frgdr.com Blog

Hagigit, the Jerusalem artists’ cooperative I co-founded, got some attention today in the form of an interview:
Jerusalemite.net, the self-proclaimed ‘definitive English-language culture guide to the center of the world’ published today an interview with Guy Yitzhaki, a fellow co-founder of our little art group. In the interview Guy discusses the goals of our group and elaborates on our most recent activity. Check it out!

Yesterday, in front of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama delivered an historic speech. Instead of the usual speech that every other politician gives, which basically show affection without backing it up with any specific commitments (’we stand with Israel… Israel is strong… I cried at Yad Vashem… Bla bla bla…‘) - instead of that, Obama made elaborate and unprecedented commitments including:

• keeping US aid at 30 billion dollars over the next decade
• unequivocal commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon
• rejection of the Palestinian right of return
• Jerusalem as the capital of Israel - undivided

Now that Baruch Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, do yourself a favor and invest 35 minutes of your time to listen to one whole speech by the senator. Each day I watch in dismay how the TV channels summarize a speech to a 30 seconds sound bite, and while each day it is a different speech, the sound bites are almost the same: Change-change-change, Hope-hope-hope, Yes we can. People who say Obama has nothing but slogans to offer - this is for you:

Full transcript, below the fold:
[Read more →]

On the road last week, an old song by Israeli band Yarkon Bridge Trio was being played on the radio, and it got me thinking about how cultural norms change over time, and how songs can be time capsules, storing the essence of en era. In this particular case the era of Israel in the 1960’s, when all the men were ‘men’, all the women were ‘girls’, and all acts of blatant sexual harassment were considered acceptable foreplay. This particular song was not only extremely popular at the time, but was considered a praise for womankind.

As always, in my translation of the lyrics to English I tried to adhere to the meaning, the tempo and the rhymes, to the best of my ability, but as always, unless you can read the original Hebrew lyrics, you can only get the general gist of it. As Israel’s national poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik put it: reading a work of art in translation is like kissing somebody through a handkerchief.

Don’t Cross the Street Alone - Yarkon Bridge Trio - lyrics:

Watching the Eurovision Song Contest last night, I could not help notice that while each country had a different representative delivering its votes, somehow the female representatives showed similar characteristics. I am a firm believer in the law of large numbers and thus think a large sample size can sometimes reveal significant issues. As an artist I use mosaics from time to time to express various opinions, and so after composing this new work I think we can agree Europe still thinks women are nothing more than eye candy:

For higher resolution, press F11 and then click the image

Following is a legend with the name of each country corresponding to each photo’s location:

^* Out of a total of 43 representatives, 14 males were excluded.
^† Insignificant minor retouching was done on some of the photos.
^‡ The Turkish representative’s shirt was heavily retouched to remove some superimposed graphics