marketing a placebo

Birell, the non- alchoholic egyptian beer, is marketed in the same way that american beers are.



Babe:
Hi Morsey.
Guy:
In my opinion, that girl has a beautiful personality
Announcer:
A girl's personality is the last thing that you notice about her.
Be a man and drink Birell, It's a pure feeling that only a man would feel.

Yes, there slogan is "Be a Man."

Because only real men drink non-alcholic beer so they can pretend to feel a religiously prohibited form of inebriation.

i don't even know what else to say, really.

Pray before you die! (a friendly public service anouncement...)

or for the less morbidly inclined...


this one is ALWAYS playing on TV, and i actually kind of like it...

enjoy!

(Abstract expressions of waning hegemony in the passive voice)

Who throws a shoe?
At whom is a shoe thrown?

Three days later, the shoe-throwing incident is still big news in Egypt.
It seems that American coverage of the event has focused primarily on two aspects.
First, there has been the talk of how Muntader al-Zaidi has become a "folk hero" in the Middle East, inspiring rallies in Iraq, and general admiration from Arabs everywhere.
Second, there is the attempt to impress upon the American public the cultural significance of throwing shoes – how this is more than just Austin Powers slapstick comedy – but a grave insult.

But both of these components, while important, seem to miss the broader significance of the event from a Middle Eastern perspective… namely that it somehow symbolically undermines a perception of American credibility, that it intangibly pierces the 4th wall of American hegemony…

I like to do a grammar exercise with my Advanced English classes where we look at a list of Bushisms and attempt to fix the grammar and usage mistakes. It’s a fun exercise, but the initial reaction from students is inevitably one of disbelief; not only that the American President could have a weaker grasp on the English Language than they do, but also that such a compilation of quotes even exists… that the President of The United States would stray from a carefully orchestrated image enough to say such things, and then that these comments would be publicly viewable – and open to public ridicule.

That kind of thing just doesn’t happen here. This is a country where it’s illegal even to speculate on the legal succession of the 80 year old president. Where the biggest scandal of the year – involving a millionaire murdering a famous singer – is banned from state broadcasting.

It’s not so much that it’s unimaginable that someone would throw a shoe at Mubarak: its unimaginable that Mubarak would have a shoe thrown at him. This is not something that happens to a President. This is not something that happens to people with power.

As much as Egyptians might hate the United States government, there is still a firm appreciation that it is the Government, a separate entity detached from the mistakes and embarrassments that might affect the citizenry. Indeed the general warmth shown to regular Americans here is entirely predicated on the notion that, just as their government is completely separate from what they deem humanly Egyptian, so is ours.

I’m trying to decide how obvious of an observation this is… back home we take for granted that Bush is a Lame Duck, a laughable goofball who's days are numbered. The Middle East, still swarming with US troops, doesn't exactly have the luxury to appreciate this viewpoint.

All this is also directly tied to an alternate understanding of Respect in the Middle East. For better or worse, in America humor is an acceptable - and often effective – way to diffuse potentially embarrassing or disrespectful situations. One’s ability to laugh something off, to show that it has not affected him, is seen as a sign of strength. Indeed, humor seems to be the general response from Americans. Yet as I’ve learned the hard way, this doesn’t really fly in Egypt. I won’t go so far as to say that authority is all that Egyptians understand – an idea that strikes of Barbarism, but I will say that in most cases, a perception of toughness is a prerequisite for respect.

But personally, I’m surprised the coverage hasn’t focused more on the Presidents reflexes... he dodged that shoe fast.

hugging the imaginary Sphinx

blood on the tracks...

my shoes got a little bloody...



yeah!!!!!!!!!

... and then there were bones...

christmas trees vs goats (part 1)

Eid al-Adha was yesterday.

It was hard not to think about New York, and all the christmas trees laid out for the slaughter in the weeks before Christmas. only here, the slaughter is literal.

And now the internet won't let me upload any more pictures, so the streets running red with blood will have to wait another day....

CIB involved in unsafe mating practices.

Aside from the fact that the slogan "confidence breeds success" seems more appropriate for a stable than a bank, its hard for me to trust in Confidence's animal husbandry skills when the bank's entire computer system has been down for 2 consecutive days.

