Tying The Knot: Musings on the Modern Marriage | GQ INDIA

By the time you read this, I will be married. This isn’t a milestone I find particularly terrifying. Nour - my girlfriend - and I have been together for two years, get along swimmingly, and already make great life partners. This isn’t gloating. This is true, plus it’s pretty handy given we’re committing to a lifetime together. Added advantage: getting married means people can stop referring to us as each other’s ‘fiances’. This is undoubtedly the ugliest word the English language has ever borrowed from another language, and it should give it back. Immediately.

Engagement itself is such an odd, mildly annoying state of being. You’re essentially still just a couple and nothing has changed. Yet - despite yourself - everything has. People ask more questions, things have suddenly gotten ‘serious’, although they’ve always been serious to you. And, worst of all, you have to plan your wedding.

Doing this, however small the shindig, adds a lot of stress to lives that are already a cacophony of information and decision making, compounded by a world that seems to be - to all intents and purposes - falling apart.  So deciding what color the tablecloths are going to be at a party in four-months time isn’t something anyone should really spend time doing.  

In my case, things got so overwhelming at one point, that I couldn’t keep track of everything I was doing, and I actually sent my girlfriend a Google Calendar invite to discuss something about the wedding. It was around this low point (seriously, a calendar invite) that we were headed to Florence to a childhood friend’s wedding.  

***

Our Middle East Airlines flight from Beirut to Rome was predictably chaotic. Lebanese travellers see assigned seating as more of a suggestion than a requirement, and negotiations over seating rights go on during the whole flight. The instant we land every seatbelt buckle in the plane comes undone with a loud clang and everyone stands up pointlessly. An exhausted flight attendant screams down the intercom: “We just landed. We’re 10 minutes away from the gate. If you could wait 3 hours to get here, you can sit the hell down for 5 more minutes!”

Things outside the plane aren’t far more organized. This is Italy after all, and everyone around the Mediterranean is essentially the same. However, this being Italy, everyone is suddenly very well dressed. The Carabinieri uniforms make me question my sexuality for a minute.

On our first day in Rome we head out for some tourism. About 17 seconds later we realize it’s 35 degrees outside and the city is full of Americans weidling selfie sticks. We quickly retreat to our hotel and the quiet of its pool, devoid of both. We only venture out once to grab a Negroni (or seven) in Pigneto, an area I found by Googling “Hipster Rome”. Think Brooklyn meets Lisbon, but again, better dressed.

The following day we take the high speed train to Florence. A leathery man thrusts his Billionaire Couture jeans tag in my face as he places his crocodile skin briefcase next to our tattered bags. We smell his cologne for the next hour and a half. It lingers with us during the cab ride to the hotel. After some freshening up we head to the Villa Di Maiano, where the wedding dinner is getting underway.

It was the kind of international mess we love. Our friends getting married were Syrian-Brazilian & Lebanese-Chinese-Dutch from Curacao. And they both live in Dubai. They are ridiculously, absurdly attractive yet also aggressively lovely, which makes them impossible to hate - try as one might. As for the event itself, it was as close to a fairy tale as I’ll ever get I think. And it fits these two perfectly.  I tried to imagine Nour and I being at the center of this, and I burst out laughing. We’d look like trained monkeys dressed up to entertain at a carnaval. But I guess that’s what a wedding and - at the risk of sounding melodramatic - life is all about: always doing something that is entirely sincere.

Under the fireworks and general aura of Instagram-ready perfection around us, 3,000 kilometers away from our noisy lives, and well into a fifth round of Jager shots, Nour and I disconnected from everything. Our days filled with multiple email accounts, multiple social media accounts, multiple responsibilities, identities. We took a moment to do nothing and enjoy what was happening around us. And I think it allowed us to enjoy what we have coming our way too.

***

If everything goes to plan, by the time you read this we’ll have had a small ceremony in Nour’s parent’s backyard in a village in South Lebanon with a few friends. There will have been some drinking, some awkward dancing, some embarrassing speeches. And it will have looked and felt like us.

But what a wedding looks like isn’t important, really. It’s a what a marriage looks like that prepares you for the often difficult reality of life together. And the reason I’m not terrified going into this thing is that I know my marriage started two years ago, and things have never been better.

This article appeared in the September issue of GQ India on sale now, at good newsagents and online. 

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The Happiest Day

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. 

Officially Married. 💍

A photo posted by Nasri Atallah (@nasri.atallah) on


Reconnecting: Readings & Storytelling Nights

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.

NasriAtallah_Storytelling

What's Making Me Happy: Pop Culture Recommendations From A Lazy Weekend

Anxiety. 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 Oscars Are Utterly Useless

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'.