beck talk visits Cuba!

Please stay tuned for exciting news on the food and culture of Cuba. Amnon and Gaul will be sharing their experiences as they travel the country and sample the cuisine. We can't wait to cover their adventure through photos and essays over the next two weeks.

Salad Days in Israel

One of the things I love about spending time in Tel Aviv is the diet. Every meal has salad.

Israel has one of the highest longevity rates of Western Countries, especially for men. Despite military service and the obvious stresses of living in a country that phases in and out of war and nuclear threats, Israel is right up there with Sweden, Iceland, Italy and Switzerland.

According to studies, several factors account for this long life: great national health care available to all, tight and cohesive family and community, varying migrant genetic mixes in the population, low alcohol consumption, physical activity and diet.

But I believe the daily consumption of fresh vegetables is key. The salad come as a side with every restaurant meal, and the open air markets practically beg you to buy fruits and vegetables with their abundant and beautiful displays.

And when I come back from time spent in Israel, I always start off making more fresh salads for my family. Starting off, yes, at breakfast.


Unfortunately this focus fades after a few weeks of being back, but this weekend I am trying to remind myself and reanimate our diet.



 One of my consistent sources of inspiration is my mother-in-law Shulamit's table. No matter what time of the day we pop in to say "hi," there is always a bowl of fresh fruit or some steamed artichokes or other vegetable dish just waiting to be eaten.  Here is a sample of side-dishes from a Friday night meal we had over winter break:

 Vegetables triumph! So back to the cutting board for today's dinner salad...

Vacation Reading: Harry Potter Grown-up Style

 

Before long plane rides I like to have something addictively readable downloaded on to my Kindle so that I am innoculated from all forms of travel frustration: long lines (I read in line), long flights, layovers and unexpected delays. This year's winter break travel had all these and more—but with a good book going it is all the same to me whether I am in my living room armchair or an airport. Well, almost...

Lev Grossman's Magician Trilogy did the trick (pun intended) for me this year.

The first book, The Magicians: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy)introduces us to Quentin Coldwater and his friends, whose adventures continue throughout the series.

The series is a cross between Harry Potter (there is a magic school), the Chronicles of Narnia (there is a magic land that awaits two human kings and two human queens) and a Donna Tart novel (lots of adolescent angst sex, drugs and drinking.) Imagine Harry, Ron, Herione, Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edgar in college with lots of drugs and booze, tats and attitude. And magic.

However the magic itself is wildly imaginative and goes incredible places. Some extraordinary, some dark, and some just random in a very millennial kind of way.


The second book The Magician King: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy)was such a Catcher-in-the-Rye parade of angry attitude that it got a little tiresome, but it was worth sticking it out through the third book The Magician's Land: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy),because it is not just great story telling, but a radical act of imagination.

If you like coming of age fiction you will love this. If you like fantasy you will love this. And even if you just like first class writing about serious ideas you will love this. The series got me through Cleveland Hopkins, Newark, Munich, Tel Aviv and the initial sleepless nights of jetlag!

And in the interest of transparency, if you click on the links, you can buy the books directly from Amazon under my affiliate number. And I will know someone reads my recommendations!

Tel Aviv 2014-The Malabie Days

Tel Aviv is a wildly vibrant and constantly moving environment. Every time I go, I discover something new. Malabie was my new culinary fetish from this year's holiday visit.



My first hit of malabie was while returning to Hummus Asli in Jaffo (see former blogpost).
At the end of the meal we were served malabie. It is a milk pudding, covered with radioactive sweet red sauce, rosewater, peanuts, pistachios and coconut, or some variation thereof.

After Amnon, Irad and I each had a portion, Amnon and I ordered another one. It was that good! Thomas Keller (of French Laundry and Per se fame) started a whole new food movement with the contention that after three bites of any food one exhausts the freshness/pop of the taste, so no need for more.

Not so malabie. One is not enough. Three bites is just the awakening stage.

And we discovered there is a place called the Malabi-ah right around the corner from our apartment!!! A few steps out our doorway, open seemingly 24 hours a day as we visited it after breakfast and after midnight.






It is a dumpy little third-world looking, well, to call it a storefront would be an exaggeration.  You either sit inside a little porch, or go out to the tables in the street. Many of which have chess and checker sets to keep you occupied while savoring your malabie.

You basically get your malabie—customized at the counter —you choose your flavor of radioactive red (classic, cinammon lemon, and two other flavors I can't recall)



















and choose your toppings—peanuts, sugared peanuts, coconut, toasted coconut and homemade cookie crumbs.

And because Tel Aviv is so hip and really not third world at all despite its grunge, grit and deterioration (the romance of decay,) there is even VEGAN malabie! And a malabie punch card so that your 10th one is free.


Needless to say our visit was punctuated with frequent refueling trips to the Malabiah.

Fun Fiction-SciFi Fix

I do a lot of "light" reading. I have always been a voracious reader—I was the kid walking to school while holding a book in front of my face— I would read anything and everything, and my first degree is in Comparative Literature. But as an adult I find myself drawn to lighter, escapist reading. That is why I am grateful for my Book Club (called the Book Club) because it pushes me to read more literary fiction and even some non-fiction and memoir.

But at heart I love a good sci-fi space opera. I think my life involves so many "little" stresses—driving kids to after school activities and doctors appointments and dog to vet appts and showing up at the school meetings and concerts, that it is nice to have a reading experience that is wholly restful and not wrenching, deeply thought provoking and life-changing—not that there is not a time and place for that kind of reading! But not in my life. Not today.

