Nasri Atallah. | tall and hairy. established 1982.

Matthew McConaughey Only Exists On Airplanes.

April 12, 2013

Most short-haul travel these days consists of sitting in what is essentially a glorified office chair for 2 hours while you get flown from Gatwick to Verona by the Celtic bus-in-the-sky Ryanair. Which is about as glamorous as imagining the short-lived tv show Pan Am being filmed in Scunthorpe.

But most medium and long-haul flights do retain something from the golden era of air travel. You get a lunch that doesn’t look like it’s come from Tesco’s Bargain Bucket, where sandwiches go to fester while they wait for their expiry date. And you get in-flight entertainment.

On a flight from Beirut to Paris the other day, as I was pawing away ineffectually at the screen in front of me, and explaining to a geriatric gentleman sitting in the window seat next to me how to plug in his earphones, it struck me that an airplane is a really weird place to consume pop culture.

Even if you’re a frequent flyer, a plane is still a foreign setting. When you settle in for a couple of hours of entertainment, you usually do so in a relatively familiar place. Your living room, with the accommodating groove of your worn sofa. Or you head down to the local multiplex, to take in the smell of buttery popped maize. Sitting in a tube in the sky hurtling through space isn’t the first place that pops to mind when I think of watching Kick-Ass 2.

When you decide to watch something on a plane, you’re taking in the film, plus everything going on around it, and you. Gut-wrenching bouts of turbulence that make an episode of Modern Family feel like watching Saw 7, as your stomach turns with the same frequency as the kid kicking the back of your seat. The rarified cabin air, the crying babies, the sexual tension as the stewardesses’ thighs rub against your arm on the aisle seat. Just me? Ok, just me. But still.

Then there are the films you choose to watch on a plane. I doubt anyone has ever thought “Ha. Tree of Life, that seems like a great way to spend this 4 hour flight to Cyprus!”. You tend to watch the things you wouldn’t watch anywhere else, or at the very least things you wouldn’t be comfortable paying to watch anywhere else. For a very long time, this meant I thought Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson only existed on 4:3 screens encrusted into headrests.

Sometimes your viewing pattern is a direct response to your environment. I remember a very bumpy flight from Houston to Newark during hurricane season. The whole flight was packed with college students, who were on their way to a football game, wearing the traditional American teenager-on-a-trip uniform of school sweatshirt, short shorts and flip flops. Half-way through the flight, we hit a very rough patch of turbulence. I did what I always do, and clung desperately to my armrest and repeatedly muttered ‘fuck’ to myself, as a kind of obscene personal lullaby. The kids around me on the plane decided the right course of action was to shriek “Oh my god!” both nasally and at the top of their lungs, the way only American girls from the Midwest can. Obviously, this didn’t help calm me down, so I frantically went through my entertainment options, selected an episode of Friends, and tried to go to a happy place with Chandler. Turns out Chandler isn’t much help when you’re convinced you’re going to die.

But even on a normal flight, there something odd about the fact that hundreds of people are each watching something different. In a confined space. At the same time. Once you hear someone guffaw to your right, you can’t resist glancing at their screen. Watching films on airplanes encourages voyeurism.

And then there’s the crying. I cry at everything I watch in an aircraft. The same way tomato juice only exists on planes, people only cry at crappy movies at 30,000 feet. It’s something to do with cabin pressure, and definitely has nothing to do with me being a little girl.

Oh, and the best part of all is when you’re in the middle of a scene and you’re all excited because Liam Neeson is about to kill 28 Albanians with his new Nokia smartphone, and you get a big sign across your screen saying PA, followed by a nasal voice shouting “cabin crew prepare for landing.” And you just know that those words mean you’re going to miss the end of your film as they switch off the entertainment system. And there’s no way I’m paying to finish Taken 2 in a movie theater.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion.

Hard to Love, Hard to Hate: Some Thoughts on Thatcher.

