“Here’s another problem with technological extrapolation. It assumes a technologically determinist, utopian vision of the future in which all the callous brutishness of the present is somehow magically erased. That the future will somehow be evenly distributed, with relatively equal access to these technologies that make it all better. That the future will be made in the image of those currently in power, using the same tools and technologies. That it gets better, and not way, way, worse.

For Cluster Magazine’s recent «Branding» issue: cultural imperialism, becoming a William Gibson character, the dubious politics of being a cultural informant, ethnomarketing in the uae, coolhunting in the age of the internet. Also, anxiety—A Spy in the House of Hip 

Included in the brief for my own possible assignment was a directive that the respondents be—and I quote directly—“open to American brands and brand America, ie, not anti-America.” I wondered whether this was a standard brief point, or an assumption specific to the Middle East; whether it was a crypto-assertion of soft power, intimated in blue denim, rivets, and a zipper. Whether this was what cultural imperialism had become in this age of light-speed transnational exchange.

A feature on Bidoun’s Babak Radboy: the X-files, the Bidoun Library, post-orientalism, class, cultural constructs, and the diasporic Middle East—Radical Literature (This is from ages ago—Brownbook’s March issue.)

Imagine a library that contained every imaginable book on the Middle East, variously housed in hexagonal galleries from Stockholm to the Lower East Side. The Library of Bidoun comes pretty close: pulpy desert sheikh romance novels jostle for space with meditations on the 1970s oil crisis, multilingual literary ephemera and frowning Soviet era political pamphlets. Its chief curator, Iranian-born Babak Radboy isn’t what you might expect from your usual librarian either. Creative director of Bidoun magazine, his commercial clients include the likes of Hugo Boss and a kaleidescopic VMA nominated video for Kanye West. Not bad for a young émigré who arrived in New York City (NYC) on a whim, aged 19 and clutching $600 in his pockets.

One of my earliest memories is getting hit in the face by a book. I was two; we had just moved to Dubai, and were staying with another family for the first few weeks. While we were playing, their younger son threw his book at me. It cut open the thin skin below my right eye, just above the line now demarcated by insomnia’s purplish bruisings. I remember only fragmented flashes. The green Small World Library hardback with Goofy on its cover, the tears, and the blood—so much blood that the book retained a rusty stain on the spine.

BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL: DUENDE AND THE NEW AESTHETIC. With Woody Allen, Lorca’s duende, Kim Jong Il, and machines rolling over like Golden Retrievers.

In an early response, Matthew Battles compellingly framed the New Aesthetic in terms of ‘pathetic fallacy,’ or an attribution of human-like emotions to inanimate objects. It’s hard to argue with, yet equally applies to our relations with just about any technology. Just look at the way we baby our laptops’ temperature tantrums, ascribing nuance to each sulky bleep and whir. As a literary device or effect, then, it seems fairly bankrupt. Instead, perhaps we should compare the New Aesthetic to the ceremonial breaking of the fourth wall. It happened with Brechtian theatre, and later Godard and the New Wave of French cinema. A few decades later, the age of confessional media and YouTube rants dawned, and what was once a radical rupture of boundaries began to feel pretty old hat. But then the New Aesthetic and the machines got involved.

DESIRING MACHINES in TNI 4: Beauty.
With Laura Mulvey, the gaze, curation as feminised labour, the odd glamour of anti-grooming, and robots laughing alone with salad.

Remember the earlier decades of the uncharted Internet, and the pioneering gusto with which certain browser software was named. First came Netscape Navigator, sailing the high seas, followed by Internet Explorer and Safari tentatively traipsing through the World Wide Wilderness. Now it’s time to begin making contact with the natives — with the spambots, mail-order brides, and online apothecarists already appearing unsolicited in our inboxes, introducing themselves in their own languages. It’s time to wonder about their interiority. Are they listening? Are they looking back at us? Do they feel, or even care? Don’t they just want to be loved, too?

In the intervening months? Almost entirely Dubai, with a recent trip to Bangalore and Ooty. Summer is looking like a return to Brooklyn, with a possibly move to Istanbul (!) afterwards, roundabout October. More on this later, though; for now, have at Brownbook’s gorgeously redesigned site. I have four pieces newly up there, mostly from the last issue that I was with them:

East is East—on Nada Debs, and a design aesthetic that merges the Middle and Far East(s)

In 1917, just as the ravages of World War One were tearing through Europe, a young man named Ezzat Debs picked up his threads and followed the Silk Route to Yokohama in Japan. The son of a textile merchant and cotton mill owner, he began exporting Japanese silks and cottons and eventually established a lucrative family business. Eighty years later Nada Debs – Ezzat’s great niece – retraced her relative’s steps and set up an eponymous design company back home in Beirut. Today, Debs fuses the influence of her two homes – the Middle and Far Easts – in furniture and interiors using distinctive patterns and materials from the region.

