I've been in Jerusalem for 24 hours or so... i went to the old city twice, once last night and once today... i can tell you that visiting the wall at night is absolutely, besides friday, the best time to see it as you avoid all the shit bags that come shake your hand, ask you if you're married, say a blessing for your well being and then ask for money, without having released your hands. they ask out of the goodness of their bearded pesa wearing hearts and if you look at their italian leather shoes your heart will melt with sorrow and compassion for these men of the wall, roaming for the goodness of jerusalem's poor. yeah... poor my ass... the old city during the day really irritated me. it was good to see the muslim quarter alive, its very lively there, dirty, bustling, crazy, noisey, but the liveliness was welcome. the difference between the jewish and muslim quarters is stunning, you will notice the poverty in the latter immediately. you definately feel off walking around there, but the food in the muslim quarter is amazing... absolutely amazing, had this dish made with goat chese, fried and in a sweet sauce with pistachio, definite artery clogger, but i could've eaten several orders of it and still wanted more. the dish is syrian, i hear the lebonese make the same thing, but its completely different from this syrian version we had. if you're wondering why my typing seems a little off its because i'm on oren's keyboard which is a bit funky, it has the slash key in a strange place and rather than struggle with caps, it's easier for me to barrel through this without... and here i must give a nod to my good friend grady_love a.k.a. john, he took me to the airport, the good irish man that he is... and he never capitlizes anything so i'll attribute my lack of caps to this trail blazer.
there are so many stories and observations i'd like to write down but time is nigh, oren just popped out of the shower and the night calls. the phone has been ringing off the hook with invitations for parties and celebrations to mark the new year. i do believe we're heading to someone's house first and then a club, an underground party, old school really, directions are kept secret until it happens... ilya, do you remember the good old days of raving in frisco with map points and crazy drives into the muir woods looking for the secret grove filled with satyrs and nymphs engaging in a bachic rite? well, maybe that's going a bit far, but it sounds like a hoot... so updates about my trip to caesaria, haifa, netanya and the bizarre place that is jerusalem will have to wait until, perhaps, i get back to tel aviv on tuesday and back onto erez's wireless where i have oodles of photos to upload... in the mean time.. l'shana tova... may old blah blah be forgot as the song goes... peace and brotherhood to all... and to all a good night...
health, wealth and happiness (in any order you wish)...
liebe,
-L
p.s. mom, the red string thing is a total scam... complete and utter, pisses me off like nothing else... not bringing them back, i'm morally opposed to them at this point. the money is collected by the ultra orthodox, for who, the needy, the poor? last i checked those fur hats and long silk coats aren't cheap... i refuse to contribute to the ones that refuse to serve in the army and seem more a blight than a blessing... and where in the bible does it say to wear a red string as a sign of a blessing, hm? no red strings for you... love ya ma!
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Trade-offs
Spiderman constantly grapples with his Uncle Ben's dying words: "with great power comes great responsibility." I kind of feel the same way: "with a short trip comes constant trade-offs regarding what to do and what to see." These are the politics of dancing, metaphorically speaking, while on the road. As for physical dance, there's been a bit of that too, but we'll get there yet.
I suppose I have to back up here, a number of days at that, as I've not been in Tel Aviv (means: Hill of Spring). The story starts with my walk/exploration of the Tel Aviv from the center of the city heading south along King George V street a few days back. I got it into my head that I really wanted to see the waters of the med. The last time I saw them, I think, I was four years old and we were emigrating from Russia with a stop in Ladispole, Italia. Or maybe, the last time my skin actually felt the waters of the med it was in the form of the black sea when I was about the same age. That goofy picture of me knee deep in black sea relaxating... yeah, I think that's probably more accurate.
King George st. is a hodge podge of clothing stores that range from trendy to fetish. There's a sense that you're walking down Telegraph ave in Berkeley and heading for the great unknown, which in this case is the Yemmenite quarter. One reaches King George st. from Ibn Gvirol just after Rabin Square. Its actually a lovely walk, I wish I had taken it a little slower and explored more of the shops. When I started the day I had been dead set on seeing the markets and bazars of the Yemmenite quarter, but that changed as I went along... anyway I'm digressing as I just woke up and should probably go shower, except for the fact it's 1 in the afternoon and I'm loathe to move off this couch.
After a number of blocks along King George, one reaches the market at the intersection of five streets. The stalls of the market jut out from both sides of the street and crowd the space some like some tropical rain forest. The canopies above the stalls quite thoroughly blot out the sun providing shelter for shoppers during less favorable seasons, like the two main ones, hot and cold. The first few blocks are tend to be kitch stalls selling fake bling and clothing. I saw another market, the Carmel market, a few blocks before reaching the narrow streets of the quarter that sold clothing, but the clothing stalls with their authentic armani replicas appeared as I pressed on through the thick swell of humanity haggling in at least 3 languages. Clothing gives way to food and the mountains of fresh produce where cantors are screaming "banann" which is very much "banana" but the guy screaming is Israeli and trying to pronounce it in the Russian: "ananas" and so it goes on and on. Some are more sullen, they almost seem like prisoners surrounded on three sides by the commodities of their existence, like the man who was manning the sweets, giant trays of backlava, birds nests and other delicacies of honey with pistachio accents. I don't know why, there were others near him, but I chose to buy from him knowing that of all the sellers he probably was the least likely to speak any English. Go figure... go figure I tell you.
There was one stall, which if I had a real kitchen here, I would've spent a fortune at:
The bins on the left are filled with mixtures of rice and spices. The proprieter of the stall grabbed a scooper and filled it with goodness and shoved it right under my nose for my to smell it, damn him and his wily mercantile ways. A few stalls down I saw an aluminum table and fish, fresh from a bucket or tank of water, tossed onto the mortician's slab flopping around gasping for air. It doesn't get much fresher than that. They looked pained, their mouths sucking air instead of water. I walked over to take their photo. The fish monger shook an angry finger at me and his head in tempo with his disdain for me and my western ways. Sorry folks, no dying fish pics, but I swear I saw a great composition on that table, slightly morbid but great nonetheless.
I kept on walking until I stopped at a small line. A man on a raised dais was squeecing pomegranates in a large sturdy press. Along with the sweet red pits he would blend in orange or carrot juice, or the juice of any other fleshy fruit he had in a glass counter. I opted for a pom and orange mixture, fresh squeezed there in front of me. This was truly a pleasure, I highly recommend you try it, in whatever country you may be. Bottled Pom is nice, but as you can imagine, there's nothing quite like fresh squeezed and this goes doulbe and triple true when walking through such a market.
The end of the stalls were near at this point, quite near. I steppd out of the mess. There was a large parking lot to the right with more stalls on the left heading west toward the Sea. I parked myself against a wall smoking a cigarette while changing out my lenses. There was a man selling flowers at the very end of the row of stalls. He had these tightly wrapped bouquets of roses, very small buds, I wanted to take a macro of the colorful collections. I switched out for my old macro lens, walked up and he gave me that waving finger back and forth. I really wanted to go right ahead and take the photo anyway to spite him. I don't understand this, I really don't, but if you keep me from taking this photo, what chance do you think you have of me actually buying some of your wares? Hm? Seems like bad business sense, but then again what the hell do I actually know, I'm just a westerner, "these are not the droids you're looking for."
The Med was just a few blocks down from here, I could smell salt in the air, it could've been from some barrel of pickled herring, which I had passed just a few stalls before the the flower man and his verboten finger, but no, this was the sea. I gave Erez a call to find out what the neighborhood was like in this part of town... Yes, paranoid as always, I mean I had thousands of dollars of camera gear on me and, well, I'd like to come with it... er... um... something... If New York is "The Big Apple" then Tel Aviv is "The Little Apple" as they call it, and all apples have a rotten worm hole here and there, so it's probably wise to take some basic precautions.
I hoofed it across the sea-side road. To the North of me were large hotels which do booming business in the summer with travelers that come far and wide to enjoy the sand and surf of those waters. Some kind of current must've kicked up the silt near the beach as the water was quite brown... a little dissapointing as I was expecting blue blue and maybe some more blue along with turquoise pools of glittering midertaneanism... not so, I saw that later. To the south of me was a finger of land that jutted out into the water. I began to walk along the beach stopping for the occasional picture project. The blasted remnants of the old walls of the Gidi museum presnted themselves as a fascinating attraction. The broken stones had an inner core of steel and glass that wore the skin of the past as decoration/commemoration. I walked inside, openned my bag, confirmed that I didn't have a gun, and then began to read the placards of how a handful of troops took old Yaffo, "old Tel Aviv" and the resistance in 1947/48 before the formation of the state. There was a bit to read, but as far as exhibits, not too too much, other than old sten guns, thompsons mortars and rockets now quite defunct and impotent in their glass cases. I asked the girl working the counter, a pretty sandy blonde in fatigues if she had ever been to Yaffo, as it's a stone's throw from the Gidi house, she said, no but I hear it's quite nice. I marvelled at this statement, when a country is this small, you figure you'd go everywhere, but I don't have room to talk as I'm constantly finding new nooks and places to eat in San Francisco, but still, this isn't a nook Yaffo, this is a sizeable chunk of history.
