Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 12-23-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Film/TV, Art/Books
LA Times: “Work of Art” on Bravo concluded its second season on Wednesday, with the three remaining contestants squaring off in competing gallery shows. In a season that featured little drama and even less excitement, the series saved its biggest bombshell for the very end when it crowned a surprise winner.
Most of Wednesday’s episode was given over to biographical sketches of the three finalists. Simon de Pury paid visits to each of them in their homes to give a final mentoring session and pep talk. Young, who lives in Chicago, introduced his boyfriend and mother before revealing his planned exhibition, which failed to impress De Pury.
Kymia, the high-strung one inclined to waterworks that would rival Versailles, gave a tour of her New York apartment where she lives with her boyfriend. Kymia’s gallery pieces also disappointed De Pury, causing her eyes to well-up with tears.
In Brooklyn, Sara revealed her works that were inspired by secrets scribbled on paper by passers-by on the street.
Serving as guest judge on this final round was KAWS, the New York artist and designer whose signature pieces are large-scale riffs on the cartoon world.
The judges expressed admiration all around for the gallery shows. Even critic Jerry Saltz kept his usually snide persona in check for what must have been sentimental reasons.
Sara was the first to be sent packing. Her installation, featuring sculpture, performance and other eclectic pieces, was deemed creative but somewhat too disjointed.
In the end, the judges chose Kymia over the favorite Young. Both of their installations dealt with the loss of a father and were weighty in tone. Kymia not only receives a $100,000 prize, but also a show at the Brooklyn Museum and other goodies.
Will there be a third season of “Work of Art”? It’s too early to say, but judging from this season—yawn—the producers face something of an uphill battle.
Tags: kymia nawabi, work of art, winner, bravo
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 10-31-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Art/Books
Afghan author Nasrat Esmaty was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and fled to Pakistan when he was seven. He immigrated to the United States and earned his degree in liberal arts and sciences from the San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California. He returned to Afghanistan after college.
Esmaty has just released a novel called “Blue Blood Mirage”, a story of Faryal Sitam, a returning Afghan, and her adventures in Afghanistan. It is based on a true story and events. Life for Faryal and her family is far from uncomplicated. Upon their return to Afghanistan from Jordan, her father, Jalal Sitam, learns that he is no longer welcomed by his own government and that his cousins are trying to steal his property—and by extension, his future.
Romaan, Jalal’s friend’s son, asks that Faryal be granted to him in marriage. On what should have been a joyous day, Faryal is… kidnapped by Sardar, a powerful and dangerous criminal. Her family quickly agrees to pay the million dollars Sardar demands, but that is of little consolation for Faryal. Fearing more for her chastity than for her life, she makes a frantic choice, but even death cannot save her; her attempt at suicide fails. Desperate, she begs her kidnapper, a middle-aged man with two children, to marry her, to salvage what little honor she may still have.
Devastated by the news, Jalal tries to stop her marriage to the criminal, but his plans are thwarted. He must learn that even men can be pawns in the same game. This is just a glimpse of adventure in Faryal’s life. As Faryal’s journey continues and the story unravels further, it takes more unimaginable twists and turns right to the end.
When the upper class sets standards, everyone must abide by them. They see everything perfect and build a mirage in their outlooks, mentalities, and approaches, which makes life more difficult than it already is. Afghan women have suffered for a million reasons that have not been their intrinsic faults. This novel, inspired by true events, is an exploration on the cultural injustices done to women in Afghanistan.
This exciting new novel is available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Blood-Mirage-Illusion-ebook/dp/B005K8WDQG
Tags: blue blood mirage, afghanistan, nasrat esmaty
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 10-04-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Art/Books
On Friday, a U.S. drone strike in Yemen killed radical American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who inspired several plots to attack Americans. Last week, another U.S. citizen was charged with trying to collaborate with Al Qaeda to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. This week, the so-called “underwear bomber” is going to trial for attempting to bomb a Detroit-bound airplane.
But in the midst of Islamic extremism, Arsalan Iftikhar tells NPR’s Michel Martin that a majority of Muslims prescribe to a peaceful interpretation of Islam. In his new book, Islamic Pacifism: Global Muslims in the Post-Osama Era, Iftikhar says the Arab Spring has moved the momentum away from extremists. “Last year even, if you told Middle East experts that people like Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi would fall in the same calendar year, we would have probably laughed at you,” he says.
