{"id":8553,"date":"2018-12-26T10:00:03","date_gmt":"2018-12-26T18:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8553"},"modified":"2022-03-18T16:58:42","modified_gmt":"2022-03-19T00:58:42","slug":"time-dilation-in-tel-aviv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8553","title":{"rendered":"Time Dilation in Tel Aviv."},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

None of the following events should have happened, by rights. I should never have even made it to Tel Aviv, but for some vestige of Baptist Guilt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why, I’ve Got Friends I Haven’t Even Used Yet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I currently have nearly 250 unanswered emails in my In-Box. Some are links and bulletins concerning cool bits of science I haven’t got around to reading but I will someday I swear I will. Others are personal missives from friends trying to arrange a get-together over the holidays, or pleas from Ekos to fill out an online survey concerning Canadian Attitudes to the Theological Implications of Quahog Reproductive Strategies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many are fan emails. Some are just bits of generic praise or condemnation, which I can answer in a sentence or two. Others contain links or essays, and even the sane ones tend to languish because I can’t really answer those until I’ve read an associated 15,000 words of science or political opinion. Some ask for advice on matters personal and professional, which more often than not I’m incompetent to answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I try, though. Even though I frequently resent the implicit demands on my time; I don’t know these people, after all, and it sometimes takes hours to craft an appropriate response. Don’t they know I have over 200 fucking emails in my In-Box? Don’t they know I’m struggling to meet the deadlines I’ve already got?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I try. Because a lot of the mail is heartfelt, and the mere fact I’ve received it in the first place means that these people have some kind of faith (or at least hope) that I have useful insights to offer. I try, not because I think they’re right, but because I don’t want to look like an asshole. Because I don’t want to let someone down after they’ve reached out to me. Because, although I’ve long-since renounced my Baptist upbringing, the programming remains burned into the firmware: If you’ve done this to the least of my brethren, so also have you done it unto me<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when someone wrote me in 2012, sharing their uncertainty as to whether they should pursue a career in science or art, I saw a younger version of myself and shared what I could. When someone else asked my opinion on their premise for a video game, I gave it\u2014 even though my own experience told me they’d never get the fucking thing off the ground, because that industry is way too conservative to risk a triple-A budget on anything that gives off the slightest whiff of originality. In both cases my response prompted others, a correspondence that eventually petered out, as such things do. I went on to feeling guilty about other emails I hadn’t answered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometime in the intervening years one of those guys got involved with the Utopia Film Festival in Tel Aviv. The other left his gig at Ubisoft, came home to Israel, and booted up his own studio with a handful of friends. Out of the blue, I’m invited to Tel Aviv. Out of the blue, I’m invited to tour this startup across town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out of the blue, I get a chance to meet cool people, learn new things and unlearn others, visit an ancient and achingly-beautiful part of the world I never thought I’d get to. I feel like the guy who gave a lift to the ragged stranger hitchhiking at the side of the road, only to find out five years later he’d helped out Howard Hughes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This happens more often than you might think. It’s a whole new, purely Darwinian reason to not blow off your fans when they take the time to write to you. But I don’t think the effort:payoff ratio has ever been so high as it was in this city that literally took its name from a Utopian novel<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Future History<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We fly in via Warsaw, under cover of night. Tel Aviv looks positively synaptic. Adam and Eden meet us at the airport and we mutually rejoice over the latest findings of corruption leveled at Netanyahu and his wife.  They drive us to a funky little boutique hotel with an art gallery for a lobby, a rooftop garden that supplies produce to their restaurant, and complimentary welcome cocktails that we can take up to our suite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Schindler’s Lift. Get it?<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We’ve been up for thirty hours or more. We crash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next morning we go down to the restaurant, expecting the usual self-serve table of buns and scrambled eggs and cold cuts simmering endlessly under heat lamps next to an empty coffee machine. We get table service and a menu fit for someone in training for a half-marathon. We meet the first of countless Tel Avivian cats, a ginger stray waiting patiently for his morning feed out on the patio. He has a nicked ear: a tag to mark him as an alumnus of the local neuter\/release program. (Tel Avivians love their cats; every day as the markets close, shopkeepers put out their leftovers in little piles for the feline hordes. Already I want to move here.