War Rugs
A few months ago, I wrote about finding a book of Persian fairy tales at a sidewalk vendor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Shortly after that discovery, I ran into something even more unexpected on that same street: a vendor selling war rugs. They look like any other rugs, except if you look carefully, you’ll see tanks, grenades, and helicopters in their patterns. See the peacocks and helicopters in the rug above, for instance.
The merchant, Kevin Sudeith, let me visit his warehouse in Long Island City, Queens, where I saw a sizable collection of all kinds of cool, nontraditional rugs. My favorites, besides the rug above, weren’t actually war rugs at all but were rather pictorial Iran-related rugs, like the ones below.
This one depicts the famous Azadi Square in Tehran. I think Kevin said it was made in Pakistan or Afghanistan, not Iran.
This rug, with the French flag on the helicopter, may be a reference to Khomeini, who lived in France for a few months before coming back to Iran to take over. I am bad at translating Iranian dates but suspect the date on here is around the time of the 1979 revolution, so if anyone could do that, please leave a comment.
The history of war rugs goes back to Afghanistan in the early 1980s, and you can read about and see more rugs on Kevin’s website, warrug.com. He also has a really handy chart showing the anatomy of a rug (click on “rug education”).
Related Post:
The Root of Wild Madder
Update: Kevin tells me the rugs here were probably woven in or around Mashad, not Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Internet: Hoder Hossein Derakhshan lawsuits Mehdi Khalaji
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Hoder Shutdown, Shakedown
Hossein Derakhshan’s blog, Hoder.com was shut down on Friday by his host, Hosting Matters, over allegations of defamation brought by the lawyers of Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). WINEP’s advisory board includes neo-conservative poster boy Richard Perle, and until 2001 counted Paul Wolfowitz as a member of that board as well. Hoder, to say the least, is not fond of neo-cons. I have no doubt that whatever Hoder said was delivered in the most biting way possible, and not everything he writes is necessarily verifiable, something for which he’s become somewhat known.
My understanding is that the gist of the situation is that Khalaji claimed Hoder made false statements about him, and as such demanded a specific post about him be removed. He also demanded $10K in damages. According to Hoder, Hoder removed one post at his host’s requests, but then Khalaji’s lawyers continued to insist that all posts mentioning Khalaji are defamatory and must be removed. Hoder’s host then wrote him this email:
While we do not agree with the assessment as it relates to
the latest post you have made, we do not have the time, interest, or
resources to invest in continually dealing with his complaints and to review
your site. Please remove that post and refrain from mentioning this person
in any form on the site you host within this network.
This is incredibly disturbing – the host recognized that Khalaji/Khalaji’s lawyers were wrong but still allowed Khalaji’s bullying to force their hand.
Hoder’s site is now temporarily hosted on Blogger, and he provides the letter from Khalaji’s lawyers (PDF) and the email exchange with Hosting Matters as supporting documentation.
There’s been a lot of buzz today on this, with a good, legalese post by Pars Arts contributor Nema Milaninia on his group blog, Iranian Truth. Also, Iranian.com has some coverage, with posts by Hoder himself, a critical letter/short piece by Kianosh Saadati, and a blog post by Jahanshah Javid.
Who’s in the wrong here? It’s hard to pinpoint the blame, so maybe everyone. Hoder claims free speech, but is defamation a constitutional right? Since when is it okay for journalists, a capacity in which Hoder has worked, to write without a little fact-checking? And in a time when Iranian-American scholars are being held under trumped up charges of espionage while visiting family in Iran, accusations like the ones that fly around on Hoder’s blog become more grave than just political bickering. However, Khalaji’s lawyers were overzealous and it was wrong to press for removal of all other posts after the one that was removed at first. And it was wrong for the host to shut him down, though I’m not familiar with the terms of service.
What do you think? Did Hoder deserve what he got, or is Khalaji in the wrong for suing him?
Update (8/14): The original Hoder post that was removed is in Persian, here. To clarify, regarding Hoder’s fact-checking, specifically in this instance, I can’t conclusively say he didn’t do so but meant that the language he frequently employs in his posts, such as calling someone “the filthiest traitor I have ever seen in my life” as he does Khalaji, in my mind is combative, unprofessional, and undercuts his credibility. It’s important to note that doesn’t mean he doesn’t fact-check, but just means I think he’s excessively vitriolic – an important distinction and one I neglected in this post, which was unfair to Hoder.
Community Film & Television Internet: Iranian.com Jahanshah Javid
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Iranian.com Redesign!
