Ari Siletz

2009-12-07T21:36:00.000-08:00

Today, I received an email from a young Iranian scientist doing research in the United States. The email was titled, "New racism, very sad." It came with the above screenshot and said:

My Iranian friend who lives in Germany, and got her credit card from Germany was trying to book a hostel through HostelWorld.com just now, and she got the following discriminative message [see above screenshot]. This breaks my heart, this is new racism against people of a country that are giving their lives out on the streets to prove they do not agree with the policies of their government, it seems like the entire world is deaf and does not hear us.

I responded with some routine journalistic questions. Her reply gave me a heartache. Iranian youth get beat up in Tehran streets; must they also suffer abuse abroad?

Dear Ari,

Thanks a lot for the follow up and offering to publicize this matter more. The answers to your questions are as follows:

1. She only had Iranian passport.

2. She was in Germany at the time of use of her master card. She wanted to book a hostel in Spain for one of her friends who lives in Germnay too.

3. Banks require your info at the time of opening the account, they take copy of your passport. I actually had a bank account with the same bank last year when I was in Germany, the name of the bank is sparkasse . Its the only bank that lets Iranian students open a bank account .The other banks such as Deutsche bank and Commerz bank, which are mainly owned by USA, do not accept Iranian citizens even though the German government is paying their salary!

It might be interesting for you also to know that these matters happen in US too, because of the single entry visa that we get and the risk of going out of the country and getting rejected for visa, both me and one of my friends had to turn down travel awards for scientific meetings in Europe this year. All my Lab is currently in Dublin meeting with a group of scientist about MY research, and I could not go. My friend won an Art award and got paid to go to Italy to present her work but she could not go because of the same reason.

Golden Thread 10th anniversary play festival

2009-11-23T21:52:00.000-08:00

Whenever I enjoy a politically themed movie or play, I wonder if solidarity with the viewpoint isn’t clouding my judgment of the aesthetics. Is the artist speaking my heart, or is my heart speaking for the artist? Often it is a mix of both, to be honest. But one of the works I watched last Saturday at Golden Thread’s Festival of short Middle East plays shattered the silly question at the outset. Naomi Wallace’s No Such Cold Thing is a spellbinding play that powers its way beyond “friends don’t let friends invade Afghanistan.”

The cast of characters is made up of two young Afghan sisters, an American soldier and three big gunnysacks. They are gathered in a desert near Kabul shortly after the US invasion. We understand why the younger sister wears a burqa, but have no idea why she is also wearing the American soldier’s boots. From this setup and bits of what the characters say to each other, Wallace quickly establishes an eerie sense of “what’s wrong with this picture?” The playwright--who is a winner of the MacArthur Genius Award-- challenges us with seemingly unsolvable riddles, then devastates us emotionally with her imaginative solutions. The chilling outlook of this work persists like theme music across the set of one-act plays that follow.

Betty Shamieh’s Tamam (enough ) shifts the war drama from Afghanistan to Palestine. The play’s cast is a chorus of two actors relating the ordeal of a Palestinian woman who goes to visit her brother in an Israeli prison. There, she is detained and used in a psychology experiment to see how the rape of a sister affects the male Arab mind.

Shamieh’s accusation is so bitter and angry that it makes you wonder if the art of drama is large enough to contain the Palestinian rage. One feels guilty even trying to critique such a raw scream of anguish. This calls for a comparison with another play in this night of one-act plays, Coming Home, by Israeli anti-war playwright Motti Lerner. The two plays are tightly related in theme--they could even be two acts in the same play--yet they emote in radically different universes.

Coming Home aptly brings the American audience home from the bombed and bulldozed living environment of the Palestinians. The setting is a family residence in Israel with familiar characters occupying it. Father likes tennis, and his doctor wife prescribes herself tranquilizers. The son plays guitar and likes to take his girlfriend to the beach. He eats steaks with fries and ketchup. Everything would be the American norm if it weren’t for the Uzi in the dining room and the son stripping himself naked in front of his parents, squirting ketchup all over himself.

The young soldier has had an encounter with and Arab child who was running towards a checkpoint with a suspicious looking school bag over the shoulder. A few seconds wasn’t time enough to ask the question, it was just time enough to pull the trigger. In this play, Lerner brings to light the hidden cost of war to Israeli society. To give a clue as to the magnitude of this cost I will paraphrase Chekhov’s famous insight, “If there’s a gun on the stage, someone better use it.”

Lerner’s Israel and Shamieh’s Palestine exist on the same patch of land, but while the Israeli artist warns his people, the Palestinian artist mourns hers. There are no tennis games, guitars, beaches, and girlfriends on Shamieh’s palette. She has only humiliation, prison, and suicide missions to work with. There are plays that attempt to weave the East and West views of the Middle East conflict into the same story. It doesn’t work! Artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian has been wise to paragraph each part of this single tragedy as separate plays. Otherwise the balancing act would have pulled towards an intellectual debate--as it usually does--instead of tugging at our hearts first one way then the other, the right way to tear something apart.

As a kind gesture to her audience Yeghiazarian has inserted a light-hearted comic relief in between the blood, sweat and tears plays. In the bedroom skit, Call me Mehdi--which Yeghiazarian wrote herself--an Iranian wife sets her American husband straight regarding Rashtis* and Ghazvinis**. Then Yeghiazarian marches us back to Israelis and Palestinians for more bruising, eye-opening, and well-acted theater.

Notes:

* Jokes having to do with infidelity
** Jokes having to do with sodomy

This review just covers series 1 of the festival plays. Series 2 has a different set of plays, including a work starring Iranian film actress Vida Ghahremani.

Here’s where and when to see the festival of plays.

Re-Orient 2009 THE FIRST TEN YEARS

November 19 - December 13
at Thick House (1695 18th Street, San Francisco, CA)

Series 1 – Thursdays & Saturdays at 8:00 PM

Series 2 – Fridays at 8:00 PM & Sundays at 5:00 PM

There is also a related forum with conferences, discussions, dances and music performances. Here’s the information link.

Tehran artists in San Francisco

2009-11-11T14:20:00.000-08:00

One day, strolling down the streets of Tehran, I noticed that somethings are near and somethings are far. Big deal, I said to myself. Everybody knows there is a here and a there. But why did this thought feel like a find? Why was I inspired by it as though I had just heard a Hafez verse? For some reason, I felt compelled to give life to the sensation so that it can trot out on its own and share itself with other people?

Fortunately, I am a Hafez of sorts myself. I work in a different medium, photographs that hang in a gallery instead of verses written in a book. The poet inside me said I should grab a camera and take a picture of this…this whatever it is. But an ordinary camera wouldn’t do; it had to be a pinhole camera. Why?

I don’t know if this is what went through the mind of Tehran artist Mehran Mohajer as he created the work that had pinned me in front of it for so long. Just guessing! I moved on, promising to come back to Mohajer later. Attracted by the red paint defacing a set of photographs on another wall, I made my way through the crowd to see what that was all about. Nothing at first. Just pictures of busy Tehran streets, each with a red ribbon painted over it. What was the red paint masking in Mohammad Ghazali’s photo art? Musician Arash Sobhani, had no trouble spotting it. When we ran into each other at the gallery opening, I thought here’s someone who likely connects with Ghazali’s The Red Ribbon. Sobhani’s widely admired social criticism in song leaves little unsaid.

“Damned if we focus on it, and damned if we don’t,” Sobhani reacted in Farsi. He was talking about the large shaheed street-posters that would burden Ghazali’s photos with grief, guilt, anger and deceit if it weren’t for the red paint obscuring them. But forgetting or ignoring what is there, leaves scars as noticeable as the wounds, the artwork seemed to argue. “This is Iran’s paradox,” Sobhani said, voicing the sentence with his signature gentle fury. His hand was clenched as though pressing a chord into a guitar neck. The two artists had understood each other well!

Leaving Sobhani to his new artist friend, I ambled back to revisit Mohajer’s pinhole camera photo. A classic pinhole camera doesn’t have a lens, so there’s nothing to focus. As a result everything, both far and near is in focus (see above photo). If our minds worked like pinhole cameras, Iran would have no paradox of focus. It is all just there! There’s one problem with this device though, things that move show up very blurry. Living things going about their business can’t be imaged properly. So Mohajer’s photos have an empty apocalyptic feeling. Ghosts roam here and there, but there’s no stir of life. The Supreme Leader’s face appears clear enough in the distance, but he stares at us immobile from a poster. Splitting the worlds of near and far with color instead of focus, the outer realm is gray, wintry, and silent, while the inner realm is sunlit and talkative.

Promising again to come back to Mohajer, I was attracted by a double-image black and white video on the opposite wall. The left and right videos seemed identical, and at first I thought this must be one of those contraptions where the image becomes 3D if you stare at it the right way. The game was far subtler, however. Among the crowd entering and leaving a busy Tehran subway station, there was one passenger present in the left video that had been digitally erased in the right one. Finding this person takes patience and a strong will to know. The blurb next to the photo said the absent person represents arrested protesters who have disappeared in the recent uprising. Maybe so, but there was also something personal about Neda Razavipour’s work. Had she recently lost someone close to her? Did her work also reflect the shocking realization that the outside world shrugs obliviously at the emotional hole inside of us when we lose someone dear? Again, a young Iranian artist was contemplating the inner versus the outer. In this case Razavipour had connected the two realms. Her nation too had a part of its heart torn out. On the inside there was emptiness where there used to be love, on the outside the missing chunk was in the shape of freedom.

Working the walls one by one, I found equally relevant, emotional and insightful contemporary art by Saba Alizadeh , Homayoun Askari Sirizi, Abbas Kowsari, and Ghazaleh Hedayaat.. Nima Alizadeh’s works had broken out of the frame and spilled out subtly onto the wall paint. Even on the floor of this small gallery there was a work of art where a traditional medium debated modern design. Turning Green is a laser cut wool carpet by the organizer of the show, Bay Area artist Taraneh Hemami. It is in the shape of Tehran’s street map. To go into more detail would impose too much of this writer’s interpretations. Forget what you have read here and go see the works through your own eyes.

As promised I made one last visit to Mohajer to say goodbye to the show. On the way home I thought it would be nice if there were a pinhole “camera” that worked on Time, bringing the same focus to the future as our minds give to the present. Maybe someone could turn the idea into a piece of writing. Then I wondered if Arash Sobhani was thinking what part of the show he could turn into a piece of music. On the inside art is a feeling, on the outside it is a language.

Here’s where-and-when to see the show:

One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran
Wed, Nov 4 - Sat, Jan 23, 2010

Location

Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Gallery hours are Wednesdays - Saturdays, noon-5pm, FREE

The Three Iranian Sopranos

2009-10-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

In the movie Moonstruck Nicolas Cage tells Cher, “I love two things, I love you and I love the opera. If I can have the two things I love together for just one night I will be satisfied to give up, oh God, the rest of my life.” Iranians reach spiritual climax with poetry: Hafez, Khayyaam,Rumi; for Italians the national source of rapture is opera: Verdi, Puccini, Rossini. A few nights ago at the Iranian.com music festival I heard three Iranian opera singers, each lovelier than Cher, who left me… starstruck.

Since they were children in Iran, the sisters Shirin and Nasrin Asgari dreamt of becoming opera singers. They spent their playtime pretending be Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Later they made friends with Kamelia Dara, who had also been training to sing since early childhood. They practiced together. Yet hard work and ambition could only take the aspiring artists so far. They quickly realized they needed better training than they could find in Iran. Opera is rooted in Europe; you can’t perfect it in Tehran any more than you can perfect the Persian radif of music in Vienna. So the three came to Austria on tourist visas, hoping they could pass the auditions to be admitted as students. The judges were skeptical. Why put these young women through the punishment of opera training when their reward back home would be cultural disapproval? Could anyone love opera so much that she would stick it out through the torment of the discipline even if the outcome were shame and not fame? Being nice people, the judges gave the would-be students six months to find out for themselves that the pain isn’t worth the trouble.

An opera singer trains her voice so that it can hold its own, un-amplified, against a full orchestra. To find out how difficult this is, try screaming as loudly as you can--on a hilltop perhaps--and see if you can keep up the same volume while controlling your voice to the tune of “The hills are alive with the sound of music.” Likely, the wildlife will run away, leaving the trees wishing they could do the same. Yet a good opera singer can voice profound emotions in clear melodic phrases easily breaking beyond the last row in the opera house. You really have to hear it to believe it, so here is the Swedish soprano Nina Stemme in front of an 80+ piece orchestra. Start at the 4:20 mark where the orchestra begins a spectacular crescendo--drums and all—and hear Stemme’s voice absolutely dominate Wagner’s orchestral behemoth by the 4:40 mark.

I talked a little with Nasrin Asgari about technique. Her dramatic beauty and delicate features makes it easy to think of her as a fine musical instrument, which is what she is as an opera singer. Sometimes a good singer is said to have a “golden throat,” but in opera the throat must, as much as possible, stay out of the way of the flow of breath. The performer’s throat is almost in a yawning position. It was fascinating to watch Nasrin slide her hands down her ears across the jaw line towards her lips to show how different parts of the face participate in the shaping of the sound. This is why opera singers appear to be making faces. They are actually manipulating the sound texture, for example filtering the “breathiness” out of it to leave purer tones.

When we talked about breath control, Nasrin’s hands began their ascent just above the hipbones. To gather enough air for a long phrase, an opera singer does not blimp as though she’s about to dunk her head under water, rather she gathers a large volume of air calmly with a motion that originates in the diaphragm. Rationing the air outwards along the same path, she can create powerful vibrations throughout her entire torso that she can nuance according to the emotional content of the music. That’s how Snow White gets the creatures of the forest to flock to her rather than flee the kingdom in a zoological diaspora.

Nasrin’s sister, Shirin is a force of nature in herself. She is a rare coloratura soprano. If voices were animals, a coloratura’s voice would be the agile deer or the swift sparrow. Shirin is in high demand with opera productions partly because she can flawlessly nail the impossible F6 note in the midst of a famously rapid passage in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Her role as the wrathful Queen Of The Night in this opera is arguably the most difficult singing in the standard opera repertoire. In this video of Shirin performing part of the song it’s easy to hear why it’s not every soprano who can sing this aria (listen for the first F6 note around the 0:55 second mark).

While Shirin Asgari dazzles with her vocal agility, the third member of the Iranian soprano trio, Kamelia Dara, carries heavier emotional artillery. As with any other musical instrument, the timbre or texture of the voice matters. Some timbres are better suited for the more complex roles. These singers are traditionally called “dramatic sopranos.” Dara is a good example. As a dramatic soprano her voice is like expensive chocolate: there’s something bitter and dangerous beneath all the sweetness and perfume. Yet you can’t resist it.

Someday I hope to hear Dara wrap her voice and persona around a complicated character like Kundry in Wagner’s Parcifal. Cursed more than a thousand years ago, Kundry cannot help but stay beautiful to seduce brave men to their deaths. When she meets Parcifal, she turns into a frighteningly alluring Freud as she magically sings to arouse the hero to sex, all the time desperately hoping he will reject her so that she could finally die. Parcifal must have been tone-deaf! No other explanation for how he survived such beautiful singing.

The Italians Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, have less time for Wagner’s Germanic heavy-mindedness. The most popular Italian opera plots are contrived with unlikely coincidences, tragic errors, and mistaken identities. As we saw with Cher in Moonstruck, these operas shamelessly assault the defenseless tear duct. Silly misunderstandings, senseless suicides, and dumb sacrifices are thrown onto the dramatic pizza like anchovies upon pineapple chunks. This isn’t a matter of bad taste, however. Italian opera uses exaggerated plot as a ladder to emotional acrophobia, the same way our classical poets use hyperbole. The more recklessly the plot dares, the higher our view of the musical vistas laid out before us. This brings us to Iranian opera singers attempting Shekar e Ahoo or Gol e Gandom or whatnot. In the absence of any emotional context but nostalgia, the songs feel affected. Not grand as in good opera, just grandiose.

Often, my operatic sensibilities couldn’t care less if Leili joon ever finds that hunting rifle, or what dire fate awaits poor Bambi/aahoo. Or so I thought until I heard Hooman Khalatbari, the sopranos’ composer and musical director, accompanying the trio on the piano. For example, Khalatbari’s transcriptions of Dokhtar Shirazi and Rashid Khaan for piano and opera voices actually work. This may have to do with Khalatbari seeing himself as a conductor first and a composer second. He brings to his own arrangements a conductor’s critical sense of the right balance between art and showmanship. His piano is not a carpet of chords laid out for the singers to trample over; the singing and the playing hold proper dialog. When the singer is wistful about being naughty or coy with her missing lover, Rashid Khaan, the piano seems to respond with the right melodic giggle. Listening to Khalatbari’s well-assembled quartet (piano + 3 sopranos) for once I didn’t ache for the singers to break out into a hearty Dashtestani where I thought our folk melodies belonged.

In the light of Khalatbari raising the bar on Iranian folk song “arias,” I asked Shirin Asgari if she had considered also raising the Iranian singer’s stakes on technical brilliance. She seemed receptive to the idea of demanding Iranian folk arrangements that take full advantage of her astonishing reach and nimbleness. Hopefully Khalatbari will oblige her—and us.

