‘It’s big. And cheap. I don’t know. What’s the Commonwealth like?’
‘Well ah mean Tehran – s’not like Beiroo’ or Istanboo’, yeh? Ah mean, vey have to wear the ve-yu, yeh? Since Khomeini. An all vat.’
‘Well, that’s a shame, isn’t it?’ The conversation is presumably a mistake. ‘You know female literacy tripled under Khomeini? Complex character, the man was.’
‘Gryte. Get to study veh Qoran all day long. Brilliant. Kind a life is vat?’
I put on a suave, sarcastic smile and slowly light a Super Love Extra Mild. ‘Righteous anger. Hip thing over here. Human rights, henna, tie-dyes, moral indignation. Funny how the victims are never so outraged. Nor as dramatic.’ I tip the ash off my cigarette.
‘How smug. At least you’re not locked up as a sex-slave womb machine.’
‘Well, thank God you Birkenstocked samaritians can come bomb us into civilization when the need arises.’
‘Oh. Ah see.’ She smiles, playing with her ponytail. ‘Is vat a righteous animosity thing? What was it? Righteous anger? Moral indignation?’
I hesitate, and try to put on another smile, a little more self-ironic and engaging this time. In view of the fact that it fails to have any effect whatsoever, I slam the key on the fake marble counter and leave. ‘Aaaaw. Now he’s upset.’ I hear them calling after me. ‘Draaaamaa queeeeen.’ I shuffle through watery winter sludge toward the city center, recapitulating and rewriting the conversation in my mind, conjuring one levelheaded, impregnable response after another, the girls dismayed, overwhelmed and speechless. After an hour’s walk and five dramaturgic variations, each rehearsed several times, sometimes muttered quietly under my breath whenever I find myself alone on the sidewalk, I reach a squalid Internet café, Türknet St Georg.
As I enter the establishment, the teenage cashier is simultaneously having a heated telephone conversation in Arabic and dealing with customers paying for Internet scratch cards, lottery tickets, Marlboro Reds, Gauloises Lights and Chokito chocolate bars. When the cashier, who is sporting a Caesar’s cut exactly like my own, sees me standing by the entrance, he slips me an unmarked padded envelope without interrupting his conversation on the phone and continues adding up the cigarettes and chocolate bars on the till.
Back at the hotel, I rip open the padded envelope to find a DVD marked ‘Türknet 2001’, which, when played on my laptop, contains rough, uncut footage of city streets filmed by night from the back seat of a car, the camera shaking and slipping in and out of focus. Shuttered storefronts, stray cats rummaging in loose garbage, occasional neon lights and countless shop signs in Farsi. The car, I realize, is driving down Enqelab Avenue at high speed, passing the City Theatre, taking Hafez Bridge and eventually turning left, into Shariati Avenue. When it reaches the flower stand by the Revolutionary Courthouse, the car slows down, comes to a brief stop, then drives off again to circle around the entire complex twice. The sequence is followed by a list of names and addresses hovering on the screen, as if they were the credits following a movie. I nervously eject the DVD and start dialing Stella’s number but hang up halfway through and try to think, concluding that a complete lack of logical rhyme or reason is hardly anything new and certainly nothing to be concerned about.
In my inbox, Tarofi is insisting there’s an urgent matter to discuss regarding the Promessa, and Mehrangiz has written from New York, where she’s now talking to curators showing interest in her ‘Twenty’ project. Mehrangiz’s younger sister has consented to play one of the single mothers, while Cyrus Rahati is to play the Afghan kitchen help. Stella is still in New York.
So guess what. Visited the UN today. Can you imagine? Me, of all people, doing the culture tour of the Big Apple. Or would you call it the politics tour? Anyway. Our guide offered very clear statements on the artworks on the walls. We really learned something. ‘This is an abstract painting – it has no meaning – it just has the meaning you put into it!’ Other artworks were ‘symbolic’: ‘As you can see, this little boy looks forward, into the future, this means hope!’ ANYWAY. You have the Türknet DVD? Remember: the film only has the meaning you put into it! Ha ha. Tan will be in touch. You will find that he hasn’t changed. Fatih and Türgüt tonight. Symbolic kisses, Stella.
