Two Months Later (An Evaluation)

When I started writing this post last week, I thought it will just take me a couple of hours to finish it. It ended up taking 10 days, which confirms my view on the erratic passage of time that is quite present in the text below (and in most of my work). Meanwhile, many things changed in the past week, especially on the level of the “return to normal” frenzy, but I leave this for future posts/drawings.

Tuesday the 13th of May 2020

Two months ago to the day, I opened this blog with: “Friday the 13th (of March 2020). Sounds like the perfect date to refer to in the future as Day One”. Today I posted a drawing of an empty calendar with the caption No Future. The two references to a future and/or its absence – were totally coincidental; as much as the use of the word punk in both posts’ titles (Corona that, Punk! and Punk is Back).
What happened in those two months? It seems like time for a first evaluation.
It is maybe good to say from the beginning that this evaluation will be – like almost everything else in these diaries – not only personal, but also self-centred. And if I might sound complaining here and there, I am still quite aware of my privilege of having a home for me and my family, and enough money to last without any income until the fall at least. Wait… that’s in five months!

In My Presence / Absence

In the past two months, we learned slowly to look at things from a different perspective and to give new meanings to things. Many projects from before seem to resonate directly with our actual situation. The title of my latest solo show in Berlin is no exception: In the Presence / Absence of Mazen Kerbaj seems made for our time. I therefore thank curator Hatem Imam for insisting on that title.
This show – my first solo in Berlin, four years after I moved here – had to shut down on that same Friday 13 March.
One piece from the show, Antoine and The Arab Marseillaise resonates particularly with the present and the fate of the exhibition itself. In this semi-archival work, I reassemble documents related to one of my father’s plays:

“The Arab Marseillaise was commissioned in 1973 by Lebanese actor Antoine Kerbage. He played the leading role in the play at the Orly theatre in the Hamra district of Beirut in 1975, the year in which his son Mazen Kerbaj was born. After a month and a half, the show got interrupted by the breakout of the Lebanese civil war. The last show took place on the afternoon of April 13th. The actors never perform the play again, though the set itself stays intact on stage till the mid 80’s.”

Fortunately, my set will not have to spend the next decade in place. The show opened again to the public yesterday, with the necessary sanitary measures (5 visitors wearing a mask at a time) and with an extension until August (it was supposed to end in three days). This is part of the return to normal plan that each country is implementing in a radically different way. Does this mean that things are really going back to normal? Surely not. I think that it is safe to say at this point that nobody has the slightest clue of where we are heading. So if you wanted to see the exhibition, drop by as soon as you can, before it possibly shuts down again. And if you are not in Berlin, below is a short video tour, with music from Karkahana’s latest release Bitter Balls that you can listen to (and purchase) from my newly opened Bandcamp.

Can Time Pass even Faster?

From the first day of confinement, I insisted on the fact that continuing to work is usually my way out in extreme situations. 19 days later, I wrote a short text for the The Wire magazine where I made a first attempt to stop and think about the new situation and how I was coping with it so far. Since this text does not exist anywhere on the net, I will reproduce it in its integrality here, and discuss some of its aspects:

“I Need to Write This Text and Send It Before Tomorrow Morning…

And it is not an April fools’ joke. I am literally starting to write this text now, on the night of Wednesday the 1^st of April 2020. I am very late. And I am very happy to be late. It’s been so long since my last deadline. It’s been so long since I felt this very stressful pleasure of running late on a deadline. Doing my work at the last minute is on the one hand a habit from my earliest age, and on the other a constant source of misunderstandings and fights with close collaborators and family members alike. In short, it is a lifestyle, so much so that I convinced myself it is an inherent part of creative excellence. The best ideas come under pressure; this is one of the most persistent commonplaces of the creative field. Not to say that ideas that take some time to form are better than spontaneous ones – it would be a commercial suicide for a musician advocating free improvisation – but that ideas come and go at their own pace and sometimes take days, months or even years to crystallise.

For the past 19 days, I’ve been adapting to a new yet familiar situation. I do not need to explain what is new here since most readers are living a variation of the exact same thing; somehow, we are all working at a slower pace these days. So, I will talk about what is familiar to me.
Being a musician and a comics author, working from home is what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. It is the norm for comics artists who do not need a big studio to practice their art from home. It is less so for musicians since a big part of our work – the remunerated one – is outside the house, in live performances, studio recordings and other rehearsals. But even for musicians, staying home is not all bad; I am practicing my instrument more, finding solutions to play with other musicians – why did I never make online sessions with collaborators from around the globe before now? – and mostly creating new pieces of music I would have never thought of in “normal times”. And this brings in another similarity between this situation and others that I am familiar with: working in confinement, and working in reaction to an extreme situation. Since the first day of the lockdown, I can’t help but draw parallels with life in times of war, and more specifically the 2006 war, where all of Lebanon was closed off and under severe Israeli bombardment for 33 consecutive days. Besides the relative “safety” we have now, we are living in the same confinement (if not a more severe one), and most importantly we are in the same “waiting for something” situation without knowing when and how “what’s next” will arrive. Here, I have to say that for better or worse, I am the kind of artist who works best in reaction to something, and today, just like 2006 or another extreme situation (the assassination of journalist, friend and mentor Samir Kassir in 2005 comes to my mind), I find myself in a rather exciting creative moment.

Instead of freeing my time for contemplation and other relaxed activities, the lack of deadlines and work to be done is making my days even shorter. Is this because our society puts pressure on us to be over-productive? Maybe in part. But I believe it is mostly because I viscerally cannot give myself a break.”

