Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: consumerism, dubai, film, surveillance society, the future, occupy everything, l'insurrection qui vient, brotest, BURP, braxis, tiqqun, comite invisible, university of minnesota, invisible committee, new school in collaboration, beer, sleep dealer, dystopia, electrodes, internet, image, censorship
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: dubai, gentrification, columbia, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, berlin, dead time, the future, occupation, punk, hardcore, flipper, dispatchwork, jan vormann, cortex, open the gate, breaching the vortex, eminent domain
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..]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anarchist bookfair, anthropology, ☭☭☭, cat party, catastrophe, dead time, dissemination, dubai, expat crisis, future gutter status, headspace, listen trotskyist, new school, situationism, summer
“I sometimes think I envy those people who know where they belong;
writers who have a language and a history that is granted them with no catches, no hooks. Theirs for the taking. Along with a nation of willing accomplices, compatriots who see their own fate and that of their nation’s history and literary tradition reflected in the mirror the writer’s labour. It is all so neatly sewn up. Of course, I enjoy no such privilege. I belong to that nomad tribe, the great unwashed, those people born in the joins between continental shelves, in the unclaimed interstices between time zones, strung across latitudes. A tribe of no fixed locus, the homeless, the stateless. I have two passports and quite a variety of other documents to identify me, all of which tell the world where I have been, but not who I am, nor where I am going to…
A petrodollar summer?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: (h)aspiration anxiety, alice in wonderland, batgirl, charles manson, dubai, europe ain't my rope to swing on, expat crisis, future gutter status, grizzly bear, jellyfish, meat love, pig, pigs, polaroids, rage against the mondays, skulls, world map
Rage Against the Mondays? Clearly these aren’t going to be daily after all – perhaps when I have more work to procrastinate away from? And mhm Mondays aren’t quite so bad these days to be honest. Everyone has fled Dubai back to school or otherwise already, so this Monday, like most days now involves sleeping and reading on the swing and lots of tea and no stress, which makes a change. I should probably use this time to paint, but meh. I have just one more Monday left in Dubai, after which I’ll be in London for a bit before getting back to NYC. My friends have now dispersed to somewhere off Brick Lane and somewhere below Camden this year, so it should be fun. And interestingly, today’s pictures seem to return to what used to be common themes of pigs, Alice, and meat love. One thing that’s a Monday constant (or rather, Sunday night) is the worrying, and this continues, with the impending doom(s) of graduation and visas. I’m lucky in that with a family member working for an airline, I get free (standby) tickets until I turn 23, which gives me just a couple years left to save up and make use of these. Kinda like what la femme is doing, but hopefully connecting with some really rad groups and collectives along the way. Orhan Pamuk means dying to get to Istanbul, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, this amazing typographic map below certainly makes dream-planning easier.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, chintzy chintzy cheeriness, dubai, fugazi fridays, future gutter status, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, thaili distro
As of late, and lots of them. In wasting time in Dubai I have discovered that the internet has a lot of pictures. I might do these every day, possibly repping the bands that got me through said teenage years in the petrodollar bubble, then (and now? save for the elite end) cultural wasteland and what have you. Today could be ‘fugazi fridays, then? If and when I feel more motivated maybe I’ll write about the bands in question too. I always did want to be a music journalist when I grew up (Almost Famous and that scene singing Tiny Dancer on the bus contributed greatly to this!), which is probably where APPLECORPS and the distro came about. Uni paper music editors probably squished that fairly effectively, though maybe worth restarting?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: arab world, art, ☭☭☭, bebsi bolitics, dubai, dubai + middle east, gaza, gulf news, hamas, israel, latuff, massacre, media, media terrorism, ny times, palestine, solidarity, third intifada, uae
unknown, AP
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There was a crazy fog today and tonight – lower than I’ve ever seen it in the daytime-, covering everything with muffled dampness. Kind of like the Arab response, then? Dubai in particular usually drops big money on fireworks displays and the like yet this year festivities have been subdued or, like the fireworks, cancelled. I believe a bunch of other Arab states are doing the same, all in solidarity with Gaza. Shame that’s about as far as it will probably extend, humanitarian aid aside. And while people rally to protest at Israeli embassies around the world, here it happens at the Palestinian embassy instead. With no embassy in much of the Arab World, I did wonder where people would mobilise to, save for angry letters-to-the-editor invectives – L’Oreal counters perhaps? Libyans, however took to the Egyptian embassy instead, while others opted for the streets. From what I’m reading, Amman saw upwards of 20 000 taking to the streets demanding an end to the 1994 peace deal with Israel. |
bombs over baghdad, grenades over gaza? [warning: images may be disturbing]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2008, art, brendan monroe, colours, consumerism, dubai, new year's eve, post-consumerism?