Just accidentally discovered the redesigned Iranian.com, which looks really, really great. Very “web 2.0″ layout, blogs, soon-to-come RSS feeds, and even a more intuitive URL structure, which is fantastic. The couple of things I hope will be added as well are breadcrumb navigation, a sitemap, and the ability to comment without registering for the site, which will make the user experience that much better. I don’t think the redesign has officially launched, but here’s a preliminary bravo to Jahanshah Javid and Iranian.com!
Missing Soluch
Iranian writer Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is described in one bio as “the most prominent Iranian novelist of the 1980s” and in another as “one of the first Iranian writers of fiction to support himself primarily by writing.” Before he became a writer, he was a stage and film actor in Tehran, where he still lives. Before that, he was a farm hand, shepherd, and construction worker, and was raised in a very poor village. Perhaps that’s why this book, set in a fictional rural village in Iran, is so affecting.
First published in 1979, Dowlatabadi’s novel Missing Soluch was recently translated to English by Kamran Rastegar. It’s a really elegant translation, for which I am most grateful (I read it in English but compared notes with friends who read the Persian). And Dowlatabadi’s spare and nuanced writing is actually quite reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s, his prose simple and his protagonists complicated. The subject matter, too, is very Steinbeckian, as the novel is not short on suffering: it’s the story of a woman who must support herself and her three children when her husband, Soluch, unexpectedly leaves them and the impoverished village in which they live. Like some of Steinbeck’s works, Missing Soluch illustrates the decline of agrarian life in the face of industrialization and can be heartbreaking to read. The novel is full of madness, violence, rape, and loss, and despite the simple language, it’s not an easy read, and it’s more than 500 pages long. But there’s hope and clear tenderness towards these characters, and a look at a rural Iran that is not frequently represented in the landscape of Iranian literature (at least not in the literature that’s available in English). That makes it worthy of any reading list.
Farshid Moussavi’s Work at MoMA
On a trip to MoMA this weekend I discovered that renowned Iranian architect Farshid Moussavi and her architect husband Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s prints of digital CAD files of the Yokohama International Port Terminal (click for the photo) are MoMA’s first acquisition of that medium for the new, ongoing collection there called Digitally Mastered. Unfortunately flash wasn’t allowed and I was being jostled by passerby, so the photo is a little blurry, and MoMA’s online catalog of the architects’ work there doesn’t have any images posted. But thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can see photos of the finished Yokohama Terminal, which catapulted the pair’s firm, Foreign Office Architects (FOA), into architecture superstardom. Their work blurs lines between structure and landscape – “flowing” is an adjective frequently used to describe it.
I wrote a longer post about MoMA on my friend Lizzie’s design blog, DESIGNWatcher, but thought it was worth mentioning Moussavi, who is faculty at Harvard, here as well. If you want to learn more, the BBC program Woman’s Hour has an audio interview with her, Britain’s Design Museum has a great page on FOA, and you can check out The Function of Ornament, which Moussavi co-edited.
(Photo: via AUB)
Art & Photography Culture Events: Chadornama Haleh Anvari IAAB Iranian Alliances Across Borders
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Artist/Journalist Haleh Anvari
A couple of weeks ago, Iranian artist and journalist Haleh Anvari performed/presented a piece called “The Power of a Cliché: Representing Iranian Women” at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC, in conjunction with IAAB’s TRANSFORM/NATION art exhibit. She’s pictured here, albeit blurry, with one of her own images that’s part of a larger project called Chadornama, in which she depicts women wrapped in bright chadors.
The Chadornama photographs are very compelling; the women are faceless and, save for one photo, shapeless, but they’re so vibrant and lively even within what essentially amount to bedsheets. But the Power of a Cliché work consisted largely of press images gleaned from her friends and from the Internet, with a sort of electro-muzak soundtrack and Anvari’s spoken word/lecture to accompany the photo slide.
Anvari has worked as a producer for foreign media in Iran, and most palpable in her presentation was anger at the depiction of Iranian women in those same media. The thesis of this piece revolved around the Western gaze on Iran – its objectification of Iranian women and its reduction of Iranian post-revolutionary society to a single piece of cloth, wrapped around women. Also, she made some good points about the history of the chador, which goes back many more years than most people realize.
Spoken word is an extremely difficult genre and the combination of slideshow projection, music, and alternation between what felt like lecture and what was clearly poetry/essaying gave an overall effect of alternating between overly didactic and overly personal. Still, in all, the information in Anvari’s presentation was as compelling as her Chadornama series, and her point was really driven home when she held up The Economist’s recent Riddle of Iran cover during the Q&A session at the end. See Anvari’s website for more.
