Another time, after a climbing trip on Hong Kong island, I went with a group for dinner in a Pakistani restaurant. Once more up elevators and along corridors. As we departed, I glimpsed through another door momentarily opened and saw groups of serious islamic men eating their own dinners around wooden tables.

I stayed there because of course living in Guangzhou and having a fascination with the Pearl River region how could I not hear of this place with the dangerous reputation — especially given my taste for Wong Kar-wai’s films. Were I to get stuck again in Hong Kong now, I’d likely stay there again, given at least it’s a name I know.

There is a compulsion in accounts of globalisation and the developing world to make the story about us, we who live in the global north, who either speak english, are of european descent, or both. That there could be a parallel yet predominantly disconnected globalisation, a flow of trade, people, ideas and culture is often seen as irrelevant or incomprehensible to the central narrative, if even addressed.

Gordon Mathew’s anthropology of this building, Ghetto at the Center of the World — Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong appealed to me for more than just what goes on in the confines of its seventeen stories and five separate blocks. As he points out in the introduction, the history and culture of the building is also one of low-end globalisation. This is not a narrative of the developed world’s arrangement with China in providing cheap, off-shore manufacturing, but rather that of a globalisation in which Europe and America are at best ancillary nodes on multiply-layered and discrete trade routes that span from Africa to South-East Asia by way of Dubai, India, and Guangzhou, and more often simply don’t occur at all in the narrative.

I’ve already spent much of the morning perched on the windowsill in the sun, having knocked off half the book in a sitting, which should give an idea of how fascinating I find the topic and book.

Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the World

Published on Sunday, October 2, 2011 by NYC General Assembly
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
by NYC General Assembly

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on September 29, 2011, with slight adjustments in wording on October 1, 2011:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

New York City General Assemblies are an open, participatory and horizontally organized process through which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective forces within and against the constant crises of our times

Please read the Principles of Solidarity working draft

Interested in starting your own General Assembly, here is a quick guide from Takethesquare.net

Berlin, Brussels, Zürich, Vienna, Guangzhou, Taipei, Adelaide, Melbourne. Countries also. How does living in Switzerland or Germany differ from the city within which I reside? Or rather, how does it differ here, where I write?

Because there’s no way to make things neat, to allocate everything according to its place; categories, tags, uses, definitions change over time and even from post to post, I decided to stick with the cities I lived in as sub-categories for the Places category. Countries, other cities I have spent time in or have a connection to have remained free-floating.

Another way to regard the issue: these cities should have been categories all along, and by making them so now, I’m merely anticipating the addition of new cities (or places) in which I shall reside.

Anyway, more importantly, it makes it easy to see where I (will) (might) (have) be(en). There, in the sidebar.

It’s almost 4am, I should be going to sleep but all I want to do is …

Hosni Mubarak resigns as Egypt prez: Video of Tahrir square first reaction

The Egyptian people have toppled Mubarak, an extraordinary moment, but the regime has not been toppled, not yet.
‘This Is Who Egyptians Are’
Iran: Hope, Joy, Envy as Egypt Breaks Free
Egypt: The Vlog before the Revolution
Egypt: The World Rejoices as Mubarak Resigns
Mubarak steps down. Egypt Uprising wins the first round…
Triumph as Mubarak quits
What next for Egypt?
Where does Mubarak go now? [Updated]
Timeline: Egypt unrest
Egypt: The Moment of Triumph
Twitter: #egypt, #jan25

reza negarestani – cyclonopedia

‘BURKABONDAGE’ VON HELENA WALDMANN

mit Vania Rovisco, Dasniya Sommer, Acci Baba und Mohammad Reza Mortazavi

Infos unter: www.burkabondage.de

Indientournee Dezember 2010
06.12. – Chennai
10.12. – Colombo
12.12. – Bangalore
16.12. – Mumbai
19.12. – Delhi

— Burka Bondage

I think perhaps I’ve been reading more science-fiction than I should in the past few months though; somewhat akin to my previous chocolate indulgence, put paid to by immanent risk of gaping holes in teeth. Charles Stross is, as in the last year, well-represented, though slogging through all six volumes of The Family Trade series doesn’t exactly count. With three other books devoured this year, he nonetheless pads out the numbers.

Perhaps to start with disappointments. William Gibson and Zero History. It’s curious to find a writer of near-future speculative (science-)fiction (hence my remark about the ambiguity of a fiction/non-fiction division) feeling dated and behind the times even on the day of publication. I’m sure I’ll read him again, but this was unexceptional, in no way saved by the pseudo-MacGuffin. Charles Stross’ Family Trade series also wallowed adrift for the second trio, and many intriguing ideas hinted at in the earlier ones (and outlined on his blog) remained undeveloped or abandoned; instead veering off on an un-engaging Bush-era terrorist spiel.

