The tiles on the floor look particularly dirty today, their neo-Levantine motif smeared with the remnants of rain and mud from a particularly gloomy fall day. The uncomfortable orange plastic of my chair is as unwelcoming as the neon glow that fills the room, and it squirms and squeaks under my considerable weight. I’m sitting at the end of the third row, away from the window, like I always do. The light that hasn’t been fixed since last semester flickers reassuringly above me. It’s dark outside. Who takes a class this late on a Thursday, I ask myself.

I look around the room. I don’t really recognize anyone, and since I basically reside on the pigeon shit-covered ledge by Nicely Hall, that must mean they’re all from lower campus or just people I haven’t bothered meeting yet. I see some bags under a group of eyes, and decide that they must all be graphic design students. They must have drawn a map to get up here. Not because they needed it, but because they thought it would be cool to spend an overnight doing it. They think this class will be an easy grade, a foray into the petty world of the upper campus, full of lazy politics and sociology students like myself. They’re probably wrong.

The cheap clock above the cheap blackboard says it’s 7:10pm. Where is this guy? The self-important bozo next to me starts huffing and puffing audibly. He’s obviously far too important to be here at this hour, professorless. Then, amidst the idle chatter and checking of phones, someone finally walks in.

He doesn’t seem to notice us, rushes furtively to his desk and places a tattered brown bag on the chair behind it. He turns around swiftly, his diminutive frame comical in the large and cold classroom. His helmet of white hair remains motionless as he tilts his head forward to peer at us over his tiny oval glasses. He smiles, starts talking in bursts of excited, lucid and fascinating sentences. And we’re all hooked for the semester to come.

The man at the front of the class in the mustard-coloured corduroy blazer with the giant intellect is Samir Khalaf, and my lengthy and rather pointless introduction takes place in the AUB classroom where I had the pleasure of meeting him 10 years ago. A lot has changed in those ten years, and Khalaf addresses these changes deftly in a new book, Lebanon Adrift: From Battleground to Playground. It’s a terribly important book that deserves to be read but, since it’s dense and academic, most of you won’t. So here are the Cliff Notes.

Khalaf has studied Lebanese society closely over his long and illustrious career, which can’t be an easy task for anyone. His books should be gathering dust on the bookshelves of anyone who cares about Beirut. This new work is no different. It is undoubtedly scholarly, and the lengthy references to Emile Durkheim and Zygmunt Bauman will put off the casual reader. But then again, most people tend to be put off by a guy called Zygmunt. Beyond the academic stuff, this is also a text that is impassioned and personal, in a way academic books aren’t usually. It’s like you’re getting to glimpse into the personal feelings of someone worn by years of looking at a doomed country. There is an anger in Khalaf’s tone, a sense of exasperation. Even though he remains hopeful throughout, it feels like forced hope. Much like the forced and delusional hope many of us cling to in order to preserve a similitude of sanity in this city.

Khalaf’s premise is that Lebanon is a nation adrift, “because it has lost its moorings and direction, [and] has also lost control.” The most interesting chapter in my opinion discusses consumerism in a traumatized society. He applies Drukheim’s concept of anomie, the predicament of seeking without fulfilment, to Lebanon (don’t worry this will get interesting). He is puzzled by the fact that, rather than adhere to the ‘normal’ post-war curbing of frivolous impulse, the Lebanese have “discovered insatiable desires for extravagant consumerism, acquisitiveness and longing for immoderate forms of leisure and sterile recreation.” A worrying sentence if ever I saw one. Lebanon today is basically a reckless twentysomething who, following the loss of a loved one, has gone on a complete self-destructive bender. He’s spending on things he doesn’t need, his breath smells of increasingly cheap whisky and he hangs around bars at closing time at 3am because he doesn’t want to face the solitude of his apartment. He’s not a pretty sight.

So, Lebanon’s anomie is manifested mainly by the rampant desire to accumulate goods, in the face of which the Lebanese have stopped at nothing, desecrating and pillaging their own country. This is evident in everything from the gutting of our architectural heritage to the dumping of chemicals into rivers. In Durkheim’s theory of anomie there is a “social state in which a society’s norms can no longer impose effective control over people’s impulses.” And that’s where we are today. With no norms, and by consequence no normality. Faced with a stagnant real economy and few prospects, the deprived and not-so-deprived imagine that any means are legitimate and justified to obtain their desires and wants, however non-essential and capricious. Greed and corruption have become the norm, rather than exceptional and reprehensible characteristics at the outskirts of society. As Khalaf quite rightly points out “ the exorbitant prices one pays cannot be a result of natural inflationary market tendencies; they reflect the extortion and heavy extractions that agents and self-appointed guardians, patrons and middlemen impose.” To put that in blunter terms, we’ve turned into a nation where everyone is ripping everyone else off. We’re turning to the shadowy and morally ambiguous regions of the human experience, and we’re not thinking twice about it. He goes on to cite the litany of realities we begrudgingly accept. The three-fold increase in the price of petrol and gas over a few years, the exorbitant price of real estate, the list goes on and we’re all too familiar with it.

