A recent book from civil rights activist Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, encourages people to develop understanding and respect for people different from themselves through a process of she describes as “breathe and push.”
This involves continually challenging yourself to grow and become a wiser and more caring person and then “breathing” by reflecting and resting to replenish your energy.
As she says “What if this is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?”
This month’s issue deals with characters and places who are “breathing” and “pushing,” growing and becoming. They are caring for children and pets, gaining understanding of the world and becoming more fully themselves, grappling with mythos and legacy, exploring imagination and consciousness, mourning tragedies and resolving to move forward with hope.
Harlan Yarbrough’s young couple and their child navigate an asteroid-caused disaster in a story that seems an allegory of parenthood in a turbulent world. Raising a small child can resemble an isolated, survivalist-type experience in some cultures, as parents retreat into the domestic sphere to focus on their child’s needs. Although the larger world continues to affect them, sometimes the small family simply waits it out until the smoke clears.
Chimezie Ihekuna also writes about parenting in an essay that acknowledges the commitment and care of parents of all genders.
Laura Stamps’ speaker raises a dog and humorously relates how she prefers him to a human companion. K.J. Hannah Greenberg’s second collection of photographed animals seem rather peaceful, contemplating life in the sunshine.
J.J. Campbell’s speaker has finally found love but battles the insecurities of middle age. Santiago Burdon writes of a mother who experiences the dreary weariness of some days of parenthood, as well as a city that has lost its luster and become harsh and angry.
Christine Tabaka writes of various sorts of endings, yet, as her other pieces suggest, these can also be catalysts for spiritual transformations into new discoveries and ways of being. Candace Meredith relates a piece from a person who has passed away, encouraging their loved ones to remember them and continue to live.
Film critic Jaylan Salah interviews Egyptian filmmaker Ahmad Abdalla, whose work focuses on people and cities in the complex state of growing and becoming who they are. Poet Mary Mackey interviews poet D. Nurkse, who discusses his sources of inspiration for his new book A Country of Strangers and how poetry can resist authoritarianisms of various kinds.
Sandra Rogers-Hare educates us on Juneteenth, the day when a last holdout of American enslaved people in Texas learned of their emancipation.
Ike Boat describes the grandeur of a majestic urban hotel within his native land of Ghana. Listen to more about the Asempa Hotel here.
Selene Ozturk’s essay explores the mixture of Roman Empire and American Western metaphors within the architecture of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts and the idea of rugged, yet enduring grandeur.
Pascal Lockwood Villa’s futuristic story also harkens back to Old West metaphors to explore what it means to be human through a discussion between a robot sheriff and a female human convict.
John Edward Culp asserts the reality of human consciousness in his heady, yet forceful poem while Andrew Cyril MacDonald comments on our human psychologies within a digital, consumerist age.
Sidnei Silva crafts words and letters from her subconscious to reflect and memorialize the music of Vangelis. In another take on music, Jack Galmitz honors a recorder player who breathes out a melody amid the wildness of nature and society. Also, Ivan Fiske writes of the song of our spirits when we breathe and re-center amidst the world’s tragedies.
Renwick Berchild’s poems show how our whole world – cathedrals, whales and other ocean creatures, birds, pottery kilns – is telling us stories, inspiring thoughts and pieces.
Mark Young wends his way through a surreal path of the imagination, navigating territory in a quest reminiscent of the work in J.D. Nelson’s subterranean word forge.
Michael Robinson’s pieces relate his journey of spiritual growth and contemplation, finding solace in Christ’s love. Sunday T. Saheed explores life, death, heritage and legacy in his lyrical poem. Steven Hill reflects on how each moment of our lives is in a way, a “loan” and should not be taken for granted.
Chukwuma Eke Pacella comments on the complex inner psyches of boys and men as well as women in thoughtful meditations on gender and human equality. Anderson Moses probes our relationship with our bodies in pieces that touch on heritage and spirituality.
Mahbub writes of various kinds of afflictions and dangers our world faces, but reminds us of our potential for acts of kindness, such as his rescue from drowning in a pond as a small child.
MOMENTS
For those who leave us too soon.
At that moment, when the cup is full of warm tears that flow.
Flowing from my heart in that moment it is the tears that keep me.
Moments when the tears flow into my cup of sadness at night.
It is in that moment when the world falls away and there are tears.
Tears keep me company into the night into the morning sun warms.
These are the moments when there makes no sense to my senses.
Listening to your voice come to me you fall asleep in my arms.
Tears are for that moment, and you are not gone for a moment.
You are not gone from me more than a moment in my life.
FAITH THROUGH THE SNOW
Heavenly Father through Jesus your son.
Faith has not ceased in the winter snows.
Snows of disappointment of life’s bitterness.
Through the loss of hope in the world of man.
During confusing times of doubt, he came.
Carrying me to El Shaddai your mountain.
Your mountain in which lies above the clouds.
Above the mighty seas that would cover me.
Jesus comes to carry my soul gently into eternity.
Sorrows would swallow me without thy mercy.
Thru thy mighty breath life shall return to me.
Your light shines upon me by your love and grace.
Grace giving thru your tender mercy for my soul
ALONE with GOD one AFTERNOON
For Olga Shearer
My heart rest sitting in the Sanctuary alone.
A cross reminder of Jesus’ Resurrection.
An afternoon when there is contentment to live.
It is the solitude of devotion to the Heavenly Father.
Quietly smelling the sweetness of life come to me.
This sweetness has touched me many times.
“Heavenly Father, alone with you there is peace within.
A fragrance of Heaven in the air this afternoon with you.
An aroma that humbles me in solitude only found with you.
A reminder of your grace and mercy have given for my soul.”
LIGHT FROM A DISTINCT STAR
For Ms. Sherly, you have given me comfort.