From here it was furhter south along the coast and to the hill of Yaffo. The rest of the afternoon I can only describe as near misses. There's a syrian synagogue on the grounds, along with orthodox churches and several mosques and a center for memorizing the Qu'ran. Yaffo is a remnant of what can be described as the relative peace and harmony pre-zionism, that existed before the state. The walls and steps of the tell date back to before Jesus. This was an ancient port City and the name of Jaffa or Yafo is attributed to Noah's son Japheth who legend has built the city... there's more of such claims and history on Wikipedia if you're so inclined. I wandered around through the narrows and straights of the rising and falling stone corridors exploring the small galleries and artists shops. It really is quite a charming experience to be in a place like this. I bent down to scratch a small cat that wound up following me around as I followed the ancient sea wall, with its collar of razor wire around and back up the hill to a small shop with sketches and old roman coins that were retasked as jewelery with their certificates of authentecity from the Israeli Archaeological society.
Ok, I'm going to have to cut this short... I have a half naked Israeli standing here telling me I have one minute to go into the shower or I will be shot, as we didn't wake up till 1 this afternoon and its time for food and to visit with people while there's still a spot of daylight.
Shalom for now...
I suppose I have to back up here, a number of days at that, as I've not been in Tel Aviv (means: Hill of Spring). The story starts with my walk/exploration of the Tel Aviv from the center of the city heading south along King George V street a few days back. I got it into my head that I really wanted to see the waters of the med. The last time I saw them, I think, I was four years old and we were emigrating from Russia with a stop in Ladispole, Italia. Or maybe, the last time my skin actually felt the waters of the med it was in the form of the black sea when I was about the same age. That goofy picture of me knee deep in black sea relaxating... yeah, I think that's probably more accurate.
King George st. is a hodge podge of clothing stores that range from trendy to fetish. There's a sense that you're walking down Telegraph ave in Berkeley and heading for the great unknown, which in this case is the Yemmenite quarter. One reaches King George st. from Ibn Gvirol just after Rabin Square. Its actually a lovely walk, I wish I had taken it a little slower and explored more of the shops. When I started the day I had been dead set on seeing the markets and bazars of the Yemmenite quarter, but that changed as I went along... anyway I'm digressing as I just woke up and should probably go shower, except for the fact it's 1 in the afternoon and I'm loathe to move off this couch.
After a number of blocks along King George, one reaches the market at the intersection of five streets. The stalls of the market jut out from both sides of the street and crowd the space some like some tropical rain forest. The canopies above the stalls quite thoroughly blot out the sun providing shelter for shoppers during less favorable seasons, like the two main ones, hot and cold. The first few blocks are tend to be kitch stalls selling fake bling and clothing. I saw another market, the Carmel market, a few blocks before reaching the narrow streets of the quarter that sold clothing, but the clothing stalls with their authentic armani replicas appeared as I pressed on through the thick swell of humanity haggling in at least 3 languages. Clothing gives way to food and the mountains of fresh produce where cantors are screaming "banann" which is very much "banana" but the guy screaming is Israeli and trying to pronounce it in the Russian: "ananas" and so it goes on and on. Some are more sullen, they almost seem like prisoners surrounded on three sides by the commodities of their existence, like the man who was manning the sweets, giant trays of backlava, birds nests and other delicacies of honey with pistachio accents. I don't know why, there were others near him, but I chose to buy from him knowing that of all the sellers he probably was the least likely to speak any English. Go figure... go figure I tell you.
There was one stall, which if I had a real kitchen here, I would've spent a fortune at:
The bins on the left are filled with mixtures of rice and spices. The proprieter of the stall grabbed a scooper and filled it with goodness and shoved it right under my nose for my to smell it, damn him and his wily mercantile ways. A few stalls down I saw an aluminum table and fish, fresh from a bucket or tank of water, tossed onto the mortician's slab flopping around gasping for air. It doesn't get much fresher than that. They looked pained, their mouths sucking air instead of water. I walked over to take their photo. The fish monger shook an angry finger at me and his head in tempo with his disdain for me and my western ways. Sorry folks, no dying fish pics, but I swear I saw a great composition on that table, slightly morbid but great nonetheless.
I kept on walking until I stopped at a small line. A man on a raised dais was squeecing pomegranates in a large sturdy press. Along with the sweet red pits he would blend in orange or carrot juice, or the juice of any other fleshy fruit he had in a glass counter. I opted for a pom and orange mixture, fresh squeezed there in front of me. This was truly a pleasure, I highly recommend you try it, in whatever country you may be. Bottled Pom is nice, but as you can imagine, there's nothing quite like fresh squeezed and this goes doulbe and triple true when walking through such a market.
The end of the stalls were near at this point, quite near. I steppd out of the mess. There was a large parking lot to the right with more stalls on the left heading west toward the Sea. I parked myself against a wall smoking a cigarette while changing out my lenses. There was a man selling flowers at the very end of the row of stalls. He had these tightly wrapped bouquets of roses, very small buds, I wanted to take a macro of the colorful collections. I switched out for my old macro lens, walked up and he gave me that waving finger back and forth. I really wanted to go right ahead and take the photo anyway to spite him. I don't understand this, I really don't, but if you keep me from taking this photo, what chance do you think you have of me actually buying some of your wares? Hm? Seems like bad business sense, but then again what the hell do I actually know, I'm just a westerner, "these are not the droids you're looking for."
The Med was just a few blocks down from here, I could smell salt in the air, it could've been from some barrel of pickled herring, which I had passed just a few stalls before the the flower man and his verboten finger, but no, this was the sea. I gave Erez a call to find out what the neighborhood was like in this part of town... Yes, paranoid as always, I mean I had thousands of dollars of camera gear on me and, well, I'd like to come with it... er... um... something... If New York is "The Big Apple" then Tel Aviv is "The Little Apple" as they call it, and all apples have a rotten worm hole here and there, so it's probably wise to take some basic precautions.
I hoofed it across the sea-side road. To the North of me were large hotels which do booming business in the summer with travelers that come far and wide to enjoy the sand and surf of those waters. Some kind of current must've kicked up the silt near the beach as the water was quite brown... a little dissapointing as I was expecting blue blue and maybe some more blue along with turquoise pools of glittering midertaneanism... not so, I saw that later. To the south of me was a finger of land that jutted out into the water. I began to walk along the beach stopping for the occasional picture project. The blasted remnants of the old walls of the Gidi museum presnted themselves as a fascinating attraction. The broken stones had an inner core of steel and glass that wore the skin of the past as decoration/commemoration. I walked inside, openned my bag, confirmed that I didn't have a gun, and then began to read the placards of how a handful of troops took old Yaffo, "old Tel Aviv" and the resistance in 1947/48 before the formation of the state. There was a bit to read, but as far as exhibits, not too too much, other than old sten guns, thompsons mortars and rockets now quite defunct and impotent in their glass cases. I asked the girl working the counter, a pretty sandy blonde in fatigues if she had ever been to Yaffo, as it's a stone's throw from the Gidi house, she said, no but I hear it's quite nice. I marvelled at this statement, when a country is this small, you figure you'd go everywhere, but I don't have room to talk as I'm constantly finding new nooks and places to eat in San Francisco, but still, this isn't a nook Yaffo, this is a sizeable chunk of history.
From here it was furhter south along the coast and to the hill of Yaffo. The rest of the afternoon I can only describe as near misses. There's a syrian synagogue on the grounds, along with orthodox churches and several mosques and a center for memorizing the Qu'ran. Yaffo is a remnant of what can be described as the relative peace and harmony pre-zionism, that existed before the state. The walls and steps of the tell date back to before Jesus. This was an ancient port City and the name of Jaffa or Yafo is attributed to Noah's son Japheth who legend has built the city... there's more of such claims and history on Wikipedia if you're so inclined. I wandered around through the narrows and straights of the rising and falling stone corridors exploring the small galleries and artists shops. It really is quite a charming experience to be in a place like this. I bent down to scratch a small cat that wound up following me around as I followed the ancient sea wall, with its collar of razor wire around and back up the hill to a small shop with sketches and old roman coins that were retasked as jewelery with their certificates of authentecity from the Israeli Archaeological society.
Ok, I'm going to have to cut this short... I have a half naked Israeli standing here telling me I have one minute to go into the shower or I will be shot, as we didn't wake up till 1 this afternoon and its time for food and to visit with people while there's still a spot of daylight.
Shalom for now...
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Time's catching up...