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We have all day to explore before my first event: we wander the streets of Jaffa, an ancient seaport which has apparently been occupied for the past 9500 years (putting it disturbingly close to the end of the last Ice Age). These days it’s home to levitating peach trees and giant anthropomorphized egg plants (the plaque tags it as the whale that ate Jonah\u2014 I’m pretty sure the dude was escaping to Tarsus when Yahweh caught up with him, though, and speaking as a former marine mammalogist this statue doesn’t look anything like any whale I’ve<\/em> ever seen). There are beggars. There are massive rococo fountains. There are mosques and churches and synagogues. Fortunately there are also a million cats. There is wifi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The horse is ancient. I believe the Giant Pep-O-Mint Life Saver of Salvation is of more recent provenance.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Seriously, nobody’s gonna convince me this is a whale. A sapient potato, maybe. A smug spermatozoan, in a pinch.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
The Cumming of the Lord.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Much of the architecture of Old Jaffa was inspired by the works of Roger Dean.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
I’m not entirely sure what all these totems represent, but I want this in my back yard.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
JaffAviv is like some chaotic mix of mythic paradise and epic dystopia. With very<\/i> open-concept toilet facilities.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
The Fireside Chat, with audience numbers slowly crawling up into the respectabe range.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I’m slotted for an underground Q&A, in a museum-cum-archaeological dig. I cringe as it approaches: I’m no kind of name in Israel. I’ve had one novel and one novelette translated into Hebrew and both of those went out of print years ago.  I figure I’ll be damned lucky if four people show up, but when four people do<\/em> show up I heave no great sigh of relief. Fortunately people keep trickling in throughout the hour; by the time we hit the halfway mark there must be 20, 25 people in the audience. It’s not Poland, but it’s way better than I was expecting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
“Storytelling the Future”, which deked immediately into a full-on discussion of dystopia. As you can tell from the logo. L to R: Eden Kupermintz, Mushon Zer-Aviv, me, Aya Korem, Katharina Derm\u00fchl.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The next event is a panel on the general subject of how we use our art to describe the future. I share the stage with Mushon Zer-Aviv, a dude who’s developed a form of future-prototyping called Speculative Tourism<\/a>; Aya Korem<\/a>, an Israeli singer\/songwriter who’s here thanks to her latest SF concept album and its accompanying graphic novel; and Katharina Derm\u00fchl, who cofounded an organization<\/a> to work with refugees and asylum-seekers. Eden moderates; the panel rocks. But all the way through, I’m vaguely miffed because there’s this VR demonstration going on elsewhere in the festival, and I’m missing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It turns out okay, though. In fact, the whole VR thing turns out better than I could have ever imagined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
You go through this tiny inconspicuous door, into this indoor cave that used to be a Tel Avivian tax office but was then abandoned. During the day, it’s a variety of shops. At night the lights come out. I swear, it’s the closest real life will ever come to Fallout 4’s Diamond City. (Also, you totally have to read the menu.)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It’s common knowledge that everyone here has military training; being in the army is just a part of growing up in Israel. And yet, I’m continually surprised by that renewed realization, almost every time I meet someone. It doesn’t matter whether I’m meeting a teacher, or a filmmaker, or a musician; every hand I shake is attached to an artillery operator, or a tank instructor, or a combat specialist. Every gentle film buff I meet can probably strip down an automatic weapon and put it back together again blindfolded. They all probably know about eight different ways to kill me barehanded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a good thing they seem to like me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the Rubbing of Elbows<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Uri Aviv takes a palfie. Behind him are Katharina Derm\u00fchl, Omri Amirav-Drori, me, and Colin Trevorrow (who, if you squint, you you can just make out comparing me to Ian Malcolm in his head).<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mainly a film festival, right? By rights a written-word guy like me shouldn’t even be here. But here I am anyway, sitting on a panel leading into a special screening of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom<\/em>, with biotech entrepreneur Omri Amirav-Drori to my right and Colin Trevorrow, director of the Jurassic World movies, to my left. We’ve convened to explore ways in which biology might offer some hope for the future. This is all going down in the newly-opened Tel Aviv Museum of Natural History, down the stairs from an infographic that increments, in real time, the estimated number of species that have gone extinct just this year. It’s already on the high side of 120,000; this, among other things, leaves me a bit dubious of Omri’s free-market exhortations about extinction rates (“You talk about species going extinct, we can create new<\/em> species!”