[LCM Articles] Turn the Beat Around, What makes Beirut's night life truly extraordinary is its warmth. A report from the dance floors of a still tense city.

[Walid Georges Chamoun]

Turn the Beat AroundTRAVEL / T STYLE MAGAZINE: TRAVEL |   March 20, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/travel/tmagazine/20TBEIRUT.html

Turn the Beat Around
By SCOTT SPENCER

What makes Beirut's night life truly extraordinary is its warmth. A report from the dance floors of a still tense city.



Love among the ruins at the war-themed Beirut club known as 1975.

It's party time. George Bush II has just been sworn in, and the inaugural parties are starting to swing. In the Arab world, nearly two million Muslims have arrived in Mecca and are slowly circling the holy site with the unhurried grace of a vast millstone, grinding out devotion, salvation and identity. As for me, I'm going to a party, too, or a series of parties: I'm off to check out the night life of Beirut, which one skeptical friend has said is a little bit like checking out the cybercafes of Fallujah.

Beirut continues to bear the burden of its own reputation. Just as Hiroshima still evokes visions of the mushroom cloud, six decades after its devastation, the very word ''Beirut'' has come to symbolize everything that is despairing about the current state of civilization -- religious and ethnic hatred, civil war and destruction and the politics of resentment and revenge. It wasn't always so. At the 20th century's midpoint, Beirut was not only a center of commerce and banking, but also a city where Europeans and wealthy Arabs could help themselves to the things that make life enjoyable. Then came the civil war. From 1975 to 1990, Beirut was the killing field of the Middle East, gutted by warlords, commandos, snipers and tanks, all representing a bewildering array of tribes, political parties, religious sects and foreign powers.

Soon, Beirut was a smoking, shell-pocked ruin where even armed troops walked the streets in a state of fear. Beirut was reborn in the popular imagination as the cradle of civilization's death, and that is where, for the most part, it remains.

The underlying tensions that fueled the long, tragic war have not been resolved. And indeed they will murderously erupt in the middle of February, when a huge car bomb will kill former prime minister Rafik Hariri and 13 others. To the Muslims, Lebanon is destined to be a leader in the Arab world. To the Christians, Lebanon is a multiethnic society, with a predisposition toward the West. And, to the Syrians, as one Beirut politico will tell me, Lebanon is not even a legitimate country with its own borders: ''Lebanon is a mountain in Syria.''

As my flight nears Beirut in late January, my hope is that Lebanon's troubles will be contained to the countryside, and that Beirut, where one-third of the Lebanese live and work, is going to be hospitable. I have traveled much more than I normally do these last 12 months, searching out locations with a novelist's necessary doggedness, as I work on a book with international settings. Although several of my recent trips have been to cities I would never have visited without the motive of research, this trip strikes me as the most far-fetched of the lot. On this day, Beirut is at peace; I just don't know how long that peace is going to last.

By the time we make our approach to the city, it is about 5:30 in the afternoon. The sky, the sea and all that is unlighted onshore are the same somber hazy blue. I board a hotel minivan, and as it makes its way into the war-scarred city, with its many charred and empty buildings, I already find myself taking a bit of comfort in signs of globalization: a KFC, Radio Shack, G.E. Like them or hate them, they're outposts of home.

Fifteen minutes from the airport, we are on West Beirut's main shopping strip, Hamra Street. The traffic has slowed to a crawl, which is how the Hariri assassins planned their attack, choosing a place where the traffic was slowed. The fact is, I know no one in Beirut. All I have to ease my entry are a few contacts, all of them vague third-generation contacts, really, acquaintances of acquaintances. I start thinking about the State Department advisory I read yesterday, warning American citizens who travel to Lebanon to ''exercise heightened caution.'' It continued, ''Hizballah has not been disarmed and it maintains a strong presence.'' The advisory recommended that those who must go to Lebanon at least check in with the American Embassy, and as pointless as that seemed in New York, it now strikes me as something I might very well do, once I settle in, though it does cross my mind that if Beirut's truce were to be broken, the embassy might be the target. Who will forget the truck bomb that ravaged the embassy in 1983 and killed 63, or the second bomb that took another 11 lives in 1984?


