Posts from Will Yong

Tehran Colours

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:17:39 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

Sometimes I think my Tehran pictures are excessively two-dimensional and lack depth. The streets gave me a clue as to why that might be. Walking forwards and back, turning 90 degrees to cross - no doubt city streets have the power to impose their geometry on where you point your camera.

Another constant theme in Tehran is the unwanted attention that cameras tend to draw. It's almost unconscious for me now to swing my camera to the opposite shoulder when I see a police car. It was something I hadn't foreseen before I bought my DSLR. When I have my zoom lens on I definitely get more questions and looks than with my little 50mm prime.

So I've adopted certain guerrilla tactics - keeping my weapon concealed behind my arm before stopping suddenly to point, shoot and make a clean getaway - all in a matter of seconds. I've certainly learned the benefits of getting light settings right in advance since stopping too long to readjust multiplies the chances of getting someone on your case exponentially.

But yesterday, happily, the rules seemed to be in reverse. As I passed the Interior Ministry, my sensors began to flash amber as usual. Anywhere near a government building is after all, the worst possible place to be caught pointing a lens. A safe distance away I was shooting the pattern of some creepers on a concrete wall when I heard the excited voices of three young women from a car behind me.

"Hey Mr. Photographer, take OUR picture!"

Spinning on my heel I got off three shots which came out useless and blurry in the rush but it was well worth it for the squeals of delight from the car as it drove away. That was all I needed to put me on track. I was now in the mood.

--

Not long after, I was shooting the opposite side of the street when again I heard a voice calling me from behind, this time a man who sounded like he had a point to make. I girded myself for a confrontation.

Instead, he said to me in a matter-of-fact way, "If you're going to take pictures, take a picture of this."

The man, middle-aged, thankfully not in uniform, motioned for me to look at an electricity routing box which had been prised open, exposing bare wires, presumably packing a high-voltage punch if a stray hand touched them.

"Look at that... I had to remove a dead rat from that box - all dried up it was. A child could get killed."

Impressed by his sense of civic duty I didn't ask why he'd taken it upon himself to remove electrocuted rodents from municipal facilities - himself risking death by electrocution. I told him I thought the gaping box did look very dangerous and that I would certainly send a copy of my picture to the Tehran mayor (a certain Baqer Ghalibaf - tipped to follow his predecessor, Mahmud Ahmedinejad's footsteps and become Iran's next President.)

--

Further up the road, my beloved Vali Asr maple trees - Tehran's seasonal barometer - were poised to shed for the winter. The rain and wind later that night gave us the first big drop of late autumn. Waves of leaves cascading in ever-changing patterns under the streetlamps.

But before that was the day's final street photography moment. This time I was kneeling down in front of some fraying tarps hung to conceal a building site. When I got up to walk on, a voice with an unfamiliar accent asked what I was taking pictures of.

At first he said he was from "Shomal" which is Iran's Caspian Sea region but without much prompting he admitted that he and his wife had been smuggled illegally into Iran, presumably I thought from Tajikistan - his Farsi was close to incomprehensible to me.

Walking together for no more than 50 metres, he still had enough time to ask me whether I was married.

I told him no and he fixed me with a mischievous smile.

"But you have a friend don't you?"

I told him not exactly but that I did have someone in mind.

"Well God willing, you will be successful!"

I walked on in high spirits before turning back after just a few steps. My Tajik friend was still where I had left him. "Can I take a picture - for a keepsake?"

Happily, he obliged.

Back in Tajrish

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:16:38 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

A while since i was active on ipernity. no reason for alarm, busy at work and such things that have taken my mind off photography and instead pushed me into politics - through my job as a news anchor for Press TV. Some links to video of my on-screen work can be found in my facebook page.

But today i really needed a break so I took a walk in Tajrish. Bustling commerce and leisure shoppers abounded in the warm afternoon. Thick clouds brewing over the mountains came to only light spits of rain but a sign that autumn is on its way.

After a bite to eat at the jigari (griled liver on skewers) I took a step forward in photographing people in the street.

