Cultural critique has much left to achieve

Finally I came across the blog of cultural critic and author Brian Holmes, which is nice in the way that he publishes here some of his recent texts for open access. Nevertheless I was used to find them in several magazines or other sites spread over the net, this is an interesting and …

urgent re-evaluation needed

Back when I posted on Persepolis I already had been thinking if I should post on aryan description as the terminology for the Iranian people and point to the nowadays obsolete understanding of the usage of Aryan to mean “all Indo-Europeans” by most scholars. In central Europe and especially in Germany there is still …

the precarious nature of actual documentary

as stated by Hito Steyerl in her contribution on Documentary Uncertainty for the current issue of the A Prior magazine, which thematically focuses – as far as one can say that by displaying blue fonts on blue background, or eventually the magazine already wants this way to point to the difficulties of current readabilities …

prolonged interlude for Umm Kulthum

The interview with Virginia Danileson, the author of “The Voice of : Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century” (University of Chicago Press. 1997), I have found just became to interesting to do it simply as an extended UPDATE on Umm Kulthum, so I thought to play it out as …

interlude for ‘The Voice and Face of Egypt’

Another precious egyptian find which I brought with me from the recent travelling experience is the music of Oum Kalthoum (or Umm Kulthum) who has been described as to be more than a musician, she became ‘the voice and face of Egypt’.
... one of the main goals of her performances was to bring her …

again UPDATE: LMD and bitterlemons on 40 years

Also the June issue of Le monde diplomatique (LMD) focuses in its Dossier on the 1967 war in the Middle East and its consequences, as well does the bitterlemons-international.org roundtable by publishing it’s weekly edition this friday under the theme: June 1967, 40 years later: a regional view.

Both are again good sources to …

Persepolis: black/white drawn childhood becomes animated

.. today a slight reminder for the animation which won this year’s jury prize in Cannes and the the black and white comic book of iranian born Marjane Satrapi on which it is based. Persepolis, the drawn novel tells the autobiographic story of the author about her childhood in Iran before and during the …