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A group of Palinesque evangelical Protestants traipse around Israel, which they want preserved so that it can be destroyed by God.
running time 40 minutes
An English sikh having been mistaken for a muslim by a rastafarian and asked what its like “to be at the bottom of the barrel”, decides to find out what its like to be a muslim in Britain after the London terror bombings. He grows a beard to look a little bit more ‘fundamentalist’, and sets off on his travels.
Running time: 57 mins.
The premise of this 5 part documentary series is interesting in itself - breakaway states, but this episode is particularly relevant. It is about the Georgian breakaway states including South Ossetia. These are the Caucuses - where Caucasians, a ridiculous term that is racism by indirection, don’t come from. Unless you are Georgian, or a Georgian from a breakaway state that doesn’t want to be Georgian, that is. Confused? Stay tuned.
(running time: 30 mins.)
Quite often, I hear people complaining that New York has lost its edge and that it has been ruined by gentrification and Yuppies. The people that I hear this from have tended to be middle class white people.
Here are some pictures of New York in the 70s and 80s, when I remember visiting the South Bronx and it looked worse than my early memory of Beirut. Not much to romanticize about, unless you look back wistfully on poverty rarely seen outside of the ‘developing’ world and people shooting up through bloody, shoeless feet. The gritty creativity of downtown New York, was a theme park hell, whereas further north there was the real thing.
There is a consensus these days, that rising oil prices spells the end of suburbia. However, few people under 40 in global cities such as New York and London have any memory other than the improvement of inner city areas. Here real estate costs soared through tenement and terrace gentrification, rezoned industrial building conversions and more recently cartoon loft condo dwellings. But in a country with few socialist programs outside of free tennis courts, and a financial services crash which will lop a sizable chunk of New York’s local government revenue, the Brownstone and brick frontiers could easily retreat as they have done in the past.
On its 50th anniversary, a group of Airstream enthusiasts plan to recreate Airstream founder, Wally Byam’s 1959 Cape Town to Cairo caravan, which travelled the full length of Africa.
I love the story of this trip, because it is like someone’s grandfather climbing Everest in a plaid shirt. Byam and his followers looked like the apotheosis of 50 suburban Americans, the type that cosmopolitan types may sniff at. But they did some genuinely ground breaking traveling. And they did it in style - because they had Airstreams.
Above is a clip of the original, and here is a link to the 50th anniversary trip.
