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IMDB.com Trivia about the film "Goyband" (a.k.a. "Falling Star")
Or, differently phrased, what is "Goyband" and why haven't any of us heard about it?
In reading about Natasha Lyonne in Wikipedia for a client (true story), I noticed the film title "Goyband" on her list of credits - drilling down I discovered it was a 2008 film that asked a burning national question: "What if Rent star Adam Pascal had been a 90s boyband success story who had fallen on hard times and had to take a gig at a Glatt Kosher casino?"
This was the central premise for "Goyband," whose name was then changed to "Falling Star" (the poster features a sheriff's Jewish star, get it, because he was a falling star and because Jews are involved?)
(Trivia about this movie you'll probably never see is available at IMDB - see screencap above.)
So why haven't you heard of "Goyband"? Having seen the trailer (see embed below), I can imagine it's for any number of reasons:
The description of the film as "a romantic comedy that fuses music and pop culture with a satirical (albeit gentle) look into Orthodox Judaism and Kabbalah" failed to resonate with audiences.
Powerhouse actresses Natasha Lyonne and Tovah Feldshuh are both in the film - but Lyonne is only present in a glimpse in the trailer and doesn't speak; Feldshuh is absent from the trailer entirely.
It won four awards at the Long Island Film Festival.
They have an official MySpace site (that's how long ago it was).
Their official Goyband.com website is now in Japanese.
In case I lose it again, this is what it looks like. :)
The short story: I lost my phone on the way to the gym. And then I used Find My iPhone and Facebook to find it, in about an hour. And now, I’ve been reunited with my phone. So if that’s all you care about, you can stop reading now. It’s all good.
But there’s also a longer story, with elements that are a little murkier than that three-sentence process. If you ask me, the longer story has more of an emotional impact than the shorter story does. Because it was Mother’s Day. Because I had just spent some quality time with one of my brothers and we talked a lot about our late mother. Because the night before, I dreamed about my mother. Because this is a time when I spend weeks at a time thinking about my mother, her physical absence, her spectral presence, her echoes, her impact.
Yesterday, I left my apartment, phone in handbag, heading to the gym. Although I usually park in my driveway (and drive on a parkway), I had parked on the street overnight, saving the driveway spot for my brother’s rental car. An old, beat-up almost-station wagon of a car was blocking me. I noted the handicapped tag hanging from the rearview mirror; while the driver spoke minimal English, I managed to convey to him that if he moved his car, I could give him the spot, and he complied.
By the time I got to the gym, my phone was missing. I searched my bag, checked my car, and found nothing. I went home, figuring I must have left it in one of my mansion’s MANY rooms. After I finished checking the servants’ quarters, I concluded that my phone was not in my house.
iActivated “Find my iPhone” from iCloud. Last location was at my address. Maybe it was in my car? iChecked my whole car, but no iPhone was iFound. iChecked iCloud again and saw that my phone was on the move, slightly north of where iLived, then across Pico heading toward Whitworth. I could track it as long as I had internet – but I didn’t have internet outside of my apartment…how was I supposed to chase my phone without my phone?
As I often do when faced with a problem I can’t solve, I took to Facebook, notifying the masses (a.k.a., anyone who wasn’t at a Mother’s Day dinner) that my phone was out there in the ether and that people should keep an eye open for it. A ridiculous instruction, I thought, but why not put it out there in the universe….
Finally, iCloud informed me that my phone had been “found” at 1217 Wooster Street. I jumped in the car and tried to find 1217 Wooster – it turned out to be just north of Pico, except nonexistent – where 1217 should have been was the Fu’s Palace parking lot. Was it inside? I asked the waitstaff and they said no. I wandered back out to the parking lot and looked around. No giant neon sign reading “YOUR PHONE IS HERE!” or person waving my phone around hoping I’d see them. Just a parking lot.
“Well, what do I do now?” I asked out loud.
