Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 3oud, aesthetic, anti-civillization, cairo, folk metal, headspace, korpiklaani, kvlt, misty glen, murakami, oud, oudoccidentalising america, semantics, semiotics, summer, the south, travel
I guess I read a lot of Murakami when in Cairo- you wouldn’t necessarily think they’d match, would you? Here’s a bunch more things that don’t match but that I’ve been visually digging lately, diagrammations aside. Many of them from the righteous Acid Sweat Lodge, “organised for the dissemination of outsider knowledge”. Brilliant for mental mapping and planning my circa-August 2009 ¡Occidentalise America! trip which will hopefully be NYC-Nashville-New Orleans shaped, perhaps with many detours. It’s interesting how “The South” seems kind of internally exoticised among Americans? A Northeastern friend from Massachusetts tells me it’s dark and poetic and swampy and beautiful.
kvltising the 3oud?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: decriminalisation, delhi, fail, gay sex, GLBTQ, high court, homosexuality, india, legality, mumbai, phallocentrism, section 377, travel
That’s right, decriminalised – in a landmark ruling that amends the 148 year old colonial-vestige Section 377 law. One that’s still extant in an unchanged form in other places formally colonised bt the British like Singapore – wonder how much it’ll open up debate elsewhere? In India it seems that some conservatives are shuffling, and centrist polititians are being predictably vague, probably waiting to see which opinion will garner the most votes. Interesting to see that the CPM (Communist Party Marxist) have come out strongly in favour though. All’s well then it would seem, with much happiness and relief in the streets for a ruling that’s been a really long time coming.
“The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognizing a role in society for everyone – Delhi High Court”
Throw in some constitution love and Nehru quoting and you’re good to go. All until you look at the text of the amended code, that is. I need to read the actual ruling (or scan- it’s some 105 pages) but this bit from the times of india report jumped out at me. Note that Section 377 as it stands still criminalises non-consensual sex and sex with minors (ie statuatory rape) – but then look at how it’s defined!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: (cha)osmosis, americana, cairo, cynthia mckinney, egypt, free gaza movement, future gutter status, gaza, heliopolis, israel, khan el khalili, mosques, northeast, occidentalism, orientalism, spirit of humanity, travel
“IS THAT THUNDER IN THE DISTANCE?” “NO, IT’S PROBABLY JUST ISRAEL…”
This was of course an early morning joke – we were on a dusty balcony in Ard El Golf, a long way off from the Egyptian-Israeli border. It never did rain and we didn’t find out what the booming noises ever were – not dissimilar to a supersize Iftar cannon, but at completely the wrong time of year. Getting back to Dubai, however I came across something that’s a little less of a joke:
[23 miles off the coast of Gaza, at 15:30pm yesterday] – Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the “Spirit of Humanity,” abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (see below for a complete list of passengers). The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel.
Cairo itself was a really sick experience, albeit an exercise in imbibed hairballs (from two adorable Persian cats) and chaos. Perhaps I went expecting to magically be able to speak 3amiya (colloquial) – I couldn’t, though I got along fine with Fusha and acquired Shami/Khaleeji polymumblings. Towards the end I found it much easier to follow conversations to boot, while still finding more complex (b)olitical ones difficult. Many wonderful people, interesting insights with regards to Egypt-Palestine, good films at the Cairo Refugee Film Festival I volunteered at, unfortunate communions with both the Cairo Scholars list and a toilet bowl (many comparisons to be made from utility to aesthetics no?) an 3oud (!) and a month later, there’s not much to say. Or perhaps I’m still residually exhausted – something in the pollution-meets soundscapes? But here’s a few pictures anyway. Mostly from a mosque in the Khan-el-Khalili area before my camera imploded slightly, magically, if frustratingly coming back to life in the last two days (Flickr, is of course still charmingly blocked in the UAE).
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 3amiya, arabic, athens, fusha, graffiti, intifada, l'insurrection qui vient, lyon, msa, pigs, police, riots, semiotext(e), stencils, street art, surveillance society, tarnac 9, the coming insurrection, translation
[picture from biphop in Lyon]
Or al warida? Some consideration to be made – dictionary in hand – as we look to translate the coming insurrection/l’insurrection qui vient (recently re-translated by Semiotext(e)) to Arabic – hopefully both Fusha/MSA, and the Egyptian colloquial 3amiya.
