I posted a entry here yesterday and immediately Jonny took it upon himself to delete it. So I decided I need TOTAL CONTROL and set up a blogsite of my own. This way techno-html-guru Bones wont be able to get his grubby hands on it. 


Anyway the post is at: http://www.farmeast.com/hanoi/blog/log1.htm.


-DHF

Evidently, several Shpotzirists--including West Coast Correspondent G. Ehrlich, Columbus Ave. Grand Visier D. Ehrlich, Shpotzir Counsel A. Kisch, Shpotz Master of Urban Styles G. Graf and, I believe, Chairman Wilcha--met in mid-town for a lunch-time Shpotz, probably the most august gathering of such folk since the May wedding of G. Ehrlich to the Rt. Hon. Annika Wadenius of Wadenius Manor. Unfortunately, I did not attend, as no one invited me, so I can't elaborate any further. I do, however, call on someone who was present to submit a full, detailed report.

I also hear from upper management that more invites to join this site will be sent out presently, in order to get the roster of contributing authors up to snuff. The head office only recently discovered that the invite to Brother Graf was mis-addressed, which perhaps explains his mysterious absence from this site.

Just to make this clear--if you receive an invite, you can click on the link therein and establish an account with Blogdrive. From then on, if you go to Blogdrive homepage and log in with your account name and password, you can post entries to this Shpotzblog. You can also always just comment on a entry that someone else has left. I don't know if that requires you log on or not.

Large Charles, who is still having trouble getting his password worked out, sends in this old chestnut: his take on the origins and history of the Shpotz. We reproduce it here unedited, with all its variant spellings intact, to give some of the flavor of his stream-of-consciousness missives.

BTW, he makes several references to old newsletter pieces. We hope to post these all in an archive at some point in the future, once we get out act sufficiently together. Anyway, Charles says:

A few years back, maybe ten, my old man started taking long cold walks in the woods with his buddies--a wild-eyed old Jewish socialist from the Bronx named Jack, a guy named Larry Chasen who looks up everything in Consumer Reports to find out the most efficient and inexpensive items on earth, and a retired but still very savage Israeli tank commander we call the Colonel.

 

Their walks actually consist of long drives to Harriman State Park in New Jersey, where they dodge into the periphery of the woodland and gorge themselves on roasted meats and chocolate covered halvah. (They stop for veal cutlets and linguini on the way home.)

 

Anyway, my dad often says to my brother and I, "Hey boys, if you're not busy on Sunday, you're welcome to come with us, we're going on our shpotzir." I believe this is Yiddish for "constitutional walk."

 

Fast forward a few years. My friend Perry has resurfaced after a few years working for CNN in Atlanta, and he's taken a high-paying job at CBS working the graveyard shift. As part of our re-acquaintance process, he often stops by my apartment at 7:00 in the morning when I'm getting ready for my job at MTV and he's coming home from his. The first day, I show him a little tai chi for half an hour and then we go gorge ourselves on feta cheese omlettes and homefries at The Omega Diner on west 72nd Street. We chat like two school girls on a sleep over party. The Shpotzir is born.

 

 

Like a giant piece of velcro, the Shpotzir tends to quickly pick up other people. We move to Joseph's Kosher down the street from The Omega and all fall in love with Kristin the slender blond aryan waitress. She is majoring in math at NYU and has a delightfully demeaning way of pouring coffee, but she changes her schedule to the lunch hour and we are forced to find a new location.

 

The Shpotzir goes digital, as another Schpotz-member, Chris Wilcha, starts video-taping.  Gregor begins writing a Schpotzir newsletter, using the weekly journal to list what each Schpotzir member said, ate, and wore, at first parodying the “Kudos to Jonnie!” language of corporate newsletters, and then in quick succession, recording our unimaginably mundane activities in the style of Dickens, Tolstoy and Chekov.

 

One of his best early newsletters was based on “The Things We Carried,” the book by Tim O'Brien, only he used Jon and Chris Wilcha's festish for alt rock cred in place of the Vietnam war. The Shpotzir is in full swing.