I think I'm running out of steam for the day. I woke up early as I said, left the house with Erez and had breakfast, then made my way to a mobile phone shop and bought a sim for my Razr so that I have a local number here in Tel Aviv. After that I went and read Cannery Row at Cafe Hillel. Michal, Erez's sister lives kitty corner from the cafe so she met me on her way to the gym. We sat and talked for a bit and then she walked me to a street that she said was a good short cut to to Shaul Hamelech st. (King Saul st.) and the Art Museum of Tel Aviv. I spent several hours walking around the permanent and temporary exhibits. The museum houses a wonderful collection of post impressionism work including a couple very well known pieces by George Braque, a couple lovely Kandinsky's, Picasso, Klimt, Mondrion, Chagal and others from that time. There was a large exhibit of called DREAMLAND: REUVEN RUBIN AND THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE LAND OF ISRAEL IN HIS PAINTINGS OF THE 1920S AND 1930S ...
Another temporary exhibit was a collection of pieces entitled Femme Fatale that featured prints by Beardsly, several pieces by Munsch and others. Every piece was somehow tied to the concept of the dangerous woman. The exhibit ranged in age from 16th century paintings to a film poster from the 50's.
This is the museum's write up on the exhibit...
The term “femme fatale” – literally, disastrous (or fatal) woman – connotes a woman who uses her power of attraction to lure men into dangerous, even fateful, situations. The theme involves familiar aspects: seduction, passion, mystery, violence and dark secrets. The Old and New Testaments provide several prominent examples: Delilah, Judith, Salomé. Greek mythology too describes destructive women such as Pandora, Medea, Medusa, and the Sirens. All of these served as inspiration for many artworks of great importance. Represented in the exhibition are artists from the 15th through the early 20th century, among them Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Aubrey Beardsley, Maurycy Gottlieb, and Edvard Munch. These artists depicted a wide range of types, from the fragile, pale, seemingly helpless woman through the dauntless heroine to the woman vampire, bat, spider, and so on. The spectrum of situations they depicted ranged between the tragic, the heroic, and the melodramatic. The exhibition includes, among others, oil paintings, sculptures, graphic works, and Judaica.
I think I'm going to go sack out for a bit... I had something else I wanted to write, but I'm honestly beat...
Another temporary exhibit was a collection of pieces entitled Femme Fatale that featured prints by Beardsly, several pieces by Munsch and others. Every piece was somehow tied to the concept of the dangerous woman. The exhibit ranged in age from 16th century paintings to a film poster from the 50's.
This is the museum's write up on the exhibit...
The term “femme fatale” – literally, disastrous (or fatal) woman – connotes a woman who uses her power of attraction to lure men into dangerous, even fateful, situations. The theme involves familiar aspects: seduction, passion, mystery, violence and dark secrets. The Old and New Testaments provide several prominent examples: Delilah, Judith, Salomé. Greek mythology too describes destructive women such as Pandora, Medea, Medusa, and the Sirens. All of these served as inspiration for many artworks of great importance. Represented in the exhibition are artists from the 15th through the early 20th century, among them Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Aubrey Beardsley, Maurycy Gottlieb, and Edvard Munch. These artists depicted a wide range of types, from the fragile, pale, seemingly helpless woman through the dauntless heroine to the woman vampire, bat, spider, and so on. The spectrum of situations they depicted ranged between the tragic, the heroic, and the melodramatic. The exhibition includes, among others, oil paintings, sculptures, graphic works, and Judaica.
I think I'm going to go sack out for a bit... I had something else I wanted to write, but I'm honestly beat...
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Shalom, bo'ker tov
If yesterday was wet, today it's biblical. I woke up shortly before 7 this morning to the sound of thunder and wind. The rain on the window was pleasant enough, but someone sure took the lid of the holliest of hollies, as the sound of the weather was straight out of Indiana Jones.
The order of the day will be getting a chip for my phone, taking advantage of that GSM thing we all love and don't get to exercise, not fully, back home. Then I'll hunker down in a cafe and write a bit... the weather is just too crappy to go walking around taking pictures.
Michal and the girl we met last night, I can't remember her name, I didn't drink that much zubrovka... Shanee, that's it... they're both off today, Erez told me to call Michal once I obtained a sim card... he should be getting up soon so we can go to breakfast before he heads off to the office.
Funny thing 'bout that Zubrovka, I had to order it, I mean I was watching the 1946 version of The Razor's Edge with Tyrone Power, something I rippeed onto my Ipod before I hit the road. Elliot Templeton has this wonderful line where he says "ah, zubrovka, it's like listening to music by moonlight", guess I wanted to see the moon last night.
So here's my first feeling/observatio... Hebrew, the written language, the sign, it has a slightly new referrant here than back home. What I mean by this is that when I see Hebrew on the door of a kosher restaurant, or while walking up and down Devon st. in Chicago, when I see that back home there's a part of my brain that is aware or thinks of it as a form of exclusivity. This is "Jewish" this isn't, or that it's definitely something other than main stream the same way a "House of Saris" on Devon is something other than Bed Bath & Beyond in a strip mall in the burbs. The script bring with it a whole host of baggage back home, I'm aware that it is something more to me, or should be, than to a gentile walking down the street. Here, a sign is just a sign, and the holy script of fire is nothing more than advertising at times. There is a kind of demystification that happens from over saturation, a death of the word, or maybe the script, or maybe just my attitude toward the script. I'm aware that people here live their lives rather differently than we do back home. For instance, the weekend is not Saturday/Sunday, no, it's Friday/Saturday, so that one can spend Friday day preparing for the shabat and resting on Saturday before the start of the week on Sunday. Thursday night is the equivalent of Friday night. These small prescriptions are biblical, they're a necessary part and identity of living Cana'an. I, in all of my reformist and more than often, irreverent ways am some what of an outsider here, well naturally the language barrier, but it doesn't matter, Hebrew, or so the joke goes, is Israel's second language, the concentration of Russians is growing. I spoke Russian to the Falafel chef last night... but more so than that, there is a sense that here all Jews are welcome, regardless of how irreverent you may find yourself... as they are too... and there's no mystery to the signs on the door or the smells that emanate from them... I like the fact its just a sign here... I really do...
The order of the day will be getting a chip for my phone, taking advantage of that GSM thing we all love and don't get to exercise, not fully, back home. Then I'll hunker down in a cafe and write a bit... the weather is just too crappy to go walking around taking pictures.
Michal and the girl we met last night, I can't remember her name, I didn't drink that much zubrovka... Shanee, that's it... they're both off today, Erez told me to call Michal once I obtained a sim card... he should be getting up soon so we can go to breakfast before he heads off to the office.
Funny thing 'bout that Zubrovka, I had to order it, I mean I was watching the 1946 version of The Razor's Edge with Tyrone Power, something I rippeed onto my Ipod before I hit the road. Elliot Templeton has this wonderful line where he says "ah, zubrovka, it's like listening to music by moonlight", guess I wanted to see the moon last night.
So here's my first feeling/observatio... Hebrew, the written language, the sign, it has a slightly new referrant here than back home. What I mean by this is that when I see Hebrew on the door of a kosher restaurant, or while walking up and down Devon st. in Chicago, when I see that back home there's a part of my brain that is aware or thinks of it as a form of exclusivity. This is "Jewish" this isn't, or that it's definitely something other than main stream the same way a "House of Saris" on Devon is something other than Bed Bath & Beyond in a strip mall in the burbs. The script bring with it a whole host of baggage back home, I'm aware that it is something more to me, or should be, than to a gentile walking down the street. Here, a sign is just a sign, and the holy script of fire is nothing more than advertising at times. There is a kind of demystification that happens from over saturation, a death of the word, or maybe the script, or maybe just my attitude toward the script. I'm aware that people here live their lives rather differently than we do back home. For instance, the weekend is not Saturday/Sunday, no, it's Friday/Saturday, so that one can spend Friday day preparing for the shabat and resting on Saturday before the start of the week on Sunday. Thursday night is the equivalent of Friday night. These small prescriptions are biblical, they're a necessary part and identity of living Cana'an. I, in all of my reformist and more than often, irreverent ways am some what of an outsider here, well naturally the language barrier, but it doesn't matter, Hebrew, or so the joke goes, is Israel's second language, the concentration of Russians is growing. I spoke Russian to the Falafel chef last night... but more so than that, there is a sense that here all Jews are welcome, regardless of how irreverent you may find yourself... as they are too... and there's no mystery to the signs on the door or the smells that emanate from them... I like the fact its just a sign here... I really do...
Passport control and me...
I think it's the almighty trying to send me a message: "you and passports just don't mix." Yeah, I think that's the message, really, it seems to be my lot. Before I get to the details of my recent woes I'll tell you about the trip... misery friends, misery. I started, well truthfully, I never went to bed the night before I left. Had those pre-flight jitters, over active brain etc. etc. I left the house shortly after 5 in the morning and headed to the Oakland airport where I caught a JetBlue flight to NYC. The trip was mostly uneventful. I passed out before the plane finished boarding. I must've slept a good 3 hours of the flight to JFK. The couple next to me was traveling with a small dog in a carrier under the seat. This was the most patient crated animal I've seen since the guy I met in '03 that was bringing a St. Petersburg short hair cat back to the states.