At five o’clock in the morning, leaning against a fifties Fornasetti-style lacquer bar counter in a night club somewhere in the Schanzenviertel, San introduces me to Fatih and Türgüt, two graphic designers who happen to be the founders of the celebrated Ideal Standard agency in Lausanne, currently working on a comparative history of Hebrew, Cyrillic and Arabic typography. Both of them are wearing faded, dark blue jeans, Dunderdon polyester jackets, white running shoes and impeccable side partings. I have to catch a flight to Munich within a matter of hours, and would like to leave. Stella obviously never took the time to explain why exactly I was to meet the two designers, so I resolve to simply do my best to look engrossed in the conversation.
‘So that’s the crux of the matter. That’s our conclusion. Our falsifiable hypothesis,’ one of them is screaming into my ear. ‘The letter bears no intrinsic relation to the sound it refers to. There’s nothing that makes the sound “A” resemble the letter “A”, in any way.’ It isn’t easy to understand him over the slaps and squeaks of Detroit House music.
‘For the Kabbalists’, the designer continues, ‘it wasn’t merely the words and the meaning, but the very letters of the holy scripture which were sacred. They contained the Breath of Life. And every letter was numbered. Every single letter had its number. And all the different textual fragments added up to more and more sums and subtotals referring and cross-referring to one another, in a great big, unbounded mélange of meaning.’ At least that’s what he seems to be saying, over the crushing sounds of a certain DJ MOTOROLA, as a flyer in the beer puddle on our bar counter makes clear. The club is filled with athletic men wearing conspicuous belt buckles and clever T-shirts, one size too small.
‘So if the letter itself was God-given,’ he leans in to make himself heard over a black male voice repeating I do this I do this I do this for my fyu-tchaa, my fyu-tchaa, to an electro-bossa interlude, ‘if the letter itself was God-given, its reading was completely open.’
‘You guys are so eighties.’ I’m more than a little overwhelmed by the lettered drift of the conversation. This is worse than Tarofi, with his imperial grammatologies and porcelaine bananas. ‘You must be the Spandau Ballet of design theory.’
I’m not sure they can hear me, for the designer solemnly nods and continues, unsmiling. ‘Exactly. But so Kabbalists are the opposite of what is going on today. People sense that form is a construct, but they conclude that, well, in that case, it’s a crutch, a prosthesis for content. And content,’ he sadly shakes his head, ‘content is secured and guarded by semantic dogma. Pop semantics and hermeneutic dogma.’ He looks down, scrutinizing his snow-white Lacoste running shoes, still sadly shaking his head.
I do this I do this I do this for my fyu-tchaa, my fyu-tchaa, says the voice all around us. I do this for my fyu-tchaa. I try to remember something from the notebooks, anything that might bear relevance here. One brief erudite remark, perhaps, and then it would be easier, more appropriate to leave.
‘The Armenians of the Middle Ages,’ I say, the music once again slipping into electro-bossa, now far less overbearing, perfectly on cue, ‘all these Armenians, they learned to write these miniature Bibles, tiny as a fingernail. There’s a museum in Isfahan where you can even see a human hair with a Bible verse etched onto it. Today, you don’t have the reading techniques, so you need a –’
‘We know that museum,’ the designer interrupts me, ‘actually we’ve been to Iran a couple of times already. Snowboarding on the Alborz.’ At the other end of the counter, a group of East Asian girls in tank-tops are looking over to the designers and smiling. The two look over and nod, but don’t smile back. Feeling beleaguered and drunkenly jealous, I attempt another anecdote at random.
‘Did you know that in Hebre
w lettering, in classical Hebrew, but perhaps in modern Hebrew too, I don’t know ... ’ The designers are already looking down impatiently at each others’ Lacostes. ‘In classical Hebrew in any case the only verb that is perfectly regular, in all persons, and in all tenses, it’s katl, to kill or to murder. And so, like, when I was doing classical Hebrew at Yale, there was an entire class rehearsing the verbs, and we always started off with “to murder”: I murder you murder he murders, I will murder, you will murder, he will murder.’ Neither of the two designers are listening to me. ‘“We will have murdered, you will have murdered, they will have murdered.” You know?’
‘And so, to come back to my point’, says the designer with the snowboarding remark, ‘is there any sense in pitting content against form in the first place? C’est tirer sur les ambulances, non? Is content ever more than sheer form with a little fashion, good faith and superstition thrown in?’
