Beirupdate, T

Alone I pull pints and smash bottles to the roars of men like they’re watching football when T walks through the door in airport threads and tattoos. We shout smiles at each other across the bar and of a sudden no one matters beside Johnnie Walker and the twelve ounce glass I fill for him to the brim. I walk the length with Mexican gold and through the fug I watch T take celebrity like corpses to coffins. The next day together we walk downtown with M and V and drink smoothie martinis made with blood before Hariri mosque SS cloak the girls in black and dress down J for tonguing females on holy real estate. He splits with V and three of us visit neighbors for Lebanese brew and doodoo. T relates dropping three thousand rubs on a whore and doesn’t twitch when a monkey in Gemmayze says fifty for three drinks and I practice my arabic shouting pour it back pour it back in the fucking bottle and on my way to the concrete I pass punchbowls and pink gorillas lunging chicks to Korean pop and the strong men put arms across but let me pass from I work in a bar fuck you ana bsteghel bi bar and I didn’t fucking drink anything bchirib waleshi. M collects me from the curb and later claims she didn’t push me to the gents and didn’t ride me on the john and didn’t leek blood over my clothes and then she says there’s something called implantation bleeding so little Lyndon might be on his way for which T and I realize I’m beiruining my life. As the last drops fall from the empty cloudless sky a small boy reaching up his hand with a rose asks me if such a thing were possible for valentines. I take the flower and bite its head off while staring into his eyes and pouring crimson wax on M’s wrist. Alone again T and I pour double black like revolutionaries down our throats as though willing toward the dead zone so much so the karaoke barstaff throw the paper upon which we write radiohead creep dickhead. Resting fails so we feel fresh whiskey for a morning meal all golden in the glass like a syrup grail glazing our eyes and minds like girls. We learn Hamra means red so that’s where we hit for all you can drink poliakov and it’s almost written off when a native gives me tobacco mixed with something else he refuses to name but we dance with chairs and neck from tequila optics and the night is gone long before the warehouse where wolves and happies waltz to euphoric generica and hipster heavies tell J he can’t do that with his girl and shirt in the sky and a killer line do you even lift bro that everyone but us finds unfunny but it’s irrelevant when a hundred people jump to time and monster eggs kettle the crowd. And so we send T away with eggshells in his hair and the faces of brunette shakiras knowing that for four nights we bloom minds.

Beirupdate, romance

Talent like yours, Mr Idiots, should not go wasted in Beirut. V visits from Switzerland. She has blonde hair and of a sudden I understand I’m growing used to this place. J romances her with sunset suppers and seafront roleplay while I explain to M that the roach she saw was just a mouse and nothing to worry about except that I’m bad fucking news. J and I do pushups on the terrace while the girls look good and we all hydrate each other with black label and bombay in teacups. Soon we leave to test Lebanese patience and with M and V we’re the envy of a small world. After seven hours and a bill no one recalls settled J and I blow minds and ruin lives. Over fifteen pitchers I tell the story of the river and we agree that infidelity is admirable but when M’s mother arrives and I offer shots and sex with an unbuttoned shirt it goes down badly and yet her daughter sticks around. By now we’re Beirut celebrities and I know I am the same way a baby knows it will live forever so I dance the stage while the DJ packs away and sing in rival circles and harass short skirts to where a waiter we never tip tells me to take it easy. In the zone we waltz to McDonalds and I throw bills across the counter and yell take it fucking take it like a man as J mixes his own dessert. At home I hear myself say let’s have kids and I tie M’s neck with my belt and she falls asleep in tears.

Beirupdate, evil

Someone sucks whiskeysours and shakes my hand with warmth as though I didn’t blag the mix and tells me of the three monkeys. The first he says doesn’t speak. To the tune of chants astride the bar a boy beckons me forward. You know ee dee ell he asks and I say what like he’s spelling my name. Ee dee ell. Ee dee ell. He wears a white sweater with a red cross but a sun cross and I understand EDL like pulling on my ears and puking down my mouth. EDL as though he’s English as though he’s been to England as though they wouldn’t kick shit out of him as though I want him in my bar and I poke his knights templar sweater like a girl kissing a toy. I ask what the fuck through a grin but he doesn’t speak. The second he says doesn’t see. Z takes me to his wing for solitude and whiskey and out the blue he says I have a problem. With my son. Z bleeds and weeps to me for his boy who’s lost to his world and for whom I ponder and cross lines with empathy. He has everything but wants nothing he says, which we know is okay but for the trees he doesn’t see. The third he says doesn’t hear. In rags and feathers J and M and I play tables with embassy staff and hotshot capitalists and green people with alcohol. We cling to bottles so much so that J smalltalks our ambassador's earpiece and I’m sauced for tomorrow’s job interview but I land the gig so who’s counting. Alone we move from beer to wine and wine to arak and play I’ve never but hear nothing that wasn’t already known.

