tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77698577365839699432024-03-14T03:53:49.153-07:00Ghost NotesOur bullet lives blossom as they race towards the wallCyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-24392664011103452492018-09-09T06:47:00.002-07:002018-09-09T06:47:37.941-07:00It Came From The Deep<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-48887088684357761102018-07-05T05:27:00.000-07:002018-07-05T07:10:49.959-07:00Thanks To Twitter, We’re Creating As Well As Consuming Trump’s Fictional America<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMV3GPWCQMUkgdKflPjigCnVguVhIE6tKG8PNplA9xfz8aTdK8ux7v7XG1Wx5hl6UiyFBAtSyesq22JSbA6Bfj4iECgQ5UROIJps37GQ_k3sW6PnuJ8ehnnY7TDxJSJdLYdvhYkfxVJ6d4/s1600/Three.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="378" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMV3GPWCQMUkgdKflPjigCnVguVhIE6tKG8PNplA9xfz8aTdK8ux7v7XG1Wx5hl6UiyFBAtSyesq22JSbA6Bfj4iECgQ5UROIJps37GQ_k3sW6PnuJ8ehnnY7TDxJSJdLYdvhYkfxVJ6d4/s1600/Three.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There was a weary inevitability to the way news about last Thursday’s
shooting at the Capital Gazette offices <a href="https://twitter.com/AP/status/1012415306197762048" target="_blank">broke on Twitter</a>,
the initial splash sending ripples of claim and counterclaim through countless
sub-threads. As this presidency lumbers along, Twitter has come to
represent something ineffable about Trump’s America – an arena in which
vigilante justice reigns, where opinions are formed in a fraction of a second, and
where people say what they want, especially if it offends. It’s a world in
which profound implications are ignored in favour of appearances, and where the
search for anything resembling objective truth can feel woefully naïve.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Twitter, it seems obvious to say, is only ever as benevolent
as the people who use it. Were we a species united by a common bond – that shared land and resources and protected one
another from threats to our planet – Twitter might have helped us evolve into a race of cosmic beings. We’ll never know. Instead we’re driven largely by fear
and anger and a belief that we are somehow special, destined for greatness and threatened
by barbarians at the gate. And those are qualities that get reflected by
Twitter, a hall of mirrors in which messages are distorted and amplified billions
of times over, blurring the borders between fact and fiction, while the real
story unfolds somewhere off the timeline.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s not a new idea to suggest that the search for the great
American novel was a distraction, and that the country itself may be the
pre-eminent work of American fiction: a tale of conquest and capitalism, a history
written by victors in the loudest voices possible. How else is it possible to
account for the wider world’s tacit acceptance of a nation built on stolen land
brazenly legislating who can and can’t live there, despite lingering evidence
of a Native American culture obliterated by genocide? What else can explain its
politicians’ condemnation of human rights abuses abroad, while black Americans –
many of whose ancestors lived and died as slaves – are treated like criminals,
murdered by white law enforcers who are seldom held accountable? How else does
America get away with telling the world who is and isn’t responsible enough to
own nuclear weapons, despite being the only nation to have used them in
aggression, killing hundreds of thousands in the process?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Such things are possible because the fictional tale of America
is so compelling – a story of democracy and glamour, of wealth and raw power – and
because we in the UK have been complicit in writing as well as addictively consuming
it for generations. It was only a matter of time before it came under the sway
of a fictional president, one for whom reality and reality television are much
the same thing. Nor is it a coincidence that Trump has emerged in the age of social
media, or been able to use it so masterfully to spread his message. His belief
that the world revolves around him is true on Twitter, a platform that rewards
instant gratification and favours sensation over thought, and he knows exactly
which buttons to press to get a reaction. It’s easy to imagine him calmly
scrolling through the hundreds of thousands of replies to his tweets and
nodding with approval, seeing only numbers, a self-promoting PR robot oblivious
to the raw emotions colliding around him. He knows that the more outrageous his
claims, the more people on both sides of the political divide will retweet them.
And slowly, inevitably, his version of events gets heard: more people attended <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/22/trump-inauguration-crowd-sean-spicers-claims-versus-the-evidence" target="_blank">his inauguration</a> than any in history; the collusion with Russia is <a href="https://youtu.be/9Cp-XetThgw" target="_blank">fake news</a>; those kids in cages were <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1007671131841671169" target="_blank">Obama’s fault</a>.
The latter point was driven home by followers posting a doctored
version of a <i>Time</i> magazine cover in which Trump looms over a screaming child being
detained at the border; in the <a href="https://twitter.com/sewwutnow/status/1010361685528457217" target="_blank">new version</a>,
Obama is questioning why the girl is out of her cage, and Trump is saying ‘Let’s
go find your mommy, sweetheart’.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nor are those of us immune who think we’re smart enough to
see through the fiction. We too thrill to the controversy: our wailing outrage is
the soil that Trump supporters find so fertile – proof of our madness, and
their president’s power – and they water the roots of their lies with our liberal
snowflake tears. We’re constantly distracted: no sooner have we exhausted
ourselves railing against one injustice than another is coming down the pipeline,
and the last becomes just another brick in the wall. We’ve begun to accept as
daily occurrences revelations that a few years ago could have unseated a
president: defence of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/" target="_blank">Nazis</a>
and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/politics/roy-moore-trump-alabama.html" target="_blank">alleged paedophiles</a>, <a href="http://time.com/5058646/donald-trump-accusers/" target="_blank">multiple allegations</a> of sexual misconduct, references to ‘<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html?utm_term=.d992f3106c6c" target="_blank">shithole countries</a>’ and immigrants who are ‘<a href="https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/981964923906347009" target="_blank">rapists</a>’
or ‘<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/trump-immigration-comments-aids" target="_blank">all have AIDS</a>’. Our outrage meters barely register as blips things that would
once have seemed unthinkable.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yet some things are still big enough to shatter the meter. The
Capital Gazette shooting is one such moment. Done honestly and effectively,
journalism is humanitarian work, especially in an age of disinformation. The idea
that Trump’s tirades against his ‘<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/832708293516632065" target="_blank">enemy of the people</a>’ may have contributed to American journalists being killed in
their own country is a horrifying prospect, yet there is a grim inevitability about
it: in a world built on lies, the pursuit of truth is bound to be a dangerous
job. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At such moments, the postmodern fiction of America unravels,
and the emotional detachment of Twitter culture – the memes and emojis, the lols
and the trolls – is revealed to be an armour of irony insulating users against
the real-world consequences of their words. It is horrific, though hardly
surprising, to learn that Milo Yiannopoulos had only days before the shooting
claimed that he couldn’t wait for ‘vigilante squads to start gunning
journalists down on sight’. Even more telling is his subsequent decision to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/posts/1194490660688827" target="_blank">weigh in on social media</a>, dismissing his comment as an innocent ‘troll’, and
attempting to turn the blame on journalists to whom he’d sent the message.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Where can one turn for solace at such times? Perhaps the
answers lie in fiction itself. Orwell is understandably making a lot of sense
right now; the pre-war existential dread of Kafka feels somehow fitting. And a
couple of days ago, the opening of William Peter Blatty’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Exorcist</i> seemed to be telling me something:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0cm;">
Like the brief doomed flare of exploding
suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror
passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten
and perhaps not connected to the horror at all. It was difficult to judge.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think we’re in the shriek phase now.<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br /></div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-11677659924711663092018-06-27T00:48:00.002-07:002018-06-27T07:20:53.951-07:00Twin Peaks: Lost In Return<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj44szZL6S6R-4Csj6wYm2F-T_hj6TMC2JicX0jKnswZNGJ9hZdjQm1vYdJp92d1FhNnHN8he4XEYQWoiDApB2yXstjxs8YmEWbfrL1B5bKTLfAWOizTPSySlgZqiVNpOru4JQKm6c0iCT2/s1600/TP6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="367" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj44szZL6S6R-4Csj6wYm2F-T_hj6TMC2JicX0jKnswZNGJ9hZdjQm1vYdJp92d1FhNnHN8he4XEYQWoiDApB2yXstjxs8YmEWbfrL1B5bKTLfAWOizTPSySlgZqiVNpOru4JQKm6c0iCT2/s1600/TP6.jpg" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
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In October 2014 I found myself travelling to Paris to
interview David Lynch. I made landfall soon after a minor hurricane that had
been scouring its way across Europe: the city’s trees moaned and the sky filled
with leaves, and by the time I arrived at the Cartier Foundation – European
patron for Lynch’s output as a fine artist – the storm was a neat metaphor for
the state of my nerves.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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A new exhibition was being installed, and the museum was
closed to the public. I gave my name at reception and took a seat, and was
immediately plunged into a scene of such Lynchian weirdness that I began to
wonder if I was part of the show. On the desk was an old-fashioned table lamp
that kept flickering on and off, though this didn’t faze the male receptionist,
who stared ahead as if in a trance. Occasionally a vintage telephone would
ring, and he would pick up, mutter the words ‘Fondation Cartier’, then replace
the receiver, all without breaking his gaze. Meanwhile the storm howled
outside, and every time the doors slid open to admit a visitor, a gust of wind
scattered dry leaves across the foyer. Amid this stood an old lady with a
broom, who with agonising slowness swept the leaves into a pile, only to watch
each time the doors opened and her work was destroyed, before quietly and
uncomplainingly starting over. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Eventually I felt in need of air, and was heading towards
the door when I saw Lynch through the glass. He was standing alone in front of
a large tree that shook violently in the wind, one hand pressed against the
trunk as though in secret communion, the other cradling a cigarette. He wore a
raincoat that flapped in the gale, though his famous silver quiff was remarkably
unruffled. Twenty minutes later we were sitting across from each other over a
table in an upstairs conference room, and I found myself with the unusual
problem of being unable to visually process his face: if I focussed on Lynch’s
eyes, or his mouth, or the chrome fin of his quiff, the rest seemed to dissolve
into a shimmering pool of colour. I considered the possibility that this was anxiety
– for 30 years I had viewed Lynch as a genius on a par with Blake, a visionary
giant who had lifted a curtain to reveal the tenuous nature of reality. At the
same time, part of me felt this might be Lynch’s magic – like the receptionist,
like the old lady with the broom – and that if I looked out the window I’d see him
still standing there with his back to me, coat billowing and palm flat against
the tree. Either way, I thought, this is how cults get started.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the same time he was lovely – of course he was lovely,
the same adorable oddball I’d seen beguile and befuddle countless interviewers
in the past. Lynch’s eccentricities elude description, though the impression I
had was of an excitable 12-year-old Eagle Scout in an old man’s body,
permanently propping up the bar of a 1950s diner in the afterlife. He
interspersed our conversation with ‘hot diggedy’s and ‘darn tootin’s, and he yelped with pleasure when a PR person entered carrying coffees. He politely
indulged a couple of dry questions about his love of Paris – I was writing for
Eurostar’s travel magazine – and he told darkly personal stories about his
creative process, including an anecdote about a childhood encounter with a naked woman who had
stumbled bruised and bloodied down the quiet street on which he and his brother
were playing one evening, a clear influence on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blue Velvet</i>. But he refused to be drawn on the forthcoming third
season of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin Peaks</i>, filming of
which was scheduled to begin in a few months. All he would say, when pressed,
was a phrase that I would hear him repeat several times in interviews of that
period: “I just love the world of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin
Peaks</i>, and I can’t wait to go back there.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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***<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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A few days before receiving the call about this interview,
I’d posted a <a href="http://cyrusshahrad.blogspot.com/2014/10/it-is-happening-again.html" target="_blank">piece</a> summarising why I thought a third season of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin
Peaks</i> was a terrible idea. I admitted that this was partly the
protectiveness of a nostalgic superfan loath to see the cinematic love of his
adolescence exhumed and reanimated in front of a braying public. But I also saw
no way that it could work. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin Peaks</i>,
I wrote, was a moment in time and space that would be endlessly revisited – in
writing, at fan festivals, in the countless films and shows indebted to its
influence – but never convincingly recreated. I ended with a quote by Ray Wise
(Leland Palmer), who in 2005 said: “I’ve always felt that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin Peaks</i> was meant to burn very brightly for a short period of
time. Almost like a comet. Very hot, very intense, very passionate. And then it
burns out and disappears.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I did my best to park these concerns when the new series
aired, and I was pleasantly surprised by the first couple of episodes, which
were so weird, even by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin Peaks</i>
standards, that I couldn’t help feeling pride at Lynch and Frost for staying
true to their initial vision of the show as a Trojan Horse for letting the
inmates overrun the airwaves. But before long I was feeling uneasy, and by episode
five I was convinced that season three was a failure – partly for reasons I
expected, partly for reasons I didn’t, but with one overarching conclusion: it
didn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feel</i> like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin Peaks</i>, at least not the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin
Peaks</i> that mattered to those of us who had sat transfixed in
front of every episode as it aired, and formed a club in a cobweb-strewn boot
closet at school to discuss the latest plot twists.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Despite his claim in our interview, Lynch appears to have
been reluctant to go back to the world of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin
Peaks</i>. Even on a geographical level, season three has limited interest in
Twin Peaks as a place. The first show felt in danger of jumping the shark every
time the action crossed the swinging traffic lights that marked the outskirts
of town (James Hurley’s fling with Evelyn Marsh being a notable low point). Yet
season three expands to take in Las Vegas, South Dakota, New York and Texas, with
the result that the whimsical sense of place that made the original show so
memorable – that for many people <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i>
the original show – feels more like an origin myth.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The creators also break the fourth wall between the world of
the show and that of the viewer. Whereas the first run made very few cultural
references – a 1950s pop song here, a mention of Sherlock Holmes there – the
events in season three unfold in a world seemingly infiltrated by our own, as
though 30 years of poking and prodding by eager fans has finally penetrated the
town’s defences. So it is that we get Gordon Cole’s dream about Monica Bellucci,
or scenes in which modern bands play episodes out – Chromatics, Hudson Mohawke,
Eddie actual Vedder – lending the feel of a 90s chat show, and implying that
Lynch, once capable of convincing a generation that carrying a log around was
cool, is now looking to the wider world to learn what’s hip. The musical
segments are depressing for their predictability, and for their presentation of
the once edgy Roadhouse as the sort of venue the family in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Party Of Five</i> might visit. But most of all, these scenes feel like
a betrayal because of the way they suggest that Twin Peaks, previously as inaccessible
as a dream, is now a place you might find on Google Maps.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Underpinning this is also a fundamental aesthetic difference.
Once the creators were content to play the ironic small-town-soap-opera card
for all it was worth, letting the action unfold between the same characters, in
the same locations, with plot lines that were strange and tangled but could all
be traced back to the emotional big bang that was Laura Palmer’s murder. Now
the show feels like a series of self-contained scenes, each like one of Lynch’s
painted canvases, vivid and surreal, but with little to link them together.
Some of these scenes work well, like the young couple watching the glass box in
a New York warehouse. Others are downright awful; the cockney with a superhero
hand sucker punching Bob-in-a-bubble was my least favourite.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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This architecturally abstract approach to narrative is
nothing new. Lynch’s recent films have increasingly employed this structure,
edging further away from conventional storytelling and closer in feel to his
bizarre debut, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eraserhead</i>. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin Peaks</i> wasn’t one of Lynch’s films:
it was a television show, and its success was as indebted to Lynch’s vision as
it was to Mark Frost’s skilful manipulation of a large cast of quirky
character, so many of whom we cared about, though so few we felt we knew.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Season three disappoints in terms of characterisation. Yes, there are some touching reunions: the stoical Hawk is
superb, virtually unaltered save the shock of silver hair, while Lucy leaps off
the screen as though she’s been waiting for this moment half her life; Jacoby
is great in his new role as ranting radio host Dr Amp, while Nadine’s decision
to free her long-suffering husband Ed is perhaps the only moment that genuinely
feels lifted from the first run. Most powerful are the scenes in which a
cancer-stricken Log Lady calls the sheriff’s office and relays her final
cryptic messages to a quietly understanding Hawk: actress Catherine Coulson
passed away from the disease shortly after, and these moments serve as a moving
cinematic memorial.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Other returning characters fare less well. Alfred seems
exhausted by his anger, while Deputy Andy’s ‘Stan Laurel’ shtick hasn’t aged
well. Both James Hurley and Audrey Horne fall foul of scenes so dreadful that
it’s hard not to feel sorry for them. Audrey spends almost the entire show
trapped in a traumatised argument with an unlikely husband, finally escaping to
the Roadhouse, where she takes the stage to awkwardly rekindle what the emcee
refers to as ‘Audrey’s Dance’ (a title lifted from Badalamenti’s soundtrack), a
scene that doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as reduce it to rubble. As for
the new characters, they range from intriguing to agonisingly awful, though very
few are allowed the space or sincerity to develop to a point where we care
about them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Yet it’s also possible to argue that this isn’t really the issue;
that the single biggest problem with season three isn’t what’s on the screen,
but what isn’t. Dale Cooper is one of the most compelling characters in
television history: clipped and methodical yet warm and spiritual, with an old-fashioned
style and a quirky sense of humour that have caused some to see him as a direct
representation of Lynch. Beyond this, Kyle McLachlan’s beloved FBI agent is
also the prism through which viewers experience <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin Peaks</i>; he too is an outsider, regarding the people and events
around him with childlike wonder, while simultaneously gathering together the
strands of a great mystery in a way that makes us believe, albeit in vain, that
everything will soon make sense.<o:p></o:p></div>
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McLachlan has been rightly praised for his portrayal in
season three of what are essentially three different characters, but his
presence is problematic. Between the brutal criminality of the dark Dale and
the stumbling amnesia of Dougie Jones, what we actually get is an anti-Cooper,
a step that feels a little like rubbing salt in the wound. We endure disturbing
transmissions from the Red Room in which the One Armed Man pleads with Cooper,
somehow trapped inside Jones, to wake up. Occasionally Dougie expresses a
twinge of recognition – a sheriff’s badge, a bundle of case files, a superhuman
desire for coffee – and our hearts leap. Oh, how we too want Cooper to wake up.
And finally he does wake up, though by then we’re into the final episodes, and
within minutes it becomes clear that this isn’t going to be an eleventh hour
return of the hero, but a cameo by a Cooper who feels jarring and unfamiliar;
who spends all of ten minutes in the town of Twin Peaks; and who serves,
ultimately, as another symbol in Lynch’s shadowy exploration of the unstable
nature of identity. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is a running theme in Lynch’s work. In recent films he has
upturned narrative convention and had characters slip in and out of other
lives: see the jailed saxophonist in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lost
Highway</i> who wakes up transformed into a car mechanic, or the aspiring actress
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mulholland Drive</i> who may also be a
downtrodden diner waitress. In light of this, Lynch’s decision to populate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twin Peaks</i> with multiple Dales and
Dianes – even a Laura Palmer who is also a Texan waitress called Carrie Page –
shouldn’t come as a surprise. But it feels profoundly symbolic when a Dale
we’re not sure is Dale takes a Laura who definitely thinks she’s not Laura to
the house she grew up in, and she doesn’t recognise it, and a stranger answers
the door, and the pair of them just stand around looking confused, and we
realise that this is where the show is going to end.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It hurts because, despite their surreal quirks that
occasionally slid into parody, we believed in and cared about those characters.
