Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dubai, karama, anthropology, brownbook, headspace, summer, future gutter status, uae, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, dead time, evan collisson, estrangement, expat anxiety, deira, skateboarding
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..]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: beirut, brownbook, dissemination, headspace, july war, lebanon
[photo by Piax]
Beirut. A beautiful seaside city between cedar lined mountains, replete with forgiving blue skies and beaches. The ‘Paris of the Middle East’; the sparkling jewel in Lebanon’s crown. Breathily multicultural and sometimes painfully hip, its boxy nightclubs, falafel joints, shisha cafes and tiny galleries provide the regional answer to NYC’s ice cream, brownstones, boomboxes and beer. The city is definitely buzzing, yet sometimes all that can be heard is the faintly uneasy static hiss of a radio stuck between channels. Earnestly ignored, it continues in the background, a little like the hum of an air conditioner that you’ve already grown accustomed to
Yet in a city decimated by fifteen years of civil war, sometimes the past is hard to forget. The fast growing skyline of stylishly glassy towers remains underscored by bullet-ridden buildings – once impossibly elegant in their characteristic French-Ottoman style but now quietly falling down. Like much else in Beirut, it forms a strange hybrid: neither nor, but something in between. Like much else in Lebanon, it reflects a society of contrasts and contradictions: one that is always shopping, and one that is always at war…
Sometimes Malaysian universities are shaped like canopies. And sometimes I have a Monday deadline with at least 700 words to go and Kant to shuffle at in between ohdear.