NYC was gloomy and wet, not a white christmas at all. The lines in the international terminal were long and obnoxious, or so I thought. The actual international desk was surprisingly free of lines, you just had to know where it was, hidden, behind long thick swathes of human holiday desperation. Checked the bags and settled down at a pub for a beer and the most pathetic chicken club I've had in years. I've heard of limp pickles, the kind that are like rubber, but this entire sandwich looked and ate like it was a microwave sensation.
The plane from NYC to Milan, Malpensa, was delayed by a nearly an hour. I had a 2 hour window to catch my connection to Tel Aviv. Sometime between checking in and dinner I managed to loose my itinerary. The Delta desk at NYC didn't check me through to Tel Aviv, only to Milan. I was without a ticket and without the flight number that would help me find the gate when I reached the terminal at Malpensa. I called home and Lu was kind and generous enough to log into my email account and get me my flight number. Finally we boarded the plane and I was blessed with a quiet and completly unobtrusive Italian woman on her way back from Holiday. We spoke a bit at the beginning, but her English wasn't great and one of us fell asleep first. I can't remember which, but I'm certain we both needed the sleep.
At some point during the night I was awake and decided to take advantage of my new toy, video ipod, so I threw on The Razor's Edge and enjoyed my tiny little screen, illuminating the darkened plane of comatose travelers. The flight arrived in Milan about an hour late as predicted. The time was 11 in the morning and the Delta rep, with her incredibly sultry Italian accent, said "Run!" when I asked "El Al? 382?"
I didn't exactly run, but my pace was brisk as I found my way by following the Transiti signs to terminal 3 gate 5. Francesco was working the desk and I came straight up. He was expecting our flight, knowing that we were delayed in NYC, there were 15 of us that were transferring here, Israel bound. "Can I register here?" "Uh, yes, but I can not issue you de ticket until you pass security control."
This is where the fun begins. A slightly sloppily dressed man in a dark suit with a radio routed through his sleeve appeared. He had a short crew cut and spoke Italian, Hebrew and English, at least. His English wasn't stellar, but it was good enough to get the point across. He gathered unto him all Israeli passport holders and did his business. Then he called for Foreign passport holders, I was at the head of the line having arrived first.
"So... first time in Israel?"
"Yes"
"What is your purpose for visiting?"
"Holiday."
"Do you hav family der?"
"yes, in Netanya."
"what's taken you so long to come here?"
"I have a very busy life back home."
"You really don't speak hebrew? Shneyder, you speak hebrew yes?"
"No, English or Russian... do you speak Russian?"
"no, you have another passport, yes?" (as he pointed to the country of my birth, in my passport, Uzbekistan)
"no, I'm not an Uzbeki citizen."
"but you're a Russian citizen."
"no, I'm only an American citizen."
"Are you involved with any Jewish organizations?"
"The JCC?"
"Do you observe holidays?"
"the high holidays"
"like what?"
"yom kipur, pesach"
"and those happen when?"
This is when I wanted to unload on this man... first of all we don't follow the Hebrew calendar, so the dates are irrelevant. "usually around april or may for pesach..." and I bit my tongue at this point.
"well I can't give you your ticket, or let you inspect your luggage, until my kapo (I didn't think this was a Hebrew word for boss... have to check with Erez, gave me chills hearing it) can call your family in Netanya and confirm you are invited.
(did I mention that you have to check your luggage with a security official as it was in transit and out of your purview while enroute to Milan? Yes, this means you go to the tarmack, identify your suitcase, open it, rifle through it a bit and confirm that nothing, like a cigarette sized pack of explosives were slipped into it while you weren't looking.)
"I'm not staying with them, I'm staying with my friend in Tel Aviv. can you call him?"
"I can't, my kapo must, how do you know this friend?"
"we were pen pals"
"?"
So I stood around now, watching my passport as it lay on a table and this poor sod doing six things at once, sometimes double fisted with walkie talkie and cell phone at once. He became tired of me starring at him and my passport and handed it back to me thinking i'd be more comfortable, which I was, with it in my hand. I still didn't have my ticket though. He came over to me, as I never let him get more than 10 ft. from me, boarding had started "no problem, don't worry, you have a place on this plane, today..." to which I responded, "great, I'm not worried, can I have my ticket" and he said "no first we have to call your family." and I said "well you have their number," apologetically, half heartedly, "no we're waiting..."
This went on, as the plane slowly boarded. I kept thinking shit, this is one of those small deals with limited over head storage and I've a backpack filled with camera gear, laptop and other sundry electronics, no way will Iallow them to check it. Another thought kept bouncing around my head, my luggage is sitting on the tarmack, if this monkey fascist doesn't let me on this plane, I'm completely screwed and will be sans suitcase and holiday. I moved myself over by the ticket desk. Francesco was the only sympathetic individual around. He inquired on my behalf once, but was cut short in italian, at least it sounded that way.
As the boarding continued something humorous happened, well at least I found it humorous. From out the jetway came a host of heavily armed Polizi, I mean these boys had sub machine guns, side arms, spiffy vests with what looked lik a full compliment of ammunition and grenades, knives and all kinds of badges. They strolled out and positioned themselves on either side of the El Al and Air Dubai counters. My first thought was: "is this going to be some kind of jew/arab rumble in Milan?" Is that why they're here? Then I couldn't help but notice that each and every single one of these polizi were incredibly handsome men. When confronted with the sad sorry state of overweight doughnut holes in uniforms on the job at home, these boys looked like they were plucked straight from the pages of prada. They were done up to the nines with gelled out hair, trendy cuts, that messy metro thing that's taken the world. They were so handsome in fact that you wondered if they even knew how to fire those things around their necks, or if they were some kind of poster children for the carbineri. Just one of those odd things I notice when completely sleep deprived and heading into my third pressurization.
The plane at this point was halfway loaded with passengers. My dark haired friend came over, there was now a mother and her two daughters standing about awaiting this inspection, they at least had their tickets. He came over, whipped out his cell phone, and called my mom's cousin, Misha, in Netanya, as his kapo never showed up. I've no clue what the two men had to say to one another, I'll find out tomorrow when I get a sim chip for my phone and call Misha, but he laughed a bit, so I figured that was a good sign. He walked me to the ticket counter, fished out my printed ticket and then cut me ahead of the line, down the jetway and outside where I was met by a young versace wearing Israeli that had me identify my suitcase and go through the elaborate procedure I described above. When we finished another man walked me back up to the jeway and I double timed it around some people to the plane's door. I managed to store my stuff, and was sat next to an Italian couple, we were all too big for the seats and I was stuck with an aisle, could've been worse, it could've been the middle seat. The flight from Milan to Tel Aviv is 3 1/2 hours, still about 3 hours too long if you ask me. The plane's cabin was filled with a bizarre group of nuns, religious looking older folks, russians Israeli families. Mostly though, it was the retirees, they walked and talked with a sense of entitlement that drove me a little nuts. There was the woman on the cell phone speaking in Hebrew and yelling at the top of her lungs, the man across the aisle from me brushed off food and it hit me, and he took no note of it until I made a brushing motion with my hand to get it off me, there was the man that walked up and down the aisle seemingly blessing everyone as he went and winking at the nuns. No, this wasn't all in my less than lucid imagination, it was real, I was there, it happened.
So after another 3 1/2 miserable hours we arrived in Ben Gurion, a total travel time of 17 hours in the plane, not including boarding and deplanning, 5 or 6 hours of transits, transfers and waiting... makes for a rather long day. No, I didnt' go to bed, we went out and had falafel, then met Shanee, a friend of Erez's sister who livs up the street, at a bar across from the spot where Yitzakh Rabin was assassinated, the brasserie restaurant, lovely spot really. The falafel shop was fantastic, they had actualy closed the shutters as we were walking up to it, but erez did some fast talking and got us inside where we were the last order of the night and the hummus was fried up fresh just for us.
Its pouring right now, I mean really coming down. I'm exhausted, yes, thoroughly done or the day, so I'm going to bid you laila-tov and say... stay tuned! more to come...
Ciao!
NYC was gloomy and wet, not a white christmas at all. The lines in the international terminal were long and obnoxious, or so I thought. The actual international desk was surprisingly free of lines, you just had to know where it was, hidden, behind long thick swathes of human holiday desperation. Checked the bags and settled down at a pub for a beer and the most pathetic chicken club I've had in years. I've heard of limp pickles, the kind that are like rubber, but this entire sandwich looked and ate like it was a microwave sensation.
The plane from NYC to Milan, Malpensa, was delayed by a nearly an hour. I had a 2 hour window to catch my connection to Tel Aviv. Sometime between checking in and dinner I managed to loose my itinerary. The Delta desk at NYC didn't check me through to Tel Aviv, only to Milan. I was without a ticket and without the flight number that would help me find the gate when I reached the terminal at Malpensa. I called home and Lu was kind and generous enough to log into my email account and get me my flight number. Finally we boarded the plane and I was blessed with a quiet and completly unobtrusive Italian woman on her way back from Holiday. We spoke a bit at the beginning, but her English wasn't great and one of us fell asleep first. I can't remember which, but I'm certain we both needed the sleep.
