Joel Schalit

Work In Progress, Part II

Last Monday, the visual design of the new Zeek website was completed. Now in the hands of developers, it will be a couple of weeks before we can begin usability testing, and start migrating Zeek‘s archives. The handiwork of Richard Winchell, its an elegant and simple platform that will prove easy to build on. This snapshot, though tiny, ought to give you a reasonable sense of what it will look like.

We already have a new editorial schedule in place to follow the site’s relaunch. Regular readers of the periodical will find the content familiar, but all the same, the new site design will help enhance the magazine’s traditional literary strengths. I am particularly anxious to use this opportunity to demonstrate the difference in our cultural sensibilities, in ways that we presently cannot show.

The completion of the site also allows me to return to writing projects I had to push to the side these last three months, as I’ve helped prepare this and the print edition, in addition to editing the old site. A fractured wrist notwithstanding (I fell off my skateboard in late June), I’ve only just gotten full use of my left hand back. I finished my first article in two months, a 2400 word essay, last week.

On the Scanner

Getting ready to leave London. Living room table, March 19th.

Fans of Israel

We didn’t have all the artwork we needed. Rifling through my files this afternoon looking for backup images, I happened upon this photograph, of Israeli flag-branded fans. Taken at the Ace Hardware at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel last May, I’d gone to the store to look for electrical fixtures for my parents’ new home. Imagine what a hoot it was to find something packaged in such a purposeful way. “Hah hah, very funny,” responded my father, as I pointed out the box to him with a big grin. “It’s always about the double entendre,” he laughed.

Whether we end up using the photo for the issue, I can’t tell you. Its still too early. Still, its one of hundreds I stumbled across that I took over the last year, precisely for such reasons. The day after turning in the fall print edition of Zeek, I’m surprised I even had the energy to spot it. The first time I’ve edited the venerable quarterly, its going to be a good issue, I think. It was nice, and somewhat challenging, going back to print, however briefly. The issue leads off with a fascinating interview of philosopher Judith Butler, by Mark LeVine.

Their conversation is just the tip of the iceberg. The theme of the issue is of course Israel. The rest of the edition’s articles, featuring pieces by Shai Ginsburg, Etgar Keret, Keith Kahn-Harris, and the late Benjamin Tammuz, hopefully will prove to be as interesting to others as it has been to me. Granted, the last thing I want to do is read it again. Nevertheless, it was a joy to work on, and we’ll be releasing it in time for my book tour in November. My publisher has been gracious enough to ask bookstores to stock it at my readings.

Halfway Home

As frustrating as it was to be seeing Jennifer off again, it wasn’t as difficult as I had feared. While we’d only been together for a week, her return trip to Milan meant that mine was only three weeks away. We’d be together soon enough. No matter how difficult it was to contemplate another lengthy separation, as I told Jennifer, it felt like this summer’s upheaval was beginning to draw to a close.

For the last five weeks, Jennifer has spent all but one week traveling. Culminating her journey with a ten-day trip to China, she returned to San Francisco for a brief respite, before heading back to Italy to head up another project. This is, after relocating to San Francisco in mid-June, following nearly three months in Milan. Add in seven months in London prior, and voila. We’ve moved a lot in the past year.

The photo above was taken just before we returned to the US. Shot a couple of blocks away from our home, we were en route to our neighborhood park early on a Sunday morning, before Milan’s legendary summer heat would become too much for our dogs to handle. Think 95 Fahrenheit, with 80% humidity, for four straight months. Even a short walk to the grocery story leaves one drenched.

“It makes Tel Aviv feel like Iceland,” I joked to my father. While I still feel that way, (and Jennifer reports it feels even hotter), I’m really looking forward to putting the heat out of my mind, and returning home. As much as I love San Francisco, and have gotten an enormous amount out of being here, the only thing I can think about is returning to Milan, and getting a chance to hang out with my wife.

Same Day, Different Neighborhoods

Operation Cast Lead, in German. Breakfast in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. January 8th.

