Cardy Cards

I’m really happy with the Vagina Monologues card. I’m so clever sometimes. Friends was a bit tricky because it’s based on the show, but we legally can’t have representations of the characters. I thought this was close enough to make the connection clear without direct infringement.

My New Favorite Cards

I’m so proud of myself for making these cards. Such talent! Special thanks to Guy Gascoigne-Piggford for allowing me to use his photo as reference for the ruff. Check out his amazing costume work here (select Costuming from the drop-down).

Update: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead was canceled. Another masterpiece for naught! Maybe I’ll find an opportunity to reuse that one eventually.

I'm in a Show!

I had heard about a benefit show being put on by an organization called Stoked Mentoring, which according to their website "is a non profit action sports organization for at risk youth with the mission of developing Successful Teens with Opportunity, Knowledge, Experience, and Determination through the use of action sports, mentoring and coaching." Sounds pretty cool. So for the first time in a long time, I busted out the paints and got to it. The show is this weekend in Downtown. Stop by!

New Theater Gig

A friend is an actor for a theater company in Hollywood and through him I got a small gig designing postcards for their shows. Here’s the first batch. These have a pretty quick turn-around and aren’t quite as refined as I would like. They put on a whole bunch of shows at a time, which means there’ll be lots of these. I like the title treatment for Bit of Broadway, which was a pain to put together, though the rest of the card never quite gelled for me. I also like my Machinal illustration. Too bad the show was canceled!

Misery Loves Company

One of the projects I worked on with Micah while in Israel was this video for Aish. They wanted these very rudimentary animations in the background to go along with what the narrator was saying. I drew the frames by hand and Micah animated it all together.

Army of None

In my quest to find a job and pad my wallet, I've been applying to listings on sites like Monster and CareerBuiler. I saw a posting on CareerBuilder for a design position with the US Army in the LA area, and hit apply. I figured it must be some kind of desk job managing marketing or designing ads or something. Some time goes by and I get a call from one Sgt. Guererro who wants to ask me some questions: how much do I weigh, have I been convicted of a felony, did I go to college. Yes, I did go to college, I responded. Where? University of Pennsylvania. Is that a two-year or four-year school? Four-year. Four-year? Yes. Where is that? In Philadelphia. I thought you said you were from LA? I am, I just went to school there. You went to Pennsylvania for school? Yes. It's really a four year school? Yes, I have a BA. You have a BA? Yes.

He was so incredulous that he was talking to someone who had actually graduated from a four year school, hadn't been convicted of a felony, and was in shape, and it became more and more apparent in his voice with each new question. It also became clear that there was no design job to be had; he was recruiting for the army. He enthusiastically told me to come by his recruitment center. I gave a vague noncommittal response. What does that say about the state of our armed forces when finding someone who has above-disdainful intelligence and hasn't gotten into trouble before and isn't morbidly obese is a real find? I worry for the country.

Update: CareerBuilder has been entirely useless since then. Because I applied for an army job, suddenly my best matches were jobs like "truck driver in Valencia." I opted out of all emails from them. And I got a few more calls from Sgt. Guerrero to find a time for me to stop by. After a number of apologies for being to busy to visit, I got a call from a higher up firmly asking if I ever planned to stop by or if I could stop wasting their time. I admitted fault, and appreciative of his directness, opted to never hear from them again. Sometime later, the Culver City office closed down, taking all my unrealized military potential with it.

Hebron, Merit of our Fathers

The tour I booked to Hebron was set to leave at 9:15 from the Sheraton in central Jerusalem. I tremped into town, but unbeknownst to me, my ride would end far south of where I needed to end up. A local bus took me where I needed to go, but my plan of getting a free ride in backfired when I only saved one shekel by taking the local bus over the bus from Alon Shvut.