Like Water for Sand—on Aziza Chaouni, desert tourism, speculative design, and architecture for a world without water.

Imagine a near future, where water has become the oil of tomorrow and wars are fought over liquid not land. Imagine a past too, where regional deserts were greener and a river wound its way through the already twisty walls of a busy medieval medina…

One Man Band—on Hanni El Khatib from the bayou to the Bay Area, via Palestine, the Phillippines and Old Weird America.

Stomping, yowling and hiccupping with all the raw ferociousness of the blues, Hanni El Khatib describes his music as ‘knife-fight music for anyone who’s ever been shot or hit by a train.’ Heavily inked, with a lacquered pompadour and stripped-back sound, he could have come right out of Old Weird America. Yet there’s nothing derivative about this.

The House that Bassam Built—on Egyptian architect Bassam El Okeily, a narrow house that’s just over 5m wide, and an architectural practice refracted through Deleuze & Guattari, Tarkovsky and Nietzsche.

Once upon a time, on the Belgian border with the Netherlands, there was a picturesque city named Bilzen. On one of its quiet, tree-lined streets, a retired couple are living happily ever after. Their abode has a transparent facade that resembles a display cabinet by day; glassily austere between the brick work that flanks it. At night, coloured lights pick out two angled balconies, suspended in mid-air like a paused game of Tetris. This is the house that Bassam built.

Have you heard about THE STATE? It’s a new journal I’m co-editing, and I couldn’t be more excited. It launches on March 19^th, both in Dubai and online—where I’ll be blogging near-daily. Here’s a bit of spiel for you:

AMIDST AUSTERITY measures today, we find ourselves increasingly precarious and pixelated; atomized, alienated, and irreparably glitched. Yet rather than attempt to definitively theorise, analyse, and explicate this contemporary situation, we found ourselves returning to these few questions: How do you speak a place? How do you speak from a place, or non- place? What might the reader expect to see from a certain region, and why? Who speaks, and in whose vernacular? We might also wonder: what came first, the tablet or the book?

THE FIRST volume is themed ‘Voicings/Articulations/Utterances.’ Fifteen writers from around the world collaborated for this inaugural issue. These pieces are joined by two website- specific installations: Fayçal Baghriche performs joblessness on a hurtling train, and Cora Kobischka explores the multilingual utterances of speaking in tongues.

FEATURED IN this issue: Jaswinder Bolina | Sophie Chamas | Alex Casper Cline | Margaret Eby | Megan Eardley | Roman Gautam | Malcolm Harris | Sean Higgins | Linnea Hincks | Wilfried Hou Je Bek | Claudia Merhej | Mena Odu | Olivia Rosane | Anand Vivek Taneja

THE STATE is a print journal and sociohistorical forum. It investigates the space between print and audio-visual experiences and their transition to mediated online forms; transgressive cultural criticism and the sensuous architecture of this “printernet.”

Or: you could have at these two wonderful interviews that Clint McLean at Art Dubai Blogs and Chris Baraniuk at The Machine Starts recently did.

Now, we did have a few design snafus that meant rethinking, and hopefully rendering more subtle, the attempt at creating a book object that works as a ‘reverse-skeuomorph.’ Only time—to the tune of a neat two days—will tell how successful this is. The content, though, I’m pretty thrilled about:

the strange odysseys of single parenting throughout the ages ♦ an immigrant, a girl riding a unicycle, and post-9/11 Ohio ♦ precarity and returning to the Gulf with your tail between your legs ♦ a critical theory of chiptune, eight bits, and the Spanish real de a ocho ♦ Money, Mississippi and the age of civil rights tourism ♦ Church of England conversions and thick, unarticulated anxieties ♦ appreciating programming code as poetry ♦ Bifo’s program of senilisation, robots, and fetishes ♦ a Krzysztof Wodiczko sonic installation, empathy, and the affective dread of war ♦ conspiracy and misogyny in Sweden, via Julian Assange and the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo ♦ adventuring in the Utrechtian cryptoforest and weedy messiahs of globalisation ♦ the politics of food under austerity and a resonant wartime Britishness ♦ experiences of Afropolitanism from okada-dodging in Lagos to coupé-decalé on the Upper West Side ♦ the church and the corporation, from medieval artisan through to graphic designer ♦ albino alligators, manholes, sewers, and the miasma of modernity

This week is Art Dubai, the Global Art Forum, the March Meeting and related sundry. If you’re here, do come to our launch, and keep a look out for some other things from me that you might see scattered around the site—probable hyperventilation and hysteria aside. Soon comes travel; reading and recuperation in NY, NOLA, Istanbul, and Hyderabad, so far. Fingers crossed for Kathmandu too. A strange re-evaulation of my relation to Dubai that might even see me regularly return. In the meantime, though, this is a pretty good illustration of my life right now.

