Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss

Post video for you? No problema.
Rob bank for you? Let’s talk. Tal vez — but I would claim it is Paul McCarthy inspired performance art, taking a page from “Ragtime” with a grant from the Judaica Foundation for Judiaica or some such.

First reaction, at :47 nesh gadol hyah MAH?
Or nesh gadol hyah Mama!
Or Mem Yud Lamed how you say “ef” in ebreo? MYLF

This is the new video by Golem.
I saw them at SXSW 2009 with Polka Madre, a klezmer group from D.F. and they were involved with JDUB label which frankly made it harder to try to deal with them. They are on some Corason, sounds Spanish. I also recall the lady from the band saying they could not tour California they were having baby. And I say: mazel tov. And men yud lamed, not disrespect to Mr. Accordion-player’s.

Also, coinkydinky — and why are there chocolate coins from Ghana but not from Israel? — I just spoke with the father of a really hot female accordion player — up there with the lady from Golem, I think her name is Kogen Ezekial or something — the other one is named Sarah Savoy the Goy no that’s not fair and besides she may actually be Jewish — “seh vwah” eets French or eats french I know I would — anyways Renee De La Prada in Cali her has a 5-years running project about women who play the squeeze box Accordion Babes and I think the young-momma lady — got I hope this is not imposing her privacy –I think some managers instruct their female clients to not wear wedding band — and I also to her credit liked the way, I figured out year later when Dar Williams sang and introduced “Iowa” she did it in a way that the narrator who “never had a way with women” could be either a dude or a lady, and Dar, so this is not too tangential, did play a couple years running at a Jewish camp in Pennsylvania.

Well, what happens if the dreidel comes up: shin, put one in. Kinda suggestive, no?

Mazel tov and happy hannukah to Golem and thanks for hooking me up with Pasatono. Or, as my rabbi, or the lady who is doing it where my rabbi Sydney used to do it, and that is a Harvey Mandell or Bobcat Goldthwait joke in disguise, Rabbi Janet Marder in response to my Salinger by way of Shields and Salerno bhagadivitaism “You have the right to work, you don’t have the right to be paid” she said:

You don’t have to finish your work.
But you cannot quit either.

Got it?

Gosh golly, I mean Golem.
yes, my precioussss.

I hope it is a good for you as it is good for me.

Or is it a reference to that movie that the coin never stops spinning that is how we know we are awake.

Meanwhile, James Franco, who is a jew, because his dear mother is, he should not kill. Not even a guy who are media says is a dick. Tater. He has a dick tater.

I’m here all week. Try the meat loaf.

Ugh.

edot to add: my bar mitzvah was quite a few years ago but for the sake of plastic alto, the blog with 500,000 words but no readers, i am sticking the thought that there is no “F” in Hebrew, which explains a lot of things, and Phillip Roth fist capitalized on. There is “FR” obviously, from the title, but otherwise no “F”. It’s like a shiboleF.

okay okay, adn1: I checked, there is Pe sometimes pronounced “Paye” as in “John Paye” the not very Jewish former football quarterback I just wrote about and am interviewing tomorrow and it, Pe has a soft version as is the 17th letter of the aleph-bet so the custom dreydal the lady from Golem uses in her sexy holiday video, if you look closely but don’t stare you go blind it says Mem Yud Lamed Pe okay now I am confused the word “Po” or “Poh” but probably not poetic enough to be “Poe” as in “here” as in Israeli hannukha dreidel Nesh Gadol Hayah Poe, that most have “Pe” too, Yes? MYLP or F. It’s not funny or puny if you have to explain it. I had punny but I was thinking puny and the spell-caster as compared to plaster caster read my wand. mind.

double ugh.
double ugh sofit.

