Understanding Dubai's political economy

Almost two months ago, author Waleed Hazbun wrote a provocative piece on this blog about the current economic climate of Dubai. At the time, the article came on the heels of the news that Dubai's state-owned real estate firm, Nakheel, was deeply in debt and seeking help to make bond payments. Now, in light of the incredible news that the much-hyped Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai) has been closed to the public just one month after its grand opening, the article's analysis of Dubai's infrastructure has fresh relevance. Read on as Hazbun lays out a list of possible alternate futures for Dubai.

Non-sex workers writing about sex work

Australian sex worker Elena Jeffreys has written a review essay for Intersections about four books written by non-sex workers about sex work. She features Tiantian Zheng's Red Lights:

Zheng proposes that it is too simplistic to conclude, as Pan Suimin did, that clients only see sex workers for reasons of sexual pleasure. Rather the Chinese men in Dalian see sex workers as a foil to impotence and proof of their strength against China's condemnation of promiscuity. Participants of sex work, clients and workers, are struggling against dominant social conditioning.

Read the entire essay here.

A Single Man: Behind the Scenes

The film A Single Man, which releases today in an expanded number of theaters upon Colin Firth's Oscar nod, has been the subject of much analysis in the media recently. Has it been snubbed in a handful of deserving Oscar categories? Did efforts to market it deliberately gloss over the fact that this is a film about a gay man's grief? Has Tom Ford gone too far by telling the media that the film is not a gay film, presumably to boost its appeal to the masses?

Ford has, in fact, received much praise for his directorial debut; Peter Travers of Rolling Stone crowned him a "visionary," while the Telegraph pronounced his work an "immaculate conception." But for fervent Christopher Isherwood fans, the film strays too much from the book, adding scenes and missing themes that were central to the author's intent.

To address this, the London Times has interviewed Isherwood's surviving partner Don Bachardy, who had a hand in the making of the film. He says:

“My advice to Tom Ford was the same advice Chris gave to young screenwriters adapting books. He always advised them to make it their own, to not try to reproduce the book in movie form. He had my backing to make it his own and that’s what he did.”

Read the article here.

Art history, Suzanne Lacy, and the 'spaces between': A Q&A with Sharon Irish

Sharon Irish, an art and architecture historian who works at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is author of Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between. Suzanne Lacy is the recipient of this year's College Art Association Lifetime Achievement award. She will join Irish next week at the CAA convention in Chicago to sign copies of the book at the U of M Press booth (details here). Here is an excerpt from a recent interview with the author; you can read the full text of this Q&A here.

Q: On your website, you indicate an interest in "ways to activate history and the arts in the present day." Was it this motivating force that first introduced you to Suzanne Lacy?

A: Almost twenty years ago (1991), during the first Gulf War, I was looking for a way to connect my art historical scholarship to my political concerns about violence and racism. (I felt pretty distant from my research in American architecture of the early twentieth century.) I had gone to the Women’s Caucus for Art meeting in NYC in 1990 and experienced a profound awakening of sorts, by seeing and hearing about a number of women artists who were using methods drawn from theatre and political protest to give visual form to their ideas, including Suzanne. Of course, these were not new methods, but they were new to me. I started corresponding with a number of artists that winter and eventually I met Suzanne in 1992. She invited me to participate in “Full Circle: Monuments to Women” in Chicago. That involvement with the placement of 100 boulders in downtown Chicago to honor women made me realize that architectural history could be activated, for me anyway, by connecting it to socially engaged contemporary art.

Suzanne builds coalitions to accomplish her artistic and political goals. While often uneasy and difficult, these relationships realize what Bernice Johnson Reagon noted: “Today wherever women gather together, it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building. And if you feel the strain, you may be doing some good work.”

(READ THE FULL Q&A)

U of M Press on WCCO

Upon yesterday's announcement of the Oscar nomination for A Single Man, WCCO reporter Darcy Pohland stopped by our office in downtown Minneapolis. Check out the news footage, which includes info about all of Minnesota's ties to the Oscars, here.

A Single Man at the Oscars + UK premiere + book vs. film

We are delighted (and not at all surprised) at the news that can-you-believe-he's-never-before-been-nominated Colin Firth has been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the Tom Ford-directed A Single Man.

(Though, in our totally biased opinion, the film deserves to be among the Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress (Julianne Moore) categories as well -- not to mention Best Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction and Best Score for Abel Korzeniowski -- still, we digress.)

The film is currently getting all kinds of buzz around the UK, where it will open in wide release on February 12th. Here's a link to footage from the UK premiere, which includes interviews with Tom Ford, Colin Firth, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult.

A few recent comments on our A Single Man Readers' Forum have addressed discrepancies between the book and the film. To that effect, Claude J. Summers has written a fine piece for glbtq on the film's factual and thematic departures from the novel:

The question in the novel is not whether George will kill himself, but whether he will be able to escape his obsession with the past, and whether his fierce individuality can be incorporated within a larger, spiritual perspective. Isherwood's great theme is the transience of mundane existence when seen from the perspective of eternity while Tom Ford's is the smaller one of apprehending the beauty and joy of mundane life itself.

Ford is clearly aware of a spiritual dimension to George's dilemma, as evidenced by references to the protagonist's spirituality and by the recurrent water motif, which he presents beautifully and meaningfully both in George's stunning dream of Jim and in the exuberant "baptism of the surf" that he experiences with Kenny. Ford also suggests spiritual mystery through images of moonlight on the ocean and by the lingering image of a full moon, reminiscent of shots in David Lean's film of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

Read the entire article here.
Your comments are most welcome and encouraged. Please leave your thoughts below or join the conversation on our readers' forum.

Claude J. Summers wrote the foreword for Isherwood on Writing, which is edited by James J. Berg.

The iPad: Leveling the playing field for publishers

If you were tuned in to Minnesota Public Radio this morning, you might've caught Cathy Wurzer interviewing University of Minnesota Press director Douglas Armato about his thoughts on Apple's new e-reader, the iPad, its accompanying iBookstore, and the potential that e-readers have to change publishing for students, for publishers, and for the general reading public.

Here's an excerpt:

I think the digital environment tends to level the playing field for all publishers because everything is available all at once. It isn't like going into a bookstore that may have copies of one publisher's book or doesn't have copies of another. That's really something that Amazon contributed to the book world — their ambition from the beginning was to have everything. And I think in Apple's iTunes you saw the same thing — the ambition to make everything available.

For those who missed it, here's the audio clip:

What do you think about the iPad? Do you have an e-reader, and if so, do you like it? Please share your comments below.


Photo: James Martin/CNET