Little Stories, Big Picture Illustrating with words, describing with photographs.

Begins like this:

Travel to Zico House, an artist's collective on Spears Street.  There, an event combining freestyle rap with freestyle drawing is going on.  Watch for a bit, have a drink, then leave.

Travel to Gemmayzeh, where you have another drink at a rooftop bar with a retracting cylindrical ceiling. Note that they have repositioned the bar so that the retracting roof is now over your head. Leave.

Walk across the still-to-be-completed downtown area to the "Egg" or "Dome," the bombed out cinema in the center of the city.  Recently, it has been hired out to various events, including the electronic concert during Fete de la Musique.  This evening, it is hired out for a(nother) Michael Jackson event.

Inside, about twenty people stood around in a vast spherical space, still haggard from the old days when men peered from the air vents to snipe at what was once the war's front line.  Chunks of the ceiling were missing, as were all of the seats, and here and there on the stuccoed ceiling little holes and chunks were missing, from who knows what sort of damage.

They were playing DVDs of Michael Jackson music videos very loudly, and the effect was sort of overwhelming.  His videos are entrancing and even more so on a gigantic silver screen.  The falsetto reverberated in the vast, empty space, and the apocalyptic feeling of this half-destroyed, half-resuscitated cinema was further enhanced.

Click through to see the full versions of these photos until I figure out how to do an HTML scroll frame.

A panorama of the Beirut dome, an old cinema that was destroyed during the civil war.