Thy Lemma

Saifi Urban Gardens: a space with attitude

2012-01-11T02:42:00.000-08:00

I keep thinking about this place I visited in Beirut last summer. It seems to be making such a statement against mainstream nightlife and culture. It seems to me that the place is really making a statement about its perceptions of Beirut. It is almost like an imagined community, a mini beirut based on a story about itself and its city. What should Beirut look like? What was it like before? What will happen to it now?

The place is Saifi Urban Gardens, which began as a language school, and is now a hostel with a cafe, bar and gallery space. It is made up of an old Mediterranean town house, over 180 years old, and a tall 60's building, typical of the ones seen in Gemmayze and Hamra, which are increasingly being torn down.

Beirut consumer habits are modelled on those of Emirates: lots of gold, flashing money, expensive designer clothing. Many of today's elite in Beirut began as poor immigrants to these countries about 50's years ago. Most hotels and boutiques are made to accomodate tourists from Saudi Arabia and Dubai - at the expense of Beirut itself. What was once a highly cultured Levantine city is now a haven for Ferrari and Macdonalds.

Saifi Urban Gardens is a reaction to this. The cafe is a self service cafe, which serves cheap homemade Lebanese food - a great contrast to the glitzy restaurants in Downtown, namely Iris on top of the Nahar building, where you will get a bad risotto for 25$. At the bar upstairs, there is no loud music and no migrant workers by the toilets. Unlike in other night clubs, where two or three men show off and attract women by ordering a large bottle of Vodka to their tables, here the offerings are simple, small beer, spirit and mixer.

Coop d'etat (above), pic taken from their Facebook page.

It so happens my school friends are in the picture too!

Sky Bar (above) - glamorous rooftop bar in Beirut, with

extremely loud music and very little space to move! Expect

to spend at least $100 per person.

Speaking to the staff there, it was interesting to see that they disagreed in their perceptions of Beirut and of Saifi Gardens itself. What they had in common was attitude and a belief in change.

Relief from text: Data Visualisation

2011-07-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

Data visualisation is nothing new and it thrives on simplicity; yet it has had a recent renaissance in contemporary graphic design and journalism. Postgrad.com and Information Is Beautiful author David McCandless teamed up to find who could create the best infographic around data on the numbers of ethnic minorities at UK universities.

Visual data and the crisis of information
“Visualised information is a relief from text”, says David McCandless, a British journalist and visual data designer who brought the medium, which had previously been confined to academic research, to the fore with his book Information Is Beautiful. He creates colorful, interactive designs with the aim of conveying data more simply and effectively. For example, he has visualised a timeline of global media scare stories by running through the Google News database. Compared to the previous bird flu scare and the millenium bug, the fear of Swine Flu appears almost as a psychosis.

Visualised information is also a response to the digital age and its surplus of arbitrary, unclassified, indistinguishable information. Martin Hilbert, from the University of South California, shows that humankind is now able to store 295 exabytes of digital information. With this in mind, “it's easy to feel like we're drowning in information” Mccandles argues, “so the solution might be condensed visual information, where someone has collected and curated the information for you and serves up a concentrated, visual dose.” Infographics responds to our need for rapid, accessible and relevant information.

How many black students are there at your university?
The competition was sparked by a tweet from McCandless complaining that he didn't have time to visualise data that he'd gathered on the low numbers of black students accepted into Oxford and Cambridge. Postgrad.com teamed up with McCandless offering a prize for the best visualisation of black student data, as well as the ethnic heritage, and socioeconomic background of students attending different institutions. The final result was a series of controversial and highly elegant infographics.

The winner, Raphael Halloran, showed the percentage of black students amongst all admitted students at UCL, Durham, Oxford and Cambridge, and the entry success rate for these students. Halloran's winning interactive infographic reveals that whilst black students at Durham make up only 0.8% of students, their acceptance rate has been far above average. At Oxford and Cambridge, however, the percentage of applicants and their success rate was low in both cases.

Runner up Dave Bowker's colorful graphs against a slick black background showed that the acceptance rate for UK students was in decline and that universities were beginning to favor international students. This seemed to affect all UK ethnicities. The third runner up Jon Schwabish showed that there was almost an 100% success rate for black students at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham. This was not the case for Asian students, who, though they had a much higher percentage of applicants had a considerably lower success rate.

The wider picture in just a snapshot
Infographics, as McCandless shows, gives contextualised information in a snapshot. These graphics were succesful in that they payed attention to the context of statistics. In a talk at TED, McCandless argues that the ability to display context in a snapshot, as inseparable from the data itself, was one of the crucial features of infographics.

He points to one of his own designs, which showed that, although the United States had the biggest military budget in the world, this budget was relatively small compared to the country's GDP. Rather, the country with the highest military budget in contrast to its GDP was Myanmar. Similarly, the above mentioned infographics show that there are very little black students at the top UK universities, whilst simultaneously demonstrating that these students also have the highest acceptance rate.

The question remains, however, whether context can ever really be supported by a mere snapshot. Don't Myanmar and Jordan have different objectives for their defense budget? Can visual graphics really account for depth of research or individual incidents?

For more information on Mccandless's designs, and for compiled statistics to create your own infographics, click here. To watch Mccandless on TED, click here.
To view the winning infographics, click here.

What is the Tick? - Interview with Noel Clarke

2010-10-06T02:38:00.000-07:00

Want a career in Creative Media? BAFTA Winner Noel Clarke teams with Skillset to point media students in the right direction.

Noel Clarke is an actor. Today he is at Pinewood Studios, shooting a promotional film for the Skillset Tick Campaign. As he is running through the script, he hears a loud thud. The door swings open and in comes Noel Clarke, his double, mumbling his apologies and stumbling on the writer's chair that has been set for him. Both director and actor eye him furiously. “Right, he says as he goes through his papers, so the slogan is Pick The Tick”. “Pick the tick?” replies Noel Clarke, “so the tick is offering training and education?” The actor goes back to rehearsing his lines “Skillset is the industry body which supports skills and training for people in creative media – why', he interrupts, 'do we even need a tick?” Both writer and actor turn to Noel Clarke, who is directing the shoot, for advice. “The tick is an indication of quality, for the best higher education in media.” “Don't I put that across?” asks the Noel Clarke, the actor. “It's called The Tick Campaign” shouts Noel Clarke, from the director's chair. “Might as well get a talking tick then” replies the actor, to the production team's despair.

Confused? This is not a real shoot. Noel Clarke is a man of split personalities, and so has reality been split in the studio this morning. Surrounding the artificial set where Noel Clarke the director, Noel Clarke the writer and Noel Clarke the actor are all being played by one person, is the real filmmaking team, in the real warehouse at Pinewood Studios. They are shooting a video for Skillset, which is the Sector Skills Council for the Creative Media Industries, and Noel Clarke – the real Noel Clarke – has volunteered to represent the campaign. As a man who has acted, written, and directed for British film and television, the shoot reflects him well.

I am able to get an interview in the short break, but Clarke, who can only ever do three things at once, accords me this time whilst shaving, and whilst the make up artist is powdering his face. In the background, several runners and assistants rush in and out of the changing room, warning him that the shoot is about to resume without him. With no hint of haste, he tells me he had dropped out of his media course to pursue a career in acting, where he was landed with roles such as Mickey Smith in the BBC Wales 2006 re-launch of Doctor Who, and Ricky Smith, Mickey's double from a parallel universe – of which this latter “double” seems more suited to Clarke's character.

Later, Clarke took on the challenge of writing his first film, Kidulthood. “I felt essentially that I wasn't getting the parts I wanted to get, so I started writing them myself, and that's really how the film started.” This was a fast paced drama on teenage delinquency, centred around the students of a tough Ladbroke Grove state school. The film won him widespread recognition, for addressing the issue of London's underdog, in a style that broke away, as a Guardian critic wrote, from Richard Curtis' Notting Hill.

As a first time writer, he had not found it strange to see his work being performed and directed by others. Rather, he tells me, the making of Kidulthood served as the inspiration for his transition from writer to director: “At the time I had no designs on directing, but it was a good learning experience, I just watched and learnt.” In 2008, Clarke, made one final huge step and directed Adulthood, the sequel to Kidulthood, which one year later won him the BAFTA Orange Rising Star Award.

Clarke puts the electric razor down. He is not interested in telling me about his life, but rather about Skillset, who are campaigning to signpost the best pathways into the Creative Media Industries through education and training. Skillset is the Sector Skills Council – a body that represents the industry on skills issues – for the Creative Media. It works with the Creative Media and Education industries to make sure the sector gets the best trained people in the right jobs. Skillset's has accredited the UK's top courses in media for both undergraduate and post graduate courses, which it has signposted with the Skillset Tick. And that is the message of their new campaign - “Pick the Tick”.

“I left my media course to pursue acting, but friends of mine who came out with media degrees didn't really get into, and still don't have, any media jobs. I think Skillset can help facilitate that,” he says.

The Tick campaign stems from the need for media students to find degrees that are both theory and practice based. As numerous surveys have shown, employers, particularly in the Creative Media Industries, are not just looking for qualified graduates, but for those with skill and experience in the media fields they want to enter. Skillset, following the advice of employers in Creative Media disciplines, keeps a monitor of media courses around the UK, from animation to filmmaking and accredits such courses with The Tick as a mark of quality.

Did Clarke face such difficulties after university? “Well I never finished. I left” is his answer. He advises graduates to “Stick at it really. It's tough, you don't always have to focus on what you really want to do, but think about the various ways you can go and work towards them,” says the actor who, in trying to write his own parts, became an award-winning script writer. “There are so many jobs that you can actually do,” he says, getting up to rush out of the door, “and Skillset really helps you to find them.”

How long is too long? Internships over 6 months qualify as employment.

2010-03-30T02:09:00.000-07:00

The Donal MacIntyre show on graduate schemes last week highlighted the following problem: that graduates looking for work experience get caught up in unpaid placements that can last over three months. The discussion was geared towards the Graduate Talent Pool, a government scheme set up in 2009 to help graduates find work experience in their relevant fields. The project serves as a kick start for recent graduates facing unemployment because of the recession. However, it emerges that a large portion of the internships advertised on the GTP are unpaid and have an extensive period of over 6 months.

Published in Artgroup.org.uk and Jotta.com on 25th March 2010

Graduates fresh out of uni and looking for employment enter a vicious cycle: for though they have the qualifications, they do not have the experience required. Without this, they are unable to get a job, and are furthermore barred from gaining experience. Internships, paid or unpaid, help to resolve this problem.

There is a flexibility as to what qualifies as an internship, which leads some people to see it as “volunteered” work and others as exploitation of labour. The problem of definition begins with the distinct lack of grants available for interns, which make the opportunity exclusive to those who can afford to work without pay. Unpaid interships cover expenses only, and the Job Seeker’s Allowance is only legible to those who have been claiming it 6 months prior to their internship. This likens internships to indefinite unemployment.

In contrast, interns in Wales can claim a minimum of £240 for 10 weeks. What the Go Wales Work Placement does, in limiting the allowance to 10 weeks, is also restrict the length of internships to that time. This makes the shorter placements more appealing and reduces the risk of exploitation.

Consider the classic nightmare intern scenario. This is the one where the intern, hoping she will be offered employment by the company, or unable to find a placement elsewhere, works unpaid for over 6 months, during which she is asked to make coffee or squeeze oranges. What is clear in such cases is the following: a six month placement is no longer an internship, and neither do running jobs count as work experience for qualified graduates.

The fear is that in such cases, internships are breaking the minimum wage law, whereby anyone over the age of 22, working full hours should be paid a minimum of £5.80 an hour. A philosophy student argued that a worker’s relation with a company are purely financial, and his work contributes to an economic system of gain. To not receive monetary rewards in return is exploitation. Another student however points to a loop hole whereby because interns volunteer to work, they can do so without pay.

However interns have reported very positive unpaid experiences, many of which would no longer be available should pay become a requisite. Small businesses, online magazines, underground record labels cannot afford to pay their interns, but can provide them with great experience and the possibility of a job. A consultant at Chatham House in Picadilly told me about an intern for whom a solid position was actually created in order to make her an employee. When she left that job, the position was offered to another intern. Chatham House’s internships pay expenses and are restricted to three months.

It is not the pay, but the length of an internship that should be monitored, as well as the company’s work ethic. It is clear that this ethic will not change even if paid internships were enforced. This may, in the end, justify exploitation of employees, by becoming a disguise for what is really an underpaid job. To restrict the length is to reduce the time given for exploitation to become possible. This works on a number of levels, namely that it highlights the “temporariness” of an internship to both the intern and the employer. The former is less likely to feel trapped in an unpaid job with no financial or intellectual benefits.

Self-taught and multi-tasking: how Creative Graduates adapt to the working world

2010-03-30T02:03:00.000-07:00

Published in Artsgroup.org.uk in on March 17th 2010
That creative industries are increasing in numbers and economic activity is a recent development. To account for this, the Creative Graduates Creative Futures published a report on the career patterns of creative graduates. Undertaken between 2008 and 2010 and involving 3,500 creative graduates from the last six years, here we outline the CGCF executive summary, released in September 2009, of which a full report is to be published this spring.

The increase of the creative industry’s numbers and economic activity is a recent development. To account for this, the Creative Graduates Creative Futures published a report on the career patterns of creative graduates. Undertaken between 2008 and 2010 and involving 3,500 creative graduates from the last six years, here we outline the CGCF executive summary, released in September 2009, of which a full report is to be published this spring.

What is particular to graduates in creative degrees, is that in pursuing their careers, they tend to engage in a multitude of activities. The CGCF highlights that these activities combine a pattern of portfolio work and learning. This stems from the practice-led research emphasised in the curriculum of creative degrees. Graduates seem to combine this skill of applying their learning to work, whilst always learning and working throughout their creative careers

What this tends to encourage is a combination of self-employment and employment, and also a perfect ease with self-employment as a means of self-led learning. The summary reports that 45% of the graduates interviewed had worked on a freelance basis.

Creative graduates find the transition from higher education to the work place quite smooth. Their creative curriculum requires them to apply their learning through live projects. In the course of their degree, they are asked to set up exhibitions, they may receive commissions, and they work amongst teachers who are also practising artists. Practice-led research becomes an important factor that creative Higher Education institutions want to maintain and enhance for the future.

Whilst portfolio careers are more desirable to creative graduates, they are financially less sustainable. As the summary states, creative careers are not always very well paid. It emerges then that graduates working one steady job earn more than those engaged in three or more paid occupations. The latter, rely on these combined income streams to make a living.

However such a statistic-led research, though it can bring to light certain key patterns amongst creative graduates, does nothing to illustrate how such dynamics are achieved. Neither can it account for the concerns or the exceptions that it highlights. Why graduates choose portfolio careers over having one job with higher pay is not a question that can be answered by the executive summary. And whilst it gives a positive and dynamic portrayal of the ever growing cultural sectors, it merely glosses over a concern that creative roles tend to have a low pay.

UK Olympics: Art for Art's sake or are they just pricy gimmicks?

2010-01-28T03:53:00.000-08:00

Published in jotta Magazine Monday, 11th January

Robert Pacitti, an art director from Suffolk, has just received £500,000 to create an installation. He will conduct a mass research project on the notion of ‘home’. He will do this through a series of public events, such as a dinner of world cuisines set to feed 1000 people, which will be recorded in a feature film.



hauna RRobert Pacitti, Sichardson: East Midlands, Alfie denn and Paula Le Dieu: London, Alex Hartley (Click any image to enlarge it)

Pacitti has received a lot of criticism, particularly for his plans to fly 205 black flags across the coast, later to be replaced by the flags of the 205 countries participating in the Olympics. This is said to promote fickle “gimmicks over legacy”.

