Journalist and author Jim Krane grew up in Lakewood and played in some Akron garage and punk bands (Starvation Army, Jippo and Squelch) in the ’80s before moving to New York. His career with the Associated Press took him to the Middle East, covering Baghdad, then all six Gulf Arab nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Dubai. Today he lives in England with his family, and that’s where we caught up with him, via e-mail, to discuss his new book, City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (St. Martin’s Press).
I was born at the Cleveland Clinic in 1964. I grew up in Lakewood,
on Giel Avenue mainly. I went to St. Luke’s School until reaching 5th
grade in 1974, when my parents split up and my mom took us kids to live
in Connecticut. My dad stayed in Lakewood.
I returned to Lakewood after graduating from high school in
Connecticut. My dad gave me a rent-free apartment in his building on
Atkins Avenue in return for my handling of the superintendent duties. I
had just turned 18 and was clueless about fixing things, but I gave it
a shot. There’s a brief anecdote in the Dubai book that refers to this
period, in the summer of 1982, when I was clambering to the top of a
rickety extension ladder to scrape and paint the gutters on Atkins:
When I was a teenager, my dad put me to work painting the gutters
on his apartment building in Cleveland. I climbed up a 40-foot
extension ladder to get there, a bit over three stories high. It was
scary. I got used to it. But I’ve never been comfortable up high. I
understand how people get acrophobia, the urge to jump. So I was
worried when my request to visit the top of the Burj Dubai was approved
in the summer of 2007. The tower had just hit 141 stories, but it was a
concrete skeleton, open on all sides. I phoned the guy at Emaar [the
developer] who was supposed to escort me to the summit.
“You’re not afraid of heights by any chance?” he asks. He’s got a
thick New York accent.
“I’ve never been that high so I can’t guarantee it,” I tell him.
“Why? Have you had problems?”
“Oh yeah,” he tells me. “Saturday we had an incident. Some people
just can’t help themselves when they get up that high. They feel like
throwing themselves off. They get these thoughts in their heads, like
‘I’m going to end it right now!’ And they’re otherwise normal
people.”
He tells me how he grappled with a woman visitor who, soon after
reaching the top, tried to leap to her death. “It was a real struggle
to get her down.”
“I think they call it vertigo,” I said.
“So tell me,” he says. “Are you a big guy? Reason I ask is
because I could chain you to me. That way, if you get a crazy idea, I
can bring you back.”
“I’m about six-foot-one,” I tell him.
“Oh, forget it,” he shouts. “You’d take me with you!”
He mumbles something about checking on permits for my visit and
hangs up. Thankfully, I never hear from him again. My visit to the
exposed top of the Burj Dubai never happens. Maybe it’s a good
thing.
I moved to Akron and spent the recession winter of 1982-83 there,
trying and failing to find a job. I came back to Cleveland and occupied
a quick succession of dumpy apartments. I lived in two houses on East
31st Street, just off Superior; then moved into a small flat on
Columbus Avenue in the Flats; then shifted into Tremont, starting on
Starkweather Avenue and then two separate places on Fairfield, renting
from Keith Brown (before he started PURE[Progressive Urban Real
Estate]) and living next to novelist Mike DeCapite. I could hear Mike
pounding away on his typewriter whenever I was in the bathroom. In the
summer of 1986, I left town for a yearlong trip around the world
— departing with just $600 — and didn’t come back for 10
months. When I returned, I found an apartment in an old walkup across
the street from The Plain Dealer at 19th and Superior, next to
the Tower Press building.
I played in some of Cleveland’s garage and punk bands in the ’80s:
Starvation Army, Jippo and Squelch; used to spend a lot of time at a
bar called the Lakefront on West 9th Street, and also hung out at the
old 2300 Club on Payne, and the Agora, the Pop Shop, Cleveland
Underground and the bars around Tremont. Squelch had a periodic gig at
a go-go bar called Bugsy’s Speakeasy on West 25th Street. We split
alternating sets with the go-go girls. It was a surprisingly seamless
operation.
