Hassidism at Boombamela
Filed under: A New Reality, Environment, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Music, Pop Culture, Profiles, Religion
A long-time disciple of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and a seasoned grassroots organizer, Michael Golomb used to spend his efforts marching against the Vietnam War. But since moving to Israel along with many of Carlebach’s Hassidim as part of that community’s mid-Seventies exodus from Haight-Ashbury, Golomb has busied himself with spreading a message of love at gatherings, encounter events and festivals – even mainstream, teenybopper-y ones like Boombamela, Shantipi and Beresheet.
Golomb and his crew have helped to organize Tents of Love and Prayer at several of these festivals, with the sub-camp serving as a festival within a festival for many party-goers. According to a statement released this week by director Guy Peleg, Boombalema’s planners love Carlebach-style Judaism because of its emphasis on happiness and love of mankind, making Golomb’s contributions key elements to the eye-opening, pan-spiritualist experience Peleg is trying to forge.
At the festivals, the Tent of Love and Prayer offers kosher food (which is even harder to come by during Passover), prayer services, meditation sessions, low-impact lectures and the like.
But it’s not always easy to keep one’s mind on lofty ideas when corporate sponsorship banners are flying high and scantily clad perky young ones are doing the same. And the mainstream festival circuit has received plenty of criticism in recent years about these trends from the hippie hardcore populace that first provided their critical mass about a decade ago. But Carlebach-style outreach was never afraid of “elevating the sparks” (as the Hassidic masters might have put it) out from the ditches. As The Chicago Tribune did put it back in 2007:
…Carlebach was one of the first emissaries of the Lubavitcher movement, a Hasidic group that pioneered outreach to disaffected Jews in the 1950s. Carlebach found himself particularly drawn to lost souls: drug addicts, runaway young people, the homeless.
Golomb carries this torch proudly, dancing while carrying a Torah scroll into the throngs of drum circle, sunset-hailing revelers at the opening evening of each festival. And it’s nice to see Boombalema’s leadership, which essentially represents the ultimate in the crossroads between mainstream pop culture and new-age (which usually means post-Jewish) spiritualism, appreciating his efforts.
This year’s three-day Boombamela Festival on Nitzanim Beach is set to kick off on April 9, with plans for this year including utilization of solar energy to cut down on electricity waste by half.
Karpel turns Israel on to electro-pop
Since releasing her debut album Nemashim (Freckles) this past summer, singer-songwriter Emily Karpel has been more than preoccupied with the whirlwind that is Israel’s pop machinery, with the disc’s success even raising eyebrows in some unlikely places abroad.
One of the greatest accomplishments of Karpel’s work is the manner in which it has yanked Israeli pop out of complacency. The artist’s ironic-new wave-gogo-girl persona and edgy yet sparse audio aesthetic represent major refreshment in a scene dominated by teenybopper emulators, guitar-folk dinosaurs and club culture postures.
The Jerusalem Post’s Asi Gal recently had the honor of meeting up with Karpel for coffee in Tel Aviv, and he reported on the experience in his typically casual and wry manner.
So what’s with the synth-happy sound? Karpel explains that she’s not alone:
“It’s not a question of choice,” she says earnestly, “this is simply music that I love and that I want to do. I only do things I believe in. Besides, the music I enjoy the most – Asaf Amdursky, The Ivrit and Marioneta Sol – is played by bands that make a different, more ’80s style electro-pop type sound. And they’re succeeding, aren’t they? Change is in the air – I am only one element of it.”
And what next?
“There will definitely be shows, but right now I’m much more interested in getting back into the studio to record my second album. The first was sort of about a lost kid wanting to grow up. I know the second is going to be more mature, but the pop sound is going to stay.”
Nostalgia Sunday – 50 Years of Israeli Club Culture
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, War
Anhedonia is “an inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable life events” and in addition to being the working title for Wood Allen’s “Annie Hall” – it also describes a feeling Israelis wrestle with on a daily basis.
Nissan Shor, is the author of the new book “Dancing With Tears in Their Eyes,” a history of fifty years of dance clubs in Israel. In it, Shor – a music writer turned cable show host – makes a case for the tension between Israel’s often grim security situation, and just wanting to have fun, as unique. 
The book (available only in Hebrew but with lots of pictures that, because of copyright issues, can’t be posted) deals with places that played recorded music only, from so-called Salon Parties held in living rooms in the late 1950s to Dance Nation clubs such as Jerusalem’s Haoman 17 in the late 1990s. It does not, notes Shor, deal with “night clubs or variety clubs where there were performances, like magicians, jugglers or live music.” Over the decades, he says, “In Israel there has always been a de-legitimization of people who want to dance and have a good time, because of our national situation.”
