January 29, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-28

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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The rain holds off for much of the early morning. Right as I'm putting my hat on to head to work, it starts.

I put on my raincoat and wait for a moment. I'm already later than I want to be for work. I have to head out. If needed, I know how to swim.

I stick my earbuds in my ears and pull out my phone. In the rain, I will have to hold it face down. I won't have much of a chance to trigger things on it on the way. I'm committing to whatever I choose.

Fortunately, I'm set up for that. Using Plex,¹ I can stream music from my own library.

I've been accumulating digital music since late in the last century. I have around two terabytes of it, more than I would probably be able to listen to in my lifetime. I used to be upset that I had such a backlog of music, but then I heard an unrelated podcast with a different idea.

Assuming that there's no deadline attached and we have enough space for it to accumulate, we don't have backlogs of stuff -- we have frontlogs.

I have been collecting music for so long that I now have an effectively inexhaustible (and ever-growing) library of music. I had gotten each track or album at some point in the past few decades, figuring that I would like it. I get to listen to it when I can. Wonderful!

I set my Plexamp app to shuffle my Library Music. Apparently, it's not a simple shuffle. From what I can tell, it uses some intelligence so that there's a sort of audible connection between the end of one track and the start of the next.

On my way to work, it jumps between a segment of Berio's Sinfonia, to a Colin Walcott solo, to Siouxie, to Oded Tzur, to ambient Lou Reed, to a Korngold string quartet, to Rhys Chatham. Not bad.

At work, a headline tells me that our minister from the lunatic fringe is at it again. He's supposedly in charge of national security, and keeps clashing with police who actually know what they're doing.

His latest stunt was to stir things up at a police station in this area by showing up with a fake beard and wig, rather than his usual suit jacket and white shirt.²

A crime reporter from our network news tweeted a picture.³ (This is his usual look.⁴) He actually looks more comfortable in disguise. Somebody tell his tailor.

A couple of kids crawled under our border fence yesterday, heading toward enemy territory.⁵ Our troops spotted and returned them before they got too far. The fence was once believed to be impermeable.

Daniel Gordis, in his excellent newsletter "Israel from the Inside," features a news video about a trans soldier fighting across the border.⁶ She had fought there years ago, before her transition. Now she's back with her original combat unit. Interestingly, she didn't change her gender in the army records, and, as a religious Jew, still prays with tefillin, which is usually a male thing.

In a webinar that I watched yesterday, the writer Yossi Klein Halevi talks about, among other things, the music that the war is generating. We have always created music to go along with our wars, but there's a lot more grief and anger in the songs for this one.

One of the most popular is a rap track, "Harbudarbu",⁷ done by a duo, Ness & Stilla. (Here are the lyrics, with English translation.⁸) It's pretty aggressive. Nes & Stilla have been interviewed at length about it.⁹ Their backgrounds and story are quite interesting.

And, of course, there have been covers, responses, news videos, AI deepfakes of singers from earlier eras,¹⁰ and parodies such as this one -- about cholent.¹¹

American Rock performer John Ondrasik, who has had hits such as "Superman (It's Not Easy)"¹² under the name Five for Fighting, has posted a hard-hitting music video, "(We Are Not) OK,"¹³ about being a supporter of our country nowadays. He's also done a podcast interview about it.¹⁴

Toward the end of the day, a coworker comes to my cube carrying a shirt. He had just gotten it, but he's even rounder than I am. He says that if it fits me, I can have it. It does. I bring it home.

It looks like it may rain again as I leave the office. I put on a podcast that will be long enough to get me all the way home without having to deal with the phone. I think of putting on more music instead, but don't. There's no rush. I have the rest of my life to catch up.

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Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

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L'hitraot.