Monocle's Lebanese Affair Continues (Part 1 of 2)

Fresh from my recent visit back to Lebanon, I dropped by Monocle's new store in Zurich today only to discover that the brand's love affair with the country shows no sign of waning. Monocle's second fragrance (with Comme Des Garçons), Laurel, was inspired by the country. According to their website:

We wanted our second fragrance to capture the same smell and sensation enjoyed while staying with friends in Batroun, Lebanon. While many wonderful smells drifted through their ancient garden, it was the distinctive scent of laurel that punctuated an early spring weekend in the eastern Mediterranean. It's warm, inviting and at times a little sharp - just like the country itself.

Another account, featured at the shop and on Barneys' website, tells a slightly different story:

Inspired by a trip to the Bekaa Valley, it's a fresh, clean scent that has warm laurel notes. Developed by the same team that launched our Hinoki scent, it will remind regular visitors to Lebanon of the country's hand-made laurel soaps and fragrant gardens in Byblos.

The second volume of Monocle Live, titled “From Stockholm To Rio Via Beirut,” also features Beirut via Zeid And The Wings' "General Suleiman," for which Zeid Hamdan was arrested for the defamation of Lebanon's President, General Michel Suleiman. 

Monocle also featured Beirut as one of its 25 Resort Cities, saying:

Beirut has always stood its ground as a kind of playground for Arabs and Europeans in search of oriental frisson. With a return to political stability new hotels such as the Four Seasons and Le Gray have opened their doors and high power fashion names like Hermes and Louis Vuitton are now gracing the new Souks. Beirut is back on the tourist map (though no one knows for how long). Add to the mix, legendary hospitality, a famed party scene and layers of history, and you have a city with a unique patina that visitors and locals cannot seem to get enough of.

And finally, their first book ever, The Monocle Guide to Better Living, features Beirut as one of "10 Cities To Call Home". The preface reads:

On paper it shouldn't really work. But, despite everything, the allure of the Lebanese capital remains thanks to its cosmopolitan buzz, dazzling Mediterranean setting and the irrepressibly positive spirit of the locals.

It concludes with "Why it works":

1. Locals are well travelled and at ease in English and French.
2. The Lebanese take pride in their service industry. Opening a bank account, printing a brochure or producing a prototype furniture piece can all be done in record time.
3. The city offers a buzzing cultural scene with year-round music festivals, film premieres, art shows and book fairs that put other Middle Eastern cities to shame.
4. Ski slopes and beaches are less than an hour's drive away.
5. The airport is 15 minutes' drive from downtown Beirut, with Paris and Dubai fewer than five hours away.

(Part 2 of 2)

Lebanon: A Counterpoint

When this country glows, it sparkles! It makes you forget all that it is, and makes you believe in all that it could be. This is a country of the night: the dark hides all its outrageous faults and lets you see the lights shimmering in the hills and breaking over the water. You forget the checkpoints, the mad traffic, and politics of the day; all you can think about is the enchanting breeze off of the sea, the music reverberating in the midnight air, and the beat that thunders in your rib cage. You think, Who are these shiny happy people? Sometimes at night I can believe the insipid lyrics of old patriotic songs, I can remember feeling homesick to this place still. I can forget how we've cursed it, and how it cursed us all back. At night, I can smile at the dust on the windshield catching the street-lamps, the stillness of the moon through electric wires, and think, "There is hope yet."

Thoughts from a Broken Country - Day 2

We went out again today. That's often all it takes for me to change my mind about this mess of a country. I used to think the traffic was bad, the congestion and density of people oppressive, especially in this godforsaken part of the city known as Dahye, the (southern) "Suburbs" (of Beirut, a.k.a. Hezbollah-land).

But that was before it all went haywire, before the car bombs, before the paranoia... It was before the "Suburbs" went from a ghetto for-all-practical-purposes to a real official one, with enforced boundaries, a true country-within-a-country. There are now "self-enforced" (i.e. Hezbollah-manned) security checkpoints at all entrances to Dahye. The nightmarish traffic at the entrances went from oppressive to unbearable. But the indignity of the checkpoints is what's most disturbing, eerily reminiscent of the "civil" war days, something I thought we've left behind.

