Category Archives: Blog

While strolling through the Farmer’s Market today in Beirut, I met Mira Coussa–the creator of Mira’s Fresh Italian pasta, which is made with all natural ingredients…

All of the bread products sold at today’s Farmer’s Market in Beirut were made from whole wheat…and all of the whole wheat cookies I tasted were superb…

Just got home from a lovely farmer’s market in Beirut–brought back all kinds of goodies…

A three-part documentary released this month, called “Orphans of the Sun,” investigates the Tuareg struggle for an independent homeland. By following Tuaregs returning from the battlefields of Libya to Mali and Niger, this documentary explores the recent Tuareg rebellion for an independent country in the Sahara, and explains how different Tuareg groups have responded to al-Qaeda and French military intervention.

Apart from the political and military chaos of the past few years (and previous rebellions), Tuaregs have long been known for their musical contributions to the soundscape of Mali–and now, perhaps America too…

It was very cold that week. I thought: What about the people in the Syrian camps?
I couldn’t sleep. I had to do something. Everyone has to do something.

— Barbara Abdeni Massaad

In the midst of the devastating Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon, some people are finding creative ways to help out. Barbara Massaad, a well-known chef and founder of Slow Food Beirut (who also happens to work at my favorite farmer’s market in Beirut), has started a cookbook campaign to help bring soup to Syrian refugees. She is hoping to raise enough funds from the proceeds of her new “soup” cookbook to build a temporary pop-up kitchen in Zahle to serve wholesome meals (including soup) to Syrian refugees in the Beqaa. On her Facebook page, she quotes Rumi, writing: “If you have much, give of your wealth. If you have little, give of your heart.”

This innovative approach to providing healthy meals to those in need reminds me of the visionary efforts of Gina Keatley, with whom I used to work at Nourishing Kitchen in East Harlem. Gina, who was once homeless herself, has become one of the leading advocates of providing wholesome meals and educational cooking classes to neighborhoods and individuals without ready or affordable access to fresh, healthy food. Through their culinary know-how and spirited empathy, these two women are finding new and creative ways to share their love of nutrition and food with those who need it the most…

In restless search for that river, we hurry along;
you whose heart such anxiety has not disturbed, sleep on…

— Rumi

After work one day in Sudan, a colleague invited me to take a hike to the banks of the Nile not too far from our house in the Sahara. I’d forgotten that we were close to water, since all I ever saw while we excavated was sand. Anxious to see the Nile in Sudan for the first time, I hurried along–until we reached these fields nourished by the Nile where children were planting crops. In my restless rush to the river, I hadn’t realized that the river was already revealing itself in these irrigation canals and fertile fields…

The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation…

— Rumi

“When you go to Iran, just be prepared,” my professor warned me, “because even the taxi drivers can quote long passages of Rumi and Hafiz by heart.” Preparing to go to Iran, I realized, was going to require more than just packing a suitcase–I’d have to brush up on my Persian poetry too…

While the “death of poetry” in America has been debated for years by academics and public intellectuals, the power of poetry never seems in jeopardy in places like Iran and Russia (where heated arguments over the superiority of poetry or prose can even lead to murder). In Iran, Persian speakers often use poetry as the foundation of a political or philosophical argument. Because poetry in Iran is a popular way to start a debate or frame an attack, it makes sense that opponents of the Geneva nuclear accord would turn to poetry to disseminate their dissent…

Today, The Mast (vocalist Haale & beatsmith/percussionist Matt Kilmer) released their new album “Pleasure Island”–a sultry mix of Sufi-inspired lyrics and electro-pop/post-dubstep dance rhythms (influenced by Massive Attack, Bonobo, Purity Ring, and Mount Kimbie). The video for the song “So Right” on the new album is below…

Here’s a daring AUB student doing parkour on campus in a well-executed student video (above). What’s next? Bike parkour in Beirut?

The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire…

— Rumi

Here’s a photo of the “water clock” in Fez which runs alongside Cafe Clock–the restaurant that I mentioned this week in my Huffington Post piece “Cooking Cous Cous in Fez.”

This young boy in Sudan often passed by our excavation site, while we were digging in the desert…

The “sushi burger”–one of the newest concepts in sushi–has made its way to Lebanon. The first time that I saw a sushi burger in Beirut, at an all-you-can-eat sushi showdown at my favorite Japanese restaurant, I wasn’t exactly sure how to eat it. All in one bite? Burger first? Before I could pick a strategy, almost all of the mini sushi burgers were gone. With good reason, they were definitely the hit of the party…

Futurism‘s all the rage these days in fashion, film, art, architecture, design, and opera. But the fixation on futurism is just getting started.

This February, a new multidisciplinary exhibit on futurism is opening at the Guggenheim. “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe” will be the largest Futurist retrospective ever held outside of Italy. With more attention being paid to the “Futurist Manifesto”–written by F.T. Marinetti and published in Le Figaro in 1909–it’s important to remember where the manifesto itself begins.

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

— Futurist Manifesto

The mosque lamps and Persian carpets make sense if you know where Marinetti’s life began. Marinetti was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1876, after his family was invited to Egypt in 1865 by Khedive Isma’il Pasha. In fact, in his manifesto, Marinetti compares the ecstasy of his car falling into a ditch of “nourishing slime” and “muddy waters” to his memory of nursing on the “blessed black breast” of his Sudanese wet nurse in Egypt. In addition to exploiting the image of a woman from Egypt’s southern neighbor (Sudan), Marinetti also had a preoccupation with Egypt’s western neighbor (Libya). As the author of a manifesto which celebrates violence and war (“the World’s Only Hygiene”), Marinetti was a proud proponent of the Libyan (Italo-Turkish) War of 1911-1912.

When, in my Battle of Tripoli, I compared a trench bristling with bayonets to an orchestra, a machine gun to a femme fatale, I intuitively introduced a large part of the universe into a short episode of African battle.

— Marinetti, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature

Despite futurism’s recent resurgence in the arts (at a time when charges of fascism and neo-fascism in the political arena are being thrown from all directions), no journalists or media commentators have gestured to the (post)colonial conflicts which accompanied the rise of the early 20th century futurist sensibility, or drawn any connections between recent interventions in the Middle East with the wars that the Futurists themselves endorsed. Perhaps futurism’s back in style not only because of its appealing aesthetic, but also because of its embrace of “militarism,” “patriotism,” “scorn for women,” and “the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers” in a wireless world ravaged by new technologies of violence and war…

We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

— The Futurist Manifesto