"The Whole Book is Sort of a Meditation, a Prayer Designed to Protect the Person Who is Reading It": The Punk Rock Jewish Life of Author/Filmmaker Jeff Wengrofsky

"The whole book is sort of a meditation, of a prayer designed to protect the person who is reading it."

Jeff Wengrofsky, the most authentic punk-rock person I personally know, wrote a memoir, and you should buy it and read it. In some ways an unintentional pean to the Lower East Side, Jeff gets into what it was like to grow up feeling like an outsider ("The sensation of feeling like an outsider is not a pleasant one, so I was looking to find some new form of community, and let go of whatever past I had") and why discovering punk was a world-opening revelation ("Punk rock was very theatrical, there was the opportunity to recreate oneself; it valorized the outsider…and all those things spoke to me"). He talks about the process of becoming a filmmaker, including a possible encounter with the ghost of a dead punk rocker in the Nola hotel room he died in, and the horror shorts film festival he's curated for the past 11 years in Brooklyn -- interspersed with reminiscinces of his time apprenticing to a Hasidic Kabbalist in the Lower East Side who'd been a beat poet in the '50s. He also gets into his own religious and spiritual journey with Judaism, including the humbling intellectual intricacy of Talmud study. "It absolutely blows me away to see that the parts can fit better in a counterintuitive way…and it makes me also a little humble about my own intuitions…"  

"I like films that are surprising…I like to delight the audience by surprising them," he told me, and this in some ways is the headline for his artistic process more broadly -- the canvas of which is not just film, not just writing, not just music, but life itself.