Kerig's Korner Saturday, June 07, 2003: This morning I opened the Daily Star to see Patrick Byrne's face. It's from a talk that he gave at the American University of Beirut. We filmed the speech. The quotes are about right, but the reporter led with Patrick's aside about the effects of Lebanese corruption on business. An inflamatory lead, but an accurate story. Bill // 2:03 AM ______________________ At the edge of the city is a wide promenade of joggers and walkers and men selling bread in the shape of pocketbooks off black bicycles with high wire racks welded to the handlebars. A ferris wheel of muted pastels. Muslim women jogging in tight headscarfs. Kid in a cowboy hat selling Turkish coffee from a silver urn. The stuff is thick and scalding. Half a dozen steel stands of red and white stripped rebar with strands of scrolling barbed wire. Stand in a low row beside the curb in one section. I can see no reason for their presence. They look as if someone just forgot them there. Mothers push baby strollers. I miss my girls. I try to make an artsy shot of the barbed wire and the ferris wheel. Working without a tripod I am down on my knees when another man with a gun steps up next to me. This one is a soldier. I tell him sorry, sorry. I'm going now. He stops me. He wants to see the camera. I show it to him. Good he says. MiniDV? I tell him 24P. He holds up a finger and tells me to wait. He returns in a moment with a chair from his office. Through hand signals, I figure out that he wants me to use it as a tripod. I resume filming the ferris wheel. He nods his head, satisfied. I rewind the tape and show it to him in the small screen. He gives me a thumbs up. Bill // 1:59 AM ______________________ First Beirut Morning:Yesterday's laundry hangs lank in the salt-heavy air. A new sattellite dish aims skyward from a bullet-pocked building. Cats eat a plate of cat food set on the sidewalk. Starbucks faces the high-walled American University of Beirut. It seems natural here. As if it belongs somehow amid all these cars parked on sidewalks, angled and random and looking abondoned in the middle of a careless drunk. A well-shined Mercedes sedan is parked on a pile of broken cement. Corrugated tin shack in the shadow of a high-rise palace of black marble Japanese design. The wialing prayer call of an unseen Mosque. Two scooters whine in the still-sleeping streets. Rectangular blocks of pink-stained sky. A portly guard wants to know where my permissions are. He wears a pistol, stands in the surrendered slouch of the aging civil servant. He wants to see my permissions. The shrill volumne of his voice is rude in the still dawn. Student film, I say. Tourist. Excuse moi. His excitement grows. The chance to do something. Someone to be angry at. I haven't even had my coffee. Backpeddling down the street, he stomps after me in determined pursuit. A younger, darker, and taller guard arrives. He puts a hand on his older friend's shoulder. He pulls him back, even as he winks at me. He too is happy for this moment. Another chance to make a fool of the old guard, to make himself young and superior. I'm going away, I say. TV? The young civil servant wants to know. Student film. Personal. He is saddened by this. Not as good a story. Not as important a moment. I turn a corner and leave him to the curses of the old guard. I still don't know what they were guarding. I need some coffee. Bill // 1:47 AM ______________________ The dinner at the sporting Club takes place on a long terrace of cement cabanas that are rented by the year. Nabil, the architect in the ascot (raised in Lebanon, educated in Paris, worked in New York), has rented one. It is one room with a low bed and bongo drums and a book of the Psalms with a forward by Bono. Nabil plays the drum, expertly accompanying an irresistable Cuban CD that's spinning in a mini player. Time untethers, minutes slide sideways. Smoke from Nabil's cigar swirls with the ceiling fan and the spiraling Afro-Latin rhythms. A uniformed man with a machine gun dances on a diving board over a dry pool. Or not. I realize I'm asleep. Or not. Ali, it's time to go. My internal body clock says it's time to be out of bed, despite the fact that it's three am. The joys of jet lag. I take a camera and walk into pre-dawn Beirut. Thick stillness gives way to brooms and hoses. A newspaper salesman with a gray, well-trimmed mustache and a neat tan tunic, pushes open the