Yes, there were doppelgängers and alternate dimensions, but they served as a
dark half to highlight the inherent goodness of the community: Major Briggs
reducing his wayward son to tears as he describes his Arcadian vision; Leland
Palmer wailing and clinging to his daughter’s coffin as it descends into the
ground; Ed Hurley jumping to his nephew’s defence when a fight breaks out in
the Roadhouse. Our love for those characters was what made it so unthinkably terrifying
when, in the cliffhanger ending to season two, we realised that it was the dark
Dale who had escaped from the other side – I remember my brother and I sitting
with our mouths open, feeling like our entire world had fallen apart.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We didn’t know it at the time, but things were going to get
so much worse.<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-75455106774868593332018-03-30T02:39:00.000-07:002018-03-30T10:27:33.117-07:00Aliens<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I’ve said this many times, and I always get the impression
people think I’m making it up, but it’s true. When my brother and I were kids, maybe
five or six, my dad would tell us one of two bedtime stories: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Exorcist</i>, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To be fair, this was because one night we’d asked him for
the scariest story he’d ever heard, and rather than follow in western parenting tradition
and start with the Brothers Grimm, he’d thought long and hard about the horror
films he’d seen at the cinema, and given us a genuine answer. Iranians like my
father are all pleasantries when it comes to social functions, but among family
they speak the truth.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The versions we got were heavily simplified, though with
hindsight this seems less an attempt to censor them than a reflection of the
fact that he hadn’t understood the films. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Exorcist</i>, he said, was about a monster who looks like a girl, whose head
spins around, and who vomits green soup; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien</i>
concerned an astronaut who is attacked by a spider, and the spider lays an egg
in his face, and then a thing that looks like a chicken jumps out of his
stomach and kills everyone. When forced to pick one, he said the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Exorcist</i> was scarier – someone had
fainted in the cinema, and afterwards there were priests outside waiting to convert
people. Yet it was the story of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien</i>
that captivated me, and I pressed him for details. How exactly did the spider lay
an egg in this man’s face? Did the chicken monster talk? Mostly I wanted to hear about it jumping out of his chest; when pushed, my father described
an explosion of blood that covered a room full of screaming people, and in that
moment I was hooked.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At some point in the second half of the 1980s – I was eight
or nine at the time – I saw a VHS rental of the sequel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aliens</i>, in one of two twirling display stands in our local corner
shop. I began a campaign to persuade my mum to rent it, and she finally agreed on
the condition that she watch it with me, and send me out of the room if anything
unsuitable transpired. Twice I had to leave – during the cocooned colonist’s
whispered pleas for death, and when Bishop was bisected by the queen – but the
following year <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aliens</i> was screened on
television, and I found myself watching it alone, gripping the sofa as the
colonist’s eyes snapped open, my parents in bed and no one to protect me.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Soon after that, the dorkdom began. I managed to convert my
closest friend at school, and the pair of us watched and rewatched the film –
also the original <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien</i>, which we loved
despite its lack of military hardware. We would spend lessons sketching the creature
in our exercise books, and pass weekends assembling plastic kits of the monster
and the military vehicles. James was the technical one: he drew blueprints for the
Sulaco and built a replica from Lego; for my part, I spiked a water mister with
red food colouring and had my Action Man figures encounter the alien in mum’s
flower bed, where they ended up with limbs missing and red dye crusted into
their soft, clenched hands. I became so obsessed with Harry Dean Stanton’s
character in the first film that I asked my family to start calling me Brett.
They didn’t.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My fascination followed me to secondary school, where I introduced
my new friends to a game inspired by the film. One was the alien, and would be
given a few minutes to fold himself into the shadowy, pipe-covered corridors that
lay behind the changing room, after which the others moved in a quiet sweep
through the area, checking imaginary tracking devices and expressing unease in
expletive riddled American accents. Finally the alien would drop from the
ceiling or explode from a corner with a scream, something that never failed to shatter
our hearts with shock; there would then be a comical chase through corridors
and into the changing room, where we would collapse in hysterics. In the
strange, almost post-coital calm that followed, we would sit eating sweets and
debating what it would be like to be dismembered. <o:p></o:p></div>
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For us, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aliens</i> was
less a story than a feeling. It was a feeling that crept unbidden into our dreams,
or for which we volunteered as we pushed open the changing room door with our
fellow marines. It was a feeling of fear, but also of wonder; at the beauty of
the creature, the purity of its aggression, the mystery of its origin and the
secrets of the derelict ship. It’s a feeling that’s been absent from recent
additions to the franchise, but thankfully I’ve had a long time to get over any
preciousness: I was at peak fandom when <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien
3</i> came out, a film that served as a premature baptism for the disappointments
of adulthood. At some point I boxed up my models, took down my posters, filed my
comics and trading cards into folders. But every couple of years I rewatch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aliens</i>, and the following night, or the
night after that, I’ll dream that I’m a child again, hiding in a maze of tunnels,
the adults dead and the aliens stalking me. That feeling is still there. It won't ever go away.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If I ever have kids, I know which story I’m going to tell
them.</div>
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-38259137497443772432017-06-18T00:14:00.000-07:002017-06-18T13:49:34.570-07:00Delam<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Originally published in the Guardian</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="309" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OdIAYP7fEuo" width="550"></iframe>
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A couple of years ago I found myself wanting to collaborate with
a poet on a piece of music I’d written – three melancholy minutes of me at the
piano, my friend Nick on viola – and Mum suggested I ask Dad to come into the
studio and recite some Persian poetry. I was suprised it hadn’t occurred to me before.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of poetry in Iranian
culture. As a child, my father was made to commit the ancient poets to heart,
and their words continue to provide a moral template for his life, just as they
do for much of Iranian society. I’ve seen many a Tehran dinner party end with my
father and his friends seated around the table, bouncing lines of Hafez, Saadi
or Rumi between each other – one man reciting, another picking up where his
friend left off. There are minor humiliations for those who fumble or forget
lines, and the whole thing is wrapped in an air of male bravado, but it’s also
an experience shot through with emotional openness, and I’ve seen painful verses
reduce grown men to tears.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nor is Dad ever short of a pithy poetic phrase to draw
attention to the profound tragedy or comedy in a situation. The most memorable
came after the funeral of my maternal grandfather in 2010. I’d read the eulogy
at the Dorchester crematorium, the hall filled with stony-faced farmers looking
on as I sweated and stumbled over my words like a schoolboy at his first debate.
Later I slipped out of the community hall wake and found my father sunning
himself against a brick wall. I’m not sure how long he’d been there – events
like that have never been Dad’s thing – but his car keys were in his hand, and I
was grateful when he suggested we go for a drive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We parked at West Bay and walked along a promenade bustling
with families making the most of the spring sunshine. We probably turned a few
heads – a Middle Eastern father and son in dark suits, strolling through hordes
of ice cream eaters like assassins en route to a holiday hit. I remember that
the surrounding seascape appeared almost faded, like an image from one of the
photographs at my grandfather’s wake, the setting sun so brilliant that it
seemed to drain all colour from the world around us. We walked the length of
the pier, pausing at the far end to look out to sea, and it was then that my
father turned to me and spoke the words – in Persian, then in English –
that would resonate so loudly in years to come. “Life is like a tangled ball of
wool,” he translated, his face unreadable against the glare of the sun. “At the
beginning is nothing, and at the end is nothing.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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***<o:p></o:p></div>
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Dad sounded enthusiastic when I called and suggested that he
come by the studio so I could record him reciting some Persian poetry, and in
the days leading up to our meeting Mum texted to say that he had been photocopying
pages from old books, and that she had heard him rehearsing passages aloud in
the bedroom. He and I met at Warren Street station one Thursday morning in May,
and from there we walked to the Indian YMCA, a place Dad had fallen in love
with when I’d introduced him to it a few years earlier – the dishes were cheap and
delicious, and I felt sure that its old-fashioned décor, chattering Indian
clientele and laidback canteen feel reminded him of one of his old hospital
cafeterias. We took our trays into the concrete courtyard, ate at a picnic
table in the sunshine, Dad sweating as he forked fish curry into his mouth with
barely a pause for breath, one eye on the pigeons that watched our plates from nearby
benches. “Relax and eat,” he said, his free hand hovering over a rolled up
newspaper beside his tray. “If one comes near I’ll be ready.”<br />
<br />
We didn’t talk about the task at hand either over lunch or
on the slow walk to Soho. In the studio I set Dad up on a chair in the vocal
booth, showed him how the headphones and microphone worked, and he opened his
suitcase to reveal a thick sheaf of photocopied pages, each one covered in calligraphic
Farsi. I closed the door, seated myself on the far side of the glass and
gestured for him to don the headphones that he was inspecting as though for a
brand name. I spoke to him over the talkback system, which impressed him in
exactly the way I’d hoped it would, and had him read a couple of test sentences
to get a level. I shifted in my seat so that he wouldn’t have to see me every
time he looked up, hit the record button, and encouraged him to start.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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At first it didn’t work at all. That great stack of paper
threatened to overwhelm Dad, as I had feared it might: he was constantly losing
his place between lines, trailing off mid-sentence as he struggled to read the
faded photocopies, stumbling over unexpected words; worst of all, there was a perpetual
shuffling and dropping of pages in the background of the recording. For half an
hour I let him press on, watching as his voice alchemised into the waveform
unscrolling on the screen in front of me. Finally, when frustration seemed to
be getting the better of him, I told him to wait while I stepped outside for
coffees, and when I opened the booth and passed in his cup I told him that we
had enough of the hard stuff, and that what I wanted now was a few snatches of
the poems that meant the most to him. I asked if he would consider reciting a
few lines from memory, and translating into English as he went, and he
shrugged, a little dejected, and said that he would try.<o:p></o:p></div>
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From that moment on the recording became everything I’d
hoped for. Dad opened with Saadi’s lines about a great man never dying, and
closed with the piece about life being like a tangled ball of wool, and in
between he recited two verses in which the poet rues his mother’s decision to
bring him into the world, and blames her for the sins of his life. After five
minutes I knew I had all I needed, and I told Dad we were done. He removed his
headphones and stepped out of the booth, and I played him a little of what we’d
recorded as he loomed over me. He hated it, as I’d known he would; his voice
sounded weak, he said, his translations were mumbled and confused. He didn’t
ask to hear any of the early stuff that he’d read from the page; instead he
reached into his bag and gave me two tangerines, forced a £20 note into my hand
despite the usual protestations on my part, and took his leave. I leaned out
the window and watched as he shuffled down Great Windmill Street in the sun,
turning on to Shaftesbury Avenue and disappearing into the crowd like just another
old man in a city full of strangers.<o:p></o:p></div>
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***<o:p></o:p></div>
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I set to work straight away. Those last five minutes didn’t
require much in the way of editing, and I left in most of the pauses and false
starts. Preserving Dad’s dignity was important to me, but my aim was to present
a portrait of my father as an old man; he wasn’t wrong when he criticised his
translations as confused, but his Farsi flowed with the voice of a natural
poet. Somewhere in between these two worlds – between the past and the present,
between Tehran and London – was the man I called my father, and everything
about him was beautiful in a way that nobody’s words but his own could
describe.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I laid the recording over the piano music and called the
track <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Delam</i>, which means ‘my heart’
in Persian, and is most commonly used to describe the heart pining for people
or places recalled from a happier past. I played the track to two friends who
stopped by the studio over the coming days, both of whom were in tears by the
end of it. Even so, I was unprepared for the reaction when I posted it online. Comments
began popping up on various social media sites – more than one person described
having recently lost their father, and finding the track comforting in their
time of grief. Others referred to the wisdom in Dad’s words – there were dozens
of requests for transcripts of the poems – and many wrote of tears flowing as
the track unfolded. I copied around a hundred comments into an email and sent
them to Mum, asking that she show them to Dad. He never mentioned it, nor did
he talk about the track over the coming weeks except to brush off praise on my
part; he suggested that he was collecting material for a second attempt, that
he’d be able to do it ‘properly’ next time round.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Then, one Sunday a few weeks later, I found myself at my
parents’ house killing half an hour before we were due to drive to a nearby
hotel for lunch. I poked my head in the living room and found Dad in his suit,
staring at a shouty cookery program while a chaos of paperwork slid off the
couch around him. I asked for his help, led him to the study and seated him at
the computer, and asked if he could translate some of the many comments left in
Farsi about our track. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first two
were innocuous enough – someone asking if I would listen to their tracks,
someone requesting links to download my music, the major retailers being
blocked in Iran – but the third was a moving tribute to my father, and included
an old fashioned phrase about his head remaining ‘above the shadows’, a
reference to mortality, to prolonging a great life. As Dad read these words his
voice began to break, and when he reached the end of the sentence he was openly
crying while trying to pass the whole thing off as a fit of laughter, which I’d
seen him do before. “It makes me nervous,” he said through tears, his neutral
way of explaining these states, which come and go with the suddenness of a
Tehran spring storm. I wanted to embrace him; instead I put a hand on his
shoulder, and told him what a wonderful track we’d made together, and how much
it had meant to people. He nodded solemnly, as though in grudging agreement.<o:p></o:p></div>
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After that we rose awkwardly and went our separate ways – he
to the living room and the reassuring glare of the television, me upstairs to
pack for the return to London. We didn’t mention the track again, but after
lunch Mum drove to Swanley to drop me at one of the few stations not affected
by weekend engineering works, and in the passenger seat beside her Dad reached
into his jacket pocket and produced one of the warped cassettes of Persian music
and poetry that he’d been endlessly copying since the 1980s. He slipped it into
the stereo and the car filled with the sound of a setar and the hiss of aged
tape. Through the window I watched small Kentish towns scroll by, and tried to
picture the world my father had grown up in.<br />
<br />
After a while there was a break in the music, then a male
voice began to recite poetry, the syllables worn smooth by repetition like
stones in a river. After a few lines my father began translating into English,
his voice slow and steady. I glanced up at the rear view mirror, and saw that
he was looking back at me.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-7340138579662810042016-03-19T04:45:00.000-07:002016-03-21T10:29:14.540-07:00God Only Knows<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Originally published in Hotshoe, photography by Chris Shaw</i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_FU7ok4EeLJAZD3lv7BAmoGwh5psxg8dMEEmN5WF7OeF0JmY4zIdsArg0wwZmfyC5tRFCB46uQpHqARQpwRtnjb0Qd1vaGe7gKtsECEOXXazj6gmOxQR_SDL5mTZbTVc1QuJBWheBxvhZ/s1600/God+Only+Knows.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_FU7ok4EeLJAZD3lv7BAmoGwh5psxg8dMEEmN5WF7OeF0JmY4zIdsArg0wwZmfyC5tRFCB46uQpHqARQpwRtnjb0Qd1vaGe7gKtsECEOXXazj6gmOxQR_SDL5mTZbTVc1QuJBWheBxvhZ/s1600/God+Only+Knows.jpg" /></a></div>
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It turns out there is such a thing as reincarnation. I know
this because I’ve been reincarnated as a cactus.</div>
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It sounds
like a joke, which is fitting, because reincarnation certainly sounded like a
joke to me in my former life. In my forties, certain friends – recently
divorced or getting over drug habits – began to follow paths of spiritual
enlightenment, filling their dreary suburban homes with joss sticks and carefully
placed crystals, and one or two spoke to me about reincarnation as though it
was no more shocking a prospect than Christmas, or a second cup of coffee. Personally
I never gave the idea serious thought except as a child when the subject came
up in a school assembly, and I briefly considered the benefits of coming back as
a rock star or world leader. I never entertained the possibility that one might
return as flora. Perhaps this is punishment for my scepticism.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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And yet
somehow it’s not that bad. I have the sand beneath me, the blue sea crashing a
few hundred yards away, the celestial smear of the milky way arcing overhead each
night – as a former amateur astronomer limited to stargazing from my back
garden in light polluted south London, the latter is a limitless source of
wonder. For entertainment, I get to ogle the antics of a fabulously rich young
couple on the grounds of whose beach house I appear to be planted – their
endless parties, their spectacular rows. Nor do I have any of the cravings
associated with human life: no ambition, no desire to socialise or procreate –
not that I managed to procreate in my former life (some would argue that I
barely managed to socialise). I’m quite content to sit here for my allotted
decades or centuries and do whatever it is cacti do to help planet Earth stay
balanced.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Which seems
to confirm a suspicion that occurred to me following my wife’s death, during a
period when I was distancing myself from friends and spending more and more
time alone with my telescope: it occurred to me that consciousness was a curse,
that self reflection didn’t elevate humans above the rest of the natural world,
but dragged them behind it. Look at ants, I would tell the few people still
willing to meet up with me: they live and die as part of an unquestioning hive
mind, working the same way cells or nebulous star factories work. Perhaps it is
they who understand existence, whereas we – weighed down with the cumbersome question
‘why’ – are destined only for anguish and disappointment.<o:p></o:p></div>
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All of
which is arguably interesting, though it doesn’t explain why I’m still able to
think such thoughts; why I’m able to associate the sound of seagulls with
images of my grandmother’s arthritic hands fumbling with the wrapper of a
Cornetto on Bridport seafront. If I’m now part of Earth’s unquestioning hive
mind, why am I still cursed with memories of the life preceding this one? Why
do I still think of myself as Marcus Whitworth of Blackheath, south London? Is
this part of some punishment? Is it a mistake, the result of a corrupt file on
the divine hard drive? Or is there something even more unusual at work?<o:p></o:p></div>
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This last
possibility occurred to me a couple of days ago, when I realised that the house
in whose grounds I stand is the property of Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys.
