Thought this might be perfect for avantcaire. Empty Quarter sent out this email invite, then sent a retraction an hour later…

he showed a beautiful shot of burj dubai khalifa at pecha kucha over the weekend. go seek.

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here’s a very fuzzy jayce talking to geoff manaugh about the project at the recent BLDGBLOG book launch at storefront architecture.

Dear Friends,

If you’re on your way to work this morning heading from the Marina to Emirates Towers you might see some small words on your right side.

Noticing how dusty the construction gauze along the highway has become, I used cloth and water were used to wipe away the words “Dust to Dust”.

(photo-documentation by Mohamed Somji)

A simple non-destructive art installation. Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. Nothing lasts forever. Soon these words will disappear too. The medium is the message.

i glimpsed the piece (aptly on my way back from traffic) and read it as a meditation on dubai’s current existential crisis. a common phrase i hear repeated by locals goes something like ‘we survived with dates and camels up until a generation ago and we’re quite prepared to do so again‘. whether or not the sentiment is a sign of strength or delusional defeatist denial is open to interpretation. whatever it means, i hope this sparks more guerilla street art, FRES has had that canvas to himself for too long.

more images here. it’s all reminded me of kevin kelly’s fossilized dubai image.

she came over to us excitedly as soon as we’d ordered. this place is incredible she starts. she’s jewish, she explains, and a few months ago she met a jewish family who advise the royal family in dubai. they had bumbed into each other a few days earlier at a shopping mall where the jewish family had just bought matzo! from the organic foods marke! they invited her to passover seder at their place where she mingled with locals, jews, arabs and other dubai expatriate tribes while the haggadah was read out.

we still have a long way to go in dubai towards being a truly accepting, inclusive society (recognizing israel would be a nice first step) but the dubai society is as usual two steps ahead of the silly political grandstanding.

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there is that very chinese poetically ambivalent concern for the unknowable consequences of uncontrollable, unstoppable, hyper-development.

scored by zhang yi. another best of diff08 highlight.

semaan’s magnetic pull contributes greatly to the power of one man village but it is simone’s tender approach to his subject that makes the masterfully crafted documentary what it is. a singular vision of singular world where semaan who hogs the screen for most of the film, runs a one man farm and treats his animals as surrogate family members.

there’s a particulalry memorable scene where semaan is embarrassed when asked about love and his love life (he’ll marry when he’s finished building the bathroom he says fobbing the question) that brings to fore the fascinating insider-outsider status of the filmmakers and subject. this sincere almost-invisible filmed familial familarity is undeniably a prime factor in the doc’s success. it will be interesting to see how / what simone follows this up with.

filmed over three years one man village is an example of a new type of digital technology enabled film making that i think will be a major trend in the coming decades: enabling (increasingly well-crafted) minor (but of immense artistic merit), personal film projects (but with a global niche market).

at the post-screening q&a simone discussed briefly how he started making the film and then traveled to diff where he secured further funding (via dubai film connection) to complete it- great to see diff following through on its initial promise to create these types of opportunities for burgeoning filmmakers.

one of the 2008 dubai film festival‘s highlights.

homosexuality in arabia isn’t discussed much apart from a few bits now and then highlighting outdated and seldom enacted sodomy laws. the yaacoubian building brought a spike of egyptian interest to the subject but it is still usually under the radar and certainly not a part of polite conversation. this is even more so in the gcc where it remains amongst the many still taboo subjects. this is not to deny the vibrant but underground gay scenes in cities like dubai, tehran and kuwait.

i thought i’d shed some light drawn from my personal experience on the ground growing up in dubai. homosexuality was far more prevalent during my teens than it has been at any other phase of my life (including stints in london, new york and extensive travels).

the dubai i grew up in was extremely segregated sexually. i attended a boys’ only high school with a student body predominantly made up of well-connected locals’ kids. arabian culture in general is marked by a tactility and physical comfort alien to that of the formal british primary school i had come from. indeed, our, mainly british, teachers assumed that many of us were gay because of the way we would hold hands strolling down the corridors or embrace (nose kisses etc) and even play fight. while that was a cultural misinterpretation, it is striking how much homosexual activity took place in those years and how easily it was all accepted; stark contrast to the official anti-gay laws and image of dubai and the region.

it’s within this segregated context where for many young men / boys access to women was minimal (dubai’s prostitution phenomena was not what it is today) that homosexual experiences were a common part of male pubescent lives (to be discarded for tradition heterosexual marriages on adulthood). strangely (and peculiar to this part of the world?) there’s a marked perception different between those who fuck and those who are fucked. the former are not even considered gay by local customs.

an idea of how prevalent homosexuality was in the 90′s can be ascertained by a few high school anecdotes: attempted rapes on desert camping trips  (brushed off by my local friends as something that happens); kids being thrown out of school for ‘sexual harassment’ – it was a boys’ school.

although the international press headlines would have you think homosexuality is completely frowned upon, the truth on the ground is that the society (and i can only speak of the situation for men / boys) has a surprisingly open, easy-going attitude to gay sex, particularly in pre-adult phases.

this is to say nothing of the adult gay scenes in the region which again are a lot more open and progressive than you would think. kuwait, iran the uae and saudi (check the atlantic’s view on homo-saudi) all have thriving, under-publicized homosexual cultures. from nadya labi’s atlantic article:

In The History of Sexuality, a multivolume work published in the 1970s and ’80s, Michel Foucault proposed his famous thesis that Western academic, medical, and political discourse of the 18th and 19th centuries had produced the idea of the homosexual as a deviant type: In Western society, homosexuality changed from being a behavior (what you do) to an identity (who you are).

In the Middle East, however, homosexual behavior remained just that—an act, not an orientation. That is not to say that Middle Eastern men who had sex with other men were freely tolerated. But they were not automatically labeled deviant.

this is yet another area where international perception / official line is far removed from the reality of society in the middle east.

‘new anti-narcotics unit will take the fight against drugs beyond the UAE’s borders as the country increasingly becomes a target for international drug smugglers.‘

lets hope that the authorities take a more enlightened approach to the domestic drugs issues than they have so far.

drugs in dubai.
drugs have always featured in dubai. at high school, heroin use was common (we had ODs, arrests, death row sentences, the works – and that was just my school!). the dubai party scene (this data may be out of date as i haven’t really been in it for years) was dominated by the usual suspects ecstasy, cocaine, hash although special k was unusually popular due to its relatively easy supply (all you needed was a corruptible veterinarian easy enough given dubai’s horse industry). and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. no doubt as the city has grown so has the drugs’ market.

misguided approach.
the minimum 4 years sentences handed out to all drug users is ludicrous. the focus should be on dealers not end users. really how much good has it been locking away all these 18 year old party kids who are of no real risk to anyone. and how does that play next to the city’s goal of becoming the region’s creative hub. the authorities need an enlightened approach.

enforcement needs to differentiate between casual recreational use of of cannabis, ketamine, ecstasy and cocaine and the real drug problem – the rife heroin addiction – a particular problem amongst young local men.

it maybe wishful thinking given the region’s social conservatism to hope for the grown-up solution – legalization and heavy taxation- but the authorities would be smart to accept that drugs will never be eliminated from society and attune their strategy to minimizing the harm being caused. drug addiction is widely underreported in this part of the world but we need a better and more frank understanding of the real problems and risks in order to successfully address them.

unfortunately, delusional statements like these are not encouraging:

“Our goal will not be just to arrest the dealers but to create an environment that has no drug demand so that drug dealers will not see a market here”