plywood window of his corner booth. It sits on an island of untouched cement beside a gaping pit that today defines what once was this city's Rodeo Drive. Standing in shoes well shined, the man carefully clips today's papers to a metal display rack. The Arabic writing -- all swirl and flat-bottomed Rorsatch blots -- is jet black against bright white of the papers. Then he pulls out a broom and sweeps his three square meters of cement. He sweeps with great care, despite the fact that in a few hours the jackhammers and bulldozers will cover his whole booth in a patina of sticky red dust. Next, he wipes the counter of his booth. He places a short brass vase at the corner of it. In it is yesterday's flower. Morning delivers metaphors of hope, the triumph of routine over the vageries. He ignores my camera and goes about his business. I skulk off, feeling slightly shamed. The guilt of the voyeur. Bill // 1:22 AM ______________________ Friday, June 06, 2003: Patrick Byrne and Ahmad Elhusseini are on the southern corner of the terrance the size of an abandoned hockey rink at the Beirut sporting Club. The sun is dropping into the Med in an explosion of purple. White wine in a large bottle in a sweating brass bucket. Plastic chairs against poured cement. Patrick's girlfriend Gina has flown in from Manhattan. A small man in an Oxford button down and pale blue ascot is introduced as the best architect in Beirut. Then there's a Catalanese couple who are some sort of Barcelona delegates here for World Environment Day. It takes all of six minutes for talk to turn to religion and politics, which in this world are one and the same. Earnest streams of explanation end in inevitable shrugs. Here, there is no central authority, and thus no agreed-upon history. Only biased anecdotes. Only versions. Beirut is a city trying to reinvent itself out, but it can't even agree on what it used to be, nor why or how it changed. Dinner comes on silver platters. We eat at the northern end of the terrace that seems to be all ours. Blackened seafood and rice, savory sauces, and verieties of flat breads. The night is warm and thick and conversation never strays far from the political situation. It's in the air here. And maybe always will be. Bill // 12:13 AM ______________________ Beirut is a hilly, chaos of winding streets and rubble and French colonial architecture being muscled out of the way by unpainted cement structures. It's Nice meets Tijuana. Ali slaloms rocks and scooters and cats and beeps but doesn't slow down at intersections. There are no traffic lights and every corner presents another roll of the dice. The scratches are no longer a mystery.The Plaza hotel gleams coolly in Lebanese marble, and sits in the middle of the once-fashionable Hamra shopping district. Today the haute couture is hard hats and overalls. The street is a trench. High piles of red dirt. An army of men in uniforms of blue. Jackhammers. Bulldozers. It's not hard to imagine this city under siege. Today it's a city under a seige of shovels. I nap as the jackhammers crack rock. Bill // 12:04 AM ______________________ Thursday, June 05, 2003: Postcard from the AirAir France flight is a sweaty ordeal of bad food and poor service. They have the gall to charge four bucks for red wine with dinner. On an Air France flight? Middle East Air, no the other hand, has a brand new Airbus plane and a staff so efficient they border or unctuous. The menu features brochette, aperitifs, and cognac. Air France ought to take a lesson.Ladies and gentlemen we have begun our descent into Beirut. The deep blue of the Med. Forest green of Lebanon's cedars cling. Eight and ten story bleached building of unpainted cement, black boxes of shade where windows should be. Lebanon seems still, a Poloroid snapshot developing in high contrast. The terminal is white, long halled, and antiseptic. A set from Gattica. Men in hosptial greens in baby blue surgical masks greet a plane arriving from Toronto. SARS patrol.As I'm making a SARS joke to an unamused customs agent, Erik, a six foot four inch 32 year old with tattoos hidden under a poorly picked army green windbreaker, attracts a small crowd of men with guns. I try to go back and help him through, but I'm barred. Instead I quietly pull out the small video camera and shoot the incident until a smiling man with a gun tells me that is probably not a good idea. ERIK eventually gets through, but not without