Based on a misconception of Iranian culture, the Austrian music judges had hoped to gently dissuade Nasrin, Shirin, and Kamelia from wasting time on opera training. But six months later, even before the sopranos’ university classes officially began, the young women had already taught an ethnographic lesson to these judges: the typical émigré to Europe from many Muslim countries settle in the West to lift themselves off the economic floors of their homelands; the Iranian diaspora, on the other hand, has uprooted from home to break through Iran’s artistic and academic ceilings.

Merchant of Chaarmahaal

2009-03-13T22:07:00.000-07:00

A Jew lends someone money, the borrower can’t pay it back so the Jew demands a chunk of flesh in payment. This isn’t Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; it is a story from Iran’s Chaahaarmahaal and Bakhtiaari province. The subtleties of this anti-Semitic characterization are explored reasonably well in Shakespeare’s work, so we’ll move on to the legal adventures of the protagonist: the idiot who borrowed the money.

He was simple man who at an old age resolved to improve his lot in life. The Jew was a neighbor who according to the story had amassed his wealth in “many different ways.” At first he was reluctant to lend money to an old man with no collateral whatsoever. But the old man wouldn’t hear ‘no’ for an answer. Fleshing out this bare bones story, the Jew must have been impressed by the old man’s insistence. Surely if this borrower started a business with the money, his determination and perseverance would help him succeed. So the Jew struck a deal with the old man. For every coin loaned the old man must put up a mesghaal (about 5 grams) of flesh for collateral. Never mind the motive for this macabre contract, for that I recommend renting Al Pacino’s The Merchant of Venice. Meanwhile let’s find out how the old man lost his shirt.

He bought merchandize from one place to sell somewhere else. On the road, highway robbers attacked him and stole his wares. Here’s where our Iranian Jew faced a different predicament than Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare’s play. The old man’s Venetian counterpart, Antonio, lost his fortune at sea, whereas the Iranian Antonio (we’ll call him Hassanio) could have taken precautions against highway robbers. Did Hassanio hire security guards, or did he risk his neighbor’s money by skimping on preparations? This detail is important in the court battle that is about to ensue.

Needless to say, Hassanio wouldn’t let Shylockpour cut him up, so they set off to see the judge. Part way to the city, they ran into a fellow whose donkey was stuck in the mud. Hassnio wanted to help, but Shylockpour said, “If you feel so sorry for him, you lend a hand. I’m staying out of this.” Was Shylockpour an unhelpful man? Don’t jump to conclusions until you see what happens next.

Hassanio got into mud, grabbed the donkey’s tail and pulled as hard as he could. Now anyone who has ever helped a donkey out of the mud knows you don’t pull the animal by the tail. It’s not a tow cable. The donkey’s tail broke off, and the very upset owner joined the march to the city to demand compensation from Hassanio. Did the donkey owner say, “Good Hassanio, this was but noble intent fouled by misfortune, so thou art off the hook?” Nothing of the sort, and this wariness of human ingratitude may have been why Shylockpour didn’t want to get involved. We’ll knock a few points off him because if he had helped, the donkey may still have had a tail. But Shylockpour gets fewer demerits now that we’re on to his Shakespearean complexity.

With two plaintiffs on his case, Hassanio was so distraught that at the next town he climbed to the top of a minaret and threw himself from it. He didn’t bother to look where he would fall, and soft-landed on top of a beggar who was instantly killed. So the beggar’s son joined the procession of Hassanio’s accusers. Any judge has to consider that Hassanio’s negligence lost another person's gold, his stupidity seriously injured an animal, and his carelessness cost someone his life. By all accounts Hassanio was a menace to the kingdoms of man and beast. Yet somehow we still root for him. Anyone this unlucky must have a powerful horde of demons conspiring against him. To have a happy ending, the story must give Hassanio a break. And so it does, in a way that reveals how the Chaahaarmahaal and Bakhtiaari folks viewed their society.

When they arrived at the judge’s house, Hassanio noticed that His Honor was hobnobbing with the very highway robbers that had stolen his wares. Did the simple and honest Hassanio cry out to the world that the judge is in the pay of thieves? No, instead of helping his fellow citizens rid themselves of a corrupt official, he and the judge went into a whispering huddle and made a deal. So the judge ignored the case we have been meticulously building against Hassanio. The verdict handed down was that Shylockpour could cut off Hassanio’s flesh, but if he removed even a smidgeon over the amount, Hassanio would be allowed to carve him up in retaliation. Filling in again for Shylockpour’s thinking, he knew that scales in such a town are likely to measure a one mesghaal weight as two mesghaals. So he wisely withdrew his claim, perhaps happy to have fought and relieved to have lost.

The judge told the beggar’s son he is welcome to climb a minaret and throw himself at Hassanio’s head if he wished. That was the end of that claim. Finally it came to the guy holding the detached tail of a donkey as exhibit A. Seeing the state of affairs in this town, he too gave up on justice. But he withdrew his claim with a biting remark that is now as quotably famous as any line of Shakespeare's: “Your Honor,” he said, “khareh maa az korregi dom nadaasht.” (My donkey didn't have a tail to begin with).

Note:
Orignial folk tale from the collection Afsaanehaaye chaahaarmahal va Bakhtiaari
Edited byAli Asmand and Hossein Khosravi.
1998 Eel publications
Printed in Shar-e-Kord, Iran

A Girl’s War

2009-02-23T19:39:00.000-08:00

A play by Joyce Van Dyke
Directed by Torange Yeghiazarian

Any play with Iranian-born Bella (Ramezan-nia) Warda in the cast necessarily draws special attention to the acting. A well behaved play does not depend on brilliant acting to convey its ideas, and playwright Joyce Van Dyke has created such a work in A Girl’s War. Nevertheless, powerful actors like Warda dig their spurs deep into the work, making it bolt like a trained animal shocked back into its wild nature. It is noticeable how much the other actors enjoy sharing their scenes with Warda as Arashaluis, the fiercely patriotic Armenian mother. To survive the intensity that this actress brings to the stage, the other actors courageously counter with their own show of force.

Actess Ana Bayat who plays the lead role as the beautiful fashion model Anna, is on the frontlines in Warda’s assault. At two different levels, as it turns out: acting style as well as character conflict. Anna is Arshaluis’ politically indifferent daughter pressured by her mother to take up arms against their enemy, the Azerbaijani Turks. Here’s a scene where Warda and Bayat lock horns. Arsahaluis is ladling yogurt into Anna’s mouth, and with each spoonful the mother feeds a bit of Armenian history into her daughter, barely letting Bayat finish her line before Warda’s next spoonful arrives. “Keep up, step to it, more passion,” Warda seems to demand. “Let me be; I want composure, I want control,” Bayat seems to say. Which is exactly the dynamic between the characters in the play. Anna has turned her back on her country’s fight for land and identity. Moving to the United States, she has embraced a naive political individualism. Arshaluis on the other hand is driven by nationalistic passion, to the point of sacrificing logic. To paraphrase the lines, Arshaluis says “This is not yogurt; it is madzoon. Yogurt is Turkish, madzoon is Armenian.” “But it’s made exactly the same way,” Anna protests in between spoonfuls.” “No,” Arshaluis insists. “madzoon!”

Another character whose acting goes into high gear in Warda’s presense is the Afghan born Zarif Kabier Sadiqi as the Azerbaijani deserter Ilyas Alizadeh. To be fair, Arshaluis holding an automatic weapon at him does give Sadiqi an excuse to act larger. But his best scene with Warda is not the gun battle scene; it is scene when Arshaluis remembers him as a child in the village before ethnic wars destroyed the community. She embraces him with nostalgic warmth, bringing out jam and cookies for the reunion. Of course she suspects him. Has he really deserted, or is he a spy? Ilyas in turn is ambivalent, but for the moment both emote as though they lived in the world they asked for, and not in the world they got.

It wouldn’t have worked to write the ferocious Arshaluis into the scene where Anna and Ilyas get naked and have sex, but the scene could have used some of Arshaluis’ explicit passion. When Ilyas shows Anna his penis, I couldn’t read in her face whether she was witness to an erection or something less. Ilyas seems to appraise himself highly, but Anna is clinical, her embarrassment perhaps too well covered up. In the actor's dilemma of catering to audience laziness or remaining true to character, Byat chooses character. Or maybe she didn’t wish to compete with the symbolic content of the scene. Anna does not just sleep with the enemy; she baptizes the Muslim under a Christian cross before she lies with him.

For the playwright Van Dyke and Iranian-born director Yeghiazarian balancing Anna and Arshaluis must have taken some thought. Since the daughter Anna has no convictions, the story is really about the mother Arshaluis. On the other hand, the American audience identifies with Anna, not Arshaluis. So Anna gets the most stage time, and Arshaluis gets the best lines and the stronger actor. Anna/Bayat can advocate peace and a reserved acting style, while Arshaluis/Warda can worry about apathy taking soldiers out of the fight, and whether a generation that refuses passion may also refuse action.

There is another strongly bonded pair of characters in the play: Simon Vance as Stephen, a professionally manipulative photographer and Adrian Cervantes Mejia as Tito, Stephen's loyal sidekick. Vance is a nuanced actor, creating a Stephen whose job demands a cruelty and objectivity that goes against his compassionate inner nature. Mejia matches Vance's strengths with his ability to project Tito's generosity of soul. I don't know if it comes from Tito's affable smile, the happy gait, or the innocenct wide eyes even when he's wearing a bloody bandage on his head.

See the play yourself to tease apart how Stephen and Anna create tension on the stage. Her scenes with Tito do just the opposite; they give the play its light moments . Tito and Ilyas also come together, albeit briefly and violently. But that's all in the play.

This link includes where, when, and more info on the play

Angels of War

2009-01-12T21:34:00.000-08:00

Tom Cruise’s WWII thriller Valkyrie has had some oddly nonsensical reviews. Scratching his head about this, critic Roger Ebert says, “I am at a loss to explain the blizzard of negative advance buzz [about the film].” The zaniest of such negative reactions was penned by Roger Friedman of Fox News. This reviewer complains, “You knew it would be bad, and it is.” For a professional film review, this is an absurd statement. How could Friedman know the movie was bad before he’d seen it? Smelling a rat, I checked out the film and found it. Ostensibly about German officers plotting to blow up Hitler, Valkyrie makes us think the unthinkable: is the US military justified in overthrowing its own government if the country is being led to certain ruin.

“He [Cruise] doesn’t even attempt a German accent,” Friedman says in his panicked review. “His American accent gets very bad, to the point where he’s dropping the g’s.” As a professional critic, Friedman would know that Cruise’s American accent is likely a deliberate choice by the director to connect Hitler’s war mongering with current US militarism. The film’s opening credits literally spell this out for us by fading the German spelling of the words into their English equivalents. In an attempt to throw the film’s potential audience off the scent, Friedman feigns bewilderment at the choice of Tom Cruise for the lead role. “He’s completely miscast,” the review insists, citing Cruise’s Jerry Maguire. This is a misleading casting reference, as Friedman would know. The correct reference is Cruise’s Born On The Fourth of July. The Oscar nominated role as a severely wounded American soldier, makes Cruise the perfect choice to play the German colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg, who lost a hand and an eye in WW II. Perfect, that is, if the director wants to draw a parallel between the patriotic German soldier sick of Hitler’s lunacies and the patriotic American soldier sick of ass pyramids at Abu Ghraib.

To drive home the current events allegory, Valkyrie even imitates, tongue-in-cheek, Obama’s campaign slogan. The German colonel tells his co-conspirators that Hitler’s assassination is imperative because “a change must be made.” In an allusion to political protest being framed as “pallin’ around with terrorists,” Von Stauffenberg tells a potential recruit, “I am involved in high treason…can I count you in?” Reminding us of the disgrace of former US attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the movie details how in Western societies regulations can be finagled to engineer power grabs. Quickly it becomes obvious why Fox News, the media arm of US militarism, would assault the film.

Friedman makes his clearest argument against the film when he says he didn’t like it “Because in Valkyrie Singer [the director] opens the door to a dangerous new thought: that the Holocaust and all the atrocities could be of secondary important [sic] to the cause of German patriotism.” Never mind that the hero is trying to end the war; Friedman is disappointed that he is doing it for the wrong reason, acting "only" to save his country from annihilation. It would have been meaningless if Von Stauffenberg had succeeded in ending World War II, says Friedman’s logic, because the ensuing cessation of Hitler’s war crimes would have been coincidental!! Just a few months before Von Stauffenberg’s July plot to eliminate Hitler, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. I doubt any of the surviving inmates would have minded being rescued unintentionally.

I saw Valkyrie a few hours after I had returned from a Gaza protest rally; so images of civilian massacre were freshly painful on my mind, making one particular symbolism in the film go far with me. Von Stuaffenberg had lost an eye to the enemy, and the film made sure the audience kept that in mind. Despite the cruel wording, the “eye for an eye’ directive in the Torah is meant to limit the retribution one can exact. It is a ban against unbridled vengeance. If someone pokes out your eye, then take his eye if you must. But you are forbidden to go on to kill his wife, burn his kids, tear down his house, take away his livelihood, and devastate his land.

The enemy owed Von Stauffenberg an eye, but with his good eye he could still see that continuing the war would ultimately lead to the annihilation of his own nation. Crazy Hitler couldn’t see that.

Patriarchy, not just for women.

2008-07-08T23:19:00.000-07:00

For the past few days I’ve had women on my mind. Platonically, of course; the Iranian Women’s Studies Foundation was having its conference at Berkeley this year, and I was there to listen. But then, during the musical program, Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmai sang for us, and that’s when Plato lost his toga.

The song ‘habanera’ from the Bizet opera Carmen means cruelly to seduce. The teasing rhythm and the pliant way the melody wraps itself around it, sets up the audience for the gypsy woman’s next song, “Seguidille,” which hasn’t been surpassed in the history of the “come on.” Raeeka’s unerring choice of Carmen for the conference addressed an unspoken question about the human rights crimes against Iranian women: Why?

Don Jose, the soldier Carmen seduced, ultimately murders her when he realizes she can’t be possessed. Close to Raeeka’s political interpretation, here is opera singer Maria Callas being frighteningly unpossessable. What’s remarkable about this video clip is that for the first two minutes Callas is not singing; she is projecting presence with posture, and facial expressions—something Raeeka also excels at. Despite the baton waving and the fancy bowing action happening in the background, the camera can’t help but stay fixed on Callas just standing there being Carmen. To appreciate the artistic choice, compare Callas’ interpretation of the character with this sweet but politically vacuous rendition by Katherine Jenkins.

Jenkins’ Carmen is no threat to the likes of the IRI, but Callas’ and Raeeka’s are. Once you peel away IRI’s official justifications for its anti-woman laws--stable family structure, motherhood, disrespectful exploitation of women’s bodies, what would Mohammad do, etc.—you find only the frustrated Don Jose and his pathological urge to possess and dominate.

An intriguing twist to this interpretation had come earlier in the fiery keynote speech of progressive feminist Cherrie Moraga . At Moraga’s level of abstraction, one can see that Don Jose represents more than just the IRI and other misogynous institutions. He is also that part of the West who would impose its ways on vulnerable cultures or else eliminate them. Here, ironically, the Iranian nation is herself a Carmen. Proud, complex , set in her ways, who would rather face death than be possessed.

Mainstream feminists who promote the foreign policies of Western Patriarchy, should understand that there are Iranian women who identify strongly with the second Carmen. Their experience of oppression as the first Carmen works only to amplify their sympathy for the other Carmen. So they will not welcome anyone who regards their culture the way Bizet’s 19th century audience may have viewed his gypsy woman: irresponsible, uncivilized, futureless, and deadly. These women have already peeled away the practical and ideological justifications for the US drive for hegemony—oil and freedom—to find nothing but the mad Don Jose standing over them with a knife.

Some audience members seemed uncomfortable with hints of such an outlook interpreting it as a “sour grapes” reaction to the social successes of the West. One questioner who voiced this criticism of a speaker drew brief applause. To paraphrase the comment, “What’s the point in denying that some superior social solutions originated in the West? We should check our pride and adopt foreign methods that are obviously better.”

Fair comment!The response is in post 9-11 US history, among other places. Immediately after that single trauma, habeas corpus, search and seizure, freedom of the press, congressional oversight, and torture policies quickly degraded. Classroom mythology aside, the workings of Western freedom is a puzzle to everyone including the West. Substituting the word “Democracy” for “love” in Carmen’s song, “Democracy is a rebellious bird that nothing can tame. And it is simply in vain to call it if it is convenient for it to refuse.”

Those who are impressed by enlightened constitutions are confusing the perch for the bird. Freedom is not a Western invention; it’s just their condition, for now. The bird call for world justice, composed of the will of all conscious beings, is still waiting to be discovered, and the search is still wide open to all cultures. This is why Carmen must be protected from Don Jose.

