Of Mozart and thoughts of mortality

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly

Here's a hint: Don't grow up during a war. I once wrote "The first time I saw wounded people, I felt excited. I wasn’t afraid, just excited. When smoke came out from a place near my one of my friends’ house, I thought it was cool: I knew someone who was in danger." (In my book "Beirut Mayhem-eh - here). Still bravado aside, I remember Sebastien who died at the age of 6 when a bomb fell right next to our school and basically was too close to his mother's car when she was there to pick him and his brother when a new round of shells started.

But death was always there. Lurking in the shadows. I escaped it several times, like many Lebanese people during the war. The last of which was - twice - on the day of August 4th 2020 and the gigantic explosion of the port of Beirut (here). But this kind of laissez-faire with death had other ramifications. Mainly on my career (among other sectors).

I was always "OK, what's next", I have done, quite honestly, much more than any normal human could cram in a half century of life (born in 1974, you do the math). And the more I saw, the further I did, the less impressed I was. "A new published book?" "an exhibition in a country where my art was not displayed?" "a lecture for people who still did not meet me yet?" "a juror in an international festival?", "another interview for a TV channel?" "a new film to write?" and on it went. 

I should have enjoyed the light immensely. But as the projectors got more and more frequent and intense, I found myself crawling back to my private space. I've been there, I've done that, sometimes I got the t-shirt sometimes not. Little by little you start realizing that no team is as professional as you are, that few people can match your speed and can go as high as the bar you have set. And all this bothers people, because suddenly, compared to you, people start looking incompetent.

Long time ago, a professor I was consulting with (she was Canadian), suddenly looked at me and said "you realize you are on your way to become unemployable?" - and that is true. Because even with any employment I got as my career progressed, my exactitude and impeccably high standard along with my lack of tolerance to any "client" being disrespectful to me (as most Lebanese clients are!), led me to hot water. Sure, I did impeccable work, when I was teaching I drove the students like a maniac to get them to deliver (here).

All of this should make me proud like hell - and many times I can actually be (here) - but also, paradoxically, because I grew up during a war, and because the nihilism one is subjected to, things tend to lose meaning, a great big "meh!" around every win, and every milestone.

The reason I brought Mozart into the melee, is because, in 1994 while still a student at AUB I was talking about the great composer (can't even remember the context) and a classmate of mine simply asked "minou hayda?" (who's that fella?). I thought quickly and asked "hey, do you know ya ana ya ana by Fairouz?" (here) "yes?" he went. "Well, that's him!". For all answer he goes "byotla3 menno, 3endo mosta2bal" (well, he's talented, he has a future ahead of him). Remember Mozart died in 1791. Some 203 years before my classmate's statement.

So combine this with a death who is casually there, with notions of never enjoying triumphs and never living in the present, with "if people don't know Mozart, why on earth would they even remember me?", and all of this gives you this incredible of feeling of "m'en fichisme" which waits for a future, and never realizes that the future became a present because it did not matter anyhow.

Some days are - honestly - quite difficult to go through. Perhaps oddly, this what drives me to create further. As everything is bound to be forgotten, maybe someone will say, some 203 years after my death, that I too "have a future ahead of me".

Vegans go public in Lebanon

Photo credit: Bassam Karam

So this is an ad, not just for vegetarians - but for out and out vegans. Well, thankfully no nudity (I'd rather go naked than wear fur for Peta comes to mind). But hey, well the ad uses negative psychology by starting with "don't be a vegan" (interestingly, vegan has no translation in Arabic because "نباتي" means vegetarian "only"). So voila, once the negative psychology deployed, it continues with "because whatever is happening in the slaughterhouse resembles you". A few months ago a close friend came up with the joke "how do you know that someone is vegetarian or an AUB student? They'll tell you this right from the get-go". Well, I am an AUB student... Ooops. OK, fine, and I tried to be a vegetarian (not even vegan) long ago but well, did not work, so what I do now is really, really decrease meat as much as I can. However, I heard many reactions to the ad above, the strongest was "I just ordered a steak out of spite". I guess this covers it.

On playing - not just in a different field - but a totally different game.