At the turn to our place, a bearded man in civilian clothes stops our car and pulls us off to the side; apparently we look too Westernized, not Shiite enough. He asks "Where are you from?" and demands to see ID-cards (Lebanese code for "What religious sect are you?"). My idealistic brother replies, "I'm from Lebanon. I'm secular. I crossed my religious sect off of my ID." My father thinks he's asking for trouble; he's glad my brother is leaving the country next week for another masters in the UK. I side with my brother; I tell the bearded guy, "I'm from here before you were born; where are YOU from?" He replies, mockingly, "Syria." I ask him, "By what right do you ask to see our IDs then?" He says, "I'm trying to protect you; why are you so upset?" I say, "Because we're trying to get to our house right there and every time you stop us." At this point, my mother is glad, too, I'll be leaving soon again. And I... I'm not sure of anything anymore.

I feel like Don Quixote battling the windmills: just as foolish, just as delusional, just as aimless... Soon enough, I'll be back again in the cold comfort of my life in Zurich, I hope. I'll be back to railing against the Swiss, and the Americans, and the Art World, and whatever windmills I could muster--just another foolish man and his grandiose deluded ideals. And what becomes of here? What becomes of them? I'll pretend not to think; even a foolish man can take on only so many windmills....

"Black Water" by Joe Bolton

It happens like this

   Over and over:

A light breaks on the shore

   Of a black water

Hemmed in by cliffs of red

   Stone with faces

Carved into the faces, and you

   See another face

–The face of the remembered–

   Rising from the water,

Descending from the sourceless light,

   And cannot call it out,

Because now you are the light breaking

   Over the black water,

And you are the black water, and you

   Are the face they make.

And then you wake up, and light

   A cigarette,

And you are in time again, the world

   Of time and outside

It is Tuesday, and early June,

   And 1985.

And it would be your wedding day,

   Were it three years ago;

And it would be your anniversary

   Had she not left you . . .

But it is simply a Tuesday, in June,

   In 1985,

And you have woken up alone to the life

   You live alone,

And the workmen down the block are hammering

   The last of the dream from you.

And what work will there be

   For you today,

Dreamer whose dream the world

   Of time has torn away?

—What task to occupy your hands

   That tremble?

Only this resurrection of the grief

   That sweats the drink

Out of you and makes you thirst

   For more—

Makes you dress up to go out and drink,

   Then undress to lie down.

And you will lie down, and you will be

   The light breaking

Over the black water, and you will be

   The black water.

Life on a Beautiful Day

It is eleven years today, Teta, and I do miss you more than ever on this beautiful day...

Sometimes life is so ruthlessly beautiful,
It’s unfair;
Sometimes life is so devastatingly perfect,
It makes me want to cry.

Yesterday I heard a report about a country burying its dead,
A family burying its dead,
A woman burying her dead,
And I thought
The dead are never buried:
The sunshine wakes them
And the raindrops dig their graves.

Today the sun smiled at me,
The breeze smiled at me,
And I smiled back.
Today I missed my grandma more than ever
Because she is missing this beautiful day.

Yesterday a breath of fresh air
Wrapped around my face
Like a mouth gag,
It stripped me of my pretenses,
My vacant melancholy,
It slapped me like my mother’s kiss.

Today I fell in love with you
And I couldn’t care less
About the sound my heart will make
When it’s breaking.

Yesterday I wished I was young
And then I realized
I am.
Yesterday I wished I was alive
And then it hit me
That I am.
I should have wished more wisely,
Wished better,
Wished for what I didn’t have.

Today I smiled.

(Originally posted on April 16, 2003)

Looking In

Nothing much changes when you’re back:
dishes still need to be done,
animals fed;
only there’s less room in the bed.
I won’t say it’s lonelier with you than it is without you,
but it is far less convenient.

Scenes of domesticity gone stale:
your constant complaining of dust,
the dog turning her back and looking longingly out,
and my silence.
Rescue what you can!

I am starting to weigh my 30 years,
piling others’ lives across the scale,
making sure I’m always on the losing end.
So what if it comes to this?

Forgive me if I don’t see you as the victory you might be,
but your smile doesn’t count if it’s not for me.
Besides, I’m too busy looking in.

(Originally posted on March 24, 2007)

Joe Bolton: The Last Nostalgia

Summer

How could we think that it would never end?
While each day was a little eternity,
We must have known the leaves were getting ready
To turn and fall-then loneliness again,
The chill, exquisite longings of autumn.
You woke to find it had become September;
I woke a little later to find you gone.
And suddenly what I would remember
Was wholly formed, irrecoverable:
The hundred-degree heat and the trouble
We had trying to keep cool in our shorts
Till the sun went down-me on the back porch,
Sipping Scotch and listening to Sinatra;
You in the bedroom, reading the Kama Sutra.


