mashdownbabylon

Mixed Media

Barack Obama's positions on Israel may sound relatively conventional. However, the opportunity he's taking to frame the Bush administration's Mideast policy is genuinely welcome. Following his speech to the AIPAC meeting in Washington on Wednesday, I wrote Taking Responsibility. While I end up spending more time on Joseph Lieberman's response than Obama's speech, you''ll see exactly why I appreciate the issues Obama is raising.

Along the same lines, I wrote a series of reflections on Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen's 2007 film Jellyfish, which appeared in Zeek today. Nonsensically titled Netanya Fish Fry, the piece addresses recent American attempts to come to grips with contemporary Israeli cinema, and a tendency I detect to try and de-politicize it. Contending that recent narrative experimentation in Israeli filmmaking is in fact it's own political gesture, the article is about Diaspora anxieties about Israel, displaced onto film criticism.

Masada or Yavneh?

CEDAR: When you compare the rebels on Masada to the wise men in Yavneh, the rebels died as lions, and the wise men lived as dogs . But the dogs had puppies, and we are those puppies. So, there was something about blowing up Beaufort, blowing up the fortifications, blowing up the mountain, at the end of the film, that was also about blowing up a symbol of (the lion's) power. It's about our power to create something else that, at least for me, makes us different from our enemies.

ZEEK: It means that as Israelis, we can start over. That we have the ability to reinvent ourselves.

CEDAR: Not only that. It means that we have an identity without the geographical symbol, that we have an identity that is as powerful and as firm as concrete and fortifications, flags and pride.

To read the rest of my interview with director Joseph Cedar, check out the new issue of Zeek.

The Mirror Stage

You know you're starting to feel old when, in the space of one month, three films about three dead musicians hit the theaters, and you can still remember when their very first records came out. Such was the case when, watching the previews before the new Anton Corbijn biopic about Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, I saw plugs for new feature films about The Clash's Joe Strummer and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.

Two down, one to go, so far, Control is the winner. Casting Ian Curtis as the unstable, miserable genius that he was, the black and white feature debut by the famous Dutch photographer has a truly literary feel to it, eschewing Curtis' star quality for an up-close study of a talented young man totally falling apart. Julien Temple's homage to Strummer, The Future is Unwritten is Control's polar opposite.

A documentary portrait of an equally brilliant middle aged rock star burdened with enormous regrets, Future is best summed up in the highly critical words of my wife, who published her own terrific take on the film last night. Check it out. If you haven't read the Bionic Farmer blog yet, this is the perfect introduction.

A Different Kind of Closet

In Walk on Water’s closing scene, we find Eyal walking up to a crib to care for a crying baby, in a house, which, as the camera traces his movements, is one he now shares on a kibbutz with Pia, his new German wife. Axel, however, is never very far away. Sitting down at his laptop with a cup of hot tea after pacifying his newborn child, blanket draped over his shoulders, a domesticated Eyal composes an email to Axel, in which he tells his brother-in-law of a fantasy he had about the two of them defying gravity by walking together across the Sea of Galilee.

Obviously, whatever feelings Eyal held for Axel have not only not gone away, but, more significantly have become a subject of acknowledgement, perhaps even dialogue, between the two men. As welcome as the remarkable changes the former Mossad agent has made to his life appear to certainly be, he is still clearly closeted. Settling down with the blonde haired and blue-eyed granddaughter of a Nazi on a kibbutz may represent a dramatic step forward. Nevertheless, it is Eyal’s unrequited desire for Pia’s brother that represents a yearning for something even greater.

Ideologically speaking, Walk on Water is anything but simple. Could Eyal’s inability to fully come out be a sexual metaphor for a future peace between Palestinians and Israelis that’s correspondingly incomplete? A two state as opposed to a one state solution, where Jews may have made their peace with Europe but not, quite fully, with the Palestinians? Fox is appropriately unclear, as his message should be. Nevertheless, sexual liberation, of the kind that Walk on Water embraces, has profound political corollaries that lie far beyond the liberation of desire.