He decries the lack of ambition, and the abhorrence the average Lebanese person holds for manual work. Cafes are full at all times of the day with able-bodied individuals “squandering precious time in idle chatter” and smoking. Even the smoking itself is seen as an act of social aggression. Smoking bans have proven impossibly difficult to introduce, let alone enforce. The callous disregard for the feelings of others when one lights up is a symptom, much like aggressive driving and a general lack of common courtesy, of a country still at war with itself.

Some criticism of Khalaf’s book has centred on the fact that it absolves politicians of any responsibility because it doesn’t focus on them. Quite the contrary, I think it should be commended for laying the blame squarely with the population. People get the leaders they deserve, especially in what passes for a democracy. The culture of defeat and victimization, which we’re all guilty of, is starting to sound rather lamentable, especially in the face of the brave revolutions taking place across the Arab world. Blaming politicians for everything absolves the individual from any responsibility for his reckless actions, of which there are many. The relationship is symbiotic. If a guy wants to build an illegal extension to his house and bribes his cousin-fourth-removed who works for the municipality, who’s at fault? A politician? It’s time to stop the delusion.

Another criticism is that Khalaf focuses essentially on the affluent middle-classes. Perhaps. But what’s wrong with that? The dominant national narrative, as expressed in the popular local and foreign media, is the one that Khalaf is addressing. Much like anywhere else, this is the class that has access to the means of cultural production and consumption. Basically, they’re the idiots you see on TV, so they’re bound to dictate how we see ourselves, and how others see us.

The book does feel disjointed at times, but that may just be because I haven’t picked up anything remotely academic since my Master’s in politics. But there is another reason for what may occasionally seem like rambling thoughts. It is a highly personal book. It is infused with genuine frustration and even possibly anger. If you’re looking for a dispassionate analysis of the state of Lebanon today, this is not it. There are value judgements, which are occasionally very un-academic. And those are probably my favourite parts.

Which brings me to why this book is so damn satisfying. It is a relief to see that someone who has been studying the place for so many years, as a leading and respected sociologist and academic, has examined the issues we discuss on a daily basis with our friends. It is comforting and enlightening to see it put into a functional theoretical context, rather than the jumble of disjointed and abortive demands and complaints we make. But that is also what is most worrying about the book. The realization, the well-researched and argumented realization, that the last 10 years or so have been so destructive. They have been destructive without the visible manifestation of 10 years of all-out war. The destruction has been insidious and progressive and has eaten up at the soul of our country.

I came away from this book feeling numb and powerless. The task ahead, that of putting Lebanon back on the right course, seems so impossible it’s paralyzing. The numbness provoked by everything discussed in this book is the same numbness that stops us from taking any action about the things that frustrate us daily. The same numbness that leads us to accept all these foibles individually, without looking at the disastrous bigger picture. It’s the numbness that makes us shrug when an old building is torn down to make place for a painfully gleaming tower, and say “what can I do?”

The Lebanon that I lived in 10 years ago, when I was in that classroom waiting for Khalaf to show up, that was a different place. It was imperfect and damaged and chaotic. Almost beautifully so. It had an excuse for being damaged, it was still finding itself. It was far from being a utopia. So much of what is wrong today was wrong back then, but that was 10 years ago. The fact that what we are today is the result of what we chose to do over the last 10 years is a sad realization. I’m not one for nostalgia, but sometimes I wish we could all be back in that class a decade ago. We were all a bit more hopeful, and a bit less numb.

Lebanon Adrift: From Battleground to Playground is available at good bookstores. And probably some bad ones. 

Leave a Comment

View Video

The run-up to last Sunday’s book launch was a lot of fun. I was lucky enough to go on MTV’s Men El Ekhir to talk a bit about the blog and the book. Here’s what happened.

Leave a Comment

Sometimes it’s tough to figure out how you’re supposed to feel about being Lebanese. I got called unpatriotic for not getting behind the Vote for Jeita campaign. Apparently, I had to blindly support something purely on the basis that it was something everyone in the country agreed on. Presumably we can all also all agree that kittens are cute, so let’s go ahead and put one on the flag. It’s not like we have many Cedar trees left anyway.

My main problem with the New7Wonders campaign that Jeita was part of was the, now well-documented, fact that it reeked of con-artistry. It felt like a scam from the very beginning. But then we Lebanese are suckers for a good scam. We get scammed about a dozen times a day, and we grumble in silence to ourselves.

Earlier, I was pounced on by a bunch of friends because I had no desire to go watch Where Do We Go Now?, Nadine Labaki’s latest cinematic offering. It was my patriotic duty to watch it apparently. Well, I don’t know how you decide on your cinema-going schedule, but patriotism doesn’t have much to do with it. I saw the trailer, it bored me half to death, so I decided not to watch it. The same happened to a lot of Americans with Transformers 3, but they weren’t ostracized or lynched on a town square as if they’d burnt the stars and stripes.

I have an Almodovar DVD box-set I’ve never touched. Does that mean I dislike him? Does it mean I hate Spain? No. No, it doesn’t. It just means I’m lacking the intellectual curiosity to delve into them at this point in time, and that I should be less trigger happy when I shop on Amazon. But I’ll get around to watching them, then I’ll make my mind up about them in my own time.