Just then, a car rolled into the parking lot, an old, beat-up almost-station wagon of a car, with a handicapped tag hanging from the rearview mirror.I generally don’t remember cars. But thanks to a mother who spent a lot of time in a wheelchair, I remember handicap tags.
I poked my head into the car's open window and asked the man if he’d found a phone. “No,” he said. My heart dropped. Then he paused, and said, “phone, YES!” He communicated that it was inside with his wife and that he’d call her. She came out of the building – the family was going to Ohel Moshe for an event or a Mother’s Day dinner or something – my phone in her hands. I gushed gratitude, not believing that from "lost" to "found" had taken less than an hour.
As I left the parking lot, friend and Pilates teacher Andrea Hodos appeared. “Did you get the phone?” she asked. She explained that in response to my Facebook message, she called my phone and had spoken to the people who had picked it up. She knew where they were and was going to get the phone from them. So, even if my plea to the heavens hadn’t worked, my plea on Facebook would have.
Obviously, I burst into tears, once as Andrea hugged me and then again in my car before driving home. When I arrived at my apartment, I saw that all the electronic devices were blinking…there’d been some sort of power outage during the hour that my phone was lost.
None of it means anything, of course. Unless I start drawing lines of connection. The dream. The parking. The fact that this whole lost phone thing meant that I cleaned out my car and straightened up some things at home, something my mother would have considered a Mother’s Day present, for sure. The fact that it took both technology and people to bring this episode to a close. That my post resulted in Facebook comments from friends trying to help my situation and lift my spirits, reinforcing that what happens online can have real-life positive impact. That a loss of something of technological and social value coincided with a loss of power and control.
Like I said, it doesn’t mean anything. Except to me.
I've been flying Virgin America domestically for a while; I love the inflight experience, from the order-at-your-seat refreshments to personal entertainment screens. The flight attendants seem capable and friendly (and took care of me most recently when I got sick on a flight). Virgin America has also always had a bit of a sense of humor when it comes to safety videos.
VA's previous animated video was jaggedly drawn, a bit jarring and edgy, chill and sarcastic, featuring a bullfighter who didn't know how to use a seatbelt and a nun who was traveling with more devices than you might think a woman of the cloth might acquire. And then a few months ago, a new video dawned on Virgin America - flashy, with choreography and different styles of music to drive the safety messages home, with karaoke-style subtitles to encourage people to sing along (and hopefully remember the instructions in a way that didn't induce the panic that comes with realizing that those safety instructions are supposed to guide us in the event of a catastrophic air event, but I digress, and yes, I do have airplane anxiety, why do you ask?).
Tonight I just viewed a new safety video that must have been created to compete with (or perhaps, "pay homage to") the Virgin America style. The unlikely airline challenger? El Al, Israel airways, with a video with a kitschy, near-nonsensical vibe, that doesn't even attempt to rhyme and is so weird that I can't believe this is the first time I'm seeing it. (Video embeds and more discussion after the jump.)
There's a classic joke about the oleh chadash, the new immigrant to Israel, who sees that wherever he goes, people are parking on the sidewalk. One day, he's driving around and looking for parking. Nothing. Not a single legal space free, but people are still parking on the sidewalks. He sees a policeman and asks, "Excuse me, officer, is it legal for me to park on the sidewalks?"
"Absolutely not!" the policeman says sternly. "It's absolutely illegal and unsafe!"
"So why is everyone else parked there?"
"THEY didn't ask."
Leave it to Israelis to carry forward this classic parking humor joke into the Tumblr era. In "Dear Officer: Love Notes to Parking Cops," journalist Daniel Estrin is posting photos of interesting, moderately convincing and humorous notes from Israeli drivers to traffic cops pre-emptively begging that they not be given parking tickets. This means that they parked in a space that they knew wasn't legal, and instead of finding a legal space or paying the meter to park there, they decided their best or most just option was to leave a note in the window, explaining the car's presence with classic excuses like "our family is sitting shiva" (fair), "I'm picking up my kid from kindergarten" (okay, but so are most people, especially in Jerusalem), and "I'm performing a bris" (who hasn't been there?).