Sick and headachey, this will likely be the first New Year’s Eve for about as long as I can remember (all the way to the late 90s indignancy of being babysat to those glitzy bollywood stage marathons). In Dubai with an expired license and government offices shut for what seems like sneakily forever meanwhile amounts to something like being stranded, albeit somewhat productively so. It’s early evening yet and so putting on the glad rags vs a cup of tea is still debatable, but meanwhile Brendan Monroe’s paintings are rather soothing, with the titles balmingly perfect for an Anti-New Years? Above is ‘Breaking Blood’.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: appropriation, art, dubai, german panther, germany, inges idee, public art, street art
| If only all tanks looked like this. And deflated like so; balloons robably don’t bulldoze homes very well. I can’t understand the German, but this is a pretty inspiring 2007 piece from the Berlin based public art collective, Inges Idee which I found via formfiftyfive. Compromised of four successful artists in their own rights – Hans Hemmert, Axel Lieber, Thomas A. Schmidt and Georg Zeyit, has focused on ’site-specific public art projects’ since its 1992 founding.
It’s pretty interesting to see public art done from (someone who works commercially as) an artists, as approached to a more street art approach. I can’t tell if these projects were commissioned or their sites granted, but it definitely seem to have a rather more polished, less clandestine approach. Similarly, it seems rather more based on aesthetic theory than the maybe politically or ideologically motivated street stuff. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. Still, how possible is it to depoliticise public art? |
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This is what I was thinking last summer
What do summer stories look like? Wanting it to be all brownstones and pounding sun and melting ice-cream, dripping sweat à la Do the right thing? Wanting mad stories mining the same enticing microcosm captured in polaroids long bike rides and making vegan brownies and learning and living and loving more than you can take it? All the hippies and the punks and the skinheads and the skaters? I don’t know, or even understand it, that, or maybe still this, nostalgia for a lifestyle that isn’t mine but seems so imbued with everything I would want it to be. Scuffed lino floors and the fuzzy green felt in my head but cold marble and concrete and prickly Astroturf underfoot instead?
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Well I’m in NYC for the summer now and truth be told, I kind of miss Dubai. I have the scuzzy linoleum underfoot (with PeptoBismol pink doors for good measure) and the crushingly damp smackdown of a city summer without AC. Perhaps everything looks better on celluloid? Right angled between two fans competing for torrid air, with no ice cream trucks in sight but hypersweet coconut sorbet in my fridge, all the same. |
Stale coffee out of thrifted wineglasses for want of mugs. Sometimes iced from the expresso machine with an exactly frothing stainless steel pitcher, with soymilk because its owner is a vegan. Which used to taste kind of weird in coffee but will taste like summer come September.
| Lying on dangerously wired Amsterdam Ave rooftops, looking down on the summer storage companies and electoral politics we collectively love to hate. Shisha on the steps afterwards, matching flavour to ice cream. Never actually making it to the park to read; not finishing Young Stalin, wondering if everything looks better in writing, too. Passing around Bed on the deflated subway home instead. |  |
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Sour cherry juice and dolalr bin pita bread. Being unable to decipher the history of Gaza and explorer Ibn Battuta from uploaded Arabic history shows. Suspecting it would be facilitated by vocab for tomorrow’s test. Remembering the ridiculous Dubai mall instead. Meanwhile, there’s a sweet 3-part documentary on Dubai and its rather seedy underside, Do Buy!, which describes itself as “An ethnographic film on the city, its disenfranchised workers, utopian architecture, and consumerist heaven of shopping malls.” Rather wonderful, this. |