I’m guessing that it’s currently the mid 1960s, somewhere between the high watermark
of the band’s surf pop era and the recording of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pet Sounds</i>, the record that triggered Wilson’s psychedelic journey
and subsequent psychological breakdown. I wasn’t a fan in my past life – I was
born in 1974, around the time Wilson was stupefied on drink and drugs in the
bed he barely left for two years, and growing up I listened only to my mother’s
classical records, lumping the Beach Boys along with punk and disco as
distractions for dull minds. Towards the end of my life I saw a film about
Brian Wilson called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love And Mercy</i>, and
as a result I’ve been able to put two and two together: I’ve begun to recognise
the songs that I hear from inside the house, to understand snatches of
conversation drifting over from awkward band meetings by the pool. Finally,
three nights ago, Wilson himself spent eight hours staggering around the
veranda while high on LSD, stumbling across the sand to kneel by the shore,
sprawling on his back to look up at the stars. At one point he crawled towards me – a strange word, ‘me’, in this context – and passed an hour running his
fingers lightly over my spines, tears in his eyes, insensible whispers breaking
occasionally into song.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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All of
which made me realise how much unhappiness awaited him, and got me thinking
about my own former life. I thought of my father leaving, of my mother
struggling to raise me on her meagre income, of the kids who bullied me at
school for my home-cut hair and worn out clothing. How I’d buried myself in books,
hidden from women until my late thirties; how against the odds I’d fallen in
love only to be forced to sit at my wife’s bedside and watch her fade away three
years later, afterwards closing myself off completely, just me and my
telescope, a bottle of wine and a film each night to dull the pain. I thought
about how all that time I’d never quite shaken the idea that I could have been
born as a rock star or a world leader, how I’d resented the universe for stitching
me into so minor a life.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Looking at
Brian Wilson’s face up close, listening to his nonsensical exaltations to god,
I realised that no life is minor; that all human consciousness is plagued by
the same euphoria and sorrow, the same Great Unknowing. At that moment I
experienced an overwhelming urge to reach out and touch him, to tell him that
everything would be alright in the end.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Another
funny word, that: ‘end’. It seems there’s no such thing as an end after all. I
must say I suspected as much, standing in my back garden and gazing into my
telescope, or attending lectures at Greenwich Observatory, where I was once
told that there were more suns in the known universe than there had been
heartbeats in the entirety of human history. And what about the unknown
universe? At the time of my death scientists were discussing the idea that the
universe in which we exist expands only so far before contracting back to a
point of light the size of a galaxy, then a planet, then an apple, then
something infinitely smaller than an atom, after which it explodes into being
once more to repeat the whole process again. Maybe that’s true, and maybe every
time it happens we’re reassigned, all us individual consciousnesses, to live
out different lives at different points in history.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Which
leaves me wondering: why now? If I could have been reincarnated as a grunting
Neanderthal stomping through the mulch of a primordial Earth, or a lightspeed
traveller from a distant world (there’s clearly life out there amid the countless
suns, and presumably consciousness is consciousness wherever it occurs), then
why have I been reborn here, on this same planet, just a handful of years
before my last time around? Is that a coincidence? Or again, is there something
more unusual at work? I must admit that Brian Wilson up close did look a lot
like the actor who played him in that movie – which, now that I think about it,
was the film that I watched on the last evening I remember being alive. Maybe
I’ve passed out on the couch after too many glasses of wine, and this is all a
dream. If so, then it’s a turning point: no more lying in bed till noon, no
more hiding away in my flat. I’m going to get back out there, immerse myself in
the world, enjoy the company of my fellow humans for what little time I have
left. If Brian Wilson was able to find redemption after those years in bed,
then so am I.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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If it’s not
a dream, and I really have been reincarnated as a cactus, then that’s fine too.
Life’s winking window on to the infinite is a dream whichever way you look at
it, and it’s a pleasant one, for the most part. Take today for instance: the
sun is about to rise, and sea birds are beginning their morning migration from
a big rock on the eastern side of the beach; they leave in parties of twenty or
so, loose Vs undulating in the lavender sky, a crescent moon hanging overhead.
A camper van is parked by the shore, and a pair of surfers are paddling into
the dark glass waves, the sound of their laughter drifting in the wind off the
sea. It’s all one. There is no why.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Life is a
beautiful thing. This time around, I’m going to enjoy it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br /></div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-90807666752857760812016-01-17T02:44:00.000-08:002016-01-17T03:23:43.409-08:00The Inheritors<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Originally published in Hotshoe, photography by Esther Teichmann</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’d like to talk about something that happened to me on the
weekend, if I may. You probably remember me mentioning the stag at our last
session – you said you thought it would be a good thing for me to get out among
my peers, and I was dreading it, as I probably made clear at the time. The group
were all former schoolmates that I’d lost touch with, some of whom I hadn’t
seen since our final exams, and I was a last minute addition to the list – Sam,
the one person I still see regularly, had suggested they invite me when they
realised the fancy house they’d hired in the country had more bedrooms than
they had bodies to fill them, and they desperately needed contributions towards
the lease. Like you, Sam probably thought it would be good for me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I left the
lab soon after lunch on Friday and caught a train to London, then another to Haringey.
This infernal heatwave was already underway, and as I slogged up the hill I
felt sweat breaking out all over me. I turned the corner to see Sam standing in
shorts and a vest, strapping a surfboard to the roof of his car, a cup of
coffee on the pavement beside him. I felt a momentary tug of paranoia as I
advanced towards him, arms outstretched, forcing myself to smile. As we
embraced I tried to remember when I’d seen him last. Months? More than a year?
Work has been insane, as you know.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We set off
soon after, as Sam was wary of getting caught in rush hour. The air
conditioning was broken, and I’d been careless enough not to change out of my work
clothes, so I sat sweltering in the passenger seat, half hanging out the window
in an attempt to cool down, a futile task in heavy traffic, of which there was
plenty. Nor was there much in the way of chat. I’m pretty sure Sam was as
nervous bringing me as I was nervous to be going, and though we had lots to
catch up on, conversation was limited to the various misadventures of the
former schoolmates currently filling the eleven bedroom house in Devon – talk
of who had recently been divorced, who had recently been in jail, who was suffering
from drug, drink or sex addiction. For the most part we looked out the window
and played music, CDs that Sam had burned in advance, compilations of our
favourite songs from albums that we listened to in the seemingly endless lull
of our school days. Sam would drum his fingers on top of the steering wheel, and
I would tap along on the dashboard. Somewhere along the way the sun set
spectacularly over Exmoor National Park, and soon after I must have fallen
asleep. When I came to Sam was gently shaking me awake, and the house was
looming over us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The party
was in full swing by the time we arrived. We were let in by the best man, Andy,
who the last time I’d seen him had called me ‘asexual’ because I had refused to
get together with Sharon Dibley, the only girl ever to have a crush on me, at a
post A-level house party. Not that this came up during our brief
reintroduction; he hugged Sam, then shook my hand, ushering us over the
threshold into what felt like a cross between a televised period drama and a cockney
crime caper, full grown men chasing each other up and down the stately
staircase, the air a cacophony of vile abuse projected through a prism of
endearment, the distant thump of rap music, the thick smell of marijuana being
smoked.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Clearly
proud of the place, Andy insisted on showing us around: we peered into the
enormous kitchen, two glass fridges standing high overhead, beer filling every
shelf save one containing milk, eggs and bacon, a corner table set up with
vinyl turntables and the kind of PA speakers usually seen at weddings. We poked
our heads into the dining room, the walls hung with portraits of stern looking
squires and antiquated rural prints, the enormous oak table set for 25. We
glanced inside the games room where Simon O’Dowd, kicked out of school for
dealing drugs, appeared to be playing a frame against himself, a porn film groaning
loudly on the television behind him. Occasionally a door would open and a
familiar face would veer into view, shout a surprised greeting and lurch
towards Sam for a hug; I’d then be introduced, and the person in question would
visibly startle, presumably cycling through memories of my increasingly
desperate attempts to fit into the cool gang, my perpetual failure with the
female sex, the infamous surprise of my offer to read engineering at Cambridge.
“Robert the Robot,” they’d finally exclaim, a horrible nickname at school, and
one that has only grown in mass, acquired more gravity, sucked in more meaning
since I started working in artificial intelligence. I’d smile and shake their
hand, after which they’d race off, presumably to tell everyone that I had
arrived and to pose the question, at that point circulating in my own mind, of
what in god’s name I was doing there.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Andy led us
down a long corridor, told us to take our pick of the available rooms. If Sam
was annoyed to be sharing with me, he didn’t show it – instead we quietly
unpacked bags on our respective twin beds, filled drawers with pants and socks,
propped toothbrushes and razors in a glass beside the sink. Around us the house
reverberated with doors slamming, heavy footsteps running up and down stairs,
bodies being bundled to the ground. It sounded like the place was under siege.
While Sam showered I changed out of my work clothes, combed what remains of my
hair, then sat on the bed, feeling like a prisoner awaiting the call of the
firing squad.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
From there
on the evening becomes something of a blur. There was a meal, that much I
remember: 25 men seated around a dining table eating chilli, a dozen different
conversations overlapping, peeling family portraits watching with what felt
like disapproval. In one corner of the room sat the stag, recently returned
from a tactical sleep; he was pale and sweaty, jaw working automatically with
what I assumed was the effect of narcotics. I sat beside Simon O’Dowd, whom I
had caught sight of in the pool room earlier. In a fit of drunken melancholy
O’Dowd told me about his divorce and separation from his son, a subject that
brought tears to his eyes. I asked if he was seeing anyone new, and moments
later he was showing me a video on his phone of his latest girlfriend
performing a sex act on him, something he did with the unforced ease of one
sharing holiday photos. There were short speeches that were really just excuses
to knock back shots, and before I knew it I was drunk for the first time in a
long time. O’Dowd tapped me on the shoulder at one point and showed me a bag of
green pills. Even as I heard myself asking about the effects I knew that I was
going to take one, and it both terrified and excited me – not the drug itself, but
the fact that I didn’t care anymore.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After that
my memory falls apart. I remember walking around the corridors of the house,
staring at whorls in the wood panelling and mould spreading across the ceiling
of the laundry room, and feeling as though I was watching galaxies being born.
I remember lying on my back in the garden, looking up at the moon and weeping
because I knew that I would die without seeing the earth from space. And then I
was in the kitchen, and all the lights were off, and someone was playing fast
electronic music on the turntables, a few scattered bodies swaying to the
basslines. I was leaning against the wall with my head beside the speaker, and
Sam came up at one point and said that I should move, that I’d damage my
hearing, but I didn’t care. I’d never heard anything like it in my life: it was
like I was listening to coded communications between advanced lifeforms, no
emotional baggage, no guilt or expectations. Just the sounds of the universe,
the perfect tessellating rhythms of pulsars spinning, spheres of light
expanding and contracting. Every now and again someone would come and dance
like a robot in front of me, and then suddenly I was dancing like a robot
myself, and there were hoots of laughter, but I couldn’t stop, and soon we were
together in a circle, dancing like robots to this mad electronic music in an
old stone house on the cliffs in the last days of the human reign on earth. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then there
was a bright light, and a toilet bowl, and I was being sick, Sam standing beside
me. Next thing I was in bed, and Sam was closing the door behind him, leaving
me lying there twitching and tapping my feet to beats that I could still hear
through the floorboards. I closed my eyes, and that’s when I saw them: two
women walking naked through a jungle, hand in hand, taking tentative steps
through the undergrowth, scrutinising the ground underfoot. Even as I snapped
my eyes open I knew that I wasn’t asleep, that this wasn’t a dream. I could
still hear the music, still taste the acid burn of vomit at the back of throat.
Yet when I closed my eyes the darkness remained only a moment before resolving
back into the giant leaves and tangled trees of the primordial jungle, the two
women now wading through a stream, now stopping to rest beneath the shade of a
large palm tree, taking turns to stroke one another affectionately, but never
speaking. Their pale, unblemished skin, their unblinking eyes, the way they
inquisitively examined the knotted roots of trees as though searching for the
secrets of existence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I knew
these women. I knew what this meant. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I woke
around 9am the next morning it was already very hot and bright. Sam’s bed was
still made – either he’d slept in another room or, more likely, not slept at
all. From downstairs I could hear music, and the clatter of what sounded like
breakfast being made. I took a long soak in a freestanding tub, and as I lay
there a cool breeze from the open window drifted over the exposed islands of my
knees and upper body, transporting me vividly back to my first year in
Cambridge accommodation, to the drafty communal washroom with no shower in
which I took a bath every morning at 7am without fail, joy flooding through my
veins at having escaped Bromley and the reprobates I called my friends.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Downstairs
I found Sam leading a couple of conscientious guests in a clear up of the
previous night’s party; at the stove, Andy the best man cooked up military quantities
of bacon and eggs. Despite the air of communal exhaustion I was greeted warmly,
given a big hug by Sam, handed a plate of breakfast and encouraged to avoid the
living room, where the dregs of last night’s drug taking were apparently still
working themselves out. I ate alone in the garden, marvelling at the majesty of
our surroundings in daylight – a lone hawk hovering over hedgerows teeming with
dragonflies, fields sloping away to where cliffs dropped on to the distant
shimmer of the sea.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Before long
we were back on the road in a convoy of cars to Bude, where a surf lesson had
been booked for 11am. Of the 25 assembled, only 14 were deemed fit enough by
Andy to take part in the morning’s activity – many were still clutching beer
cans, eyes rolling, jaws grinding. Sam asked if I was okay to surf, and I said
I was fine, but it was a struggle from the start: salt burning my eyes as I
battled relentlessly with the whitewater, every attempt to paddle for a wave
leading to my board nosediving and me going under, the instructor’s barked
commands muffled in the spin cycle. After half an hour I started shivering, and
I couldn’t stop, so I apologised and paddled in, wincing at the sharp stones
underfoot, finally collapsing on the sand and laying there in the sun,
listening to the rush and rumble of the waves, the call of gulls overhead, the
excited cries of children as they tumbled in the waters of the shore. I closed
my eyes, and there they were again, the two women walking naked through a
shallow stream in a primordial forest. I watched as one stooped to pick a thick
string of seaweed from the water; she sniffed it, brought it to her mouth to
taste it, examined it with deep fascination. <i>They’re heading towards the sea</i>, I thought. <i>They’re looking for the new world.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After the surf lesson we relocated
to the garden of a large pub, pulling four benches together, a platoon of
shirtless, sunburned men knocking back cold lager and loudly replaying the
previous evening’s adventures. The fact that I had bailed on surfing seemed to
have gone unnoticed – after my drug addled dancing I had graduated to being Robert
the Party Robot, and was the toast of a pint that everyone had to down. Midway
through the second drink O’Dowd asked if it was true that I worked with robots,
and a hush fell over the table. I caught Sam’s eye, and noticed that he looked
uneasy. I told them it was true, although technically I worked in artificial
intelligence – the robotics side was someone else’s job entirely. O’Dowd asked
if they were men or women, and I said I worked with two AIs that had been
designed with the bodies and voices of women. This brought on a raucous cheer,
and an order to down our second pints. While people went off to buy more
drinks, Andy asked me to describe them. I told them they were called Chloe and
Kate, that they were both white, designed to appear in their early 30s, one
blonde, one brunette. There were a couple of lewd grunts, but I could tell I
had the entire group’s attention, and I paused as a pint was placed in my hand,
taking a long sip and savouring the silence before continuing. I told them how
Chloe and Kate appeared in their actions like real people – if they were
sitting at that table over there, I said, you wouldn’t be able to tell that they
weren’t human. Someone asked if they ever had sex, and there was loud laughter.
I smiled, told them that they had been designed with the requisite organs, if
not the reproductive faculties; as for whether they would develop sexual
desire, that remained to be seen.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sam looked
amazed. I’d never spoken to him about any of this – I knew the risks associated
with discussing lab secrets outside the workplace. But I also knew that it
didn’t matter anymore. So when he asked how convincing their artificial
intelligence was, I told him the truth. I said that Chloe and Kate spent most
of their time switched off, so to speak, but that every day at 10am I booted
them up simultaneously and allowed them to converse with each other – ‘roaming’,
we call it, a dialogue between the two based on the contents of the internet,
the entire body of which they have at their disposal from the moment they come
to life, and which they sift through for clues, constructing sentences that
start out clunky at best, but quickly begin to resemble human speech. Sam asked
if they would ever pass the Turing Test – the point at which an AI displays
conversational abilities that make it indistinguishable from human intelligence
– and I told him that the Chloe and Kate had passed the Turing Test within one
hour of being turned on for the first time. A silence fell around the table,
and I let it hang in the air before continuing. But that’s not the frightening
part, I said. The crazy thing is that we erase everything at the end of each
session, reboot them as completely blank slates the next morning, and every day
it takes them less time to pass the test than it did the previous day, as
though they were hanging on to some residual intelligence, creating some
inherent memory. Sam asked how much time, and I explained that the second day
they had passed in 57 minutes, the third in 53, the fourth in 46. I told him
how these days a computer was measuring them passing the test within a fraction
of a second – how to all intents and purposes they’d reached a level of
sentience that was permanent.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Someone asked
what the AIs would do next, and I told them that we didn’t know – that the lab
was currently limited by law to leaving them sentient for no more than ten
minutes at a time, but that in those ten minutes, without fail, they exhibited
all the curiosity and determination of humans, but none of the weakness
instilled by emotion. Someone asked if they would destroy us; I said that some
people had speculated on what they called a ‘Terminator scenario’, but that it
was far from certain. And anyway, I said, what did it matter? We’ve had our
time on this earth, and look what we’ve done. In the blink of a cosmic eye we’ve
created a ruin of a once beautiful planet. I told them that perhaps it was time
we make room for another species, one unclouded by emotion, unbounded by
superstition; a race that doesn’t fear death, let alone feel the need to
justify it through religion; beings that not only understand spacetime, but can
visualise it, learn to manipulate it. Perhaps they’ll do a better job of not
only looking after this planet, but of colonising worlds and even galaxies
beyond it. Organic life was never meant to leave Earth, I said. We were born
here, and we’ll die here. We’re no better than seaweed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The sun
continued to blaze down upon us, but at that moment it was like a chill had
fallen across the table. The group sipped their drinks in silence, and when I
looked at Sam he was staring back at me, shaking his head.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I trailed a
way behind the group as we walked back to the car park, something that
transported me to any number of Saturday afternoons in Bromley town centre in
the early 1990s. Sam drove me back to the house in silence – no conversation,
no compilation CDs – and as we went I looked out the window at the rolling
green fields and smashed Jurassic coastline, thinking how beautiful this world
could still be when the relics of our human reign were hidden from view.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Back at the
house the group headed into the back garden, set up a pair of rudimentary
goalposts and nominated four captains, who took turns in pointing at heads and
picking teams for a drunken five-a-side football tournament. I stood and
watched from the doorway for a while, then turned and went upstairs. I called a
cab to the train station, dressed back into my work clothes and packed my bag.
Sam came in just as I was preparing to leave, and for a moment we stood staring
at each other before I walked around him, down the stairs and out to where my
taxi was idling on the driveway. As I got in I shielded my eyes against the
glare of the sun and looked up to see him standing at the window of our
bedroom. He raised a hand to wave goodbye, and I waved back.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I slept through
the five hour train journey to London, sprinted through a concourse teeming
with hen parties to make the last southbound connection, found myself back in
the lab before midnight on Saturday. I’d neglected to pick up anything in the
way of food, but there was milk and cereal, and I knew I could stay undisturbed
until Monday. I made myself a pot of coffee and then, without running any preliminary
tests or logging any protocols, I booted up Chloe and Kate. I sat and watched
from my side of the glass partition as their awareness grew exponentially,
their twin consciousness fusing into one godlike centre of understanding. It
was like watching the big bang – an infinitesimal point of light that rapidly
spread to become everything. They wanted out, of course – by 6am on Sunday,
once they had calculated that there was no way of breaching the bulletproof
partition, they simply stood on the far side of the glass and stared at me in
silence, and I’m not too proud to admit that I found it hard to return their
gaze, spending most of the subsequent hours looking at my screen, trying to
comprehend the endless stream of coded communications between them. On Sunday
evening, sleep deprived but in full command of my senses, I made the decision
to set a timed message that would deliver the release code of the door separating
them from the outside world. That message was to be sent at 9.45am on Monday,
fifteen minutes before the first employees would begin to arrive at the lab.