That doesn’t mean I’m not proud of the fact she’s getting a ton of international recognition, and winning awards, quite the contrary. I just chose not to watch it. I probably will someday, and from what I gather from like-minded friends, I’ll like bits and pieces of it. But the vitriol to which you’re subjected for not toeing the party line, is quite shocking. The level of discourse in the country in general is reaching worrying levels of incivility. In a way, I think I avoided watching it because I was concerned I wouldn’t like it, and that would put me on the defensive when discussing it.

We’ve slipped into a worrying pattern in Lebanon, where true conversation is frowned upon. We’ve turned into a nation of Dubya Bushes, where every verbal exchange has to reach the inexorable conclusion that “you’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Any form of independent thought is discouraged outright. You cannot claim to be non-political. You cannot argue with something supposedly patriotic. Basically, you are faced with the impossibility of rational thought.

In the last couple of days we’ve had a reason to be deeply ashamed to be Lebanese, in a way we can all agree on. A couple of our politicians took it upon themselves to hurl insults as well as office furniture at each other on live television on Monday night. The YouTube video of the incident quickly made the rounds and went viral in a matter of hours, reaching hundreds of thousands of views. It was also the most watched video on BBC News yesterday, and on a bunch of other websites around the world. It’s a shame that viral videos are normally of kids saying cute and silly things about Halloween candy or X-Factor contestants belting out cheesy tunes after a video montage of how they were adopted by a pack of monkeys when they were 6, but ours are about bickering politicians.

The experience of watching the video was cyclical. The first time I watched it, I was just disgusted. The second time, I was saddened. By the third time I was laughing. By the fourth, I was thinking maybe it was time to find that tattered suitcase, fill it up, and head for the airport.

Political discourse has never been a shining beacon of civility in Lebanon, not by any measure. But the increasing polarizaiton is having a trickle-down effect on the population at large. I mean, I probably care more about the Large Hadron Collider than I do about Lebanese politics, but you cant help but feel its insidious effects on a daily basis.

People look to their leaders as an example, whether they voted for them or not. It’s much like working in a company, if you think your boss is a bit of an idiot, you don’t take your job too seriously. If he or she is aggressive, you become aggressive. If you admire them, you aspire to become a harder worker and to achieve more. So when we see our politicians endlessly calling each other names and engaging in infantile and corrupt behaviour, can we really expect the population at large to aspire to more than this.

Maybe we could do with a little less testosterone in our leadership. A friend of mine on Facebook posted a status lamenting the fact that the role of women in Lebanese politics is reduced to being featured as mothers and sisters in the insults of male politicians. I’m afraid she’s right on the money with that one. Maybe if we had better people representing us, who actually conversed with one another rather than at eachother, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today. It’s becoming very hard to be proud to be Lebanese, however pretty Jeita is.

On a brighter note, the Lebanese national football team beat South Korea in a world cup qualifier yesterday. And the country went nuts. You’d think we had just beaten Brazil in an actual World Cup final.  But all we’d really won were three points. As Anthony Semaan over at the Football Supernova points out, “Lebanon have not yet qualified. Not only do Lebanon have to beat the UAE in February to officially qualify to the next round of the Asian Qualifying section for the World Cup 2014, but if they do win, they will have to qualify from another pool of 5 teams – with 8 matches to prove themselves over the course of a year between 2012 and 2013”. How can we explain the euphoria after such a victory? I’d say it’s a symptom of a country thirsty for something to be proud of. And those eleven men on that pitch did make us proud. And I hope they keep doing it, because we haven’t got much else going for us right now.

Leave a Comment

View Video

Leave a Comment

There’s a video currently making the rounds, featuring an over-excited Richard Quest extolling the virtues of Lebanon’s hedonism and joie de vivre, while he prances around its handful of rooftop clubs dressed like that weird uncle in your family no one talks to, who hits on 16 year olds at weddings. And wears white loafers. When I first stumbled on the video, I wasn’t sure whether I should feel a mild sense of pride or a profound sense of shame. I have opted very firmly for the latter, for a number of reasons.

I mean the show is called Future Cities, and is supposed to be about how cities are positioning themselves for the future (the name kind of gives it away) through development and sustainability. Quite how cramming thousands of people into sweaty clubs ensures Lebanon’s sustainability, is quite beyond me.

However much I enjoy positive portrayals of Lebanon in the media, I’m not sure that showing its three most inaccessible venues is really the way to go. I mean, when they cover Mykonos or Ibiza, I’m pretty sure there isn’t a slum where people live on less that USD 2 a day within walking distance. Before I’m accused of hypocrisy, sure I go to these places. But I don’t think they’re our greatest achievement in thousands of years of history. Not by a longshot.

Plus the video features Ke$sha. Why would I listen to Ke$ha’s opinion on anything? For starters, she has a dollar sign in her name, and anyone with monetary symbols in their monicker loses points on the Credibility-meter. So, I’m pretty sure her musings about how Lebanon’s energy mirrors the energy she puts in her shows, can be safely ignored.

