Art, Music and the Man They Call Fritz

We woke up late as usual and caught a bus to Jerusalem. Ronen told me about a music & arts festival at a local liberal arts school called Musrarrah. It was quite an experience to say the least..

His friend Inon had an exhibit at the show so he got us in for free. As we walked through the entrance I could smell freshly baked pastries and hear the sizzling of falafel and burgers on a grill. People crowded the thin cobblestone corridors line with tall stone walls on either side of me. To the right, Arabic dessert stands and places to buy beer lined the wall all the way to the main stage.

The first band was very strange. It began with an American tattooed man named Fritz with thick plastic-framed glasses on, claiming to be quoting William Blake while he breathed heavily and made unsettling noises into the microphone. he then introduced his two-man band behind him and spent the next half hour creating the perfect soundtrack to a bad acid trip. I'm sure it went on longer, but I had to leave to keep my sanity intact.

Ronen and I decided to head to the arts exhibit to find Inon's piece. On the walk to the building that housed the tangible art, I soon realized that much less traditional art forms filled the street of the school. My first encounter was with a man in a quarantine body suit surrounded by what looked like a giant tube of saran wrap, throwing paper airplanes at passersby. About 100ft later, there was a man in a tree coloring its bark with chalk in military color schemes, breathing heavily into a microphone that was hooked up to a tiny amplifier sitting just beneath him. People crowded around him and watched-seemingly waiting for something even stranger to happen.

By the time we reached the art display I was prepared for the utterly absurd, but most of it was pretty standard. That is except for Inon's exhibit: three TVs sitting on the ground of an empty room showing picturesque scenes of Kibbutz Dafna (Where Inon also grew up), with a man, presumably Inon, walking through the scene every 3 minutes or so. It was all topped off by music playing in the background that resembled the musical styling of Fritz. After five minutes of watching this it was time for a change of scenery, and we headed back to see the last band perform.

The last band was an Israeli rock band called Izabo, and they put on an amazing show! They opened with a song called "Slow Disco" and I was wooed immediately. Just see for yourself!