Beirut is talking again - post financial crash and post explosion

Photo by Tarek Chemaly

Beirut is talking again. For a long time, the city was "mute". Believe it or not it happened before the explosion of August 4th. Something was odd, whatever Beirut was regurgitating was forumulatic things - through its walls and alleys and its whole sentiment and being. A long time ago (in 2008) and in an interview with a Swedish newspaper, I said "Beirut is like a snake, it needs to shed its skin periodically" - not caring who or what it hurts in the process.

Yes, Beirut is a treacherous entity. Schizophrenic, with different personalities cohabitating all at once, and as I said, all of them stopped talking at the same time. As if there was this whole new modus operandi being reworked, to sound cliché, a matrix being reloaded. But when I went to Beirut on Saturday for my first vaccine dose (yay!), I noticed something different about it - it was regaining life. Again, to be cliché once more, I am quoting Star Trek: "There's life Jim, but not as we know it".

When I say Beirut is regaining life, it is not the life "before". It is different than what was happening... before the financial crash and how it redefined socio-economic classes (see here) or the explosion which also targeted all strata of the society (see here). I know you might say I am just imagining this. Life is life after all. No, it is not. Not when the whole population went through the same trauma at the same time for the same reason, when already two prior generations (or more) had their war trauma undealt with.

Beirut (and Beirutis) is (are) still redefining itself (themselves) post-explosion and post-financial crash - and it is happening consciously or not. To quote that exceptional break up song by ABBA When All Is Said and Done, the city and its inhabitants are "slightly worn, dignified, and not too old for sex".

Nothing like a financial crisis, a pandemic, and an explosion to make a city reassess its identity. 

Paco Rabanne pour homme - a mystery ad that lingers since 1987.

A very close friend of mine loves "the day before you came" by ABBA. He says it is such a mysterious song because one does not know what happens on "the day you came" (check the brilliant lyrics here)! If this is the case, then Paco Rabanne pour homme 1987 ad works in reverse. It is "the day you came" and it lets us assume the day "before".

I am not talking philosophy, simply a lovely piece of advertising that starts with a man descending a colimacon stair, then a curtain unveils and we see a view from a window where someone is checking him departing into a courtyard. The man turns, blows a kiss in the air. He is in full tuxedo, the bowtie still there (assumption: he did not get undressed, ergo, they were not intimate), and from there he goes in a happy-go-lucky walk in Paris, all chirpy, all sincere, kicking autumn leaves that had fallen, dancing with a chair of a cafe about to open, walking on the pont Louis-Philippe, and basically - not believing his luck with an unforced smile on his face (it is the assumption because he has found love, in a story just beginning). 

What is wonderful in the ad, is that it lets you reconstruct the scenario you want about the day before. He is in tuxedo, and it is dawn - were they at the opera the night prior? Were they at a black-tie event? Were they engrossed in conversation so long that he forgot to untie his bowtie? Is it love?

As I said, the beauty of the ad is that it lets assume what you wish to assume about the earlier events, and this is what makes it so memorable. The day after you came indeed.

See the brilliant ad here.