Anyhow, the tour bus took us first to Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, except you wouldn’t know it to be there. Bethlehem is an Arab city and between violent attacks and peace accords, the place was set to be closed to Jews. But, as our clearly religious-right tour guide retold, enough Jews made a fuss and braved the dangerous territory to visit that the government preserved the site for future generations of Jews. This meant that the Wall would have to be designed in such a way as to allow access from Israeli controlled territory, so a narrow finger was built that extended to the site. We drove down this corridor, surrounded on both sides by tall gray concrete walls, until we reached the building. The tomb used to be a small building in the middle of a larger lot, but after Joseph’s tomb was desecrated by Palestinian rioters, this large structure was built around it to protect and preserve it.

From here the bus drove to Hebron, but the tour guide got off the bus halfway there and said we would be met in Hebron by another tour guide. We drove along through places unknown to us, one man commenting that only in Israel would we be on a tour without a guide. After meeting our new guide, a Jewish resident of Hebron, we stopped in various places where he told us of the history and importance of the community here. Walking through a small museum in the Beit Hadassah building, which featured a moving display on the 1929 massacre, he recounted tales of Jewish valor and heroism, and of the hardships suffered by the Jews who wanted to be so close to this holy place. Without diminishing the real efforts of Jews to maintain this part of their heritage, I can’t omit that the tour was heavy on inspiration and light on facts. I like tours where the guide tells a sweeping narrative of a place from ancient times to present day, but we only heard bits and pieces.

Hebron itself was a ghost town. Very few people—Jew or Arab—walked the streets. Here and there were a hasid or Arab kids on a donkey. The kosher restaurant, which wasn’t so good, blasted Chanukah music as a form of audio assault on the city, across from the only three Arab shops open. I looked around, watched one hand-mold dozens of small cups on his clay wheel, and chatted with another shopkeeper who thanked me for even stopping to talk. Walking into the Ma’arat Hamachpelah, or the Cave of the Patriarchs, the traditional burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and possibly others, I was caught off guard by Jews praying under Arabic script. This was converted to a mosque centuries ago, the Ibrahimi Mosque after their patriarch as well, and now arks with torah scrolls and Hebrew biblical passages sit in rooms covered in clashing religious décor. Cenotaphs honoring Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and Leah are situated among small prayer rooms, while Isaac and Leah’s are in the Muslim side of the building, which Jews only have access to ten days out of the year. The whole complex used to be open to all, until American-Israeli Baruch Goldstein opened fire on worshiping Muslims in 1994, killing 29, and a gate now separates the Muslim side from the Jewish side, with neither allowed on the other’s turf.

By the end of the day I had visited the graves of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, the holiest places in Judaism after the Temple Mount. I saw the yearning of Jews to be in this place, and heard of the courageous acts they performed to be here. But I also saw a nation divided, justified or not, and the home of our forefathers resigned to rot. We drove through the well-kept Kiryat Arba on the way out, contrasting sharply with the decrepitude of the Hebron streets. I pass no judgment, but I do hope to get an alternate story on a Palestinian tour later this week.

Touring in Stereo

Tomorrow I go on what will be the first of two official tours of Bethlehem and Hebron. Visiting these places and seeing the historical sites and the current situation for myself was a priority of mine when I came here. This was complicated by the hullabaloo over Beit Shalom (a house in the Arab outskirts of Hebron that was bought by an American Jew for Israeli Jews to live in, and because no one takes the idea of residential heterogeneity particularly well here, the Arabs got upset back in late October, the government agreed and told the Jews to leave, the Jews rioted, hilarity ensued, or something to that extent). Now that my time here is running low, I finally made plans to do it. I wanted to find a non-political trip so I wouldn’t be bombarded with whatever propaganda. No such luck. There are no non-political trips. Each has is its own unassailable agenda. Then I had an idea: I will take two tours and get both an education in the history of the region and of the perspectives of the respective groups. Tomorrow I take the right-wing Jewish tour and Thursday is the Palestinian tour, with still-in-flux Christmas plans Wednesday in between.