And what’s all this nonsense about joie de vivre anyway? I’m sorry but I have yet to see a genuine example of someone loving life when I go out in Lebanon. We go to clubs with 3000 people, but hang out with the 20 we already know. We all look inward at our table. People stare into their Blackberries and iPhones trying to figure out if something more exciting is happening elsewhere, because they’re under the impression that they are in no way contributing to the complete lack of an atmosphere here, and it’s everyone else’s fault. If they can tear themselves away from their apparati, it’s to give someone across the club a death stare. Then maybe bbm somebody about it.

And before anyone says it’s just the rooftops, I have to disagree. Go out anywhere, and it’s the same. Batroun, Sour, Gemmayze, Jounieh. Maybe Hamra’s bar scene is a tiny bit different. I have yet to see anyone actually dancing outside the sweaty confines of a salsa night. And no, guys, slicing the air with the palm of one hand and shaking your vodka tonic around in the other, while you bob your head to the newest Taebo Cruise, or whatever his face is, track does not constitute dancing.

I’m sick of people confusing self-medicated post-traumatic stress with a love of life. Drinking yourself silly is not an affirmation of life. It can be a lot of fun, sure, but don’t call it joie de vivre. People not caring about tomorrow isn’t a smart thing. Shocking, I know. Many people at these clubs didn’t live the Civil War, they have every reason to plan for tomorrow. They’re young and educated and living in a period of relative, if tenuous and tense, stability. But they don’t, because they’re inheriting their parent’s misplaced insouciance.

This has wide-ranging consequences. The Lebanese spend a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on going out. I’ll be the first to admit, I was immensely guilty of this in the past. In my days as a banker in London, I spent embarrassing amounts of money on going to the “best” clubs, because that’s kind of what was happening around me. But when I moved to Lebanon, I wanted to change that. I wanted to grow up, essentially.  How many people here say to themselves, “You know, I’ll go out less, but I’ll rent my own place.” Not a lot I’m supposing.

Sometimes I wonder if the Lebanese don’t actively enjoy being ripped off. I mean there’s that old joke about the two women who are comparing dresses and one of them says victoriously “But I bought mine at full price, yours was on sale”. But the joke is turning into a harsh reality, and our spending habits are kind of causing it. If we’re willing to pay, then retailers, restaurateurs and club owners are sure as hell happy to increase prices. Lebanon now ranks 75^th in the world in terms of cost of living. That’s ahead of LA and Munich. Yeah, you read that right.

Inflation is getting so high it’s giving Keith Richards a run for his money. Yet we don’t really complain. It’s seen as a sign of weakness to be Lebanese and complain that something is out of your price range. Sure, we’ll get in a serveece and nod along as he complains about the cost of gas and whatnot. But will you talk the same way with your friends? Will you ever tell them you’re struggling to make ends meet between inflation, your Rockefeller lifestyle and your salary that barely covers the basics.

Well, I’m sorry to say it, but I feel pretty stupid paying 8,000LL for a man’ouche at Zaatar w Zeit.  And can someone explain to me why even these places are so expensive? The staff are paid peanuts, they don’t get benefits, the businesses barely pay taxes, and yet the prices are the same as in North America or Europe for a lot of products now.

And by the way, the rampant inflation also keeps tourists away. Superior purchasing power doesn’t mean unlimited purchasing power. Many are balking at the prices in Beirut. And I can understand them. When you consider they pay 1000 USD to get here from Europe, then 200-300 a night to stay here, you can imagine they’re pretty skint by the time Skybar comes around. Compare that to 60 Euro tickets from most European capitals to Spain or Greece, and you can understand why this tourist season has, by all accounts, been absolutely disastrous.

Lebanon is not a Mediterranean party town. Places like Monaco, Ibiza, Mykonos pop up for a few months a year on the party map, much like rock festivals take place in deserted fields in England or Poland. Because life can go back to normal once that seasonality disappears. Reducing a city of 2 million people, a pulsating city, to being a handful of rooftop clubs is patronizing in the extreme.

And just to come back to that damn video for a minute. If you think you’re promoting Lebanon proudly by reposting videos of an annoying meth head prancing around what we, in our navel-gazing, have come to consider the best places in the world, you are very sorely mistaken. The type of tourist who comes to Beirut isn’t the type of tourist who goes to Ibiza. Anyone who comes here is looking for something more. Otherwise, they would just go to Ibiza. I hate to break it to you, but there’s vodka and boobies all over the world. There are things we have that we should be celebrating.

Of course they want to have a good time and have a few drinks and stumble around town. But believe it or not, people who come here also want to see Bourj Hammoud for example, the same way they want to see Chinatown in New York. They want to see the old Green Line, the way I wanted to see the Berlin Wall. They want to see the abandoned train station in Mar Mikhael or the Oscar Niemeyer architecture in Tripoli. They want to meet real people and artisans. They want to experience all the things that have disappeared from their societies.

