Reality – Original Israeli

“Original Israeli Music Line. Leonid Ptashka, Marina Maximilian Blumin.”

Ptashka was born in Baku and Blumin in Dnipropetrovsk.

I love this country so much.

Create another fable

When i first saw the video “Lama” by the Israeli singer Maya Avraham, it immediately reminded me of Massive Attack’s “Protection” directed by Michel Gondry.

Somehow i didn’t notice that the music of the song itself is also a knock-off. Compare its first seconds with “Chop Suey!”. Except that the song is standard Israeli pop.

Yet this video is very special. It is not centered on the singer walking around Tel-Aviv, walking around her rented apartment in Tel-Aviv or a huge close-up on her face. It has each of those things in certain proportions, but it is centered on knocking off Massive Attack and System of a Down. That’s a start.

Oh, and it’s two years old. The only Israeli video worth watching that was produced recently is Yadayim Lemaala by Knesiyat Hasekhel.

I somehow still believe that rock ‘n’ roll can never die.

Crime

I am familiar with only one Israeli media personality who openly professes right-wing opinions on a publicly funded station: Dudu Elharar.

Well, Dudu Elharar’s program is being closed. He blames Galey Tzahal for shutting him down for his views and says that this is the second biggest crime after the Disengagement. They don’t like the Disengagement comparison, but mildly admit that his views were not exactly their cup of tea.

No more right-wing politics in public Israeli media, then.

Reality – Women Singing

sinners only

Some food products in Israel carry the mark “Kosher Dairy (Gentile powdered milk)” (אבקת חלב נוכרי). This means that the kashruth supervisor of the factory that produces this food considers it kosher, but duly warns practicing Jews who adopted stricter dietary laws for themselves and don’t eat powdered milk which was prepared by non-Jews. Most secular Israelis hardly know what it means—if they notice it at all—, and some laugh at it, but for some religious Israelis it is quite important. Some practicing kosher Jews are not strict, others adopt strictures for themselves.

Now this came to music, too. Some religious Jews avoid listening to the singing of women, because it is considered non-modest, due to the saying from the Talmud “a voice in a women is shame” (Brachot 24). Rabbis argue about the meaning of it. A tiny minority are so strict that they completely forbid listening to a woman’s voice (except one’s own wife). Many forbid listening to a woman’s singing; some of them argue that listening to recorded woman’s singing is allowed. Some rabbis allow listening to a woman singing as long as the woman and the song are modest.

This is the first time that i saw a CD marked this way. It was sold by a vendor of Jewish traditional music in Jerusalem, who added the sticker himself, knowing that some of his customers may dislike woman singing.

It is good that it is done voluntarily. I hope that the kashruth of music won’t become obnoxious, corrupt and commercialized, like that of food.

Lo

I should be ignoring this, but i can’t.

There’s this Eurovision Song Contest thing, right? And Israel participates in it? And the Israeli songs are terrible, just as nearly all the rest, right? And it’s not really about music, but about some fake national pride and a particularly stupid television show, right?

Well, yes, it is.

This year it’s the same crap as every time. The singer’s name was shortened from Boaz Mauda to Boaz. They do it to many Israeli artists for marketing reasons. Crap. OK, i can live with that and i couldn’t care less. And of course they translated the song to English, which is also very pointless, but i can live with that, too. But on the official website they named this so-called song “Fire in Your Eyes (Ke’ilo Kan)” and this i can’t stand.

It’s this Israeli stupidity in its worst. It’s supposed to be written “Ke’ilu”. כאילו. In Hebrew the sounds of [o] and [u] are usually written with the same letter, vav, and the correct pronunciation can be easily guessed by people who know Hebrew. But when transliterating Hebrew to Latin characters Israelis carry this confusion over, and often write an O where they should have written a U and vice versa. It’s similar to a hamburger place i saw once in southern Tel Aviv, which had a big ugly handwritten sign in “English” saying HMBORGR. The A and the E are gone, because they are not written in Hebrew at all, and the U turned to an O, because it’s “the same letter”. Now i think that a stupid hamburger vendor in southern Tel-Aviv should pay a heavy fine for that transgression. What is the appropriate punishment for the “representative” of Israeli culture that can’t fucking spell transliterated Hebrew words?

Now comes the funny part: If i try to change it in Wikipedia, it may be reverted, and someone will say “give me reliable sources; the website says Ke’ilo”. Crap.

Treatment

Since about 2004 i watch very little television. I don’t have one at home and i don’t miss it. However, when i am at homes which do have one, i can hardly take my eyes off it when it’s on. That’s probably a good reason not to have one at home.

It doesn’t mean that everything on the TV is crap. I noticed that some Israeli drama series are pretty good. The stories are very humane and many of the actors are genuinely talented.

So i am quite proud to hear that an American TV network bought the rights for the fourth Israeli television script to be adapted for American TV. First there was In Treatment, the American version of Betipul. I haven’t watched any of them, but many other people did. Now, according to ynet, there are three more: Mesudarim and Merkhak Negia and The Ex List, which don’t yet have an article in the English Wikipedia.

So yay—Hebrew TV drama joins Hebrew rock n’ roll as one of the greatest achievements of Zionism.

Reality – Which one’s Pink?

There’s no business like show business.

Some salesman put Pink Floyd and Sarit Hadad on one banner, which advertises a DVD sale.

In Wikipedia there are articles in eight languages about Sarit Hadad. This seemed weird at first, but the reason for that is probably that she appeared in the Eurovision song contest. Reading about Hadad in German and Hungarian is very sobering, even though i don’t understand either of those languages.