I started college at Tri-C’s Metro campus and then transferred to
Cleveland State, where I hung out with my uncle, Jim Werle, who was
studying engineering, and Plain Dealer columnist John Petkovic,
who was then infatuated with his Bible as Literature class. In 1988 I
moved to New York, into a building full of Clevelanders, including
DeCapite. I wound up graduating from City College of New York —
nine years after starting my degree. I moved to Texas briefly, but
spent most of the next 15 years in New York or just across the river in
Jersey City. But I still consider Cleveland my hometown. Always
will.
How and when did you first arrive in Dubai? How long did you live
there?
I first visited Dubai in 2004 with my girlfriend, now wife, Chloe. I
was living in Baghdad at the time, working as a correspondent for the
Associated Press. It was six weeks in, two weeks out. I met up with
Chloe for most of my two-week breaks. Once, we went to Sri Lanka and
stayed at a friend’s beach house. On the way back to Baghdad (me) and
London (Chloe) decided to spend a night in Dubai. We’d heard the hype
and wanted to see whether the city lived up to its reputation. Neither
of us were impressed. Dubai was stiflingly humid — worse than
Baghdad — and the streets in the city center were gridlocked and
charmless. The whole place seemed designed to intimidate pedestrians.
We couldn’t figure out what the hype about this “Las Vegas in the Gulf”
was all about.
A few months later, my editor at AP informed me that my next
assignment would be in Dubai. “The pearl of the Middle East,” she
described it. I told her I didn’t care much for Dubai. Was there
anyplace else I could go? She widened the options: I could have Dubai
or Caracas. So we took Dubai.
For an American, what about the city feels familiar, and what is
jarring?
After Baghdad, Dubai was more familiar than jarring. It’s a modern
city with broad highways, sparkling skyscrapers and huge tracts of
suburban housing. You can eat substandard ribs at Tony Roma’s, pick up
a six pack at the liquor store and grill your German bratwursts on the
backyard barbecue. Dubai looks a lot like Phoenix or Las Vegas, but
with a very nice beach.
But there are plenty of reminders that you’re not in the U.S.A.
anymore. There are outdoor Iranian kebab restaurants with reclining
groups smoking bubbling waterpipes, gushing cherry- and apple-scented
smoke. There are teeming immigrant streets smelling of curry and the
sharp musky smell of oud incense in the malls, where the local Arabs
parade in their distinctive dress: the men in immaculate starched gowns
so white they are slightly blue, and the contrasting black abayas of
the women, looking graceful and attractive in dresses meant to be
modest.
What is different about the United Arab Emirates from, say, Saudi
Arabia, another nation whose wealth comes mostly from the West, that
makes the rapid rise of a city like Dubai possible?
Well, first off, I should point out that Dubai’s wealth doesn’t come
mostly from the West — at least not right away. Since Dubai
doesn’t have much in the way of oil, the city makes its money through
trade, shipping, financial services, tourism and, until recently,
construction and real estate. That said, a lot of the money invested in
Dubai comes from the surrounding oil states. That makes Dubai the
largest physical manifestation of last year’s $4 gas.
Dubai is vastly different from Saudi Arabia. Both were very
primitive and nearly empty until recently. In Dubai’s case, the
primitive days are even more recent. But Saudi Arabia is stifling
— and I don’t mean the weather. To westerners, especially, the
place just feels oppressive, with forced piety and tragic segregation
of the sexes. The atmosphere feels wrong. By comparison, Dubai basks in
a heady freedom, even though the government is as undemocratic as they
get. The city is tolerant and open, with bars and brothels, mosques and
temples and churches, and beaches thronged with women in bikinis next
to others covered head to toe in black.
What’s it like to visit the Palms [palm-tree-shaped man-made
islands packed with expensive homes and hotels]?
