For the past two years, the subject of Amman has been unavoidable for me. Not only do I live in this city, but I’ve also been, with my company SYNTAX, involved in the first big branding effort this city has undertaken. I am overdosed on Amman! The branding project has been completed but writing about Amman this year is still unavoidable
So, on Friday Amman held its first large city parade. I was really glad that I came to this event simply as a spectator with my family.

It turned out to be Amman’s most colorful day!

Now, just for some moments, consider some of the tough realities of contemporary Amman (let’s forget, for a moment the “10 thousand years of history” the tourism people like to talk about):

A city of refugees, starting with CIrcassians brutally kicked out of their land, to the Palestinians, to the Iraqis of today (and many other groups). On the more positive side, Amman was also at one point a utopian city representing a new Arab beginning. But this is largely a city of displaced people.

A socially divided city. Let’s not forget that we’re still with one foot in the Third World. This is not a European middle class city.

A city used “practically” and not celebrated emotionally. People just wanted to build a house where they felt safe. Have a job. Get the kids educated. No time to philosophize about this “city”.

A city with an inferiority complex. A young Arab capital trying to stand shoulder to shoulder with Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus. Not even to mention western capitals. Amman is often described as “boring”, “not a city”, “fringe”, “unplanned”.

A capital city of an “artificial” country. Those who feel that way forget, of course, that all identities are “artificial”. Yet when a country is still relatively young, many people scoff at its still emerging identity and its emerging capital.

A city undiscovered by many of its own citizens. My favorite examples are the 22 year old girl who’s never been to downtown Amman and the 25 year old guy who doesn’t know what Rainbow Street is.

A city that, until recently, was often treated by the “authorities”, as a traffic and infrastructure challenge and not as a cultural opportunity (despite the sporadic, exaggerated, grand poetic homages on national occasions).

So.. can such a city have a good parade?

The answer is a resounding “yes”.

And maybe it was the little touches that made this parade a success.

The city cleaners, those orange men that we often ignore, where suddenly marching center stage and greeted by the crowd. The street sellers with their typical carts carrying anything from vegetables to a meat grill, marched through the city with the same importance as the police motorbikes. The second hand clothes seller where there too, dragging their racks through the parade. Girls and women in various dress styles and attitudes. The “annoying” gas sellers, represented by a gas pickup. Amman’s most famous cartoon characters (Abu Mahjoob and Abu Muhammad), businesses, NGOs, actors. Not to mention horses, camels and lots of balloons!

Suddenly it was all there. The people, the organizations, the history, the authorities.. They where all marching together with Amman watching them.

For a few hours, a city simply celebrated itself. And if this is the “normal” thing that a parade is supposed to do, just consider that this is the first time this happens in Amman. Just consider all the tough realities I mentioned above, and you’ll understand the importance of what happened on Friday.

This event was not a “deep” intellectual exercise. But it achieved something that is intellectually very important: making Amman realize its own “cityness”.

Our Amman is the product of the 20th century, now moving into the 21st century. And this is what was celebrated. Not the Romans. Not the Ammonites. Not the Omayyads. But the people who are the Amman of today.

A number of lucky coincidences made this possible: Amman Municipality’s 100th birthday was presided over by a mayor who started his tenure by asserting that Amman should have a “soul”. This gave a voice to those Ammanis who saw value not only in the ancient history of the place (which indeed is important), but ALSO the contemporary collage of the last 100 years. In the background there was a branding initiative which gave Amman a new visual language that celebrated the populated hills and the diversity of the people.

The immense challenges facing Amman have not gone away, of course. But we the city seems to have taken an important step towards accepting itself and maybe even dare show its colors.

Check out my photos of the parade..

It’s been a long time in the making, but now its here.

Never before has Amman’s story been presented to its citizens and guest so vividly and comprehensively. It’s still a work in progress that Ammanis and their guest will complete in the coming months and years. I am talking about the Amman Centennial website, branded and designed by SYNTAX and developed by its sister company Spring.

I will let the site speak for itself and I urge you to visit it.

Telling Amman’s story was a key recommendation we presented to GAM as part of the comprehensive city brand we developed for Amman. A city without a story is a city without an identity. Amman’s story is unique. It is a city that defies easy classification. It is a hybrid, a collage, a melting pot. For that, Amman often gets dismissed by people who are looking for the stereotypical ‘oriental’ city, and even by many of its own urban elite, who consider ‘not cool’, ‘not original’, ‘not grand’ or ‘not serviced’ enough. But once you start understanding the story of this city, the youngest of the Arab capitals of the Levant, you start seeing it with new eyes.

This site is the first ever bilingual (Arabic/English) attempt to take Amman’s story to the mainstream. So far, only academics and intellectuals knew anything significant about the story of Amman. Many of the attempts of recounting Amman’s hostory fall into the trap of talking more about the Romans (and other ancients) than the Amman of the 20th century. What we tried to do for our client, GAM, here was to give them a package of information, that forms the basis of future efforts to tell the story of Amman. Our hope is that our effort and that of others (like the work of Dr Rami Al Daher, who created an exhibition on Amman’s story as well) will be translated into a future downtown interactive museum that tells the unique story of Amman.

