The Joy and Pain of Beirut

Tom Young is a British painter who has developed a fascination for Beirut and Lebanon and depicted it in his work. He points out that the city provided him with the symbols of both 'joy and pain' and their co-existence. No doubt, there is little shortage of either in Beirut and Lebanon.

Tom Young's attitude and craft are discussed in this pleasant video that also depicts photographs of a Lebanon long-gone, one that will be hauntingly familiar to anyone who lived there during that era.

Young states that his work focuses on memory and longing, as well as rebirth and recovery. Lebanon is indeed penetrated with sentiment and melancholia; the people's faces, and often their taste in music, reflect these longings. Their actions do also speak to the patch-up and the constant recovery from war.  

The video also has a quote which may be relevant in these circumstances: "There is a circle called sentiment and there is the compulsion to break free of it. In the negative space between contraries we learn to venture."

Mona el-Hallak and the Barakat Building

For over a decade, Lebanese architect Mona el-Hallak has waged a single-handed campaign to turn a war-ravaged belle epoch building in Beirut into the first museum devoted to the contemporary history of the city. 

The museum, which will be called "Beit Beirut", will devote part of its display to addressing the country's devastating 15 year civil war (which lasted from 1975-1990).

Also known as the "Barakat building", the four-story structure sat astride the city’s so-called “Green Line” during the war, which divided the Christian and Muslim quarters of Beirut. It is an area that saw some of the heaviest fighting during those years.

The architect who created the building in the 1920s, designed it in such a way that would later make it a perfect hideaway for snipers during the war - providing depth, safety and a variety of vantage points from which to shoot at passersby on the street. During the war scores of civilians were killed outside its doorsteps. 

When real estate developers tried to turn the pockmarked structure into a parking lot in 1997, Hallak launched her crusade to save the edifice from demolition. At the same time she put forward an alternate vision for the building: to turn it into a museum devoted to the memory of Beirut, where visitors could come and learn about the civil war. 

It was an ambitious scheme in a country of deep and longstanding ethnic disputes, and where the erstwhile conflict is seldom discussed in any meaningful way.

“After almost a generation of reconstruction there is not one single museum, or centre, that addresses what happened here and how 100,000 Lebanese were killed,” says Hallak. “This project is an attempt to reverse this dangerous collective amnesia among the Lebanese.”

For 15 years real estate developers, politicians, and a public more interested in forgetting the past threw every obstacle into her path. But Hallak’s determination and deft campaign proved too difficult to stymie. 

After much toil the project has cleared the final hurdles to construction. Renovation work on the Barakat Building, which began several weeks ago, is slated for completion in 2015.

A full-length Q&A with Hallak about the history of the building and her efforts to save it can be read here.

The Blood of Adonis

Legend has it that a young man grew up in the city of Byblos, and became so handsome and prominent that he was called "Adon" (or "lord" in Canaanite) - an appellation the Greeks later hellenized into "Adonis".

Adonis was so loved by two goddesses that another god grew jealous, transformed himself into a wild boar, and gored the beloved young man to death. A river near Byblos was named Adonis after the legend (today it is called the Ibrahim River, see photo below). Its annual spring run-off is reddish which was interpreted as the very blood of Adonis coursing into the sea.

On February 15th of this year, another Lebanese river ran red into the sea - but the source was no legend or metaphor. The Lebanese Ministry of Environment found that a nearby factory had dumped a red dye into the Beirut River causing the frightening scene. That sad river was already deprived of its natural beauty by having its banks paved with concrete, and it has now suffered a second humiliation.

This event is a powerful and stark emblem of how badly things have gone wrong in Lebanon's environment. The flow of red dye may be a singular phenomenon, but Beirut's daily air pollution is three times the norms considered acceptable by the World Health Organization. The seashore cities, such as Sidon, Tyre and Tripoli, pour endless currents of raw sewage into the sea close to shore. The mountains around Beirut are paved with uncontrolled development that can only be described as a kind of urban cancer, and of civilization gone terribly wrong.

Lebanon is infamous for its civil war and troubled politics. In fact, the real threat to the country may be from environmental degradation - air, noise, water, sea, and ground pollution that is slowly but surely destroying the bodies and souls of its citizens. The red river of Beirut may be a dramatic warning, but who will heed it?

Behind these troubles is a more mysterious tale, and the legend of Adonis can enlighten us again. The boar that gored the young man is a symbol of the wild creature within us that thinks of naught but itself. It has uncontrolled appetites and is known variously as the ego, the beast within, or the "Commanding Self" - that knot of motivations created by a lifetime of greed and vanity. In the legend of Adonis, the wild self destroys the beauty that is within each human.

The factory that dumped the dye into the Beirut River, the developers who build randomly in the hills and the corrupt government officials who pocket money intended for building sewage plants suffer from the same uncontrolled appetites as the wild boar that destroys out of jealousy and self-interest. To be sure, some of this is due to the failure of the state in Lebanon, but even that is due to the rapacious motivations of its leaders and politicians.