Raeeka’s moving on from opera to Iranian folk songs reinforced the thought artistically--for me. ‘Goleh Sangam,’ ‘Mastom Mastom,’ ‘Shekaareh Ahoo’ can be sung to the accompaniment of the Western piano—particularly as they were so sensitively arranged by composer David Garner. But there are many other Iranian melodies with tonal flavors impossible to render in the Western tempered musical scale.

Ideas are melodies. What flavors of freedom would we oppress if we favored philosophies able to play only a few?

The Essential needs of Iranian Woman today, a conference

2008-06-26T16:23:00.000-07:00

“Dad, would you rather I were a boy?” The first time my daughter asked me that she was in her teens, arguing for easier curfews and a more liberal attitude towards boyfriends. What she was really asking was, “Why is my worth as a human being disproportionately tied up in my chastity?”

As I browse the program for the 19th international conference of the Iranian Women’s Studies Foundation, I see that some of the lectures and panels pose same question from different angles.

For example, Sharareh Shahrokhi’s lecture topic will be, "The right to choose what to wear: an essential need for an Iranian woman or a superfluous one?"

Though the hejab topic gets top billing in Western media, Iranian women activists who live under IRI laws wonder what priority they should give the hejab relative to, say, unfair divorce laws. Does it make sense to bicker over a piece of cloth while custody of your child is threatened? On the other hand, bowing to the hejab symbol gives up turf even before the battle has begun. Gender segregation works against equitable family law.

Iran’s adultery laws are another place where justice and symbolism are at odds. Stoning cases are few and there is a moratorium on carrying out such sentences. But the very fact that adultery is a capital offense in the law books, means that in principle the IRI assumes the power to end a human life based on her sexual behavior. Moreover it has reserved its most hateful form of punishment for adultery. Stoning in its original intent is execution by collective injury at the hands of one’s own community.

Conference panelist Soheila Vahdati Bana, a leading activist against Iran’s stoning laws, has argued that the punishment affects women disproportionately. Iranian Family Law allows female child marriages, restricts a woman’s right to divorce, handicaps the mother in child custody cases, and is biased in favor of the husband in domestic abuse cases. All these factors tempt the wife to seek affection outside the marriage.

The second time I got the question from my daughter, “Dad, would you rather I were a boy,” she was no longer fighting curfews. She was wondering about gender and the nature of power and leadership as she embarked on a long period of professional training.

I don’t know where in the world she will end up living-- Iran ,US, Europe Africa. But I had assumed the disadvantages of being a woman in Western cultures are fast disappearing. Both senators from my state of California are women, and a powerful California Congresswoman is the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. By comparison women in Iran are virtually deprived of a share of official power. The power and leadership question depends on which country you’re talking about, or so I thought.

Guest speakers, Soraya Fallah and Sakineh Sahebi may disagree. Conference organizer Jamileh Davoodi says these thinkers look beyond national boundaries to the more fundamental issues of Patriarchy. “There is no external or internal Patriarchy. Our borders are not different,” Davoodi paraphrases.

A year ago, I had little idea what she may be talking about. But during the Hillary Clinton campaign there was an unease in American society that told me there is something to “get” that has nothing to do with whether a woman can hold high office, and may even be unrelated to sexism as it is normally defined. I hope to find clarification by listening to these speakers’ discourse on fontierless patriarchy. Right now the feeling is vague; rather like the pause after you unknowingly invite a vegetarian to your barbecue.

While thinking globally, there may be reasons to act locally by seeking solutions in the unique context of each culture’s history and political circumstance There will be representatives from Iraq and Palestine at the conference, and one question that I hope comes up is whether it is good strategy for Iranian women to approach their problem from the global view of Islamic repression. While breaking formation has the advantage of better focus, cooperation and shared strategies have also proven very effective. For example the famous Million Signature Campaign to end gender discrimination in Iran is modelled after a political mobilization program that began in Morocco. Mitra Shodjaie will be there to discuss this groundbreaking campaign.

The conference also includes discussions on the contribution of the Internet to free speech, the new sexual risk taking patterns of urban women, and the specific needs of younger generation of Iranian women.

I’m also rooting for Partow Nooriala’s talk to be a hit. Her topic, “The necessity of shattering traditional images of women in cinema,” reflects the wisdom of the conference organizers in recognizing how art brings about social change. Naturally, there will be music, singing, and this play.

Here is the contact infor for the conference.

San Jose Human Rights Seminar on Iran

2008-06-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone who went to the recent San Jose Human Rights Seminar on Iran got a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). During the presentations there was much discussion of religion, and it is possible to review the event by comparing the UDHR to a much older declaration in the Bible.

There are ten commandments in the laws of Moses, and three times as many in the UDHR. The first four laws that came down from the mountain aren't at all about how humans should treat each other; rather they establish the authority of the lawgiver:

1. I'm God.
2. Don't worship any other god.
3. Respect my name.
4. Every seventh day is "God day." [see note 1]

After God uses up almost half the space on the tablet with pictures of his police badge and gun, he finally gets around to saying we shouldn't rob and murder each other.

By comparison, none of the articles of the UDHR claim the power to enforce. The first article, for instance, simply says, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

There is no reference to authority because the code isn't meant for individuals; it is meant for states. Lawgivers themselves. The only god able to lord over these super beings is History. This is reflected in the preamble to the UDHR, which basically warns:

1. I'm History.
2. Respect human rights and your reward shall be peace and joy.
3. Violate human rights and your punishment will be war and a pissed off population.

The conference itself was a showcasing of restrained but powerfully articulated anger. Smoke and rumbling from Mount History.

Religious minorities:
Bahais are the most severely persecuted religious minority in Iran. Their leaders are jailed or executed. They are denied access to higher education. Employers are pressured to fire Bahai employees, and lawyers are intimidated into refusing Bahai clients.

Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians have nominal freedom under Islamic law to practice their religions. But IRI laws are cleverly designed to whittle away at these rights. One conference speaker, Dr. Jaleh Pirnazar mentioned an IRI law where if one member of a family in a religious minority converts to Islam then all the rights of inheritance go to that person, disinheriting the other family members. These sneaky persecutions slowly institutionalize our culture's traditional mistrust and contempt for members of minority religions.

The audience questioned critically whether defending the right to religion does not go against the secular grain of human rights. After all, which of these God based institutions wouldn't do the same to Muslims if the situation were reversed? The answer seems to be that if the UDHR is powerful enough to liberalize Islam, then it would also restrict intolerance in other faiths.

At one point in the panel discussion Neda Shahidyazdani, speaking for the Bahi, told a story that transcended even the articles of UDHR. A Muslim man broke into tears after handing over the body of an executed Bahai to the victim's mother. He said he wished he were not part of a system that would commit such crimes. Is it not a human right to live in a society where one does not contribute to crimes of conscience? As an American I feel this violation of my human rights every time I remember my taxes are paying the salaries of torturers in Guantanamo prison.

Women's rights:
The Million Signatures Campaign to stop gender discrimination in Iran is currently at the frontlines of the human rights efforts in Iran. IRI laws discriminate against women regarding polygamy, divorce, child custody, inheritance, blood money, court testimony, travel abroad, public appearance, and other issues. Women's rights activist Fariba Davoodi Mohajer made a strong play for leadership of the dissident community by pointing out that the vigor in the women's movement could energize other movements too damp to ignite.

She's right! Current political winds are backing women's movements. The universal upheaval in gender attitudes reminds us of the dramatic days when class wars were reshaping the world. During her "can do" style PowerPoint presentation Davoodi Mohajer outlined the successes of the campaign in reaching, educating, and activating Iranian women, setting an example for organized action against unfair laws.

Daringly, Davoodi Mohajer chastized the traditional leftists for ignoring women's rights in their agendas when the Left held the world's attention. The shoe is on the other foot now, but has the lesson been learned? I wonder how much cooperation exists between the women's movement and, say, the labor movement. Conversely, how many signatures is the labor movement collecting towards the million?

There is tremendous support for the Million Signature Campaign outside Iran, including a recent youth demonstration in Geneva that helped pressure the IRI to free some of the campaign's activists from prison. Other diverse dissident groups in Iran could pitch in with resources, and get profitable returns on their investment by supporting the internationally favored women's movement.

Which brings me to a great new Farsi word Dr. Mansour Farhang used during his talk on cooperation. Faraajenaahi, coined by Iran scholar Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak means "non-partisanship", a desperately needed word and concept for Iranian activists.

Admittedly, cooperation is sometimes unpleasant. For example the Million Signature Campaign does not seek regime change, only changes in the law. This may deter regime change supporters from participating in the effort. Yet another word that is fairly new to our ancient language may be of some help. The word Siaasat used to mean "good administration." But when the concept of citizenship evolved around the 1906 constitutional movement, Siaasat started meaning "politics" [see note 2]. This word democratized negotiating, coalition building, power brokering, and yes, distasteful alliances. So everyone can get in the mud now, not just ministers and kings. In a sense, politics is democracy, and getting dirty is a privilege not a dishonor.

Nevertheless, for the virtuous and the principled, The faraajenaah nature of the Iranian Society For Human Rights makes it an ideal vehicle for coalition building, and the most formidable tool yet for a multi-pronged democratic assault on the IRI. In fact we know the IRI is threatened by the human rights weapon because, it has responded by creating its own center for human rights studies and holds its own conferences on the topic.

Despite the ushaven faces and the retro taste in fashion, IRI supporters are cutting edge politicians, and know how to avail themselves of democratic teamwork when needed. Their common Shiite faith isn't their only instrument of unity. As for the opposition, the moral strength of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights is a good replacement for faith in God, but the rest has to come from smart politicking. In this God versus Man contest, the winner will be whoever forges the strongest union. May the best man win.

Note 1: This is the Torah grouping of the Ten Commandments. There are other groupings.
Note 2. See State And Society in Iran by Homa Katouzian page 6.

The Fish Fall In Love

2008-06-10T18:54:00.000-07:00

Directed by Ali Rafii

The main theme of The Fish Fall In Love is so familiar to the Iranian viewer that few of them may complain about its plot making no sense. Or if the viewer is not Iranian, he/she may adopt a post-modern disregard for plot logic and concentrate on the clearest message of the film: suspicion destroys our best hopes.

Newly freed political prisoner Aziz (Reza Kianian) sneaks back to his Caspian hometown to find his fiancée, Atieh, has been married off. Philosophical about life, he sneaks back out to roam the planet doing we know not what. These events happen years before the movie begins. In the opening scene Aziz drifts back into his hometown again, seeking nothing in particular. But a purpose finds him when he discovers he is in a position to help his ex-fiancée’s beautiful daughter, Touka (Gholshifteh Farahani). In a parallel between the generations, Touka’s fiancée has also been jailed, and she too has been misled to think her man has frivolously abandoned her.

The reasons for the deceptions are different. Touka is misinformed by her fiancee’s best friend because he wants her for himself. Atieh on the other hand took the word of Aziz's father who lied to save face. Her own father probably accepted this lie “for her own good.” He wouldn’t want her wasting her youth waiting for Aziz. How they got away with this lie in a tiny town where Aziz has close friends, we are not to question.

The characters, however, are free to indulge in outrageous skepticism. Touka’s jailed fiancée for instance, thinks Aziz has hired him a lawyer just to botch the criminal case against him. He suspects the middle-aged Aziz has fallen in love with young Touka and wants to eliminate rivals. Aziz in turn frustrates us with his stoic silence against this accusation.

The most frustrating moment of Aziz’s stoicism, however, happens on the occasions when Aziz and Atieh (Roya Nonahali) meet. He says nothing to clarify why he disappeared from her life. In fact he says nothing at all, because Atieh yells at him to shut up and listen while she guilt trips him about showing up after all these years to ruin her restaurant business. After her husband’s death, she has moved into the property abandoned by Aziz’s family, and set up a restaurant. Now, she thinks, Aziz is there to reclaim the property and evict her. The presence of a lawyer in the picture convinces her of this.

Atieh’s suspicion is unfounded. Aziz had no idea anyone was squatting in his property, or even seemed to care, but he is in no hurry to make this clear, or to explain about the lawyer. Nor does he ask Atieh what went on with her during all these years. Instead he asks a friend who tells him Atieh’s husband beat her senseless one night then took a rowboat out to sea never to return.

The domestic quarrel and the suicide are not explained, but this revelation along with subtle line deliveries by Reza Kianian invites us to guess what directions the plot may have taken if censors hadn’t been watching. Aziz and Atieh had premarital sex. Touka may be Aziz’s daughter. This is why Atieh’s husband went nuts, and this is why Aziz and Touka hold each other in such deep affection.

Now that the characters’ behaviors have found a sensible basis, we see that Atieh’s father had no choice but to quickly find a husband for his pregnant daughter. Atieh’s moving into Aziz’s house with her child, and the issue over property rights suddenly picks up considerably more logical as well as social and dramatic substance.

Reza Kianian’s artistry helps cut through some of the fog. In the scene where he and Touka first meet, he is multifaceted with his line delivery. “Are you Touka?” he says, and we can't be sure if he's responding to Touka's flirtatiousness or enjoying getting to know her after all these years. At a later dinner table scene, his line delivery of “Now that we are all together,”has a strong flavor of paternity. The sense of this alternate plot is strongest when Aziz confides in a friend, “Atieh acts as though we never…”

But director Ali Rafii (Fined by IRI in 2002 for "promoting immoral conduct" in a play ) knows such a film would never see the light of the projector. Instead censorship has left him with a confusing movie vulnerable to banal panderings to the male-bashing market. This has resulted in inaccurate film descriptions such as:

“Atieh’s singular passion is food, and her small but popular restaurant on the sleepy Caspian coast is her pride and joy. But when Aziz, a former lover, appears after a twenty-year absence with the intention of closing the restaurant, Atieh prepares his favorite dishes, one after the other, in a desperate effort to convince him otherwise. Loosely based on the Persian fable of Shahrazad and the Thousand Myths (A Thousand and One Nights), director Ali Raffi uses the language of food to paint a richly textured portrait of life and love on the Southern coast of Iran [sic].”

Never mind that the above description has a Google sense of geography [see note 1] ; it also gives no clue that the Shahrzad theme and the pretty food is just the marketing candy. Yet, despite the silent compromises Rafii has has made to censorship and international marketing, his message about the destructiveness of groundless suspicion comes through, and makes a powerful emotional impact.

Reza Kianian’s interpretative skill as an actor encourages us to be patient with the film’s frustratingly stoic compromises, and view it as a visually delightful post-modern work. After one thousand and one such films, the censors may relent.

Note 1: The Caspian is to the north of Iran, not on her southern shores. Many Iranians are miffed with Google Earth for calling the Persian Gulf "Arabian Gulf."

Note 2: For a historical snapshot of the politics of pious film censorship in the US, see this absorbing 1965 essay by Judy Stone, 'The Legion of Decency: What's Nude?'

Shahnameh Millennium Concert at the Iranian Studies Biennial

2008-06-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

Ferdowsi packs so much literature in his verses that storytellers, singers, percussionists, and painters have traditionally helped unpack his work for us. For a thousand years, this collaboration of the letters and the arts in ghahveh khaneh (coffee house) settings has upgraded and refreshed the Iranian national identity. To commemorate the Shahnameh millennium, the Seventh Biennial conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies will include a multi-media concert combining Shahnameh storytelling (naghali), Shahnameh-inspired orchestral music, and visual presentations of scenes from the epic.

To bring the concert to this Toronto gathering of hundreds of Iran scholars, program chair Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi invited Shahnameh narrator Morshed Torabi to collaborate with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He then invited concert pianist Ariana Barkeshli, who is also a music researcher, to be the artistic director for the event. Barkeshli recommended Persian Trilogy (Seganeh e Parsi), a suite of Shahnameh-inspired symphonic poems by Juliard composer Behzad Ranjbaran.

Looking back on a previous musical rendition of the Shahnameh, Iranians were so awed by composer Loris Tjeknavorian's Rostam va Sohrab that, despite its orchestral format, they welcomed the work into Shahnameh's exclusive tonal tradition. So I asked Barkeshli about her choice of Ranjbaran. In reply, she sent me the London Symphony Orchestra's recording of Persian Trilogy. Ranjbaran's work is mature in the way Sohrab would have been if the Shahnameh story had a happier ending. Confident, strong, wise, compassionate, yet youthful and contemporary. I was ready for drums and clashing daggers, but instead was humbled to find musical substance and emotional depth.

On the other hand, the audience for this multi-media presentation will be a lot tougher than I. It will include the world's largest concentration of experts on Iranian literature, history, art, anthropology, sociology, politics, whatever. Imagine playing a recital where seated in the first row are Bach to Bernstein, Rodrigo to Rohani. Add to these luminaries a Liberace or two who would delight in prima donna wisecracks. Nightmare!

Yet Barkeshli has no pre-performance anxiety. She is proud of her choice. Persian Trilogy is up to the challenge. Seemorgh, The Blood of Seyavash, and Seven Passages, simply dazzle. Maestro JoAnn Falletta apparently agrees. An avid promoter of Ranjbaran's talent, the internationally sought -after conductor will be interpreting Persian Trilogy for the large Toronto audience.

