Hi?

Okay...I haven't updated. Yeah. But here's a big long one, okay?

This year, 2012, is the Tel Aviv Art Year. I believe they chose now because a new museum building has opened and the Tel Aviv museum now houses the largest collection of Israeli art.

So last Saturday night (the twenty-somethingth) they officially kicked it off at the Tel Aviv museum grounds. The great thing about that area is that it's quite cultural; there is a large theater nearby as well as a library. The event was entirely free, including entrance to the museum. There were all sorts of performances and activities. In one corner there were people singing opera, in another there was an audiovisual stage with mainly loud rock music. Street musicians had been asked to come and play. The sculpture of people feeding pigeons was covered in sunflower seeds as it should be (but they only put out the sunflower seeds when it's a special event). There were lots of cardboard houses arranged into small cities, and most of them were taller than me, so it created small "streets." There was one area with tons of colored cardboard blocks which could be stacked and made into all sorts of amazing structures (this is part of the Dreamfields urban innovation project). Everyone was building, no matter what age or what language they spoke or where they came from. There was also a computer component to this - you could play the Dreamfields game and it would be projected onto the wall of the museum.

On another wall, there was a place for shadow play, with a white light that invited people to create strange shapes and pictures. Our silhouettes appeared enormous on the wall.

I loved it. All the art and culture and connection and bright lights and people, all together. That night, it felt amazing to be alive.

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Yesterday I went to the Bahai gardens in Haifa, where I was for the weekend. The gardens are famous, with their carefully planned terraces. In the center is a shrine for their founder - the Shrine of the Bab - who is buried there.

It was weird, from up there I could see all of lower Haifa - all of it that isn't on the mountain. It all seemed so temporary, like a bubble - the gardens so carefully created and maintained, the shrine's pristine gold dome, the rusty city, the dirty buildings with laundry hanging from the windows, the old neighborhood's red ceramic roofs, the glassy new buildings rising up from it all, the people bustling and running from place to place like so many ants. I could easily imagine that one day it would be gone and only the trees and the wide sea would remain, moss and ivy making crumbling ruins of the plaster walls. I don't know why I felt that. But its temporariness made me appreciate it a bit, I guess - the gardens planned so that they would seem like the product of much work, the buildings washed of the dust that the smog carried everywhere, the old train tracks still there, unused, flowers peeping between the steel rails.

Later that day we walked in my grandparents' neighborhood. We passed a building that was once beautiful but now was just abandoned. The windows had cardboard on them from the inside and the garden was overgrown. People come and go, they work and they rest, and what they leave is up to nature to take up.

And that's what nature did.