The shoe-shiner on the steps next to Mellat Bank knocked me back at first but I literally stood my ground, camera in hand and the fortuitous arrival of a customer. A young guy who wanted the soles of his football boot mended managed to get a smile out of the chap. At first he said only one but I showed him that I had underexposed. That was my cue and I sat down next to him and started chatting.

Later, on the fringes of the bazaar I caught the young guys in front of the vanity belts and promised them a quick print from the developers up the road which I handed to them 10 minutes later.

Images of old Yazd

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:02:36 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

Some great pictures taken in the mud-wall alleys and bazaar district of Yazd

yazdnegar.blogfa.com/post-466.aspx

whose air is it anyway?

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:27:25 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

A dust storm has hit the city and I can hardly see past milad tower.

There are electricity pylons in the mountains just above us. Is it true they cause cancer? And what about the microwaves from the big satellite dishes on the roof at work? Did they put the newsroom at the bottom of the building to make it bomb proof? I’m not sure if all this technology and politics can really be trusted.

This morning there was a fracas in the street below my window. They’re opening up a dead end road which backs onto the mountains. The Basijis have buried some unknown soldiers up there and they want to make it a shrine to the politico-religious establishment.

The neighbours were complaining their peace would be broken by all the rough-stubbled plebeian men and black-clad women folk on Fridays, driving their noisy Paykans up the hill to cry in the name of the martyrs.

In Tehran, the right to clean air is something you only get with premium real estate. Central Tehran was a dust bowl today. The wind kicking it into your hair and eyes.

While one of the neighbours went irretrievably hysterical, a man revealed the undercurrent to the discussion:

Why not? Let the bottom-of-the-city people come up here and enjoy the air up here sometimes. You talk like you own it…

They did pay for their piece of the mountain. but I guess it didn’t come with a guarantee.

Typographic mingling in the centre of civilization

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:25:36 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

If there is a trend towards homogenization there is also a trend towards bringing out the essential native aesthetic through means developed in other cultures.

Typography has gone hand in hand with the technological developments that enabled it, required it and shaped it.

So are cultural latecomers now adapting to this new world? Adapting it’s tools and techniques to its own needs? Adapting or reinterpreting it – recreating it?

Typography as part of the Dialogue of Civilisations requested by Mohammad Khatami when he was Iran’s president.

The meta-dialogue of techniques of visual communication, a dialogue of written scripts and illustration.

at the Imam Ali Religious Art Museum Japanese calligraphy was placed alongside Iranian. noted calligraphers from both countries had been invited, they walked us through the tea ceremony step by step and dressed a woman up in clothes no one has worn in more than a thousand years.

I really didn’t notice any real dialogue between the two traditions apart from in the exhibition promotional material. Two styles cohabiting a single space but remaining tactfully distinct. While the embassy functionaries and invited artists shared the sensor space of dozens of digital cameras, the two distinguished artistic traditions eyed each other silently, respectfully, across an ocean.

Arabesque

it’s good to know that graphic artists in Europe have seen the positive side of the rise of Islam. Is Arabesque a great achievement in spite of the current tensions between Europe and the West? Or is it itself a product of it? positivity abounds in posters for Iftar parties in the Netherlands, Arabic inspired calligraphy-in-light from a French graphiste and graffiti in early-Kufic.

Tehran Spring.

It’s good to be outside again.

if they're so tough why do they have to be in our faces so much?

stood politely side by side.

tacit acknowledgement of the gulf between the two.

Oh The Places You'll Go...

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:02:11 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

Congratulations!

Today is your day.

You’re off to Great Places!

You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes

You can steer yourself

any direction you choose.

You’re on your own. And you know what you know.

And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look ‘em over with care.

About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”

With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,

you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any

you’ll want to go down.

In that case, of course,

you’ll head straight out of town.

It’s opener there

in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen

and frequently do

to people as brainy

and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen,

don’t worry. Don’t stew.

Just go right along.

You’ll start happening too.

OH! THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!

You’ll be on your way up!

You’ll be seeing great sights!

You’ll join the high fliers

who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed.

You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead.

Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best.

Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t

Because, sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so

but, sadly, it’s true

and hang-ups

can happen to you.

You can get all hung up

in a prickle-ly perch.

And your gang will fly on.

You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch

with an unpleasant bump.

