Category : Culture
I’m a huge fan of Monocle magazine, and have been reading every issue religiously since its launch a couple of years ago. The magazine has always had a loving relationship with Beirut, and we’re often featured alongside Sao Paolo, Tokyo, Copenhagen and Cape Town as one of the most exciting places to live and work. Finally, the magazine’s weekly radio show has broadcast from Lebanese capital. It is a refreshingly honest conversation, both heartwarming and utterly scary, much like Beirut itself. Here’s the synopsis from the website and a link to the streaming podcast:
The Monocle Weekly takes its first trip to Beirut this week and kicks off with a briefing on the state of politics in the region with Nicholas Noe, political analyst and editor-in-chief of the news service Mideastwire.com. Architect Raed Abillama is in the studio to share his views on architectural preservation as Beirut continues to develop at top speed, and pioneering Lebanese music producer Zeid Hamdan plays some of his latest tracks. Finally, we check in with Kamal Mouzawak to hear about Tawlet, his unique new culinary concept in Beirut that has the Monocle team hooked.
Listen to the podcast here.
So I might be a tad late commenting on the two main Oscar nominees, but who cares. So Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron used to be married and now they both have movies nominated for 9 Oscars.
Cameron has always been a specialist of the big brainless money-churning blockbuster. He’s brought us such visionary films as Terminator 2, Titanic and True Lies. He even wrote Rambo. And now comes Avatar. The first reason I hate Avatar is the slew of 3D films it has spawned. Now every studio thinks they can make a billion dollars by making us wear stupid glasses and get slightly queasy at the sight of various objects coming our way in a darkened room. At least they’re not the silly red and green glasses of my childhood, which made you look like a genetic reject.
So here we sit, faced with the awfully named Pandora, a rainforest on acid inhabited by a race of annoyingly and relentlessly new-age oversized Smurfs. Its basically a John Smith meets Pocahontas story set in an improbably elaborate environment some 150 years in the future. You’d think that 150 years from now people would have stopped using unmistakably Bush-era terms like shock-and-awe and vilifying big heartless corporations. To be fair to Cameron, the movie took years to elaborate, and much of those years (8 to be specific) were spent under the mind-numbing gung-ho attitude of the Bush neocons. And the film has been met by conservatives in the US with much ire. All the quacks from Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh have taken to calling Cameron a tree-hugging, America-hating, Marx-loving, sandal-wearing commie. That’s the kind of treatment usually reserved for the latest outings by Michael Moore or Oliver Stone. The right-wing hatred of the film is probably the only thing it has going for it in my view.
Don’t get me wrong, the experience is entirely immersive. The vistas on Pandora are absolutely breathtaking, especially in 3D. You kind of come out wishing you could book a holiday on one of the floating mountains. The film is also a new benchmark with regards to technology in movie making. However, I was consistently annoyed by the pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo and caricature Marine oafs and corporate whores. I mean, surely audiences in 2010 are capable of accepting more subtlety from their blockbusters than this. You just need to look at franchises like the Bourne Identity to see how subtle yet entertaining popcorn movies can be. A Slate review of the film notes that the original Sanskrit meaning of “avatar”—the bodily form taken by a deity descending to earth—is also suggested in this movie’s quasi-religious cosmology. But so what? Superficial depth of analysis is far worse than a deeply superficial story.
The Hurt Locker on the other hand, is what movie screens were made for. It deals in a more direct and less insulting fashion with the implications of warfare in far-flung places. The film starts in the summer of 2004, where Sergeant J.T. Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge of Bravo Company are at the volatile center of the war, part of a small counterforce specifically trained to handle Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), that account for more than half of American hostile deaths and have killed thousands of Iraqis. It’s a high-pressure, high-stakes assignment which becomes glaringly apparent when they lose their team leader during a mission. The gleefully reckless Staff Sergeant William James (an amazing Jeremy Renner) takes over, much to the dismay of the rest of the team. Throughout the film we slowly realize that James is a hybrid of a swaggering cowboy, a highly professional solider and a real human being.
Its impossibly tense from the get-go and the film basically swings back and forth from ultimate boredom to impossibly dangerous situations. A perfect representation of time spent in the war theatre. The depiction of Iraq in 2003 is spot on, and as someone who lives in the Middle East I can safely say that the cinematography captures the feeling of sweat and claustrophobia and dust hanging in the air perfectly. The acting is spot on by every member of the cast, even the 10 year old Iraqi bootleg DVD salesman at Camp Victory. There isn’t a boring minute throughout, yet the film is rife with contemplations on the nature and legitimacy of war. It examines war as a drug, evident in Jeremy Renner’s free-wheeling adrenaline junkie character who is itching to be sent back on a second tour. The Hurt Locker opens with a quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a 2002 book by war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”
The Oscars have long been a pointless exercise in futility, both as a telecast and as a benchmark by which to judge the year’s films. They are highly political, and no one really cares about them anymore beyond figuring out “who” Beyonce is wearing this year. “Academy Award Winner” is a nice title to blurt out before someone’s name in a trailer, but many of the worlds greatest actors and directors were never recognized with a statuette. So, what I’m trying to say is let’s not pay too much attention to who wins how many trophies on the night itself. If you have to choose between watching Avatar and The Hurt Locker, watch the latter. You’ll have more fun and come out of it having learnt something real and honest about human nature.