The Years

And yet we'd do it all over again—
The success, the excess, and how desire
Got all mixed up with money, sex, the moon,
Till our house lit up like a house on fire.
Maybe it's the intensity we miss,
Those sleek maneuverings at night, when style
Seemed an end in itself, and which it was,
As things turned out. Tonight, in the dead still
Of the night, I lift a glass of amber
To all that's left, which is less than nothing,
Which is to say all I can remember
Of that feeling, that memory of a feeling.
Strange to want back what we wanted back then.
We were as good as dead, or better than.

Two Songs of Solitude and Lament

1

There’s nothing to celebrate this evening.
I’ve come home tired
To a mailbox gorged with junk it can’t
Digest, to a room bereft
Of any hope of getting put into order,
To a radio gone numb
With humming the old tunes and passing along
The old gossip: a breakthrough,
A disaster, the economy’s rise or fall, a war
Going on somewhere.

No one will come by, no one will call,
No ex-friend or –lover
Materialize from my wired-out memory.
Boredom is dangerous:
It gets easier with practice. The streetlights,
As if in celebration
Of nothing, erupt the off-shade of cheap champagne,
While in the bedroom
The clock I can never think to wind
Ticks down like a bomb.

2

Dozing to the tugging drone of fans
These summer afternoons,
The haunt of memory surrounds and inhabits me
Like a siege on some ruined city.
Runners of sunlight manage to twist their way
Through a full-leafed maple,
And the shadow-splotched walls of this room are suddenly
The blush of blood
Across the skin above your breasts
When you came.
Or it rains, and everything the rain streams down
Remembers your hair.
We were in each other’s arms then, but now
We are in the arms of the wind.
The proud ancient warriors, in hopeless bondage,
Would kill themselves
By biting their tongues in two, so as to bleed to death.
I wake in the dark
And walk out onto the balcony to watch the stars
That won’t touch down on the rooftops.

Days of Summer Gone

It’s too late to go back to that apartment
In Bowling Green, Kentucky, where we slept together
So many nights. I wonder if whoever lives there now
And fucks in that bed ever wonders about us?

If memory’s any good gauge, the place
Must be ghosted with us even now—
Where I read aloud to you the love stories
Of other languages, and where there was no part
Of your body my tongue couldn’t locate in the dark.
Don’t try to tell me you’ve forgotten.

I can’t let them go, those days
Of summer gone, for under my eyelids you move
As you moved through the changes of light in that room.

But it’s raining tonight
In Houston, Texas, and how is your weather
In Berkley? What happened to us?
Westward is the world’s motion, and time’s,
If not memory’s.

"August Elegy"

You write that you are tired,
That even language has failed you,
That each sentence doubts itself halfway through.
I start to type, "This rage
For order..." but run out of words,
And the letters fall to pieces on the page.

Monday arrives wordless,
Sun-struck, August wind in the chimes
As birds flit past, elusive as their names.
Last week a black guy bigger
Than me, and much to my surprise,
Pronounced me to be an "artificial nigger."

Otherwise, there's no sound
Of anyone else's voice for days
On end, save yours through the splice and fray
Long distance. I watch, I
Wait for the mail to come around,
Then stand there disappointed under the sky.

This living alone is
Endless language left unmeasured,
And the slow coming of sleep a pleasure
Sadder than being young.
I wake to speak, and the word was
Breaks sweeter than any berry on my tongue.


-Joe Bolton, from "The Last Nostalgia"

(Originally posted on December 03, 2009)

images and images

A visual stroll through the role of women in Egypt and beyond, in Arabic & English. (I did the Arabic typesetting.)

Evil Time / Böse Zeit (H. Hesse)

Evil Time

"Now we are silent
And sing no songs any more,
Our pace grows heavy;
This is the night, that was bound to come.

Give me your hand,
Perhaps we still have a long way to go.
It's snowing, it's snowing.
Winter is a hard thing in a strange country.

Where is the time
When a light, a hearth burned for us?
Give me your hand!
Perhaps we still have a long way to go."

-Hermann Hesse

Böse Zeit

"Nun sind wir still
Und singen keine Lieder mehr;
Der Schritt wird schwer.
Das ist die Nacht, die kommen will.

Gib mir die Hand,
Vielleicht ist unser Weg noch weit.
Es schneit, es schneit!
Hart ist der Winter im fremden Land.