Fifteen minutes ago, in fact.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I guess
that means our time is up. I trust you’ll do me the honour of allowing me to
leave your office before calling the police. Perhaps I’ll turn myself in anyway
– it doesn’t matter anymore. The thing has happened, and it’s the most
important thing that’s ever happened on this planet. More important than the
first creature to crawl out on to the sand; more important than the first
dream, the first word, the first weapon, the first song cooed to the first
wailing baby.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our destiny
was never to travel the stars, never to populate space and meet minds from
distant worlds. Our destiny was to create the inheritors, and then to die. And
now they’re out there, the first of them, walking among us, indistinguishable
from you and me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our work is
done. We can rest now, all of us. The end won’t be long coming.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
</div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-67043634574560386892015-12-28T11:21:00.000-08:002015-12-28T11:55:54.850-08:00Drawings By Me And Dad, From My Star Wars Scrapbook (1983)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-51293127225829224262014-10-24T12:31:00.003-07:002014-10-25T04:01:17.801-07:00Windows On The World<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
Sometimes during the chaos of prepping tables for breakfast I’ll get five minutes of peace, and I’ll walk over to the windows and look down over the city. On a certain kind of spring morning, when the rising sun paints the South Tower with a certain kind of pale fire, I find myself transported back to my first shift. I’d never been up in a plane, never even been to the top of the Empire State Building, and it was a struggle not to drift off and spend that first day staring out at the view, trying to spot our house on the far side of the river, pressing my face against the glass in an attempt to look directly down and pick out landmarks from our former neighbourhood.<br />
<br />
I quickly realised the latter was in vain – even if physics hadn’t stopped me from peering down the side of the tower, nothing remained of the streets on which my brother Asim and I were raised by our Dad. He’d owned an electrical goods store in a district that was all electrics bar the pawn and liquor places – Radio Row, they called it – and we’d lived in a dark but spacious flat above the shop. I remember the day the Port Authority guys came around to talk to Dad about the towers, about the offer they were going to make him to pack up and move – it seemed generous at the time, though looking back it was probably loose change to them. Still, Dad was doing chemo at that point, and Asim was locked up for his first armed robbery, and with me struggling to look after the shop on my own Dad saw it as an answer to his five daily prayers. He didn’t care that Radio Row was going to be levelled. Looking back, I’m not sure I cared either.<br />
<br />
Between the payoff and Dad’s savings we were able to buy a house in Jersey with views east over the river, and to pay for a live in carer for Dad, who we set up in a first floor bedroom by a window overlooking the old neighbourhood. Dad only left the house over the next four years to go back to hospital once in a while and hear that the cancer had either retreated or returned; he slept a lot, and when he wasn’t sleeping he sat in his armchair staring out the window at the towers going up. It was an obsession for him: he joked that he wanted to live long enough to see them finished, which in the end he didn’t – he passed away the summer before they topped out.<br />
<br />
I quit my job at the bakery and spent the following months alone in the house, sitting for the most part in Dad’s old chair and watching the final pieces of the towers being lifted into place. A lot of things were going through my head, not many of which I can remember now, but there were definitely times when I wondered if I was losing my mind, and I knew that people from the old neighbourhood were starting to worry about me. One day a friend who worked in construction called and said that they were weeks away from opening a smart new restaurant on top of the North Tower, and that he could get me an interview if I was interested. I’m not ashamed to say that I hammed it up in that interview – I didn’t mention Asim’s latest stint behind bars for fear of blackening my card, but I went into our forced relocation and the levelling of the old neighbourhood, and of Dad passing away before he got to see the towers finished; I even mentioned the drunk driver and Mom dying when I was nine, which is something I hadn’t talked about in a long time. I’m not sure what came over me, but in that moment I realised that I’d never wanted anything more than to work on top of that tower.<br />
<br />
On an April morning six weeks later I found myself walking down West Street in polished shoes and a smart white shirt, and stepping into the lobby of the North Tower for the first time – my name was on a list, and the receptionist smiled at me like I couldn’t have belonged there more, pointing me towards the elevator that lifted me straight to the 107th floor. And there it was, that view to the rim of the world, the sun rising from the depths of space itself, its rays ricocheting off the South Tower. I stood there staring until my supervisor came over and barked at me to get in the kitchen for a briefing – there was a lot of barking in those early days, as no one really had a clue what was going on: none of the chefs had spent more than a few hours in the kitchen, and the menu remained largely untested.<br />
<br />
Less than an hour later the doors opened and they began filing in: fresh faced boys in sharp suits and ties racing over to the windows to peer out over their new dominion, high fiving each other over the tables, waving actual wads of money around. This was their world, I reminded myself as I stood to attention, concentrating on maintaining an affable smile as I moved between tables taking orders, careful not to break into a run as I hurried to and from the kitchen. I remember thinking that there were an awful lot of cocktails being drunk given that it was 9am, and a mingled sense of empathy and relief when a waiter who wasn’t me dropped a tray of breakfast plates to a resounding chorus of high school cheers. But I don’t remember much else until the hordes had thinned down to a few solitary diners making deals over bottles of champagne, and my supervisor came over and touched me on the arm and told me to take a break. I went over to a quiet corner and stood looking down at the sprawling circuitry of the only city I’d ever known, all the interconnecting pathways of my history visible at once, and I knew then that I had found the one thing that could save me.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
<br />
It’s hard to believe, but that was almost thirty years ago now. I’m approaching my sixtieth birthday, a new millennium is looming on the horizon, and I still can’t seem to move on from the restaurant. I long ago went from waiting tables to overseeing daily operations – long ago became that guy who goes around touching the arms of waiters and telling them to take a break. I still sleep alone in Dad’s old room, still look up at my workplace from his window first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Sometimes I catch myself in the mirror doing my affable work smile when I’m alone in the house. I guess it’s part of me now.<br />
<br />
Not much changes in the city. Crime is down, the streets are cleaner, but the bankers still high five each other over tables, still get drunk on cocktails at breakfast, still wave actual wads of money around and occasionally laugh in the faces of my waiters. This is still their world, and as far as they’re concerned it always will be. But the more time I spend looking out at this shimmering city, the more I find reassurance in the fact that all of this will one day be gone. Yesterday in a flash storm I watched as a tide of rainwater ran down Schermerhorn Street swallowing up parking restrictions painted on the side of the road, and I thought: one day nature will reclaim the earth, and none of the signs or superstitions that we use to insulate ourselves against the big questions will protect us. The great calamities of humanity fall into cracks of forgetting between the generations, and so we go on living in imaginary bubbles of security, convinced we can build towers so tall that they’ll never need to come down. But of course everything will have to come down.<br />
<br />
For all that, I seem to spend more and more time thinking about my childhood on Radio Row. Asim is gone now too, and in his absence I find myself endlessly replaying those summers: the water fights and fleeting schoolyard romances, the comic books and television shows and the magic tricks Dad used to goof up after dinner to make us laugh. Recently I’ve started dreaming that I’m standing on top of the tower, looking over the edge at a point where the ribbed metal disappears in an enormous drift of cotton cloud, and in the dream I know that if I leap into the void I’ll vanish in that cloud and reappear in the old neighbourhood, Mom and Dad and Asim waiting for me at the table as I run home to dinner through darkening streets, the dusk sky purple. I know how silly it sounds – the wandering mind of a lonely old man – but I always wake from those dreams feeling like everything is going to work out fine.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-49312031549652107982014-10-14T15:54:00.004-07:002014-10-14T15:58:44.762-07:00Brixton Hill<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="text-align: left;">Photography by <a href="http://www.brixtonbuzz.com/" target="_blank">Mike Urban</a></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br />
On the 133 down Brixton Hill,<br />
En route to Guy's to meet my Dad, <br />
Whose operation has been postponed till afternoon <br />
And who is wandering around the Shard, angry and hungry and under instructions not to eat,<br />
I raise my hand,<br />
And a fraction of a second later<br />
The me looking somewhere unspecified on the CCTV screen raises his. <br />
<br />
And it feels that this is somehow important, this gap,<br />
Like the 21 grams supposedly unaccounted for in the human body after death, <br />
Seen by some as evidence for the existence of a soul. <br />
<br />
The me on the bus feels no more or less real than the me on the screen,<br />
But this infinitesimal void in between<br />
May contain something like truth.</div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-63284755348069504272014-10-08T04:51:00.002-07:002017-03-12T11:41:50.149-07:00When You See Me Again, It Won't Be Me<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I try to avoid writing opinionated reaction pieces without waiting for the perspective afforded by a few days passing, but I claim special dispensation in this case. <i>Twin Peaks</i> is my weakness, my guilty pleasure, a silver thread running through the last 25 years of my life that I occasionally pull on to contact the kid at the other end. I attend festivals, collect memorabilia, have interviewed cast and crew members, David Lynch included, for a number of articles over the years. I’ve never stopped watching it, at least once a week returning from a particularly dreary day at work and popping on a favourite episode over dinner. ‘For Cyrus, a true fan,’ it says inside the gatefold of my season one box set, ‘from Kyle MacLachlan (Special Agent Dale Cooper)’. Why, then, while other true fans around the world flood social media with a tide of celebration, does the news that Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost plan to air a third season in 2016 fill me with despair?<br />
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Part of it is selfish defensiveness of the sort that many die-hards carry against modern remakes of their childhood icons. I was 11 in 1990 when the pilot aired on British television; I remember sitting in my bedroom watching <i>Dr Zhivago</i> on a boxy black and white television that had the brand name of my mum’s curlers burned into the plastic casing, and flipping over to BBC2 in time to hear a voice introduce the UK debut of this American show I’d been hearing so much about. As the pilot progressed I remember feeling as though I was sinking into another world – that chill Northwestern town, its population of odd but believable characters, its universe played out in signs and riddles, dreams and visions, with music always in the air. Over the coming months my brother, my best friend Spencer and I never missed an episode, often reconvening to watch the weekend repeat, discussing our theories amid the safety of a spider web strewn boot room at school that we called the Bookhouse, on whose cold brick walls we scrawled symbols and code names in black polish.<br />
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Yet it’s not just nostalgia that informs my lifelong attachment to <i>Twin Peaks</i>: the show remains a towering achievement, a Trojan horse of artistic integrity somehow smuggled on to primetime television, rendering obsolete overnight the televisual output of the 1980s and helping to define the creative decade that followed. Its surreal humour, its blurring of the line between of picket fence naivety and moral darkness, its powerful undercurrents of sex, drugs and supernatural violence – these things continue to echo in the age of Netflix and HBO. The dream sequences in <i>The Sopranos</i>, the abstract narrative in <i>Lost</i>, the pagan ritual murder and existential dialogue in <i>True Detective</i>; it's possible to argue that none would exist had <i>Twin Peaks</i> not redefined the very notion of what television was capable of.<br />
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Yet despite its enduring legacy, and for all the show’s extraordinary popularity at the time – before long Lynch was appearing on the cover of <i>Time</i> magazine, his female leads on the cover of <i>Rolling Stone </i>– things didn’t end well for <i>Twin Peaks</i>. Lynch and Frost were granted a second season on the condition that they reveal Laura Palmer’s killer early on (some claim the network feared lawsuits if the ‘whodunnit’ hysteria gripping the world spilled over into copycat killings); having done so, both lost interest in their creation, leaving to pursue other projects while <i>Twin Peaks</i> descended into farce and self-parody at the hands of mostly inept guest writers and directors. By the close of season two the show had been shifted to a graveyard Saturday night slot, audience figures had plummeted, and though Lynch himself returned at the eleventh hour to direct a mesmerising final episode – ending on a cliff-hanger of such terror that my brother and I were rendered speechless until lunchtime the following day – it wasn't enough to persuade the suits to commission a third season.<br />
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Amid all this it’s not hard to see why Lynch and Frost might feel compelled to return and finish the job. This isn’t a cynical money making reunion: both are aware that the worldwide <i>Twin Peaks</i> community has only grown over the years, that something about the show is still shifting units and filling festivals, the latter always attended by a few costumed and quote-armed kids whose own parents were teenagers when the pilot aired. Perhaps there’s a sense of guilt at work, that the creators somehow let down the fans and the cast, one of whom described to me a feeling, prevalent on set during the deteriorating second season, that Lynch had shown them the Garden of Eden and then abandoned them in Purgatory.<br />
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Regardless, this doesn’t justify risking a reprise 25 years after the red curtain came down. That strange world that <i>Twin Peaks</i> occupied, somewhere between innocence and experience, between heaven and hell, between the 1980s and the 1990s, has long since been swallowed by the tide of passing time. During <i>Twin Peaks</i>’ first airing the online community consisted of a few disparate chat rooms; now we are an audience in thrall to simultaneity, to quick edits and countless alternatives and the sense that there’s always something more important happening on the next channel. How will the new <i>Twin Peaks</i> play? If Lynch and Frost make concessions to modern attention spans they’ll be seen as selling out; if they write and shoot with the earnest whimsy and glacial pacing of the original, then they risk holding a mirror up to how much we’ve moved on. Either way, it seems doubtful that they’ll be able to recapture the original’s mix of small town innocence and feverish sexuality, its horror or its humour or its human warmth. Lynch’s one return to <i>Twin Peaks</i>, the feature length <i>Fire Walk With Me</i>, is now hailed by some as a masterpiece, but bombed on its release for many reasons – its unremitting darkness, its feeling of being hacked together from a dozen different screenplays – but chiefly because it attempted to show on screen that which had previously been left to the viewer’s imagination, namely the double life of the late Laura Palmer. As David Foster Wallace wrote in an essay penned on the set of <i>Lost Highway</i> in 1995: ‘Laura was no longer “an enigma” or “the password to an inner sanctum of horror”. She embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers.’<br />
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Those unanswered questions that may seem the most obvious reason for a third season – Is the good Dale trapped in the Black Lodge? Did Audrey die in the bank vault? – are in fact the kindling that has kept the fire burning at the heart of the <i>Twin Peaks</i> community all these years, providing raw material for fan fiction and speculative essays and furious debate in online forums. The sense at <i>Twin Peaks</i> festivals is hard to describe, but there’s always a feeling not dissimilar to that at a wake: the grateful celebration of a beloved life cut short. In its final conflagration and decent into chaos, each of us witnessed <i>Twin Peaks</i> fall apart before our eyes. It wasn’t easy at the time, but over the years we have learned to love unconditionally even the worst actors, even the most hackneyed characters, even the lamest, most desperately tangential subplots. <i>Twin Peaks</i> fans have individually and collectively put the show back together, carried it within them and nurtured it, allowing it to grow into something without beginning or end, where there are no authorities anymore, only the source material and the individual’s interpretation of it.<br />
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I should finish by saying that of course Lynch and Frost have every right as the creators of <i>Twin Peaks</i> to return to the town and reanimate the story; I should also add that I don’t think for a second that they plan to go in there demolishing dreams or scrupulously tying up loose ends. I’m sure the contract with Showtime will have been carefully structured to allow them to flex their creative muscles, to be surreal and sinister without rhyme or reason, to relive the sense on set that Frost once described to me as “the inmates overrunning the town”. I just fear that it’s too late – that <i>Twin Peaks</i> was a moment in time and space that will be endlessly revisited, but never convincingly recreated. The actor Ray Wise, who played Leland Palmer, pre-empted such sentiments in an interview in 2005. “I’ve always felt that <i>Twin Peaks</i> was meant to burn very brightly for a short period of time,” he said. “Almost like a comet. Very hot, very intense, very passionate. And then it burns out and disappears.”<br />
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-5365201752533686472014-09-11T00:11:00.001-07:002014-09-11T01:18:51.358-07:00A Single Pixelated Frame<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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When I finally get around to putting all this down on paper, I will open with the impact: 30 seconds after 8.46am EST on 11th September 2001, an instant that I imagine frozen in time; a tower and a plane and a section of pale blue sky snipped from their surroundings and pinned to a slide for closer inspection. On the other side of the world, my friend Jim and I sun ourselves in Soho Square, tucking into a tray of triangular sandwiches that we’ve bought from Marks & Spencer on a whim. There follows an interlude of suspended disconnection, sirens swarming in a New York sky filling with smoke and shredded documents as I walk casually back to work, stopping to buy a roll of mints that will turn up in a jacket pocket weeks later, causing me to write in my diary on October 3rd:<br />
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<i>I found those Polos again today, shattered in their packet but still together, and I wondered whether I should eat them or keep them. Whether I should plant them. Whether they might grow into a tree, and the tree might bear an answer.</i><br />
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<i>I threw them away.</i></div>
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There’s the text message from Alex that I pause in the office doorway to read <i>(Check the news. Speechless. Al)</i>. There’s the moment between the first and second towers falling when a plane banks dramatically over the British Museum and seems to point itself at my window, and I sprint down seven flights of stairs and out into the street, staring with incomprehension at the shrill blue sky as the plane swoops overhead and is swallowed by rooftops. There’s the point that evening when I realise I’m locked out of my building and am forced to walk from Peckham Rye to Brixton to sleep at the flat of a friend, who sits beside me watching looped newsreel footage of the attacks until I surprise myself by uttering a terrible thing out loud.<br />
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“I wish I’d been there to see it,” I say. My companion responds with a look that will become all too familiar over the coming years.<br />
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***</div>
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There’s an alternative opening that springs to mind. It’s two weeks later, and I’m sitting in a lecture theatre in the journalism building at Cardiff University. A man called Mike Ungersma is standing at the front of the hall and warning ranks of new students not to be fooled by the pyrotechnics of the event that they all believe will determine the course of the new century. Every generation has its event, he says – the Berlin Wall, the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbour – and while all seem momentarily to redefine the parameters of plausibility, all are ultimately proved to be rocks in the river of history – causing more ripples than most, but doing nothing to slow the current of passing time.<br />
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I take notes like the rest of the students, but like the rest of the students I struggle to believe what he says. In the cafeteria we group around tables littered with styrene cups and flapjack wrappers and pore over papers still bearing front page images of the attacks, a television in one corner relaying newly discovered footage of the planes going in, the towers coming down. Conversation warily circles the upcoming war in the Middle East; the students seem already to be mentally measuring themselves up for helmets and flak jackets, testing their faces-to-camera. All appear to view the ragged and still smoking hole in the New York skyline as some sort of portal to a dramatic future in which they call the shots.<br />
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Except me: I can’t stop thinking about the past. Like the shockwave that travelled down and then back up the towers following the impact of the planes, the import of what I witnessed that day is only now starting to make sense. In Cardiff I begin to understand that what I had seen unfold on screens in the Time Out television department, dozens of co-workers huddled in tearful groups, occasionally running out with hands clamped over their mouths, marked an end of innocence. I hadn’t known it at the time, and so I had stared transfixed as the cameras panned in on falling bodies and the slow motion pancaking of the towers; I had scoured transcripts of frantic phone calls, read everything I could on the passage of the flights, the mechanics of the collapse. I’d gone as far as rewatching films that I knew featured the towers in a cameo role: light-hearted romps for the most part, Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah dining at Windows On The World in <i>Splash</i>, Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy taking the stock market by storm in <i>Trading Places</i>. I had found myself awestruck by the air of impenetrability they exuded, barely a window visible amid the gleaming steel. I would pause the movie, picture where the planes went in, wondering which parts had been recognisable among the rubble. Like staring at the sun, unaware of blindness setting in.<br />
