I’ll bet you young whippersnappers don’t even know who Bobby Vinton is. He’s “the Polish Prince”, and a damn fine singer.

Just as I decide to quit, WordPress introduces the ability to put music in our posts.

Update: here’s a not-so-great Bobby Vinton song. This was a monster hit in the seventies — both among the general public, as well as at every one of the 20 Polish weddings I attended as a chld.

I ask because I’m almost certainly going to delete this thing in the near future.  The deletion is the important thing, but it would give me an extra bit of comfort to know there were no traces of the blog anywhere.

I’ve really appreciated interacting with my readers over the last year, including, or perhaps especially, the off-blog emailing.  Anyone should still feel free to drop me a line and say hello.  And I suppose that there’s a chance I’ll set up another blog somewhere else in the distant future; anyone who might want to know about this can email me, and then I can let you know, if/when it happens.

Ifrits in common mythology are jinn spirits that embody fire. They consider themselves superior to all races because they supposedly “came first,” and they resent deeply that humans have found magical ways to take control over them. Even when tasked, they show an ironic and malicious attitude, tending to subvert their masters’ orders every time they can.

They often appear as individuals of superhuman beauty and strength, but are very difficult to deal with.

When I was in Egypt I remarked to someone that people seemed to be pretty indulgent towards stray cats (unlike in some other countries); he agreed, but then said that there is a common superstition that at night, cats are full of Ifreet — so people are more likely to throw shit at them once the sun goes down. Don’t know how widespread a view this really is.

Thinking about this reminded me of Uncle Khairy (عم خيري), who was the electrician who had a shop in the lobby of my building. I used to sit and talk to him a few times a week, when I was coming home from the university. One day I was telling him about my cats back in the US, and he was appalled when I said that I let them sleep in my bed with me. “Cats steal your breath when you’re sleeping! You can die!” I gamely tried to argue with him, to no avail.

Then last Christmas this subject came up when I was visiting with L, and it turned out that she had a Jamaican friend whose grandmother used to say the same thing about cats stealing your breath while you sleep. So this superstition seems to have an African origin.

Thinking about how little bits of culture can travel to far-flung places, I remembered this song that I used to have on an Atlantic jazz compilation of ragtime tunes. One of the songs was called, “Eh La Bas”, and it was sung in Cajun Creole. The chorus went, “Eh la bas! (Eh la bas!) / Eh….la bas cherie (Eh…la bas cherie) / Comment ça va?”

It was only years later that I learned that “la bas!” is Arabic for “all right!” (لا بأس) In Morocco, when people ask you how you are, you say, “la bas!” which translates to something like (if you’re Australian) “No worries!” or (if you’re English) “Musn’t grumble!”

This in turn reminded me that I have to put those CDs together this weekend.

The issue wasn’t love. I feel not at all guilty about not loving him, and again, I would have preferred it if he didn’t love me. Nor was it about looking after “my needs.” What were my needs? The need not to endure an annoying ten-minute conversation on the day someone died? And it wasn’t, as someone suggested, the case that I had tried and tried and tried to reach out to him until I finally became exhausted. I was exhausted with him from the get-go. A few ten-minute conversations each year is not an unreasonable demand to make of someone, and he didn’t ask for more than that.

The pain comes from putting myself in his place on the day he died. I imagine what it’s like to be facing surgery and knowing I’m going to die (because I think he himself was certain he was going to die — he took out a huge cash advance on his credit card in the days before his operation) and being utterly alone. A phone call from me would not have erased, but would certainly have mitigated, the horrible fear and isolation he must have felt.

I can’t help but feel surprised that everyone’s sympathy was directed toward me, even though I suppose it makes sense: after all, you “know” me, you didn’t know him. But I hope that the things people said were purely to make me feel better and do not reflect their actual views on what is excusable and what is not. I can’t help but be a little surprised that no one evinced any sympathy for the person who deserves it: the man who died destitute and alone. Is it because dying destitute and alone is so far outside most people’s experience that they just can’t imagine it happening to them? I personally have been destitute while facing severe trials — all alone, because people turned their backs on me. I can remember it happening to me. And somewhere in the back of my mind I fully expect to be in that situation again. Do you realize how horrible it is to be there? And to excuse my behavior is to excuse the behavior of people who’ve done the same thing to me, which is why this:

I constantly complain about the coldness and anomie of North American culture; I’ve complained, in particular, that I found very little moral support from friends after my divorce and then after my father’s death. But what claim do I have on anyone’s consideration? What right do I have to ask for warmth and concern when I was unwilling to provide it to someone who so desperately needed it, simply because he was annoying?

was the crux of that post.

