Desert Hot Springs is a tiny universe of chur-ches, meth labs, and boutique spas. At its hot and sandy center, closeted in a one-room pub-lic library, is a neglected cardboard box, stuf-fed with newspaper clippings that amount to the local history archive. Many of these snippets, now colored khaki by time, are devoted to a […]

One afternoon, Jill Magid, small, pale, black-haired, walked into the headquarters of the Amsterdam police and offered them a pro-ject. She told them she wanted to do an art piece about their surveillance cameras. The Dutch policeman at the front desk was unimpressed. He passed her off to someone on the phone. “We don’t work […]

Donald Rumsfeld was born in 1932, which means that when he turned fourteen and star-ted reading science fiction, Frank Herbert had not yet written his epic 1965 novel, Dune. The same is true of all those touted as the architects of President Bush’s aggressive Middle East policy. Bespectacled to a man, with a penchant for […]

Illustration by Kamau Patton

In January of 2007, Sweden announced its intention to become the first country to open an embassy in a virtual world, promising to establish “diplomatic representation” inside the five-year-old online community Second Life. Unlike more traditional online communities, where users represent themselves to one another using text, photographs, and profile pages, Second Life (2L for […]

Still from the DVD Coming to the Netherlands “Every bit of land in the Netherlands is used for something�for agriculture, for industry,for traffic, for housing, or for recreation.” -Coming to the Netherlands, the film Dutch multiculturalism isn’t what it used to be. These days, Dutch identity is oddly rooted in ideas about sexual liberty and […]

Stills from Knowledge and Faith The mid-1980s in Egypt was a time when the hangover of the rapid and sometimes violent changes of the heady 70s started truly settling in. The state had finally managed to completely defang all forms of popular organized politics with, of course, the one notable exception of militant radical Islam, […]

Sushil K Dade, better known as Future Pilot AKA, is not an obvious candidate to helm a celebration of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns. But the 2007 Burns Mela (the word is Hindi for “fair” or “gathering”), held in Glasgow’s Old Fruitmarket, is an exercise in genre-mashing and stylistic frottage as adventurous as the musician’s own records. Raga rubs up against dub, Celtic folk, and bhangra. The great septuagenarian novelist Alasdair Gray reads aloud anti-war verse. Reggae versions of Scottish ballads are sung. Indian vocalist Sheila Chandra delivers a version of Auld Lang Syne. Together with a buffet supper that includes haggis pakoras and neep’n’tattie samosas, it’s an evening to make any cultural purist weep.

“Capitalize on random snippets of sound.” -The Homosexuals “The Family of Noise is here and it’s come to save everybody.” -Adam Ant “We’re in tune with disoriental philosophy.” -Charles Gocher, Sun City Girls Alan Bishop doesn’t care if you like him. When a major British music magazine complained that Bishop’s band, the Sun City Girls, […]

LETTER

PREVIEWS

TRAVEL
Highway to Heaven
Negar Azimi and Sohrab Mohebbi

ART MARKET
Gold Rush
Antonia Carver

INFRASTRUCTURE
Conspiracy!
Mohammed Yousri

MUSEUM
Kingdom of the Dolls
Sean Dockray

WORK IN PROGRESS
Mohammed al-Riffai
Clare Davies

WORK IN PROGRESS
Yoshua Okon
Magali Arriola

PROFILE
Jill Magid
Elizabeth Rubin

CURATORIAL
Tropical Malaise
Mirjam Shatanawi

TECHNOLOGY
Bidune
Anand Balakrishnan

Glory
Binyavanga Wainaina

Perfect Sound Forever
Mika Taanila

One Life to Live
Gary Dauphin

Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads
Curtis Brown

Going Dutch
Eric Fassin

Free Love, Funny Costumes and a Canal at Suez
Marwa Elshakry

CENTERFOLD
The first Iranian in space

Doctor Know
Hassan Khan and Haytham El-Wardany

Let Them Eat Laptops: a moderated discussion

The Blue Nile
Sherif El Azma

Drill Bits
Mohamed Mansour

ARCHITECTURE
TechnoSea
Neyran Turan

MUSIC
The Haggis Samosa
Sukhdev Sandhu

Disorientalism
Michael C Vazquez

FILM
Body Tech
Bruce Hainley

Gentleman’s Agreement
Tirdad Zolghadr

Lens Flare
Antonia Carver

Film festival reviews

COOKING
Shirin Aliabadi and Farhad Moshiri

BOOKS

Chicago
Youssef Rakha

Reading ‘Legitimation Crisis’ in Tehran
George Scialabba