Foto Friday – Retrospective for fashion-forward Mula Eshet

January 20, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, design, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Pop Culture, Profiles 

In our time, photo manipulation has become as much a part of fashion photography as the photographers themselves. Without Photoshop, a new photo exhibition, opening this week at Holon’s Beit Meirov Art Gallery, takes that concept to task, presenting works from the 60s, 70s, and 80s by fashion photographer Mula Eshet. In those times, as the title implies, photographers worked hard to present the camera lens with the most arresting and interesting scenarios because there were no second chances.

In a radio interview today, Eshet said that he, together with his wife, the artist Dalia Eshet, always tried to find unusual locations and tell a story that expressed thought and originality. Venues like the Dead Sea, the zoo, the streets of Tel Aviv and even the Lebanon War were his backdrops. The couple served as stylists, makeup artists, directors, producers, designers — even model scouts, as there were no modeling agencies when they first started.

Eshet: “In the pre-modeling agency days, the relationship between fashion houses and myself was direct. Entire collections were sent to my studio and from that moment on until I got the photo I wanted I dealt with finding the models, designing and producing the image (including location and accessories) — and ‘decorating’ the model (the term ‘styling’ didn’t exist [in Israel])”.

Dalia Eshet: “He loved select the ones that came with a background in dance and movement. The model’s personality was an important component expressed in his photography”.

The exhibition presents photographs of those personalities, including Israel’s leading fashion models of the period, such as Penina Rosenblum circa 1972, before she became Israel’s most famous cosmetics queen / reality show / hoochie mama / ex-Knesset member…

Heli Goldberg went on to an acting career – including one of her best-known roles as a shopping cart bashing pudding thief in “The Battle For Milky” commercial…

The amazing Michaela Berko, Israel’s first 80s supermodel export (who recently paid homage to her famous Vogue cover on the cover of Israel’s La-Isha magazine)…

Exotic Tami Ben-Ami, who lived a supermodel’s life before they gave it a name. She dated wildly popular basketball player Aulcie Perry and was Gottex’s first house model. Sadly, she died of cancer in 1995 at just 40 years old.

The exhibition photos were selected from tens of thousands of images saved by the Eshets over the years, published in Israeli fashion magazines, catalogs, posters, ads and more. Definitely worth checking out, as is this report about Mula Eshet in his heyday.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Old Israeli songs

January 15, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Music, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, tv 

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.

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Foto Friday – Tal Menkes’ Dreadful Delights

January 13, 2012 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, Blogging, design, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, Israeliness, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Profiles 

Tal Menkes is a copywriter at advertising agency Mccann Erickson, Tel-Aviv, Israel. In addition to his day job of penning award-winning ads, Menkes’ fevered brain works overtime several times a week to create Mutzar Ayom, a photoblog of seemingly useful yet cheerfully useless objects.

The name takes the hackneyed shopping channel phrase mutzar ha-yom, “product of the day”, and replaces it with the word ayom, meaning “horrible”. And indeed, many of the products are in fact, delightfully dreadful examples of visual wordplay.

Some of the ideas are universal in nature — others are unmistakably Israeli, for example, this toy soldier armed with mother’s cooking…

Water concentrate, as opposed to the ubiquitous sugary red mitz petel, so ingrained in the Israeli child’s psyche — and the Israeli child’s teeth!

A reversed three-fer electric adaptor…

A floor squeegee that actually gets into corners…

And my personal favorite, the real and original dubon coat.

Menkes also runs a Mutzar Ayom Facebook page in which followers are invited to comment on recent postings and share their own imaginary product ideas. Who knows, some might even make it into production — after all, if the Crembox can be an actual product fulfilling an actual need, then anything’s possible.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Yaffa Yarkoni

January 8, 2012 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, coexistence, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Movies, Music, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, tv, War 

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?”

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Nostalgia Sunday – Riding the waves

December 11, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, education, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, Social Justice, Sports, Travel, War 

Israel’s Lee Korzits won the gold medal this past weekend at the Sailing World Championships in Perth, Australia. Her achievement, along with Gal Fridman’s Olympic gold medal and Shahar Zubari’s bronze, is remarkable on its own. Even more so, given how new pro surfing is to our young country. And, like most things Israeli, it started with a dream.

Before surfboards arrived on our shores, there was the hasakeh, a sort of platform on which lifeguards would stand and paddle. Used from at least the 1930s onwards, there are several theories as to how this banana-shaped wood vessel came into being: one that it was used by Arab fishermen, another that it was based on a 1926 design by legendary surfer Tom Blake.

Its use by the Israeli Navy was immortalized in song in 1972.

Hasakeh

Riding the waves on a hasakeh, however, was not surfing. According to an online essay about the History of Surfing in Israel, that began with Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, an American surfer and physician visited Israel in 1956. Wikipedia states that he volunteered for the Israeli army during the Suez Canal crisis but was rejected. Nonetheless, during his year-long stay, he found happiness on the beaches of Tel Aviv where he conceived of a dream: to found the first Olympic surfing team from the young state of Israel. Paskowitz imported six long-boards imprinted with the Israeli flag and began scouting the beach for potential talent and for someone to manage the project.

“…he arrived on Frishman Beach, [where] he found a lifeguard named Shamai Kancepolsky, also known as Topsea, and presented the idea to him. Says [Topsea's son] Nir Almog, ‘There was an immediate chemistry between them and my father decided to take on the project.’

‘At that time, lifeguards caught waves using hasakehs alone. Dorian gave them lessons and slowly, the lifeguard booth gang began surfing. In those days, [before breakers were built] Israel had high waves that broke on the shore itself… and going into the sea to surf was considered an act of bravery bordering on insanity…”

“A few years passed and the gang gained experience… but there was still no Israeli representation abroad. Dorian [Paskowitz] returned a second time, bringing a load of surfboards with him that were distributed among the new members.”

“Nir Almog adds, ‘In the Sixties, a huge storm damaged the storeroom where the surfboards were stored, and broke some of them to bits. After that, my dad decided to restore one of the big ones and shortened it to 1.80 meters. I was the only one in Israel with a shortboard.”

“In the early Seventies, a paratrooper commander by the name of Yair told Topsea that the army used a material — a aerated plastic called polyurethane foam — made by a company in Haifa. The material was similar to that used to make surfboards. Yair raised the possibility of manufacturing surfboards made of this material… Topsea and Nir began trying to design surfboards… and began a small surfboards producing industry. Most were rented out, and so a new generation entered into surfing…”

Topsea managed a small workshop on Hilton Beach and, along with renting out Hasakehs, designed surfboards. He, his wife Naomi — Israel’s first female surfer — and their children, all became lifelong surfers.In 1977, son Nir founded Almog Surfboards, Israel’s first pro surfboard company. Topsea co-founded the Israel Surfing Association in 1986.

The sport has continued to grow in popularity; according to the Encyclopedia of Surfing, “Israel is home to about 15 surf shops and 10,000 surfers”.

Paskowitz, by the way, gave up practicing medicine to become a professional surfer. He and his family founded and run Surf Camps and are known as The First Family of Surfing. In August 2007, he founded Surfing 4 Peace together with his son David (along with Israeli surfer Arthur Rashovan and eight-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater) to deliver surfboards to the surfing community in Gaza.

A wonderful online photo archive, can be found at the Topsea Israel Surfing Center website. Topsea’s youngest son Orian runs the center, carrying on the tradition and legacy of his father. The Center also hosts a YouTube channel where there are more videos about the legendary Shamai “Topsea” Kancepolsky and the history of surfing in Israel.

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