 

After a few attempts to find another Shpotzir spot, we settle at the Flame. Magda, our waitress, is like a giant mothering cow with all of us sucking at her probverbial eleven nipples. Mohammad, our maitre d', is equally eager to please, quickly grasping the mastery of our ways. The Shpotzir cannot be stopped.

 

Fast forward a few months. We abandon the Flame after a protracted break-up with the waitress Magda. The cause of the split was an incident we dubbed "Polandgate." Magda became so enamored of us that she graduated from bringing her own homemade strawberry jelly to our table to loaning us, unasked for, a videotape of her beloved home town of Gdansk, Poland. But Perry left the video in the back of his car, which was then stolen while parked on West 29th Street. We were all too ashamed to Œfess up and when she began asking for the tape back, which none of us had ever watched, or even wanted to see in the first place, we fled.

 

Since Gregor had gotten into one of his Vladimir Lenin moods and begun using the Schpotzir newsletter to relentlessly attack Jonnie,  Jonnie--in good Stalin-style--wrested control of the Shpotzir Newsletter away from him in a caffienated coup de tat. This turned out to be a boon, since Jon was also teaching himself to use Photoshop and Quark and mercilessly bilking his employer out of thousands of dollars by color xeroxing the Schpotzir newsletter every week. It had by then grown into a sophisticated 4-color weekly magazine, devoted exclusively to the mutterings, clothing, and food choices of a bunch of 20 and 30-something Jewish guys, mainly childhood friends, who ate breakfast together every week on Friday.

 

Soon we also had a presence in cyber-space at www. schpotzir.com. and we had Schpotzir business cards made up. Since most of us were writers or artists or designers or producers of some kind, for about a year there was talk of starting an ad agency or writing a screenplay or a TV show, or creating a book about New York¹s great breakfast joints, or somehow otherwise trying to make the Schpotzir a source of income rather than simply a source of diarrhea. Instead, we just kept drinking coffee, and the Schpotz kept growing.

 

Like a magnet or a windstorm or any other powerful mysterious force, the Schpotzir gained momentum and took on a life of its own. It had centrifical force: it sucked some people in and spit others out. The Schpotzir had its own particular laws of gravity, only we didn¹t like gravity. We liked levity. We stood for nothing and for all things, for the love of pomposity and for the pompadus of love.

 

We had a series of guests, such as film editor Graham Fuller and indie rock boy Zev Brrow. These guests never really know what they were being guests for, or what the Schpotzir was. It didn¹t matter that they didn¹t understand us, we consumed them, like they were just another breakfast special.

 

It is late 1996. We try many different greasy spoons before coming to rest at the Cosmic Diner on 58th Street (notable for its beautiful picture window). Eventually, Perry quits his night job, Chris Wilcha moves to Los Angeles to attend film school, and MTV fires me for laying on the floor of my office sobbing for several months. It was a dark period. After years of dragging ourselves out of bed at 7:30  every Friday morning‹regardless of how drunk we had been the night before, and hauling our sad, weak bodies to some God-awful greasy spoon for the chance to face the circle of bad-breath having, media-savvy Bar mitzvah boys we¹d grown up with, the Schptoz began to crumble like a stale bagel. Despite being a slow process of attrition, it was still shocking and felt like a scandal. We referred to this period as Schpotzgate-98. It was like the Iran Contra scandal, plus some runny eggs, and it was all happening way too early in the morning.

 

And so the Schptoz went on an extended hiatus. For special occasions, over the last few years, we have reconvened. But the Schpotzir is like exercising‹if you don¹t do it regularly, it¹s hard to get a rhythm going. These days, it takes weeks or sometimes months to get a consensus on location and time for a single Schpotz. Blasphemers have suggested a night Schpotz, but the Schpotzir is inherently a morning thing. It¹s about renewal, starting over, nausea.

 

It¹s been almost three years since the Schpotz died, although no one really wants to say it¹s dead. It¹s more like it went to a retirement home down in Miami and is sitting around a hot tub with a gold chain around its neck, mumbling about the stock market. Exactly where we all hope to be some day.

