Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: burj khalifa, dubai, future gutter status, headspace, indoles, perfume, summer, writing
It’s been a long while. Many things have happened during these past five months. I travelled to the ostensible top of the world, and also London, Phoenix, Cambridge, New York, Mumbai, and around this country I grew up in yet never explored. I talked myself in and out of finally being able to live in Dubai, and began burning geranium oil. The perfume education continued too, with a swoop into the heady narcoticism of indolic white florals—of jasmine, lilies and nargis; of torpid summerlong stupors and of sweetness turning to rot.
And through these months I wrote: about the craft of gulet building in the boatyards of Bodrum, Turkey; a superkinetic Lebanese webseries, Shankaboot; a Moroccan bank that’s more than just a pretty facade; and the inimitable Rose Issa, grand doyenne of Arab and Iranian art and film.
And an Egyptian-Deleuzean architect and a house that’s only 5.33m wide; embroidering the Palestinian struggle; the Lebanese Head of Exterior Design at BMW; a biodegradable camel leather factory off the Abu Dhabi-Al Ain highway; and designer Essa Bhagoorwalla, the «Oprah of Sharjah»
And the traced history and languages of dhow racing in the UAE; Mocha coffee’s journey from Yemen to Japan; Berber-inspired contemporary mud architecture in southern Morocco; various birds and dressforms of the Middle East; and Egypt’s answer to ramen, among other things.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academia, brownbook, driving, dubai, evens, future gutter status, gonzo ethnography, headspace, ian mackaye, june, justin pickard, malinowski, metanarratives, perfume, sheila heti, sillage, speed, summer, uae
 |
 |
In June, everything was lovely and nothing was bad. I got a tiered mesh tray, and everything was organised. I switched my default gmail font to Georgia, and felt a little bit more articulate. I read a lot of perfume blogs and shamelessly appropriated their beautiful vocabulary. Sillage, chypre, fougère. Head notes, heart notes and base notes; rationality, emotion and ferality.
It’s actually only the eleventh of the month but I’m projecting. Last winter was brutal and May kind of ugly, but June? June is going to be wonderful, I can tell. And now that I’ve swapped Brooklyn for Dubai, there won’t be any winter anymore. The weather is heavy and sticky, but it feels oddly earnest. An overly enthusiastic mouthbreathed hug and both cheeks pinched: unwelcome, but still comforting. (more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 9/11, arab spring, beltane, bin laden, may 1, mayday, maypole, origin of mayday, osama bin laden dead, osama bin laden death, sarah hawas, september 11th, wisconsin
t: “Mayday” by Erik Ruin
Sometime in late April or early May, sometime in the mid 90s. Blue skies, grass, and swarms of red faced and peeling drunken expats who really should know better—as is standard for the UAE. Yours truly, clutching a ribbon and dancing the maypole at a Great British day celebration. Probably wearing a frothy white confection, definitely gritting my teeth at this colonial imposition that seemed a bit forced even to my very small self. Beatific sun. Passive-aggressive humidity.
Patriotic chest thumping aside, the festivities were loosely modelled after traditional mayday festivities that welcome the advent of spring. The rather phallic maypole dance itself is apparently a pagan throwback to ancient Babylonian sex worship and fertility rites. It’s a loose memory—I otherwise remember only that there were bouncy castles, meat pies and jousting knights on hobbyhorses.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1980s, 80s, alaa edris, alia al shamsi, alia lootah, archive80, art, ‹‹ فن فن فن فن ››, bastakiya, consumerism, dar ibn haytham, dihn 3oud, dubai, eighties, esra özyürek, exhibition, friday, khaleeji art, khawla al marri, leila al marashi, nostalgia, perfume, rebecca black, sail magazine, schadenfraade, shani, sugar vintage, thamaneenat, uae, zero boys
 “Dihn 3oud no. 5″ by Leila Al Marashi |
 Back in Dubai, then. Back in my childhood bedroom, after a somewhat unceremonious ejection from Brooklyn. Back among the scorching heat and bougainvillea and saffron tea and—what a blessed luxury—24/7 AC. Back to being surrounded by canvasses filled with teenage angst that seem doubly more baleful when turned to face the wall. Unlike 7-8 years ago, I’m no longer surrounded by construction sites, with scrap materials free for the scrounging. Wouldn’t mind being back in the cradle of A-Level art—all free time and freer materials—either, for that matter. |
One personal emergency upon arrival later, the dust is finally beginning to settle. Around the world, the present still looks pretty dire. Japan, Syria, and karmic punchlines from the Arab Spring; not to mention the the jobless recovery that sees McDonalds turn away nearly a million applicants for (mostly) part-time minimum wage jobs. And to adopt the Coming Insurrection‘s painfully cogent phrase, “Le futur n’a pas d’avenir”. What a month—a spot of nostalgic indulgence feels about right.