This would be the point in the post where i link to an article explaining Confidence's apparent inability to coax Success into fruitful copulation, but that would require a newspaper to consider this an important enough setback to write about.

I mean, shouldn't this be a vaguely big deal? Considering that Egypt is an almost exclusively cash economy - with major transactions literally being conducted with paper money - the inability of the largest private sector bank in Egypt to dole out cash ought to be news. What if i was supposed to buy a house today? I'd be fucked, that's what.

Whatever, i guess if your vision is as concise as "To be the best financial institution in the Middle East and Africa by 2020," you needn't worry too much about the small details of actually being able to give people their money.

nomadic misopaidea

Ugh. I want to write about Egypt, i really do. But there's a problem.

In Korea, i had nothing to lose by fixating on the bizarre and the different. Korea was not my home.

But home intimates normalcy, and if i want to 'live' in Egypt, to actually unpack, (if only for a while) - it means ignoring the differences that before would have intrigued, upset, and infuriated me. i can stay here as an abject foreigner, observant but uncomfortable, or i can try and let a little go, for the sake of actually living somewhere in the present for once.

Basically, its hard for me to justify expressing all the subjectively peculiar things i see without accepting that I'm just a nomadic misopaidean, (a 'hater of cultures', if my Wikipedian Greek serves me correctly) or an accursed nostaphile...

This is, I've realized, why i had such a hard time writing after returning to New York City. It wasn't that i didn't have anything to say, but rather that the admittedly acerbic humors of differentiation began to feel a lot less funny or meaningful as they began to hit closer to 'home.'

Or to put it another way, i began to appreciate the sentiment behind the phrase "don't shit where you sleep."


That being said, i would like to briefly point out that Egyptians seem to sweat a lot...

from their butts.
Maybe everyone does this. Maybe the real story here is that i notice it. Clearly it's irrelevant to anything, and even i can't come up with a good way to make this representative of some broader cultural distinction.

But you know, its been on my mind. And its good to be back.

Alexandria Zoo

This tiger was not happy... i'm still trying to decide if the handlers were genuinely nervous, or whether this was some sort of elaborate show meant to edge on the tiger for the sake of onlookers. Wouldn't be too surprised either way...

Can someone please tell me why the video quality always sucks once i upload to youtube??? i have more, but i'm too disheartened by the degradation of quality (the degradation of the animals, not so much.)

what $361.50 can get you in Alex...

not exactly the most profound of returns...

Egypt hasn't changed. Lee and i went back to my old neighborhood last night. They're building some sort of amphitheater on the grounds of the old ruins next to my house, and my old doorman was nice enough to sneak me in.

more to come...

Travel as a study of The Trajectory of Pop Music in a Globalized World

Once I sat in a Pizza Hut in Nizwa and they were playing White Town's "Never Be Your Woman."
40 years ago Nizwa was a rebel Omani city without paved roads or electricity. Now... White Town (...and pizza.)

Last week i heard Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" on a public bus into Pusan.

I don't know how many times i had to defend my distaste for Michael Bolton/Phil Collins/George Michael while living in Egypt.

(linguistic) insecurities

The first time a student in Egypt explained to me that Arabic contained every phonic sound from every language on earth, i was a little taken aback.
After all, Arabic contains no V, P, or CH sound, nor a grouping of 3 or more consecutive consonants (like in spring).
And this is only the English sounds that Arabic lacks.

But in the Middle East, Arabic is more than just a language. It is first a signifier of purity - the Koran was revealed in poetic Arabic, and unlike the Old or New Testament, it cannot be sacredly translated.
It is also a symbol of unity.
Though the Egyptian and Moroccan dialects are as different as Spanish and French, their definitional sameness acts to represent (maintain/produce?) an analogous unity among Arab countries. When you speak the same language, you implicitly share values and responsibility - and as differences in culture, politics, and economy have decimated any notion of pan-Arabism, Language has remained the one true bond. The exclusion of Shi'a Islam in Iran and 'secular' Islam in Turkey from the broader Middle Eastern concern is no coincidence - they speak a different language.

While living in Egypt, I saw this linguistic myth as nothing more than the language component to a host of myths meant to reify Arabic/Islamic superiority through 'empirical' examples.

And then I came to Korea.

