Punk Heebs

The last seven days have been a divine mix of joy and melancholy.

I did not go up for my aunt’s funereal. The cousins were not encouraged to--no one wanted anyone to turn their lives around for it and so we didn’t.

The whole thing still feels a little surreal to me. I found out she had died when I checked my email on my phone while in line outside of the Black Cat. I was waiting to attend a panel discussion on a book about the connections between the punk movement and Judaism (The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's, by Steven Lee Beeber).

I know--WTF, Citymouse! What two groups could have less in common?

If you clear the picture of white-skinhead-neo-nazi-youth-punks from your mind it actually starts to make sense.

Jews have been involved in nearly every fringe movement this nation has experienced. Mr. Beeber spoke much more eloquently than I ever could about a history of questioning and examination, or being an outsider population, of the drive to make the planet a better place, that are important values to both punks and jews. Sometimes it felt a little bit like an outing ceremony (two of the Ramones? Jewish. Lou Reed? Jewish. The guy who founded CBGB’s? Jewish.)

In the review of the book on Beliefnet, Saul Austerlitz explains, “According to Beeber, the common thread for many of these Jewish punks was a desire to overturn the stereotype of the feeble, brainy Jew, the yeshiva student or the bespectacled clerk, replacing him with a brawny Jew in closer touch with his inner beast, and intent on shocking society out of its narcotized comfort.”

Anyway—I read the aforementioned email on my phone, and then spun into a “what do I do now? Should I go home?” spiral. I spoke briefly with my dad, who’d emailed me because my voicemail had been out of commission ALL DAY (fuck you Sprint networks) and so, he sent it in print. Weird, weird.

I stayed. I was already there. Hanvnah was introducing the event, and I was looking forward to catching up with her, something that doesn’t happen nearly often enough. And the discussion was interesting. At times the connections between jews and punks felt a little bit forced, but as Hanvnah said, I like jews and I like punks, so how could it not, in some way, be an engaging evening? It inspired me to take another crack at Lipstick Traces, a book I started when we were first working on Titus!. I couldn’t get through it, my mind was all over the place then and the book is written in a somewhat slapdash, pastiche style—that mirrors the movement it examines—but that I just couldn’t get in to. I’m still working on ULYSSES, and will now take a break from that for October’s Book Club pick, MOTHER NIGHT, but after that maybe I’ll look back at the Marcus book.

And it was wonderful catching up with Hanvnah, let that be said. I am very glad I stayed.

The rest of the week felt like it needed to be life as usual. I wasted no time in jumping back into my social life here, and was very happy to see people, and theater, and friends, and cats, and cousins, and all sorts of welcome sights again.

The wedding? The wedding will have to wait until the next post. I am trying to get back on a more consistent schedule of posting. We’ll see how that goes.