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly based on Georges Schehade's work

So obviously, as of late, I have not been at my utmost best mentally and psychologically. But rest assured, I am not imagining any of it, my problems are real and true. Still, I often go back to that one week on the fall semester of my graduating year at AUB, and yes that was October 1995, where things became clear for me. 

On Monday, sometime during the second or so week of the semester, our soil teacher came whistling a tune. it was "I don't like Mondays" and he sarcastically asked us what this had to do with soil science. I raised my hand - obviously he was annoyed. "Yes, Chemaly?" he asked exasperated. "The song is by the Boomtown Rats and their lead singer is Bob Geldof who, along with Midge Ure, wrote "Do they know it's Christmas time?" after seeing a documentary about famine in Sudan." "A documentary about soil erosion is Sudan, you are usually a pain in the butt Chemaly, but that was a good answer".

Then came Thursday and the statistics course, the teacher was explaining the importance of sampling and he gave the example of how a newspaper in the US predicted the results wrong due to a wrong sample of their readers but admitted he forgot what title it was. To which I said "It was the headline, Dewey Defeats Truman".

Christiane, who was with me in both courses and who was a habitual presence on the dean's honor list which I only saw once looked at me with her enormous eyes and said admiringly: "chou bek hal semester?" (What's with you this semester?). Interestingly, that week showed me something very important: I was not destined for the same things as the rest of my class was.

Yesterday, I went to Linkedin and started scrolling to see what people from my graduating class were doing: Poultry, food safety, landscape, irrigation, many recycled themselves in environment and so on and so forth. Do note that for some odd reason, none of them are connections of mine so I had to actually research where they were at. Sure, I know what you are thinking, me who left agriculture to go into communication must have a ting of regret especially that 2023 was a disastrous year work-wise.

Actually, the reverse happened. I kept thinking - wait, I saw the Monza Grand Prix from the starting grid, I slept in the medieval room on that monastery turned hotel in Sweden, I exhibited my artwork in too many countries, I published all those books, my film was screened on the opening night of the Beirut Film Festival, I lectured in so many universities and counseled too many students, I was quoted in innumerable number of newspapers and outlets, and the list goes on and on.

Well more interesting than food safety and irrigation for sure.

Yes, I know, this still does not fix my daily woes, but even now, with the deluge of problems on all sides, I can still walk with my head high knowing I have lived the most exciting of lives. Sure, I have not travelled in a long while due to a combination of logistic reasons, but do you know that nightclub which only opens at midnight in the historic fortress in Corfu? Or have you been invited to a lunch which turned out to be a banquet in your honor? Has your book made it to the frontpage of the biggest-selling newspaper in Denmark - on the Sunday edition no less? Do you still voice your opinions on the oldest still-running blog in Lebanon with thousands upon thousands of readers?

You know what? I have. 

Beat this.

AUB changes its logo - yes, but why?

Every other day I get a notify from AUB - my alma mater - pleading for donations. Understandable considering how the country has totally fallen apart and how university fees have gone completely through the roof. I am not going to go through what helped me then go through the AUB tuition and how these schemes have been scrapped from the university. But suffice to say is that if you want to save money (and ergo not ask for donations from your previous graduates day on day off) it would be nice not to squander - and I am measuring my words - your budget on a logo change.

Why? "let me count the ways" as the poet said. You need to change, your logo on your buildings, stationary, fleet of cars, caps for workers, napkins in the cafeteria, website, digital presence, folders, envelopes, t-shirts, this, that without even counting the original design work fees. 

All this is incredibly costly and... A little pointless. Already there are too many banks, brands, companies who have two or three logos cohabitating in the market together - Zara still has its old logo on many of its shops. 

I see no logic whatsoever in this move, and if there ever was one, definitely not at this time when AUB is claiming to be in financial need.

Lucien Samaha: Party in the sky at the AUB galleries.

Photo copyright: Lucien Samaha

You don't follow Lucien Samaha on Instagram? Really? What kind of a creature are you?

Well, that he is one of my favorite photographers, he is an exceptionally warm and communicative human being, and now he is back on show in Lebanon at AUB (he showed previously, but the results were too monochrome to give justice to his incredible color photography!).