Young

Happy birthday, Neil Young.

Yesterday i bought a bunch of CD’s in Tower Records – Sonic Youth, Sigur Rós, Neil Young, Portishead, Joni Mitchell.

Later i went to buy milk and bought Shlomi Shaban’s new CD. That’s right, in a supermarket.

When Americans talk about buying music (or computers) in the supermarket (usually they say WalMart), they usually refer to folks that don’t really understand anything about music (or computers).

The scary part is that of all those CD’s i bought yesterday, Shaban’s happens to be the one that i enjoy the most.

Did i become stupid and disgustingly mainstream?

Or did the Israeli music became so good?

Made Me Cry – Nikita

My nephew Nikita came to Israel to spend the summer with his grandparents – my parents. It was all fun, until two days before his flight back to Moscow he was hospitalized in Rambam with a bad case of peritonitis.

So his flight is postponed, of course. A week after the operation he can still hardly eat and walk. My parents sit at his bed in the hospital twenty-four seven and they are terribly tired, so i came to help them.

Today i sat with him for a few hours. He mostly slept. The TV was on with a low volume and i watched Music 24 (nonstandard¹), the Israeli music channel.

The golden age of the music video has ended in about 1996. Back then MTV was the undisputed Master of the Universe and local videos, although very low-budget, aspired to the international big brother and had a lot of character. These days, however, nearly all Israeli music videos can be grouped into three sets:

1. The singer is walking around the streets of Tel Aviv. And it’s the same couple of streets in all of them.
2. The singer is walking around his rented apartment in Tel Aviv, makes coffee, watches TV, talks on the phone or goes down to the street to buy cigarettes.
3. A huge close-up on the singer’s face. Obviously, this group is the most disgusting. I guess that too many video directors fell in love with Sinéad or – worse – with Alanis (Flash²).

By a rough count, nine out of ten videos falls into one of these, which is quite astonishing and depressing. It can ruin even good songs. But there are exceptions.

Eviatar Banai’s video for “Yesh li sikuy” (Flash) is a quiet little masterpiece of music video making. The song itself is one of the all-time masterpieces of Israeli music; It is from Banai’s debut album. It’s black and white and it shows people in a bar lip synching to the song, subtly conveying the mood of the line they are singing. (Can you spot Banai himself there?)

Somewhere in the middle of the song there are those lines:

אמא שרה לבן בלילה,
אמא כאן לידך כל הזמן.

Mummy sings to the son in the night,
Mummy’s here near you all the time.

In the video a pregnant woman is singing the last line. You can hardly notice that she’s pregnant until she touches her belly. This subtlety is pure beauty.

I guess that it would make me cry even without the unfortunate circumstances, but sitting there in the hospital near sleeping Nikita while his mother was far away in Moscow did put things into a perspective.

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I started writing this entry a few days ago. It was a pretty crazy bunch of days since then.

Nikita’s mother – my sister – Olga finally came to Israel today after fighting with travel agencies for a few days. His health became better.

Yesterday i bought him Gossip’s Standing in the Way of Control, a CD for which he was looking for months, in Moscow and in Israel. Finding it wasn’t easy. He was particularly happy to receive it, which may have contributed to his slowly improving health, too. Despite his current condition, i envy him; i don’t think that i shall ever be as touched by music as i used to be when i was his age.

Anyway, for the night he put it in a drawer next to his hospital bed and in the morning it wasn’t there. There is a slight chance that with all the fuss around him the CD was just misplaced and will be found, but everybody is sure that it was stolen.

I’m amazed. What a terrible scumbag someone must be to steal a rare CD from a sick child. I mean, i would at least understand the motivation if it was something famous, but even i hardly know this band, so what kind of a low life would want to steal it? He can get – what? – 20 NIS for it in a used CD store? Fukker.

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¹ Actually, the site seems to be mostly functional, but the videos use CastUp technology, which is IE-only. I never managed to install the Firefox plugin they offer, and even if it would work, it would only work on Windows. By the way, i (still) work for the company that recently announced the acquisition of CastUp. What do you know…

² Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” is not on YouTube. Alanis’ Head over Feet video is still there…

Amir E. Aharoni vs. Shalom Gad

Watch me.

He buys a seven hundred channels mixer, Connects microphones, Connects left to left, Connects right to right, Connects to electricity, Finds the red button And presses It. May the temple be built. (from “Alcohol and Cigarettes” by Shalom Gad)

הוא קונה מיקסר שבע מאות ערוצים מחבר מיקרופונים מחבר לפט ללפט מחבר רייט לרייט מחבר לחשמל מוצא את הכפתור האדום ולוחץ עליו. ייבנה המקדש. (מתוך “אלכוהול וסיגריות” מאת שלום גד)

Eran Gitara 2004

Played with Meron and Eran yesterday. We worked on only one song, Eran’s “Am”. A few months have passed since the last time we played together; in the meantime he has written good lyrics and gave the song some structure. The problem is the balance between the instruments—my piano is way too dominant, and Meron’s guitar lines are too sparse. And there are no drums. Meron has a kit, maybe i’ll try to learn it? There’s also a major problem with Eran—he’s a genuinely good songwriter, but has bad timing; he just couldn’t manage recording his guitar over a recording of piano and elc. guitar that Meron prepared. Completely out of beat. I’m sure we’ll get over it.

Meron is great songwriter too. Every time he plays us some of his demos, of which he’s unrightly ashamed, but i’m constantly stunned. It will be very bad if they don’t develop into complete recorded songs. He’s gotta get an album out, to paraphrase Waters.