Pacitti is one of 12 artists across the UK awarded this grant as part of an Arts Council funded project, Artists Taking the Lead, which has been set for the 2012 Olympics. Critics of Pacitti have raised questions on the artistic value of all 12 pieces, and whether this can outweigh the money that will be spent on their production.

“Will it be any good? And will anybody care?” asks a Guardian journalist at the ATTL launch in March last year. ATTL will be receiving a lot more funding and a lot more coverage than other art projects in line for the Olympics.

It is not a surprise that Artists Taking the Lead, a project which has put £5.4 million into 12 commissions spread across the country, has achieved such scepticism. Cynics are sure to raise their voices when it comes to government expenditure. In this particular case, money is shown to have been attributed to individual artists, and the award of a £500,000 budget may seem a bit like winning the lottery. However these funds will not be feeding the artists themselves but going towards the production of their projects. These are larger than life scale installations that will involve the efforts of many, many practising designers, sculptors, accountants and engineers. In fact these projects are so technically ambitious that a £500,000 budget might not be enough!

Pacitti’s flags and feasts, as a critic called them, may value entertainment over artistic depth, but this is part of a political motive inherent in all the ATTL projects. Each piece does its best to involve the community and to reflect national pride. The Northern Ireland project THE NEST will be a devised musical piece based on objects donated by “the people of Northern Ireland”, which is to be performed in Belfast. Shauna Williams, commissioned in the East Midlands, plans to build three taxidermy style 30 foot high lions across Nottingham to disseminate the values of courage and nobility, commemorating Richard Lionheart, and “celebrate the region”.

The debate between elitist and accessible art, Ezra Pound over Harry Potter, Tarkovsky over Goddard is made prominent. That the commissioned pieces are neither too obscure nor avant-garde, that no one opted for a gothic performance on male/female deconstruction (followed by an after-party in a Glasgow basement) is part of a deliberate and political choice. Rather this is art that is democratic, it aims to be universally understood.

“Much is being prepared for the Olympics, and a lot of it has received Arts Council funding.” Says an artist commissioned by Art at the Edge, a project organising a public display of sport themed art. Here, as opposed to ATTL, established fine artists will be creating exhibition pieces, and their audience is restricted to the gallery space. Aimed at the wider public rather than the artistic elite, ATTL becomes dependant on wider coverage, larger scale pieces and accessible ideas.

Arts Council Cuts: A rough Guide

2010-01-28T03:49:00.001-08:00

Published in Arts Group Jan 18 2010

Though there have been no major cuts to Arts Council funding just yet, the looming elections are likely to set a new tone. Much has happened over the past two years to dramatically alter its budget. In 2007, the Arts Council placed a large chunk of its funding towards the 2012 Olympics. Last year’s recession meant that public sectors faced major setbacks, and the profits made in the arts were significantly reduced.

This all sounds very gloomy, but is it really? The 2009 budget report in April announced it would cut £4 million out of the previous £467 million, decreasing the budget by less than 1%. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which, along with the Arts Lottery, funds the Arts Council has had its own cuts in 2010 of £20million. The Arts Council, therefore will only be bearing a fifth of DCMS’ losses.

Although these cuts are minimal, they do come as a great disappointment. Since 2002, the Arts Council has had yearly increase in funding. That year, a new spending plan was announced that would make the DCMS budget £257 million higher in 2005-06 than in 2002-03. Furthermore in 2007, the Arts Council was promised £20 million over the following three years.

As for prospective cuts, the Arts Council continues to point out that the revenue from the Arts sector is much higher than its spending. In July last year, MP Andy Burnham told the Stage: “the small – relatively small – amount of funding here, produces a huge benefit not [just] socially, educationally, culturally, but also economically.” Indeed, when Liverpool became Europe’s Capital of Culture in 2008, it generated £176 million from tourism alone and an £800 million boost to regional economy.

No doubt 2010 will see a decrease in Arts Council money. Can a new government change this? Or is it dictated by the recession? Predicting the former, Chief of the Arts Council Alan Davey met with the Conservative Party last October to discuss the importance of funding. Like Burnham, he argued that arts revenue was beneficial to the economy. On the opposite side of the spectrum were the conclusions reached at the Funding Transition conference hosted by arts think tank Missions Models Money in December. Chair of the meeting Clara Miller, CEO of Non-profits Finance Fund, argued that it is the way arts businesses are run that needs to change, rather than government revenue. Can art businesses, as Clara Miller suggests, overcome financial struggle by remodelling? These are questions organisations, as well as art students and artists, will have to face as we draw closer to a new government and a revision of this year’s budgets.

2009-12-01T11:19:00.000-08:00

Poetry: Poejazzi at Proud Galleries, 2nd November

2009-10-16T17:27:00.000-07:00

Edgy, urban and underground, PoeJazzi is hosted by poetry collective APoemInbetweenPeople. Perfectly located at the Proud Galleries in Camden, don't mistake this for the future of rap or the death of poetics, it is a reflection of urban life as we know it.

Proud Galleries Camden
The Horse Hospital,
Chalk Farm Road
NW1 8AH

November 2nd, 8pm
Tickets: £5

Frisky and Mannish: Cabaret, Edinburgh and an upcoming show in Brighton

2009-10-11T03:09:00.000-07:00

It is in a beige underlit starbucks in Edinburgh that I meet Frisky and Mannish for the first time. We are all there for the fringe, and Frisky and Mannish had been selling out shows every night of the festival. This cabaret duo had held a wacky and colorful act at the Edinburgh Underbelly with shamelessly parodic renditions of 90's pop classics.

No Scrubs was sung to the tune of Greensleeves in hommage to Catherine of Aragon and Meat Loaf's I will do Anything for Love was retold in the voice of a small child. Medley's of cult classics bring back with irony the droning choruses of the era. These parodies, as good parodies do, expose the vacuousness of popular culture and undermine its self-assurance.

Lady Fritz Frisky's glittery red lipstick, and Hans Mannish's twee face paints had been removed for the interview, and they arrived as their alter-egos Laura Corcoran and Matthew Jones, two graduates from Oxford. "We started off like all university graduates: we got depressed as soon as we finished out degrees. We were writing these parodies just for fun. Frisky and Mannish came much later" Warm and attentive, they completed each others sentences and, leaning across the table to take my questiosn, their eyes blinked in unison.

Indeed, the brainchildren of Laura and Matthew, the English aristocrat Lady Fritz Frisky and Austrian pianist Hans Mannish are elaborate and complex characters. Dark and parodical biographies have been written for them both. "Their weird and isolated childhood, explains Tom, makes their eagerness to write pop songs even more painful; because although Mannish's Austrian upbringing makes him completely unaware of British culture, Lady Frisky would have had a taste of it and is convinced she knows the recipe for popstardom."

Tragic rejects of the pop industry, Frisky and Mannish turn to Cabaret, where Frisky's operatic voice and Mannish's elaborate piano skills can be rightfully applauded. Appealing to the marginal, and embracing song, dance and comedy, Cabaret is potent mode of escapism. "Cabaret is so full frontal in its glamour and absorbs its audiences with its extravagance." Whereas I saw Cabaret as a manifestation of the marginal, kept alive by Soho hedonists in opulent make-up, Laura and Matthew insisted in its very modern popularity. "By combining music, theatre and comedy, Cabaret allows us to entertain in a way that stands out from traditional and mainstream performance. Young people today especially are too used to high brow plays. Cabaret provides them with something new".

What next for Frisky and Mannish ? The pair have been working on videos of their songs, that can be found on Youtube. Laura insisted these were home-made clips shot and edited by her brother. But I was too easily fooled: if you enjoy the Frisky and Mannish songs, you will love the videos, where costumes and setting provide an even livelier narrative for their music!

Frisky and Mannish will be playing in Brighton on Wednesday 14th October at the Pavillion Theatre. Make sure not to miss them!

Go See........

2009-09-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

Charles Avery's Eternity Chamber and all the drawings leading up to it at the Walking In My Mind exhibition at the Hayward. It will change your life.

The exhibition also features the imaginary house of Yoshitomo Nara, as well as works by Keith Tyson and Bo Christian Larrson.
Walking in My Mind 23rd-6th September
Hayward Gallery, Southbank, London

Sculpture: Daniel Silver at the STONE Project, Edinburgh College of Arts

2009-09-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

Was very pleased to bump into Daniel Silver at the STONE project exhibit at the Edinburgh College of Arts in August. The current exhibition at the ECA explores the different contexts of stone, from its origins in landscape to stone mines and sculpture. Based at the School of Sculpture at the ECA, this three year research project has the aim to create a innovative archive on the uses of stone. This will help future sculpture and conservation work.

The Live Carve exhibition featured 11 internationally reknowned sculptures doing live stone carving in the college gardens. The procedure here becomes a performance, though the space itself had the feel of a construction site.

Daniel Silver's work comprises of wonderfully shaped busts and objects. Flattened, scratched, stretched and disproportioned the subjects of Silver's pieces are nonetheless distinct and recognisable. His work has colorful and glossy finish and and the bold simplicity of this is reminiscent of modern day visuals.

More talks, events and exhibition stemming from the STONE project will be featured at the ECA as research progresses.

visit STONE project website

Ed Comedy: Jason John Whitehead- Emotional White Male

2009-08-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

Jason John Whitehead Emotional White Male
at The Stand, 4 pm.

Slow, heavily slurring canadian stand up, Jason John Whitehead presents himself as himself. Part hipster, part stoner, part misogynistic drunk his show reflects on the perfect timing of Michael Jackson's death, how to discipline your children and why he used to think racists were people who took part in races. Unfortunately for Whitehead, questions regarding misogyny and racism are too much of a taboo for British audiences; and it doesn't help that the less the audiences laughed the more obscene Whitehead was compelled to be. These moments of unsureness turned into extensive and tedious ramblings and were unfair to Whitehead's previous display of original humour and spontaneity.

Edinburgh Fringe: Last Night Things Happened, SUDS

2009-08-15T17:53:00.001-07:00

Last Night Things Happened is a student production. And it is a good production. Awoken lost and naked and with no previous recollections, a young boy makes his journey home, meeting strange and outlandish characters on his way. This surprisingly complex tale by undergraduate Chris Harrison takes its audience and protagonist on a lonely and nightmarish walk, where Le Petit Prince meets Franz Kafka. On stage, SUDS's rendition is just as imaginative, with absurd costumes and slick scene changes. Director Alexandra Sayer builds well on the minimalism of this low budget production, to create a visually engrossing and atmospheric piece.

Go see Last Night Things Happened at the Underbelly at 1.45 pm until 22nd August

Go see......

2009-08-15T17:43:00.000-07:00

The River People's new show Angel Rust, yet to be complete and starting next week at the Bedlam Theatre

More eery folklore!
4pm 17th-22nd August

Go see: Elaine Showalter at Edinburgh Book Fest 16th August

2009-08-15T17:41:00.001-07:00

16th August
4.30pm RBS Maintheatre

Those who studied in the late 70’s will remember Elaine Showalter as one of their radical peers. For students today she is a historical revolutionary. American literary critic and feminist writer, Showalter is known as one of the founders of feminist literary criticism, or ‘gynocritism’ as she coined the term. Today she perseveres and will be present at the festival to discuss her latest study: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. Pondering on the fantasy of the Great American Novel, Showalter explores why this concept has been inaccessible to literary women throughout American History.

Ed Book Fest: Carloz Ruiz Zafon

2009-08-15T17:36:00.000-07:00

Carlos Ruiz Zafon does not discriminate between the high and low brow forms of art. “Every book deserves respect because every book has a reader, argues Zafon, we should not be swayed by the thought police” With the phenomenal and unprecedented success of Ruiz Zafon’s novels in mind, a sceptical audience at the RBS Theatre today fired questions about popular readership. An enthusiast of the latter, this is not what Zafon aspires for his own novels however, believing strongly in the intricate art of storytelling. A light talk overall, given by an engaging and promising author.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is the author of Shadow in the Wind (2001) and The Angel's Game (2008).

Go see......

2009-08-15T17:28:00.000-07:00

Lilly Through the Dark at the Bedlam Theatre:

Spooky fairy tale, atmospheric and wonderful folklore by Hampshire Theatre collective, The River People.
6.30pm until 16th August

Edinburgh Lit: Raja Shehadeh at Word Power Books

2009-08-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

It took over twenty years for Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh to discover the identity of his father’s assassin. This closure is accounted for in a recently added afterword to Shehadeh’s memoirs of the assassination, The Strangers in the Night (2001). A political activist like himself, Raja’s father had believed writing to be a weak political tool. Raja Shehadeh’s talk at Word Power Books today reflected on this “unresolved tension” with his father and the power of literature as a denunciatory voice.

Image: Raja Shehadi on the right recieves the Orwell Prize for Books 2008 for his novel Palestinian Walks (2008). Image from Orwell Prize Website

Go see......

2009-08-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

For your first ever Meat Bingo Experience:

Pippa Evans
Your Evening's Entertainment
At the Pleasance Courtyard
7.20 pm until 28th August

Free Festival: Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting 9th-29th August

2009-08-12T04:52:00.000-07:00

Leah Rudick and Katie Hartman are the twisted brains behind the aptly named comedy duo, Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting. And as we like to think of New Yorkans, they are slightly neurotic and obsessed with sex: sex with brothers, sex with ghosts and sex with porridge. Their sketch comedy show Misery Eats Company, which is free at the Rowan Caves, exposes the darker sides of femininity, motherhood, romance and breakfast. Sing a long songs, with classic lines such a "We like men but we hate: The Man", give an up beat summer camp-like facade - though this does not disguise their degenerate humour. Rather, the latter oozes in excess and is responsible for sketches such as "How to raise an Organic Child". This is a sweaty show and a sticky show; Leah and Katie are crude, brash and oblivious to convention. In fact, they won't be satisfied unless their audiences leave in fits of laughter and that sense of having been forever damaged.

Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting
11pm from 9th-29th August
Rowan Caves, venue 232
Free

Image from Skinny Bitch website

Previews: Edinburgh Literary Festival 15th-31st August

2009-08-11T10:28:00.001-07:00

Carlos Ruiz Zafon
15th August
3pm RBS Main Theatre
Supposedly, after four hundred years in Spanish Literature, the publishing success that was Cervantes’ Don Quixote has never been outdone. Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s 2001 novel The Shadow of the Wind came close, and still is Spain’s second biggest-selling novel. Once a writer for films and young adults, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s moved on to adult fiction, for which his work has received outstanding critical acclaim. A gothic tale of mystery and obsession, The Shadow of the Wind has won countless awards, and in his first ever visit to the festival, Ruiz Zafon will reflect on the acquired art of storytelling.

Will Self
23rd August
6.30pm RBS Main Theatre
Philosopher of the bizarre, satirist and literary dilettante, Will Self unveils the dark workings of his mind. A modern day William S Burroughs (and this includes a stint with heroine) the writer is known for his grotesque short stories and as a columnist for The Independant. He has recently collaborated with Ralph Steadman, who illustrated a collection of Self’s column Psychogeographies. Self is currently enjoying the success of his new nightmarish novel The Butt and continues to write on his blog. A rebel and provocateur, he is sure to produce a mind altering talk at the festival.

Melvynn Bragg
Saturday 29th
August 11.30am
The fourth in a series of novels dealing with love, loss and suicide, Remember Me is Melvyn Bragg’s latest work. Melancholy, moving and largely self-reflective, Remember Me has been a cathartic exercise for Bragg and commemorates the suicide of his first wife, French artist Lisa Roche. A pioneer in contemporary British culture, Melvyn Bragg has been a prominent figure on BBC radio and is a controller of Arts at LWT. Join Bragg as he reveals a life of hidden conflict behind his outstanding career.