A traditional folk singer at Music Hall.

Two hours later, I am picked up at my hotel to begin the most socially strenuous weekend I have spent in 20 years. One of my Beirut contacts, a phone number that has come to life in the form of a beautiful woman in her late 40's, arrives with her 23-year-old son. Deferring to the fact that I haven't slept since leaving New York, they take me to what is by local standards an early dinner; if Beirut had early-bird specials, the cutoff would be about 10 p.m. Lingering over coffee after a brilliant dinner at L'Eau du Vie, the moment for which I have half-prepared myself suddenly arrives: I am questioned as to my background.

Of course, in a country that fought a civil war whose sides divided into ever more narrow ethnic and religious groups, there is an understandable preoccupation with genealogy. There is no illusion that ''we're all just Lebanese'' here. And yet I am quite sure that what I'm being asked for is not what country my grandparents came from but what religion I practice. The Lebanese have strongly differing views about Syria, Saudi Arabia and the United States, but one thing they all agree on is Israel. Even now, travelers are not granted a Lebanese visa if they have ''Israel'' stamped on their passports.

My interlocutors are themselves Christian, so just saying, ''Oh, I'm Christian,'' may not be enough. The night before arriving, I was told by a friend, ''Don't tell people you're a Jew,'' and he proceeded to go through a deliberately vague rundown of what my assumed identity should be. I don't really feel it would be a matter of life and death to let my hosts know that I'm a Jew, but the fact is that I am depending on them to show me around town, and I don't want to foul things up for myself. And so I find myself repeating almost verbatim the words my friend floated past me: I'm English, Welsh and Austrian, my father is a Catholic, my mother was a Protestant, but we weren't religious.

In some ways, travel always holds within it a degree of impersonation. Setting out for distant lands, the traveler not only leaves behind his home -- with its utility bills and nosy neighbors -- but he can also leave behind his dreary, shopworn self. He can become the melancholy gentleman in Room 901, the art appreciator, the bungee jumper, the bon vivant, the lover of street dogs, the sort of person who visits ancient burial sites or red-light districts, the inveterate walker. And so, uneasily, I settle into my traveling persona of the Generic Gentile and set off with my host's son for a look at Beirut's nightclubs.

But first, we must wait for his car, because by now Thursday night in Beirut has officially begun, and the hotel's driveway is swarming with Jaguars, Hummers, Jeeps and Rolls-Royces. From the Phoenicia Hotel -- damaged in the February bombing -- it's a quick and invigorating drive over to Rue Monot, the locus of the town's nocturnal life. Eight years ago, this half-mile of downtown real estate was dead at night, but now nearly a dozen clubs have sprung up to generate a brisk business in valet parking: there are many, many more valet parkers around than cops. The built-in irony of Rue Monot is that it offers a close-up view of Beirut's infamous Green Line, the urban swatch that during the long civil war ran between East (Christian) and West (Muslim) Beirut, and where snipers and land mines often made a short walk fatal.


And nontraditional dancing at Music Hall.

We go to a bar called 1975, named after the year all hell broke loose. Inside, mortar shells stand on the bar between bottles of Absolut Citron, and the waiters wear combat helmets. Fake sandbags are piled up in front of the windows, and upstairs there are more sandbags, which function as cushions for people lounging around, clapping to and singing along with a young, loud singer. The songs come from a time that predates both performer and audience -- just as the iconography of 1975 predates them all -- but the full-throated vigor of the performance and the audience's participation is palpable and touching. One of the young waiters is dancing, drumming his fingers against his helmet.

I feel a surge of jet-lagged pleasure that is practically giddy. With its clear view of the old Green Line, its life-size action figure climbing the netting hanging on a front wall, its dying-hand sculpture protruding from a wall near the back and a collection of old grenade launchers tricked up with Day-Glo hoses and turned into hookahs, 1975 would be easy to describe as an ostentatious exercise in absurdity. The ironies are right there on the surface, explicit and unmistakable. After all, you'd only have to walk 10 yards to see the real thing: marks left by actual bullets and mortar shells.