And sure enough, identical story. Only here the claim is expanded to include Hangul, the writing system, which can supposedly reproduce any 'foreign' sound.

While no language can make the claim to umbrella all others, at least Arabic was sort of close. I mean, Egyptians are shockingly fast language learners, and they actually don't have strong accents.

But Korea? Aside from lacking phonemically differentiated L/R, B/P or G/K, there is no F, Z, V, or voiced dental fricative TH (as in 'the'), nor many short vowels. Also, any consonant sound must be followed by a vowel, even if it at the end of the word. (thus max becomes maxuh.) Koreans are shockingly bad language reproducers.

But the 'fact' of Korean lingual superiority is so ingrained (mythified) that it goes completely unchallenged. The adult students i have confronted about this obvious untruth have either laughed in realization, or frozen up, like being told God didn't exist.

But their is more to this bizarre convergence of mythified Linguistic Exceptionalism.
The direction towards which this myth is used varies greatly between the two countries. In Egypt the linguistic superiority myth served to unify a diversified Arabic culture and reify Islamic superiority. Although it was to an extent used as an in-group creating example, (demonstrating superiority over the European out-group) this "in-group" included many countries, and in a sense expanded and defined the group beyond an equally plausible "Egyptian exceptionalism."
But in Korea, the Linguistic Superiority Myth serves an almost opposite purpose. Korea doesn't share its language with a broader region, and so the bolstering effect of the myth does not expand the group. Rather it exclusively serves Korean Nationalism, which unapologetically accepts Korea as the Best Country on Earth.

Of course, there are a billion examples of how this myth is hypocritical. Just as Koreans claim their language is superior, they also rely on English catch phrases as an economy of 'cool' more than anywhere else I've ever been. Korean advertisements regularly use nonsensical English phrases to bolster their images.

(the usage of 'story' in store names will be the subject of another post)

Furthermore, a large portion of the Namdaemun disaster coverage here has focused on Foreign coverage of the incident, to the point where it feels like The Korean Media is over-emphasizing foreign concern as a way to demonstrate the true importance of the disaster. Like the news is saying - "If the New York Times and CNN are covering this, than you know it is important."

As always, i'm not sure what the point of these observations are. In English, I feel like we're more proud of the words we absorb than anything else - knowing the definition of schadenfreude, or that the word for 'tariff' is of Arabic origin, is a sign of sophistication, and any notion of linguistic 'purity' only comes up when confronted with the idea of Ebonics as a legitimate linguistic whole.

But if we weren't so confident about our economic/political/moral superiority, would things like linguistic nationalism start becoming more important?

You've come a long way, baby. (video edition)

This was my job in Egypt...


And this is my job now...


And i'm the asshole who misses Egypt.

A Susan Sontag kind of week (part 2)

part 2

Sontag talks about viewing suffering in two very different ways;
First - and more importantly - as a way to remember and honor war's dead, to (maybe) avoid future wars, or at least to understand their horrifying implications.

Second as a narcissistic and base desire to witness the morbid.

Since leaving Egypt i have thought a lot about this second part. About our natural 'attraction' to viewing suffering and the grotesque. Sontag locates the first recorded acknowledgment of this attraction in Plato's Republic, where in Book IV Socrates relates a story about Leonitus, son of Aglaion:

On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, "There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight."

Last night in a taxi on the way back from Pusan, we saw flashing lights up ahead on the highway. Scott said it was going to be a checkpoint, but i was pretty sure i knew what was coming.
In America we're so fast to hide the bodies. Part of the implicit pact of rubbernecking back home is an all-but-guaranteed PG-13 rating. We crane to look, but we anticipate only the signs and symbols of carnage - shattered glass and crumpled metal. I've noticed that this is rarely the case outside of the West.
Last night no one had bothered to cover up the body. It just lay there, face up, on the side of the road. I saw him first, and pointed out that "that guy's dead," whereas Scott and Cyndi decided that he definitely was not. The cab driver, for his part, said "oh my god" dramatically/breathlessly a few times, clearly for our benefit. ("Oh my god" is a genuine Korean expression, used in all corresponding situations to the English version.)
Afterwards, i couldn't stop thinking about the gulf between our different reactions.
Cyndi asked, "how can you be so cavalier?" But I wonder how i couldn't be.
I saw so many car crashes in Egypt that the cringe-component of the shock faded. All that was left was the visual, and the visual remains fascinating.
Sontag points out that "suffering from natural causes, such as illness or childbirth, is scantily represented in the history of art; that caused by accident, virtually not at all - as if there were no such thing as suffering by inadvertence or misadventure." (p. 40) This is probably because suffering removed from pathos becomes narratively meaningless. (unless of course it serves an anti-narrative of universal pointlessness.) And because most of Sontag's book is devoted precisely to the 'meaning' associated with viewing suffering, she doesn't dwell any further on the accidental misery of others.