Douglas Coupland
30th August
8pm RBS Main Theatre
An influential voice for contemporary art and post-modernity, Douglas Coupland will be talking about his latest novel, Generation A, a futuristic dystopia on the 21st century invasion of the digital world. Best known as a novelist and blogger for the New York Times, the Canadian writer has also made marks in the world of visual art and design. Since his 1991 debut Generation X, Coupland has published 10 novels and several pieces of non-fiction. His novel jPod has been made into a Canadian TV series. Progressive and trendy, he is not to be missed at this year’s festival.

Edinburgh Fringe: Frisky and Mannish's School of Pop 7th-30th August

2009-08-10T03:31:00.000-07:00

Playing at the Cowgate Underbelly at 9pm throughout the Festival, Frisky and Mannish's School of Pop is an hour of Cabaret Glam and Cheesy sing-a long. Tragic rejects of the pop industry, Frisky and Mannish are, as you would expect, highly skilled musicians and merciless social critics. Frisky’s voice carries through beyond the room whilst Mannish plays memorable keyboard tunes with an added hint of Baroque. They expose the vacuous nature of pop culture in comic medley's of various cult classics. Acting as Catherine of Aragon, Frisky sang No Scrubs to the tune of Greensleeves, and later gave a rendition of Meat Loaf feigning the voice of a small child. This becomes more than just silly parodies, but clever analogies fraught with meaning. Innovative and shameless, Frisky and Mannish are the underworld's answer to show-biz.

Image from Frisky and Mannish Website
Underbelly Website

Edinburgh Fringe: The One Man Show-Off at the Gilded Balloon

2009-08-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

Dave Florez, six foot, well spoken and charming; in fact his shows reveal an awkward, daydreaming observer. The One Man Show-Off is Dave Florez’s first solo show, having performed in comedy play The Art of Dating And Dumping at the Fringe’s Assembly in 2008. This year, he has lined up his various alter-ego’s in a character comedy. A native of Camden Town in London, his cosmopolitan background becomes apparent in his sensitivity towards the various characters he plays. These range from a leather strapped sex comedian to a Jeremy Clarkson spin off, whom Florez assured me later was that ‘mysoginist, racist and arrogant man who presents Top Gear.’ Apart from Clarkson, the characters are all played in good nature with no moral or satirical strings attached. Florez works to make his characters more than just funny stereotypes and ones that are personally accessible to his audience.

Dave Florez' The One Man Show Off is on from 7th-31st August at the Gilded Balloon at 4.15

Visit Dave Florez' myspace

Edinburgh Fringe: The List Operators at the Gilded Balloon

2009-08-08T07:14:00.000-07:00

Death, disco lights and Michael Jackson. Those were the first ten minutes of the List Operators experience, in their opening sketch 10 Ways Not To Start a Show. An energetic double act from Australia, they wear skinny jeans, big frames and crocodile shoes. They may sound like a cool indie band but they dance to Annie Lennox and gangster rap, give pet names to molding fruit and they like to make lists.

‘Frantic.’ Is how List Operators Richard and Matt describe their show. This felt completely appropriate. Their hour slot at The Gilded Balloon on Friday 7th was haywire with bright lights and children’s toys. Their sketches are rapid, their contents disjointed and bizarre.

The absurdity of the show, stemming in the humour and use of kitchy bright coloured props evident of a trendy L.E.S. chic, also has its roots in children’s theatre, in which Matt and Richard worked in. ‘There’s something really pure about children’s shows, says Matt, because kids will never hide when they’re bored, and you’ll see them looking around, saying things out loud – I went to a show once where one kid actually stood up on his chair’ ‘We’d like to have a show similar to this one, but for kids.’ Adds Richard.

I was surprised at how these absurd and playful sketches, working on silly lists to produce explosive hilarity, could feel so closely knit. Improvised moments were so fluid, whilst having that cringing potential to interrupt the entire sketch.

How do they do this? ‘We start with video improvisations, where we film ourselves in each draft of a sketch and work on it progressively.’ Ideas stem from TV culture, philosophy to funny props. ‘Like Matt’s talking giraffe’ Richard points. This appeared in the show as ‘The Hello Sketch’ where after a loud build up, Matt gave the mic over to a singing toy giraffe, visible on the stage throughout the show and finally given voice to sing its “Hello, hello, hello to you” refrain.

In a strange turn of events the sketch eventually lead to a mock structuralist reading of the word “Hello!”. Despite the total rinsing of post-modern linguistics, Richard is a big fan of French philosophy. ‘I would get moments of epiphany at four in the morning, where I thought I finally understood Deleuze.’

So... could you deconstruct your show? I ask jokingly, but this touched on a sensitive aspect of their work. ‘Our shows aren’t really about anything’ They use lists because its a flexible concept, and they avoid anecdotal comedy. ‘We are surrounded by an alternative hipster crowd, who find that comic anecdotes and life stories just aren’t funny.’ ‘In fact, Richard pauses, we deconstructed comedy in our piece. We had a sketch about The Recipe For Bad Comedy’ – to which Matt adds ‘Actually we should make that Bad Australian Comedy’ and the two go off on a tangential pow-wow about ideas for their upcoming shows. Evidently, the pair is very aware about the modern state of Comedy. With disgust they tell me how they were described as having an ‘ironic’ use of music: ‘We like the music we use. I love Whitney Houston. Irony is no longer funny, we live in a post-ironic age, we grew up with Annie Lennox and The Bodyguard and we love them.’

Richard and Matt have lead artistic careers as diverse as their performance. Richard took Cultural Studies and is also a visual artist. Prior to his stint in Children’s shows, Matt starred in a one man performance of the Camus’ L’Etranger. ‘Every time I get nervous before a show, I look back and think – this does not compare to the opening night of The Outsider.’ Matt performed alone in a ninety minute set to a philosophy-minded crowd. ‘And this was so nerve wracking because they would have very strong views about the way I’d performed him – I saw him as this really nice guy rather than an angst ridden louse’

Richard hosts an alternative performance night back home, involving performance poetry, visual arts and their own comedy. They seem devoted to the state and progress of all artistic domains, and Richard even frowned in deep penitance when he told me he’d missed half of the Gilbert and George show at The White Cube in London.

'You know Sean Connery used to live in the place we’re living in.' Says Richard, still under the spell of Edinburgh’s cultural charm and the buzz of the festival. ‘It’s a lot of fun, and everyone seems to be partying everywhere.’ The List Operators will be playing from the 7th to 31st at The Gilded Balloon.

Check out the List Operators on their website
Photos from The List Operators Website.
For Gilded Balloon Box office and Tickets call 0131 622 6552

Edinburgh Fringe: Barry and Stuart 8th-30th August

2009-08-08T07:02:00.000-07:00

An evening of black magic and dark humour, Barry and Stuart give a gothic twist to magic tricks. These are all the classics, disappearing cards, the moveable knot to which Barry and Stuart add their perturbed charm. But Barry and Stuart are more than just party magicians. Pallid and scrawny, they dress like young school boys and their act revolves around an eerie gothic allure. They have obsessive nerdy interests like a collection of strange records, and Stuart plays us his obscure Russian instrument. They go for the visceral and relish in making the skins of their squeamish audiences crawl: the show began with Barry being strangled with a cheese slicer followed by Stuart sticking a needle through his tongue to ‘impress a girl on a night out’. A very strange but stylish pair, who remain elegantly deadpan throughout.

Images from Barry and Stuart Website

Barry and Stuart will be playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Underbelly at 10.15pm 8th-30th August
Visit Barry and Stuart Website

Bold Tendencies III

2009-06-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

Camberwell gallery owner Hannah Barry opened a new gallery space on the top two floors of a car park in Peckham, last Tuesday. Spread across two floors, the space is arid, empty, grey. The ghosts of passing engines echo in crescendo down the spiralling car park paths. Their sounds are always growing more distant.

To this drab manifest of urban alienation Hannah Barry saw one damn cool place to host a summer show- and with this she brought the avant garde and the edgy, turning the car park roof top into a sculpture garden, that over looked the city, red bricks and the Peckham Rye overground.

For Hannah Barry, this urban block represents our youth. At the launch tonight it was a space for modernity, for beauty, for staring into wide open spaces and thinking aw, that's stunning!

Recently Peckham and Camberwell have become the London Arts university town, a hotbed for students from South East and Central art schools mostly Camberwell, LCC and St Martins. Rusty fixed-gear bikes with flowery baskets whizz up the multistory car park. Red lipsticks in vintage dresses float around in the reggae reggae sauce of postcolonial Peckham.

Hannah Barry makes herself well known amongst these aspiring innovators. Bayly Shelton, who was in my painting group last year and is a first year Painter at Camberwell, exhibited his piece, a Sand Maze. " Yeah Hannah stalked Bayly for a year before she took any of his work" said one of his buddies.

Many of the exhibiting artists were recent graduates, including Melissa Jordan, a Royal College of Art grad, who's sculptures were on show at the lower level of the space. These were wax and plaster pieces, Grosz-like grotesque figures but deflated and sprawled on the cold cement floor.

As part of the evening, a red marquee was set up where young Camberwellian scenesters loitered around nearby, collecting their free Campari and grooving to the jazz set attheback on the sax and a gran. Art students lack social skills. They strut past, in their chequered shirts and fluorescent caps, always looking interested in whatever is right behind you. But this inner turmoil can be forgiven: its from whence they get their inspiration, man!

Visit Hannah Barry Gallery Website
Find Bold Tendencies III at:
Multistory Car Park
Level 10, 95a Peckham Rye
SE15 4ST

Mertle's M.E.S.S.

2009-06-30T03:57:00.000-07:00

Mertle was waiting outside the Tate Modern in a tent on Saturday. Previously, she had waited in a public toilet, and in a cleaning closet. But this Saturday was a tent outside the Tate, and Mertle waited for strangers to enter the enclosed space and reveal a secret, one to do with eating.

What secrets do we have about eating? I was with three other girls and we pondered for ages. I count my calories? that was hardly a secret. I really love porridge? We all had our anxieties about eating, and what we ate was a reflection of this, porridge, Splenda, chocolate - but were they really secrets? 'I like to eat in the dark' was another suggestion -it was a dark tent, and we were told that we could exchange our secret with Mertle for one of her cupcakes. 'I like to eat in the Dark and - oooooh its sombre in this tent please can I eat it here'

The aesthetics of tents has been that they embody cocoons, or the entrance to another world, the consciousness of the tent owner. But Mertle's choice of a tent outside the Tate Modern may have been a cheeky dig at Tracy Emin. Toilet cubicles, closets - all enclosed places for us to open up with our eating secrets.

Photo by Katy Potter from Caroline Smith Website

And with the aesthetics of tents comes the politics of eating. I told Mertle my secret, in exchange for an eating experience. She gave me three possible eating scenarios, of which one was to stare at me lovingly - while I ate my cupcake -, and another was On Location, where Mertle said she would pretend to be a duck in a lake - while I ate my cupcake. She gave me her headphones, which played a light 50's swing, and offered me a very domestic looking cupcake: topped with pink icing and a glazed cherry. Can you hear me? She asked, can you hear me well?

As soon as I took my first bite Mertle, staring right through me with deviant eyes, brandished a rubber duck, which she bobbed with her hand, still staring at me, while i ate the cupcake. And the eating anxieties steamed out and thickened the air of the tiny space. Should I be eating more slowly? Do I look stupid when I chew? No one likes to be glared at when they're eating, especially not when this involves indulgence in opulent cupcakes.

I felt invaded, trapped, self conscious, and thus revealed my real eating secret. Mertle still stared with a forced candid smile, at one with the rubber duck she held in her hand, as the fabric walls of the tent moved in convergance towards each other.

The last sordid bite of sweet sponge finally swallowed, Mertle returned the duck to its bag and switched off the music. Relief as I ran out of the tent, barefoot collecting my sandals from the floor, but also a sense of absurdity,of having experienced something absolutely surreal, completely mad but yet so relevant.

Mertle's M.E.S.S is performed by Caroline Smith, a lecturer in Performance writing at Greenwich University. Visit the Caroline Smith website and the M.E.S.S.'s eatingsecret blog.

The Cola Bottle

2009-06-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

We have unleashed this whirlwind of chemistry
As we would shake then unscrew
A cola bottle.

Watch it fizz fizz fizz fizz splurt and fizz
It levitates at times, it bangs the table
The carbonated pressure of its sweet juices
Fizzes fizzes fizzes
And fizzles out.

Pfffshht!

The Gallery Mess outside Saatchi

2009-06-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

Gallery Mess Café/Bar
Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York HQ

You wouldn't expect the Saatchi Gallery's newly opened restaurant on the King's Road to be anything less than swish, slick and smooth.

Taking from pioneering gastro-galleries like the MOMA at NYC or the Tate Modern, the Gallery Mess at Saatchi brings together the aesthetics of food and the clean palette of the white walled restaurant. The wine glasses are polished down to become ethereal and waiters stride confidently to the crisp cluttering of the kitchen.

"Would you like to sit next to the art or overlooking the window?" Asked one of the attractive staff. I assumed here that we are allowed to delect in the surrounding paintings while we wait for our food? The less pretentious may want to just oggle the waiters.

The menu is unusual, the choice ranging from real beefy American Burgers with chips to a Steamed Salmon with Spinach in a Curry Cream. They took the pedantics out of light and healthy : enjoying the subtleties of good food as opposed to the celery-on-ricecakes neurosis or the gluten-lactose-wheat-and-flavour-free hippy tyrrany.

Not the cheapest of places, yet reasonbly priced for the swish, suave cafe of today's art pioneer. Worth sitting in just for coffee if you don't feel like spending but want to look cultured.

Opening hours are from 8am to 11.30pm daily

To book call: 0207 730 8135

The Comedy of Errors

2009-05-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

Thursday 21th May
Shakespeare's Globe on tour
Dyke Road Park, Brighton

What is there left to write about a fabulous Shakespeare performance that hasn’t been written before? No doubt Shakespeare's Globe’s latest rendition of The Comedy Of Errors has received profuse amounts of elegant acclaim, making this review seem like a petty pastiche.

Set outside in the now sunny gardens along Dyke Road, where the pastoral realm of comedy can be assured, eight actors in outlandish costumes played over twenty characters, danced, played music and made animal sounds and crashing noises. The Audience was gathered round a transportable wooden stage, of all ages drinking wine or Ribena in the rest of the day's sun.

The estranged twins Antipholus of Epheseus and Antipholus of Syracuse were played by the one Ronan Raftery, and so was Miltos Yerolmeu in charge of being both of their respective twin servants, the Dromios of Epheseus and of Syracuse. Naturally as the play progressed so did the confusion , and comedy reached its climax at the times when the two actors jumped from character to character in dialogues that engaged all four personalities.

But the theme of mistaken identity or even usurped identity did not just end there. Actors frequently played more than one character in the same scene, expanding on the comedy of expressive gesture by dressing and undressing or changing tones and voices.

This hands on approach of a minimal cast in charge of the music, the sound effects and the many characters was essential in creating the atmosphere of a troubadour band. It brought ot light the actors’ own physical abilities, of which the energy fuelled the comic and feel good throughout the entire performance.

Brighton Festival: Kurva

2009-05-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

Sunday 17th May
Somewhere outside Hove
Brighton Festival 2009

It was on a rainy ride to around Hove that I saw a small chapel to let in Hove cemetery, and decided this would be agreat place to throw a part. This was preceded by the thought that oh my god, I am in Hove, and next to Burger King and Toys R Us there is this giant cemetery for deceased Hoveans.

The landscape switched quickly from our moving bus and we drove out of suburbia into the not-so-complexe geometries of the English countryside. Those who refuse to call it an extention of the city may want to think of it as the roadside patio.

