Nour and I have been friends for three years. For the past two years we've been a couple, and on August 26 we finally got married in a civil ceremony at the cultural center in Germasogeia (an Eastern suburb of Limassol in Cyprus) officiated by a badass mayor in a Hawaiian shirt.
Undoubtedly the happiest day of my life.
I was asked by Brownbook Magazine to write a few words about my relationship to falafel. Prompted by an esteemed Middle Eastern publication, I decided to come clean with a dirty confession.
I haven't really done much public reading or free-form storytelling in a while. So it was amazing have a chance to do both, pretty much back-to-back over the past few days.
Last Wednesday, my friend Rabih Salloum and I read some of our work in front of a crowd at Bardo. It was an intimate venue, and the complimentary Russian Standard helped ease some initial nerves. In the process of preparing for the reading, I was trying to polish up some of the fiction I'd been working on for a collection of short stories (which could have also doubled as a novella). While I was working on it, I came to the sudden realization, after a couple of years of work, that I actually don't enjoy writing fiction that much, and that I'm probably pretty shit at it. So I took the decision to focus on creative non-fiction, and have been extremely productive since.
Then, this past Monday I told a story for the first time in a The Moth-style format in front of about 100 people at AltCity during the Cliffhangers - Storytelling Nights, organized by Dima Matta, herself an author and creative writing instructor.
They were both great experiences, and I met lots of great people who motivated me to do this kind of thing more often, and dedicate some more time to writing and storytelling in general. All in all, a solid few days.
The Slovenian philosopher reacts.
Read MoreAnxiety. There’s a lot of it going around at the moment. Not huge paralyzing anxiety, but just a constant low-level anxiety that you’re not taking in as much as you should be. Mass FOMO. We have to watch everything, listen to everything, share everything. It’s anxiety-inducing. What if I miss a trend? What if I don’t know what the latest meme is or what the photo comments on the LADBible mean? How can I live down the shame? Have you tried Meerkat? Do you have an opinion on Tidal? In the contemporary trend-heavy, algorithm-driven cultural landscape you’d be forgiven for going loco.
One way to make sense of the pop culture consumption environment is through recommendations. Some are algorithmic, some are organic (ie human). One of my favourite ways of getting the latter is through Pop Culture Happy Hour (an NPR podcast with a pretty self-explanatory name), that incorporates a great segment at the end of each show called What’s Making Us Happy. A kind of freestyle recommendation after the structured programme. So in the same spirit, and if you’re in need of some pop culture guidance, allow me to go into what made me happy this weekend. It’ll be a bit narrative, a slight departure from the kind of habitual copy pasting of a link on a social feed with the word “This.” appended, as if it is some form of universally applicable contextualization.
First off, some algorithmic recommendation from our friends at Netlfix. Normally, the platform’s recommendations are a bit off-base. I have no desire to watch Suits, yet the Netflix gods seem to think I should. I am still unsure why. However, this weekend, and in the wake of a The Killing binge over the last two weeks with my significant other, it pulled up the BBC miniseries Luther, which ran for 14 episodes between 2010 and 2013, as something I should dig into. I finally clicked on it on Friday evening, and have been finding it hard to tear myself away from the screen to do anything else, like shower. It is a staggeringly brilliant show. Idriss Elba’s performance as the emotionally volatile sleuth is engrossing, and he’s got a presence unlike anything I’ve ever seen on the small screen (not since Stringer Bell anyway). The show lives in that kind of liminal Britain that exists in narratives such as Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. Set five minutes in the future, but retro-feeling (without the kitsch), a dystopian wasteland, a reflection of a London glimmering and fast losing its bearings. The seasons are short and brisk, made up of hour-long chapters, like most blistering English television.
The second recommendation isn’t really a specific show, but rather a person, documentarian Louis Theroux. I’ve been aware of Louis Theroux for as long as I can remember, growing up as I did in the UK with his Weird Weekends on the BBC. But I’d never bothered to actually watch anything he’d done until now, my only connection having been a hasty reading of Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, followed by some googling that led me to realize they were father-son and some internal ruminations on the state of nepotism in British culture. However, having watched some documentaries from various bits of his career, I can safely say he is a brilliant storyteller in his own right, and nepotism has nothing to do with his success. Very early on, with the aforementioned Weird Weekends in 1998, he crafted this on screen persona of a naive, deer-in-the-headlights shaggy reporter. As a viewer, you know he’s intelligent and educated, but his earnestness on camera is disarming, and he leaves all these pregnant pauses all over his interviews, that the subjects start to fill with their innermost thoughts. It’s an interview technique that’s been widely adopted since then. For example, without Theroux, there’d be no Vice Guide to the Balkans (although that is a highly banalised version of his genteel gonzo journalism).
On the literary front, I finally picked up a volume that’s been lying on a shelf in my line of sight for a month, entitled The Henry Miller Reader. You could say it’s an indirect recommendation from my father, since he just kind of left it laying around. Anyway, the volume was published in 1958 and pulls together some of Miller’s writing on his travels, some of his fiction and some profiles of acquaintances. Not that the distinction makes much sense, as the line between fact and fiction in the literary canon got very blurry thanks in great part to his efforts. My favourite piece (so far) is probably The Ghetto, an extract from his seminal Sexus, as it describes a part of New York City that I’m particularly infatuated with (the Lower East Side), and seems prophetic now in its warnings against over-gentrification.