The story of Adonis goes on to tell us that one of the goddesses who loved him begged the masters of the Underworld to let him "resurrect". And so he did, and was afterward permitted to live in the hills above Byblos (where this entry was written) in summer and spring, and to descend back to the Underworld for the other six months of the year. His drops of blood are also believed to have been transformed into the red anemone flower that carpets Lebanon's fields every spring.

For Lebanon to gain any such recovery, someone, if not many, will have to demonstrate some sincere love for their country, and for the welfare of their children, and rise beyond the narrow self-interest: the wild boar within.

Time is short. The Lebanese would do well to hear the clarion call of the red river.

Restaurant Varouj

The most interesting Middle East Institutions are often those that fly far below the radar of the masses. A purely word-of-mouth establishment, Restaurant Varouj is one such place.

This Lebanese cookery, located in the tiny labyrinthine streets of Beirut’s Armenian enclave of Burj Hammoud, requires of its customers not just a monster appetite, but also a serious wherewithal for exploration.

There are no maps, street names or workable directions to find the place – just a general location from which to enter that Borgesian maze of laundry-draped alleyways that make up the Middle East’s most densely populated neighbourhood. Only by asking directions from a series of bleary-eyed elders and teenagers playing soccer in flip-flops will one find their way, point-by-point, to Varouj’s doorstep.

Here a father-and-son team presides over all four tables situated beneath shelves decked with Middle Eastern bric-a-brac. The mercurial, cigar-smoking elder, playing the combined role of owner, waiter, and maitre d’ is a character of the old school variety, who’s known to verbally manhandle his customers in the slightly tarnished Arabic of the Burj Hammoudi Armenians. His mild-mannered son whips up culinary storms at his command from a cooking station just a few feet behind him.

The usual Lebanese fare is on offer here – and all of it is extremely good. The prize dishes are the sujouk (spicy Armenian sausages), chicken livers, makanek (Lebanese sausages), b’tata harra (spicy homefries), and the raw kibbeh. To wash the whole thing down, order a bottle of locally made Arak (diluted with water in a pitcher and served in small glasses with ice cubes).

The novelty of the Varouj experience is amplified by the absence of printed menus or listed prices of any kind. Food is ordered ad hoc depending on what the master of ceremonies has available that day - and what he thinks you should eat!

At the end of the smorgasbord the host haphazardly tallies the meal price in an indecipherable chicken-scratch and throws it on the table. But it’s invariably less costly than what you'd expect to pay for such a meal fit for a king.

We’d add a few lines about how to find the place, but getting there through one’s own efforts is half the reward.

Beirut Graffiti

Torino Express

Most aptly described as a pint-sized hole-in-the wall, this café-cum-bar located in Beirut’s boisterous Gemayze district, is one of Lebanon’s epicenters of social ferment. Throngs of diehard regulars made up of local and expatriate artists, journalists, and creative young professionals descend in waves upon this cellar-like intrusion to revel the night away to the strangely eclectic musical selections of DJ-proprietor "Andreas" – Torino’s celebrity half-German, half-Lebanese owner known for his bushy salt-and-pepper beard, scotch-taped headphones and glassy-eyed disposition. He is both loved and held in contempt for sending his parties into convulsions by throwing sudden wrenches into the musical fray – German beer garden music, classic Julio Iglesias, and Mirielle Mathieu being some notable selections. Lab-coat clad bartenders serve up bottles of Almaza, trademark mojitos, and some of the best toasted salami sandwiches found anywhere east of the now vanished Green Line. Often packed like a sardine can, this bar is not for the claustrophobic or faint of heart.

All text and photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2009

Chadi Younes, Director

Photo Courtesy of Chadi Younes
All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

The impression one gets of Chadi Younes is anything but that of a man whose life is split among cities spread across colliding hemispheres and cultures. But if asked, this is exactly how he would describe it. His serene, almost sedate, manner - one more appropriate of a Biblical shepherd than of an international, jet-setting, ad director - belies this fact.

We are at Wanda’s Pie in the Sky - a café and bakery in the quasi-bohemian Kensington Market district of downtown Toronto. It is Sunday and the street teems with shoppers and drifters idling away the afternoon. Although Younes, just back from a directing job in his native Beirut, is visiting this neighbourhood for the first time, he appears as much at home here as any of the Torontonians ambling leisurely past our table.

"Beirut and Toronto, my cities of residence, are complete opposites," Younes says. "They mirror the opposites in my personality, which is why I have to constantly go to one to get away from the other.”

Younes, 36, is one of the Middle East’s most promising directors whose synergistic embrace of both eastern and western cultural influences has made him one of the more highly sought after ad directors in the region. Constantly skipping between the cities of Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, and his newly adopted Toronto (where he makes the occasional appearance for R&R after his lengthy jaunts in the hyperactive capitals of the Arab World), Younes is a gipsy in the truest sense of the word.

Admitting to being part of a generation which he describes as “not feeling at home anywhere”, and wanting to embrace all cultural influences, Younes has made the fusion of East and West his calling card. And you can see it in his work. He has directed commercials for MTV Arabia, Showtime, Vodafone, Snickers, and many others – all of which are geared towards Arab audiences, but which are crafted with a directness and edge that are more typically western in style. His use of unusual characters, humour, strong art direction, rhythmic cuts to music, ambient light, and wide camera apertures, typifies his work and sets it apart from that of his contemporaries in the region.