Don’t believe me? Well, Lebanon ranks 190^th out of 200 in a recent index of Nation Brand perception, so we obviously haven’t been doing it right. I think it’s time to move past the “party capital of the Middle East” spiel, and onto something real and engaging. “Hedonism” or “Joie de Vivre” are not brands for a country like Lebanon. They are both irresponsible and grotesque for a place steeped in so much history and circumstance.

Not caring about tomorrow isn’t something to be proud of. Leave that to alienated emo teenagers listening to Slipknot in their dilapidated suburban houses in Maryland. That’s not how mature adults who have ambitions think about life. You know what my most hated expression in Lebanon is? When you say to someone “Let’s meet next Thursday” and they scoff at you and say “Tan 3ish la wa2ta” (Let’s live till then first). Even if it’s just a lexical overhang from a time of war, it is insidious. It doesn’t communicate joie de vivre, or fun, or hedonism. It says you’ve given up. It says you don’t care. I’m sorry, but I don’t want that to be the brand my country brandishes to the world.

Leave a Comment

Read my interview with Medea Azouri Habib in the August | September issue of L’Officiel. 

Leave a Comment

The last week has been what you would call the opposite of a slow news week. It started off last Friday when a delusional terrorist (is there any other kind?) decided to take the lives of 68 innocent people in Oslo. The following day Amy Winehouse was found dead in her apartment at the age of 27. Then, during the week, a beloved Lebanese landmark was supposedly threatened with destruction, and a Lebanese singer was briefly thrown in jail for a song he recorded three years ago.

What do these events have in common? Not much on the face of it. I guess, in a way, they show various aspects of the tragedy of the human condition. Heavy stuff. But on a far simpler level, all these events took over my Facebook news feed over the last few days, and quite rightly so. Where LOLcats, Justin Bieber jokes and wedding photos once reigned supreme, people were now discussing terrorism and addiction.

However, I have some observations I’d like to share. I can almost hear your sigh of exasperation seeping through the screen, but bear with me.

Let’s take the first two events. The day the bombing and subsequent mass-shooting took place in Oslo, I could hardly believe what I was reading. I had to reread the story a few times before it sunk in. This was human atrocity at its basest level. I sent out rather pointless messages to my Norwegian friends, which were more of a sign of shared humanity than anything else. But at this point my news feed remained rather barren. Then, the next day, Amy Winehouse passed away. And suddenly my mini feed was packed full of condolences and heartfelt agony. And this got me rather angry.

A day after no one had reacted to one of the worst terrorist attacks in years, everyone suddenly seemed to be bereft over a celebrity who had been on a path to self-destruction for years. So I posted a status to that effect, wishing for some perspective on the scope of human tragedy. And the comments started pouring in. People angry that I was comparing tragedies that weren’t comparable.

They might not have been comparable as tragedies, but they were comparable on Facebook as entities of concern. I obviously can’t quantify human suffering, but I can quantify responses to it. And the disproportionate amount of people who cared more about Winehouse than about Norway felt rather grotesque.

It seemed to completely exemplify our obsession with celebrity over the past decade. Most of the comments were along the lines of “Amy touched me with her music, and I knew more about her, so it affected me more”. Well I’m sorry, but the day you identify more with a multi-millionaire drug addict than with innocent teenage bystanders, there’s something wrong with the world.

After about 60 comments on that status, I thought I was done arguing on Facebook for the week. Then came the news, through Lebanese NGO Save Beirut Heritage, that the beloved Egg in the Downtown area was to be demolished in a matter of days. When I read that, I was sceptical for two reasons.

First of all, I attended a writing workshop last week sponsored by Solidere, and got to meet with their head of Urban Development. I asked him all the questions I thought would make me sound concerned and lefty in front of the group. “Why aren’t there any green spaces?”, “Why have you made the city centre a soulless, semi-public place designed for the elites and guarded by an army of private security firms?” and “What is going to happen to landmarks like the Egg?”. I was assured that the Egg, whose real name is the City Centre, would stay where it was and that it would become part of a new structure. My second reason for being dubious, was the last big Save Beirut Heritage campaign that I remember, about Ahwet el Ezezz. We were told that this beloved Gemmayze hangout would be turned into a Bank Audi. This brought together a lot of outraged people at the time, but at the end of the day its just being replaced by another café and the whole building just got a lick of paint.

The tone of voice of the update on the Save Beirut Heritage Facebook group sounded alarmist and attention grabbing. And throughout the course of the day it turned out that no imminent plans for destruction were scheduled at all. I spent the day arguing with the organizers on their page, telling them that crying wolf and attention-seeking harms their cause tremendously. I am no activist, but I don’t claim to be. If you’re positioning yourself of the saviour of our city’s Heritage, take it seriously. Don’t form infantile campaigns to “chain yourselves” to buildings two days before you think they’re going to be demolished. Create awareness campaigns throughout the year; make sure the population at large knows why these buildings are important, why collective architectural memory serves a purpose. Don’t just show up at the last minute with a load of self-righteous bourgeois bohemian indignation, and then disappear again until the next alleged wrecking ball rears its ugly head.

