Well, you can find out this Friday and Saturday, Aug. 6 and 7, when I’ll be doing my latest monologue, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, at the lovely 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Marin County’s very own Mill Valley. Both performances are at 8 p.m. For tix and info, click here.
Posted: August 3rd, 2010 under Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, Mill Valley, Performances.
Comments: none
We’ll find out, as I’ll be doing my show Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? at the 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley on Aug. 6 and 7.
Not sure whether the high-school-aged daughter of the owners will home-bake chocolate-chip cookies for concessions, as happened the last time I was there. That was a few years ago — and the way time has been zipping along lately, she’s probably a postdoc by now. Also not certain whether to expect tasty candied ginger again in the greenroom. But I’m pretty confident that the atmosphere will be relaxed and convivial, as it always has been in this place: I’ve never not had a great time there.
You can get tickets and info here.
Posted: July 12th, 2010 under Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, Marin, Things with "ock" in them.
Comments: none
Ask anyone: Socially, I’m not at my best when I’m taking a shower. This is mostly because I can’t see anything with my glasses off. But I do think a lot. And a couple days ago, while showering at the gym, I was thinking about the Contemporary Jewish Museum, which originally commissioned my piece Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews? Some of my favorite people there have been the guards — and my favorite guard was a guy named Abdel. He’s from Algeria, and is pretty much always smiling; when I ran into him while working on the Warhol piece — typically he stood in front of the gift shop — he invariably eased my worries. One time I did a photo shoot at the museum in which I ran around with a Warhol wig on my head; that’s when he started calling me “Andy.” Subsequently, he’d say stuff like, “Andy, why have you come back from the dead?” I’d reply with something like, “I missed all you living people.” And he would nod in agreement: that made sense to him.
I ended up putting Abdel in my piece, but wasn’t able to invite him to see it — as by the time I was performing the (relatively) finished show at The Jewish Theatre San Francisco, he had left the CJM. I heard from my pal Dan Schifrin at the CJM (another “character” in the monologue) that Abdel was now working as a guard at Alcatraz — which struck me as containing just the right amount of irony for this playful spirit. And then, shortly before the TJT run, I actually ran into Abdel in downtown Berkeley. He told me that he’d moved on from Alcatraz (not always easy to do!) and now had a nice desk job with Social Security (I think). I invited him to my show, but he explained that he was about to travel back to Algeria for a few months.
So here I was, taking a shower at the Y the other day, and I heard a voice: “Josh!” I tried peering across at the swim-trunked figure across the shower room, but he was too blurry to make out. “It’s Abdel!” he explained. And I thought — well, I thought a couple of things. One is that I definitely wasn’t wearing that Warhol wig. And the other is that is was so good to hear a friendly — and totally unexpected — voice. (I had no idea he went to my gym.) And, as it had generally been at the museum, the timing of my encounter with Abdel was especially welcome — in this case, because my thoughts at the gym that day had been unusually morbid, even for me. Earlier I’d heard that someone (a woman, apparently) had committed suicide at the gym, in one of the bathrooms; she had hanged herself. And without meaning to, during my subsequent liftings and groanings and sweatings I’d found myself thinking dark thoughts of mortality. While stretching in front of a mirror, I had one of those occasional moments when the finiteness of my life, and of my loved ones’, vibrated out of the background blur and snapped firmly into position before my eyes. And all those things I haven’t done that I should do, they relaxed for a while, knowing that I’d taken one of my rare breaks from my preoccupation with them to attend to other matters.
By the time I was showering, I probably had things pretty much under control — it’s helpful not to be able to see the world, for a while — but when Abdel spoke, he made a connection. And this connection instantly pulled me out of myself — well, at least part-way. He told me he was back from Algeria; and I told him the run had gone well. And the morbid beast who’d been stretching a few minutes earlier was now merely a blind and clumsy animal with a nice little story to tell when he got home.
Posted: July 8th, 2010 under Abdel, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?.
Comments: none
Yay! The run of my new comic monologue, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, at The Jewish Theatre San Francisco has been extended through June 20. You can buy tix here. And to get a 50 percent discount — for this week’s shows only (May 27-30) — just call their box office at 415.292.1233 and say the code “TJT50.”
The nice folks at TJT — who are celebrating their having just been voted the best theater of 2010 by San Francisco Magazine — did a sweet promo video for the extension. Here it is:
Posted: May 19th, 2010 under Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?.