April 8, 2013

I grew up in London in the 80s, too young to understand what miners’ strikes and privatisation meant, too young to understand anti-Poll Tax graffiti scrolled against the walls of the then-grimy capital, too young to even imagine where the Falklands were. But I was old enough to understand that it was important that we had a woman in power. She manufactured wars, she led social unrest, she supported vile regimes. She divided the British Isles. She also strengthened them. She created a disgustingly aspirational society, full of yuppies shuffling through their Filofaxes, looking for their next big deal. She created greed. Inadvertently, she also created punk and counter-culture. She created a culture that both ruined the UK, and made it what it is today. A country obsessed with class. Although she’s hard to like, she’s also hard to hate, although plenty of people seem to do so very easily. I’ve seen a YouTube video of The Wizard of Oz’s “Ding Dong The Witch is Dead” circulate widely on Facebook in the last couple of hours. I’m not particularly inclined towards any political party, be it in the UK or elsewhere, but I can’t help but think that revelling in the death of an 87 year old woman is slightly perverse, and doesn’t show much more humanity that she showed the strikers from the 80s when she called them the ‘enemy within’. I still think I’m too young to fully understand her legacy, although I do find it easier to blame her for the inefficiency of the First Great Western service from Paddington. I think I’m inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt because she’s the first Prime Minister I lived under, much like Roger Moore is my favourite Bond because I saw Octopussy on iTV when I was 7. Anyway, I guess I’ll be doing a lot of reading over the coming days, and trying to come to some semblance of an informed opinion.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: Falklands, Legacy, Margaret Thatcher, Miners' Strike, Yuppies

Quote While You’re Ahead.

February 26, 2013

“The thing about quotes on the Internet is that you can never confirm their validity.” – Abraham Lincoln

Quotes are notoriously tricky in the digital age, as the one above illustrates. They end up on websites that make little to no effort to ensure correct attribution, and then they spread quicker than an STD in a co-ed dorm in New Orleans during Mardi Gras.

Quotes also appear to have a new enemy: the tastefully designed inspirational visual. Part of my daily routine involves going through tumblrs to see what the world’s (read: the hipster blogosphere) mood is that day. Although the allegedly meaningful quote set against a Brannan-filtered backdrop has been a staple for years, it now seems to be working its way away from ‘art blogs’ and into the Facebook habits of my bored aunt.

I see people in my Facebook feed bandying about quotes by Bukowski and Ayn Rand, and I can guarantee they’ve got no clue who either of these people are. That’s not an immense problem on its own. Quotes are often decontextualized, and appropriated in wholly unexpected ways. But the fact that the quote in its current state has basically been reduced to the sharing of a visual, means that the assemblages of carefully crafted words are no longer words at all. Well, not in the lexical sense at least. The letters become visual elements, mined and slapped onto a supporting structure to form a new unitary whole.

It’s important to remember why we quote. Normally it’s to pay tribute to someone’s work, and their ability to express an opinion better than we ever could. It’s also a convenient and semi-socially acceptable way to tell your friends that you read more than they do. Since the advent of the useable web, it has become the defacto repository for all forms of quotations that would have previously had to fight their way into carefully edited dictionaries. So quotes, even centuries old ones, are as much a part of internet culture as goats that laugh like humans, Nyan cat and the humble LOL. Many people even use them to sign off emails or discussion forum posts.

As someone who cares about language, this ubiquity kind of worries me. Because once they become pervasive beyond reason, words find their way into the murky shitfest of the cliche, overused to the point of triteness.

And anyway, to quote Voltaire, “a witty saying proves nothing”.

Comments: 1 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion.

The Quest For The Perfect City: You’re Doing It Wrong.

February 7, 2013

I was very happy last weekend. You may or may not care about this. Actually, I’d much rather you not care about this. There, that’s better. However, the reason I was happy was that I was in London. My hometown. The city where I learned to ride a bicycle. Quite badly, which also makes it the first place I crashed one into a stationary brick wall. It’s the city I first loved a girl in, while she did her best to ignore me. Hi Annie, by the way. It’s the place I first worked in, but more importantly, the first place I resigned. The place I lost 4 phones while drunk on night buses from Tottenham Court Road during one of the shittier periods of my life. But the mere fact of being in London makes me happy. Not a silly, giddy, American-out-of-work-actor-slash-waiter-on-Prozac happy. A melancholy happy. The proper kind.

On the first night, I went out with a close friend to some new bar. As we walked in, the hostess looked at me with a puzzled look. After some quizzical mutual staring and eyebrow raising, we figured out we’d exchanged phone numbers in a bar in Chelsea six years ago. Then, suddenly, as it often does, a city of 7 million people suddenly became two people standing awkwardly in a loud bar in Soho. We engaged in the obligatory catching up. She asked what I was up to, and I mentioned I now lived in Paris. And she said Paris was boring.