-From IvU, Chapter 7

A Canon (of Sorts)

Working feverishly on my next to final chapter, here's a brief list of the cultural product I'm presently fretting about:

Film

Walk on Water, directed by Eytan Fox (Israel, 2004/US, 2005)
Paradise Now, directed by Hany Abu-Assad (France/Israel/Palestine, 2005)
Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg (US, 2005)

Books

A Little Piece of Ground, by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan, 2003/Haymarket, 2006)
Palestine, by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics, 2001)

Music

Magnetic Storm, Smartut Kahol Lavan (CD-R, Boshet, Israel, 2005)
Discography, Dir Yassin ( LP, Alerta Antifascista, Germany, 2006)
Vote Hezbollah, Muslimgauze (Soleilmoon, 1993)

All About the Subtext

If you have the patience, the results are well worth it. Sitting in the exact same spot from where I listened to him lecture last year following the premier of Astra Taylor's Zizek, on Sunday night, I spent two and a half hours watching the same Slovenian philosopher explain why movies matter. 

A collaboration with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema isn't as overtly transgressive as the title implies. What's radical (hence 'perverted') about it is how Pervert simplifies a decidedly complex, psychoanalytic approach to interpreting films for a non-academic audience.

Replete with footage of Zizek in San Francisco (on city streets, standing by the Golden Gate Bridge, etc.) Pervert is also a curious study in the intersection of his career with the Bay Area. A fan of the many Hitchcock and Coppola dramas shot here, most of Zizek's discussions of them ( The Birds, for example) were filmed in SF. 

Worth noting is Pervert's sixties-style editing and visual detail. At times resembling an avant-garde documentary - imagine a vintage public television feature on Jean-Luc Godard hosted by Marshall McLuhan - Pervert is as stylistically rich as it is intellectually stimulating. Or, to put it simply, dope.

Authors, Friends

The nicest thing about being an editor are the relationships you forge with authors. By no means the first time I was reminded of this, (but definitely the first since I left Tikkun,) my former film editor decided to pay me a visit on Monday. The first time we'd actually met (after nearly three years of exchanging email and phone calls), Shai Ginsburg was out here on a brief break, determined to finally get together.

One of the best critics of Israeli film writing in English (in fact, the top right now), Shai added the kind of depth to our Israel coverage at Tikkun, which, in the form of film reviews, helped me obviate the magazine's never-ending problems with being deemed too 'anti-colonialist' (to quote a right-wing friend of mine), in its historical emphasis on the occupation, to the exclusion of other forms of Israel analysis.

Much to my delight, as Shai and I walked down to San Francisco's best Middle Eastern joint, the Old Jerusalem Restaurant, we ran into one of my longtime contributors, Other publisher and Choir Boy author Charlie Anders, whose work I've printed in both Punk Planet and Tikkun, as well as The Anti-Capitalism Reader. Strolling quickly by on Mission Street in one of her signature outfits, we almost missed her.

Thankfully, Charlie noticed us, and flagged me down. Introducing her to Shai, I explained that Charlie was the author of one of the more controversial religious pieces I commissioned at Tikkun, an article on transgendered Jews. Long in the making, Charlie's piece was a terrific read, and had a kind of secular quality to it which is so lacking in most Jewish periodical coverage of the new queer spirituality scene.

Speaking of Tikkun, the magazine's webmasters were kind enough to consolidate my infrequent blog entries into one URL. Not exactly god's gift to the blogosphere, there's still some stuff of interest. My last entry was in late December, when, despite my crazy schedule, I attempted to jot down some final thoughts on our Israel/Palestine coverage. Check it out. I'm sure I'll be writing more on this greater subject in the future.

Bring the Noise: Drunks with Guns: Second Verses (Intellectual Convulsion, 1990)