A Tale of Two Cities
Combining Tfat and Tel Aviv in one day made for an interesting contrast between old and new. Since we began our trip in the Golan Heights and the kibbutz there, these were our first tastes of city life in Israel. In both cities, however, we took a closer look at art and how different people share these traditions and opinions.
Tsfat is an artists' community, and it feels like a painting - all sun bleached brick and winding, narrow cobblestone with blue accents and mosaiced doors and archways. There's movement to the city, both frantic and ordinary - people setting up for the morning, crowding slick walkways, selling their work along a slight but crowded main passage. When I got caught in a crush of people or ducked into a small storefront, it was easy to feel the warmth of the stone beneath me and imagine this pace of life back a few hundred years.
Men outside along the path with walls of silver hanging jewelry, painters with their canvasses still sticky in the back corners of their stores, artists who greeted you and explained their pieces and their processes - these people are now catering to tourists, but so much of the craftsmanship I saw was gorgeous, expressive, and genuine.
Aside from the three pieces of art, I broke out my credit card to purchase ($75 American dollars feels less when you see it as 300 shekels!). My favorite experience in Tzfat was a demonstration from two local musicians. They played traditional music on various combinations of oud (a guitar ancestor), kamany (a violin ancestor bowed and played in the lap), and a gakin (a keyboard ancestor laid flat and plucked). We ducked into an open room of pillows and alcoves at the top of the city and settled along the perimeter for their performance.
When I'm not gallivanting around Israel for 10 days, I'm a musician, and I almost expected to be moved here - the musicians easy, playful improvisations, their subtle communication, their fingers flicking across strings and drums and wood. What I did not expect was how enraptured my entire group was - 46 separate people of different backgrounds, taken aback and taken in by the center point of the music, the ethereal quality of one of the drums, clapping in the heartbeat of the sound. It was such a special communion and appreciation, and I am grateful to have shared it with this group of people.
Fast forward to Tel Aviv that evening (the long bus ride antics and Independence Hall visit both deserve separate posts). We explored the city on our own through restaurants and pubs as well as a guided tour of graffiti and street art in the city. Our guide bounded around the downtown area, explaining the history of Tel Aviv street art snd contrasting it with Jerusalem and the tensions between each city's personality.
Each piece demonstrated an alias-Ed artists agenda - painting small and large, changing with the social climate (we saw several leftover rainbows from pride last week), and artists responding to each other over top of the art, growing it into visual conversation. Some art has remained untouched for years - a depiction of Rabin's assassination in blurred security camera black and white - while others elicit more immediate responses - an artist who added himself to portraits of the "27 club" had his face painted out by other artists for the hubris.
I had never really considered graffiti/street art as social commentary or disruption, but hearing different interpretations to "color" the art so to speak, has made me pay attention to the walls and public spaces with a new perspective. At the end of our tour, our guide announced that it was his night shift at work. He was off to add some new color to the city