It's chutzpah. But it's also an "only in Israel moment" - the parking cop isn't really seen as mishtarah, the police that you might fear, but as a guy who's doing something annoying by giving out parking tickets, and why should you get one? You don't deserve it! You're doing something important. Like for instance, attending a local soccer match.
I live in Los Angeles. Driving and parking is all most people do here. I've seen busted meters with plastic bags over their "heads," burned-out shells of cars, cars held together with twine, and people living out of their cars. But pre-emptive notes to parking enforcement? Not in my neighborhood. (Although the Valley, which has a higher density of Israeli natives than some parts of Jerusalem, might be an exception - for all I know, this has been going on for years.)
So next time you're driving around, looking for spaces, and wondering if you can actually park there, why take a chance by asking? Leave a note, just in case. (And make it entertaining, because it will probably end up on Tumblr.)
I seem to do this a lot, ask my friends what they've seen, what they're enjoying, what's making the rounds virally on the web. I delight at being among the first few viewers, and when something is good, I really enjoy sharing it. And so, I launch a new series here. ICYMI, for the uninitiated, means "in case you missed it." And as for "best things on the internet," my only parameters are that it's fairly new (generally in the first ten days since it hit the interwebs), deeply engages me on some level and makes me want to share it. And don't worry about me running out of material. I've tried to hit publish a few times now, and every time I'm about to, something newly awesome arrives. The content, it keeps coming.
For instance, this late-breaking - and I suspect emerging - battle between @LivviesCurls ("I have many different forms. I look best in the shower") and @MelliesHair ("The more you screw me over, the more height I gain"). That's right - Twitter is the space where two Scandal characters' HAIR(s?) are having a throwdown. And since I followed them this afternoon, they're following me back. So just to say that again, so you understand,"Two Scandal characters' HAIR are following me on Twitter."
Star Wars Filibuster (Animated). If you loved Patton Oswalt's Star Wars-themed filibuster on Parks & Recreation, you'll love this animated version, which takes his genius of a plot outline and renders it visually.
The Camp Gyno. I'd be shocked if you haven't already seen this advert for HelloFlo, a company that sends young girls monthly packages timed to when they receive their, er, monthly packages.
Badger's Star Trek episode. Breaking Bad's final season (or really the second part of the previously aired season that AMC was saving until August) launched Sunday night with a great episode - at its center was an incredibly strange, seemingly unrelated monologue by a minor character about his original plot for a Star Trek episode. And by the next morning, Vulture had made it into an animation (probably due to the success of the aforementioned Patton Oswalt filibuster animation). This is the speed of the internet, folks.
Tom Thum at TEDxSydney. Truly amazing beatbox work - tons of sounds and styles all coming out of one person's mouth. Really impressive and delightful to watch.
Life of a Stranger Who Stole my Phone. Hamid stole this woman's phone but forgot to disengage the "auto-upload" feature - so now the victim of the theft has a window into the perp's life that lends itself to snarky and hilarious captions.
Working at a Nonprofit. Yes, it's funny - the tropes, trials and tribulations of working in a nonprofit culture ring true to those of us who've been there (or who are there). But it also seems to present a set of fairly depressing problems, many of which could be addressed, toward the improvement of quality of life for the world's nonprofit workers. So is it comedy or a call to action? I guess we'll see. I may just be writing more about this...
And two Jewish-holiday themed clips: since 'tis the season to talk about repentance and acknowledging our misdeeds, IKAR challenges us to think about how we ask for and grant forgiveness. And for a more whimsical view of the guilt admission and repentance process, the e-Scapegoat from G-dcast allows you to confess your sins and send the virtual goat into the wilderness - as the site says, just like they did "in biblical times, only nerdier."
