Mary and child. And child.

Mary and child. And child.
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We've been back in Montreal a few days and it's too late for a last post, but I felt like some kind of formal leave-taking was in order. Montreal feels drizzly and green and secular after Jerusalem. We're back in the strange and familiar weave of the everyday. Last week in Jerusalem I spent a day in the old city, wandering between The Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. At the Western Wall a woman beside me took out her cell phone. "Yonatan," she yelled into it. "Yonatan, I'm at the Western Wall, Pray, Yonatan, pray!" Then she held up the phone to the warm stone.

In Arabic class we learned a phrase, "tomorrow, in Apricot season," which means, roughly, that it's never going to happen, because apricot season is fleeting, and over before it really begins. Anyway, we left Israel near the end of apricot season, and it's true, I'd no sooner noticed apricots in the stores than they were already gone.

Goodbye, inconstant readers! I think I'm done with this particular form of electronic exhibitionism, at least for now, but I'll keep posting some pictures on Flickr. And some of you I'll finally get to see in person now...

And doesn't it look like a pool cue leaning up against the virgin mary's cheek?

jerusalem pride 2009

jerusalem pride 2009
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

orientalizing

ibn tulun mosque from the gayer anderson museum
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I've been a bit delinquent posting...we're getting ready to go. I'll try to put up a few more thoughts about Cairo and our last days here before we leave.
And yes, this is an orientalist photograph. Because one of the women who worked at the Gayer-Anderson museum took a break and stood for a few minutes in the striped shadows of the trellis, looking at the minaret of the Ibn tulun mosque. I'm not sure if it was the disorientation caused by the heat and chaos of Cairo, or the effect of all the the symmetry of the mosques and palaces, but I had a terrible time shooting straight during our whole visit. I kept taking pictures that were slanted. Even all the straight lines in this picture served to confuse rather than guide me.
I like the Manichean lines on her Burka - the striping of the black. And the breeze, of course. That's agency.
I read somewhere that there have been a disproportionate number of photographs of the Iranian - do we get to call it a revolution yet? - rebellion - featuring pretty women. I've noticed that as well. The revolution will be televised, and it will be telegenic. In the last day or two, the close-ups of women have switched to pictures taken from a distance featuring men throwing rocks, or the massive crowd scenes shot from above.
We're off to Tel Aviv.

felucca

felucca
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Don't take the bus from Jerusalem to Cairo with a six year old.

But if you do, go with a six year old (seven today!) like Benjamin, who will read to himself in Hebrew for two hours and mid-way through the trip, tired and wan, will say "Thank you for taking me to Cairo - even though this is hard it's also already fun."

We arrived near midnight, and the streets were still quite busy. We took a cab over to our hotel (Hotel Osiris), on the twelfth floor of an office building and run by a French/ Egyptian couple. In the morning we had breakfast on the terrace overlooking the smoggy, multitudinous city. All the buildings have been stained the same dull brown of a smoker's teeth, so it's easy not to notice that some of them are glorious - laundry strung across elegant stone balconies. Our first day we walked over to the Egyptian museum. There is a glorious chaos to the collection, though it makes the visit impressionistic rather than educational. Dusty unpacked crates of antiquities still cluttered the corners. We saw two mummified crocodiles and several mummified kittens. A princess was buried with her pet baboon. The royal mummies had labels that identified the illnesses they suffered from in life: obesity, bad teeth, herniated scrotum, smallpox. On one mummy's leathery skin you could still see the marks of the pox. Ben sat on the floor and drew sarcophagi. King Tut's death-box still glitters.
And at night, we hired this felucca and drifted on the Nile, where we spotted "Nile Bowling." A reason to go back ,maybe?

pyramids

pyramids
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

More to come...

ben

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Jeremy took this picture; Benjamin has now lost his second tooth (swallowed like the first).

jerusalem

jerusalem
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This massive fabric mural of Jerusalem stretches around the construction site on King David street; the imagined, ideal city and the real, dusty skeleton behind it, in constant process of destruction and construction.