NYC: It's a Family Affair

Dear New Yorkers: You're lookin' good.

Since I came back to NYC, it's been about 75 degrees every day with light humidity and clear skies. Everyone looks in particularly good health. The trees are riotously green, though starting to look a little on the wilted side, it being the end of the summer and all. Compared to Beirut, things feel quiet, and smooth-running.

I went down to a park on a pier near Chelsea piers today, sunbathed and people-watched. (That's the view above, thanks to Llima, who licensed her work on Creativecommons.org; I neglected to take a picture.) I put on my headphones and listened to Sly and the Family Stone sing "It's a Family Affair" as three New York kids to my left argued over whether the very real grass was fake or not.

And I have to say, with me and NYC, it is now a family affair. Thanks for having me back, city.

The Last Cedars of Lebanon

I'm already back stateside, but I wanted to write a few lines about my visit to Lebanon's cedars in early August.

When you hear Lebanon, you think cedars. The tree is featured on the Lebanese flag, the cedar forests of Lebanon are mentioned in Gilgamesh -- which is the oldest known written story -- and any two-bit Beirut tourist shop will have trinkets supposedly carved from cedars. Which is why it is astonishing to see just how few are left. (At least in the main preserve, which is the one I visited. Apparently there is a secondary one in the Chouf that is quite a bit more extensive.)

In the reserve in Mount Lebanon, the cedars are confined to a few acres on a broad, denuded plateau at about 8000 feet. The winding road that takes you to them -- with the anticipation mounting all the while -- goes straight up from the sea through fantastic villages perched on the sides of chasms whose bottoms lie in shadow. You pass the village of Khalil Gibran -- the famous poet who wrote The Prophet, a popular feature at 70s weddings -- and churches built improbably on precipices. Bare mountain summits tug on shreds of mist. You're almost there as the car climbs up through a final ravine...

Suddenly, the car passes through a 30 meter stretch of crammed stalls selling cedar-related tourist goods, and a few stately cedars begin to pop up on your right. Man, you must really be getting close to the forest!

But then you pull out into a treeless plain and there's nothing in front of you except a bare mountainside with a lonely ski lift floppily hanging to it. Those few stately cedars were the forest. And barring a somewhat spotty attempt at replanting on the road to the entrance of the preserve, all the old trees have been cut down, literally to the edge of the stone wall surrounding the preserve. Inside, there are just enough trees -- and some of them truly are sacred, thousand-year-old grandfathers that instill a lot of awe -- that you can briefly be tricked into thinking you are inside a forest.


From a vantage point high on the mountain ridge above, however -- where I drove afterward -- the magnitude of the deforestation is clear. The cedars look like someone's garden, perched on the lip of a high basin that must have once cradled a mighty forest that seemed inexhaustible to its early harvesters. The deforestation is probably a problem that dates back to ancient times, because there is very little evidence of stumps or the former forest. But based on the topography and climate, and my experience with clear-cuts in North America, it seems pretty clear that the forest was as large as I imagine (though I'd like to get a scientific confirmation).

It is a pitiful sight and one representative of Lebanon in general -- so much has been taken from this country's glory. Only a tiny glimmer remains, just like these cedars. Perhaps it is just barely enough to produce seeds, which if carefully protected could produce another forest of beautiful Lebanese cedars one day. Then again, the grove is also so small that a single catastrophe could easily wipe it out.

The sight of this grove also made me thankful for the systems of public land protection we have in the United States, something we need to continue to protect. We are extremely lucky to have as many national forests, parks, monuments and wilderness areas as we do. Let's not take it for granted.

The South Wind of Summer Caresses the Hills...

I got a call around noon on Sunday -- my last Sunday in Lebanon -- from my capoeira friends asking if I wanted to come to the Bekaa to do a workshop for a youth camp.

Duh. Of course I want to go on a road trip with a bunch of capoeiristas to northern Lebanon!

An hour later, I was cruising up the Damascus Road in the back seat of a capoeirista's jeep with a berimbau lying across the middle of the car. We came to the crest of the mountains and beheld the mighty Bekaa Valley. It was supposedly the breadbasket of the Roman empire, full of grains and fruits for nearly the length of Lebanon. Now, it still produces some of the best fruits, vegetables and wines, but it has been left out of the international trade loop, people say. It is relatively impoverished and development has bypassed it. Parts of it are home turf for Hezbollah. On the far side of this deep, broad valley rise the slightly more arid ante-Lebanon ranges. On their far side -- in their rain shadow -- lies Damascus.

The view has the same effect as the one that greets you coming over the Grapevine from Los Angeles into the Central Valley of California. You know, the view that Tom Joad sees in The Grapes of Wrath when his Okie convoy finally comes through the Mojave.

