Chit Chat on the Nile: Last summer?
BY HEBA ELKAYAL Last month, I did the most frivolous thing I have ever allowed myself to do: buy a plane ticket and travel to another country to attend a concert. Lady Madge, aka Madonna, was set to give not one, but two concerts in Abu Dhabi as part of her MDNA world tour and a friend had a ticket to spare. I appreciate a good pun and I suspected Madonna’s tongue-in-cheek tour name wouldn’t involve anything related to the party drug MDMA but certainly a musical and visual high. I have spent money recklessly on shoes and dresses but…
Emotional catharsis in El-Maslaha
BY MARIE-JEANNE BERGER Cairo: If it bleeds, it leads. We fallible human creatures gloat over destruction, delight in the horrible and the macabre, and choose to see terrible movies full of unnecessary violence to amuse ourselves. But it’s not as if violence is something rare: some sort of exceptional knowledge detached from our lived experience, isolated, occasional and infrequent. Violence is a frequent, necessary facet of experience. And don’t we get enough of it already? Susan Sontag used the opening phrase to censure society’s obsession with violence and trauma in news media and popular entertainment. Mulvey called it scopophilia: the…