On the Way Down South

Tomorrow I have a tour booked of Petra. All tours to Petra leave from Eilat, so I took the 4.5 hour bus from Jerusalem to Eilat where I would spend the night. Alone, after various people bailed on me. After a close call (I left my passport in the bag I had left in Emek Refaim and made a few frantic phone calls to have someone take a cab to the bus station and bring it to me) I was on my way, east toward Jericho, south along the Dead Sea, past Ein Gedi and Masada, through desolate desert expanses, to Israel’s prized coastal resort. Which was pretty dinky and kind of a letdown. I checked into my hostel, thankfully the least sketchy looking of the bunch, and commenced my romantic day with myself. I explored the city with myself as my guide. Put my feet in the cool waters of the Red Sea and gazed at the boats bobbing on the cerulean waters and watched the sun set over the mountains of Jordan. I wandered by myself through the promenade, pointed out to myself the interesting people I saw. I marveled to myself at the Muslim girls riding the bungee swing in their hijabs on their Muslim holiday. I took myself out to a delicious steak dinner (across from a Muslim family eating opposite a portrait of the Lubavitcher Rebbe) and then out to a movie. Getting late, I walked myself back to the hostel and prepared for my big day in Petra.

Mount of Olives and Jesus' last days

Going back in time to the day before Jesus’ last, I went to explore the Mount of Olives. Walking the same route as yesterday, I visited the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu, named for Peter’s rejection of Jesus and his later repentance. The main sanctuary has lovely pastel mosaics in an art nouveau style. Caves on a lower level are believed to be a possible location of Christ’s prison, and an ancient stairway along the side of the church, possibly the path Jesus took down to Gethsemane on the other side of the Kidron Valley that night. Walking along the Eastern Wall, I could see the various churches on the Mount of Olives, to their right the historic Jewish cemetery, and beyond that the town of Silwan.

I descended into the valley and investigated the monumental tombs at the base of the mount. These tombs, traditionally identified as the tombs of Avshalom, Zechariah, and Jehoshaphat—and a fourth marked as the tombs of the sons of the priests—were carved out of the very rock of the mountain. I meandered through the thousands of Jewish graves, some new, some ancient, cracked, and worn to oblivion. The churches were closed for siesta, so I trekked up and up to the top of the mount by the Seven Arches Hotel with its spectacular views of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. I tried to follow a church spire but got disinterested and stopped partway at the Pater Noster church, close to where Jesus related the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples. The walls of the church, cloisters, and courtyard are covered with translations of the prayer in more languages than I knew were spoken by Christians, everything from Cornish to Tagalog to Hmong and beyond.

On the descent down the mount, a small residential complex also includes an underground complex of tombs, believed to be the burial place of Malachi. I ran into some Americans in the blackness and searched the tunnels with them. Farther down is the Dominus Flevit Church, where Jesus wept for the destruction of Jerusalem. A window at the front of the chapel looks across onto the Temple Mount. The grounds also include ossuaries of the type used at the time. Sadly, the Church of Mary Magdalene, with its gilded onion domes, is only open to visitors for two hours once a week.

At the foot of the mountain is the Church of All Nations, built on the site of two older churches, which sits next to the Garden of Gethsemane. “Gethsemane,” derived from the Aramaic for “olive press,” is where Jesus and his disciples gathered the night before his death. A small olive grove stands there today, and a very forward young Arab man with surprisingly good English offered to show me through, until I mentioned that I was not willing to pay him. The church façade’s stunning mosaic, the colossal marble columns in the interior, and the ornate architecture were the most awe-inspiring I’d seen the whole day. But for all their beauty, I was still surprised that all of these churches were less than two hundred years old. Their locations were historic, but the actual structures less so.

Just outside the garden is the tomb of the Virgin Mary, an Orthodox crypt cut out of the ground, and housing the sarcophagus in a small shrine. As an Orthodox site, the dimly lit space, heavy with smoky incense, profuse with lamps and mismatched art, stood in stark contrast to the elegant, carefully crafted Western spaces I had visited earlier. The father wished me well in very broken English, then I headed back to Emek Refaim, where, in one of the odder sights of the day, saw frummies on Segways. Miracles never cease.