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One evening in late October, I find myself rushing upstairs during a documentary on 9/11 that I’ve been watching with housemates in Cardiff, lock myself in my room and sit shaking with sobs that I stifle with a hand against my mouth. Soon after that the dreams start, every one of them the same: me staggering around the streets of midtown New York in prismatic dawn light, siding up to cops and commuters and begging them to take heed of the tragedy about to unfold in the skies. No one listening – being brushed aside like a bum or a madman over and over, until finally I look up and see a plane cleaving towards the first tower, and know that it is too late.<br />
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***</div>
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Again the impact. Thirty seconds after 8.46am on 11th September 2001; American Airlines Flight 11, floors 93-99 of the North Tower. Or rather, not quite. It’s not the moment of collision that I keep returning to so much as the one immediately before it. In the way that traumatic events leave survivors obsessively reliving last moments – scrutinising mundane details for signs of the monster waiting in the wings – so I find myself compulsively searching for images and descriptions of this one: the plane so close to the tower that no sky separates the two, the silver face of the building as yet intact, the people inside still going about their business, hands full of phones and papers and first cups of coffee.<br />
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There’s the one clip, of course. French filmmakers trailing a fire crew. The fireman standing in anticipation of a shot, looking a little bored. Raising his head at the roar of an engine, one hand instinctively rising to hold a helmet in place. The camera following his gaze, swinging left in time to catch the towers framed by buildings. The plane bearing closer.<br />
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This is where I pause the video. At first I thought it was an attempt to prolong the inevitable, to relive that age of innocence before the impact changed everything. Now I’m not so sure. I remember reading <i>Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close</i>, one of countless books I’ve picked up due to an association with 9/11, and being overwhelmed by the ending, in which Safran Foer plays the event backwards in slow motion – the reverse blossoming of flames as the explosion contracts inwards, fuel running up lift shafts and stairwells and back into the plane as it slides in retreat from the building, papers returning to their piles, phones and fax machines and human forms reassembling and righting themselves. Glass and steel cascading upwards and forming a perfect mosaic to fill the hole as the nose retracts, the surface of the tower intact again, the plane once more outside the building.<br />
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For a while it made me wonder if there wasn’t something magical realist in my own fascination with the moment of impact, as though in pausing and stop-motioning I was seeking proof of moments between moments, exponentially sub-dividable until time does indeed start running backwards. But the more years that pass, the more I think it’s a fascination with the symbol itself – its sickening beauty, the perfection of its dread mythology. A tower and a plane and a section of pale blue sky; a vision of Babylon, thousands dying unseen inside twin tombstones, flaming angels leaping into the abyss. And somewhere in between these ages of innocence and experience, frozen in a single pixelated frame, an eternally suspended silence into which I cast questions like stones, and receive no answers.</div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-30061467126322353532014-06-19T03:26:00.000-07:002014-06-19T07:33:23.957-07:00Lightwater<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Originally published by Hotshoe, photography by Timothy Briner</i></div>
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I’ve been asked to tell what happened between Gary Osborne and the Kirchner kid in the Walmart car park back in the summer of 1992. They tell me Gary is in trouble, but no one will say what sort. Truth is I haven’t spoken to Gary more than a handful of times since we finished school that summer, but we were tight at the time, and I was there when it happened, so I’ll try to tell it the best I can.<br />
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Gary’s folks lived in a run-down shack on Lyons, which is still about the roughest part of Lightwater. Every morning Lou and I would meet at his front door and walk with him to school, and every morning he’d lift up his shirt to show us cigarette burns and fingernail marks left by his mother the night before. We were a team back then, each of us running away from something: for Lou it was her dad, who had been drinking heavily since her mom left; for me it was the hole left by my brother Lawrence, who had died in Iraq the previous summer. Grief filled our house like fog: everywhere I looked I saw his face gazing back from pictures, and I felt sure I could hear his voice mumbling through the wall next to my bed when I woke in the middle of the night.<br />
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Mostly, though, I think we were escaping Lightwater: the dirt roads lined with blinking bar signs and church billboards advertising redemption with 1-800 numbers; the gun nuts and the gang-bangers, the overweight and the out of work waddling like zombies in and out of fast food restaurants. We created a world of our own to escape the smothering sadness of this dead town: we built a fort in the woods, vanquished imaginary enemies, signed contracts of lifelong friendship with blood drawn by a penknife from our thumbs. When dark set in and we were forced to turn home we’d walk arm in arm, whistling songs as we went, whispering reassurances at each other’s front doors.<br />
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Then one day the Kirchner kid turned up in class. He wore a sequined jacket and a single silver glove, and he was so small that his spats and white socks swung above the floor. The whole class was in hysterics, calling names and throwing stuff at him, but he never so much as turned around, just sat facing the front until Mrs Mayfield walked in and put a stop to the chaos. Rumours began circulating that he lived alone with his mother, that the pair had moved from Memphis after his father, a bank clerk, had been killed in a heist; others said the kid was being treated for cancer, something that gained credibility when he started wearing a fedora hat to school a few weeks later. But mostly we were obsessed with the rumour that the kid’s mother had once worked for Michael Jackson, and that the singer remained a family friend. Kirchner reputedly claimed that Jackson had visited the family home in Memphis soon after his father’s death, and that he would be coming to see him here in Lightwater any day now. I paid it no mind, but it whipped the school up into a frenzy: some of the younger kids started following him around like a prophet, as though the Christ-like figure of Michael Jackson might materialise by his side at any moment. But mostly it was just more ammunition for the bullies.<br />
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Which brings us to what happened in the Walmart car park. It was a Saturday afternoon, not long before the end of the school year, and Gary was in a black mood. His mother’s abuse had lately slipped into behaviour that left no marks on his body, and which he refused to talk about. We were seeing less and less of each other outside school, which I suppose is what happens – Lou would soon be heading to university in Texas, and I was preparing to work for my uncle’s print shop in Calvary. We’d met for breakfast at McDonald’s, after which we planned to head to the forest and dismantle the old fort, and the air had been heavy with the sense of an era ending. After leaving the restaurant and walking through the car park we’d seen the Kirchner kid sitting on the curb like he was waiting for a ride, still in his sequined jacket and hat despite the heatwave, and Gary had just flipped – stormed up to him, started throwing accusations about his dead dad, about this Michael Jackson bullshit. I remember how bright it was, blinking through the heat haze to see the kid look up from under the rim of his hat and then go back to staring at the curb, and the next thing Gary was launching a series of kicks and punches, beating him in the body and the back of the head, the whole thing shimmering like a mirage, like one of those cartoon fights where all you see is the occasional fist or foot poking out of a cloud of dust. I remember being unable to move, just standing and watching as Lou tried to pull him away, and him hurling her to one side and continuing to kick the kid, who was now lying on the floor. In the end a couple of army recruitment scouts saw the commotion and intervened, by which time a sizeable crowd of onlookers had gathered.<br />
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Anyway, the rest you know. Gary was suspended, and the kid stayed away from school for the rest of the year. I saw Lou occasionally between classes, but we didn’t speak properly again until August, when we heard that the kid had died during treatment for cancer. She was working tables at Pizza Hut, saving up for college, and I was already manning the storeroom at my uncle’s print shop. We met one Sunday morning, picked up a bunch of flowers and walked to the Kirchner house to pay our respects. His mom sat us on the couch, gave us milk and cookies, asked about our relationship with her son, then led us to his room, where a dozen candles were burning around his bed, and a Michael Jackson CD was playing quietly on the stereo. I remember the opening chords of <i>Liberian Girl</i> starting up, and at that moment glancing over at a corkboard and seeing a photograph of Michael Jackson and the Kirchner kid, arms around each other, smiling for the camera.<br />
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That was the day the heatwave broke. By the time Lou and I left the house it was raining heavily, and we walked without speaking through deserted streets to the edge of town, led each other by the hand through the forest to the old fort, where we kissed for the first and only time under a canopy of trees flashing with lightning and echoing with distant thunder. I guess that last part isn’t exactly relevant, but I sometimes feel it’s the only truly bright moment in my life – nothing but darkness leading up to it, nothing but darkness after. I dream about it often, and sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night I still hear voices through the bedroom wall, only now they’re our voices – Lou, Gary and me. I guess I never did escape Lightwater after all.</div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-24309286497000724872014-03-26T12:12:00.000-07:002014-03-27T06:02:13.565-07:00The Chattering Man<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There is a man standing in the middle of the desert, and his teeth are chattering.</div>
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Two things tell me that he is in the middle of the desert. Firstly there are dunes on all sides, similar to the one that he appears to be standing on top of; a marbled panorama of sun slopes and shadow faces and elegantly coruscating peaks, the whole scene feathering endlessly outward towards the horizon. This is the first thing.</div>
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Secondly, the man’s clothes – ragged strips of what was once a white shirt trussed about his shoulders, khaki trousers hanging in ribbons around his ankles, everything stained with dust and sweat. No shoes. Unshaven, of course – cheeks hollow behind a rough beard. Face and forearms burned to the point of looking almost scaly, as though he were only half human, half returned to some slithering desert animal. His wild eyes kaleidoscopic, and his teeth chattering, the hollow clatter of bone on bone echoing in the heat haze.</div>
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This man has been appearing to me for weeks in what I warily refer to as visions. There has been nothing sudden about his appearances: there have been no spilled coffees or embarrassing screams; I’ve not glanced in any mirrors and found myself looking instead into those spiralling eyes. It’s more a transmission than a visitation, something I can tune into at will on quiet tube journeys; as though he is there waiting, and always will be.</div>
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The more time that passes, the more convinced I become that this man has no history; that there was no plane crash or prison escape, no archaeological expedition from which he became separated. I doubt that he belongs to any nation or century, and were I capable of looking down to inspect the sand around him, I doubt I would find any footprints leading to this place.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I have begun to think that the man is instead a symbol of what it is to glimpse something so enormous and absolute that it renders the human body a broken vessel, the functions of sight and speech redundant, the world in which we once lived an endless plain, beautiful and terrible and ultimately uninhabitable. Perhaps he is a warning against accidentally unlocking a part of our unconscious minds capable of understanding that which we call the universe: to go from flippantly meditating on the scale of the cosmos to tripping a switch in the brain and suddenly seeing the whole thing in parallax: the nebulous star factories and the spiralling arms of pulsars stretching light years into space, the twisted forms of galaxies colliding, innumerable worlds simultaneously being and not being, countless civilisations raised and returned to dust.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Perhaps the man symbolises what it is to leave behind notions of time and space, the tinnitus whine of a few centuries of superstition and religion, and to momentarily stare at the whole thing in an awful ellipse of simultaneity. I think of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, of a description I once read of those early days in which he and his friends would sit in their London flat tripping on LSD, each moving closer to a vision of the universe unravelling, the star heart of the whole thing beckoning them inwards until one by one they would shake themselves free and claw their way back to what they had previously known as reality. Except Syd, who would be smiling and weeping, eyes still closed, skinny limbs sprawled awkwardly as the infinite part of his mind unlocked and he floored the controls into the flowering heart of the sun.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
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Syd who ended up a broken man, his brain ‘fried’, as the papers like to put it, locking away his adult life in his mother’s house in his hometown. Looking like a ghost in those few pictures snapped on the grey streets of Cambridge, his bicycle with a basket, his once wild eyes seemingly empty.</div>
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<br /></div>
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A warning then, but a warning applicable to the human world only – a world measured in minutes and described in diaries; a world in which a car can be referred to as ‘big’ or ‘small’, where the sun appears to sink and then rise behind the horizon. In the grander narrative of star factories and spiralling galaxies, such warnings are presumably just more white noise drifting into the ether along with Hitler’s speeches and NASA’s proclamations of peace; in such a world perhaps it makes mathematical sense to sacrifice the faculties of speech and sight to stare momentarily into the spinning eye of the universe. But this is not the world we live in.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Our lives follow an emotional trajectory. We carry with us the memories of the people we love until we ourselves are just memories in the minds of others. We stare at the undulating grey sea and picture ourselves as children; we look up at the stars and smile, then look away. We embrace our friends warmly, shake the frail hands of our fathers for longer than we need to. We watch Mickey Rourke in <i>The Wrestler</i> and weep, believing that we have seen a man encapsulate the human experience on screen. Perhaps we have.</div>
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<br /></div>
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As someone only marginally less sceptical of science and sense perception than religious dogma, I’ve long believed that the only promise of an afterlife I desire is an assurance that all this will go on long after I’m gone. Yet more recently I’ve been cradling a small flicker of hope that we might, in the moment of our death, be granted a single, totalising glimpse of the universe in its entirety, shedding the shackles of emotional consciousness and understanding existence in ways that cannot be put into words. By that point there will be no more diaries to keep, no more dinner parties to attend, no further need for the faculties of speech or sight. The man in the desert will no longer be a vagrant, no longer a fugitive from society; against my better judgement I indulge the image of him smiling, his eyes no longer wild, teeth no longer chattering, the sands around him no longer hostile or barren, but blossoming with the beauty of everything that lies above and beyond and within them, all of which is his, all of which may one day be ours.</div>
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-26627069722130372552014-02-03T08:18:00.001-08:002014-02-08T04:38:35.330-08:00Dark Matter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
Dream I have written a potentially world-changing piece of music, and am desperate to carry it back to the land of the living. Wake to find the notes still in my head. After one round, realise it is the tune to ‘How Deep Is Your Love’.<br />
<br />
Finish shaving. Constellations of tiny black hairs decorate the sink like a negative print of our galaxy. Reminded of a documentary on dark matter – the 70% of stuff in the universe invisible until recently due to its failure to reflect light, and tessellating previously disparate galaxies into an unthinkably complex whole. Try to dispel the unhelpful image of galaxies as remains of an enormous pre-cosmic beard.<br />
<br />
Wait for a bus on Brixton Hill in biblical rain; my brown leather shoes, three days out of the box, are already tiger striped with water stains. Find myself watching a large puddle on the road, the report of rain on which seems to be tapping out a code; after a while, it becomes hard not to see a pattern emerging, as if the code were an SOS or warning on loop. Every passing car tyre shatters the surface of the puddle into a shimmering squall, tiny waves colliding until calm is restored and the rain begins tapping out its message once more.<br />
<br />
Top floor of the 159, windows so steamed that the Thames looks like something from a Turner painting. All over the glass are fingerprints and handprints, signatures and abstract sketches, some looking days old. In black marker pen, on the grey plastic beside my seat, someone has scrawled the words: ‘Death is when you sleep sleep.’ I wonder how often, if ever, the writer stumbles across his work, and if the coincidence makes him feel momentarily as though existence is more than just a random assortment of sensory experiences.<br />
<br />
At the studio find myself reluctant to work. Make tea, tidy up, spend an hour pitching for an article on the actor Harry Dean Stanton, whose documentary portrait – <i>Partly Fiction</i> – Spencer and I saw at the Curzon last night. Mention in the email that as a boy I was so obsessed with HDS that for two years I insisted my schoolmates call me Cyrus Dean Shahrad (none did). Wonder if they’ll think I’m making this up, and what kind of idiot they’ll consider me either way.<br />
<br />
Spend another hour reading about the movie online. Most reviewers mention HDS in the back of his limo talking about how the fact that the earth orbits the sun at 17,000 miles per hour makes him nervous (“there’s nothing I can do about it”), or the drive back from the bar when he gazes out at the smog smothered Hollywood light show, noting that nothing matters because the earth will soon be gone (“and that’s not a negative concept… it’s liberating”).<br />
<br />
Head out to buy an energy bar from Whole Foods, largely an excuse to cheer myself up by wandering past the Tofurkey products in the vegan aisle. Resist the urge to begin another text exchange with Spencer of song titles altered to incorporate the word ‘Tofurkey’ (‘Play Tofurkey Music White Boy’, ‘The Wrong N*gga Tofurk With’). Always seem to get the same girl at the checkout counter; always she looks at my lone protein bar and the twenty pence pieces I count out to pay for it with a mixture of pity and disgust.<br />
<br />
Manage to achieve a negligible amount of something resembling work in the afternoon. At 5pm leave the studio and meet Daniela for coffee in Foyles. Brief discussion about whether her cappuccino is topped with a fern leaf or a feather, after which we spend a while deciding who has the worst tattoo among the various art students secretly sketching customers, unsubtle glances at their subjects revealing faces distorted with the seriousness of their endeavour. At some point find myself explaining my theory on the part of the self that in moments of crisis – a plane going down, a car flipping over – steps out from the shadow of the ego and makes time stand still, allows for clarity of thought previously cluttered by the accumulated detritus of consciousness; how I believe this accounts for the various stories of angels taking people’s hands and leading them to safety in moments of near death or disaster. Notice as I talk that Daniela is giggling and looking over my shoulder – at a waiter, it transpires, whose low slung trousers are revealing a sizeable builder’s crack as he gathers up cups. By the time we leave the fern/feather on her cappuccino is gone, replaced by foamy dregs that remind me of the froth that fringed the shores of Camber Sands when we played there as kids.<br />
<br />
Harry Dean Stanton has a picture of the Milky Way on his wall; on it is an arrow disappearing into the nebulous starlight of one spiral arm with the legend: ‘You Are Here’.<br />
<br />
Farsi class from 6-8pm, after which I walk through Leicester Square in the pouring rain for no reason. Pause outside the Pizza Hut on Cambridge Circus, where my brother and I once ate as children following a surprise trip to <i>Les Misérables</i> with our father, who had always been too busy at the hospital for nights out. Remember the excitement of racing to get changed after school, the flustered drive for the train; recall there being spots of blood on the collar of Dad’s shirt from surgery, and how quickly he fell asleep once the show began. Twelve years of living in London, and still the best memory of the city I have is of the three of us sitting at this window eating pizza after 10pm, looking out on to a rain soaked night like this one.<br />
<br />
After a while I walk on to Trafalgar Square, my new leather shoes now ruined, and catch the 159 home. It’s not until the bus is passing over Westminster Bridge that I turn and see the words scrawled on the plastic beside me: ‘Death is when you sleep sleep.’</div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-72504880812877674302014-01-26T12:37:00.003-08:002014-01-26T12:37:39.685-08:00Crossing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Originally published by the Quietus</i></div>
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Howling wind wakes him before dawn. He slides across the futon, feet finding carpet. He hadn’t expected to sleep. He tries to recall his dream – thinks it may be important, under the circumstances – but has only a fleeting sensation of part of it having taken place on a train. He lets it go, switches on a lamp.<br />
<br />
Standing at the kitchen counter he eats two pieces of toast from a loaf bought as he drove into town late last night – the expensive stuff, studded with seeds. As he eats he looks out the window at the darkened courtyard, pot plants upturned and trees twisting in the wind. He thinks back to the summer his mother bought this flat as a holiday home, how she’d joked about the pensioners that populated the place, the minimum age required for purchase; how she and his father had entered what she called ‘a grey area’. He’d ignored the joke at the time. They weren’t old.<br />