To appreciate Ranjbaran, the listeners will keep in mind the modern work that Iran scholars have done on Shahnameh's symbolic content. For example one Ferdowsi authority, Mahmoud Omidsalar, has done much to elevate the image of the epic from an action-adventure story to a thoughtful riddling of the human psyche. Due to Omidsalar's literary analysis, The Seven Trials of Rostam (Haftkhan) can now be seen as a dream sequence rather than an actual experience of the ordeal. Omidsalar points out that before some of the trials Ferdowsi has Rostam fall asleep. In fact Rostam does not fight the first battle at all. His steed, Raksh, kills the lion while his master sleeps. [See note 3]

There are several wispy, dreamlike demarcations in Seven Passages but the composer may or may not be proposing Omidsalar's Jungian take on the trials. Though he does mention in the CD notes, "I was inspired by the symbolism evident in the story." He adds, "The music reflects my general impression of the story rather than following it faithfully. It is one continuous piece organized tightly around a three-note motif (B, A sharp, B) transforming in the heroic finale to its inversion (B, C, B)." He too seems to view the seven trials as symbolic of the upheaval that occurs in our passage from a state of childhood to maturity. Or to take the symbolism a step further, the inversions that occur as lower levels of consciousness blossom into true awareness.

The audience will also be listening for how well Morshed Torabi melds the tenor of his narration into the texture of Ranjbaran's music. The art of naghali is a one-person show, with an occasional drum or bell. Strings, woodwinds and brass are new to this art form. Torabi will be arriving 10 days prior to the performance for rehearsals. I would pay a lot just to watch the Morshed emerge triumphant after he battles his own Seven Trials in this historic transformation of the art of naghali.

What sort of dialog will Torabi hold with the Persian miniature images projected onto the stage as he paints his own images in words? If Torabi is a pardeh khan (scene narrator) as well as a naghal, he may feel more at home surrounded by burly Qajar-style figures than with classical Persian miniatures. Will the sound tech know to capture the clap of the hand or the slap on the thigh? How does an actor who is used to being his own director share the stage?

Like Rostam's vanishing dragon there will be dangers invisible to the hero that others may have no trouble spotting. Shahnameh recitations are seamless with Persian tonal intervals and rhythmic declarations. Will Torabi's authenticity come through in the context of Western sounds? How much of the intimate coffeehouse warmth will this able naghal salvage in a performance hall that seats over 2500? How will he conjure the aroma of tea and the clink of saucers against glass? If you don't think this is a trial, try telling a campfire story without the dark woods and the embers.

Hopefully this multimedia experiment will raise some good debate. In fact the very idea of having cultural events at the once purely academic gathering of Iran scholars is still novel and controversial. But as our academics begin more and more to appreciate the enormous impact of art on human thought, I believe the disagreements will seem absurd in hindsight.

"The Iranian attitude towards art has come a long way though, hasn't it Ariana?" I told Barkeshli knowing it would bring emotion to her voice. As cousins we both remember how her father, Mehdi Barkeshli, kept repeating the lesson that art, literature and science are tonic, mediant and dominant in the strum of a single chord. The Sorbonne-educated physicist and musicologist worked hard constructing a theoretical foundation for the radif (system) of Persian music. Meanwhile he managed to found the Department of Music and Theatre at the University of Tehran-this accomplishment from a man whose traditional Iranian father once threw his son's violin into the fire.

Such outrageous behaviors of intolerance writ large by the IRI continue to make the Iranian diaspora cringe in embarrassment. Shahnameh Millennium Concert's program chair Tavakoli-Targhi says large-scale policies of intolerance are alien to Iran's cosmopolitan psyche. An accomplished Iran scholar, Tavakoli-Targhi points out insightfully that lovers in the Shahnameh--Bijan-Manijeh, Rostam-Tahmineh, Seyavash-Farangis-are mixed couples. This concert's vision in marrying a beautiful symphonic work to a handsome Shahnameh narration is the sort of vision Ferdowsi may have had for us from a millennium ago.

The Shahnameh Millenial Concert is scheduled for August 2 in Toronto's Roy Thompson Hall.

Note 1: The conference also includes a film festival. See details here.

Note 2: Here is a brief interview with "Gordafarid," Iran's first woman naghal. Morshed Torabi mentored her.

Note 3 : Shahnameh versions may vary from one coffee table to the next. This gem of a paper by Omidsalar on the haftkhan of Rostam uses the Khaleghi-Motlagh version.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

2008-05-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

The fastest way to build trust and generosity in someone is to spike her nasal spray with a dose of the hormone oxytocin. But hurry to the point--money, promotion, sex, whatever it is you can't get without cheating; the drug degrades to half its strength in only three minutes. The science article with this info coincidentally comes with a graph that suggests, among 29 nations, Iranians are the fourth least likely people to resort to this sort of deceitfulness. Norwegians stole the gold medal in trustworthiness, Denmark grabbed the silver, and if it hadn't been for the Chinese, Iranians would have come home with the bronze. Intrigued, I went surfing and found data that I liked even better. According to a World Values Survey of no less than 88 nations, the top scores in the trust games were Denmark: 60.1, Sweden: 62.4, Norway: 63.9, Iran: 65.4! Whatever you do though, don't leave your nasal spray unattended in Brazil. They scored dead last in the survey with a score of 4.8. If honesty were soccer, Iran would clobber Brazil 13.6 to one.

But before we start the doodooridooing, it is fair to ask how the integrity score is calculated. Simple; the score is the percentage of the population sample in each country who say other people can be trusted. To make sure a high score doesn't indicate a nation of trusting fools, these numbers are checked against "wallet drop" tests. The two approaches correlate well. This means if you drop your wallet in Iran, there is a 65.4 percent chance it will be returned to you-or maybe it means if you drop a wallet with $100 in it, you'll get back $65.40; take your pick. [see note 2]

Iran's first place result was so astonishing that one study using the World Values Survey threw out the data for Iran altogether, citing some technical equivocation. I checked the authors expecting to find a list of Brazilian sore losers. Instead, there was only Dr. Christian Bjornskov of Danish nationality (fourth place). His paper "The Determinants of Trust" posits that trust in a society is a kind of capital just like any other kind of economic asset. This economist belongs to a school of thought that says high levels of trust in a country bring about social goodies like economic growth, rule of law, democracy, clean government, good education, and low crime. The IRI is sitting on the world's largest reserve of social capital, yet it is still waiting for prices to come down. This is why our glorious score was thrown out as suspect.

Yet Bjornskov objectivity is also suspect. According to his research many Muslims use the phrase "Inch' Allah" (sic) in their daily life. He concludes, "...which means that only contingent on a number of factors do people feel morally obliged to keep their promises. This God given uncertainty naturally could lead to lower trust in fellow citizens."

Most Iranian Muslims I know refrain from saying "Inch' Allah," or dare think it. A similar sounding phrase, often mumbled, advertises the speaker's belief in an entity that would dip him in molten lead if he doesn't return people's wallets. If the above Iranian mumbled things like, "110% absolutely," then I would know he is clueless about the melting point of lead, and would not trust him. Invoking the will of Allah is a trust builder, not a trustbuster.

Bjornskov's reasoning is more at home in analyzing his native Nordic phrases. He notes that the old Viking saying, "a word is a word," is sometimes followed by "and a man is a man". This shows that, "...if a man was to break his word he would no longer qualify to be treated as such." Assuming every Danish male wants to be treated "as such," Bjornskov's predictor guarantees a minimum integrity score of 50% for his country. Presumably, the balance is contributed by Danish women who happen to be virtuous for unexplained reasons.

Before our dispute descends further into mother/sister name-callings, let me say I was actually impressed by Bjornskov's masculine appeal to "a word is a word, and a man is a man." Despite his low opinion of Islamic peoples, he seems familiar in a Viking way with the Iranian concept of looti gari. This makes me phrase my reaction to him in different terms: "Daashteem Pahlevoon? When did it become the rasm of the best and brightest of Vikingdom to spread misunderstandings as social science?"

As for the misunderstanding about Brazilians, no amount of oxytocin is going to make me believe that communities can be different from each other by trust factors as high as 13.6. Here's what I propose to Brazil: we Iranians are often desperate for a good soccer coach, and you folks obviously need world class coaching in how to respond to surveys. Shall we shake hands on the deal, or would you trust a mustache hair as collateral?

Note 1: The survey scores can be found in the appendix at the end of Bjornskov's paper, "The Determinants Of Trust," linked to in the above the article.

Note 2. In the second paragraph, the technical term "correlate" is used with some artistic license. A score of 65.4% in the survey doesn't necessarily mean a score of 65.4% in the "wallet drop" test.

Iranian Scholarship Foundation 2008 gala

2008-04-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

Comedian Maz Jobarani finagled his complicated schedule so he could accept Iranian Scholarship Foundation’s invitation to speak at their fundraising gala. An alternate choice for the event had been graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi. But Jobrani was more stubbornly persuasive in beating back his schedulers. A stellar cluster of young Iranian scholars needed his support, and no other engagement seemed more important.

Jobrani immediately challenged his audience with a hilariously multi-layered routine about how his mother wanted him to be a lawyer--when he really wanted to be an actor.

Mother: You want to grow up to be a clown?
Maz: Mom, I just want to act.
Mother: Well being a lawyer is a kind of acting. Isn’t it? You act in front of the jury, that’s twelve people right there. Throw in the judge; that makes thirteen. And then there’s the weekends. Why don’t you act on weekends, ghorboonet beram.

Of course none of the scholarship students are attending clown school. Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, are all institutions with superb curricula in law and the sciences. But Jobrani’s clever routine seemed to be asking if the Scholarship Committee treated the arts seriously. As though in answer, one of the student speakers gave us the delightful news that his new play was about to be professionally produced. Later I found out another scholarship student majored in fashion design. In the case of Lawyer vs. Clown, the Scholarship Committee had been an impartial jury.

This impartiality is expressed tersely by Selection Committee member Dr. Abbas Milani. He says, "Once I determine a candidate has the four qualifications--grades, need, Iranian ancestors and contribution to promotion of Persian culture--then a composite of all four, along with the quality of statement and recommendations determines a students final rank."

On the emotional level, however, the four qualifications can be better understood in a Wizard of OZ format: brains, courage, heart, and vision.

The brains part of the story is easiest to see. A GPA of 3.5 in this need-based scholarship qualifies to apply for it, but some of the students carry strings of uninterrupted “A”s coupled with near perfect SAT scores.

Courage is the domain of Professor Jaleh Pirnazar, another of the six committee members. Venturing beyond academic achievement, undeterred by imperfect grades, she scours the applicant’s written essay, seeking strengths where a gamble may bring big payoffs. The qualities that impress her are leadership, perseverance against hardships, and a good sense of community responsibility. Tellingly, a recipient is obligated to perform 100 hours of community service each year so that his/her conscientious faculties continue to get a workout. Outside of class, look for ISF students in places like the Big Brother/Sister Program or cancer help centers.

Heart is symbolized by Mehdi Safipour. Ask any of the students who hold him up as their role model for commitment. When I saw Safipour last Sunday, I lied to him about looking less tired than he did during previous galas. He has not stopped to rest since he joined the committee years ago. The force of his dedication supplies even the tiniest administrative capillary of this foundation. In the middle of a busy financial accounting day, he has been known to take the trouble of making reminder calls to students who may be late in their paperwork, or who may need counseling towards a particular course credit.

Azadeh Hariri is the Dorothy archetype, symbolic of the students' vision . Her dream of happier futures drives the ISF narrative. An heiress to pre-revolution textile wealth, Hariri is the financial mill of the foundation. At first encounter she comes across as an unpretentiously rich altruist. Good students shouldn’t have to worry about money while in school.

At a broader level Hariri sees a time when the best Iranian minds are contributing to American culture. As politicians, judges, artists, entrepreneurs, professors, medical scientists, journalists, and economists they will fuse the wisdom of their Iranian heritage with the traditions of American democracy, creating better policies and decisions.

Of course if some of these students were to win Nobel Prizes, Oscars, or Pulitzers—and it's a safe bet—Hariri’s collection of intellectual gems will outshine any ornament she could put behind a glass. But this takes Hariri's philanthropic strategy too lightly. To explain, she pays all the costs of the foundation including the huge annual gala, so that 100% of the donations go to the students. One may ask if she’s got so much money why doesn’t she just pay the tuitions directly? Because the social institution of Iranian-Americans rolling up their sleeves to support each other could use help being built. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and…

Among the farsighted organizations teaching our community to fish, few are able to grant up to a $10,000 yearly scholarship four academic years in a row. Also, the selection committee never considers an applicant’s politics or religion in the award decision. At the gala there is a student who wears an Islamic roosari. This recipient--who scored first place in Iran's national university entrance exams--has bonded with Bahaiis, Jews, Christians and other Iranian youth of undetermined creed.

Packed with donors this year, at each event the numbers at the gala have been growing. Still, more funds are sought to invest beyond obviously “blue chip” students. There is hidden talent out there for historic Iranian-American innovations. With rising support and exposure, ISF hopes to go after matching university funds, potentially doubling its capacity to reach out to our community.

This year’s gala brought in over half a million dollars, including the auction overseen by hostess Rudy Bakhtiar, the journalist who occasionally lights up the CNN newsroom with her Persian charm.

The journalist Bakhtiar hosted us, the actor Jobrani gave us critical perspective, and the Persian Jazz singer, Ziba Shirazi, recorded the event in our emotional memories. Humming a Ziba Shirazi tune during the drive home, I wondered when the scholarship custom began in history. Back in the fifteenth century the wealthy Medici family took in a 13 year old kid who wasn’t much into school, but liked to draw. This is one early instance of the secular scholarship tradition that I could think of. The kid's name was Michelangelo.

Important note:
The May 31 deadline for ISF applications is approaching. Here’s the link if you know a student from anywhere in the US who would like to apply. Check out interviews with some of the ISF students here.

Shirin and Salt Man.

2008-04-07T00:41:00.000-07:00

By Nilofar Shidmehr.
Oolichan books 2008

No man has died more nobly for love than Farhad the stonecutter. And no man should be loathed more than the heartless news bearer who told him the lie that his Shirin had died.

The poet Nezami tells us that Princess Shirin of fable built a mausoleum for Farhad who shredded mountains to deserve her. 1700 years later, author Nilofar Shidmehr found out that mummified remains of a man were discovered near the mountains where Farhad had thrown himself to his death. There was no mausoleum. Fickle Shirin, undreamable as the morning sun, if love cannot rage then what curse burdens your daughters today?

In Shidmehr’s vastly imaginative novella, Shirin and Salt Man, a modern day Iranian woman named Shirin plans to elope with the mummy of an ancient salt miner preserved in brine and discovered in 1993 in Iran. She is not as fortunate as Nezami’s Farhad. Her insanity is not from love, but from neglect. She married the abusive Khosro, and now remorse has driven her to adultery with the pile of salted bones she imagines to be Farhad.

Shidmehr’s Khosro is not a king like Nezami’s Khosro. Though the romantically obsessed heroine married him for his kingly name, he really just works at the ministry of Islamic Guidance. As Shirin says,

“His job was to censor foreign actresses
who spoke their love out loud.
He was good at chopping images
and changing story lines.
My husband turned prostitutes into virgins
all the time”

The modern Khosro would likely censor Shidmehr. Her imagery mixes anger and sex like mud and blood. Here’s how the author describes the virgin Shirin being raped:

“There was Shapoor
shaking and gnashing his teeth
as though my shame were his.
You showed me your legs.
You stole away my virtue;
cover your body, woman.
Pebbles jabbed into my back,
like a mess of my own dislocated vertebrae.
and when he got up my voice ran silent
as the river through me. Darkness covered
my body, the mud was mixed with blood.”

Shirin had tried to get a ride with the man, who accidentally glimpsed her legs through a split chador. Shidmehr perhaps knows that the Nezami fan would compare this to Farhad’s equally pathological but harmless behavior at his first glimpse of Shirin. He faints!

Even in her humorous moments Shidmeh’s imagery is wet. She says,

“Shir has three meanings, as you know: milk, or the animal,
the lion. Never mind the third meaning.”

It was the meaning between the first and the second that got Abbas Kiarostami’s “The Wind Will Carry Us” in trouble with Iranian Khosros. You see, the director had “no idea” women aren’t supposed to milk cows while men read love poems to them.

Yet Nezami has ducked Islamic censors for centuries. Shidmehr constantly borrows from his sensuality in her free translations of him:

“Call me whenever you drink
from that milky brook
I brought you. Every day
when you sweeten your mouth
please say my name aloud,
for I am bitter here without you”

At one point in the novella the repeated milk imagery suggests an odd possibility to the reader.
“As a newborn
to a mother’s breast,
Farhad spoke to Shirin,
I am drawn to you.”
Does Shirin intend to put the stolen mummy to her breast and nurse him back to flesh? Is the second meaning of shir not lion but lioness taking responsibility for suckling a new pride?

Struck by Shidmehr’s display of literary brilliance, I kept wondering why Shirin and Salt Man is a novella and not a full-length novel. A more culturally aware publisher would not have let her stop at women vs. Islam. Like a lover who can’t get enough, the editor would have begged the author to go places where Nezami’s imagination could only point the way.