“Throughout, we see people whose desire to have fun becomes an antiestablishment act. And a young person who dances isn’t necessarily protesting the establishment but the ideological hegemony is so strong, that people who deviate for the purposes of pleasure become, whether consciously or unconsciously, anti-nationalistic. You can’t just dance and be normal.”
Shor touches on the non-conformist bohemia of the early Yishuv pre-State settlement – whose Foxtrotting tea-dances were condemned by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, who wrote, “What emptiness! What tastelessness!… Degeneration and hollow soullessness!”
But the book really gets started with the introduction of Rock ‘n Roll and the noar salon (literally, “living room youngsters) Israeli-style Greasers later immortalized in the movie Eskimo Limon (Lemon Popsicle). Says Shor: “They didn’t go to Zionist youth movements because the framework – uniforms, hierarchy – wasn’t their style. They wanted to be like the other young people all over the world, wear jeans and leather jackets, listen to Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. And by the way, there were noar salon who went to both youth movement and dance parties.”
Photo by Fritz Cohen
The summer of 1965 marked a milestone in the history of Israeli clubbing, when the first discotheque opened on the veranda of the Hammam nightclub in old Jaffa. The venue, owned by author Dan Ben Amotz and poet Haim Hefer, was leased out to entrepreneur Rafi Shauli – a key figure in the creation of a new paradigm in Israeli nightlife. Shauli really deserves a full column devoted to his accomplishments, but it should be noted that in addition to the many clubs he opened in the 1960s and 70s, (Mandy’s, Mandy’s Cherry and Mandy’s Singing Bamboo – all in honor of then-wife, the glamorous and scandalous Mandy Rice-Davies), he also opened HaMoadon in 1977, a members-only discotheque that raised the bar for all clubs in the Jewish State.
The phenomenon “gave rise to serious debates in the Knesset from all ends of the spectrum about the deterioration of Zionism and all sorts of dangers to the nation’s future. And this discussion comes up every few years. When the Coliseum club opened in 1982, around when the [first] Lebanon war broke out, the national debate was ‘how can people dance when others are dying?’, and [state-run] Channel One called it ‘the last days of Pompeii.’ The 80s New wave clubs – Penguin, Sirocco, Liquid, Kolnoa Dan – said rock had to be sung in English,” leading to another outcry. “And when the second intifiada broke out, the national debate was about the ‘Tel Aviv bubble’. It’s constant.”
Photo by Moshe Milner
In the early Nineties, euphoria over the Oslo Accords and the promise of a New Middle East, dovetailed perfectly with the introduction of muti-channel television and increased Western cultural influence in Israel. “The Israeli electronic dance music revolution came in with the consumer revolution, chains stores, cable TV – and Ecstasy. By 1997-98, it dominated youth culture.” That euphoric balloon, he adds, “burst with the second Intifada.”
Given that clubs have become a target for terrorists, Shor says that going clubbing during times of high alert has evolved into a form of national pride for some young people. “For example, right before the first Gulf War, there were ‘End of the World’ parties. After the suicide bomber attack at the Dolfi-Disco, the club re-opened and the kids kept on coming. It wasn’t heartlessness. It was saying, ‘No, you won’t stop me living my life.’”
Shor worked on the book for four years, inspired by his own love of nightlife, and the lack of an authoritative source on the subject. “I saw there was this genre of literature in other countries. I think that the conflict, that the subject deviates from the conventional, is one reason why no such book had been written. And this book tries to analyze that convention and introduce it into the Israeli discourse. It seemed right from an Israeli point of view.”
The generations of accidental rebels, he adds, “Weren’t trying to be political protesters. It was a rebellion only because of their actions, trying to live a western life in Israel. I think this is true Zionism – to live as every other nation. I think Herzl would have preferred endless partying to endless war.”
Video: Haoman 17 Jerusalem closes
Nostalgia Sunday – Happy Birthday Arik Einstein!
Filed under: Art, Israeliness, Life, Music, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture
Arik Einstein turned 70 this week. Were it not for the war, this would have been front page news. Not only because it is an occasion for celebration but because in this land of the perpetual diminutive, where everyone goes by their childhood nickname, people find it hard to believe that Arik – singer of songs, cultural icon, survivor of the Sixties and the Tel Aviv bohemia – is entering his seventh decade. If that is so, and Arik is getting old, what does that mean the rest of us?