And the chances are, then,

that you’ll be in a Slump.

And when you’re in a Slump,

you’re not in for much fun.

Un-slumping yourself

is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.

Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.

A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!

Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?

How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right…

or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?

Or go around back and sneak in from behind?

Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find,

for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused

that you’ll start in to race

down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace

and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,

headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place…

…for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go

or a bus to come, or a plane to go

or the mail to come, or the rain to go

or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow

or waiting around for a Yes or a No

or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite

or waiting for wind to fly a kite

or waiting around for Friday night

or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

or a pot to boil, or a Better Break

or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants

or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.

Everyone is just waiting.

NO!

That’s not for you!

Somehow you’ll escape

all that waiting and staying.

You’ll find the bright places

where Boom Bands are playing.

With banner flip-flapping,

once more you’ll ride high!

Ready for anything under the sky.

Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!

Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!

There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.

And the magical things you can do with that ball

will make you the winning-est winner of all.

Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be,

with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t.

Because, sometimes, they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times

you’ll play lonely games too.

Games you can’t win

’cause you’ll play against you.

All Alone!

Whether you like it or not,

Alone will be something

you’ll be quite a lot.

And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance

you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.

There are some, down the road between hither and yon,

that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.

But on you will go

though the weather be foul

On you will go

though your enemies prowl

On you will go

though the Hakken-Kraks howl

Onward up many

a frightening creek,

though your arms may get sore

and your sneakers may leak.

On and on you will hike

and I know you’ll hike far

and face up to your problems

whatever they are.

You’ll get mixed up, of course,

as you already know.

You’ll get mixed up

with many strange birds as you go.

So be sure when you step.

Step with care and great tact

and remember that Life’s

a Great Balancing Act.

Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.

And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?

Yes! You will, indeed!

(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)

KID, YOU’LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!

So…

be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray

or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O’Shea,

you’re off to Great Places!

Today is your day!

Your mountain is waiting.

So…get on your way!

Oh my god...

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:07:45 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

www.dear-god.net

Baluchestan and Iran

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:32:48 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

Baluchestan is a pretty traditional place. Wherever we were received as guests women and men were strictly separated. I attended a wedding without even seeing the bride.

When I saw women and girls in the streets they were often wearing black chadors loosely draped over outfits like these. But the black covering never fully hid the bright colours beneath. It was just one of so many ways that Baluchestan reminded me of India and showed me more clearly than ever that Iran is a diverse country and is essentially nothing without this diversity.

Baluchis are not separatists by any means. The Baluchi people are a relatively new ethnic group and accept their position sandwiched between the two great civilisations of Iran and India. Baluchis from Pakistan seem to have no problem crossing the border into Iran where they find plenty of work and higher wages. Unfortunately, some of the lawlessness of Pakistan also makes it over to Iran and there have been some high profile kidnappings of foreign tourists in the area and a bomb attack on Iranian soldiers in Zahedan.

I'm back

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:52:17 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

I've been away for a couple of weeks - far from computers but clicking away happily on my still new Nikon D80. Thanks to Adam for his Iranian new year wishes - I hope you all have a happy 1387.

First I spent a week in Iranian Baluchestan, near the Pakistan border. With Betel stains on the walls, spicy food, long beaches and brightly-coloured mosques it was was one step closer to India and a world away from Tehran.

Then from the far south of Iran I came back to the capital and headed north to the forests of Gorgan province. Hiking up the mountains and rising up above the clouds. The wettest, greenest, lushest, freshest forests I had ever seen. Behruz, this is one for you as I was with all your old buddies from Terhan Uni.

Pics from both these trips coming soon...

www.ipernity.com/doc/willyong/album/59301

Best of 1386

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:45:41 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

From the streets of Tehran

Dubai

Yazd

India

music

Irony

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:44:50 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

Arch-purveyors of postmodern irony, CNN International, tonight offered us this alarming headline:

"More advanced societies, more vulnerable to attack"

-- How to protect yourself from "Cyber Terror"

It seems we in the "advanced" world have more to lose than anyone else... we're not even safe behind our laptops.

no "terror" can be effective if people aren't afraid.

the trouble is, at heart, most people ARE afraid.

afraid of facing themselves in the mirror.

afraid of losing something because they don't know what they have.

afraid of growing old because they haven't really lived.

these people become the majority.

teach them to fear an invisible enemy,

and they run to the state for protection.

