Strange Lands

   

Jaffa is strange.  We didn't know what to expect.  Suddenly we find out that it's the city that doesn't sleep.  It's a tourist trap, filled with peacocking hardbodies working out on the beach, bars,with  hookers' business cards littering the streets and graffiti.  Lots of graffiti is splashed across middle eastern cement architecture as it crumbles quickly due to the salt air.  It has a European culture that is the polar opposite of what we just experienced in Jerusalem.  It is permissive and liberal and most importantly it has the Mediterranean sea.  After our obligatory market crawl and our "Old Jaffa" exploration of history in its' Mosques, Churches and famed ancient port we braved the ocean.  It's so warm with tiny fish that go in like kamikaze to bite at your moles.  It's also crawling with people, so many of them.  They are everywhere, honking and yelling, reaching and hawking, chatting and eating ice cream.  They are just everywhere.  It's the place to be.  Who knew?  I came for the art museums.
      Amber and I have had some lively debates here about the cultural climate and graffiti as a type of protest, specifically the tags of "Utah/Ether," an artist couple devoted to blazing their pseudonym across anywhere they vacation.  We have seen them everywhere, they are ubiquitous and clearly busy with their sharpies.  On their website they maintain their identities as conceptual artists that reject notions of property and gain.  They pair their works with videos and it seems as though they don't make any profit.
      Now let me say this again.  Jaffa is smothered in graffiti.  It covers this place like honey on a profiterole, but not as sweet.  It is also a place where art is alive and well, with its tourists and rising cost of living there is a clear push against poverty and the divide in Israeli/Palestinian worlds.  Beyond just your well worn, cliche self agrandizing name tag, the graffiti can reflect this malaise.  It's angry, coercive and sometimes poignantly seductive.  It can provoke and has multiple times in our experience.  We've lookup up multiple hashtags and tags we've seen that have proven interesting.
     This city, Israel as a whole really is about history.  It's all been about history for me in my travels here.  The port in Jaffa is over 4000 years old and has hosted as many in creed and faith tying to its' piers.   This city is truly a melange.  The restaurant we sit at is Euro in style, hybrid in cuisine, Hebrew in language, British owned and has French, German, English, Arab and Israeli patrons.  As we grow more homesick, we look for our familiar beacons, watching dogs play, listening to the VH1 music channel, listening for English speakers.  I look for quiet.  I look for where people aren't.  There was a surreal moment yesterday where I stopped Amber in the middle of a downtown neighborhood asking her to listen.  For several moments, you couldn't hear a sound.  Then the familiar bustle started again, crazy as ever.  After floating in the Mediterranean in a lovely contemplative moment a fish leaped out of the water and struck my head with a loud "THWAP," yet another reminder of the volume we exist in and how beauty is so very fleeting.  Jaffa was meant to be my last perusal into art history and contemporary art, but what this place has done for me personally has reminded me of the chaos of life, the noise of even a simple existence.  And while we read the plaque outside the Savoy Hotel about a night filled with murderous terror at our own hotel

in the busiest city I've ever been to, it occurs to me yet again that it's impossible to fight when you stop making noise and be still.