The Palm Jumeirah is the only one of the three Palm islands that is
yet open. Visiting it is a non-event. In fact, driving up the “trunk”
of the Palm, you rarely even get a view of the sea. The land was so
expensive to reclaim that every square inch of it is built upon. You’d
be forgiven for not realizing you were on an island. Each of the 17
“fronds” leading off from the main trunk is a single dead-end street
lined with blocky McMansions jammed as tight as teeth in a set of
dentures. The gargantuan pink Atlantis resort at the far end is an
arresting sight, the interior done in undersea themes of starfish and
shell bas-reliefs, and giant fish tanks swarming with sharks.
You write about the stratification of the city, with abject
poverty amidst the staggering wealth, even sex slavery. Do the wealthy
inhabitants and visitors ever see this? Do they care?
Yes, Dubai is extremely stratified, about as stratified as is
humanly possible, with some of the world’s richest people living just
blocks away from some of its poorest. No, wealthy Dubaians don’t
usually venture into the labor camps, where the poorest immigrant
workers live in their ramshackle dormitories. But that said, wealthy
people in the Cleveland suburbs don’t usually spend a lot of time in
the city’s poorest ghettos. And the poverty in Dubai isn’t the grinding
urban malaise you see in Cleveland, with the despair, unemployment and
the violent subculture. Dubai’s poor have jobs. There is very little
crime. But the workers, mainly young men who’ve left their families in
their home countries, work in extremely harsh conditions for nearly
nothing. The men responsible for building a city that claims
ostentation as its brand are not much better off than slaves.
You write that Dubai was built in “the earth’s most barren
landscape” on the concept of “hotel as destination.” So it’s tempting
to think of the city as the Vegas of the Middle East. Would that be
accurate? Has it become popular among American celebrities?
Yes, it’s Las Vegas on steroids, without the gambling, but with
twice the hookers. American celebrities do breeze through from time to
time. Paris Hilton just shot a TV series in Dubai. Tiger Woods designed
a golf course and Brad Pitt was designing a resort hotel, but it
appears both of those projects were canceled.
You note that the UAE is an American ally and viewed in
Washington as “the anti-Iran.” Is that sound reasoning, or
naïve?
You’re asking me whether I’m naïve? Let me explain: Dubai and
the UAE is viewed as the anti-Iran in the context in which I placed it
in my book. Washington (belatedly) wants to support Dubai’s social
freedoms and religious tolerance as an antidote to Iran’s intolerance
and lack of those freedoms. They hope the region ultimately adopts the
“Dubai way” rather than the “Iran way.” This is one reason why the Bush
and Obama administrations gave support to the UAE’s nuclear-power
program. They pointed out that the UAE went about developing its
nuclear program in a transparent fashion, swearing off the enrichment
process and working hand-in-hand with the United Nations. In this way,
also, Dubai is the “anti-Iran” — the example to the region that
there is a right way to pursue nuclear power and a wrong way. The right
way gets you American support. The wrong way gets you American
sanctions.
This approach is similar to the way that Washington bolstered Puerto
Rico in the ’60s and ’70s, pouring in the cash to create a capitalist
role model that would diminish the attraction of Cuba to the rest of
Latin America and the Caribbean.
Of course, Dubai isn’t only the anti-Iran. Dubai is also Iran’s
window through the U.S. embargo, one of its largest trading partners
and an offshore mecca for Iranian business.
“Dubai is the most important city on earth to the Islamic Republic
of Iran, with the exception of Tehran,” says Saeed Leylaz, the editor
of Tehran’s Sarmayeh financial newspaper.
These roles may sound incompatible, but they’re not. Dubai is a
place that is focused on business, not politics. It makes a lot of
money out of its relationship with Iran, just as it does with America.
It’s not impossible to be great simultaneous friends with Washington
and Tehran, but it’s difficult. Dubai does a great job finessing
it.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 6, 2009.