Articles

Serhat Köksal: The spam artist

His aesthetic is perhaps best embodied by the 2/5BZ website, a massive tangle of information that looks like a primitive MySpace page plastered over a Bulletin Board System laced with punk flyers.

Alexander Provan

Transmissions

Recording and collaging radio broadcasts became an inseparable part of traveling. A similar impulse led me to create books.

Alan Bishop

Noise Education: A conversation with Cevdet Erek

Once I had the poison in the blood, I looked for anything different, anything “anti.”

Michael C. Vazquez, Cevdet Erek

Noise Education: A conversation with Hassan Khan

I remember being at a friend’s house and discovering that her father had this tape called Bitches Brew, and I just stole it.

Hassan Khan, Michael C. Vazquez

Noise Education: A conversation with Jace Clayton and Kelefa Sanneh

When we heard that band Half Japanese for the first time? Music where you couldn’t quite tell the mental state of the people making it? That childlike shouting over horrible noise? We were like, “Perfect.”

Michael C. Vazquez, Kelefa Sanneh, Jace Clayton

This Charmless Man: World Music and the church of latter-day orientalists

I refrained from suggesting that maybe the British should try having a civil war or two, or perhaps a bombing by the Israelis, if they really wanted to go green.

Lina Mounzer

Boy Talk: Dating while Kuwaiti

A man could literally live in a hole, but if he was capable of renting a really fancy sports car, he could get a lot of girls. So it would make sense for him to put his email address on the car.

Fatima Al Qadiri

Static: Anonymous emails on refusal, revolution, and representation

what you are really struggling with here is your fear of connecting your emotional and somewhat insecure (fair enough, we all are) political attachment to these events, to your professional profile as a cutting edge fanzine made by really cool dudes.

Bidoun

Destiny for Dinner

The most interesting fortune-teller I ever met was a lapsed Jesuit who converted to Islam and who didn’t, strictly speaking, tell fortunes but rather enumerated one’s “masks.”

Gini Alhadeff

Tone Poem: SOS

When she woke, it was to the smell of death.

Sophia Al-Maria

Satellite of Hob: An HDTV guide

Want to take the pulse of the Arab street? Don’t talk to the cab driver, watch TV.

Sophia Al-Maria

Kuwaiti Kar Krash

When a car crashes here in the gulf it’s left out to bake the wreck curls up at the edges, sun-dried steel cluttering the shoulders of every road.

Sophia Al-Maria

Iran Inside Out

The story began, as good art narratives so often do, with a toilet in a museum.

Media Farzin

Nasreen Mohamedi

Mohamedi’s writings describe volcanoes of restlessness and despair, which she converted with supreme concentration into lines and spaces.

Guy Mannes-Abbott

The East, the West, and Sex

But Bernstein is not content to tread the rose gardens of Topkapi, lamenting the wet dreams of yesteryear.

Scott Long

Photography and Egypt

Talk to just about anyone involved in the cultural practices of the Middle East, and the conversation inevitably turns to the dearth of documentation in and around the region.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Abnaa Al Gebelawi

In Farghali’s latest and greatest work, we face the prospect of a world without literature.

Youssef Rakha

Letter to the Editor

Indeed, it will be a great disappointment if his ******* is still attached to his body, but there are a lot of other things that my article could touch upon.

Anand Balakrishnan

True Dub: John Wayne, Iranian idol

The American accent combined a rubbery tongue with nasal exhalations, and we all imitated it. Only rarely did we say anything meaningful; mostly we just made up the words. We twanged as a posture, and that was meaning enough.

Abou Farman

Thirty-One Flavors of Death: Ice cream, horror porn, and the idea of Pakistan

Places that only existed for me through newspaper accounts of Taliban strongholds were repopulated with lecherous beast-ladies hell-bent on plunder.

Achal Prabhala