The show is accompanied with a long, informative, and exhaustive essay by curator Octavian Esanu which traces back Samaha's life, work and art (which are all inextricably linked actually) - such as being a flight attendant, a DJ and numerous other professions which again, influenced his life, photography and incredible eye. As I said, I am partial to his work and his output as I am a fan, but again if you read the essay it will be clearer why I am so. Understandably, even if Esanu concentrates on World Trade Center issues, as the show is under the Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) emblem, it does look at Samaha's work under the umbrella of "Americas" (which was the CASAR them for 2019 before local events derailed it) - a plural term which engulfs many aspects of America at large - and its relation to the Middle East.

Do note however that the connection is not superfluous considering the tight relationship between Samaha and New York though as well as that with his native Lebanon, yet the said aspects of the diversified America in question do not include his "risque" images as they did not make the cut since I am assuming this is a family-friendly exhibit - even if virtual. I can already hear senator Jesse Helms imploring "look at the pictures". I did, and I am not offended this being said.

The AUB exhibition also focuses its lens (har har!) among other topics, on a specific party which Samaha DJed and he dubbed "Mondo-107" at a bar on the 107th floor of the north tower at the World Trade Center called "the Greatest Bar on Earth" (I assume one did not need to check one's ego at the door) - at the time the highest party in the world, ergo an apt description of both, the party and the exhibition, as coined by Samaha: "party in the sky". Also the show sheds a light on the transition between analog and digital photography of which Samaha was one of the pioneers.

Producing such an extensive show in the middle of a global pandemic must have taken a colossal amount of work by everyone involved with all the obstacles that needed to be surmounted to get the final result ready and done. 

As for the image above which seems part of the show as per the AUB presentation and taken on top of the World Trade Center, here's the original story straight from Samaha:

"Andres was one of my passengers coming back from Rome August 1st, 1982. There was so much air traffic delay that evening coming into JFK, that he missed his connection to Savannah. The airline was going to put him up at the Airport Ramada. He had never been to New York so I offered him to take a voucher and come be my guest in my loft in Tribeca.
The next day we did a lot of walking around Manhattan and then visited the observation deck of the South Tower. Fifteen years later I would become the resident Wednesday night DJ at the Greatest Bar on Earth right at that corner across. The first few weeks I had so much fun with a just a small crowd of friends who had been coming to my various gigs in lower Manhattan, but then the party took off and was lauded as the best party of the summer of 1997. One night in September that year, the bar made more money than they ever had before or after.

I was supposed to Deejay on September 12. In what direction would my life have gone had the Towers not been destroyed? as so many other lives that were also directly affected by the tragedy."

But again, if Samaha is DJing the party, I will have my COVID snood on, and I am partying like if it was 1999!

AUB: To have WHAT more abundantly?

La lil 10% la lil imperyaliye
(Artwork by Tarek Chemaly from the series Abou Fouad)

Well, the AUB motto is (and it is etched in marble on its main gate): "So that they may have life, and have it more abundantly"... The title of this post comes from an article in the sadly now dead Campus Newspaper when there was an open clash between the students and the Internal Security Forces (circa 1994) at the AUB grounds due to tuition hike. Yesterday the same scenario happened it seems. This time the clash was with the riot police.

Like everything, there was the students' version (inflammatory in tone), the AUB version (completely antagonistic and exonerating to the University), the armed forces version (no official statement), and the truth. Do note that 800 AUB employees were sacked not long ago, although some of the said employees did go back voluntarily after the August 4 explosion to help with the massive scale of the hurt people (without pay mind you).

This being Lebanon one cannot isolate problems, the devaluation of the currency, while some bits of the economy still work on the 1515 Liras peg while others are dealing with the banks' 3900 and others with the black market rate of more than 8000 makes it a total Capernaum. That the economy is not just teetering at the edge of the abyss but rather being in the total abyss makes any decision - even if financial survival depended on it - very politically tricky, and no doubt, want it or not AUB is politically connected on all levels (see here and here).

To be clear though, although AUB is my Alma Mater, I am - apart from giving the occasional lecture there based on kind invitations - very far removed from the atmosphere. But what is certainly true is that - with MEA only accepting fresh Dollars for their tickets - the point of no return has been reached in Lebanon. 

Interestingly one of the most famous protest slogans "la lil 10% la lil imperyaliye" comes from the famous semester long the AUB students held in 1974. No for the 10% no for imperialism....