DJ MOTOROLA crudely interrupts the electro-bossa to introduce back-to-back Deep House remixes of the Euro Top Ten. Tired of bein alone yeah yeah sick of arguin on the phone yeah yeah you tellin all your friends yeah yeah your nigga don’t understand. I watch the bartender pour a soft drink into a tall, slim glass filled with crushed ice. From the corner of my eye, I can see three of San’s friends bending over a kidney-bean coffee table to snort two lines of coke each, using only a packet of Gauloises Red as a platter. After half-heartedly trying to catch the eye of the girls in tank-tops, I invent a story on complex codes embedded within the ISBNs of US King James Bible editions that have foretold a number of interesting events in time, including Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s 2005 visit to Israel. But the remark has ostensibly been made to no one in particular, since the designers have slowly started walking towards San’s happy circle.
The air outside is soothing and friendly. I take a cab to the hotel, where I wake the chronotopic prodigy and check out, then take a flight back to Munich and on to Tehran. As I walk through the door of my studio apartment, my satchel under one arm, a Duty Free München bag in the other, I hear an accordion in the courtyard below, playing the tune to a well-known folk song, just slightly off-key.
I can remember the melody from my early childhood, when Zsa Zsa used to sing it to me, usually to calm me down during my recurrent, violent tantrums, when I would often beat, kick, strangle, or at times dismember any household pet within reach. Looking down, I briefly wonder why I didn’t notice the musician on the way in, before tossing him some twenty-cent coins from the living-room window.
This Wednesday happens to be the night of the Chaharshanbe Soori saturnalia, the last Wednesday of the Persian solar year. I switch on the TV, to BBC World News, still summing up the arrests of the Milan and Hamburg sleepers, take a hot shower and fondly replace a depleted tube of Colgate White.
I open a fresh canister of date vodka, mix it with tomato juice and green Tabasco and watch the highway outside my block. When I check my emails later that night, I see my long-lost Uncle Tan has indeed tried to get back in touch but surprisingly avoids any reference whatsoever to the I-CON, or to the suggestions I made last week.
What you been doin ya old codga you? Ay? Married yet? I picture you doin the domestic girlfriend thing – and enjoying it despite yourself. Or you’re at the stage where the grass over the fence looks greener and you feel suffocated, drowning, you can’t breathe, your eyes and mind are straying, you’ve cheated on her, not yet but it will happen, has happened, she’s an Italian girl who works at the local café you go to on your lunch breaks. It started innocently, a few nervous glances, a smirk but then you got the courage to chat, exchange numbers. Then you felt remorse, how could I do this you thought to yourself, often at weird moments like when wiping your arse after a dump. That didn’t last long though, and now you’re having a fully flung affair like any good Western red-blooded man will. You swine you, you smirk to yourself as you look in the mirror, you bastard, you are a bastard but I love you/me. Seriously though – fill me in please. I’m off to Viet Nam on a holiday. Would be nice to hear from you, son. Yours, as always, Uncle Tan
Tarofi has also written again, insisting it really is urgent we discuss the Promessa. I can sense I would be ill-advised to ignore the advice of a man like Tarofi, and I know Stella would not approve, but cannot resist the petty pleasure of trashing Tarofi’s email once again. Mehrangiz, finally, has sent out a passionate mass appeal from New York, pleading with half the Tehran Kulturindustrie to go visit the website of ‘Aglutinador’, a dissident Cuban art collective. You just got to go check it out. You will NOT regret it. You will n-o-t regret it.
By the time I finish skimming the site, I can hear the crackers and fireworks marking the Chaharshanbe Soori celebrations outside. Inspired by the heartrending Aglutinador manifestos and poignantly pretentious press statements, I start drinking the vodka neat, without ice.
The PROMESSA is an epistemic crossroads, a fashion boutique, a cafeteria, a think tank, a populist funfair, a gallery, a tribute to the New Image Economy, a retraction into uncompromising precepts of the intellectual vanguard.
