It's 3:30 AM, Do You Know Where Your Z Tile Is?

Scrabble was one of the most lovely elements in my past marriage. Lin and I were both scrabble fiends, the proud owners of one huge delux set (Naor's gift for our wedding) as well as a groovy little travel one featuring its own elegant case. My top score in a two-people game was 450, I don't remember hers but it may be higher still.

I didn't bring scrabble into my current relationship until yesterday. Downtown lover studied at an American university, she translates from English and in short - is quite fluent in the language. Nevertheless, whenever I brought up scrabble as a possible way to pass an hour she refused, claiming she was afraid of losing miserably to me.

Yesterday I called her in the afternoon. "what's up?" I asked, "Where are you at?"

"At the emergency room".

"What? What happened?"

"I hurt my eye. I leaned over to pick up an extention cord at the hardware store and got it pricked by one of the hangers. Now I'm waiting for the doctor to take a look. I may be stuck here a long time."

I told her I'll be rushing over, slipped on my sandals, searched for my keys, then a thought flashed through my head: Did she just say she may be stuck there a long time?

"I've got you," I said out loud to the walls of my bedroom, "Now I've got you". The little groovy travel scrabble was placed in my bag and I headed out to Ichilov hospital.

We bever ended up playing there. She was discharged quite quickly. The hanger hook did wound her eyeball, but not the cornea, so the healing should be quick and the eyelid serves as a natural patch. DL even managed to watch the cup finals (albeit with one eye shut) and then headed out happy as though never hurt to celebrate the Spanish triumph with a glass of cava. That glass led to a beer at the Riff-Raff bar on Gruzenberg street, which is where I decided to pull out pandora's little travel case.

The game began indoors with three players: DL, Flashky and myself, and two spectators: filmmaker Ari Liebsker and his date. It ended on the sidewalk way after the Riff-Raff had closed down, with only the bats in the trees to watch us. We were just having too much fun for anyone to quit, though the board was quite knotty (is that a legitimate word?) the sidewalk filthy and the dawn at hand.

DL scored 89 points by placing the word "whistler", featuring all her tiles, on a triple word square and assuring us that she isn't referring to the proper name of the renowned painter but rather to someone who habitually engages in the act of whistling. I finished at less than 200 with Flashky trotting not far behind me. The one eyed lady was declared victor. she also got to keep her beer glass, compliments of the bartender too tired to bring it in. Some wounded people get all the luck.

On Rooftops, in Streets, Underground

This is how the weekend began: with Shlomo and Rikky's wedding, which literally took place at the little Prince. The 24 hour cafe was closed for the evening and a catering service squeezed little white tables into its narrow, gravelly yard. a huppah was brought in a glass was broken for once outside the kitchen.

I don't think I've ever seen a bride this happy and the groom was too moved to pronounce his vows properly. Nevertheless, much of the happyness belongs to us, members of the "Prince" crowd. These two gave us the perfect party to mark this period in our lives, right where it's happening. Look how happy we are:



Don't you love it when a party pours out into the street,

And don't you completely adore it when the police arrives and the bride comes over and covinces them to just go away?

The following day I was guiding a very special group around Jerusalem: it featured my parents. In celebration of my mom's birthday they decided to recruit me as tourguide and take their friends along for the Yuval Jerusalem experience. I took them underground into St. Helen's cistern, through street rather overcrowded with Friday mobs and to the rooftop of the Austrian Hospice, where we took a group portrait (all three pictures by Rooti Hazroni).



That was not the last rooftop nor the last happy crowd for the weekend. Saturday happened to be the birthday of Renen Mosinzon, an urban shaker and maker. Renen is one face behind the creative commune at 70 hayarkon st, one that will be remembered in the city history.

I've only ever attended cinema nights at hayarkon 70, but knew of the weekly jam sessions, study groups and cummunally cooked feasts that made the place famous. Here was the chance to sniff the ferfumed air, sip the beer and even go onstage.


