A dot.com dropout discovers the gift of helping people find what they desire, need, and love.

My new book, 19th Nervous Breakdown: Making Human Connections in the Landscape of Commerce, will be released on June 28th, 2011.

The book, derived from the early days of my blog, speaks of the connections made among customers, workers, and other denizens in the unlikely world of retail.

This is what I’ve learned as a book and music seller: In business relationships, we can’t simply approach the customer as an undifferentiated source from which we can wring out cash. Each encounter and transaction is a moment in a personal relationship, however fleeting. Each is as much a part of life as our connections within families, in romance, and with our coworkers. In working with customers, we discover and address their personal desires and open up areas in which we can turn them on to new possibilities, based on how we read their tastes and needs.

Find out more and buy the book at the official website or order it through your favorite bookseller.

The Book of Voices (Video Trailer) from Joseph Zitt on Vimeo.

Directed, animated, and all that amazing stuff, by Travis Dixon. Full credits, etc, at the trailer’s Vimeo page.

Enjoy!

The Rounds

Why, you may ask, was this nice Jewish boy wandering through a church late every night for more than five years?

The answers are in my latest book, The Rounds, now available from the Apocryphile Press. Created in collaboration with photographer Chelsey E. Stewart, the book presents images in words and pictures from Berkeley, California. The text developed from my blog entries earlier in this decade, focusing on the situations and people that I encountered and experienced late at night in my unexpected role as a security officer at a neighborhood church.

Click on the image in the right column to purchase the book from shops online or from your local bookstore. Chelsey and I are donating our proceeds from the book to Grace North Church.

Shekhinah: the Presence

My first book, Shekhinah: the Presence, has been reissued by the Apocryphile Press. First published in 1992, this poetic meditation on the feminine image of the Presence of God in Jewish mysticism evolved from the dance/theatre piece of the same name. More information, including a web-readable version of the entire text of the book, is on the book page on this site.

Click on the image in the right column to order Shekhinah: the Presence now from most online booksellers.

Jerusaklyn front cover

I’ve posted the tracks and art from one of my old CDs, Jerusaklyn, online at the Internet Archive. It’s a collection of instrumental tracks that I recorded in Brooklyn between 1986 and 1989 and released in 1999. So this is the grand tenth anniversary reissue. Or maybe the twentieth anniversary. Or something like that.

At the time, I was listening to a lot of electric jazz, such as that of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, James Blood Ulmer, Frank Zappa, and Material, along with rock by King Crimson, Brian Eno, Public Image Ltd, and others, trying to figure out how it worked and how to make music like it. (Yes, much of that listening can be blamed on Steven Hart.)

This is rambunctious music, and benefits from loud listening (though some of the feedback solo on “Portable Face” may be a bit piercing). I played guitar, bass, keyboards, and drum machine on most tracks. “Theme by Rabbi Nachman” incorporates found vocals and other sounds that I recorded at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, including a madwoman who spoke of her visitation by the Prophet Elijah.

Some tracks began as songs, but lost their vocals in the process. I recall that “The New Tax Laws and You” had a title and lyrics derived from a novel that I spotted in a gutter on Times Square, now (perhaps mercifully) forgotten. The current title came from a headline that was within sight when I needed to name the file. “Portable Face” had a vocal that tried to sound like Johnny Rotten but sounded a bit more like a rabid chipmunk. We’re better off knowing that that vocal, too, has been lost.

Other tracks were overt tributes to favorite musicians. “Song for Charlie,” played on four tracks of acoustic guitar, was directly influenced by Charlie Haden. “Osaka” was influenced by Miles Davis’s double live albums Agharta and Pangaea, both of which were recorded on the same day in Osaka, Japan.

I tried to put a band together in New York City in 1989 or so to play this music live, but it didn’t work out. I would still love to do it sometime.

There are more liner notes at the site, where you can stream or download the album in a variety of formats.

Enjoy!