Well, after an unexpectedly long hiatus, I'm back for one last post. I've had a lot of fun keeping this up over the past 12(!) years and forcing myself to discover new music beyond the playlist hits, while along the way interacting with lovely people from across the globe. I might eventually decide to take a closer look at the musical gems from the past decade once more time has passed, or to dig deeper into tunes from other periods, as I have occasionally done, but for now, I'll leave you with Gon Ben Ari and Zulat Choir, taken from the stellar album 'Yesh'.
♥
Between the evenings in high school
In the suburb which you've already repressed
Making muscles against the madness
In the toke gym
Drunken light from Babylon
Lit in the street at night
An endless hole in the phone
Scroll down, down, down
How many signals can I give you
Until you will finally look
How the river overflows the rock
Every button turns on miracles
And was there water
When you entered up to the knees
They didn't open in front of you
For you to come in
Israel
They reinvent you every night
Who in the chill, who in the bumps of the road
Israel
A voice that has no body or mouth still prays
Through Arsim chanting at school:
"Here not here here here
Here not here here here
Here not here
Here not here here here"
Together
How many operations will we carry out
So that the border of "who am I"
Will feel stable enough for a moment
And for a moment, you'll breathe
I know, you love
But let's try tonight
To not talk about anything
Except for the future
Israel
They reinvent you every night
Who in the shade, who in the sun's indulgence
Israel
A voice that escaped from a synagogue is still splitting
Maroon 5 performed here earlier this week (much to the delight of the 16-year-old in me) and it was quite a whirlwind, highlighted by Adam Levine inviting the singer Coral Bismith to perform onstage after seeing her sing "Sunday Morning" from his hotel room facing the Tel Aviv promenade. What a story! I think the humorous account Hapshuta put it best with this post:
"Walla I don't understand how Adam Levine just got on a plane and flew to another country.
Honey, you're already settled in.
You have a Jewish name and also a six-pack and those are already two criteria for the right of return sweetie
I thought in your next story we'll see I'm making Aliyah
In a month a trip across Israel as part of Birthright, in a year a feature in the weekend news on Adam Levine's journey from a singer to a lone soldier, and now I just feel betrayed
I feel like you wrote to me 'you're the only country that I'm speaking to'
And then you just moved on to the next country I don't know let's say Poland
And probably there you'll also shout Good Evening Warsaw and you'll invite a Polish busker to sing with you and you'll share stories of Polish women and then you'll also leave them for the next country because once a cheater always a cheater
Now I know what you meant in One More Night you scoundrel
My heart is broken
Only good news"
We love you Adam and thank you for introducing us to the wonderful Coral Bismuth, whose recent single Lava just entered the coveted Galgalaz playlist. As a post I came across explained, "As people call her, Coral Bismuth, "Sunflower girl," is a street performer. For years, Coral has been performing on the streets with one mission - spreading good in the world. She has her spot on the boardwalk and has a beautiful setup for her instruments and swag. What caught my attention was not just her voice but the sunflowers. Next to the sunflower pot, there is a sign "Take and give as much as you can; if you can not give, feel free to take!"
♥
Such a strange situation, a balcony here across the street
A dried banana tree, I went for a walk
I said "hi" to the window I just created here
His smile is cute, okay I'm going up to him
You're so beautiful that it's hard for me to describe
You're as beautiful as the sunset on white sand with Bon Iver in the background
You're as beautiful as water flowing like white in the clouds you're beautiful
Like a charcoal lamp in a poet's dark room
It's hard for me to describe
Like lava in the heart of the earth
Or like the most beautiful sound in all the wilderness
You're a sophisticated chord on the piano
A beautiful flower that hides and improvises
Such a strange situation, I got lost
I was spinning in the kitchen when you offered me a dance
Even ancient energy loses control
Changes consciousness, come to bed now
In the heart of the earth
The most beautiful sound in all the wilderness
You're a sophisticated chord on the piano
A beautiful flower that hides and improvises
A total of three dates, you ran away pretty quickly
I fell hard
Fuck, what a mess
Suddenly my heart opened, after years and years inside the dusty body
Cut
You came with a pink shirt written on it Tonight
What was I thinking? That we'll go sailing tomorrow?
