Tag: culture

Review: Golia on the Yacoubian Building

My friend Maria Golia, writer, columnist and author of Cairo: City of Sand (What? You haven’t read it yet? Do you like staying ignorant about contemporary Egypt and Umm ad-Dounia? What are you waiting for?) has sent me this review of Egypt’s star-packed, hit movie of the summer, The Yacoubian Building, based on the Alaa Al Aswany novel of the same name. I haven’t seen it yet and heard very conflicting opinions about it, and Maria’s review puts it in the proper socio-political context.

Downtown Cairo’s Odeon Theater charges half the price of other first-run film venues and is consequently always packed. These days, it’s showing the screen adaptation of The Yacoubian Building, based on the eponymous novel by Alaa al-Aswany. Presented at several foreign film festivals, The Yacoubian Building is causing a stir for its so-called frank portrayal of corruption, torture, classism and several types of exploitative sex. The film itself is unsubtle, overlong and visually flat, with all the artistic merit of a wad of chewing gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. What is interesting is the response to the film, or more precisely, to the narrative content that survived the scriptwriter’s hackneyed treatment.

Following the early showings, word was out: The Yacoubian Building has gone too far! People left before intermission, an unheard-of event since Egyptians will sit through unimaginable tripe, if only to enjoy the A/C. When questioned as to who left and why, the ushers at the Odeon said it was mostly girls who found the R-rated film obscene. Whether this delicacy is real or feigned, it’s as melodramatic as the movie, whose only truly obscene moment is one we’ve seen before. Adel Imam – Egyptian comedy’s former tutelary deity, now a maudlin, pot-bellied grandpa – manages to grope and bestow his froggy kisses on yet another beautiful, ambitious bint.

Continue reading Review: Golia on the Yacoubian Building

Beirut theater welcomes refugees

Because sometimes you need feel-good stories:

BEIRUT, Lebanon – Al-Madinah Theater was supposed to show art films this summer. Instead it has become a home to scores of refugees, and a cultural oasis where their children can act, draw and watch movies.

So far, 85 people have taken shelter from Israeli attacks, laying mattresses in the dressing rooms and wide corridors of two underground floors. In an office building above the theater, 125 others have taken refuge.

Volunteers show up daily at the theater on Hamra Street — several miles from Israel’s relentless bombardment of southern Beirut — to give art and drama workshops to help the displaced youth channel pent-up fears and anger into creative expression.

On the main stage, children scamper around their drama teacher, their giggles echoing through the cavernous theater. On a lower floor, youths bend over sheets of paper, drawing trees, butterflies and, in some cases, scenes from the hostilities that have forced them out of their homes in Beirut’s suburbs and southern Lebanon, where Israel is focusing its strikes on Hezbollah militants.

Word of the workshops has reached other refugee centers, and the number of children attending has swelled from about 30 to more than 100 on some days.

Read the rest.

من أحمد فؤاد نجم إلى حسني مبارك

Nora Younis posts poet Ahmed Fouad Negm’s birthday wishes to President Hosni Mubarak: من أحمد فؤاد نجم إلى حسني مبارك

Update: I now hear that the poem was not actually written by Negm. There is an email going around, written by his daughter, saying that while he agreed with the contents it was not him to who wrote, and urging the real author to have the courage to claim authorship. A literary friend who told me this also pointed out that the poem had grammatical mistakes and was rather inelegant, another reason why it wouldn’t be Negm’s.

Actors and Artists demonstrate for Lebanon today

The Actor’s Guild and the Artists’ Syndicate have called for a sit-in at the UN office in Cairo, today Monday, to protest the Qana massacre.
The actors and artists will assemble in front of the Guild, located in el-Bahr el-A3zam Street in Giza, at noon, and will move in buses and cars to Garden City, where the UN office is located.

Several actors and artists have joined the ranks of dissent since the launching of Kefaya, in addition to others who’ve known to come into the art scene from activism background. The most outspoken actor/activist has been Khaled el-Sawy, the star from the box office hit The Yaacoubian Building. He together with the novel author, Alaa el-Aswani, had helped launch Artists For Change last year, as one of Kefaya’s offshoots.