A little while later we were heading up the Bekaa listening to Salif Keita. We went through some small farming towns, where the people had a hard-bitten look to them, and there were Hezbollah and Amal flags everywhere. They run the show, and the Amal guys we asked for directions were completely helpful, despite the foreign appearance of even the Lebanese in our six-person group. (Amal is the purely political wing of Hezbollah.)

Ahead of us was a thunderstorm: a good, old-fashioned, high-desert, afternoon-sky-blackening thunderstorm. My instructor -- who lived in Albuquerque for years -- and I immediately knew it was going to be a nice rain. We had a fun time arguing with the Beirutis in the car, whose conviction that rain does not fall in Lebanon in August under any circumstances was stronger than the evidence before them. Finally the blessed drops began to fall, and we stopped the car and greeted the moisture with out-stretched arms. Such refreshment is hard to come by down in Beirut.

We turned up into the hills to the west, and began a slow ascent through mountains that looked exactly like the semi-arid country of southern Colorado. The difference was that here, the soil was limestone, and the trees were not pinions and junipers but olives and other deciduous trees. They grew in the same evenly spaced patterns of a pinion forest. A breeze was blowing and I could smell the rain. I felt right at home.

In a small dale where the road was glistening from the recent rains, we stopped by a cabin where some apple trees were growing. A man in camouflage pants with a pony tail came out of the cabin. Some children and women were in the background.

"Hey, don't I know you?" he said in clear English, with a decaying smile. He then proceeded to offer us "cocaine, ecstasy, hash -- whatever you want."

"Uh, no, we just wanted some apples," I said in Arabic.

"Oh, OK, please have some. In the summer, we have apples. But in the winter we have cocaine, ecstasy, hash, only."

It was a puzzling and light-hearted conversation. We had no interest in his more exotic goods, but we left with our delicious, fresh apples and drove above dark green fields of crops (you read correctly, Cypress Hill fans) to the camp where we were doing the workshop. The picture above was taken on the last leg of the trip, above the little valley where the hamlet is.

At the summer camp, we did drills with everyone in the late aternoon on a large stage. People liked it -- the children were most enthusiastic -- but their attention was mixed until we played in a huge roda and they got to see the acrobatics and contortion of the game. Then, with great enthusiasm, everyone taught us same dabkeh steps and played darbakeh beats on the African drums we had brought along.

We drank fresh cold water from a stream (hope that was OK, everyone was doing it) and ate a meal of fresh fish, fattoush and french fries. The full moon came up over the beautiful valley and the air was very cool (elevation about 1,500 meters). It felt just like a New Mexican village. We left despite the entreaties of several young men who begged us to stay and talked about American music with us. Most of the people in the camp were visitng from the middle of the Bekaa and thought of the locals as a bit backward. (Which was a little funny since that is how Beirutis probably view them.) The town looked like Hezbollah ran most major operations, despite the presence of a cursory Lebanese army post.

We cruised back out over the hills in the moonlgiht and told each other scary stories. I freaked everyone out with La Llorona, which seemed appropriate to the landscape.

Finally, we were back in the flats of the Bekaa, and drove by the awesome (not in the surfer sense -- rather, the original sense of the word) Roman ruins of Baalbek. To make everything unbelievably perfect, we had the windows open bumpin' Marvin Gaye as we drove past the towering columns and still-intact temples of the ancient city. So the denizens of the surrounding town got a nice taste of Sexual Healin' before we left down. Which is really very appropriate for Lebanon, whether or not you are in a Hezbollah-dominated area. People like to live, and they are used to the outside world.

Anyway, that's the story of my last Sunday. I gotta say it was a good day.

(PS The title of this blog is from a song by the band The Flatlanders. Listen for an auditory equivalent of the breezes I felt that day.)

Tripoli Tragedy

When I woke up this morning to the news of a horrific bombing in Tripoli (northern Lebanon) that killed at least 11 people, I swore I would not join the throngs of amateur (or often amateurish professional) pundits who leap to blame someone or other for this kind of strife.

But I have to point out how quickly people are doing just that. Check out this unfounded-in-fact editorial from NOW Lebanon, which blames Syria for the attack.

It’s gotten to the point where, any time any violence happens, folks just pull out their own agenda and slap it onto the vague facts of the case. There’s no sense of justice or accuracy in such games. Quite the opposite, they stoke hatred and suspicions. (Blaming Syria, in this case, implies certain sectarian and political abettors in Lebanon, which I won’t get into here.)

In a place where so many such crimes remain unsolved, I don’t blame people for speculating. But it would be nice to let people mourn and take stock of the situation before making wild accusations, especially if you have a voice that carries some authority. Using the event for a political agenda is terribly callous.

Anyway, I refuse to join the crowd of would-be experts and speculate about who is responsible. All the voices of such pundits gain steam until they are reported as near-fact on respectable websites. I just want to say that this attack -- because of its timing and the fact that it apparently did not target any particular individual -- especially requires some calmness and careful thought before allegations are made.