Comments: none
Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, my latest collaboration with director David Dower, opens tonight (March 10) at Theater J in Washington D.C., and runs here through March 21. For each of my shows, with the help of my friends (always including Scott Rosenberg, and this time also including great suggestions from my Facebook and Twitter peeps), I put together pre- and post-show playlists of songs that relate (sometimes very tangentially) to the themes of the piece. I don’t care as much about these playlists as I do about the shows themselves, but I still care a lot: My adolescence was made livable by WNEW-FM, which allowed its deejays to play whatever they wanted — and the way they put together eclectic sets of music that they loved (especially my favorite, Vinnie “Bayonne Butch” Scelsa) delighted and educated me. When we first became friends in Boston in the ’80s, Scott would put together mixtapes for me: In particular, I remember listening to one — which included a great Jonathan Richman song — as I walked in the early morning along Commonwealth Ave. after my father had died. In those lonely hours, I popped Scott’s tape into my Walkman and learned that there still was joy and beauty in the world.
Anyhow, here’s the pre-show playlist for tonight (including such themes as wandering, commerce, strangers and strangeness, doors, imagination, God, art, knapsacks, and Andy Warhol himself):
And here’s the post-show mix:
Feel free to offer me more suggestions — these playlists tend to keep evolving!
Posted: March 10th, 2010 under Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, Performances, Playlists, Scott Rosenberg.
Comments: 2
Rabbi David Jonathan Cooper
I think maybe — maybe — I’m starting to pick up the faint outlines of what my new piece, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, wants to be. A lot of this has to do with the fact that my director/collaborator, David Dower, has been focusing on it the past few days, and we had a nice talk on the phone about it recently. (You can join part of our collaboration, via Twitter, by following warholjew and WarholDir.) Also, I had a great, long conversation with my producer, Jonny Reinis, yesterday about Warhol and Jews and Martin Buber (one of the 10 subjects of Warhol’s “Jewish Geniuses” portraits) and Existentialism — you know, the usual stuff performers talk about with their producers. And I’ve been having some fascinating exchanges with two brilliant and freaky Berkeley rabbis, Menachem Creditor of Congregation Netivot Shalom and David Jonathan Cooper of Kehilla Community Synagogue. Plus I’ve been reading lots of cool stuff, including a book that I just happened to find in the Judaica section at Half Price Books in Berkeley: Martin Buber: An Intimate Portrait, by Aubrey Hodes — the first account I’ve discovered that actually conveys Buber’s ideas in what I could firmly call the English language. Not to mention that, despite my stark fear that I would bum them out on a celebratory occasion, I managed to do an improv towards the Warhol piece at a Berkeley Hadassah benefit last weekend. And you could toss in the long conversation I had with my mom yesterday about our Jewishness (or lack of same) — which included her delivery of this classically Jewish-type sentiment: “Well, I thought they should have founded Israel in South America — but no one asked me!”
But I’d have to say that mostly, it’s this: For the first time, really, as I try to explore Buber’s concept of “I and Thou” and relate it to my own experiences, I’m thinking about not just the “thou” but also the “I.” Who is he? What does he want? What’s he so afraid of? The next step, I suppose, is to track him down. If I make any headway, I’ll let you — or thou — know.
Posted: February 10th, 2010 under Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, I, Jews, Martin Buber, Thou.
Comments: 3
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
I’m going to my first-ever religious Jewish service tomorrow morning — at Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, where I’ve performed and improvised a few times. I called my friend Menachem Creditor, the temple’s rabbi, to ask — among other things — what one wears at a Jewish service. (Thanks to my late father’s love of church ceremonies and my six years at an Episcopalian choir school, many Christian services are more than familiar to me.) Our connection wasn’t great — he was about to pick up his daughter from her school bus and I was about to pick up my son from school — but he told me that, if I wasn’t wearing a yarmulke and … something else I couldn’t hear … someone would hand them to me. He said the service starts at 8 a.m., but usually only “visitors” come then, and that I should plan to arrive at about 10 or 10:15.
Recently I have been struggling with learning about my Jewish heritage, as I prepare for the next stage of development of my show Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews (opening at Theater J in Washington D.C. in March and at The Jewish Theatre San Francisco in April). Just finished reading David Mamet’s The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews, a book of essays about how assimilated Jewish “apostates” such as myself are engaged in treason against our own race. Now reading some more of Wallace Shawn’s book of essays (titled, simply, Essays), in which he seems to ally himself with all people, regardless of tribe or nationality — a stance I have long felt myself to hold. But, spurred by this project and by Mamet’s pugnacious arguments, I am excited to at least think of myself as a member of this ancient tribe. (And yet, I have to say, whenever Mamet talks about how great and wise the Jewish writings and traditions are, I reflexively think, “But isn’t every major religion and culture — that is to say, every one of long-standing — equally wise and great, albeit perhaps coming at things from different angles?”)