At some point during the night I was awake and decided to take advantage of my new toy, video ipod, so I threw on The Razor's Edge and enjoyed my tiny little screen, illuminating the darkened plane of comatose travelers. The flight arrived in Milan about an hour late as predicted. The time was 11 in the morning and the Delta rep, with her incredibly sultry Italian accent, said "Run!" when I asked "El Al? 382?"
I didn't exactly run, but my pace was brisk as I found my way by following the Transiti signs to terminal 3 gate 5. Francesco was working the desk and I came straight up. He was expecting our flight, knowing that we were delayed in NYC, there were 15 of us that were transferring here, Israel bound. "Can I register here?" "Uh, yes, but I can not issue you de ticket until you pass security control."
This is where the fun begins. A slightly sloppily dressed man in a dark suit with a radio routed through his sleeve appeared. He had a short crew cut and spoke Italian, Hebrew and English, at least. His English wasn't stellar, but it was good enough to get the point across. He gathered unto him all Israeli passport holders and did his business. Then he called for Foreign passport holders, I was at the head of the line having arrived first.
"So... first time in Israel?"
"Yes"
"What is your purpose for visiting?"
"Holiday."
"Do you hav family der?"
"yes, in Netanya."
"what's taken you so long to come here?"
"I have a very busy life back home."
"You really don't speak hebrew? Shneyder, you speak hebrew yes?"
"No, English or Russian... do you speak Russian?"
"no, you have another passport, yes?" (as he pointed to the country of my birth, in my passport, Uzbekistan)
"no, I'm not an Uzbeki citizen."
"but you're a Russian citizen."
"no, I'm only an American citizen."
"Are you involved with any Jewish organizations?"
"The JCC?"
"Do you observe holidays?"
"the high holidays"
"like what?"
"yom kipur, pesach"
"and those happen when?"
This is when I wanted to unload on this man... first of all we don't follow the Hebrew calendar, so the dates are irrelevant. "usually around april or may for pesach..." and I bit my tongue at this point.
"well I can't give you your ticket, or let you inspect your luggage, until my kapo (I didn't think this was a Hebrew word for boss... have to check with Erez, gave me chills hearing it) can call your family in Netanya and confirm you are invited.
(did I mention that you have to check your luggage with a security official as it was in transit and out of your purview while enroute to Milan? Yes, this means you go to the tarmack, identify your suitcase, open it, rifle through it a bit and confirm that nothing, like a cigarette sized pack of explosives were slipped into it while you weren't looking.)
"I'm not staying with them, I'm staying with my friend in Tel Aviv. can you call him?"
"I can't, my kapo must, how do you know this friend?"
"we were pen pals"
"?"
So I stood around now, watching my passport as it lay on a table and this poor sod doing six things at once, sometimes double fisted with walkie talkie and cell phone at once. He became tired of me starring at him and my passport and handed it back to me thinking i'd be more comfortable, which I was, with it in my hand. I still didn't have my ticket though. He came over to me, as I never let him get more than 10 ft. from me, boarding had started "no problem, don't worry, you have a place on this plane, today..." to which I responded, "great, I'm not worried, can I have my ticket" and he said "no first we have to call your family." and I said "well you have their number," apologetically, half heartedly, "no we're waiting..."
This went on, as the plane slowly boarded. I kept thinking shit, this is one of those small deals with limited over head storage and I've a backpack filled with camera gear, laptop and other sundry electronics, no way will Iallow them to check it. Another thought kept bouncing around my head, my luggage is sitting on the tarmack, if this monkey fascist doesn't let me on this plane, I'm completely screwed and will be sans suitcase and holiday. I moved myself over by the ticket desk. Francesco was the only sympathetic individual around. He inquired on my behalf once, but was cut short in italian, at least it sounded that way.
As the boarding continued something humorous happened, well at least I found it humorous. From out the jetway came a host of heavily armed Polizi, I mean these boys had sub machine guns, side arms, spiffy vests with what looked lik a full compliment of ammunition and grenades, knives and all kinds of badges. They strolled out and positioned themselves on either side of the El Al and Air Dubai counters. My first thought was: "is this going to be some kind of jew/arab rumble in Milan?" Is that why they're here? Then I couldn't help but notice that each and every single one of these polizi were incredibly handsome men. When confronted with the sad sorry state of overweight doughnut holes in uniforms on the job at home, these boys looked like they were plucked straight from the pages of prada. They were done up to the nines with gelled out hair, trendy cuts, that messy metro thing that's taken the world. They were so handsome in fact that you wondered if they even knew how to fire those things around their necks, or if they were some kind of poster children for the carbineri. Just one of those odd things I notice when completely sleep deprived and heading into my third pressurization.
The plane at this point was halfway loaded with passengers. My dark haired friend came over, there was now a mother and her two daughters standing about awaiting this inspection, they at least had their tickets. He came over, whipped out his cell phone, and called my mom's cousin, Misha, in Netanya, as his kapo never showed up. I've no clue what the two men had to say to one another, I'll find out tomorrow when I get a sim chip for my phone and call Misha, but he laughed a bit, so I figured that was a good sign. He walked me to the ticket counter, fished out my printed ticket and then cut me ahead of the line, down the jetway and outside where I was met by a young versace wearing Israeli that had me identify my suitcase and go through the elaborate procedure I described above. When we finished another man walked me back up to the jeway and I double timed it around some people to the plane's door. I managed to store my stuff, and was sat next to an Italian couple, we were all too big for the seats and I was stuck with an aisle, could've been worse, it could've been the middle seat. The flight from Milan to Tel Aviv is 3 1/2 hours, still about 3 hours too long if you ask me. The plane's cabin was filled with a bizarre group of nuns, religious looking older folks, russians Israeli families. Mostly though, it was the retirees, they walked and talked with a sense of entitlement that drove me a little nuts. There was the woman on the cell phone speaking in Hebrew and yelling at the top of her lungs, the man across the aisle from me brushed off food and it hit me, and he took no note of it until I made a brushing motion with my hand to get it off me, there was the man that walked up and down the aisle seemingly blessing everyone as he went and winking at the nuns. No, this wasn't all in my less than lucid imagination, it was real, I was there, it happened.
So after another 3 1/2 miserable hours we arrived in Ben Gurion, a total travel time of 17 hours in the plane, not including boarding and deplanning, 5 or 6 hours of transits, transfers and waiting... makes for a rather long day. No, I didnt' go to bed, we went out and had falafel, then met Shanee, a friend of Erez's sister who livs up the street, at a bar across from the spot where Yitzakh Rabin was assassinated, the brasserie restaurant, lovely spot really. The falafel shop was fantastic, they had actualy closed the shutters as we were walking up to it, but erez did some fast talking and got us inside where we were the last order of the night and the hummus was fried up fresh just for us.
Its pouring right now, I mean really coming down. I'm exhausted, yes, thoroughly done or the day, so I'm going to bid you laila-tov and say... stay tuned! more to come...
Ciao!
Monday, December 25, 2006
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
HDR Imaginnings
So what is HDR? HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is a technique used to create eye popping, jaw splitting timages that take in more of the color spectrum than what a single exposure can capture. Cameras aren't quite like the human occulas, our eyes adjust to different gradations of light and record the entire scene. When you see those brilliant sunsets you are seeing multiple levels of exposure while a camera can catch a single exposure at such and such fstop/time. HDR is a way of create images from multiple exposures of a single scene so that you can convey more color, more depth and more of the gradients that a camera might miss when shooting something that is the product of single exposure. I took some of the raw files from my trip in Russia and applied some Ton Mapping filters to them. I didn't have the necessary triplicate exposures to create even more surreal HDR images from them, but its possible to do it with .RAW files. The improvement is noticeable if you look... in addition I did little experiment using a single light source, my windows and a sliver of my living room to play with some of the HDR tools and the triple exposure, +2/0/-2 EV, that's up there too... so if you want to see what HDR can do, click on the image below...
Monday, December 18, 2006
Friday, December 15, 2006
Moscow...
The complete set of pictures, finally, after like forever, I finished scanning that last roll of film from Moscow that includes a few shots of the interior of St. Basil's in Red Square, the very recognizeable and bright symbol of Russia, an Orthodox onion domed church. So you should go look at them... now... as it took me forever... to finish....
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Fort Bragg, 2005 Road Trip, Scanned and posted
After a year or so of procrastinating I finally scanned and posted mostly macro shots from a road trip to Fort Bragg which lies north of Mendocino on the coast. There's a botanical garden there, 40 some odd acres of beautiful gardens a top a cliff over looking the ocean... so go here to see the stuff...
Monday, December 11, 2006
Contemporary Arab Films
Contemporary Arab Films:
Narrative, Social Commentary and Artistic Integrity
—Good-bye, sir.
—Where to?
—Madness.
—Which madness?
—Any madness, for I have turned into words.