An outdoor, "roadside performance" by Catalunian group Companya Reail de Catalunya, this is what they called a "theatre of expereience", where the setting of the play -the more rural end of Hove akes the spectator a voyeur of roadside prostitution.

The stage was the muddy road ahead, and the length of grass that seperated us from the actors. Two women sit, at each end of our focal points, one lounging on an abandoned sofa, the other grumpily, uncomfortably on a steel chair. Cars drive past, with young black haired Spanish men, music roars from their car radios.

Cars go by either stopping, feigning blind eyes or harrassing the women, and so does the tension between the two women increase, teetering between jealousy, a petty theft of condoms, poverty and compassion.

Experimental, of course, but the performance worked on very fundamental theatrical grounds. The piece took the form of a pastoral comedy, in which both actors and spectators are invited to play.The topic is the grimness of prostitution, but the performance ended with celebration, music and reuniting.

Breaking news, but maybe not so thrilling.

2009-05-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

Breaking News
Saturday 9th May
Theatre Royal Brighton
As part of Brighton Festival 2009

German art collective Rimini Protokoll had a brilliant concept: a performance on an increasing phenomenon, the global plethora of 24 hour news channels. Five journalists living in the same apartment block in East Berlin, and representing five different regions, Middle East, Eastern Europe, South America, Asia and Scandinavia guided us through live news of their respective countries. For two minutes or so, each journalist would listen to and translate for the audience the breaking news from a chosen channel.

Images from Rimini Protokoll Website
The play ticked all the postmodern boxes and a member of the crew stood briefly on his head as a symbol for the 'pillar of ideology'. On stage was a set of stacked television monitors representing the defragmented nature of news itself with its constant switch from one channel or breaking news headline to another. In a typical Berlin squatter style, the staged news station had a strong DYI feel, like a mad scientist’s shoddy lair.

An ambiguity was created between the actor/spectator distinction, and the former were of course spectators themselves. This ambivalence was extended to the use of language and translation. In the deeply political context of breaking news, an accurate and unbiased translation seems impossible.

However the transitions from speaker to speaker were not as slick as the news channels they emulated. There was little suspense and the journalists got clumsier as they struggled to keep with the fast pace of the changing channels. Whilst they manage to save parts of it with a sweet humour, overall the performance dragged a bit and, unlike news, was difficult to follow.

Visit Rimini Protokoll's website

Ashley Bickerton: Recent Wurg , White Cube, Hoxton

2009-04-10T03:24:00.000-07:00

A long line of 20th century American party animal satirists, Hunter S Thompson or Jim Morrison to name the obvious ones, have established hedonism and decadence not as moral topics but subjects of intrigue and glamour. We don’t as readers ever pity Fitzgerald for having partied too much in the Jazz Age, rather, we revere him.

In his latest exhibition, Recent Wurg, Ashley Bickerton works along a similar line, with narrative compositions that denounce the hedonistic lifestyles of expats in South East Asia. The show made it’s launch last week at the White Cube Gallery in Hoxton and is a follow up from recent works exhibited at Lehmann Maupin in 2006, 2007 and Frieze Art Fair in September 2008. A prominent figure of the 1980's Neo-Geo movement, Bickerton has been represented by leading galleries such as Lehmann Maupin and the Sonnabend Gallery in New York.

Bickerton's pieces are brightly colored and kitschy, with pasty layers of paint, the excess of these being reminiscent of the opulence and the seediness of the world surrounding him. In his attempts at satire, Bickerton presents a world where pretty women sleep on money and tourists stagger drunkenly is sex clubs. His snakehead sculptures stand as an allegory for grotesque morphing of the world around him.

Now living in Bali, the British born artist from Barbados is not unfamiliar with the world of wealthy expatriates and becomes himself an actor in the world he depicts. His paintings of the "blue skinned man", figured as a kind of anti-hero, can be seen as representation of himself. Beneath this Bickerton romanticises himself as the free spirited action painter, the exile who has found himself in psychedelia, in the depths of the jungle. The allusions to consumerism, to money, drugs and excess are very much part of the glamour factor of his paintings.T his is all a bit passé – such characters were given life in the late 50’s by William S. Burroughs and redrawn a decade later by Ralph Steadman.

But despite the social commentary, this visual aesthetic remains striking. It is in the kitschy frames and abstract action painting where the power lies. Bickerton has carved huge wooden frames for his paintings, reminiscent of the grandiose Victorian ones. In a typical Neo-Geo fashion, as with the works of Ross Bleckner or Philip Taaffe, he uses repetition and traditional art -here East Asian- as a decorative motif: within them he carves intricate miniatures of Hindu deities, and makes mosaics out of coconut halves. Splashing large amounts of brightly colored paints onto both canvas and frame, he does this in a seemingly indiscriminate manner that merges both wood and canvas, the abstract and decorative with the figural.

Past Exhibition: Jim Lee - Paranoid

2009-04-05T17:45:00.000-07:00

Freight and Volume
542 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
February 28th- April 4th

Jim Lee uses wood, canvas, paint rolls, dust and staples. He likes surfaces that are chalky and gritty, the ones that make your skin crawl when you scratch a nail against them. If you trip and stumble on it, his pieces will give you splinters and they will gouge your eyes out with their protruding nails.

Beyond the brutishness of the texture, are calm and meditative abstract shapes. These are at first assembled and then painted on. Pierced (Ash & Tan) looks like a two part gelatine capsule. It is itself built in two parts, one slab of black painted wood in front of a bare slab. These are screwed together but also set apart by long iron nails, of which the ends stick out of the front panel.

A closer look inside each piece reveals it as a complex structure rather than blocks of hard wood and sawdust. These are akin to to clumsily made canvas boards, ready to collapse, but held together by a stretched canvas, or concealed by soothing abstract shapes on a painted board.

Surprisingly, the assembled pieces do not necessarily on a new form or identity. The materials used, scraps of leftover wood and steel, are remain abstracted by their anonymity. Yet at the same time, they teeter ambiguously towards self-representation: unshaved and unvarnished, their lack of artifice gives them (and paradoxically so) a sort of significance.

Do read a great interview with Jim Lee by Jon Lutz at The Old Gold

Top image from Freight + Volume gallery website, see more Images of the exhibition.
Visit the artist's website at paranoid.jimlee.com

The Problem Perspective: Martin Kippenberger at the MOMA, NY

2009-04-02T22:10:00.001-07:00

Did Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) know he would die at the age of 44? A retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, portrays the german artist so hasty in his changes of style it seems that throughout his twenty year career, he was always pressed for time. The colours, the large scale and general bizarreness from his paintings and installations shows a man proud of his work, but his refusal to commit to and develop a particular style portrays the artist as eternally dissatisfied.

Kippenberger moved to Cologne in 1982 to begin his career as an actor. These aspirations were unfruitful and a mere three months later Kippenberger decided to become an artist. A year later he produced his first major show Lieber Maler, male mir…(Dear Painter, paint for me…), where he commissioned a painter known as Mr Wegner to paint highly realistic images from photographs Kippenberger had taken of himself on the street and in different situations. This stood as an initial commentary on the commercial concepts of authorship so prominent in contemporary arts and literature.

His own paintings are very politically minded, and fraught with symbolism and pay more attention to immediate effects of colour and content. Down with Inflation (1984) is in two parts: on one half of the canvas the a close up of a man’s lower body with his trousers undone, and on the other is an oddly shaped steel chair, designed to seat two people. Both objects stand alone in empty rooms, with plain bare walls. This minimalism brings out the absurdity of the objects and their details: the man, though painted in a realistic manner, throws an odd shadow that does not fit with the geometry of the room; and the chair though an object within the room, has a leg disappearing into the corner of the wall. His work is not a search for depth or beauty, and aims instead to spark immediate surprise, laughter or argument.

It is difficult to see a continuity in Kippenbergers work, what is more apparent are his brief stints with different mediums of expression and topics. Whilst he is highly political in his earlier paintings, works such as the sculpture of his crucified alter-ego Fred the Frog has its psychological and surrealist foundations.

Kippenberger also produced hundreds of quick drawings, all on hotel pad paper. These range from the comic, to the surreal and the delicately observed. Some have been more worked on than others and as with his paintings there is a striking sense of comedy, which stems from the rapidity of these doodle like sketches.

This makes the totality of his work similar to a blown up sketch book. Small ideas are always sending him from tangent to tangent. The collage I Love Simone de Beauvoir, is from a series of collages. Having put together an intricate ensemble of newspaper photographs, he stamps a “I Love Simone de Beauvoir” label right on top. Perhaps a comment on the impersonality of celebrity worship, it is more importantly a manifestation of the artist’s own spontaneity and impatience.

Text here, as with his other paintings, serves almost as a substitute, conveying commentaries that would be frustrated or unclear in their visual form. The pieces themselves have outlandish poetic and self-referential titles such as “Now I am going into the Birchwood my pills will soon start doing me good”, and these are not always in tune with what can be seen in the work.

Images from MoMA website and others.

The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika'
Installation
Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
Photo by Jason Mandella, 2009

Down with Inflation (1984)
Oil and silicone on canvas, 2 parts

Untitled from the series Dear Painter, Paint for Me (Ohne title aus der serie Lieber Maler, male mir), 1981
Acrylic on Canvas
Promised gift of Steven and Alexandra Cohen.
Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Jeff Perrott: Empty Canvas, Morgan Lehmann NY

2009-04-01T17:41:00.000-07:00

March 19- April 18, 2009
Morgan Lehmann
317 10th Avenue (btwn 28th &29th), New York, NY10001

At first glance, Jeff Perrott's paintings appear to be an abstract array of black dot contoured by gradients of bright colors. Standing in front of them, and tilting backwards and forward, the images underlying the composition start to materialise, bringing forth a world of still lives, of portraits and of Master paintings.

A brightly coloured cow, in a sickly green pasture is the subject of one of the inkjet paintings. "What's this one called?" I ask the gallery owner. She looks at it, and looks at me: "Cow," she replies, breaking the silence of the white walled gallery. For it is indeed a cow- but it is almost iconic in its kitsch illuminance.

Despite the optical barrier of the pixelated images, there is a strong sense of photographic reality. The images have been deconstructed, fragmented, yet they are still present, still accurate as if whole. The pixels, in their alternating diameters and different gradients create a wavelike movement, as would a light veil hung between the image and the viewer.

Perrott's medium of work engages with enthuthiasm a computerised perception of the world. For what could be more in tune with our technological progress than a pixilated cow? It makes sense at this point for Perrot to choose a traditional composition style for his paintings. For "Cow" is indeed a cow, and we can imagine it grazing in its pastures, prior to and after the instance of the image. Similarly, the painting Studio (Corner) is a pixelated rendition of the artist's studio.

If the colorful renditions of the artist's studio are similar to those of Matisse and earlier modernists, Perrott makes explicit his playful references to earlier painters. As F.K. Miller mentions in the Exhibition Catalogue, Alex (nude), where the figure walking down the stairs is reminiscent of DuChamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912-1913). The pieces Carravagio I and Carravagio II are details of the hands from figures of Carravagio's Supper at Emmaulus (1601). Perrot's references are within the realms of observational painting, which he reworks, continuously experimenting with the visual capacities of his pixelated medium. Perrot's images, though blurred by the mode of pixelation, are dependant on the belief of the empirical reality of the underlying objects.

Images from Morgan Lehman Gallery website:
Double Portrait
UV- Curable inkjet on canvas
Cow
UV-curable Inkjet on Canvas

Jonathan Santlofer: Scrapbook - Pavel Zoubok Gallery, NY

2009-04-01T16:12:00.000-07:00

Pavel Zoubok Gallery
March 19- April 18 2009
533 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011

March 2008 at the Contemporary Fine Art gallery in Berlin featured the 6th solo exhibition of American artist and illustrator Raymond Petitbon. His large sheets of comic book style drawings were saturated with sex, death, George Bush, aliens and the 1970's. This highly self referential, and mediatic approach can be seen in the drawings of Jonathan Santlofer, exhibiting at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery this month. Santofler's favourites lie in the sassier days of American culture, bringing back images of JFK in a slick motorcar, an injured Che Guevara and 1950's Hollywood.

Whilst Petitbon focused on the brute draughtsmanship of illustration, Santlofer's drawings are the works of a meticulous painter. Using very light mediums such as ink and silver pigment on watercolour paper makes the drawings seem like they have been washed onto the canvas. There is a sense of nostalgia from the ethereal substance of the drawings, which could not have been achieved in a photograph, and it is the painterly mark making that diffuses a sense of epic history.

Out of the Past (2009) is a tryptich taking images of a kissing scene from a 1950's film. Two lovers in the woods, stare into each others eyes, kiss and embrace. The lovers are in trenchcoats, the woman with her hair down and fringe tied back, the man in a melon hat, and their style is significant of their era. Santofler conserves the drama of the sequence by emphasising the contrast between light and dark. Similarly, Kiss Collection (2009) brings forth clips of various kisses. These are the romantic sequences with Clark Gable, an amiable greeting between Clinton and Obama or homoerotic acting of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

As well as cinematic romances, American history becomes defined by recognisable faces and fashion. Motorcade (JFK & LBJ) and Untitled (Che & Mantegna) are most referential to this. John and Jackie Kennedy ride at the back of a convertible, suffusing leadership and youthful glamour. Crowds of men are standing, looking back or walking by the car in suits and thick dark glasses. Similarly, in the Che painting, it is the military outfits, the guns surrounding a scruffy Che, naked from the torso, that romanticises rebellion and freedom.

Images from Pavel Zoubok Gallery website:
Out of the Past, 2009
Ink wash with silver pigment on paper
Motorcade (JFK & LBJ), 2009
Ink Wash and pencil on paper
Untitled (Che & Mantegna), 2009
Ink wash and pencil on paper

Essay in Poetic Form

2009-03-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

An Essay in Poetic Form
From Elizabeth Bishop’s North Haven (1978)

It was then that I re-wrote the poem
Over and over and once again
Paraphrasing paragraphs of black ink scribbles
The paper carelessly ripped from the pad:
These are only drafts. In time they will be typed out neatly.

I wrote the poem once again
Reworking ideas, clawing through a cerebral compendium
Of devices, images, references and intertext
Searching for the very core of its soul:

What is it that makes me tremble such?
“The islands haven’t shifted since last summer, even if I like to pretend they have”
The geological movement in the earth’s plaques
In verse 5, expands the scope of vision
as well as sense of time.
Thousands of miles of earth shifting slowly
every hundred thousand years
This evokes dimensions only imagination can grasp
“Drifting, in a dreamy sort of way, a little north, a little south or sidewise”
Slowly swaying like the poet’s mind, their movement
is soothing, cradling and we can hear
the acoustics of the sea
hitting against the slippery rocks
of the mossy islands

The above is reminiscent of Prospect poetry (i), part of the 19th century romantic movement whereby the poet depicts a natural place he has returned to and the pangs of nostalgia this evokes. A typical romantic style, Similar to that of Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850), Bishop reveals the tensions between reality and imagination…

A rainy half term in Cornwall,
our first trip to the English coast
On a bay between two cliffs
Writing our names in big in the sand

And now for the flowers:
“Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetches”
Was their enumeration, in a typical postmodern style, a reflection of the rapid reproduction of images, and bringing in modern consumer society as a foil to pastoral convention?
In this sense do the images of the flowers, not described but listed, appear whole in a rapid sequence, as would a pop art print (ii) ?
Or is the nonchalance, the slacking in literary device, implied by the list, a reflection of the poet’s own melancholy, which in turn is evoking the stark reality of the transience of life amongst the cyclical processes of nature?