Iftikhar tells young Muslims to gain inspiration from the Arab Spring and choose a path of nonviolence over despair and rage. He says Islamic Pacifism stems from the desire to “use religion only for good, using the 10 commandments, using the Golden Rule concepts of loving thy God and loving thy neighbor — which beats at the heart of every major world religion today.” Iftikhar adds that a wide range of mainstream Muslim scholars have actively condemned terrorism, and people like Osama bin Laden have “essentially yanked the microphone of global Muslims.”
Tags: islamic extremism, arsalan iftikhar, npr, michel martin
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 10-03-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Leaders/Stories, Art/Books
Frank Miller is one of comics’ few undisputed geniuses. From Daredevil to Ronin to Sin City, Miller excels at exploring the dark side of humanity without reducing his characters to simplistic killing machines. His Dark Knight Returns was one of the game-changing comics of the 1980s, the greatest Batman story ever told, a book that rivals Watchmen in its ability to prove that comics are literature. As an artist, Miller’s forte is in stark black-and-white color schemes, yet he creates worlds where the morality is a subtle gray.
Holy Terror, Miller’s long, long, long-awaited statement on 9/11 and counterterrorism, hit comic book stores Wednesday. Longtime Miller watchers have viewed it with apprehension, hoping that his dark views about the source of that national trauma wouldn’t turn the comic into a vulgar, one-dimensional revenge fantasy. They were wrong. It’s even worse than that.
Miller’s Holy Terror is a screed against Islam, completely uninterested in any nuance or empathy toward 1.2 billion people he conflates with a few murderous conspiracy theorists. It’s no accident that it’s being released ten years after 9/11. This comic would be unthinkable during the unity that the U.S. felt after the attack.
Instead, it’s a perfect cultural artifact of this dark period in American life, when the FBI teaches its agents that “mainstream” Islam is indistinguishable from terrorism and a community center near Ground Zero gets labeled a “victory mosque.” Call it the artwork of 9/11 decadence, when all that remains of a horror is a carefully nurtured grievance.
Holy Terror, the inaugural offering from Legendary Comics, starts out with the Fixer, an ersatz Batman, enjoying a tryst with an ersatz Catwoman when they’re interrupted by a nail bomb. The culprit: a “humanities major” named Amina, an Islamist version of the psychopathic Rorschach from Watchmen, who sneers that the “haughty” skyline of Empire City is like “sharpened sticks aimed at the eyes of God.”
The Fixer’s response is to go to war — indiscriminately. “We give them what they want, minus the innocent victims,” the Fixer thinks as he opens fire. To bring the point home Miller draws 14 stereotypical Muslim faces around the righteous anti-hero. Naturally, the only way to learn more about the next attack is to torture a surviving terrorist — which Miller illustrates pornographically — even though the Scary Muslim says “pain means nothing to me,” so it’s not like the Fixer is torturing, you know, a human being.
“So Mohammed,” the Fixer says, “Pardon me for guessing your name, but you’ve got to admit the odds are pretty good that it’s Mohammed.” Naturally, the terrorists are amassing an army in a mosque, against whose walls “the night winds blow away seven centuries.” That’s the tenor of the book, though I won’t spoil the ending.
Tags: frank miller, holy terror, anti-islam
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 09-30-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Art/Books
NY Times
Randy Kennedy
IN one of Washington Irving’s tales from “The Alhambra,” the short-story collection that rooted the great 14th-century Moorish landmark in the American imagination, a poor Spaniard and his daughter discover a hidden chamber deep within the abandoned palace’s crumbling walls and spirit away the treasure inside.
Over the last three years in a suite of galleries concealed from public view on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is as if Irving’s fable of Islam’s rich past has been unfolding in reverse. Treasures, in this case more than a thousand pieces from the museum’s extensive holdings of Islamic art, have been slowly populating newly constructed rooms, taking their places in gleaming new vitrines with Egyptian marble underfoot and mosque lamps overhead, amid burbling fountains and peaked arches framing views of 13 centuries of art history.
When this 19,000-square-foot hidden chamber is finally opened to the public on Nov. 1 with the unwieldy but academically precise new name of the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia, it will not only represent the culmination of eight years of planning and work. The reinstallation and enlargement of the collection — one of the most important outside the Middle East — also promises to stand as a READ ARTICLE HERE
Tags: new york times, metropolitan museum of art, islam art, muslim art
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 09-21-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Art/Books
The Islamic center that has sparked debate over cultural sensitivity for its proximity to the World Trade Center is set to open Wednesday with a photography exhibit of children from more than 170 nations. “NYChildren” features portraits of kids from 171 countries, all living in New York. It marks the grand opening of Lower Manhattan’s Islamic community center and mosque, built by nonprofit group Park51.
