the B sides

-bombay bicycle club

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:55:14 -0400

-michael winterbottom

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:08:39 -0400

"…Dream City is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion...."

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 12:05:00 -0400

““…Dream City is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.””

- zadie smith

-frank ocean

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:00:00 -0400

-frank ocean

“In London or the world, I’m wondering, what corresponds...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 14:24:00 -0400

“In London or the world, I’m wondering, what corresponds as an artistic or architectural monument of this time?”

“I think it’s in the rash of buildings trying to be iconic. A thing that’s very much of the moment is these buildings that are trying to be free standing, these buildings that are almost their own brand. Lorenzo Piano’s Shard. Or what’s known as the Gherkin, the Erotic Gherkin, a Norman Foster building which does look indeed like half a gherkin, half a penis, 40 stories high. It’s from the idea of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim-Bilbao, which I think is a wonderful building. But I think it started a trend for the idea that the building is a sort of picture, an icon. It’s not much to with the place; it’s not much to do with anything. It sums itself up and is its own logo, in a way. And we’re seeing an awful lot of those, so I think that’s going to be this moment — the idea of a slightly self-contained, self-reflexive, anti-humanistic building because they look worse when you put people in and around them. They’re better without the humans. And when you interact with them you feel like one of those tiny model figures in an architect’s diagram, and you’re meant to. So there is an anti-humanistic aspect to those guys’ buildings, and I think that’s the kind of thing we’ll look back on and say: oh well, that sums up that period.”

-john lanchester, author and financial journalist

One of the great gifts of travel can’t be planned in advance,...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:37:00 -0400

One of the great gifts of travel can’t be planned in advance, scanned on a Google map, or underlined in a Times’ 36 Hours guide. I am referring of course to a serendipitous moment of true discovery, riffing off an unexpected thought bubble or walking into an inviting back alley. One hopes for those moments of travel bliss on every journey, but when cities are filled with world heritage sites to check off, digital photos to collect, evocative and enviable status updates to write… that kind of meandering journeyism is hardly an efficient or boastable use of time.

I struggled with this balance immensely on a recent visit to Rome. Look, St. Peter’s favorite Apse! Aah, the Pantheon! Caesar’s preferred sacrificial temple! Mussolini’s balcony!

Network short circuiting. Restart systems. Civilizational overload.

Rome is a city so filled with riches and then compounded and compacted into such perfect urban spaces that it can feel almost impossible to find your footing. It is called eternal for a reason. At every corner is a Byzantine sunburst of intellectual, visual and sensual stimulation. At every corner is an opportunity cost computation; one enriching ruin foregone equals one iconic work of art consumed.

I am jealous of the Romans who are already mosaics of those civilizational layers, who are not counting down the looming hours to departure flights, who can lean against a doorway with an espresso and look out at the shadows dancing across ivy strewn courtyards….dolce far niente, the bliss that is delicious idling.

I chose to visit Vienna this weekend inspired by that state of mind: no reservations, no expectations, and no itineraries. There were centuries of Hapsburg history to wrestle with, palaces and museums brimming with monumental work, concert halls that inspired movements by Beethoven, Schubert, et al. I did see them them all, but not as the foreground for my visit. Instead, this weekend Viennese heritage became the backdrop for a weekend made of more modern discoveries.

I loved Vienna because unlike so many schlossy European capitals it doesn’t feel weighed downed by its imperial history. Germany is lumbering and heavy on its feet; Vienna, lighter and more relaxed. The city and its denizens know the place is way past its prime. Today it’s kicking back, enjoying the fruits of its artistic labors and its has been history as the cultural crossroads of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And in that process of kicking back, Vienna is inspiring an entirely new generation of creatives and secessionists.

The Hapsburg palaces are now hangouts for the city’s seemingly massive and eclectic waves of junge mensch; the old Royal stables the grounds for a complex of contemporary design museums and pop-up DJ nights. The crowds in this aptly named Museum Quartier are a generational mish mash of alternative style, bare shoulders, bed hair, piercings and designer shoes. And hanging over the entire complex are banners celebrating Vienna’s original hipster, the artist Gustav Klimt.

The photo above is Klimt stroking his kitty in his beloved robe.