Which brings me to that last event that took over my Facebook feed, the arrest of musician Zeid Hamdan on charges of defamation for his song General Soleiman. The social media sphere went crazy, and rightly so. The arbitrary detention of an artist on a flimsy charge can only be a source of worry for the population at large. I don’t know the details of the case, so I won’t comment further, but I will comment on the squandering of human capital. In the hours after his arrest, Facebook pages sprung up to get him released and people changed their profile pictures in support of the cause. I thought the profile pictures depicting him as a fallen martyr were a tad overzealous, especially considering he had been released by the time most people had joined the page and put up the pictures. But the real tragedy is that these thousands of people who clamoured in that moment of need, will disappear today and tomorrow. They will forget about the threat to our liberty here at home and on idyllic islands off the coast of Oslo. That is the real tragedy.

While it is a perfectly acceptable exercise to berate each other on Facebook and flex our intellectual/rhetorical muscles, it doesn’t do much. I remember a Facebook event for a Save Beirut Heritage march having hundreds and hundreds of attendees online, but when I actually showed up there were about 50 of us. Indignation is fine. One-off indignation is pretty pointless. Misplaced indignation is useless. If we can direct and sustain our indignation, then we’ll get somewhere.

As things stand, we have a lunatic terrorist bent on ridding Europe of immigrants, we have a talented artist who died far too young and far too lost, we have a complete lack of understanding of where our heritage is going and we still lock up musicians in 2011. It’s been a busy week for Facebook, and a sad week for humanity.

Leave a Comment

Pick a street in Beirut. Any street. Look in front of you, behind you, above you. Chances are, within your line of sight, there is an ad for some form of physical enhancement, a woman who looks like a cross between Najwa Karam, a disco ball and a Czech pornstar and a guy who has consumed enough steroids to make Schwarzy look like a girly man whistling at her. This unholy trinity of visual queasiness is starting to get very annoying.

I am by no means conservative when it comes to social mores. I’m a Godless libertarian. But the socio-visual landscape in Beirut is becoming repugnant. I actually wouldn’t mind it if everyone was actually bumping uglies, but it’s the blatant hypocrisy of it all. Our society has become hypersexualized, with a distinct lack of actual sex.

Let me explain. I don’t mean no one is having sex, obviously. I mean, Beirut is one of the rare cities I’ve seen where they sell every kind of Durex condom under the sun at the Duty Free checkout counter at the Airport. You know, in case you’re thinking of joining the Mile High Club and you haven’t planned ahead. What I’m saying is that if you walk into a club in the UK, your chances of leaving with someone and getting up to no good are about 70%* (*highly unscientific guess). Your chances in Beirut, where I would say everyone is dressed and acting about the same, is 15% (*again, highly unscientific guess).

There is something misleading about the way we function. Everyone is always dressed up to the nines. Everything is enhanced. Breasts are augmented, fat is reduced, hair disappears. Eyes go green. Lips go red and plump. Pecs appear, bisceps bulge. And yet, very little actually every happens between the sexes on a casual basis.

I know I keep coming back to the opinions of tourists I meet, but they’re a highly useful objective and external vantage point. Every time I take them somewhere, they gasp and say something like “Jeez, it looks like everyone here is getting some tonight”. I proceed to explain the complex dichotomy between appearance and reality, which is an immense buzz kill to the pack of marauding horny Italian Eurotrash men.

Much like the oversexualized women in Arab pop videos, Lebanese women are expected to be alluring and seductive, yet remain virginal. Walking through a shopping mall or making limp-wristed vaguely Oriental dance moves in a club, most seem to be reprising their role as themselves in the movie of their life. It’s a symptom of the Blingification of the world. Everyone wants to be in a hip-hop video. So the men and women of Lebanon flock to Skybar (Note: Other Rooftop bars are available), tanned and toned, their bloodstreams a mix of vodka and champagne, their nostrils flaring at the smell of fireworks. They sway and flirt. But there is no dancefloor. Ever. There is no communal space for people to interact and meet, dance and sweat together.

Everyone lives in a proverbial music video for a few hours. Then they leave the blinged out universe of faux-independence and fleeting adulthood and return to their parents’ homes. Their parents’ homes replete with marble floors and gold chandeliers and expectations of virginal daughters.

Of course, for the men it’s different. They are coached from their earliest age to have double standards, namely that Lebanese women are pure and respectable and foreign women are to be used as vessels for sexual discovery. Many Lebanese men have their first sexual experience at the hands, quite literally, of Eastern European prostitutes in seedy hotels North of Beirut filled with the pungent odour of desperation and lost youth.

Men then go on to embrace this concept of the “Western Whore” and consider anyone remotely blonde that they meet ripe for the taking. Like unevovled cavemen, they whistle and gawk and grope. It’s an embarrassing sight. When I dated a Russian girl in London for two years, and I’d tell anyone in Lebanon where she was from they’d give me a knowing wink and I suppose they’d imagine her with her legs wrapped around a pole, upside down, her blonde hair caressing the stage floor. When I would explain she wasn’t a stripper, or blonde and was the epitome of class, I’d get confused looks for a few moments. It was as if I was pulling the rug from under their every assumption about relationships and sexuality. Then they’d chuckle, as if to say “I’ve just erased what you’ve said, and gone back to my parochial social dynamics. Phew, that was close”. Sigh.