Looking down from the top I took a picture
Impressed at the clarity of the letters
L E M M A in dark ochre on yellow ochre

The relationship between sailing and kissing
Youth, strength and independence
“That Classic summer”,
The Golden Age according to Grease (1978)(iii)
No school, no worries, good looks and boys
A euphoria I know too well
But set so far away, in North Haven of ‘32

I too can think of old coloured boats
on wild Tunisian beaches
I remember running in the sand and screaming

Later the nights spent drinking on the Marina
The lights of the city stretched along the coast(iv)
Civilisation delimited by the black watered sea
In a nice dress (v) and white sandals (vi)

An Essay In Poetic Form
Well, why not?
I tried to unscrambled North Haven (1978)
and it became something new.
This is the poem in my own words,
What I saw in it and what it made me feel.
The images sparked, the salty breeze and the grating sand:
Are they not all mine?

(i) Williams, R: The country and the city, Oxford university Press 1975

(ii) Andy Warhol on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol

(iii) 1978 musical film directed by Randall Keiser

(iv) Coast on the outskirts of Beirut

(v) Black and navy blue silk with sequins

(vi) L.K. Benett; S/S‘08

Brighton Art School 150th Anniversary Exhibition - until 14th March

2009-03-02T18:35:00.001-08:00

Paul Clark's 1960's series of objects with Union Jack Motifs and others.

On for another two weeks is From Art School to University: Art and Design at Brighton 1859-2009 an exhibition celebrating The Brighton Art School’s 150^th Anniversary. The show displays a variety of works, from traditional painting, moving on to study drawings, and later design and installation sculpture. Each work is selected so that it stands out in medium and context.

Some beautiful drawings from the slightly older fine artists at Brighton, of which were the sketches of George Hooper (1910-1994) a British painter born in India.

Bottom Center and Top Right: Drawings by George Hooper, Bottom Right, Dorothy Clover.

On the more contemporary front are pieces by Turner Prize winner Keith Tyson, and his simultaneously comic and awe striking Somewhere near the Edge of the Visible Universe.

Notable on the design front is the work of Paul Clark, 1960’s designs typical of the emerging pop culture. Also an impressive range of media works, such as Transport for London Posters, Siobhan Keaney’s Sci-Fi stamp series based on novels by H.G. Wells, and album covers for Pink Floyd and Muse.

The exhibition also demonstrates some acutely aware fashion pieces, of which were Jerwood Prize winner Caroline Broadhead’s seven seams.

Caroline Broadhead, Seven seams

A great show, which I keep going back to every time I walk past for it’s variety of intriguing works.
For a map to the Grand Parade Gallery click here

Balance it Out!

2009-03-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

An article on the Student sit in for Palestine at Sussex Uni last January.

Published in The Badger Monday 02nd March
In response to an article on Monday 2nd February

Josh, you are right. As an anti-war campaign, it would not make sense to support Hamas. Hamas of course believe a military resistance to be the only solution. As you know, for Hamas a state of war is a state of victory and every dead child a martyr. This is not compatible with what you stand for: human beings must always be treated as ends in themselves. But Josh I am surprised: as a pacifist and campaigner, how can you boast that, after Dr. Azzam Tamimi justified suicide bombing in Arts 2, only one person spoke out against him?

No need to take offense on behalf of Dr. Tamimi: he is proud of his position. He made no exception in his talk at Arts 2. That USSU allowed him to come on campus does not allow him decrease from the controversial elements of his presence.

The Student Occupation was in solidarity with Hamas. Stop the War Coalition are in solidarity with Hamas, and have been so for years. Dr Azzam Tamimi speaks on behalf of Hamas. On the first discussion, a girl from Stop the War Coalition called for solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. Will somebody please, please tell her, that as a young woman, she would have no voice in a state run by Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria or Iran. The pictures hung around the walls of A2 were Hamas tactics: using the dead, the scorched, the impaled to score political points. The speakers who continually spoke out against Egypt, Saudi Arabia as pawns of “American Imperialism” are following the Hamas argument.

Many, like me, came to the occupation to condemn the war crimes committed by Israel. Many who believe Palestinians are as much the victims of Hamas as they are of Israel. Yet none of the speakers and none of the discussions at the Student Occupation made that distinction: the one between the Palestinian people and Hamas. There was no voice for those who also condemn both Israel and Hamas.

I believe you when you say you do not support terrorist activities. This may have all been out of the Student Occupiers’ control – a triumph of passivism, not pacifism. It is very easy for big campaigns to exploit students. For example, one of the speakers, John Molyneux, also from Stop the War, at the start of his talk asked the occupiers to sign a petition against his recent arrest. He equated this to “the principle” of standing in solidarity with Gaza. Here he used the suffering of Palestinians, and the good will of the Occupying Students for his own political gains.

Every view in a conflict should be given a voice. If the Student Occupiers want to support Hamas, they have that right to. But they cannot delude themselves into thinking this was an all inclusive campaign. Those who refused to sign the Occupation petition, were seen as war sympathisers. The Occupation believed it could claim the status quo on an anti-war campaign against Israel, yet it refused to present a coherent, multi-sided debate at any one time. This alienated more people than those brought into solidarity.

Maybe it was a case of bad speakers, a lack of organisation, and an absence of knowledge in Middle Eastern politics. It is a shame that student campaigners can still romanticise the Orient (as their colonizing forefathers did) and not question what it is they are campaigning for. Hamas’ military resistance against Israel has nothing to do with the Student struggle against University Management.

Read more about the Sussex occupation on their Blog: sussexoccupation.blogspot.com
Read The Badger : www.thebadgeronline.co.uk

The Shape I'm In - Phoenix Studios 14th- 28th February 2008

2009-02-18T08:28:00.001-08:00

"O" Inspired by the title of the show

The inspiration for this was the lid itself being an "O". We had done a lot of "loose", big drawings, where we were trying to keep the detail simple and sparse, so it was a relief to use fine pens and go small again!. The subject matter is either of a day dream or a self portrait or a portrait of a friend or family member

Above is one of the headings for the colorful pieces that lured me into the Phoenix Galleries of Brighton Art School on the Grand Parade. Hung from the ceilings and on the ground where simple geometric sculptures ornate with colourful equal sized prints, ink and crayon childlike drawings. Is this an art collective ? Why the special interest in naïve art? What springs to mind in childlike drawing, beyond the ignorance of technique, is the freedom from historical reference, the spontaneity of colour and the looseness of line. The psychological background, from which children’s drawing as a form of art emerged, brings in the suggestion that they can teach a lot about human nature. Delving deeper, parallels can be drawn, and usually are, to the doodles of institutionalised mental patients. In this vein of thought, the appealing color and playfulness of children's drawings also hold within them the power to reveal a darker, more complex aspect of our intrinsic selves.

“The Shape I’m in”, Same Sky’s annual young artists exhibition, displays a collective of projects conducted in 14 primary schools across the country. It is organised by the art collaboration Same Sky and St Bartholomew’s school both based in East Sussex. Hand made stamps, drawings inside lids, wire figure, and rapid ink drawings were all the skills worked on. Anish Kapoor, David Nash are all brought in to the works. These are all assembled onto big geometric sculptures, designed by John Varah, an artist and curator in the team.

Anything pleasant that stems from children tends to be “delightful”. Childrens books, children’s movies are given a voice according to how “delightful” or "enchanting" they were. Here the unfounded and unproblematic use of delight takes on a new importance. The overall result of the project was colorful, energetic pieces, with no underlying historical jargon and no stark implicit messages- the absence of the latter two in this case being good things. The pieces are simple in concept, and what oozes from this is the creativity and playfulness that produced them. The exhibition is on for ten more days, until the 28th of February. With all the need to assess art according to it’s historical, social and financial worth , go here to remember why you really love it.

Baba Slips

2009-02-02T14:43:00.000-08:00

Imagine living in a small village where everyone knows each other, there are two pubs and every other music night features the two village bards and contributions from other aspiring musicians. Brighton is pretty much the same thing, and I have seen the same band perform three times this week. Part of the hippy revival movement that infuses the East Sussex coast line, it is enough to say that Baba Slips are fronted by a saxophonist, Alex Brown, but that would be forgetting their guitarist, the dreadlocked James Riley who can jump and jam like an early Zack de la Rocha, bassist and total funkster James Patterson. As this suggests, the music brings in a little of bit ska, a little bit of funk, a little bit of reggae, and a little bit of rage against the machine. It is certainly not devoid of that recycled and homemade creativeness that oozes from all things Brightonian, bringing in alot of improvs and spontaneity. Baba slips played on campus last Friday for Somali Aid, and graced us with their presence once more at the East Slope bar the following week. They also are regulars at the nights hosted by comm.:UNITY and play at the Rusty Seas, which is on once a month at The Volks. As far removed from the romantic indie notion of its-us-youths-against-the-world, this is not angry and sex-driven, power mad and lovesick but made to dance, dance and groove, move your head and feel good, coz we’re 20 mins away from the sea, there’s anarchy in the cloud-stiffled sun, and at the horizon I can see freedom, man.

Listen to Baba Slips on Myspace

The Boss Hoss

2009-02-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

Boss Hoss are only crap in theory. Cowboy country blues german wannabes who made their claim to fame by cowboy-country-bluesing pop classics like Cameo’s Word Up or Britney Spears. But watching them play live you get a sense of their understanding of folk music, their love of what they do and playing together, and why they refuse to transpose, innovate and be cool. Using cheesy pop songs as a comical template, the Boss Hoss produce some really graceful and talented country jams, that are open to unlimited changes, additions or simplifications. Once packaged and made to sell, as cheesy pop songs sung by crazy germans, they do not have enough to gain appeal and significance in the eyes of progress. Talking to them before their gig at Audio, their first show in Brighton, vocals and acoustic guitar Hoss Power (Sascha Vaullman) told me he was not so interested in the charts, and that now they were playing for such a major label, Universal, maybe he should be. The Boss Hoss, through their label, their marketers, or their own personal choice, attempt to reach a world they have no interest in, that of innovative and youthful music. Their sacrifice and great loss as a result is the magnificence of understatement in the dog bitten, flee ridden ramblin’ Blues.

U-Cef : Playing at Tate Britain and an Interview

2009-01-26T16:56:00.000-08:00

A Moroccan drummer who fuses traditional Middle Eastern music with dance tunes, U-Cef has collaborated with the likes of Missy Eliott and Daman Albarn.

I met him at the Late at Tate Distant Sounds exhibition at Tate Britain last June, where he was DJ-ing. Being modest about his achievements told me he'd spent the past thirteen years "just bumming around". However the questions he answered later reflect the love and the insight for rythms and parties responsible for his highly productive career in music.

Could you describe with more detail the different trends and music cultures in Morrocco?

Trend in Morocco, is pretty much set in the urban diaspora of the west, as it gets to Morocco, between fashion, music, films…etc. the Moroccan public, like most societies don’t have much choice but to embrace the new trend, except in remote areas, where people still live closer to nature, and “NOT” the city trend.

How did these affect the way kids dressed, danced, where they went out and how they behaved?

I would say, the same way I was effected, in my teens I started dancing, a couple of years later, started drumming, then I got into different styles of music, from Hendrix to Bob Marley… so to sum it up, if you walk down the high streets of Casablanca or Marrakech, you will see hip hoppers, Rastas, Metal heads…etc.

my experience in Lebanon was that they had a really strong alternative scene, where hippies and heavy metal kids hung out in underground blues bars to rebel against their parents. Is this similar in Morocco?

I would say quite the same syndrome more or less!

What was the dancing at parties like? Did you swing, salsa, belly dance –or mix all three?

I dance to James Brown and funk, also reggae and swing rock, in house parties I went to in my teens. Also there was weddings where Sharqi & Chaabi music were dominant.

How connected do you feel to all the different sounds you wish to incorporate in your music (ie Gnawa, Dub, Irish folk)?

For me there are 2 types in the music, good and bad!… so from there, I go to explore anything that I think will be an important feature to use in my music. And that could be Gnawa, Rock, Chaabi or hip hop… also my most important element to my work, is to produce materiel that relate to the youth, urban and multicultural.

My north African friend made me listen to a tape once with Oum Kalthoum “Ca, c’est de la musique Arabe” he said, Khaled “Ca c’est du Rai” and later Bob Marley “et ca, c’est de la musique Africaine.” You too worked with Gnawa musicians What influence would you say does African music have in Morocco, and how strong is it? Does it affect fashion and dance too?

I don’t know what your friend meant to say!… but I do work with Gnawa music, as it’s probably the most African influenced in the Moroccan music. Also Gnawa is a suffi based music, I’d say it’s sub sahara African that have embraced Islam. Also not everything in music is related to fashion. Some of it is to bring people together, rather than making a fashion statement.

When you say you would like to work with Flamenco, is this because of the similarities Spanish scales have to Middle Eastern scales?

Flamenco is based on Andalucian music, left behind by the Moors that occupied Spain at the time. however, I’d like to work with flamenco dancers and Andalucian band. I’ve seeing some experimental, badly executed.

Could you tell me more about the Melhoun?

Melhoun is based on Andalucian music, and it’s a city intellects and upper middle class music, this was then. Now most Moroccan take pride in Melhoun.

You have used talking in your track, what would you think of using recited traditional poetry, or a reading in your work? Which one would you choose?

I would use poetry or story telling or anything that suits my production… so it depends. But I enjoy poetry.

There is a form of improvisational songwriting whereby each musician sings a line. A good example is the song Dawwerha by Ziad Rahbani. Have you ever experienced such music first hand?

No I don’t know what song you mean. But I know about getting hit first time by a great song.

What political/ cultural norms in history do you think have formed traditional Arabic music, and their local varieties?

We should not forget that the luth was first string based music instrument, invented by Arabs, also the music theory and its mathematics. And the fact that Arabs were explorers at the time, have travelled and have share the knowledge. But the shaping of the music has evolved in a prospering era, whether for the Arabs or other cultures.

Roots Manuva and Jimmy Screech at Concorde 2 Brighton

2008-11-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

21st October
Concorde2 Brighton

On yet another grand tour of the country Roots Manuva is affirming 14 years of reign on the UK Hiphop scene. And what a crowd of fans came to pledge allegiance. Gathered were young indie teens, brightonian hippies, hoodied hiphopers, many of them now reformed and sadly transformed into fat old men. Roots played songs from newly released album Slime and Reason and reminisced with some old school classics. The venue was packed making it hard for us to get our groove on, but that didn’t stop the headbopping and hipswaying (when we could).

With his sunglasses and shirt for the ladeez, Roots expels charisma of the supreme kind. Great energy on stage –came on in his hoodied jacket, came off with his shirt soaked from all the sweat and burn. In turn, we were sardined between quite a few greasy men, which was more than just annoying.

On tour with Roots Manuva was his young protégé Jimmy Screech, a debutante on the scene and based in South London. A great start up to the show it could have easily been the main act. Jimmy's looks are as appealing as his voice (oh my god you just want to kiss him!), more importantly he's got some pretty funky tunes. With the easy going rythms of reggae and the voice of rap that's always harking back at you, he's going to be an ipod hit at house parties. Chatting to him before the show, he told URF about the great gamble that is joining the music scene, and how much he owes to the legendary Rodney Smith.

Zouzou Kai - youth art in Lebanon

2008-08-28T15:00:00.001-07:00

The Gemmayze art fair goes up along the old steps of Gemmayze. Amateurs, art students and practising professionals all rent a space along the walls. Since the protest camps in Downtown have been set up near Achrafieh, Gemmayze has become the new clubbing district. Small unlicensed bars have opened very quickly to accommodate this new influx of party people. The fair however has been around much longer. Going up the stairs, I spot nothing I particularly like: a lot of landscapes, too much symbolism and paintings of robins and pink horses.

