USA | Latest News

I have a hard time following the news coming out of the States. I don’t watch television, so I have to rely totally on the internet. I don’t actually click on most of the stories, but just from the headlines I gather there have been a lot of problems recently. It seems that Tiger Woods and Conan O’Brien crashed a party at the White House and after a night together in the Lincoln Bedroom Conan O’Brien ended up pregnant. Then John Edwards came forward and claimed that he was actually the father of Conan O’Brien’s baby.  But then Jay Leno announced that he was in fact the father of Conan O’Brien’s baby and that they intended to get married and have a talk show together. And now Lady Gaga has come forth and proclaimed that the baby is a result of a threesome between herself, Tiger Woods, and Conan O’Brien but that she is the father of the baby, Woods having teed up at the wrong hole. The latest news is that Obama invited the Dalai Lama, the current incarnation of King Solomon, to the White House and asked him to make a judgment as to who is actually the father of the baby.  At least this is what I gather from the headlines. What a mess! I’m glad I live in Mongolia. The only problem here is that 2,000,000 Head of Livestock have died over the winter and thousands of families have been left destitute.

Dubai | Boom | Bust | Schadenfreude

Dubai now hosts the tallest building in the world, which may or may not signal the coming of the Apocalypse and the Mahdi. See Is the World's Tallest Building a Monument or a Tombstone for Dubai? Dubai has now also become the Poster Child for Wretched Excess and an object lesson in everything that is wrong, so wrong, with the global economy.

The Khalifa Tower, the Tallest Building in the World. Photo courtesy of the Anarchists at Coming Anarchy. See also The World's Top Photo Opportunity.

In Appetite for Destruction John Gravois offers a corrective to the “cheap metaphors, apocalyptic exaggeration, and schadenfreude that marks the Dubai backlash.” Excerpt:

Alas, singlemindedly obsessed with facades and underbellies, the backlash correspondents fell quickly into weird observational pathologies. Writers would lavish numerous punishing column-inches on The World, an unpopulated offshore development that few Dubai residents have ever laid eyes on, while insisting that Dubai’s ubiquitous manual labourers are somehow concealed from the public gaze. Meanwhile, the same writers actually did render invisible vast segments of the population: namely, pretty much anyone who is not a rich, boorish westerner, an Emirati, or an immiserated low-wage worker. Entirely missing from most accounts was the Dubai of Indian shopkeepers, Filipino professionals, Lebanese restaurateurs, Iranian artists, Keralite longshoremen, African gold traders, Palestinian bankers and Pakistani estate agents. Between the facade and the so-called underbelly, an entire city went missing.

On a recent Swing through the Mideast I had a ten-hour layover in Dubai. If you are in transit the mammoth Dubai airport has a cornucopia of coffee shops, cafes, up-scale restaurants, luxury goods outlets, etc, where you can while away your time, but once you pass through immigration the choices are a lot slimmer. I ended up sitting in a Burger King drinking coffee until the sun came up, whereupon I took a cab down the Perfume Souk to the old section of the city. Every time I pass through Dubai I make a point of stocking up on scents.

Water Taxi in Dubai

I arrived downtown at 7:30 a.m. only to discover that the stores in the Perfume Souk did not open until 9:00. I strolled over to the nearby Gold Souk. Here I took a seat on one of the benches in the covered-over passageway through the souk. Already a few shopkeepers were arriving for work, most of them carrying a small plastic cup of tea they had picked up on the way. Soon a short little guy dressed in patched shorts, strapped tee-shirt, and plastic flip-flops came and sat down beside me. He appeared to be his seventies. From the large plastic bag of detritus he had with him I assumed he was the local version of a street person. For fifteen minutes he just sat there. Then he turned to me and asked in passable English, “What country are you from?” I really did not want to talk to the guy—I assumed he would try to beg money—so I said “USA.” In this part of the world in years past if you said you were from the USA people would usually just get up and walk away. But we live in different times. Instead, this guy exclaimed “Obama!” I was tempted to point out that in some in circles Obama is Thought to Be the Mahdi, but it was too early in the morning for eschatological debates.

“Where are you from,” I asked. “Pakistan. In Dubai twenty-five years. Never go back to Pakistan. Good here. Lots of Pakistanis.” He pointed to three guys walking by, each holding a little plastic cup of tea: “Pakistanis. Shops on the Gold Souk. Pakistanis like gold!” A group of five guys slowly walked by, engaged in an animated discussion. “Pakistanis?” I wondered. “No!” he exclaimed, as if shocked by my ignorance. “Iranians!”