—Mahmud Darwish
As a religion Islam embodies vast numbers of people and cultures across vast lands. The common thread among these disparate groups is the religion of Islam, a submission unto Allah, unto God. The central unity of such a religion, as with other religions that have a global presence, is the language of the central doctrines and dogmatic teachings of the religion. Thus, to submit, or to surrender, is to give one’s self up to the language by which one is to live one’s life. Similarities can be seen within the orthopraxy of Judaism’s 613 laws and the commandments of the Christian bible. According to Adonis language doesn’t exist to understand meaning outside of itself, but more accurately meaning is contained within the language and the rules that define it[1]. Arabic’s linguistic rules are not only a codified grammar that organizes thought into communicable modules, but legitimates artistic forms and mediums that can not exist, or attain legitimacy, outside of a religious context that also contained the political, inextricably linked to the religious. The plight of the Arab poet is a crisis of modernity struggling with the ancient past; one can not exist outside of the other. Although Adonis sees that this crisis, for poetry, has its locus in an attempted split of the new from the old, or of truth (al-batin)[2], from the language that justifies the truths, he admonishes us from peering at this problem from outside the very lexicon that prevents transcendence outside of itself. The crisis for poetry, on the level of language exists in regard to image and narrative for the Arab filmmaker. It is impossible to make a film of the Arab world without in some way borrowing from the rich mythology of its language and religion regardless of which language it is, it will always convey the Qur’an if it’s to be successful and bring a native viewer into the reality of its narrative. To scrutinize such a film one must in essence step inside the movie and not assume a truly “western” objectivity; this, according to Adonis, would be a mistake in the form of modern criticism, or modernity’s lens:
“If we are to treat the problem of modernity, we must first re-examine the structures of Arab thought. To question modernity, Arab thought must question itself. Arab modernity can be studied only within the perspective of Arab thought, on the level of principles and actual historical developments, within the framework of its specific assumptions, using its epistemological tools and in the context of the issues which gave rise to the phenomenon and have resulted from it. To study it from a western perspective would be to distort it and distance oneself from the real issues.”
(Adonis pg. 93)
The means by which criticism happens in film varies from filmmaker to filmmaker but this year’s crop of films in the Arab Film Festival[3] take different approaches to discuss culture and identity through the medium of film. Heaven’s Door, an Algerian film by Imad and Swel Noury, three interconnecting stories weave a haphazard chronology that moves forward and back through time so that the audience is entreated to partake in the “organization” or, a second retelling in reordering the narratives.
The first vignette concerns a young man by the name of Ney who digs ditches for a living. He supports his blind mother and adolescent sister. As the sole bread winner and head of the small but tight house hold the responsibility for the survival of the family is squarely on his shoulders. Fast money seduces him when his friends introduce him to Mr. Monsour, who says "Let's be honest, we are breaking the law, but we will make lots of money." The dynamics of the family, albeit in a foreign tongue, aren't that far removed from western archetypes of poverty and the struggle for survival in an urban landscape.
Ney’s world is the byproduct of globalization where American Rap music reigns supreme, the soundtrack of the film never really touches native tone, but instead keeps its frenetic pace with angry hip hop, youths break dancing, chase scenes through shadowy corners, over exposed cinematography where shapes become ethereal and rooftop vistas of Ney jumping rope to stay in shape. Money flows, for a while, but like all crime sagas, the street catches up. Ney is wounded in an altercation and sent to the hospital. He recovers and seeks revenge. The premonition that Ney’s life will end badly comes to pass during a shoot out in an apartment that leaves 3 people dead.
Flash forward, there's one survivor in the bathroom of the apartment, you don't know this until the second vignette that centers on the survivor, Salim, and his mother who is in a coma after being shot. Salim and his mother are taken in by an American ex-pat art professor whose dead husband was the brother of Salim’s now dead father. Lisa, Salim’s aunt by marriage, is a bitter woman who nurses her despair with Jack Daniels and a kind of labyrinthian solitude as she lives in a foreign land and society where her position as a woman precludes her from integration, and moreover, her national identity as an American ex-pat is yet another absolute road block.
The story takes a bit of a contrived turn here, Lisa, in her anger and solitude, unable to have children, is cold and distant. She sets harsh rules for the gentle Salim and expects a distraught child who walked out of the bathroom to find a scene reminiscent of the shootout at the OK Coral on his living room floor. With time Lisa melts and falls in love with Salim, "Je t'aime" she says to Salim as she tells him he's the son she never had.
The shadowy Mr. Monsour makes an appearance offering to take care or help out with the family by contacting the social worker, Jalil, who has a crush on Lisa. This is incredibly strange when you consider that Monsour gave Ney the address of Salim's father to exact his revenge and provided the firearms with which to carry out his plan. Eventually another relative surfaces and Lisa must give up Salim and his mother's still silent body in a painful agony that returns her to solitude. She says that there was a time before Salim and then there's the time after Salim. What will become of her is uncertain, but she chooses to go home for a bit to deal with her "phantoms" and dysfunctional family back in
Between the Vignettes a narrator reads poetry, obscure and haunting verses, illuminating, foreboding, somewhat beautifully lyrical and foreshadowing of events to come. Poetry becomes a living voice, not a cold academic rhetoric or a childish limerick, but an important part of contemporary society. The present drama and narrative is in essence couched in an older voice, something almost mythological in its reliance on an older traditional form. The living voice of poetry is in an integral part of the society as it legitimizes the film by its reliance on the past. This “eastern” paradigm recites poetry, as with the Ghazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the Pakistani poet, recitation is a normal part of every day speech, it’s a way of communication that realizes the present through the ancient, and in some way brings both speaker and listener closer to al-batin, the truth. Poetry’s presence, to the ear of the listener, is a kind of open ended question, however within the context of the film, however in terms of what Adonis posits as its absolute necessity to garner legitimacy, questioning is almost nonexistent, in practice politics is a sort of submission as must be questioning[4].
On a trip to the beach, Lisa meets a homeless woman, an old beggar asking for alms. She sits like a sage fresh from the desert and issues Lisa oracular wisdom about solitude; loosely put: some run from solitude because they aren't comfortable with it, some run to solitude because they can't live without it. Lisa's nature is of the first variety, the old woman on the other hand is the latter. As she lives, Lisa offers her money, and she refuses, saying next time, as if to mean “this time you’re the one in need”.
Through the first two stories an old man is seen in prison, in brief clips, an arresting image of solitude. The man’s identity is finally established, Smail, an old con, a sage in his own right who tells a younger cell mate "we are not friends, we are both here in this situation and have to rely on each other, when we get out we might be friends." The story of Smail starts with him at the slain man's apartment, recently release from prison, trying to procure a gun. He leaves and passes a young man in the hallway on the way to the elevator, Ney, the connections are now complete. Smail's story, and at this point, the whole montage, seems very much like narrative lines of Alejandro González Iñárritu Amores Perros, an older man has debts to settle in a self-righteous manner which comes off as compelling that weaves into the story of two younger individuals that exist at the pace of the world, rather than setting their own.
Smail takes up residence is in a small bungalow by the beach, he funds his life with a modest treasure that he stashed before going to prison for 15 years because he was ratted out by one of his partners. The details of his movements read more like those of
The familial hierarchy is confusing, for within both of these examples, it is the mother who acts like a kind of glue, but outside of the family unit, the mother is powerless, so her power is a kind of mythological power invested in by her children, and actuated by a web of curses and paradises that define ‘mother’. However, even in a distant land, the
As the narrative of Noury’s film pushes on, Smail arrives late, his mother is near death in the hospital; his goodbye is short lived as she never regains consciousness. With that detail of his life settled he sees the woman he lost when he went to prison, Omar's sister, and holds a quiet and painful conversation fifteen years overdue. While at the beach, an old drunk imparts similar knowledge about solitude and "being" in that Schoppenhauerian sense of being. He is the masculine component to the feminine solitude that Lisa experiences within society, Smail experienced it outside of society through prison. Albeit has left prison, he is firmly rooted in the prison of the past. Not too surprisingly, we learn that the partner who betrayed Smail is Monsour and that he's going to exact his revenge before vanishing to
Revenge isn’t at the heart of Algerian director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s film Bled Number One. Nor is the film told through hand held shaky cam shots, on the contrary the film is very much in the spirit of cinéma vérité[7]. Although the film isn’t a documentary because of its fictive narrative, it retains the feeling cinéma vérité, through its moment in time portrayal and use of non professional actors and village locals for a cast. The soundtrack is a clever hodge-podge of ambient sounds that seem to somehow create background rhythms from conversations and the sounds of birds in the rural setting of the Algerian village. This montage is sharply contrasted by the climax “concerto” on the hill of Rodolphe Burger's heavy and haunting guitar solo.
The narrative revolves around Kamel, an Algerian ex-pat who returns to a small village in
The communal harmony of the village doesn't seem to last long. Enter a young band of ruffians who begin to terrorize the villagers with a brand of radical Islam. They go into the local cafe and declare that playing dominos is a sin, to which one of the villagers replies: "look, we're all Muslims, we're not rejecting Islam, but to each their own." The zealots are pushed out of the village and a guard post is erected at the road leading into the village following a meeting to mobilize the men of the village in defense of their way of life.