This year marks the artist’s 150^th birthday and Vienna has rolled out the gold carpet for the man responsible for the iconic and beautiful painting, The Kiss (1908): a work that so impeccably captures that most sexy of moments that it has become a defining image of romance in our time. I had forgotten in my non research that Vienna was where it was conceived and created. Fortunately, one exhibition in the current anniversary season explores Klimt’s avant-garde personal life and the influences behind his masterful fusion of color, form, and female sexuality. As I learned on this unexpected creative riff, Klimt’s use of real gold was inspired by time in Byzantine churches in Italy, the microscopic detailing and composition drawn from his expansive personal collection of Japanese and Chinese art. The sexuality and love of women is underscored in countless postcards written from across the world. Basically, travel.

Across Vienna are echoes of artists and travelers. Balkan, Eastern European, German, French, and British influences are indiscernably infused in its relaxed air. Even its deafeated Turkish invaders left coffee and culinary influences behind. Today UN staff, college students, chic Austrians, and Sikh shopkeepers collide over weekend lunch at the Naschmarkt, an enormous open air food and flea market that transforms at night into a buzzing bar scene. Old grand palace salons that once hosted classical concerts are now home to some of Klimt’s most taboo and controversial paintings. A beautiful wood-paneled Kaffehaus where Freud met clients is the scene of Sunday hangover recoveries, casually delivered by elegantly dressed older Austrian ladies.

Those unexpected layers and collisions of old and new could easily be missed if one focused on the city’s historic sites as somehow suspended in time, waiting to be captured for your Facebook album. But to view them with a wider lens for the population that now reinvents and remixes them is to see the picture of a city and a world that is always in flux.

And in unexpectedly discovering the personality behind the college posters and tshirt reproductions of The Kiss, I realized hipsterdom, too, is timeless. Those who push against the stifling, conservative status quo have always done it with flair and they’ve always enjoyed the fight.

At the very least, they’ve dressed the part.

“Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 07:42:00 -0400

“Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?” -Thomas Mann

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the communal violence in Gujarat, India, a religiously fuelled and politically sanctioned orgy of killings between Hindus and Muslims that echoed haunting memories of Partition. It also etched in the imagination a sense that the ‘two nation’ theory perhaps still held true, the idea that Hindus and Muslims constituted primordially different nations… a justification for the bloody scar that now cuts across South Asia and across my beloved city of Lahore.

I was in Pakistan that year, returning to the country after a series of history and literature courses at U.Va that had filled my young mind with cross-border love… why so divided, let us be one, tear down these walls, sing Yash Chopra songs in undisputed Kashmiri valleys! But my idealism was not only confronted with the reality of 60 years of formalized and now deeply entrenched statehood, but also the bloody television images from Gujarat. To a Pakistani audience who I had hoped to convert to my pan South Asian idealism, those images were the antithesis of cross-border and cross-cultural love.

There sits before Congress at the moment a resolution to mark the anniversary of the violence in Gujarat, to condemn the regional government for its role in the violence and to remember the victims. But Gujarat remains a deeply divisive and painful issue, a politicized scar on the reputation of modern, rising, democratic, multicultural India. Brave and more independent minded Bollywood stars including Nandita Das and Naseerudin Shah have made films on the subject, but like so many painful memories in South Asia, both personal and national, we choose to wear our finest colors instead and entertain the world with our exoticism and our exuberance.

In response to the Gujarat resolution, someone in Washington recently said to me, I prefer to move forward, not to look back.

If only life could be so simple. And yet for many Americans it often is.

We are a young nation and one that turns even the most painful chapters in our own history including slavery and Japanese interment into inspirational stories of glory and progress.

Living in Germany is a constant, incessant reminder that history surrounds and defines us… the sweep of history shapes nations, identities, creative expression, flirtation techniques, culinary choices, stereotypes. Hollywood still portrays Germans and the German language as if spoken in Hitler’s intonation; West Germans still resent the provincialism and debts of East Germany. History with a capital H is quite simply everywhere and yet today’s European liberals are trying to forge a new identity that transcends the scars of centuries of war. At every turn, they must face the historical landmines that still scatter this continent. When Greeks protest against Germany’s austerity measures with Nazi posters and images of Angela Merkel dressed as Hitler, the ugliest chapter in Europe’s life returns in full view.

What to make of the weight of history? To meditate and drown in its massiveness is to be rendered ineffective in living in the moment, to moving forward. Yet to dismiss it is as the forgettable past is to overlook its shadows as they chase us to this day.