Your views...

national pride and prejudice

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:25:46 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

you know, I don't want to judge what a society does or doesnt do. I mean, the simple fact that people group themselves together and see themselves other than individuals is wrong - whether you discriminate according to race, sexuality, even ability and intelligence. basically - a government is obliged to play to the people's mass-mindedness in order to stay in power and take advantage of it. Very often - sadly - this involves fostering norms which play to that mass-mindedness. One could even say that the iniquity of a system of government is in direct proportion to its need to manufacture a majority - to manufacture consent - by a combination in various proportions of outright force, cult of personality, propoganda and marketing, systematic education, regulated use of drugs etc... you can call it "unite and conquer". Create a mob and manipulate it.

When a society sees something as undesirable - there is always an act of distancing and stereotyping involved. There is no individual on earth that one could not accept the humanity of given sufficient time and patience. But instead, man all to easily discriminates and judges. In Iran, gays have a particularly hard time getting accepted because of strong prejudices. I guess I'm more interested in why people have prejudices in the first place as opposed to what they are particularly prejudiced against.

I'm sure that BBC documentary was interesting about gays in Iran. But don't you think judging the situation in Iran is a bit premature when the heart of the issue is right on the doorstep. Why not ask – what is it about any culture’s system of norms and values that makes it necessary for a person with minority sexual orientation to feel “born the wrong gender” in the first place? This we can study without sensationalizing surface differences between geographically and historically distinct national groupings.

Sadness causes cancer

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:18:52 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

Maman Mahin, my grandmother was making kotlet in the kitchen and I was eating lunch beside her. She often makes food for the children of her daughter Sudabeh, a successful hospital pathologist who never has time to cook. I like kotlet, fried patties of potato, egg, minced beef and Maman Mahin’s completely unique balance of spices. But it disagrees with my stomach and today I found out why.

“That much minced beef, are you serious?” beef has never agreed with my digestive system.

“This? Oh, there’s more here,” she lifted a plate and under it was another plastic container full of the stuff, “I’ll add this first, mix it and then see how much more it needs.”

“I love kotlet but it upsets my stomach. Too much fried meat. You know some people live so unnaturally these days that they don’t even listen to what their bodies tell them.”

“Nima and Mani don’t get sick. They eat kotlet.” Nima and Mani are Sudabeh’s sons.

“But Nima sleeps during the day and wakes up at night. That’s not natural. People live unnatural lives then they get sick and go to the doctor and they ask ‘what’s wrong with me?’ They don’t know what’s good or bad anymore and they eat things one hundred times worse! Maybe they even get cancer. Then they run to the doctor but they never ask themselves ‘why?’”

I’d mentioned the c-word. Auntie Zari has cancer. Doctors had given her two months to live. She’s still alive and doing well now after 2 years. I uttered a quick blessing to for her to get well to make up for the indiscretion. After a few seconds, Maman Mahin replied.

“A doctor once told me there are ten things that cause cancer. I can’t remember nine of them but one of them was sadness. Sadness causes cancer. Aunti Zari got cancer because of family troubles. Praise be to God that she’s still with us, God protect everyone from such things!” she said this last prayer eyes turned up to the ceiling, hands covered in kotlet mix.

She continued.

“When I was young, when Haji Agha bought our house, I saw this girl I’d known at school lived on the same side of the quarry as we did. Her name was Fatemeh. The name in her birth certificate was Espehvarin. She was a good girl and beautiful too. She was in sixth grade when I was in grade five. It was her brother that married Agha Mohsen’s sister, then she introduced him to your Aunt Zari and they’ve been married now for more than 30 years.”

Maman Mahin’s hands were once again deep in the pan of kotlet mix. An eighty-year-old woman with forearms bigger than mine and a tough grip. Seven decades of serving the family and God.

