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Thursday, December 23, 2010

EGYPT IN THE BEGINNING AND END OF THE 20th CENTURY







This photograph is from the Hollywood City Hall Archive.





It is of the Club CAIRO's which, in this particular photograph, was being a marketing background for an American automobile commercial ...



Club Cairo's was at one time the epitome of class, prestige and the quintessential destination for night time entertainment for the Who's Who celebrity and upper crust socialites of the Los-Angelesenes in the Twenties, through the late sixties.


Seven thousand miles away on the other side of planet Earth, In the twenties through the late forties, Cairo Night Time was particularly attractive to the myriad of foreigners trotting in and out of Egypt at will. It was a society ordinary Egyptians were barred from looking in on its unique and naturally morally squalid sordidness.

Yet, precisely because Americans had been the up and rising new global power, and rife with prosperity, they copied much of what they had seen and liked where ever they had been.

While most Egyptians may feel proud to see the name of their capital city on a Los Angeles Classical Land Mark, no doubt it may sound odd to many others that they should be native to a land that had once been copied by Americans some seven or eight decades ago, and now, they themselves copy everything "Americana", and do so blindly and often stupidly just so they become like Americans.