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Not exactly cause for hope.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Maybe a bit too much of the panel consists of me and Omri arguing about capitalism and apocalypse, but Colin seems amused by the whole thing. Describes me as the incarnation of Ian Malcolm. He says this a couple of times over the course of the evening, and I smile and nod and feel like an ignorant doofus because while the name sounds awfully familiar, I can’t remember who Ian Malcolm actually is. I envision some present-day incarnation of Rachel Carson or Sylvia Earle; I feel profoundly inadequate that someone with my scientific background could have forgotten a person of such stature. It isn’t until the next day I remember that Ian Malcolm was just the Park-bashing mathematician in the original Jurassic Park<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Spanish Ambassador’s pool is bigger than our house. We paced it.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My inadvertent channeling of Crichton’s character pays off big-time, though. Colin thinks enough of the exchange to invite Omri and me into the fold for a couple of hours of consulting, which basically consists of getting paid to sit around opining about Jurassic movies both past and upcoming (no details; the NDAs involved are almost as arcane as those you’d find in the video game industry). Omri, en route to Senegal the moment the panel ends, can’t make it; so I end up jamming with cybersecurity specialist Keren Elazari instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Director Isaac Ezban and The BUG. We hit it off.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This sort of thing happens all week. Hiding behind the BUG during some shindig at the Spanish Ambassador’s residence, we run into a guy wearing a Westworld Maze t-shirt\u2014 turns out he directed a movie that some Netflix algorithm keeps haranguing me to watch. (“The Similars”\u2014 also “The Incident”, which I also haven’t seen. They’re both on the list now.) I show up for my “Storytelling the Future” panel and discover the person I’m sitting next to is an activist pop star<\/a> who not only took her record label all the way to Israel’s Supreme Court\u2014 and won\u2014but also pioneered federal legislation to protect the rights of artists against predatory record companies. (My only regret of the whole week was that we never found the time to take Aya and her partner up on their offer of beers.) Even the mandatory lunch with a Festival sponsor got me a free t-shirt and an argument about consciousness and determinism. (“Are you for the revolution, or against it?” Yanki Margalit<\/a> wants to know when we first meet. I hedge: that really kind of depends on what we’re revolting against. “Violence against women!” he pronounces. Which seems to me like way too self-evident a thing to require an outright revolt; surely the vast majority of people are already against that, right? It would be kind of like staging a revolution against genocide, or environmental destr\u2014 ohhhhhhh<\/em>\u2026<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He never even mentions his private space program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Not sure about the t-shirts Yanki handed out. The whole clenched-fist-punching-an-icon-of-femaleness might be open to interpretation.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A Debt to Incompetence<\/strong><\/p>\n

A quick digression back to the Tel Aviv Museum of Natural History for a moment: state of the art, brand spanking new, home to everything from dinosaur bones to Brazilian Hissing Cockroaches.<\/p>\n

Also to one of the most embarrassing yet vital naturalist legacies  you might imagine.<\/p>\n

Father Ernst Schmitz was a priest and amateur naturalist, active in the late eighteen\/early nineteen hundreds. He was perhaps the only person with a deep and devoted interest to Middle-East fauna at that time, and he scrupulously collected and stuffed specimens of everything he could get his hands on.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, passion does not necessarily map onto skill. This dude’s taxidermy chops were terrible<\/em>, which is odd given how much he practiced. I mean, just look at these lifelike poses:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>

<\/p>\n

Not that this has anything to do with the festival, mind you. I just think it’s heartening to know that no matter how bad you are at something, you can still achieve a measure of immortality just so long as no one else occupies the same niche.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The door to the Bat Cave. Note the booby trap.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Stuff of Which Reality Is Made<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve never been to CERN. It’s on my bucket list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve hung out with a piece of the Large Hadron Collider, though. It’s lying around in Adam’s dad’s basement. Or at least, the basement of his lab. As chance would have it, Erez Etzion<\/a> is the Chair of Particle Physics at Tel Aviv  University and a CERN physicist, and\u2014 despite my repeated insistence that I don’t know nearly enough about that stuff to even ask a competent question\u2014 he opens a couple of hours in his schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I get a quick yet fascinating tutorial in subatomic physics (I get to ask him about the “Fat Universe” model, although I remain unclear on quark flavors) before we head downstairs into the basement. The door to the lab is counterweighted with a soda can filled with some unidentified fluid. I’m not sure whether it’s a booby trap or just some kind of arcane latching mechanism; either option seems disappointingly Newtonian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside, though, are CERN shells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Like a single scale from some quantum serpent god.