getting flustered enough to forget the tripod at customs.The paper sign reads: Pill Kerig. The driver introduces himself as Ali. He ushers us through a gauntlet of aggressive taxi drivers who grab at our bags to "help" us to their cars. Instead with jump in Ali's scratched but new Mercedes. The men with guns at the booth at the ariport exit wave us through. Ali doesn't even slow down. Bill // 11:52 PM ______________________ Postcard from NYCab to the white Plains train station and onto an express down to Manhattan. Rolling into town I get up from my seat and move toward the door as we come into Harlem. Oh, you don't want to get off there, says a Chinese man who's on his way to work at Grand Central. I tell him it's okay; I'm just cutting across town (to West 107th where I'll rendesvous with cameraman Erik at Yellin's). No really, my friend, he says as the train rolls up to a burned out building. Look at it out there, he insists, it's looks like Beirut. Bill // 11:39 PM ______________________ Postcard From New YorkThe $155 cab fare was worth it to get to Old Oaks Country Club in Westchseter on a soft morning of quiet seriousness at the U.S. Open qualifer. Tom Yellin was thin and intense on the putting green. He faded his tee shot but came back to make par. Then sprayed again and saved with birdie. He battled around the course as I lugged the bag and wiped and cleaned and did all the other things that came naturally to this once and former caddy. Somewhere on the loop I came untethered. An hour's sleep and Beirut pressing down from the close and pressing future. Where am I? Who? Forty or fourteen and caddying at Myopia Hunt Club. This trip has just begun and already I'm altered. Bill // 11:35 PM ______________________ test Bill // 11:31 PM ______________________ Monday, June 02, 2003: My plane leaves in two hours and I'm about to walk out the door. It's hot here, still in the 80s at 10 pm, and probably about what it will be in Beirut. I must confess that this idea, so often pitched and honed and repeated and massaged and re-repeated, has taken on its own shape. It's become a construct, a mere idea. It's as if I created the whole skeleton of this trip like a boat inside the bottle of my brain. Now I've got to try and sail it, which will take some dismantling and reconstructing in the real world. Which is to say that the idea that I am flying to the Middle East for three weeks hasn't quite hit me yet. Except, that is, in the way that I have a slight but heavy pain on the end of every inhale, as if I'd swallowed too much salt water at the beach. I will miss my girls dreadfully, but then how successful can any trip be if you are not somewhat torn when you leave and again when you return?Bon voyage! Bill // 9:31 PM ______________________ Sunday, June 01, 2003: It's difficult not to look for cosmic connection in the idea that today, as I stuff and unstuff and restuff bags, is Ascension Sunday in the Catholic calendar. Tommorow I ascend into the sky in a big aluminum tube and that will eventually deliver me to Beirut. En route, I'll stop in New York and caddy for Tom Yellin (my partner in this TV show) as he plays 36 holes to qualify for the U.S. Open. It would be nice to think that this brief ascension into the realms of golfers who can outstroke par might signal some elevation of my own pitiful game. But I know too much about the game to think that mere contact with the golf guns in Westchester would infect me with some new virus of competence. Anyway, the trip is not about golf. It's about making a TV show about the artisans of the Middle East. To those ends, the plan is to reboard another aluminum tube and ride it to Paris and on to Beirut.Here is our rough ininterary. More soon.> > Bill & Erik leave SLC @ midnight on June 2> > Meet with Tom Yellin in NY on June 3> > Leave JFK on Wed. June 3> > Arrive in Beirut @ 3:45 pm on June 4> > June 5 - Meet Hiram, rent equipment, secure a driver/fixer. Film> Patrick's speech?> > night.June 6 - film speech? Film "Dinner Table" scene & scenics> > June 7 - Travel to Baalbeck in the morning. Begin filming in the> > afternoon.> > June 8-12 - Film in Baalbeck.> > June 12 - Travel to Beirut in the evening.> > June 13 - Regroup in Beirut> > June 14 - Travel to Aleppo> > June 15-19 Film in Aleppo> > June 20 - Travel to Beirut> > June 21 & 22 - Regroup and capture scenics in Beirut> > June 23 Travel to Paris >>>NYC> > June 24 Meet with Yellin in NYC> > Arrive in SLC @ midnight on June 24If I can find Internet access along the way I will update this blog.Allah will provide and,Happy trails,Bill Bill // 10:01 PM ______________________