For example, she could tell us why Farhad had to die. In Nezami’s time, and doubly so in the Sassanian period when Khosro va Shirin takes place, a princess could never marry a stone cutter, regardless of his merits. Nezami is coerced into feeding Farhad and his pure love to the maws of his social order. The hero was condemned to execution by the tragedy of rigid hierarchical societies.

But modernity changes class paradigms in upheavals that dwarf the political revolutions it inspires. The new consciousness of female oppression rides the seismic waves of a historyquake where dynamic landmasses of meritocracy rub against the stolid ways of autocracy. This is how a modern novel about Shirin and Farhad story can have a happy ending.

Sadly, the Western publishing industry (includes distribution, reviews and other publicity) takes only what it is conditioned to want from Iranian women writers, allowing the rest of their talent to lie dormant. It has frustrated the desirous volcano inside Shidmehr to groan threateningly but not erupt.

Yet love compensates for small dissatisfactions. Shidmeh’r mature romance with our own literature cleans up after many of the carefree Lolitas seduced by the lustful Humberts of Western autocracy. While these writers’ crush on the splendid American Khosro makes them oblivious to our culture’s humble handsomeness, Shidmehr’s devotion to our legacy showcases just what treasures there are to lose if we neglect our heritage. Despite the taste of salt in her lament, Shidmehr’s protectiveness of Nezami forbids the foreigner Alexander to think his sword could defeat a Gordian knot as skillfully tied as Persian culture.

It is fair to acknowledge the complaint of star struck Lolitas, but we need no urging to suffer Shidmehr’s anguish because this writer has made it clear she is of the same body as the rest of us. Or as Farhad said of Shirin, “I cannot say we are of one body because self-worship is idolatry.”

Reading Shidmehr’s resurrection of Nezami in English, I wondered if it is it even possible for the thirty-year-old IRI weed to choke a three thousand years old tree? Shidmehr’s prognosis is not the hope of a mad lover when she says,

“No story is written unchangeably
in stone—not mine
nor Nezami’s Shirin’s,
Shah Khosro’s or Farhad’s:
“Reconfiguring Mount Bisotun.”
I could call Farhad back
to life, be a Jesus
and make Farhad rise
from the dead. He will lift
his head off the stones,
his breath lend its color
to the world I create
around him. He will intuit
that Shirin lives, that the news-bearer
was deadly and dead
wrong. He will raise”

When I see an Iranian writer unraveling our old myths to weave new meaning into familiar smelling wool, I am inspired to wish that for every copy of Reading Lolita In Tehran there would be two copies of Shirin and Saltman, Because inside the pages there
is nourishment , there is power, there is hope.

There is love.

Notes:
1. See Nazy Kaviani’s prose telling of the Shirin and Farhad story, here.
2. See Nezami in the original, here.

Confessions of a Farsiholic: reviewing a one-letter epic.

2008-03-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

The first time I was fined for saying “Farsi” instead of “Persian” I didn’t fight the ticket because back then the action was all about French. French fries had become “Freedom” fries, ruining a flavorful shortcut to khoresh-e-gheimeh. Flag wavers claimed fried potatoes sliced lengthwise should never have been called French fries in the first place. There were “chips” to go with fried fish in England as early as 1864. Surely the US adopting fries in the 1930s, should have named this calorie bomb after her freedom-loving ally, and not after folks who would leave Iraqis in peace.

The Francophile in me worried that the logic of Iran experts who said the term “Farsi” broke ties with prestigious Persia, could also apply to French culture. I was nervous that Freedom fries, instead of French fries, would confuse historians as to the location of the Louvre and the nationality of Inspector Clouseau. If this renaming becomes a trend, I fussed, Americans would no longer think of Descartes when they eat French toast, or of Voltaire when they look out of French windows. Cardinal Richelieu would never again leap to mind as soon as anyone stuck a tongue in someone else’s mouth.

In this crisis, I reached out to an abridged history of the potato, which tentatively placed fries in Paris in 1840, almost a quarter of a century before the first chips greased the streets of London. I could go back to enjoying khoresh-e- gheimeh without feeling a party to the looting of Iraq’s civilization. More importantly, American English could begin reversing its Orwellian decline.

Throughout this time, though, I kept falling off the “Persian” wagon. Supportive friends promised that love would eventually come to my arranged marriage with this word. Yet I philandered with “Farsi,” and English cheerily egged me on. She gets a kick out of making her speakers and writers squabble. For example, did I tell you about the black eye I got over Star Trek’s “To boldly go where no man has gone before?” English has been on red alert status since the original sci-fi series first came out in the sixties. Is it correct English to insert the adverb “boldly” between “to” and “go?” I was in the coalition that said even in the 23^rd century Captain Kirk had no right to split his infinitives. He should have said, “To go boldly where no man has gone before.” We thought we had the opposition finally outgunned, when Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suddenly decloaked in front of us.

In his book, The Language Instinct, Pinker explained the origin of the taboo against split infinitives, making our side look very silly. Showing off your Latin was a sign of good education in England, and in Latin you can’t split the infinitive even if you wanted to. Latin infinitives are like Farsi “raftan.” Where can you put “boldly” in “raftan?” Surely not “raft boldly an!” But natural English does allow us to boldly split infinitives. So for years over-educated English academics had unnecessarily disfigured their beautiful language with the syntax of Cicero.

The Language Instinct, more than histories of the potato, transformed my lust for the word “Farsi” from a sin to a fact of nature. Though Pinker focuses on English grammar rather than word usage and doesn’t mention Farsi, his book exposes the organic, dynamic, and inborn aspects of human language. Pinker’s work made me think that the English language has adopted “Farsi” for natural reasons, not because Iranians have passed on a bad habit to English speakers.

To find out why English speakers feed “Farsi” but shoo away “Persian,” I spoke with American novelist and prolific short story writer Elliot Fintushel. Fintushel’s prose should never be taken with other amphetamines, but this ultra-modern writer has a subconscious so close to his normal awareness that he can explain why he does or doesn’t choose a particular word. By the way, he knew nothing about The Farsibition when I phoned him.

Ari- Hello Elliot, what do you think of when I say, “The Persian language?”

Fintushel- Well, uh…Sanskrit!

This educated and worldly American writer prefers “Farsi” to “Persian” because his image of historic Persia is at odds with his modern interactions with Iranians. He says “Farsi” because his mind can no longer put Iran in a museum. Television, globalization, immigration, Youtube, cheap travel, all conspire to break the “Persian” display glass for him. While the culture of Sohrab allows the old to kill the young, Fintushel ‘s Oedipal culture has no qualms against slipping the dagger of novelty deep into Rostam’s heart. “Persian” withers, “Farsi” flowers. English sighs, remembering her own virgin days when brave men called her “Angelisc.”

As for the Iranian speaker of English, there are also natural reasons why “Persian” sounds like a trademark and “Farsi” the real thing.

First, developmentally. “Farsi” is what our moms said our language was called, and if English wants to imitate us, then she has realized—perhaps by sensing our adamancy—that “Persian” is no longer the right word. Remember, until recently English didn’t have much contact with Iranians except through our classical culture. Never mind that the French don’t use their own word for their language when they speak English. Fintushel’s tongue isn’t allergic to “French” but he does break out in hives with “Persian.” The word “French” doesn’t fight his reality of who the French people are; “Persian” does! Thankfully, the ultimate authority on American English has baptized “Farsi” into the English language and here’s a link that swears to it:

Webster also says that the English word “Persian” primarily refers to ANY of the SEVERAL Iranian languages dominant in Persia. Iranians who tell hapless Webster-toting Americans that they speak Persian are suggesting they may be fluent in several languages including Tajik, Dari and Judeo-Bukharic.

Secondly, there is an organic link between words and voice/body gesturing. Here’s a revealing test for Iranian-American writers and poets: with which concept do you best associate the following sounds? Aakh, oho, evaa, ah’, vaay, digeh, bah’, baabaa. Imperial Persian or Farsi e khodemooni? The interjection I most associate with “Persian” is Maz Jobrani’s famous “meow.

Third, mechanically. Farsi rolls off the tongue better than “Parsi,” or “Persian.” The “P” sound is a sudden plosive consonant; “F” is a smooth fricative, takes less force. In an onomatopoeic sense (the closeness of a sound to its intended meaning), Farsi may reflect our subtler post-Empire maturity better than “Parsi.” Sure, Arabic voice mechanics changed “Parsi “to “Farsi,” but why didn’t it change “Paarsaal” to “Faarsaal?” Yes, we were flattering Arab administrative jargon, but there must have also been a social advantage in the consonant change that somehow served the common speaker. This advantage may not exist today—whatever it was—but it was there. To speculate as to what this utility may have been, poetic ears may notice there is an inclusivity of regional sounds in the lovely name “Khalijeh Fars” that is lost in its unrealistically exclusive—and bumpy-- translation, “Persian Gulf.” When I contemplate why “F” and no longer “P,” I hear songs, not battle cries. I see pens, not swords.

Finally, there are patriotic aspects to using the term “Farsi.” Ironically this has to do with our protective feelings for our classical literature. To an Iranian writing in English, it feels unfair to allow Greece at the height of its splendor to name a language that eventually surpassed Greek in poetic expressiveness. When Herodotus was calling us Persians (Persikos) none of Iran’s classical poets had been born to measure up to Homer, Hesoid and Sappho. But some centuries later, 300 Khayaams kicked ass against a million Greeks. “Persian” reflects Hellenistic cultural supremacy; “Farsi” starts the clock when we had our strongest claim to high culture, documented by our own historians.

In our day-to-day experience “Persian” covers just a small subset of the Farsi that buzzes around our ears. Colloquially we may call it Farsi e Aflaatooni. But this Persian of the distinguished Yarshater, Davis and Nicholson is just one bee in the bustling hive of contemporary Farsi. In fact the other bees are so busy making up new words for modern nuances, they sometimes steal from other languages. Young people occasionally use the English word “money” when they covet a hard-to-afford luxury, and the traditional “pool” when they buy gum. They use the English “number” for digits that dial a date, and the old “shomareh” when they call their parents. Among a different group, the Arabic proper name “Zeid,”--Farsi equivalent of “some dude”-- now also comes with a Russian suffix: “Zeidowfski!

Sometimes there is ethnic influence. Daaf for girl is Kalimi Farsi, so is “Zaakhaar” for “boy,” occasionally meaning, ”mate” in the Australian sense. There are new descriptive verbs like “Yazeed shodan” as in to suddenly explode into anger—from a mean character in Shiite plays—but we also have “love tarakaandan” for public display of affection.

Haveej is used for street cleaners—refers to uniform color, as does kaaktus for police. BBC can be a spy or a cell phone. To this add the journalistic and technical vocabulary factories that coin Farsi expressions daily like the Feds print money, making my Farsi dictionary as useless as a stack of dollars. One Nobel Prize winner throws around words like faraa ravesh (methodology) and shahrvand (citizen). Remind me, which Persian dynasty popularized the word shahrvand? If all this activity makes your head spin, you need a daroon paalaa (exorcist)

In this dynamic linguistic community, I speak a variant that could be termed "Farsi e Dolaari." Yet I am aware that there are Javaads, Ghazanfars, Manijehs and Shahlaas stuck in Tehran traffic in their Jaaroo barghee (vacuum cleaner), jaa saaboni (soap dish), and pejhoo kaarmandi (Dilbert mobile). They watch film e aamoozeshi(over 21 “documentaries”) and spend esken, money, peel, maayeh.

There are narm afzaar (software) geeks kleeking away on their raayaanehs (computers) building taarnamaas (websites). After I explain to Fintushel about the double entendre in daroon gozaasht (input) and beeroon daad (output), you would have to drag him to Egypt and waterboard him before he gives up “Farsi” for a word that conjures up Sanskrit to his readers.

To be sure in academic circles where precision is more important than expressiveness, “Persian” is an indispensable technical term. But should Persian literature academics dictate to English speaking writers, poets, casual speakers, standup comics, or rappers, which English words are allowed? Would they bully little Luke on Valentine’s Day if he’s hard up for something to rhyme with “Marcy?” The attempt reveals a disappointing absence of communication with the social science building next door where they study how communities create and use language. The intrusion of our culture’s dictatorial vices into the common man’s English is ungracious, whereas our tolerant and humble flip side is magnetic.

The marketing approach, promoting “Persian” as a brand name, has been harmful to Iran’ s sincere modern culture. For example, my interview with contemporary Iranian-American playwright Sepideh Khosrowjah rankled a commenter who was frustrated about the article’s use of the term “Farsi.” This commenter obviously has an interest in the arts or he/she wouldn’t have read the piece. In the spirit of this shared love, I propose we redouble our efforts in encouraging our living cultural treasures, even as we struggle to rescue our threatened antiquity. Artists like Khosrowjah wield a formidable language. They contribute to one day making “Farsi” as prestigious as “Persian.”

The commenter asks rhetorically if my use of “Farsi” has a political motive.

You bet!

Some notes:

1.For an informative and entertaining study on Tehrani Farsi vernacular see Farhag va Loghaateh e Zaban Makhfi, by Dr. Seid Mehdi Samaai. info@nashr-e-markaz.com

2.The touching and beautiful Zoroastrian Gathas do compete with, and arguably transcend, ancient Greek poetry, but their number is few in comparison and their subjects limited to devotional concerns.

3.To explore why Greeks had historians and pre-Islamic Iranians possibly had only mytholgy, see anthropologist Donal E. Brown's work on hereditary caste societies.

"In Memory of Kazem Ashtari," backstage

2008-03-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

Backstage, after seeing “In memory of Kazem Ashtari,” I told actress Bella Warda that I thought her character, the resilient Mahin Ashtari is in very good hands. If you haven’t been backstage after a play, prepare for a jolting experience. There is strong magic in speaking to someone--still in costume and sweating from the ordeal--who has just returned from the story world. This is something film can never do.

As I waited to congratulate actress Sepideh Khosrowjah, she was still the ambitious yet easily dominated character, Shafagh Gooya. The fact that as playwright Khosrowjah created Shafagh and all the other characters in the comedy belonged to the reality she was just coming back to.

Director Hamid Ehya was thoughtful, absently submitting to our praise. What worked, what didn’t work with the audience? I bet he wishes Mahin’s wisecrack to Shafagh were true.

Shafagh- But do you even know how to direct?
Mahin—Directing doesn’t need any knowing how!

Funny line! Ehya’s task was far messier than “simply” interpreting the work. For example, Warda has strong stage tactics. Like a good chess player she goes after the center and holds it, inclining the other characters to speak towards center stage instead of out to the audience. Remedying this without diminishing Warda’s presence takes careful problem solving.

Here’s another example, this time in set design. There is a door-answering phone where Mahin’s daughter, Atefeh, gives us the first “oh shit” moment of the play. Someone’s at the door she did not expect. This event begins the story’s climb; yet its comic impact is threatened by a small stage that forces the phone in an awkward out-of-the-action place. The young actress Shadi Yousefian has funny body and face language when the sky falls down, and stage limitations diminished one of her good moments. But to borrow from Donald Rusmsfeld, you direct with the stage you’ve got. Budget, time, and resource juggling makes the director as much mathematician, as artist. When you see the play, watch for the limitations to appreciate the director.

Putting on his artist hat, Ehya has introduced a clever sideshow that takes place before the curtains open and during scene changes. In this slide show appear the play’s characters in their earlier days. We see film director Kazem Ashtari pretending to be chummy with Iranian film icons Behrooz Vosoghi and Mohammad-ali Fardin. There he was stretching to match heights with the great filmmaker Bahram Beizai, proudly displaying Atefeh when she was a baby, and smiling next to his stunning young wife, Mahin. There are also pictures of his abysmally designed B-movie film posters, graced only by the face of the beautiful actress Shafagh Gooya. These images are intermingled with unintentionally hilarious condolence cards from a film industry that rightly did not take Ashtari seriously while he was still alive.

These preludes add greatly to the emotional and comedic impact of the play; they help especially with act one which is often the thinnest act in any play.

In act two the plot heats up. Mahin Ashtari has published the love letters her husband had sent to Shafagh Gooya. Mahin has prefaced the collection with, “Dedicated to my wife, Mahin, my only love in life.” Shafagh storms into Mahin’s house, pissed about the blatant lie. But Mahin, who over the years has transmuted her pain into wisdom, makes a devious proposition to Shafhagh. A proposition that eventually makes Kazem Ashtari deader than he was before.

After the show I saw Kazem Ashtari sucking up to Hamid Ehya. I wanted to warn Ehya about what a scoundrel Ahstari is, never mind that Ehya was really consulting with Mansour Taeed, the wonderful actor and promoter of Iranian culture. Backstage magic takes a long time to wear off. Try it though!

Playwright Sepideh Khosrowjah

2008-03-10T22:47:00.000-07:00

When playwright Sepideh Khosrowjah was two years old her parents gave her a doll, which she immediately destroyed. “Toys were boring,” she says. I can understand why dolls would frustrate a future playwright; there’s nothing inside them. Darvag performance company has recently staged Khosrowjah’s Farsi language play, “Dar Soogeh Kazem Ashtari,” and there is plenty inside the characters. Besides humor, love, cunning, ambition, jealously, shame, and frustration, there is also a surprising secret. It was fun reading the play twice, the second time knowing the characters were hiding something from each other..

I asked Khosrowjah, “can you tell when people are acting in real life, and is that necessarily a sign of insincerity?” She replied,

“Everyone acts in real life. We all act all the time. We play different characters under different circumstances; I play a mom with my son, a professional woman at work, a cool person with friends, a good girl with older people, etc. This is not at all a sign of insincerity most of the time; it is a sign of how life is just a constant play. Those insincere people are bad actors both in real life and on stage.”

After 23 years of writing plays, Khosrowjah would know what makes a bad actor. In fact one of her characters in “Dar Soogeh Kazem Ashtari,” is a so-so actress. I look forward to watching this character on stage, as it takes an accomplished performer to play a mediocre actress. Actually I’m doubly curious because Khosrowjah herself will be playing this difficult role.

The playwright revealed something about her approach to acting when I asked her about her favorite character in any work of fiction.

“My favorite character in a play is Jessie in “Night' Mother,” a play by Marsha Norman. She is a woman who has come to the end in life and she wants to commit suicide. The play is about her last night and how she wants to put everything in order for her mother before leaving. She gets to explain why she has decided to end her life or as she puts it to ‘get off the Bus of life.’ When you listen to her you realize the alienation in life and how we lose opportunities to make thing different for each other. It is a very sad play, but it is a masterpiece. I was lucky enough to play Jessie many years ago, but it made me so depressed that I could not think of going back on stage again, like with Jessie dying I was also dead as an actor.”

“How did it come about you auditioned for Jessie's role in ‘Night' Mother,’ and would have ended the play differently?” I asked.

“One of the advantages of having your own theater company is that you don't have to audition. People who have worked with you for years know you and are aware of your abilities. Hamid Ehya translated the play to Persian and directed it. Darvag produced the play and I got to play Jessie and Mojdeh Molavi played the mother. I would have not ended the play differently. It was totally justified for Jessie to end her life. I can't think of any different ending. This was the tragedy of the play and the tragedy of our lives. You understand the character so well that you don't dare give her the usual clichés about thinking positively! “

Yet “Dar Soog…” does dare think positively, though not in clichés. A thoughtless act of insincerity by the deceased, Kazem Ashtari, has created chaos for his wife, his daughter and his mistress. In response, the three women characters defy expectation by making the right decisions! Now we begin to sense these women’s mediocrity in life was perhaps due to Kazem Ashtari’s influence.

“Was there ever a period in your life when a man seemed to dull your talents?” I didn’t really ask that question. If life were so straightforward, we wouldn’t need artists. Khosrowjah does say, though, that when she started acting she realized not many playwrights were telling her story. This is why she began writing her own plays at the age of 25. Her first play aptly named “Aghaz,” began a long career in the dramatic arts, not just as a playwright and actress but also as a theater company founder.

“I was one of the co-founders of Darvag. With a few friends who loved theatre, we established Darvag in August 1985, but after the first production, Darvag became much more than a few of us. I just became part of a group of wonderful people who also loved theatre. Mansour Taeed who is playing in Dar soogeh Kazem Ashtari was also one of the founding members and Bella Warda [also in the play] joined us from the first play, and Hamid Ehya [director] joined us in 1986. It is amazing how we still enjoy working with each other. Of course, we had lots of ups and downs, but we are still together after 23 years. We are so happy and excited that Shadi Yousefian also joined us in this play. Shadi is a young, beautiful, talented, energetic artist who is an amazing addition to our group and I hope she will carry the torch after my generation.”

Here in America, not many performance companies are telling our story either. Darvag is one of the few, and we would certainly like to see more productions. Khosrowjah identifies the challenge in this way,

“I have been writing plays for 23 years and after all these years my book containing three of my plays were published in Iran by Nila publishing house. I really enjoy doing my art and don't like to promote it as much because the time I should take to promote my work I can think about writing another play. I always like to think of the flying because I know the bird will die, "Parvaz ra beh khater bespar, Parandeh mordanist" (remember the flight, the bird is mortal). Creating art is like flying and you want to go higher and higher to be free!”

So that more birds will fly, the sky must invite.

Iman Maleki 's Paintings

2008-02-06T17:24:00.000-08:00

A criticism often leveled at Iman Maleki’s astonishingly realistic paintings is, “ why not just use a photograph?” To survey the strengths and weaknesses of one of Iran’s most promising artists, we ask the same question of the following work by American painter, Denis Peterson.

“Don’t Shed No Tears” (2006) is, believe it or not, acrylic on canvas! This instance of hyperrealism is a performance art. Viewers are deliberately made to notice the amazing amount of time and painstaking effort that went into portraying this Darfur refugee. Peterson isn't showing off; he is a radical painter, compelling us with his dedication. The astonishing realism is the result of every wrinkle and twist of hair being colored and shadowed in the context of reflected light from every other object in the scene. Whereas the camera does this mindlessly as a matter of optics, the artist has endured whatever it took to make sure human eyes do not respond as mindlessly. We can flip the page on a Newsweek photo, worth a click of the camera, but we can’t as easily turn away from such an extraordinary labor of compassion.

Maleki’s hyperrealism is likewise rooted in obsessive compassion. But he also draws from his gift as a storyteller. In “Omens of Hafez,” one young woman is wearing a ring on her right hand, the other only a watch, both waiting.

Empty sandals is a clever way to suggest each woman is waiting for someONE. The poetry book being opened does Hafez justice with its double entendre, hinting at wedding night sensuality. There’s a subtle contrast in the facial expressions of the two characters. The soft trace of hesitation in the older girl’s face is enigmatic. What is there to fear about becoming a woman?
In the next painting, we see a possible answer.

In this image, the age difference in the characters is more extreme. It is no longer possible to nuance the obvious. The infant is sleep to the world. The young girl looks on, perhaps with envy, at the younger sibling who has displaced her as the baby. She is on her way to the reality that her mother experiences. The angular motif in the background window echoes a similar pattern on the carpet in the first painting, connecting the themes. The sandals in this painting are now full, by the way.

I asked an Iranian woman friend about this painting. This was her comment:
“There is fear, and there is resignation, worry and perhaps even feelings of betrayal among many other feelings, all encapsulated on the face of the young mother holding her newborn. This is an undeniably huge commitment sitting on her lap. The unknowns on the road ahead are even huger. Is the father a war 'martyr'? An absentee dad? Is there a 'havoo' somewhere in the picture? Will she end up having to beg for her and her kids' livelihood? Is she rejected because she has given birth to yet another daughter?”

Maleki is an artist who sees fit to pay a brush stroke for every human suffering, using detail to flagellate himself in sympathy with his subject. He reflects a Shiite culture in shedding visible tears for the suffering of others, and reveals an Iranian mindset in respecting our tradition of detail in visual arts. The best carpets take years to weave; inlay artists sacrifice their eyesight, and tile workers grow old with unfinished mosques. Iran's aesthetic culture is more comfortable with styles where clear references exist by which to judge a work. In showcasing labor and commitment Maleki makes his work immediately accessible to a larger audience, yet in energy and impact, he holds his own against more exclusive abstract styles.

Sometimes, however, the traditions that give strength to Maleki’s art also conspire against him. He is brilliant at drawing attention to suffering, but tends to abandon his subjects to noble resignation. The mother in the above painting has dignity but no power. The child in the painting below is trapped in his environment, just like the beautiful goldfish he can’t sell.

In meter with Iran’s traditional poetry, Maleki occasionally finds more artistic payoff in surrendering to Fate.

Philosophical bickering aside however, the above work is quite successful in what it sets out to do. By Western standards the painting may appear overly sentimental, but that is mostly because something is lost in translating the Iranian emotional vocabulary. It is probably the days before Nowruz, still winter. But for this child there is obviously never a spring. Putting philosophy back into the debate, the Nowruz symbol could have been used beyond irony, to encourage hope.

When Maleki refuses to surrender, his images of adversity are energizing and inspirational. Below is a painting titled, “Composing Music, secretly”—presumably so as not to alert a Baseej gang, as it is unlikely these musicians are practicing in secret for a birthday surprise.

In this image of defiance, the drum is silent, and the singer is brooding, heavy verses sagging his shoulder. Yet there is a rebellious joy in their gathering. We are moved by the almost childlike enthusiasm of these souls, who stubbornly refuse to let go of their right to “boogie.” Touchingly humorous is Maleki's implying that each performer has brought his own chair to the jam session. Also, he shows us it is daylight outside. The darkness is not imposed by nature, but by social circumstance. Note, there are no women in the scene, even though this is a secret gathering. In this regard a progressive reading of the painting is compromised.

Maleki’s treatment of women is sympathetic and respectful, but not empowering in a modern sense. In “Unstable Cover,” the artist shows us the hands from the da Vinci portrait, Mona Lisa. Here, the painting is not what is covered; Mona Lisa herself is draped! We could take this as a visual joke by a master painter, or read a feminist protest in it. Or both.

If Mona Lisa’s hands ripped away those covers though, we would not see the typical Maleki woman. We would see a painting where the Italian artist has given his female subject a great deal more power.

Most strikingly, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is looking back at the viewer. In Maleki paintings, women are often looking down, usually preoccupied with books, mementos, and other ways of being somewhere else in spirit. Below is an example.

Maleki’s playfulness is apparent in the way he makes us guess how these three young women are related. The clue is in the black and white photo of the three of them as children. Can you tell which is which? Who was Mom’s favorite? Or maybe the sisters in the black and white picture are from the previous generation, and these women are first cousins. This is the kind of painting one can spend hours navigating emotionally. Longer than it takes to watch a movie. Not bad for a single frame! Significantly, Mom is not wearing a roosari in her mug shot. The photos are outdated technology, but Mom’s world was advanced enough she could look into the camera. The “photographer,” Maleki, does quiz himself on issues of female power; he’s just timid about it.

In contrast to his women, the stunning male portrait below projects solid confidence in the charismatic subject staring at us.

Just as self-assured is Maleki’s “Achaemenid Soldier.” The diligent research into Achaemenid weaponry and military uniform is admirable. Architectural grandeur is appropriately understated, yet breathtaking. Hollywood should occasionally hire this artist as a set consultant.

The atypical narrative-starved choice of subject, however, exposes an unsoldierly hesitation in the painter. If Maleki wishes to romanticize this period of Iran’s pre-Islamic history, he certainly knows of more provocative Ahcaemenid legends he could risk. Of course depicting the defeat of the imposter Gautama--who pretended to be Iran’s legitimate ruler—may have Maleki chalking murals on Evin prison walls. Safer, but just as communicative would have been, Cyrus freeing the Jews of Babylon, or Xerxes lashing the sea. After seeing “Achaemeind Soldier” I am curious as to how Maleki would treat historic/legendary themes--pre-Islamic or otherwise--that give a better workout to his talent for hidden commentary.

To illustrate, below is Jacque-Louis David’s propagandistic “Oath of the Horati.,” completed during the years leading up to the French revolution. David is recognized as an influential painter because he used romanticized historical themes to participate in the political debates of his time.

The testosterone on canvas notwithstanding, Horace (center) is making the ultimate sacrifice, offering up his sons in the service of the Roman Republic. It is obvious that David’s mind is not as complex as Maleki’s, yet the French painter is more assertive in making his political statements.

Western artists such as David, da Vinci and Denis Peterson are important in part because of their skill and innovation, but also because they come from cultures that dominate the modern global power scene. Renaissance painters catered to emerging capitalism, the sons in David’s painting above symbolize French colonies, and Peterson’s Darfur painting, “Don’t Shed No Tears” provokes America to intervene with her wealth. Iran too is no longer an “extra” in the global power drama, and has found a “speaking role” in History, so the voice of our best artists has the potential to carry much further into the future, and much wider across societies. Our artists are more important now than they have been ever since the Safavids.

Which brings me to the most urgent aspect of modern art criticism. Financial advice! Sell your belongings to snap up the right Maleki paintings, as they come along.

A chat with Martin Luther King

2008-01-21T22:51:00.000-08:00

There was still plenty of abgoosht and vodka left when Martin Luther King’s ghost crashed our party a couple of nights ago. His holiday wasn’t until today, but he showed up early because he overheard our debate about US-Iran relations. The subject: does criticism of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Falluja, Blackwater, and the Patriot Act somehow excuse or legitimize human rights violations of the Islamic Republic? After all, if it is legal in America to torture in the name of national security, why pick on Iran for doing the same thing?

Immediately, MLK jumped in with his famous quote, “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.” I took it he was in no mood for letting Iran off the hook, just because America does something. He agreed to be interviewed, and my first question had to do with him being dead.

AS: Dr. King, what can you tell us about the other world?

MLK: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.

AS: So you think it’s OK for us to protest US human rights violations?

MLK: There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

AS: But the IRI oppresses women. It threatens other countries in the region. Makes a sham of democracy, disqualifying perfectly good political candidates. I can’t tell you how frustrated, desperate, and angry we are about all this. Shouldn’t we hold back our gripes against America until after she has bombed this regime out of power?

MLK: As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

AS: Um...sir, the Vietnam war was over years ago; Don’t you mean Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran?

[MLK just stared. Ghosts do that. All the ones I’ve met never use words beyond what they have said when they were still alive.]

AS: OK, so why do you oppose the war in, er… , Vietnam?

MLK: I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart. Above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country to stand as a moral example to the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and deal forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. America has strayed away, this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality. It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home.

AS: Well, I too am deeply disappointed in America. But it is not my “beloved country.” These days people like me are called America haters.

MLK. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

AS: Gosh, I suppose I do have a slight crush on America. Hard to admit though. Maybe, its just that I wasn’t born here, like you were.

MLK: We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.

AS: We’re agreed on that, Dr. King.

MLK. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

AS: But many Americans don’t agree with our protest. They support a warlike president, Republicans and Democrats alike, and these folks may even elect a new President that will continue this war, even extend it.

MLK: Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world.

AS: Isn’t it the very job of writers and artists in a free society not to be conformists. Why do you think our best and brightest are so afraid to speak up?

MLK. Now of course one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows out of the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It is a dark day in our nation when high level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent.

AS: Yet we have the noisiest non-dissent I have ever heard. Do you get FOX news in the other world, or the New York Times?

MLK: In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

AS: I hear you man!

MLK: History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

AS: Speaking of strident clamor, how do you stand on the “support our troops,” issue?

MLK: I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

AS: Aren’t the troops defending us against terrorists who hate us?

MLK: Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism

AS: With so many people hating us, and this War On Terror, you’d expect Hell to be full of fighting men these days.

MLK: [shaking his head] Conscientious objectors!

AS: Hell is full of conscientious objectors?

MLK: Conscientious objectors in the war against poverty.

AS: I see.

MLK: I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America through her historians years and years to come saying, "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky. We build gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths."
But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.

AS: Isn’t that condemnation a bit extreme?

MLK: The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

[The conversation dangerously drifting towards Homeland Security territory, I moved on to a much lighter subject]

AS: What do you think of George Bush?

MLK: Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

AS: And on a slightly more serious topic, what do you think of the abgoosht?

MLK: Divine!

To hear what Dr. King sounded like that ghostly night, check out this youtube link.
Also, here are some great MLK quotes , in case he appears to anyone else who may wish to interview him.

Persepolis

2007-12-03T22:26:00.000-08:00

Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi

A handful of ordinary lives caught in the storms of civilization inspired Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Recently Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis has rendered the Iranian revolution in intimate terms, approaching what Dickens accomplished for the French revolution and Pasternak achieved for the Russian revolution. While History is a satellite photo of a forest, this autobiographical narrative is a single leaf which you can rub between your fingers and bring to your nose.

The graphic novels, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, now combined into a movie, do not look back to the classics. Satrapi’s self mocking style is ultra-modern. It combines a Disneyesque cuteness with the author’s Hedayat-like anguish. At first the work appears to lack subtlety, protesting the Islamic Regime’s repressions too directly. Later we realize this straight shooting is just another manifestation of the no-nonsense way in which the artist conducts her life. Satrapi’s uninhibited tendency to speak her primal mind has been the driving force in the events of her life.

After she slugged her school principal in Iran and trashed the Islamic Regime in the classroom, Satrapi’s parents hurriedly dispatched their fourteen-year-old daughter to a Catholic school in Europe. There she got herself expelled by calling the nuns whores. Later she made herself homeless by telling her Austrian landlady to go fuck herself. The nuns had dared suggest Iranians had no manners, and the crypto-racist landlady had accused Satrapi of theft.

In the humorous movie, some of the laughter comes from the character’s obliviousness to authority, and some from her breaking personal taboos such as showing us her hairy legs. One of the best moments happens in a scene where she combines the two techniques. Her Jedi master of a grandmother passes on to her granddaughter the secret of having firm breasts in old age. I won’t reveal the trick here, enough to say Yoda himself would shrink from the mind control it demands.

