twt.fm / a silver mount zion [he has left us alone but shafts of light sometimes grace the corners of our rooms] -- "blown-out joy from heaven's mercied hole" B-O Joy
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hamidandco
hamid tekebaye
Nov 28, 2009
twt.fm / a silver mount zion [he has left us alone but shafts of light sometimes grace the corners of our rooms] -- "blown-out joy from heaven's mercied hole"
Nov 27, 2009
A morally bankrupt dictatorship built by slave labour
“They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police.”
Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time.
Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.
If you go there with your eyes open – as I did earlier this year – the truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the country's hereditary ruler.
It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying.
In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised.
They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police.
I met so many men in this position I stopped counting, just as the embassies were told to stop counting how many workers die in these conditions every year after they figured it topped more than 1,000 among the Indians alone.
Human Rights Watch calls this system "slavery." Yet the Westerners who have flocked to Dubai brag that they "love" the city, because they don't have to pay any taxes, and they have domestic slaves to do all the hard work. They train themselves not to see the pain.
But Dubai's bankruptcy does not end there: it is ecologically bust. This is a city built in the burning desert, where everything shrivels up and blows away if it is not kept artificially cold all the time. That's why it has the highest per capita carbon emissions on earth – some 250 percent higher even than America's. The city has to ship in desalinated water – which is more costly than oil. When it runs out of cash, it will run out of water.
Today Dubai will be bailed out by the United Arab Emirates, the oil-rich country of which it is only one state. But the oil will not last forever. More importantly, there is no Bank of Morality that could provide a bailout for this sinister mirage in the desert.
Nov 26, 2009
The House is Black / خانه سیاه است
1962, 22 Minutes, Black and White, 35mm
It is the only film from Forough Farrokhzad, possibly Iran's most noted and controversial female poet. A look inside a leper colony, the documentary short has been called "the greatest of all Iranian films" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, and is (now) frequently referred to as one of the lynchpins of the Iranian New Wave. Following an opening statement accompanying a black screen that simultaneously warns and invites viewers to gaze upon that which society has deemed horrifying, Farrokhzad trains her lens insistently on the decay of human faces in bleak honesty, observing the lepers' flaccid eyelids (incapable of doing the biological job of protecting the eyes behind them from flies), the crusty, flaking stumps that used to be their feet, and their exposed nose cavities completely devoid of cartilage (one of them casually and surreally exhales cigarette smoke from the orifice). While showing the leper community forging an ersatz societal representation of normalcy. Old gents playing board games, women dressing up and donning make-up for what appears to be a wedding march (and once you've seen a woman apply mascara to the inside of her eyelid, the image will not soon leave your head), kids tossing a plastic ball around the courtyard.
Farrokhzad soundtracks her images with an alternating narration. A male voice (whose detached matter-of-factness brings to mind a contemporary Jean-Luc Godard at his most bemused) unpacks the medical implications of the condition, gently reminding the audience that leprosy is a treatable condition, provided the proper expediency, in what constitutes the film's most salient instance of activism. But between the clinical dialogue (in every sense of the definition) are snips of poetry by Farrokhzad, read by the author herself, that elevates the colony's plight to the level of that Old Testament paragon of unanswered and cruel kismet: Job. If Farrokhzad's poetic sensibilities were said to be both preoccupied with Eastern mores and influenced by Western modernism, then The House is Black authoritatively clears the path for such aesthetic dilettantism.
-- Eric Henderson
Nov 25, 2009
Insect Sex-Ed “Green Porno”
Actor/director Isabella Rossellini’s short films GREEN PORNO. watch seasons 1,2, &3 on The Sundance Channel
original Interview:
trailer: penis geometry
The snail:
Earthworm:
Picasso, Guernica (3D)
Paris, 1 May to 4 June 1937, Oil on canvas, 349.3 x 776.6 cm, Zervos IX, 65
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
The Way David Macaulay Works: Finding Ideas, Making Books and Visualizing Our World
This presentation feels akin to a new Disney ride: During your tour inside David Macaulay’s imagination, prepare to soar over Rome’s great monuments, raft within the human body’s circulatory system, and dismantle and rebuild the Empire State Building.
Don’t expect much in the way of explanation or background, but simply sit back and enjoy as this master illustrator rolls out sketches and storylines from some of his greatest published and unpublished hits.
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