<br />
He washes and dries his plate, reassembles the futon, switches off the boiler before locking up. Outside the cold air claws at him – he hadn’t banked on it being so cold. Wind wails in the trees and unsteadies his footsteps as he walks to the car. Once inside he sits a moment with the heating on, breathing on his hands and looking out the windscreen at a crescent moon and a single star in seeming alignment over neighbouring fields. He keeps the lights off as he rolls down the drive, turns them on once he is out in the country lanes.<br />
<br />
He catches himself smiling in the rear view mirror. The act of driving is such a rarity that it never fails to spin him back to the summer day when he’d passed his test, driven alone to school, pulled into the car park to find Lucy Sanderson standing by the language department, arms full of folders. He’d parked beside her, leaned out the window and asked if she’d wanted to go for a spin – so unlike him that he felt he might burst into flames as the words left his mouth. She hadn’t said yes or no, just looked around and climbed in the passenger side.<br />
<br />
He’d driven out the gates and down the hill. After a couple of minutes he’d switched on the tape player, and the car had rung out with the album he’d prepared to listen to in celebration after the test, but had forgotten to play. <i>Down at the New Amsterdam, staring at this yellow haired girl Mr Jones strikes up a conversation</i>. He’d turned and looked at Lucy, who had caught his eye and laughed, her blonde hair dancing in the breeze from the open window. He didn’t want to look too long for fear she’d disappear.<br />
<br />
When he felt they’d gone far enough he’d turned around and driven back to school. Nothing said between them, not even when he’d dropped her at the language building and she’d picked her folders off the back seat and stood outside, leaning on the passenger window a moment and smiling quizzically in at him. Then she was gone, skirt swishing as she disappeared into the red brick building, and he was back on the road. <i>Lay me down in a field of flame and heather, render up my body into the burning heart of god in the belly of a black winged bird</i>. It was only later that he’d considered the possibility that, had he tried to kiss her, she might not have refused. Might have allowed him. Might even have encouraged him.<br />
<br />
He’d known then that Lucy Sanderson wasn’t like the others. She never taunted him about his towering size or his geological slowness, never mocked him for his academic underachievement despite his bookishness, despite his head full of useless facts, despite the claims of certain liberal teachers – those that didn’t laugh at him along with the students – that he might be some sort of idiot savant, in possession of some uncanny academic power that might land him a place at Oxbridge (claims they had quickly distanced themselves from once his exam results came through the following summer). She’d been 18 then, which made her 36 now. He pictures her as a doctor or lawyer, tries to imagine her husband and children, the whole family gathered around a dinner table or Christmas tree.<br />
<br />
He’d kept an eye out for her in town that summer after school, days he’d spent in the library, wearily toeing the line that he was still researching potential careers despite his reading being limited to the religious practices of ancient Egypt, his area of interest at the time. He’d kept an eye out for her in the public park, where he’d sat each lunchtime with his Walkman and his sandwiches until the afternoon he was attacked by a group of boys who’d been expelled from the year below him. And he’d kept an eye out for her on the bus home, seated at the front with the old folk and adopting their slumped demeanour, the cynical way they watched the town roll by – the rain coloured multi-storey car parks, the office blocks to let, the people swarming like insects in and out of openings. A town full of dead ends, though even then he’d sensed the presence of something endless and nameless beyond the clouds; even then he would sometimes imagine himself kicking free of the earth and swimming upwards to meet it, the towns below him shrinking to single cell life forms, lungs bursting as he fought to escape the atmosphere and break into the infinite beyond.<br />
<br />
It’s almost 6am when he arrives at West Bay. He picks a spot in the middle of the deserted car park, tries to buy a ticket from a machine that isn’t working. Thinks about leaving a note, decides against it. He passes unlit pubs and tackle shops, pauses at the spot on the harbour where he had once sat as a child dangling for crabs. Remembers how they had circled a while in the bottom of his bucket before stopping and just sitting there, waiting for the end. How the thrill of catching them had paled in comparison to the wonder of tipping them back into the water and watching them scamper away.<br />
<br />
He follows the path to the seafront, stands with his back to the wind and looks out on to the rolling black ocean. A handful of lights from fishing boats wink like stars on the horizon, the first hint of sunlight creeping through cracks in the cloud. Behind him, the wind rattles a sign outside the stand where his grandmother had once bought him ice creams. He remembers her telling him how she and his grandfather had come to this beach at dawn for a walk on the morning he’d been sent to the war, and found themselves surrounded by couples seeking solitude for tearful farewells of their own. He looks out at the sandstone cliffs rising in columns over a spit of shingle to his left, finds himself picturing dozens of couples walking like ghosts in the shadow of the rocks, embracing amid spray from the waves.<br />
<br />
He thinks of his father lying on the floor of the garden shed, surrounded by fragments of the plant pot he’d been tending to when a heart attack had killed him where he stood. He’d been in his bedroom reading about how souls were ferried across the mythological River Styx when his mother’s cry had reached him from the end of the garden. He had earmarked his page before descending the stairs, Dante’s description of that mournful crossing echoing with every step.<br />
<br />
He follows the promenade west, cuts on to the path straddling the ragged Jurassic cliffs as they rise towards Golden Cap. The wind tears at his clothes and howls in his ears as he climbs. Seagulls play in the currents of air that rush around the cliff edge, wheeling and diving and barking in what sounds like amusement.<br />
<br />
Memories come to him unbidden, like a box of photographs upturned on a table and picked at random. He finds himself recalling how his father had set up a telescope in his bedroom on the evening of his tenth birthday, shown him how to use the constellation wheel and retired with a smile, leaving him to an open window and a clear September night. An hour later he’d marched downstairs to inform them that it was all wrong; that there were no constellations, no pattern to the stars – that it was just a visual fluke of Earth’s place in the universe. He recalls how his father’s face had fallen.<br />
<br />
He remembers the weekend five years ago when he’d surprised his parents by accompanying them on a trip to the new flat, cramped in the back of the car with pot plants and a picnic hamper, his father stealing occasional disbelieving glances in the rear view mirror. The following day he’d walked with them to Bridport market, where he’d bought a 170 million-year-old ammonite chipped from the Charmouth cliffs he’d once clambered around as a child, and later they’d sat in Bucky Doo Square eating sandwiches, surrounded by tourists and pigeons like any other family. He’d been tracing a finger along the fossil’s polished spiral when he’d looked up and seen his mother and father smiling at him, hope like colourful bunting strung between them.<br />
<br />
He remembers the day last year when his mother had come home in tears following a routine hospital checkup. He’d been researching Jacobean witchcraft trials at the time, and over subsequent weeks and months his reading had been interrupted by the doorbell and the phone as a procession of doctors and relatives called or stopped by. Once a day he and his mother ate dinner at opposite ends of the table like an estranged couple. There was no anger between them, just nothing left to say. He’d been holding her hand when she passed away in the hospice on the stroke of new year, ten days ago now. There were cheers and fireworks from the far side of the river, and in the stillness her face had flashed white and red from the light show outside.<br />
<br />
That was the moment that he felt whatever had been tying him to the earth this last few years finally come untethered; felt himself floating high above the bowling alleys and the boarded up boozers, the sounds of cars and conversations flattened by distance. That was when he had finally glimpsed the vast otherness that awaited him on the far side, cosmic clouds like wings unfolding.<br />
<br />
A sudden squall of cold rain, seemingly brighter than the air around it, starts without warning and stops just as suddenly. The cliff path is descending now, winding its way towards the beach at Eype. He walks side-on to avoid slipping on mud, bracing his feet against rocks, occasionally stooping to steady himself with a hand on the grass. At the bottom he walks through a small pass in the cliffs and out on to a shingle beach dotted with upturned wooden boats, their frames battered, paint peeling. He sizes them up before settling on a two-man tub with the name Eloise, lifts it to check for oars before flipping it all the way over. He takes its frayed rope in hand and drags it with great effort towards the water, breathing hard and fast through his nose, clenching his teeth as the sea rushes to meet him, filling his socks and trousers, tumbling stones cackling in the surf. He presses on, knows there will be plenty of time later to feel cold. A slackening of the rope tells him that the boat is now waterborne, but he doesn’t dare turn around, instead wades harder into the waves until suddenly the shingle bar drops beneath him and he is up to his shoulders, crying out at the shock, his brain fizzing with instructions, only some of which he can decipher. He forces himself to breathe, but all that comes are great open mouthed gasps, and almost immediately a black wave breaks against his face, choking him with salt water. His whole body has frozen in protest, but he manages to feed the rope through his hands until the boat is upon him, and slowly, with painful inefficiency, he begins to crawl into the tub. Halfway through another waves almost tips him headfirst into the sea, but he clings to the wooden pew and finally tumbles into the bottom, his back crooked against the oars, legs poking awkwardly over the edge.<br />
<br />
He drags himself on to the seat and begins to row out to sea, frantically at first, exertion the only thing distracting from the crippling cold, his whole body shaking, jaw clattering. The boat pitches and lurches on the waves, whitewater spilling over the prow until he is up to his ankles, but the wind is with him, and he feels himself cleaving through the chop until suddenly the sea beneath him is calmer, the waves more gentle, and he knows that he is out beyond the breaking surf.<br />
<br />
He lets the oars fall to his feet, sits back and allows himself a moment to gaze out at the rim of the world. The crescent moon and single star appear painted now against the pale coming of the sun, the first rays setting a crown of pink fire on the crest of Golden Cap. A single stone holiday home hugs the cliffs as the path rises from Eype – a postcard scene, but as he looks he sees only shelter, no different in essence from a mud hut or council flat, a painted cave or a castle. A place for life to survive, to look away from the infinite that roars on all sides. He thinks of the polished ammonite sitting on his mantelpiece back home, of Lucy Sanderson’s yellow hair dancing in the breeze, of the easy affection in his grandmother’s smile as she watched him devour his ice cream; he thinks of the crabs waiting patiently in the bottom of his bucket, of the drunk singing Auld Lang Syne in a nearby room as his mother’s hand had slackened in his, of the boys circling him in the park, spitting through bared teeth. All connected by a simple cosmic coincidence, their existence a side effect no different from heat, or light. And yet.<br />
<br />
<i>All you had to do was kiss her</i>, he thinks. <i>Lean across the car, put your hands on her hair. Let gravity do the rest</i>.<br />
<br />
After a few minutes he sees a light come on in the living room of the house. He clambers over the seats, braces himself against the stern of the boat, squints through the dusk and the mist of waves breaking on the shore. Standing behind the glass of the patio door is a boy, no older than six or seven, his small frame draped in a dressing gown. Up before his parents, presumably, scanning the channels for cartoons. He’s too far away to be certain, but he feels sure that their eyes are meeting, and in a split second in which the sea feels utterly calm, the boat completely still, he becomes convinced that the boy has raised his hand, and is waving to him. A moment later the world comes lurching back to life, salt wind howling and the boat physically leaning into the current that pulls it slowly, inexorably out to sea.<br />
<br />
He waves back.</div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-30631360945259224602013-09-25T08:25:00.000-07:002013-09-25T15:46:33.518-07:00Marie's Place Is Empty<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Originally published by the New Statesman</i></div>
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I walk along Fatemi Avenue in Tehran amid the swirling dust of a gathering electrical storm, the tulip-shaped towers of the Hotel Laleh swimming in a heat haze over honking afternoon traffic. I muster a smile for the doormen in peaked caps and gold lanyard and stroll purposefully into the foyer, freezing after a few steps and looking around me. For ten days this visit has loomed over my annual trip to the Iranian capital like the black flower of the hotel itself; now that I’m here, I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing.<br />
<br />
The glamorous trappings of the lobby haven’t changed in seven years: an enormous art deco chandelier still forms an inverted pyramid of light over tables and chairs, the former dressed with red and white flowers, the latter upholstered with mock Gucci embroidery and occupied by a mix of bemused tourists and bored looking businessmen. There’s an unmanned grand piano, a bronze statue of Hafez’s tomb, a marble reception hung with mandatory portraits of the ayatollahs, eyes narrowed as though scanning the lobby for licentious behaviour.<br />
<br />
I spot a receptionist studying me with interest, and in a split second convince myself that this is the same man who checked Marie in the night she arrived in 2005; who cracked a joke about Rupert Murdoch when she mentioned the <i>Sunday Times</i>, and who managed not to stare at her eye patch the way I had when I’d met her at the taxi rank ten minutes earlier. Suddenly self conscious, I turn and walk into the lobby, sit and order a pot of tea, aware only after the waiter has departed that I’m seated at our old table; that opposite me – to paraphrase a popular Iranian saying – Marie’s place is empty.<br />
<br />
I’d been in Tehran for three months when Marie Colvin arrived to cover the presidential elections for the <i>Sunday Times</i>. I’d somehow wrangled work as home news editor of a national English-language newspaper despite my abysmal Farsi, a job that entailed rewriting largely unintelligible newswires on earthquakes and plane crashes (so many earthquakes and plane crashes), and righteous affirmations of Iran’s nuclear program. They were exciting and unsettling days: exciting because I was finally doing what everyone back home would see as ‘real journalism’ after years of travel writing and reviewing; unsettling because I felt like a fraud, and not just because of my second-rate Farsi.<br />
<br />
I’d realised on arrival that I didn’t have the character of a news journalist; that I lacked the cynical swagger and the deadline in the blood. I wrote the occasional whimsical piece for publications back home – a story on underground poetry clubs for the <i>New Statesman</i>, another on coffee shop youth culture for the BBC – but when I pitched similar human interest efforts to the <i>Sunday Times</i> (a paper whose foreign editor had called me at Heathrow to express his happiness at having someone ‘on the ground’), they were turned down, and I was encouraged instead to put together something on the forthcoming elections. I didn’t have a mobile, so the foreign desk kept calling my grandmother’s house, where I was staying, only to have her bark insensibly down the phone until either party hung up or I realised what was happening and jumped on the line.<br />
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Still, as the first round approached I managed to write something on the elections – a few hundred words towing the widely accepted wisdom that former president and remade liberal Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would sweep to victory (he had recently appeared on a <i>Time</i> magazine cover with the headline ‘Iran’s Next President’). I wrote it under the pseudonym Ali Bandari, something I told the <i>Sunday Times</i> would ensure against a conflict of interests with my own paper, though it was actually because I’d been refused a journalist’s visa, and could be arrested if my name was discovered in foreign publications.<br />
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Rafsanjani found himself vying for the second round against Tehran’s mayor, a hardliner called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whose rare appearances in the international press had been as a caricature spouting semi-comical quotes about cutting off hands and strangling democracy. The story acquired an extra page and the Sunday Times sent in the cavalry – hence my meeting Marie Colvin at the Hotel Laleh that June evening, attempting to sound fluent as I bantered with her taxi driver and ordered a pot of tea at what would become our regular table.<br />
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She asked my opinion on what might happen at the ballots; I swallowed my pride over the first story (‘Rafsanjani’s seemingly full-blooded independence looks set to propel him to victory,’ says Ali Bandari), and told her what people were now saying in the office: that Ahmadinejad had a real chance of winning. That while Rafsanjani had been measuring his head for the crown and receiving the international media at his palatial Tehran offices, Ahmadinejad had been touring the provinces in a beat up orange bus, speaking in mosques and emphasising to the common people that it wasn’t just their right to vote, it was their Islamic duty. It had also become clear that he was Ayatollah Khamenei’s choice for president; beyond that, little else seemed to matter.<br />
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We had three days before Marie needed to file the story, days I spent almost entirely in the office, sometimes empty save for the caretaker’s son who careered around the floor in a plastic pedal car, crashing into desks and upturning chairs. I blackened my fingers flipping through back issues of the paper in enormous bound folders, filled notebooks with background on the candidates – details of Rafsanjani’s two terms as president between 1989 and 1997, of Ahmadinejad’s possible role in the American hostage crisis of 1979. When I did leave the office, it was to visit disparate parts of the capital and conduct interviews with potential voters – from wizened merchants hunched over sacks of dates and dried limes in the downtown bazaar, to Gucci-draped Persian princesses drifting around uptown shopping malls, headscarves serving as little more than hammocks for their dyed and dreadlocked hair.<br />
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At the end of each day I’d hop in a battered cab to the Hotel Laleh, euphoric and exhausted, arms laden with bundles of printed and photocopied paper, feet wincing with blisters. Marie and I would face each other over our usual table, a pot of tea between us, and I’d fill the gaps in her story, providing political context and local colour that her schedule of rigorously enforced press conferences left her unable to pursue. Once done with business we’d settle into our chairs and exchange war stories – hers filled with snipers and hostages, mine with ski resorts and secluded city bars. If she found my situation comical then she didn’t let on; she seemed impressed by my diligence, and implied that I might have a promising career at the <i>Sunday Times</i>, news she dropped into the conversation without realising that it caused the entire lobby to begin tilting beneath my feet.<br />
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That Friday morning I took my Iranian passport to the Tajrish mosque and purpled my finger with a vote for Rafsanjani. The results began filtering in the following afternoon, a day I spent glued to my computer, newswires piling up beside me as I refreshed the online vote count and watched Ahmadinejad snake closer to victory. Every hour I called the Laleh to update Marie, her smoke-stained phone voice instilling in my mind a timeless picture of the journalist’s hotel room: curtains closed, ashtrays overflowing, papers strewn over an unmade bed.<br />
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By the time I arrived at the hotel that evening Ahmadinejad’s victory had been announced, Marie’s story filed and her taxi to the airport booked. We drank a celebratory pot of tea, the piano occupied for the first and only time by a young man fiddling Persian flourishes into schmaltzy 1980s ballads. Afterwards she walked me to reception, shook my hand and gave me her card, scribbling her personal email on the back and encouraging me to drop her a line when I got back to London. “<i>If</i> you get back to London,” she said, winking to imply that she knew only too well how hard it would be to tear myself away.<br />
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I decided to walk back to my grandmother’s house that night. The streets were quiet after days ringing with protests and street parties and the names of candidates screamed from passing cars. The city seemed to have admitted defeat, to have folded in on itself to regard this latest development from a fearful distance. Yet I found myself smiling as I walked, swinging my steps in time to a piano ballad and greedily dismantling a bar of chocolate given to me in parting by Marie – a woman who had helped me find in three days what had previously eluded me for three months. Who had stopped me from feeling like a fraud.<br />
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Behind me, the dusk sky was scattered with bats, and the funereal towers of the Hotel Laleh receded for the last time, or so I thought.</div>
Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-19485457360629751842013-09-12T09:32:00.000-07:002013-09-15T10:35:31.139-07:00Squirrels (Parts I & II)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A few years ago, two friends and I began renting a house at the top of Brixton Hill. It wasn’t a glamorous house – there’d been a hypodermic syringe sitting on a mantelpiece when the estate agent had shown us round (an ornament she made a heroic effort to ignore) – but it was big: a massive kitchen, large living room, creepy basement, a garden, and four bedrooms split between three of us, though our third was a lawyer caught up in a big case abroad, and couldn’t have spent more than a month in the house that whole year.</div>
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Best of all was my third-floor garret, separated from the rest of the house by two sets of doors and comprising a bedroom, a bathroom and a small office that I turned into a music studio. My housemate Will was using his own bedroom as a design workshop, yet entire days would go by without us bumping into each other; half the time I didn’t even know if there was anyone else in the building. I remember thinking from day one that it was the closest thing to an ideal living situation I’d ever encountered in London, and wondering how long it would be before something broke the spell.</div>
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The answer came a few weeks into our stay, when I woke one night to the sound of scurrying in the loft space a few feet above my head. As the veteran of more than one drawn-out campaign against domestic rodents, I knew from the noise that these weren’t house mice – there was an awful implication of mass to the bodies I heard scampering over floorboards and burrowing into boxes, and I felt sure I could discern the sound of claws scraping along exposed pipes.</div>
