Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adbusters, advertising, art, censorship, consumerism, future gutter status, hijab, hijabism, hijabizing, korinna irwin, no logo, orientalism, post-consumerism?, princess hijab, rock star with words, street art, veil, visual terrorism, zines
Who is Princess Hijab? She’s my age, yet anonymous; an “unseen character” And
since 2006, the Princess, who has begun a movement (Hijabism) based on the subverting of advertisements (Hijabizing) veils faces on billboards using a black marker pen.The black hijab encompasses every existing form of distinction. PH also operates on the Internet by creating animated gifs. She initiated the hijab_ad collective.
There’s some debate over whether she is a hijabi or even a Muslim. Or even a woman (take that as loosely as you will). I kind of like that it’s ambiguous
and that you don’t necessarily need to subscribe to certain identities to dislike the oversexualisation of women’s bodies, and especially the creepily prepubescent
(hello, Tom Ford! though I do think those ads are kind of unintentionally brilliant in their hyper-plasticity, kind of like lucy and bart). Princess Hijab, anyway, sees her work as a kind of culturally specific Adbusters-ish response – except for the part where you consume to cut down comsumption. She tells Menasset that
“I created PH to be connected. I wanted to mix elements from different extractions and cultures, starting from my initial subject: the veiled woman. I believe it’s the reason why PH had such an impact. She never let herself be defined by religion nor gender. It was really crucial for me,: she said”.
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: 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: 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: future gutter status, anthro, hakim bey, anarchism, bluestockings, space, magic, thesis, MAZ, magical automous zone, TAZ, michael albert, parecon, M.A.Z.
My life feels marginally more sorted now. only just, though. berlin is semi-certain but still up in the air. dubai in summer seems very likely. magic is back, in a really good way. Instead of fieldworking in summer in dubai – not on labour or domestic worker abuse or anything that involves asking the ‘wrong’ questions and getting my family kicked out, I will now thesisise on anarchist spaces and magic though a theory (yet to be fully developed) of the Magical Autonomous Zone. Probably in the city – places like Bluestockings, 123, ABC No Rio? But also taking that outside – into homes, into collective projects and into the street.
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: 1990s, as if, dead time, fashion, film, future gutter status, headspace, rage against the machine, rags, rnc 2008
The last few weeks have been kind of strange, kind of characterised by a weird pre-apocalyptic silence (that has nothing to do with election hyperventilation). Sleeping every three days, and when I do sleep, missing whole days. I have been semi-repulsed by fashion over the last near-year or so yet I find my self drawn to it and everything visually embodiable lately. And maybe mostly, the 1990s and the films, and fashion that went with it (and I suspect there’s so so much I’m missing).
Things I remember like plaids around the waist and docs and small-print florals and dungarees and neon sneakers and dark lipstick on coffee cups (I’m becoming my mother) and really really wanting to be a riot grrrl. And things I don’t like the ubersleek gorgeously clean minimalism of the early side of the decade. Of course it’s retrospective nostalgia, but didn’t things seem mad fun? Like this Amy Grant video (the hat!), and remembered slushies, astroturf, pink bougainvillea and little-kid fashion shows in somebody’s Jumeirah back garden. I really miss Dubai right now, or at least its more-is-more excesses, maybe it’s the same thing.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, future gutter status, jessica hagy, sin
Sin-tersectionality? This is amazing. a sin-diagram of almsot everything I love-to-hate-to-love. By Jessica Hagy.
