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Oud v’Rikoud

The annual Jerusalem International Oud Festival has become the leading event of its kind on the ethnic music calendar. Now in its tenth year, the festival, which kicks off next week, lasts for 16 days and includes shows in both Jerusalem and Nazareth. But those of us fortunate to have attended last week’s “Boogie Nights” dance party got a special sneak preview.

Boogie is a Jerusalem institution. A twice-monthly feel good free movement extravaganza, Boogie is a place where you don’t have to worry about your dance steps or dance partner. You just flail your arms around, hop up and down and twirl to the beat which emphasizes energetic world music rather than the disco or trance found at more traditional dance clubs and bars.

This edition of Boogie featured an hour-long Oud performance in a separate room. The tight group of three actually performed on guitar, darbuka and a strange breathy sounding flute. The crowd lounged on yoga mats arranged haphazardly across the floor. Many clutched cups of Chai tea, a popular Boogie beverage – in keeping with its international flavor.

The oud is a strange-sounding (to Western ears) kind of Middle Eastern lute. It owes it origins to the Arab world but there are now practitioners from Turkey, Spain, India, and Greece. To mix it up even more, the opening night of the official festival next week features veteran Israeli rockers Nikmat HaTraktor (The Tractor’s Revenge) performing oud and electric guitar versions of Jewish piyutim (medieval poetry).

As for the funky rhyming name of the Boogie special evening – “Oud v’Rikoud” – the latter is Hebrew for dance. I wonder what they’ll call the next Boogie in two weeks which features another eclectic special event: an African drumming workshop and performance. I’ll most certainly be there and let you know.

Going to the zoo

I’ve been waiting for the right moment to introduce my baby boys to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, and given that their ears perk up every time they hear a dog bark, bird chirp or see a bird cross their path, I figured the time had come. Enough with reading about animals and faking a tiger’s snarl; we had to actually see some live animals.

The wait was well worth it — as is the annual membership which varies for singles, couples, couples with one child, two children, etc. — as they were equally enthusiastic about all the animals we saw, from ducks and flamingos to meerkats and yes, a couple of tigers. They both were slightly flipped out by the goats who swarmed their stroller in the ‘pinat chai’ (petting zoo), one trying to grab the remnant of Lev’s cookie out of his small fist. But once the goats butted out, it was on to bigger thrills, like stroking a sheep and watching turtles crawl around their enclosure.

The choices of animals to visit seems endless on that first trip to the zoo — elephants! zebras! monkeys! And what I also liked is the coexistence effect of the place; on a Thursday morning, the place was pleasantly full with ultra Orthodox boys on a school trip, Arab elementary school children in their red sweater uniforms, also on a school trip, as well as Arab high schoolers and similarly-aged Jewish high school kids. And just to prove the zoo’s coexistence effect, all signs next to the animals’ enclosures are written in Hebrew, Arabic, English and, often, Yiddish.

30seczoo01.MP3We’re [all] going to the zoo…

Tel Aviv battle of the bands

It was an opening line that did not forebode well.

“You picked an interesting night. Almost all the entries are metal,” said Bryan Steiner, greeting me at the bar of the Barby club in Tel Aviv Sunday night.

Steiner was referring to the 16 musical acts which were set to perform two songs a piece in the hopes of going on to the Israel finals of the Global Battle of the Bands Challenge. Steiner, the head of Blue Sun Records, along with promoter Carmi Wurtman and Barby owner Shaul Mizrahi, organized Israel’s participation in the event for the first time.

Over a dozen qualifying heats have taken place in October and November throughout the country with scores of Israeli bands vying to head to the finals taking place on Wednesday. The Israeli champion then goes on to the world finals in London on December 13, competing against the finalists from 36 other countries, with the winner receiving an artist development package worth $100,000.

Along with Sderot-based musician and producer Avi Vaknin, and Ziv Goland, a musical arranger for Dana International, I was asked to be one of the three judges for the event. However, unlike the high-profile American Idol model of in-your-face judging, we were allotted comfortable back-of-the-room tables and a scorecard to rate the entries from 1-20 and to provide written constructive criticism.