What are you watching? Why does it engage you? And most importantly, is anyone else being followed by television hairstyles?
Two things you should know before reading this blog post.
1) There are those who believe that in Jerusalem, the layer between dreams and reality are thinner, as if there's some cosmic connection between that place and a plane that we don't understand. In some people, this manifests as a belief in their own prophecy. Whether you're calling it supernatural, mystical, or collective unconscious, there's something special about the place.
2) My mother, Shulamit, was grandmother to four grandchildren: Gil, Dov, Julia and Ella. She loved them all equally, with all of her heart. But the first one, Gil, was the one who transformed her from "just" our mother into "Savta Shuly."
Now, the story.
While I was in Jerusalem, three weeks after the passing of my mother, these things kept happening to and around me that made me feel her presence: walking down the street in Jerusalem, at the daily minyanim I attended to say kaddish, in erev Shabbat breezes that seemed to blow air straight into my lungs in a way that made me gasp, in angels who appeared in human form to help me when I was crying during services, and in one particular case, in a carton of rugelach.
Welcome to the first utterly pointless post I've put up in some time.
Several months ago, I went to a trivia night at a bar in Santa Monica - that night, the other teams all knew math and circumferences and astronomy references, while I managed to eke out two correct answers to pop culture items, but that was about it. Suffice it to say, that evening did not make me feel smart.
But in going through my receipts and papers in preparation for taxes last week, I found a piece of paper from Trivia Night, which challenged us to determine - from a list of Italian names - which names belong to members of the mob, and which are members of the Jersey Shore cast. I am sad to say / happy to report that I got them all right.
I have reproduced the list below for your entertainment: to test which group is actually more dangerous, and so I can finally throw away this piece of paper (because I wanted to blog about this months ago). Good guessing to you all.
Tell me whether this person is a member of the show Jersey Shore or may have buried someone there, i.e. a member of the mob. [Then there were two columns: you had to write "member" or "burier" in one column, and the person's nickname in the other.]
As you may know, I was among those stranded at JFK Airport when a blizzard prompted the cancellation of hundreds of flights on December 26 of last year. My Virgin Atlantic flight - which had been cancelled on the 19th due to a blizzard at Heathrow and rescheduled for the 26th at 6:05pm - was cancelled after we sat on the plane for two hours because of a blizzard at JFK, and was rescheduled for 6:05pm the 27th, then delayed to 7:30, then to a boarding time of 8:15 that didn't happen, and eventually, after great protest from the passengers, finally took off after midnight on the 28th.
What's the problem? Why won't Virgin Atlantic make compensation to the 250 of us who were on VS 004? According to USA Today, Virgin Atlantic (via spokesperson Greg Dawson) claims that "monetary compensation is not due" to the people on our flight - who "had to sleep in the airport terminal because all hotels nearby were booked" - because the snowstorm was an 'extraordinary occurrence.'
But apparently, Virgin's petulant behavior extends far beyond our particular flight - according to Bnet's Brett Snyder, "Virgin Atlantic has decided it won’t pay Heathrow Airport’s owner BAA anything until an inquiry into last month’s days-long shutdown is completed. Virgin Atlantic is acting like an impatient child here, and runs the risk of making relations with its most important airport even worse."
This preposterous experience just doesn't seem to end. And least of all for writers. Because Jason is still on this situation - it's his job to be. And as for me, while I'm not spending every day fighting about it, I definitely have more to say. Because all the elements of this experience combined into something resembling a psychological experiment in how far people's patience can be stretched before someone cracks and goes postal.
Look for the first part of my recollections to appear later today.
Stuck at JFK (or any major airport) overnight thanks to a Virgin Atlantic or other airline flight cancellation? Put off by a hard, dirty floor that's probably crawling with human germs and rodent feces? Well, get down off your high horse and embrace the inevitable - the human body can only take so much walking around an airport before you need to catch forty winks. Plus, if you ever get to that conference in the UK you're supposed to present at, you'll want to make sure you don't sleep through your own presentations! So here's how to get comfortable when there’s no comfort able to be found!