My merciful Father has given me grace since the beginning.
A soul gave contrition for life which was grace seen or unseen.
This penance is given by me for gratitude in Jesus’s name.
My pleas were heard by you and deliverance came upon me.
Heavenly Father there is silence in my whole being for you.
Never did my soul forget your loving spirit imparted in me.
Your grace with mercy for a life-giving for me.
Silence to remember what it was like before time.
Connected to all that was of grace for me to live.
Now heaven has been restored and peace comes
A chapel in which Jesus comes giving me comfort.
Jesus’ resurrection allows me to be covered in eternity.
Wikimedia Commons, taken on an OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Fabricated Ruins:
The Palace of Fine Arts and the Californian Dream
“No more land! We can't go any further
‘cause there ain't no more land!”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
I am writing to determine what it is about the Palace of Fine Arts which led Reyner Banham to remark: “I went to see it more or less on a ‘duty’ list of San Francisco monuments and was staggered by an impact, comparable to that of the Basilica of Maxentius.” Bernard Maybeck begins his pamphlet, Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon (1915): “In discussing a subject such as that of making plans for a World's Fair, it is necessary to assume that the hearers admit there are mental processes not to be expressed in language.”1 He omits the Palace’s construction, referring only to its effects upon the mind. Stone and wood relate to architecture as keys and strings to music. What compels an architect to say this? What crumbling testament to Californian endurance could he build, which led us for a century to preserve it?
Maybeck spent his earliest years as a furniture-maker’s apprentice in Greenwich Village, then to the École des Beaux-Arts at nineteen. He went by Ben. There, in the atelier of Louis-Jules André, he learned the heft of form. He made a neat drawing on clean Whatman paper. “Beautiful,” André said; “Now study it.” Maybeck wondered what he meant. André worked over the lines with a soft pencil until the paper was black.3 T-squares, rulers and calipers practically disappear from Maybeck’s work thereafter. He planned according to a French principle: if the form “were reduced in scale to the size of a golden brooch…in Venetian cloisonné jewelry, that brooch thus made would pass as the regular thing in jewelry without causing the suspicion that it represented a plan for a World’s Fair.” It is a temple borne of space and mass rubbed, erased, and molded, a hand-hewn stage set in classical balance. Frank Morton Todd deemed this costume-jeweled manse “the most divinely beautiful building ever reared in America.”4 How could a vainer aim yield a nobler form?
Predictably, Maybeck was excluded from the planning board and rejected from all competitions. He’d never so much as built a warehouse. He was fifty and destitute. At the pleading of his wife, his former student Willis Polk hired him as a draftsman. Polk chaired the board. Displeased with his design, he held an in-house competition for the most important building of the fair. He awarded Maybeck the job on the basis of a single charcoal drawing. His wife held, more realistically, that Polk was too busy to do the job himself. He set to cast Piranesi’s etchings of Roman ruin. From every angle men wither, worlds molder, outlines marred by sure hands. Beauty alone endures, time-stripped of its maker. He set the Palace behind a bog which Polk had planned to cover, and carved from the bog a lagoon. It gathers and reflects a light—at plum dusk and red dawn, in clearness and in haze—which moves “sadness to content.”5 It was, after all, a fair. Gloom would not serve its goers. Funds denied a bridge; you take an oblique and winding way around the shore, between hot columns and under cool trees. In his later years Maybeck would cite the absence of a straight path to the Palace as the reason for its success.
It is among the last buildings erected for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the only one which survives. The fair celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal and the city’s recovery from the earthquake and fire nine years prior. It saw 19,000,000 people in ten months, among them Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Charlie Chaplin and the Liberty Bell. Funds comprised six million dollars in donations, five million in state bonds, and five million in city taxes. Engineers lay a 635-acre site from bay mud flats where the posh Marina now stands; if not for the fair, the district would not exist. The Palace was a transient space of transient stuff, plaster and burlap on a frame of laths intended as respite from the strain of galleries and popcorn barkers. Upon seeing it, Thomas Edison declared that “The man that designed that building is a genius.”6 It is as popular now as it then was: it is always a strenuous and usually an impossible task to contemplate the most divinely beautiful building ever reared in America without appearing in the background of a wedding or family photo. People walk through this staid suspension of boom and waste as they have done for a century, wondering at the folly of men and the brevity of life with ice cream in hand.
It is a Greek temple in the Roman style: a 100-foot rotunda (never mind that the Greeks did not have domes) held by eight Corinthian columns and framed by colonnades arcing toward a 1100-foot pergola. Planter boxes mount them. Weeping women mount each corner. Maybeck wanted vines watered by their tears and ringed by redwoods; funds allowed for neither. At each corner of the attic stands a large and largely nude woman peering inward with arms akimbo and offering a sotto in sù of her buttocks. Broken pediments cap the niches, with clay urns above and behind. Beneath and around the dome, battle friezes in Greek relief by Bruno Zimm. Behind it a crescent-shaped gallery of 114 concrete rooms, from Renaissance to (to public horror) Futurist. The trash cans and fire alarms were painted ochre.