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.

And tomorrow morning, I’m going to quit my job. Risky, and perhaps even quite stupid in this economy but it feels like the right thing to do at the right time. I have a few projects lined up, but will essentially be looking to freelance—and hopefully travel—full-time. Exciting, overwhelming, and kicking up my heels the edge of a precipice, like these two waitresses at Yosemite National Park hotels, who danced on Overhanging Rock at Glacier Point in 1900, and on postcards well into the next two centuries. I’m still knocked over by those indolic white florals; the last few lines of Rimbaud’s “Poet at Seven Years” feel perfect right now

Flowers of flesh opening in star-filled woods/ Dizziness, epilepsies, defeats, compassion! While the street noises rumbled on below/ Lying alone on pieces of unbleached canvas/ With a violent presentiment of setting sail!

]]> http://killingdenouement.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/with-a-violent-presentiment-of-setting-sail/feed/ 0 killingdenouement http://killingdenouement.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/with-a-violent-presentiment-of-setting-sail/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/killingdenouement/~3/9FFW6nhGKyE/ http://killingdenouement.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/on-returning-to-dubai-and-against-abstraction/#comments Fri, 10 Jun 2011 22:10:14 +0000 killingdenouement http://killingdenouement.wordpress.com/?p=2794 ]]>

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.

Thus far, June is falling squarely on the Evens end of the IanMacKaye spectrum. You know? The same quiet/loud dynamics and pained intensity, but slower, older, and more restrained. Almost languid. New York meant trying to do too much and making lasagna with exhaustion and anxiety. All this free time now feels extravagant. I even don’t quite know what to do with it, to be honest, save for instagramming everything to make it look the way I feel. But still, it’s there to luxuriate in. Delicious yawning promise, the way summer holidays used to feel.

Or perhaps I feel this way because I’m barely driving, having renewed my long expired license but not, as hoped, the muscle memory. In the U.A.E., you can’t begin taking driving lessons until you turn 18. Even now, driving feels like a strangely adult activity: thrilling and liberating but also a little scary. April to August of my senior year then makes a grand total of five months spent behind the wheel.

Coming from NYC, I used to be alternately frustrated and nervous every time I returned to Dubai. Why did people drive so fast, but walk so slowly? But there’s no longer even any numbing gridlock to break up the blind terror of driving on Sheikh Zayed Road—the arterial highway that literalises the death drive—as a nervous, unpracticed driver. Although with petrol stations running dry (!) across the northern emirates, maybe the roads will change before I have to.

From the day that Salik dawned, with ensuing traffic snarls. A balcony somewhere in what is now TECOM.

I relish the slower pace now, of course. Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village. And—there’s so many ways to fill in the blanks, really. Rewrite the same ‘now that I’m back in Dubai…’ piece which seems all the weightier now that I am actually back for a while, in the armchair instead of the stool.

Saratu Abiola has done this gently and particularly elegantly at thisrecording, on the similar return to Lagos. Similar only in sentiment, that is. Dubai is not Lagos or Africa or even my country. Against the odds, though, it functions as my home.

And admittedly, I do have quite a soft spot for the grandiose meta narrative. So satisfiying because it fits, and especially seductive when couched in pretty academicese. In the beginning was the language, and the language was gravity, &c. So I was particularly taken with this quote from an interview with sheila heti suggesting how to be:

When I was younger, I always really wanted to abstract life. More and more as I get older I realize that this abstraction is totally devoid of life. It’s missing something true about life. Every situation is different from every other situation. There is always the temptation to have some big abstract answer, but life is not abstract. That is inaccurate.

Right? This exactly. It’s what draws me to anthropology over other social sciences, and why I’m especially enjoying Brownbook‘s people-driven approach. Particular situations and people. I would also crudely posit that anthro is the most anarchis(h) of social sciences against the made-to-be-marxian history, but that’s for another few thousand words. And there I go totalising again.

So I don’t know how to get beyond this abstracting tendency, and it’s making me put off getting further entrenched in academia. And also move away a little bit from the PhD as means of escape. Escape into what, and funded by whom I don’t know, with the increasingly corporatised university. Wanting to wait until I find a topic I’m utterly thrilled and consumed by, versus going into academia because of the economy, or an extended eight-year shoulder shrug. Suspect this isn’t the way it’s done, though. Grad school still feels inevitable but not so absolutely, manically urgent anymore. Perhaps applying to EGS for these next few Dubai years, though it will scupper my annual leave?

