'Ugly Beirut' built on ruins of beautiful Beirut

Beirut ca 1880s

Beirut’s colonial architecture and charm earned it the name “Paris of the Middle East”, but since the war those days are gone. “Beirut is an ugly city.”This statement would infuriate plenty of proud residents of the Lebanese capital, but veteran architect Assem Salaam stands by his words.

via BBC News – ‘Ugly Beirut’ struggles to survive peace.

The hobo couldn’t agree more. During the time he spent there, working for the worst employers he has ever been employed by, or is ever likely to be, he interviewed one of the city’s most outspoken and tireless campaigners for architectural preservation. This was a grand dame called Lady Cochrane Sursock, (don’t try saying that name several times in a hurry). Anyway, when noting that there were still pockets of the city evocative of what a beautiful place Beirut must have once been, she hastily corrected me: “No, not pockets. Elements.” See the full article here. Quite a contrast from Budapest where, as I’ve recently noted, whole areas of downtown are being pedestrianised, creating public spaces and making an already beautiful city still more beautiful.

Keith Richards quits drinking…

Jet-Set Hobo reels in shock.

‘Sir’ Mick Jagger accepting a knighthood and becoming a gym junkie was one thing. Ron Wood making a fool of himself over nubile Russians is another. All too predictable. Jagger always was the business man of the group, and Ron, well, he’s your true sex-addicted satyr. And fair play to ‘em both. Far be it for me to ridicule a man because of his vices.

But according to both The Guardian and The Sun, the man famous (among other things) for being surgically attached to a bottle of Jack Daniels has finally kicked the sauce, and has been teetotal for at least four months.

You’ll know if you check the links, that the Sun and the Graunian headlines are a couple of weeks old. I only found them because, bored, I was led there by not particularly interesting story about that puppyish hero-worshipper Johnny Depp making a film about another of his bad boy role models.

Still, I don’t know how I can have missed this staggering development, unless I was, well, pissed at the time. As in pissed drunk, my American readers.

Ethiopian plane crashes into sea off Beirut

Ninety people, including two British nationals, are presumed dead after an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed into the sea early today just minutes after taking off from Beirut in stormy weather. Witnesses reported seeing a “ball of fire” plunging into the Mediterranean. Among those on flight 409, which was heading to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, were two British nationals of Lebanese origin, as well as the wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon, Reuters reported. The majority of the passengers were Lebanese or Ethiopian. The Boeing 737-800 took off from Rafik Hariri international airport at around 2.30am (12.30am GMT) and disappeared from the radar a few minutes later, two miles off the coast from Naameh, a coastal village just south of Beirut. Local people in Naameh reported seeing a “ball of fire” fall into the sea, Reuters said.

via Ethiopian plane crashes into sea off Beirut | World news | guardian.co.uk.

I don’t have much details or insight to add to this story, just a few impressions: because, endemic of the era in which we live, I am getting all the details from The Guardian. It puts one’s own problems into perspective though. Last night at 230am when the plane crashed into the sea, we were just finishing the final layout and proofing of issue 18, Time Out Beirut. Certainly it was dark and extremely stormy over the Mediterranean last night, and if I’d thought about it I would have said that it didn’t look like particularly safe flying weather. Taking off in such a storm, was just a damned sight too laissez faire, I think. My own flight to London on Thursday leaves at a comparatively late hour of 9am, but it is normal, incidentally, for flights to depart from Rafik Hariri in the wee small hours of the morning. Perhaps the only time they can get the airspace, I would imagine.

Gloomy Sunday in Beirut

My loyal fans, all three of you, may have been wondering about the prolonged absence of the Jet-Set Hobo. Suffice to say, it has all gone pear-shaped here in Beirut.

As of tomorrow, I am once again a free agent, I am between engagements. Or to put in another way, unemployed. Probably it’s all my fault. Not in all honesty that I’ll be terribly sorry to leave the Lebanon. A bit of this place goes a looooooong way. The hobo has been routed, defeated, trounced, traduced, and put through the wringer. He has learned something about himself along the way however. In short, it is this. Without briefcases full of cash, a personal driver and an apartment with a uniformed doorman, he’s just not tough enough for day-to-day life in Beirut. And right now those kinds of accoutrements are somewhat out of reach. It has been a long, cold recession for this roving scribe and bon vivant, and on this rainy Sunday evening in Beirut, it’s hard to see the light at the tunnel except as a train heading towards us, as we struggle, tied to the tracks.