The English-language Wikipedia entry for Arik Enstein is a rather poor version of the far more comprehensive Hebrew one, but still manages to give the reader a sense of the breadth of his career. The son of an actor, he got his start in the Nahal Brigade entertainment corps, after being demobilized he joined the legendary Batzal Yarok entertainment troupe (together with Chaim Topol, Gila Almagor and others), then the Yarkon Bridge Trio (with Yehoram Gaon and Benny Amdursky), who were so hip, they covered a Beatles song! But if you really want to know what their music sounded like and how Israel looked like at the time, this clip is best:
Kylie remixes Roni Superstar
Aussie dance-pop pixie Kylie Minogue is set to celebrate her 2009 Grammy nomination with the release of a remix compilation called Boombox in early January. Named after a previously unreleased Kylie track that features prominently on the disc, the album sports 15 remixes from the past nine years of the international superstar’s canon.
Among the DJs and producers who have contributed to the collection is LA Riots, a West Coast duo that has in recent years earned a reputation thanks to its bouncing sets at club and warehouse parties. LA Riots has also created some landmark remixes for mainstream rock acts including Weezer, Chris Cornell, The Cure and The Verve.
The LA Riots addition to Boombox is actually an Israeli endeavor, which confirms what we’ve al known for some time: that the road to Israeli superstardom (with a reach as far as Oceania) leads through California. LA Riots’ “Boombox” remix features Roni “Superstar” Duani, the bubblegum songstress who has served as a soldier in the IDF, as a TV host, as a star of the stage and as a fashion spokesmodel. With a teen temptress persona and a wardrobe that favors plaid miniskirts, many have compared Superstar to Britney Spears, but the Israeli performer has understandably distanced herself from those comparisons in recent years. While rebranding, Superstar has hunkered down in the studio, hard at work on her third full-length effort, scheduled to hit stores later in 2009.
As the latest Roni “Superstar” Duani singles trickle out towards radio outlets, it’s nice to know that people with profiles as formidable as Kylie Minogue’s are paying attention to our hit parade. Audio for the Kylie-LA Riots-Superstar “Boombox” remix streams here.
Teapacks retires…
Referencing the once flourishing music scene they once called Sderot the “Seattle” of Israel due to the influential bands coming out of the area. The most popular of these bands was Teapacks who went on to be one of the top selling bands in the country and even represented Israel at the Eurovision song competition. Now before I moved to Israel back in 1997 my taste in Israeli music… was…uh…misguided. I’ll save myself the embarrassment and hold off on the listening habits of a previous life. I have my army buddies to thank for getting me in line.
When I was enrolled in Ulpan (intensive Hebrew course) I listened to Teapack’s earlier albums endlessly. They were an amalgamation of ethnic music and rock with somewhat witty lyrics. I learned a tremendous amount of Hebrew transcribing their lyrics. Their live show was always better than their records and I had the opportunity to see them probably about ten times.
As is the case with bands that have integrity, their sound evolved. My music tastes evolved as well and I no longer connected to their more disco pop oriented sound (though their lyrics remained filled with humor and wit). They are widely known for their song “Push the Button” which they performed at Eurovision in 2007 which was all about the threat of Nuclear destruction. I didn’t get it and certainly couldn’t connect with lyrics such as “I wanna see the flowers bloom/Don’t wanna go kaput kaboom.”
After over 18 years as a band, ten albums and numerous hits Teapacks is calling it quits. And not a moment too soon.
Maimon on MTV Europe
MTV might be the ultimate trendsetter when it comes to the Eighties niche cable programming revolution in the US, but until recently, many countries were able to establish their own local music video channels that competed for ratings against MTV Europe and MTV Asia, to name two examples of regional versions of the channel.
Over the past few years, however, MTV has aggressively gone local-global, offering its brand name to licensees in countries around the world. MTV Israel might not be much more than a glorified, Viacom-approved YouTube so far, but plans to go on TV are in the works.
Now the trend is coming full circle, with the 2008 MTV European Awards on November 6 offering a “Europe’s Favorite Act” category, its 23 nominees made up of regional winners. If nothing else, it’s a clever way to get esoteric markets to tune in to the mega-broadcast. Representing Israel at Liverpool’s Echo Arena will be Shiri Maimon, no stranger to international pop competition, currently starring in a recurring role on Bad Girls, a soap opera on the local MTV-competing Music 24 channel.
So a few weeks after Liverpool pop finally came to Israel, Israeli pop is finally going to Liverpool.
Following a second-place win on the American Idol-emulating local TV show Kochav Nolad, Maimon took fourth place at the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest. She also has released three hit albums on Helicon Records. Regardless, becoming the first-ever Israeli performer at the MTV European Awards feels special to her, as she told YNet:
“For me, it is amazing to represent Israel in Europe again,” said Maimon.
“This may be a cliché, but it is really a dream come true to appear on an MTV stage. I will try doing the best I can, just like I love,” she said.
The general public is invited to vote for a Shiri victory in Dublin by clicking here.
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