Cypress, acacia, and willow line and shroud the temple. It is a dignity overgrown and gone in the teeth, a Versailles half-marble and half-shrub. A brief bright smell of lilies and a mute play of swans about the lagoon strays the senses from children and cars. Plaster allowed for any finish, hewn stucco or smooth marble, but doomed the whole to rot. Signatures were gathered (33,000) and money solicited ($350,000) to preserve it before the Exposition closed in December. The original demand was its duplication in Golden Gate Park. Phoebe Hearst—William’s mother—led the effort. When the fair cleared, the Palace alone was spared. A visitor remarked that it was impossible not to see it aright:7 even as it cracks, placid blues above and wavering shades about relieve the form from its tautness. The city sent armed guards to prevent demolition. Maybeck insisted that it was the most he could have done to build something that wouldn’t get in the way of the water and trees; all else “the public was bribed to like.”8 Once, in Paris, mounting a white sheet, André stopped his pen: “You will never do better.”9
Professional criticism was as unanimous as public support. Architects used a two-slide technique to expose the influence of one building upon another. The whole begged the very origin of European architecture but reflected no particulars: the columns are squat and piers lanky, the proportions are nearly Greek and the forms nearly Roman, the radius is not the rotunda but the lagoon, so that the Palace seems to widen into water. The stage-set classicism was tawdry enough to belie Maybeck’s Beaux-Arts training and eclectic enough to resist recognition. However sound the Palace seemed “on the ground,” there was “nothing to show on the other screen.”12 Form did not follow form. Others, with better intention and worse consequence, argued that precisely because the form was meant to spoil, it should not be judged by permanent standards. But despite its brevity, the form is as sound as any classical or modern ideal: what led Banham to proclaim the Palace, on the basis of these corpulent ladies, crafted friezes and curving colonnades, “the truest ancestor on American soil of Mies van der Rohe's essential buildings of the 1950s”? Only “the discipline of their use and location”:10 as Mies structures form around its negative details, so Maybeck builds a ruin that he may center the land around.
He wrote, in a 1957 telegram to Governor Knight, that “The Palace of Fine Arts is probably the last of the traditional pieces of architecture to survive the modern age.”11 He died that year. Public opinion held that the ruin should remain one permanently. Maybeck held that “the main building should be torn down and redwoods planted around—completely around—the rotunda. Redwoods grow fast, you know. And as they grow, the columns of the rotunda would slowly crumble, at approximately the same speed. Then I would like to design an altar, with the figure of a maiden praying, to install in that grove of redwoods. I should like my Palace to die behind those great trees of its own accord, and become its own cemetery.”12
The San Francisco Art Association maintained the Palace. It was a city park after World War One. It became a Park Department warehouse, then a phone book distribution center, then a flag and tent depot, then a fire station. Statues fell and murals faded; the W.P.A. commissioned artists to repair it. Vines grew to cover the planters left bare. The weeping women were meant to represent the subjection of Art to materialism. Vandals beheaded them. The gallery held eighteen lighted tennis courts from 1934 to 1942. The Army used it as a motor pool during World War Two. It crumbled. The city fenced it off as a public hazard. In 1959, the state offered $2 million for restoration if San Francisco would match it. The city faltered. A philanthropist, Walter Johnson, donated and did not stop donating until his death in 1978. He wed his wife Mabel the year before the exposition; the Palace was their favorite spot. The contract was signed in 1964.
Molds were made of every detail, concrete casts of every form. Steel l-beams held the Palace. It cost ten times the original. It opened with several days of “concerts, folk dances, organ recitals, films, lectures, and sound-and-light shows” in 1967,13 ten years after Maybeck’s death. A theatre was built behind it, an echo of the gallery. It has hosted everyone from Timothy Leary to Henry Kissinger and Akira Kurosawa to the Clancy Brothers, everything from the 1976 Presidential Debate to the Cerebral Palsy Telethon. It was a slated homeless quarantine during the shelter-in-place orders of 2020; after a few too many press releases with thread-and-tape floor mats and nary a bathroom in sight, the city reneged. It is a monument to 107 years of industry misnamed, pragmatism misplaced, and fortune misspent.
Maybeck concludes his pamphlet with his belief that the Palace expresses “the life of the people of California” and has California as “its geographic reason for being.” The form could not have held “in Boston or in India”14 because it echoes what holds it. But this seems odd. The prior twelve pages describe it as a sad lone ruin, deliberately excluding mention of place or time. Why the abrupt transition from ephemeral gloom to permanent glory? One has only to see the Palace to know that ruin is as much the limit of its survival as its condition. No wonder Maybeck wanted redwoods planted around the columns, which would grow at the same rate that they crumbled. The frontispiece is a marble Muse finding the head of Orpheus, who charmed stones with his music and coaxed cannibals to live on fruit. Art in its purest form was for him abstinence from murder. For all the dreams which Maybeck sets in stone, above the facts of life which help and hinder mere survival, this dream is survival. This is indeed a very a Californian belief: that survival lay in one’s doomed commitments, in one’s attempt, like Orpheus, to retrieve the dead, which slip inasmuch as we try to seize them. It is a wagon-trail pathos, with removal the only panacea one has to employ against time. A four-panel mural depicted the birth of Art on the dome’s underside. It begins with the four golds of California: wheat, citrus, poppies, and gold. Each has seen its crisis. The panels end with a Ming legend of earth wresting visions from air. The dream endures; the forms by which we hold it do not.
It is not these—not “the object or the likeness to the object” which Maybeck sought—but “a portrayal of the life that is behind the visible.”15 It is a specious stubbornness which takes as much stock in the dream as it denies the forms by which one holds it, a deliberate doggedness which sets its sights to the far and wide for fear that basements would burn and skyscrapers fall about one's ears. All cures and no disease to belie them. The colonnade bears nothing, the rotunda shelters no one. Todd could not see the Palace “without feeling an onrush, an assault, of ideas. And they were not orthodox ideas, no conventional, parlor ideas, but rough, brutal, Darwinian, evolutionary ones.”16 The men fight and muse, the women hold and mourn. It is a peculiarly Western incapability of sundering design from dream. In the rest of the country people know that if yours doesn’t grow where it’s planted, it begs a new frontier. Precisely because California is the culmination of that perpetual clean slate, people stay because nowhere else remains. When there is no more land to cross, you settle or go backward.