Now, I may agree with that theoretically. Paris is famously known as a “ville musee”, a city staunchly proud of its past, and its present immobility. A recent blogpost that made the rounds on Facebook shows Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, and far from being a throwback to a simpler time, every photo basically looked like the city in 2013. All you’d need to add would be a branch of sub-par fast food outlet Quick and a Velib’ stand. But who’s to say what makes a city boring or not. If you want to find fun in Paris you can. I have it on good authority that lots of sordid stuff goes on.

This got me thinking about how we judge cities. Every year lists come out, Quality of Life Indices (whatever the fuck that means). Those are always topped by some place in Switzerland, which makes them immediately invalid. Then you’ve got stuff like Monocle’s Most Livable Cities Index, which, to the best of my knowledge, ranks cities by the grammage of Elderflower in the air and the type of wood used in their airports’ first class departure lounges. These surveys use some combination of metrics (yeah, that’s how you judge a place, with math), which someone with a degree in something sticks into Excel, where your life expectancy in Zurich competes with your ability to use the metro at 4am in Berlin, and hey presto, we’ve got ourselves a ranking.

What these surveys, and most of my conversations with friends, lack is a sense of time. What time in your life do you happen to be in this city? Is Beirut when you’re 60 and in need of sunshine and easy access to a backgammon board the same as Beirut when you’re 22 and eager to work at an internet startup?

Some people are stuck where they are, for whatever reason. It could be visa restrictions like a lot of Lebanese, or it could be places that are getting increasingly unwelcoming, like my native Britain. Others are spoilt for choice, like Europeans. You can pack your worldly belongings, board a Ryanair flight at some obscure airport in the middle of a disused field, and decide to move to Gdansk. Although quite why you’d do that is anyone’s guess.

Samuel Johnson famously said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. But maybe sometimes that man is just tired of delays on the District Line.

There is no right or wrong city. There is no city that will answer all your needs. There are only bits and pieces. London was perfect when I wanted to end up in raves in the East End and not really remember my name the next day. Now that my work requires a bit of introspection (feel free to insert wanking gesture here), I’m happy in a city where you can find a seat on the metro. Paris isn’t home. But then again nowhere is. And while it lasts, it’s doing a lovely job of making me happy.

Comments: 6 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: beirut, cities, City Guide, city rankings, london, monocle, Paris, perfect city

Anthropological Fieldnotes from the Mall

December 20, 2012

13:23 I approach the edifice cautiously in my vehicle. I am directed by men in uniform towards a subterranean parking bay. I comply, wanting to remain docile and form bonds with the mall-dwellers.

13:43 I find a place to leave my vehicle. I almost lose this space to an irate man who appears to have no neck, and one eyebrow. I abandon the safety of the vehicle, adopt a non-threatening posture and enter the communal area.

13:52 The feeding area appears to be several stories above the subterranean ecosystem of screeching cars. It is accessed through an intricate system of automated travelators, otherwise known as escalators. It appears the bipedal mall-dwellers have lost motor functions in their lower-body limbs. Take note of this for later study.

13:54 It would appear most of the population of this microcosm has only a limited knowledge of how to utilize the escalators placed at their disposal. I observe many of them (36 individuals) freeze once they get off the contraption. They appear lost, paw ineffectually at so-called smart phones, survey their surroundings, and head for the food court.

14:01 It has been a long 38 minutes since I entered the edifice. I feel weak. I can’t remember the last time I ate. I’m starting to wonder if this expedition is worth it. I’ve come this far already, I must continue my research. I detect a source of nutritional sustenance on the horizon. I can make out a primitive etching. Lina’s.

14:03 The synthetic leather couches appear to smell of residual cigar smoke. Overweight men, and women in war paint recline in them, silently. It appears they are mates, but they do not communicate verbally.

14:36 My map indicates the presence of a Virgin Megastore on level 2. This ancient repository of cultural artifacts might be of interest. I venture down through an empty stairwell.

14:42 There are many mall-dwellers here. I get pushed out of the way by an obese 9-year old emitting a nasal groan. The subject appears to be lunging for a package marked X-box. I suspect it is some sort of religious deity. Maybe he will be sacrificed to it. I secretly hope so.

14:49 I acquire a book entitled 101 Things to Do Before You’re Old and Boring. I note that going to the mall is not one of them.

15:01 I head back to my vehicle to leave this godless place, and decide to write a useless blog post about the experience in the style of anthropological field notes. I am unsure why. Note this behaviour for further study.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion.

