78 78s - In Search Of Lost Time - is a streaming mix of beautiful 78s from around the world, collected and curated by Ian Nagoski. "I started sifting through boxes of junky old 78s that no one else wanted about 15 years ago, and almost right away, I made a rule: Anything that wasn't in English, buy it."
[more inside]
posted by carter
on Jan 29, 2012 -
15 comments
Egyptian army officer's diary of military life in a revolution --
It's ridiculous; at the height of the unrest reserve officer salaries doubled and everyone was getting huge bonuses all the time [...] Most full-time officers didn't really care what was happening politically on the streets, they were just happy with the extra money. Occasionally though you'd hear guilty jokes about how we were the only people who were benefiting from the revolution and the Egyptian people had been screwed over.
posted by philip-random
on Dec 28, 2011 -
7 comments
Libyan Desert Glass is strewn over an area of hundreds of square kilometers in the Great Sand Sea, a region desolate even by the high standards of the Sahara. As
one account of a recent trip to acquire Libyan Desert Glass puts it: "Out there, death sits on your shoulder like a vulture." While some would have you believe that Libyan Desert Glass is
evidence of ancient atomic warfare, it is probably evidence of a
massive meteorite or comet explosion nearly thirty million years ago, similar to Tunguska, but much bigger. The stone age Aterian peoples made
tools from it, but the remoteness and inhospitality of the Great Sand Sea has ensured that until recent times it has mostly been undisturbed. However, a
breast ornament buried in Tutankhamen's tomb has a scarab made from Libyan Desert Glass, the only piece made of the material to have been found by Egyptologists, and
how Tutankhamen's jewelers acquired it has remained a mystery. Until
now.
[Previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 8, 2011 -
38 comments
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
Mohamed Elshahed
writes in Jadaliyya about the many problems with the museums of Egypt, including their conflation of "Egyptian history" with "ancient Egypt", their tendency to address themselves to tourists rather than Egyptians, their recent domination by the influence Zahi Hawass (who has
resigned as Minister of Antiquities for the second time in five months, after having first left his post in March over
the looting of archaeological sites during the recent uprising), their poor organisation and shadowy finances and, not least, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities' use as a torture site during the protests in Tahrir Square.
posted by Dim Siawns
on Jul 20, 2011 -
12 comments
Tahrir Documents is an ongoing effort to archive, translate, and make available printed matter from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath. We are not affiliated with the papers’ authors nor with any political organization, Egyptian or otherwise. [more inside]
posted by jng
on Mar 28, 2011 -
6 comments
'Volcano of Rage.' Arab rulers had grown too isolated, too inflated with pretense and hypocrisy, and too complacently confident in the power of their police. Their overwhelmingly youthful populations suffered perpetual humiliation at the hands of government officials, faced dim work prospects, and had little means of influencing politics. They felt, in the famous words of the Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous, that they were "sentenced to hope." More sophisticated and exposed to the world than the generation that ruled them, they had lost faith in the whole patriarchal construct that seemed to hem in their lives. Max Rodenbeck writes about the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments.
posted by russilwvong
on Feb 25, 2011 -
8 comments
Egypt's women face growing sexual harassment. 'Some women in Egypt say they suffer catcalls, groping and other sexual harassment daily. For a time it seemed the Tahrir Square protests might point to progress, but the attack on TV reporter Lara Logan and others showed otherwise.' 'In 2008 the
Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, a nongovernmental group that campaigns against such abuse group polled 2,020 Egyptians and 109 non-Egyptian women. The results:
83% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women surveyed said they had suffered sexual harassment. About half the women said they were harassed every day. The research showed that more than two-thirds of the women reporting abuse wore traditional Muslim head scarves or robes. Some even wore a flowing body-length black burka, with veil and gloves. Fewer than a third of the women wore Western attire.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Feb 22, 2011 -
64 comments
What if the egyptian protesters were democrats? "In short, if the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have undertaken no revolution. The Democratic Party represents the pervasiveness of elite corporate power; its liberal supporters represent the appropriation of oppositional politics into the neoliberal economies of electoral hegemony; the Egyptian protesters represent a determined, collective will to social justice and legitimate freedom. If those protesters were American liberals, they would have sided with the state while professing support for the people."
posted by Duug
on Feb 21, 2011 -
106 comments
How to Hack the Dictatorship. "Gene Sharp is an American intellectual whose ideas can be fatal to the world's despots. For decades, Mr. Sharp's practical
writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt." His fame is
spreading.
posted by storybored
on Feb 17, 2011 -
21 comments
"Sometimes the hardest part of a story is getting there. Sometimes it is getting around. Sometimes it is obstructive intelligence agencies and soldiers. Sometimes it is lawlessness, sometimes overattentive law enforcement. Sometimes it is lack of transport, poor communications, power blackouts, accreditation difficulties or a hostile local population." In Cairo it's been all of the above. Stephen Farrell learns to pack a smaller camera kit:
New York Times lens blog
posted by Mister Bijou
on Feb 9, 2011 -
3 comments
A mixtape of tracks by North African hip hop artists from Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, music which reflects the current zeitgeist in the region. To listen and/or download (zip):
enoughgaddafi.com
posted by Mister Bijou
on Feb 7, 2011 -
15 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
Why Mubarak is Out by Jadaliyya, an independent Ezine produced by ASI (Arab Studies Institute) —
Many international media commentators are having a hard time understanding the complexity of forces driving and responding to these momentous events. This confusion is driven by the binary “good guys versus bad guys” lenses most use to view this uprising. Such perspectives obscure more than they illuminate. There are three prominent binary models out there and each one carries its own baggage: (1) People versus Dictatorship: This perspective leads to liberal naïveté and confusion about the active role of military and elites in this uprising. (2) Seculars versus Islamists: This model leads to a 1980s-style call for “stability” and Islamophobic fears about the containment of the supposedly extremist “Arab street.” (3) Old Guard versus Frustrated Youth: This lens imposes a 1960s-style romance on the protests but cannot begin to explain the structural and institutional dynamics driving the uprising, nor account for the key roles played by many 70-year-old Nasser-era figures. [more inside]
posted by heatherann
on Feb 2, 2011 -
78 comments
"The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance?"
Slavoj Žižek on the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia.
posted by klue
on Feb 1, 2011 -
118 comments
An Associated Press photo of last Wednesday's Middle East peace talks in Washington D. C. was
enhanced for publication in
Al-Ahram, Egypt's state-run and largest newspaper. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak was electronically moved to a more central position.
posted by Obscure Reference
on Sep 17, 2010 -
34 comments
