Nostalgia Sunday – Al Bano Carrisi
Filed under: Art, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Music, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles
Israeli culture is made up of subcultures that coexist but are not necessarily aware of one another. For example: this past weekend, a very famous singer packed not one but two auditoriums with adoring fans and the story went completely unreported by the mainstream Israeli press, Hebrew and English alike.
No matter. For the record, Al Bano Carrisi was in Israel and if the name doesn’t ring a bell, then you either aren’t 1. a survivor of the Europop Seventies, 2. Italian, or 3. Russian.
But if you are one of the aforementioned three, then the name Al Bano elicits cries of joy and sighs of nostalgia.
Without going into the details of how it happened, last night I found myself a member of Al Bano’s backstage entourage at the concert in Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium. The night before, he had packed ‘em in at the Haifa Auditorium. This was not his first trip to Israel. He’s toured here before and — due to popular demand — will likely be here again.
This is why: Russians love Al Bano’s singing and Al Bano loves singing. In the Sixties and Seventies, Al Bano was a crowd-pleasing singer of sentimental songs, so famous in his home country that he opened for the Rolling Stones on their 1967 Italian tour. He participated in the San Remo Music Festival and Eurovision Song Contest and together with wife Romina Powell (daugher of actor Tyrone Powell) won both competitions in the Eighties. In the Nineties he turned to opera and even stood in for Luciano Pavarotti, singing alongside Plácido Domingo and José Carreras in their Three Tenors performance.
He also sued Michael Jackson for plagiarism. He didn’t win but still, how great is that? You can read about that and more about his storied career here.
Somehow during his career, Al Bano’s music managed to slip through a chink in the Iron Curtain. And so, although today he lives the life of a gentleman farmer and vintner, a few times a year Al Bano ventures out on tour, performing in countries with large Russian emigre populations who are wild for Al Bano.
Yesterday’s audience turned out in all their lacquered, manicured, hair-sprayed, sequined and fur-trimmed finery (PETA has no place at a Russian event). The majority were middle aged and up but that doesn’t mean they were tame. Not by a long shot. Between almost every song, women climbed, bounded or hobbled onto the stage with bouquets for their idol, as is the Russian tradition. And once on stage, they serenaded him, got his autograph and even had the backup singers take their picture.
Al Bano reveled in every moment he had with his audience — he loves connecting with the crowd by talking directly to them — and they responded with waves of affection. He opened with a few transliterated words in Hebrew and Russian. Before singing the song “Nostalgia” he explained that he’d had a long-standing songwriting collaboration with journalist and lyricist Willy Molcho, a Jew whose daughter now lives in Israel. And for his third ovation — “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” from Verdi’s Nabucco — he dedicated it to the audience. They wept.
And that’s the thing about seeing a master showman with four-and-a-half decades of performing experience, a true creature of the stage — his music might not be to my taste but just watching him command the crowd was an unforgettable experience.
Standing backstage after the show, it turned out that in addition to the Russian-Israeli majority, (and the Italian-Israeli minority) there were also members of another subculture present: sabra Israeli doctors who had studied medicine in Italy and — as one M.D. put it to us — spent their nights burning the midnight oil with Al Bano’s music on the radio, playing in the background.
The good doctors wanted express their gratitude by taking him out to dinner. He wasn’t able to but clearly, given the love his Israeli fans have him, Al Bano Carrisi could dine out every night this week in Tel Aviv if he wanted to.
Here’s Al Bano and Romina Powell singing their 1981 hit Felicita.
Ben gets married in Israel
Filed under: Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Movies, Pop Culture, tv
The happy couple (Photo by Riccardo Savi/Getty Images)
After a long ‘discussion’ of comments about whether people would or wouldn’t be interested in bumping into Tom (too nuts as a Scientologist), Denzel (liked by all) or Ryan (most couldn’t decide whether it was Ryan Gosling or Ryan Seacrest), it was added that the wedding they were attending was that of Ben Silverman, former co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and an Emmy-winning executive producer of shows such as The Office, Ugly Betty and The Biggest Loser.
So it seems that Silverman was marrying his longtime girlfriend, Jennifer Cuoco, in a destination wedding in the holy land. They got engaged last year on a golf course, and for whatever reason, decided to get married here. I’m thinking that it had to be a good party, given that this is a guy who once partied with caged lions. He’s also the one who’s been gently mocked on “30 Rock” as the character Devon Banks, an amusingly slimy NBC executive played by Will Arnett.
Well, mazal tov to Ben and Jennifer. May you live happily ever after.