On the non-fiction side, Christopher I. Beckwith, who is indisputably a formidable scholar on Central Asia and Tibet frustrated me in twice. First in Empires of the Silk Road for his ceaseless tirades agains post-modernism and other failings of scholarship, which is especially jarring when I’m trying to concentrate on the lineage of Mongolian barbarians. The second is for confusing said lineages with history. I was deeply thrilled to receive The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia, anticipating much excitement (and winter fashion) with the Goloks. Instead I was beaten into submission by the feudal slaughter equivalent of biblical begatting. History is not an ad nauseum which man with an army ground which other underfoot.

Lucky The Tibetans, while not so much an an in-depth academic text, manages to avoid this monotony and thus far is the best generalist volume I’ve read on the region. Still, I am searching for more substantial books, be it eastern Tibet, Amdo and the Goloks, or western and the mountain passes into the -stans. I haven’t really begun reading The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan, which I hope might bring a little more enlightenment… I’ll have to wait for next year’s anniversary to discover that.

Many other books I’m very happy to have at least attempted this year. Edward Said’s Orientalism falls into this category. I expect I’ll slowly absorb it by sleeping near than by overthrowing it in a week-long siege. Some out of China also, Voices from the Whirlwind, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China and The Age of Openness: China Before Mao filling out my sino-reading – something I’ll need to do more of in the next year if I wish to get through even a portion of my reading list.

Surprisingly, the non-fiction book of the year isn’t some Sino-Tibetan / Central Asian monograph on horse sport, but one which many people I know have read: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. That it made me question and change my already infrequent meat-eating, as well as dispose of much dairy product consumption through reminding me why I became vegetarian and vegan in the first place is only part of the reason. That it is causing in my friends similar responses is perhaps the greatest achievement. And to think I read it out of boredom in an evening lying on a sofa in Vienna.

To say a little more. It is beholden upon us and our generation to instigate change. The governments, politicians and businesses who nominally are our seniors and act in our interests have categorically failed to act in any meaningful or decisive way on what is unequivocally a great catastrophe facing the planet. To reduce this catastrophe to the term, ‘global warming’, while certainly affording attention to one aspect, fails to include myriad interconnected impending disasters which are the singular result of our lifestyles. When confronted with the reality of the ecological vandalism and destruction eating meat involves – even before raising the issue of the suffering it causes and our complicity therein – it becomes unarguable that the single biggest, immediate difference a person – we – can make to bring about change, to attempt to avert or at least partially ameliorate this coming ruin, is to comprehensively and permanently change how we eat.

On, then, to science-fiction.

Charles Stross has provided many hours enjoyment this last year; The Fuller Memorandum was consumed twice in quick succession, but it was Saturn’s Children that came closest to fiction book of the year. He, like Iain Banks attracts my attention because he writes strong female characters (even if the females are sexbots from after the demise of humans) and like Banks and Miéville has an obvious social and political agenda in his work that I find an affinity for.

Iain (M.) Banks provided similar pleasure with re-readings of many old favourites and the new Transitions and (just finished) Surface Detail. Both are very good but don’t quite get up to the level of wild brilliance of earlier novels. Yet, they do seem to – along with The Algebraist and Matter – point to a new period in his writing and I’m already looking forward to his next.

Further on the unambiguously fiction side, by which I mean science-fiction or science-bloody-horror-no-near-future-speculative-fiction-here-fiction, the book of the year though is the quite brilliant, verging on genius for the two most terrifying thugs in London – far better than The City and The City which won a Hugo this year – China Miéville’s Kraken. If I’ve managed to persuade you to read Iain (M.) Banks, this isn’t quite Feersum Endjinn, my book to take if I can only take one book, but it’s close.

Finally adding a Reading category, almost all the books I’ve read in the last couple of years can be found there. Otherwise, some of the many books I’ve enjoyed this year…

(Oh, I started the ‘Reading … ” thing here in October, 2007 (with William Gibson’s Spook Country), which is why ‘Book of the Year’ arrives in October (the 16th or so) instead of on some other temporarily significant yet nonetheless arbitrary date such as the end of the year.)

peter hopkins – the great game

Many of my friends seem to have read “Eating Animals” in the past weeks and months – myself included in Vienna. Reminding me why I became vegetarian in the first place, and specifically putting the onus on me to be responsible in my eating, the immediate impact has been to cut my already minimal meat and dairy eating to almost none.

With some provisos, eating meat or dairy in Europe – when these delicacies come from organic farms – is a substantially different thing to eating McDonalds or other fast food either here or in America. Nonetheless, being reminded once again of the suffering such a predilection causes – to animals, the environment, to ourselves – means I have found myself without a trace of desire for any casual eating of flesh.

Organic lamb meat is not cheap here, more than twice the price it was in Australia, some €26 a kilo. As to how the animals are treated in their lives and deaths, I’m not sure, though the German guidelines for organic farming are fairly strict. I pay then, for some salving of my conscience, though maybe it’s not enough.

Figs then. A safe topic of discussion and eating. It is fig season here, and the prices are in direct opposition to lamb and Australia. Ten ripe, fat and purple-skinned fruits for a mere €3. And spices. I have had an idea for a fresh fig and lamb curry for more than a year, though mostly finding only Tajine recipes; admittedly not so distant from a curry. I discover the name of a mixed spice called Ras el Hanout, which I don’t find in any Turkish supermarket. Maybe it has a different name. Having a long history of love with Chinese and northern Pakistan curries, I came up with this from various recipes and self-enjoyment.