We’re not dealing with the latest rumor about an American presidential candidate’s extracurricular activities. We’re dealing with events that threaten to destabilize a country that is still very vulnerable to civil war. So if you’re in the media, be responsible and show some restraint before you start calling out names.

Isaac Hayes and Mahmoud Darwish

It's a cruel year when we have to mourn Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes and Mahmoud Darwish, three personages that are so big it is hard for me to think of them as dead. All these guys were revolutionaries in their own ways.

Isaac Hayes passed on Sunday, and I will not repeat the incredible details of his life here, since you can read them yourself in this very good Washington Post obit.

Hayes' 1974 song "Hung Up On My Baby" has probably my favorite guitar lick of all time (OK, with the possible exception of some Ali Farka Toure stuff, but I consider any comparisons with him unfair). It's the one sampled in the Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks On Me," and it's completely haunting and unforgettable.

The song also has the second best guitar lick ever, which 2nd II None sampled in their early 90s hit, "If You Want It," which was one of my favorite songs when I was about 12. Little did I know how much better the original was.

Mahmoud Darwish was, of course, a Palestinian poet -- the Palestinian poet, really. His death on Saturday is a big loss not just because of his artistic genius but also because he was a voice of compassion, reason and nuance in a conflict and region rife with extremes. I feel lucky I got to see him read in person in Damascus in 2005. Here's a decent LA Times obit (read it now because the link will probably only work for a while).

I'll fill for them the parting glass, and I hope you'll do the same.

Midnight Oud to Beirut

It is getting quite hot here – it’s been close to 100 for the last few days, and combined with the humidity it can be stifling.

When I arrived in Beirut, I had a fantasy of sleeping with the floor-to-ceiling glass doors open onto the balcony, with curtains billowing and the dawn pouring in above the rooftops, probably accompanied by Cesaria Evora singing “Soledad”. But I discovered on my second night here that if you leave the door open, a mosquito is liable to single-handedly ruin your life, biting your face and droning ever more lowly as its gut fills with your blood over the course of a long, sleepless night. So to sleep, I close the door of my fourth-floor room and turn on the AC. (And if I don’t use the AC, I wake up in about a half hour drenched in sweat.)

The other evening was a very warm one, and just as I was dozing off the power went out, and with it, the AC.

In the ensuing quiet, I heard a strange sound. It was a haunting melody played on strings, so faint I couldn’t tell if it was my imagination or not. I got up and opened the doors, walked out onto the balcony and peered into the night, listening.

It was there, coming from the street below, where it was very dark because the electricity was out: the tremulous, smooth notes of an oud. The music filled the street for a few minutes and then stopped, and I saw the oud float up on the hands of a group of men sitting in front of a sandwich shop. It flashed in the ambient light like a gem, luminous, perfect and lusciously full-bodied, as more hands received it to put it in a car.

In the streets of Beirut, you rarely hear anything but the screech of tires and of horns and Arabic pop music blasting from fancy cars that, in their luxury, are incongruous with the pot-holed, rules-free roads. You see half-finished construction projects and garish ads for beauty products, cigarettes, alcohol and soft drinks. Haze obscures the mountains.

So hearing this oud – that most authentic of Arabic instruments, whose sound is the cry of longing – lovingly played in the silence of the midnight was like listening to a secret whispered about the real soul of Lebanon.

Beneath all of the scar tissue, it seemed to say, beneath the plastic consumerism and the chaos and the violence, somewhere in the tired soil of this land the seeds of its essence lie quietly in wait for the chance to grow again. There are still fingers that play those ancient, gentle Lebanese chords, though you may need to have a power outage in the middle of the night just to hear a few bars.

It is a theme on which I will expand in my next post, about my visit to one of Lebanon’s last stands of cedars.

"And Life Goes On"

Every time I hear of a tragic, premature and unjust death, the Tupac Shakur song "Life Goes On" begins playing in my head. It's what I listened to when Columbine happened, and when the war in Iraq started.

It's what I'll be listening to tonight thinking about the death of the ten-year-old Palestinian boy pictured above, who was shot in the head and killed by Israeli forces on Tuesday in the village of Ni'lin.

Lots of innocents die everyday in the Middle East and around the world, but this death holds special significance for me because the child was known to my friend and colleague Willow Heske (she posted this picture on her blog), who is working in Palestine for the summer. It also resonates because this child was shot during demonstrations against the "security wall" (more appropriately called the "apartheid wall") being built through his village. The wall is a violation of human rights and international law, an attempt to ghettoize a people based on ethnicity and a harbinger of bad times. We should all be concerned about it, especially we Americans, because our tax dollars are indirectly financing it.

I don't like hyperbole for these kind of matters -- the tragedy speaks for itself. I just want to bring attention to this boy's unnecessary death.