This is a photo a Twitter user in Cairo uploaded on Wednesday. Nevine Zaki writes: "A pic I took yesterday of Christians protecting Muslims during their prayers."
It makes my heart warm. All the implications, all the faith present, in God and in fellow man. Then, also this week, over in the Holy Land, this happened.
And it makes the heart stop.
Why they don't ever stay longer? Give us a clue? Ask us a couple questions? Join in prayers?
On Monday the tallest building on planet Earth -- by a lot -- opens in the tiny and troubled Arab emirate of Dubai. Designed by Chicago-based Adrian Smith, the Burj Dubai tower is more than 2,600 feet and 160 stories of astounding engineering. But more than anything else, it's ... just sad on arrival.
From Christopher Hawthorne:
It is mostly empty, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Though most of its 900 apartments have been sold, virtually all were bought three years ago -- near the top of the market -- and primarily as investments, not as places to live. ("A lot of those purchases were speculative," Smith, in something of an understatement, told me in a phone interview.) And there's virtually no demand in Dubai at the moment for office space. The Burj Dubai has 37 floors of office space.
For a local look at the tower's rise and Dubai's fall, go to Arabian Money. And for a discussion of the Burj Dubai's "meteorological variability" -- as in, its diverse weather -- see Geoff Manaugh's BLDBLOG.
So when can we all go to the observation deck?
Above, converging in the middle of Mexico City with a French-Iranian curator and art worker from New York, and a Zacatecas pocho artist and "wanderer" from San Francisco, swapping secrets on crocheting and crystals, mythologies both ancient and contemporary, and on how similar Mexico City is to Tehran -- as anyone who's been to both places always concurs.
More here, here, here, and here. You get the sense this sort of thing happens all the time, in 2009 in the bellybutton of the moon, guided by ideal convergences. The idea struck me as I walked the other night in the rain on a strip of Calzada de Tlalpan dotted with thumping cantinas, transgendered sex workers, and the local Chinese.
* Previously, "Control your magic."
* Above, driving in the rain in Santa Fe.
By far the most unsettling but not totally unexpected creation in contemporary Mexico City is Santa Fe, a hyper-modern district on the city's far west that epitomizes all that is wrong with the rapid commercialization and privatization of global urban development in the past 10 or 20 years. And -- it was built over a landfill and is surrounded by slums.
There's a new Habita group hotel in the area, Distrito Capital, but it's not clear to me who'd choose to stay there. As Mexcellent says, "This is perhaps the closest thing in Mexico City to Dubai."
On assignment, we ventured the other day to Centro Santa Fe. The three-level mall is enormous and packed on weekends. International chains compete with small Mexican shops, and the food court has a Burger King and a franchise selling tortas from Tamaulipas. Also, kiosks to charge your cell phone for free and interactive mall maps that talk.
The highlight, though, is the mall's fairly new Saks Fifth Avenue, one of only five Saks stores located outside the United States -- the other four are all on the Arabian Peninsula. We can thank Carlos Slim for the distinction; he bought the license to build a Saks on Aztec earth.
And just so you know, Sante Fe's official "neighborhood" site has a page devoted to the topic of security.
* Above: Marching to the gallows in Iran, 2005.
The president of Iran's statement in New York this week that "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country" may have had some kind of truth -- as in, yes, officially a homo-culture is not recognized there -- but I imagine in a literal sense Ahmadinejad's statement was news to men like Kamran and Kaveh, partners of three years in teeming Tehran. The pair did an interview recently with IRQO, or Iranian Queer Organization, and based on their observations it appears Iran has a pretty complex society of queerness:
KAVEH: Tehran gays are divided into two groups: south side gays and north side gays. Or shall I say upper-class gays and working-class gays. Working class gays are financially struggling because there are no jobs for them. If they do get employed somewhere, soon many problems arise for them in the workplace. So in general they do not have any real income. Parents will not give them pocket money. They don’t have the means to go to school and pay for books or tuition. For financial reasons they are denied higher education. They get teased in their neighbourhood and it is very hard for them to find friends. Most young people these days care very much about the clothes and brand names and so on, so that also works against them. The difficulties these gays face are much more intense and horrible than their rich counterparts. Rich gays are not problem-free either. Their parents usually give them a car, a home and money and say “just go and get lost from our sight”. Most of these people live in uptown in fancy houses, work in their own businesses, and continue getting pocket-money from their parents. Working-class gays often have liaisons with upper-class gays. They are exploited by the upper-class as fresh faces. After a while these relationships inevitably expire. This is a type of entertainment for upper-class gays.
Yup, no gays in Iran, Mr. Ahmadinejad. Thanks for clarifying that. And to get a sense of how Iran responds to gays it does locate and identify, click here -- unless you find the sight of young men hanging too disturbing.
* IRQO link. See also here, a proclamation of existence by Seyed Medhi Kazemi. And for more on the 2005 execution of two gay teens in the Iranian city of Mashhad, see Doug Ireland's reporting.