Battle of the bands have taken place for as long as there have been rock groups. Even in the mid-1960s, local high school bands would perform against each other at sock hops and on TV talent shows. One of the highlights of my college education in the late 1970s in Boston was attending the annual Rock & Roll Rumble held at the venerable punk club The Rat, where young hopefuls would wield “guitars like switchblades” in order to lay claim to the title of Beantown’s best band.

Turns out that not much has changed in 30 years. Despite the digital age of downloads and the gradual disappearance of CDs, the fading on the radio of guitar-based rock & roll in favor of studio wizardry hip hop, pop and dance music, and music in general receding as a number one priority among the social network-crazed youth culture, there’s still a lot of guitar slingers out there – of all ages.

The Barby was swarming with a mostly rambunctious teen audience – many of them bused in from Modi’in, where a good number of the competing acts hailed. The high school-aged entries, which made more than half of the 16 contestants stood in contrast to the half-dozen or so ‘older’ bands of adults, including one bass player who was even older than me, and a singer-songwriter, Yasmine Ariel who was in an advanced stage of pregnancy.

According to Steiner, amateur and professional musicians were eligible to sign up for the Challenge, with the only requirements being the ‘bands’ consist of two to eight members, all the music is live with no playbacks, and the songs are original compositions and not cover versions.

Regretting the fact I neglected to bring ear plugs, I took my seat, ready to face Steiner’s prognosis of a head banging evening. And indeed, there were a good number of acts – like Rockweiler (guess their genre) and Behind the Sun that looked and sounded like they learned everything about music in the back seat of Wayne and Garth’s car in Wayne’s World. Long hair flying in circular motions to the thunderous beats, they were parodies of a genre invented to be a parody.

Yet, there was something fresh and innocent about it nonetheless, as if despite the years of watching music videos and playing RockBand to get their moves just right, these kids were feeling music’s primal power and creating their own magic, no matter how derivative.

A big revelation for me was how musically tight and well-rehearsed every band was – this was no ‘hey, let’s enter the competition and write a song’ operation. While the lineup was male-dominant, women were represented by two high school bands featuring female singers of the Pat Benatar variety, a third with an incredible 16-year-old female lead guitarist, and the aforementioned Yasmine.

Particularly eye-opening were the school-age musicians, who must have been playing since they were kids and waiting for this day. It was a little sad that they’ve had to latch on to the music that their parents grew up with and many of their moves and riffs are mechanical regurgitations, but it was uplifting to see that another generation has caught the rock and roll bug.

When each band played, some singing in English some in Hebrew, its fans stormed to the front of the stage holding signs, pogo dancing and moshing in a show of solidarity. The audience also received scorecards, and like on American Idol, it was their vote, not the judges which ultimately determined the winner.

My top pick was a young four-piece band called Hageveret Harishona who performed sparkling guitar power pop with precision three-part harmonies . But chosen by the majority and headed to the finals on Wednesday is Spitfire 07, one of the female-led Modi’in high school bands. They were a ‘great for a high school band’ entry, and I gave them high marks for their spunky, arena rock performance and stage presence, while citing their lack of originality.

But they were unsurprisingly the audience favorites, with singer Meit Botton, dressed in Joan Jett black and reaching all the vocal shredding high notes, darting around the stage in various ‘rock chick’ poses.

While it’s unlikely they’ll be headed to London for the international finals, you can be sure the members of Spitfire 07 will keep their victory on Sunday night close to them for the rest of their lives. Even though there’s nothing new under the sun, rock & roll is still alive in Tel Aviv.

The week that was

The pace of news events developing and exploding into headlines is always seemingly propelled by steroids here in Israel. There’s never a minute to rest, and the news addiction that most of the public suffers from isn’t helped any by half hour radio bulletins, that annoying beep beep beep of the hourly news reports and nightly hour-long TV newscasts that are holy in some households.

But even veteran observers are hard pressed to remember a week of news events – aside from wars and intifadas – that rolled in like a tsunami, pushing the previous one off the front page with an ease that is creepy and disconcerting.

