Visages de Beyrouth

I am being honest here: reading political essays from the 1940s can be quite boring at times. Today, I decided to reward myself with a generous serving of earthy mouloukhiyeh at The Blue Note.


Moulokhiyeh is a sort of stew of rather slimy leaves similar to spinach with chunks of chicken and beef meat, served with rice and a sweet-and-sour dressing made with raw onions and vinegar. Rashid Da'if, a Lebanese writer, mentions the Blue Note and this dish in Testofil Meryl Streep!, one of his sharpest novels ever. So I thought it would be nice to remind the maître d' that this café and its signature dish have their own place in contemporary Arabic literature. Well. Not only was the maître not aware of the story, he didn't even know who Rashid Da'if is. I decided to quit my literary pretensions and to return to Michel Chiha's Visage et présence du Liban, a collection of articles and essays on Lebanese and Mediterranean identity that was published in 1964.
I then drove to Gemmayzeh for the vernissage of Wissam Beydoun's Mouvements and Amjad Faur's An Extraordinary Violence at Espace SD, next to Charles Helou Road.



The place is extremely interesting and the bookstore a threat to my budget restraints. I couldn't resist buying Zaven Kouyoumdjian's Shot Twice. The author collected some dozen pictures of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war and then went back to the same places, taking pictures of the same people fifteen years later. This photographic book is a punch in the stomach and definitely a must-see. My friend F joined me at Espace SD and then we had some pub crawl (with a few margaritas) in Gemmayzeh.
At 9 pm, I went to Club 43 to watch Fatih Akin's movie Gegen die Wand, also known in English as Head-On.I ended my day at Basement, where resident dj Jade was performing minimal electro.


As the name properly suggests, the place is a concrete-clad basement with some decadent baroque decor à la B018. In a certain sense, it looks a lesser version of B018 with much younger crowds.