But if Sontag is correct in arguing (and i think she is) that viewing the misery inherent in war photography cannot be separated from the narrative of the war in question, then photographs - or first person viewings - of narrative-less accidental death is indeed a very different bag. It is all the depravity with none of the 'benefits.' Except that even here Sontag sees potential for personal growth:

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. (p 98)

And if this truly is a goal (i'm skeptical), then I would think that accident photography offers the best way to approach this, free from the distractions of the narratively contextualized. And the lack of any mainstream interest in narrative-less accident-photography (whether documentary or artistic) becomes a strange omission.
Or maybe we really just need this contextualizing as a shield. Both from appearing morbid and grotesque ourselves, and from feeling that the world itself is morbid and grotesque without consequence.

Or maybe i've written a stupidly long post.

on decay

I'm still struggling to understand the disconnect between my awareness of Korea's "beauty" and my complete lack of appreciation for it.

I'm ready to give up on some grand explanation, and instead focus on the details... (small differences, if you will.)

1.

Something is wrong when i can't tell the difference between a modern bathroom...

...and the ancient palace complex it is meant to "compliment."

Thanks, but no thanks. I can see the same thing at Epcot. (which i have. its actually kind of interesting.)

When you juxtapose the True Past with a modern duplicate, you complicate matters of authenticity and value. And unless we're dealing with something truly awe-inspiring and unique (like the pyramids or the alps), authenticity is really all that something old has to offer.

When you build a bathroom as beautiful as the adjacent site, you're just reminding me that the site itself isn't unique.
And once you negate the mystique of uniqueness, you point out the secret that any encounter with the Ancient is illusionary, and is inevitably wrapped in the historical process that has carried it to the present...

2.

When you erase decay, you undo meaning.

Decay is an inevitable and important part of historical sites. It is the scars and beauty marks that separate man from mannequin, real from reproduction.

But in Korea, decay at historical sights is viewed with the same disdain as decay in the home - an embarrassing blemish that distracts from the 'true' beauty and significance of the site in question.

But Travel is not about recapturing the past the way it once existed, that's what time travel is for. Travel is about viewing a process, a continuous and eternal cycle of growth and decay.
Sometimes we travel to see the breadth of the process as it has effected one site. Turkey is a remarkable layering of cultures spilling over each other, a living museum to the triumphs and failures of both the West and the Middle East. Other times we travel to see a single point in the decay/growth cycle. We see a modern technophile Japan or a starving Cairo, and our own lives serve as the reference to 'normalcy.'

Because in the end, travel is ultimately about understanding the old as it relates to us now.

In Egypt they leave one Past in the context of the many Pasts that followed. Statues remain toppled, ancient graffiti is ubiquitous. And it is this accumulation of pasts that gives meaning to Places, that makes them historic. But in Korea one Past is singled out and preserved to the detriment of all others. Cultural sites have been swept clean of narrative, of the inevitable expansions and re-appropriations that history has wrought.

Would (could?) Shelly have written Ozymandias if the Egyptian government had restored or removed all the fallen statues? Could we ever understand our own place in history if all we saw of the past was it's leaders desired projections of excellence?

All This doesn't mean you should leave the 5000 year old layer of grime over king Tut's golden crown. It just means you shouldn't confuse the 'Past as an object' with the 'Past as a narrative'. We may delight in viewing the Past's objects - but truth, beauty, and meaning inevitably come from observing it's narrative...



I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

small differences (linguistic - neurological edition)

I'm very interested in how the brain "translates" accent into understandable speech. Are Engilsh speakers, with its infinite accents, better at this? Furthermore, is the way we learn our first language reflective of our general way of thinking?

