All About the Hummus
Two weeks before the beginning of my book tour, I discovered that Amos Oz would be reading in San Francisco. Not just on any night, but the exact same evening that I’d be reading at my favorite local bookstore, City Lights Books. ”There goes that event,” I remember telling Jennifer, as I braced myself for what I was convinced would be the single worst-attended event of my trip to the US.
No such luck. The room was filled to near-capacity. Even better, it was a repeat of the previous night, when I’d read to an equal number of people in Berkeley. Granted, Oz was reading at the JCC, and I was at an indie shop, but still. Even in the Bay Area, the readership for such Israel-focused work tends to be fairly specific. Watching folks take their seats, I was overcome by an enormous sense of relief.
Indeed, everything about the Bay Area leg of my trip proved to be positive. I’ll be the first to admit I was apprehensive, not just because of my fear of having to compete with much better-known writers, but because the most significant parts of Israel vs. Utopia’s treatment of the Diaspora is based upon my experience of San Francisco. I really wanted to be able to talk about it, in the city that defined it all for me.
To that end, I’ve been recording nearly every night of the tour so far. I haven’t had the opportunity to sit down and edit the recordings yet. However, this interview, conducted on San Francisco’s KALW last Wednesday, does a great job of summing it all up. Wait until you get to the part where we start taking callers, and the show’s host, Sandip Roy, brings up the issue of food.
The lack of complexity with which I explain that I approach the subject is precisely because of the intensity with which Americans have grown accustomed to relating to the Mideast conflict. Hence the rather unfortunate juxtaposition of adverts above, which I noticed as I waited for the train back to San Francisco following my first local reading, at Pegasus Books, in Berkeley. It’s very Bay Area.
Nowhere in Particular
It isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think about getting a good plate of hummus. However, as far as San Francisco’s Arab restaurants go, its one of the city’s longest-running Mideastern establishments, and the kibbe, if I remember correctly, is absolutely first class. The only other local place that served kibbe of that calibre was the late, great Cleopatra’s, in the outer Sunset, several blocks west of the old San Francisco Conservatory of Music campus.
One of the things that Jennifer wrote to me about during the last month we were separated was her determination to find an equally good spot for hummus here in Milan. She finally found one near her firm’s new office, a few blocks from Garibaldi station. I’ve yet to try it, but frankly, I confess to having fallen in love with a Turkish-run doner spread a stone’s throw away from our apartment. If you ask them to hold the mayo (yes, mayo), their panino kebab is totally killer.
Complex Carbohydrates
That’s one ideologically charged burrito. Notice it’s colonially-designated Indian neighbor. Cal Mart supermarket, SF. 9/4/09.
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.
Armor Piercing
All they could talk about was Obama. How naive he is. How he would be appeasing the Arabs. How, inevitably, he’d not only sell Israel short, but the Jewish people, too.
“We are the defenders of the West, the only barrier between Islam and democracy, and this young man still puts them first, as though Abdullah ever came before Netanyahu.”
The words were those of an aging general, long since retired from the IDF. “We defend this country for them, for you,” he said, looking at me, assuming that because of my American accent, I was an outsider.
I listened for as long as I could, trying to keep my cool, despite the infuriating assumptions that were being made. When I finally did speak up, I really spoke my mind. Everyone was surprised.
“You aren’t taking into account why the Americans would begin to express complex feelings towards us, towards the Middle East, and start contemplating such things as negotiations and withdrawal,” I replied.
I thought back to this conversation yesterday as I drove by this memorial, at the mouth of San Francisco Bay. There was something particularly moving about it, that caused me to stop, to think and remember.
Don’t get me wrong. I still loathe cliched displays like this. But sometimes, under certain circumstances, they’ll punch through the armor of the most jaded of skeptics.
The presence of a Veterans Administration hospital right behind it certainly helped.
Home Schooling
San Francisco’s best used bookstore is fifteen minutes away. In the kitchen, July 23rd.
Work in Progress
In a matter of weeks, Zeek will cease publishing at Jewcy. As many of you already know, the periodical is moving to a brand new home, hosted by The Forward, America’s oldest Jewish newspaper. In the final stages of a redesign, we’ll be debuting a brand new site too, put together by Jennifer (who created the wireframes) and Richard Winchell, a terrific visual designer. It’s going to be a wonderful publishing platform, if only because of the people who pieced it together. Hopefully we’ll provide it with content of equal quality.
I’ve been working as Zeek’s online editor for the last three months, though I’ve been supplying the same amount of content since February. Following the completion of the book, I’ve had the opportunity to step up my day-to-day work at the mag. So far, its been extremely gratifying, and a nice change of pace. I’ve often worked as an editor in order to give myself a break from writing. Even though I’m supposed to be writing a column (and will be doing more of that) its nice to worry about other folks grammar for a change.
Despite the fact that we had not planned on returning to the US this summer, it turned out, obviously, to be an ideal time. I could not imagine doing this level of editorial work and planning at such a distance. This way, when we return in the Fall, everything will be built, and we can get to work, wherever we are. I’m enjoying the idea of editing Zeek in Milano. The Italian tie-in seems so distant from what English-language Jewish publishing is about here, with its division of coverage always split between the US and Israel.
Wartime Imaginary
In the Fall of 2007, I started to document numerous instances of the Middle East in San Francisco. Signs of the city’s burgeoning Palestinian and Israeli immigrant populations, the local Jewish community’s longstanding activism around the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the War on Terror, everything seemed to come to a visual head here during the final year of the Bush administration.
Imagine my surprise when, the day after returning from Milan, Jennifer and I encounter the image above. An archetypal ‘milk carton kid’ (for those unfamiliar, in the US, milk cartons used to carry pictures of missing children) the picture was taken on Valencia Street, in a spot normally covered with smarty-pants political posters. Notice, of course, the fact that this missing child is in fact Osama Bin Laden.
The following day, twelve blocks away, I found this image inserted inside a weekly newspaper bin. The cover of another American icon – a Chick comic – this one features obvious caricatures of terrorists. Judging from the execution, jihadis, in traditional garb, disingenuously posing as ‘friends’ while still flying the flag of Islam. Notice the sinister-looking guy holding up the flag. Its hilarious, albeit lame.
Chick publications, a hipster fetish (because of their obvious extremity) are too easy to pick apart. Rightist Christian pamphlets designed to deliver political information in the form of a religious comic book, the contrast of such publications with the imposition of Bin Laden’s likeness on an all-American beverage is a good way of summarizing the mental space the Mideast continues to take up here.