“I don’t make many friends but when I do, I try to be a real friend. Sometimes she even borrowed money from me – but she always paid me back. Four children – two girls, two boys. But her husband. Hay, hay! If he were here right now I would spit right in his mouth, the bastard! She would spend just 5 garan and he would come home at night and beat her for it. Once he even offered money to her cousin to tell her family that he’d slept with her.”

“Why did he do that?”

“He wanted a reason to divorce her of course, send her back to her family in shame. The idiot donkey! He’s still alive now, that dog! In the end he caused Fatemeh so much grief that she fell ill with cancer. Four children, and she left them motherless when she ‘gave her life to you’ my dear.”

I like that phrase. Instead of just saying ‘died’ – ‘she gave her life to you’. What better way to remember the dead than to thank them for the life that they left to the living?

“But before she died she came to me one day in secret and gave me a fist full of gold jewellery –bracelets and rings. She told me that if she died I was to keep this safe until her younger daughter was 15 and then to give it to her grandfather – with her as a witness – and tell them that this gold is to provide anything that’s necessary for her. Yes, kids had it hard back then. Well, Fatemeh died and that bastard husband kept coming by. He knew I had her gold and he’d bang on the door and shout a lot of things. I never opened the door to him. I just told him that if he had a just complaint, he could go to the courts and bring the police. He gave up in the end. Then years later Maryam, yes our very own Maryam, came home from school one day and she’d brought her friend who had told her she wanted to see me.”

Maryam is one of Maman Mahin’s five sisters. She’s about twenty years younger than my grandmother – younger even than my mother. And she’s not even the youngest. Maman Mahin also has four brothers.

“I thought, well I never, is this my friend Fatemeh’s daughter? Well, I gave her the gold just like Fatemeh told me.”

“What happened to her other children?”

“Well, it’s sad. One of her sons went into the desert and killed himself. His no-good father probably drove him to it, the poor senseless boy. Her other daughter died too. She married a pilot – a good man – but he crashed the plane they were flying in and that was that. The other son went abroad and we haven’t heard about him since. But I remember that doctor told me there are ten things that cause cancer. I don’t remember nine of them, but one of them was sadness.”

I cover, therefore I am not

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:11:09 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

There's something very powerful about the chador when it is worn over the face. In Iran you only see it in special circumstances - sometimes when a woman is begging. They just sit, motionless, existing but denying their existence. The most complete expression of shame that I can imagine.

Taking pictures in Tehran

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:44:14 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

The rallies to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution are an uncomfortable mix of festive gaiety and political posturing. Walking down "Revolution Street" towards "Freedom Square" there were people begging to have their photos taken. Every time I stopped to point my camera, passing groups would shout for me to look. Kids in camouflage gear and pro-Palestinian check scarves puffed out their chests and waved their flags more vigorously. At one point a group of about twenty-five men all lined up neatly and patiently for me. Best of all, one middle-aged lady sitting by the side of the road looked up at me as I passed – her eyes just begging me to take her picture. She smiled a sweet smile, beaming innocently and incongruously over a poster showing the frankly lascivious grin of Ayatollah Khamenei and a black and white "death to America" placard.

So, in fact, Iran's biggest show of nationalist pride is actually one of the easiest times and places to take people's photographs. With the whole day almost entirely devoted to showing defiance against foreign meddling, the theory is, the further this message travels the better. And since "the enemy" speaks English, it makes sense to translate the printed material for their benefit as my friend Roland Platteau has oberved.

The national psyche has been so long moulded by opposition and Iran's pariah status in the western world that I even sensed a degree of knowing self-parody. Chanting slogans against America, Israel and, to a lesser extent, Britain has taken on the air of a national pastime. The role of 22 Bahman (11 February) as a political as a national day of rememberance has at least been equalled by its new role as a street festival – a kind of super-politicized Carnaval. There was even a tent by the side of the road giving kids the opportunity to throw darts at a crude mockup of Uncle Sam. A geopolitical fairground game. The host was wearing a comically-tall stars and stripes top hat.

At any other time, taking picture in Iran can be sensitive to say the least. And it’s hard to put your finger on why. Once I was taking a picture of bus. A normal city commuter bus. A plain clothed man, no uniform, no ID approached me and asked me if I had permission to take pictures. I said that we were in a public place and there was no need for permission. He assured me that I was wrong. After some time talking I think I got to the bottom of it. He told me that many foreigners come to Iran and take pictures of things to present Iran in an unfavourable light. I asked him what about the good things in Iran? What if foreigners want to show Iran in a good light? I had taken my picture and he was getting bored so we parted without reaching a conclusion.