Beirupdate, M

I meet M whose father hears voices and who dropped out of life to become something unreal, to act and commit herself as though to hospital. She tells me of earlier years and older men and fired teachers and married men and ruined lives like one of us. All the while I talk through teeth and can’t believe she’s real with eyes like fields and her voice a mirror to passing guys all envy and stares. Because I show them garbage and flowers she says and I have a beautiful face she says but the men here treat me like a cockroach. Tomorrow she cooks foul for us and launders and sings and laughs and fucks and asks for violence and not to stop and says she’d forgive her man with offers of others so with her I’m the most hated man in the room. For me she pulls favours and friends and spends the day but she can’t be real while I see it through those around me watching in the Hard Rock café, through cameras and bile where J swills local beers and tells his wildest tales to MTV and orders wings for the first time in years. Later M and I lay to Damien Rice in the halflight and the next day she rings to the same songs to bring me tea and oranges and send me pictures and talk of morals and visas and England and marriage and I see the rocks beneath the berth and I know she’s falling in love so this is where I stop writing.

Beirupdate, self

J falls asleep at the bar on nothing but illness while a guy tells me about hashish in Lebanon and compares it to politics. Like a drug he says. A fear he says. A ten year-old boy knows more politics he says than you. Hitler he says wanted peace in his way. Ask anyone around the world. Even terrorists communicate a culture he says with bombs and threats and deaths and fear like selfhood. Meanwhile I work where wanderers fall, an English bar with football and Danish ale and Guinness. I work for my identity only and support a team no one knows and split the bar like a sword while J sings songs at home alone to echoes of rifle fire from moped thugs with reverb as though at war with houses. The next day we walk graffiti streets and disused carparks to the smell of piss before a call to prayer rallies a hundred men and we cross a sandbag walkway not unknown to northern France in nineteen seventeen. Martyrs Square sits inside highway tarmac and vandalized walls and bomb-shelter architecture. Of bulletholes. We answer the call among the shoeless others but as we enter the blue roofs and marble arches a van astrides the sidewalk all in earpieces and crewcuts and suits and Glocks away from which our gaze averts. A silence ripples the carpet all aligned in symbols as four women anonymize their selves behind a line of raised behinds. A clock tells all of time and a chandelier made of lies and lives and money dominates. We exit beneath a green man running through an open door. Later J gives a speech to a room full of hackers and lawyers about morality and theft and Aaron Schwartz while I meet a crazy with a United shirt who kisses and kisses and pushes me to be from England even though she’s never been. I make her vomit and the next day I steal from H&M but before I waltz I ask the guard for a pharmacy to buy own-brand rubber from which no one benefits.

Beirupdate, waltz

This guy believes Roethke’s Waltz is about a Waltz and not a fight and when I tell him he’s gone wrong I go warm inside like I’ve been floored but then I realize this guy knows shit about poetry. J saves me with noise and alcohol so we split to a bar called Dictateur like some French fuck factory and I sit across from a mum who thinks I’m her age and a designer who definitely does not look like Zooey Deschanel and answers my questions by blowing smoke in my face. I douse the table in beer and scotch and absinthe before everyone bails to a club called fuck knows what where fags and dykes and chubs prance to eighties classics no one remembers. The last thing I feel is neat Bombay in a large glass and a single drag from a cheap cigarette that burns it down to the nub. Soon we hustle cups and balls for pong with espresso vodka and scotch chasers and despite refraining from a decider we leave to streets of nausea and go Mad. The site says sanity is overrated but before we arrive J shouts lalala at the cabman and throws me to the tarmac. We know that Mad is hundreds down the line so I stand uncontrolled in showers of sprinkler water shouting and jumping as though a god and I feel untouchable and so we fight. With jeers and laughs J eggs for others to come and swing and they do and we make peace between nations when a boxer dances from across the street to punch me in the stomach. The next day I eat sheep spleen in a sandwich and then brains that taste of nothingness and dissolve on the tongue like promises to a girl I once knew.