I’m in Cairo for this month; it’s more than a little overwhelming, but pershaps in a really comforting gulf (pre-emaar and nakheel) meets india way. My own 3amiya is improving a fair bit which is a nice validation of my last summer-of-doom spent (re)learning arabic, perhaps. Next up, perhaps to (de)learn it? I do love the sentiments of these four Athens stencils from Magic Krtek in, from the disciplinary interrment, to anti-semiotic and anti-flic:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, baa baa black sheep, beacon, beirut, commuication, genou choueiri, jean-luc cornec, jim darling, junk, nursery rhymes, potatoes, recycling, street art, telephonic sheep, trash
Yeah, amazing. There’s something really satisfiying about painting or drawing onto convex surfaces like balloons (or for A levels, surgical gloves), or even just looking at the back of a spoon. Lebanese artist Ginou Chouei, who lives and works in beirut, does just this with her series of potato portraits. I wish I wasn’t reminded of those Mr Potato Head ‘pets’ that you would water and watch their herby hair grow. Of her potatoes she says:
I chose the potato to portray the human face due to it’s many striking parallels. Not only is their skin porous like ours but they also come in different colors, shapes and sizes. Potato heads grow, sprout, age, then decay… but they refuse to go without a trace.
Like humans, they come in various forms, from family friends above, to even the esteemed George Bush(el?). They are covered in eyes too – might be interesting to do a surveillance society version? I can’t quite tell how she’s done them either – painting would make sense, but it almost seems like some kind of photo transfer.
more: papas and trash dudes
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adalah, anarchism, anarchists against the wall, armed struggle, BDS, boycott, consumerism, direct action, divestment, future gutter status, insurrection, international solidarity movement, israel, jordan, lifestyle politics, palestine, sanctions, Sufism, uri gordon, wayne price
 Palestina by Melanie Cervantes |
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, after coming across Wayne Price’s “the Palestinian Struggle and the Anarchist Dilemma, fleshing out my own thoughts on the death of armed struggle, and then following the recent successes of the US Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. At least thus far it’s been something I’m a bit reluctant to take on especially as it looks like this is what I’ll inshallah be PhD applying to, so maybe part of a series? |
BDS – Pushing for institutional change
As much as I wholeheartedly believe in, and work with BDS campaigns at various levels, there’s something that makes me slightly uneasy about banking on consumerist/lifestylist, institutional, and interstatist avenues to produce social change. Not just the question of academic boycott, which I’m wholly torn on, but it that it feels like a ‘necessary evil’, a compromise for campaign efficiency, in a way. Necessary evils – awkward good/evil morality aside, it feels like an awkward liberal binary, or people who consider themselves anti-authoritarian but insist on centralised and hierarchical organisations and meeting structures for ‘efficiency’s sake’. You could perhaps look at it in the view that ‘every little bit helps’, think global act immediately local, and so on . Kind of the way I feel about veganism, buying local/from CSAs, fair trade etc – a good (if privilege imbued) along-the-way means to an end, but not the end in itself. But when BDS becomes, or rather, feels like the only avenue, what then?
MORE: WHAT DO YOU WANT THEN, A REVOLUTION?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: beer, braxis, brotest, BURP, censorship, comite invisible, consumerism, dubai, dystopia, electrodes, film, image, internet, invisible committee, l'insurrection qui vient, new school in collaboration, occupy everything, sleep dealer, surveillance society, the future, tiqqun, university of minnesota
Ignore the start picture – the video at the end is a Tiqqun one from 2001, and well worth watching. It’s dedicated to the lost children; here’s some other lost children in the hipstershapes of the Bro University Radicalization Project (BURP) which focuses
on redirecting the socially repressive forces of alcohol towards spontaneous anarchy, salutes the snap attack on sober conformity, a non-hierarchical attempt to liberate U spaces in favor of their natural free-form Bro-ness and Duder-tude, with chillaxing required for any kind of mutual aid, Miller or Bud.
