Touffar for Esquire gulf

This would have been my first magazine appearance but they put it back a month till March so Executive, which prints next week, pips them to it. Touffar are heavily politicised rappers from the Bekaa valley area of Lebanon. I couldn't understand a word of the concert but it was apparent they were pretty pissed. The unsubbed version of US freelancer and all round nice guy Josh Wood's story, as it will appear in next month's edition of Esquire gulf, is below. Cheers to Touffar for letting me blind them with flashes for the entire concert.

Bananas in Beirut

Turkish author Ece Temelkuran was in Beirut at the end of December for an interview with Turkey's second best read daily Milliyet by journalist Devrim Sevimay, which appeared in the paper on January 3. Her new book, "Sound of Bananas," the story, among other things, of a Filipino maid and Syrian construction worker living in Beirut, is out soon but you'll need to be pretty hot on your Turkish or Arabic to read it.