The humor sweetens the profound bitterness of the events. As in Sound of Music and Cabaret, where sugary melodies simultaneously mask and highlight the creep of fascism in Europe, Satrapis’ self-deprecating jokes expose the modern dissonance between individual concerns and social forces. Ominously, Satrapi’s Europe is as purposeless as Iran was in its pre-revolutionary times.

European youth, drugged, disappointed and mistrustful of their leaders, shout their aimless rage out-screaming electric guitars. In a scene stunningly effective for its graphics and sound, a club musician swears incomprehensibly at air while giving the finger to the emptiness of existence. The scene is also quite funny, which is why--for me--it best captures the bi-polar psychology of Persepolis.

Meanwhile, back in Satrapi’s Iran the youth have become focused by the war. With their existential angst soothed by arbitrary ideas of righteousness, they have become brutal enforcers of correct Islamic behavior. Much as Charles Dickens warned and criticized English society by dangling the French revolution in front of English eyes, Persepolis drags our attention to the possibility that the upheaval in Iran is just one expression of the global rationality crisis: the rising suspicion that Western Enlightenment has lost its appeal.

In Persepolis we find warmth and satisfaction only in the love between family members. In a departure from Disney charm, even the pure love between a dog and its European master is lampooned as a sign of loneliness and alienation. Family love is something Iranians have had in abundance for as long as we have been mammals. What does modernity offer that is worth the price of giving up family for a mutt?

A frame of mind which extends our caring for immediate family to include all of society was an implicit promise of modern humanism, to replace the explicit promise of the religions we outgrew. In Satrapi’s Europe, socialism cures her pneumonic, cigarette damaged lungs, but it is also why this smart, educated youth spent days homeless in the cold seeking cigarette butts on the sidewalk.

Satrapi constantly reminds us that she comes from a family of progressive liberals. Her uncle, who wrote his thesis on Marxist-Leninism, a program to reverse alienation, was jailed and eventually executed for his efforts. Yet there’s a scene in which an innocent conversation between Satrapi’s parents brings a heartbreaking disappointment.

The well-to-do parents discuss moving away from Iran--to America perhaps. Satrapi’s father tells her mother, “Why, so I can become a taxi driver and you a maid?” After years of risking their lives preaching that everyone’s function in society merits dignity, these “somebodies” still can’t shake their traditional disdain for “nobodies.”

Purposefully or not, Satrapi’s work goes to the heart of why our liberals and leftists were so roundly trounced by the Islamists. The intellectuals saw themselves as an aristocracy by virtue of their Western education and professional expertise. Like a piece of breakfast stuck to the lips, their internalized colonialism was seen by everyone but the intellectuals themselves.

Tellingly, numerous times in the graphic novel and in the movie, God appears to the young Satrapi as the Christian father figure, a leap Westward from the eerily abstract Semitic entity, Allah, who according to the Koran is “lam yalad va lam yoolad”: begets not, nor is begotten. In the book, this child raised among Marx fans self-critically reminds us of how Karl Marx looks so much like God to her--except with curlier hair. The mostly Muslim Iranian nation could not have overlooked what was obvious even to a child.

Meanwhile the movie shows us that the Islamic Republic has put a window washer in charge of administering a hospital. An asinine expression of Islamic affirmative action, but a gesture nevertheless, not unlike the ugly punk musician, this time giving the finger to the old order.

But social insightfulness aside, Persepolis is above all a living account of a young woman who has courageously invited us into her personal life, to share how she was affected by a pivotal period in world history. Our hostess is a punk version of Anastasia, the last surviving princess from a sophisticated class, executed, exiled and suppressed into oblivion by the boorish crowds. She is strong, but also prone to bouts of depression and self doubt. Unlike the fictional Dr. Zhivago or Sydney Carton of The Tale of Two Cities, Marjane Satrapi is real and lives among us today. So her story is not over, and we continue to worry for this character as her sudden celebrity status brings new adventure to her life.

Precisely because Persepolis is world-class art, it has set off political bickering, and triggered ideological opportunism. This is nothing new. Boris Pasternak’s Nobel prize in literature was helped along by the CIA in order to embarrass the Soviets (Pasternak knew nothing of this). The Iranian government has already protested Persepolis’ winning of the Prize of the Jury at the Cannes film festival:

"This year the Cannes Film Festival, in an unconventional and unsuitable act, has chosen a movie about Iran that has presented an unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution…"

Since the US quarrel with Iran intensified, many Iranian women activists, writers and artists have received significant attention in Western media, Shirin Ebadi, Azar Nafisi, Firoozeh Dumas, Nahid Rachlin, Shahrnush Parsipour, Shirin Neshat, Azadeh Moaveni... To varying degrees, these Iranian women condemn the abuse of their heartfelt protests to justify Western aggression against Iran. But among them, the foul mouthed Princess Satrapi may have the most eloquent advice for both sides of the propaganda war. As she once instructed her dog-loving landlady, Frau Doctor Heller, “Go fuck yourself!”

A long chat with Maz Jobrani

2007-10-11T00:05:00.000-07:00

“I’m Pehrzheean!” actor Maz Jobrani declares in one of his Axis of Evil stand up comedy routines. To find out how “Pehrzheean” Jobrani really is, I sent him an email asking if ever puts raw eggs on his rice.

“What red-blooded Iranian doesn’t?” was his reply.

Later I met Jobrani in person. He’d invited me to watch his performance at Punchline, the illustrious San Francisco comedy club that has also hosted Chris Rock, Ellen Degeneres, Dana Carvey, Margaret Cho, Dave Chapelle, Rosie O’Donnell, and Robin Williams. Afterwards, we met in a nearby pub. Jobrani was in a sprightly mood. He had just stepped down from the stage, leaving Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad with egg on their faces, and the audience still writhing with laughter.

It turns out, Ahamadinejad and Jobrani go way back:

“My dad was in New York on business in late ’78,” Jobrani explained. “My older sister and I went to an international school. The school was closing down for the winter holidays. Also because of the protests there had been some power outages. My dad sent for me, my sister, and my mom to join him in NYC for two weeks. We really didn’t think we’d be gone for good. I think people thought things might get better. To give you an idea of how much we planned to return, we actually left my baby brother back in Iran.”

“So what happened to your brother?”

Jobrani’s reply, “Today he is known as President Ahmadinejad.”

For the record, Jobrani was just kidding.

Teasing aside, Jobrani adds, “In reality we got the poor kid out 6 months later, and here we are almost thirty years out of Iran. I always say we left for two weeks and stayed for 28 years.”

Years later, each “brother” went on to start his own Axis of Evil comedy group. To see which one has had the most success, I googled both Maz Jobrani and Ahmadinejad. The score: Maz Jobrani 42 google pages, Ahamadinejad 38. Try it!

By this measure, the phenomenal success of Jobrani’s Axis of Evil comedy group ranks him as the most influential Iranian-American today. To show that this is not an exaggeration, one need only point to the millions of dollars of media airtime this artist has single handedly racked up for free, undoing the negative image of Iranians in the American mind. Dr. Jaleh Pirnazar, once Jobrani’s Persian Studies professor at UC Berkeley, astutely notes, “Even if the money was somehow available, who could have organized such an extraordinary task?”

I asked Jobrani how, as a political science major, he came to take Persian Studies at Berkeley.

“Since I came to America at the age of 6, I never really learned how to read and write Farsi. But I always spoke it at home, so I spoke it fluently. Well, when I started at Berkeley I signed up for beginning Farsi, in the hopes of learning the basics—alphabet, reading, writing. On the first day, the teacher went around the class and tested us to see if we spoke Farsi well. There were other Iranians in the class who dumbed down their Farsi in order to stay in the class. I, not knowing that I’d be moved up, spoke fluent Farsi with the teacher. He in turn moved me up to Dr. Pirnazar’s class. It was a challenge because I had to learn how to read and write on my own in order to catch up with the level of her class. I struggled through the semester, but Dr. Pirnazar was very cool and made sure I got through it.”

Having survived a semester of Dr. Pirnazar, Jobrani tested his courage with a language he could learn from scratch: Italian.

“From the moment the teacher came into the class and said, ‘Mi chiamo Francesca. Come ti chiami?’ (my name is Francesca, what’s yours?) I was in love with the language.”

Later, Jobrani went to Italy on a study abroad program. “Italians are very much like Iranians,” he observes. “Food, family, long naps in the middle of the day…It’s now a fantasy of mine to someday own a place out there where I could spend several months at a time sipping wine and conversing in Italian.”

Why Italian? I asked. Besides Jobrani, I know quite a few Iranians with Italian sounding last names—Fooladi, Milani, Kiani—but none has gone so far as to actually study Italian.

“I was…a big fan of the Godfather,” says Jobrani.

I think he’s serious. Francis Coppola’s brilliant filmmaking aside, Jobrani refers to his own father as the “Godfather” type. Not in the outlaw sense, but as someone people can rely on for help. According to his son, Mr. Jobrani Sr. is the kind of Tabrizi Iranian who gets offended if people who could use his help don’t let him know their need. He has been particularly generous to Iranian expatriates who found themselves in a financial bind after the revolution. Hearing Maz speak of his father, I wonder if the archetype he means is not the Godfather, but the Iranian strong protector persona, the pahlevaan.

Mr. Jobrani Sr. started his career at an electric power facility in Iran. He got the job because he was the only applicant who had the bulk and strength to pick up the massive iron-core transformers and fit them into place. Endowed with brains to outrival even his brawn, Mr. Jobrani Sr. quickly moved up the ranks to become one of three partners in the business. Later his two partners dropped out, leaving him as sole owner. When electric power was nationalized in Iran, he became a government contractor providing electricity for the country.

Almost six feet tall and in great physical shape, the son expresses his own pahlevaan sense of community in a modern context. Jobrani uses his considerable artistic ability to defend the image and honor (gheirat) of his countrymen in the West. In a humorous foretelling of a future as an artistic pahlevaan of sorts, teenage Jobrani’s first time on stage was his lead role in a Marin County Redwood High School production of The Batman Musical and Comedy.

I asked Jobrani, “As an experienced Batman, how do you rate the various interpretations by Clooney, Keaton, and West?”

“As a kid I loved the Adam West Batman. It was fun and campy. Always seemed strange that he had a slight belly going. After all, Batman was supposed to have 6 pack abs. West made him seem more like a normal dude who liked to wear Spandex. When the films started I was in my late teens and really enjoyed the Michael Keaton version. I think he did a good job showing a troubled Batman. He’s really a fantastic actor. That was my favorite.”

For a while there was speculation that Batman Begins 2 would star Robin Williams. Had things turned out that way, Williams would have been the second internationally known actor/comedian graduate of Marin County’s Redwood High to be in a Batman production. I neglected to ask if Jobrani and Williams have met, or discussed their high school alma mater. I did ask him though about his work with actor Sean Penn and director Sydney Pollack in the 2005 thriller The Interpreter. Jobrani played a sympathetic character as secret service agent Mo[hammad].

“I was very pleasantly surprised to see the final cuts and find that the Mo character is indeed important throughout… It was great to have a character like that of Middle Eastern descent that meant something [positive] to the film…I wish there were more parts like this in film and TV. I’m pushing for such things every day.”

Jobrani began his professional acting career relatively late. He was 26 years old when he told his parents he was going to drop out of the Ph.D. program at UCLA, to pursue his acting dream. From his comedy routines one gathers Jobrani’s parents would have preferred their son to continue with that Ph.D. program. Doctor, lawyer, dentist, engineer, Jamba Juice franchise owner—anything but the arts. But then how could they know their Maz had the potential to become a world class actor? Today at 35, Jobrani reveals the liberating excitement of this career decision in stories about his work:

“My experience with Penn was a really good one…[he] invited a group of the younger actors out to watch a good friend of his play music one night. That was an amazing night, as he was sitting with some secret service agents who he’d been in touch with for the role. I went over to say ‘hi’ to them and befriended one of the agents, who later took me to lunch in town. Always cool to be in an unmarked car that can turn on its sirens to get through traffic from time to time. As I was saying ‘hi’ to the secret service agents and Penn at this table, I looked up and another friend of Penn’s was walking toward us. It took me a second to register, but it was Al Pacino. He walked right up to the table and introduced himself. I almost lost my mind as I was standing there just looking like one of the guys shaking hands with Al.”

Here’s the actor still getting jazzed about being on the set:

“My first day on the set [of the Interpreter] I was waiting for Sydney]Pollack to go ‘who’s this guy? I wanted]the other bald goateed guy, not this one….’ However, he was very nice and made me feel comfortable—that is, until I had to do one of my first speaking scenes.

“I had a scene where I was supposed to be doing surveillance and looking through some binoculars into someone’s house. Then I was supposed to mumble some lines to myself as I looked at this guy through the binoculars. Well, I did the scene, mumbled the lines, and then heard Pollack’s voice come through a walkie-talkie they’d put in the car with me for him to give me direction. He said something like ‘Give the line less emphasis.’ So I did take 2 with less emphasis. Then his voice came back on the walkie, ‘You need to be more casual.’ I tried more casual. Take 3...take 5…this went on for about 7 or 8 takes.

“We moved on from that day and I felt more and more comfortable with Pollack. A year or so later when I saw the film, that scene was cut…I had a feeling it would be.”

Expecting to see Jobrani in a blockbuster any day now, I asked, If he could play a Star Wars character who it would be?

MJ: R2D2.

AS: Why R2?

MJ: He was always up to some goofy mischief, getting people into trouble and joking around. However, when it came time to save the day he could always be counted on. If It weren’t for him, none of the other characters would ever have prevailed—and yet he had a fun air to him.

AS: Which Star Wars character wouldn’t you play?

MJ: The Emperor. He had really bad skin.

AS: Speaking of bad skin, except for Xerxes, there isn’t a single Persian—out of a million—in the movie 300 who shouldn’t sue his dermatologist. Do I take it that Xerxes is the only Persian you would play in that movie?

MJ: I never saw 300. I saw Sin City and really enjoyed it. Someone told me that Frank Miller made some racist remark in a radio interview about Middle Easterners not having the knowledge to build airplanes and yet they flew those planes into the twin towers on Sept 11. I believe he was responding to the criticism of his film from the Persian community. If he did indeed say these words, then I don’t think I would have wanted to play any one of his characters in 300—good skin or not. However, I do have an idea for a sequel called 600, where a Persian dude buys a 600 series BMW—black—and goes around looking for Spartans to run over. It’s called The Persian Estrikes Back!

AS: Estarring who?

MJ: Estarring who? Estarring me, of course!

Spartans, there’s no need to run and hide. Even during his Batman days the gentle Jobrani drove the family’s hand-me-down Honda. He is a peace-loving, secular Muslim devoted to his secular Christian Indian wife. He has nothing but kind words even for his in-laws. Jobrani does, however, have a childhood bone to pick with the school bully.

6th grader Jim Jevonan used to tease little Maz about being Iranian. Things never got violent, however. “He was a 6th grader and I was a 4th grader,” Jobrani says. “He chose not to beat me up and I didn’t try to fight him since he was bigger than me. Just became material for the future.”

Indeed it did. Jobrani’s crowd-gathering charisma, compelling warmth, and sensuously animated stage presence, is secretly energized by a powerful angst characteristic of the most fearsome comedy. In my memory only Eddie Murphy—in his earlier days—has savaged racism with such glib intelligence. Eddie Murphy spoke in a time when anti-black racism was in retreat. Maz Jobrani takes the stage while anti-Iranianism is on the rise. That takes courage of a rarer sort.

As the evening wrapped up at the pub with Maz Jobrani, his friends and admirers, a friend of Jobrani’s father came up to him for Persian hugs and kisses. “I spoke to your father in Iran,” this friend whispered to the artist. “And he is very, very proud of you.”

As are we all, Maz.

The Real Story

2007-10-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

The Iran Agenda The real story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis.
By Reese Erlich
2007 PoliPointPress

Journalist Reese Erlich grew up in Los Angeles just south of UCLA. As a child he used to walk up Westwood Boulevard toward Westwood village, past a stockbroker’s office and the Crest movie theater. At the time there was no Tehrangeles. The Westwood legal offices I visited last year to fix my Iranian passport mess used to house the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. As an aborigine of sorts, Erlich has no grievances against the Iranians who have colonized the Westwood of his childhood. On the contrary, he seems to delight in the cultural upgrade. His latest book, The Iran Agenda: the real story of U.S. policy and the Middle East crisis, should however give the American reader a nostalgic lump in the throat. Not because of old memories of a neighborhood now transformed; but because this seasoned journalist writes in a tradition now mostly abandoned by the US media. Trustworthiness.

Erlich identifies his sources by name, and gives references which independently corroborate his statements. By contrast the average American’s perception of Iran has been largely defined by “unidentified sources.” The Iran Agenda begins in the real Tehran bazaar where Erlich--along with actor Sean Penn and columnist Norman Solomon--had put their journalistic “boots on the ground” to report on the Iran situation. Erlich mentions other American reporters in Iran, but he observes, “Most American reporters I met saw Iran as an evil society and a danger to the United States. While many expressed disagreement with President Bush’s policies, they believed Iran was developing nuclear weapons that threatened America. In short, their views tracked the political consensus emanating from Washington. Rather than proceeding from reality, they filtered their reporting through a Washington lens. When a Washington official makes a statement, even a false one, the major media dutifully report it with few opposing sources.”