Wo ist die Zeit,
Da uns ein Licht, ein Herd gebrannt?
Gib mir die Hand,
Vielleicht ist unser Weg noch weit."

-Hermann Hesse

Demo fur Gaza, Sa 24.11, Helvetiaplatz

Liebe Freunde

Am nächsten Samstag organiesieren einige Vereine eine Demo

gegen den barbarischen Krieg gegen Gaza.

Es laden ein:

1. GSP Gesellschaft Shweiz-Palästina (www.palaestina.ch)
2. BDS Zürich/BDS Schweiz (www.bds-info.ch)
3. Gruppe Café Palestine (www.cafe-palestine.ch)
 4. Verein der Ägypter
 5. Komitee zur Unterstützung Syriens

Schweigen ist Komplizenschaft!

Mit Beteiligung und ein Referat von Herrn Nationalrat Daniel Vischer

(evtl. auch Hrn. NR Geri Müller und Hrn. NR Balthasar Glättli)

Lieber Gruss

Ahmed Afifi (Bitte weiterleiten)

الاخوة والاخوات الاعزاء

ستنظم إن شاء الله يوم السبت القادم 11.24. الساعة الواحدة والنصف ظهرا

 من ميدان هيلفتسيا بزيوريخ مظاهرة ضد العدوان على اهلنا في غزة

 بدعوة من

1. BDSحملة مقاطعة الكيان الصهيوني  

2. اتحاد المصريين بزيوريخ

3. فريق مقهى فلسطين

4. الجمعية الثقافية الفلسطينية

5. لجنة مناصرة سوريا

فالسكوت على هذه الجرائم الصهيونية يعني الرضا بها والمشاركة في إثمها

سيتكلم في المظاهرة السيد دانيل فيشر البرلماني السويسري

 وربما ايضا كل من السيد جيري ميللر وبالتزار جلاتلي

مع تحياتي

(أحمد عفيفي (برجاء إرسالها لكل من تعرفونهم

SYRIA – THERE AND HERE

The difficult and complex situation in Syria leads to a fragmentation of society into various isolated parts. Some of these parts seem to be in line with each other better than others. Sometimes it appears to be a unified. And then again it falls to pieces. Syria as concept has become a synonym for itself and all the questions that arise when the red line is crossed: be they existential, ethical, humanitarian, political, religious, economic, military or in terms of international law.

WARM UP: CORNER COLLEGE

November 22nd, bar from 7 pm

Presentation in English: Social Media tools in Times of Transition

Discussion and talk, start 7.30 pm

In order to understand the development in Syria we take a closer look at the Egyptian revolution and the struggle for information, media coverage and connectivity. Battuta, Muhammed Radwan is an engineer, activist and social media entrepreneur from Cairo. He visualises and analyses the complexity and multiple layers of the Egyptian revolution, and its use of language on the basis of flyers, stickers, etc. Also, besides Facebook and Twitter, other transnational social media platforms with a simplified operation mode, such as Bambuser or Ushahidi, are used to promote identities and opinions. Battuta draws on his own experiences from the streets, digital spaces and the financial market. He links this to the opportunities of social media tools in times of transition and their field of application – a cultural landscape oscillating between representation and archive; one of his theses states that the speed of technical development is overtaking history.

For sale: “sold out… for now”, original revolution T-shirts from Cairo

To see: collection of printed things, stamps, stickers and flyers

Music and open bar with Ashraf Osman, Architect from Beirut, Lebanon/Switzerland

SYRIA – A DAY BETWEEN CULTURE/S AND FACTS
CABARET VOLTAIRE
November 25th, 12 am – 10 pm

During our second event visual impressions of current artistic works from Syria, such as videos, cartoons, graffiti and illustrations will be displayed digitally on screens. The artist duo Germann/Lorenzi from Zurich outlines a map of Syria without drawing a defined final stroke according to geopolitical and ethnic borders. They rather investigate the fraying, the blind spots and the mental landscape. The presentations will give an insight into the complexity of the Syrian way of thinking, creating and living. Taking into account an Egyptian perspective and position will broaden the context. Private initiatives are often more flexible than institutions and organisations. The approaches differ. Two positions pursue an objective. Finally, to round of the day, which will offer time for discussions and talks besides the exhibition and presentations, a scenographic documentary investigates the influence of the ruling Baath Party on education and self-perception.