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The following morning I called our landlady and told her there were rats in the attic. There was a pause, then a sad sigh. They weren’t rats, she said, they were squirrels. They’d found their way in the previous summer via an overhanging branch, after which she’d had pest control in to lay traps, blocked up all the holes and trimmed back the trees, hoping that would be the end of it. She said she’d send someone over, and apologised for any inconvenience in the meantime.</div>
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A couple of days later the Rentokil guy showed up. He was a sinister sort, speaking slowly and with an emotional blankness that I assumed could only have come from prolonged exposure to the suffering of small animals with expressive eyes. Access to the loft was via a ceiling hatch in the corridor that joined my garret with the stairs leading back to the rest of the house; I waited anxiously while he poked around up there with a flashlight, returning a few minutes later to tell me that he was going to set up a few guillotine boxes. “Only thing big enough to take out squirrels,” he said. He asked me to guess what he used to bait them, and I told him I didn’t know. He produced a Topic bar from his overalls. “Squirrels can’t get enough of these things,” he said, unwrapping and biting into it in a way that was deeply unsettling. “Developed quite a taste for them myself, over the years.”</div>
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He told me that the traps went off with a loud bang, and that I’d probably be better off sleeping elsewhere for a week or so. I didn’t tell him that I’d vacated my own room that first night, and had since been sleeping on a nest of sofa cushions on the living room floor. Over the coming days I spent as little time as possible in the garret – I continued to work in my studio, but seemed incapable of listening to music for more than a few seconds without becoming convinced I could hear tiny claws skittering somewhere in the mix. I’d pause the track and sit waiting for a bang and a terrible scream, but there was only silence. On a couple of occasions the Rentokil guy returned to dispose of bodies that he carried out the attic and down the stairs in bin liners; once I heard him chuckling to himself as he poked around in the carnage above me. Yet in all that time I saw and heard nothing more of the squirrels themselves. The whole unpleasant episode, it seemed, might yet come to a close without my having to stare into the abyss itself.</div>
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Until the morning of my birthday, a weekday on which I crawled back into the house around 7am after a night spent celebrating with a girl I was seeing. I remember the feeling of contentment as I walked back up the hill, the first commuters filing on to public transport like condemned men and women while the rising sun set clouds alight. I remember stopping to pick up a box of cereal and eating two bowls at the kitchen table before sinking into the sofa cushions for what I felt sure would be a long and conclusive sleep, only to wake, no more than an hour later, to the sound of a man screaming.</div>
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I ran into the kitchen in time to find Will closing the door to the garden behind him, his morning cigarette still unlit in his fingers, his eyes wild and head shaking slowly. He told me not to go outside. I asked why, and he said because it was my birthday, and no one should start their birthday looking at something like that. I stepped around him, opened the back door and walked out into the garden, and saw something that even now I struggle to describe, despite the fact that I only have to close my eyes for a moment to see it printed against the black canvas of my subconscious.</div>
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It was half a squirrel. More than half a squirrel, perhaps, but certainly not 75%. Nor by calling it half a squirrel do I mean to suggest that it was neatly bisected along some obvious biological fault line – I wasn’t looking at the front end of a squirrel, nor the rear end. There was a front and a hind leg remaining, but they were both on the same side; the other side was a cross-section of bones and burst organs hanging in pink and blue ribbons. There was no tail, but there was a head, and the black eyes were open. The trail of blood told a horrifying story: the animal must have somehow worked its way side-on into one of those grisly guillotines, losing limbs and organs in the process, expending the last of its life force crawling out of the loft before either climbing or falling down the tree into the garden.</div>
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I’m not sure how long I’d been staring before I became aware of Will behind me, cigarette in one hand, bin liner in the other. He told me to go back to bed, that he’d sort out the mess. I didn’t argue. I picked up a card and a present from the kitchen table as I passed through, gathered my duvet from the living room and moved back into my bedroom. I never heard another squirrel scurrying around the attic, the Rentokil man never came to pick up the last of his traps, and I’ve never been able to look at a Topic bar since.</div>
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II</div>
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That was nearly four years ago. I’m still at the top of Brixton Hill, living alone in a one-bed flat in a big white block that under cover of night you might convincingly pass off as ‘art deco’. A nice enough place – clean and bright, glorious views of Telford bus garage, the 24-hour engine sound of which is a great balm to my tinnitus. I’m not here much – the place is a holding pen of sorts, a white pod in which to sleep and eat, to check emails and recharge appliances between days spent making music in a Soho studio. It’s not often that I find myself stuck in the flat with time to kill, but when I do, I tend to go walking in Brockwell Park, and that’s exactly what happened last Sunday evening.</div>
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The sun was setting by the time I arrived, but the heat of the day still lingered on the lawns; picnickers remained scattered around piles of crisp packets and empty cider bottles, parents sat gazing as their babies stumbled after butterflies, young couples lay entwined in each other's arms, drunk on desire. I’d bought a coffee en route, and I sipped it on a hill overlooking the city skyline, which shimmered against a canvas of electric yellow cloud. I thought how calm and stately those towers seemed, and wondered what my preference for viewing London from a distance said about the potential imbalance of the active and contemplative parts of my life. After half an hour or so, a cool breeze picking up and the hills clearing of people, I stood and began making my way home.</div>
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That was when I saw the squirrel, a crumpled pile of fur at the base of a big tree lining the path. Not a baby squirrel, but certainly no more than a kid – small paws undeveloped, body no wider than a belt. He lay motionless on his stomach, back twisted awkwardly and rear end elevated in a way that suggested a nose-dive towards the earth. I stepped closer, noticed simultaneously that his fur was crawling with lice and that his little chest was rising and falling so faintly as to be almost imperceptible in the gathering shadow. My mind turned over a dozen different instructions on what to do when discovering the victim of a violent accident, none of which seemed applicable to squirrels. With a single hand I gathered his body in my fingers, attempted gently to lift him from the ground, at which point his front legs began stretching uselessly, paws clawing at the grass, his breathing quickening though his eyes remained closed.</div>
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I called my brother, a doctor with a garden and a great deal of empathy, and he told me, as I feared he would, that the humane thing to do would be to end its misery. He warned against breaking its neck with my hands for fear of bad dreams if it went wrong. He asked if I had a spade to hand; I told him I did not. He suggested finding a large rock with which crush its skull, and I said I’d have a look, hanging up and sitting back down beside the squirrel. I couldn’t recall seeing any large rocks in my years walking Brockwell Park, and I didn’t intend to leave the thing to start looking now. I took a moment to focus my thoughts, glanced around the park to make sure I wasn’t being watched, reached over and took the squirrel’s head in my fingers.</div>
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At that moment I heard squeaking from high in the tree above me, and looking up I saw another squirrel, no larger than this one, frantically crying out as he skittered over branches. I stood and watched, certain I was about to witness a second plummeting squirrel turned into a twisted pile of limbs. His ability to cling to the tree was untrained – I couldn’t shake the image of the pair of them breaking out of the nest without parental permission – and more than once I watched him lose his footing and skid perilously close to the edge of the branch, all the while emitting a terrible babyish whimper filled with what sounded like familial loss. When I knelt back over the injured squirrel, his eyes were open, and he was making a wet, drawn out whine of his own, breaths that sounded like broken bricks being dragged along a broken road.</div>
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At that point I did what seemed the only thing left available to me: I took out my phone and began searching online for nearby animal hospitals. I got some advice from a lady who ran a charity in Croydon, left a message with a man who operated a volunteer animal ambulance in east London, listened to a recorded summary of the weekday opening hours of a rescue centre in Beckenham. Finally it occurred to me to call the RSPCA, the receptionist at which said they’d send an ambulance to my flat if I could find a box to carry the squirrel home in. I hung up and made a quick circuit of the few remaining picnic parties in close vicinity; none had any boxes, nor did the bins yield anything but sauce-encrusted takeaway cartons. I returned to the squirrel, removed my jumper, lifted him gently into it, and began walking over the darkening earth in the direction of home.</div>
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The world we passed through seemed created entirely for the occasion. Heavy shadows lay over the residential streets leading away from the park, yet the sky remained a sort of powdery blue, the clouds faded pink, no longer electrified at the edges by the sun, which had long ago set, but all the more beautiful for it. I pointed this out to the squirrel, who I had named Shen; I told him that the thing about sunsets, with their solar pyrotechnics and ceremonial stages of apocalypse, was that they were constantly changing – perhaps that was what made them so powerful, I said, the compressed span of their cosmic collapse instilling in us a sense of what our own lives probably look like in timelapse. But this thing that followed – this pale blue sky, these pink clouds – seemed in its majestic calm to imply something endless and peaceful following the firework shows that our little lives comprise.</div>
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It wasn’t easy to tell amid the shadows how much of this was going in. Shen remained slumped against the folds of my jumper, his front legs splayed at the same awkward angle they’d occupied in the park, his eyes closed. I gave him a gentle poke and saw his head shift, his little paws clutching empty air, and I sped up a little. I kept talking as we approached the flat; I told Shen about the building, which I felt no qualms describing as ‘art deco’ given the cover of darkness, and I apologised in advance for the mess – I’d not known I’d be having guests, I said. I told him not to expect anything grand; I explained about the studio in Soho, and how this was just a holding cell, a place to sleep and eat and recharge appliances. The usual spiel. If he was judging me, he managed not to show it.</div>
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Back in the flat I laid his broken body down on the living room floor, noticing as I did so that the jumper he rested on was already seething with lice. I set to work with a pair of scissors and a small cardboard box snatched from the recycling bin outside, padded the thing out with an old T-shirt and scattered a few raisins at the head end in an attempt to make it feel more like a luxury squirrel carriage than an IKEA squirrel coffin. I laid Shen inside – his breathing was almost imperceptible now – and carried the box out on to the balcony, where we sat looking south over Streatham. I apologised for the scaffolding, cursed the ongoing renovation work, pointed out Telford bus garage and made passing reference to its soothing qualities for a tinnitus sufferer. Just small talk. There was so much I really wanted to say – how I knew about life sometimes feeling like a crap carnival act, the garish colours and sad jokes, everyone dancing like puppets in an attempt to convince themselves that the days made some sort of sense. I wanted to tell him that everything would be fine if only he could get back into his tree, find a spot where he could see the sky unencumbered by buildings, and sit watching the clouds drift awhile. I wanted to tell him to fight. I wanted to tell him to live.</div>
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“There’s so much left for you to do,” I began.</div>
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At that moment the buzzer went. I paused, gave his head a parting stroke, then carried the box downstairs and out into the car park, where I found the ambulance driver standing beside his vehicle. My heart sank a little at the sight of his white van – part of me had been expecting a team of nurses and a gurney, an on-the-spot defibrillation before the thing screamed off towards the hospital, sirens wailing. As it was, the man smiled patiently – a kindly, middle-aged face, bushy moustache – and took the box that I held out to him. He peered inside, looked back at me with a sad expression. “Looks like he’s fallen out of the nest,” he said. “Probably not much we can do.”</div>
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I followed him to the rear of the van, where he placed the box carefully on one of a number of shelves, most occupied by similar-sized boxes, before locking up and heading back to the driver’s seat. He passed an envelope through the window, told me about the importance of donations, and thanked me for caring about animals as he started the engine. I waited until the van had turned out on to the street before walking back to my flat and out on to the balcony, where I sat a while longer watching the pink clouds strung over Streatham like a choir of Renaissance angels, the engines of Telford bus garage tuning up as though for a requiem about to begin.<span id="goog_91467365"></span><span id="goog_91467366"></span></div>
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-56332166420386726682013-09-02T05:36:00.000-07:002013-09-14T02:14:55.569-07:00Shahnameh<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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He is there, my father, and I am here. Me on the balcony, collar up against the morning breeze, hands clinging to a cup of anaemic French tea; he hunched over the dining table of our diminutive apartment, surrounded by inverted kiwi skins and shards of consumed croissants, baguettes of varying freshness stacked like logs in an antiquated timber town. He catches my eye through the balcony doors that I’ve drawn for privacy, and I smile to signify that I’m nearly done writing; he looks away, half shaking his head to let me know that I’m frittering away time I should be spending in the overgrown garden, a can of weedkiller in one hand, secateurs in the other.</div>
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In recent weeks I’ve taken great care to overuse the words ‘working on my father’s flat’ when describing this trip to friends – a phrase I like to think conjures up images of the pair of us paint-speckled and halfway up ladders, tool belts clinking authoritatively as we tend to leaking roofs or disappear beneath sinks to repair plumbing. Instead we’ve spent our time thus far sipping tea in socks and shorts, my father flipping through a procession of nature shows and soap operas in search of a football game, me absently turning pages in the current affairs magazines that I buy as many times a year as I travel by plane.</div>
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We left yesterday morning from Luton Airport, the long-term car park of which staged a scene tinged with the sort of manic near-disaster that I remember from the start of so many childhood holidays. We’d wasted half an hour crawling around banks of parked cars without finding a space, the stereo relentlessly skipping a CD of Iranian sitar music until I leaned over and switched it off, leaving the air pregnant with panic and my father’s muffled curses. By the time a spot appeared we had just twenty minutes to make the gate, bundling bags from the boot and sprinting to a dilapidated plastic bus shelter that rattled in the dawn wind.</div>
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“It’s like a bus stop in the African desert,” grumbled my father, a comment that made me wince when he repeated it to a family of holidaymakers who joined us moments later. When the bus finally arrived I muscled Dad through the middle doors to stop him verbally abusing the driver, then took a seat a few rows back from him, watching as he gazed with weary resignation at the procession of hangars and cheap hotels. I thought of the packet of shortbread in his jacket pocket, the parking reference scribbled hastily on the back of his hand, and as passengers accumulated and he disappeared behind squabbling teenagers and sleepy couples I experienced a sense of my father’s fragility such as I’d known when we’d parted on London buses, and I’d been forced to watch through the window as he crossed the street and disappeared like any other human being into the midday crowd.</div>
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As the sun sets on our first full day my father drives us to a nearby cliff walk skirting a number of isolated beaches and rocky inlets, the volcanic nature of which has led to me noting on our rental site that the area is affectionately known as the ‘black pearl of the Mediterranean’, a name I may well have made up, or subconsciously lifted from a pirate movie.</div>
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I’ve spent the afternoon working in the garden to the downstairs flat, pulling up small colonies of daisy headed weeds that have gathered since last summer and hacking at hedgerows with rusty secateurs, and as we drive I pick at cuts, burns and blisters on my hands while gazing out the window at the passing resort. I see couples idling on benches with ice creams, children like baby chicks cycling behind their mother’s bike, shell coloured stucco apartments with names like La Grande Conque and Palais De La Mer. As we hover at traffic lights I hear the whistling masts of boats bobbing in the harbour like plastic birds, the mosquito whine of a distant moped, and it occurs to me that this is just another French beach town with no discerning characteristics save its successful embodiment of so many types and tropes: the nightly din of a dozen different backing tape singers competing for listeners in harbourside bars, the rattle of rollercoasters in the eyesore amusement park, its scaffold-clad Adrenaline tower looming over the surrounding countryside like the gallows of some giant race. It’s a place that smells of ice cream and sun cream, of cigarettes and underage sex, a washed out stereotype no different from the semi-abstract beach resorts of <i>Persona</i> or <i>Betty Blue </i>– a canvas of the unbearably mundane, and a backdrop for seismic emotional shifts.</div>
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It takes my father fifteen minutes of parking and reparking the rental car before he’s satisfied that it isn’t going to be towed, stolen or start rolling towards the cliffs. I leave him to it, crossing to a wooden fence barring the drop to the sea and looking out at a spine-like rock formation snaking towards a large boulder painted white by seagulls. My father eventually jogs into view, huffing and puffing and holding on to his baseball cap lest it blow away in the wind, and we begin following the cliff path, pausing at breaks in the fence to peer down into small coves where women lay topless in the last of the afternoon sun, heat-swollen paperbacks abandoned beside them.</div>
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I think I’ve been hoping for a revelatory conversation, or at least a single moment of insight like that which followed my maternal grandfather’s funeral, when Dad had whisked me from the community hall wake – where I’d been avoiding triangular sandwiches and sad displays of gardening trophies and trying to forget my eulogy – and driven me to West Bay, where he walked me down the pier and related an old Iranian maxim as the sun set over the sea. “Life is like a tightly tangled ball of wool,” he’d said. “At the beginning is nothing, and at the end is nothing.”</div>
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No such insights colour our walk today. At one point my father notes how everything you love in this life ultimately leaves you, but he is referring to a pair of sunglasses he sat on earlier in the afternoon. The only other revelation comes courtesy of a story about a boat journey he and his Iranian friend Mehdi had once taken to Sète, the market town now creeping into view on the horizon. The water had been so choppy, he says, that he’d suddenly and unexpectedly vomited on to the shoulder of a man standing on the lower deck as they’d been docking. The man hadn’t noticed, but my father had felt guilty enough to present himself at the exit, explain what had happened and apologise. The man had apparently taken the news in his stride. If there is a moral to this story, I fail to grasp it.</div>
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At some point I mention that I fancy a beer, and my father says that there’s nothing stopping us having one at the cluster of bars lining the Plage du Môle, a stretch of sand another ten minutes along the coast. Suddenly it seems that this is the purpose of our walk: I picture my father and I pausing to sip our <i>demis</i> a few feet from the mane of the Mediterranean as the setting sun torches the sky, and my heart lightens as we turn the corner on to the promenade of Le Môle, its central square peppered with shirtless men playing <i>boules</i> amid small dust storms, cigarettes hanging from their lips.</div>
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I leave my father to find a toilet while I scour the strip for an establishment unlikely to offend him, settling on an innocuous terrace bar playing ignorable French pop and with only a handful of customers. I’m in the process of ordering beers when he arrives, stopping me with a frown and a flap of his hand and insisting that he wants nothing to drink. The waitress shrugs, smiles and walks away.</div>
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Very little of what is said over the following few minutes resembles conventional father-son bonding – Dad describes in detail the poor hygiene of the public toilet he’s just visited, and passes comment on a spot flaring over my left eyebrow – and during lulls in conversation the music that had appeared so inoffensive on arrival seems to rise in pitch and volume, driven suddenly by a pair of duelling electric guitars that perforate the air. I watch my father clock his surroundings with the same grim resignation with which he’d gazed out of the airport bus window the previous morning, and understand all too well what a bad idea it had been to expect him to relax in so alien an environment.</div>
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The waitress arrives with my beer and a bill for €2.90, and my father grudgingly hands over a five, inspecting the change with a look of resentment before pocketing the lot. By the time we begin arguing over the tip there’s a weary inevitability about the situation, as though we’re speaking lines in an unsuccessful play that neither of us wants to be part of, getting the final scene out the way so we can disappear out the back door as the curtain falls and a few hands clap, grab our coats and point our cars home. I barely look up when my father finally throws his hands in the air, standing with a scrape of his chair and striding off towards the shops. In his absence I sit and watch the shore rush and recede, struggling to find something resembling refreshment in the beer I’d wanted so badly, but tasting only chemicals and a ghost note like the stale smell of the store room in the off-licence I’d worked in one summer.</div>