No, I do not belong to Hezbollah

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:01:00 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

And I saw a lot of people smiling and laughing and so I took pictures of them. Some of them were carrying pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei. Fewer held old photos or even painted portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini. Many held placards in printed with “death to America” and “death to Israel” in Farsi and also in English - presumably for the foreign cameramen like myself. Lots of the children had made dolls to represent Uncle Sam or George Bush. It struck me that perhaps they had been given the assignment as school homework. These crude effigies were probably burned in the street as a climax to the day’s festivities but I had work in the afternoon so I went home early and missed the opportunity to confirm my suspicion.

Everyday life in Iran is strongly pervaded by dissatisfaction. When people find out that I’ve chosen both consciously and freely to live in this country, first, they want to know why, but when my answers fail to satisfy them, they very quickly start to give me their take on the country’s woes. Life in a city like Tehran especially can be a struggle.

So it was unexpected for me to see so many thousands gathering to mark Iran’s national day – the anniversary of the 1979 revolution. No one was forcing placards into anyone’s hand. Chanting was spontaneous and spirited. I can only conclude that the circles I move in represent a very small and misrepresentative portion of the whole. Artists, musicians, returned foreign exiles – these people are not the stuff of political parades.

What I was seeing was the masses. And I feel free to use this word because each and every marching, chanting, placard-holding individual there had decided for themselves to sacrifice their identity to a group phenomenon. Don’t however let us think we are so immune to this. How many of us have never bought a t-shirt with a brand logo in the upper left portion? How many of us have never shouted “come on you Reds!” at a football match? And there are surely countless more ways than this that we march to the beat of drums.

There’s comfort in unity and shared hopes even if just for a day.

Dubai bookshop disappointment

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:53:14 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

While the ladies went on the trail of this and that to pick up, put down, put on, pay for, haul home and then consign to the back of the cupboard, here, I thought, I would find my solace. With a couple of hundred dollars I could source myself with perhaps more than a year’s worth of reading. In Iran, the books you want are not always easy to come by – what treasures would I find here?

Then I stubbed my toe on a huge two volume tome entitled “Feng Shui – A Practical Encyclopedia”. The cursed thing was a trip hazard, not even worth its weight as a door stop to let those positive energies flow in. I was in the “General Knowledge” section, just to the right of the dictionaries. I remembered enough about the Dewey system to know that if this bookshop was arranged in library format, Philosophy would be here.

I wasn’t initially dismayed by the fact that philosophy and psychology had been bundled together –plenty of non-specialist bookshops do the same. But to my anguish I saw that “MacGrudy’s” (the name was probably poached off a bottle of cheap Bulgarian Scotch) had committed the ultimate bibliophilic sin– philosophy and psychology had been supplanted by “self-help”. “You – The Owner’s Manual”, a near complete library of the Dalai Lama Publications© psychic survival repertoire, “Teach Your Children How To Think” by Edward de Bono. “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. Between endless volumes of self-confidence-boosting, anxiety-busting platitudes I spied the name “Aristotle” – only to find below it – “A Very Short Introduction”.

According to the earliest records where its name appears, Dubai was a pearl-fishing village until it became an important trade stopover on the way to India. Then with the discovery of oil, it found a place on the modern economic map. Nowadays oil accounts for just 6% of Dubai’s trade revenue with supplies running out fast. Oil money was used as a stepping stone to establish the Jebel Ali free trade haven which has fuelled Dubai’s astronomic economic growth ever since.

The foreign wage-slave population of Dubai is now more twice as large as the native Arab population. Indian and Bangladeshi men toiling on construction sites in the summer heat, sometimes unpaid for months, sometimes dying on the job unpaid. Philipino girls folding t-shirts for tourists in GAP. All doggedly chasing the historically and statistically implausible ideal of rags to riches in a ceaseless frenzy of cut, chase and run. White Western professionals too – why else would they be here but to sell their skills to the current world’s highest bidders? And then there are the poor Iranians who find in Dubai what they lack back home.

