Welcome to "But Not Enough About Me" ...
... from Josh Kornbluth
Hi. I’m Josh Kornbluth. I make monologues, movies, and videos. I’ve been performing my autobiographical shows since 1989, when I started improvising towards my first solo piece, which eventually became Red Diaper Baby, about my upbringing by Jewish Communists in New York. (“Mommy’s a Commie!,” raved the Daily News.) And I’ve been storytelling ever since!
And now I’m putting out this new publication on Substack, “But Not Enough About Me”!
Okay, Josh, but, um … what in the world is Substack?
I wondered the same thing! I’ve been picking up the term from the zeitgeist for the past couple of years, without really knowing what it referred to. So I decided to look into the matter, and Substack turns out (I think) to be a pretty cool platform for putting out your own e-newsletter that lands in people’s inboxes. Typically, your subscribers can either follow you for free or at various paid levels. To start with, I’m going to make everything available for free — though if people want to pay, they can (and wow — thanks!). After a few months, maybe, I can get a sense of what kinds of features might work behind a paywall.
For right now, I’d be thrilled if you’d at least subscribe for free for a while — and please give me your suggestions in the Comments section! I plan to do a lot of experimenting in “But Not Enough About Me,” and readers’ feedback will be super-important. What would you like to read, see, and/or hear in this space?
What can you expect to find here?
All kinds of stuff! (Translation: I’m not totally sure!!) I’m aiming for at least two posts a week. Some possibilities (or even actualities):
Stories! (Both original to this publication and from my past work — the Kornchives, if you will.)
Birds! (Also known as “boiids!” — yes, with two i’s. Sara and I go biking and birding almost daily, weather permitting.)
Sara recently took this photo of a female Common Merganser at the Richmond (Calif.) Marina. She says: “If Jessica Chastain had an underbite and were a bird, this is how she'd look. I adore this bird!” Songs! (Check out my “But Not Enough About Me” theme song.)
Videos! (Including videos of songs! And of performances! And maybe of boiids!)
Chats! (Once I’ve delved into the mechanics of Substack’s app a bit more.)
A podcast, maybe! (I’d really like to do this eventually — there are so many people I’d love to interview! I need to figure out how: equipment, etc.)
Many things I can’t even imagine right now — in large part, because (I hope) you’re going to suggest them to me!
What’s been going on with me lately?
I just started wearing pajamas, for the first time since I was a kid. This was inspired by watching a bunch of old Thin Man movies recently.
I’m reading China Miéville’s mind-bending novel The City and the City. I recently discovered Miéville when I heard him being interviewed on Chris Hayes’s wonderful podcast, “Why Is This Happening?,” about his book A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto (which I’ll be reading next).
I have gone cold turkey on Werther’s Original Hard Caramel Coffee Candies. Since early in the pandemic, I’d become addicted to them — ordering them literally by the carton-full. They gave me comfort, reminding me of dear, late Grandpa Julius, who always had a big bowl of coffee candies on offer. Grandpa grew up in the same shtetl, near St. Petersburg in Russia, that the painter Marc Chagall (and my Grandma Dora) came from. As a child — in a desperately poor family that often survived on stale bread dipped in pickle juice, and with a father who was a drunken blacksmith — Julius became a pickpocket. A really bad pickpocket, as it turned out — he kept getting caught. At one point he was sharing a jail cell with a young revolutionary (this was before the October Revolution), who taught Julius how to read and write and urged him to go to America and start a new, better life. After arriving at Ellis Island, he began selling hardware from a cart in lower Manhattan. Eventually he became a salesman for a small company, schlepping his wares to hardware stores in all five boroughs. He became (as he would say proudly) his boss’s “highest earner” — even as he continued selling, store-to-store, into his late 90s. (And even though, during the McCarthy period, he’d drop off complimentary copies of the Communist Party’s newspaper The Daily World along with his pots and pans.) Grandpa lived to 103, and, towards the end, was still quite capable of flirting with my then new girlfriend Sara. ... Anyhow, that’s my excuse for eating so many coffee candies. (You know, if they were good enough for Grandpa Julius …) But then, as I recently endured root-canal surgery, it dawned on me that Grandpa also had a full set of false teeth (he kept them in a jar in the bathroom each night, in water that magically turned blue). So I’ve decided that, rather than emulate him by eating coffee candies, I will try, by exercising regularly, to enjoy some of the same lifespan-extending aerobic benefits that he apparently derived from pickpocketing.
Thanks for checking out “But Not Enough About Me”!
I hope you’ll consider subscribing! If you do, you won’t have to worry about missing anything: Every new edition of this newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
A few links …
My website.
The “Citizen Brain” video series.
Info about my Citizen Brain solo show from when it premiered (via Zoom) in 2020. When this (very, very) rainy season is over, I’m looking forward to resuming my Backyard Performance Tour with this piece.
Me performing “Citizen Brain” in September in the lovely backyard of my friends Kristin and Jeff. Not pictured: when a dog wandered across the “stage” in front of me and then peed on a shrub before triumphantly exiting. You can buy a copy of my book Red Diaper Baby: Three Comic Monologues, or DVDs of my concert films, Red Diaper Baby and The Mathematics of Change (some people must still watch DVDs, right?). You can also buy or rent Red Diaper Baby and The Mathematics of Change as Videos on Demand. I’ve made two audiobooks, Red Diaper Baby: Three Comic Monologues and Ben Franklin: Unplugged … and Other Comic Monologues; you can find them on iTunes (Red Diaper Baby; Ben Franklin: Unplugged), Audible.com (Red Diaper Baby; Ben Franklin: Unplugged), or Amazon.com (Red Diaper Baby; Ben Franklin: Unplugged). And there are two feature films, both collaborations with my brother Jacob Kornbluth: Haiku Tunnel (Sony Pictures Classics, 2001) is on Amazon Prime and Apple TV; Love & Taxes (Abramorama, 2017; rated 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes!) is also on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
Here’s the website for The Mathematics of Change concert film, including my interviews with real, live world-class mathematicians at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley.
A cool article by Jeff Greenwald about my painful efforts to make a decent oboe reed.
The logo and banner artwork for “But Not Enough About Me” is by R. Black, who is a genius artist and a wonderful guy.
My mom used to keep a jar of those same candies on the coffee table. She was a Hungarian immigrant. Thanks for reminding me about them, and the warning about their addictive qualities.
Loved your story about your grandfather Julius…