A Different Drummer

A few days ago I shared some links about my new employer, so this time, a couple of good reads about what will be my new home, the UAE.

"Fear and Loathing in Dubai" - A well written, lefty critique of Dubai by Mike Davis in the New Left Review:

"Thanks to his boundless enthusiasm for concrete and steel, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board upon which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, glass-domed ‘snow mountains’, Truman Show suburbs, cities within cities - whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with architectural steroids. The result is not a hybrid but an eerie chimera: a promiscuous coupling of all the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jon Jerde, Steve Wynn and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Although compared variously to Las Vegas, Manhattan, Orlando, Monaco and Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation and mythologization: a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly."

"Abu Dhabi: East Leans West" - An interesting look by Judith Miller (yes, that Judith Miller) in City Journal at the emergence of Abu Dhabi as a regional culture capital:

"To make itself the region’s true cultural hub, the emirate has forged surprising partnerships, and is negotiating others, with some of the world’s leading cultural and academic institutions, several based in New York. In 2006, for instance, Abu Dhabi commissioned the Guggenheim Museum to construct a vast, 450,000-square-foot branch in the emirate. (Abu Dhabi shares Dubai’s obsession with gigantism: having the world’s “tallest” skyscrapers, the “best” hotels, the “largest” shopping malls, and so on.) This past November came the announcement for New York University–Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), which will be the first comprehensive liberal arts campus that any major American research university establishes abroad. The emirate has also recruited the Sorbonne to create a French-language university and inked a whopping $1.3 billion deal with the Louvre to use its name, build a classical art museum, and share and jointly acquire art. Further, Abu Dhabi is talking with the New York Public Library and several other great libraries about opening branches, and it has approached New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center about a partnership, though executives say that no deal is imminent....

“It’s better for all of us that Saadiyat be a cultural complex than a naval base,” agrees Bassem Kudsi, who went to college in Oregon before returning to Abu Dhabi to work for its Authority for Culture and Heritage. “My jihad is culture: let’s let a thousand festivals bloom! What our region needs is more culture and less conflict.”