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Havana Youth: Q&A with Greg Kahn
Photographer Greg Kahn’s new book explores youth culture in Cuba. Greg Kahn was sitting at his fixer’s house in Cuba one night when he heard the thump of a bass beat echoing through the streets. He wandered outside, where he found a plaza with hundreds of kids dancing to electronic music. “It was current music that I had been listening to in the States,” Kahn said. “It just totally flipped that idea of everything that Cuba is.” Khan points to this moment as the foundation for his work over the next two years, and the subject of his new book “Havana Youth” (Yoffy Press). “Havana Youth” (Yoffy Press) “Havana Youth” is the DC-based freelancer’s first book, and its pages reveal the color and vibrancy of young Cuban society, brought to life by Khan’s meticulous attention to detail and intimate ...
Anissa Helou: Good Morning, Beirut
This week on The Trip podcast: Greeting Lebanon’s revolution with culinary hero Anissa Helou. Good morning—early morning—from Beirut. It’s dark out in the Hamra neighborhood, a beautiful little fist of city that pushes down into the Mediterranean. It’s dark up here but the muzzeins calling the prayer and the roosters calling to no one at all are well-caffeinated and already firing. Good morning. Good morning from Beirut. Wake up. Wake the fuck up. There is a new day out there, just beyond your horizon. There is a revolution going on in Lebanon. That’s why we’re here. They started gathering months ago, at the Egg, an odd concrete derelict landmark in the heart of downtown Beirut. They are still there, camped out, peaceful but very urgent, resolute that they will stay until the goals of the ...
Chyno: Beirut Battle Rap
This week on The Trip podcast: Beirut-based, Syrian-Filipino rapper Chyno on Lebanon, rap, and revolution. I’ve been thinking here in Beirut about the many-sided… let’s call them gifts, that America has given to the Middle East. And of course when you wade into it, when you look at yourself and your country in the mirror, you’ve first got to walk your mind through a vast swamp of evil action and intention. From cluster bombing to propping up Saudi hoodlums to supporting the instincts of Israel’s politics, there’s a lot to regret, past, present and future. But tucked inside the exports of empire, sort of the opposite of a poison pill, there’s also this wonderful counter-programming, an exported American liberalism, a real and instinctual belief in free speech that is a beacon for many ...
Jade George: Cocktail Culture in Beirut
This week on The Trip podcast, publisher Jade George on Beirut’s booze culture and her hopes for Lebanon. The rain is coming down in Hamra, Beirut on a Wednesday and Jade George are headed out to drink. We are going to drink gimlets, we’re going to drink Manhattans, and we are going to drink Negronis, because you drink in Lebanon for the same reasons you drink in Lima, Ohio and Los Angeles, California. You can cope in those cups, you get that conviviality, that extra 5% burden melting off your shoulders. Sure, maybe it’s also a bit of a maintenance high, but here in Beirut, there’s an urgency to the drinking. Jade tells me that during the revolution, everybody is smoking and drinking more. And you know, they can. Despite the call to prayer ringing from every mosque, despite Hamra being the...
Gilles Khoury: The Heart of the Lebanese Revolution
This week on The Trip podcast: journalist (and protestor) Gilles Khoury on what sparked the Lebanese revolution and what’s next. Welcome to the Egg, the battleworn concrete theater that has become epicenter of Lebanon’s revolution, where today a rally of small business owners and entrepreneurs kicks off with a singing of the national anthem. Small business is the heartbeat of Lebanon’s economy, and they’ve been terribly affected by the banking crisis since the revolution began, leading to a wave of layoffs across the country. Our guide here is a singular voice in Lebanese media, a young writer named Gilles Khoury who writes a weekly, whimsical slice-of-life column for the French-language paper L’Orient Le Jour, about Beirutis and their hopes and dreams, and lately, about their revolution. ...
Ghosts of Tokyo: A Q&A with Barry Yourgrau
An author brings his flair for the fantastic to old Tokyo. Writer and performer Barry Yourgrau is a master of the surreal, intense, funny, and sometimes very short story. His eccentric career includes writing for The New Yorker and The Paris Review (among others) as well as starring both in the film adaptation of his memoir and in a music video for the heavy metal band Anthrax. I first met him with his partner, the author Anya von Bremzen, in Istanbul sometime in the mid-aughts, but it’s his deep, long-standing relationship with Japan, where his work has a steadfast following, that fascinates me most. He is the only American author to publish short fiction specifically for Japanese cellphones—an early form of viral smartphone content known as keitai sosetsu, or cell phone novels. His next ...
