Beirut

I really like Anthony Bourdain. He's a pretty hard-drinking, dirty-mouthed, ex-junkie of a chef, but I enjoy his sarcasm, and his book Kitchen Confidential was one of the only books I allowed myself to read for 'pleasure' during my exam year, justifying it by that fact that it was 'non-fiction'. It also made me much more aware of what I was eating, and the fact that one should never really eat brunch in a restaurant in NYC (where else do the week's leftovers go?). One of the greatest joys that cable tv awarded us that one year we could afford it in NJ was that we could watch his travel show No Reservations on the Travel Channel. In this show, he travels to pretty exotic places and tries the food culture there in a somewhat ironic anthropological way. He tries things so disgusting that I nearly gag when I even hear him describe them - better him than me! He did an excellent show on New Jersey (which is where he's from) that was very amusing and included a scene when he goes to a restaurant or bakery or something with celeb chef Mario Batali, who is then swarmed with fans while Bourdain sits off in the corner watching. Batali, as you NJ peeps may or may not know, was first employed at our beloved Stuff Yer Face before he hit it big and became the most arrogant chef on the early Food Network (at least I thought so at the time, although I would pay lots of money for him and Sara Moulton to come back to the Food Network and replace stupid Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee - although it is fun to use the word 'tablescape' in a sentence and watch A. lose his mind).

Anyway. A. bought me the best gift ever this week when he sent me Season 2 of No Reservations, downloadable from iTunes. I had particularly been waiting to see the episode that they shot in Beirut in the summer of 2006 during that surreal war with Israel. Bourdain himself says in the beginning monologue that this wasn't any sort of journalistic or objective view of the events, but just a documentary about the experience that he and his film crew had. While most of the fighting was going on, they were barricaded in a cushy hotel on the top of a hill, watching the city be destroyed while lounging next to the pool (the balcony provided the best view of what was happening). Of course they were watched over carefully by the US embassy there, and eventually evacuated by the marines onto a boat in the Mediterranean, while the city exploded behind them. It was clearly an outsider's perspective, but the really amazing thing about it was that they arrived and started filming the day before the capture of the Israeli soldiers that seemed to have been the catalyst for these events. He is at first wandering around town with a local guide, who is clearly proud of Beirut and its cosmopolitan character. They talked a lot about how the city had rebuilt itself and how the Lebanese were extremely proud of it. The food looked amazing and it really seemed like someplace where things were turning around and life was getting back to normal after the civil war. But it was in the middle of this whole discussion that, on camera, you see how it all unravels. His guide looks embarrassed and distressed that American cameras are filming the kids in cars celebrating the capture of the soldiers. And later that night he goes to a bar and meets up with another Lebanese man who wrote the Time Out guide to Beirut and the most amazing parts of the show are the moments when you see the worry and resignation in the faces of these men as they start to realize what is going to happen to their city and country in the coming days.

I study war a lot, but mainly either in a European or colonial context, but I don't think I have ever seen something like this, where everything good and happy in people's lives is destroyed in a matter of minutes. But it seems like this is the way war is now, and I think it's really tragic that Americans don't really see that. I don't know if it's some sort of censorship, or more a sense of apathy and a concern for ratings. Or maybe Americans just don't want to know. I remember watching the news as a kid during the first Gulf War and watching reporters for CNN standing in front of huge explosions and fighting. I can't remember watching any footage of Rwanda, or even now seeing much of what's happening in Kenya. Why does it take a sarcastic American chef on a little travel show that not that many people watch, and who isn't anywhere near the center of the action, to see what it might be like? I know it's really dangerous for journalists embedded in Iraq and I am still really fascinated by their experiences and trials, but I feel like the war in Iraq right now is so far removed from people's consciousness that it barely exists. I saw a headline this morning in the NYT about bombs going off in Baghdad, which jolted me because I'd sort of forgotten about it while I've been sort of wallowing in self-pity in Paris for the past few weeks. I know at the beginning of this war, there were lots of journalists wandering around, but mostly sitting inside their press headquarters in Qatar. And I know there are lots of new documentaries about the war coming out, but I get the feeling that very few of them will ever make it to theaters or television in most of the United States.

The past year or two I've been finding it really hard to live my life without feeling horribly guilty about the sort of privileges I have and the peaceful existence I live, even as we grad students sink deeper into poverty and debt. The more I read about Africa or the situation of refugees and the failure of international organizations and humanitarian NGOs, the more frustrated I feel about everything. I guess it's in a way what ends up pushing me forward in my work, because I feel a huge burden to expose these things to Americans who have no clue, or even to find the causes for these tragedies. I still don't feel like it's enough though. And I don't know what else I can do about it. I am really... I don't think happy is the right word, but pleased perhaps, that something simple like No Reservations can reveal something about the world and the difficulties of world politics that never comes through the news.

I have a friend (and fellow FB grantee) here in Paris who is doing a really interesting art history dissertation on the changing way that war was represented artistically in France throughout the first half of the 19th century, starting with paintings from the Napeolonic wars, and ending with photography in the Crimean War (sorry Katie if I'm not representing your work accurately!). Her argument is about the way these pieces were viewed and the concept of 'truth value' that emerged at this time in war representation. Photography certainly made a huge difference in Europeans' conceptions of war experience, and I know that the television cameras in Vietnam probably did something similar for Americans. But it seems like now we're all so oversaturated with inane nonsense on tv and even on the news that nothing is real anymore. Does anyone else feel this way or am I just overanalyzing everything again?