First up at the beginning of the week was the disclosure that police had arrested an American immigrant – Yaakov Teitel – a resident of a West Bank outpost on suspicion of murdering two Palestinians in 1997 and carrying out a string of previously unsolved hate attacks against other targets, including planting a pipe bomb outside the home of prominent left-wing Israeli professor Zeev Sternhall which injured him, and sending a bomb package to a family of messianic Jews from Ariel, seriously wounding their 15-year-old son.

This was huge news and the media covered it from every angle, from settlements spawning extremism to questioning whether the Law of Return which enables all Jews to immigrate to Israel should be reconsidered, or at least more stringent.

But no sooner had we started to digest this horrific news, Israelis were presented with something even more uncomprehensible the next day. The police announced they had caught the suspect in the brutal murder of six members of a Russian immigrant family in Rishon Lezion last month. It was considered the worst murder case in Israel’s history, with many pundits speculating that it involved the Russian mafia and a hired killer.

However, police said that the suspect, Damian Karlik, 38, who was arrested with his wife, parents and two other female relatives, killed the Oshrenko family because he had been fired as a waiter a couple months earlier from the family’s restaurant.

Dmitry Oshrenko fired Karlik, who was headwaiter at the Oshrenkos’ high-end restaurant Premier, after accusing him of stealing a bottle of vodka. Karlik said he felt humiliated and began to nurture his hatred for his former boss. Expressing no remorse at the murders, which included two young children, Krilik allegedly bragged to the police that he was a “bad motherfu**er.”

Disoriented at the front pages of our newspapers being turned into True Crimes magazine, we felt things returning to ‘normal’ yesterday with the disclosure of a dramatic high seas capture by Israeli naval commandos off the coast of Cyprus of the “Francop”, an Antigua-flagged freighter packed with 3,000 Iranian rockets and shells headed for Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Related

If it had achieved reaching its destination, the shipment would have provided Hizbullah with almost the entire rocket arsenal they unleashed against Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Israeli sources say the shipment violates not only the UN Security Council resolutions from the 2006 war, but also those that forbid Iran from engaging in any arms exports. More importantly, it shows how Iran is attempting to incite the region, coming a day after Hamas in Gaza tested an Iranian-supplied rocket that has a range to reach Tel Aviv.

But hey, these are headlines that we’re familiar with -Iran, rockets, terror. However, by this morning, I found myself yearning for one of those days when the worst thing that could happen was The York Yankees winning the World Series, or narrow-minded citizens from my home state of Maine repealing same sex marriages. Both of those items are indeed reflections of a sorry state of affairs, but I’ll take them over the world gone crazy pace of news events we’ve had to put up with this week here in Israel.

Bayit banamal

I’m not the first to write about Tel Aviv’s namal, the refurbished port/boardwalk at the northern end of the city. And I must confess a ‘hubati’ (read below) love for strolling along its wooden planks, hillocked in some places to encourage kids on scooters, bikes and skateboards, and with just the right kind of cafes and restaurants along its length. (Although, as my mother pointed out recently, there are not enough benches for just sitting and looking at the sea.)

(’Hubatim’ or a ‘hubati’ — pronounced cho-BA-tim — is someone or those from Holon/Bat Yam. It’s a tongue-in-cheek/somewhat derogatory term for the Tel Aviv version of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, those who don’t actually live in Tel Aviv, but come in from the outskirts to enjoy ‘the big city.’ Another TLV friend of mine has a kindly term for those of us who don’t live in the Big Orange, ‘ambassadors and diplomats.’)

This isn’t an entry about hubatim, however, rather about a societal development that I noticed at the namal. Sure, it’s got the shopping, the restaurants, the event halls and bars. But during the day, besides the ‘ambassadors and diplomats’ strolling along the boardwalk, as well as the tourists and unexplained working-age people who are hanging out rather than working — btw, they must be freelancers — there are many, many moms with babies, pushing strollers and carrying babes in slings. Sure, it’s a nice place to stroll when you’ve got a kvetchy ankle-biter. And the Israeli commercial network is clearly starting to feed into that trend, with a Steimatzky’s for kids, a Shilav (of course), including a lovely playground outside the store, and Dyada, a kind of club for babies and their parents.