“Let’s create a physical space that reminds us to be in touch with something greater than ourselves, the unity in community and love of neighbors,” Park51 wrote on its website about the exhibit. The event corresponds with the United Nations’ International Day of Peace. The exhibit is being held at a temporary space at the site; the rest of the building has yet to be renovated.
“NYChildren,” featuring work by photographer Danny Goldfield, is set to open at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday
Tags: ground zero islamic mosque, ny children, park 51, danny goldfield
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 09-13-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Art/Books
Don’t miss a very exciting book reading featuring Afghan authors Naheed Elyasi and Sahar Muradi TONIGHT at 8 pm at the National Arts Club in NYC! The event will be hosted by actor Robert Duvall!
One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature is edited by Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi. This extraordinary collection goes beyond stereotypical impressions of Afghanistan and Afghans and speaks to the long and deep relationship between Afghanistan and the United States, the firsthand stories of Afghan-Americans and the Little Afghanistans in American cities.
When: September 13th, 2011
Where: National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York, NYC
Tags: Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature, naheed elyasi, zohra saed, shar muradi, robert duvall
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 09-11-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Art/Books
Today marks a day where the world rightfully honors the victims and fallen heroes of the tragic September 11th attacks. But people often forget about the innocent victims of a now 10-year war in Afghanistan. This touching video shows artwork from artists and children in Kabul, and illustrates the human cost of the war.
Tags: 9/11 memorial, war in afghanistan, afghan art, windows and mirrors
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 08-15-2011 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Art/Books
The set-up: September 11th is still a fresh, raw memory, and a jury of art experts, public officials and one prominent family member is judging the competition to design a memorial to the victims. Submissions are anonymous. Only when the jury settles on its choice, a walled garden with a raised pavilion, does it learn the name of the architect—Mohammad Khan. A Muslim-American.
That’s how Amy Waldman’s novel “The Submission” begins. You can guess what happens next: A lot of people go ballistic. Driven by a wolfish reporter-columnist at the New York Post and pundits at Fox News, and aided, rather appallingly, by the New York Times and the New Yorker, a big segment of the public unites against Khan.
It isn’t Fox News but the Times that ties Khan’s design to the faith of the terrorists (“A Lovely Garden—and an Islamic One?”). Once the idea is broached, though, the right-wing press runs with it (“a martyrs’ paradise,” “an assault on America’s Judeo-Christian heritage”). Khan, meanwhile, is too proud, or too arrogant, to utter the I’m-not-a-terrorist disclaimer that his liberal supporters want to hear.
Waldman, a former South Asia bureau co-chief for the Times, has antennae well tuned to the media circus. Perhaps it’s her reporter’s skill that makes her so nimble at sketching in characters; she’s a penetrating psychologist, especially for a first novelist. She weaves together a half-dozen stories, from the top to the bottom of New York’s social strata, and keeps them moving briskly forward; you never want to stop reading.
Tags: amy waldman, submission
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 04-20-2010 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Film/TV, Art/Books
In the wake of 9/11, Naif al-Mutawa made what some might consider an unusual career move for a clinical psychologist. He created a comic book. Al-Mutawa, a Kuwaiti with multiple degrees from American universities, wanted a series that could counter the anti-Muslim backlash for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
The 99, as al-Mutawa named his creation, has everything a good comic book needs—evil in the world and superheroes to fight it. Unlike most comics, however, its stories are told in an Islamic context. The superheroes are boys and girls from all over the world, each of whom finds one of 99 stones created after the destruction of an Iraqi library by Genghis Kahn’s descendants. The stones endow the heroes with superpowers based on Allah’s 99 virtues—such qualities as wisdom, healing, destruction, and love.
The comic books’ popularity has grown quickly, and al-Mutawa’s superheroes now have an international audience. On April 26th al-Mutwawa and his company Teshkeel, plan to announce its American debut of the animated series set for this Fall 2010!
Tags: Naif al-Mutawa, The 99
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Are you a Muslim/Middle-Eastern/South Asian actor, musician, singer, comedian, designer, film-maker, journalist/host, or have a special story? Show us what you got!