Many a Californian has explained to me something about the will to move on and endure. I had always taken it as a will to flee and forgo, and still cannot distinguish between the two. Louis Mullgardt, a member of the planning commission, recalled as many San Franciscans who foresaw a renaissance of the city on the eve of its destruction as those who “hastily bade farewell to the still smoking ruins of the City That Was, firmly believing that it should remain forever buried in its own ashes.”17 It is a frontier ethic which resorts to optimism in the trails and cannibalism in the passes, bearing children and planting wheat in the troughs with no time and space apart for rest and remembrance. While one forgets the nearness of everyday things amid these urns and yews, they stand only that the everyday may hold.
Maybeck knew that “the artist began his work a long time ago in a nebulous haze of whys”18 and he must work a long time before he realizes that he does not seize the object at all but the reason he wrought it. An architect finds beauty as readily in the face of wood as a painter does the face of man. He confessed that he had never been an architect, that he had only liked one line better than another. The Palace was borne of lines smudged, smeared, and sculpted; like the Basilica of Maxentius it betrays the clean of the chisel only from afar, and even then blurred in fog. Todd writes that if we could “stand there a hundred years while swamp growth swathed its piers and plinths, while willows and acacias choked its portals, grasses dug into its urns and ivy over-ran its cornices and dimmed its lines,” the beauty would hold “above all other physical possessions.”19 None would see it now and think him wrong. It bears the worlds of fact and dream alike, elevating brute survival above the forces which would threaten it. But it is as much a dream that one can endure only in decay as that one can endure apart from decay. It is by its ruin that this monument to Californian survival still stands.
This is the reason for its hold, and is itself the dream, and as a dream an illusion. The real causes of Californian survival—eastern commerce, federal subsidies, native genocides—were clean absent from the Palace and subsequent accounts. Although it commanded the most support of the fair, no artwork garnered more applause than James Earle Fraser’s The End of the Trail. It depicts an Indian with endurance worn and bowed; he, on a horse as weary as he, searches in vain for a clear path. No wonder that a monument to Western self-reliance should evoke the ruins of Rome. Where else remains to go?
Endnotes
1 Reyner Banham, “The Plot against Bernard Maybeck,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 43, no. 1 (1984): 37.
2 Bernard Maybeck, Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon, introduction by Frank Morton Todd (San
Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915), 4.
3 Peterson, Charles E. “A Visit with Bernard Maybeck,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 11, no. 3 (1952): 31.
4 Maybeck, vii.
5 Sara Denise Shreve, “A History Worth Saving: The Palace of Fine Arts and the Interpretation of History on a Reconstructed Site,” MA diss. Cornell University, 2006, 7.
6 Keith L. Eggener, “Maybeck’s Melancholy: Architecture, Empathy, Empire and Mental Illness at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, 4 (1994): 218.
7 Banham, 36.
8 Richard Reinhardt, “Bernard Maybeck,” American Heritage 32, no. 5 (1981).
9 Ben Macomber, “The Palace of Fine Arts and its Exhibit, with Awards” in The Jewel City, San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915.
10 Ibid., 37.
11 Shreve, 76.
12 Ibid., 75.
13 Reinhardt.
14 Maybeck, 13.
15 Eggener, 217.
16 Ibid., 221.
17 Alexander Ortenberg, “Joy in the Act of Drawing: Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 1 (2011): 42.
18 Maybeck, 6.
19 Ortenberg, 40.
Works Cited
Banham, Reyner. “The Plot against Bernard Maybeck.” Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 43, no. 1 (1984): 33-37.
Eggener, Keith L. Maybeck’s Melancholy: Architecture, Empathy, Empire and Mental Illness at
the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.” Winterthur Portfolio 29, 4 (1994):
211-226.
Peterson, Charles E. “A Visit with Bernard Maybeck.” Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 11, no. 3 (1952): 30-31.
Macomber, Ben. “The Palace of Fine Arts and its Exhibit, with Awards” in The Jewel City. San
Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915. http://www.books-about-california.com/Pages/
The_Jewel_City/The_Jewel_City_Chap_12.html.
Maybeck, Bernard. Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon, introduction by Frank Morton Todd. San
Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915.
Ortenberg, Alexander. “Joy in the Act of Drawing: Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts.” Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 1 (2011): 38-63.
Reinhardt, Richard. “Bernard Maybeck.” American Heritage 32, no. 5 (1981).
https://www.americanheritage.com/bernard-maybeck.
Shreve, Sara Denise. “A History Worth Saving: The Palace of Fine Arts and the Interpretation of
History on a Reconstructed Site.” MA diss. Cornell University, 2006.
Palace of Fine Arts, photographed by Joseph A. Baird Jr., Historic American Buildings Survey, 1956.
The City Holds My Heart
Conversations with Independent Filmmaker Ahmad Abdalla
There are films about cities and cities that need to be archived in films. Ahmad Abdalla’s filmography is a long tale about lost cities and their citizens trying to gather their broken pieces among the ruins. Whether it’s simply a suburb in Heliopolis, a decaying art scene in Microphone, a journey on the outskirts of a politically torn Cairo in Rags and Tatters, or the harsh, unnerving Cairo nightlife in Exterior/Night, Ahmad’s heroes and heroines are on a personal conquest to search the self and the city. The only time he made an intrinsic journey, escaping the vastness of cities to the intricate details of one’s inner-city a.k.a home and identity was in Décor. I had the pleasure of interviewing Ahmad Abdalla, whose films fascinated me, I saw two of them in the movie theater, one with my family and the other with a man I loved, both films still resonate within, not just because of the quality and the distinct style with which he makes movies, but because he knows how to dig deep into the subject at hand without getting too sentimental about it.
