Jerusalem Nursing Home

There’s a story I never finish. Every year, I write a new draft, and somehow lose it. It’s about visiting my senile grandmother in a nursing home in east Jerusalem in April 1977. Not just any nursing home, but a converted  Jordanian army barracks, replete with falling plaster and broken pipes. The works.

At least half the patients are elderly Arab men in wheelchairs. Everyone is speaking a different language, including my Palestinian Jewish grandmother, who, for the first time ever, addresses me in fluent German, while her roommate, a giant Armenian woman, insists over and over again, in French, that she is Napoleon.

Imagine being transported thirty-one years back in time, in London, at an installation by two Chinese artists, at the new Saatchi Gallery on Kings Road. The photograph above says it. all.

Unidentified Public Sphere

Working as the editor of an international news aggregator, I had my worst fears confirmed. In the US, as newspaper and magazine circulation continues to constrict, most foreign news is now imported. Subscribing to hundreds of Middle Eastern and South Asian periodicals and blogs as part of my job, even though I’d mastered receiving my news via RSS years before, the longer I did this work, the more I longed to go to an old fashioned newsstand and walk home with three or four periodicals. Friday evening, I did just that.

I was particularly taken with the idea of reading through The National. Published in Abu Dhabi, in the weeks leading up to its launch last summer, it was subject to much hype in the US. In between hiring former editors from newspapers such as The New York Times, and starting up in a publishing environment like that which presently exists in the United States, Americans were indeed curious about it. The fact that English-language Arab periodicals are experiencing a spike in US readership due to the war definitely helped.

Rough Guide to London (Slight Return)

The timing couldn’t have been better. Immediately after arriving in London, I had to edit the US edition of a guide to local graffiti installations by British political artist Banksy. Written, photographed and self-published by journalist Martin Bull, the book has been an underground hit here since it first appeared last March. Finding a copy at the Serpentine Gallery bookstore, Jennifer and I were pleasantly surprised. Having only seen the UK version before, back in San Francisco, it made our new home feel a lot more familiar.

Yesterday the author signed off on the final PDF, whose cover, shot in Hoxton, appears above. Today, the book’s designer, Courtney Utt, will enter his final corrections and send it to the printer. We’re both really excited to finally see it off. The book was ingeniously re-designed from the ground up. I worked my little fanny off (or non-existent one, as my wife would lovingly put it) to retain Bull’s original language, while giving it a good makeover. Banksy: Locations and Tours will be in US bookstores starting in January.

Israel Seizes Hyde Park

A lone Christian Zionist waves the Israeli flag at Speakers’ Corner, singing to whoever will listen in broken, Cockney-accented Hebrew. London, 10/19/08.

Target Marketing

Everyone warned us that it would be at least two weeks before we’d get telephone  and broadband service installed in our new apartment. However, no one explained to us that because of where we live, as our cable sales rep tried to politely explain it, it’d take up to a month. “You mean its difficult to get service in London,” I reiterated to the embarrassed salesperson, with all the innuendo I could muster. “Yes,” they replied, sounding relieved that I understood the subtext of what I was being told. “I am so, so sorry.”

Nothing, however, prepared me for this Western Union poster I discovered at the local Internet cafe I’ve been using. Placed next to phone booths advertising low-cost calls to locations such as the West Indies and South Asia, the pointed, culturally specific character of the ad stands outs. He may be dressed up as a bee, but this Sikh is still a metaphorical insect. While I’m used to ethnically directed commerce in the US, such overtly cartoonish moments had become a thing of memory. Not so for Americans and their firms abroad.

My New Diaspora

It used to be that calls from family would always come from Israel. Now, they’re coming from the United States as well. Not just from my siblings (who prefer email), but from Jennifer’s relatives too, most of whom live in the Los Angeles area.  

Thirty years ago, when I was in fifth grade and living in central London, the word Brixton never, ever graced any of my family members’ lips. Whether they were speaking Hebrew, Spanish, or English, ‘Brixton’ might as well have been Uzbek. So restricted was our sense of this city’s geography that Chelsea seemed like it was the only urban area that existed outside of Tel Aviv.

Four days ago we moved into a beautiful light-filled loft in Brixton. A five minute walk from the tube station, and seven minutes from Eddy Grant’s reknown Electric Avenue, the neighborhood is every bit worthy of having been immortalized by so many like-minded artists. As though on cue, this is the first signage we saw as we stepped off of our train to check out what would become our new home.

Rear-View Mirror

Speaking of political economy, this was the last picture I took before leaving the US. San Francisco, 9/27, just as Congress and the Bush Administration were trying to close a deal to bail out America’s troubled banking sector.

Posted on Valencia Street, adjacent to a store I’d gone to at the last minute to buy discounted Brazilian espresso, its unclear whether this is a Shepard Fairey print, or one inspired by him. I should have examined it a little more closely.

He Put the P in Private Property

The father of modern capitalism, reincarnated as a real estate agency. Bayswater, London, the day that the British government announced that it would be partially nationalizing eight of the UK’s largest banks.