Whichever way you slice it, my implosion in Beirut represents another broken dream for the collection. Conventional wisdom has it that in life you only regret the things you don’t do, not the things you do. But that’s a load of tripe, I’m here to tell you.

The video link is to the trailer of A Cafe in the Sky, a little arthouse film I carried like a cross on my back for longer than I care to recall, but which of course has never made a dime. The tune is Gloomy Sunday, which is appropriate, and it’s the gloomiest possible version, which is also apposite.

Anyway, in a few days I fly to London. Oh my word. Whatever comes next, it will be a pleasant, initial change to be somewhere the electricity and hot water is reliable, internet speeds are faster than continental drift and I’m not regarded with something between bewilderment and suspicion when I walk the streets or into a cafe or bar. I have been trying to keep a brave face, at least in Facebook status updates, but it’s been getting to me.

Stiff upper lip and onwards and upwards. I do hope to send more chipper tidings from London, though too many of my pals over are there are writing me grim missives about job cuts and recession and you know, ‘broken bloody Britain’. For broken, they should try the Lebanon, where for example just this afternoon in the office, the electricity, gas, phone lines and internet have all cut off at various points. Spare me.

A braver man than I…

Not that it’d be difficult.

Last night, I went drinking around some of the more notorious expatriate watering holes of Beirut’s Hamra district. You’ll recall perhaps, that this is the area of Beirut which seems permanently caught in a freeze frame time capsule of the early-mid 70s.

I had gone to Hamra to meet a journalist named Glen Johnson, a fellow New Zealander, or ‘Kiwi’ if you must – or even if you mustn’t. “Johnson turned out to be an affable young fellow whose thoughtful manner belied nerves of steel and gritty determination. Just occasionally, he seemed haunted by what he had seen.” At least that’s how I’d describe him in the great, probably never-to-be-finished Graham Greene type novel about Beirut; which I find myself making mental notes for on most nights, before the honking horns and the roar of the highway outside finally lull me to sleep.

The real life Glen Johnson has spent six months living around the occupied territories of West Bank, has got into trouble asking Syrian officials about Iraqi refugees, and is currently working on a story about an Islamic Jihadist group.

Talk about your lost civilisation

This weekend, the man Dirany and I took a bus to Byblos, travelling the highway from East Beirut. Hundreds of new tower blocks shooting up, the vast majority of them empty. The key word in Lebanese Real Estate, must be speculation, speculation, speculation. The speculation being that a peace of some kind will last, Lebanon will continue to boom and the tower blocks will be worth something.

In any event, my interest was less in new developments and more in old ruins, as we were on our way to the oldest continually inhabited town in the world. That’d be Byblos folks, pronounced ‘Byblos’, fnar fnar. This place has had quite the history for a sleepy fishing village. After all, there’s archeological evidence to suggest that people have been living here for some 7000 years, and the town even gave its name to the bible, circuitously. Byblos being the name given to the papyrus exported from here to the Aegean, and the English word bible meaning, in essence, the ‘papyrus book’. Now now, quiet at the back and pay attention.

Lady Hester Stanhope went hard, didn't go home

Go hard or go home, as we young and wild Colonials used to say on the obligatory, first ‘Big O.E.’ (Overseas experience). Oh and thank you for the encouragement ‘Jim Brown’, (see comments, prior post) if that’s what it is meant to be. Good friggin’ luck to you too.

But perhaps what’s most surprising about Beirut is, aside from the occasional car bomb, how normal it all feels, well, most of the time. Some of the time. A fair bit. Quite often, really. Anyway, it’s certainly more …stimulating than trying to fit in back in New Zealand, which is what I try and remind myself when the electric power shorts out again in the middle of The Daily Show. One thing that undoubtedly spurs me on is the indomitable pluck and backbone of my editorial team at Time Out. Mostly female, they negotiate the traffic, temperaments, high prices, power cuts, death crawl internet speeds, bomb scares and constant threat of war with indefatigable spirit, and I salute them all. Every one of these magnificent ladies is a Lady Hester Stanhope in the making. Well, without the high-born, invincible sense of their own superiority that comes of such breeding.

Trouble in the Lebanon — again

I suppose I only get to use that headline but once. Anyway, last night in Beirut, a car bomb killed two senior members of Hamas, Basil Jomaa and Hassan Haddad. It seems the two of them had been trying to defuse three bombs found under a Hamas owned car. Apparently they had been visiting Dahiyeh, a stronghold of the Lebanese Shiite armed group Hezbollah when it happened. State radio seemed to think the three bombs wired under a car were meant to target Ali Baraka, a member of the Palestinian Hamas movement in Lebanon.

