Two weeks before the beginning of my book tour, I discovered that Amos Oz would be reading in San Francisco. Not just on any night, but the exact same evening that I’d be reading at my favorite local bookstore, City Lights Books.  ”There goes that event,” I remember telling Jennifer, as I braced myself for what I was convinced would be the single worst-attended event of my trip to the US.

No such luck. The room was filled to near-capacity. Even better, it was a repeat of the previous night, when I’d read to an equal number of people in Berkeley. Granted, Oz was reading at the JCC, and I was at an indie shop, but still. Even in the Bay Area, the readership for such Israel-focused work tends to be fairly specific. Watching folks take their seats, I was overcome by an enormous sense of relief.

Indeed, everything about the Bay Area leg of my trip proved to be positive. I’ll be the first to admit I was apprehensive, not just because of my fear of having to compete with much better-known writers, but because the most significant parts of Israel vs. Utopia’s treatment of the Diaspora is based upon my experience of San Francisco. I really wanted to be able to talk about it, in the city that defined it all for me.

To that end, I’ve been recording nearly every night of the tour so far. I haven’t had the opportunity to sit down and edit the recordings yet. However, this interview, conducted on San Francisco’s KALW last Wednesday, does a great job of summing it all up. Wait until you get to the part where we start taking callers, and the show’s host, Sandip Roy, brings up the book’s emphasis upon food.

The lack of complexity with which I explain that I approach the subject is precisely because of the intensity with which Americans have grown accustomed to relating to the Mideast conflict. Hence the rather unfortunate juxtaposition of adverts above, which I noticed as I waited for the train back to San Francisco following my first local reading, at Pegasus Books, in Berkeley. It’s very Bay Area.

Elliot Bay Book Co, 6;45 PM on Saturday. Twenty minutes before the first reading of my US tour gets underway.

Check out the review of the event posted this morning by Seattle’s Unlikely Outsider. Its a really thoughtful piece.

National Public Radio affiliate KUOW recorded the gig. I’ll post the date when I hear its scheduled for broadcast.

The last time I flew back to the US, I had the good fortune of ending up on a flight with the most remarkable video offerings I’d ever seen. News, (France 24), art house films, European sitcoms, the works. For once, I enjoyed having to sit still for twelve hours.

This time I had the exact opposite experience. Turning on the television following takeoff, this image, of the late Pope John Paul II, appeared. When I tried to change the channel, the screen froze. When I tried to turn off the TV, the display refused to darken.

For the next nine hours, every time I looked up from the book I was reading, this is the image I saw. All the way from Milan to New York.

At this year’s Venice Biennale, the Israeli and American pavilions were situated right next to each other. In this photograph, Israel sits to the left, America to the right. “Israel” is written in Hebrew on the front of the Israeli pavilion.  The word “avarice” graces the left side of the US building, bordering Israel.

Locals observe the first anniversary of the credit crisis. Via Beroldo, late September.

“I don’t understand what interests you so much about the army,” Amir said, sounding somewhat exasperated. “My father’s stories, about being sent into Lebanon to hunt Fedayeen, would scare you to death. Even he gets frightened when he retells them.”

That conversation took place in the spring of 1976, on the balcony of Amir’s mother’s apartment, in Ramat Gan. We were both nine years old at the time. Seeing this advertisement, for the Venice Film Festival winner, brought his concerned words to mind.

Dolf had the best ears. Whether it was clicks and cuts, musique concrete, or the Dead C, he could always hear the continuity. And he didn’t like any of it, which Dolf always indicated by promptly walking out of the room until I changed the music. So, for the year that we took care of him,  after several missteps, I only played dubstep CDs. Whether they were the squishy, synth-heavy producers of the Dubstep Allstars series, or genre forerunners, like Rhythm and Sound, the thirteen-year-old schnauzer was always happy. This was his easy listening music. So moved was I by Dolf’s predilection towards a certain sound, I completely excised noise from my iTunes library. That Dolf was dreadfully sick made it an easy decision.

Flipping through our library last week, I decided to put on some old Fall records – the best-selling Infotainment Scam LP, and my favorite Fall song ever, Free Range. Any serious Fall fan will tell you that these are definitely not the most representative works, that it would be best to push them aside in favor of earlier material, like the brilliant Hex Induction Hour. Not for me. These recordings are both laden with personal memories attached to the time and place of their release. As inclined as I am to recount them, even more interesting is how they drove me to connect with our younger dogs.

Skipping the needle between the Joe Gibbs-Lee Perry mashup, Why Are People Grudgeful? and Mark E. Smith’s bored-sounding intonation of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” in “Free Range,” Pixel and Raster started waving their tails, excitedly barking at the speakers, as though there was something new inside them. Granted, they are younger schnauzers, certainly smaller and healthier than the late Dolf. Nonetheless, it was like somebody spiked their puppy chow with intensely good cheer, and, maybe, a double espresso or two. So surprising was their response, it was as though it changed something inside me, not just my appreciation of The Fall. I’m going to have to play the band for them again and see what happens.

The new Zeek OS is now live. We released it last night, warts and all. This is the lead story: My analysis of the present crisis of Israeli-American relations.

Mussolini and his entourage were hung outside our apartment building, in Piazza Loreto, on April 29th 1945. We’ve never ascertained the exact spot, though we assume its dual-commemorated by a monument to fallen Communist partisans in immediate view of our building’s front door, on Viale Andrea Doria. Indeed, it is curious that there is no memorial for the event.

That’s why when we encounter nostalgia for the late Italian dictator, we are almost always surprised, lulled as we are by the ideological consistency of our neighborhood. Walking down Via Torino yesterday, we encountered this positively non-ironic collection of Mussolini chic, displayed alongside classic rock bootlegs and Catholic calendars.

You have to appreciate the art school quality of the collage. Eric Clapton and Il Duce? That’s awesome.

This supermarket thinks very highly of its clientele. Esselunga, Parco Solari neighborhood, Milan.