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Think of CERN’s ATLAS<\/a> assembly and you’re most likely to envision something that looks like God’s Own Spark Plug, fifty meters long, threaded onto a particle-accelerating torus almost 30km across (turns out there are a few smaller torii linked in as well, but let’s not make this  more complicated than it has to be). All the particle-smashing, black-hole-creating, potential-universe-destroying stuff happens in the heart of that plug; but the particles created thereby fly off every which way, proliferating and speciating and decaying at a range of distances from the initial collisions. So ATLAS is sheathed in a concentric series of detectors packed with mixtures of exotic gas, or steel, or lead, depending on what kind of particle each is trying to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Adam and his Dad.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I’m a bit too intimidated\/uneducated\/starstruck to be sure in hindsight, but I’m pretty sure that the slabs Prof. Etzion keeps in his basement are muon detectors, designed right here on campus. They look entirely unremarkable; they wouldn’t look out of place next to a motorbike and stacks of old porn in a Scarborough garage. (I’d imagined clean rooms and hepafilters and hazmat suits.)  Think of them as space-shuttle reentry tiles; unremarkable in isolation, but absolutely mission-critical when linked together by the thousands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prof. Etzion is primarily a Standard-Model man, but he’s not above slumming it with off-the shelf components. He builds cosmic-ray detectors out of repurposed Plasma TV screens, for example. I want to poke around, see if I can maybe dig up a flux capacitor, but we have a panel over at the Natural History Museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
I have no idea what any of this stuff means.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Rapture<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time I experienced VR was in the nineteen nineties. You’d put a small bathtub on your head and find yourself in a wireframe environment populated by geometric solids and fellow players rendered as polygonal, roughly-humanoid shapes who jerked and flickered whenever you moved your head.  You would shoot pixels at each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The modest, shoeless geniuses of One Hamsa. L to R: Michael Dagan, Assaf Ronen, Dave Levy, me, Ofer Reichman.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
In the process of losing my “VRginity”. Blame Dave Levy for the pun.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The second time I experience VR is in 2018, in the offices of an Israeli start-up called One Hamsa<\/a>. They are fans, apparently; I exchanged some emails with one of the cofounders back when he was working at Ubisoft. They’ve spent a couple of hours watching me eat mixed nuts, then reluctantly eating some themselves when I wondered out loud why nobody else was eating these nuts and what they knew that I didn’t. We’ve discovered a lot of common ground (not the least of which is an enduring love for “Star Control 2”, a nineties-era videogame involving\u2014 amongst other things\u2014  screenplay-writing pterodactyls, blobular aliens whose idea of a practical joke is to instigate religious wars among other species, and a hypercapitalist civilization that literally throws its crewmembers into the fuel converters for an extra boost during space combat). One Hamsa has exactly one game on the market: a kind of space racketball arcade game called Racket: Nx. Big whoop, think I as I adjust the visor across my eyes. You want to impress me with VR? Gimme Skyrim<\/em>. Gimme Bioshock<\/em>. Gimme\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
I just grabbed these off the internet. They don’t come close to coming close to doing it justice.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

And then they boot it up, and I am Born Again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am standing on a circular platform, Earth hanging off my left shoulder. Stars everywhere. Diaphanous nebulae. I turn my head as fast as I can without giving myself whiplash: no frame drop. No response lag. No screen-door effect.  I am there<\/em>, I am standing in Outer Space and it goes on forever<\/em> in every direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a while I remember to breathe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I barely scratch the surface of the game itself; I’ve received no instruction, I don’t know anything about the tractor-beam option or the strategic order in which one is supposed to pick targets. All I know is my right hand is a massive paddle that looks like a cross between a radio telescope and a waffle iron; I am in the center of a spherical arena build of interlocking hexagons; and the Devil’s own Rollerball is shooting toward me, streaming fire in its wake. I swing wildly, connect; it ricochets off hexagons, transforming and replicating and shattering them on impact, comes back at me from behind. I fend it off again. Somehow I’m racking up a score.