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A cheesy metaphor

More about food. Sort of.

In this clever, tongue-in-cheek video by second-year film students at Hebrew University’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, the faces of an assortment of familiar Israeli and imported food products — the Gerber baby, the Gad cheese grandfather, the Kinder chocolate child, the Quaker men — talk amongst themselves in the fridge and cabinet about the smelly Gad tzafatit cheese in their midst. I found it amusing that they chose tzfatit — such a quintessential Israeli cheese, at least to me, that was once sold in salty, crumbly chunks, sliced off a large, damp mound from the corner makolet — as the smelly culprit of the fridge.

As their ‘owner’ removes the cheese, tastes it and proceeds to throw it out, he moves around a very Israeli kitchen, from the pullout drawer of oils and vinegars to the floor laid with classic Persian carpet tiles.

But the point of the video, says one commentator, is to recognize the metaphor of the movie. The peak in life, is not necessarily the refrigerator shelf, where it appears that everyone should be situated. But rather, the garbage pail, which may represent the margins of society or a greater mix of products, may offer more self-expression, and, more happiness.

It’s good to get the inner meaning, but you can just appreciate the clever aspects of this student project that has already been viewed more than 30,000 times.

Nostalgia Sunday – Old Israeli songs

Last week was a busy one in the world of Israeli musical nostalgia. David Sela, a prolific online archivist and proprietor of the wonderful Nostal site, launched his latest labor of love: Radio Nostalgia an online music channel playing Israeli hits of yesteryear, 24/7.

In an interview with Israel Hayom, Sela stated that he and music editor Yoram Siman-Tov, had selected a library of about 4,500 Israeli oldies going back at least 25 years — 25 being the cut-off date (or is that the starting point?) for being considered an “oldie”. Each year, the station plans to add another year’s worth of old songs to the database.

Sela also said he was reviewing several proposals for radio broadcasts as well.

The Nostal website itself houses tens of thousands of images, some 1,000 videos, hundreds of audio clips, as well as scanned newspapers, magazines, posters, postcards, books, toys, trinkets and other ephemera. Sela stated that the site had visitors from 132 countries and estimated that 19 percent of users are Israelis living abroad.

Another great source of old Israeli songs is the YouTube channel called, not surprisingly, OldIsraeliSongs. It’s run by record company NMC United Entertaiment, which holds the rights to the old Hed Arzi music catalog.

The 90s may be less than 25 years away, though not by much, but enough time has elapsed to give music aficionados some historical perspective. Radio host and pop music historian Yoav Kutner has deemed that decade the most important in Israeli rock and produced a five-part series for Channel 8, The Albums, about five seminal works: Simanei Hulsha by Berry Sakharov, Plonter by Rami Fortis, Zman Sukar by Eifo Ha-Yeled, and the debut albums of Ziknei Tsfat and Eviatar Banai.

Following is a Ynet report on the series which features period clips as well as interviews from the launch party with Israeli rockers like Aviv Geffen (“We all lived on Sheinkin Street… there was a Sixties vibe in the air”), Gilad Segev (“I was most influenced recently by Berry Sakharov in working on my latest album”), Chemi Rudner (“Being unfashionable is the most fun”), and performances by Rudner and by a now-religious Eviatar Banai.

All agree that what happened at that time can’t be replicated — they cite commercial hype and the reality-TV-ization of the music industry, and that includes Geffen who is currently one of the judges on the Israeli version of The Voice.

But, as Rudner says, there’s still a place for artists who create for the love of it.

NOTE: If you can’t see the embedded video, click here to view.

Explaining flavor

There are times, many times when I’m reading an Ha’aretz article about something — whatever — and I’m just stumped about what they’re trying to tell me, the reader. Consider the piece in last weekend’s Haaretz Magazine, “Creative, But is it Edible?”, about how — I think — local chefs go to incredible lengths to come up with innovative dishes. It takes a while for the writer to get to the idea that local chefs, mostly Tel Aviv chefs, of course, are aspiring to be the kind of chefs that create from scratch, not merely copying or interpreting but making new flavors, textures and, eventually, recipes. It takes a while because the piece begins with chefs in Spain, and while that’s interesting, it’s not clear what their connection is to us.

Anyway. I was pleased to find that they quoted Asaf Granit, one of the chefs from the very popular Machneyuda, which is in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market and is considered one of Israel’s top restaurants right now. Unusual, really, as Jerusalem is seldom considered the have the best of anything trendy in this country. We may not care, but, sigh, I guess I do. So his contribution to this piece about coming up with unusual dishes was the following:

“Last week, there was a married couple and four young women here for a bachelorette party. We quickly got into a very interesting discussion and I decided to prepare a dish of beef tartare for them – right in their hands,” says Granit. “We put on their hands a layer of beef, onion, parsley and capers, all minced. We squeezed on some fresh lemon, drizzled a little olive oil, and all they had to do was lick their fingers.”