In Egypt, people were often baffled by the slightest mistake in accent. I lived near a street called tram street, which in Egyptian Arabic should be pronounced ahhh- taahh-rehhm. There is a very slight rolling of the R in there. Although my general arabic accent is quite good, this one word was impossible for me.

One time, I sat in a taxi and tried to explain to the driver what street I wanted. We agreed that there are three main streets that run across Alexandria. We agreed that we were at the moment on one of them, and it was not the one that i wanted. We agreed that I didn't want to be on the sea. In my mind, this alone should have been enough, but he began to rattle off all of the smaller streets, until finally i was able to pronounce tram street correctly.

Another time i was in McDonald's, and said i wanted my meal a cahm - bow. (As in Combo. With fries and a drink. I actually forget what they call it in America now, but in Korea its called a "set.") I was met with a blank stare. What i meant to say was cum-bow. There was no mental training to search for similar words, to do internal interpretations of meaning. The language was an all or nothing deal, where you either hit a bullseye of meaning, or grazed the target as gibberish. The fact that there was literally no other similar word i could have been trying to say in that situation was entirely besides the point.

While I was in Egypt and bitter and angry, I interpreted this as a clear sign that Egyptians were retarded. Now I'm beginning to realize that it has a whole lot more to do with how we are taught to learn language.

So now in Korea...

i sort of lost it yesterday. I was teaching little Bennie and Angie phonics stuff out of there phonics book, and there's a page that has

P + ark = Park.

That's it though. The book doesn't follow through with the whole Electric Company thing, it just moves on.
However, i have about 20 minutes of material that i have to stretch to fit a 45 minute class, so i thought i'd build on it.

wasn't going to happen.

They could read "ark"
and they could read "park", because they already knew it. But when i switched to an "M", i met blank stares. It's not that the kids didn't know what sound an M makes. (And furthermore, its not like there written language isn't phonetic either.) It's just that they're trained to memorize, not to problem solve.

I wrote "ark" "Mark" "Park" and "Hark" on the board, and had them repeat the pronunciations of each.

Then i added "Gark." (again, meaning isn't important here, this is a phonics class.)

One of the girls said "gorilla."

She knew the letter g, but the way her brain was wired to learn, she had to say a word that she already knew.

I was ready to cry.

war as comedy

I visited a giant POW memorial in Geoje a few weekends ago, and it was...

...interesting.

I just can't imagine what purpose is served by portraying war in this way.
My understanding was that these things (btw, what the hell are they called?) are more appropriate for, say:

...corn.

I suppose there's a lot to be said about the general disinterest in war memorials in America. When people do talk about war memorials in America, they usually think of the Vietnam one, and even then its most likely discussed as a work of art.

But war memorials are huge in Egypt and Korea. And aside from singlehandedly supporting the diorama industry, they probably say something about the countries. (maybe.)

In Egypt the war memorials/museums were intense, sprawling places with poorly made figurines and large plaques with phrases like "the defeat of the invincible army." (I still can't decide whether the 'invincible army' is the Egyptian or the Israeli.)



But in Korea they're like bizarre theme parks.

How travel made me less liberal.

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but haven't really found the right way to approach it...
This pretty much sums it up I guess.
But yeah, before I lived in Egypt I was perfectly happy to give it not just the Benefit of the Doubt, but really much more; I wrote my thesis on Islam as an "alternative and cohesive telos and worldview."
And yet... after 7 months in Egypt I couldn't believe how disillusioned I felt. I've touched on it before... how everyone middle class just wanted to get the hell out of there. How it felt like the clash between "Islam and the West" was based on the fact that they desired literally everything Western, which led to a natural problem with the "Islam" part. (not the religion per se, but the economic, political, and cultural stagnation that because of the holistic nature of Islam, is hard to attribute to anything other than Islam, or it's deterioration due to Western influences.)

I went to Egypt open-minded, and I left with the same opinion that a lot of egyptians have:
(to quote an Egyptian i was particularly fond of )
"Egypt is fucked"

So how does one deal with the fact that liberalism is better served by theorizing than by experience? Would i have been a better "scholar" if I'd stayed at home?

Speaking to people who study the Middle East from afar, i literally feel tainted by experience.