Here was a chance to stay late into the night,


and to go home feeling very lucky.

The weekend's sole memento mori was a powerful one. DL and I went to watch Ari Fulman's powerful Waltz with Bashir, possibly the most somber animation film ever made, a beautiful discussion of war, conscience and memory. I reccomend it strongly.

Women

There were about thirty guys at Hamooda's Nargila place tonight, all cheering for Turkey, which played beautifully against the invincibly determined Germans. In Palestinian-Israeli Jaffa it's typical to side with the team wearing red, be it Hapo'el Tel-Aviv, associated with left leaning (i.e. pro-Palestinian) Israel, or B'nei Sachnin, which is Palestinian-Israeli to begin with. Tonight too I felt that the support stemmed from a sense of cultural connection. The Arabs of Jaffa look more like the Turks then like the Germans, they share the Turks' cuisine and follow the same religion.

What most of them don't realize is that there's a deep gap in culture between them and the Turks, one that displayed itself strongly tonight. I've been to Nargila joints in turkey and they were full of women. There were religious girls wearing Hijabs exhaling white, apple scented smoke next to modern girls in jeans. In Hamooda's place girls are welcome. I've sat there with Efros, with Osnat, with downtown lover and with several feminine out-of-town guests, but I've never seen a woman there that I did not know and tonight there were indeed none.

There's no shortage of female football fans. The cameras in Basel showed bleachers full of ladies wearing both white and red, waving the German tricolor and the Turkish crescent. Angela Merkel jumped up in joy when Klose opened a 2:1 advantage on the 79th minute. At her parents home near Jerusalem, downtown lover was meanwhile biting her nails in hope for the Turks to get even. When the game ended at 3:2 for Germany, my only condolance was the notion that the biggest football fan I know, Anna Kemper, is rejoicing somewhere in Berlin.

So why was the Jaffa crowd so homogenous? Arab society in Israel and Palestine is just too patriarchal. Living so much within this society, this is one thing I find difficult to come to terms with. I remember being envious when seeing how sexually diverse Istanbul's cafes are. Though I'm sure things are far from perfect for Turkey's women, It turns out it's possible for a Middle Eastern, muslim nation to be more open towards the place of women in society. In Turkey this can't be blamed on occidental, colonialist influence. There's some form of homegrown acceptence of women being out and about there and too little of it at Hamooda's tonight. This may or may not change eventually. In the meantime it's Germany 3, Turkey 2, Jaffa 0.

How God Composes Music

The whole "Jerusalem Syndrom" concept is bogus. People don't become convinced that they're Jeremiah or Jesus by hanging around Jerusalem. they come there already convinced of that. Jerusalem is a major attraction for people who acted like Jesus back on the Michigan peninsula.

You meet a lot of original people in Jerusalem, self proclaimed prophets, self certified theologians and archeologists, Mary Magdalene and Indiana jones dress-alikes. .. The common tendency is not to listen to them, to drift by them as you drift by the vendors who call after you: Yes my friend, how may I help you?

Yesterday, having too much time on my hands, I went to the hub of false messiahs in the city: the ramshackle Petra Hostel near Jaffa gate. This used to be a finer hotel back in the day, nowadays the wooden stairs screech perilously as I head to the roof for one of the most magnifiscent views on earth, that of the entire old city rolling underneath me towards the mouth of the Kidron canyon, crowned with the dome of the rock and presented against the backdrop of the Mount of Olives. (I've described this view once before )

Behind me was the family of the hostel's chief warden, Gabriel. The members of Gabriel's family are always dressed in long blue gowns. They are members of a religion that observes Wednesday as the holy day and regards Jesus as a Satanic entity. Usually I feel uncomfortable around their unmaskable esoteric lifestyle. This time, however, I was relaxed and found myself taking to them very strongly. One of the kids was crying and Gabriel and his wife took care of him in the kindest way imaginable. Blue or not, Gabriel's cross-racial family is sweet. Their use of English rather than Arabic, Hebrew or the mother's native Czech reminds me of the 1947 U.N. decree in which Jerusalem was designated to become international territory, and a less judgmental city, probably.