On the way up I am introduced to my friends classmate, who is exhibiting photographs at the fair, and who stands out in his work as well as his looks.Zouzou Kai is in his first year of Creative advertising at Alba (Academie Libanaise des Beaux Arts). He has longish curly black hair, voluminous and shiny, and thick black glasses. He sits cross legged on his low chair, lighting cigarettes and looking up at the people walking past. “It costs $70 for to rent a square meter.’ He points up to the photographs he’s pegged to the grid ‘I didn’t want to overfill the space, so I’ve stuck a few on the wall’ he points to pictures above, below and next to him, blue tacked onto the wall of a pre-war beiruti house, the ones with the yellowed stone, cracks and gunshots that have slit the surface. “so technically, he jokes, these are illegal.”

He has displayed black and white photographic portraits of anonymous Lebanese people. A fresh faced student, with short dark hair, smiling against a blurred building; an old overweight local with a white apron, staring into the lens and behind him is the fat rear of another baker bending over; a man lying on a long chair, shot from his knees we see his inner thigh, the lower end of his shorts, erect chest hairs and the tip of his nose.

Zouzou has been taking photography lessons for two terms now, experimenting with different finishes and Ilford film. This series of photographs is a selection from his favourite works throughout the year. “As I was learning how to take and develop my own pictures, I discovered this guy called Walker Evans. He wanted to take portraits of people for who they were, and he did this by photographing farmers and countryfolk –people who are removed from the city. And I liked this idea, I want to take pictures that show people as they are, so I ended up with very simple portraits, of people looking straight at the lens and smiling.”

For such simple images, they have provoked many reactions. “I started to write all the different ones down- someone asked me if they were portraits of dead people, and then why I’d put their picture up they were not dead.” My own thought was that there was an element of grotesque, apparent in the blown up thighs from the man on the beach, or the baker’s rear end, but he didn’t seem to like this.

He stresses there is no particular theme to the photographs, they were just taken during the course, and he was more interested in the people and their expressions than any social situational surrounding. “I took photographs of people I knew, and who were willing to do it. If someone doesn’t want to be photographed, they start doing annoying things like scowling and looking away, they just aren’t themselves in the picture.”

His Black and white photographs are developed with a high contrast. Zouzou says this was actually a mistake, that he’d left the paper too long in the solution, and that he feels he lost alot of the “volume” that comes from a more accurate image.

As for the rest of the Dar El Fen Gemmayze, Zouzou was like me, disappointed. “I thought this was going to be a proper art fair! Everything is so commercial!”

Lebanese Film Festival 21st and 26th August

2008-08-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

The 7^th Edition of the Lebanese Film Festival run by ne.abeyrouth and HEDGEHOG has been going on this week at the Empire Cinema in Sofil, Achrafié. It has featured short films and documentaries made by Lebanese directors. None of these were particularly memorable or innovative, but they provide a good insight on Lebanese Cinema. Here are a few of the films that stood out:

Dzovig Torigian’s short film “Bala Wala Shi” is set in a bohemian Beiruti club, which he turns into a small village cafe. The camera revolves slowly around the different characters at the bar, showing the small worldness of Lebanese society. Their conversation is about “everything and nothing”, a mode of distraction vibrant in Lebanese humour. It leads to the discovery of their highly implausible American style relationships, but the familiarity between the characters

Talal Khoury’s short film illustrates his poem “The Gentleman”, which evokes the banality of daily repetition, that turns tenderness into aggression. The Gentleman recounts his daily routine, how he grooms himself before wondering about streets of Beirut. Paying no attention to social or political issues, the scenes look like they could have been shot in Sicily or Tunisia. However the Gentleman is reminiscent of Attaturks modernization of Lebanon; dressed in his 1930’s suit and bowler hat but promenading like a Bedouin dilettante.

Akram Zaatari’s “Video in five movements” shows super 8 clips taken in the 60’s and 70’s of a man and his family, at various touristic sights like Beiteddine Palace and Jezzine. The images depict a rural 1970’s Lebanese family through the children’s retro outfits, Lebanese men walking in suits and the obviously staged movements in all the clips.

My favourite by far was Little Mornings by Ali Zaraket. This short documentary depicted Beirut in the early mornings, before the congestion, heat and pollution. It featured a social commentary from a ranting taxi driver on the corniche, the slow death of a cow hung from its legs and drained of it’s blood, the new arrivals at Hariri Airport, and other points of dynamism at this mainly silent hour.

Roy Samaha’s “Terror Unleashed” shows unseen footage of Islamists residing in Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. Featuring interviews with Osbat Al Ansar, the directer claims he got nothing out of them but their usual propaganda. However if you look up interviews with Shehadeh Jawhar on Youtube, you won’t see him checking his email, serving Turkish coffee and weightlifting as you do in these videos.

As far as political documentaries went, there was alot of hubbub about Hady Zaccak’s documentaries, of which “Shi’a echoes from Lebanon” I found these touched only the surface of the issues, and taught us nothing new. Zaccak did capture some good moments such as nannies from the Dahyeh shouting political abuse from their balconies, and I wish there had been more of this. The documentary gave a light comic overview already served just as well by CNN.

A film that caused much controversy to do with censorship is Daniel Arbid’s “This smell of sex”. Arbid addresses this highly taboo topic by playing interviews conducted with various anonymous Lebanese about their sex lives. An intimate super 8 tape of a young woman is played simultaneously. Although the interviews were subtitled in English, these did not capture the humour of the vocabulary used in Lebanese dialect.

Al Saqi Books -25th Anniversary

2008-07-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

A small shop in Notting Hill, a wild writer in a red dress, a Glam Rock music theorist and a reclusive Lebanese poet were all meshed together to celebrate 25 years of Saqi books. Gathered at the Kensington Town Hall were writers, poets, musicians, politicians and general shmoozers. The evening also commemorated co-founder of Saqi, author and feminist Mai Ghoussoub, as well as 120 years of Kahlil Gibran’s poetry.

One by one, figures from the worlds of Middle Eastern Politics, Literature, and Music got up and to celebrate Saqi books and Mai Ghoussoub as original, forward thinking and daring landmarks in contemporary Literature. Musician Brian Eno introduced the talks and was followed by Turkish writer Moris Farhi, contemporary British author Maggie Gee, and Tarek Mitri, the Lebanese Minister of Culture.

Moris Farhi and Randa Asmar gave a reading in English and Arabic of Kahlil Gibran’s poetry. No one could look as literary, as involved with words, thoughts and imagination as Moris Farhi does. With a white beard and bushy hair, walking and talking slowly, he seemed to have just awoken from a three month reading binge. On the other side, Randa gave increasingly fervent readings of Kahlil Gibran, her whole being swaying to the accusatory words of the poem, and the audience started clapping before she’d finished the last piece.

As one of the most celebrated and influential writers in Lebanon and the Middle East, it seemed only natural to dedicate part of the evening to Kahlil Gibran. The Author and Journalist Trevor Mostyn said that his opinion on Gibran keep changing, that there are times when he can find him a bit sugary and others when he really enjoys reading his work.

My friend and I were really excited to see Brian Eno, who gave a very sweet talk about his growing curiosity and fascination with Middle Eastern culture. He commented on the importance of seeking ideas from the outside and celebrated London for giving him the opportunity to have “Breakfast in Brazil, Lunch in Lebanon, Dinner in Iran, meanwhile being served by a Nepalese or Estonian waitress.” Chatting to him later about this he said that he would like to see a festival “dedicated to smoking”, where people could sit and smoke arguileh, and then have musicians and performances.

Maggie Gee’s speech, simple and memorable words, gave a touching and clear reminder of the importance of Saqi books and the brilliance of Mai Ghoussoub. “Everything she said was true” said Nadim Shehadi, who has worked with Saqi Books and was good friends with Mai.

Gee described Saqi Books as “the only publisher that everyone likes”. She stressed the creativity and open mindedness of their editors, that “Saqi was a real publisher that valued the individual and dared to take risks”

Mai Ghoussoub, she painted as a great thinker, writer, activist, “kind, sexy, passionate and liberated”, who threw parties and belly danced in a red dress. The way Ghoussoub demonstrated “complexities as well as subtleties” showed her sensitivity and understanding towards the people and situations she wrote about.

Ghoussoub is as reknowned for her charisma and energy as she is for her work, and Moris Farhi and Maggie Gee’s affection for this was clear. It was nice to see such admiration from people who had known her well.

Tubby Pope, a good friend of the Gaspard's said that having known the family for ages it was really moving to see how much everyone at the party loves them and Saqi Books. There is a lot admiration for the publishing house and its co-founder Mai Ghoussoub; Brian Eno called himself an “evangelist” for the small shop in Notting Hill and Moris Farhi’s feels that “Saqi has become my family, Mai Ghoussoub was my sister.”

London Belly Dance Festival - April 11th-12

2008-07-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

Red, orange, pink sashes and glimpses of skin rush past, creating a jingle jangle from metallic sequins. Female voices chat speedily in Hebrew , each sound constantly on the move, twisting from one end of the room to the other. The occasional Arabic comes out elongated and emphasised “ooooooooooooh Ahlaaan!” “ Yalla, yalla!” It is the very start of the London Belly Dance Festival at the Cockpit Theatre, a tiny council center, and it feels like the Djerba of Edgware Road.

Daniel Vice is the art supervisor, a supercamp Israeli, tiny, trim, tanned, his shoulders twist and hips bounce as he walks. “Hellooooooo, lovely to meet you, just wait here I’m going to get you a day pass” and but everywhere he turns he is stopped by women with big green eyes, brown curls and shrill voices. “Danièle! Danièle!”

As with all of the crew, Daniel was knowledgeable and involved in the Belly Dancing world. He was not into the European fantasy of Efnic Stuff and emphasized the uniqueness and art in traditional dance. “This is not Aerobics or Erotic, it is really about the roots of Belly Dancing and with this festival we hope to show the real, the traditional belly dancing.”

“It is about the subtlety of the movement, we have to be able to see it, and it is about dancing from the heart”

The first workshop Vice took me to was a Baladi Dancing workshop run by Fifi Ness. Baladi Dancing, can be understood as the local dance, which varies from region to region. The workshops were conducted not as step-by-step dance classes but as studies of bodily expression and cultural tradition. This is probably because the organisers themselves see belly dancing as an inherited practice and feel a duty to pass it on.

Fifi Ness struts with loud eyes and smile. She demonstrates Baladi as something theatrical, every movement reflects an expression and tells a story. She raises her hands up in a triangle looks at the sky. Her head falls back and with abrupt sighs she exclaims “My husband has upset me today”. The other women smile. Her first dance in the workshop is the one of the very beautiful girl “like the moon” who by revealing herself only slightly to the shoemaker, the fishmaker, the greengrocer and other regulars, walks around the village and gets things for free.

In the theatre room, organiser Michaella was teaching students how to dance with Wings of Isis. These are huge sashes tied to the neck. The dancer holds the edges in both hands and they spread and whirl. The dance is more about elegance and mystery than with Baladi dancing and Michaella’s taller, slimmer figure seemed more suited to this. “Aiiwaaaaaaaaaa! Beautiful! ” she said as the wings swept up and around the dancers body which reappeared briskly from behind the fabric.

The Bazaar in the main hall had collections of tiny, noisy, shiny polysterene dresses. Accessories to tighten, enhance and highlight. The tackiest , raunchiest outfits that my grandma’s generation in Lebanon rejected in favour of the more demure French couture houses and that my own embracement Vogue today would never tolerate. Brilliant. Through fashion alone the Belly Dancing world stands out as a manifestation of the marginal.

With the flow of westernisation in the Middle East after the first world war, many Ottoman traditions were rejected for the European ones. By the 1950’s, Belly Dancing was seen as a dance for the vulgar and uneducated, and so the young elite of Beirut and Cairo would have twisted to Elvis in New Look dresses. Belly dancing in the Levant is now back in fashion, but kids will learn it in specialist lessons rather than intuition, as they would for hiphop or house.

On the surface belly dancing can look like a lot of shimmy and shake, but beneath lie many political connotations as well as other spiritual or cultural interpretations. Lillee Naor, a dancer and organiser at the festival, has incorporated Belly Dancing in art psychotherapy. She believes that as an “ ecstatic celebration of feminine power, creativity and sexual energy” belly dancing can help enhance self image, relieve tension through movements of the spine. “Different body types suit different strands of belly dancing, and this will even change the music a person will choose to dance to.”

The afternoon was dedicated to musical workshops run by acclaimed singer Natasha Atlas and her crew of musicians. Natasha gave a course on chants. Because of the difficulty for untrained ears to hit quartertones used in Arabic scales, she taught using the Hijaz scale, with had only full and half tones. She also taught the Mawal, an improvisational technique used for Baladi dancing and the call for prayer. She emphasized the importance of the shrill in the voice, which was very distinctive of Oriental music. Natasha Atlas is tiny, round with big black eyes.

Upstairs, Aly taught a drumming workshop. He is known as the best tablah player in the world but spoke, stood and smiled like an Edgware Road fix-it man. Hearing him play outside the room I felt like I was about to walk into some kind of ritualistic midnight fire gathering orgy. The drumming was furiously fast and steady. Inside was a cheerful smiling Aly, patiently teaching an old hippy how to drum the derbakkeh.

All these dancers, musicians, art directors, therapists, modern day orientalists were gathered together for a final performance in the evening. Natasha Atlas sang and moved her hips in slow wide circles to Michaella’s dancing.

The Belly Dancing festival is wacky, quirky, sexy, intelligent and informative. It is run by a small group of people who embrace the moves, the music, the clothes, the history and politics which they have innate in their identity and upbringing.

Honour Bound - Political Art or Liberal Propaganda?

2008-02-18T15:58:00.001-08:00

A performance produced by the Sydney Opera House and Malthouse theatre, it showed at the Barbican from 14-17 November as part of the Ozmosis 07 performing arts festival. Conception, Direction and Codesign by Nigel Jamieson, Choreography by Gary Stuart and music by Paul Charlier.

Honour Bound is the account of David Hick’s experience as a Guantanamo detainee. The controversy around David Hicks lies in a disagreement between the Australian public and the American Government over Hicks’ conviction. Hicks is accused of having been to Taliban camps in Afghanistan and having participated in operations with Al –Qaeda, that did not involve killing but transmitting information. The Australian public disputes this vehemently and for these reasons I will not go into the politics of Hick’s imprisonment.

The performance itself is a two-layered Pritt-Stick collage of TV journalism and dance. The projector projects video interviews of Hick’s parents, pictures of Guantamo Bay (and Abu Ghraeb) and news clippings. Meanwhile the dancers dance choreographed contortions of human suffering. The choreography was initially intriguing as the depiction of physical and mental torture. Choreographer Garry Stewart believes that through this the “struggle becomes real and not illustrated” However the routines got repetitive and the dancers were so swift and graceful they clashed with the very idea of human suffering. The drama was created mostly by the music. For 70 whole minutes a dreary sci-fi movie suspense-style-symphony droned on and on and on. The opening and closing scenes are decorated with Arabic chants, of which was a recording of the Muslim call to God, which has become a crude cliché in the world of audiovisual politics. By introducing these, the director contradicts from the very start of the performance the initial message of his work: that this is a production by Australian artists, about an Australian citizen for an Australian audience.

Half of the piece was dedicated to the video documentary. The ingredients for liberal propaganda were all included in a glorious parade of journalistic clichés. Passages from the Declaration of Human Rights were both recited and written with an assumption that the audience has reading or hearing difficulties. Later a juxtaposition of the interrogation techniques and Hick’s personal account of the tortures he experienced appeared also in visual and audio formats. The Funny Quote by George Bush was not funny. Interviews with Hick’s parents, Terry and Bev, presented them as the typical tabloid heroes: white, middle-class and victimized citizens. The scandalous newspaper pictures, supposedly of the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, turned out to be mostly a collection of the atrocities commited in the Abu Ghraeb prison in Iraq.

