Did you ever wonder....

...what would happen if you took two laptops with webcams and faced them towards each other while they're connected via video chat?

Well we did, and it was possibly the most amazing moment of my life! Ok, that may be an exaggeration, but it was still really cool. Here's the picture and video of what resulted. Highly recommended!

Middle Eastern Israel

Living in America (or Jerusalem for that matter) it's easy to forget that Israel is in the Middle East. We all know Americans who have moved here, into towns full of English-speakers. It's easy to walk around Emek Refaim or Ben Yehudah and hear only the chatter of Anglo-tourists and seminary students. We imagine Israel to be a Western nation, fighting the terrorist battle facing the entire Western world, participating in the academic world we inhabit and embodying a Western-style democracy we can all relate to. Of course, there's an element of truth to all of these, but I think it's worthwhile reminding ourselves once in a while that Israel is a Middle Eastern countries, and that does make a difference.

I was first reminded of this last week, when a former member of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) gave a speech to a group of former Israeli Fulbright scholars. His speech was a refreshing analysis of certain aspects of the conflicts in the Middle East. Refreshing, because he is a former member of the government, and therefore is no longer required to adjust his comments to fit any party line. He gave a frank analysis of the prospects for peace in Israel, including his suggestions for future Israeli and American approaches to Iran, Syria and the Palestinian conflict. But when addressing America's role in the Middle East he reminded us that all those other entities are not the only Middle Easterners, but that Israel too is a Middle Eastern country, and many of its citizens have what may be called a Middle Eastern mentality. This is apparent in politics, and is often a reason for misunderstanding between America and Israel, and especially between America and other Middle Eastern countries.

After that reminder, I began to take note of those aspects of Israeli culture which are Middle Eastern. It's especially obvious in the arts. The international oud festival is a great example, but it also shows up in the fine arts, in the works of my classmates and in the galleries and museums. But perhaps it is most obvious in the Israeli manners. The type of hospitality and bluntness which seems to me to be characteristic of Middle Eastern cultures.

Political Art

Last week I went to an exhibition at Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem's coexistence museum. Entitled "Bare Life," it is a collection of contemporary art focusing on human rights and the times and ways that governments choose to infringe on those. It was an interesting exhibit with all the strange quirkiness to be expected from any display of contemporary art. Bruce Nauman's piece, which consisted of a spinning head on a bunch of screens screeching, "feeeeeeed me, eeeeeeeeat me, anthropologeeeee" was particularly difficult to get out of my head, as the soundtrack (which became exceedingly irritating) was audible throughout the museum. I was surprised to find that the exhibition wasn't overly saturated with finger-pointing or extreme liberal sentiment. It did, however, bring up some interesting questions in my mind about the place of political art, especially journalistic type photography.

There was a fairly wide range of pieces there, including installations, collages, paintings and photography, and I suppose such an exhibition begins to force us to ask some basic questions about what is considered to be art. When does a photograph or video of a peace rally move out of the realm of photo-journalism and become art? Is photo-journalism itself an art, or a method of documenting events, or both? Is a video of a man discussing some interesting insights about the nature of language and possession a piece of art or a piece of philosophy? This in turn brings up some questions about the place of the artist in this type of art. For instance, suppose that the artist taking a picture of a riot has the choice to photoshop the photograph so that the violence of the police or the rioters is more or less extreme. Even without photoshop, things can be cropped out or focused on. I suppose these things are the choice of the artist, but what gets sticky with these types of photos, is that they're often considered factual rather than a single artist's interpretation. And when such a photo appears in a newspaper or news program in addition to the gallery or museum, the significance of these choices is further magnified.

Clearly I don't expect there to be an answer to these questions. There's no distinct line between art and history or science. No exact way to define the difference between objective documentation (which doesn't really seem to exist) and subjective interpretation. I just found myself thinking about this as I walked through Museum on the Seam, trying to categorize what I saw and to find a way to place the artist in the creation of these documentary pieces of art.

Jesus of Jerusalem

Was just walking home from the supermarket and came across a tree that looked remarkably like Jesus, so I had to stop and sketch for a while. Do you see it?

Oh How I love Oud

Big news here in Jerusalem! This weekend marked the beginning of the annual international festival of the oud! (pronounced ood)

The oud (according to Wikipedia) is a pear-shaped, stringed instrument similar to a lute used in traditional Middle Eastern music and East African music.

There are events throughout the next two weeks, all featuring the oud in some form or another. On Saturday night, I attended an event entitled 'Sufi Song and Dance.' It was performed at a small, intimate venue (actually the same one as the Avishai Cohen concert I attended a few weeks ago). There were only two performers: a man singing in Arabic and playing the oud, and a female dancer. The dance was a mix of modern, flamenco and sufi dance, and the dancer was truly incredible. Her body moved in ways I didn't think possible. The story seemed to be a sort of typical love saga, filled with a variety of intense passion, some anger and uncertainty etc., although the fact that all the words were in Arabic made it a bit difficult to actually follow.

One point of interest - on the one hand, this seemed to be a modernized version of a more traditional art form. The dance included some distinctly modern elements and I've heard from a number of people that the dancers in traditional sufi dancing (at least in public) are usually men, where as here it was a woman. However, I actually found this fact - that the dancer was a woman and the musician a man - to feel a bit anti-modern, or at least anti-feminist. In this scenario, the woman was completely lacking a voice. She was only there to be looked upon, whereas all of the speaking and the music came from the male. Even during the rare lines when the dancer actually sang along with the singer, her voice was barely audible, as his microphoned voice and oud overpowered her. I could be over-analyzing here, and it's totally possible that the roles taken were merely coincidental, but it stuck out in my mind anyway.

Overall, not the most amazing night of my life, but certainly an interesting performance, and a good reminder that we can all use a little more oud in our lives.