Tag: nyc

by jad

They Say Your Name is Amelia

The woman murdered by immolation in the New York subway was already sentenced to death by a society built on the ever-present threat of immiseration. The flames were stoked by a policing regime that serves and protects only property—it cannot see those without. And the fire roared and rose on the fuel of a spectacle we’ve been trained on for over a year—we no longer watch bodies burn with alarm. This is the new normal. Aaron told us so. And now she is ash that is still smoldering on the coals of reaction. Sister, they say your name is Amelia.You … Continue reading “They Say Your Name is Amelia” →

by jad

Basic Filmmaking

This is the very first project I made in a “Basic Filmmaking” summer intensive I did at NYU back in 2006. It’s shot on Kodak 16mm film using an old Arriflex and was hand spliced and screened silently for a class led by Katherine Lindberg, who seems to be still teaching there. I don’t remember what the project prompt was, but I loved how she intuitively got what I was about. She would later tell me (approvingly) that I “like to poke sticks.” She didn’t let me quit on myself when Israel’s shelling of Beirut started to mess with my … Continue reading “Basic Filmmaking” →

by jad

Consolations

A Pentecost sermon is many things, but you don’t often expect to hear about the fear of heights, let alone the kind of morbid ideation that sometimes accompanies that phobic vertigo: “what if I just flung myself over the edge,” the preacher intimated, illustrating his larger point about the fragility of trust in the self in contrast with the solidity of trusting in God. I suspect that his moment of vulnerability was encouraged by an editor who left a comment in the margin urging him to “tell us something of what you’re afraid of here.” I wonder if he worried … Continue reading “Consolations” →

by jad

Syria: 20 Weeks of Gratitude, Week 9

Part 1: The Citadel Al a’aqel zeena. “The mind is decoration”—or the mind is what makes one beautiful. I didn’t know it at the time, but those words on that shirt referencing a wartime radio play by the Lebanese artist I was about to see performing at the Damascus Citadel would perfectly summarize my sense of Syria for years to come. I’ve only ever had pleasant feelings in Syria, a place so close yet so distant, so foreign. I grew up in a country where you learned very quickly to stiffen up when a Syrian soldier was addressing you. My … Continue reading “Syria: 20 Weeks of Gratitude, Week 9” →

by jad

NYC: 20 Weeks of Gratitude, Week 7

Part 1: The Grid “Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature.” (Marx) When I first arrived in NYC, I didn’t even know what a “block” was. I’d heard it used in dialogue in movies and such, but … Continue reading “NYC: 20 Weeks of Gratitude, Week 7” →