This is all a long prelude to confessing that I have spent the last few months re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold's 15 book Miles Vorkosigan series. I jumped into the series this time at book #4, The Warrior's Apprentice (Vorkosigan Saga Book 4), which is the beginning of the life and times of Miles Vorkosigan, whom I just love. He is a daring, brilliant, moody, young member of the Vor Class with all the weights and responsibilities of his high caste, and and he is tortured by physical deformities which make him a target in a mutation-phobic society. Yet he manages to take us on a non-stop thrill ride through a far future galaxy that is richly developed throughout the series.

I am not Miles' only fan. The books have garnered 6 of scifi's highest awards (Nebula, Hugo and Locus) as well as a dozen nominations in those categories. Also several listings on the New York Times Best Sellers List.


If you have the winter-blues, I recommend this escape!

Photography in Three's

photo taken from the Cleveland Museum of Art website

I've noticed that things often come in 3's...I don't know why that is nor do I stake claim to any mystical relationship with the universe, but by the time I hear of/read about/or am told something for the third time, I pay attention.

Recently I had 3 encounters with photography in my life: photography exhibit and lecture, a novel featuring a photographer, and viewing my son Amnon's new photos.

The lecture was at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), which has mounted an exhibition of surrealist and post modernist photography called, not surprisingly Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography. We were fortunate to attend the opening preview in which the collector and the curator had an on-stage discussion of the work, which helped put the collection into context for me.

The collection was donated in its entirety to the museum by David Raymond, who began collecting the works in the 1990s. Its acquisition by CMA is a major contribution to the permanent collection. The exhibit is described by the museum as, "Vertiginous camera angles, odd croppings, and exaggerated tones and perspectives are hallmarks of the two principal photographic movements of the period, surrealism and modernism. As with surrealist efforts in other media, artists making photographs also aimed to explore the irrational and the chance encounter—magic and the mundane—filtered through the unconscious defined by Sigmund Freud. Eventually, photography became a preeminent tool of surrealist visual culture."

I loved hearing the collector talk about the hunger for these arresting and strange images that possessed him. The vintage collection is all from the 1920's - 1940's. I learned to look at photography in a different way, specifically I was taken by the role of the photographic paper in the depths of the blacks and greys in the photos.



With photography on my mind the next day I cracked open the latest selection from my Book Club, Anna Quindlin's Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel. I didn't know what the book was about in advance, so it was a completely coincidental juxtaposition of media around photography, that after viewing a collection, and hearing the collector impart his passion for the photos, I was reading an author's imagining of the way her heroine, a celebrity photographer in the art world, approached photography. The book is called by critics a comedy of manners, and it is a great story about finding oneself in the "second half" of life, but it is also a look at how the art world randomly elevates one artist to celebrity, almost despite herself, as well as a look at some of the questionably voyeuristic aspects of photography as an "art." When I first started it I sighed, thinking it was another one of those glib dysfunctional family novels that seem to occupy all the prize winning lists, but I was delightfully surprised by the quiet of the book, and the playfulness of its narration, and came to genuinely care about the characters.
And just to add the dessert course to my week of photography, my son Amnon shared some photos from his experiments with a twin lens reflex camera using medium format film— and I loved the results:

Akko

I don't think the universe is sending me a message about becoming a photographer, but I certainly enjoyed spending a week thinking about photography from so many perspectives.

Ben on a Bench

Cafe Tel Aviv

Another Dance Night in Cleveland

We saw an unbelievable dance company last night, once again thanks to DanceCleveland.


 photo by Uri Nevo from http://www.kcdc.co.il/en/photos/ifatall.html#galMenu

This was the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company  (KCDC) from, you guessed it, a kibbutz in Israel.

The dance was what I am dubbing a "long form" dance - a novella as opposed to the usual collection of short stories. It was an hour and a quarter long and was the entire program.

It is extraordinary how each dance company we see has their own lexicon of movements and their own personality. The variations in repertoire in today's modern dance world are infinite and an endless channel for creativity. This company was started by Holocaust Survivors and its legacy is continued by the child of survivors, Rami Be'er, who directs the company and plans every detail: sets, music, costumes, lighting. The result is a very cohesive whole.

The piece we saw "If At All" (אמבכלל) is described on their website as "A moving theatrical event in figurative and abstract circles, from the closed form to the open structure. Physical space in motion whose essence is a chain of events of diverse and ever-changing interpersonal relationships."

 I would describe it as "post-narrative" - there is a story-like feel but there is no clear story line - just emotion, action and power. The long form creates a hypnotic immersion experience that pulls the viewer into a lengthy descent into the world of the dancers. The dancers are technically amazing, full of power and fluidity— explosive action and lyrical retreat. Many relationships seem to unfold; circles, duets, solos, groups move to ever changing music. The piece transforms itself as it moves from dark to light, costumes and lighting and music changing throughout, yet part of a unified whole.
 

The video (which is excellent) gives a taste of the experience. Watching the video makes me want to go back and see it again—it is one of those pieces that would continue to work on repeated viewings.

In the Q and A afterward the director, and two of the dancers, spoke overtly of not over-determining the interpretation for the audience but keeping it open, so that the viewer brings their own interpretation to it.

DanceCleveland, as usual, adds their own additional fabulous features to the experience, like buttons and chocolate kisses on the tables afterward and little post-its on each program to fill out and to put up on the wall after the performance in which viewers list three take-aways or their general impression: survival, celebration, athleticism. There is also a twitter gallery in the balcony. The organization is a model for hybrid audience engagement!

Somehow KCDC created a story of survival, love and life through dance—and today it continues to echo within me.