Viva Tel Aviv: Part one
I’m sat in Manchester airport listening to Empire Of The Sun, and it seems like a fitting soundtrack - crazy sounds for what promises to be a mental trip.
Tel Aviv is the party capital of the world (believe) and it has the freshest, most unspoiled street culture scene. The street art ‘scene’ currently holds little monetary value - no marketing opportunities or street art 'dealers' hovering on the periphery, eyeing up gaps in the 'market'.
Chances are that this could all change – the very fact that you're reading this, and the fact that the place will feature heavily in my next book, goes to prove that. But for now, for this trip, it’s all pastures new, chock-full of fresh talent and virgin visions. Okay, so Israel has a bit of negative spin right now (perhaps rightly so), but remember I'm here for the love, the talent, the people, not the bulllshit politics...
The one thing you need to know about Tel Aviv is that geographically it may be in Israel, but it’s a fucking oasis of cool street shit in a mad ol’ country. Tel Aviv is not like the rest of Israel: it has its own state of mind. Forget what you know, read, watch, hear, none of this applies. It's a bit like how Cape Town used to be in pre-Mandela South Africa - anything goes...
ARRIVING IN TEL AVIV
My guide is my good pal and amazing artist PILPELED, and once again I'm picked up at the airport in a jeep, but a much better one than in LA: a big black cruiser. We shoot into town and a ton of brand-spanking-new skyscrapers roll past. “You see, it's not a desert” PILPELED tells me (he's jokingly referring to when I asked if my cell phone would work here).
I spend a few hours booking the talent I want to meet up with and then we head out to a bar that would be too cool for Berlin. A DJ is rocking the non-existent Sunday night crowd and we hook up with local DJ Walter Einstein Frog and a couple of promoters. Tel Aviv, it seems, is a small place. The boys spark up the chronic and the smoke begins to rise. No-one in the place bats an eyelid. I get a grip on how the club scene is run (totally hands-on). Walter has a party on Friday and I'm on the list.
On the way back to our ride we pass a kid sat on the kerb with his laptop, jacking someone's WiFi, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to be doing on a Sunday night.
“Welcome to Tel Aviv,” PILPELED tells me as we pass by...
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 one (text) by King Adz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK License.
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israeli vandalism or street art!