Tel Aviv Diary - June 6-10, 2012 Karen Alkalay-Gut
June 6 , 2012
For tickets to Levontin 7 on Friday at 4 click here
I have done something to the display of this computer and cannot see what the hell I'm writing. So this is completely from the heart. Sometimes I joke about how Tel Aviv is the city for gays because we can't get the Jewish tourism that goes to Jerusalem so we have to find the another target audience, but it makes sense. Not that Tel Aviv is all gay, but there is something all inclusive about the city - and when I'm sitting in a cafe on the street I can't take my eyes off the contrasts and the combinations. It's not one group I love but the groupness of it all. May it stay that way forever.
June 8, 2012 The show today was great, but I have no pictures. I do, however, have a video and Ezi will divide and put it on youtube or something soon. In the mean time, I thought you'd like to know we went to Benedicts - where they serve only breakfasts - and our advisor, Ayelet, was totally surprised we could get in. There's usually a long wait, she said. But we were exhausted and I hadn't had my afternoon snack, and this was the closest place we could find. We were immediately joined by one of the locals:
The breakfasts themselves were good - for breakfast. Not cheap but perfect in their way. Even elegant.
The afternoon performance at Levontin itself was great fun. How can I describe it for my friends who couldn't make it? It started off very intellectually - with Rony Somek, Roi Tartakovsky, Moran Korenberg-Weiss and Rafi Weichert saying things about my poetry I'd never thought of before. Then I read some straight poems in English, with the Hebrew posted on the wall on powerpoint, and then I read a new version of "Poetry and Public Toilets," as part of my belief that poetry shouldn't be confined to the page. And then Nissim Calderon introduced Yael Kraus and Roy Yarkoni of Panic Ensemble. We did a little dialogue of poems and music and kept cutting because we were worried - it was the first time we ever talked on the stage. But it was good. And, as I say, I learned a lot, so I hope everyone else in the crowded hall of Levontin 7 did as well. Now, after an afternoon of food and babies, I'm going to Barby for the disk launch.
June 10, 2012 This is something from the Barby launch
