Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: burj khalifa, dubai, future gutter status, headspace, indoles, perfume, summer, writing
It’s been a long while. Many things have happened during these past five months. I travelled to the ostensible top of the world, and also London, Phoenix, Cambridge, New York, Mumbai, and around this country I grew up in yet never explored. I talked myself in and out of finally being able to live in Dubai, and began burning geranium oil. The perfume education continued too, with a swoop into the heady narcoticism of indolic white florals—of jasmine, lilies and nargis; of torpid summerlong stupors and of sweetness turning to rot.
And through these months I wrote: about the craft of gulet building in the boatyards of Bodrum, Turkey; a superkinetic Lebanese webseries, Shankaboot; a Moroccan bank that’s more than just a pretty facade; and the inimitable Rose Issa, grand doyenne of Arab and Iranian art and film.
And an Egyptian-Deleuzean architect and a house that’s only 5.33m wide; embroidering the Palestinian struggle; the Lebanese Head of Exterior Design at BMW; a biodegradable camel leather factory off the Abu Dhabi-Al Ain highway; and designer Essa Bhagoorwalla, the «Oprah of Sharjah»
And the traced history and languages of dhow racing in the UAE; Mocha coffee’s journey from Yemen to Japan; Berber-inspired contemporary mud architecture in southern Morocco; various birds and dressforms of the Middle East; and Egypt’s answer to ramen, among other things.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academia, brownbook, driving, dubai, evens, future gutter status, gonzo ethnography, headspace, ian mackaye, june, justin pickard, malinowski, metanarratives, perfume, sheila heti, sillage, speed, summer, uae
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In June, everything was lovely and nothing was bad. I got a tiered mesh tray, and everything was organised. I switched my default gmail font to Georgia, and felt a little bit more articulate. I read a lot of perfume blogs and shamelessly appropriated their beautiful vocabulary. Sillage, chypre, fougère. Head notes, heart notes and base notes; rationality, emotion and ferality.
It’s actually only the eleventh of the month but I’m projecting. Last winter was brutal and May kind of ugly, but June? June is going to be wonderful, I can tell. And now that I’ve swapped Brooklyn for Dubai, there won’t be any winter anymore. The weather is heavy and sticky, but it feels oddly earnest. An overly enthusiastic mouthbreathed hug and both cheeks pinched: unwelcome, but still comforting. (more…)
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Below might be the best thing I’ve seen all month (you wouldn’t imagine Lucáks to be the tender sort). Badiou’s new book on Wagner the best I’ve read all month. Etc. Superlatives, come to think of it, seem to flow easier in the colder darker months; whether because of the weather or the turnover of the year? Maybe as soon as next weekend, I will finally get the Acéphale tattoo I’ve been thinking about for a few years now. I’m giving myself til September to complete the EGS application, find more stable employment. Summer is threateningly muggy, jasmine scented, with the ever present threat of bedbugs, but otherwise fairly nice.
: My dear friend Gyuri…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: alberto seveso, art, drc, headspace, ink, prospect heights, summer
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One day they will be written?. Several months post thesis, I think I’m coming round to capital letters again. Verso means battling British spellings and learning how to use a supercomma aged 22. Other things happened: I graduated, moved to Prospect Heights, acquired a bike, a clearance gold tapestry curtain and many scented candles. It’s been so long since I last updated this, and already my internal monologue and headspace has changed. Slower, more vivid, a little more languorous – not unlike Philip Larkin, where “Here, silence stands like heat“. (more…)
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: 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: 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: arabic, dead time, future gutter status, headspace, larkin, summer
I am unsure of who this man is or what it is that he’s doing. This does however characterise my current relationship with the Arabic language rather accurately. Today I was told that I sound like an ambulance siren (a quieter, more mumbly version) when distressed. I’m not sure how I feel about this? [I would like to learn to whine/wail to the theme tune from M*A*S*H when I grow up please]
But I’m reminded of a goldilocks level of bitterness – Philip Larkin poem:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ☭☭☭, fecal face, miss universe, positivity, summer, the revolution
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Aw. I also do not love Arabic right now in its thorough consumption, subsequent implosion of my life. Originally via weheartit.And in other positivity du jour, I’m really not feeling movement politics lately. And by lately I mean at all. Maybe it will pass, maybe not. SDS national in DC may or may not be the turnpoint.
MORE: I HAVE 57 VOCAB WORDS, A DISTRESSING TEST AND PROBABLY 26 HOURS TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP
