Softcore

by Zolghadr, Tirdad;

  Tirdad Zolghadr

  Softcore

  TELEGRAM

  London

  My deepest thanks

  to Charles Buchan

  and Khavar Zolghadr

  Patronage

  I’m standing in a side alley somewhere in downtown Tehran. On this February afternoon, I’m wearing a duffle coat over a polo shirt, blue jeans, tinted glasses, unfashionably lavish sideburns and a sparse, scruffy beard. Though actually much younger, I appear to be in my mid-thirties, underweight, short and slightly hunched, with striking, full lips and a Caesar’s cut of red hair over a high forehead. Even if I’m actually rather sure of myself, I never fail to look self-conscious. I’m the type to make you wonder whether the difference between shyness and reserve, or charm and condescension, was as obvious as you’d always assumed. I’m nursing a hangover from a housewarming party the night before.

  Before climbing into the taxi behind me I lean back, taking in the concrete façade on the other side of the street. Through the swinging glass doors on the ground floor I can make out a round, tube-like corridor, painted over in black-and-white zebra stripes. The winding corridor makes a sharp turn to the left, then immediately to the right, before slanting downwards, into a large salon which has remained unused for two decades.

  The zebra motif continues across the walls of the salon and much of the furniture, including the Eames surfboard tables, the polyethylene chairs, and the barstools surrounding the circular chrome bar in the symmetric center of the room. The glaring stripes are soon to be replaced by untreated cement in varying shades, from dusky white to brute, concrete gray. An occasional sprinkle of designer neon, matched with a scattering of Turkoman pillows, early Safavid miniatures and black-and-white Qajar photography, will ensure just the right blend of ethnic marketing and cosmopolitan obeisance.

  Upon arriving in Tehran the month before last, I quickly decided to re-open the family establishment, the Promessa, not as the restaurant and cocktail bar it once was but as a showroom of sorts, a space for art exhibitions, catwalks, launches, readings, screenings, student workshops, talks, corporate receptions, film sets, dance parties and such. The room is to remain mostly vacant, polyfunctional, presumptuous in its lavish use of space, displaying little at a time, when it’s showing anything at all. Upstairs by the entrance is an unframed black-and-white portrait of Zsa Zsa, matron and matriarch who founded the Promessa some forty years ago.

  There will be not one but two openings: an official vernissage early on a Wednesday afternoon, an unofficial one later the same day. The official opening shall be the more entertaining by far. Bureaucrats in loose-fitting gray suits, shapeless, gusty trousers flowing over cheap black leather shoes onto the floor. The government brand of canonical humility, of the people for the people, bulky glasses, and six-day stubble carefully trimmed. They’ll be sipping on Fantas and smiling, always careful to take long, thoughtful, suggestive pauses before speaking.

  Friends from the clergy will also be invited. Camel-fur capes, black turbans or white, gray and light-blue robes reaching down almost to the ground. The effect is superb. Mullahs always look like they’re floating, hovering two inches above the floor. They, like the bureaucrats, choose their words carefully, but tend to speak in strenuous hypotheses and confident conclusions, not in candy-coated, officious formulae.

  There will also be the art scene, or the official rendition thereof. National museums, international cinéma d’auteurs. And artists in Nike running shoes and CK shirts elaborating on their instaaleshens, and their performaanses to French reporters and Lebanese curators. And there could well be a reading. Your visiting journalist-writer with his written impressions of the country, paying homage to the particular, gentle allure of the luscious Persian melancholy, the cultivated religiosity and smiling self-denial that are brought to bear these days in Iran. And there should be celebrities, of a comfortably wide range, if possible. Anything from Neil Diamond to Michael Moore to someone more artworld. And there will also be my friend and mentor Stella.

  Stella is a historian, specializing in postwar art brut, whom I met in the US some ten years ago. It would be hard to overestimate the impact Stella has had on my life, from my politics to my personal tastes to my everyday habits, none of which have remained untouched since that first, chance meeting at an espresso bar on Houston University Campus, following a lecture on Richard Greaves. Stella, with her limitless web of devoted artworld contacts, her impeccable sense of dress and the way she seems to have an answer to everything from the discrepancy between a latte machiatto and a latte tout court to conflicting histories of urban guerilla warfare in twentieth-century Chad.