Ahmad Abdalla is an Egyptian filmmaker who originally studied music and was a pioneer in non-linear editing which he taught himself as part of his passion to become a director someday. He was a key player in the so-called Egyptian independent cinema wave which uses limited resources, outside a major studio, defies traditional storytelling and directorial techniques, relies on personal stories and -mostly- unknown actors or regular actors, although many movie stars opt for an independent film if they believe in the key message or the theme. Many cinephiles and Egyptian film critics have argued against the modern Egyptian independent cinema as a wave of sorts, partly because it lacks vision or it relies on funds and script development programs that align films in similar directions and themes.
I chatted with Ahmad via Zoom, during a world still railing under the ambiguity of the COVID pandemic in 2021. His voice was friendly and tactical, carrying his inquisitive methodology as seen in his movie, yet laced with the sympathetic lens through which he views his subjects,
“Even a freelance artist struggles, they are left to the whims of whatever is going on in the world. Like a candle in the wind, they are left to the chances and the global socioeconomic implications of a constantly changing world.”
Egyptian actress Mona Hala from the movie Exterior/Night
Watching Ahmad’s movies up until Exterior/Night has been a throwback experience, a view-from-the-top, bird’s eye style of Egypt we have known and impeccably misunderstood. He archived a critical state in post-2011 Egypt to create a mesh of ideological, religious, and social chaotic visions from individuals who found themselves at the mercy of a world between vigor and decay.
Ahmad Abdalla has been introduced to the Egyptian film scene as an indie filmmaker, whose films are more niche than mainstream. His films were never box office hits, but they gradually blossomed into cult classics which increased in popularity as they aged, like a fine bottle of Château de Granville. Microphone and Heliopolis became these quotable, shareable internet content. Songs from Microphone despite their success back in the ravishing post-2011 days, have seen even more recent success as youths started witnessing the dying days of the Alexandria underground art scene. Was it because the state of the city itself was lost? Alexandria and Cairo now are two different entities from when they were back then, what does Ahmad think of this,
“Change is part of the game, the graffiti that appears in Microphone is all about the concept of graffiti as an art form itself. Graffiti is there to be subconsciously removed and then redrawn again. This is part of the identity of the city. Change is the only constant. When I made Microphone back in 2010, many films were shot in Alexandria at the same time and were more concerned with the nostalgic aspect of the city and its cosmopolitan past, but this was the last thing on our mind. We were more interested in the people who lived there at the time and where they were headed. Films are supposed to look beyond the current condition of the city. However, if people look back at the city through Microphone and feel nostalgic, this is something I could understand. It resembles people now watching Darbet Shams [by Mohamed Khan] and feeling nostalgic as Nour El Sherif -the main lead- drives his motorcycle across Abdel Monem Riyadh Square and witnesses the All-Saints’ Cathedral before it was demolished. Visuals change but what remains at the heart of the film is the story. Are people able to resonate with it or not? Are the vibes of what the city was similar to the vibes that are buzzing in its recent form? In my case, I believe I have retained those vibes.”
The short movie The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal by Matt McCormick came to mind after Ahmad’s speech, but also his view on cities and whether they retain their souls despite all the interchangeable energies and shifts. One main topic that I wanted to discuss with him was the vibrant Alexandria rap scene which in Microphone was infantile, slowly testing the waters and attracting young listeners and now it’s become a solid genre with constant followers, rabid fans, and emerging sub-genres,
“Yes, the rap scene has changed completely in Alexandria but it’s still there. Not much graffiti is being produced but a lot of visual artists emerged and are currently starting their exhibitions whether virtual or in more spacious, welcoming art galleries. The art remains but it took a different form and shape from what it was before, and that’s the nature of things. Had we shot Microphone in the 60s for example, we would have captured the Greek and Western music scene that was active in Alexandria in San Stefano Casino. In 2010, those Greek bands were replaced by alternative music bands such as Soot Fel Zahma and Massar Egbari. Had we shot the movie these days, it would have introduced us to rappers such as Wegz and Marwan Pablo. Our modern times are defined by the agile transformation phase. If you watch a movie shot in the 60s-70s you would barely notice how the city evolved, probably only through the evolution of vehicles. However, if I showed you how the Alexandrian corniche looked like four years ago, it would shock you how much has changed.”
Ahmad created three distinct and divergent journeys in Heliopolis and Exterior/Night. While the first was a personal ode, an individual journey of a certain habitant of the elegant Cairo self-titled suburb, the second was a requiem for the Egyptian intellectual middle class, a journey where they burst out of their existential bubbles into the dark side of the city. On the other hand, Rags and Tatters exhibited a minimalist, semi-documentary style using minimum resources and harsh lighting, telling the story of an escaped convict on the outskirts of a Cairo boiling with rage and political unrest in 2011,
“I consider every film a journey. All my films are about people trying to find their place in the world; specifically in the city, whether to have a voice, to be an artist, or as simple as finding a roof over their head to stay after coming out of prison, like in Rags and Tatters. I try to see it [the city] through their eyes. And it is usually a reflection of how I saw the city at a particular moment in time. I made Heliopolis with an approach similar to how I lived my life at the time. This was the narrative that intrigued me back then, and it’s a very personal film for me, made about people I’ve known in real life and issues that concerned me as an artist and individual. I made it to retell stories that had been told to me as a way of archiving these tales. When films are made they become a mesh of my vision and how I saw what happened at the time, not necessarily how it happened exactly. And [you] as a viewer, the films become a mesh of your vision as well. Your narrative is intertwined with mine, and as we talk about the film right after its release the conversation would be different from talking about it ten years later. In the end [my heroes] are people trying to find where they fit in the city, during their journey we see the city from a lens within the moment that the filmmaker decided to capture it. That’s not just me, I think. Every serious filmmaker trying to make a movie and deciding to shoot in the street and not in a closed location would have similar hauntings and views about cities. Take Land of Dreams by Daoud Abdel Sayed for example which was also shot in Heliopolis -by the way, Daoud lives there- and how it reflected the filmmaker’s vision about the city at the time through the tale itself.”