Balkan Break | Photos

November 18, 2012

Comments: 2 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: Balkans, Belgrade, Bosnia, Novi Sad, Sarajevo, Serbia

Balkan Break: Hipsters, Tito and Crazy Bus Drivers.

November 18, 2012

I haven’t really been on an actual holiday in about a year (mainly because right around then I started a job I actually enjoy, that allows me to travel a lot and forget that holidays can be useful from time to time). So in early November, in a bid to disconnect from all my routines, I headed off to a place I’d always been fascinated by, the Balkans. Over the previous couple of months I’d met a whole bunch of crazy Serbs in Beirut who were organizing the SHARE Beirut conference (where my company, Keeward, was a partner and I was lucky enough to be a speaker), and I also happened to make some Bosnian friends at the same time. So it all made a lot of sense. Here’s the crappy diary I kept while I was travelling.

DAY ONE
As I’m in the cab to the airport, I suddenly panic that I need a visa to go to Serbia. I don’t know why I panic, because I know that I don’t. But I still Google it, and my phone freezes, and I start imagining I won’t get to go on holiday. Then I find a page that tells me I can spend 90 days in the country and that I’m encouraged to invest in small businesses in Novi Sad.

The queue at check-in is both promising and worrying. The women (and men) all seem to be 6ft tall and unnecessarily attractive. They also seem to share an inability to stand in a straight line and wait their turn. This may be troublesome. In my mind, I jump ahead 4 days to the moment when I’ll tell a burly Serb that I was in line before him while he beats me to a pulp.

Now, JatAirways is a funny airline. It’s not that it is comically horrible the same way an internal flight in Russia would be, it’s just that it makes me think I’m going to land in a country where I’ll be greeted by an imposing portrait of Tito. The stewardess’ badge says Yugoslavian Airlines. Someone should tell her that Yugoslavia fell apart 20 years ago. Someone might also want to tell her that she fell apart 20 years ago. Actually scratch that, no one should tell her that. She’s matronly and I’m starting to find that comforting on this shaky flight.

I’ve chosen to stay at the redundantly named Balkan Hotel, and my room is a bit bleak. I suppose that is because, despite my best intentions, I can’t seem to find a window on any of its four grey walls. I think I like that’s it’s a bit ugly. I head out to find some Strepsils, because my throat’s itching. I’m happy to find that the surrounding area is lively. I walk into the pharmacy, and again, everyone is attractive. This is getting unsettling.

I ask for my stuff in English, which makes me feel like an American tourist who’s got his I Heart Belgrade t-shirt tucked firmly into his fraying khakis. And this doesn’t make me feel good. So instead of saying thank you, I conjure up a hvala. This, predictably, backfired and made me sound like an annoying American trying to score brownie points with the locals.

I meet up with a friend who tells me that Serbs like to kill foreign-looking tourists. Then he lets out a single guffaw of a laugh. So, I suspect he’s joking. Although I can’t be sure.

After a drink in the touristy bit of town, we go to Grad which is basically Belgrade’s hipster HQ. I don’t mean that as a bad thing. Actually, I probably mean it as a very good thing. There are farewell drinks for someone from the Swedish Embassy who’s been instrumental to funding a lot of art and culture projects. Much to my surprise, she dresses like a rockstar and gives a cool speech. Not your typical Northern European diplomat.

She’s followed by a Croatian band called Lollobrigida. They’re ok. Kinda shouty and annoyingly fun. They’ve got a skeletal crowd, given that everyone’s outside because some bright spark decided that tonight was a no-smoking night (you can still light up indoors in Serbia by the way, which means that Lebanon has beaten someone to a piece of useful legislation for the first time, well, ever).

I’m outside too, downing Baltic vodka, against everyone’s advice. I’m told it’s what penniless students and the homeless drink, and that it’ll give me heart palpitations in the morning. Far from putting me off, this makes me order a succession of doubles (I will obviously later regret this).

Everyone is so cool. And it gets me thinking about Beirut. How we share a lot of the same problems and half-assed solutions. I strike up a conversation with a girl who’s got an English accent, so I ask her if she grew up in England. She calmly says: “Nope, never been to England”. I tell her she’s odd and should read up about foreign accent syndrome. (I’ll later find out that Yugoslav TV was very eclectic in the 80s and early 90s, which means a lot of people grew up watching Keeping Up Appearances. Which I think is my favourite bit of information ever).