The PROMESSA’s maxims are:
1. Don’t Cry, Work.
2. Ceci n’est pas un anti-fasciste.
3. Las instituciones son una mierda.
The PROMESSA resorts to fabrications and compromises exclusively for the sake of material gain, political opportunity and rhetorical coherence. The PROMESSA is a refusal to accept the ongoing glocal discrimination of Tehran artists, deserved as it may be. The PROMESSA supersedes the representation of representation. The PROMESSA focuses on men, women and objects and on the situations, gestures and architectures that produce them. The PROMESSA considers censorship a red herring, the true problems being taste, provincialism and money. The PROMESSA faces up to its own context, rife with surveillance, suspicion and anxiety. It takes pride in elevating voyeurism and paranoia from a matter of State policy to a refined moment of creation inherent in any relationship between art and audience, actor and viewer.
I immediately send the text to Ideal Standard in Lausanne, inviting them to design a pamphlet, a catalogue and a poster for the opening, then pour a last drink and walk outside.
Predictably, on this New Year’s fête in Zirzamin, thousands of adolescents are standing around in groups of twenty or thirty, lighting firecrackers and playing DJ Bobo, Shakira or Tehran soft rock on oversized, grandiose ghetto blasters. Towards 2 AM I start running into thick crowds of cheering men and whistling women surrounding groups of breakdancers. Every now and then, someone drives by on a 125 Suzuki, and the crowd disperses.
The men on the motorbikes are members of the bassij government militia, looking out for clusters of people they can report to their comrades, who show up with sticks of wood four feet long, to thrash the shit out of the dancers and their admirers. Luckily, they’re easily recognizable by their sparse, fluffy beards and white shirts, buttoned up to the top, and worn over baggy trousers. I’m intrigued and eager to meet these angry young men who refuse to comply with the peaceful rules of the Petri-dish community that make Zirzamin so special, and decide to drop by for a visit. Should there be any way to befriend them or, more importantly, their leaders, the aesthetic potential would be immeasurable.
Fashion
The militia’s Zirzamin headquarters are in a conventional one-storey house, a discreet bungalow in the symmetric center of an open space left over between two particularly large clusters of slabs of South Korean make. In the center of Zirzamin, yet clearly set off from the rest in an unmistakable stylistic counterstatement. As I approach the front door, I make my way through ever larger swarms of young men with fluffy teenage beards and bad skin. Once I ask to see the officer in charge, I’m led down a long, unlit hallway bearing the distinct smell of unwashed socks, bassijis floating in and out of the many rooms on either side, and finally offered a seat next to a chubby gentleman in civil clothing, negotiating the price of a Nissan pickup.
With its fluorescent lighting and standard A4 pic
tures of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, the room is very much like any government office in the country. Not too many baroque swirls or rococo ruffles, only the golden clock on the wall shaped like an owlet flapping its wings. When the Nissan dealer finally leaves, the officer pours chaii, and we gradually pick up a conversation on Zirzamin’s badminton courts and weightlifting studios. He’s surprisingly friendly, and perhaps I could even learn to relax in his presence, if I only took the time.
‘I wouldn’t let my daughter grow up in a house over two stories high,’ quips the officer. I expect him to bewail the anonymity of Zirzamin, the size, the graffiti, the adjoining rooftops allowing you to move unnoticed from block to block, the teenage cliques, unmarried couples and single mothers, but personal liberties are not the issue here.
‘Obviously it would be better, so to speak, if people didn’t want the freedoms they want. But the real problem with high-rises, so to speak, is that Islam explicitly disapproves of architecture that offers a view into your neighbor’s private home.’ He sighs, shaking his head. ‘The fabric and the structure, it’s all very confusing. If you take a look at the underground parking lots, you’ll see how tricky it all is. Like something straight out of a movie. So to speak.’
The man is clearly upset. At a lack of things to say, I open my bag and hand the officer a Panasonic DV camera. He looks up, a tired, suspicious look in his eyes.
‘The idea, if it is not too much trouble for you, is to film your everyday professional life. To make your own movie.’
‘Film my life?’
‘Just point the camera at whatever seems important to you, whatever you think the world has to know about Iran. It’s a documentary project. A project on the militia. Letting you have your say. After all the rumors and the slander, all that propaganda against you and what you stand for. I am opening an art gallery, I can show your work there. That’s why I wanted to meet you. You just film. This is your voice. You pick up the camera whenever you have a spare moment, or give it to one of your men, one of your members.’ I hold my breath, waiting for a reaction. ‘This is your voice,’ I insist.
Softcore Page 8