Beirupdate, water

We walk taxied streets and waterfront promenades. No beaches only rocks and shirts and shiny shoes for half a dollar. In bright colours we walk under flags of gold and green that we see to be Hezbollah, so we pass bowed and hushed but then embarrassed when boyscouts hand us cookies. Then we drive. On roads like pouring water our driver shows us a small boy who returns to windows with factory alcohol in pink plastic. Our driver drinks and drinks a beer before we see Byblos. Roads and souks of cobbled stone draw a coastal paradise. We walk a pier of seaspray and perfect sights all night and faraway lights. From scotch to roadside drinks and beers and scotch again before local liquors that look like semen on ice and taste like anise and our host says fuck your life. Below and beyond the dead zone now we steal mugs and waltzing couples to the taste of hops and scotch some more. Our driver drinks and eats nothing and we laugh in the car while we ride with my hands over his eyes like we’ve already survived. We play five-o-one and finish on deuce checkouts but whoever wins concedes to the abyss while our hosts depart to goodbyes and girls not from around here. Meetings with Kiev and Hackney and Bogotá and lastly Glasgow who touches me beneath his jacket and tomorrow someone says we’re in the shallow part of the pool.

Way to Safety

Two months ago a telecommunications engineer from Beirut launched a start-up company that aims to permanently alter the face of urban warfare and eradicate gun-related crimes around the world.

Utilizing the hardware infrastructure we already have, Firas Wazneh wants to launch an application that uses GPS and wi-fi positioning to pinpoint the precise location of gunfire when heard through the microphones of any laptop or smartphone. It’s called Way to Safety.

“I was sitting and I heard gunshots, machine-guns”, he tells me, “and I turned on the media – nothing. The gunshots were really close. After two hours the media told us the gunshots originated near our house, so what the Hell is the country doing to locate these shooters? I thought of the idea [behind Way to Safety]. Being a telecommunication engineer I know that it is possible. Then I searched online, founded my company and thought of the solution, going mobile as an application.”

It’s a simple idea, and not without hurdles, particularly with regard to patents and privacy, but Wazneh is convincing and didn’t mind me writing about his ideas online. He explained the concept to me as follows:

“It’s an application, a mobile and PC application that will sound-triangulate the source location of gunfire. Whenever a shooter fires a gun we will triangulate the position of the shooter in about fifteen to twenty seconds, and our goal is to send this information to the security agencies primarily, then to the media and press, and it’s free to the people in the hot-zones. So when you hear a gunshot and you have the application you will get the knowledge, the data, where the shooter is, for free.”

Hot-zones refer to isolated areas of high gun-crime. One immediately thinks of Homs in Syria, or Tripoli in Lebanon.

The technology has been around since World War I, when well-placed microphones could locate the whereabouts of canons and artillery batteries. There’s a comparable city-wide system in the US, most recently implemented in Chicago. Wazneh concedes that he’s not doing anything new.

“In the US there’s a similar system for gunshot location that’s been around for sixteen years and it’s still growing and growing heavily. It takes a lot of money. The problem is it needs hardware; it’s not scalable. It costs about $50,000 per square mile per year, which the security agencies pay to this private company. They’re not scalable for this matter. They need help, they need equipment on the rooftops, they need to rent places, they need constant internet and electricity. That’s how my thought came to mind: to use the existing infrastructure that we have from phones and laptops, and locate the shot.”

Needless to say for the software to work it requires a lot of people to download the app. “The more people you have, the more accurate it will be,” claims Wazneh. “Basically you need ten to twenty people in a circle with a radius of 1.5km. That much and we will be accurate to 25 meters.”

When I press Wazneh on its usability and the reliance upon its own ubiquitousness, he explains how simple it would be to market, especially in the middle-east, where gun-related deaths are so prevalent. Not only in war-torn countries like Syria, but also in the United States, where the topic of shootings is so hot as to melt steel.

“Because of the scalability of my product,” he says, “being an application, of course I expect it to expand in America. They have about 10,000 people killed per year in gun-related crimes.

“I think it will market itself in the hot-zones,” he goes on. “For example, in Tripoli now they are firing. If I go to the media and tell them, use this application; it will tell you where the shooter is and where they’re shooting from. Or if I go to the media personnel in the hot-zones; if I tell them I need five or six of you to install this application and then I can tell you where the shooter is, and the direction he is shooting, and the quality or type of gun he is using, they will install it.”

Every gun produces a different sound when fired, as identifiable as a fingerprint. Wazneh and his partner will spend a lot of time mapping the sound-signatures of hundreds of weapons over the coming months.

Way to Safety is intended free for civilian users, which one suspects is essential given its prerequisite for popularity, so when I ask about monetizing the service I’m told they will find a way to sell the data to the media and emergency services.

“I’m working on the concept to maybe get investors to help me,” says Wazneh. After he’s granted proof of concept he can deploy the application to different platforms. “Now I’m getting permitted to one platform [Android], then investors will help me to hire mobile developers and draw other mobile users.”

