Poet Roni Somek: I am very much in favor of canceling the matriculation exams in literature.

This is my dream

Not moved by the culture of cancellation, it is certain that his friend Yair Lapid will serve as prime minister and continues to maintain the "right of levitation."

Before he puts on a special evening in the month of reading, the beloved poet tells in an interview why he writes over and over again about Marilyn Monroe, and how one of his poems got a new life in the garbage truck parking lot.

Sagi Ben Nun

02/06/2022

Thursday, 02 June 2022, 00:00 Updated: 23:36

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Take the singing out of the penthouse.

Roni Somek (Photo: Reuven Castro)

I was born on the day the filmmaker was invented.

In the previous roll

I was Charlie Chaplin's stick, Marilyn

Monroe's underwear, Gary's gunpowder, Ginger

Potpourri.

Since then I have been wandering, guarding holy places,

wanting to shoot the one who escaped and am in love with the kiss of the

asphalt.

One day, maybe,

I'll make a movie out of it.

(The song "December 28" by Roni Somek)

The poet and writer Roni Somek was indeed born on the day the Lumiere brothers performed their first paid film screening.

With no connection, he occasionally returns in his work to one of the greatest movie stars in history - actress and model Marilyn Monroe, who will turn 60 in August: he wrote about it in his first book, "Exile" published in 1976, in what is considered a revolutionary use in popular culture. And I will mention her several more times in his songs over the years, including the song that opens the article.

Blush tries to explain this recurring motif.

"Look, I lived in a house they read in a magazine called 'Cinema World.' She's not the one who broadcasts - I'm beautiful, keep your distance from me, but on the contrary, it's one that says come on, give me a shoulder, hold me, smile at me so I'll smile too. "It's a feeling that made me feel both admiration and compassion for her. She became a symbol," he says in an interview with Walla!

culture.

"If I had to arrange my dream team, then James Dean on the motorcycle, Charlie Chaplin on the laughter and Marilyn Monroe not as the beauty model of 'Be Beautiful and Shut Up', this is the actress you fall in love with because you feel she might as well have been Falling in love with you I said a similar thing about Scarlett C.

The most anti-heroine there is.

Marilyn Monroe (Photo: GettyImages)

This line you wrote - "I was Marilyn Monroe's panties" - or other songs you once wrote, might not have passed today, in the Mi-Tu era?

"There are some of my songs that would not go through today, for example a song called 'The Ballad of the Valley of Alcohol'. It ends with what a girl from the Valley of Alcohol said to me: "Without a dog / a sign that she forgot the dog at home. '

"Recently I was working on a lecture I want to do, with a long list of songs in Hebrew poetry, which the Mi-Tu era would have ruled out. Your house is on you '- there was a big storm. Bialik has a song in which he says:' Tonight I ambushed your room '- it's a peek. ".

More on Walla!

In his new book, AB Yehoshua asks not to let perceptions from the past handcuff the mind

To the full article

So in case an artist or creator harassed, attacked or raped, do you think it is worthwhile to continue consuming his works?

"Listen, it's very difficult with that. I like a lot of Zohar Argov's songs, in which 'the years have passed', they are part of my soundtrack. I kept hearing his songs even after I found out about difficult cases he did, I do not want to use a hard word, Cases that will not be done (Argov was convicted of rape - SHB).

I can not mentally be a friend of this guy - but I did not remove him from my playlist or his songs.

It's a lot harder for me than what's happening to me right now with people like Roger Waters or Eric Clapton, who I really like their music but they went crazy against Israel and against vaccines.

So I make that separation. "

"He has no ego from Lego."

Yair Lapid (Photo: Reuven Castro)

Apart from the 60th anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe, this year we also mark the tenth anniversary of the birth of the Yesh Atid movement, headed by Yair Lapid, the poet's best friend.

On May 3, 2012, Blush joined the list of founders of the Yesh Atid party, and was placed in several election campaigns in the 120th and symbolic place of the list.

"Yair and I are friends even before Yair spelled the word politics in his head. It is a growing society, and it is friendship beyond anything else. According to what you say, on the day Yair announced that he was going to form a political movement, I should have told him - is the ceremony over? No.

"He's going to be prime minister. And I'm telling you this not because I'm hopelessly optimistic, but because I think it's going to be good for this project called the State of Israel. And it's beyond the fact that I love what he does and believe in what he does. He will. "The dream government. This is not a government that has a clause that says there should be a Palestinian state. But politics is an impossible art, as someone once said, and I very much hope it will be, because we just deserve it to be."

Still retains the right of levitation.

Roni Somek (Photo: Courtesy of the photographers, Liora Somek)

Ten years ago, when Lapid entered politics, she interviewed Somek in Haaretz, Merav Michaeli, and asked him if he wanted to be Minister of Culture.

His response was: "People who go into politics, the soles of their shoes touch the ground, I feel like I'm a millimeter above the same ground, so I'm still maintaining the right to float."

Blush says his position has not changed since.

"If there is anyone who wants to be listened to, who feels he has something to say and has time to do it - let him do it. But God forbid it does not hurt a millimeter in his work. I did not want Arik Einstein to be the head of the Tel Aviv Municipality's culture committee. In the Eastern Crown, the possibility is confirmed that he will sit in meetings at the City Hall building. "

More on Walla!

Avishai Ben-Haim uses songs to tell about the first Israel.

