Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all and, my dear, I’m still here. Plush velvet sometimes, Sometimes just pretzels and beer, But I’m here. I’ve stuffed the dailies In my shoes. Strummed ukuleles, Sung the blues, Seen all my dreams disappear, But I’m here.
Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Well quelle surprise, the ‘Jet-Set Hobo’ is still here blogging away when just a few weeks ago we all thought this whole enterprise would be shut down and moved on. Like a gypsy caravan in cyberspace. Read More »
My previous post is probably as close as this writer will be getting to addressing the problems of the Middle East. My two extremely nervous months in Beirut did little to alter my preconceptions which were, broadly speaking: that they’re all bloody mad: Palestinians, Israelis, the whole lot. I realise this is a less than rigidly statistical analysis.
So better I stick to my beat, especially as we’re being encouraged to narrowcast here at True/Slant. That once again has become Central and Eastern Europe. As you may already know, when finances or circumstances allow, I make or act in films here; specifically in Hungary. Here’s an overview of why…
Budapest – One big film set? Well, Nicole Kidman was just in town. Una Thurman was here for a few weeks recently. Sir Anthony Hopkins will be in Budapest soon too, if here’s not here already, working on a film about dark secrets behind closed doors in the Vatican. I suppose that actually, it’s not really such a secret at all, that Hungary in the last few years has become a film and TV production hub. Read More »
The distinguished Middle East correspondent of The Independent recalls the culinary highs and lows of an extraordinary career – from feasting with kings in Jordan to eating under fire in Afghanistan.
When the Iranian Revolutionary Guards closed the roads to journalists after Ayatollah Khomein’s return from exile in 1979, I decided to travel the country by rail. Secret policemen and soldiers always forget trains. They like road-blocks; and the journalist who wishes to elude them must remember Michael Collin’s old maxim, that no one ever sees a man on a bicycle. No one ever sees a journalist on a train. So Iranian state railways – and their single-carriage restaurant cars – became my home for weeks.
Paul Julius Freiherr von Reuter – yes, the founder of the news agency – built half the railways in Iran, and after several days there wasn’t much I didn’t know about the massive Boy’s Own Paper trains that freighted me to Qom and Ahwaz, the Tabriz express and the slow train to the shrine of Mashhad. Numbers of bogie wheels, the horse power of the diesel locos, the maximum gradient to climb below the towering cliffs of Zard Kho – “Yellow Mountain” – on the way to Tehran. And the meals.
The more assiduous readers of this blog may recall that I was in Beirut for two months recently, which is where the great man (discuss) still lives. Read More »
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.
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.
Mohamed Fayed loved Harrods so much that he wanted to be buried there. Now he’s sold it.
Harrods has been a byword for glamour and excess for more than a century and a half. And the backdrop for some of the world’s most lavish and, at times, eccentric window displays. It is a quintessentially British landmark and tourist attraction. Yet we British come more to browse – to marvel at its magnificence and its bling – than to buy. But on one thing Harrods has always been insistent: there is only one sale.
And that came yesterday when Mohamed Fayed, who bought the 4.5 acre department store in 1985 for £615 million, confirmed that he had sold the London emporium, which boasts 330 departments, for £1.5 billion to Qatar Holdings, owned by the state’s royal family.
Well, well, well. Only a few weeks ago, Mohamed Fayed, whose communication style is nothing if not impassioned, had denied he was selling the vast mercantile emporium. “People approach us from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. Fair enough. But,” Fayed went on. “I put two fingers up to them all. It is not for sale. This is not Marks & Spencer or Sainsbury. It is a special place that gives people pleasure.” And now, wait for it: ” There is only one Mecca.”
Spoiler Alert: Pleasantly diverting little article about a unique institution and is eccentric (former) proprietor. It is said Fayed’s staff will be surprised about the sale, because most days, Fayed liked to spend a couple of hours walking around Harrods & minding the store. Some nice stories too about how there were wild animals kept inside the premises, including a lion cub that used to break out of its cage at night, and a boa constrictor that was part of a display showcasing a pair of gem encrusted ladies shoes, valued at around 60,000GBP. The shoes sold within three hours apparently.
Brilliant cartoon from The Spectator, many more of which can be seen at their website. Another one I like depicts a couple waiting at a restaurant table. Read More »
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.
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Police in Cyprus say that it is unlikely that the assassination of the country’s most powerful publisher was politically motivated.
Andy Hadjicostis, the 41-year-old director of the Dias media group, was gunned down Monday night as he stepped out of his car outside his home in central Nicosia. Police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos said on Wednesday that a member of the island’s intelligence service had warned Hadjicostis that his life was in danger. Katsounotos said the investigation is proceeding in a ‘specific direction’, but did not elaborate. The killing stirred fears of rising instability amid a new push by ethnic Greek and Turkish leaders to reunify the war-divided Mediterranean island.
Hadjicostis was something of a media mogul in Cyprus, one who owned at least one television station, newspaper and magazine apiece. One of those publications was Time Out Cyprus. You can best believe news of his murder did not go unremarked around here – the offices of Time Out Beirut. For one thing, have a closer look at that car. See the Time Out logo? Not that any of us imagine the assassination had anything to do with Time Out, and some psychotic restauranteur, peeved at his review. Whatever the motive for the killing though, it was certainly brazen, taking place in close proximity to the American, Egyptian, Russian and French embassies.
Anyway sorry my loyal hobos, but my True/Slant posts have been somewhat intermittent this week, principally because this lowly Editor is busy getting his first hands-on edition of Time Out Beirut ready for the printing presses. After that I had tentatively planned to take the 45 minute flight to the island of Cyprus for a long weekend’s vacation.
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. Read More »
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. Read More »
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.