If you’re successful here, you can be more or less comfortable, give or take a few modern neuroses. For the foreign workers on the tough end perhaps there’s nothing for it but to cushion the daily blows with dreams. Either way, in such a crass wasteland of inflated hopes and superficial desires, there’s little room on the shelf for philosophy. That voice inside that compels man to step back, to reflect, to question his place in the world, is simply drowned out by the collective unconscious crying for help.

"moral agent" vs "servant of power"

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:01:03 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

I’m glad of the opportunity to clarify and work through logically what has, until now been only a feeling and a growing but unsure sense of what it is to be human. In the course of my existence I believe that it is only in the last few years that I have realised that to be human is not always a given for beings of our genetic make-up. I am reminded of the old monk Kosima in The Brothers Karamazov who imparted to the young Alexei a simple and fundamental truth about humanity in general – “my elder told me once to care for most people exactly as one would for children, and for some of them as one would for the sick in hospitals.”

Perhaps I am just repeating myself unhelpfully. But it is here that the “ignorance” I speak of rears its head. It is not simply lack of knowledge – we all lack that, we are not gods after all. Rather, it is something wilful, something chosen. We are all as human beings given some potential for self-analysis. We reflect on ourselves, our actions, motivations and ideals. It may be true that not all of us are equally endowed with this capacity – furthermore it is almost certainly true that this capacity for self-knowledge needs nurturing before it can become fully-fledged. Childhood experiences are one well-documented source of influences on character formation. But to put this side of the debate to one side for the time being, my contention is that man is fundamentally a self-regarding creature and it is in this realm that we can break our bonds with the determinism enforced upon us by countless external and internal factors.

I’ve just picked up a copy of Edward W. Said’s “Culture and Imperialism” and on the front cover is a quote from a review of the book by Noam Chomsky. It runs – “Edward Said helps us to understand who we are and what we must do if we are to aspire to be moral agents, not servants of power.” Now if we replace “Edward Said” with “Knowledge” – that pretty sums up the stance I have regarding knowledge and ignorance. But you see, here, knowledge is not some inert cold fact. Knowledge implies an imperative – rather in the sense of the Socratic idea of knowledge – that one who knows cannot but fail to do good and that one who fails to do good suffers from a lack of knowledge. Knowledge and lack of it are moral states. Kierkegaard worked with this idea further when he said that moral culpability in this lack of knowledge can be lesser or greater. At a certain point it becomes a choice to remain ignorant or to accept the responsibility of pursuing knowledge.

I’ve seen it and I’m sure you’ve seen it too. People running away from the existential pain of being human. The temptation to be something other than, less than human is often too great to resist. We can be cogs in a machine, blind followers of authority – be it political, social, the tyranny of common sense, the tyranny of fashion etc, etc... – we can give up our selfhood to become slaves (or indeed, masters over others) in any number of ways to escape the responsibility of being human.

For the acceptance of this knowledge – the acknowledgment if you will – I have chosen the word “faith”. I do so because it truly requires what you might call “a leap of faith” to accept it and to live by it. To live in and act on this knowledge requires not only moment to moment diligence but also a faith that when we stray from our path of becoming and instead fall into the numerous and very tempting traps of materialism, emotional dependence and neurosis, we have the power to will to get back on it. And that’s what I label faith.

Thus, it is my challenge to you to reinterpret your notion of faith. I think that the above explanation should exorcise any remaining doubts that what I consider to be faith bears no necessary relation to the idea of “faith in God” that so many unthinking religious people adhere to. It’s pertinent that religious people are often referred to as “followers”, a more appropriate designation than many of them probably realise. That doesn’t warrant the word “faith” – rather, it is the opposite, it is an escape from taking the responsibility to seek knowledge, to be the leader of our own destinies. There’s nothing blind about the faith I talk of. On the contrary, it is an ongoing acknowledgement of the need to be constantly vigilant.

Furthermore, while questioning is critical to the ongoing process of becoming, I reject the extreme relativism which states that truth is entirely subjective. Sure, there are truths that may be more or less relevant in a given situation but that does not stop them from being truths. Arsenic is a poison but this does not mean that it cannot be used to treat certain illnesses. Truths are always extremely interrelated – to isolate a truth, argue that its opposite is also true from a different viewpoint and then throw out both propositions in the name of subjectivity is methodologically invalid.

You fear that I am proposing that everything is “imposable” – you might say “deterministic”. I would say that we have the choice. Faith or determinism. We can on the one hand embrace faith in our essence as self-reflecting, self-guiding, self-improving, self-fulfilling beings and accept the responsibility of being “moral agents” or throw up our hands, accept determinism and become “servants of power”.

My Family: Grandmother

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:37:39 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

Since moving back in with my grandmother my life has been structured around hers. From months of solitude I’ve once again returned to the orbit of another – she, whose advancement in years is only matched by her continuing certainty of who she is and why she is. Her God has always given her the faith to be herself and the strength to bear worldly rejections. But of course, now she tires more easily than in her earlier years so she sleeps much. All the better to preserve her strength – still ample – for the tasks she still sees ahead of her.

Married at 14. Her first child – my mother – at 16. Even then she was powering forward to be what she is now – the spiritual leader, matriarch of our family and the eventual sink for its dysfunctions. Seeing there was money to be made in buying, selling and developing land, she would encourage those around her to put their savings into smaller or larger plots here and there. Sometimes, even as a forthright 17 year old, being on hand at the construction site, cane in hand, ready to dole out justice to workshy labourers.

Her mother was not so easily won over. “What kind of a girl would exchange her wedding jewels for dirt?” she asked, refusing on occasions to allow her daughter to make investments that, in bitter hindsight, would have made them millionaires. Still though, her successes were not few and her successes helped her to pay school and university fees for her brothers, sisters and her own children and eventually bring the entire extended family – along with her parents to Tehran. On those foundations much was built – now, the children and grandchildren of my grandmother’s father – a Kermanshah blacksmith – have all either become successful in their trades, or at least seen their hard won Tehran properties rocket in value. Security in a volatile economic world.

There remains just her one son, my uncle, who never really learned to stand on his own two feet. My grandmother sent him to Germany as a youth – he was to study and return with a trade but succeeded only in falling into bad habits with the wrong kind of people. He returned and, at the behest of his mother, married. Then the signs of his latent mental illness began to show and his family life suffered accordingly. Unable to provide his wife and children with the living they expected, a rift developed and he is hardly even wanted in his own home. Other family members have been kind enough to find work for him but now, at 60, and still with nothing to his name, it is my grandmother’s one last wish to see her son independent.

My grandmother lives exceedingly simply. All her gains have been for others. The apartment she owns, and in which I now live, has nothing in it which you might call valuable except for the numerous carpets (which she already refers to as belonging to the children and grandchildren to whom she wishes them bequeathed) and possibly the gold jewellery which she keeps somewhere-I-don’t-know-where.

In between her regular and time-consuming prayers and her ample sleep, she plans and advises for the future of the family still.

uplifting ipernity conversation

nobody@ipernity.com (Will Yong) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:54:01 +0000

Will Yong has added a post:

Fabian Zerneke : UNBELIEVABLE what people had CREATED

WY: every where is beauty - people, people creating art, art feeding people, nature feeding art, but only people destroying nature and killing themselves and others ----- only this is so sad....

Fabian Zerneke : Weve DECIDED by our own to do so. May be you had viewed the following phanomen inside you ...you "get down" (become angry, not well..etc)... and out of THIS... you see BEAUTY...and the contrast is so GREAT.. that youve LEARNED SOMETHING NEW. There is the SENSE. But we have to stop this "bad"- RIGHT. WE WILL!!!

WY: All duality is ONE in US. every bad in the world, every good in the world, all the beauty in the world, all the pain in the world, all the love in the world is in ME and YOU - we travel, we work, we love and lose and win all to find OURSELVES. learning IS the GOOD, ignorance is FAILURE to be good. love and learn and love, learn and love and learn, love and learn, love and learn, love and learn, ....

Fabian Zerneke : FORGOTTEn SOMETHING: LEARN & LOVE ;)

WY: lol - yes that too! :D