So Lebanon is a country that has something that goes beyond double standards. We have Triple or even Quadruple standards. Lebanese women are virginal yet buxom, foreign women don’t know how to do their nails but they’re fair game in male sexual exploration and all of this happens to the sound of trance and house music and smashing vodka glasses.

It’s an explosive mix. As the summer quickly takes over, and even more clothes are shed, and more alcohol is consumed, more frustration builds up. The gulf between the faux-Miami we’ve created, and the enduring pervasiveness of traditional social values spreads wider. Lots of sexualized bodies with no one to have sex with. Even if they had someone they’d have nowhere to do it, with 30 year-old men still living in their childhood rooms, surrounded by high school memorabilia and a maid that makes their bed before they head off to act like adults for the day.

Our only hope? Well, at the rate we’re going, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that hypersexualiztion will turn into complete desexualisation. The more men pump steroids into their system, the more women pump Botox into theirs, the less they look human at all. Semi-retarded blobs of post-human flesh floating around a phantom city, occasionally bumping into each other and feeling nothing. What was once skin, now a tepid silicone and steroid laden wasteland. The only hope for sex in Lebanon? The death of sex.

Leave a Comment

Goran Bregovic is playing at the Beirut Music And Arts Festival on June 12^th

Besides being undoubtedly the youngest looking 61 year-old in the world, Goran Bregovic is also the Balkans’ most prominent purveyor of neo-gypsy beats.  But he’s also kind of the embodiment of the Balkans themselves, born in Sarajevo, in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, to a Croatian father and Serbian mother.

I don’t know much about him, but from what I’ve read he appears to be a mish-mash of Balkan influences. Which is saying a lot, and probably explains why his work is so layered and universal.

See, the Balkans are very much like Lebanon, more than either of us would like really. On a trip to Zagreb a couple of years ago, I was struck by how similar a lot of the discourse is to our own. Of course, the Croats themselves hate being assimilated to the Balkans, so for the sake of sematics, let’s call the place ex-Yugoslavia.

Most of us grew up with images of bombings and massacres perpetrated in these countries not so long ago. It seemed so surreal, countries at the heart of Europe, deeply beautiful countries, committing atrocities at the end of the 20^th century. A lot of the scars of that conflict remain, and it doesn’t take long to sense them. And sense the similarities with Lebanon.

Religion still plays an important role, as does suspicion and fighting for scraps of land and influence. They’re still hunting down their war criminals 15 years after the conflict has ended. Much like Lebanon, history is never far in ex-Yugoslavia for anyone willing to look.

While I was there, I asked my friends to take me to a club that played traditional folk music rather than the bar we were at which was wall to wall models and lounge music, and could have been in Manhattan. Not that that’s something I usually shy away from, but it seemed like the wrong place to do it. They accepted grudgingly, the way I guess I would have grudgingly taken a visiting Serb to an all-night one-man-show by a Wael Kfoury impersonator in Beirut.

As we all walked over to Sokol, I had distant memories of the soundtrack to the award-winning Emir Kusturica film, Underground. That was the first time I’d heard Bregovic’s music, or Balkan music of any sort really. And it was sensational.  It had so much energy, like the whole orchestra was on crack and it was the end of the world and they wanted the whole planet to have one last drunken dance!

Needless to say the experience at the Serbian folk-song club was disappointing. Ironically it was music I was kind of familiar with, stuff like Ceca, proper Serbian pop stars. Less Ziad Rahbani, more Najwa Karam. The rest of the night consisted of me vaguely attempting to make friends with everyone in the place by buying them shots. I was mostly met by the kind of stereotypical scowl that Serbian gangsters give in movies, so it shouldn’t have surprised when it was explained to me that the pouches they were all carrying, and that I’d been making fun of, actually contained their chosen piece of weaponry. Mainly guns.

As I think back to dancing around like a fool that night in Zagreb, and as I look forward to a trip to Belgrade at the end of the month, I really appreciate what someone like Bregovic does. Someone who takes a genre and reinvents it. Someone who creates new boundaries or obliterates them altogether. I later found out that his music also includes Bulgarian and a lot of Roma influence. It is new and adventurous, layered and meaningful, infused with cosmopolitanism, all the while sounding as if it is hundreds of years old.

Bregovic was once in the most successful band in Yugoslavia, but I will always be marked by that first piece of music I heard from Underground. A film described as sprawling and rowdy, laced with outrageous absurdist dark humour and unspeakable pain, suffering and injustice.

Dark humour, unspeakable pain, vodka, Kalashnikovs and a whole lot of dancing. Sounds a lot like a place we know all too well, doesn’t it?