Fellow mourners
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life
From the movie, 'Shiva'
I’d felt that way earlier in the week, as my boys’ ganenet was sitting shiva for her father, which meant, practically, that the gan was closed for several days. Clearly, not the easiest situation following Chanukah vacation but of course nothing could be done about it. Yet when she came back home and to work after being away for ten days and was telling me about the last days of her father’s illness and ensuing shiva, I felt closer to her than I’d felt in the last three months of having known her, because I knew what she was going through, having experienced it myself.
I was thinking about that on Friday after finishing my weekly grocery shopping. We were leaving the store, me with my cart and one of my boys in tow, when I stopped to buy some flowers from the guy who always sells outside our favorite local store. As I picked out a bunch of anemones, calaniyot, I noticed that the flower guy had grown a scruffy beard and was wearing a kippah, not his usual accoutrements. When I asked him about the beard, he told me that his wife had died two weeks ago and this was his first time back ‘at work.’
What do you say? I offered the usual words of sympathy, and said I hoped he would find some sense of relief in his mourning. Just words, because, really, what can I, a stranger, offer to that kind of loss? But I was struck by the fact that I had known he was in mourning, without saying a word, just by the scruffy beard on his face and the kippah on his head.
If anything, I was glad that mourning necessitated him, in his practice of it, to stop shaving for the 30 days of mourning and wear a kippah. Those physical signs let me know what was happening with him, and allowed me to offer my condolences. That’s what community is all about.
Foto Friday – Local Testimony 2010
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, coexistence, design, education, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, News, Picture of the Week, Politics, Pop Culture, Travel, War
Local Testimony, the country’s largest and most prestigious annual exhibition of international and Israeli press photography, opened this month at the Eretz Israel Museum.
Photo: Mohammed Muheisen, Daily Life category
The exhibit presents images from the past year of war and peace, politics and society, culture and art, nature and the environment, sports, portraiture, multimedia presentations and more.
Photo: Shlomi Nissim, Nature category
The exhibit also includes a special focus on the work of its curator, photographer Galia Gur-Zeev, who notes, “As the curator of Local Testimony 2010, I regard this as a chance to compare this year’s photos with those of previous years that deal with the same topic.”
Photo: Rina Castelnovo, Politics category
“Press photos always appear together with a mediating text which imposes meaning and interpretation that are not free of manipulation. Separating a photo from the text enables freedom from verbal linearity and a transition to the photograph’s timelessness.”
Photo: Amir Cohen, Daily Life category
“Now, the documentary photo is open to new observation, new interpretation, and the suspension of our gaze.”
Photo: Moti Milrod, Portrait category
Local Testimony runs through January 15, 2011, and is open till 10:00pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Goats on a hill
The Alon Road near Mitzpe Hagit
A few weeks ago, on a trip to the Dead Sea, we picked up a friend of our youngest son.
Nesya lives in an outpost deep in the West Bank. It is so tiny we couldn’t find it on any map until I set Google to maximum zoom and slowly traced a winding road north from the settlement of Kfar Adumim. The resulting satellite image revealed an enclave of just eight homes.
The entrance to Mitzpe Hagit, which was established in 2001 and named after Hagit Zavitsky, who was killed in Wadi Qelt in 1995, is more like a gravel driveway than an actual road. The houses are arranged along a single street with a fenced off “zimmer” (Hebrew/German for “country inn”) at the end. Maariv wrote about the latter, pointing out that the bed and breakfast’s owner had built a semi-Olympic sized pool overlooking the Jordan Valley.
Up until now I had read about these hilltop encampments but never seen one up close. The homes were not the corrugated shacks I’d imagined, but neither were they proper buildings. Nesya’s house consisted of a modified caravan on stilts, a broken window facing out and a sort of half-completed wooden awning that reminded me of a Tanzanian safari lodge. Around the back there was a large yard where 20 some goats lived with an equal number of turkeys, chickens and menacing, unceasingly barking dogs.
Nesya told us how she wakes up at 4:30 AM to milk the goats (taking a few squirts for her own breakfast) before catching a school bus from Kfar Adumim into Jerusalem. The family makes its own cheese and eats the eggs from the motley mix of fowl.
It all sounded like an idyllic life – nestling high on a mountain, living one with the land, organic and serene – except for the inseparable politics that have deemed Nesiya and her family a statistic who, depending on the narrative you choose, are either an obstacle to peace or patriotic pioneers.
Driving home, we continued on the road, passing Ma’aleh Michmas and several other settlements of varying sizes before reaching a very large, very red sign that warned in utterly unsubtle terms out that it was forbidden for Israelis to continue – we had reached Ramallah. A sharp left and we were in the Jerusalem suburb of Pisgat Ze’ev. Twenty more minutes and we were home.
No matter where you are in the political spectrum of the Middle East, you owe it to yourself to see what a hilltop outpost in the West Bank really looks like. While you’re there, you might spend a night in the zimmer. And be sure to say hi to Nesya and her goats.
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