Israel
sheila.johnston
A field of sunflowers hang their heads, as though in shame or sorrow, to the deep thrum of a single chord in the film's opening shot, at once beautiful and threatening. But that is about the only breath of fresh air in the whole of the movie. Set on the first day of the 1982 Lebanon War, it proceeds for the rest of its duration to trap us, along with four terrified young Israeli soldiers, inside the confines of their tank, a monstrous apparition fetid with stale cigarette smoke, sweat and blood and a fifth character in its own right.It sounds like the recipe for a stage play, even a Read more ...
Anonymous
The force of Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon’s world view – his anti-Zionism, but also what Robert Wyatt, a self-confessed “Gilad groupie”, calls the “intrinsically non-racialist philosophy that's implicit in jazz” – comes through loud and clear in his stage banter. Not many jazzers namecheck the Chilcot Inquiry or dedicate tunes to “the biggest arseholes on the planet”: ie a good handful of (named) British and Israeli politicians. Crucially, though, that ideology comes through at least as strongly in the saxophonist’s music, the mix of jazz and Middle Eastern folk music pursued by his now decade- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Purists would have it that punk rock was but a brief explosion in first New York then London, and was all but spent by the end of 1977. Irish photographer Niall O'Brien, however, was born in 1979 and has no truck with purism. Instead, taking the role of anthropologist for his exhibition Good Rats, he has befriended and spent time with groups of young punks, from skaters in Kingston-upon-Thames to homeless teens in Berlin and Tel Aviv, and documented the noise, chaos and sense of belonging that comes with the subculture more than three decades on from its inception. Click on the images below Read more ...