Later, on another corner of the roof, I bumped into a blond, middle aged man named Robert. He was hanging the laundry next to a tent full of faded books of scripture, clearly his current residence. I asked him of his life and was told that he was born in D.C., raised in the jungles of Peru, and later came to Jerusalem to compose a research on theology.

I then asked what his research was about and was presented with a pile of information, most of it criticism of modern Christianity and Judaism as compared to a more profound ancient model of Judaism. I also recieved this gem: "You know how all human music is made up of time. It's all got rhythm, it occupies a breadth of time, but God exists outside of time. So I was asking myself, how does God compose music?

"So here is what I realized: I realized God's music must be made up of the differentiations between high and low tones. Now, what are our lives made up of? of hights and depths, of good moments and bad ones. As long as this movement between the high and low persists, we are alive. As long as the line on you hospital monitor goes up and down, you're alive."

The ups and downs of my day are God's music? I loved that. I'd never have heard this had I not fueled on patience and tolerance and climbed to that roof. I'd make a joke here about having received my calling and feeling that I must wear a tarp cape and run through the Via Dolorosa bearing the good news, but this is no joke. Jerusalem's less listened-to visitors bring it both wisdom and tenderness. Who'd have thought.

In other news: tonight my favorite piece of art on earth is to be performed before mine very eyes and ears. The opera Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky is coming to the Tel-Aviv opera house. I love this opera so much, I'd write it a love letter, but I fear being rejected. Today is also my Sister Tamar's 24th birthday, to be celebrated with sunflowers and coctails into the night, once Yevgeny and Tanya are done driving each other mad.

Juhannus in Ethiopia with Shlomo

You don't really feel that it's the shortest night of the year in Israel. It gets dark at around 20:00 and stays that way until the morning. When exactly in the morning I don't know. Being a Finnophile and a general Scandinavia enthusiast, I celebrate Midsummer every year, drinking and merry making as the northerners do. So usually I wake up late the next day, quite unaware of when dawn actually took place.

One memorable Juhannus (Finnish for Midsummer) was that of 2006. We put up a maypole and lit a bonfire on a north Tel-Aviv beach. Finland's own Susanna and Paivi were there, both very religious Christians who didn't mind at all dancing around the maypole in the best pagan tradition. There was some cheating on lovers going on in unlit reaches of the beach, and an accident that ended with a visit to the hospital. I still bear its scar on my right ring finger.

This year's June 21st was the bachelors' party for Shlomo, Tel-Aviv's #1 publisher of underground poetry. Dana Guidetti organized for all to meet at an Ethiopian restaurant on lower Allenby. A band was playing beautifully under a mock straw parasol (enfin, ca fut la fete de la music). We hit the beach and swam in the dark and drank too much Whisky and met a girl from Croatia and another from New York, and went to sleep dizzy and woke up at noon.

I'm feeling sick today. I had my first instance of hung-over vomiting since 1998, but that's better than getting a scar and besides, both Juhannus and Shlomo deserve to be taken seriously. I hope next Midsummer will be just as decent. Until then, I invite you to enjoy both a day in the Finnish countryside with the band Ultra Bra (which is enormously popular over there) and this great British campaign against binge drinking.

Four Paragraphs About L.A.

L.A. reccurs in my dreams. Why so? I walk through its downtown at night (do not try this at home) bumping into lost loves and friends. I take its light rail from Long Beach through scary, mystifying Compton to the foothills and back, I fly into LAX and out of it. L.A. L.A. L.A.

O Santa Monica roller-blading tarts, O British expatriates at an English bar, O Australian tea tree growing horizontally on the promenade, O Lonely suburban wasteland in bright technicolor, O lonely office on Wiltshire with a Muhammad Ali cardboard cut-out. O glass offices, O Mormon temple, L.A. L.A. L.A.

