Links

cute.

The Berlin International Literature Festival is appealing for a worldwide reading of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry on 5 October 2008 (tomorrow) so play your part.

a dxb clique worth keeping an eye on.

i-D on identity via lara baladi, hussein chalayan, ali mahdavi and others.

This September Adel Abidin's Abidin Travels premieres at WHITE BOX at its new Bowery location. This work was featured in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. They will be selling real tickets to travel to Baghdad!

TVotR gone done it again. fave lyric so far: "Foam Injected Axl Rose".

Ghada Amer (American, born Egypt, 1963). one of my favorite Middle Eastern artists is at the BK museum until oct 16.

Happy 50th Birthday Minimalism. One day I'll write about why Phillip Glass means so much to me.

Paul Kedrosky has put together a live spreadsheet to track recent SWF investments. not pretty.

The House of Arts and Culture is a great sounding architecture competition in Beirut funded by Oman.

nothing but respect for what the end has accomplished and for staying on top of the game for so long and for bowing out with nobility. via the mire.

i'll pick up the october dazed to read the column but will avoid the book; sounds like more of the usual uninformed sensationalism. Monk asks a great question though: "Why have I never read, for instance, a New Yorker profile of Sheikh Mohammed?" Not sure that would get past the Sheikh's press office! It's easy for the Middle Class in the rich world to spew out comments like: "each day brings a new, more insane project, often relying on the labour of minimum-wage workers "liberated" into desperate poverty by the very same free market reforms that anointed this glittering plutocracy". Come to Egypt or India and you'll understand that "liberation" isn't far off at all. People are genuinely hungry for opportunity.

new rab music alert. akeed worth an add.

Go Bahrain!

My own, none-too-frequent, encounters with the social milieu of bourgeois hipsterism and 'indie culture' have been, to say the least, curiously enervating: expecting, to a certain extent, the excitement and glamour that was absent from a childhood and adolescence spent in the alternately dreary and torturous realm of public education (including 5 years in a rather shit all-boys' secondary), in a family with no real expectations and not a lot of money, I found simply a variant on the same dreariness, and a sense of continual exile. I was there, but not with them. The seemingly ontological sense of embarassment I carried around - my clumsiness, my ill-fitting clothes, my social ill-ease - persisted precisely where I'd hoped they would disappear; indeed, they seemed almost amplified. The ideal of an unbridled hedonism permitted by monetary independence quickly palled, and was revealed as impossible; it soon became apparent that my previous depressive insistence on the impossibility of happiness was nearer the mark (if still a little off). The world and possibilities documented in Virginia Nicholson's Among The Bohemians: Experiments In Living 1900-1939 were a corrolary of the experience of modernity, something that has apparently now left us.

www.discoballbreaker.blogspot.com

out today!

i wrote about paul schrader's mishima a little while ago. <a href="http://www.girishshambu.com/blog/">girish</a> briefly reviews the film for artforum in its new criterion 3 disc release that includes the amazing sounding mishima-directed <a href="http://www.criterion.com/ASP/release.asp?id=433">patriotism</a>.

i leave for beijing in a few hours for a glimpse into the future and to better my cooking and to seek out happenings like this Maison Martin Margiela 798 Exhibtion.