enjoyed hearing about this ramadan’s expected hit tv show in egypt based on the ‘i want to get married blog.

i beg to differ. pops used to take me along to his squash league games growing up. like most boys, i assume, i grew up believing my parents were perfect flawless beings – especially my father who’s absence from my childhood lent him a distant air of mystery. i was devastated then to witness my father lose a league game for the first time. stunned, i dont think i uttered a word the rest of the night. my father didn’t notice my confusion, he had no reason to, he’d only lost a game of squash after all. what followed slowly but surely was the dissolution of all notions of perfection right up to a now that allows not even a semblance of perfection to be contemplated. my parents originally defined perfection. god, religion, science, mathematics everything that followed was a product of them or in more abstracted terms a product of humanity. and humanity was from then on forever fallible and incomplete.

a bit melodramatic for a squash game sure but the essence of that night was as my dear friend and mentor eloquently put to me a decade or two later the revelation of mortality.

peter singer wrote a great op-ed in the ny times a few days or weeks ago questioning the morality of having children. it has always bothered me that the general discourse on having children revolves around the parents’ wants and desires leaving the unborn child necessarily out of the decision- the only decision that counts, the decision to exist is not ours. some favorite bits from the op-ed that you should read in full:

The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer held that even the best life possible for humans is one in which we strive for ends that, once achieved, bring only fleeting satisfaction. New desires then lead us on to further futile struggle and the cycle repeats itself.

South African philosopher David Benatar, author of a fine book with an arresting title: “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” … To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her.

almost all of my closest male friends have by now either had children or are about to embark on the frankly baffling to me adventure. i say all that without taking away from the undeniable joy that fatherhood has brought these friends, a joy far deeper than money, power, fame and other successes which these same friends have achieved in spades.

father to son to father.

my dad is a beautifully flawed man. deeply beautiful. deeply flawed. our relationship has evolved erratically and often maddeningly into an intense and honest love. i celebrated him today alongside my father (and soon to be father) friends around the world.

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It was not a prodigal’s return … from one simplicity to another. He looked for a less dogmatic politics that combined liberal values, respect for human rights and social equity. He hoped the space for such a social-democratic outlook existed in regions he knew best, beyond Europe and the United States. He was too shrewd to believe that it must exist. He was nevertheless withering with anyone who claimed that the persistence of autocratic and theocratic attitudes meant that it could not exist. As with God and Marx before, he thought of political values as universal.

He also favoured outside intervention to rid people of oppressors. A Soviet-backed regime was preferable to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and he blamed the United States for creating a seedbed for Islamist terror there. “Bin Laden”, he said, “is the illegitimate child of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.” He was for removing Saddam Hussein, though he thought the occupiers recklessly ill prepared. To the enemies this earned him on the left, he retorted: “The future of humanity does not lie in the back streets of Fallujah.”

Mr Awad is a former fighter from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, not a lily-livered pacifist. But he questions the utility of battling militarily against the Israelis when the results hurt Palestinians more than the enemy. He is one of the founders of a proclaimed “popular campaign for security in the buffer zone” that seeks to crack Israel’s siege wall by means of peaceful protest.

Week after week his followers march into the 300-metre-wide perimeter zone which Israel declared off-limits after last year’s assault on Gaza. From their nine-metre-high turrets on the surrounding walls, Israeli snipers chase off the protesters with gunfire. Though several of them have been wounded, week after week they march back and plant Palestinian flags as close as they can to the walls before Israeli soldiers open fire.

Could such civil resistance catch on? Unlike the Islamist movements that stage rallies from the relative safety of Gaza City, the unarmed protesters have won local plaudits for their courage in marching to the front-line to advocate non-violence. The campaigners dream of a mass march through Gaza’s crossings to break free of the suffocating siege and of replanting the farmland that has been turned into a wasteland. Most Gazan campaigners from the established political movements say that non-violence is pointless and has never worked. But the new movement’s numbers, though still small, seems to be growing, boosted by the farmers who have lost some of their best land.

still awaiting the arabs’ gandhi.

100LIVE ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL
CAIRO – 2010
14th/15th May 2010
Live electronic music + Live video

ARTISTS:
adham hafez / yara mekawy / ola saad
jan jelenik / telepoetic / mahmoud refat / ahmed saleh
iqbit / ahmed basiony / john kannenberg
ahmed sabry/ nermine el ansari / mohamed allam / eleonora / wensh.

ADDRESS :Kasr El Sham3 Street ,Al Fakhareen – Old Cairo – Behind the Hanging Church and Amr Mosque Tel.: +2 23 610 511 http://www.darb1718.com

[Organized by] 100COPIES MUSIC / CAIRO http://www.100copies.com

[100COPIES MUSIC / CAIRO]
www.100copies.com
www.100radiostation.com

100COPIES is a music label based in Cairo/Egypt, releasing music from Egypt, the Arab world and International.100COPIES is focusing on experimental music, sound and jazz related. The main intentions of the label is creating a platform/network for the independent music scene in Cairo. As well as introducing international artists and independent music from other places to the Egyptian music scene. A limited number of 100 copies will be out for sale inside Egypt. Another limited number will be produced for international distributors from each release.
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[DARB 1718]
www.darb1718.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=43270774592&ref=search&sid=1663254969.2200041353..1

Darb 1718 is a registered non-profit organization.
It is the latest addition to Cairo’s art and culture scene. Right In the middle of Old
Cairo, in El Fustat area and just next to the Hanging Church and Amr Ibn Al Aas
Mosque, emerges a new heart for contemporary art and culture.
Darb 1718 is a culture promoting centre, art exhibition space, programs and
initiatives facilitator and education and community service site. It is a hub connecting
Egyptian artists from several walks with the local and international art and culture
scene.
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telepoetic were of my favorites last year there was a youthful tenderness to them.