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a strategy element to all this, and a multiplayer mode but I don’t know about that: I’m just smashing things. Eventually I smash enough of them and the arena shatters like a mirror\u2014 drops away in hexagonal fragments and I am standing on the surface of the fucking sun<\/em>. The photosphere boils beneath my feet, a vast seething expanse of convection cells; solar prominences arc overhead. The feeling borders on religious awe. I have just spent maybe five minutes at  Level 1, set (I can only assume) to Dead Easy mode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time I take off the gear I am a convert. No wonder this thing pulls down a 98% on Steam. No wonder those tech-companies-whose-names-I-forget chose this game to showcase their new audio warez. We have talked, One Hamsa and I, about the possibility of collaboration on their current project\u2014 a game with significantly deeper themes than Space Racketball\u2014 and I would be utterly on board for such a partnership. But whether that happens or not, I cannot wait to get home and research VR systems. I cannot wait to wait for Boxing Day when the prices go down, so I can spend the money Colin Trevorrow paid me. I cannot wait to convert the Trombonarium into a gamespace, to move the dining-room table and chairs and bookshelves and plants off into the kitchen or someplace to make room for my own alternate universe. Whether I get to claim it all as a business expense almost seems beside the point.  I would buy all this stuff, and wreak such havoc on our home and marriage, just for this one game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I find out that Skyrim is available in VR, I don’t stop jizzing for an hour and a half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Place Where Even Artists Do Not Go<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The city had been called Tel Aviv.  Central Station rose high into the atmosphere  in the south of the city, bordered in by the webwork of silenced old highways. The station’s roof rose too high to see, serving the stratospheric vehicles and rose from and landed on its machine-smooth surface. elevators like bullets shot up and down the station and, down below, in the fierce Mediterranean sun, around the space port a bustling market heaved with commerce, visitors and residents, and the usual assortment of pickpockets and identity thieves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Lavie Tidhar, Central Station<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Really, you’ve got to click on this to embiggen the gory and glorious details.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Central Station exists, as it turns out. Lavie Tidhar just slapped a spaceport on top.  In real life it was supposed to be the central transportation hub for all of Israel, a hive not only of transport but of commerce. The bus station part, grafted onto a pre-existing train station, took decades to complete\u2014  including years spent derelict and incomplete when the money ran out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given Tidhar’s description, I’ve been expecting a bustling market heaving with commerce\u2014 and there is in fact a chaotic and tawdry sort of strip mall crowding a couple of ground-level floors between the actual bus platforms and the Lower Reaches. There are religious outposts\u2014 we found a synagogue near the top of the Inhabited Levels and a derelict Christian doorway down in the Forbidden Zone\u2014 but the religious iconography that most obviously rules over the Inhabited Levels are the Golden Arches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not much of a Kingdom, though. Almost three quarters of this monstrous edifice are deserted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The actual bus bays occupy the uppermost levels, in an area festooned with all manner of graffiti. (Entry into the bays is an unexpectedly one-way affair: you push the door outward onto the platform, and only when it swings closed behind you do you realize that there are no knobs on the outside. There’s no way back in unless some kind or careless soul opens it again from inside and allows you to sneak past.) Even these occupied zones have an air of dereliction about them\u2014 water puddles on the floor, stray cats haunt the corners\u2014 but at least there’s a semi-bustling human presence. The further down you go, though\u2014 beneath the strip-mall chaos near ground level\u2014 the more deserted the place becomes. One retail outlet shines forlornly from a rank of abandoned neighbors. One fluorescent tube that works flickers alongside five that don’t. Every now and then, down some abandoned wing, a double-bolted door is festooned with intricate carvings and symbols.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Box office. No theater.