It’s all quite baby-friendly, which is a helpful thing when you’re trying to negotiate the real world from the vantage point of a double stroller loaded with two one-year-olds. Then again, all they really wanted to do was crawl after the seagulls.

Photo credit: Debbie Zimelman

Walking with the King – Israeli style

I know that Israelity has written about it in the past, but after a visit to the Elvis Inn for a friend’s 60th birthday party, it’s impossible to resist commenting about it.

An oasis of kitsch from the King right off the Neve Ilan turnoff on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, the Elvis Inn is now an Israeli landmark that should not be missed – especially if you want to go home with an Elvis portable alarm clock or a postcard of Elvis as the baby Jesus, or a Bedouin nomad. It’s the kind of place that John Waters or David Lynch would have thought up for a scene for one of their movies.

The Elvis Inn is actually a restaurant – a garish, American-deco diner at that. You can’t miss the place, with the huge Jurassic Park-like statue of Elvis outside. But rather than serving the traditional cheeseburger and fries – after all, this is Israel – you can get your fries with pargiyot, kebab and any number of grilled Middle Eastern delicacies.

[The music is a taped loop of greatest hits by the King, which I'm sure the staff must be sick of hearing by now. The gift shop is chock full of the Elvis memerobilia described earlier, and the wall and ceilings are jam-filled with photos of 50s Elvis, pre-army Elvis, movie-star Elvis, Las Vegas Elvis, and wall murals of the King's numerous movie rolls. Then there are the statues and figurines throughout the restaurant - magnets for photographs. We went home with an Elvis Inn mug, and a few pilfered Elvis sugar packets.

A visit to the Elvis Inn shouldn't be missed - for a combination of Israeli and American pop culture excess at its most peculiar. Even better if you can make it on the annual commemoration of Elvis's death, when the cadre of Israeli Elvis impersonators converge for an evening of sneering and attempts at Israeli accented "Jailhouse Rocks."

Foto Friday – Reli Avrahami’s “Diary”

Beer Sheva-born Reli Avrahami is one of Israel’s premiere magazine photographers. A new exhibition of her work, “Diary”, will open next week at the Hadassah College in Jerusalem, where she once studied and is now a lecturer.

Avrahami has worked as a freelance portrait photographer since 1986, shooting celebrities, artists and politicians for Israel’s main newspapers and weekend supplements including “Maariv”, “Yediot Aharonot” and “Haaretz” where she is best known for her long-running series of Israeli family portraits.

In “Diary”, Avrahami invites viewers to look in on three generations of her own family: celebrations and tragedies, weddings and funerals, everyday life and unique occasions.

Her daughter – Botticelli curls cascading down her shoulders – en route to a Scout trip…

…the morning of her son’s induction into the IDF…

…her mother, fast asleep in a Netherlands zimmer motel…

or a “Girls Night In” with her sisters and mother.

“Diary” opens at 6:00pm, November 5, 2009 at the Hadassah College, 37 HaNeviim Street, Jerusalem.

Have any lessons been learned from Rabin’s assassination?

Thursday marks the 14th anniversary of the death of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – certainly one of the cataclysmic events of Israel’s short history.

The divisions among the country’s citizens which led to Rabin’s assassination are still very apparent, with venom from both the Right and Left toward each other spouting freely without any attempt to mask the hatred. The Right blames Rabin and his followers on the Left for the failed Oslo process and the Left blames the Right for the environment that enabled an Israeli to take the life of a prime minister.

While most of the country mourns Rabin’s death and marks each anniversary with sadness, there’s a not so small minority who don’t take part in the collective grief and go about their business like any other day. It’s not a holiday that brings the country together.

Still, there are attempts at unity. President Shimon Peres opened the 24 hours of commemoration saying that the former prime minister’s vision of peace will not be abandoned. The state ceremony, held at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, was attended by Rabin family members, ministers, members of Knesset, and students from schools throughout Israel.