Now this egalitarianism is all well and good until Louisa arrives home and the darker side of this patriarchal society is shown. Louisa, as you later find out, has left her husband and taken their young boy Yanis. She has come home because she wants to sing American Jazz and Cabaret which goes against the wishes of her family. She is reprimanded by her Mother and urged to return to her husband. Louisa has a tired and half defeated look in her eyes as she listens to her Mother’s chiding and her brother Bouzid looks on, dubious and plotting. Flash forward, Bouzid is stumbling through the hills with two cases of alcohol and the religious zealots catch up to him and threaten to cut off his head. For a moment you think they’re really going to do it, but they eventually let him go. The next day Louisa's husband shows up to collect her and his child. Her husband spends the evening in the local cafe drinking and chewing tchim. In the cafe there are discussions of politics and what people are doing about their relative situations. There's no real animosity toward the west in the discussion, there is a kind of removal, an odd sort of objectivism about contemporary events that is disarming. Eventually Louisa and Yanis leave in a car with Louisa’s husband. Half way down the road Louisa's husband stops the car, steps out of it, throws her suitcase to the side of the road and then drags Louisa out of the car by her hair and takes off with the boy.
Here is where Louisa's troubles begin. For every insult that befalls her there is an injury waiting to happen. When she returns home late at night alone Bouzid, her brother, takes her to her room and proceeds to beat her bloody. She has shamed the family and he exacts a kind of revenge. The interesting parallel between this Heaven's Doors is the absence of a father in all of this. The brother is effectively running the household and distributes a kind of patriarchal justice, or at least has the final say in how things will happen. The sad fact of the matter is that Louisa is exercising her freedom of dissent with her spouse in a society where there’s no room for dissent either linguistically or through self actuation. She is ostracized by her family, shunned by her husband's family and beaten for her insolence. After this incident she is taken to the local cleric for advice and told to put her faith in Allah that the husband will come back for her. She is also told to absolve her sins by allowing seven waves to lash her in the face and then to run around the mosque seven times.
As effective outsiders, Louisa and Kamel share a strange attraction. Kamel calls Bouzid on his brutality and accuses him of not being a man for beating his sister. Although the villagers seem to be progressive and liberal in their contemplations about world politics, they don’t spring to support Kamel in calling out Bouzis. There is a definite sense that tragedy rolls down hill and that Bouzid’s castration at the hands of the ruffians is ultimately paid for by Louisa. Nothing can console Louisa at the loss of her child so she leaves the village for the city and her Husband's family who tells her he has taken the child and throws her out of her own home.
Distraught, she attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge and is stopped and taken to a mental institution that resembles more of a battered women's shelter than anything else. The occupants are all women, or at least we're not shown the male ward, but you get the feeling that they are all there for the same exact reason. The images and deft cinematography is reminiscent of Diane Arbus's photographs from mental institutions that are simply numbered, denying her subjects a kind of human dignity in terms of a name as they jostle through the black and white images in their stark white robes in their role as patient and subject blur the distinguishing lines of doctor vs. patient.
Louisa stages a concert at the institution in a long black evening dress contrasting the gowns most of the audience is wearing in a rather touching scene that is as odd as it is surreal. This performance is juxtaposed with two strange scenes of Rodolphe Burger sitting on a hillside with an electric guitar plugged into an amp and Kamel wandering around. These two scenes come in pivotal moments in the film, one in the middle and then the very last scene after Kamel decides that he's in love with Louisa, who is now gone, and that he has to leave the village and will go so far as sneaking into Tunisia, as he's going mad and his sense of democracy and women's rights is completely at odds with the accepted pace of village life. It is Rodolphe's guitar that closes out the film with a haunting melody. You never quite find out what happens to Louisa or Kamel for that matter, but you are left with the knowledge that life will not change much in the village, it can’t, its existence depends on the uniform continuity of the inhabitants that consider themselves Muslims but not extremists, however are all socially conservative if examined from the western perspective. This tension between East and West through the character of Kamel, is a kind of invasion, he enters back into his own community but is changed, and the community resists the change that he brings. Change in a sense is a form of madness within such a community as it is essentially contrary to the daily act of surrender that is both religious and practical in order to preserve the harmony.
Mohamed Al Daradji takes on a journey into post Saddam
Ali is a soldier confined to the mental hospital after he was nearly killed in a
In the hospital, Ali is almost unrecognizable as a gaunt figure cowering in the corner thoroughly broken. This portrait of Ali is completely contrary to how he is show before coming to the mental hospital. From the beginning of his flashback sequence you quickly understand that Ali is a fundamentally good person: he gives money to those less fortunate, a ferry man refuses to take money for the passage across the
In 1998 Mehdi was a promising and over achieving med student who passes his finals and dreams of doing a master's degree. His over protective mother says "Son, don't study so much, rest, they say sleeping more and studying less will help you pass the test." As he sits by candle light in his home at a desk the size of a cafeteria tray, scribbling in his notebook and reading while smoking cigarettes. His classmates think highly of him, he has velocity and trajectory in his life, yet his father's crimes and subsequent execution forestalls his ascent, and he falls like Icarus into the ocean of the Iraqi military.
Ahlaam isn’t what you would call a beautiful woman, but she has a sweetness about her that’s compelling. She’s on the verge of becoming a wife, and as she says, dawning a true Abaya, becoming a woman in a certain sense. She is the bridge between families, between the future and the past when she finds herself in a mental institution, still wearing a wedding gown for the day that Ahmed will return and make of her a wife. Ahlaam and Ahmed’s love affair is short but intense; it’s made up mostly of words, declarations, and skipping stones across the river. There is a sense that mutatis mutandis will bring about even greater joy to the families and these two people, albeit arranged, there’s an assumption that they’re genuinely in love.
Ali heads up to the Syrian border with his friend Hassan who is openly critical of the regime. Ali quiets him over and over again, worried about who might be listening, and who could report Hassan. Hassan’s other problem, his hair, is falling out in patches, and he believes all his misfortune in life and in love stem from his "condition"; he's something of a Samson without a Delilah. If it weren't for his hair he would be braver, more able to cope with the realities of living in
Once Ali and Hassan reach the desolate no-man's land of the Syrian-Iraqi border there's not much to do until the bombs start falling. A joint US & Great Britain operation bombs the north. Their camp is hit. Ali is knocked out and shell-shocked, unable to hear. He wakes up bloody and stumbles around looking for Hassan who’s lying amidst a litter of soldiers clutching the stumps of where limbs used to be yelling for help or an officer, both in short supply. Delirious, Ali picks up Hassan and begins to carry him, looking for a doctor. Stumbling through the night he crosses into
The film resumes its “present” narrative chronology with a cruel doctor at the mental hospital who believes in electro shock therapy, yells at the patients, kicks them, and has about as much mercy as Torquemada. Mehdi is the absolute opposite; he has the penetrating insight to know that Ali isn't mentally insane, but that how you treat a man will determine how that man will live, and how he will react to such inhuman conditions. The chief psychologist wheels the screaming Ahlaam in for electro shock, and during the delivery of the first round the hospital is hit by a bomb.
It’s the morning after, 2 days, to be precise, before Sadaam’s regime collapses. Pandemonium has broken out, bodies are lying the streets, houses collapsing as a mostly civil society that has lived together under the unflinching rule of the regime comes apart at the seems. The patients are fleeing the hospital as it’s being looted, Ali and Mehdi try to intervene with the looters but find themselves targets when they get in the way of the looters. Search parties are organized to track down the patients and Ali begins to run around the streets, in nothing but his boxers, barefoot, looking for patients. Ahlaam's parents take to the street with a cleric to help them; they walk around showing people her picture, as she wanders seeing her husband in every strange face and shadow. Her dreams and her waking hours become one and the same and she suffers for her inability to see clearly. Her delusions serve to comfort her in that Ahmed is very much alive in her mind, but when every brigand turns into Ahmed her punishment becomes a prison not of her own making.
The story becomes a bleak portrayal of the worst of human nature when a sniper opens fire on innocent people in the street. There isn't any anxiety that isn't explored in this first film since the fall of the regime. The film understands and is capable of conveying beautiful gestures in the simple act of giving a naked man a coat, and how that has a resounding effect through so many other "coats" in cinema history, most recently The Pianist and the scene at the end where the Russian army officer quite bluntly says "why the fucking coat?" Ali is eventually shot down by the sniper while herding patients back to the hospital in a horrific moment, a naked soldier dying in the street.