In Ahmad’s films, cities are haunted by ghosts of past relationships and exes. It could be almost found in every movie he made. In Exterior/Night, there’s the ghost of Mo’s ex Mai; a recurring presence throughout the film whether in the dialogue, like a low-res photo or through their WhatsApp chats. Khaled’s ex Hadeer shows up in Microphone as part of the non-linear narrative in scenes from Khaled’s past that juxtapose back and forth with his present, cementing her haunting existence in his psyche as an insurmountable memory that does not go away with time. In Heliopolis, Naglaa -Ibrahim’s ex- is a dominant presence in his conversations with friends, his interview subjects, and through her haunting voice message at the end of the film.
Yosra El-Lozy and Hany Adel getting directions from Ahmad Abdalla on the set of “Heliopolis”
This makes Ahmad’s movies an interwoven narrative of the Adult-Child trope, which makes adulthood so different and unattainable from when it was a decade before. Films like The Worst Person in the World, Frances Ha, and tick,
tick...BOOM! show what it’s like for adults to go through their 30s without accomplishing anything, where resolutions and settling down are parts of the big ol’ mystery that their parents and generations before had. Ahmad joins the clubs with his haunted cities, hesitant characters, forced heroes, and love stories that don’t die,
“I firmly believe that romantic relationships are the things that reveal us the most, and the most accurate way to see the world. Relationships with all their bittersweet memories, brutalities, and wonders open doors inside us more than anything else in the world. On a personal level, each long feature that I created was inspired by the post-breakup phase in my life. These are where my creative levels soar. At the time when the breakup washes off, I find myself looking back at it, wanting to revel in the details, and see where I am in the aftermath. In the middle of this discovery stage, I find myself learning more about the reality of things, and how the world works. Relationships resemble a cave where you have been spending days on end and suddenly the door opens and you find yourself out there in the world. Many critics have written that in my movies there’s an obsession with unfulfilled love or unresolved relationships. I believe that we are all obsessed with that. It’s just that we are not used to writing or expressing it. Our hunger to seek these romantic urges, and fulfilling what might have appeared as a fulfilled love story is what drives us to change our lives ultimately.”
Art is a strange being, it hits you in the sorest spots, at the time when you least expect it. When I first watched Exterior/Night it felt like I couldn’t relate to any of the characters. That was one year ago, and now, it feels like I’m the female version of Mo, an artist so consumed with his ego and inner world that he retreats into it further and further as the years go by. Mo has become the mold of the intellectual unable to mingle with the masses, yet so thrown off the art scene that his existence became subconsciously attached to his characters. As he dozes off or daydreams, he becomes the poor peasant hero of his film, for which he might never find a producer or an actor. Ahmad is a realistic dreamer, an artist who sees the world for what it is, he doesn’t fool himself but also cannot sacrifice his artistic vision for the sake of earning his dime as an artist.
The same artistic obsession could be found in Décor, a fairytale in reverse of an independent woman who dreams of domesticity and a simpler life. Again Ahmad returns to artists who are forced to seek a less than glamorous, rebellious artistic path but this time the heroine, Maha, yearns for a life that has been completely rejected by a woman of her path and craft. She is an art director on the set of a commercial film who struggles against doing her job and making a living as an artist. Yet deep-rooted in her psyche is a traditional Egyptian woman pining for the safety of a normal, apple-pie life. It’s the first actual female protagonist that Ahmad pushes to the front to lead his film narrative,
“Let me tell you why I make films in the first place. Only my last two films were written by someone other than myself. I’m not interested in piling up films in my filmography, although it has a financial significance for me since making films is my main source of income and I have no other monetary source for my living. I don’t do advertisements or direct TV series but I still make movies only because at this particular stage in my life there’s an issue that haunts me and I want to express it. At the time of making Heliopolis [as I told you], I was so emotionally charged and I wanted to insert it into this tale with all my power. The same goes for Microphone, the first time I met Aya Tarek [Alexandrian painter, street artist, and illustrator] and the musicians I was dazzled by their world of artistry as if I entered a different portal. I never thought I would be able to meet these people and make a movie about them. Microphone was supposed to be a documentary at first which is why I consider it a docufiction with scenes from the initial documentary inserted within the fiction film format.
Still from “Décor” featuring Horreya Farghaly and Majid Al-Kidwany
Décor is not much different from my other films, but it came at a certain stage in my life where I questioned the concept of choices; whether choosing between two things meant that we were free to make those kinds of decisions? For me choosing between two things was a fragile and very limiting concept. So when I read Sherine and Mohamed Diab’s script it piqued my interest, in addition to my passion to make a movie that paid homage to Egyptian classic noir films [e.g. those directed by Kamal El-Sheikh]. This question coincided with one that hovered over my psyche at the time so I knew I had to make this film. There’s also a quote by Yousry Nasrallah [famed Egyptian director] that I love: Egyptian cinema died when it stopped telling women’s stories and this also made me more compelled to make a film where the narrative was female-centric since it didn’t happen a lot these days. I was amazed by the script when it got passed to me and had to sink my teeth in it.”