All this is still true today, but with some nuances. Time is passing very fast these days. Faster than ever actually. I am quite surprised that the routine is not slowing the passage of time as one would expect, but rather accelerating it. I wonder if this feeling is shared by everyone.
Besides, after two months of this new routine, and with no clear end of this situation in sight, I’ve noticed lately that time is not passing in the same way every day. I am living in a pattern that is completely new to me: every five to six days of life as it goes, where I read, watch movies, go for a bike ride, listen to music, play music, draw, and engage in various human interactions with the four people around me, are followed by two rather depressive, pessimistic, and unproductive days. This cycle has a frightening regularity, and I do not try to resist it anymore; I just know I am now in one of those periods and that it will pass in two days or so.
I will never repeat it enough: our capacity of adaptation to literally anything is quite something.

What Have I done?

So besides these diaries, what “have I done instead of what I was supposed to do” in the past two months?
I played a lot of music and recorded many new solo pieces, mostly related to the confinement. I posted some some of them here, while others were “released” somewhere else, like I Swallowed a Modular Synth, an acoustic trumpet piece that I recorded in the first week of the lockdown for the Amplify 2020 Quarantine Festival, or the short video loop I Can See You made from pre-existing material for the Discrepant label’s Corona Loops series (I will post soon a longer version of this loop):

I also worked on a project that has been sitting in a drawer for the past 4 years: Remember Me when I Am Not Here Anymore. This is one of those series that are meant to never end, but rather to be stopped when I am dead (the title and subject seemed waiting for our joyful time!). Each instalment consist of 70 dated post-it notes, placed in chronological order on a 70x100cm canvas. What pushed me to finally start this series now is a commission by Colères du Présent a French literature festival I was meant to be part of and that decided to do an online edition rather than cancelling. They asked all the participants to make a contribution on the theme “Le monde d’après” (The World After). I sent them the two screen-friendly images below – not the actual canvases that look much nicer – with the title and the following caption: “Le monde d’après sera fait de petits bouts du monde d’avant, assemblés aujourd’hui” (The world after will be made up of bits of the world before, assembled today.)

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Working Alone / Working Together

Since the beginning of the lockdown I am working on ideas and projects that I can work on at home and alone; these include, but are not limited to, the While Listening to You series that I initiated with Ute Wassermann and followed-up with Tony Buck. I am now working on the third instalment: a solo piece played while listening to a solo by Andrew Lafkas. There are several other pieces already filmed and/or recorded, and waiting for some free time (I thought you had plenty of that nowadays!) to get edited and posted.
There were some notable exceptions to my “working alone” rule; one of them is the weekly duo sessions I’ve been playing with double bass player Mike Bullock, based in Boston. After the second trial, Mike and I managed to find a good way to play together via video conference. I have to admit that it is both easier and tougher than I thought. The experience reinforced my conviction that live streaming of such sessions is not interesting; however the setup is perfectly suitable for playing together and for recording the music. The way to do it is quite simple, but someone had to think about it (thank you Mike!):

“Mazen and I have played together many times since they first met in 2004, in spite of always living on different continents. But only because of Coronavirus did it finally occur to us to try playing over the internet. Playing over the internet felt surprisingly natural, and the recorded results reflect that.
Recorded in April 2020, using Zoom for a visual and (temporary) audio connection. Each of us also recorded our own sounds at home, using direct connections to recorders, and headphones to avoid spilling into each others microphones. Later I was able to line up the recordings. So what you hear is not internet chat audio, compressed and choppy, but much closer to the results we’d get if we were physically together in a recording studio.”

We released one 20 minutes track on Mike’s Bandcamp so far, and are thinking of doing a proper album later on. When it is possible, we are adding Vic Rawlings (cello and electronics) and playing as the Mawja trio, a band I like a lot to play with since our first encounter on the stage of a cafe in boston in 2004. We will be releasing some old (2007) and new (now) recordings by the band soon enough.

Besides these two exception, I didn’t play with any musician in the past two months. However, I had two very fruitful distance-collaborations, with unique methods and surprisingly good results; the first one is in duo with Ute Wassermann and the second with the mighty “A” trio – one of my oldest and most active bands, with Sharif Sehnaoui (guitar) and Raed Yassin (double bass). I will talk about these two projects when they will be released, in the upcoming week(s).

Those sentences that live in our brains (Conclusion)

“If only I had the time…” is a sentence we all use to justify to ourselves our incapacity to achieve some things.
Looking back at the To (Possibly) Do list I posted on the second day of the lockdown, I realise that I am not far from completing it. I even did some stuff that weren’t there. The only two things I wasn’t not able to properly get started are my new website (due since 2009) and the chapter four of my ongoing graphic novel Antoine. It seems a little bit too early for me to be able to work on something that is completely unrelated to the present. I hope I can change that in the close future.
Two other sentences came often to my mind in the past two months.
The first one is “je ne m’ennuie jamais” (I am never bored); I heard Antoine Doinel saying it in one of François Truffaut’s movies when I was 17 years old, and I directly related to it. I still do today, more than ever, and I am more than happy to be at home all the time and have time to do absolutely what I fee like at any point.
The second sentence is “I should take a sabbatical year and stop everything”. This idea has been present in my mind ever since my professional life became too busy to let me take a little pause, and eventually look back on what I just did.
A sabbatical year where I can of course play music or draw, but only when I feel like it and for the pleasure of doing it. No touring, no gigs, no exhibitions, no work on a book, nothing. Just take the time to live. This idea has been postponed to the year after, with a fascinating consistency for the past 10 years. Today it seems finally possible, but to a certain extent only; on the one hand I am not completely free and I continue to work on ongoing or new projects, and on the other hand I am in the midst of a situation where contemplation seems above my capacities. Keeping myself busy is the only way to focus on the present and forget about tomorrow. Which brings in the last sentence that is our common leitmotiv nowadays: “What’s next?”