“Israel’s young generation has kept in their hearts the knowledge that such a despicable murder mustn’t ever happen again,” said Peres. “When the criminal took Yitzhak’s life, he intended to extinguish all hope for peace as well, but his plot will not succeed.”

Peres added that while peace has many enemies outside of Israel, there are also many skeptics within Israel’s own borders. He added that “Rabin’s assassination delayed the entire process and hampered the diplomatic course, but the understanding between us and our neighbors has grown, and its urgency has not changed.”

Memorial ceremonies will continue Thursday throughout the country, and the state ceremony is scheduled to take place in Mount Herzl cemetery at noon.

I remember leaving my newspaper that night after putting out the Rabin assassination edition thinking that Israel was in mortal danger from within, and wondering if we would survive. 14 years, we have perservered, but still have many lessons left to learn and internalize about what kind of country we want to build here.

Accessorize it

There are now so many accessory designers in Israel that they have their own fair. If you’re in need of a new handbag, belt, jewelry, scarf and whatever else qualifies as a clothing item that adds to your overall outfit, head to the ‘Accessories Shuk’ this weekend, Thursday through Shabbat, October 29-31, at Ganei Hataarucha in Tel Aviv.

With discounts of 20%-30% on the current season, and 60%-80% on previous seasons, deals are clearly to be had. And while I don’t know all the designers who will be present, I can tell you that Or Forbin, whose line of jewelry, Eva Teffner — named for her grandmother — will be there, and she offers some extremely clever and affordable costume jewels. She uses elements of collage, printing on metal and then incorporating that into the earrings, pendants and pins that are part of her inventory.

Ghosts in Israel? Not likely

Israel may be an ancient land, with an ancient, not to mention, bloody history, but despite this, it doesn’t seem to be a land of ghosts.

What with Halloween coming up, I thought I’d do a story on the top 10 hauntings in Israel, expecting to find some fascinating material dating back to biblical times that would scare the pants off even veteran ghost observer Melinda Gordon, AKA Jennifer Love Hewitt. I scoured the web. Then scoured it again. There were many references to ghosts and hauntings – but only the living kind.

“There isn’t a culture of ghosts in Israel,” said an American friend who’d done similar research just a few years ago and also drawn a blank. “They just don’t have a history of it.”

I asked my sabra husband. “Ghosts!” he said, looking baffled. “We don’t have ghosts in Israel!”

But wait a minute. This is the country that spawned Paranormal Activity – supposedly the scariest movie about ghosts around today.

I carried on my research and discovered an article from Ynet last year. Apparently, the research by the German Bertelsmann Foundation showed, only 16 percent of Israelis believe in ghosts and spirits. A pretty low figure that could explain the absence of ghost stories. Compare that to the US, for example, where 48 percent of the population say they believe in ghosts , and a sizable 22 percent say they’ve actually seen or felt a ghost.

Interestingly enough, however, in the same Israeli poll, 45% of participants said they believed in angels.

It would make an interesting research paper to examine why Israelis don’t believe in ghosts. I’m sure it reveals much about the society, since ghost stories are an essential part of most cultures around the world.

Is it because they are well-grounded people with a surprisingly strong sense of optimism (angels!)? Is it because a country that has so many living enemies doesn’t have time to waste thinking about spectral enemies? Or could it be that the country, founded as it is in the wake of the Holocaust, is haunted enough by the very real loss of six million people?

I did come across one haunting – on a base in Israel. See above. Speculation runs from a speck of dust on the screen, to an energy orb, or a dead motorcyclist haunting the road.

And I’d love to hear your ghost stories too. Come on, there must be one or two stories of troubled spirits in Israel.

 

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  Israel is often seen as a place of conflict and strife. In reality there is much more: there's business and research; art and culture; community and family. At ISRAELITY, Israelis blog their daily thoughts, experiences and insights. It's the real Israel, not the media's Israel. It's people living ordinary lives in an extraordinary place.

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