  Stella is an heir to old, mature money and has also been the only source of financial support for the showroom project to date, although this, she has made clear, is bound to change sooner or later. The fact is, despite her considerable standing in academia, I’d never heard of Stella until I was introduced to her by an old family friend, a certain Tan Christenhuber, or ‘Uncle Tan’, an oil engineer from Hamburg.

  At the opening, I’m hoping Stella will offer her typical celebrations of Third World megalopoles as adorable swirls of plastic glitz, to then affront and galvanize with select historical revisionisms, cheap, brutal and unfair, reaping unending discussions with alternating bureaucrats sweetly smiling over their Fantas.

  The unofficial opening: raisin vodka, a dozen entrées, crystal meth or second-rate cocaine in the restrooms, opium and sweet black tea in the back garden to impress Stella. Many associate opium with Lewis Carroll, dream-like euphoria and de Niro in Once Upon a Time in America. But the local variety offers a very mild effect, hardly more bewildering than a hot bath.

  I turn and make for the cab, avoiding the patches of damp snow on the sidewalk. The driver nods and mumbles politely as he turns the key in the ignition. He’s wearing a light gray polyester suit and looks like a young Leonid Brezhnev. Very much my idea of an essentially characteristic Russian (or Ukrainian, perhaps) – pale cheeks and dismal shadows under St Bernard eyes – which reminds me that Stella is to leave St Petersburg next week and will soon, hopefully, be flying on to Tehran.

  The driver switches on the tape recorder, to what sounds like Neil Diamond, live in concert somewhere. Hep-Hep, says Neil Diamond. Hep-Hep – you want me. And I can’t deny I’m a man. The driver is looking at me through the rear-view mirror with his depressing, watery, blue-gray eyes.

  ‘So you grew up abroad, didn’t you?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘What’s better? Here or there?’

  I ignore the question and start cleaning my glasses with a used Kleenex. Ever since moving to Tehran, everyone from the plumber to the dentist to the janitor has been keen on hearing how I would personally compare Iran to the rest of the world. I put on my glasses again and reach for my packet of Super Golden Love Deluxe, a local brand with gold and lilac packaging, and light a cigarette, tossing the match out the window.

  Owing to my parents’ multinational careers in corporate pharmaceuticals, I grew up visiting various polyglot schools in Central and West African republics. After which I spent several years working part-time in cafés and sports bars in Oregon and Texas, which is where I met Stella, who persuaded me to move to the East Coast and study Hebrew and Arabic, along with a minor degree in Art History and a certificate in Criminal Forensics.

  I came to Tehran for the first time just over a month ago. When questioned about motives for ‘coming back’, I refer to various lines of kinship, or my ‘cherished mother tongue’, and something about the light, the landscape, roots. The more I make myself sound like a palm tree, the more people are touched. It was of course Stella’s idea that I move here in the first place.

  The taxi heads down Revolution Avenue, tow
ards Freedom Square. From the very start, I was struck by the fact that in central Tehran you’re rarely more than twenty feet away from a pizzeria serving chiizberger in a setting of purple bathroom tiles, fake black marble and pink neon, with syrupy Iranian soft rock in the background.

  But the city’s appeal, I decide, as the taxi turns into the freeway leading to the Zirzamin housing estate, where both I and most of my acquaintances have studios or apartments, or both, must be the fact that Tehran doesn’t try to please, consisting largely, as it does, of sand, dust, glass, neon and eight-lane motorways running straight through concrete housing projects. Surrounding the official city center are scores of satellite towns and villages that are very similar. Over the past twenty years or so, eight million locals have joined the preceding four, most of whom were newcomers themselves.

  Swifter than speech, as I like to put it, somewhat theatrically. Lighter than language. To describe Tehran would be like spelling out a frenzied, hour-long quarrel over dinner to a newcomer at the table. Personally, I would take Tehran over Isfahan flower gardens and donkey bridges any day and find a smug sense of satisfaction in the fact that there are many who would beg to differ.

  Very recently, European architects in Prada dinner jackets and Le Coq Sportif have been here, reciting statistics from Dutch coffee-table catalogues, of the new avant-garde status of Third-World metropoles carelessly breaking urban records, proportions, aesthetic standards. Western concepts and terminologies, they say, trying to sound apocalyptic, ominous, touched, enthusiastic and nonchalant at the same time, can no longer do justice to the many Tehrans of this shifting world.

  I take out a small Moleskine notebook, ‘a pocket format for everyday use, the same legendary notebook of Van Gogh and Matisse, of Hemingway and Chatwin’, which is what I do after every situation, performance, exhibition, news programme or snippet of conversation I consider gainful for the Promessa in some way, specifying the date and place and archival epithet, Patronage, Bygones, Friends, Travel, Fashion, Administration, Hearsay, Opening or Closing. I prefer to give everything in my notebooks a narrative flow, a coherent storyline to frame and embed the material. This is more important than chronology or psychological realism. I’ve always hated loose ends, whether in essays, living-room scenographies, journals or notebooks. Be that as it may, most of what ends up in the notebooks is determined by Stella herself in the end, along lines and parameters she has never taken the time to spell out, and I’ve never insisted on knowing, preferring to see the whole thing as a private joke between the two of us, a modish play on fact and fiction and archival theories and the post-contemporary condition and such.

  ‘You see, my little possum’, I remember her telling me on the very day we met, in the teacherly, protective tone I was soon to cherish and look forward to, ‘we can no longer set out to represent the historical past. We can only represent our ideas and stereotypes about that past. Is that something you can understand?’

  I open the notebook to the last page, to a floor plan of the Revolutionary Courthouse on Shariati Street, then flick back to the beginning. ‘The bourgeois artist now acts without clearly formulated reasons or intentions, which means that anything can become an indication of his authorial motivation, and that the whole planet has become one big collection of possible hints, clues and innuendos. Josef Stalin, 1944. Olympics 2000. Weightlifter Rezazadeh screws up fleshy, heinous face, lifting 1040 lbs. Olympic gold. Defeated favorite Ronny Weller: can’t remember what he looks like, nor what his name is. Iranians are appearing out of nowhere. It’s like being in a Spielberg. I slowly rip out the page and throw it out the window, then instantly regret having done so.

  I can vaguely remember hitting on various women last night, none of whom showed any interest in me, not even after the cocaine. I can also recall House music remixes of early Madonna tracks that caused the neighbors to knock on the door around 4 AM, athough whether they were meaning to join in or complain I never found out.

  The air flowing in through the open windows is cold and unpleasant. The driver takes a highway exit leading into the Zirzamin housing estate, an enormous assemblage of right angles, functional voids and horizontal strips of glass and concrete, the stuff people refer to as ‘Stalinist’, although Stalin, if I remember Stella’s point correctly, actually preferred gigantic wedding-cake architecture, playful squiggles and pointed turrets. Designed in the mid-seventies, at the peak of the hysterical optimism of the Shah era, Zirzamin is said to be the largest housing estate in the Middle East. At an opening at the Ti-Tap gallery in north Tehran last week someone claimed it had more inhabitants than Sweden.

  I immediately spot Mehrangiz sitting on a park bench in the outer courtyard of block 39A of the estate, not far from my own studio apartment in 44D. Mehrangiz watches the taxi approach, waiting for it to come to a complete halt before shutting her paperback and rearranging her headscarf and sunglasses. Only then does she stand up and head for the car. Mehrangiz is an up-and-coming video artist with a perfect gap between her front teeth. She’s wearing olive green army pants, Charles Jourdan pumps and, by way of Islamic hejab, a Lonsdale scarf and an oversized Fred Perry polo shirt under her cashmere coat.

  I watch her from the cab crossing the smooth concrete courtyard in the faint afternoon sunlight, realizing she is without question more attractive than Stella. Most people would find her plump, overweight even, but this doesn’t bother me in the slightest. On the contrary. I appreciate the big cheeks and ‘fuck me eyes’, as Stella would put it, the women who differ from the average, proto-anorexic daddy’s girl you see in north Tehran or thereabouts.

  I try to relax the muscles in my gut by taking several deep breaths, as if to pull the air all the way down into my stomach. This is a technique I learned in acting classes as a teenager, for stage fright.