So-called romantic, living in my house
You ruined my vibe
But what will I do that you're so beautiful that it's hard for me to describe
You're as beautiful as the sunset on white sand with Bon Iver in the background
You're as beautiful as water flowing like white in the clouds you're beautiful
Like a charcoal lamp in a poet's dark room
It's hard for me to describe
Like lava in the heart of the earth
Or like the most beautiful sound in all the wilderness
Ugh. It felt like it was only a matter of time before there'd be a terrorist attack on Dizengoff. I passed by the crowded bars earlier this week, everyone was outside enjoying the nice springtime weather, and the memories of the deadly attack in Bnei Brak the week before were starting to fade away. A bit after I got the notification about the shooting I checked in what a friend who lives near Dizengoff and moved to Israel after the eerily similar Dizengoff shooting in 2016, as well as with a colleague who lives just a few buildings away from the bar that was hit and was all too familiar with these kinds of attacks. My sister left a chilling voice note on the Whatsapp family group chat that she was at the Tel Aviv port, there were rumors that the terrorist was also there, and her phone was about to die - she texted the number of her friend she was with and eventually made it back to her car a few hours later. It was a chaotic night because the police instructed everyone to stay at home and busses and taxis stopped running - but it was Thursday night when so many people from outside of Tel Aviv had come to the city to start the weekend. Many found refuge in shops and strangers' homes when it wasn't clear how long it would take to catch the terrorist (they eventually caught him early Friday morning). I was actually planning to go to Dizengoff yesterday to go shopping for an upcoming event but decided to postpone - not out of fear, just because it didn't feel right. I'll still go to the movies tonight and I'll still go out for pre-Passover drinks next week. I knew that the victims were young, but I wasn't prepared to see the smiling faces of two young men who were childhood friends and were just starting their lives: Tomer Morad (28) and Eytam Magini (27) from the city of Kfar Saba. The third victim, Barak Lufan (35 and a father to three children), died from his wounds on Friday.
I was searching for something comforting and came across this beautiful song by the iconic Rivka Zohar. It was just what I needed to hear. Rivka Zohar has been singing on stage since her military service in 1968, known most famously for Mah Avarech (With what shall I bless), and she recently released the album Hearing the Heart, which you can listen to here.
Rest in Peace Taylor Hawkins. What a tragic loss - I'll miss seeing him goof around with Dave Grohl, geek out over Queen, and play the drums with all his heart. ♥
Purim festivities have finally concluded, after an extra-long weekend (which started on Tuesday!) filled with work parties, street parties, and house parties. I wasn't really in the mood to celebrate, citing the gloomy current events, though to be honest, I'm not really a Purim person in general. But a good friend of mine who has family both in Ukraine and in Russia invited me to a party she was hosting on Friday and I immediately said yes because I realized that she needed a break from the war and just wanted to dance a bit (we danced a lot). She belongs to what's known here as generation 1.5 - those who immigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 90s when they were kids. Many who belong to generation 1.5, such as Arik Eber, made statements against the Russian invasion, no matter where in the former Soviet Union they were born, though there are others who are taking a more neutral stance, especially if they have friends and relatives in Russia who are suffering from the international sanctions. Everyone realizes that there's going to be an influx of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine, and I can only hope that they'll somehow have a smoother landing than the 90s wave (we'll see...). Arik Eber is quite known in the poetry slam circle and I'm very happy to see his work highlighted by the Tel Aviv Review of Books, with excellent translations by Alex Moshkin and Zackary Sholem Berger.
A boy's choir from Israel arrives at the Grand Choral Synagogue in St. Petersberg
This is how 1990 began
I don't remember any of their songs
And that's not the point really
What I do remember is the chewing gum
Bazooka
That they handed me
I'd never seen anything like it
A comic strip that absolutely nobody could understand
What's funny about it
I chewed this gum for two weeks in a row
Chewing during the day
Then carefully laying it on a shelf at night
A ritual I repeated with all chewing gums
Which were then
A truly rare
Commodity.
They took away my dog
A Rottweiler named Chase
Sold it to a security company
For a long time I'll be shaken by the thought: what did they do with that benevolent creature
Although we got him for protection from the antisemitic mob
Actually he'd lick anyone who'd enter the house from head to toe.
Dollar
My dad's friend gives me a dollar and says
Hide it in your shoes when you go through customs
Traitors are not allowed to take foreign currency out of the country
I'm frightened
But succeed in the task like James. Fucking. Bond.
Actually, we were supposed to move to the United States
But it closed the door right in our faces
Imagine
How easily
I could be American right now
Doing spoken word in Wisconsin or something
A friendly clerk at the Ben Gurion airport decides
That the name my mother gave me
Isn't suitable for the Israeli climate
So he writes on my ID card instead
Ariel
Why not Arnon
Or Arie
or
Boaz
Why not Boaz?! Boaz is a good fit for me, no?
Or something practical like
Aaron
With Aaron I'd probably be a star student in the religious school where I spent second grade
Not because my parents believed in the Jewish God or anything like that
But because that school was just across the street and free
And that's perfect for a Russian boy, poor and stinking
There, for the first time in my life I heard the phrase:
Stinking Russian
By the way, do you know why Russians stank in the early 90s?