الجو جميل

Shatta Theatre Troop would like to invite you to:
“El Gaw Gameel�
“الجو جميل”
Based on
Louis Calaferte’s “Un Riche, Trois Pauvres�
Directed by Nada Sabet
An absurd play, composed of split second disjointed scenes that bring out the circus in the streets and the street in the circus. The performance is the result of improvisation based on the original text that leads to an ever-changing picture on stage where the street and circus are always evolving into each other until they gradually merge into one. “There are as many realities as you care to imagine� (Lawrence Durell).
Monday 7th August, 2006, 9pm
 El-Hanager Theatre, Opera House
As part of the independent theatre troops festival

وداعاً رمسيس

So finally Ramses is gonna escape the polution, dust, fumes, and garbage hills of downtown Cairo, to assume his new position in front of the new Egyptian Museum, currently under construction.


As happy as I am we are saving this valuable piece of our country’s history, but I know I and many Cairenes will miss it. May Ramses find some peace now in his new home by the Giza Pyramids…
Here is a slideshow of the mock transferring process that took place last night. The Antiquities’ authorities moved a replica of the statue, to see if the experiment was going to work.. and it did..

UPDATE: The actual tranfer of the original Ramses statue will take place on October 6, according to Al-Masr Al-Youm

If you are interested in more background information on the new Egyptian Museum, check out this story I wrote for the LA Times last year.

Continue reading وداعاً رمسيس

Beirut artist jams to bombing

43BoingBoing reports:

30-year-old musician, comic book author, and painter Mazen Kerbaj in Beirut has been blogging throughout the recent violence. You can view some of his recent drawings here on his blog.

Listen to a six-minute ambient, improvisational music piece he performed — accompanied by the sound of falling bombs. “Starry Night” — Audio link, alternate MP3 link, more links.

I just visited his site and looked at his drawings, and listened to the audio — eerie.

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Memory for forgetfulness

In 1982 the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote a long stream-of-consciousness poem about that Israeli attack:

Three o’clock. Daybreak riding on fire. A nightmare coming from the sea. Roosters made of metal. Smoke. Metal preparing a feast for metal the master, and a dawn that flares up in all the senses before it breaks. A roaring that chases me out of bed and throws me into this narrow hallway. I want nothing, and I hope for nothing. I can’t direct my limbs in this pandemonium. No time for caution, and no time for time. If I only knew—if I knew how to organize the crush of this death that keeps pouring forth. If only I knew how to liberate the screams held back in a body that no longer feels like mine from the sheer effort spent to save itself in this uninterrupted chaos of shells. “Enough!” “Enough!” I whisper, to find out if I can still do anything that will guide me to myself and point to the abyss opening in six directions. I can’t surrender to this fate, and I can’t resist it. Steel that howls, only to have other steel bark back. The fever of metal is the song of this dawn.

The whole poem, Memory for Forgetfulness, is here.

Thanks to E.H. for reminding me.

The War Tapes

Arabist reader and friend SP sent me this interesting link about a US military documentary project, the war tapes.com

Here are her thoughts on it…

The documentary is put together mainly from footage taken by three soldiers in the same battalion, with their commentary, and from interviews with their families back home, from 2004-2005. These are citizen-soldiers, guys who signed up for the National Guard post 9/11, rather than professional soldiers, real New England average Joes. Except for one extremely interesting Lebanese American chap (who looks so much like Ali G’s Bruno persona that there’s some cognitive dissonance at first) whose parents brought him to the US as an adolescent to escape the civil war in Lebanon (his rather dramatic mother is a treat). No grand patriotic fervour here, though most of them nominally support Bush and the war, many signed up for the military for pragmatic reasons without expecting to be deployed. One of the soldiers says he thinks it will give him a sense of purpose.

Continue reading The War Tapes