The Egyptian cinema died when it stopped telling women’s stories. Ahmad’s -in that case Yousry’s quote- stopped me midsentence and I asked Ahmed to elaborate,
“I believe that has to do with how conceiving the female box office star changed in Egypt in the last decade. In the past, moviegoers paid to watch Nabila Ebied and Nadia Elguindy on the big screen. Nabila and Nadia’s audiences were predominantly women, if you looked closely at photos of movie theaters from that era you would find women flooding to see their films. However, the New Comedy wave which started at the beginning of the 2000s and rocked Egyptian cinemas like a hurricane was purely male-dominated. Female characters only resorted to secondary roles, filling plot holes that boosted the male character’s narrative. It started shyly at the beginning until it became a staple as the New Comedy wave progressed.”
Ahmad’s heroes are people struggling with their identities. It’s them against, not just the world, but their obsessions and fears. Their unfulfilled creative paths and their unsteady steps echo a generation of millennials who have not yet achieved their societal or economic successes. Ahmad is not interested in showing the lives of artists who made it, since he believes in the journey and not the destination, and as all of his heroes have not done anything special with their lives, they are eternal lost souls in the great Labyrinth of modern Egypt,
“With Exterior/Night, my friend Sherif ElAlfy [the scriptwriter] told me about an idea based on his personal experience and together we sat down and discovered many questions that tackled deep into both our worlds such as the modern world of the intellectual burgeois as reflected in our main protagonist, Mo. But as the film progressed it became about Toto, the prostitute. However, to be more loyal to the story I had to tell it from Mo’s POV. Exterior/Night was what I saw happening in Cairo at the time and how I wanted to show it. I wanted to make it a commentary on the nature of relationships between men and women in Egypt which was mainly governed by class, religion, and cultural background.”
Still from “Microphone”
It's strange how Ahmad saw the world. People who never thought they would grow into the lives they saw their parents live. Adults who resist the life of adults, and try to rebel against it only to realize they are not teenagers anymore and get sucked back into the adult life. In one scene in Heliopolis, Ali watches as his fiancé Maha contemplates buying another fridge, and in an unexpected move attempts to flee and abandon her, probably calling the whole marriage off, only to change his mind and join her reluctantly. A subtle scene that captures the spirit of a generation; the lost kids of the late 80s/90s after they got handed responsibilities and became adults despite their infatuation with the Peter Pans they once were. On his familiarity with the stories he tells and the worlds he creates, Ahmad states,
“I don’t make movies about worlds I am not familiar with. Many people pass on scripts to me and the plot alienates me so I decline to do that. Even the crew behind the camera, at least in my first three films have been in my life for as long as I can remember. As for actors’ choices, most of them are my friends in real life. Throughout this safe zone of mutual understanding, we can play together and try as many approaches as we can to the scenes or the acting. Décor is a different story, it was the first time that I worked on a script that I didn’t write while being backed up by a major production company with a big budget. That’s why I wanted to work outside my comfort zone and work with artists from the world of the mainstream movie market. That’s what happened with Horreya [former beauty queen and high-profile Egyptian actress] whom I loved before our artistic collaboration. She studied her role faithfully and we were able to communicate perfectly during shooting. I think she was great and she brought a freshness to the role that I don’t think anybody else could have done better. In Exterior/Night I paid great attention to picking the actor who would play Mo. He had to look the part of an Upper Middle-Class Egyptian intellectual bourgeois.
There was no one better than Karim Kassem whose francophone and family background made him the perfect match. Karim is a great actor, and his subtle acting method could be one of the reasons he is not getting well-deserved attention.”
During our conversation, I made a point to wonder about the craft of acting itself. How some promising young actors are sometimes cast aside, living their whole creative lives in the shadows. I mentioned a specific Egyptian actor, Amr Abed who played a minor role in Exterior/Night showing unmistakable buried talent yet never getting the exposure that he was worthy of,
“Unfortunately our industry [cinema] depends on luck, specifically for actors. You have to be in the right place at the right time. You have to get the right exposure. Some actors are not that lucky to get that kind of exposure, regardless of their talent, and there is a sort of sticking to safe casting choices. However, talent usually conquers, especially if there are filmmakers who are open to searching for these specific talents and seeking them in person without resorting to the easy options.”
Ahmad’s main purpose as an artist was self-expression, whether the medium was writing, photography, or filmmaking. It didn’t come as a surprise that he was not keen on watching as many films as he could. From what I saw, Ahmad tamed the medium to fit his narrative, filmmaking was one of many methods by which he could exist through stories that he was telling,
“People who are close to me know that I’m not a major movie buff in the sense of the word. I go to the movie theater to enjoy a blockbuster and my taste in terms of movie favoritism is purely commercial, believe it or not. I’m not concerned with cinema as an art form, but more with the art of self-expression and using filmmaking as a means to convey that.”
Ahmad was born to create whether through the lens of a handheld camera or in the air-conditioned corners of a photography exhibition in Zamalek. The world will see more of his creativity through the terms he dictates as a self-immersed independent artist truly representative of our modern times.
HOPE: A HAIKU!
Hope it’s you and me
it’s a light so bright so bright
it is a pure gold.
HOPE: A HAIKU!
Hope is like a light
It’s a little light you can see
Hope is Happiness
By Aurora Brown, age 9, 3rd grade,
Alexandria, Virginia
Lunching LlamasMe and My ShadowMore FishOld FriendSpringtime Friend
My paintings and digital paintings have graced two galleries, served as covers for more than half of a dozen publications, and been incorporated, alongside my poetry, in in One-Handed Pianist (Hekate Publishing, 2021). These days, I party with the imaginary hedgehogs I met in midlife, write about the foibles of parenting, teach online courses to emerging writers the world over, and deign to use color and shape to express feelings. There may not be anything new under the sun, but Granny can share with youngins various ways to secure their bonnets. After all, exposure to feral ideas remains important.
How To Start
I cannot start
without the dagger pain of a wooden splinter
cored deep and burrowing in the dark.
