killing denouement

A feature on Bidoun’s Babak Radboy: the X-files, the Bidoun Library, post-orientalism, class, cultural constructs, and the diasporic Middle East—Radical Literature (This is from ages ago—Brownbook’s March issue.)

Imagine a library that contained every imaginable book on the Middle East, variously housed in hexagonal galleries from Stockholm to the Lower East Side. The Library of Bidoun comes pretty close: pulpy desert sheikh romance novels jostle for space with meditations on the 1970s oil crisis, multilingual literary ephemera and frowning Soviet era political pamphlets. Its chief curator, Iranian-born Babak Radboy isn’t what you might expect from your usual librarian either. Creative director of Bidoun magazine, his commercial clients include the likes of Hugo Boss and a kaleidescopic VMA nominated video for Kanye West. Not bad for a young émigré who arrived in New York City (NYC) on a whim, aged 19 and clutching $600 in his pockets.

Recently at Rhizome: THE WEB THAT CAN’T WAIT—reading anxieties online, the Fast and Slow Webs, Robin Sloan’s Fish App, and a book printed in ink that fades in two months.

One of my earliest memories is getting hit in the face by a book. I was two; we had just moved to Dubai, and were staying with another family for the first few weeks. While we were playing, their younger son threw his book at me. It cut open the thin skin below my right eye, just above the line now demarcated by insomnia’s purplish bruisings. I remember only fragmented flashes. The green Small World Library hardback with Goofy on its cover, the tears, and the blood—so much blood that the book retained a rusty stain on the spine.

So the New Aesthetic happened, for a time. Seemingly everywhere—the ad above is from a Harvey Nichols in the UAE. And in a short-lived side project, so too did the Mew Aesthetic. A few months ago, I wrote two things on the New Aesthetic—at the Creators Project and at The New Inquiry

BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL: DUENDE AND THE NEW AESTHETIC. With Woody Allen, Lorca’s duende, Kim Jong Il, and machines rolling over like Golden Retrievers.

In an early response, Matthew Battles compellingly framed the New Aesthetic in terms of ‘pathetic fallacy,’ or an attribution of human-like emotions to inanimate objects. It’s hard to argue with, yet equally applies to our relations with just about any technology. Just look at the way we baby our laptops’ temperature tantrums, ascribing nuance to each sulky bleep and whir. As a literary device or effect, then, it seems fairly bankrupt. Instead, perhaps we should compare the New Aesthetic to the ceremonial breaking of the fourth wall. It happened with Brechtian theatre, and later Godard and the New Wave of French cinema. A few decades later, the age of confessional media and YouTube rants dawned, and what was once a radical rupture of boundaries began to feel pretty old hat. But then the New Aesthetic and the machines got involved.

DESIRING MACHINES in TNI 4: Beauty.
With Laura Mulvey, the gaze, curation as feminised labour, the odd glamour of anti-grooming, and robots laughing alone with salad.

Remember the earlier decades of the uncharted Internet, and the pioneering gusto with which certain browser software was named. First came Netscape Navigator, sailing the high seas, followed by Internet Explorer and Safari tentatively traipsing through the World Wide Wilderness. Now it’s time to begin making contact with the natives — with the spambots, mail-order brides, and online apothecarists already appearing unsolicited in our inboxes, introducing themselves in their own languages. It’s time to wonder about their interiority. Are they listening? Are they looking back at us? Do they feel, or even care? Don’t they just want to be loved, too?