After working several years, first as an Art Director and then an Associate Creative Director at the BBDO Advertising Agency in Dubai, Younes decided to leave his job in 2003 to try his luck at directing his own commercials. The combination of his experience at BBDO, his good contacts, his enrollment in the odd filmmaking course, and a strong foundation in stills photography, helped Younes get off to a solid start. In 2005, he directed an ad for “Barbican” – a non-alcoholic beer that was considered a huge success and became a creative benchmark for television advertising in the Middle East. He attributes a big part of his success to selecting work that is intelligent, interesting to watch, and which allows for his own creative input.

“I like to put myself in the shoes of the viewer before I create something that invades his or her space,” Younes says. “I feel it criminal to invade someone's home with material which is not watchable. So I try to take care with what I select and craft.”

Despite his success at finding interesting projects, Younes admits that there are limits to working in the Middle East.

“Clients are generally fearful and cautious in this part of the world,” he says. “Any approach which is deemed risky or in the slightest way sensitive is quickly shot down. There’s a lot of self-censorship.”

In addition to wanting to work on more projects in North America, Younes is planning to try his hand at short films, and to direct more music videos.

His most recent music video was made for Rima Khcheich, a Lebanese singer whose style Younes describes as a "jazz classical Arabic fusion." This video, called Haflit Taraf was "directed in a way to express visually what the Lebanese people have been going through of late," Younes says.

To view a few of Chadi’s MTV Arabia ads, click here and here.

To go to Chadi’s website, click here.

From Beirut to Jerusalem to Beirut to Jerusalem to Beirut to Jerusalem...

All text and photos in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

These two cities somehow belong together:

Beirut: Sexy, vibrant, pretentious, fed by sea breezes, a city of Mercedes cars and Cohiba cigars, sophisticated restaurants, electronic trance music and a cosmopolitanism that speaks of Babylon - a place for food and fun, a city to drive and dance in, and get very tense in.

Jerusalem: Elegant, quiet, inspiring, covered in a cool mountain breeze, clearly lit, surrounded by golden stone city walls, cypresses - yet also oppressive in its cultish heaviness, its worship of rocky monuments and odd ritual gear - a city to walk and converse in, and get very tense in.

In these two extremes, the very nature of the Middle East is expressed. On one hand: a worldly cunning where all is possible, all can be bought, the give and take of the bazaar, a love of food, talk, and smoke.

On the other hand: a sense of spirituality, profundity, magnetism, the land of prophets and ideals, of reaching transcendence and unity, of overreach, self-obsession and of a grace embodied in the very hills of the Holy Land.

The two belong together because they complete one another.

The social psychology of the Middle East is very much like these two cities: a daily friendliness and form mixed with a brutal pursuit of dreams, a toughness in business mixed with a fatalistic submission to the future. The surface and the depth are not always in harmony and the schismatic labyrinthine Easterner is difficult to understand for the much more linear Westerner.

This schism can be found within the borders of each Middle Eastern nation: Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in Israel, Cairo and Mount Sinai in Egypt, Beirut and the Cedars of Lebanon, each exposes the polarity of the other. It is most profoundly exhibited between Beirut and Jerusalem, these two cities seven hours apart by car. Yet, the border between Lebanon and Israel has ruptured them. Except for Israeli soldiers and the few Lebanese who had access to Israel during the latter’s occupation of the South, plus a few UN workers, the great majority of Israelis have no access to Beirut’s ample charms, nor Lebanese to the grace of Jerusalem.

The two cities are only 250 km apart, by highway only 3 hours apart, and in between are the great old Phoenician cities of Sidon and Tyre, the Crusader Keep of Acre, Mount Carmel and the bay of Haifa, the valley of Megiddo, and inland, off the beaten path, Nazareth and its olive groves, and the hills rising to Jerusalem. Each stop, a station in mankind’s history, the places of battles that formed the world, or thinkers and prophets whose words echo still today in our laws and morals, of potters and merchants who moved wares from Assyria to Rome, or from Baghdad to Venice. Throughout the trip, the Mediterranean accompanies you, with the possibility of the setting sun, or the olive groves of Galilee creating a corridor of travel.

Beirut and Jerusalem would be better off in connection with each other and the rest of the region, for they work together, balancing each other, finding what is missing in the other. Not through politics but by the very movement and interaction of people with all their wares and vices, their sweat and illusions. This movement, now interrupted by national projects, is the very core of a healthy Middle East – in this way can the various peoples find balance to their local excesses.

The Coast

The coast has always attracted humans. They emerge from the adjacent hills and valleys to try their luck in the waters. This scene is repeated on the coasts of Brittany, Malabar, or Batan. Here is a scene from Beirut at sunset.

(Photograph by Gabriel Reyes)

Middle East Institutions - Le Chef

Gouraud Street, Gemayze, Beirut, 961 1 446769 - 961 1 445373