Bearded dog, limping Cuckoo wasp, the painted
canvases are tumbling dominoes
but I cannot start.
Once I wandered onto property that was not mine
and an old man came screaming up
on a swastika-stamped ATV and the damp moss
spat his beliefs in my eyes, and I was startled
by a mind that was not mine.
I could start then.
Her Body
She lifts her body with her body,
moves her body with her body, sits down
on a hard mahogany chair that holds her body
while she tends to her body, as it is a creature
that needs be tended. Cutting lentils
and cooking rice to sustain her body,
boiling water, infusing safflower
that will quench her body, her body
moving her fingers (a part of her body)
with fine finesse and ease. She thinks
nothing of this marvelousness
that is her body; her body
is a sack which carries her brain around
which is also a part of her body,
wishes she could be without it, contemplates
the necessity of fingernails and earlobes.
She navigates the stairs with her body
that was built by bodies
with the help of machines and tools
that were imagined and designed by bodies,
who sweated, labored, debated
and shaped them alive like art. She enters
with her body, exits with her body,
works with her body, talks
with her body, embraces with her body,
treats it like a garden bush,
keeping it satisfied in its self-containing self.
Her body is the ultimate instrument,
that could even make other bodies
if she so chose; in her womb,
with her body, and the brief assistance
of another body, she can form a being.
(She does not consider much
how this is an attribute of gods.)
She lifts her body to reach the books
on the top shelf, lies her body with her body
onto her bed that cradles her body,
an idea her body came up with
to reconfigure itself. And so
she dreams in her body,
sees orbs and faces and feels pine needles
and loses time and place and law.
Her body is a distant echo; for seven hours
she is more than her body and she likes this,
she thinks this is a miraculous feat.
When she wakes she is a body again.
She rouses her body, walks her body
to the kitchen with her body,
to the kettle with her body, her body
a marvel, to be sure, her body
a majesty of cells and electrical impulses
and movements of bone and lore.
She counts her dollars, heads
to the grocery store, buys a vegetable body,
smells it, feels its leathery hide, wonders
if a potato is aware it has a body,
she walks alone the five city blocks
back home, considering only
the consciousness of the sky.
Dead Finches
They say the bird is a messenger.
Two finches die in a heatwave but who’s around?
The folding and unfolding skies twiddle
with my heart-ends, my valves summer yellow,
chambers blanketed in snow. Again
a lover sends down the rains, but all I get
are rasping gulls with shrieks that puncture sleeps
as musky as cow pastures, as heavy as gold.
My messengers are in procession down the nave
of a church with no one but straw dolls in the pews.
Birds die everyday. I’ve broken bottles
with more than liquid in them. In mourning
there’s a need for a story (even if cruel).
Words unwritten are words unused.
The Play
The curtain rises, and there are faux-animals
human beings dressed in gowns
of lions, elk, cicadas, foxes, toucans
whales on their stomachs moaning upon the floor
so they sway, declare they are grass blades
heaped together, a meadow, a symphony
and yes, they are singing
singing with not just their mouths dressed
as maws and bills and proboscises but with their eyes
their arms, their bellies, their hands
they are trying to tell the story
the story of what it means
to be on an oblate ball of clay alone
orbiting its way through unrelenting space
and what it means, they tell, of how they all lean
together upon one another's shoulders
how they have sex with each other
eat each other
die and will head
into the same soily, cool bed
how they fear and love each other
and are pulled
arrested
driven by yearnings and cravings
to rub against, break things open
watch it, see it, touch it, all of it, grow, change
it all so painful, heavenly, astronomical
so they sing, of when they first realized
that they could not leave, that they, all as one
existed on an island, and if it goes
they all go, gulped by an exhalation of energy
dark matter and quantum particles
and together they begin to act out the end
by suddenly spinning like tops
they fall into and over each other, calling out
hollering roars and coos and clicks and baas
and gasps and cries that are human
and taking off their pelts, as humans
they collapse, impact, all as one, to the stage
except the whales, they merely roll onto their backs
and reach their flippers up toward
the lights shining above, and this theater
all the way to the back rows and utmost rafters
is silent as a tomb.
Shake
All things rattle to your touch.
You are an earthquake, with feelers for the moon.
Monsignori pray for you. Playwrights scratch out
the tremor that takes place inside your pen;
little things make you quiver,
like lost daughters, dead pets, gone friends.
As the mother hen you bear the egg.
As the second youngest of the Babe and the Pop
your shoulders shake from all the wave of
Seven Sibling Wonders who came.
You stick to shampoo, like glue,
and all the windows leak whispers to you.
You pluck a cigarette, and shiver in the drag.
As the grass whipping, you smile.
The dandelions sprout in droves
and you reach to uproot—but you don’t.
Mama, you get me to commit
the genocide.
Lime Kiln
Around his steeple, a neckerchief
embroidered with the lie his father gave.
So, around the point, the strong gulls live,
songs like raking nails to the ear.
Dry myrtle, in the hand, spittle
aside the mouth, we forge course
through the arching buttresses of stars.
He knows the hammer. He knows the bouts.
What swings lays waste to things unmoving.
I reject his common beliefs, his white napkin
that dabs away the gore of his stinging words.
Daytime the chronometer, daytime the stick
measuring the waves at Lime Kiln.
My hands cross the hours. My hands
silt smeared and boney old. He harbors
his clean justice, his pure head
in the flailing wings of birds thriving.
I see the dead ones, on the stones.
Full of ivory threads and matted plumes.
Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She is lead editor of Green Lion Journal and writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review. Her poems have appeared in Porridge Mag,Headline Press, Whimperbang, Free Verse Revolution, Vita Brevis, Streetcake, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. Find more of her work at www.renwickberchild.com
