Author Archives: eliefares

The Civil Wars (Album Review) – The Civil Wars

The Civil WarsIt’s a civil war on the new self-titled The Civil Wars album. If only all civil wars were similar.

The folk duo, which announced they were going on hiatus for “internal discord and irreconcilable differences of ambition” back in October, barely managed to finish their sophomore album which might be their last. This album was brewed in the midst of their turmoil. Can such tension translate into excellent music, the likes of which is present in their first album Barton Hollow, in a band that relies heavily on harmonies to stand out?

The truth is that The Civil Wars is even better than Barton Hollow.

From the cover of billowing smoke to Joy Williams spewing “I wish I’d never ever seen your face” on the album’s opening song “The One That Got Away,” a song that departs from their relatively acoustic style, you know you’re in for one musical ride. On Same Old Same Old, the duo examines a struggling relationship whose components don’t want to let go. “Do I love you? I still do. And I’m going to till I’m gone. But if you think that I can stay in this same old same old, well, I don’t,” they sing together on one of the album’s highlight songs.

My favorite song on the album, Dust to Dust, about the loneliness that we all experience doesn’t have the dramatic music you’d expect such a topic to require. It is subdued, relying more on what these two vocalists can do together to convey the story they want to tell. The harmonies the duo create on this track may sound secondary but it’s beyond essential for the mood it creates for the song.  “It’s not your eyes, it’s not what you say. It’s not your laughter that gave you away. You’re just lonely, you’ve been lonely too long. All your acting, your thin disguise, all your perfectly delivered lines. They don’t fool me, you’ve been lonely too long. Let me in the walls you’ve built around. We can light a match and burn them down. Let me hold your hands and dance round and round the flames in front of us, dust to dust.”

Eavesdrop, the album’s possibly most commercial song, is about dealing with pain, even if through a simple hug. “I can’t pull you closer than this. It’s just you and the moon on my skin. Don’t say that it’s over… let’s let the stars watch, let them stare. Let the winds eavesdrop, I don’t care. For all that we’ve got, don’t let go. Just hold me.”

The album has two covers. One of Etta James’ Tell Mama and the other of Smashing Pumpkins’ Disarm. The Civil Wars completely unravels both songs and create their own version out of them. They make the lyrics and the story more prominent in both by toning down the music and making the vocals stand out more. D’Arline is a song that sounds gritty simply because it was recorded on an iPhone and included on the album as is. You can hear the background noise of a suburb on it as The Civil Wars flawlessly deliver the song.

Sacred Heart, a French song they wrote in Paris, is as surprising as it is interesting. With near-impeccable enunciation, the duo tell the story of a lover waiting for her significant other who may not show up while she remembers all the promises in the name of love on her way to the Sacred Heart. “Tu prends peut-être du retard. Tu as peut-être raté ton train. Tu ne peux peut-être pas me pardonner. Les ombres grandissent et les foules s’effacent. Je vais t’attendre là, viendras-tu pour moi? Je vais t’attendre là, seulement toi.”

The Civil Wars is intense. It’s also beautiful. This might be the band’s last album, a tragedy if it turns out to be true because this piece of music proves exactly how brilliantly this duo can do music. The band won’t even be performing these songs live. If you’ve ever seen their live performances, you’d know they are even better than they are recorded. Such an album creates a multitude of “if only” scenarios. With it heading to #1 status in the United States in a few days, the duo would have reached higher levels of success and fame with this work if only had they stayed on speaking terms. Add this album to your list of must-have music for 2013. It doesn’t matter if you like folk or alternative-tinged music, there’s something here which will bring forth the civil war in you.

Grade: A

Must download: The One That Got Away, Same Old Same Old, Dust to Dust. 

Breaking News: I Almost Died

Well, not quite.

I was in Tripoli when Saad Hariri’s long-awaited Ramadan speech was taking place. I couldn’t care less about what he had to say so I just sat with my friends on a porch, enjoying an afternoon August breeze.

“He’s ten minutes in and we haven’t heard bullets yet,” Ismail said jokingly. And, as if on queue, the bullets started getting fired up the air.

So as we discussed some inescapable politics through the distant shots, we heard something ricochet off the wall and land immediately next to us. We were four people. This surprisingly heavy bullet could have hit anyone:

Bullet tripoli lebanon

I’m not the kind to immediately freak out so we simply retreated inside as they cursed the morons shooting on the streets in celebration. The shooting soon ended as the speech died down.

Then I wondered: what if this actually hit one of us?

Any kind of injury because of this bullet would necessitate hospital attention.  What if we can’t afford the hospital? What if there’s no hospital around? What if the supposed injury was life-threatening? Why is my well-being contingent upon the odds of ricochets?

Till when should we be satisfied that this is simply a “what if” scenario?

The worst part of it is that we have all become so used to this, even those of us who don’t come from a city that has become far too acquainted with such incidents, that the logical thing to do was to simply change rooms and wait it out because we knew there was nothing else we could do and that no entity whose job was to prevent such things from happening would actually do its job.

However, I’m not full of negativity. I can see the silver lining in all of this: they were firing bullets not rockets.

The U.S. Visa Cancellation of Lebanese Citizens

It’s a joyful moment for many when they get that American embassy employee to smile at them and tell them their visa request has been finally approved. I wouldn’t know since I’ve never had that happen to me.

For many, it is believed the struggle to get into the United States is almost done – what can go wrong now that you’ve got the paper work? Nothing, right?

Wrong.

For 3000 Lebanese, visiting the United States has become an impossibility for reasons no one knows. The people whose visas got cancelled belong to different Lebanese sects and religions: Christian, Muslim, Sunni, Shiites. They belong to different societal strata: businessmen and regular joes.