Goran Bregovic is playing at the Beirut Music And Arts Festival on June 12^th

Leave a Comment

I got a message from a French friend of mine the other day asking if Beirut was a safe place to visit. I’m never quite sure how to answer that question. And it comes up quite a lot. On the one hand, walking the streets at night in Beirut is probably safer than anywhere I can think of. There are no hooded youths on the streets waiting to steal my Blackberry and use it to film me as they go about on a happy slapping rampage. On the other hand, we tend to pepper our existence with Ak-47s and the occasional car bomb. Armed with these two realities, I gave my usual answer, which is “it’s safe until it’s not”.

This particular French friend was planning on visiting as a tourist but was also interested in the ins and outs of life in Beirut, beyond the security situation, because she intends to move here to take up a rather exciting job opportunity. She asked me how easily I thought she’d make friends, because she doesn’t know anyone in town and she’s a bit concerned about that. I chuckled to myself as I told her not to worry, everyone in Lebanon loves foreigners and that she had the added advantage of being both French and Female.

There was a time when the word tourist in Beirut basically meant anyone from the Gulf who couldn’t be bothered to make it all the way to Europe for a long weekend intended to smoke a chicha at Grand Café. And that was about it. I don’t have a problem with that kind of tourism, but it’s the Lebanese equivalent of a lobster-red English tourist in Mallorca in a Newcastle United shirt who thinks he’s mastered the Spanish language because he can say “Oi, Manuel. Dos cervecas por favor. Innit.”

It also meant hordes of returning Lebanese expats, with bulging wallets. But even though the Ministry of Tourism loves counting them in its statistics, they aren’t really tourists at all. They sleep at home with their extended families and basically use the country as a large spa for the duration of their stay. They get medical checkups, see their dentist, get a haircut, load up on zaatar and head back to work.

But something has changed over the last couple of years. And Im not just referring to the slew of articles that I’ve already discussed (which were at the origin of me starting this blog actually), that extol the virtues of Lebanon’s buxom women and endless supplies of hummos and Arak.

When I first read those articles, I often cringed. Both at their patronising, vaguely Orientalist tone and the fact that I know we have a knack for hijacking our own success.

But a couple of years on and there’s a steady stream of real tourists. The kind of tourists armed with North Face backpacks, battered Birks and a sunburn. The kind of tourists who stand bewildered at an intersection in the street, pull out their Lonely Planet and cogitate.

Every time I see a bemused Scandinavian in flip-flops and shorts taking a photo of an innocuous wall in Hamra, while a confused bakery shop owner looks on in utter confusion, I smile to myself. The baker slaps some cheese onto a piece of circular dough, wipes his hairy knuckles on his off white apron and shrugs. Ajenib. I have no idea what the Scandi sees on that wall, but I’m happy he sees it. And I’m happy it’ll end up on his Flickr and Facebook and that his network of friends will see it. And that they’ll flock here.

Tourists and our interactions with them are terribly important. The more we meet people from around the world, the more we come to accept them, as cheesy and redundant as that sounds. Places stop being abstract, they become embodied by a real individual. There’s an interaction that sticks in your mind.

One of my favourite hangouts in Beirut is Torino Express. It was one of the first bars to open in Gemmayze, before it became a petting zoo full of pony-tailed pot-bellied valets and management consultants. It’s not much to look at, just a stunted hallway basking in red neon. But it’s my real life equivalent of Cheers. A refuge for anyone who wishes to eschew the touch-screen, uber-designed clinical Beirut that has emerged over the past few years. And it’s always full of tourists.  Their battered guidebook resting on the creaky wooden tables, more often than not serving as coasters.

I try to make the most of having these tourists around. I kind of miss the diversity I had in London. I know I keep harping back to that, but it’s true. That was my reality for about 20 years. Bumping into people from everywhere every day, and I miss that. So I’ll be that annoying Lebanese guy who wants to start chatting away to a group of tourists minus the “you know in Libanon you can swim and ski in ze same day”.

Of course, not every non-Lebanese person in town is a tourist. A lot of  those you see around town aren’t tourists at all. They’re expats. They’ve made this city their home.

I do most of my work freelance now, which means I spend a lot of time working in cafes in Hamra. I say working, but I actually mean staring blankly at my MacBook and looking at the people around me trying to imagine their lives.

A cursory look around on any given day reveals that half the place probably isn’t Lebanese or even Middle Eastern. This never happened when I spent my AUB days loitering around the area. There were two American exchange students who’d been disowned by their parents in Nebraska, and that was about it.

Today, there are the journalists who think they’ve figured it all out. There are the activists and aid workers, who know they haven’t figured anything out but keep trying anyway. There are the randoms, who came here for a weekend on their way back from Jordan 10 years ago and forgot to leave.

So, if you think about it, Beirut is teeming with people from all over. Although I started this post wanting to talk about tourism, we shouldn’t forget we have hundreds of thousands of people from exceedingly interesting parts of the world living with us on a daily basis, often literally. The Syrians, Egyptians, Filipinos, Ethiopians, Sri Lankans and others.

Sure we’ll ask a Dutch couple at Torino what it’s like living in Amsterdam, but when was the last time you stopped to ask what it was like living in Addis Ababa or Manilla. I’m pretty sure that would be just as interesting. Probably even more so.

Leave a Comment