As this is an interactive website, it offer Amman’s citizens and friends to share their own Ammani stories. So far a number of interesting pieces have been submitted, most of them in Arabic. My colleague and fellow blogger Roba Assi has contributed a number of posts reflecting on ‘her’ Amman in English. As this blog is in English, this is an invitation to English speakers to contribute to this site too.

Also, for the first time ever, the institutional history of Amman’s municipality (ie the history of GAM as an organization) is being told on this site (for now in Arabic, but the English version is coming very soon). It was an unbelievably difficult task to piece this history together. After a number of failed attempts, the task fell upon Mr Mohammad Rafee’, one of Amman’s most prominent historians, who was able to complete this task to the satisfaction of GAM.

At SYNTAX, we often get ourselves involved in pioneering projects. Amman has never undertaken a comprehensive branding exercise. It never presented its story in an accessible manner. City identities, especially in this turbulent part of the world, are never easy to deal with. City’s stories happen at the intersection of the social, economic and political spheres of society. Creating this site was at times frustrating and stressful, to us and to our client. I am sure that people will find things to complain about. But for now it stands as a piece of the Ammani collage. It is an attempt to establish a new official narrative, blended with the non-official stories of ordinary Ammanis.

My hope is that it becomes a catalyst for further story telling about Amman and its spirit.

Give it a try..

This morning I woke up at 6 am Amman Time, be interviewed by Dubai Eye 103.8’s Business Breakfast show about Watwet .You can listen to the interview here. This comes hot on the heels of an interview that Emirates Business 24/7 did with Watwet CEO Kareem Arafat.

With the Twitter hype going mainstream in the region, more eyes are on Watwet too. The site recently enabled its users to use it a a Twitter client and mirror and also launched its sms-based services in the UAE via Du.

It definitely an interesting time to be in this business

I have three kids, aged 11, 6 and 3. So its obvious that a lot of children TV and content is consumed in our household. Kids today have an amazing array of media targeted at them: from Bluray quality Pixar movies in vivid detail, color and surround sound, to online Flash games and YouTube videos that show them how to build better paper planes, not to mention game consoles and other gadgets.

Recently, I bought my kids all the episodes of Maya the Honey Bee (in German) from the iTunes music store. It was quite interesting to see how they reacted to content that my wife and I watched as kids. They really liked it actually.

Our household in Amman is trilingual (German/Arabic/English). This presents some challenges to the younger kids. Of course, kids can learn languages very fast, but learning three languages at once and learning to read and write English and Arabic at school is not without its problems (currently we are facing this with our 6 year old first grader).

To get more Arabic content into the house, we went and bought the DVDs of Iftah Ya Simsim (Arabic Wikipedia page, English Wikipedia page), which is the Arabic version of Sesame Street (by the Children Television Workshop).

This is a landmark show in the history of Arab TV. It was produced, starting in 1979 as a joint production by the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. If we think back to 1979, this is very impressive. The UAE was merely 10 years old as country for example. Of course Kuwait already had a pretty advanced media, so the show was shot in a studio in Kuwait City, with outdoor film material shot all over the Arab region. Notably there are a lot of Iraqi actors playing leading roles in the show. I am pretty sure that Arab talent from all of the Arab region was used in the production, but it was the Gulf countries that paid the bill for getting the rights to use the Sesame Street content and characters. The show was given away for free to all Arab TV stations in the 1980s, and consequently got wide exposure (apparently the Egyptians refused to air for one reason or another!).

Although the show has a strong Arab character, the diversity of dress and the role of women is very interesting to watch after 30 years. Most human characters wore European dress styles, but there were also people who wore Arab dress. The main woman character was not veiled. Generally, the production felt quite progressive within its Arab frame.

This history of Iftah Ya Simsim ends with Arab politics and in-fighting rearing their ugly head. A number of its 3rd season episodes disappeared from the Kuwaiti studio after the Iraqi invasion of the country in 1990. Even more hilarious/sad was the fact that the puppets of the two main Arabic animal characters, the bear Numan and the parrot Malsoon were stolen.

So how did this 30 year old content perform with my 6 year old boy in 2009. Well, I would say 50/50. Of course, sound and picture quality are not that great. The content must feel somewhat alien to a kid of today. But we were able to get him to watch two episodes. With some nudging I think we’ll be able to go through the whole season with him.

I will be on the lookout for the Jordanian-produced children show Al Manahel (Arabic Wikipedia link), which also was modeled on one of the Children Television Workshop’s shows: The Electric Company.

The longevity of content, stories, songs, images, is remarkable. Yet I wonder what the state of Arab educational today is. Since I have stopped watching TV years ago, and as my kids have been mostly watching English and German content, I really can’t judge what, for example, Aljazeera children channel is doing. I will pay close attention to this in the coming weeks and months.

