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.
I have been writing about this numerous times. And finally there is a scientific basis for Hugh MacLeod’s motto and his book title – Ignore Everybody. The experiment by Prof. Gregory Berns of Emory University involved financial decisions, I am certain this applies to any kind of advice. It appears that listening to an expert has an effect of turning off precisely the areas of brain responsible for making the right choices. I am sure this broadly is the mechanics of a guidance or indoctrination. Alon Nir writes on Dan Ariely’s blog Predictably Irrational – The value of advice:
“Berns recorded his subjects’ brain activity with an fMRI machine while they made simulated financial decisions. Each round subjects had to choose between receiving a risk-free payment and trying their chances at a lottery. In some rounds they were presented with an advice from an “expert economist” as to which alternative they consider to be better.
The results are surprising. Expert advice attenuated activity in areas of the brain that correlate with valuation and probability weighting. Simply put, the advice made the brain switch off (at least to a great extent) processes required for financial decision-making. This response, supported by subjects’ actual decisions in the task, are troublesome, perhaps even frightening. The expert advice given in the experiment was suboptimal – meaning the subjects could have done better had they weighted their options themselves.”
A momentous moment!
Thomas Rowlandson, The Doctor's Dream, Hand-coloured etching with aquatint, 112 X 185 mm. From: W. Combe, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in search of the Picturesque, London 1812, pl.27
Content is king they say. Wait a moment, blogs are made to distract and sidetrack. Anyone who runs a blog knows there is a spike in readership on Monday around 9:30am, coincides with workers filing in for the hated jobs and desperately seeking a diversion to numb the routine pain, to forestall the inevitable, the crushing, dehumanizing assembly line of reality. Shirky described this as management of a “cognitive surplus”. Guess how the YouTube works?
Blogs are to our generation was sitcoms were to our parents and alcohol to our grandparents, the cheap analgesic with the reality avoidance promise. For the split second on your blog they forget the spreadsheet, the credit cards and the memos. Blogs are not about “added value” they are about the valuable moment taking users away from the hopelessness of the daily grind. It’s that millisecond on your page that stops reality, soothes the pain of the financial and emotional pressures. All the elaborate blogging structure with comments, trackbacks, interesting facts, etc. is just a ruse to trick the readers into pretending they are having a meaningful experience. When you start a blog your job is to stone the readers out cognitive dissonance, while at the same time giving them an excuse to imagine this was the most rewarding revelation of their lives. The art of blogging is in skillful navigation between the tension and the pretension.
Image license courtesy Royal Academy of Arts
David Perlov was born in Rio de Janeiro 1930 and passed away in Tel Aviv in 2003. He was an einikle of the Karlin- Stolin dynasty. His great grandfather moved to Tzfat in 1857 (must have been a grandson of perhaps even one of the sons of the Reb Aaron Hagodol! I would defer to the experts but it is unlikely that he was from Asher Karliner line or even a product of the marriage pact between Asher Karliner and the Ruzhiner children).
David Perlov Photography is unique and he shoots to kill (via Maxim Reider). David Perlov left a voluminous documentary film diary and I am looking forward to seeing it.
David Perlov was much ahead of his time, he understood the demise of the staged cinematography and the coming power of the video moment.
He wrote:
“The documentary cinema interests me only if I can turn it into something more poetic. Only then does cinema interest me. The documentary cinema has become very journalistic, with a lot of technique involved; too much preparation and preliminary research, so that the subject is all “dried up” by the time the director starts his work.”
The following is 1977 short clip from the Perlov diary and it is precisely the art of paradox that I admire so much. The tenuous juxtaposition of myth and reality, Klaus Kinski is a mythological villain but he is profoundly humane in real life, he even rescues a little sheep. An Arab boy paradoxically salutes when seated but surrenders when he is standing, one would expect an opposite. ►►►read more
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.
This photo was taken in Tel Aviv a couple of years ago (note the orange ribbons on the horse at the time of the “disengagement” from Gaza). 