:)

Time passes by quickly, doesn’t it? It’s been exactly FIVE YEARS since I blogged about his highschool graduation.

Mabrook 7abeebi :)

(More mabrooks to Hisham’s 3amara buddies, namely his project partners Aiya Shegem and Ahed Hijjawi)

I love my boys. My funny, funny-looking boys.

And their friends, obviously.

You now have a chance to help one of these boys win 25JDs courtesy of AndFarAway. All you have to do is press the Facebook “Like” button at each boy’s post.

The boy with the most Likes will win the 25JDs.

Competition ends next Sunday at midnight.

How to vote: Click on any of the images and vote at the end of each image’s post.

I have to point out that the boys do not always look this funny. They can sometimes look dashing:

DON’T VOTE ON THIS POST OR YOUR VOTE WON’T COUNT.

Found this old image randomly on Flickr.

Its been five long years since the first JARA summer (you can read about my thoughts on JARA back in 2005 here).

A five long years of change for Amman, a city that is creeping towards the early years of adolescence, reaching that stage of messy self-discovery, of complex identity crises and moral conflicts.

Jabal Amman, with its bourgeoisie history and current bohemian middle class is sitting at the core of the city’s shift from child to teenager. Amusingly enough, it’s not Jabal Amman’s first time serving this role; it had played a similar one in the early 70s, but somehow saw some stunted growth that has tethered the area till recent years.

Yesterday was JARA’s first Friday for the summer of 2010. I parked my car outside the guys’ place up by the first circle and walked with them the length of Rainbow Street down to Fawzi Maalouf Street, the tiny cul-de-sac that has housed JARA Market for the past five years.

The walk is beautiful, aside from the crappy village style tourist attractions like Kan Zaman and Cave I-don’t-know-what Cafe. There’s Coffee and News, its casual cool clientele sipping coffee and smoking their cigarettes without Amman’s dress-to-impress mentality. Turtle Green a few meters down the road is filled with a younger audience with their laptops shining brightly across their faces. Next to the always crowded Falafel Al-Quds is Shawermize It, a newly opened shawerma restaurant with bright green typography (that I haven’t tried yet). Gerard’s, Amman’s favorite ice-cream store, has recently opened its Rainbow address, in the same vicinity as La Calle, Cups and Kilos, and R’N'B.

Batata, the little store that has been selling nothing more than french fries for the past 15 years is my earliest memory of the street, and the memory is of a dark and empty alley, with absolutely no soul. I remember being so surprised that such a delicious place existed in that part of town, which I had never been to before (I was maybe 9). Speaking of childhood memories, my heart always aches when I pass by the huge and terribly abandoned Abu AlDahab Center, but that is a different story for a different day.

Rainbow Street is alive, and with life comes people, sounds, public interactions. With life comes hijababes, teenage metal-heads in black, families of five, older Ammani women, younger Ammani men, tourists, weird characters that are totally out of place. That’s the beauty of street life. 

It is fit to point out that JARA was opened by a great and unbelievably crowded gig by what is indisputably Jordan’s best band, Rum Tareq Al-Nasser. It also took us an hour at 11:00 PM to get to Shmeisani, which is a five minute ride on a normal day. I wasn’t even parked near Rainbow, I was parked on Manilla Road.

I really hope that the municipality closes off Rainbow Street to cars on Friday nights. Let’s make it a pedestrian street.

Summer is here.

Other Rainbow Street Posts:

My Top 10 Summer Hangouts for 2010
Urban Review: Turtle Green Tea Bar
Urban Guide to Amman: Jabal Amman
All the colors of the Rainbow
Are You Rainbow Material?
The Six Crowds You Meet in Heaven
The Dull Colors of the Rainbow
The Blouzaat Store: إنتاج شركة بلوزات للجرائم الغذائية
Through valleys and mountains
The best breakfast in town…

If I was forced to dump either of these brands to keep using the other, I would have a hell of a hard time deciding.

Adobe, whose softwares I have been using every single damn day without fail for the past seven years. My career would not exist if it weren’t for Adobe. I feel more at home in the panels, sliders, and pen tools of Adobe Illustrator than I do in my own living room.

On the other hand, there’s Apple, that makes my life in Adobe Illustrator fast and snappy, that I use to access the Internet, that I spend a good 10 hours every day using.

These two products go hand-in-hand. They really do. Especially for creatives, we’ve had decades of Adobe and Apple. Peanut butter and jelly.

That’s why I really love these ads by Adobe to tell Apple off for their anti-Flash sentiments.

You know what? I’m siding with Adobe this time.

Updated image:

How Apple should reply:

Hahahahahahaha.

(Hattip for imagined comeback from Apple: Yan)

I was 12 and quickly growing over books written for girls my age.

That year, during the bi-weekly trips to Jareer Bookstore that my parents always made sure I took, I spotted a book with a purple cover with “Pandora” typed in blackletter.

By that time, thanks to years of reading Christopher Pike, I was very much obsessed with mythology. And I remember looking at the cover and thinking, “Cool! Now I can read about the myth of Pandora’s Box”. Internet was too expensive and too slow to be used for research, at that point.

Thus started a youth heavily influenced by the skillfully written prose of Anne Rice.

At 13, I learned what it meant to be a “virtuouso”, that the Italian master Vivaldi wooed the world with Four Seasons, that Bottecili painted the most beautiful artworks ever seen. I learned about the philosophy of Ovid, the historical significance of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and how a Stradivarius is one of the most precious objects on earth. I have to say – I owe Anne Rice my A’s in art history classes.

I was enraptured by Anne Rice and the characters she created, and I hungrily devoured every book she wrote, up until she found God in the early 2000′s, dumping her characters of 30 years to write about biblical figures (very amusing, as it was also in her books that I was first exposed to the idea of logic versus faith, her early books are loudly atheistic).

That’s a very long intro to a book review, especially when the book review itself will be short. I somehow found one of the few Anne Rice books I had not read as a child at the airport on my way to Beirut. It was not one of the vampire books, but it was written in 1982 so I bought it anyway.

While her plots are not the most exciting, Rice is a brilliant story teller. Weaving words and history so skillfully it can lose you. I wouldn’t recommend you start with this book if you’ve never read Anne Rice, try Blood and Gold or Pandora, but read Anne Rice you must.

Other book reviews on AndFarAway:

The Mists of Avalon 
All My Friends are Superheroes 
The Lord of the Rings
His Dark Materials
Persepolis
Harry Potter
Blood and Gold
1984
Twilight
Maus
Fatal Identities
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Alchemist
Eleven Minutes