There was an interesting piece in the Beirut Daily Star last week regarding a retrospective of filmmaker Luchino Visconti’s oeuvre currently playing in that city. The administrative head of the Acadamie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (or Alba), a gentleman named Khalil Smayra, insists that Visconti’s seminal if controversial Death in Venice “occupies a special place in the heart of Lebanese audiences.” This is a reasonably confounding statement: the film is a lugubrious rumination on Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella about man-boy love, with a soundtrack courtesy of Gustav Mahler, set in a sinking Italian city, with about as much action as Andy Warhol’s Empire played in slow-motion.

That said, I think I know where Mr. Smayra is coming from. Visconti’s film is, of course, a meditation on youth and death. Venice is doomed to return from whence Venus delivered it: it is, and always has been, a vital city encoded with watery decay. Beirut - a place obsessed with plastic surgery and other means of slurping from the cup of youth - was murdered during the civil war, only to rise as a reconstituted, deadened version of its youthful self. As most Lebanese will tell you, Beirut looks back wistfully, without properly considering the means of its demise.

Whether or not Death in Venice is greeted with the rapture that Transformers II will be the younger denizens of Beirut I cannot say. But this is a wonderful story of a strange cultural mash-up like Death in Venice finding a home in a place like Lebanon.

Last August, I got a call from Sarah Fulford, editor of Toronto Life Magazine, asking me to knock together a profile of a Toronto personality who had made front page news across the world. His name is Igor Kenk, and he is an alleged bike thief accused of stealing and hoarding 3,000 odd bikes over the course of his storied career. Turns out, the story had legs (or wheels, as the case may be): it was one of the most emailed pieces since the magazine went online, and certainly one of the most talked about local news stories of 2008, financial crisis and Obama notwithstanding.

Shortly after the publication of the TL story, I was approached by two stealthy young men. They plied me with craft beer, and asked me if I’d be willing to get involved in a very strange project indeed. They wished to turn Mr. Kenk’s story into a graphic novel (with a web and film component), and were going to start an indie pub called Pop Sandbox in order to realize these dark dreams.

It has come to pass that Pop Sandbox is, as of last weekend, officially launched, and the Kenk graphic novel is properly underway, with publication (I’m starting to sweat now) set for May 2010. The visual treatment is unique, the story is remarkable and the music…well, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Here’s some photos of the Pop Sandbox launch. Here’s the Kenk press release. Here is an image of the bike I’m currently racing. And here is a nice post on the currently underway Giro d’Italia.

The Prophet Mohammed, unlike Jesus, has had a short and desultory history as a video game character. His most recent incarnation – as a meteorite throwing hero battling JC, Ganesh, Jehova and a host of other deities in an online game called Faith Fighter – met with opprobrium from the Organization of the Islamic Conference watchdog group, and was summarily pulled from the ‘net.

“Choose your belief and kick the shit out of your enemies. Give vent to your intolerance!” reads Faith Fighter’s tagline. As a species, we’ve been doing a marvelous job of this without computer games, but one imagines that a Streetfighter style religious game could tame the odd fundamentalist’s ire, at least for an hour or so. As it turns out, we’ll never know. The Italian developers, Molleindustria, said in a statement that the game was meant as a sop “against intolerance and against the one-way Islamophobic satire of the Danish Muhammad cartoons. So if a respectable organization didn’t understand the irony and the message, we failed.”

It’s difficult to parse just how Molleindustria managed to miss the central grievance of the Cartoon Crisis, which counted against the cartoons as much as the satire did: It is forbidden to depict Mohammed representatively in any form of art. Yet Faith Fighters was firmly satirical and meant no specific harm to Muslims (Or, Hindus, or Chrsitians.) And while this does raise free speech issues – must all artists refrain from depicting Mohammed as a character when Islam has become a part of a larger cultural and political conversation? – it also raises interesting artistic conundrums.

Most game developers in the Muslim world come under fire from local religious and moral institutions - many of them similar to the “respectable” Organization of the Islamic Conference - for depicting historical Islamic episodes at all. Characterizations of Mohammed are, of course, out of the question: all representative art is frowned upon by conservatives, who also happen to be famously inflexible in their interpretation of history.

Afkar Media in Syria – the premier Middle Eastern game developers – have come under heavy criticism for their civilization games, which depict Quaraysh-era early Muslims battling their foes. In this, there doesn’t seem much a opportunity for relevant Muslim gaming that depicts the religion in any way outside of official sanction: Qu’ran games, learning memes, and so on. In other words: Boring.

But Muslim game developers could, one supposes, take up the challenge and lead the world in the lucrative puzzle gaming medium. The most successful games of all time are not, as we’re lead to believe, Halo and CounterStrike, but rather Tetris and Pac Man. Only the Taliban and their ilk get could worked up over these games. Perhaps this is the future of Muslim gaming. It’s just that it doesn’t leave developers with much of a choice.

The good news? Faith Fighter now has a sequel. The bad news: It asks the player to love her enemies to death. The game, insists Molleindustria, “is a very simple [and] can be played by children of all ages, religious leaders and even journalists!”

Even journalists? They overestimate us.