I was really entertained by how President Obama handled that delicate balance during this week’s visit to Washington by British Prime Minister David Cameron. Instead of simply evoking the glories of our ‘Special Relationship’ and current obsession with Princess Middleton and her crew, President Obama touched on something strangely forgotten in contemporary American life: the legacy of British imperialism and brutality against the American colonies that sparked the original Tea Party. In his quick witted, hip hopping ways, President Obama gracefully slipped in a historical reference to the British sacking of Washington to David Cameron’s face, “…It’s now been almost 200 years since the British came here to the White House under somewhat different circumstances. They really made an impression. They lit up the place. But we moved on.“

And so in my own occasional confusion and sense of being overwhelmed living in Germany among the shadows and ruins of history, I draw inspiration from a President with a remarkably historical sense of the world…. that there is value in being aware of one’s place in the sweep of history, but there is also value in acknowledge that the conversation moves forward and so must we.

"Tear down the mosque and temple too, break all that divides But do not break the human heart as it..."

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:06:44 -0400

“Tear down the mosque and temple too, break all that divides
But do not break the human heart as it is there that God resides.”

- Bulleh Shah (Punjab, 1680-1758)

-Dustin O’Halloran

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:05:27 -0500

-Dustin O’Halloran

It was a visceral contact high: those synchronized chants, the...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:56:00 -0500

It was a visceral contact high: those synchronized chants, the graphic images on the posters, the sheer volume of those crowds moving through Downtown’s streets as one unrelenting force. The monumental buildings of Nasser’s Cairo stood there as if silent witnesses to their very destruction; to their purpose being rewritten.

And yet somehow, amid all those impassioned men and women, he felt utterly and eerily alone.

He was not just severed from the love he had fought so hard to preserve; he was now divorced from himself, too; pushed toward Tahrir by the mobile anger surrounding him, pushed toward that inevitable confrontation with the military they were planning for days.

The cell phone bars had long disappeared. The once searing sun slipped behind the clouds.

At that moment, as an almost instinctive response, he reached for his inside jacket pocket, panicking. As his fingers brushed against the emptiness, he remembered he had carelessly thrown his passport onto the dinner table, leaving it lying next to the pile of American change he had emptied out the night before. They were all now sitting there together in the dark, forming a small memorial on a Cairene table to the life he had come there to abandon.

o, berlin.

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:46:48 -0500

o, berlin.

sleeping in technicolor

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:05:00 -0500

I keep falling asleep at the movies in Germany.

I buy popcorn, reserve an appropriately centered Sitzplatz at a vintage Kino, and yet there I am, asleep within thirty minutes, popcorn and gummy Bärchen littered all over myself. At first I was convinced this phenomenon was the fault of the energy efficient Germans, who refuse to air condition you to frigid alertness as the Regal Multiplexes have so successfully accomplished. The Germans don’t need climate control to guarantee interest; the inherent philosophical value of Kunst itself is all one needs to create a climate of aesthetic appreciation.

But last night, as I drifted in and out of consciousness yet again, this time to the lilting score of The Artist and its flickering monochromatic images, I realized there was something more obvious that may explain my sleepiness…. the films.

This year’s Oscars have already been described as one of the least inspiring in years. There is the inevitability of a French (!) B&W, silent film as Best Picture, nominations for a superficial attempt to Help us heal the wounds of race, a mid-life crisis saga set in Hawaii, Descendent from a long line of vanity projects in which Hollywood stars dress down to ‘get real.’

It’s all frankly a snore, and I am not surprised that that is literally what I have done at the cinema this year, ably assisted by the German thermostat.

By the early 2000s, Hollywood had stopped financing the mid-budget character-driven dramas that defined my cinematic adolescence. I seriously doubt that even something like the Bodyguard, a mainstream, interracial thriller with musical sequences thrown in for added effect, would be green lit in today’s market. Risky detours from the bankable norm belong in downtown cinemas for urban snobs or in niche racial markets. Studios would rather focus their attention on widening the common denominator for global consumption: enter glossy New York romantic comedies starring pop stars, Transformers, fifth and sixth sequels, 3-D extravaganzas.

At Berlin’s glittering English-language multiplex in Potsdamer Platz, what passes for American cinema is indeed often loud, abrasive, and dumb – the global American stereotype writ large. It’s hardly a reflection of the complex, diverse and rich nation I know. But before I start mourning the state of culture like a coastal snob, I acknowledge that the counterweight to the summer blockbusters are the Awards Season films, the colder time when Hollywood bundles up, gets serious and tries to look past it self to the world beyond.

But for some reason this year those were the very films that seemed most off.

