Dreaming life. Living is easy.

A great couple days here in Tel Aviv, making my head spin. Reading the Lemon Tree is messing with me too, it almost brings me to tears and fills me with rage while teaching me tons. I read the recounting of the 6 days war like a spy novel or something. Riveted. Took off from the hostel and went to meet Yoav at his place. I looked up the address on Google maps but the intersections and those around it had no english streetsigns. Asking around I found it, but it was a locked-up door. I loafed around and eventually he came down. He has such a cool place. Exterior courtyard with a rusty old wrought-iron staircase, a crumbling single room studio with a chipped-up floor that he's turned into an in-progress art installation.





He's very interested in dirt, clay, and scale, a love of the desert and its fractal nature, which is something I've thought a lot about as well. One of his pieces was all about emulating miniature scale while leaving out the obvious markers of it, like trees or humans. Trying to just use details of the landscape and meticulously controlling the marks tools make in order to maintain the illusion of miniature scale. He's quite prolific and consistent, you can see more of his work here.

We talked a while about art, Israel, and traveling. I really like Yoav, he's easy to be around. He wants to move to Berlin, he biked from Amsterdam to Berlin last summer. Coolo. We talked about how he'd always thought of Tel Aviv as western, thought of himself as western, until he went elsewhere and realized that wasn't the case. Interesting and makes perfect sense, this is a town of European people stuck in the Middle East. They've made it their own but the two effect one another in a great hybrid way.

We rode over to Tal's house, who is sick. I stopped by a shop and learned about dates and figs, which are more expensive than I thought but delicious. She's at home sniffling, showed us some performance art videos she'd made, and talked tons more about whatever. She has a really odd/cool apartment that she got in a really strange arrangement.


She had been living in a family-owned building when I club moved into the basement. They had a good relationship but the club was there illegally. They wanted to stay, and make her happy but were too loud, so the club owner decided to rent her crappy little place for twice the price from her and she moved elsewhere. So now she's living in fat city with a stipend! We made dinner together, listened to Dolly Parton, Edward Sharpe, and watched this video:

Yikes. Awkwardest video ever.

Then, this happened:



Scandal!

Next day was more or less uneventful, mostly wandered and read, riding my new bike around the city. Made great crepes in the morning. I'll let the pictures talk for themselves for the most part, with some explanation (sorry about the imbedding, I've been annoyingly locked out of my flickr account so things aren't as pretty as usual.)





Got approached in the park by a homeless outreach group, which I should take offence at, but it was the middle of the night, so whatever. Ended up meeting a really cool journalist and then, inexplicably, getting drunk in the park with a really crazy russian-heritage goth/punk kid who was extremely (goofily) violent, misguided, suicidal (in a cry-for-help way) and, it turns out, a bit of a neo-nazi. Savory character (on the left).