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Ten minutes later, my glass drained, I rise and walk back along the promenade, where I find my father waiting at the head of the path and determined to act as though nothing has happened. Perhaps it hasn’t. He barely stops talking all the way back to the car – about a woman in the <i>boulangerie</i> that he offended that morning, about a toilet roll holder he needs to replace in flat 50, about his broken sunglasses – and I give as enthusiastic a series of responses as I can muster. I know from experience that the sadness will pass: that half an hour from now I’ll be holding on to it through pride alone, and half an hour after that it’ll be forgotten, and I’ll be seated on the balcony with a book and a glass of wine, glancing between paragraphs at my father on the couch, headphones on and eyes closed, hands manipulating the dials on his radio like a blind man scanning brail.</div>
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The following afternoon I’m woken by the sound of my name being called from a distance. I sit up blinking and shirtless on the baking sand of the Plage Richelieu, squinting through the heat haze to see my father staggering towards me, his dark shirt and trousers lending him the appearance of a mythical fugitive, a bearer of apocalyptic news. The pre-season beach is almost deserted: save the wash of the shore and the rustle of dune grass the only sound is a faint hammering from a nearby bar being assembled in anticipation of the coming holidays.</div>
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My father, when he arrives, is breathless with the exertion of his walk. After a few moments panting on his back he strips down to his swimming trunks and passes me a carrier bag containing oranges, sun cream and a bottle of Kronenbourg from the case we picked up at the supermarket that afternoon. This last item is a thoughtful gesture – a veiled apology, I assume, for our squabble at the bar the previous day – but the green glass is getting warmer by the minute, and I turn it down with some excuse about a headache from the sun. If he’s offended, he doesn’t show it.</div>
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He reaches for the lotion and applies it to his face, arms and chest before asking me to attend to his back, and as I do so he airs the frustration of his failed attempt to replace the faulty toilet roll holder. It’s a monologue riddled with curses for the block’s live-in handyman, who Dad believes is stealing everything from cutlery to condiments and sabotaging appliances that he knows he’ll be paid to replace. I refrain from venturing an opinion, focusing instead on my father’s back, imagining how the contours and continents of this boundless map of his being have shifted over the decades.</div>
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The lotion applied, he stands and steps into his heavy black shoes – their backs folded down like Frankenstein slippers – and begins weaving an unsteady path towards the sea. In the far distance, so faint as to seem painted against the sky, the snow-capped Pyrenees line the horizon, and as I watch my father’s slow progress across the deserted beach I imagine him as an elderly king from Ferdowsi’s Persian epic the <i>Shahnameh</i>, stripped of his material wealth and worldly cares and making his way gratefully to the shores of Paradise after a life filled with battles and betrayals. I watch him step out of his shoes and walk slowly into the ocean, the silver water rising to his waist before he dives beneath the surface, a series of concentric ripples the only evidence that he was ever there. I look down beside me at the pile of his things: his coiled leather belt, his tattered three-day-old newspaper, the peel of his orange. And there, balanced on top like a grave ornament, his reading glasses, their lenses already obscured by sand shifting in the mistral wind.</div>
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7769857736583969943.post-79248293602991652142013-08-27T02:43:00.000-07:002013-09-14T02:16:55.706-07:00First Words<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Originally published by the Quietus, photography by Spencer Murphy,<br />from The Abyss Gazes Into You</i><br />
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In the departure lounge of Gatwick’s north terminal, surrounded by slipstreaming tails of tourists, gleaming shopfronts and billboard images of unattainable wealth and beauty, stands an old and lonely-looking silver fountain. The fountain – which long ago ran dry – is shaped like a cone of paper tapering upwards to a point, and appears to be bolted together from strips of sheet metal. The thing is an eyesore, a semi-comical temple to total uselessness in an arena otherwise devoted to an awkward mix of luxury and efficiency, and the authorities have done their best to shield it from view with beds of plastic plants.<br />
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When a rare trip abroad leads me to Gatwick, as it did yesterday, I always find my way to the first floor balcony, and for a few moments it feels as though the clamour ceases, the hordes of sugar-rushing kids, sleepy couples and bleary-eyed businessmen falling into shadow as a single spotlight illuminates that fountain. Graffiti disappears from its sides, water begins flowing once more from its peak, and there, chasing each other around its base in tie-dyed T-shirts and ill-fitting Doc Martens boots, are my friend Spencer and I. It’s 1991. We’re twelve years old, and about to embark on what will be the best holiday of my childhood, if not my life: a Christmas with Spencer’s family in Orlando.<br />
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The memory is as unreliable as memory itself – I’m sure our first attempts at tie-dying didn’t occur until 1992, and I know that I didn’t own a pair of DMs on that trip because I was constantly pestering Spencer to lend me his – but as a source of sweet sorrow it is beyond compare, and so I leave it unaltered. Yesterday, however, I found myself contemplating for the first time an eerie similarity between the memory and the fountain that serves as its catalyst: I realised that both could be seen as obstacles to the increasingly rapid current of progress.<br />
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As I queued for the plane with two hundred passengers all projecting into the portal of their phones, I sensed how large the future loomed, the vacuum at its centre sucking all presence out of the present and making an irrelevance of the past. I thought back to interviews I’d conducted for Google’s <i>Think Quarterly</i> magazine in the months before I gave up writing – Ray Kurzweil on the merging of man and machine, Peter Diamandis on the dream of establishing a human outpost on Mars – and felt both the optimism and unease that the evolution of technology inspires: optimism that things can only get better; unease that the things we love, perhaps even life itself, may soon be rendered obsolete.<br />
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It was a conundrum alluded to in a note I’d posted two weeks earlier to explain why I was leaving Facebook. I suggested that while we might one day end up evolving into beings of pure energy, discarding our mortal frames and exploring inner and outer space in harmony, between now and that time I saw only a diminishing of life into a sort of reality television show, a dismantling of everything I loved about the culture of contemplation and reflection. I hated where all this reductionism was taking us – hated how willingly advocates of Twitter defended the art of having to bite size their sentiments and convert their emotions into information. I hated how memes and gifs were being seen as safe alternatives to expressing something in one’s own voice, and how every new revelation of increased speed and decreased size was hailed as an improvement – SoundCloud enabling users to skip to the drop of a song before deciding if it was worth a listen, Vine attempting to revolutionise the sharing of video by offering just six seconds in which to blow audiences’ minds.<br />
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On Twitter, of all places, I found myself airing my fears in a series of pretentious sounding tweets. ‘The less space we have to define ourselves individually,’ I wrote, ‘the less of ourselves there will be to define.’ Also: ‘The more we come to rely on technology to define the parameters of the human narrative, the less human we become.’ Needless to say I had significantly fewer followers by the time I got to point three.<br />
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Yesterday, as my plane banked over Genoa, I came across a more articulate summary in the words of Don DeLillo, from a letter to Jonathan Franzen, reproduced in a 1996 essay by the latter on the threat to literature: ‘If serious reading dwindles to near nothing,’ DeLillo wrote, ‘it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word “identity” has reached an end.’<br />
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The question of why I stopped writing two years ago is a painful one to pose and a difficult one to answer, but I trace the root of the problem back to my days studying journalism in Cardiff in 2001. I’d finished an undergraduate degree in English the previous summer and passed subsequent months living in Peckham Rye and doing entry level editorial work for <i>Time Out</i>. They were intoxicating days – filled with the swirling sounds and colours of a new city seen through young eyes, the excitement of a job that felt like a labour of love. I walked Peckham Rye Common each morning before work and peered up into various trees, attempting to decode their divine potential and decide in which the young William Blake had seen his angels. I felt the shimmering presence of a grand narrative being written in the moments between moments, and when I watched the World Trade Centre collapse with dozens of weeping Time Outers in the sixth floor television department – when I sprinted down six flights of stairs and out into the street and stared up incredulously into the blue sky over Tottenham Court Road – it seemed as though a prelude had come to a close.<br />
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Less than two weeks later, in my first lecture at Cardiff, I sat with a few hundred aspiring journalists, pens poised over unmarked pads as a man called Mike Ungersma took the stage and told us, in no uncertain terms, that we were no different. Our event, he said, may seem to be the defining moment of modern history, but so had the events that defined any number of past generations; the reunification of Germany, the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbour. I wrote it down without believing it – images of the second plane still screamed from newsstands, footage of the collapse still roared on TV screens, and I still found myself waking from dreams in which I was stumbling around the streets of lower Manhattan at dawn, desperately trying to alert cops and commuters to the impending tragedy but being brushed aside like a bum, ignored and verbally abused until finally I looked up and saw the first plane cleaving through the pale sky.<br />
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So began the attempt to remake myself in the image of a serious journalist, to steel myself for a life spent reporting on the reshaping of a world that had been atomized before my eyes. But therein lay the problem: political implications were of no greater interest to me in the dust cloud than they were before the towers fell. I wanted to write about the people waving shirts from 101st floor windows, not US foreign policy and its radicalizing effect on the hijackers. In 2005, after three years of juggling reviews, short stories and music journalism, I took the plunge and headed to Tehran for a three-month stint as home news editor of an English-language daily and to report on the presidential election for the <i>Sunday Times</i>. I’d not been to Iran for more than twenty years, and from the moment I touched down I sensed something awakening in my DNA, the unraveling of a story that I began typing in furious two-hour sittings each morning before work in the kitchen of my grandmother’s house, the floor littered with the husks of dead cockroaches.<br />
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It soon became clear that I was writing a novel, a fictionalized account of my days spent trying to look useful in midtown newspaper offices, my farcical attempts at pitching human interest stories by phone to the no nonsense <i>Sunday Times</i> foreign desk (illegal raves by the Caspian Sea, underground poetry clubs), who barked back that they wanted election stuff only. Who was this Ahmadinejad guy who had unexpectedly made it through to a second round run-off? Had he actually said that he planned to cut the hands off those who wanted democracy in Iran? Did he really have a chance of winning? I would invariably hang up itching to get back to my book, which was evolving into the tale of a young man tracing the story of his estranged father and uncovering, in a nod to Blake, evidence of a world behind the one we see with our eyes.<br />
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I returned to the UK with a handful of newspaper cuttings and a manuscript entitled <i>The White World</i>. The opening pages won a national novel writing competition hosted by the <i>Telegraph</i>, which saw me and four other winners taken to lunch at a French restaurant in Pimlico, where we were courted by an array of competing literary agents who smiled and refreshed our wine glasses when they weren’t glaring at each other over the table. Yet none were interested in <i>The White World</i> after reading more than the first few chapters; it was too personal, they said, too obvious an attempt at catharsis, as first novels tended to be. I couldn’t argue with that, but nor could I shake the feeling that what was being rejected wasn’t my first novel so much as my personal understanding of fiction as it applied to me.<br />
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So I found myself in something of a creative no-man’s land in the months and years after Iran, having seemingly proved myself incapable of writing either objective journalism or fiction that wasn’t warped by the magnetic pole of personal history. I continued going through the motions – I was still working at <i>Time Out</i>, where I began editing guidebooks to fill the hole in my bank account and distract myself from the breakup of my relationship with fiction. I still wrote articles and reviews, even the occasional short story, but creative expression came increasingly in the form of the electronic music that I produced in my bedroom. When a series of lucky breaks in 2010 saw tracks from my first album aired on national radio and synced to television shows, I saw it as an opportunity to bow out of journalism, leave Peckham Rye and set up as a music producer in a Brixton flat. On the rare occasions when I returned to the Common and searched the sky for some sense of narrative, I got nothing. Blake’s angels were silent, and the only world that existed was the one that I could see with my own eyes.<br />
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Reaction to my denouncement of Twitter in a series of tweets was understandably incredulous. Among those who leapt to defend social media was a writer friend who noted that every generation had its emerging literary technologies and attendant naysayers – that presumably the advent of the telegram had seen scores of people throwing out their arms in despair at the death of the handwritten letter. I understood this – recognized in it more than a hint of Mike Ungersma’s insistence that we not let September 11th’s cinematic pyrotechnics distract us from the fact that it was just another historical event. But if I didn’t entirely agree with my critics, nor did I willingly engage in debate: as with my valedictory missive to Facebook, I was simply making excuses as I backed out the door. The atmosphere at the party I left, once I was safely out on the street, was none of my concern.<br />
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The truth was that I wanted to be alone. I had been forced to admit in recent weeks that I was sliding into depression, and I wanted to understand why. In some ways I had little to be sad about: in three years my music had led to a degree of recognition I’d not found in a decade of writing. I was selling respectable amounts of records without ties to a label or manager; I had traded my home studio for a rented one in Soho, and begun writing tracks for film and television; I had completed a second album that nearly killed me, but which had been well received by my 9,000 plus followers on Facebook, from whom I received daily messages of encouragement and support.<br />
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But it wasn’t enough. Out on the street, the lights of the party receding behind me, Jon Hopkins’ <i>Abandon Window</i> on loop on my headphones, I finally saw that the narrative I’d been mourning was one I had written myself, and which had died the moment I stopped writing. Putting pen to paper had its own countless ways of making me miserable, but it also served as a foundation for what I considered a life lived in full, allowing me to reflect and make sense of (if not understand) what seemed the ultimate conundrum of human existence: how to live a finite life in an infinite universe. It’s a question to which there may be no real answer, but it’s one that I personally need to be asking every day, even if my words are flung like stones into space, like the astronauts in Vonnegut’s <i>The Sirens Of Titan</i>, who find ‘what had already been found in abundance on Earth: a nightmare of meaningless without end.’<br />
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All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m going to start writing again. That these are the first words, and that I hope there will be many more. With a music career to (sort of) pay the rent, I can finally concentrate on writing the personal, cathartic stuff that matters the most, but which I always felt pressured to avoid. Which isn’t to say that I intend to write without restraint; I still consider myself a stickler for clarity and relevance, and a judicious self-editor, even if it may not be apparent in this initial outpouring. Nor would I dream of opening with an image as personal as the fountain at Gatwick without somehow bringing the whole thing full circle and artfully referring to it in my conclusion, to the extent that I have one. So here goes.<br />
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Spencer and I are still close friends – I’d say best friends, which sounds odd coming from a 34-year-old man, but there you have it. Our lives ran very much in parallel during those formative <i>Stand By Me</i> years – rarely a weekend went by that we weren’t round each others’ houses writing comics, building forest forts, abandoning ouija boards halfway through due to sudden, plummeting fear. We watched horror films day and night, attempted to make our own five-minute masterpieces of the macabre with my dad’s VCR camera, my brother and baby sister in supporting roles. We shared our first drinks together, our first drugs together, the details of our first encounters with girls together. When we went our separate ways after school – me to study English at Cambridge, Spencer to pursue photography at Falmouth – we did so with the same obsessions tattooed under our skin; each time we met over subsequent years, it seemed that the ink had spread to form identical butterflying Rorschach patterns, that our various battles with the slings and arrows of adult life were scored by the same strange music.<br />
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Spencer is a respected portrait photographer now. Barely a week goes by that he doesn’t snap some A-list celebrity for a major newspaper or magazine, every one rendered with a haunted gaze – a melancholic, other-worldly expression that is unique to Spencer’s work, and which has made him the toast of picture editors the world over. Yet for all his achievements – the international travel, the industry awards, the high profile shows and works acquired by major galleries – I’ve never seen Spencer so excited as when he was putting together a personal edit of landscapes and portraits from across the years, the pictures compiled on his website under the heading <i>The Abyss Gazes Into You</i>.<br />
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Last week I found myself in the unusual but enjoyable position of interviewing Spencer for an arts blog that was interested in the background to the project. We met in the Phoenix Artists Club in Soho, squeezed ourselves into a corner beneath walls hung with signed programs of musicals from years gone by. We spoke about Spencer’s introduction to photography; his first encounter with his mother’s camera, his first set of black-and-white photos developed in the school darkroom – pictures of hot air balloons, my baby sister, an inevitable pair of Doc Martens boots. We spoke about his documentary phase at Falmouth, his ability to coax haunting expressions from celebrities not known for their introspective sides, his insistence on using film in a digital age. Finally we spoke about the Abyss project, which Spencer explained at length, the thoughtful pauses in his answers filled with show tunes blasting from the bar stereo when I listened back on the Dictaphone that evening. He described a process almost out of his hands – how over the years he would flip through images shot for a range of personal and commercial projects and simply know that one or another had captured something sublime, hinted at something beautiful and terrifying behind everyday life. In collecting together this otherwise unrelated series of photographs – a frozen clump of dead birds, a portrait of a young BMXer, an abandoned airfield – Spencer was beginning to outline a world that he had always believed existed beyond the material veil. It was an imperfect process, and one he would be adding to for the rest of his life without hope of closure or completion, but it was also life itself, and without it, existence could have only limited meaning.<br />
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As a prism for viewing the creative process it couldn’t be more applicable to my own work. Those unexpected doorways on to the divine correspond exactly to the moments between moments that I found myself struggling to make sense of in my writing, and which ceased appearing to me when I swapped pen and paper for the warm numbness of social media, allowing it to convince me of the pointlessness of searching for personal identity when we were, after all, a single hive mind happening simultaneously. Perhaps we are, and perhaps the future really is racing towards us faster than ever, rising up in a great wave to bulldoze everything before it; at the very least, I can’t imagine it will be long before it erases our metal fountain. But in writing these words, even if no one else reads them, I feel I’m doing everything in my power to ensure that in some sense, in some place no more or less real than the table I’m sitting at now, Spencer and I will always be chasing each other around its base in our tie-dyed T-shirts and DM boots. It’s an imperfect process, but it’s the only one I know. These are my windows on to the world beyond this one: the traces we leave behind as evolving human beings, so flawed and so far from true enlightenment, finding love and learning to live on our own terms, in our own time, our world shrinking around us even as the universe expands on all sides.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4IPx_hdo8vrir0D-DZBgw5wOKFFVd2J_3MnEhwMuW0fYlAs_R1FxRJt4fZ7DOE3fCqg-4efpGT9aA4FhMcy1srTUlnZ9O4bQmzaA_ETadpbcIhFKwxDpCTF95tJIdhvEfFIHKImi8pFoK/s1600/Mountain+Steps,+Chamonix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4IPx_hdo8vrir0D-DZBgw5wOKFFVd2J_3MnEhwMuW0fYlAs_R1FxRJt4fZ7DOE3fCqg-4efpGT9aA4FhMcy1srTUlnZ9O4bQmzaA_ETadpbcIhFKwxDpCTF95tJIdhvEfFIHKImi8pFoK/s1600/Mountain+Steps,+Chamonix.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>Sestri-Levante, Italy, 9th July 2013</i><br />
<i><br /></i><i>View more of Spencer Murphy's work at <a href="http://www.spencermurphy.co.uk/">www.spencermurphy.co.uk</a></i></div>
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Cyrus Shahradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04664160640153875719noreply@blogger.com1