My Life with Marilyn, Hugo, The Help, Midnight in Paris, and The Artist are films steeped in a strange, hazy nostalgia. Set in “the good ol’ days” when men were men, women were delicate, writers lived in Paris among painters, enlightened southerners dressed in tailored ensembles, blacks forgave racial injustice… a purer past, and one that is perhaps captured at its purest by The Artist.

There is no doubt that this highly original film has won over critics and members of the Academy alike for its beauty and for its creativity. But above all, it has won over the predominantly older, homogenous Academy for its unadulterated tribute to their world. What’s better than a finely crafted love song to one’s youth?

And yet as I watched The Artist, I didn’t feel nostalgia for its world: not aesthetically, not culturally and certainly not historically. I for one can’t tap dance around the fact that while some among us would have been allowed to wear tuxedos or sequined dresses in that era, others among us would be completely out of frame, in segregated isolation, under violent colonial rule, invisible from economic and political life… and most certainly invisible in the audiences and the movies the film celebrates.

One of the true gifts of cinema is the ability to imagine oneself in someone else’s shoes and to consequently feel your sense of the world expand before you. That experience is why I love the movies. And I could hardly blink, much less sleep, during my favorite film of the year, the Iranian masterpiece A Separation. Like most films, it has very little in common with my life, but in telling the story of one Tehran family, it pulsates with universally relatable emotions and ethical questions. Director Asghar Farhadi brilliantly unfurls layers of conflict between men and women, rich and poor, children and parents, the past and the future. It is a viscerally Iranian and global story, a film for our interlocked times, not a love song to an idealized and monochromatic vision of the past.

Yet A Separation is tucked away in the shadows of this year’s Oscars as one of five cryptic nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. Given the time difference between Munich and Los Angeles, this year I too will be tucked away during the ceremony. And perhaps it is for the best, since I obviously I need all the sleep I can get if I am to stay awake for another go at the Kino.

“hanging on” -active child those harps. those...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:57:31 -0500

“hanging on” -active child

those harps. those vocals. those words. as the winter thaws, a perfect season changer.

an expanded tribute

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:17:44 -0500

On Friday, readers of the New York Times woke to sobering news of the death of one of the newspaper’s most celebrated journalists, Anthony Shadid. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Middle East correspondent had been surreptitiously reporting inside Syria, covering President Assad’s brutal crackdown of the uprising there. Despite the risk of reporting under a ban on foreign reporters, Mr. Shadid was in Syria because he had made it his journalistic mission to cover the Arab revolutions for Western audiences. He was unrelenting in his belief that the world needed to understand these movements and whether it was from Tunis, Benghazi, or Tahrir, Mr Shadid’s words helped define the narrative of the Arab Spring.

Tragically, he suffered a severe asthma attack on Thursday evening and died in the field. He was 43 years old. His colleague, the photojournalist Tyler Hicks, carried his body across the border from Syria to Turkey.

I acknowledge that for a region that has known so much suffering and loss, to mourn an individual ‘Western’ reporter’s life may seem aggrandizing or decadent. But the tributes that poured out from across the Arab World and from the United States were testaments to the fact that Mr. Shadid transcended the role of an ordinary foreign correspondent. He was a rare Arab-American star of the journalism establishment: an award-winning reporter, a beautiful writer, and above all, a deeply respectful advocate for cultural understanding.

I first encountered Anthony Shadid not through his articles in the Washington Post or the New York Times, but as the author of a haunting book about the Iraq war, Night Draws Near. In stark contrast with the embedded military and Green Zone dispatches offered by most American journalists, Anthony Shadid set out to tell the story of ordinary Iraqis in the months leading up to and following the invasion. Nobody else was illuminating that side of the story and it fundamentally changed my understanding of the war. But what struck me even more was Anthony Shadid’s uniquely American voice, his dualism. His ability to speak Arabic and write English as if a poet, his historical and deeply personal view of the Arabs and Americans… it was that double consciousness that gave his work its grace and its insight.

Unlike many reporters, he did not believe in ‘parachuting’ into the region during a crisis. He lived there, spoke the language fluently, and understood the nuances of the societies he covered. He wrote about the joy, the music, the warmth of the Middle East… and he wrote about the bitter politics and the violent sectarianism. As a result of that duality, Anthony Shadid’s dispatches allowed us to understand the humanity of the Arab world alongside its tragedies. And perhaps his intimate understanding of that fragile balance was a reflection of his own story.