In this vein, though, something especially exciting: Justin Pickard’s gonzo-ethno ‘Project Cascadia,’ which proposes to integrate All These Exciting Things:

Hauntings, world expos, gonzo journalism, science fiction, systems, geopolitics, utopianism, virtuality, globalisation, the sublime, resilience, collapsonomics, aesthetics, architecture, environmentalism, infrastructure, design, futures studies, sovereignty, atemporality, risk, the nation-state, the uncanny, Americana, technoscience, cyberpunk, multispecies ethnography, fiction, capitalism, the human senses, counterfactual history, media and cyborgs (and media cyborgs)

This said, I don’t care too much for the idea of ‘venture ethnography’ which suggests the slimy embedded anthropologists of the U.S. Human Terrain System. Still. I’ll be headed to the city on seven oases—Al Ain—on Monday for a destinations piece. Worth a go, perhaps.

Sometime in late April or early May, sometime in the mid 90s. Blue skies, grass, and swarms of red faced and peeling drunken expats who really should know better—as is standard for the UAE. Yours truly, clutching a ribbon and dancing the maypole at a Great British day celebration. Probably wearing a frothy white confection, definitely gritting my teeth at this colonial imposition that seemed a bit forced even to my very small self. Beatific sun. Passive-aggressive humidity.

Patriotic chest thumping aside, the festivities were loosely modelled after traditional mayday festivities that welcome the advent of spring. The rather phallic maypole dance itself is apparently a pagan throwback to ancient Babylonian sex worship and fertility rites. It’s a loose memory—I otherwise remember only that there were bouncy castles, meat pies and jousting knights on hobbyhorses.

September 11th, 2001, midweek and midafternoon. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV in our old flat and watching two towers burn and crumble, again and again. A sense of disbelief and a sinking foreboding for What Would Happen Next. Sadness, as the needless loss of life sunk in, came much later. And the rest, as they say is history: tragedy, farce, hundreds of thousands dead, and so on. It’s one of the few indelibly etched ‘TV events’ I remember, the others being Diana’s death and the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps the last such televised instance, as social media and the Internet made their inroads into the delivery of news.

May 1st, 2011. The morning of May 2nd, actually, with the time differences. Twitter overflowing with the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Switching channels: BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, NDTV and Fox in English, and trying to follow PTV and Dune News (both Pakistani) in Urdu. From NYC and DC came images of jubilant Americans celebrating in a decidedly fratty manner, replete with chants of U-S-A. Presumably, they realised that Osama can’t have been an operational leader for years, and his death was nothing more than a symbolic victory. Then why dance? Why dance at death at all, for that matter.

My former bandmate Sarah Hawas has a similar reaction in a Mondoweiss piece, “In Search of Meaning: Osama bin Laden and the Dancing Americans:”

Osama Bin Laden is symbolic, but in effect what many Americans today seem to celebrate is a vicious cycle of violence, a historic tradition in which real or invented causes are allowed to take precedence over collective human dignity and the value of life.

To dance in celebration today is offensive first and foremost to the victims of the attacks on September 11th. They are palpably alone in singing the Star Spangled Banner and celebrating the murder of Osama Bin Laden, thoroughly alone, because no one in the world cares or even remembers. If these dancing Americans, however, were to transform their fear and fascination with violence into rage and courage to occupy the same streets in protest, against the ruling elite that has profited from the loss and grief of 9/11 and the wars that followed, and the undemocratic corporate interests running their lives, they might find the arms of other ordinary working people from around the world extended in solidarity.

Solidarity? Sounds like mayday— the annual celebration of unions, workers, and more recently, immigrants. In light of Wisconsin and the Arab Spring, I was especially curious to see what this year’s protests would be like. Why did the US choose May 1st, however? Surely Obama didn’t wake up, stretch, and think to himself “the birds are chirping and the mice are warbling; it’s a fine day to kill Osama bin Laden!” (For the record, I love those singing mice). Surely he’s not a closet socialist after all—! And how exactly did we get from Beltane to Bin Laden?

This site provides some clues on the transition. Mayday used to involve wandering into the woods to cut down a growing tree for the maypole, and indulging in all sorts of sexual licentiousness along the way. The Puritans didn’t take kindly to this, and banned it in a 1644 act of Parliament. Charles II reinstated it in 1660, with its more subversive elements downplayed. Finally, the 19th century Victorians laid down their moral spin—emphasising its innocence and turning it into the sort of kitschy Merry Olde England fest that I was subject to. Also lost were its political elements, among them, the temporary setting aside of social hierarchy. The taking of the tree, in particular, highlights medieval rights to wood usage and to the commons.

A particularly well timed victory, at that—planned to coincide with President Bush’s infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech. It’s also the day that the world learnt of Hitler’s suicide.May 1st is however remembered primarily as MayDay—annual celebration of unions, workers, and more recently, immigrants.

Wait, so I would probably have gone on to dissect, or probably coo at Mayday. Fists, hearts and minds; warm solidaristic statements. But then I forgot about this for a month, and it’s nearly June. And, well, I live in Dubai now. This is what Mayday looks like here.

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