Then, unbidden, he called out the nationality of each man (there were no women) or group of men walking by. In addition to Pakistanis and Iranians here were Indians, Afghanis, Yemenis, Sudanese, Somalians, Syrians, Chinese, and a host of others. There seemed to be inordinate number of Chinese. All were people who worked in the Gold Souk and other nearby souks. “Where are the Dubai people?” I wonder. He did not seem to understand me. “People born here, the local people,” I explained. He shook his head. “No people from Dubai. They don’t work here.”

The merchants of the Gold Souk are people between the “facade and the so-called underbelly” mentioned above. As noted, these are the people you don’t hear much about, and who will no doubt remain in Dubai through its various booms and busts. Skyscapers may rise and fall but gold remains eternal. And oddly enough the old guy, despite all the information he imparted on me, never did ask for any money.

Gold necklaces in the Gold Souk — apparently just looted from the Tomb of Ur.

Nice solid gold necklace and earring set. Just the thing for Lady Ga Ga.

This little gold trinket cost 500,000 UAE dirhams — $136,147. Pick up a couple the  next time you swing by Dubai.

World | Lady Ga Ga | Nobel Peace Prize

Now that Obama, or as he is known in some circles, the Madhi, has gotten a Nobel Peace Prize, can Lady Ga Ga be far behind? She’s due up in 2010. Obama has already admitted he has taken a back seat to her:

She [Lady Ga Ga] sat front-and-center at the black-tie Human Rights Campaign Gala in the ballroom of the Washington Convention Center, where 3,000 gay advocates and allies clinked glasses and liberally exercised the right to give standing ovations (she got two). HRC President Joe Solmonese says she was an obvious invite —"She pushes boundaries and brings people along" — and credited her for the dinner's rapid sellout. Even the president of the United States knows his place. "It is a privilege to be here tonight to open for Lady Ga Ga," Obama said during his remarks.

Get behind me, Obama!
Yassar Arafat got one! Jimmy Carter got one! Obama got one! I want one!

Scandanavia | Nobel Booby Prize

Update: Obama Wins Heisman Trophy!

Has the Nobel Prize Committee gone completely nuts? The Daily Beast seems to think so. Commenting on the Noble Prize for Literature going to Herta Muller (who the hell . . . ?) and the Noble Peace Prize going to Obama, Lee Siegel unloads:

Never mind the handwringing over whether Muller’s husband, a novelist named Richard Wagner, was related to Richard Wagner [yes, that Richard Wagner], which, combined with the fact that her father had been an officer in Hitler’s SS, was just asking for trouble. The important thing was to confirm, absolutely, that Obama himself was not related to Hitler—despite the resemblance in a certain type of poster that had been in circulation over the summer—and that his plan for overhauling health care was not derived from the Nazi euthanasia program, which Muller’s father probably supported, and which Muller, and Wagner, most certainly—we hope!—are opposed to. Wagner the husband, that is.

What a mess! But then the Nobel Peace Prize, especially in the last decades, has been mostly a self-satirizing disaster.

Need we add that Nicholas Roerich was once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize . . . ?

Mongolia | Zaisan Tolgoi | Lady GaGa

Spent an afternoon holed up in my hovel in Zaisan Tolgoi watching the rain clouds blow over Bogd Khan Mountain as I drank Shan Ling Xi Ooolong Tea and listened to Lady GaGa. I’m thinking she is a reincarnation of a Tokharian Caravanserai Singer I once heard.

Lady GaGa

As so often happens when I drink Shan Ling Xi Oolong Tea on rainy afternoons my thoughts soon drifted to Kuchean Dancers:

A rigorous, twirling dance, the Sogdian Whirl was usually performed on a colorful felt carpet. The dance took the Tang Capital of Xian by storm. Not only the emperor, but his favorite concubine, the infamous Yang Guifei—along with her "favorite," the 400 pound Sogdian-Turk An Lushan—could perform this exotic dance, snacking on Lychees from Canton and sipping grape wine out of Roman cut glass goblets, all night long. There were Sogdian dances danced to Persian melodies, played on Persian lutes and harps, Indian dances and music and those from the Northern steppes and Korea. Without a doubt, most famous of all the Tang dances was the music and dance of Kucha.

I should point out the Sogdian Whirl, popular during the Tang Dynasty in the 8th century, was updated as The Locomotion in 1962 by Little Eva.