Same war, twenty-seven years before. Looking for dinner in Kreuzberg, nine hours later.

Kosovar Punk

Right after we arrived in London last September, my MacBook Pro decided to give up the ghost. When it died, so went a number of files I thought I’d lost for good, including scans of an enormous collection of articles I’d written for print periodicals that had never made it to the web, or if they did, had long since been taken down. Most had been written for Punk Planet during the 1990s, and held a particularly sentimental value for me. I was devastated by their loss.

Last week, I successfully resuscitated the drive this material was on, recovering the PDFs I’d made of these articles. Today, I posted some of the better examples to the Clips section of this site. Of particular note is Ready for War, the cover story for the July/August ’99 edition of PP. Written following a roadtrip through northern Italy at the height of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, the sounds of fully loaded US F16s flying overhead were still fresh in my ears.

There’s more to it than that. Needless to say, a decade later, it is fascinating to go back and read these pieces, for both personal and political reasons. Written when I was working on my PhD, I was particularly consumed by the wars in the former Yugoslavia. They were especially rich for persons with my set of academic interests. I was convinced that the anti-Islamic rhetoric of Serbian nationalists would eventually be assimilated by western conservatives.

Milan Does Obama

The hair salon around the corner from our apartment. Viale Andrea Dorea, June 2009.

Look the Other Way

I’m still a big fan of sampling from vinyl LPs. Despite the degree to which electronic and hip-hop musicians relied upon them during the 1980s and 1990s, there remain entire genres of beautifully-recorded spoken word and field recordings which remain under-utilized for artistic purposes. One such genre is foreign language instruction discs. During the 1950s and 1960s, American record labels rolled out some of the most elegantly packaged releases, many of which can still be found today at specialty vinyl shops and flea markets.

Because we’ve been living in Europe, trying to learn other languages – right now, Italian – I swore to myself that when I got back here, I’d try and finish off collecting this genre of recordings. Continually moved to imagine how they might be repurposed for musical projects, I’ve had the good fortune of finding a number of these records. Hebrew in fourty minutes, Russian in a week, German for English speakers, recorded on unfathomably thick slabs of virgin vinyl. I haven’t had this much fun record shopping in years.

Stopping at Recycled Records on Haight Street last week on one of these outings, I found Thurston Moore blocking my way to the corner of the store containing it’s spoken word recordings. Pulling out all kinds of obscure LPs, the fifty year-old Sonic Youth guitarist did not look a day older than when I had last seen him, twenty-one years ago, playing with his band in Portland. It was a fitting spot, and moment, to run into him again, ageless, combing through an indie music store as though he were still a nerdy graduate student.

I did my best to busy myself while Moore made inventory of the only shelf in the shop that I was interested in. Looking at the poetry records adjacent to him, I anxiously tried to tune the legend out, while the sounds of a late 1980s Fall record boomed over Recycled Records’ sound system. Content to read the liner notes to a sixty-year-old recording of TS Eliot, I patiently waited until the guitarist moved on to the cash register, carrying a load of albums in his hands, hoping I’d done a passable job of pretending I hadn’t noticed him.

Hell of a View

The last time I went to San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, it was to attend a Yom Ha’atzmaut (independence day) party hosted by the Israeli consulate. I’d been invited by the consular press officer at the time, a sarcastic, American who was always interested in hooking me up with offbeat Israeli filmmakers and novelists that the government thought would be appreciated by the idiosyncratic, bohemian sensibilities of local Jewry.

Since the apartment we’re subletting is only six blocks away, I walked over to the museum yesterday, only to stumble upon this rather intense display. A memorial to Jews who died in the Holocaust, it points north, slightly west of the Marin Headlands, out towards the Pacific Ocean. On the other side of this pile of ceramic corpses stands a ghostlike mannequin, staring through a well-worn fence made of wood and barbed wire.

Ha Internationale

So many countries to be interpellated by. The third in line is California.