notes:
1) this is a bit of a shonda, a disgrace, so maybe I should apologize. That little dreidel trick did make me dizzy. The headline references a children’s song, about a dreidel made of clay, and as I remind myself what is knowable about Golem, the article in the San Diego Jewish news recounts the story that the Golem is a creature made of…wait for it…clay. I have no idea what “Freydele” means, I presume, since the video has a small spinning toy, that it rhymes with “dreidel”.
2) Curtis Hasselbring plays trombone in this film and presumably in some live appearances of Golem. If he looks familiar, it is because he played at Stanford recently with Josh Roseman band. (A Sun Ra gig, or was it a Ska gig that sounded like Sun Ra?). Curtis and Josh incidentally both played probably overlapping and maybe thats how they met, with Russ Gershon’s Either Orcherstra, which was spun yesterday on KCSM jazz and back announced as celebrating an anniversary of their founding. I thought of Russ in that he produced an album of music using Ethiopian musicians,and I think he would have the kind of ear I like for sizing up the upside of a Pasatono, and how to improve, in the way that Ry Cooder said to add trumpet. And sorry to Annette Ezekiel Kogan for digressing from promoting her video back to discussing Pasatono, but that is where I entered the picture and you can at least rest somewhat assured that I can write standard written English — and picture of dreidel with S, W, E — when I want to.
3) I don’t want to tip her hand about her personal life but I imagine when not performing the song from this video live offstage of the Golem brain trust this time of year does involve some serious Hannah-knocking (that is me pretending I am the spellcheker recommending real English words when I either make up words or misspell them or write in Spanish) because it is a children’s holiday more than anything. Hint, hint. Mazel tov.
4) Nobody noticed I was wearing a green New Orleans Klezmer Allstars t-shirt at the Freight and Salvage’s Pasatono show, although I was thinking hard about and trying to channel Glenn Hartman the accordion player, who once brought his son with me on an interview, which took place at Kirk’s hand burgers at Town and Country, although I ordered the hambone. Has Golem performed with or corresponded with NOKAS?
5) I have not actually heard the new Golem joint, I played it on mute or actually was in a loud room, first Zoe Cafe then a Starbucks with hands cupped to ears like my father used to do –maybe I need an ear-horn — hunched over so am kinda bluffing here but she did say seasonal song — I am deliberately writing around the word “hannuka” based on my fear of spelling it wrong — and in terms of ending up in the gutter, as if she didn’t realize she was sending us there, well, I did recently re-screen “A Serious Man” which has the scene of Gopnik up on his roof to try to tune “F-Troop” (wink,wink) and then he notices his neighbor sun-bathing in the nude behind a so-so privacy fence. So it’s not just me, and B, T, W when I asked Glenn Hartman if he has seen this movie he said the unknown star is his childhood good friend. I wanted to start a Coen Brothers tribute that meshed Hendrix with Klezmer called Sussman Can’t Sleep, from “Machine Gun”. Anyways on the dreidel song I found this: However, in English the singer sings about a dreidel, whereas in Yiddish the singer is the dreidel. In the Yiddish version, the dreidel is made out of “blay” (Yiddish: בלײַ), which is lead, which is historically accurate, and in the English version it is made out of clay. Which reminds that I like to pass on and not pass over something I read that the famous “glass slipper” in the fairy tale is a mis-read of “fur”. Let’s get blayed. In any case, POH or SHAH, today’s tops are mostly plastic with the occasional woody that pops up here and there.
7) and further or fur her and I mean to support Annette Ezekial Kogan and Golem, by digressing into the canon to bolster not bury her but sussing around post-editing phase of the Plastic Alto post process brought reference to a Tom Lehrer song I’d like to hear, about Hannukah in Santa Monica. And the same wiki article lists the now ubiquitous Adam Sandler song, which reminds me that at the Rachel Garlin Curtis McMurtry show a few weeks ago I was sort of narrating translating and heckling and I said something about the fact that Curtis’ mother is a Jew while Rachel’s father is: I said put them together that is one fine looking Jew, which I think is a reference to the heritage or family trees of Goldie Hawn and Paul Newman, and Rachel whether she got the reference or not said “but i’m a lesbian”. Actually if you put Goldie and Paul together you would not likely get a whole Jew in fact you’d get like an one-eighth, which reminds of the truism about chaos and physics that you cannot stir order. And unless Ms. Kogan Ezekial is a physics professor by day, I am sort of doing her a less-than-solid in that it turns out turns turns turns out that there is a Tom Stoppard play from 1993 “Arcadia” that is the easiest to find proofing of my hardly remembered ditty about order: a character Tomasina says, and probably not on Chanukah, or while laying suggestively on a couch with her legs spread, not unlike the apple sauce on my Whole Foods latke I did eat:
THOMASINA: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
8) Ok, a little more research with my little smarty pants on the lap top thingy and I am fairly certain, by Plasty standards that the lyric of the Golem bomb rhymes Freydele which is a lady’s name with Meydele which is Yiddish for “pretty young woman”. So in the video Annette plays a character “pretty young woman”.
9) earlier I was going to fake a Fitzgerald reference, from “This Side of Paradise”: he had only been inside Princeton for a very short time but it had changed him forever.
10) Golem played the 23rd Jewish Music Festival in 2008 in Berkeley the same year I produced the Steven Bernstein Dispora Suite cd release show at BOTH (B, O, T, H) with Glenn Hartman as support act so look he thinks he is a big Jewish promoter?
11) this is more of a yartzheit than holiday fun but point of fact JDUB, founded by Aaron Sisman an NYU grad who worked briefly for Ropeadope and now is at Lincoln Center in Jazz audience development, issued grants of something like $40,000 to each of its artists, including it seems Golem and SoCalled (who I met at KZSU and Lively Arts), and one of its major backers was Richard and Rhoda Goldman fund which has distributed $700 million in grants but after Richard died, the philanthropic part of the estate, according to Kevin Fagan of the Chron, was split among the three children, including Doug and Lisa Goldman, but did continue to fund JDUB which eventually sold its assets and disbanded.

edit to add, a week later, the 9th night of Hannukkaha:

The Jewish version of wonton or ravioli is kreplach, more than matzo ball or (stuffed) matzo ball. Matzo meanwhile is a flatbread, as in the bread didn’t have a chance to rise before the Exodus. There’s also, and I am a little out of season here, matzo-bri which is pieces of the flat-bread scrambled into eggs.

More importantly, where can I find HeBrew the seasonal lager?

And why did I find gelt made in Ghana easier than made in Israel?

And not to stray too far, but the famous song “I have a little dreidel — toy top — I made it out of clay” is a mis-read of “blay” which means led. The rock band Golem has a sexy new video that could be playing in the window of 520 Ramona the vibrator shop, meanwhile, that is closer to the original Yiddish “I am a little dreidel”.

I am not making any of this up. And none of this is making me up.