One can dream...

"Obama, please phone the Muslim 'street vendor hero' too"

Professor Hamid Dabashi addresses an open letter to President Obama about the NY "street vendor heroes" -including a Somali man- who alerted police to the Times Square bomb threat earlier this month.

New York (CNN) -- "Dear Mr. President: How good of you, sir, to have personally telephoned two New York heroes whose timely diligence prevented a lunatic from causing a catastrophe in Times Square.

We New Yorkers are happy to hear you called Mr. Lance L. Orton Sr. and Mr. Duane Jackson to thank them for their vigilance. But there is a third vendor, Mr. President, whom you forgot to call. His name is Alioune B. Niass, and he is an immigrant from Somalia who said he was the first person to notice the smoking Nissan Pathfinder.

There is another reason besides fairness. Mr. Niass is a Muslim from Somalia, and some of us Muslim-Americans have a suspicion that your staff might not have brought him to your attention because the idea of a Muslim hero in New York does not quite dovetail with the stereotype..."

Link for full article.

Photo courtesy LA Times blog.

Desert Jewels & North African Art

A new art exhibit featuring beautiful baubles from the Xavier Guerrand-Hermès* collection of North African jewelry opens this weekend at the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.



Conjointly with the exhibit is the book Desert Jewels, highlighting this

"jewelry from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt, along with late nineteenth- and early twentieth century photographs of North African landscapes, urban scenes, and portraits. The book blends a careful analysis of traditional North African jewelry design and Amazigh (also known as Berber) culture with dazzling images of ornate necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings, and fibulae."

If you're lucky enough to go, let me know what you thought!

More info -and photos- at the NY Museum for African Arts.

*Yes, that Hermès.

Au galop

Like horses? Like this photo essay from

the Magnum archives on Slate.com.

Horses on a Moroccan beach, 1973.

Nadine Labaki's film "Caramel"

I resisted seeing Caramel when it first came during our International Film Festival. I thought: "a beauty salon in Beirut, a bunch of scheming women bonding over leg waxing and kvetching about men? No thanks." But I was wrong to write this film off.

Nadine Labaki's beautiful film is a vision of a woman with a deep-felt love for people and life. The women in the film -all of them- are a refreshing departure from the plastic-sheened bobblehead bimbos for which Lebanon has unfortunately become best known in the past decade. These actresses and their characters are magnificent in their elegance, passion and weakness. You easily slip into their world, like a quiet spectator seated in a corner of their pink beauty salon, and are enraptured...

Labaki likewise possesses a sense for les moments de douceur de la vie and a sense of artistic restraint indicative of true talent. In her hands emotion and passion are subtly suggested -- and all the more titillating for it -- by a wisp of hair falling across another's face, a sun-lit silhouette, a wailing car honk.

You get a real sense that this film was created for insiders already versed in the realities of daily life in Lebanon; therefore there are no didactic segues into religious sectarianism, digressions on politics or any other snares of the spider's web in which a filmaker can get stuck when trying to explain their culture to a Western audience; for this, the film retains a natural rythm and commendably respects the intelligence of viewers, no matter their background, and their ability to understand the film's many layers of meaning.

Of course any good film needs strong, relatable characters. What could have been over-acted, stock dramatis personae in the hands of lesser actors become memorable performances with this cast. There's the Muslim fiancee whose husband won't be her first time; the jilted, bitter mistress waging a one-sided battle against her man's clueless wife; a washed-up housewife/former actress desperate to get back into the biz; the not-so subtley repressed lesbian who yearns for one of her clients and most touching of all, two elderly sisters, seamstress Rose and her deranged, trash-collecting, shrill-voiced but endlessly charming sister Lili. The men occupy more peripheral roles.

This isn't high cinema and the plot itself is pretty standard, but thanks to Labaki's strong directorial vision and the characters' melancholy charm, this film that's all about the "sweetness of life that burns" is never saccharine or cloying.