Cooking with Michael and Dasniya; bottles of wine, my favourite spices an aromatic haze in the apartment, figs seared and then braised in honey and lemon juice with an avalanche of walnuts. Stewing for hours until we eat. (I should have taken photos.)

1kg organic lamb
garlic
ginger
2 red onions

saffron
tumeric
cinnamon stick
cumin
cardamom pods
mustard seeds
ras el hanout (if you can find it or make it yourself)
cayenne or paprika
salt

lamb or chicken stock

8-10 fresh figs
honey
walnuts
lemon juice

3-4 tomatoes
fresh corriander

brown basmati rice (or couscous or flatbread)

Notice the lack of measurements. I cook by throwing in as much as I think might work and then a little more. I like spices and chillies and can’t understand why anyone would want to eat such a divine thing as a curry only half-spiced.

Mash the garlic and ginger, thick slice the onions and fry on low-ish heat while cubing the lamb (leave the fat on; it’s yummy). Add lamb and turn the heat up to sear it.

Mix all the spices together – I used around a half to full tablespoon for each – crumble the cinnamon stick, throw it on top of the lamb and keep stirring till it becomes aromatic and sweats.

Add the stock, put a lid on and simmer on a looooow heat (barely bubbling) for two hours.

Meanwhile…

Sear the figs in a pan. I cut them into sixths first but it might be better to sear them whole then cut them and sear a bit more. Add the honey – a couple of big tablespoons – and let it caramelise, careful not to turn the figs to mush. Add the walnuts and lemon (juice of one) and try to avoid eating this in the next two hours.

Brown rice takes 40-50 minutes. Put it on about an hour after finishing the figs. Other things that would go well are Couscous or warm flatbread.

Two hours or so later…

Remove the lamb from the sauce, turn up the heat and reduce it till it’s fairly thick. Add the tomatoes and continue until they have become one, maybe 15-20 minutes.

Return the lamb, till it’s warmed up again, then add the figs, carefully stirring through. Throw on a good handful of fresh corriander leaves and take it off the heat.

Have some fresh figs, corriander, walnuts, lemon, other spices around for garnishes and mmm… bottles of red wine… happiness for three greedy people (or four if Gala comes along).

Hannah Arendt And The Challenge Of Modernity: A Phenomenology Of Human Rights http://bit.ly/al0fTY

Publishing Bigotry: What Obligations Do We Have? http://bit.ly/ap8JfM

The Banksoniain #16 http://www.banksoniain.netfirms.com/banksoniain_16.pdf

From the Feuilletons (10/09/2010) http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/2067.html

Insights From The Afghan Field http://www.currentintelligence.net/reviews/2010/9/6/insights-from-the-afghan-field.html

What Books on Afghanistan? http://easterncampaign.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/what-books-on-afghanistan/

Can we really say Wen is insincere? http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/09/10/7524/

You have failed us, Mr. Wen http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/09/09/7483/

William S. Burroughs’ Lost Graphic Novel Ah Pook Is Here Gets Exhumed http://bit.ly/99IVYd

Corruption in Afghanistan, Part DLXXII: Kabul Bank in Crisis http://bit.ly/bzJYzu

On Clean Energy, China Skirts Rules http://nyti.ms/crIV9P

If We Only Had Twelve Fingers http://cabinet-of-wonders.blogspot.com/2010/09/if-we-only-had-twelve-fingers.html

Obama: I mean it — tax the rich http://bit.ly/d8mJZR

China’s Other Billion: Mud Houses in China’s Powerhouse http://bit.ly/aghJ9U

Being Jewish in Shanghai http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/being-jewish-in-shanghai-photos/62574/

Racist patriarchy in Israel, updated http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/09/racist-patriarchy-in-israel-updated.html

‘Livelihood Issues’ http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/mirsky_09_10.html

Shenzhen Special Economic Zone celebrates 30 years
http://www.danwei.org/front_page_of_the_day/shenzhen_special_economic_zone.php

Hungary: Heterosexual Pride March http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/09/06/hungary-heterosexual-pride-march/

Thesis: That’s why they go to war http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2010/war

Book review: Goodbye to London – Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies http://bit.ly/9fBkhH

Awesome death spiral of a bizarre star http://bit.ly/crFrQH

Readin: GYP. http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003982.php

Thoughts on Inner Mongolia (內蒙古回顧) http://www.portraitofanlbx.com/2010/09/thoughts-on-inner-mongolia-內蒙古回顧/

Hu’s Shenzhen speech: the numbers http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/09/06/7383/

Israel: “Rape by deception” turns out to be brutal rape of a vulnerable and abused woman http://bit.ly/9tYI9q

Assigning a gender to be appealed
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/06/3004047.htm

Restrepo http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/09/05/restrepo/