The piece is so anti- bush it becomes pro- Osama. For a performance that tried to expose secrets of the Bush Administration, it did very well in concealing details of Hick’s conviction -which can be found on wikipedia, listed in bullet points. But this is a common disease that is spreading widely as the polarization between Bush haters and supporters increases. Many support the American War on Terror whilst disagreeing with their tactics. They point to the incompetence and disaster of American foreign policy in Iraq. They criticize the security measures taken within our cities that have stubbed out our civil liberties. Others who are more extreme begin to deliberately support targets of the Bush administration such as the Ba’ath regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine or detainees in Guantanamo.

The idea to collaborate journalism and dance had an original potential, but it did not work in Honour Bound. Instead the melange of aesthetic cliches and bad information made the whole performance rather naf and annoying.

Samir Kassir: What Are You Writing?

2006-12-18T03:55:00.000-08:00

I attended a screening of Samir Kassir: What Are You Writing? This Monday at the Frontline Club in Edgware Road. The documentary was on the life and work of Samir Kassir, a controversial Lebanese activist and journalist. Raised in Beirut and of Syrian and Palestinian descent, he had a passion for the Levant, and was a great supporter of modernity and democracy in the region. He was killed in 2005 in a car bomb, one of the many anti-Syrian icons to be assassinated that year.

The documentary was the hommage to a passionate writer, friend and family man. The director Ephrem Kossaify, who saw Samir Kassir as his mentor, said he did not show any pictures of car or body after the assassination because he didn’t want to commemorate Samir Kassir’s life as a tragedy. However the documentary did make the whole room very sad, and very angry. It opened our eyes to the necessity of journalism and freedom of speech of the Middle East, by reminding us of incidents such as the MTV demonstrations in 2001. The Lebanese TV station MTV was shut down when a court ruled it had violated election laws in it’s broadcasts. The owner of the station was the anti-Syrian member of Parliament Gabriel El-Murr who was running for election. This was percieved as part of a pro-Syrian campaign, and mass demonstrations followed shorty. The demonstrators were fired at with powerful water guns and many students were seriously injured.

My father was good friend’s with Kassir and I was struck by how sad he was when he’d heard the bad news. I remember meeting him and his daughter at Biel three years ago when he was selling a book he was the producer of. He had the same relationship with his daughter which I had with my dad and watching her talk in the documentary with a big smile and a lot of courage made me very sad.

His wife Giselle Khoury answered questions at the end of the screening. She was brilliant, making her views clear and forceful. The crowd at the screening was a mix of mainly Lebanese and Europeans and the contrast between the two was amusing. The Lebanese where very sentimental in their comments and questions “How are you coping etc..” whilst the others kept their questions more political. She stressed the importance of journalism and activism in order to bring justice in Lebanon. Although many writers in Lebanon have gone quiet since the death of Samir Kassir, powerful journalism has not been abolished completely.

One of the questions asked was what is the hope for futur generations of journalists in the Middle East. The director answered that halting journalism in the Middle East would be “killing [Samir Kassir] a second and third time.” The futur generations may have a more muddled perspective on activism in the Middle East. The problem today is not just with freedom of speech. Older Arab thinkers like Samir Kassir, who campaign for a modern and democratic Middle East, were born at a time where a westernized Beirut was really thriving. It will be harder for the Middle Eastern youth of today to take this stance, as they are increasingly aware of a fallible and cruel West. They are less likely to support a world they feel has let them down.

Fighter Children

2006-09-04T17:07:00.000-07:00

Today, I found this piece which I wrote having just returned from Lebanon. It is about the children I met during the evacuation to Cyprus from Beirut by the British Navy. I had forgotten their names and the details and was pleasantly surprised when I read this again for the first in time in 6 weeks.

The first stage of the evacuation was a 7 hour wait in the Forum de Beyrouth. People were scattered round in this badly ventilated warehouse hoping for a possibility to get on a boat leaving the country. We found my friend Toufic and gathered a few chairs to make a circle for our little group.

Next to us were about a dozen kids aged two to eleven. They were with their parents, three couples all belonging to the same family. They played cards, ate biscuits, cried occasionally. They also spoke fluently in Arabic and English and were Masters of Slang in both languages.

Roseanna, who proudly announced she was going into year 7 after many years at Highgate Primary, approached me with her 2 year old sister Rawane, who from excitement and timidity was confined to a speechless but disarming smile, and her very chatty nine year-old cousin Danielle who lived in Tottenham. We agreed to play a card game, Toufic joined as well as Nour, a third cousin about the same age as Roseanna, and Hiba, a girl they had just met.

We played many games, of which charades and a multiplying game. Then the girls started talking to me about London and the conversation eventually escalated to their ruined holiday in Lebanon. “I’d watched [war] on TV it made me sad, she pauses, and now it’s happened to me” explained Roseanna, before I’d even asked. They had a house in the Dahyeh and had fled to their summer house in Aaley and were once again being evacuated to England. It is common for Lebanese expatriates to start building summer houses up in the mountains, using the money they have saved up from their work abroad

Hiba was very quiet and had trouble with her English. She sat with her head cupped into her hands and her elbows tucked in her thighs; her big eyes looking up at the ceiling, wondering perhaps, as we all were, what would come after this wait in the forum. She was very bright and very mature. She had just met the girls, and was hoping to go live in London, since she and her family had been asked to leave their house in the Dahyeh. “My house is fine but they [authorities] did not let us go back to it”, for the past week she has been living in Jounieh, on the other side of Beirut, a 20 minute drive away, safe from the bombs but not from the noise and the tension, “my friend she saw my school on TV she said it was completely gone”. She made imploding hand gestures to describe “gone”. To comfort her I laughed and said “yay…khallas school” with my own sign language.

She laughed at this childish logic, the one which dreams of finding ones school in ruins. But war had taught her that such things were not so great in reality and this made her giggles very hesitant. Indeed, this was a place “next to [her] house” she had been to everyday for the past 3 years at least. It was where she had learned to read, write, think and had made her first ever independent choice of friends. School is the second home where she would have been free from her parents, free to experiment and break rules without too much guilt. Her home could change, but her school was centre for friends, a goal and a future. It was all rubble now.

She avoided sad thoughts and elaborated on my joke: “I told my mum that if we get to London I am not going to school”

But if the war lasts much longer than the summer she may end up at the local school. This timid girl who could just about get away with her broken English through hand gestures hesitations and Arabic connectives in between English words would have to make new friends, learn a new language, a new way of life. She would start a new life having hardly begun the first one.

I know for a fact that Danielle, her sister and her parents did not get out of Lebanon that day. Roseanna’s mother, with whom I chatted to on the boat the next morning (a conversation dumbed down by sea-sickness, lack of sleep and an excess of coffee an cigarettes) said they waited the whole day only to find complications with their papers.

Hiba’s story moved me alot. It took us 48 hours to get from Beirut to London. Every hour we were wondering where the next stage of the evacuation would take us. Those who had a knowledge of their homes and lives back in the UK took comfort in it. Otherwise the empty hours of waiting for the next unknown step and the fear and anticipation that preceded each one would have been too much to handle.

But Hiba had no idea what would happen next. She didn’t know if she would get on the boat. She had never seen London and had no idea how long she would stay there. Tomorrow at school she will be experiencing British life on her own for the first time and the cultural shock will be very painful.

When Criticism of Cluster Bombs is "Anti-Semitic"

2006-09-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

An article by Stanley Heller which i thought was interesting as a follow up of my previous post. Stanley Heller is a moderator of al-Awda-Unity, a division of the Right to Return movement intent on encouraging Jewish activism.

Blanket Immunity from War Crimes
When Criticism of Cluster Bombs is "Anti-Semitic"

By STANLEY HELLER

The Israeli paper Ha'aretz reports that the head of Germany's Jewish
community accused a minister in Angela Merkel's German government of "anti-Semitism" because of the minister's statement on Israel's use of cluster bombs. Development Aid Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul had asked for a United Nations probe into Israel's use of cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of German Jews, complained about what she terms a growing "anti-mood [sic] against Israel and the Jews" in Germany. [Ha,aretz August 30] Merkel, who made absolutely no criticism of Israel during the fighting, immediately met with Knobloch to "soothe Jewish ire" according to Deutche Welle [August 31]

The U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland revealed this week that of the estimated 100,000 unexploded cluster bombs lying in Lebanon almost all of them were fired in the last few days of the fighting when the terms of the ceasefire had already been set. The Guardian (UK) reports Egleand said, "What's shocking--and I would say to me completely immoral is that ninety per cent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution," he said.

It was known that in the last days of the war the Israeli army was engaged in a desperate attempt to have some "victory" and rushed troops here and there in an attempt to have a photo shoot near the Litani River. What was not known until now was the blind spite that sowed the ground of South Lebanon with a massive number of bomblets.

Cluster bombs are delivered by a large canister and disperse over a wide area, a sort of lethal piñata. The bomblets come in many sizes. Some are tiny, even smaller than 2 inches in diameter. Kids are constantly trying to kick them or pick them up with the result in
the loss an arm or leg or even death. "Every day people are maimed, wounded and are killed by these ordnance," said Egeland. The UN official based his estimate on the reports of the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre which has traveled through 85% of Lebanon.The casualty figures as of 29 August from unexploded ordnance rose to 59 people, including 13 killed and 46 injured.

Responding to U.N. reports of cluster bombs being found in Lebanese civilian areas the U.S. government has begun an investigation to determine if cluster bombs have been responsible for civilian casualties. It seems far fetched that the Bush Administration would do anything other than shower Israel with more money, but the Reagan administration did ban export of cluster bombs to Israel for six years for its misuse during its 1982 Lebanese invasion. The Zionist Ultras have been circling the wagons on this issue, not giving an inch. They hysterical statement by the German Jewish leader was typical of many.

Responding to a report by Human Rights Watch charging Israel with war crimes in its conduct of the war in Lebanon that was written by its director Kenneth Roth, Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel has called Roth "loathsome."1 An editorial in the New York Sun accused Roth of "de-legitimization of Judaism" because his group condemned Israel's strategy as "an eye for an eye." Rabbi Aryeh Spero in Human Events Online referred to Roth as a "human rights impostor," and likened him to "Nazis and Communists." On Sunday, the Jerusalem Post published an op-ed by NGO Monitor's Gerald Steinberg titled "Ken Roth's Blood Libel." [quotes from Kathleen Peratis, Washington Post August 30] The fact that Kenneth Roth is Jewish and his father fled Nazi Germany makes no difference to the Ultras. If you are do not support Israel 110% you are a Jew-hater, a renegade, a self-hater, and a holocaust denier. Get it?

In a very competitive field Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League took the prize for the comment showing the most utter stupidly. In attacking Human Rights Watch he said if Hezbollah was not made to pay an "overwhelming price" for rocket attacks "the Holocaust would be in the works". [Peratis, Washington Post]

something to make you giggle

2006-08-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

It seems there are still some people who take pleasure in our redundant President Emile Lahoud`s imbecilities.

This is who Haaretz quoted in their article: Lebanese cabinet won't force Hezbollah to disarm

"The weapons of the resistance are the only ones, of all Arabs, that succeeded in standing up to Israel and defeating it. No one can take away the weapons of the resistance, certainly not by force," pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, who headed the cabinet meeting, said. "The Lebanese army will deploy [in the south] and will be for all the Lebanese," he told reporters.

scary.

So, what exactly went wrong?

2006-08-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

On the 11 august the UN Security Council voted unanimously for a resolution that requested a immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hizballah.

Israel must now pull out of Lebanon after its largest military operation having destroyed the country`s bridges, gas stations, power stations, milk factories; having dehoused a quarter of the population; having killed at least 1000 civilians and injured many more ; and ultimately having failed to destroy Hizballah, which they had been set out to eliminate.

The Times Magazine reported that according to the top Israeli intelligence official, what the IDF really needed to liquidate Hizballah was bunker-buster bombs "capable of punching deep into an enemy`s underground defenses". Israel claim they knew exactly where the 38 hizballah bunkers (from which rockets have been launched) were, but that that Israeli made bombs had failed to destroy them. These bunker-buster bombs had been offered to Israel in 2002 by the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, Israel`s air force chief, rejected the offer and commented on the excellence of his country`s weaponry.

Interestingly, Tim Hames`s article in the Daily Mail believes that we are "profoundly mistaken" in believing Hizballah are victorious just because "it has not been completely destroyed after four weeks of fighting". He notes that "much of Hizballah`s infrastructure has been destroyed, it`s missiles have been wasted"(on 30 Israeli civilians?) and that if this is what Israel calls a defeat, it should be asking for many more of them.

It seems that the general opinion is Israel has failed because of a badly organized miltary operation. People have forgotten that Israel did not just fail once they could not destroy Hizballah but at the very moment they set out to make Hassan Nasrallah a martyr. They failed to understand that the operation itself was a tragic mistake, not how it was conducted

Israel has been terrorised by suicide bombers for years, and yet it does not pick up on their rationale. Israel strongly believes it is up against a bloodthirsty Arab, radicalised by his own heartlessness and ready to go against his innate instincts of survival for anti semitic causes. It does not think that it is haunted by the underdog of their society: Palestinians who for generations have been homeless, nationless, hopeless.

Israel`s enemy is a young palestinian who has nothing to live for but his religious reward and continuously provoked anger. And they continue to push him into suicide. Israel does not seem to know a form of defence other than violent aggression and destruction. By bombing Lebanon, they have left many Lebanese with as little as their "freedom fighting" refugee neighbours.

What will happen to the children of the South? As many lost their home and families, their daydreams turned into nightmares and infantile idealisms were precociously distanced from reality. What chance to they have?

Nasrallah is the newly appointed father figure for these bombarded Lebanese civilians, and he has Israeli savage brutality to thank for it.

2006-08-06T10:50:00.001-07:00

At the Spyro Ark meeting I wrote about in a previous blog, an old soldier of the IDF who had served in Lebanon until 2000 stated that he and other officers "really did not want to be there" but that Israel had to defend itself.

What does an Israeli soldier think of the war he is being sent to now?

"Visite guidée parmi les réservistes de Tsahal prets à rejoindre le front nord."
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-734511,36-801006@51-759824,0.html
This article in Saturdays LeMonde interviews Israeli soldiers in training to be sent to the front. It is very interesting honest and focuses on the human reality of these soldiers.
For those who do not speak French, I've translated the soldiers responses to the reporter.
Feel free to correct my translations.

Sagiv Avidal, a 27 year old lawyer told the reporter

"J'ai appris que j'étais mobilisé par un coup de téléphone à 2 heures du matin. C'était un disque automatique."
" I learnt that i'd been mobilised from a phone call at 2am, it was an automated call"

"pas du tout excité de partir à la guerre. Mais s'il faut le faire pour mon pays, ajoute-t-il sans emphase, alors je le fais"
"not at all looking forward to going to war. But if it must be done for my country, he adds with no enthusiasm, then i do it"

Natie Shelev, 40

Cette mobilisation me fait tout sauf plaisir. Mais c'est notre vie, ici en Israël. Des extrémistes refusent de nous laisser vivre en paix. Nous sommes obligés de nous défendre. " L'action de l'armée israélienne dans les territoires palestiniens est-elle du même ordre ? Natie baisse les yeux, embarrassé, puis dit : "Non, mais ne me demandez pas pourquoi. C'est une question politique."
"This mobilisation brings me no pleasure. But that's what life is like in Israel. Extremists refuse to let us live in peace. We have to defend ourselves" Can this be said for the Israeli action in palestinian territories? Natie looks down, embarrassed, then says: " non, but do not ask me why. It is a political question"

Adi Wolk, 33 years old:

"Je ne suis pas vraiment sûr que cette guerre nous soit imposée. C'est plus compliqué que cela. En fait je change d'avis constamment."
"I am not really sure that this war was imposed on us. It is more complicated that this. In fact i change my mind constantly."

