Museum at Eldridge Street
12 Eldridge St. between Canal & Division Sts.
Tuesday, July 14, $10, 7:00
212-219-0888
www.eldridgestreet.org
knish.me
I grew up on knishes. When I was a kid, my father would regularly bring home a big cardboard box of Gabila’s square delights, as their fleet of trucks was serviced by our family tire and auto repair shop on Utica Ave. in Brooklyn and Larry would always give a dozen to my father whenever they came in. So I’m particularly looking forward to July 14, when native New Yorker and food journalist Laura Silver will give a talk at the Eldridge St. Synagogue about her book Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food (Brandeis, May 2014, $24.95). “More than latkes, matzoh, or the apple-and-walnut charoset that crowned the seder plate, knishes were my family’s religion. For knishes, we went on pilgrimages,” Silver writes in the first chapter, “Au Revoir, Mrs. Stahl’s: Brighton Beach to the Lower East Side.” She continues her exploration of the “pillow of filling tucked into a skin of dough” in such chapters as “In Search of the First Knish: From the Holy Land to the Old Country,” “Mrs. Goldberg to Gangsta Rap: The Knish in Culture,” and, most important, “Where to Get a Good Knish,” Silver details the history of the doughy delicacy, which can be stuffed with potato, cheese, kasha, mushrooms, spinach, fruit, and rather unusual mixtures in this experimental gourmand time. Attendees will also get a sample from one of our favorite knisheries, Yonah Schimmel (or is it Yonah Shimmel?), where we often go for the delectable chocolate and cheese version.
About ten minutes into journalist David Thorpe’s absolutely charming yet emotionally bittersweet Do I Sound Gay?, he is at dinner with his best friends, Alberto and Sam, and the three are discussing the title question. It’s a fascinating conversation that is worth detailing extensively here. “I have the impression that you think it sounds bad,” Alberto says about David’s voice. “I interpret David’s feelings about this, and the feelings around this whole project, as bad. He has negative feelings about his voice, about the perception that it creates.” “And you don’t feel that at all yourself?” Sam asks. Alberto responds, “I have sort of a generic self-loathing that is created around my gayness. . . . . But I don’t think I can say it’s the only thing, or the main thing.” Finally, David chimes in, explaining, “I think I feel out of sync with my voice, and, at least it seems to me, that it’s anxiety about sounding too gay, so, okay, let’s see what it’s like to not sound gay, and maybe I’ll feel more in sync and maybe I’ll have some idea what my voice should sound like.” Alberto then gets to the heart of the matter, inquiring, “But you could also argue, why don’t you just accept how you sound?” And Alberto sums it all up: “We have never talked about this idea until you brought it up. I don’t know anybody else that I’ve talked to about it either. So I think there is this thing, obviously, that we all are aware of that hasn’t been spoken of. Maybe this is the elephant in the room.” David spends the rest of the film exploring the elephant in the room, meeting with speech therapists who examine his voice and teach him how to change it; talking to such out-of-the-closet gay icons as Dan Savage, Tim Gunn, Margaret Cho, David Sedaris, Don Lemon, and George Takei, who delve into their own gayness and how their voice is part of that; introducing us to a boy who was beaten up at school at a very young age because of his voice; and interviewing gay people on the street, who share their thoughts on whether they, or he, do or don’t sound gay, and whether that matters. Sedaris, whose short story “Go Carolina” served as inspiration for Thorpe, tells him, “I’m embarrassed to say this, but sometimes somebody will say, ‘I didn’t know you were gay.’ It’s like, Why does that make me feel good. I hate myself for thinking that. It’s very disturbing. I thought I was beyond that. What’s the problem if somebody assumes that I’m gay when I open my mouth? Why do I have a problem with that?”
The third film in Mushi Production’s adult Animerama trilogy, following A Thousand & One Nights and Cleopatra, a pair of collaborations between manga godfather Osamu Tezuka and Eiichi Yamamoto, Belladonna of Sadness is a gorgeously made grown-up fairy tale, a deeply moving erotic story about love and power, loyalty and revenge. Based on Jules Michelet 1862 book Satanism and Witchcraft, also known as La Sorcière, the film follows the misfortunes of Jeanne (voiced by Aiko Nagayama) and Jean (Katsutaka Ito), a couple “drunk on happiness” who present their marriage to the local lord (Masaya Takahashi), a harsh ruler — his evil elegantly expressed by his skeletal head. When Jean and Jeanne are unable to pay the absurdly high tax demanded by the lord, his evil wife (Shigaku Shimegi) decides that the lord and his court will have their way with the virgin Jeanne, then return the spent woman to Jean. Jeanne is raped by the lord in a harrowing, psychedelic, blood-soaked sequence and comes back home with an overwhelming melancholy. As Jean tries to deal with the horrible situation, Jeanne is visited by a small, red, phallus-shaped spirit (Tatsuya Nakadai) who claims to be part of her. “Your soul was screaming, ‘I want power. Someone help me,’” the strange creature says. But every time Jean and Jeanne start to put their life back together, terrible things happen to them, and it gets worse when the town believes that she might be in league with the devil.