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We find a box office for a cineplex, but no actual cinemas to go with it. We find social amphitheatres that look like they were designed by the guys who did the sets for Space:1999; the chairs there look like they’ve never known a human ass. Apparently people hold raves down here (we see none), and phantom druggies haunt the levels to shoot up (we see one). Most startling and creepy and compelling are the “squatter art installations”, courtesy of anonymous artistes who have occupied abandoned storefronts and filled them with bright nightmare visions: giant crocheted eyeballs dangling from ligament and artery; balaclava’d child-angels playing with giant bloodworms; decapitated baby heads on poles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We keep going down. We descend into, as Adam puts it, “the places even artists do not go”, places even he<\/em> hasn’t gone, where the walls are bare concrete and the few lights that work glow dimly behind a generation’s accumulation of spiderwebs. We find a bomb shelter. We find a colony of bats, easily ten times the size of the pissant bats we have in Canada: these have bodies big as fat pigeons. We find a locked door with the bolts rusted shut, in an alcove where the concrete itself is crumbling to ruin; and a strange hoop-shaped antennae mounted on the wall beside, as if any EM radiation could ever make it this deep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Halfway to the Earth’s mantle, we find a gender-neutral urinal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Possibly unclear on the concept.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Longer Lines than Disneyland<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The New Jerusalem.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I missed the official tour of Old Jerusalem because it was booked across from my appointment with Prof. Etzion. So Adam drives the BUG and me there the next day, gives us our own personalized walkthrough. We visit the Wailing Wall and get into a small amount of trouble from a very pleasant dude hailing from Cleveland, who tells us we’re not supposed to take pictures of the Wall on religious holidays. (We get off easy; apparently there are parts of Jerusalem dominated by Orthodox gangs who throw rocks at women unwise enough to pass through their turf wearing pants.) We shop down cramped alleyways lined by little stalls hawking ancient traditional wares by Hugo Boss and Tommy Hilfiger. We watch Adam buy and consume an authentic Jewish bagel the approximate size and shape of a 400m running track. We hike along cat-haunted rooftops while Jewish and Muslim criers call their respective flocks to worship\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christian Territories. You know, the people who follow that guy who told them to sell all they had and give it to the poor.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
The guide insists that this is the exact spot where Jesus was crucified. Ohhhkay.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Most of these people are just abasing themselves. That guy with the little plastic boxes, he’s taking samples<\/i>.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Nobody seems to find it odd that all these sites are so conveniently close to each other\u2014 each basically an amusement-park lineup away from the others. In fact, the authenticity of the morgue slab is so thoroughly embraced by those in attendance that many of them prostrate themselves against it, speaking in tongues. Others mop at the slab with cloths, as if to wipe up some bit of divine Christly essence that might yet persist after two thousand years. I see one man collecting samples into a series of tiny white plastic sample containers, for all the world like those I used to embed decalcified bone fragments in wax for microtoming back in grad school. Perhaps he’s hoping to clone the Son of God back from residual flakes of epithelium. I wonder if he’ll be disappointed when all he reconstructs is a clone of one of the myriad believers who drooled and sweated on this totem earlier the same day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Old (and bits of newish) Jerusalem. This is more like it.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Islam’s Dome of the Rock shines like a beacon over on the far side of the Wailing Wall, but we don’t visit. The BUG and I would have no issues getting over there; Adam, a Jew, might run into trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Is it just me, or is the whole stormy-sky\/Wailing-Wall combination a bit reminiscent of Mordor?<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Which brings us, I guess, to<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Elephant on the Blog.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask your host if he can arrange passage for you into the West Bank<\/em>, droid said<\/a> at one point. See what happens<\/em>. It’s the kind of challenge you take half-seriously at best\u2014 go to Canada’s Travel Advisory web pages<\/a> and try to find a border with Israel that doesn’t<\/em> come equipped with huge red exclamation points and DO NOT TRAVEL warnings in big red letters\u2014 but I ask anyway, while we spelunk Central Station. I also ask about Gaza, given what I’ve heard about the wall turrets there.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We could go,” Adam says after a moment. “It would feel intrusive, exploiting my status as an Israeli to go uninvited, basically to gawk, into areas where people don’t have nearly as much freedom to move. But I could reach out to my Palestinian friends, see if we could set something up.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To any who might be reaching out to tick off the Some of my best friends are<\/em> square on an Ideological Bingo card: Adam met these particular Palestinian friends through his mother’s work in an Israeli\/Palestinian alliance called Road to Recovery<\/a>. They carpool sick and injured Palestinians (mainly kids) past Israeli bottlenecks so they can get medical care unavailable in the occupied territories, so they don’t die waiting to get through a checkpoint. I doubt that any of the people Adam calls friend are token;  I haven’t know the man for long, but I’ve rarely met anyone so thoughtful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, if anything, he bends over almost too far backward for balance. He prefaces his answer to pretty much every hot-button question with “Obviously this is just my interpretation”. He’ll channel the enemy, relate their accusations of injustice and atrocity past and present, admit: “\u2014 and they’re not wrong”, before going on to explain how much wrong<\/em> there is to go around on all sides. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who so scrupulously recognizes their own biases and gives so much credit to their opposition. All in a context almost guaranteed to raise Us-vs.-Them<\/em> thinking to steroid-infused hyperOlympian levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Aforementioned hipster soft-drink bar. Possible fetus skulls in jars to the right.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We spend a fair amount of time with Adam and his friend Eden, talking over hole-in-the-wall hummus or sipping hipster drinks that seem to contain fetus skulls at the bottom of the glass. I’m not stupid enough to claim that I’m anywhere near to understanding the cesspit of conflicting agendas that have plagued this part of the world for so many centuries, but I think I’ve learned a little more about certain bits and pieces. (The Right of Return, to cite just one case-in-point. Maybe you’ve seen demonstrations of displaced Palestinians, waving the keys they’ve kept to family homes from which they were banished to make way for Israeli occupiers. They’re not wrong. Another not-wrong way of looking at it is that some of them left in the first place on the advice of Arab armies in surrounding countries, who told them they should leave for their own safety but that they’d be able to move right back in again just as soon as those armies had killed off all the Jews. You can see how certain Jews, yet unkilled, might be less than sympathetic to subsequent claims that Hey, we had a deal!<\/em> Turns out even war crimes can have nuance.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adam was the man who invited us to Israel; he’s the guy who showed us around Jerusalem, and hung out with us, and talked to us the most. He met us at the airport, and, ten minutes after shaking hands, stated outright that the treatment of Palestinians was “basically apartheid” (contradicting any number of extranational voices who’ve insisted that comparisons to apartheid are off base). But he’s hardly unique in Tel Aviv; literally everyone we spoke to about the subject was adamantly opposed to the Israeli occupation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are the people we’re supposed to boycott? People like Uri, who tells me “I don’t consider myself an Israeli. I consider myself a Tel Avivian.” People like Eden, who matter-of-factly excoriates the Israeli government for its treatment of the Palestinians? Like Katharina from Berlin, who has dedicated her life to working with refugees and sees no dissonance in being here? Like Adam, called a traitor by his own countrymen for supporting Combatants for Peace<\/a> and demonstrating in support of fallen Palestinians on Memorial Day? People who themselves have been boycotting West Bank businesses for years?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These<\/em> are the people I’m supposed to renounce, in support of a campaign that doesn’t even have the support of the Palestinian President<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We never do make it to the West Bank. Too much to do, too little time. But the option’s there, and if I ever make it back I hope to take them up on it. If we can figure out a way to do so without  gawking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

Exodus.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We leave on the morning of the 10th. They send a cab; one of the organizers was supposed to give us a lift but there was a dead-dog party after the closing ceremonies and if I had to guess, I’d say she’s probably got the mother of all hangovers. We say goodbye to the funky hotel and the swarms of cats and the cycads and the hanging gardens. Security asks us more questions going out than coming in, which means our interrogation lasts all of thirty seconds. We fly across the Med in broad daylight, and follow our progress across the birthplace of civilization on Google Maps.<\/p>\n

I check my In Box. I have emails to answer.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Epilog<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Yeah, right. Like I’m going to finish off a blog post set in one of the most cat-friendly cities on the planet without showing you any Israeli cats. Here is a small sample.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Looks like the smart gun report<\/a> was either erroneous or I misunderstood it, by the way, unless they upgraded their hardware within the past year. One of the folks I speak to on this trip has seen the bunkers where Israeli soldiers teleop the wall guns. Apparently Humans remain in the loop. Whether this makes things worse or better is left as an exercise for the reader.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

None of the following events should have happened, by rights. I should never have even made it to Tel Aviv, but for some vestige of Baptist Guilt. Why, I’ve Got Friends I Haven’t Even Used Yet I currently have nearly 250 unanswered emails in my In-Box. Some are links and bulletins concerning cool bits of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8553"}],"version-history":[{"count":95,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10185,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8553\/revisions\/10185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}