A colleague pointed out this cool photoblog from Tehran by a "former Los Angeles resident" that offers further glimpses into everyday life in one of the largest and certainly very oldest cities in the world. I like the tone and manner of the images and captions. For the above photo, the blogger says:
Two friends being silly and covering their faces inside Asr Jadid movie theater where we watched a horrible Iranian film named "Mask." I would say out of the 100 films produced every year only 5 are worth watching.
Under a photo from a darkened birthday party, the blogger says he's "a 79," meaning he's around 28 right now. Here, the blogger shows us "a jazz concert in someone's living room." The metro, he writes, is more modern than in New York or London.
* Link: Life Goes on in Tehran. Related, on modern and contemporary art in Iran, and Issue 9 of Bidoun: Rumor.
We're on a bit of a global kick at Intersections lately, so bear with this excursion to the shadowy corners of one of our newly minted "global cities," Istanbul. NPR's Ivan Watson takes us to Tarlabasi, a teeming district of Istanbul that is basically one of humanity's many urban badlands, a place that attracts the Turkish capital's outsiders and miscreants, its dope dealers and transsexual hookers, its gypsies and illegal immigrants from Africa. Not surprisingly, the area is not mentioned in The New York Times' recent "36 Hours in Istanbul" feature.
The NPR piece is worth a listen, and the audio slideshow is excellent. Link. And also, this attachment feature on Tarlabasi at De-Regulation. Read more on the cultural scene of the greater region, always at Bidoun.
* Also new at NPR, Afghanistan's last Jew. Tarlabasi street image from FotoTrek.
The World Press Photograph of the Year is linked here. (I've grabbed and reposted it from the Guardian newsblog.) The winner is Spencer Platt of Getty Images for his photograph, taken during last summer's Lebanese-Israeli war, of stylish young Lebanese driving down a devastated street in south Beirut, in a red convertible. There's a guy behind the wheel and four attractive and busty young ladies wearing oversized sunglasses. One of them is snapping pictures on her cellphone cam. Behind them, what must have been a high-rise is a pile of rubble. The image is stunning in its contrasts and banality. Without the background, it could have been taken on Rodeo or La Cienega. (* Or even, a friend notes, Mexico City or Tijuana.) If I remember right, it ran A1 in the L.A. Times.
According to their website, TimeOut Beirut is still rebuilding after shutting down during the conflict. Here is Mehammed Mack's ode to that city at the LA Weekly. The current ArtKrush has an interview with the founding editor of Bidoun magazine, Lisa Farjam:
Any form of expression is a political act, but you could make the case that the link between art and politics is exceptionally intimate in the Middle East, whether it's a question of representation, expression, funding, or exhibition space. In the Middle East, art-making occurs in relation to ideas about nationhood, "good art," censorship, etc., which all intersect with political discourse. One can't really talk about the arts in this part of the world without raising the question of politics.
The New York Times reports on a reality TV show being broadcast in the Middle East, "On the Road in America," which follows a group of young, attractive Arabs as they travel across the United States and learn about us. Looks like fun. The NYT story has an amazing clip of a young Palestinian production assistant talking about Israel with an Israeli cameraman. Here is the show's official teaser clip. Let's hope the program gets an American distributor because if there's one thing U.S. kids need -- okay, two things -- it is a) one more reality TV show, and b) one that shows us how young people from other parts of the world are not too different than ourselves.
* First I've heard of Hubculture and their Zeitgeist List but I won't question their methods: They've named Los Angeles the Center of the Universe in 2007. What a sexy list. Of the few cities they hype that I've visited, and what I've read or seen from the others, it seems to be pretty right on. New York is always going to be awesome, but London is the New New York. We all know Beijing will be our global capital in about 20 years. Along with all those hot cities in India and the Middle East. And down the stretch, who doesn't want to check out Moscow or Mexico City? But L.A. is where it's at, exporting its culture around the world and proving that the Pacific Rim and Latin America will be leading the charge into the uncharted 21st.
* Photo above: An L.A. woman at the 2006 May Day immigrant rights' march from MacArthur Park down Wilshire Boulevard.
Had a nice sit-down the latest LA Weekly. It's graced with a wonderful and enriching package of stories by Mehammed Mack about progressive American Muslim thinkers, and an amazing photo essay from Iran by Teun Voeten, who notes that tourists are welcome there. Azadeh Moaveni, who worked briefly at the L.A. Times around the same time I did, has a book out on her homeland's youthful cosmopolitan underground. Tehran looks almost familiar, big and electric, like Mexico City. Geopolitics and fearmongering are boring. What really matters is people, the streets, our common pop world. For cutting-edge cultural coverage of the Middle East, definitely get familiar with Bidoun magazine. * The Weekly dispatch from Iran by Nayer Khazeni is also very well done.
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