This morning I opened the Daily Star to see Patrick Byrne's face. It's from a talk that he gave at the American University of Beirut. We filmed the speech. The quotes are about right, but the reporter led with Patrick's aside about the effects of Lebanese corruption on business. An inflamatory lead, but an accurate story. Bill // 2:03 AM
At the edge of the city is a wide promenade of joggers and walkers and men selling bread in the shape of pocketbooks off black bicycles with high wire racks welded to the handlebars. A ferris wheel of muted pastels. Muslim women jogging in tight headscarfs. Kid in a cowboy hat selling Turkish coffee from a silver urn. The stuff is thick and scalding. Half a dozen steel stands of red and white stripped rebar with strands of scrolling barbed wire. Stand in a low row beside the curb in one section. I can see no reason for their presence. They look as if someone just forgot them there. Mothers push baby strollers. I miss my girls. I try to make an artsy shot of the barbed wire and the ferris wheel. Working without a tripod I am down on my knees when another man with a gun steps up next to me. This one is a soldier. I tell him sorry, sorry. I'm going now. He stops me. He wants to see the camera. I show it to him. Good he says. MiniDV? I tell him 24P. He holds up a finger and tells me to wait. He returns in a moment with a chair from his office. Through hand signals, I figure out that he wants me to use it as a tripod. I resume filming the ferris wheel. He nods his head, satisfied. I rewind the tape and show it to him in the small screen. He gives me a thumbs up. Bill // 1:59 AM
First Beirut Morning:Yesterday's laundry hangs lank in the salt-heavy air. A new sattellite dish aims skyward from a bullet-pocked building. Cats eat a plate of cat food set on the sidewalk. Starbucks faces the high-walled American University of Beirut. It seems natural here. As if it belongs somehow amid all these cars parked on sidewalks, angled and random and looking abondoned in the middle of a careless drunk. A well-shined Mercedes sedan is parked on a pile of broken cement. Corrugated tin shack in the shadow of a high-rise palace of black marble Japanese design. The wialing prayer call of an unseen Mosque. Two scooters whine in the still-sleeping streets. Rectangular blocks of pink-stained sky. A portly guard wants to know where my permissions are. He wears a pistol, stands in the surrendered slouch of the aging civil servant. He wants to see my permissions. The shrill volumne of his voice is rude in the still dawn. Student film, I say. Tourist. Excuse moi. His excitement grows. The chance to do something. Someone to be angry at. I haven't even had my coffee. Backpeddling down the street, he stomps after me in determined pursuit. A younger, darker, and taller guard arrives. He puts a hand on his older friend's shoulder. He pulls him back, even as he winks at me. He too is happy for this moment. Another chance to make a fool of the old guard, to make himself young and superior. I'm going away, I say. TV? The young civil servant wants to know. Student film. Personal. He is saddened by this. Not as good a story. Not as important a moment. I turn a corner and leave him to the curses of the old guard. I still don't know what they were guarding. I need some coffee. Bill // 1:47 AM
The dinner at the sporting Club takes place on a long terrace of cement cabanas that are rented by the year. Nabil, the architect in the ascot (raised in Lebanon, educated in Paris, worked in New York), has rented one. It is one room with a low bed and bongo drums and a book of the Psalms with a forward by Bono. Nabil plays the drum, expertly accompanying an irresistable Cuban CD that's spinning in a mini player. Time untethers, minutes slide sideways. Smoke from Nabil's cigar swirls with the ceiling fan and the spiraling Afro-Latin rhythms. A uniformed man with a machine gun dances on a diving board over a dry pool. Or not. I realize I'm asleep. Or not. Ali, it's time to go. My internal body clock says it's time to be out of bed, despite the fact that it's three am. The joys of jet lag. I take a camera and walk into pre-dawn Beirut. Thick stillness gives way to brooms and hoses. A