and, i just, i prayed. i shockeled. i flung my arms out like leonardo in titanic. my body *sang.*

and at the end, anya and i snuck into the kitchen and ripped out all the garlic bread and scarfed it all down.

matthue @ 2004-09-20T17:40:00

2004-09-21T00:40:41Z

matthue @ 2004-09-12T02:44:00

2004-09-12T06:43:26Z

my favorite ex-hasid anarchist vegan keeping-me-on-my-idealistic-teenage-toes type has a livejournal.

poem

2004-09-01T21:59:54Z

THE OTHER UNIVERSE OF PARIS HILTON
based on bucky_sinister's poem "The Other Universe of Bruce Wayne"

There’s an alternate universe
where Paris Hilton has her shit together
and I’m a drunken heiress.

I show up fashionably late
to her party, having already
knocked back a few
and knocked out her bartender.

The reason why escapes me
but it would have been a great story
if you were there.

And, in this case
“fashionably late” means 5 a.m.
too late for the last guests to appreciate me
but not too late
for them to catch shards of glass
from the falling crystal I crash into
on their way out.

I’m shaking my head
crying all over the ruins
of the party
tasting salty vodka tears.

“Dammit” I sniff
it isn’t fair.
I fucked up again
kissed Prince’s girlfriend at the afterparty
had a drunken orgy
with Christina Ricci
and 2 former Spice Girls
traded one of my six Swiss
bank accounts for coke
and did it off the roof
of my hum-V
clocking ninety
off the chest of this underage nymphet”

Then I proceed to lurch
the remains of the evening
all over the Persian rug
that she worked 285 shifts at Wal-Mart
to pay for.

Luckily
she didn’t notice

She’s by the medicine cabinet
with an ace bandage,
Neosporin,
and some orange juice

“Don’t worry”
she consoles me
“In another world
you’re an Orthodox Jew.
You pray to G-d constantly
never break anyone’s heart
girls don’t only want you for your body
people call to confide in you
at six in the morning
and you never, ever
get laid.”

“So in this other universe,” I say,
“what are you?”

“Oh,” says Paris,
brushing away a tear,
“don’t concern yourself
with that.”

matthue @ 2004-08-26T17:56:00

2004-08-26T21:53:45Z

rock the vote invited me to perform at a party.

actually, they invited me to write stuff for them. i did. they liked it. the poems, by their own admission, are "nonpartisan poems about voter registration and health care management."

so, with that caveat, i'll post them in the comments section....

be warned.

matthue @ 2004-08-24T23:28:00

2004-08-25T05:17:59Z

hey y'all.

i just got asked to write poems about healthcare, slash, healthcare and "young people" (that's us) and young people and the political process.

and it's supposed to be nonpartisan.

that is, "i can't pay for my healthcare" is okay but "the corporate giants are sucking my money" isn't.....

comment

2004-08-19T19:17:06Z

i never treasure quarters anywhere so much as new york, where one of those silver discs will buy you a bag of potato chips, pretzels, rippled Dipsy Doodle corn chips or, occasionally, even weirder fare. party mix is what i eat (constantly, constantly) when i write. tonight, erez and i both stacked up on day-glo orange spiral things, grabbed some Tastykakes as dessert, and sped off toward the brooklyn memorial highway.

we sat on this little catwalk by the river, stared at manhattan across the water, and watched it sparkle back at us. erez was curled up against the metal gate and my feet dangled over, scraping the water like teeth and nails.

presently the police came and took our IDs, walked around with flashlights and looked at us sternly for trespassing on city property. the people on the other end of the pier kept insisting that they lived here, only they'd never changed their drivers' licenses. at the time it seemed like the absolute dumbest thing in the world. eventually they waved us away, handed us back our licenses and told us they were letting us off with a warning. they looked like nice guys, honest, just tired. we could relate.

then we drove down the road, to the actual park, where the water was right up against us. glittering boulders got smaller and smaller and ran right into the water. a bunch of punk rock kids sat on the rocks, swilling 40s and combing their mohawks. i thought of hava, sneaking out after hours to visit them.

i'm in new york. it's always felt a little bit like a nightmare and a little like a dream. it's never felt like home. but now?

we've got a book in common, baby.

i'm learning yiddish from children's picture books about the Vilna Gaon. wish me luck.

matthue @ 2004-08-09T01:24:00

2004-08-09T05:26:45Z

friday: i taught writing classes in the suburbs. this one girl wanted to be a reporter for People magazine. as an excercise in class, we all wrote stories about Mary-Kate & Ashley's first day of class at NYU. i wrote one, too. i thought about giving this assignment to all my favorite writers and putting out a zine. thought about it. thinking.

...thank you, thank you, and thank you in the corner for the sympathy clucks re. my journal tumbling into the new york dark. seriously. so much. i'm starting to believe in hope again.

tuesday, they said. tuesday i'm calling up the subway lost & found people and finding out if there's a good reason for me to buy a new bus ticket back to new york.

and in the meantime....this is philadelphia. i grew up here, ran away at 17, and, coming back, i remember that everyone else ran away too.

this is like a bad game of chutes and ladders. i can't wait till the scholastic check clears.

although, in the meantime -- did i tell you i wrote 5000 words today? i swear to you, i'm a get famous if it kills me.

matthue @ 2004-08-04T15:04:00

2004-08-04T19:04:42Z

lost: one journal, red, with various stickers on cover. Fat, paperback. Includes scripts to 2 untyped and unpublished books.

Last seen: in the East Village. In a cafe. On the 4 train.

Please reply if you're out there.

I'll do anything.

matthue @ 2004-08-02T19:38:00

2004-08-02T23:41:37Z

i was so going to try and avoid the RNC with all my heart -- not because i hate them or like them, but because rallies make me jumpy and nervous.

so, forget the rally. why would i have any interest in attending the RNC? i voted for nader (twice). i'm not a republican. i think john mccain is kind of cool, and kennedy from mtv makes the whole girls-with-glasses thing sexy, but i'm just not so republican, you know?

and then i got asked to perform.