In a sense, this club is as much an impostor as I am, maybe more. Yet for all its ersatz machismo, its expropriation of catastrophe as cultural reference point, its sampling of horror, there is something else going on here that eclipses the rather more ethereal experience of postmodernity, something that makes the night life both eerie and compelling. I try to find a word for it, and then, finally, I do: joy.

Nearby, at the club Pacifico, the place is designed to make you feel like you've wandered into the hippest bar in Belize, if bars in Belize played (and they might) the deepest soul music mix I've ever heard: not merely Al Green and Marvin Gaye, but also Otis Clay, Junior Parker and Betty Wright. The people here range from 20 to 40 and are voraciously conversational, and the kitchen has a convincing Latin flare, manned by locals and uprooted Cubans. The mojitos are strong. Very, very strong. So strong that I am inwardly staggering around the idea that I owe it to my guide to clean up this little bit of hocus-pocus about my English-Welsh background. Yet how, above the din of Beirut's midnight music and within the dissonance of speaking in my new friend's third language, do I make it clear that when I say, ''Jew,'' I don't mean Ariel Sharon or the West Bank settlers or anyone who has ever flown missions over his city, any more than when I say, ''American,'' I don't mean Donald Rumsfeld?

Alas, there is nothing so fleeting as the perfect moment at which to come clean, because suddenly we are off to another club, where we are joined by some friends, beautiful young women and their mopey, decidedly less striking dates. (This is perhaps a universal story: the only place in Beirut where I find men who can match the fitness and sheer physical beauty of the women is at a small, rough-hewn, pulsatingly loud club called U.V., where it happens to be Gay Night and where the male clientele, dressed for the most part in white T-shirts and enviable bluejeans, are lean, muscular and on full erotic alert.)

Everyone is intrigued that I would come this great distance to see where they spend their boogie nights, and I am taken to club after club.

What do you think of this place? they all ask me, time and again. How do you like Beirut? Tell the truth, were you afraid to come here? But it's good, isn't it? You're having a nice time? They are like a junior chamber of commerce, concerned to the very edge of anxiety that I am getting a positive impression of their country, their city, their lives.

I am taken to BO18, named after the suburban street where the owners holed up during the worst of the war years, and where the vibe is as macabre as 1975, though here the aesthetics of the bunker have been supplanted by the ''look''of the mausoleum. Built on the spot where once stood a Palestinian refugee camp, BO18 gathers late-night revelers in a concrete fake bunker, where the walls are bare, the lighting is somber, the seats open like some creepy hybrid of an attache case and a coffin, and each table bears the a melancholy photograph of a deceased jazz musician. Though BO18, designed by Bernard Khoury, invites its patrons to revel in the spook-show accouterments of death, it also relieves the chic gloom with its hydraulic dome of a roof: at certain points the bartender pulls a lever and the club goes topless, revealing the infinite sky above. Like joy riders in an old ragtop, the dancers raise their arms to the open air.

Get back to my hotel an hour before dawn, and as I swallow an Ambien -- I have passed the point where sleep could naturally occur -- I suddenly remember that at dinner, eight hours ago, I accepted an invitation to be picked up at 9:30 a.m. for a tour of Beirut's downtown by a representative of Solidere. Founded and owned in part by the late former prime minister Hariri, Solidere is a privately held corporation that's been granted the power to confiscate huge parcels of war-torn Beirut, paying the former owners in stock. A whirlwind of privatization, doing what in other circumstances would be done by government, Solidere -- which to some represents the best hope Beirut has of once again becoming a world city -- is reclaiming seafront that has until now been filled with garbage; building homes, office buildings, churches, mosques, schools and parks. It is preserving some of Beirut's astonishing Roman and Phoenician archaeological sites, rebuilding the souks and restoring an ancient and picturesque quality to the generally Westernized shopping center of the city; it even has its own security force.