At the time it occurred I was twenty miles from Beirut, in my temporary lodgings in Jounieh, trying to get as much information as possible. In the distance, the Beirut sky was lit up with light beams, and transistors from neighbouring houses in Jounieh carried furious invective on the night air. It was apparently clear to the er, commentators, that Israel was responsible. I wanted to find out more about what was happening around me by watching TV, but then the power was cut again in the neighbourhood, and so I groped my way to bed in the darkness.

I rose early the next day (Sunday) and made way into Beirut. It was a brilliantly sunny morning, and a hushed one as I reached the streets of Centreville, the reconstructed French mandate era downtown. Church bells rang out, but aside from that a morning hush settled over the streets. So did I just imagine an extra ratchet of tension in the air?

The New York Times goes Beirut bonkers

Beirut dining experiences usually begin with mezze, an array of appetizers. Abd el Wahab is a top destination for mezze. By SETH SHERWOOD

ON a balmy Middle Eastern night, our feast was rolling along fabulously on the outdoor roof terrace of Abd el Wahab, a vaulted and marbled Beirut gastropalace, when a flock of birds made a sudden appearance.

They came not from the sky but on a large plate, served by a suited, poker-faced waiter. Their blackened headless carcasses, each barely palm-sized, were soaked in a dark sauce that gave off a tangy aroma. Through wisps of sweet chicha smoke exhaled by boisterous groups at nearby tables, my Lebanese companions explained that the birds are traditionally eaten whole. I was dubious. Hesitantly, I popped one in my mouth. Tiny bones cracked like toothpicks. In a quick burst, succulent meat mingled with the sweet-sour basting sauce. It was sublime. A miniature Hitchcockian menace had been transformed into an unexpected gastronomic gem. “What kind of birds are they?” I asked the waiter.

“Small birds,” he said.

Such moments are blissfully common in Lebanon…

via Choice Tables – In Beirut, Raw Materials Meet Magic – NYTimes.com.

And so this article in the New York Times continues, with the writer, the evocatively blandly appelled Seth Sherwood, (it conjures up someone wearing a flannel shirt and living in Minnesota, but it turns out instead ‘Seth’ wears flannel shirts, lives in New York and travels on food junkets to ‘reveal remote corners almost no westerners visit‘ like Belgrade, Serbia {pah!}) anyway, here he is in all his flannel-shirted pomp in the New York Times, rhapsodically describing a visit to one of Beirut’s better, and more colourful upscale restaurants.

Anyway he’s bang to rights, such moments are blissfully common in Lebanon.

The Great Lady in her stately pile

On the weekend, the Jet-Set Hobo sat down for a chat with one of the Grand Dames of Beirut: Yvonne, Lady Cochrane Sursock. Among her other qualities, this indefatigable and splendid lady is a living link to a bygone age. “I’m 87,” she told me, “and my Grandfather was born in 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo.” Yet even as Lady Cochrane approaches her tenth decade, it is evident that she was once a very great beauty. I asked her if she thought Lebanon would be better off under an aristocratic, not to say feudal system, to which she responded that it would depend on what kind. But after a bit of prevarication, she admitted, yes.

We sat together in the study of the Palais Sursock, a room lined with books and heavy gold brocade curtains, some of them rather threadbare. The price of upkeep on these houses, don’t you know? Lady Cochrane spoke of the utter ruination of her country, and the city she loves; describing the lost garden city and the coastline around Beirut which was once a playground, but is now little better than a sewer; she told of greedy developers knocking down a Roman temple and baths, to build yet another high rise block of flats. “We had a minister who listed 600 houses as historical places, now little more than a decade later, only three or four are left.”

A butler brought us tea and biscuits and closed the shutters on the windows, as night drew down. When eventually I left her magnificent home however, it was the Lady herself who showed me to the door. As I passed out of the gate, and back into the present day, I noticed the stone wall around the house was riddled with bullet holes, presumably from the civil war.  As bleak as things must seem sometimes, for someone who knows what has been lost in the last half-century or so, at least there aren’t gun battles in the streets these days.

At one point I’d said to Lady Cochrane that while her pronouncements were grim, there was often a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eyes. The look she flashed me in response, well it might best be described as girlish.