So let’s go back even further, then. I can never really settle on a decade to fetishise above all, but the 1980s comes pretty close. The ‘al thamaneenat’ in the title, for the Zero Boys fans among you, does translate as ‘the eighties’. It’s also the title of a pretty great project celebrating growing up in 1980s UAE. (more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, berlin, christian marclay, clocks, corrine vionnet, dubai, headspace, lcd soundsystem, new york, paula cooper gallery, photo opportunities, photography, tourism, traces
 |
 |
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, ☭☭☭, ⚑, channel 33, dubai, egypt, egyptian revolution, February 11th, january 25, political graphics, posters, solidarity
 - Caesar Diablo |
 - Nick Bygon |
| So this site tells me that Mubarak’s finally gone. A nice day in history: Feb 11th saw the beginning of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and Nelson Mandela’s 1990 release from prison. Shades of Dubai’s now defunct Channel 33, which used to have a daily 15 minute “Today, in history!” programme. I remember watching it at 19:00 every night for about a year, right before my mother sat down to The Bold and the Beautiful. The one with the stripes and bolt of pink satin in the sax-y opening credits. |  |
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2.6g 329m/s, bio art, BioSteel, bulletproof skin, bulletproof vests, bullets, cyborg anthropology, cyborgification, Designers and Artists 4 Genomics, HIDs, human-machine interfaces, Jalila Essaidi, magnetismmads peitersen, northpaw, sensebridge, social networking, sonic boom, surveillance society, transgenics, wearable sensory augmentation devices
The part in which I updated more frequently, Tumblr aside? Yeah. As machinic limbs go, I’ve been trying to get to grips with Twitter lately. Social networking in 2011—not exactly the frontiers of cyborgification. A couple of projects I’ve come across lately are however pushing this in rad ways.
Via grinding, comes Sensebridge, with its wearable sensory augmentation devices. They describe themselves as such:
Sensebridge is a research and collaboration group based at Noisebridge, a hackerspace in San Francisco, California. We are concerned with human-machine interfaces and making the invisible visible. We aim to bridge our senses by augmenting our bodies with wearable electronics. We’re making ourselves (and you) into cyborgs!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: advertisements, architecture, bernard tschumi, desire, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, meteorological eschatology, music, snowpocalypse, space
[via we find wildness]
There is no way to perform architecture in a book. Words and drawings can only produce paper space, not the experience of real space. By definition, paper space is imaginary: it is an image
Advertisements for Architecture (1976-7): a great series of postcard sized text-image juxtapositions from architect Bernard Tschumi. The accompanying text says, “Each was a manifesto of sorts, confronting the dissociation between the immediacy of spatial experience and the analytical definition of theoretical concepts”. Wonderful as these are, I don’t know that most people experience architecture through words and images—paper, and now the screen—as opposed to in physical space. Unless architecture cannot be experienced only from the outside, but requires actually traversing the space. This, or some sort of aesthetic hierarchy that relegates some structures as just being ‘buildings’, and not ‘architecture’. (more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Apple, atomisation, e versus i, html, I/O/D, iAppleProduct, iGeneration, interactivity, internet, iSemantics, Mars Bar, PatriotApp, rupture reveals structure, semantics, surveillance society, synaesthesia, textuality, Triple Canopy, visceral interactivity, Web Stalker
Following the Patriot Act, its iEquivalent: the PatriotApp. Not surprising, or particularly creepy as these things go—as someone put it today, “iSnitches get iStiches”. Fascinatingly, though, is the ascendance of ‘i’ as the new virtual prefix of choice. Not to mention the contracting of the hyphen, no thanks to décapitalisme(!) I wonder if this progression from ‘e’ (e-mail, e-commerce, e-book) to ‘i’ (iPhone, iGoogle, iPlayer) reflects a broader turn? Presumably from ‘electronic’ to ‘interactive? This said, much of the latter comes from iAppleProducts, whose ‘i’ initially stood for ‘internet’, and is now presumably modulated to ‘individual’. Interestingly, Apple did try to introduce an eMac—with the e standing for ‘education’—in 2002, before discontinuing it. (more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: algorithmic music, capitalism, john zerzan, maurice blanchot, monsieur dupont, noise, silence, supercollider, textuality, twitter
I figured I’d take some time to navigate attribution anxieties, deal with apartment catastrophes, and finally learn how to bake. Also figure out what I really want to do with this blog. Other collective print projects are now fairly dead; this could go either way. This said, some interviews and hopefully broader collaborations (or a new home) coming up soonish. And unrelatedly, editing at Lacanian Ink is starting to feel like karmic retribution for a lifetime of cooing over the impending apocalypse, castration anxiety and so on.
In the meanwhile, I’ve been thinking and writing about text versus noise/silence lately. (Text-as-ascii-characters certainly scream, shout, whisper. But text congealed as PDF and/or image? And on the other end, textually programmed coded music, like SuperCollider in 140 character twitter form. I can only dream of having SC code that clean … ) Here’s Blanchot, M. Dupont, and Zerzan: (more…)
