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Showing posts from 2011

Casa

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Luck brought me to Casablanca but with only enough time to take a fewphotos in the early morning or evening. The old downtown area, near the port is graced with lovely old buildings, standing cheek to jowl with some badly neglected neighbours. The sun setting on the paved area surrounding the King Hassan II mosque. Spray coming off the Atlantic covers the Corniche (promenade). The mosque itself is the 7th biggest in the world and has the tallest minaret. It was built on the water because, according to the Koran, "the throne of Allah was built on water." Children playing in one of the magnificent but waterless fountains. Setting up shop in the old vegetable market. The logs the man is facing seemed to have petrified into stone. Breakfast before school. Too many buildings look like this. Not everyone's idea of cool... Early morning shoe shine. In the market. Pancakes are cheap and popular. The spaces onte walls are reserved for polit

Deja Vu on Liberty Square

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A visit to Zuccotti Park, the epicentre of the Occupy Wall Street movement, triggered a sharp sense of deja vu. We'd flown in from Israel where the last vestiges of the protest tent encampments were being removed, only to find that they had been reincarnated a spit away from Wall Street. And what was fuelling the protestors here among the sleeping bags and placards  was the same middle class anger with big business, with bad government, with the disproportionate distribution of wealth, in short: with the system. There was also the same infuriating/intriguing refusal to be tied down to fixed set of demands. References to the fundamentals of American democracy were a major motif. One man stood reading the Constitution out loud. I copied the following passage from the New York Times Review (but forgot to jot down the name of the author): Sounds familiar? It would be hard to beat this as a description of the Daphni Leef  school  of the Israeli social protest movement, down to Dap

Making Art Loving Art in Yaffo

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This weekend the annual Tel Aviv art festival took to the streets. We took a walk along Yehuda Hayamit in Yaffo, a normally nondescript commercial street in a mixed Jewish-Arab area  that turned up some suprises. Outside the Galei Tzahal (Army Radio) building two dancers performed in front of a small crowd . This trio of Arab girls had a strategic view next to spotlights and seemed entranced. a From the outside, the studio/salon at number 20 looked pretty dilapidated but the interior revealed this cosy area. Further up the road, an explosion of primitivist colour. Not often that you see a cellist playing at the entrance of a carpentry shop, so  we were drawn in. To find that the cellist had friends making electronic sounds at the back. On the way we met Ahmad who was taking advantage ofthe crowds to display his bicycle technique. He agreed to have his picture taken on condition that it would appear on the internet. So this is for you Ahmad. Watching video art project

September 3 - the final demo?

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We were out on the streets last night, together with another 400-450,000 people, in what was optimistically dubbed The 'March of the Million'. The million didn't materialize but it was still the biggest protest ever held in Israel. All these photos were taken on the upmarket Kikar Hamedina (State Square), an ironic venue for a social protest Encompassed by boutiques selling Tshirts for hundreds of shekels, hundreds of thousands of Israel's long suffering middle class came to chant, perhaps for the last time this summer "ha am dor esh tzedek chevra ti! " (the people demand social justice!). An English speaking protestor turned the familiar graphic slogan "I (heart) Tel Aviv " into, "I can't afford to (heart) Tel Aviv " The (religious) Reform movement touts a banner quoting a Biblical commandment to pursue righteousness Like all the previous demonstrations, this one too, though noisy, was completely peaceful. On the outski