The U.S. Embassy in Lebanon has denied such numbers  (link), asserting that it is within the authority of the American State Department to cancel visas if information came to light after their issuance that would make the person in question inadmissible in the United States. But isn’t it also the right of Lebanese citizens, whoever they are, to know what those information are?

The most prominent example of canceled visas is the Hallab family in Tripoli, which has affected all four owners of  Hallab. For those who don’t know, the Hallab family owns and runs Asr el Helo (The Palace of Sweets). Some were forbidden from going for their medical checkups while others were told, upon leaving the United States on their way to Lebanon, that this would be their last visit. Even calls for Lebanese officials who, until very recently, used to be fully acting prime ministers to help with this issue proved to be completely useless.

Furthermore, it has been brought to my attention that Hallab, the sweets shop, is currently cautious about exporting its goods to the United States. The family is currently in a legal debacle in order to try and see how the visa cancellations affect the export.

But is there even any logical why the Hallab family’s visas are canceled? I can think of none. They do not harbor nor support terrorism and Islamist movements. They do not fund radicals who might find their way to American soil.  And yet here we are.

Another businessman whose visa got cancelled is Khaled Rifai who owns the Tripoli branches of GS, Springfield, Polaris and Bossini  as well as an insurance company. Khaled Rifai and the three Hallab brothers, who are a mere fraction out of many that includes Lebanese students, were not given any reason as to why their visas got cancelled. Better yet, their cancellation got almost no media coverage in Lebanon to begin with. I guess the media blackout over Tripoli extends to such incidents as well.

Who do we blame for this? I guess we can blame the politicians who have willingly turned the country into a playing field for everyone who wishes to start a game of tug of war. We can blame our useless passport, the most expensive and least efficient in the whole world. We can blame the current situation. We can blame whoever we want, point our fist at Awkar and pretend being outraged will get us somewhere.

But the truth is there’s absolutely nothing we can do but remain under the mercy of such embassies, vying for the next visa to take the bunch who doesn’t live in their version of Lebanese lala land out of here. I guess it comes with the territory of being where we are, what we are and who we are.

There’s nothing we can do but take it.

Video of Lebanese Woman Committing Suicide

The video below is disturbing. Watch it with caution.

Video link if taken down: here.

 

The video looks real. And according to the following news item (link), the woman in question, Amina Ismail, did throw herself off the balcony of her apartment at the 8th floor of a Beiruti building. She has been buried in her hometown, Tyr.

I wonder what got into her husband’s head to start filming though. It must be completely natural to bring up a camera when your wife straddles herself off a balcony in order to jump to her death. Or could he have sniffed out signs that his wife might do such a thing and figured a video is the best way to prove his innocence in court?

Either way, this tragedy, regardless of whether the video turns out to be true or not, is further proof that we are in dire need for two very important things:

  1. De-tabooing the idea of mental health across the country,
  2. Making psychiatry more accessible for everyone.

I don’t know what the conditions that led to this woman jumping are. But her death, if the video isn’t fake, could have been prevented if the idea of seeking help hadn’t been, in this country, worse than the idea of death itself.

May she rest in peace.

Update: according to an email from a reader who allegedly knows the couple, the man was filming their newly bought apartment when the incident happened.

Lebanese Tales You Don’t Hear Everyday

She was blowing the candles off her 35th birthday’s cake. This would definitely be her year. She had a man by her side she was marrying in a few days. She had a loving family. Her wedding preps were going smoothly. And yet, there was this one thing gnawing at her head: how was she going to tell him that he wouldn’t be the first, that the skin on which all dignity lay was not really there, that there were several men before him, that she had even had one ectopic pregnancy which she obviously aborted?

She had gone to her gynecologist a month prior. She asked for advice. She wasn’t worried like other women would be at that point. She knew that medicine can do wonders in that regards those days but she didn’t want anything major. So he stitched her up.

What if I didn’t bleed? She asked. Her doctor told her then that only around 35% of women bled on first intercourse, that the myth with which she was troubling herself was unfounded. But she wouldn’t take those odds. Who knew how those Eastern men thought, she told her doctor. Would any of those men she had slept with in years past marry someone like her?

He recommended she’d get a tube of her own blood with her and hide it. So on their first night of marital bliss, she faked being in pain as her husband thought he was giving his wife a new experience. Faking it all the way to the bathroom, she spilled the blood in the tube on a white towel and returned with it to her husband, clutching her abdomen as she faked the insufferable pain all the way the bed.

She was relieved. He was happy. And she told this to her doctor giddily.

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He was rounding on his patients as he normally does every morning, making sure their night had gone smoothly. After a weekend, Monday morning rounds are more complicated because they require you to catch up with two days of work which you hadn’t attended.

So there she was, a girl his age, suffering from a complication that happens in 1% of assisted reproduction therapy cases. She sat in her bed, obviously worried. But why would she be worried, he wondered. There was nothing about her condition that was troubling if it’s under the control similar to hers.

Mom, can you leave the room for a bit? She asked just as she saw him making his way inside. Her mom obliged. She gave him the bag of medicaments she was on: hormones here, hormones there. He went through them quite fast, still wondering why someone his age, who wasn’t married, would be on a therapy designed to eventually get women pregnant.

But she didn’t want to get pregnant. She was getting her body prepped for something far less motherly – She was preparing her ovules for sale.

It was against the law, sure. The hospital she was in had no clue and would never do such a thing, certainly. But no one was allowed to know.

I’ve got myself covered, she said when he asked her how she intends to carry on with her plan. Just don’t tell my mom.

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