Bigup Hermanos Chu. The Premiere of their movie The Recess Ends is tomorrow night in San Francisco at Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St. Doors open at 7pm, movie starts at 8:30. Cost: FREE. Must RSVP with therecessends@gmail.com
Peep the extended trailer below, then a check out a quick preview of Austin’s upcoming notes about the film tour after the jump.
I could see the owner doing a mental calculation: Talk money now because I really want the money or talk money later because I’d be really freaked out to see this goy drop her kid right here, right now.
-Julie Schwietert “Labor & What’s Left: A Few Notes“
An 1878 painting by Maurycy Gottlieb depicting Ashkenazi Jews praying in the synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement
Notes on Yom Kippur:
1. All over the world my people are alternating sitting / standing in synagogues. In dense cities, look for the garment and fabric sellers’ neighborhoods. In the suburbs, look for the churches with no cross, and lots of nice cars in the parking lot. Listen for an organ playing long and droning minor chords.
2. I remember growing up that Yom Kippur services were so crowded you had to buy tickets and it was like $50 a person or something. Pay to Pray. That part seemed unreal. They had television monitors broadcasting the service live out in the lobby. Among American Jews this is almost a cliche. The “Superbowl” of worship.
3. I just got back from the park with Layla. We listened to community radio in the car. They played Yom Kippur music and Layla and I sang harmony.
4. There’s a great tradition of singing something even when you don’t know what it means.
5. At the park there was a lady who saw Layla and commented on her curls. The lady talked to her–asked her what her name was–in this really loud and clear and enunciated way as if there were an audience of people all around us listening.
6. Then she said: “We prayed that this pavilion would be open today–you know it’s first come first serve–our church group has an event today–and see, God provided a little air-conditioning–feel that breeze. All we need is to wipe down the tables, and . . .look, here comes my husband with the leaf-blower.”
7. I asked my Dad if they were going to services later but he said he didn’t think so. “We’re definitely going to the memorial services tomorrow though.”
8. I wanted him to ask me “Do you want to go?” after that.
9. You can miss services and still be Jewish here, I think. The could do just about anything today and still be Jewish–dodge tear gas at the G20 summit, be out at sea somewhere on a global surf mission, sit in front of a computer remixing beats (why not Yah-ah-say Shalom?), almost anything. . . except going to church.
10. When Layla and I sang in the car–the heat and the Spanish Moss on the other side of the glass–I thought about mosques and calls to prayer–how they blazed this music / voices out over the towns. Seems like it could be a good thing with the right music.
11. When I was 10 I watched my Grandfather put on his suit to go to Yom Kippur. He was sick with Diabetes. Later he’d answer your questions with only one or two word. This was the last sentence I ever remember him saying: “I’ve never missed a Yom Kippur service in all my life.”
1. The other day they discovered there’s water on the moon. Since then I’ve kept thinking about space cabins. Spent hours on tumblr looking at people’s designs. Space cabins can also mean cabins here on Earth. You just have to have the right kind of eyes. A place that breaks what you understand scale to be helps too. Patagonia. Badlands. Olympic Peninsula. But it could be here in Florida too.
2. Been reading a reviewer’s copy of Heart of Dryness by James Workman. It’s about the Kalahari Bushmen. Soldiers sent by the Botswana’s government come in and wreck all their wells, smash their canteens. Control a person’s water and you control them. The original electric fence. One of the elders in the tribe, a woman, is staying behind. She knows how to get water. The soldiers figure nobody will be able to survive.
3. The rivers I grew up on–the Chattahoochee, Sweetwater Creek–in Georgia reached all-time floodstage last week. Atlanta got 18 inches of rain. 9 people died. The water flowed over I-285. Before this, the south had been in a drought for half a dozen years.
4. Bubba lived in a cabin along the Broad River near Athens, Georgia. Got sent to prison for growing weed. Bubba stood on the banks at Roostertail and took pictures of us running the Broad at floodstage. Years later he drowned. His tractor turned over and pinned him in some kind of gulley.
5. Back in those days, two of my closest bros and I had a vision we called the cabins plan. How could this have been 10 years ago? It doesn’t seem too late, but where?
6. Here in Florida people are freaking over Chinese drywall. And yet most of the houses are already built on “compacted, poisoned fill.”
7. The really old places on Fruitville road are built up on piers so the air can circulate underneath. 50 years before those houses were built there were still the ancestors of slaves who lived out here in cabins. They worked tapping the pitch pines here in the flatwoods for turpentine.
8. Before them were Seminole Indians who lived in cabins made of palmetto.
9. A wood-stove. Clerestory windows for light. A loft. A small piece of land to raise food, a family. Water flowing nearby.
Trisha Miller over at Travel Writers’ Exchange interviewed me earlier this week for this podcast.