This in turn begs the crucial question: BROTEST + BEER(Y) + BRAXIS = BURP??. Tiqqun’s invocation of electrodes is anyway fascinating in that the short was made in 2001, and is uneasily echoed in this year’s dystopian film Sleep Dealer, set in Mexico. I won’t rehash it here, but in brief, it depicts a near-futurist world of hypersurveillance and control, and a hypercapitalism that succeeds in total virtual alienation. Exploited workers thus ‘plug in’ to machines to remotely work across the border in America, through nodes in their bodies – put in by the technified coyoteks (!). The nodes themselves strongly resemble the 1/4 jack holes where you would plug a lead into a guitar or bass – it’s interesting to map this back to the connections that humans have with their own favourite shapes of wood (as opposed to perhaps a forest). In a final cessation of humanity, people can even leech and commodify their own emotions and memories (hello, NGO-industrial) and even plug into each other’s nodes – via a computer of course.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: activism, anarchism, anthropology, arabic, BDS, bebsi bolitics, books, brotest, cairo, dissent, egypt, gender, maps, palestine, space, state security, summer, surveillance society, traces, up the broletariat
No hyperinsightful solutions, unfortunately. I don’t actually know too much about bolitics in Egypt right now at that, though I really should. ‘Egyptian freedoms’ are probably more of an oxymoron than I realise. This illustration though, lovely no? From a 2nd grade Arabic language reader from 1938, it was donated by Christian Awaraji in Beirut 1997, and used to belong to his aunt, Flavie Awaraji who was born in 1938 and died in 1947 in a bicycle accident. Its inside cover reads “This book belongs to the honorable mademoiselle Flavie Awaraji, 11th (2. elementary) 1944, Lycée Français in Beirut”. I am slightly overwhelmed by these kind of traces of unknown people, like forgotten pressed flowers in the pages of old books. Traces of the geographical kind are becoming fascinating too, after burying (bunkering?) self in Paul VIrilio’s work lately (and of course the recycked Weizman fetishisation. I need to segue away from print back to image though, perhaps even film (which shouldn’t fizz out with a castrated film major?)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: berlin, breaching the vortex, columbia, cortex, dead time, dispatchwork, dubai, eminent domain, flipper, gentrification, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, hardcore, jan vormann, occupation, open the gate, punk, the future
The picture above is from the Berlin that I won’t be revisiting in June – I think it’s from the alleyway/courtyard leading to Central Kino? Couldn’t agree/hope for more perhaps – capitalism is pretty much ‘civilised cannibalism’ anyways. Ditto with ecocide – I have issues with the “Earth-my-mother” vibe – but it seems that hyperconsumption and death-by fossil fuels looks a bit cannibalistic? And sorcery – I don’t remember where from but Paul Bohannon has opined that “men attain power by consuming the substance of others”. (For a desktop sticky note tells me so – I sense my life would implode slightly if the program ever crumbles). I’ve been thinking a lot about magic/sorcery and links to power and art lately following a recent final (and via Zerzan’s ‘Case Against Art’ – hopefully not the beginning of an awkward green-team foray) – more on this later perhaps. Also from Berlin though, this time to patch up the gaps of the past (not that the vortex hasn’t been breached already) is this lego brick project I’m really digging:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anthropology, brownbook, dead time, deira, dubai, estrangement, evan collisson, expat anxiety, future gutter status, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, headspace, karama, skateboarding, summer, uae
Dubai again and a strange affection for a city that I guess is my home, little as it does want me here. Jobs here seem impossible at first hunt, perhaps I should look to skip and dip on standby tickets for the next two months? I will definitely be in Cairo (and not Berlin) for a fortnight sandwiched in June, and Kashmir/Mumbai for the first 2-3 weeks of July. Hopefully finding an affordable (!) sublet in NYC for August and couchsurfing for the last dredges of July til I can inshallah move in. My life is currently packed into six boxes in the radio station – I fascinatingly had five last year and four the year before. I suspect the number could go down though as I have scores of books to disperse (like theory, like cats) into the atmosphere, and several boxes lined with wake-up-an-hour-before-kickout-time dump and run panic. [you can't go home again..]
