Are you ready for something too cool for words?
The MoZaiK Web site doesn’t exactly have a lot of content. In fact, its only function is to hype the musical group’s CDs.
But what a group and what a site.
This is how MoZaiK describes itself: “An eight piece improvisational band…drawing from the roots of Jewish soul music and their own World Wanderings. Blending the sounds of klezmer, ancient Middle Eastern melodies with jazz sensibilities and a jamming approach that fuses African tribal trance to the psychedelic explosion born out of Northern California.”
Another description: “Psychedelic Jewgrass.”
Get it?
It doesn’t come as a big surprise that the band started in Berkeley or that it was heavily influenced by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the renowned master of Chassidic music.
The site is your basic band groupie site, but with outstanding graphics and a style that gives you a real taste of what this bunch of musicians is like.
Read bios of the band members, learn about their other projects and check out their press clippings. You can also get on an e-mail list for updates about appearances and CDs.
Click on the “Soundz” button to hear snippets of the group’s music in MP3 or RealAudio format. Be patient; these files take a long time to load, but the music is worth the wait.
The site’s design is fabulous — like, far out, man. It’s what the Grateful Dead’s home page would have looked like in 1969, if there had been home pages in 1969.
You don’t go to this site for content, you go for the experience. The animated graphic at the bottom of the home page is worth the price of admission.
Alas, the glitzy format doesn’t completely work. Hitting the “New CD, Now Available” button first produced an irritating “object not found” message, and then, amazingly, it shut down Netscape entirely. It threatened to do the same on Explorer.
Still, this is a not-to-be-missed experience.
Oh yes, another band slogan: “Able to make a grandmother dance on a table and a teenager scream for more.”
Check it out at www.mozaik.org and you may agree.
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So you’ve been to Israel with your trusty disposable camera, but the pictures you took are…well, disappointing. That panoramic shot of the Old City makes it look like a discarded movie set; the Chassidic family you thought filled the viewfinder moved, leaving you with a picture of a wall.
Not to worry: IsraelImages.com offers hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures of Israel taken by photographers with a whole lot more skill than you.
The site owners — proprietors of a stock photo agency in Israel — do a good job of sorting and arranging a dazzling array of pictures and making them accessible to casual visitors.
The images, arranged in categories, range from the very nice to the outstanding.
The home page offers a menu in the shape of a Star of David. Click on a category — Economy, the State, Archaeology, Lifestyle and the like — to get a more detailed submenu.
Search the “personalities” subcategory, for example, and you’ll see some 140 images, arranged 12 or so to a page, with pictures of political and literary figures, entertainers, even the Dalai Lama giving a speech in the Negev.
Some of the most beautiful images are of Jerusalem, with 56 pictures of the Western Wall alone.
Visiting the site and looking at the pictures are free. But this is a business; the proprietors want to sell you copies of the pictures that you can publish in a magazine, on your Web site or brochures. And it ain’t cheap; a gorgeous panoramic picture of the Old City can be had for $750 for use on the cover of a national publication, if you happen to publish one, or $100 for use on personal business cards.
If you’re looking to buy images of Israel for publication, this is the place to go. But it’s a fun place for casual visitors, too, who just want to look at the vast assortment of beautiful images; much better than the lousy photos you brought back from your last trip to Israel. You’ll find it at www.israelimages.com
Along the same lines, check out PhotoZion — another commercial source of images from Israel that lets even non-buyers gaze at gorgeous pictures of a gorgeous country. It’s at www.stockphotographyisrael.com/gallery.asp
The writer is a Washington-based correspondent who has been writing about Jewish Web sites since the early 1990s. His columns alternate with those of Mark Mietkiewicz. Besser can be reached at [email protected]