And then there’s the God thing. I’ve had no experience of God — which, the more I read and listen to theologians, may actually put me in their camp. People, including Rabbi Creditor (and my atheist father), have described God as something like the full potential of the human imagination. Even there, I think (perhaps frivolously?), “What about the imagination of animals and plants, and of the vast universe?” And then I stop myself and think, “Well, that would pretty much be God, wouldn’t it?” (if the universe had an imagination). And I am reminded (and it makes me smile sometimes) how shallow my thinking is.
And yet I keep wanting at least to move forward.
May I confess that turning 50 has not been as uneventful, emotionally, as I had anticipated? Possibly this has something to do with the fact that my father had a stroke at 55 and died at 59. But I think it has more to do with my ambivalence regarding how relatively important or unimportant it is that I am alive. Is it possible to kind of separate out these two feelings: (1) that I am not particularly important in even the medium-sized scheme of things and (2) that the fact that I am alive — that I have been so unimaginably fortunate as to have a chance to be alive one time — is enormously meaningful?
My stepfather, Frank, a mensch, who has made my mother’s life so wonderful (and the rest of the family’s as well), has been ailing. He and my mom are both in their 80s (though she’s several years his junior), and so when there are ailments they tend to raise a larger question: Is this part of a serious decline? My mom is, as she is typically in these situations, remarkably clear-minded about what’s going on; in addition, among Frank’s amazing children is one — Rachel — whose husband, Peter, is either a geriatrician or a gerontologist, depending on what the dictionary would tell me if I were to look it up. (He’s a doctor who works with old people.) Rachel and Peter arranged for Mom and Frank to go from Chicago (where they live in a beautiful high-rise on the South Side) to visit with them in Cleveland. As of Mom’s last email, Frank has been improving greatly; I cannot begin to tell you how hopeful this makes me.
I’m trying to work with time — to accept it, not let it be the enemy, let it just be. I have a tendency to resort to kind of a willful narcolepsy in response to things that challenge me. Maybe I’m somewhat depressed most all the time. The things that make me happy: I’m wildly in love with my family, just really blissed out when I’m with them. I have friends whom I love. I love living in Berkeley. I am a proud American. I am a proud un-American. I am proud to be a Jew, and totally confused about what that means. (I imagine that I would be equally proud to be whatever else I happened to be born as.) I love listening to music, and reading.
The work I do — making stories on stage and on film — is, in part, the craft of working with time. Its masters teach me — or try — how to make of my limitations (or, perhaps, the ordered confessions of those limitations) a sort of strength, or at least a living. For thousands of years Jews have commented in the margins of history, creating pressurized, often indecipherable (at least to many) counter-narratives to the prevailing ones. At 50, facing the task of fitting my infinitesimal story into the vast tapestry I sense is there, I guess I want to say to myself (and to you) that I will try, very hard, as hard as I can, to be open to any possibilities that present themselves.
And why is it that the prospect of going to temple for the first time arouses these chaotic thoughts in this atheistic, apostate Jew? I’d give you my usual superficial answer, but I want to try something different this time: I want to have the experience, rather than imagine my way through or around it. I am, as the great Suzanne Vega song puts it, tired of sleeping.
Posted: January 9th, 2010 under Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, Berkeley, Jews, Rabbi Menachem Creditor.
Comments: 10
My longtime theatrical collaborator, David Dower, is far away, in Washington, D.C. So as we collaborate on our new piece, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, we are experimenting with communicating via Twitter (among other methods, like the old-fashioned telephone call).
If, for some reason, you’d like to join us on our continuing journey (which, admittedly, will sometimes seem obscure or confusing, as you will be joining us a dozen years into our overall conversation), you can go on Twitter and “follow” warholjew (that’s me) and WarholDir (David). And if you feel moved to offer a reply, or argument, or question, you can send out a Twitter tweet with “@warholjew” (but not the quote marks) embedded in your message — such as:
@warholjew You call yourself a Jew?
Or:
@warholjew, I knew Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol was a friend of mine. And you, sir, are no Warhol Jew!
That way, I will be sure to see your tweet. (Add “@WarholDir” as well, and David will see it too.)
Also, as with all Twitter streams, you have to read from bottom to top — i.e., in chronological order. And to take in the whole conversation, you’ll have to hit “More” a few times, to get to the beginning — which is to say, bottom. (Do Twitter streams in Hebrew start at the top, I wonder?)