Anthony Shadid was born in Oklahoma to Lebanese-American parents. His family had left their ancestral village in southern Lebanon generations earlier in pursuit of the American dream. Shadid studied political science and journalism at the University of Wisconsin and he recognized early in his career that he wanted to cover the region his family had once called home. He moved to Cairo to learn Arabic, befriended scholars including Edward Said, and wrote his debut book about the legacy of political Islam. His star rose quickly and he went on to cover stories from Palestine to Iraq for esteemed newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. In 2009, he was offered one of the most important jobs in American journalism, that of a Middle East correspondent for the New York Times. It was opportune timing since it would give him the support and the platform he needed to cover the Arab Spring in all its complexity and depth.

Shadid’s unique voice is best reflected in his final project, a memoir of his family’s history in Lebanon called House of Stone that was scheduled to be published a few weeks after his untimely death. It is the story of his personal return to embattled southern Lebanon and his journey to renovate his great grandfather’s home so that it would become his family’s bayt, the home where he had planned to raise his son with his wife and the home he wished would become a symbol of his hopes for the future of the Middle East. I encourage you to seek out and read his work as a source of optimism against the cynicism we often feel about the role of media in the world today.

In Anthony Shadid’s death, the United States and the Arab world have lost a rare, critical bridge of understanding. His writing is his enduring legacy and he leaves behind those articles and books as a gift to a new generation of journalists. For that, I am both deeply saddened and deeply grateful.

the arab winter

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:55:00 -0500

The great American journalist Anthony Shadid is gone. A chronicler of the contemporary Middle East, its wars, its tragedies, its upheavals…but above all a chronicler of the humanity of its people… Anthony Shadid has left us at a time when we needed him the most. The Arab Spring was the story the Pulitzer Prize winning Lebanese-American journalist was born to cover, and it tragically consumed him in much the same way it has the societies and dictatorships of the modern Middle East. I first encountered Anthony Shadid not through his articles in the Washington Post or the New York Times, but as the author of a haunting book about the Iraq war, Night Draws Near. In stark contrast with the embedded and Green Zone dispatches offered by most American journalists, Anthony Shadid set out to tell the story of ordinary Iraqis in the months leading up to and following the invasion. Nobody else was telling those stories and it fundamentally changed my understanding and sense of that conflict. But what struck me even more was Anthony Shadid’s uniquely American voice, his dualism. His ability to speak Arabic and write English as if a poet, his historical and deeply personal view of the Arabs and Americans… it was that double consciousness that gave his work its grace and its insight. There is often no middle ground between those cultures in our political and media discourse … but it was always present in Shadid’s reportage and in his life. Today I am watching friends post tributes to him from Washington and Ramallah, New York and Cairo, London and Beirut. It is a sobering reminder that in bearing witness to our shared history with integrity, respect, and an unrelenting intelligence… Anthony Shadid blurred our divisions and deepened our understanding of one another. For that, I am both deeply grateful and deeply saddened.

During a routine lunch at my current German office, awash in...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:09:24 -0500

During a routine lunch at my current German office, awash in unlimited supplies of sparkling water and lattes of course, the conversation auf Deutsch turned to a coworker’s recent trip to New York. Although my German remains rudimentary, my ears perked to listen to a moneyed Munich crew’s observations and ruminations about our great city. After a few inane comments about how exciting it is to luxuriate in an Empire State of Mind, this particular colleague started telling a compelling tale of the Schwarzen (Blacks) and Hispanics she met on her journey! She discovered them standing in a long line…and upon approaching the crowd, learned that they hadn’t assembled for her arrival but had actually been waiting for hours for the launch of a new Nike basketball shoe. She high tailed out of there because she was sure violence and chaos were bound to ensue. The coworkers gasped, laughing at those silly American minderheit and their silly antics. That was the point at which I wished my German skills were rudimentier. It’s not that crowds like that don’t form in New York and it’s not that minority communities don’t in fact indulge in unhealthy product consumption. It was striking and revealing coming from a Bavarian perspective, a German region that systematically suppresses cultural differences in pursuit of preserving Lederhosen purity. To underscore the hot mess that Schwarzen and Hispanics contribute to an otherwise pristine city probably provides some much-needed comfort and assurance that Munich will never be such a place. And inshallah, it never will, given German policies and immigration history. But ironically, since moving to this Bavarian paradise, I have found myself strangely nostalgic for New York and for its unapologetic multikulti swagger. Munich couldn’t be quainter, safer, and at the moment, whiter. But sometimes walking through white, virginal landscapes in my snow boots, I too would kill for a new pair of Nikes. But when it comes to the next lunch hour, I will keep that to myself.