rue bliss.

Rue Bliss (Bliss Street) runs through West Beirut until it spits you into the Mediterranean.







This series, from that.


And I guess this is the last shot before the ocean.

beirut.

The Damascus-Beirut highway, less than 100 km of road, ascends into mountains before bisecting the Bekaa Valley and curling you down like a marble spinning round a mountain into the mediterranean basin of Beirut.


The rather sprawling geographical compression left me deposited somewhere on Charles Helou Boulevard, nearly winded from the comprehension of my geographical whereabouts.

I'm in Beirut.


Compared to Syria, Beirut was throbbing with modernity, commercialism, tension and grace. The contemporary downtown core was the result of a concerted government renovation effort throughout the 90's (post the civil war), and the area is now an oddly sterile commercial arena surrounded by condominium development projects for the urban middle class.

It carries an air similar to Robson St or SoHo, and the "beirut souks", even without comparison to the tunneled and cavernous density of those in Aleppo and Damascus, essentially parallell a mall. [More pictures (by someone else) of contemporary, cosmopolitan Beirut].

The Martyr's Statue, built in 1915, essentially marks the center of the city. It survived the civil war by accepting a rampage of bullet holes - forgoing its capacity as an echo chamber and instead becoming capable of transposing new passages of light. Here's what it looked like in 1982.


The statue is right on the Green Line - the invisible marker that separated the city into East and West during the civil war (1975-1990). The (mostly Maronite) Christians dominated the East, the (mostly Shiite) Muslims dominated the West, and the other minorities were settled amidst. There's some pretty impressive photographic documentation of what it looked like shortly after that time, here.


Within a stones throw of the Martyr's Statue, there was a Dunkin Donuts, a Virgin Megastore, the Al-Amin Mosque (which now houses the tomb of the late prime minister Rafik Hariri, assassinated in 2005), the headquarters of the Kataeb (Phanlangist) party (across the street from my hotel and plastered with the face of a late party MP, assasinated in 2006), and an Armenian catholic church (as shown below, superimposed by an urban development zoning wall).


There were tanks and machine guns and you couldn't park virtually anywhere in central Beirut due to previous issues with car bombs.

And nobody projected the slightest air of fear, and that was lovely.



It took me awhile to dissolve my own psychological fear rhetoric, working against injections from western propaganda and the iconographic associations tethered to "dangerous" - namely tanks, guns and war-scarred buildings. Things that I don't have default associations with in my societal wallpaper as a post-upper class kid residing on an island in Canada.

Beyond the reconstucted nucleus of the "Beirut Central District", the atmosphere grew a bit more authentic to its past. Pock-marked buildings, graffiti swathed in social/political/cultural strife and consciousness; and both together:





About halfway to Hamra (the university district); we passed what I later came to realize was the Holiday Inn. The hotel, now a military outpost, was a key sniper spot in West Beirut during the civil war. Initially it looked like many of the other war-scarred buildings, but the tanks and lone guard on the blasted out lower level took it beyond its historical notoriety. An inverted idea of hospitality: "hotels as incumbent military posts." A sensation augmented all the more because about 20 seconds earlier I was contemplating buying toothpaste in a pharmacy.


And so, inverted ideas of urban utility and function.


Somewhere along the line, Andrew and I came to the conclusion that Beirut (or at least, parts of it) would be a pretty sweet city to skate in. There were kids bmxing all over a downtown square in Aleppo - but Syria's got a long way to go to be skateable. As for Beirut - well, we decided to take a photo sequence. We got as far as this one.


The next attempt seemed to inadvertently include government buildings, in front of which I established a guard in my viewfinder hastily motioning us over with his machine gun. Upon crossing the road, he communicated that such pictures were not, at all, permissible. I took this to mean: "no documentation that could contribute to greater intelligience regarding the architectural nature of state buildings, which in turn, could potentially result in malicious activity towards said state buildings." Roger that, end skate collection.

Instead, we rode the ferris wheel.


One night we rode the ferris wheel, one night I danced to This Charming Man with a smashing arab lad in a jean jacket a few blocks down an alley from a restaurant called Corleone,

one night I won an iPod in the u-district - though we never got into the University. Apparently I didn't play my AUB student life card very well by inquiring with the guard at the entrance.


Quite a throbbing little world. Sweeping away debris and manifesting anew. In the sixties Beirut was referred to as the "Paris of the East", which seems both ethnocentric and short-sighted, but then, we are essentially talking about global perceptions imprinted by colonialism.

"Triangulated City", perhaps.

For everything that forms a base, there's something standing on the other side, connected in opposition.

the query of beyrouth

The day before we went to Beirut I was quite batty at a hostel in Damascus. Quite batty, throbbing with whether or not the idea of going to Beirut was foolish, naive, precarious, or whether all of the above were imbedded with unsubstantiated fear and propaganda.