Farrah Berrou: Into the Beqaa Valley
Farrah Berrou takes The Trip into Lebanon’s wine country. It’s 6:45am and Farrah Berrou, host of the podcasts B is for Bacchus and A Better Beirut, is picking me up in her mom’s car to make the climb out of Beirut, past snow-capped mountains, dusty villages, endless military checkpoints, almost to the border of Syria itself, for a full day of Lebanese wine. We’re going to Domaine Wardy, one of the great wineries of the Beqaa Valley, a winery whose roots started out actually in Aleppo, Syria, long ago. But before that, it’s time for an early-morning trip to Baalbek, the ruins of the colossal roman temple of Bacchus, the god of, among other things, wine and group sex. What a combination, what a testament to the eternal determination of the people in this part of the world to live, and live w...
Tom Tillotson: The Midnight Voter
This week on The Trip podcast: Drinking baijiu with Tom Tillotson in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. At the stroke of midnight in the high mountains near the Canadian border, in a lodge on the property of the abandoned Balsams Resort, there’s a table covered with red-white-and-blue bunting, a podium, two closet-sized voting booths. Five voters, 30 journalists, four TV trucks, two cakes celebrating the 60th anniversary of the midnight voting at Dixville Notch, NH. Now, you may think this a departure from our usual subjects. But for me, the performative small-town democracy of New Hampshire’s primaries has always been the stuff of drinking podcasts. Photographer Shane Carpenter and I were first dragged up here to Dixville Notch 16 years ago by a hard-drinking fringe presidential candida...
Gary Hirshberg: Organic Power
This week on The Trip podcast: Stonyfield Farms Chairman Gary Hirshberg talks sustainability, politics, and the role of money in the US elections. It’s the 61st Annual McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner at the big Southern New Hampshire University arena in downtown Manchester. The state party is using its quadrennial flicker in the spotlight, and all the candidates who are here like moths to the flame, to pack an arena and raise a boatload of money—bleacher seats cost $25-50 and the tickets for the white linen rubber chicken banquet tables on the arena floor, where they’ve put me, must have cost much more. They’re not serving wine at the tables, so I sneak off to ferry a camera lens or two for the photographer Shane Carpenter, who has been covering the New Hampshire primaries with ...
Eva Castillo: Manchester Defender
This week on The Trip podcast: Eva Castillo on Presidential politics and immigrant advocacy in New Hampshire in the time of Trump. So this was it, election day in New Hampshire, the real starting gun of the race is that is now settling in. And if the Democratic primary looks a bit different nationally than it did when New Hampshire’s results started rolling in (Rest in peace, campaign of Mayor Buttigieg), critics of the first-in-the-nation primary usually point to one main factor: race. The numbers don’t lie: New Hampshire is a very Caucasian state. It is 93% white; that’s like, whiter-than-Wyoming White. Not to be essentialist here, but that not only affects how voters respond to candidates, but also how candidates respond back to voters; the kind of questions they get asked in those famo...
Climbing the seven summits: a route to the top
Climbing the seven summits – the highest mountain on every continent – is an improbable dream of mine… but that’s the beauty of dreams I have always loved trekking and climbing. I usually spend several weeks of any given year on the grades of the Scottish Highlands or Welsh Snowdonia or ideally further afield such as the Arctic Circle Trail in Greenland or the K2 base camp trek in Pakistan. It was one of these trekking trips – to Tanzania in 2010 – that ignited something new inside me. It was while climbing Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, that an idea, an ambition, began to formulate. My hobby deepened into passion and I realised that I wanted to achieve something great: to climb the seven summits, the highest mountain on every continent. Mountain Continent Altitude Tech....
Life under lockdown
Kia – who prides herself on discipline – examines the effects of coronavirus on her state of mind Yesterday, I promised myself I would close my laptop at 5pm on the dot. The working hours of my week had taken on a strange, flat quality: a shallowness, like kicking my fins and striking sand. I found myself flitting from one task to another, breaking off midway to check the news, check Twitter, check one tracker and then another. In this manner, I found myself passing hours followed by yet more hours, which is why I promised to close my laptop at 5pm on the dot. Four hours later, I was still on my screen, scrolling, clicking, linking, sinking. It’s taken me six days to muster the discipline to write this post. It pains me to say that because I pride myself on discipline; on grit; on le...