Step One: Scan & Select Your Space
As soon as it becomes clear that you'll need a place to sleep, the prime sleeping spaces will go quickly, so scan the terminal like you're the Terminator, assessing the potential spots for their potential comfort based on your internal programming: Are you seeking solitude? Heat? The company of others? Find a piece of floor that reflects your preferred sleeping sensibilities: if you stake out your own space, people may give you a wide berth, resulting in your own island of space in a crowded terminal. Or, if solitude is threatening to you (single females, you may wish to consider this) or is in a dark location away from the public eye, you may wish to seek out a trustworthy-looking group of similar-age individuals - this selection may be a bit rowdier or more brightly lit, but may appeal to your sense of safety and community.
Want to recharge as you recharge? Make sure to locate the "sleeping spaces" next to electrical outlets: if you have a power strip with you for some reason, now's the time to use it and become very popular.
Step Two: Sterilize Your Space
Make sure your chosen space is clear of obvious garbage that will muck up your sleeping experience - steer clear of sticky patches of spilled Coca-Cola or snowy wet boot tracks, for example. If you have 3 oz of Purell in your Ziploc bag of allowed liquids, now's the time to use it to sterilize the space. (Or save it, to clean yourself once you rise up from your nap.)
Step Three: Build Your Bed
Then spread out a blanket and – what’s that? You don’t have a blanket? Wrestle one away from one of the airline staff members (they claim they don’t have them, but they DO!). If your airline doesn't have blankets, you may go to another airline with a cancelled flight. They don't know who's on which cancelled flight, so the important thing is to get a blanket from someone before everyone runs out. You can then use it as a mattress (recommended for comfort and hygiene reasons) or as a first layer over your shivering body in contact with the near frozen floor. and build a nest out of that and whatever you have on you: your coat, scarf, a hat pulled down over your face to block the light, an extra pair of pants stuffed into a laptop sleeve and used as a pillow: be inventive. It’s like Project Runway, only - let's face it - you are probably never going to get to the runway.
Step Four: Tweet Your Position
Obviously.
Step Five: Secure Your Stuff - To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Once you've built your bed, now's your chance to lie in it. But before you close your eyes to enjoy the wrenching back pain of sleeping on a rock-hard airport floor, make sure your valuables are secured to your person: this may entail things like using your computer bag as a pillow, threading a bag handle around your arms or legs so you'll feel it if someone tries to nick it, or trusting a virtual stranger who says he or she will watch your bags whilst you sleep. There may be a price for generosity like this - like your photo ending up on Twitter - but it's a small price to pay to greet the morning (or the later part of the morning) having had 20 minutes of sleep, isn't it? When you wake up, it will be time to battle with the rest of the hungry airport zombies for food at airport eateries with dwindling supplies, so you'll want to have had that 20 minutes to fuel your attack strategy.
We at My Urban Kvetch hope that you've enjoyed this practical travel guide to sleeping at international airports. Stay tuned for other helpful guides about overnight airport bathroom survival and use of nearly useless food vouchers at eateries that don't accept them or have 200-person lines and minimal supplies.
To recap, in the beginning, I started a blog. (Hint: You're reading it now.) Years later, my Aba started a blog. Several months ago, I started doing video. And now my Aba's doing video, live from the floor at Kosherfest.
That's right - from squeezable hummus, falafel filled with tehina and popcorn (in a box) to beverages like watermelon juice, tequila in painted skull bottles, and sangria (in a box), my father was there and covered it all.
So to go behind the scenes at Kosherfest (and perhaps also my childhood), view the video - and if you like it, share with a friend or leave him a comment. I happen to know that he enjoys both comments and traffic.
Kol hakavod, Aba! (And don't you dare invade Twitter!)