newspaper salesman with a gray, well-trimmed mustache and a neat tan tunic, pushes open the plywood window of his corner booth. It sits on an island of untouched cement beside a gaping pit that today defines what once was this city's Rodeo Drive. Standing in shoes well shined, the man carefully clips today's papers to a metal display rack. The Arabic writing -- all swirl and flat-bottomed Rorsatch blots -- is jet black against bright white of the papers. Then he pulls out a broom and sweeps his three square meters of cement. He sweeps with great care, despite the fact that in a few hours the jackhammers and bulldozers will cover his whole booth in a patina of sticky red dust. Next, he wipes the counter of his booth. He places a short brass vase at the corner of it. In it is yesterday's flower. Morning delivers metaphors of hope, the triumph of routine over the vageries. He ignores my camera and goes about his business. I skulk off, feeling slightly shamed. The guilt of the voyeur. Bill // 1:22 AM
Patrick Byrne and Ahmad Elhusseini are on the southern corner of the terrance the size of an abandoned hockey rink at the Beirut sporting Club. The sun is dropping into the Med in an explosion of purple. White wine in a large bottle in a sweating brass bucket. Plastic chairs against poured cement. Patrick's girlfriend Gina has flown in from Manhattan. A small man in an Oxford button down and pale blue ascot is introduced as the best architect in Beirut. Then there's a Catalanese couple who are some sort of Barcelona delegates here for World Environment Day. It takes all of six minutes for talk to turn to religion and politics, which in this world are one and the same. Earnest streams of explanation end in inevitable shrugs. Here, there is no central authority, and thus no agreed-upon history. Only biased anecdotes. Only versions. Beirut is a city trying to reinvent itself out, but it can't even agree on what it used to be, nor why or how it changed. Dinner comes on silver platters. We eat at the northern end of the terrace that seems to be all ours. Blackened seafood and rice, savory sauces, and verieties of flat breads. The night is warm and thick and conversation never strays far from the political situation. It's in the air here. And maybe always will be. Bill // 12:13 AM
Beirut is a hilly, chaos of winding streets and rubble and French colonial architecture being muscled out of the way by unpainted cement structures. It's Nice meets Tijuana. Ali slaloms rocks and scooters and cats and beeps but doesn't slow down at intersections. There are no traffic lights and every corner presents another roll of the dice. The scratches are no longer a mystery.The Plaza hotel gleams coolly in Lebanese marble, and sits in the middle of the once-fashionable Hamra shopping district. Today the haute couture is hard hats and overalls. The street is a trench. High piles of red dirt. An army of men in uniforms of blue. Jackhammers. Bulldozers. It's not hard to imagine this city under siege. Today it's a city under a seige of shovels. I nap as the jackhammers crack rock. Bill // 12:04 AM
Postcard from the AirAir France flight is a sweaty ordeal of bad food and poor service. They have the gall to charge four bucks for red wine with dinner. On an Air France flight? Middle East Air, no the other hand, has a brand new Airbus plane and a staff so efficient they border or unctuous. The menu features brochette, aperitifs, and cognac. Air France ought to take a lesson.Ladies and gentlemen we have begun our descent into Beirut. The deep blue of the Med. Forest green of Lebanon's cedars cling. Eight and ten story bleached building of unpainted cement, black boxes of shade where windows should be. Lebanon seems still, a Poloroid snapshot developing in high contrast. The terminal is white, long halled, and antiseptic. A set from Gattica. Men in hosptial greens in baby blue surgical masks greet a plane arriving from Toronto. SARS patrol.As I'm making a SARS joke to an unamused customs agent, Erik, a six foot four inch 32 year old with tattoos hidden under a poorly picked army green windbreaker, attracts a small crowd of men with guns. I try to go back and help him through, but I'm barred. Instead I quietly pull out the small video camera and shoot the incident until a smiling man with a gun tells me that is probably not a good idea. ERIK eventually gets through, but not without getting flustered enough to forget the tripod at customs.The paper sign reads: Pill Kerig. The driver introduces himself as Ali. He ushers us through a gauntlet of aggressive taxi drivers who grab at our bags to "help" us to their cars. Instead with jump in Ali's scratched but new Mercedes. The men with guns at the booth at the ariport exit wave us through. Ali doesn't even slow down. Bill // 11:52 PM