It's a drizzly, cool day; my inner eye is reduced to a bloodshot squint, but it strikes me that there is a degree of imposture in this extensive renovation. If the conceit of some of the clubs is that they are still living in wartime, the conceit of the Solidere projects is that nothing has happened. Spotless and serene buildings are rising above the rubble, but there is something embalmed about them. They are imitations of Beirut, a re-creation of the city as it was in its heyday, a combination of approximation and homage. It's like going to someone's house, and it is completely filled with pictures of them as they looked when they were young -- only the pictures aren't really of them but of models who remind them of what they used to look like. Here is a hotel, an office complex, a cul-de-sac of upscale urban residences, complete with vest-pocket parks, sudden bits of greenery, but no people in sight. It's all been put up like the baseball diamond in ''Field of Dreams'': if you build it, they will come. I am even taken past a gutted synagogue and told there are plans to rehab it. ''The Jews will come back after that,'' I'm told. Not very likely, I want to tell my guide, but I am plunged into a bit of nervous introspection. Is he offering this patent absurdity about the Jews' returning to Beirut because everyone here knows I'm Jewish and my claim to be otherwise is making the rounds as a joke?

That night, I hit some more clubs, this time in the company of a 23-year-old graphic artist whom I e-mailed from home, saying that a friend of a friend of her cousin had told me she knew a lot about the club scene. Despite this gauzy connection, she is on the case. She has come with a friend who works in public relations for an advertising firm. I can't swear to this, but I think one of them is on the Red Bull account. Red Bull, which comes in a slender silver-and-blue can and purports to be a perfect blend of caffeine and energy-boosting vitamins, is hugely popular in Beirut. In the clubs, it's regularly consumed with vodka. (It's like Robitussin mixed with No Doz, and really quite terrible.)

My escorts trundle me from hot spot to hot spot. Element and Crystal, at the pinnacle of the Monot Street scene, are packed, with plenty of hopefuls waiting outside, but we are whisked right in. Mojitos are, for the time being, out of the question, but there is no way for me to be in a club with Donna Summer blasting from the sound system and people dancing on tabletops without having something to clutch, so my chemical companion for the night will be Jack Daniels. At Element, huge and comfortable, with a good enough exhaust system to keep the air breathable despite the fact that at least half the people are chain-smoking, everyone seems to know everyone. No greeting is casual. There are shouts of delight, hugs, many kisses.

People are multitasking, as if they know that the fun could stop at any moment, and they want to pack in as much as possible. They are talking, hugging, drinking, smoking, tabletop dancing and talking or text-messaging on their cellphones. They look as if they are waving neon glow sticks as they move to old American disco hits. It's as if all the fun that we had in the West while the Lebanese tore each other to shreds is now being had, 25 years later. That pop world of the 70's and 80's went into a state of suspended animation in Beirut, and now it's come back to life. They are dancing to their parents' music, making the moves their parents were unable to.

Someone has told the D.J. that a writer from New York is in the house, and he is bellowing into his mike: ''Hello, New York!'' And I am being asked the familiar questions: How do you like it here? Is it different from what you thought?

I think it's great, I say.

''But it can be so stifling here,'' one woman tells me. She must stand very close to me to be heard. ''Everyone knows everyone.'' I think that would be nice, I bellow. ''No, no, it's impossible to have a one-night stand.'' I nod understandingly. She tilts her head, shrugs her bare shoulders. ''How old are you?'' she asks. In a surge of hallucinatory sexual panic, I add eight years to my age.

All along I have been reminding myself that my impersonation of a non-Jew is particularly forgivable here, since there is a light dusting of make-believe over everything I have been thus far shown. As the weekend wears on (and eventually I am singing along with those old Bee Gees songs, and hopping about and bobbing my head and doing something vaguely Levantine with my shoulders, passing around cigarettes, making incomprehensible toasts with 8 or 10 of my newly minted friends), I cannot escape the feeling that there is something quintessentially Lebanese about these clubs, even the most absurdly stylized, the most ironicized and ''postmodern'' of the lot.

At first I thought the X factor was the sheer joy of these places, but I am coming to see it is something more than that. The patrons bring their passion here, not only for night life and its universal pleasures, not only for their own lives and their erotic and career ambitions, but also -- and this is what I think makes these clubs unique -- for the lives and history of their parents, all of whom lost blood or treasure during Beirut's decade and a half of murderous anarchy. This fealty the young club kids feel toward their parents gives the clubs a kind of sentimentality, a poignancy and sense of Gemutlichkeit that works as a counterweight to the campiness and conspicuous consumption that glitters so seductively on the surface.