He is wrong about almost everything

To the full article

And what do you think about Avishai Ben - Haim's theory of "Israel First and Second Israel"?

You are supposedly the dictionary definition of the second Israel, but maybe he will not consider you as such because you do not support Netanyahu.

And that the teacher was yelling at them in classes they were abusing Mozart, and my father said to me, 'Tell them, you are not forced to learn the piano.'

Dad said this while he could tell us things like 'we are poor, they have money, we are poor'.

But he did not say that.

He gave me the outlet of pride.

He gave me the way out not to turn poverty into something that lowers you by a few inches.

On the contrary, he explained that poverty is not a physical state, it is a mental state, and we do not want to be there.

That is my position. "

"I wrote a song called 'The Poverty Line', a very personal song about a child who grew up in a transit camp. When I was a child, I came to Israel with a black box empty of memories, and the transit camp was a paradise for me. "The Poverty Line" I wrote from a very personal and private place, between me and myself, when Judge Edmund Levy read this song in the Supreme Court in a hearing on human dignity and freedom, and turned this song into a demonstration sign. To the theme song of the series 'Transitions'. These are the great things that can happen to the song. We talked about Marilyn Monroe, and believe me the same dreams about Marilyn Monroe can be in both the neighborhood of the rich and in transitions. In 1972 I was at the Black Panthers demonstrations and wrote a song about them. I did a workshop in Dimona for 30 years. It was important for me to get to these places.It is important for me to appear in prisons and in the fourth ward of the youth in Geha. "

"I hope they will. And I'm always happy for my part. I'm very, very, very three times, love composing my songs, because the composer in my opinion is a kind of good reader, who knows how to illuminate both with a flashlight and with a projector. Haim Rahmani's project was attended by Alon Olarchik, Tal Gordon, Sha'anan Street, Berry Sakharof, a real dream team. And some of my songs were composed by others as well. And suddenly I realized that the songs that appear in the book are a kind of unfinished symphony and the composer takes the songs to his place. "

"About 20 years ago, Hava Alberstein called me and she told me that she was working with a man, who until then had only been a writer and composer, named Yoni Roa. Even if the knife comes / we will try to stay in the same slice. 'She sent him the song, Yoni called her and said:' Hava, only four lines came. 'She told him: this is the whole song. "House B, Pizmon".

More on Walla!

"Uri Zohar changed the face of entertainment in Israel, he was an architect of humor and language"

To the full article

It's an amazing song.

By the way, when I got married 16 years ago this song appeared on the invitation to my wedding.

"I have your wedding invitation. Your girlfriend who was at the wedding brought it to me, and I was very much in love with her."

"I will tell you something funny that happened with this song. A few years ago the Tel Aviv Municipality did a project of songs that were about garbage cars. The municipality told me: You are the only living poet willing to have his song be about a garbage car. The song was five years about garbage cars. One day I read in the newspaper an interview with the man who was the guard of the parking lot of the garbage cars, and he said that of all the songs that hang on the cars, he likes my song the most, and another song by Bialik. On the waterfront of Jaffa, they did in the parking lot of the garbage cars and are photographed under my song. "

"Suddenly I have a chance to be with him on stage."

Blush with Moni Moshonov (Photo: Itamar Ginzburg)

Blush will participate this month in the Ministry of Culture's Reading Month Festival, which takes place throughout the country throughout June and includes dozens of free events that connect poets and writers to musicians.

On June 14, Somek will join Moni Moshonov in "The Bubble" in Bat Hefer and together they will host the poet Shirley Peles.

For more details on the reading month, click here.

"Moni Moshonov is an actor I really like," he says.

"One evening he can be with me at Mishkenot Sha'ananim and read an excerpt from a story of Haim Hazaz, the other evening he can stand on stage and present a monologue by Hanoch Levin. A man who loves poetry and literature, and it's less displayed in front of his shop window. Suddenly I have a chance to be with him on stage. He started singing during the Corona period. About Alterman, about what poetry is called and about sports. "

"I think so. Ariana Melamed once said 'the rumors about the death of poetry were too early.' Teaching poetry was against the wind. It interested me more than teaching at university and elsewhere, which I did at the same time. Because I understood language I enter not a field - but a minefield, and I should not explode - but blow up. "I suddenly felt I could take poetry and bring it to these people without them knowing they spell the word poetry. Just turn the white collar of poetry into a blue collar as well. Take it off the penthouse. I'll give you an example - I suggested they put only lines of poetry on social media." .

Supports its reform.

Shasha Bitton (Photo: Government Press Office, Oded Karni)

What do you think about Education Minister Yifat Shasha Bitton's attempt to pass a reform in which external matriculation examinations in literature (and also in history, the Bible and citizenship) will be abolished, and students will submit papers instead

?

It's kind of my dream that this will happen.

The teacher at the school as I taught is a contractor.

He needs to suffice this song and this story.

If a student writes a paper then I will sit with him, I will ask him: Do you like football?

Come find ten songs about football and write about them.

Let the student write a paper and treat it as if it were his or her doctorate.

Let teachers not tell me that it lowers the value of the profession and so on.

If you study well then the value of the profession will go up.

And another sentence about literature teachers: this is actually the commando unit that the school has.

It's just against the wind. "

"Yo, what a question. If I have to find lines to quote about my tombstone, and I'm thinking about it right now, then maybe it's from the song 'Revenge of the Stuttering Boy.' ".

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• Ronny Blush

• Moni Moshonov

• Yair Lapid