L.A. is my favourive forest, slender palms - such a variety, spanish rooftiles, barbed-wire fences around one story self-storage facilities, Champagne flutes on the strip, overlooking the twilighted truth. Watts towers rising over all other trees, like a cluster of General Shermans.

And at night the old cars zoom east of Venice, lusting and lonely like overworked janitors. It's not a bad place, L.A. L.A., I'd like to go back there, but then, I'd like to go back everywhere.

Stella!

An attempt to discuss the art of translation and the history of Israeli theatre with my new penpal D., ended in her assersion that she prefers to discuss beer. "In the immortal words of Philip Sidney," she wrote, "'True, and yet true that I must Stella love.' Oh – what wouldn't I give for a nice cold stella right now…. (sigh)"

Dear sighing D., I love stella so, as well as other brews, that I'll be happy do discuss the subject lengthily here in public. I've already dedicated a post to beer, specifically the wonderful Palestinian Taybeh, and another post to a night spent beer tasting, but there's news in the field and much beer adventuring to recount. Time for a third entry.

First there's Nimrod's place. I don't even know Nimrod's last name. A lot of us just call him "The older Nimrod" since Flashky is the young Nimrod and quirky poet and journalist Nimrod Kamer is the in between Nimrod. The older Nimrod popped into the Prince scene a few months ago, friendly, pennyless and speaking dreamily of opening a bar over the ruins of Tel-Aviv's closing Lesbian joint, "The Minerva". I didn't believe it was going to happen until I was indoors, but he really did open a place, and that place has beer, serious beer.

St Bernardus on tap is impressive enough. Every keg of this lambic is a bustling metropolis of yeast, and at 8% alcohol content. a quart of it would set you straight for the night, but Nimrod is aiming higher. He's got Maredsous tripel on tap, which is even stronger, (10% alcohol content), and while maintaining belgian complexity, manages to be smooth and drinkable enough to be gulped. Though it's true that I must Stella love, Stella's homeland is responsible for much better fare.

Nimrod's place "Harozenet"("the Countess"), also has great food. He recruited the chef of now defunct "Pastis" on Rothschield, who put up a menu fit for the brews he serves. She went on and devised such combinations as a glass of Cava served with a slice of camambert and seasonal fruit that has nothing to do with the place's decor (it still has the Minerva's dungeony quality). This rings more like picnic food to me, which brings me to my next favorite beer source: the Tiv Taam convenienve store on Rotcshield.

Friends and neighboors, come and picnic at night in our summery city. I promise to buy whoever takes my invitation seriously a beer from the Tiv Taam on Rothschield. We'll take it out to the boulevard to sit and shoot the shit and look at the people and the dogs and kids. Looking for rarities? Worry not. They've got France's own 1664, Italy's pleasant Peroni and several good Bavarians. More beautifully still: they've got Strongbow cider, an uncommon treat around these parts and a happy drinking experience galore.

It may sound as though I'm raving hedonistic nonesense about my town's culinary execces, both here and in my previous "Well Fed" post, but in truth I'm writing a love letter to its summertime beauty. I've lived for years in cities where you couldn't bring a beer out to the street or could only get it at 2.50% strength, and in others where anything better than a PBR was difficult to obtain except in specialty boutiques. This town's grocery stores offer malty magic and its fringy bars make no beery conpromises. Bravo.

I will wrap this up, however, with a word of nostalgia to Boston and to "The Sunset Grill and Tap", a bar that used to serve 525 different kinds of beer, 112 of them on tap. Each week its selection would change and a new drink menu, looking like a newspaper, would be published. Though it's true that I must Tel-Aviv love, it still hasn't poured me Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier that tastes like smoked ham, nor New-Mexico chilly beer that's to spicy to drink. Another one I miss is Charles Quint. The best beer I ever drank. My friend Yanki and I were served this in Brussles out of a horse drawn barrel, the size of an SUV. Here in Tel-Aviv horses still mostly draw carts loaded with old electric appliances, but we shall continue to drink and dream, till our drinks come true.