What observers have reported -- young women starved to perfection, some of them with surgically enhanced pouts, jeroboams of Moet & Chandon going for $3,000 -- is certainly here to be seen. But what makes Beirut's night life truly extraordinary is its nearly overpowering warmth, the constant hugs, the kisses, the spontaneous sing-alongs, the continual click-click-click of glasses raised high. Life here reminds me of New York City's eruption of fellowship and patriotism that swept the ordinarily self-possessed city after the attack on the World Trade Center. September 11 for the people of Beirut lasted 15 years, left nearly 200,000 dead and rendered what was once a beachhead of pleasure in a rather dour region practically uninhabitable. A Lebanese artist living in the United States told me: ''Other people say, 'We will always remember.' The Lebanese say, 'Let's try and forget.''' But this will to historical amnesia, the self-medicating nostalgia of kitsch, has within it a charge of palpable vitality.

To put it bluntly: I have rarely been to public places that were as much fun as the clubs of Beirut. Perhaps my favorite was Music Hall, a little off the beaten Rue Monot track, in an arts center newly built in an otherwise quiet part of downtown. Here, the manager is an extreme-looking bearded boho, wearing a jaunty hat and carrying a walking stick a la Dr. John the Night Tripper.

What distinguishes Music Hall from Beirut's other clubs is its live floor show. With tiers of tables and chairs, it looks like an old supper club from the 1940's. Salads and steaks are served, Red Bull and vodka, platters of roasted almonds; many of the parties seem to be buying their booze by the bottle. There are security guards all around, well-muscled guys in black T-shirts. One of my companions says that some of the young men who came of age during the conflict find a somehow comforting echo of their old life in the field of private security, but here, as at every other club I've gone to, there seems little for security to attend to. The Lebanese seem to be able to drink for hours without getting sloppy or mean.

The stage is up front, with a plush red curtain bordered by immense wooden roses painted gold. A demure middle-aged man wearing an embroidered skullcap is sitting at the edge, playing the oud and singing traditional Arab songs. My club-mates are awfully generous about translating the Arabic songs for me, but I must admit my memory has since failed me and my notes are pictographs of derangement. I have scraps of lyrics about loving food, missing home, about a man loving a woman so much he will cut off his mustache to prove it to her. Near the middle of the oud player's song, an electric guitar revs up in the darkness, and then a spotlight hits a musician who looks like a refugee from the heavy-metal 80's. They are soon joined by another hair god of a guitarist, a keyboardist, Cuban drummers, all urging the oud player onward, singing harmony, while the crowd is shouting, singing, clapping and dancing.

Next comes an 80-year-old woman, in a somber gray dress and a long pink scarf. She looks awfully frail, but her voice is so powerful that I am moved practically to tears. I have no idea what she's singing about; by now, I've stopped asking for spot translations, so I can just let the sounds wash over me. In between acts, the sound system fills with an Arabic clarinet solo that morphs into ''Copacabana.'' And then a Latinized Middle Eastern version of ''Can't Take My Eyes Off You.'' Then a recording of ''Hare Krishna'' eases into Tom Jones's singing ''She's a Lady.'' The ecstasy in this place seems to be rising. A young singer with a shaved head, white shirt and black sweater vest sings a song in Arabic and a song in French, and then, in English, goes into ''Staying Alive.'' A few minutes later, he is joined by the oud player, whom I have somehow mistaken for the keeper of the flame. I feel a rather stern tap on my shoulder. I turn around. One of the security guys has finally found something to do. It seems I'm on the table, and here at Music Hall that's against the rules.

Near dawn, one of my hosts drives me back to my hotel. As we careen down Hamra Street, he slows down at a fast-food shop, a Wimpy's. ''This is where the first Jewish soldier was assassinated,'' he says, pointing. ''It was in the afternoon, and he was sitting right there. Eating all alone.''

''Terrible thing,'' I say.

''Yes,'' he says. He presses the accelerator, and we move on. ''Do you want to go to any more clubs?'' he asks.

''It's 5 in the morning.''

''For here, that's not late.''

''It is for me.''

He shakes his head. ''People here can't stand to be alone.''
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