I’m going to close comments because I sort of think now that there’s not much of a point to having a back and forth about this in a public forum. I mean, what can people say, other than, “don’t feel guilty”? The person who, I believe, got it right emailed me in private because they didn’t feel comfortable saying in comments, it’s good that you feel guilt. Then followed some remarks about how our Protestant-based civic culture makes no space for guilt and redemption, even though they’re important and often work as a kind of social cement (these were not the words of my correspondent, but rather my gloss on them). I felt comforted that this person understood that people ought to feel guilty when they’ve fallen down on their obligations to other people. A world in which people can turn their backs on the very weakest and not suffer any penalty for it is not a world I want to live in.

Between sets, a couple sat down and began chatting with us.  Turns out they live…on 17th Street.

I looked for, but could not find, Cracklin’ Oat Bran.  I didn’t look that hard, though, because looking at all those lurid cereal boxes gave me sensory overload after a minute or so.  It was then that I realized that preserving my sanity in this modern world means I must ignore around 90 percent of my environment.

When I was in the grocery store last night I heard “Come Dancing” by The Kinks, which reminded me of a long-standing argument I used to have with a friend. To me, Ray Davies always sounds like he’s singing in some indeterminable non-British, non-American accent. Like a fake Mexican accent, maybe. My friend insisted that Ray Davies clearly sings with a British accent. Who’s crazy, me or him?

From what I could tell, there is very little public discussion or acknowledgement in the media of this problem. When I complained about it to my Egyptian friends the reaction was often embarrassment and shame, but there were also an element of denial, and attempts to rationalize the behavior. A couple of women told me that they were flattered by the verbal comments such as “sweet!” or “honey.” The grabbing was considered acceptable by no one, but a friend defensively responded by saying, yes, the grabbing is bad, but in America there’s so much more crime, so living in Cairo is considerably safer than living in an American city. There is some truth to this: for a city of upwards of 15 million with a mostly ineffectual police force, Cairo is amazingly safe; but walking around your average American city doesn’t make me feel emotionally worn down at the end of the day. Some tried to rationalize it by saying that I was a target because I was a foreigner, and foreign women are perceived as sexually available. But this ignores the considerable extent to which Egyptian women are harassed.

Harassment is pretty common in Mediterranean countries in general –I’ve heard horror stories about Sicily — but in the other countries I’m familiar with, the situation seems to have improved: I was harassed in Athens more in 1991 than I was in 1996; I was harassed in Turkey more in 1995 than I was in 1997.

Sadly, sexual intimidation of women has taken a very disturbing turn in Egypt. This blog documents a recent hair-raising incident:

The facts:

• The crowds seem to have initially gather at a movie theatre where some actors were present for a movie premier. Tickets to the movie ran out and people started breaking glass and stealing posters.
• The first day involved more unconcentrated/disorganized harrassments. the second day involved larger crowds approaching girls at a time before surrounding them/her and groping them/her.
• There was no police involvement though Egyptian State Security were no more than 5 minutes away, stationed at Gam3et El Dowal and the American Embassy.
• The crowds did not spare women that were with their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, relatives.
• The second day harrassments lasted for more than 4 hours.
• The men’s ages ranged from 10 to 40.
• Fights between the men sometimes ensued over who gets to assault the victim.
• Some bloggers report police officers receiving bribes to leave the area.

Read on for more stomach-churning details. Some women were surrounded by mobs who removed their tops and bras.

This is a relatively new phenomenon, as far as I am aware. The street harassment I described above was mostly annoying, certainly demoralizing, but seldom terrifying. The first I became aware of mobs assaulting women in this way was in the spring of 2005, when police used these same tactics against female protestors (the issue was the phony referendum held to rubber-stamp another Mubarak mandate) and against the female photographers who were taking pictures of the abuse. The Arabist Network had excellent coverage of this here, and this post here links to photos of the demo. From the first link:

I went to join the Kefaya demonstration in the press syndicate. I was wearing the KEFAYA badge and was leaning at a wall because I have recently had an operation in my neck. Those men attacked me and beat me brutally and tore my clothes and underclothes until I was naked. The police was standing there, watching. What has happened is a major violation, a molestation of women in the streets of Cairo. The streets became an Abou Ghraib prison. It was clear those were the instructions of the police. I caught the hooligan who tore my clothes. But he was helped to escape by the police authorities. I shall file a complaint. I know how he looks like. I shall not let him go.