Another soldier said that he was "very happy" to go to war since he came from the moshav in Galilee, which was targeted by Katyushas. although he was troubled "by the deaths of Lebanese civilians", he also had his people in mind.

It is important to note that the soldiers had been previously briefed by an IDF official before they went to the interview. Adi Wolk had not been selected was therefore interrupted. Irit, the official in charge of the press briefings makes her presence clear throughout the interviews. As the journalists begin to leave, Irit congratulates the soldiers:

"Les médias étrangers parlent constamment des souffrances des enfants libanais. Il était important que vous leur montriez notre côté humain."

" Foreign media constantly talks about the suffering of Lebanese children. It was important for you to show our human side"

Apart from the disproportionate comparison of dying, innocent children with mature, reasoning adults , Irit's comment has a very necessary stress that no matter which side we take, we are all human after all.

Late Night Fun with IDF hotline

2006-08-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

My mum's friend in Beit Meri, Lebanon recently complained:

At 5 am a few nights ago, having been completely nervewracked by continuous Israeli bombings, frustrating war declarations by Nasrallah and the Israeli state, isolation from the international community which has been repeatedly postponing a ceasefire and a sense of injustice she cannot act upon, recieved a phone call, from an unidentified, monotonous recording.

" This is the state of Israel, said the voice, please, do not support Hezbollah, we will not kill you if you do not support Hezbollah" and they hung up, before she had any time to answer.

Of phone calls like this, there are many sent by Israel at odd ends of the night. The older generation may be used to aggressive phone calls from the civil war when opposing guerrilla militias attacked each other by sending bored recordings of accumulated swearwords.

Could it be that Israel's "War on Terror" as a democratic state defending it's people is really limited to the absurd harrassment of a tyrranical authority?

Existentialist Fear and Right Wing Pretence

2006-08-01T18:43:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing sadder than war it is people’s response to it. I went to a meeting this Sunday held at Spiro Ark Centre, a Jewish Cultural institute in Marylebone where two Chatham House associates, Nadim Shehadi and Yossi Mekelberg were asked to give a talk, as Middle East experts, on the situation in Lebanon. It was open for both Jews and Arabs of the London community with the goal to aid an understanding of both sides of the conflict

The meeting opened with the reading of a poem by Yvonne Green who had a dire and expressionless face, unlike the quirky ethnic particularities you find in the Levantine and Judaic physiognomy.

Asked about the Qana massacre, Nadim Shehadi set the tone of his discussion by saying he did not want to “exploit the deaths of people in order to score political points” and asserted that he viewed the military operation as part of an Israeli doctrine that had proved to be wrong with or without the incident at Qana. This opening line became his most powerful argument: a humanitarian reminder that before politics comes the importance of life.

Sadly, people at the meeting did not grasp his plea for humanity. A woman’s voice at the back, clear, energetic and somewhat desperate was first to speak out. She condemned the Arabs and the rest of the world for being Israel’s enemies, and justified the use of Israeli military action as self defense. Another woman got up and referred to Arabs as “animals”, and a third responded that Arabs will “only understand if [they] crush them”. These petrified Israeli women had found comfort in hatred, what chances do they have?

A few people stood up and asked for peace, for a future that was not so embittered by almost a century of fighting. An Armenian Lebanese woman with a tremendous aura of compassion, gave a heartfelt (slightly over dramatized but heartfelt nonetheless) plea for humanity and peace. She talked about the Armenian genocide, to which the jewish community related. Armenians in Lebanon, she said, were living in peace qne prosperity with the other cultures around them.

An old woman facing me, a holocaust survivor with a number still tattooed on her left arm, sat quietly the whole meeting, intently taking down notes which seemed meticulous and well chosen, from the slow and engraving movement of her hand as she wrote in her small notebook, the simple kind that grandmothers buy at newsagent counters and use for shopping lists and memos. It was touching to see this old woman with a dehumanising past still so open and hungry for knowledge.

Later, a man which who shall be known as the “Grand Ayatollah Ben” stood up, erect like an army officer called for war. He claimed to be a Muslim Jew, and an the best expert on the Qoran. The laughter subsided and he continued, pointing accusingly at the arabs sitting at the front, pointing preachingly to his fellow Jews. “these arabs, they do not belong, in Lebanon, they do no belong, in Jordan, they do not belong, in Egypt…AND EVEN IN PERSIA THEY DO NOT BELONG!…WHY?, his tone lowered suddenly, Because the JEWS were there first 2500 years ago!”

Yossi Mekelberg urged his audience to open their eyes to other crisis’ in the world, and this had a very calming effect on the room. He referred to genocides in Rwanda, and the 5 year conflict in Congo. The audience perhaps slowly realised that the Middle East crisis was not a personal battle, but a clash of civilizations repeating itself as part of man's history. They were not alone in their suffering.

When I went to Syria two years ago we visited small isolated villages around Aleppo. The colourfully dressed and joyfully plump Kurdish women greeted us with big smiles which exposed a discolored, uneven ray of teeth and the extent of their poverty. I was told that these people, the Yazidi’s, gave more importance to the threat of Satan’s evil than to the unconditional love and goodness of God. As a result of their fears they make tremendous offerings to the Devil and become devil worshippers .

The people at the meeting were perhaps a more extreme version of the Yazidis. They were scared and felt oppressed by other cultures and were convinced that Israeli’s everywhere were doomed for another Holocaust. Yet instead of attracting sympathy, they have brought more hatred and more contempt onto themselves.

Although this meeting was a primary display of radical Zionism, I also want to stress that the jihadists we see in London and everywhere else in the world are no better. I was offended by their presence at the Stop the War Coalition, and there was that same, draining feel of deep self-torture and twisted anger.

The audience at that night seemed blinded by a moral bacteria that falls somewhere in between an inflated self image and infantile helplessness.“ I have never seen the end of the world so clear” said my father's Israeli friend after the meeting. Enviromentalists urge us to stop our contribution to global warming. Humanists should stand up against the toxicity of hatred and racism on the rise, which pollutes our atmosphere, our minds and our joie de vivre.

Orange Juice, Toast and an Air Raid in Qana

2006-07-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

The Qana Massacre was a horrible incident to awaken to yesterday morning. The Israeli Air force bombed and killed 56 Lebanese civilians, 32 children, who were sleeping in a building where a some Hezballah officers were thought to be hiding. The whole world, i hope, was saddened by their deaths, this unjust loss of potential life, potential peace turned into potential war for it’s survivors.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called them innocent martyrs. Will these 56 people be remembered as martyrs of the "war on terror" or the "war for liberation"? Neither, like instants in Iraq, Vietnam, World War II and many other wars, the massacre of Qana will stand as a reminder of how innocents are brutally wasted on the wrong side of people’s ideologies.

This is the headline for an article in the Times: Qana carnage hastens hopes of a ceasefire. Must we always wait to be completely stupefied by crimes against humanity before we can confidently affirm that war goes against every aspect of man’s moral and psychological well-being? I don’t think anyone will deny that when you take on death and destruction, such atrocities are inevitable. Yet no matter how many times these carnages repeat themselves, we watch them on TV with wide open, disbelieving eyes and for the next few days feel exasperated from shellshock.

Who's the bigger terrorist: Hezballah or IDF

2006-07-30T03:29:00.000-07:00

A friend told me about a programme on TV recently which explored what the words “war on terror” implied. It argued that people were misusing the word “terrorism”, refering to it as an ideology rather than a method.

Here are 3 definitions of “terror” taken from wordreference.com

1 panic, terror
an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety

Anyone who’s been in a warzone or had relatives in a warzone will have experienced this kind of “terror”.

2 terror, brat, little terror, holy terror
a very troublesome child

a very troublesome child, when told to not to eat the ice cream, will finish the whole tub and replace it with milk in the fridge. He cries later when all that bad food has given him a tummy ache.

3 terror, scourge, threat
a person who inspires fear or dread; "he was the terror of the neighborhood"

And a definition of “terrorism”:

1 terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act
the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimindation or coercion or instilling fear

So who are the terrorists in Lebanon at the moment? IDF, Hezballah, or the Lebanese government?

My letter to the "Stop the War Coalition"

2006-07-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

Dear organizers,

Thank you very much for your invitation to the “peace” march for Lebanon on the 22^nd July. Having just arrived to London from my evacuation to Cyprus, I was ready to unleash the anger of a whole population, which I’d brought back with me from Lebanon.

I went to your protest, hoping to defend my country which for the past week had been in chaos from Israel's irrational attack and America and the UN's indifference to the increasing death toll.

I must admit I was a little surprised to see our friends from the Socialist Worker Group distributing papers and recruiting people within the crowd. The radicalist Arabs who spoke out for Hizballah’s irrational magnificence and selfish heroism also managed to gain a few more people on their list of human sacrifices. I also thought your posters and slogans with unprofound cliches, which you so sell at £8 -£11, were a bit misplaced for such a cause.

I found the crowd you attracted very interesting. I have never seen so many hippies so focused on the death and annihilation of Israel. A South African woman, whom I had only just met, accused me of being “obviously a Christian Arab” when I explained to her that I had not come to the protest in support of Hezbollah. From a passionate hatred for democracy, Christianity and other values her culture stands for, she had found her final cause in the prejudices of Middle Eastern contempt for the western world. Angry at the world and ideologically bankrupt, she had only come to the demonstration to project her frustration.

Her Arab husband was not so entertaining due to his incapacity to string a fact together and his seeming purposelesness at such a protest. He condemned the “killing of innocents” in the 7/7 attacks, but argued for the release of more Lebanese and Palestinian terrorists illegaly detained in Israel. We left, having refused to believe that Israel’s plans were to take over the entire Middle Eastern region and he apologized for his knowledge: “I hope one day you will look more into this”.

This is such exploitation of other people’s miseries. Rebels without causes or knowledge and fundamentalist racists had all gathered in a demonstration of their anger supposedly in the name of Lebanon. Over the years, Stop the War Coalition has recycled the Middle Eastern Cause and used it for money-making, propaganda and letting off steam. The worst damage of all is that through your ignorance and through your crowd stirring speeches , you are encouraging the hatred between Arabs and Israeli's to grow. Many Israeli's and Arabs get along and make efforts to take on a liberal perspective of the Middle East conflict, why must you focus on the people who just want to create a bigger division?

Such a shame that whilst people are suffering, others elsewhere in the world can abuse of their pains.

Up in smoke: Lebanon Crisis

2006-07-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)

To my Jewish friends: I am writing to you as Israel is destroying my country. In an attempt to destroy Hezbollah it has already killed over 400 civilians and left over 1200 with serious injuries.

They are responsible for rendering thousands homeless, destroying cities in the South of Lebanon and West Beirut and for isolating the country by destroying its infrastructure. It is doing so in your name. Will you stand for it?
I just got back from Lebanon yesterday morning after an evacuation that took 48 hours of waiting and very little sleep. My experience in Lebanon has changed me a lot.

I write this because I cannot remain silent when my country is being unfairly and violently persecuted. To watch your country being destroyed is possibly one of the most painful experiences.

Although we were safe from the bombs, the experience, the noise, the chaos was very nerve wracking. The weather had been particularly bad that week, with a suffocating mist that clung to the mountains. When it coincides with war, all of fog’s ghostly values are painfully heightened.

Planes soared past like evil spirits with their loud and incessant groans, a constant reminder of this hostile presence hovering over us with a cruel eye. Then bomb sounds bounced back with the echo, fresh and intact, shattering doors and windows as though the shelling had been happening just next door. All is followed by a vacuous silence. Only the crickets keep to their high pitched rattle and are closest to satisfying the anxious sounds of agony like sharp droning we are too stunned to release but let ring in our heads.

I remember one evening distinctly. From the balconies of my flat in Beit Meri, I have a clear view of Beirut. At day, you see the buildings and the roads, at night little lights show the city’s ongoing dynamic. Night and day it stands out as the view of a city par excellence.

On this evening, at the furthest point of the city, on the right, where the coast turns at a sharp angle and singles out a few buildings, the sunset yellowed an otherwise foggy Beirut and over Lebanon hung a cloudy red sky. To the left is the Dahiyeh where mushrooms of black smoke would rise up like tiny nuclear explosions and viciously curl into fiendish dances as they evaporated.

I hear another bomb, a particularly loud one, which sounds and feels so close that a frightened child standing outside the church starts to cry. People gradually leave the church, sit on the edge of the road, their legs dangling into the steep forest below, watching their city being destroyed. They point and they discuss. What are they talking about?

People do their best to forget the war: go to the pool, clubbing, drink, gather round with friends. They try to talk about other things and when they are overcome by anger silence invades the conversation with an underlying staleness brought by shock and frustrated helplessness.At night the few bars in Brummana are packed with locals and refugees who want to get on with their lives. Behind the smoke, the drinks and the clashing voices of a violent relief hides the sly injustice that laughs at man’s suffering escapism.

Israel has destroyed the country’s infrastructure. Those fortunate enough to have foreign passports, were evacuated safely by foreign states. Others have escaped through Syria, despite the destruction of the roads leading to it. But the rest are not so lucky. I saw a taxi carrying two families, a total of eight adults and small children in a worn out mercedes that could take a maximum of five. They were on their way to Zahleh, to seek refuge, and they didn't know the way. They probably didn't even know that the roads leading to Syria from Zahleh had been destroyed. Israel has made homeless the poorest of Lebanon's people. People who have never had the money to go out further than Beirut and who could not get sufficient information as to where the danger zones really were have been forced to abandon everything and make huge financial sacrifices in less than a day.

We were all waiting for foreign intervention. They obviously saw the damage being done to Lebanon. America and Britain’s response has left a feeling of isolation and despair in the Lebanese people. They had no means of escape and the outside world has left them to die.

Now for most, Hezbollah have become heroes: a Lebanese resistance against Israel’s aggression and America’s support of it. Every time Israel drops a bomb into Lebanon, it glorifies Hezbollah’s purpose.

A Middle East expert explained how Israel hoped that by hitting Lebanon, civilians would rise against Hezbollah. “This is like saying that during the London Blitz, when Hitler was destroying London people would have turned again Churchill and supported Chamberlain who wanted to appease Hitler” he said.

You cannot blame the Lebanese for supporting Hezbollah after such bombings, what other choice do they have? Israel is falling into an obvious trap. As America’s protegé with a carte blanche to - as I have read in hate mail- “blow [Lebanon’s] phoenician ass back to the stone age” (as though this is all one big video game), it is increasing contempt towards Israel and the worldwide Jewish community. Has racial history not taught us that by acting through hate we bring about hate?

I was appalled when I heard Israeli representatives lie with such a straight face. Israeli correspondant Jerry Lewis on BBC Hampshire radio yesterday morning said that although the bombings in Lebanon seemed awful on TV, they were really not as bad.

A few days ago, on BBC World, Daniel Shek, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry official, insisted that IDF was "NOT killing civilians". When asked how he thought the Lebanese perceived the bombings he answered "It is not important how the Lebanese perceive it, I am talking about how things are perceived in reality". Obviously for Mr. Shek, reality may seem quite comfortable in his home.

I wonder how a culture so old and tainted by a 2000 year history of persecution and a Holocaust can be so oblivious to the suffering of other people? Can the killing of innocent civilians, the destruction of a country, which just like Israel wants a voice in this world, really be necessary for the sake of an independent state for all Jews to be re-united?