I'd been following Lebanese newspapers online for days, and deduced, with my very lightly educated understanding of the country's present turmoil, that as long as the UN's indictment regarding prime minister Rafik Hariri's death wasn't released during the duration of my visit (and it likely wasn't to be), than Hezbollah would continue to sit pretty (as opposed to likely going apeshit if they were held responsible for his assassination), and my trip to Beirut and greater Lebanon was likely not to be in ludicrous opposition to my personal safety.

Yet later that night, desperate for another human opinion, I found myself nearly gasping in the common room: "have any of you guys ever been to Lebanon?"

Between the UN freelance writer from NY who frequented the country, the German backpacker enroute, and the Spanish kid in his first semester at the AUB (American University of Beirut), I felt better.

Next thing I know the Spanish guy is co-ordinating with the freelance writer about how many kilos of Lebanese sweets he should get for her in Tripoli before we all planned to meet at some vinyl bar where they were to have a poetry slam a few nights nights later.

In the words of the freelancer "Beirut could blow up at any time, so if you want to go, just go."

So we did.

how much is it for cinderella to piss?

once upon a time, outside a bathroom in Damascus.

April 19, 2011.

Cinderella is not a character of Arab descent (though arguably French by inception). Barbie isn't either, though the Arab spin-off Fulla, named after a Middle Eastern flower, is.


Arabic reads right to left, though the arrow to the bathroom points opposite. Here is where I found myself, waiting to relieve my biological foils, ushered by dolls and their distorted presentation of my experience. Not to mention gender norms, social stereotypes, and the murky ties between east and west.

But it cost more for me to piss, which led me to wonder if it costs more for cinderella to piss, and so I found myself flailing in the wake of her ball gown's societal imprint.

That's the cost of the ticket. Though I may do about as well associating with Cinderella as your randomly selected 26-year old girl from Damascus, Syria, or the greater Arab world does with Fulla. But there are far less pigeon-holed truths, as Asmaa Mahfouz vindicated.

Behold the cerebral plateau, behold the arab spring.

A step aside.

I don't see the arab spring to be bred off the desire to adhere to a western model, nor be reactionary to it or revolutionary against it. The root of the struggle is regionally personal - perpetuated by a unified human idea amidst an array of otherwise separate (and yes, sometimes even secular) ideals. But if Islam is to play a role in governance, it is not invariably destined to be an autocratic, militant or inherently conservative role; as Turkey, a country governed by a moderate hybrid of Islam and democracy, can attest.


Now Syria's on the bandwagon - the only country that I visited to really spark - which seems to be afoot in both canons and confetti. If emergency law's been lifted, I can only hope it is carried out to its word, and that the balloons rise from here.

All the best from Daraa to Dimashq.

batmobile in damascus.

[seen previously in Aleppo]

"the ruins"

syria is speckled in an array of ruins; we set our feet upon only one.


Palmyra





beyond the temples the whole thing was like a burnt and gleaming lunar landscape.


inclusive of tiered burial chambers that were certainly precarious to navigate internally.


though pursued by the dragon's eye,


we scaled the dunes to the castle at dusk




and then descended again upon the city.

Absolut Aleppo.

syria سورية‎

It seems Syria isn't going to get on board with the recent incendiary Pan-Arab revolution. Despite being winged by his father's hand-me-down bureaucrats, apparently the president's an alright guy. Either way, I think skynet is kindling its own ideas.


It took some time to uncover from the elusive media campaign, however - I eventually deduced that J-loc is the Middle Eastern wing of Skynet.


This is the location in which I speculate the critical computer chips to be located, the fountain water is maintained to a fraction of a degree.


Sources which I have communicated with on the subject have suggested that the chip may be contained within the arm of St. John the Baptist, inside that triangular prism (which would insinuate that the one located inside the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, is a fake). Most evidence resides in Aleppo.

Aleppo

Aside from referential sci-fi allusions to the concepts of a hollywood franchise; Aleppo at times housed an aesthetic dimension akin to a sandcastle New York, with an energy that proved to rise above Damascus. And to reflect that, I have pictures of...the citadel.



...and the courtyard of the Al-Jamaa Al-Kebir (Great Mosque).


Lattakia

Essentially Syria's only port town; and thus beholder of a grand shipyard and enough apparent water to defend a circulating tea fountain.


But besides our hotel owner who relished Tin Tin with the glimmer of a seven year old boy (who lent out his concurrent library eagerly) and the Jetson's tower,


I failed to extract much from the place except a high quality pasta served at an establishment operated by men just nailing the French waiter cariacature.

Hama

Known for it's water-wheels. Old rickety things. But those dusk laden walks beyond the water-wheels.





I failed to capture the severed camel's head.