Beginning
In recent months more and more I have felt that I’m not writing the funnest things I could be writing. In October, I followed Marina Abramovic around Kyiv for a full day, watching people react to her. It was amazing. Marina Abramovic does not disappoint. At one point I mumured to Todd Eckert, who is her guy, that she is something like today’s Picasso, and he looked appalled. Picasso was such an awful person, he said, inside. What I’d meant, of course, is that she is alive and creating at the same time that she, herself, is a cultural artefact/icon for the persons drawn to see her. I had nowhere to write about this.
About two years ago, I got to have lunch with a platoon of young Azeri solders in the field, near the war zone with Armenia. It was fascinating. The young soldiers were fascinating, but the most fascinating thing was what they got to eat. I could have—and should have—written an entire article about Azeri army rations, which are produced by on-site cooks and in many places around the world could be served in perfectly decent restaurants. Spend an hour and a half with those rations, and the young draftees eating them, and you will understand quite a bit about the unending conflict with Armenia.
On and on. I wanted to write an article about the new, electrically-charged post-Netanyahu Knesset, but it never materialized.
But the subject that keeps on coming up, often daily, is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, now in his fleshy post-prime ministership and on trial. On trial for corruption. He likes to pretend the proceedings aren’t real, and all too much coverage of the droning proceedings at the Jerusalem District Court feels like a thin ping-pong game between the Israeli media and Netanyahu’s still substantial ability to spin it like a top.
The trial has scored only the most cursory coverage in the foreign media, yet every day, for those following it, some nugget emerges, or a new piece of evidence, that reveal the man, Bibi.
So this will be my diary of Bibi in the Bardo, a state of existence between the reality of Israel today and the reality which he inhabits. My impressions. My takeaways. Let’s see how it goes.
Interesting, thank you for covering this. I had an experience of a Supreme Court Case in Jerusalem in 1992-93 on religious right to grow cannabis for religious exercise of Priesthood in Torah. At same time in 1992 Vendyl Jones uncovered the Incense of Golden Altar hiddem at Qumran after finding bottle of Anointing Oil a few years earlier in late 1980s that sparked me to go there to restore Levite Priesthood Service in Torah that the government fought against to control it for themselves.