It appears that recent mob violent has its precedent in government-sponsored violence against female protestors in 2005. Not so shocking, then, that police did not lift a finger to stop the harrassment of women in last week’s incident.

Everyone has a pet theory as to why this is happening. Some cite the widespread sexual frustration suffered by Egyptian men: a man can’t get married until he has the money to buy a flat and furnish it, which means that many for men, even middle-class men, marriage has to wait until they’re in their thirties; and they point to the fact that sex outside of marriage is generally unavailable. Prostitution is not common and is probably unaffordable for most men anyway. Others note that there’s been an increase in palpable economic and political frustration in Egypt in the last few years. Still others point to the general climate of sexism and discrimination directed at women in Egypt. And a commenter at Mechanical Crowds says that women are attacked because they can’t fight back (though this does not convince, because not too many men can fight off an entire mob either).

These theories don’t explain why this mob violence is rearing its ugly head now, and why it’s taking this particular form. I wonder: it is a fact that the police regularly and intentionally use sexual humiliation tactics against anyone they perceive as a threat to public order, whether these be accused terrorists, gay men, or anti-government protestors. That police sodomize prisoners and have abetted the public stripping of women is pretty widely known. Perhaps now, groups of hostile men have been made aware that this is a quasi-accepted, very potent way to express rage, and thus this practice of systematic sexual humiliation has made its way down from the state apparatus to the angry man in the street.

Just throwing it out there.

(Links via Tom Scudder.)

al-Qasr mosque

Originally uploaded by xinejc.

The darkroom-rental landscape in New York City has changed a lot in the last few years.

The last time I rented darkroom space was in 2004. I used to pay $10/hour at Print Space for the use of an enlarger in a well-equipped communal darkroom. Print Space had a really good set-up for washing and drying prints, and time spent doing this was off the clock. There was also a huge lounge area where you could hang out.

Now it costs $18/hour to print black and white because there’s no longer a communal darkroom: you have to get a private room, and there’s only a couple of them. The reason for the change is that Print Space used to have two floors, one for color and one for B&W, but now they have consolidated both floors into one. What this says to me is that they couldn’t afford to keep both floors. Which indicates that people are using darkrooms less. Damn you, digital!

Another photo place I used to frequent no longer rents out darkroom space at all.

In my quest for a cheap place to print, I discovered Photo Manhattan. The staff there is super-friendly, and at $7/hour it’s the cheapest around, but you get what you pay for: the enlargers are sort of shrimpy, the tables are too low, the easels have all seen better days, the wash system consists of one water tray, and there are no drying machines.

Nevertheless, my prints turned out well. Here is one I took in Dakhla Oasis in the spring of 2005. I’m not thrilled with the way it scanned in, because it doesn’t look as sharp or as contrasty as the print itself; furthermore, the highlights on the left are a little burned-out and you can’t make out the detail in the shadow. Trust me when I say the original is very nice.

This picture was on a roll of Konica 120 infrared film which sat in a closet until late this summer when I finally got off my ass and developed it. I had forgotten what was even on the film, and I half-expected it to be damaged since the film had expired before I exposed it and then it was 16 months until I developed it.

The structure in the photo is the mosque in the now-deserted mud-brick ghost town in al-Qasr (Dakhla Oasis, Egypt). According to a google search, the mosque dates back to the Ayyubid period, which makes it about 800 or 900 years old.

He then told me that Shreddies are not sold in the US.

How can I not have noticed this?! Shreddies were the only cereal I ever bought when I lived in Canada (leaving aside the rare, impulsive Golden Grahams purchase), and somehow I’ve forgotten all about them in the last six years. A further sign of approaching senility.

Since I learned of the unavailability of Shreddies here, I have been craving them. My frosted shredded wheat totally pales in comparison. And although the product review at the above link says that Shreddies resembles Chex, this is not true. In fact, it is a vile calumny.

I miss Vachon Flaky too.