I.

Dubai is a city designed by, for better or for worse, money hungry autocrats and their architects. It is the truly modern city; the first city of the 21st Century. The buildings are more important, and more amazing, than the humans who inhabit them; the ideology behind the city still more incredible than the buildings that have been built because of it, because when the money runs out and the city finally sinks back into the sea, what we will be left with is a giant metallic monument to the first ten years of the new millennium. The place is an architect’s wet dream. Giant towers in which every floor is able to revolve independently. The Atlantis Hotel with a whale shark in its swimming pool. This is the ideal of the inorganic supermodern city that exists outside of the narratives of history.

There are more computer-generated images of Dubai than there are real images, more ideas than there are applications from them, more transitory people than there are natives: a city of prospectors, developers and architectural agencies and everyone is out to make a quick dollar. Dubai doesn’t exist as anything above the ideals of the imagination and as the representation of the possibilities and failures of the condition of supermodernity.

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The First Part of the Divine Revelation of St. John

When the Lamb opened the first of the seals I heard the noise of thunder, and one of the four beasts was saying, come and see, and I saw. Beholding a white horse and a man with a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth to conquer.

And when he opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, come and see, and I saw. Beholding a red horse and its rider, power was given to him to take peace from the earth, that man should kill man: and there was given unto him a great sword.

And when the lamb had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see, and I saw. Beholding a black horse and a rider with a pair of balances in his hand.

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see, and I saw. Beholding a pale horse and the name of the rider sitting upon him was Death. Hell followed with him, power was given unto him, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony that they held: they cried with a loud voice – ‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ – white robes were given unto every one of them.

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake, the sun became dead and the moon became blood. The stars of heaven fell to the earth as a dying man casts away his love. The heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together. Every mountain and island was moved out of place.

The kings of the earth, the great men and the rich men, the chief captains, the mighty men, every serf and every free man, they all fled to the dens and hid in the rocks of the mountains. They cried out to the mountains and rocks – ‘fall on us and hide us from the face of him that sits upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb,’

For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to withstand Him?

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