Today’s media landscape in the Arab region is TOTALLY different than the days of state controlled media 30 years ago. But the question of progressive children content must be at the top of our priorities at least to counter all the ugliness, pretentiousness and fanaticism that’s out there.. Does anyone know of progressive Arab material being done for kids (sorry, but the Jordanian produced DVDs like ‘Al-Alwan min Hawlina’ might be ‘cute’ but don’t really count as progressive).

I am increasingly interested in this field for obvious family reasons, but also as a field of research and study.

In a previous post a month ago I explained that the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic’s screen goes fuzzy and scrambled when it gets cold, and that warming it up helps bring the screen back to normal.

A number of people from around the world commented on that post, describing the same problem. In my desperation I was often holding my phone over our kitchen toaster to warm it! (do not try this at home, you might fry your phone by mistake!)

I will be taking my phone to maintenance very soon, but in the meantime I would like to share with you an AMAZING way to bring your screen back to life. This does NOT solve the screen’s problem for good. It’s a temporary fix that allows you to use the phone (touch screen phone without screen = USELESS). Once the phone’s screen goes to sleep, you have to repeat the process.

Ok. So all you have to do is to unlock the screen (with the side sliding button) while a strong light is shining on it. For example, I use my table lamp for that. I just hold the screen to the light while unlocked, then I unlock it while it’s in the light and 90% of the time the screen switches on normally!

You can use the light in your car. If the sun is shining you can simply point the screen at the sun!

I even used the light from the screen of an iPhone. I stuck the two phones together, screen facing screen, made sure the iPhone’s screen was on and bright, and unlocked the 5800 using that!

IMPORTANT: energy saving lights and neons don’t seem to work. Halogen and normal light bulbs work very well.

My scientific explanation of this: the screen problem is a hardware problem. The screen is not getting enough electrical current to be properly switched on. The light shining on the LCD screen “excites” the electrons in the screen and give them that extra shot of energy needed to operate the screen normally.

Having a phone which doesn’t work properly is totally annoying. I hope this post helps some people until they get the chance to have their phones fixed.

A flying robot..

An his creator..

..are coming to Amman!!

Go Nagai, the man behind Grendizer is coming to Amman and giving two lectures.

7 October at 11 am at the Princess Sumaya University
8 October at the Royal Film Commission.

This is fantastic. Details here.

When I blogged about Grendizer five years ago, the amount of comments I got was overwhelming. In fact, that post is 360east’s 2nd most commented! I am definitely going.

UPDATED: I had a very friendly chat with the Jordan Times Editor in Chief (who was totally unhappy about what happened with me on Twitter). Obviously, The Jordan Times does not condone the blocking of users from their service nor the style of the communication that was used by the person working on their Twitter channel, who clearly has gone beyond the mandate of posting the Jordan’s Times stories on Twitter. Before my chat with the Jordan Times’ management, I also received an apology from the person handling the Twitter account and I was also unblocked.

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Get this! I got into a normal argument with whoever is handling the Jordan Times’ Twiiter account and I got blocked from following their service!

This is what happened. A few days ago, on September 23rd, I was looking at the latest tweets from the Jordan Times. I saw a tweet asking Jordanians not to allow “foreign Journalists” to “ruin” Jordan reputation. The instruction in that tweet was that, we, Jordanians, should always emphasize how safe Jordan is.

I found it strange that the Jordan Times is sending out such generalized instructions (as if talking to a herd of sheep). Its not their job to tell me or anyone else how to “protect” the country’s reputation.

So I replied to that tweet writing something like “with all respect, a paper’s job is to be informative and critical” and that flag-waving instructions about how to deal with foreign journalists is not needed.

Almost immediately, the JT sent an ALL CAPS tweet (which is considered shouting on the net) saying “JORDANIANS AND WE ARE PROUD OF OUR JORDAN, AS BUSINESS AS NEWSPAPER AND AS PATRIOTIC”.

Huh??

Not to mention that this shouting was not even written in proper English, I replied to the JT saying “Why the ALL CAPS shouting? Generalizations and warnings of foreign journalist trying to ruin our reputation is not patriotism.”

Today, I noticed that I have not been seeing JT’s tweets for some days. At first I thought this was some Twitter glitch, but after trying to follow the JT again, I got a clear message that I was blocked from their service!

This is outrageous and totally unacceptable!

What I know is that the JT’s Twitter account is being handled by a company specialized in social media. But it seems that the person handling this is someone who doesn’t get the “social” bit. This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen capital letters, grammatical mistakes and and an angry attitude on the JT’s Twitter account.
It is worth mentioning that the JT has over 23,000 followers on Twitter. The company doing this for them is obviously very aggressive and active. But besides posting links to the JT’s articles, the JT often tweets things which by no means belong on a serious national newspaper’s Twitter account (such as general warning about foreign journalists!)

Needless to say, the Jordan Times will be hearing from me on what happened. As a newspaper they should be up to their responsibility of protecting freedom of speech and debate, whether on paper, on the web, or on Twitter.

I might add that I am a paying subscriber to their paper version. Blocking a subscriber’s access to one of their online services because of a comment is a very serious mistake.