Generation Faithful

Interesting article about young Muslims living in culturally hybrid Dubai. Muslim identity is changing in the socially mixed state.

In Egypt, and across much of the Arab world, there is an Islamic revival being driven by young people, where faith and ritual are increasingly the cornerstone of identity. But that is not true amid the ethnic mix that is Dubai, where 80 percent of the people are expatriates, with 200 nationalities.

This economically vital, socially freewheeling yet unmistakably Muslim state has had a transforming effect on young men. Religion has become more of a personal choice and Islam less of a common bond than national identity.

Generation Faithful - Young and Arab in Land of Mosques and Bars - Series - NYTimes.com

Several other good articles on Arab youth are also available from the NYTimes.com

Hybridity and cyborgs hit Hollywood

Two themes from my dissertation are used in this article about James Cameron's new film. (And how fitting that the director of Terminator should be doing this.) Titanic-esque in scale, this new film will seamlessly mix together live actors with computer-generated ones.

James Cameron, the director whose “Titanic” set a record for ticket sales around the world, will join 20th Century Fox in tackling a similarly ambitious and costly film, “Avatar,” which will test new technologies on a scale unseen before in Hollywood, the studio and the filmmaker said on Monday.

The film, with a budget of about $200 million, is an original science fiction story that will be shown in 3D even in conventional theaters. The plot pits a human army against an alien army on a distant planet, bringing live actors and digital technology together to make a large cast of virtual creatures who convey emotion as authentically as humans.

...

“There’s this sense of bifurcation, that really true artistic, cutting-edge filmmakers make these indie pictures, and that CG films are these clanking machines,” he observed. “I’ve tried to fight to inhabit both spaces. There’s a way to take all these technical tools and have them come from a place where the artist is still running the film. It’s not easy.”

Computer join actors in hybrids on screen