We go to Club 20/44 which is on a barge on the Sava. I’d heard about these things, and had always been worried that if I ever went on one, I’d fall in the river. Now that I have very little blood left in my Baltic vodka stream, I can fully picture plunging to my shivery grave here. After spending an hour staring at the red curtains and thinking that the place looked like a steamboat casino, I decided to head off to meet another group of friends.

I think I went to Box, but if I said that my recollection of this bit wasn’t fuzzy, I’d be lying. What I do remember though, was that this was my first experience of turbofolk (that’s a semi-lie, I went to a turbofolk club in Zagreb a few years back, but Serbia is to turbofolk what Hollywood is to Jerry Bruckheimer). The music is absolutely godawful, it makes you want to claw your ears out with rusty nails. But everyone is quite hot, so I decide bleeding ears aren’t a good look.

DAY TWO
Oh man. This has to be the hangover to end all hangovers. Damn you Baltic Vodka!
Inexplicably, I skip having a bite to eat, and head to Branko’s Bridge, because I’d decided it would be the first thing I do in the morning. It’s a beautiful vantage point, this city is stunning. Not stunning the way Angelina Jolie is stunning, but stunning the way the emo girl at the end of the bar is stunning. Damaged, laced with stories.

I suddenly remember I’m hungover and feel dizzy looking over the bridge. I walk back along the banks of the Sava to the hipster area I was in last night, then I continue along all the way along the river till I get to the Kalemegdan Park. This has to be one of the most beautiful park & fortress combos I’ve ever been to. It was filled with couples getting up to no good in discrete corners, old men playing chess and shouting at each other, caked up girls angling for a winning Facebook profile picture as dusk settled across the bridges below. There was even that most awful of park dwellers: the acoustic guitar player. Go to any park in the world on a reasonably warm day, and I can guarantee there’s some long-haired tone-deaf Dave Matthews wannabe belting out Hotel California surrounded by a handful of stoned friends.

DAY THREE
I go for lunch at the Supermarket concept store. It looks, predictably, like every other concept store everywhere else in the world. There a selection of organic Japanese watches and Swahili marmalade. Or something. However, there’s a table next to us doing dozens of shots. At 1pm. On a Monday.

I walk over to Nemanjina with a friend, to check out the bombed out site of the former military HQ that’s been left to its own devices. Too expensive to tear down, too expensive to fix. For some reason, I’m completely awed by damaged and abandoned buildings. I’m sure there’s an insightful psychological explanation for this. I haven’t tried to find it yet.

We have dinner at a kafana, which is kind of a traditional Balkan hangout, where you can have a beer, some goulash and a laugh with friends. I do all three. As we leave, I decide to photograph a painting of a Nikola Tesla lookalike (or Nikola Tesla) hanging over the main dining room and get barked at by a burly man in a red tracksuit. At which point I realize that I’m that annoying tourist guy.

After a nice stroll back to my hotel, I get approached by a pimp trying to sell me the services of some poor lady (I think she’s a lady) across the street. He scowls at me through his tar-black eye, his breath a haphazard cocktail of whisky and evil, and hands me a tattered piece of paper with the words “Escort Lady” and a hand-written phone number . I feel the need to hand him a piece of paper with the words “Bleakest Moment of the Year Award” scribbled in larger red letters , but decide I should go sleep instead.

DAY FOUR
I haven’t touched a tourist guide since I’ve been here, so I decide to pick a leaflet up at reception. Maybe I should visit a museum, just so I don’t feel guilty. The Museum of Yugoslav History looks interesting, so I jump in a cab. Who looks at me and enthusiastically blurts out “Tito!”. I nod and smile. And am slightly worried as to where he’s taking me.

As we pull up in front of the constructivist building, I can tell I’m probably the first person to visit in a while. There’s no one at the door. Then someone runs after me to tell me I need to pay, I say that I’m more than happy to, but didn’t want to wake her up. In one of the buildings, I walk into a long hallway that seems to contain gifts from all of Tito’s non-aligned allies. No one has bothered to switch on all the lights, and it’s a semi-abandoned museum and I’m staring at display box containing a series of porcelain dolls. This strikes me as a slightly freaky confluence of stuff.