These small codified messages, intentional or not, make the film a rich presentation of east and west, as the east's fate seems to rest in western hands. The final scenes of the film are exasperating as the family spots Ahlaam just as
Respect and consideration cut to the heart of Jocelyn Saab’s Kiss me not on the Eyes. The film derives its title from a piece of Egyptian music that is and played during the film. The story is relatively simple and even predictable at times. A young girl, daughter of a famous belly dancer, is chasing her mother's ghost as she studies the dance. She is courted by a young man who she has affection for, but isn't quite sure she's in love with him. Love becomes equated with loss in the sense of possession and the fear of loosing him forces her hand, she agrees to marry. Not surprisingly, once married, her artistry, her dance, becomes a point of contention between her and her new husband who wants to keep her body to himself. She calls herself an artist, he sees her as his wife; the controlling hand of the patriarchal society creates the tension, the necessary tension, to allow Dunia, our dancer and protagonist, the courage to blaze her own trail.
The film really takes shape through the supporting cast and the tangential plot lines that are woven around Dunia’s somewhat hectic and complicated life. Take for instance her friend, a woman and a cab driver who runs what must be the only “American Graffiti” styled cab in all of
It’s truly difficult to be critical without realizing that the criticism is a superimposition of one culture’s values on another. There’s a myriad of contradictions in making such a judgment when you take into account the west’s predilection toward advertising and how that advertising leads to our experience of other people based on what we see in regard to what they look like[8]. The lack of judgment based on action and true communication stunt our ability to interact with “other”, such a dislocation, person to person estrangement is not unlike a piece of us, cut out, with a visual razor.
To complicate matters of appearance, of living in her mother’s Ghost, Dunia is also a poet who apprentice for an intellectual, Beshir, who supervises her thesis on ecstasy in Sufi Poetry. Beshir begins to teach Dunia to trust herself while simultaneously teaching her about the problem in love poetry. The central problem seems to be one of direct addresses. True passion, a kind of rapture and suffering because of love is freely written about in lyric and song, but as for passion and love itself, the moment of departure rather than the aftermath of that departure, or as Beshir puts it "we're afraid of it openly" is completely stifled. This tension of aftermath vs. actuality, or real presence vs. assumed pitfall, is almost a modern analogy for the preventions/prescriptions of religion in dictating morality. The ability to live life undaunted according to a universal law of live and let live, like the men at the café in Bled Number One, may not be a fall from grace, through the eyes of a tradition built on religion, but a more fulfilling way to live, according to Beshir.
Dunia is hell bent on living as she wants to live. There’s a powerful scene when she says to the committee, as she attends an audition for a dance competition by reciting poetry while standing perfectly still: “I've never seen my body.” She sits down on the stage with her knees pulled to her chin, her toes wrapped in the hem of her skirt; this is her fetal pose where she is safe. As she discovers more and more poetry, listening to the now blind Beshir, the victim of an attacker wishing to defend Islam and its opponents who would have Egyptian society revel in the immorality of the Arabian nights, Dunia decides to look at her body. She buys a mirror and hangs it near her bed. She undresses out of the shot and then returns to the round mirror wrapped in bubble wrap that the mirror came in, still modest, but only in so far as the bubble wrapping is the appearance of modesty. She peers, opening the cellular curtain that surrounds her in order to take not of her body’s appearance for what seems to be the first time.
Mamhoud, Dunia's husband, becomes ever stricter, asking her to put her hair up when she goes out and asking her not to dance anymore. Eventually, as you might've guessed, following Yasmine's excision, a fight with Mamhoud, she flees her own apartment where he is now living, taking Yasmine with her, and winds up in the guest house where Beshir lives. There she discovers sensuality, she dresses in the garb of Beshir’s lover, the woman who runs the hotel, and enters his room, shaking the many gold bracelets on her left arm that Beshir is accustomed to hearing from his love. She steps into the role, breaking all tradition, marital vows, everything, to discover, or more accurately, pursue something taboo, and more importantly, something direct and real.
Dunia’s entrance into a sensual realm seems to reverberate in her dance. Her teacher says that there is equilibrium of the universe when you dance and that equilibrium is present through all the axes of the body from north to south, east to west front and back. It is only then, when she enters the room in garb, and the professor tells her "never dress as another, never disguise yourself, never wear another's makeup" that this seems to become a reality. The axes have realigned themselves because she has begun to live her life according to her own rules, even if she stumbles a bit in a dress that's too long for her. Dunia, in a sense, realizes her Gender on two levels, not only the ascribed gender as a social relation but a mental or internal understanding of that gender based on her ability to make decisions that help her identify with her inherent gender[9].
Dance, on the order of social interaction, and according to Dunia’s teacher, is a balance between heaven and Earth. One hand is arched toward the heavens, the other channels power into the ground. The posture that Dunia assumes is that of a whirling dervish in the midst of a dhikr. Knowledge moves from Allah, through Dunia and into the Earth. The hand gestures are similar to medieval painting, especially the depiction of Plato and Aristotle in Raphael’s
To be caught between these fires, the past and the present, between religious prescriptions and personal desire are addressed by modern Arab film makers as they struggle with the price of surrender. The medium of film allows for a critical meditation on these problems, however, in order to be critical the story must live within the tradition as Adonis says, it can not be an outsider in its judgment and criticism.
The struggle couldn’t be more eloquently illustrated than in the 2005 Iranian film Café Transit by Kambuzia Partovi’s. Reyhan is a woman that seems to be caught in the world of Sharia while living on the Iranian border with
Reyhan isn't from this area, nor does she have any intention of marrying
In addition running the café, Reyhan begins to take in strays of all kinds including a young Russian girl running away from the war in
The narrative plot of the film is told through a kind of "remembering" and "witness" to the magic of Reyhan created through the eyes of the young Russian girl and Zakario a Greek Trucker who falls in love with Reyhan. There is a mystic quality to the food and the scenes of her cooking, chopping vegetables, grilling eggplants and potatoes, plates of steaming basmati rice and saffron with heaps of lamb. The film fits into that long tradition of "foodie" cinema punctuated by such gems as Big Night, Babbette's Feast, The Dinner Party, Mystic Pizza, Chocolate, Water For Chocolate, Eat Drink Man Woman, Fried Green Tomatoes, Vatel and maybe and the delightfully perverse, The Cook The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.
The climax of the film and its virtual end are a kind of beacon of hope. Reyhan goes to the café across the road from
Bibliography:
Books:
Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id), An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans: Catherin Cobham, Texas University Press,
Darwish, Mahmoud, Memory for Forgetfulness:
Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, The Rebel’s Silhoutte, Univ of Massachusetts Press,
Jung, C. G., The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, No. 9, Pt. 1,
Kowan, Jane K., Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990
McGrane, Bernard, The Un-TV and then 10 MPH Car, The Small Press,
Salih, Tayeb, The Wedding of Zein, Heinemann Education Books, Arab Author Series
Films:
Ahlaam, Mohamed Al Daradji,
Bled Number One, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche,
Café Transit (Border Café),
Dunia (Kiss Me Not On The Eyes), Jocelyn Saab,
Heaven’s Doors, Imad &
Other films seen, considered but not directly cited:
I know I’m not Alone, Michael Franit, 2005 (Iraq/Palestine Documentary)
Occupation 101, Abdallah & Sufyan Omeish, 2006 (
The Blood of my Brother, Andrew Berends, 2005 (
[1] Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id), An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans: Catherin Cobham, Texas University Press,
[2] “The authorities viewed the mystical elements in these movements as constituting an attack on the law and practice of islam; this was because they made a distinction between ‘the evident’ (al-zahir) and ‘the hidden’ (al-batin), or between ‘the law’ and ‘the truth’, asserting that knowledge and truth come from ‘te hidden’, hence the possibility of achieving a kind of unity or union between God and existence and between God and man.” Adonis pg. 76
[3] San Francisco Arab Film Festival, 2006
[4] Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, pg. 84
[5] C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, No. 9, Pt. 1,
[6] Tayeb Salih, The Wedding of Zein, Heinemann Education Books, Arab Author Series
[7] The French movement of naturalism in cinema that evolved a new style of documentary film making, the rough translation means "cinema of truth" or from the Russian progenitor of the movement 'kino-pravda'.
[8] Bernard McGrane, The Un-TV and then 10 MPH Car, The Small Press,
“A spectre is haunting the mirrors of the modern world, the spectre of advertising. The genius of cinema, Frederico Fellini, once said in an interview: “Each person’s face is the perfect expression of the being of that person.” How far is that from the established way of seeing ruled by our advertising culture! Instead of seeing our self or someone else for who they are we see them for what they look like.”
[9] Jane K. Kowan, Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990, citing Edwin Ardener’s 1975 essay Belief and the Problem of Women: “The study of gender relations entails at least two levels of analysis of gender as a thought construct or category that helps us to make sense out of particular social worlds and histories; and of gender as a social relation that enters into and partially constitutes all other social relations and activities.” (Kowan, Pg. 8)
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Monday, December 04, 2006
Friday, December 01, 2006
Danny D. Drunk & Bashing Bush
Ok, not only is Danny DeVito drunk off his ass, while on the View, he bashes Bush in the process, which is all a little humorous considering how wrecked he is and that it was Clooney who got him that way...
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