And down in Ashdod, a flourishing seaside city, Balzac’s Nati Shafrir (whose restaurant is possibly named after a very popular restaurant in NYC) is thinking about serving a dessert in a glass ashtray (you think there may just a little bit too much smoking around here?): He’s working on an “edible version of cigarette ash. It will be made of roasted coconut or cinnamon and cloves.”

Lovely. And, finally, a quote from Itai Rogozinsky, who owns the Vaniglia ice cream parlor chain and is most proud of his frozen yogurt made with rosewater, roasted pistachios and apricot jam, kind of a takeoff of mahalabia, a pudding dessert that is popular in many Arab countries. How does this boy who says the yogurt is “a nostalgic reminder of his childhood in Kochav Yair” — a suburban town east of Kfar Saba that has been around about 25 or so years, created by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to solidify the Green Line — know about mahalabia? Probably from the excursions his family used to take to nearby Nablus, Kalkiya and Tulkarm, three Arab towns in the vicinity.

It’s all good, drawing from memories and good flavors to create new tastes. And, interestingly, way down in the article an unnamed source commented that Israeli chefs just travel abroad to the chicest restaurants and come back to copy what they ate there. Would have liked a little more on that idea. Just a little context would help, oh Ha’aretz editors.

Nostalgia Sunday – Yaffa Yarkoni

It would be remiss of me if I did not mention the death of singer Yaffa Yarkoni at the age of 86 last week.

The papers, both local and international, reported on her passing — she was indeed the symbol of the War of Independence generation and a singer of some of Israel’s most beloved songs.

But she was also loved for being a fixture on the Israel Song Festival and Children’s Song Festival circuits, in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively.

For many years, she was an unofficial cultural ambassador for Israel, who charmed visiting international celebrities like Sean Connery, Cliff Richard and Sammy Davis Junior.

Like many women performers with a strong personality and powerful stage presence she, like fellow diva Shoshana Damari, inspired a generation of local drag queens.

Most of all, Yarkoni was a dyed-in-the-wool performer who was born to be onstage. In later years, she came out strongly as a member of Israel’s peace camp. In this interview, she covers topics ranging from cataloging her gowns, (so that she would never wear the same dress twice to a given venue), to face lifts (she didn’t have one and shows the back of her ears to prove it). She also describes the time she went down to Sinai to perform for the troops and ended up giving an impromptu performance to an onlooker who happened to be an Egyptian soldier on the other side of the line. “On the way back, I said to myself, ya allah, maybe we can end this war simply with song?”

Nostalgia Sunday – A look way back

It’s the first day of 2012. A good day to check what was happening in Israel a decade ago, courtesy of the wonderful Wayback Machine, an online historical archive of preserved web pages going back to 1996. The Wayback Machine crawls the Internet, taking “snapshots” of websites which are added to the archive. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can then type in a URL, select a date range, and view the archived versions.

On December 16th, 2001, when Wayback Machine visited The Jerusalem Post, the headlines were concerned with an IDF crackdown on the Palestinian Authority in the wake of shelling from Gaza, a falling Cost Price Index and relations with PA Chairman Yasser Arafat. JDate was the dating site of choice for Jpost readers.

The lead story on Ynet on December 17th, 2001, (only available in Hebrew at that time), was about victims of a shooting attack. Other stories included the opening of a second McDonald’s franchise in Jerusalem and the Bank of Israel’s fight against forged checks while online messaging pioneer ICQ offered up its ultimate tip guide and Ynet ruminated over who would be its choice for Person of the Year. Cupid.co.il was the premier dating site for Hebrew-speaking Israelis at that time.

That same day, December 17th, 2001, Haaretz also ran the story about the West Bank attack victims. US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said the US had no plans to invade Iraq and Arafat called for an end to violence against Israel. (It must have been true ’cause it was in the papers!) And JCupid, the English-language version of Cupid.co.il, was offering an end to lonely singledom.

Wayback didn’t crawl Globes around January 2002. It visited Globes on November 8, 2001, at which time the financial news headlines were concerned with, among other things, the acquisition of cement block maker Ytong, the public sector workers strike and the short-lived reopening of troubled Phoenicia Glass Works. There were no dating ads; the one advertiser was a bank.

Israelity didn’t get started until 2005. When it did, it looked like this:

And what of our own Israel21c? Unfortunately, due to its archive structure, the Wayback Machine isn’t able to reconstruct its “snapshot” — good thing I made a screenshot some time ago for another posting!

The Wayback Machine is operated by the Internet Archive, which collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. It’s great fun to go in and crawl around.

 

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