Word: beirutization
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...antithesis of the ideologues who provided the intellectual rationale for the Iraq war. He is a classic example of what the neoconservatives scornfully call an Arabist. He is fluent in Arabic and Farsi and has a real affinity for the cultures of the region. He was in the Beirut embassy when it was bombed by Hizballah in 1983, and he dug through the rubble for his lost colleagues. His proudest moment was raising the flag in post-Taliban Kabul, reopening the U.S. embassy. He was a co-author of a secret 2002 State Department assessment called "The Perfect Storm" that...
...past ten years, Beirut has been home to a small but artistically significant rock scene, where a handful of bands with names like Soap Kills, the New Government and, of course, Scrambled Eggs, have tried to put this tiny country on the musical map for something other than sexy Arab pop divas. As such, they've been part of a creative subculture of artists, architects, and designers who've tried to reconcile Eastern and Western cultural forms, as well as tradition with modernity...
...1950s and 1960s in America, and the Middle East today - sexually repressed conservative societies dominated by religion and an ideological cold war. Interviewed last week at the band's studio in Gemmayze, a formerly working-class neighborhood of garages and crumbling townhouses that's become ground zero for Beirut's young and restless, Haber places the Beirut rock scene in a wider Mideast cultural context: "At the end of the day, sex, drugs, and rock and roll means freedom...
...Rock and freedom - if not necessarily sex and drugs - got a big boost in Lebanon in 2005, during what outsiders called the Cedar Revolution, when huge crowds gathered in central Beirut to demand an end to the Syrian occupation and an end to the country's sectarian divisions. But the creative and intellectual frenzy that accompanied the Syrian withdrawal was cut short after the country's ruling sectarian political class co-opted the Cedar Revolution, and turned Lebanon into battlefield between regional superpowers. Spurred by last summer's war with Israel and by the current struggle between Iran...
...farewell to the city's golden moment that followed the Cedar Revolution. Its haunting melody is meant to conjure the orange and violet melancholy of a Mediterranean sunset. "It's an Arab thing," explains Haber. "They always go back to the ruins and cry and remember their lovers. In Beirut, it happens every decade, the city is destroyed and then rebuilt. It disappears and then appears. That...