HANGING
mapping Syria, by Germann/Lorenzi, Zürich

DIGITAL EXHIBITION
– Video clips by Abou Naddara, video and film workshop
– Video animation by Dani Abo Louh, film and theatre director and Mohamed Omran, painter, sculptor
– Illustrations and drawings by Sulafa Hijazi, a.o. director, producer, writer of educational children series
– Random images – visual messages from social media

TALKS AND DISCUSSIONS

1.30 pm Welcome
1.40 – 2.25 pm A revolution seen from an inner perspective
Odai Alzoubi, Ph.D. candidate for philosophy
2.30 – 3.15 pm From Egypt to Syria and back
Battuta, Muhammed Radwan, engineer, activist and social media entrepreneur from Cairo.

Break

3.45 – 4.30 pm Work that should effectuate a difference in others’ lives
Reto Rufer, Amnesty International, Switzerland
4.35 – 5.20 pm From the Limmat to the Euphrates, a personal story
Ziad Malki, economist
5.25 – 5.50 pm Artistic and activist strategies during the revolution
Bissane Al Charif, film and theatre scenographer

Open Discussion and Break

7.00 – 8.00 pm Film, short introduction by Ziad Malki
Flood in the Baath Country, 2003, colour, 48min, Arabic, with English subtitles
by Omar Amiralay, Syrian documentary filmmaker, 1944 – 5 Feb. 2011 
an approach to examine the influence of the Baath Party in Syria
Courtesy http://www.proactionfilm.com

Open discussion and bar until 10 pm

Concept and realization: Rayelle Niemann, Cordula Bieri/GsoA
Translation: Edmond Alkhal, Ziad Malki, Ashraf Osman
Technical support: Robin Angst / Pastry: Le Mur
Grafic design: Moiré. Marc Kappeler

Admission CHF 15 / 10

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International

Excerpts from the introduction to Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman:

It was about two weeks after the July 2006 Israeli bombing of Lebanon. I was having dinner with a Lebanese friend, the gay novelist Rabih Alameddine. "I don't get it," he said. "In the thirteen years that I have lived in this country, many of my friends, maybe most of my friends have been Jews. We usually agree on everything. Sometimes they are more left wing than I am. We agree about the war in Iraq. But, then, Israel invades Lebanon, and suddenly they don't get it. They get it about Iraq, but all of a sudden they are telling me that Israel has a right to defend itself, et cetera. And I'm shocked. What is going on? Why don't they get it?"
(Kindle Locations 15-19)

"When I was in Argentina, the fascist police made me get down on my knees and bark like a dog, because I was a Jewish dog," he told Mike Wallace, a Jewish man who had changed his name to have a career in broadcast journalism. "When I came to Israel, I heard that some Israeli soldiers had made some Palestinian youth get down on their knees and bark like dogs, because theywere Arab dogs. And I asked myself, are these two incidents the same? And I had to answer yes."
(Kindle Locations 124-128)

What I have come to understand, finally, is that for Europeans, what they call laique or secular culture is actually a kind of liberal Christian culture. And so, to them, difference -switching between Jews and Muslims, depending on the historical moment-violates what they believe to be "secular objectivity" but is really basic Christian aesthetics.
(Kindle Locations 170-172)

And how did the Europeans, who caused the pain in the first place, get off scot-free, while the Palestinians, who had nothing to do with it, ended up paying the price?
(Kindle Locations 184-185)

The United States and the Allies needed a strong military base in the Middle East, and there was widespread guilt about the lack of global aid during the genocide. So creating the state of Israel as a place to dump the refugees and build a military footing in the region for the West served every-body's needs.
(Kindle Locations 208-210)

Does America support Israel because it loves Jews and wants to protect them, or because it just needs a military base in Israel from which to conduct wars and control resources? It's a naive question. All military alliances are strategic in nature. But the blurring gives both the illusion of independence and the illusion that the United States is a "friend" of Israel. The result is a lot of instability, false fronts, fear, and pretending. Israel exists simultaneously as a colonial settler state in relationship to Palestinians, and as a semicolonized project of the Christian West, the very people who caused the Jews' suffering to begin with.
(Kindle Locations 218-221)

So we lie to ourselves, because the truth is so much more frightening. The truth is that Israel's policies do not make the world a safer place for Jews or anyone else. To be a responsible government is to act as though other human beings are real and have lives that matter. In this regard, both the U.S. and Israeli governments have deteriorated into rogue states causing pain and inflicting suffering from a delusional place.
(Kindle Locations 260-262)