Viva Tel Aviv: Part two
King Adz heads to Israel in search of an unspoiled street culture scene that has yet to break.
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Tel Aviv by day is what I imagine Beirut must have been like before it fell. Coffee kiosks everywhere, people chilling and chatting in groups in the sun in the wide central reservations, plenty of youths sporting dreads and skaters galore.
Sub-cultures are important round these parts — which is a seriously good indicator of the psyche of the place. The one thing is that there is no sign of trouble. Day and night there are people walking the streets. To go back to my original analogy — the one thing about South Africa is that after dark, the streets empty. Here they don't, and this tells me something. It's one of the most laidback places I've ever been, the polar opposite to LA, and it has a real bohemian sense. The only reminder that I'm in Israel are the occasional soldiers strolling nonchalantly about packing some serious firepower — toasters galore, as they say in BKLYN. Obviously I don't take any photos of this, as people are a little ‘camera shy’.
This is the balcony where I drink my coffee each morning...
After seriously abusing the cappuccino machine, my first morning is spent in a photographic studio where PILPELED is having his photo taken for Time Out. He's been up all night finishing the design for the cover, and is not (quite rightly so) feeling the photographer’s request for him to 'Act'. The guy is on fire right now and I'm honoured to be down with him. He certainly deserves it.
After this we go for a kosher burger (like a fucking 1/2 pounder in a loaf of bread) and then meet up with local hottest-artist-in-Israel, Know Hope, who is like a major dude (I'm stoked to be getting some serious time with him). He signs up for my new book and his work is unique (double bubble!). Then we swing back to HQ to meet local producer/musician Kutiman, who has been a pretty big name over this side for some time and has recently completed his most insane project to date, THRU YOU. (I can't really explain it, so you’ll just have to watch the video to see how amazing the concept is.)
Onili reaches out to the animal in us all... (she's not the girl on the flyer LOL)
Thanks to this project, Kutiman is currently blowing up all over the world. He rolls into our place after conducting an interview for public access radio in the US. I shoot an interview and then head out to have dinner with ONILI, a singer-songwriter-producer who's about to cross over and release her banging Nu-Rave choons in the UK. She cooks us some mental Moroccan food and then for desert treats us to a preview of her new album and everything is Irie in the land of the falafel...
Shalom motherfucker...
Tune in tomorrow for the next installment.
King Adz is a writer, ex-filmmaker and street culture aficionado. He is the author of The Urban Cookbook: Creative Recipes for the Graffiti Generation
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Viva Tel Aviv: Part two (text) by King Adz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
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That said, big thanks tho to King Adz for showing there's some god shit going on, amongst all the religious and war mongering bullshit.