 

In retrospect, I have begun to understand the Schpotzir in a new way. As more of us get married, have babies, or‹in the most extreme cases‹move to Brooklyn, I have begun to see the glorious 5 or 10 years after college as a kind of final gasp of dorm life. Even though we had all graduated and moved to New York, we still lived as though we were on some bucolic New England campus, drifting by one another¹s apartments, getting together frequently, without plans or checking first with the wife. The Schpotzir was our college cafeteria, transplanted to a New York diner, and it kept the young, dumb part of us alive. College is, after all, really an extension of high school, and in that sense, the Schptozir extended our high school years and even our childhood camaraderie, the innocence of casual, pointless, ritual male bonding, by a few precious years. We weren¹t jocks, so we didn¹t have sports to talk about. And we weren¹t the cigar-smoking card playing types. But we had the Schpotzir: three years of bad coffee, terrible eggs and each other. And it was good.

 

 

 

An Explanation of the Term “Shpotzir,” Delivered on the Occasion of the First Shpotzir Reading, November 9, 2000.

 

Hello, thank you for coming tonight. My name is Jon Moskowitz and I’m your host for tonight's reading. I just wanted to take a moment to clear up any confusion you might have with regard to the word “Shpotzir” and explain just what is meant by the phrase "a Shpotzir reading."

Shpotzir is a garbled form of the Yiddish “schpazirn,” itself derived from the German “spazieren”—v. to walk. Perhaps the best definition of a Shpotzir is "a walk without a destination." In other words: a stroll, a constitutional, a post-prandial amble. I first heard the word used by a father of a close friend. Every weekend, he hike in the woods with a group of associates, then stop at a roadside dinner for roast beef sandwiches and coleslaw. When some friends and I started gathering for breakfast every Friday morning before work, we casually referred to the meal as The Shpotzir. Being indulgent young single men in our 20s, with far too much time on our hands, we started to think of ourselves as a sort of low-rent Algonquin Table. I was perhaps more guilty of this than the others. I started a newsletter detailing the events of the previous week’s meal, staying up late every Thursday night to design it. One issue featured an article on the origins of the Shpotzir, and in it we learn:

 “In the Old Country, Shpotzirs could be festive affairs, helping to celebrate religious holidays, or the birth of a family’s first child. They could also be quite spontaneous, involving whoever happened to be around that day. Some of the best Shpozirs were solo affairs -- a yeshiva boy, say, walking through the woods contemplating a passage from the Talmud. (Of course, should our young scholar run into any local Cossacks, the leisurely pace of the Shpozir would immediately gave way to that altogether more hectic event, the infamous Shtetle Sprint. Such were the dangers of rustication in the old country."

Much of what we wrote was drivel, but occasionally an inchoate philosophy would emerge, as in this exchange in one of our many letters pages:

Dear Shpotzirists,

Haven’t you bastards got anything better to do with your time than write elaborate newsletters about having breakfast in a diner (something that is not particularly original, interesting or difficult to accomplish)? I mean, you all have jobs, right? You all have real lives to live. Why the obsession with who ordered what, who was wearing what, and who forgot to pay? Grow up!

--I’m So Mad At The Shpozir

We answered:

“Well, what can we say? We think the problem here is that you have no imagination. The Shpozir is not about having breakfast. Far from it. The Shpotzir is the ritual bath in which we refresh and revivify our spirits. It’s a cup of water that cools brains parched dry by the pitiless sun of consumer culture. We think you should get a life, kid—ours are a stone groove.

 

After a long hibernation, The Shpotzir as a breakfast gathering is once again in full swing. Hopefully, tonight’s reading will convey the spirit of the endeavor on which we Shpotzirist’s have mutually pledged our Friday mornings, our sensitive stomachs and our sacred money.

If you got an invitation to post here, the idea is this:

The Shpotzblog would be a place for any Shpotzirists to post their writing, images, etc. as well as direct each other to things they read on the web when they should have been working. We might also post old Newsletters and cartoons, etc.

So if you got the invite, you can follow the link and create a name and password for yourself. After that you can post an entry, edit a previous entry or comment on someone else's post. 

I get a lot of questions about what, precisely, is going on out here. Even though I try to tell anyone who asks on the phone, and I keep up my own blog more or less devoted to the topic, I am always happy to try to keep the continuity we once had at shpotz going. So I applaud Jon and his efforts, and I will do my best to tell all at all times. Also vent my spleen against those who oppose me.