The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
Behold an allegorical layer superimposed on the ancient urban fabric. The “dish veil” looks like a foreign fashion. But if you walk the narrow streets facing the facades you will hardly see it. The “dish veil” is easily and quickly removable. To clean the dirty dishes off the table slate grab the four corners of a magical tablecloth…abracadabra there is no trace of the feast for the senses, the buildings appear au naturel circa 18th century – naked, pure and innocent like Adam and Eve. Yet there is the claustrophobic, choking, uneasy apprehension that all the gadgets are permanently anchored, dialed directly into the brains of the inhabitants, the tubes of the information life support IV dripping into the blood stream of imagination. You can picture the wires snaking down the soft, apple rotten crevasses of the pale, pinkish limestone, plugged and soldered into the human conscience circuit. A reversal along the metaphorical vertical access, the flip of the modernity flop played out on the most stubborn of stages. Traditionally the submerged dark mystery is below ground in the proverbial basement, the hidden foundation, while the persona emerges above ground lit by the sun. Here the captured sun energy descents from the soaked with revelation firmament to energize and illuminate the concealed subterranean layer of dreams and desires. The Jerusalem roof is the new spiritual catacomb. The Jerusalem of Gold glistening with shadows of the parabolic reflections.
Rob Dobi undertaken a tremendous project of photographing New England Ruins, abandoned institutional structures. The light and lighting is magical and makes all the difference in the photos. It has a Stalker feel. Especially the markers of human life left around the empty buildings.
John Frederick Lewis, Two horses pulling a plough, viewed from the back, c. 1820
We can’t define an intellectual by the volume of his database. Not even by his or her ability to reason. Alain de Botton writes that “a wealthy family in England in 1250 might have had three books in its possession: a Bible, a collection of prayers and a life of the saints”. They are not less intelligent than a college graduate in humanities after reading a thousand books. So intelligence is not a familiarity with the contemporary European philosophy, comparative fluency or ability to memorize. Intelligence is curiosity. This curiosity in turn fuels the exploration of a subject or an object.
I meet many people who have an enormous mental database covering a vast filed of knowledge. Yet they became jaded and lost their curiosity. It’s hard to describe these people as “intelligent”.
There are the current laments about the lack of intellectuals among the modern orthodox here and here (and not even an expectation about the other streams). This is unfair to people brought up or converted to the dogmatic culture. You can’t hold people responsible for the lack of curiosity if they are indoctrinated into a system that presumes and postulates more answers than questions. Centuries of breeding out the curious and curiosity as an undesirable trait are finally paying off.
Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
38 year old Anastasi Calatzis jumped to his death pretending to be a potential renter in a new Long Island City highrise. Anastasi Calatzis was distraught about his mother illness and his dire financial condition – NY Post: “I can’t take it anymore”.
Baba Baruch Business
On the subject of Move over Baba Bernie Madoff, here glides the carpet surfer Elazar Abuhatzeira. There is new book by Professor Yoram Bilu that looks at the phenomena in Israel: The Saint’s Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel’s Urban Periphery (Israel: Society, Culture, and History).
Naturally this is not just about Moroccans and it would be a mistake to cast this business as uniquely Israeli. Definitely one of the two oldest professions… There is a review of the book in Haaretz – A “Baba” is born. Now we know why Baba Baruch’s Beer Shevah brother, Baba Elazar Abuhatzeira needed to steal so much money from the working and hardly working Jews. The dude got an underground tunnel from his house, “not to see women” of course:
“The Baba Baruch invented the new version of the tzaddik. Bilu writes in his book that already in the 1980s and 1990s, Baruch Abuhatzeira raised his father, Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, known as the Baba Sali, to the level of a national holy man. Masses of people began to visit his poor home in Netivot and to fill up bottles of water, which they believed became curative and brought luck, after being blessed by the tzaddik. After the death of the Baba Sali, his son built him a gravesite with a characteristic white dome in Netivot, surrounded by a national park that has become the most important site for hilulot in Israel.
At the same time, Baba Baruch built himself a sort of palace, as well as a neighborhood called Kiryat Baba Sali. He wore traditional robes, a la Baba Sali, and began to implement a program to turn himself into a kabbalist: in other words, abstaining from women and engaging in kabbala. Despite his shady past, which included affairs with women, he succeeded in acquiring status and prestige.
Many grandsons of the Baba Sali have started flourishing hatzerot (literally, courtyards) for themselves: Rabbi Elazar Abuhatzeira built a luxurious one in Be’er Sheva, which includes a tunnel that connects his home to the synagogue, so that he won’t have to see women on the way to prayers; in the north, David Abuhatzeira, the rabbi of Nahariya, conducts a court that is similar in terms of prestige and status. Because they had the sense to go far away, rather than competing with them, the Baba Baruch has been conducting battles of prestige for years with “the X-Ray,” a stranger who settled in Netivot and eroded his power. The latter seems to have gained the upper hand. Just recently, the foundation for commemorating the Baba Sali filed a petition – one of many – against the Sdot Hanegev Regional Council, claiming that, contrary to the regulations, it allocated 34 dunams (about 8 acres) for building a yeshiva.”
Interesting so it was Baba Baruch who marketed his father. Is that “X-ray-ted” dude in Netivot a Rabbi or a Rapper?