The start-up is young, and already it’s secured its share of funding, but in November Way to Safety placed third in a social innovation competition hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum after someone raised a question about invasion of privacy. Listening in on a user’s microphone is a delicate issue, which Wazneh recognizes.

“It’s a really good question about privacy. Later on I came up with a solution to make the application mostly open source [code available to the public]. I will verify it with a different company, get my application certified by a different security company to show that it will not hack your phone, nor spy or spam you .”

Technology is not my scene, but where Wazneh is unclear about his strategy for commercializing the concept, he’s sure about his plan: to revolutionize gun control.

“My solution is not for a particular party,” he concludes. “It is for every party all over the world, so there is no more gunfire. It is an ideal thought but I want shootings to stop.”

You can follow their progress on Twitter.

Beirupdate, an intro

We arrive to streets and calls to prayer and generous hosts and shawarma. In minutes we find and fund a Beirut barfly where pink gorilla suits welcome girls onto the bar for a dance all in flames. Friendly tweeps colour the wall in warmth and invitation and soon I have followers and phone numbers from Brits, Lebanese, and Danes, girls and gays surfing the foam of bottomless beer. As the flame subsides and the monkey man leaves the stage a game of beerpong centres the room in clear cups and cheers. No one knows any rules but no one cares and my host tells us this is a perfect representation of society in Beirut. The staff no longer ask for empties and instead pour pitchers and pass along the bar. We meet W, a writer drinking who gets greeted across the street with a bottle of tequila and fresh oranges. It sours from the wrong side of the dead zone that’s been tracked all night by classic rock. I nudge his ribs and he smiles and we pour the stuff from a great height to our throats because we’ll never drink again.

Short-Course Worlds, Istanbul

This piece originally appeared online at Guardian News and Media's Sport Blog on December 12, the opening day of the World Championships in Istanbul. It is reprinted here without permission and with minor changes, or rather, reversions to original copy in light of British editors, even at the most reputable of news outlets, being largely unlettered in sports besides football, cricket, and rugby.

Elite swimmers from all continents returned to competitive waters for the first time since the Summer Games today as the Short-Course World Championships got underway in Istanbul.

With so much emphasis placed upon the Olympic cycle, athletes may have been forgiven for taking a sabbatical, but the short-course contest offers a chance for swimmers to exchange 50-metres for 25 and race in the faster format.

While the distances remain the same, disciplines alter. Because competitors are allowed 15m underwater coming off each wall, the mindset of racing in a short-course pool differs so completely as to render the event almost a different sport altogether.

The dolphin-kick technique popularised by Michael Phelps means swimmers can achieve greater speeds by staying beneath the surface for as long as possible, so much so that rules were introduced in 1988 to ensure swimmers travel no further than 15m underwater on the dive and turns. Expect to see records broken throughout the week as competitors exploit the rules to their own advantage.

International eyes will turn toward Ryan Lochte to see if he can reproduce the success that garnered 13 gold medals in his last three outings in this competition. In so doing, he adopts the mantle of the United States' most decorated swimmer in the wake of Phelps, who retired after the 2012 Olympics. Unsurprisingly, Lochte is similarly renowned for his underwater kicking abilities, a trait that secured him countless titles on the American collegiate circuit, and will undoubtedly propel him into contention for each of his six individual events.

Competitors well-versed in the technicalities of short-course racing understand the value of their opposition. So often in the sport, where the margin between first and second place is rarely more than a fraction, swimmers race the clock. Not so in the 25m pool. Elite swimmers will talk of using the person in the lane next to them, hugging the lane-rope and surfing the rough water for his or her own gain.

The more experienced racers will conserve energy in the heats and semi-finals, feign illness or injury, get carried through on a literal wave of other competitors' speed, and secure an outside lane for the final, all with the view of passing undetected. Almost a thousand athletes from 162 participating nations are hoping to make the top eight of their respective specialty where the cat-and-mouse tactics of the prelims count for little.

Team USA look to dominate in the pool and yet again top the medal table. Swimming in 25-yard pools is commonplace in the US, where imperial measures still make up an uncomfortable marriage with the metric system, and competing in Olympic-size pools presents a break from the norm for Americans.

Hannah Miley and Olympic silver-medalist Michael Jamieson are among the 19-strong team representing Great Britain over the next five days, both of whom have lately enjoyed success in the shorter format. The Glaswegian came away victorious from the recent University and College Sport Championships in Sheffield with golds in all three of the breaststroke events. Elsewhere, Miley posted a new European record to win the 400m Individual Medley at the European Short Course Championships in Chartres last month.