Postcard from NYCab to the white Plains train station and onto an express down to Manhattan. Rolling into town I get up from my seat and move toward the door as we come into Harlem. Oh, you don't want to get off there, says a Chinese man who's on his way to work at Grand Central. I tell him it's okay; I'm just cutting across town (to West 107th where I'll rendesvous with cameraman Erik at Yellin's). No really, my friend, he says as the train rolls up to a burned out building. Look at it out there, he insists, it's looks like Beirut. Bill // 11:39 PM
Postcard From New YorkThe $155 cab fare was worth it to get to Old Oaks Country Club in Westchseter on a soft morning of quiet seriousness at the U.S. Open qualifer. Tom Yellin was thin and intense on the putting green. He faded his tee shot but came back to make par. Then sprayed again and saved with birdie. He battled around the course as I lugged the bag and wiped and cleaned and did all the other things that came naturally to this once and former caddy. Somewhere on the loop I came untethered. An hour's sleep and Beirut pressing down from the close and pressing future. Where am I? Who? Forty or fourteen and caddying at Myopia Hunt Club. This trip has just begun and already I'm altered. Bill // 11:35 PM
test Bill // 11:31 PM
My plane leaves in two hours and I'm about to walk out the door. It's hot here, still in the 80s at 10 pm, and probably about what it will be in Beirut. I must confess that this idea, so often pitched and honed and repeated and massaged and re-repeated, has taken on its own shape. It's become a construct, a mere idea. It's as if I created the whole skeleton of this trip like a boat inside the bottle of my brain. Now I've got to try and sail it, which will take some dismantling and reconstructing in the real world. Which is to say that the idea that I am flying to the Middle East for three weeks hasn't quite hit me yet. Except, that is, in the way that I have a slight but heavy pain on the end of every inhale, as if I'd swallowed too much salt water at the beach. I will miss my girls dreadfully, but then how successful can any trip be if you are not somewhat torn when you leave and again when you return?Bon voyage! Bill // 9:31 PM
It's difficult not to look for cosmic connection in the idea that today, as I stuff and unstuff and restuff bags, is Ascension Sunday in the Catholic calendar. Tommorow I ascend into the sky in a big aluminum tube and that will eventually deliver me to Beirut. En route, I'll stop in New York and caddy for Tom Yellin (my partner in this TV show) as he plays 36 holes to qualify for the U.S. Open. It would be nice to think that this brief ascension into the realms of golfers who can outstroke par might signal some elevation of my own pitiful game. But I know too much about the game to think that mere contact with the golf guns in Westchester would infect me with some new virus of competence. Anyway, the trip is not about golf. It's about making a TV show about the artisans of the Middle East. To those ends, the plan is to reboard another aluminum tube and ride it to Paris and on to Beirut.Here is our rough ininterary. More soon.> > Bill & Erik leave SLC @ midnight on June 2> > Meet with Tom Yellin in NY on June 3> > Leave JFK on Wed. June 3> > Arrive in Beirut @ 3:45 pm on June 4> > June 5 - Meet Hiram, rent equipment, secure a driver/fixer. Film> Patrick's speech?> > night.June 6 - film speech? Film "Dinner Table" scene & scenics> > June 7 - Travel to Baalbeck in the morning. Begin filming in the> > afternoon.> > June 8-12 - Film in Baalbeck.> > June 12 - Travel to Beirut in the evening.> > June 13 - Regroup in Beirut> > June 14 - Travel to Aleppo> > June 15-19 Film in Aleppo> > June 20 - Travel to Beirut> > June 21 & 22 - Regroup and capture scenics in Beirut> > June 23 Travel to Paris >>>NYC> > June 24 Meet with Yellin in NYC> > Arrive in SLC @ midnight on June 24If I can find Internet access along the way I will update this blog.Allah will provide and,Happy trails,Bill Bill // 10:01 PM