  Mehrangiz climbs into the cab, smelling of some musky men’s aftershave, and the driver and I both mumble a standard greeting before resuming the journey towards my grand-aunt Zsa Zsa’s country estate in Karaj. I’m silently hoping Zsa Zsa will not embarrass me when we get to the farm, although presumably she will. With her corduroys, denim shirts and handsome, arrogant features, you might have seen a gentleman farmer in her, if it weren’t for her high-pitched giggle and her pubescent sense of humor, despite being almost ninety years old. Zsa Zsa likes to surprise you by sticking her little finger in your ear and making obtrusive clicking and whistling sounds. Or by suggesting she recently had sex with one of your close relatives, out in her apple orchard somewhere.

  Over the last fifty years or so, Zsa Zsa has earned the reputation of a skilled and distinguished hostess, clicks and whistles and other conversational gambits notwithstanding. She usually speaks very little and is considered an outstanding listener. During the many afternoons I’ve spent at her estate I’ve witnessed army officers, political dissidents, Kurdish Sufis, folk musicians, housewives, farmers, Swiss journalists, Arab tourists and a TV newscaster sitting on the veranda, mumbling to Zsa Zsa as she sits with her hands folded in her lap, head cocked to one side, doing a fantastic job of appearing to be sympathetic.

  During the Iran-Iraq war, when Baghdad and Tehran were pelting each other with Soviet and American missiles, dozens of families moved out of the city center to stay at Zsa Zsa’s. Long walks in the orchards, volleyball, date liquor, eleventh-century poetry. The dust on your doorstep / a paradise to me / a fervent pheasant / I fling myself / on searing arrows of your glance. Or suchlike. In the evening, there was cheap Goa technotrance, as remixed in LA or Istanbul, blasting from a tiny tape recorder. But also opium with sweet tea and sopping honey pastries.

  As Mehrangiz and I arrive at the farm, we find a small group of visitors having a late lunch on the veranda. They all interrupt their meal to awkwardly stand up and shake hands. Khoshbakhtam khoshbakhtam haleh shoma. In a confused fit of coquetry – compounded, indeed, by the enduring hangover – I decline to join them for lunch, looking on as Mehrangiz is offered cucumbers in yogurt with raisins and fresh
mint, along with lamb and eggplant sauce on saffron rice, with sour berries and a baked crust.

  Later, over black tea, honey pastries and pistachio-saffron ice cream, Mehrangiz praises me for the ideas I’ve been pursuing since my recent arrival, the showroom in the making, the many ingenious little plans for the Promessa website, the merchandising, the behind-the-scenes Promessa documentary.

  ‘In Iran, such things are just so totally unexpected, so completely new to everyone. It’s so much more appreciated than anywhere else.’

  I nervously assume Mehrangiz is coming on to me, but then realize with disappointment that she isn’t, so I snidely tell her that to impress the locals with flashy gadgets and cosmopolitan prattle, I could just as well move to Wimbledon, but then stop, seeing as she’s not really listening. She smiles at me, rubs my elbow absent-mindedly and goes and sits down next to Zsa Zsa at the other end of the veranda. I light a cigarette and watch them chat as they carefully sip their hot black tea from small, gold-rimmed glasses.

  Like most of the art scene here, I’m not exactly of proletarian ancestry myself, what with the family owning the small town of Ozgalabad in its entirety, only two hours northeast of Tehran. In the late twenties all of my paternal great-grandfathers and great-granduncles were officers under Reza Shah. Reza was the Iranian Atatürk, keen on modernizing the country by any means necessary. Iran, he insisted, was to be taken seriously. Reza found the term ‘Persia’ embarrassing – it smacked of water pipes and flying carpets – and had it replaced by ‘Iran’, which refers to the country’s Aryan heritage.

  According to Stella, the Aryans were little more than a despairing mob of hungry Siberians who had settled in what is now Iran a very long time ago. Most had long forgotten they had ever existed, when a small flock of German Romantics in wigs, white stockings and puffy shirtsleeves suddenly decided the Aryans had successfully colonized vast parts of Asia and Greece and declared them the ‘Cradle of Civilization’. Apparently, Reza Shah very much approved, as do many Iranians nowadays.