Of course this is not news to we Iranians. The value of The Iran Agenda is its usefulness as a tool of argument in discussions with curious Americans who ask us to be their tour guides on the Iran subject. Most educated Iranians carry an overall knowledge of the Iran-US quarrel, from Mossadegh’s overthow, to the hostage crisis, to the US Navy’s shooting down an Iran Air passenger jet. The Iran-Iraq war, NPT, human rights violations, student protests, worker’s union discontent, Ganji, Ebadi, Ossanlou, are all swimming somewhere in our data base. But it takes a professional like Erlich to organize these floating facts into an engaging story with a strong moral. To undo years of skilful propaganda, equal skill is needed. And Erlich is certainly a talented story teller.

While he informs us that the Kurdish PJAK guerrillas are supplied by the US and Israel, Erlich simultaneously evokes a feeling of action and travel reminiscent of the colorful adventures of Tintin:

“The PJAK camps are located in inhospitable terrain. During winter months, the snowy roads are accessible only on foot or by tractor. Luckily the snow hadn’t yet blanketed the area, and we drove up easily—if slowly—over winding dirt roads. Suddenly, young women in green pants in the distinctive Kurdish head scarf were walking along the road. They were female guerrillas. PJAK claims its troops are almost 50 percent women.”

Erlich’s very brief history of the Kurds updated me on some interesting statistics. For example, I was under the impression that Kurds were mostly Sunnis. This is true in general, but in Iran 50% of this minority is Shiite. This figure makes a difference in my thinking on the Kurdish issue.

Erlich goes on to remind his readers of other ethnic minorities, the Azeri, Baluchi and Arab Iranians, who could destabilize the Iranian regime. Little of this is intelligently discussed in the US media. For obvious reasons even the Iranian media tend to keep the lid on news of ethnic unrest.

Not all of Erlich’s criticism targets mainstream media. He has harsh words of advice for Iran’s exile media in his native Westwood backyard. He mentions Amir Taheri’s infamous false report about a Majils law requiring Iranian Jews to wear a yellow stripe on their clothing. “With each phony or exaggerated story,” Erlich warns, “the LA newscasters and commentators [who continued to play the story long after it was falsified] think they are helping the popular struggle against the Iranian government. But repeated over time, the distortions discredit the exile media and, by extension, all exile opposition.” Erlich describes another, bitterly funny incident--the Hakha affair-- as being “something right out of the Keystone Kops.” I can't find a web link that explains this fiasco nearly as well as Erlich's narrative.

Clarifying his own agenda in writing The Iran Agenda, Erlich says, “…I personally don’t trust mainstream politicians, lobbyists, and think tank gurus to resolve anything soon. Nor do I trust the clerics in Tehran to stop their belligerence. A pro-peace, pro-democracy movement exists within Iran. I think people in the United States need to build one as well.” It seems Westwood had earthy, smart people long before Iranians arrived.

Benedictus, the play

2007-10-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Screenwriting (chapter 7), says “In the theater, the playwright is God.” In screenwriting, on the other hand, the prevailing theology is that the director is God. The play Benedictus is about a Muslim and a Jew meeting in a Christian monastery, yet ironically God’s meddlesome hand has been slapped away. Displaying artistic chutzpah, the creators proudly declare that Benedictus has been put together by committee. Instead of the expected chaos however, a curious Darwinian order emerges from the multiplicity of perspectives.

Benedictus is a collaboration of Iranian, Israeli and American artists. This composition in itself immediately gives form to what the play will be about: the Iran-US-Israel conflict. I had hoped a less obvious theme would assert itself, but though one can occasionally negotiate with God, there is no arguing with reality. Subtlety takes longer to evolve.

The character Ahser Muthada, an Iranian born Israeli arms dealer, projects the Israeli point of view. Ben Martin, traumatized into alcoholism by his experience as a hostage in the 1979 US embassy crisis, is the American. Ali Kermani, an out-of-power Iranian reformist president, takes on the burden of being the Iranian. The three come together in Rome, each with their own agenda. Muthada is there to beg safe passage out of Iran for his Jewish Iranian sister He has good reason to fear for her safety because the US is only hours away from invading Iran. Kermani is in a position to help her, but won’t do so unless he gets what he wants: a secret meeting with a US official who can help stop the war. That would be the alcoholic Ben Martin, who is now a US ambassador. Kermani believes Muthada can set up such a meeting, and is in a sense holding Muthada’s sister hostage.

But nothing is as it seems, as they say. Plot twists reveal surprising hidden motivations, and in the tradition of sophisticated drama, each character sees the others more clearly than he sees himself. For example Kermani’s plea to save Iranians who would die in the impending war are countered by Muthada’s reminder that Kermani isn’t as concerned with life when it comes to the Islamic regime’s support of terrorism, and the brutal suppression of internal dissent.

Sadly, Kermani does not put up a worthy defense. This is partly because the Islamic regime’s position is difficult to uphold in the first place. Another reason is that the collaborating artistic team is composed of Iranians, Israelis, and Americans who disagree with the regime. The main reason however is artistic: Al Faris who plays Ali Kermani is not in love with his character. His comfort zone in Bendictus is the introverted, opaque type who, in his self righteousness, considers his opponents beneath emotional sharing. Though the Kermani character is certainly an upgrade from the terrorist types Feris has sometimes portrayed in mainstream films, he has to labor to operate outside those familiar unemotional parameters.

Ali Pourtash, on the other hand ingeniously lodges his character, the Israeli-Iranian Asher Muthada, into our hearts and minds. Muthada throws his arms around Kermani when they first meet in the secret negotiations chamber at the Benedictine monastery. They were childhood friends in Iran before the revolution. They played soccer on the same team. They spent time together in the Shah’s prisons. All those memories are embraced in Muthada’s wrap of his arms around his old friend. For Muthada, Kermani has the smell of home, of youth, adventure, idealism. The sight of his old friend takes him back to the time when they both Looked hopefully to the future instead of bitterly into the past. Muthada is reluctant to let go the hug. Kermani, on the other hand, hesitates to embrace Muthada. Something inhuman has occupied his soul, or perhaps the emotionally genuine Muthada had misunderstood Kermani’s calculating friendship all along.

Of course Muthada is not naïve, though he wishes he lived in a world where he could be. Like a loyal traditional wife Muthada even remembers what foods Kermani likes. The wealth Muthada has accumulated as an arms dealer is the result of his shrewd and non-judgmental assessment of human realities. While the young Kermani rose to power by exploiting idealism, Muthada could not pretend to transcend his fellow man; he got rich participating in the genuine savagery of our human nature.

All this and more is reflected in the brilliance of the Muthada characterization both by the writer Motti Lerner and by the actor Ali Pourtash. While Faris performs his actor’s duty and gets some sympathy for his character’s Islamic background, Pourtash, with openhearted humor, lavishes nuances on his Jewish character. Muthada’s unabashed solution to his national vs. religious identity issue is, “Who ordered Kosher?” This he blusters at the Benedictine nun attendant who has respectfully brought him a tray of food.

While the play was being created, there were intense moments of political disagreement between the various factions of the artistic team. It seems Faris wished his character could be portrayed as more trustworthy. Perhaps this is the directorial error that weakened this actor’s commitment to the Muslim character. The biggest mistake however, was made by Iran. Iran’s representative of the ITI (International Theatre Institute) turned down an invitation by the project’s initiator, Roberta Levitow, to participate. It seems Iranian resident artists felt a collaboration “is not possible at this time.” The opportunity for more input from the Iranian Muslim point of view was therefore squandered in mistrust. This was two years ago. Today, as war with the US creeps closer, the seriousness of such negligence in appreciating the communication power of art is more apparent.

Of course, not everyone can benefit from communication; sometimes art is just therapy. The American in the play, Ben Martin, is psychologically devastated by his experience as a hostage. His captors at the US embassy in Tehran used to click empty guns against his temple. Earl Kingston, who portrays Martin, does such an adept job of projecting this trauma that one wonders if the man is psychologically fit to be in any decision making loop regarding Iran. Benedictus is meant to suggest questions, and one question Martin’s experience raises is what share of Israel’s fear of Iran’s hostile posture is due to the trauma of the Nazi Holocaust.

Benedictus succeeds as entertaining and thoughtful theatre; its failures are the failures of our time not of the artists. Therefore its flaws are just as watchable as its strengths. Founding artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian and director Mahmood Karimi Hakak have delivered a work of high artistic quality. This includes attention to details sometimes neglected, such as music and sound design. Mitchell Greenhill starts the mood with melodic Middle Eastern flavored music, but as war nears he greatly enhances the foreboding developments with disturbing cello notes.

Ultimately though my favorite statement in the play is delivered by set designer Daniel Michaelson. Ostensibly to make the small stage appear bigger, he has created a physical perspective by converging the lines of the stage walls towards a vanishing point. At this singularity there is a door where the players enter into the secret negotiations chamber to hammer out deals. Of all the multiple ideological perspectives presented in the play, this singular physical point, the entrance into the negotiating room, represents the unifying principle of Benedictus. Michaelson seems to be saying, “There’s the place where peace begins.”

Iran nukes issue as an intro to "The Moon Landing"

2007-09-26T11:58:00.000-07:00

These days its easy to find images of the ugly crowd in Iran chanting slogans. But I had to browse the Google image finder for quite a while before I found one that had the right geometric property for a discussion of Iran’s nuclear technology issue.

One placard the crowd is holding says, “Death to America,” as expected. The other two say “nuclear development is Iran’s right,” and “We want our legal rights in NPT (the nuclear non-proliferation treaty).” You’ll notice that I have been able to draw a straight line across the picture separating the two sentiments cleanly. In most other pictures this geometric property is absent. The two issues are mingled in a not-so-easily-drawn demarcation. And if they are separable, the proportion isn’t right. Notice the “Death to America” portion is smaller than the side which says “nuclear development is Iran’s right.”

After I am done painting Iran as a nation of mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, you will see that even these proportions are unfair. The history of Persian civilization is much more about higher intellect than it is about radicalism, and superstitious religiosity. I will then give an emotional dimension to this point of view by presenting one of my short stories, “The Moon Landing.” An autobiographical account of what went on in my own family the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

The moon is a good place to start this extremely brief overview of Iran’s scientific history because there is a crater on the far side of the moon named after the tenth century Persian mathematician Al Khawrazmi. Why is he so honored? In small part because his influential book on arithmetic taught Europe how to write numbers and do arithmetic in the efficient way we do now. It was extremely cumbersome to do multiplication, division and fractions and advanced mathematics in Roman numerals, and the absence of the number zero was a huge impediment in the development of European science and mathematics. In his book, Khawrazmi compiled the methods of Indian mathematics which Europe then adopted wholesale. This includes our “Arabic” numeral system which is really the Indian numeral system introduced to Europe through Khawrazmi’s scholarly work.

In larger part Khawrazmi is honored today because he is known as the father of algebra-- which is a shortened version of the title of another of his books Al jabr va moghabelat. Today this first of the “difficult math subjects” is a prerequisite to taking calculus, differential equations and beyond. Why? because it was historically the prerequisite to the development of these mathematical tools of science.

Khawrazmi and other Iranian mathematicians like Al-Karaji (10th century), born in a town a few miles west of where I grew up in Tehran, helped develop the easy way in which engineers and scientists set up equations and go about solving them in the algorithmic way that they do now. In fact our word “algorithm” is probably a Medieval mis-pronunciation of the name of the author Al-khawrazmi.

The emphasis of Persian algebra on the use of algorithms is a leap of the intellect roughly analogous to the invention of the computer, because algebra is a machine that lifts a huge burden of thinking from us by reducing analysis to mindless operations—the way we let software do most of the work these days. Prior to algebra, problems had to be reasoned through every step of the way. Using Algebra as a lever, mathematics could now bite off much bigger problems than it could chew in the past. This machine of the mind began what I privately call “the industrial revolution of mathematics.” Because it triggered the invention of many later mathematical machines such as calculus, without which modern science would be impossible.

But mathematics isn’t the whole of science. Let’s see what the Iranian scholar Tusi was thinking in the 13th century. He says, "Look at the world of animals and birds. They have all that is necessary for defense, protection and daily life, including strengths, courage and appropriate tools [organs].” From these observations Tusi went on to describe a theory of evolution where hereditary variability was the leading force of evolution. In words that sound like Tusi is teaching a biology class on mutation he says, “The organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable, as a result they gain advantages over other creatures.” 600 years before Darwin Tusi did not spark a Scopes trial, though this Muslim scholar believed that humans are not only related to apes, but that apes are in fact a kind of human. Iran’s 13th century Darwin.

Here’s is another` Persian scientist, Biruni, being a geologist in the 11th century: “But if you see the soil of India with your own eyes and meditate on its nature, if you consider the rounded stones found in the earth however deeply you dig. Stones that are huge near the mountains and where the rivers have a violent current. Stones that are of smaller size at a greater distance from the mountain. And where the streams flow more slowly stones that appear pulverized in the shape of sand. Or Where the streams begin to stagnate near their mouths and near the sea. If you consider all this you can scarcely help thinking that India was once a sea, which by degrees has been filled up by the alluvium of the streams. Iran’s11th century Charles Lyell.

Let’s move on to the astounding genius of the scientist/philosopher Ibn-Sina who lived in Hamedan, the same city my father was born. He proposed that a body stays in the same place or continues moving at the same speed in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. This law of physics --rediscovered by Galileo 400 years later—is known as Newton’s first law of motion. And Ibn-Sina doesn’t stop with Newton, he says “If every single thing throughout the world was motionless, time would have no meaning.” Iran’s 11th century Einstein.

These scientists aren’t unknowns of history among Iranians. Our affection for these men of science is encoded in the myths and legends I grew up with. In a story reminiscent of some we tell today about the antics of the brilliant American physicist Richard Feynman, Ibn-Sina is said to have been such a wonderous physician that he could no longer stand being mobbed by his patients. Instead he had a rope one end of which was in the waiting room and the other in his office. The patient held on to one end of the rope and ibn-Sina, holding on to the other end, would diagnose him. One day, just to test him, a man brought in his cat and put the cat’s paw on the rope. When he opened his perscription on the way out, it said, “There’s nothing wrong with your cat that a less stingy feeding wouldn’t remedy.”

Ibn-Sina, who did not believe in alchemy, studied and severely criticized the works of another great 10th century Persian scientist, Al Razi who was born in a city just a few miles south of Tehran, where I was born. This alchemist is credited with the discovery of alcohol and its use as an antiseptic in medicine. He is also believed to have discovered sulphuric acid. Razi was a genius of classification. For instance he compiled a description of all the glassware and instruments used in standard chemsitry until recent times. The Hollywood image of the mad scientist cackling over beakers, tubes and alembics goes back to Razi. And whenever you say, “animal vegetable or mineral,” remember Razi, because he was the first to classify objects as such.

Then there’s the great Al-Haytham (11th century) , the father of optics. Persians and Arabs fight over Al-Haytham because he was born in Basra, a town that now sits just inside the border with Iraq not very far from Bushehr where Iran is building a nuclear reactor. Basra went in an out of the Persian empire as the empire expanded and shrank throughout history. When Al-Haytham was born, Basra was in Southern Persia, so Iranians claim him. It is highly likely that the ethnicity of this great physicist was Arabic-- unlike the other scholars I have mentioned, who were ethnically Persian. But the very fact that Persians fight to claim Al-Haytham suggests the zeal with which the Iranian civilization collects and protects scientific heritage.

Putting my nationalist hat back on, the great Persian Empire scientist Al Haytham studied the reflection of light by curved mirrors, and refraction by water and the atmosphere. He investigated the magnifying power of lenses, discussed rainbows, binocular vision and so on. He also corrected Ptolemy and Euclid’s idea that vision results from the eye sending out rays to the object. In a thought experiment very Einsteinian in texture he argued that if the eye sends out rays to the object, then nearer objects should become visible earlier than distant objects. Then using the scientific method he simply did the experiment when he closed his eyes and opened them again to the stars. The distant stars of course became immediately visible, disproving earlier theories of vision.

And on and on and on… to show that Iran’s desire for advanced technologies is much less a quest for political power than a desire to preserve an important chunk her national soul.

I hope at this point I have been able to show that the demarcation in the above photograph is not only qualitatively correct—one side is bigger than the other-- but that it is quantitatively unfair. Iranian's legal rights under the NPT are of hugely greater concern for Iran than her beef with the United States or Israel.

So what happened to the iranians? With this tremendous amount of science and mathematics, why didn’t Iran start the rennaisance instead of Europe. I’m broaching the topic even though it is outside the scope of this discussion because the question is such an obvious one it deserves to be mentioned. Too bad it can’t be explored here. Enough to say that Iranians believe the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century which decimated Iran’s population had something to do with it. It’s not the whole story by any means—Iran’s social and political structure , and also its geography were major factors--but whatever the reasons, in July of 1969 when the Americans landed on the moon all of this history caught up with us in a very personal way.

My short story “The Moonlanding,” was written against this backdrop of national soul searching