My hope is that this can be another way for me to improvise within a community — an extension of my live improvs at theaters — and to get more of the feedback that I find so invaluable. My fear is that none of this will be of any interest to anyone, and that I am pissing (my Twitter stream) into the wind.
But I have to say that, so far, it’s been really helpful — exciting even — to be able to jump out of the shower, jot down a bunch of 140-character-max ideas as warholjew, and then — not long after — find a series of David’s brilliant responses waiting for me the next time I check. And I’m curious to see whether this can become a community thing as well, with your input.
At the same time, by the way, I continue to maintain my ordinary, ecumenical Twitter and Facebook identities. Oh, and I also still exist in the physical world — though in a much less organized way.
Posted: December 31st, 2009 under Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, David Dower, Facebook, Twitter.
Comments: 4
Even my lovely and powerful computer is getting fed up with all the multitasking. When I ask it to let me use Firefox, it rope-a-dopes me — asking, in effect, “Do you really need to use Firefox? Wouldn’t you be just as happy sticking with your email application?” I need to click on the little Firefox icon a few more times before the machine grudgingly brings up the browser.
I feel my laptop’s pain (something I’m sure we’ve all experienced, though possibly not on our wedding night): There are so many things I’m trying to do right now that I feel myself approaching a sort of fugue state.
On one of my “tabs” on Firefox is an uploading video that my brother Jake and I made yesterday, alerting our supporters at IndieGoGo.com that we plan to shoot the next installment of our new film, Love & Taxes, next weekend — and gently asking for even more donations.
On another tab is the enewsletter-generating program I use: I plan to send out an eblast to my peeps today about a couple of improvs I’ll be doing (towards an expanded version of my monologue Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?) in San Francisco over the next two weeks. (The improvs — each open to a maximum of 15 audience members, so that few will be able to speak of the chaos and disaster — will be on Dec. 21 and 22 at 8 p.m. at The Jewish Theatre San Francsico; call 415.292.1233 to reserve a spot.)
Another tab holds yesterday’s article from the San Francisco Chronicle detailing brother Jake’s ongoing collaboration with Robert Reich on terrific little videos that give simple explanations of complicated policy issues. At the same time, I keep checking my email for updates regarding an event that Jake and I are trying to put together: me interviewing Reich on stage at the Berkeley Rep in January, and filming it for use as a pilot for our new interview show, Josh Kornbluth Talks to Strangers.
There are also:
Which is just for starters, and does not take into account the books by and about Kafka, Brandeis, and other “Warhol Jews” that are staring accusingly at me from the bookcase, asking why I have not finished them yet; nor the pile of unsorted papers I brought back from my recent trips to India and Portland (guess which place was drizzlier); nor the fact that my new booking agent has been waiting a week for me to send him the technical requirements for my “smaller” shows (i.e., the cheaper ones); nor many other things that are now rolling around vaguely but impatiently in my head and working their way down to my esophagus, from whence they will eventually try to reflux their way back out into the world …
But really, the idea is to just start with something, right? Baby steps. Okay. Right.
I’ll pee. Yes, that is what I’ll do first. I will pee. Peeing is good. It also involves stepping away from the computer, which will be a relief for my laptop and myself. We both need some space. Too much multitasking. Too many tasks to be multi-ed. Go back to a simpler time, when people left their front doors unlocked and movies cost under $10 and one person doing one task on one computer was the subject of worldwide awe and admiration. That is what I will do. And it will be nice.
Posted: December 11th, 2009 under Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, Berkeley Energy Commission, Global Warming, India, Interviews, Jews, Love & Taxes, Portland, Robert Reich, Touring, YouTube.
Comments: 1
Golda Meir, the first member of Warhol's minyan, takes a seat and waits for the others.
For his “Jewish Geniuses” portrait series, Andy Warhol ended up choosing 10 subjects — coincidentally (or not?), the number of Jews you need to start a religious service. (Technically, I’ve been told, a minyan is traditionally 10 men — but as a feminist Jew, I think I’ll just go with a gender-free definition.) As I have been working on Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, I’ve found it helpful to pair up the 10 — not for any thematic reasons, necessarily, just as a mnemonic device:
Now, you may notice that — with the Marx Brothers — there are actually 12 members of Warhol’s minyan (not even counting Zeppo or Gummo!). So, okay, let’s call this a “baker’s minyan.”
Posted: November 14th, 2009 under Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?, Jews.
Comments: 2