Protesters vs. Supreme Council of Armed Forces Tahrir Square: "For five straight days, nearly 120 continuous hours, thousands of protesters, most of them young men and women, did battle with security forces. Police used live ammunition, rubber bullets, shotgun cartridges, and an astonishing amount of
tear gas. Protesters fought back mostly with rocks and sometimes Molotov cocktails."
[more inside]
posted by jcrcarter
on Nov 29, 2011 -
39 comments
The Burton Holmes Archive has information about Burton Holmes, the travel writer who became the first person to make filmic travelogues. More importantly, they also have a lot of
film clips by Holmes and his associate,
André de la Varre, who was also a great travelogue maker himself. Watching these clips is not quite time travel, but it is as close as we can get. Take a look at
Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1926,
Lake Michigan in 20s,
Cairo in 1932 and
the 1955 Rio de Janeiro carnival. The later films have sound and narration, but I prefer the silent ones.
[Burton Holmes previously, André de la Varre previously, and the Travel Film Archive, which runs Burton Holmes site, previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 26, 2011 -
5 comments
It's not quite the Nile, but there is political strife there too. The Illinois river town of Cairo (KAY-row), IL, is
surrounded by the Ohio and the Mississippi, and is in danger of being flooded. The Army Corps of Engineers wants to activate a flood mitigation plan by breaching some levees into spillways designed to mitigate such a flood. Unfortunately, those floodways are in Missouri, and they would rather not have a bunch of farmland flooded just to save some little town in Illinois. Judge Limbaugh (
yes) gave the OK, but the battle isn't over yet.
posted by gjc
on Apr 30, 2011 -
39 comments
Deacon Dodge has a couple of posts (
here and
here) about religion, freedom and democracy amid the turmoil of Egypt.
[more inside]
posted by KMH
on Feb 4, 2011 -
4 comments
The Complaints Choir phenomenon, started by the Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, has
spread all over the world since
last we paid it any attention, from
Birmingham to
Helsinki,
Hamburg,
St. Petersburg,
Poikkilaakso,
Bodø,
Penn State,
Canada,
Juneau,
Gabriola Island,
Sointula,
Jerusalem,
Melbourne,
Budapest,
Malmö,
Chicago,
Florence,
Copenhagen,
Vancouver (
2),
Philadelphia,
Sundbyberg,
Milano,
Åland,
Hong Kong,
Tokyo,
Rotterdam,
Basel,
Umeå,
Ljubljana,
Gdansk,
Arizona State University,
Washington, DC,
Horace Mann School,
Durham-Chapel Hill,
Auckland,
Toronto theatre students,
Kortrijk,
Cairo (
2),
St. Pölten,
Maribor,
Port Coquitlam,
Ústí nad Labem,
Columbus &
Kauhajoki (
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8). For more information, including a
9 step guide to forming your own complaints choir, go to the
Complaints Choir website. Finally, here's the
Singapore Complaints Choir, whose performance was banned by the Singapore government.
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 19, 2010 -
40 comments
Cairo, Illinois is mostly abandoned. It was once a thriving city of 15,000, but the Mississippi barges don't stop there anymore, and
racial turmoil, including
a three-year boycott of white-owned businesses that refused to hire black workers, killed the town's economy.
The Cairo Project, from Southern Illinois University, is a good overview of Cairo's history and its current situation.
Can punk label
Plan-it-X start a rebirth by
moving to Cairo and
opening a coffeeshop? If it helps,
there's still good barbecue.
posted by escabeche
on Jun 12, 2010 -
54 comments
"Don’t stop. Keep right on going.... Go someplace you’ve heard about, where you can fish or hunt or collect rocks or just look up at the sky. Find out what’s at the end of some country road. Go see what’s over the next hill, and the one after that, and the one after that." In 1959 Airstream founder
Wally Byam - taking his own advice to heart - led a convoy of 36 of his company's trailers - together with over 100 American adults, children and pets - on a journey from Cape town to Cairo. They stayed in
remote villages, negotiated
rough roads, saw
upteen tribal dancers, met up with
Haile Selassie and finally ended up at the
pyramids of Cairo.
Here is the original film account of the expedition (complete with its own theme song). Next year, on the 50th anniversary, there is a plan to do the trip again - this time there and back again.
Wanna go?
posted by rongorongo
on Jul 16, 2008 -
12 comments
The Last Jews of Cairo As soon as we saw the guns, we knew we’d arrived at the synagogue. Egyptian policemen thronged behind barricades, white uniforms in the dusk, handguns at their hips. Above them, on stairs, Special Forces soldiers in black with red armbands held machine guns as easily as we did point-and-shoot cameras.
posted by MDA38
on Feb 13, 2007 -
34 comments
Kids with Cameras (warning, embedded QT video in link)
With an
Oscar Nominated documentary,
Born into
Brothels, under her belt,
Zana Briski's spinoff project,
Kids with Cameras, teaches children growing up in difficult circumstances the art and skills of photography to empower them to appreciate the beauty and dignity of their own expression.
With projects in
Calcutta,
Haiti,
Jerusalem and
Cairo, they send great photographers to lead workshops, the children are given inexpensive 35mm cameras to capture
whatever they choose and then the children's
pictures are shown (and
sold) around the world through exhibits, books and film.
posted by fenriq
on Feb 27, 2005 -
7 comments