But I guess the thing that made me the happiest this weekend wasn’t a matter of consumption at all, but rather a conspicuous lack of it. Thanks to my Jawbone UP I’ve been obsessed with hitting my daily walking targets for the past couple of years (I highly recommend this hilarious piece by David Sedaris in The New Yorker on his absurd relationship to his fitbit). So yesterday, after I was done reading some Miller over a bite to eat in Parmentier, I walked home along the banks of The Seine. For the first time in a long time, I decided to do this with nothing in my ears. No podcasts. No Spotify KCRW playlists. Nothing. Just the sound of the river lapping up against the cobblestones. No one was really walking along the banks in this area, save for a lone jogger every 15 minutes. Until I came across a guy playing his saxophone and I got to listen to that for a bit. As I kept walking, a Bateau Mouche went by. By now the sun was setting, and the boat had the purpose-built lights along its side blaring to show tourists the details of what was going on along the banks. A group of clearly inebriated teenagers waved at me. Free from distraction, in that moment, I decided to connect fully with the world around me. I stopped solidly, turned fully towards them and gave them the most enthusiastic wave I’ve ever given a seafaring vessel. And they lost their shit, started jumping up and down and suddenly the waving on their side expanded from a group of 10 guys to a hundred people on the windswept deck. Then they continued cutting through the water heading away from me, and the scene quietened down suddenly. Again, the water next to me and the faint rumble of cars in the distance were the only sounds. In a way I was alone again. But in many more ways, I’d never been less alone.
The humourless and self-congratulatory circle-jerk that is the annual Academy Awards seems more anachronistic than ever. From the inane savaging of the sartorial choices of female actresses on the red carpet, to the tightly scripted opening show tunes, to the trite in-joking between mega-rich mega-powerful celebrities, to the absurd running time, to the whiteness of it all, it just seems to belong to another era.
In the age of video on demand, and streaming and Kickstarter-funded independent cinema and audience empowerment, we still get flicks like The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, Weinstein-driven (or Weinsteinesque) dramatized biopics featuring lofty performances by competent Englishmen bent on taking home a trophy. Films genetically engineered to win statuettes, but devoid of all meaning and entertainment. It was refreshing to see the twee sensibility of Wes Anderson rewarded. Although I’m not a fan of that sensibility, I find it far more in tune with the current mood of audiences than, for example, a purposefully nothingsexual Alan Turing played by a Benedict Cumberbatch who has forgotten this isn’t season 4 of Sherlock.
Birdman - which I loved almost as much as it loved itself - took home the big trophies of the night. While I’m happy that Alejandro González Iñárritu, a Mexican director, is getting deserved recognition - and using that recognition to shine a light on the injustices of immigration laws in the US - the film is so precisely what Hollywood loves: Itself. A meditative reflection on its self-worth, which isn’t of much use to people outside of the navel-gazing scope of fellow creatives.
The Oscars do serve a financial purpose, naturally. The Oscar bump having provided the vile piece of shit that is American Sniper a 10,000% increase in ticket sales, and a more modest bump between 30 and 70% for the rest of the Best Picture nominees. Are awards important? Certainly. They help us make sense of the vast amount of production that is churned out on a yearly basis. They help do that most 2000something of things: curate. Is an award mainly dished out by the overwhelmingly white, male members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences important? I'd say that's a pretty solid 'Less than ever'.
This was originally shared on Facebook, about a year ago. I've edited it slightly for grammar and syntax.
As we're standing outside Torino last night three guys approach us. Two of them are colossal with long blonde ponytails, and the third is shorter and stocky with an emo punk haircut and a broken nose. All three are wearing metal band tees. In what sounds like a nondescript but thick Scandinavian accent, they ask us what the club we're waiting in line for is called. We explain that we're not in line, we're just drinking on the sidewalk outside a dive bar. They say they're very confused and that they've been drinking a lot. To illustrate this one of them waves a bottle of Kassatly Chtaura liqueur in my face and cracks up. I ask him why on Earth anyone would drink liqueur. He pointed at a sticker that said -20% and shouted out "cheap!" as he lifted the bottle and tilted in, gesturing I should take a swig.
Knowing what Kassatly Chtaura liqueur tastes like I politely kept my mouth shut. We start talking, and laughing and as they buy us flowers, we find out that they're actually from Estonia. I ask them if they're traveling with a band or something (they look unmistakably like roadies), but they say that they're on a far more important mission. Intrigued, we ask what this mission is. "To drink in every country in the world!" they scream back in a cackle of laughter.
They've been to 100 countries so far. Correction. They've gotten thoroughly hammered in 100 countries so far. Marty explains that he broke his nose a few days ago falling down some steps while heavily inebriated in Petra. Then he takes out his phone and shouts "Want to see something cool? We got drunk in Kiev last week on Maidan." He starts sliding through the photos of his phone, standing on the scenes of the Kiev protests. Beer in hand. After a few photos we get to the ones he's really excited about. They raided former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich's opulent mansion, along with all the other protestors. And they sat in his jacuzzi. Naked. There is photographic evidence of this (which I can, very sadly, never unsee).
It was one of those encounters that had half the street in stitches. A happy piece of Beirut randomness, that was broken up half an hour later when the police came along and started confiscating rolled-up cigarettes from people outside the bar and opening them up to check for drugs. The cops were sitting in their car and sniffing away ridiculously at the destroyed roll-ups. There was a sense of indignation at the unnecessary rudeness with which they broke up a friendly gathering of people gearing up for a long Easter weekend. One guy approached the car and defiantly started rolling a cigarette in the cops face, saying he just wanted him to see it happening to avoid having to roll another one later. When asked for his ID, he refused and muttered something about the dysfunctional state of affairs in the country and was promptly - and literally - dragged away to the crumbling and decrepit station across the street.
No two encounters could more perfectly illustrate a typical day in Beirut. From laughter and worldliness to violence and hopelessness in an hour. And all of that on the pavement outside a bar on a Thursday night.
Outside Torino Express with some friends. (Photo by legendary Lebanese photographer Tony El Hage)