Here’s a short documentary from last year’s Beirut International Tango Festival, as a little taster of what’s to come this April.
Greetings all. This post is a public service announcement of sorts. When I first came up with the idea for this blog, I was still fresh off the boat in the Lebanese capital. In short, I was petrified, exhilarated and frustrated in equal measure at the prospect of being in Beirut. In the few months since then I’ve actually settled in quite nicely, and I’m proud to call the city home. Fret not though, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have regular misgivings about the way life unfolds here, I still honk my horn at motorists running red lights in the hope that I can singlehandedly improve our roads. A traffic light vigilante, if you will. I still recoil when I see overly made-up women trotting around the shopping malls, mobile travesties of womanhood.
However, I’ve also come to realize that incessant ranting probably gets a bit boring to read. I’m also pretty worried about becoming overly repetitive. So, what I’m trying to say basically is that from now on I will be dealing with a wider range of subjects than my pet peeve of the day. You’ll have to put up with my musings on my hatred of the film Avatar for example. Pocahontas meets Operation Enduring Freedom in a world populated by oversized Smurfs. You’ll have to endure my extolling of the virtues of various dance forms I’ve been introduced to since I’ve been in town (expect a post on the upcoming Tango Festival in Lebanon). Expect me to rave about the soothing sounds of the Norwegians behind the band Kings of Convenience, incidentally they’re ideal music for rush-hour traffic in Beirut. I guarantee all your homicidal road rage will slowly waft away. I’ll be sharing thoughts on goings on around town, film and music releases, interesting articles and videos I’ve stumbled on.
Naturally, I’m still a man in Beirut. So anything I do write is written with that specific worldview. And I won’t be able to help myself from ranting occasionally, to exorcize my demons and yours.
I haven’t written anything in about a week because I’ve been in a particularly visceral “hater” mood. Since most people complain that I’m turning into a grumpy old man, I figured it was probably best not to write anything during this period of pronounced negativity. One friend told me I was slowly turning into a version of Peter Griffin from the “What Grinds my Gears” episode of Family Guy. However I’ve just had one of the most enjoyable weekends I’ve had anywhere in a while, so I think it’s time to write again.
Being the grumpy serial-complainer that I am, one of my favorite pet peeves about Beirut is that there’s very little culture to be savored year-round (besides the obvious summer festivals). However I now realize that I’m very much mistaken in this assumption. The major difference is that whilst culture assails you incessantly in Europe, here in Beirut you have to proactively seek it out.
And on this point, I’m afraid most of us are inexcusably lazy. Anytime I suggest anything remotely cultural to any of my friends I’m met with either a pronounced sense of apathy or a geographical/sectarian disdain for the region where the particular event is taking place.
However this weekend a good friend of mine was over from abroad. He didn’t come from the snowstorms of Paris or London. He didn’t come from the newly-bankrupt sandstorms of Dubai. He drove two and a half hours from Damascus. We’re friends from London, and transcend the confessional, national, blablabla divides that often punctuate friendships in the region. I poke fun at the nasty looks his Syrian number plate must elicit in Beirut and that’s about it.
So imagine my personal shame when this friend was the first to take me on a cultural tour of Beirut in a while. On Friday night we headed to the Madina Theater in Hamra. I’d heard a lot about the play “Sar Lezim Nihke”, a follow up to the wildly successful “Hakke Niswen” itself a Middle Eastern take on the worldwide success of the Vagina Monologues. The whole theater-going experience in Beirut is a bit of a novelty for me.
I have one major handicap when it comes to culture in this city; I dress like a hardcore capitalist/off duty banker. I have a self-imposed uniform of White Shirt, Black blazer, jeans and loafers. This shouldn’t pose a problem in and of itself. However both ends of the stupidity spectrum are equally represented here. The capitalists are caricatures of themselves, as are the hippies. So one party doesn’t accept me because I don’t embrace their apocalyptic perception of the “Dollar rules all”, and the other rejects me because I don’t wear socks with sandals and reject all earthly possessions. It’s a tricky catch 22, but I deal with it. Maybe I should get a t-shirt made: “No One Knows I’m a Hippie”.