I have a theory
As you know, they took all their furniture
All of them
And stuck them into tiny containers
In unbearably humid conditions
And shipped them across the continent for six months
Offloaded them in some port in Haifa or Ashdod
Then all this half-rotten furniture was crammed into tiny apartments
What the hell did they expect?
The stench stuck to everything
Like communism.
We didn't think it would collapse
My father would tell me a few years later
We thought it was just a lull, things would get back to normal,
We had to take advantage of this slit in the Iron Curtain
He was wrong
Communism crumbled
The nimble-fingered and quick-witted managed to seize a juicy piece of property
belonging to the state
Some of his good friends got
Incredibly rich
My Dad
Cleans a pool in Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem
My mother cries
For his two academic degrees
For her medical studies
For the elegant buildings of St. Petersburg which she left behind
Because of the heat
Because she can't talk to strangers on the street
At the sight of her two sons
In gas masks
In a "sealed" room
Dreading death by gas
That's how 1991 began.
1990
At eight: cut right out from the Soviet Union
And pasted into Israel. What could I do?
I, a Russian boy, in a religious school
Who was told that God rules
But just as I learned how and when to pray
My parents decided that God was not the way
First they say religious, then they say not. For God's sake!
Who am I, who am I, who am I
Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?
In middle school I took another look around
Confused, what can I do if there's no God to be found
I realized that in Jerusalem to be popular and cool
I had to be more like the Morrocan youth
Morrocan is code for all Mizrahi Jews
Morrocan, Iraqi, all the same to stinking Russian tools.
Let's drop that, not relevant right now.
Look at me: a Russian listening to Eyal Golan
Faded jeans, gel in his hair,
Platform shoes, I tried but no one seemed to care
I always stayed a foreigner, strange kind of stranger.
Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?
In high school I tried to get back to my roots
"Belamor" cigarettes and Russian swear words
I hung out with the slackers, smoking out back
Wearing a tracksuit, accent so fake
But I failed to fit in, blend with the masses
My Russian vocab was zilch, what were my chances.
In the army I finally realized what's what
In the bed of elite girls I screwed my way to the top
The canon was revealed to me in all its glory
I swallowed it without gagging, no worry
Two servings of Leah Goldberg, Alterman and Oz
I became an Ashkenazi without any flaws
I rested on my laurels
Thought I found out who I was
'Til somebody blurted out: Nah
You are just an Ashki-passing Russian from nowhere.
Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?
I searched far and wide for who I was
Until I finally found a clear response:
I am Russian
I am a Russian Israeli or Israeli Russian or Hebrew-speaking Russian or Russophone Israeli or Israeli whose mother tongue is Russian
I mean, whose mother talks to him in Russian and he answers her in that language
Unless he wants to make a point and then he switches to Hebrew to make that point
Because, for real, Hebrew is his language
He's an Israeli, the case's closed, enough already! The guy's Israeli!
I'm not a fan of historical comparisons, but as I've been anxiously following the war in Ukraine I couldn't help but think of the Six-Day War, and how it led to a surge in national pride. This led me to an article on songs that were written during the tense waiting time before the war, during the war, and after the victory. I was familiar with most of the songs on the list, especially "He who dreamed" (Mi sheChalam), which has become a somber anthem for fallen soldiers, but I had not heard of this song, sung beautifully by Aliza Azikari, at all. I was struck by the sensitivity of the lyrics and was curious to learn more about Miriam Yalan-Shteklis, the woman who wrote them. I found out that she was born in the town of Potoki, near Kremenchuk, Ukraine and she studied psychology and social sciences at the University of Kharkiv, a city I had never heard of before this senseless war. She immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1920 and published her first poem in Hebrew in 1922, eventually becoming Israel's leading children's poet. As her JWA encyclopedia entry states, "alongside poems filled with hope for peace and redemption are lyrical-confessional poems about the fears and emotions of a child trying to come to term with his/her identity and living in society." It's not easy to know how to comfort a child during a war, but the father in this song manages to do just that, and something about the way he reassures his daughter made me think of Volodymyr Zelensky's courageous and heroic fight for his country's survival. I can't even begin to imagine what ripped-apart Ukrainian families are going through, and I hope with all my heart that they will be reunited soon.
Your letter has arrived, thank you very much, my daughter
How good it is that you know how to write
How good it is that you can read my letters
I kiss both your eyes, my girl
Both your eyes, my girl
Always remember: I am with you all, you are all with me
Because there is no distance in the soul within
Take care of your little brother, take care of mother
My thoughts are with the Ukrainian people and my heart is heavy with sorrow.
I've been following Liav Tal for a while now, and I love how she pours all her emotion into her covers. This one is exceptionally touching and does justice to Idan Raichel Project's timeless original.
