In Memoriam

I'm sure that many interesting things will be written about the great Amy Winehouse in the coming days. (And if you're looking for great things already written, check out my pal Dvora Meyers' take on the hot mess that was Amy Winehouse in Tablet.)

But I think letting Winehouse speak for herself (above) is the best way to appreciate her incredible, tragic talent.

To know her is to love her....

My friend Dvora Meyers has a brilliant meditation on the Jewishness of the hot mess that is one Amy Winehouse in Tablet.

I never quite saw Winehouse in Jewish terms... More, in Janis Joplin-burning-bright-and-not-long-for-this-world terms. But Dvora makes a convincing case.

If you take nothing else from this article, it will give you a chance to appreciate just how tender a singer Winehouse can be -- especially when she sings a sweet, simple long song like "To Know Him Is To Love Him" -- written by that other Jewish hot mess.

Schlepen zie to rehab...

Hey loyal readers --

In an effort to do a little FSTS promotion, I will be blogging for Jewcy this week. (If you don't know about it, it's a little like a Jewish version of Slate -- and one of the top editor dudes there is my good buddy Mike Weiss.)

So you might not see much original content here for the next week or so.

But I gave a somewhat lengthier argument for why Sarah Palin is a schlemile. ("I didn't think it was very convincing," said one of my colleagues at the Post.)

I have a little item on how Jerome Allen Seinfeld is clearly a threat to one and all.

I will shortly have up an item on why Barack Obama should listen to the Jewish mother inside all of us when he schedules a campaign rally in the rain.

And there will be much, much more!

In the meantime, I didn't want to blog on Jewcy about this, because it's sort of a rival publication -- but the Forward has one of the greatest videos I've ever seen up on the Bintel Blog. It's a rabbi singing Amy Winehouse's song Rehab in Yiddish!

Enjoy! (I sure as hell did.)

Memo to Amy Winehouse:

Quit while you're ahead...

David Carr has a fairly gripping piece in tomorrow's NY Times Magazine about his life and times as a drug addict/dealer/wife beater -- and how he sobered up.

It's funny: Almost all the stories are the same (or, at least, similar: If you've lived to tell the tale, you've obviously cleaned yourself up) and yet I still find most of them extremely exciting and readable. (Exception: 28 Days.) I actually never read any of the James Frey books, but I really liked Augusten Burroughs' Dry. And Seth Mnookin has written extremely wrenching pieces in Slate and Salon about his struggles with addiction. (For the Salon piece, Mnookin's mother wrote a companion article -- which was even more wrenching.)

(Schlub connection? There isn't really one. However, when he was first trying to get custody of his children from his addict/dealer wife, his lawyer says: “You weighed close to 300 pounds. It was in the winter, and you had on a very heavy coat, but it obviously didn’t fit you; it was raggedy. If I had seen you on the street, I would have thought you were homeless, because you were very rough. Your hygiene was bad; your eyes were rheumy.” But, just for the record, even though Carr might have looked a little schlubby, there is little overlap between hopeless addiction and schlubbiness.)

You know that she's so good

I might be the only person on the face of the planet who was turned on to Amy Winehouse by my mother!

It's true. About a month ago, when she was asking me to show her how to work her new ipod (one of her more schlubby characteristics) she also asked me to download some music for her.

"What about Rehab?" she said.

I had vaguely heard the name Amy Winehouse before, but nothing more than that she was a young celebrity with crack problems. I must say, though, when I heard her sing "Rehab" I was simply floored. Every bit as good, in my mind, as the best stuff of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas or The Ronettes.

Having since listened to the rest of Back to Black, I only continued to be impressed. This is a woman who doesn't just have a good voice -- she has the gifts of a real artist. And that beehive hairdo! I loved it. (And she's Jewish!!)

It's really too bad she's destroying herself. This piece in Rolling Stone by Claire Hoffman is a pretty good picture of a tailspin. And not in a cute, schlubby, ooh-I'm-a-big-slob-who's-just-in-her-twenties-and-getting-it-all-out-of-her-system sort of way. The description of her apartment reminded me more of Augusten Burrough's Dry when he comes home from rehab and sees the hundreds of liquor bottles littered on the floor of his apartment and wonders how he could have lived like that.

You've got to snap out of it, Amy! This schlub wants to hear more!