So back to our theater. I was delighted to see some new faces, filled with anticipation at this new play. People started congregating in the hall of the theater, itself a self-knowing throwback to the 70s. A few people sipped on wine and vodka as they waited for the tardy start of the play. Everyone respectfully switched their phones off before walking into the auditorium. It was a welcome reminder of what civility looked like.
The play itself was a mixed bag. It was refreshing to see “taboo” subjects treated in colloquial Lebanese meters away from a mosque. Female characters were complaining about their male counterparts’ lack of geographic orientation skills with regard to their G-spot and so on. However for someone with exposure to plays and comedy the world round, some of the jokes sounded tired (read Plagiarized) and some of the dialogue was straight out of Sex and the City. But I guess, placed within the context of the local theatrical scene, this stuff is groundbreaking. And that’s the important part. So that was success number one.
Then on Saturday came two eagerly awaited cultural happenings. The first one took place at the Paper Cup Bookshop in Mar Mikhael. The Lebanese photographer Rhea Karam, who I was supremely chuffed to meet on my last trip to New York, was signing copies of her self-published book detailing the evolution of Beirut’s walls. It’s a seminal work in the analysis of self-expression in the Lebanese capital and I recommend you all grab a copy.
Shortly after getting the book, I headed over to Barometre off Bliss Street for a quick beer and some chicken wings before moving onto the main event on the musical calendar for the week, the Mashrou3 Leila CD launch and concert. These guys had been brought to my attention a few months ago, and I’ve been listening to a handful of their tracks on MySpace and some shaky YouTube handheld camera footage from some of their appearances around town. The concert took place at the Demco Steel Warehouse in Bourj Hammoud. The venue was great, even if it was something of a Health & Safety nightmare. Hundreds of kids hoped up on cheap Vodka and foul beer in a steel factory? What could possibly go wrong?
The band played all hits like Shimm El Yasmine and Batenjein, as well as a few improvised bits here and there. The front man exhibited a fragility and dexterity onstage which was mesmerizing. He skipped about as if he were alone with 6 friends, forgetting that there were hundreds upon hundreds of people there cheering them on. From time to time he and the band would look out over the crowd and say: “fuck there’s a lot of people here tonight” and indulge in a fit of nervous giggles. I’ve been listening to their CD (which they were giving away with the tickets at the door) on loop in the car. It’s a truly solid work, exploring themes we can all identify with. From the overbearing parents to the abrupt and intimidating security forces. They even brought out a male belly dancer at one point, which greatly angered a raging homophobe standing next to me, but I thought was a brave (if slightly pointless) addition to their whole rejection of established Lebanese societal morals. My personal favorite song is Latlateh, mocking gossipy Aunties Who Lunch.
So, overall, I can say I was a very happy camper in Beirut this weekend. I bumped into lots of old friends and made a few new ones. I even discovered this blog has some fans, and that they’re badgering me to keep it going because they’re happy someone is voicing what’s happening in their minds. The constant question, should I be here or should I be somewhere else. Should I be a banker or a writer? Should I go to the theater or to a pompous bar? I say do whatever makes you happy. And do it well. And keep doing it. And when it stops making you happy, move on. Which brings me to my next anecdote.
I really wanted this post to be entirely positive. However, on my way home tonight, I was confronted with the kind of bozo that makes life here just unbearable. Driving down a quiet one way street in Achrafieh, I see a set of oncoming headlights heading towards me at speed (the wrong way down a one-way street, if you’re following closely). So I responded with flashing lights of my own, this being the preferred method of communication along with the horn amongst the cabal of inbred retards that occupy the nation’s asphalt surfaces. The guy persisted in driving up the road, and squeezed in next to me at the entrance of a parking lot (still facing the wrong way, obviously). He rolled down his window, and I had to hear what this fine specimen of a human being had to say so I rolled down mine.
Then came the dumbest sentence of the week, in the world’s most efeminate voice: “ma shifet 3am dawilak w itfilak yaane?”. I responded in an equally camp tone to make the situation even more absurd: “eno mat koun jayye b3aks il sayr 3ayoune”. The effeminate man, who by the way I think I’ve met in London (ironic, I know), the responded with “ma tit3a2ad” which sent me into a protracted bout of existential solipsism. I took a hard look at this pitiful little man sitting atop one of those huge American SUVs, the kind that looks good when it shows up on in a scene on CSI Miami, but makes you look like you’re overcompensating for shortcomings in the size department in real life. Then I responded with a barrage of highly expressive Lebanese expletives (the best in the world in my opinion, I’ll let you imagine what I came up with) and sped off. What I really should have said was “mate you should get laid and go to a concert from time to time. You’ll be happier and be a better driver.”
As 2009 slowly comes to an end, Beirut is full of expectation at the upcoming arrival of the hordes of expats for Eid and Christmas. As is usual during the holidays, our sprawling and chaotic capital will double in size. Expect traffic jams as far as the eye can see, lots of gesticulating drivers, queues in restaurants and inflated prices all around.