I would be remiss not to mention that Baruch’s brother Meir who was the father of Elazar and Baba Sali himself are not responsible for the shenanigans. In fact a reader of this blog writes:
“…both Meir and his father were truly saintly men who lived lives of absolute simplicity, humility and service. I’m saying this in absolute sincerity. They both lived on the verge of poverty their entire lives with no political aspirations or involvement whatsoever. They were both a source of great pride, joy and leadership to the community of Moroccan jews during the extremely(!) difficult period of the transition from Morocco to israel, and just on that account I am very proud of them. The current generation has definitely made a mess out of things, and I have nothing to say in their defense.”
I am typing this while I am yet again on hold and listening to a randomly bad instrumental music. When you speak to a rep. on a telephone in an official “support” capacity you are not actually speaking to a human. You are speaking to an input device that has a voice recognition and the ability to read out-loud text off a screen. When you get to the last screen and inevitably there is no resolution to an issue the only choice is to handshake your packet to another device. You get the worst of all worlds – a human being embarrassingly degraded to an input device and a computer saddled with the most inefficient and deliberately opaque interface. The vast part of the economy is still run this way.
This is a not only the problem of the inefficiency or the bad usability concept. The emotional toll this process takes on the economy is enormous. A human reduced to the helpless keyboard, the frustration of dealing with an impermeable machine. This is far worse than the classic Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The traditional bureaucrat is a glorified sadist, happily beaming with the illusion of power. In other words a fulfilling, honorable job. The classic bureaucrat can be tricked, bribed and occasionally reasoned with. But today’s rep. has literally the dignity and the self-worth of a plastic mouse and there is no way out from the last screen. It’s a lose-lose situation for customers and clients.
Blogging is peculiar delusion based on the strange expectation that there are more people in the virtual world who understand you compared to the real world. It’s hard to find a more prefect mental distortion.
Burning of the Jews during the Black Death, Liber Chronicarum, 1493
Two Jewish treasures discovered in Colmar, Alsace region of France in the 19th century and recently in 1990s in Erfurt (former Eastern Germany) are on display in London at the Wallace Collection. The exhibition will be on the permanent display in the Old Synagogue of Erfurt, one of the oldest synagogues in Europe. Both treasures were hidden during the flight from the towns by the Jewish families. Guardian has a video review of the exhibition. Amazing jewelry and memory.
The Erfurt wedding ring with a bell inside. Many photographs show just the crown of this ring while the most unusual detail are the two folded hands on the bottom of the ring. The tops of the widow decorations are slightly bent inwards so a beautiful bride wouldn’t scratch herself. The stars form what appears to be a three-dimensional Star of David. I feel it is possible to imagine and bring to life the bride that was wearing the ring, bring back her flowing robes and her fleeting dreams. Hes sense of doubt and her generous acceptance. The fragrance and the love.
The image above is part of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Lewis family, Adam and Eve , 19th C.
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Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
John Frederick Lewis, A sleeping child
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Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
On the subject of The Chasidic Court of Bernard Madoff, here how it’s done by the professionals of the Abuhatzeira family. A hair raising tale in Haaretz - N.Y. Jews accuse Be’er Sheva Kabbalist of massive fraud. All Bernie Madoff promised was the steady 10% and he actually delivered for 40 years! But Elazar Abuhatzeira went on to do what every miracle maker and a Rabbi on the face of the earth has done before him, exchanged superstition for cold cash. And what Elazar Abuhatzeira sold was not the lousy 10% but the very life itself, is there a price one would not pay for that? One might say it’s the fault of this confused man from Brooklyn, but no, he only followed to the letter what the Rabbis told him to believe. And the esteemed Rabbis teach this with the specific purpose so that this very fraud ride continues indefinitely.
Is the Google page rank algorithm redirecting our culture? At the end of last year Fred Wilson wrote a post – People First, Machines Second. Fred was saying that the page algorithm elevates linking and anchoring of information, a human action. But there is a peculiar omission from the logic, machines or uncaring humans can link and anchor many times faster, and they do to the tune of billions of pages and millions of dollars. More importantly they poison the well of knowledge by cluttering the “super highway” with the clunkers or should we call them drones. For sure Google is aware that this has the enormous impact on the search results quality. But there is the deep apprehension that Google in fact prefers quantity over quality. Google is an advertising supported business, they need the inventory to distribute the ads, they would rather monetize point of purchase not the point of information (see Chris Dixon on the massive misallocation of online advertising dollars) and they don’t particularly mind the drones because that can multiply page views by the millions (see Aaron Wall – Spam vs. Mahalo).
Now Matt Cuts started to direct humans to the Google Spam report page, “help us maintain the quality of Google search results”. If this is not an admission that a Google bot sees no difference between a splog and a blog than what is? We know that Gmail spam filer works pretty well but then it relies on the reporting benefit of the huge installed base of the darn humans. And it doesn’t look like the usability of the search results will improve anytime soon, not after the massive amount of the social media clutter is now integrated into the pages. Tweets might be a human signal but if the disjointed bits of information, mostly click-through links to the 3rd party sites is not a spam than what is? Inevitably signal to noise ratio in relationship to a particular search is dismal. In short the search no longer gives you the aha “buzz”…
This commentary would remain academic if not for the fact that the “setup” is detrimental to writers and content originators. The machines don’t emote to art, poetry, heck they don’t even properly recognize the significant technical or scientific writing. The bots are not very good at detecting copyright. The robots are way too busy selling the washer dryers and the quantifiable viral amusement. If you think this has nothing to do with the punishing grip of this great recession than you really might be a machine.
The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