I head over to the House of Flowers next door, and only now do I realise this is Tito’s mausoleum. I don’t know why, but suddenly I feel like this is far grander field trip than I’d initially imagined. There’s a collection of batons from the relays organised in his honour, and they are absolutely stunning. I Instagram a picture of Tito’s tomb, which makes me feel very dirty. #ThingsYouShouldntInstagram #InstaIdiot

I pass through the gift shop. I pick up a postcard of Tito and Liz Taylor, and this makes me inordinately happy. I also pick up some Tito fridge magnets, and I can swear I hear the Marshal turning over in his grave up the hill.

DAY FIVE
Belgrade’s been beautiful. I’ve fallen in love six times a day, but now it’s time to take the bus to Sarajevo. A friend there has organized for me to jump in a van with a bunch of people for the 6-hour journey. As soon as I can get in, I can tell the driver is an absolute nut job. He keeps yelling out “Party Bus” and singing songs by the Bangles. It’s 9am. His constant barrage of expletives levelled at everyone who appears to be driving normally around town lead me to conclude that he must be the head of the regional Association of Recreational Tourettes Sufferers. We keep going through Belgrade picking up people. Within an hour, he’s given us all monikers. There’s Italiano. I’m referred to as “Hey, you, Englishman who is Lebanese”, which is slightly disappointing, because the other Brit in the van has been christened James Bond.

He drives like a nutcase too, swerving into oncoming traffic to play chicken with other buses hurtling towards us. He keeps eating Jaffa cakes, and throwing some to the back so we can have a taste. He seems intent to point out every Yugo on the road. There are a lot of Yugos on the road. This gets repetitive pretty fast.

The border leading into Bosnia is about as casual as it gets. They even forget to stamp my passport. As we drive through the Dinarides, I can’t help but smile stupidly out of my window. This has to be one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever come across, even if everyone in the van is now singing Savage Garden songs.

But the trip is well worth it, and I can tell the second I get there that I’m going to love Sarajevo. My hotel has an air of Fawlty Towers about it, and it’s right on the Latinski Most, the bridge where Franz Ferdinand was killed. The archduke, not the band. The city is a breathtaking mix of Istanbul and Vienna the size of a French seaside resort. And it’s a place where people have embraced their painful past. I get an eye-opening tour before we head to a few gallery openings. It feels like belong here within 5 minutes, it’s a nice feeling.

DAY SIX
I can’t help but keep thinking that Sarajevo has done everything right that Beirut has done wrong. And nowhere is this more apparent than at the museum dedicated to the siege of Sarajevo. I grew up, much like everyone else in the world in the 90s, with constant news reports of the Balkans disintegrating. Reports full of odd-sounding names of Slavic military commanders, distant cities, and incomprehensible notions of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘mass graves’. This museum is further proof that this is a place that has accepted its past, that it wants to memorialize it.

There are truly heart wrenching photos on the walls, slightly worse for wear, much like the museum itself. There is an installation that shows what a typical kitchen would have looked like during the siege, complete with UNHCR plastic sheets for windows, canned beef from EU humanitarian aid and powdered milk. As someone who never lived the war in Lebanon, I always found it odd how much my friends there hate powdered milk. Looking at this room, in this solemn space, I get it. I choke up, as does my friend, who wasn’t in Sarajevo during the siege either because her family lived in Libya. I think we both feel guilty about that.

DAY SEVEN
9-hour bus ride to Novi Sad. Not fun.

DAY EIGHT
Last night, I ended up remedying the never-ending bus ride by drinking a lot at a house party and later at a club with the gang from SHARE. As is often the case, I haven’t bothered to look at a map of where I am, so I’m perfectly satisfied with walking around the area I happen to be in (which is slightly outside the town centre). This suits me just fine, as I’m about 10 minutes away from the Danube and from one of the most stunning strolls I’ve ever taken. As I walk with a friend and stop for coffee and fish stew, I can’t help but notice that the pace of life here is quieter than Belgrade, which makes sense. But there’s something nice about that, and I think it’s because I’m starting to feel melancholy about leaving. I’ve enjoyed disconnecting for a week. I’ve fallen in love with this part of the world, as I knew I would. And really can’t wait to be back.

________

You can find pictures from the trip here.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: Belgrade, EXIT Festival, Grad, JatAirways, Novi Sad, Sarajevo, Sava, Serbia, SHARE Conference

Going to McDonald's for a salad is like going to a hooker for a hug.

Anonymous

MS MR

November 13, 2012

Bones from MS MR on Vimeo.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: MS MR, New Music

BMI Voyager Interview.