Up until last August, I used to be one of these returning exiles. I’d sit in the offices of the bank I worked for, a soulless concrete and glass block in London, staring out at the perpetual drizzle and gray skies and think of Beirut. Then, suddenly, I decided it was time to quit and move back to Beirut. The use of the term “move back” was even surprising to me, as I’d only ever lived in Beirut for about 6 years during high school and university. The rest of my years have been spent in the aforementioned drizzle. But I’d always had this longing, even before I’d ever set foot in Lebanon in the 90s, to one day inhabit the country whose faded Ministry of Tourism posters I had plastered around my childhood bedroom on Queen’s Gate.
In the months since I’ve moved here, I’ve dealt with the daily frustrations every Beiruti endures. I’ve spent hours baking in the August sun in the Beirut Port waiting for my furniture, books, DVDs and albums. I think importing a container full of RPGs would have been less cumbersome. It appears books (of which I had 34 boxes) are far more threatening to the powers that be. I’ve endured the traffic jams, the aggressive drivers, the frustrated traffic cops, the bored telephone receptionists, the over-zealous security guards, the gossipy housewives, the faux-hippies, the faux-jetsetters. I’ve gotten used to the fact that people can smoke in restaurants, clubs, hospitals, airports, offices. I’ve tried not to stare at the botched nose jobs and garish dress sense. I’ve accepted that my internet connection slowly evaporates as the rain starts to trickle and then pour down through flooded streets. I’ve accepted that on the sunniest of days, my internet connection is still only about a 20th of the speed of the one I just left behind in the West.
Then one day, I flipped. I refused to believe I lived here. I’d tell people vaguely that I lived between Beirut and Paris. I promptly packed my bags and went to Paris for over a month. Since I quit a soul-destroying career in finance, I’ve decided I would take up my one and only passion, writing, and make a career out of it. I’m currently working on a book about Saudi Arabia’s regional wars, as well as a first novel. While I was in Paris, I was also working on an online magazine I’d been developing for a few months. Since most of my intellectual fodder comes from Manhattan-based publications, I wanted to launch an online arts & culture magazine in the same vain. I could basically live anywhere I wanted and work from my laptop.
Then, a week ago, I returned from Paris. I found the same insistent cab drivers at the airport, the same cops shouting vague threats at incorrectly parked motorists outside the arrivals terminal. My heart sank immediately. I was back. A few days of moderate depression ensued, with daydreams of my next flight out of here. Then one morning, I decided to head to my father’s ancestral village. One of the last places where I can escape to without the burden of car horns and wireless internet. I had always admired how my father has travelled to the four corners of the earth, but still only finds true peace amongst the pine trees of his native village. Sitting on a sundrenched terrace, staring down a sunlit and green valley all the way to the sea, I realized my place was in Beirut. I finally accepted that I now live here.
As I drove back to home, thoughts were racing through my mind. As soon as I got back into the 21st century, and found my wireless connection, I purchased this domain to the page you’re now reading. I have now scrapped my initial ideas for an online magazine, and will now direct my online efforts towards this blog. The daily musings of a returning expat, with all the frustrations and joys that this implies. As Beirutis and Lebanese, we’re quite good at complaining about our plight, but we’re not really proactive about it.
Over the years I’ve posted a few thoughts on Lebanon and the Lebanese on my personal blog and on various forms of social media (you can read a couple that I’ve reposted on this blog get a taste of what’s to come). Some have been plagiarized; others quoted on blogs and in books. The last note I posted on my Facebook profile drew 80 responses, so it’s pretty obvious a lot of people share my frustrations and hopes, and more importantly they want to discuss them.
So, on Monday night, this blog was born. The title “Our Man in Beirut” is a reference to the byline attached to foreign journalists and the segways made by news anchors to war correspondents. I thought it was appropriate as I often feel like a stranger in my own city. You’ll find my own musings as well as links to videos and articles of interest, with some form of snooty commentary from yours truly.
Enjoy, and thanks for reading.
This post was first published on May 12th 2006 on my personal blog. It has since been re-posted on other blogs, forwarded as an email and plagiarized by the unimaginative.
Ladies and gentlemen, following this exclusive online guide is a sure-fire way to be mistaken for a Leb.
Driving
The driver’s seat must be in an uncomfortable and impractical reclined position at all times. No more than one hand shall be on the wheel at any time. The other hand should be on the window frame. Alternatively it may be located on the gear-shift or your girlfriend’s leg. Profuse use of horn is encouraged. Religious symbols are to be attached to dashboard at will. Shiny rims and tinted windows, accompanied by thinly veiled threats to fellow motorists on your back window are commonplace.