May 3, 2012

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: BMI Voyager, Interview, Nasri Atallah

Elle Magazine Interview.

May 3, 2012

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: Elle Magazine, Interview, Nasri Atallah

Other Lives.

December 9, 2011

Just discovered this band a couple of weeks ago. They are just perfect. Judge for yourself.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Music. Tags: hipster bliss, other lives, tamer animals

The Book.

December 9, 2011

Last Sunday, I launched the Our Man in Beirut book. The launch party was a huge success thanks to all the amazing people who showed up, my publishers at Turning Point Books, the great setting at Secteur 75 and the vodka offered by Russian Standard Lebanon which kept everyone chatting and mingling.

I’ll write a post about the event this weekend, but in the meantime you can find the book at all major bookstores in Beirut, and at AntoineOnline.

Oh, and there might be a book signing in London in late January. I’ll keep you posted.

Comments: 2 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Fiction., Humour., Opinion., Photography. Tags: Our Man in Beirut Book

The Impossibility of Pride.

December 9, 2011

This was originally published on my blog, Our Man in Beirut.

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.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: Lebanon, Our Man in Beirut

On the Telly Again.

December 9, 2011

Had a great time at Men El Ekhir with Pierre Rabbat and the panelists. Probably the best show on Lebanese TV.

Comments: 2 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Humour., Opinion., Video. Tags: Blogging in Lebanon, Men El Ekhir, Nasri Atallah, Our Man in Beirut, Pierre Rabbat, Religion in Lebanon

The Loneliness of the Blackberry User.

November 8, 2011

I wrote a lil’ sutin’ over at keeward.com about how lonely it feels to be a Blackberry user these days.

“When the world of Blackberry collapsed in October during a widespread 3 day service disruption, there was a hilarious tweet that went something along the lines: the worst part of the Blackberry outage is that I have to admit I have a Blackberry. And I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. It’s an odd feeling to have, especially when you’ve developed brand loyalty over time. I got my first Blackberry about 6 or 7 years ago. Back then the phone was just starting to make its transition from an unsexy brick made for bankers and consultants into something everyone could use. Its practicality was unmatched, from push email to the free messenger service.

The early adopters who weren’t professionals could show off with their Blackberries with pride. They made them seem important, like they were receiving so much important email that they absolutely had to have it in the palm of their hands at all time. Of course, most interactions for the mere mortal were trivial. Mine revolved around forwarding jokes, and figuring out where afterwork drinks were.”

Continue reading here.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: android, blackberry, iphone

Something Meaningful On a Post-It.

November 8, 2011

Write something pseudo-meaningful on a Post-It. Take a Hipstamatic photo of it. Post to Facebook.

Comments: 1 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Humour., Opinion. Tags: Hipstamatic, Post-It

Music, Books and the Future of Consumption.

October 21, 2011

I wrote a lil’ something over at the keeward website. I work at keeward as a media and publishing consultant, which means I get to work on lots of interesting projects and think about things like the future of digital creativity.

“Living in Beirut has its advantages, the main one being 300 days of sunshine and the Mediterranean being about five minutes away from you at any given point during the day. One thing, however, that really isn’t enjoyable is the Internet speed. Lebanon has one of the slowest Internet connections in the world. It’s so ridiculous that it has even been the subject of a BBC report . This means that plenty of things people take for granted elsewhere, such as streaming the video I’ve just linked too, are arduous and frustrating activities. Sometimes it also means we don’t have access to certain services. I watched with the rest of the world as Facebook announced its Spotify integration a few weeks ago. But I didn’t really understand what that meant in tangible terms, since I didn’t have access to Spotify.

Now that I’m in Paris for the week, I’m streaming all sorts of great tracks through Spotify and sharing them in through my ticker feed with my friends. I’ve already made a couple of musical discoveries in the last couple of days, just by clicking on recommendations and related links. Spotify kind of exemplifies the way digitizaiton changed the way music is made and consumed…”

Continue reading here.

Comments: 0 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Opinion. Tags: amazon kindle, keeward, music, napster, publishing

Frieze Art.

October 19, 2011

Spotted this at Frieze Art in London last Saturday. Didn’t bother to check who the artist was (I may have been a little sleepy). Any ideas?

Comments: 2 Posted by: Nasri Atallah Categories: Art., Design. Tags: art, frieze, now

Going to McDonald's for a salad is like going to a hooker for a hug.

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