When I invite 500,000 people to my backyard for a party

Strolling through the city this morning, I came across mayor Robert Doyle in a necklace of gaudy gold medallions,* speaking to a handful of reporters outside the town hall. Particularly after the Occupy Melbourne shmozzle, I’m generally curious about Doyle, so stayed to watch.

He was announcing a 2.6 million dollar New Years extravaganza for Melbourne. The theme was gold. ‘It’ll rain down with gold. We’ll be encouraging Melburnians to wear gold. If you’ve got a gold lurex suit, by all means wear it,’ he said with cameraderial jolly.

The journos appeared unmoved. ‘What do you mean exactly when you say it will rain with gold,’ a stony faced young woman asked flatly, either ultra-sarcastic or extremely bored. I laughed, and she gave me a pained smile.

I blanked out for a second as Doyle started explaining the firework, vaguely, to avoid ruining the surprise. On the way to a cycling advocacy meeting, my head was filled with bikes, and I wondered what spending 2.6 million on city bike lanes would do.

(I’m comparing apples and oranges though, and being a bit wowerish. Public celebrations are important for our mental health and sense of community, and probably should be funded by the state. And gold lurex suits are awesome.)

The reporter had more egalitarian concerns: the battlers, of course. She asked Doyle if he thought spending 2.6 million dollars on a party was insulting to Australians struggling to make ends meet. It struck me that this one could be in any reporter’s template list of questions, ready to be whipped out at any time.

Doyle reminded her that the council actually does heaps for disadvantaged people (which is probably true). Plus, while the focus is often on the cost of fireworks, most of the money is spent on keeping night-time revellers safe (who could disagree with that?).

‘When I invite 500,000 people to a party in my backyard, I want to make sure they’re safe,’ he said. It’s not your backyard, I thought, but whatever.

As the conversation paused, a woman with a face of tough life, and pink highlights in her hair, stood behind Doyle and started addressing the cameras. ‘No war, no famine, no floods, no droughts, no homelessness, no tablets, no drugs…’ she said in a strong, clear voice.

It was like a poem. She went on for about a minute and it got awkward. Doyle’s burly offside moved to stand in front of her, but then did nothing, as if he intended to lay down the law but then realised he’d better not.

‘When New Years comes, I’m going to release my NO POLICY,’ she concluded before trouncing off to the other side of the road. Given that she was on topic, she must have been listening to the press conference the whole time, but I hadn’t seen her anywhere.

Doyle smiled at the reporters with amused relief, trying to share the moment with them. ‘How about no interruptions?’ he quipped, which seemed to reflect his general attitude to unseemly public disruptions.

The young reporter remained unimpressed. ‘Can we get on with it?’ she said.

*I was later informed this may have been his official mayoral necklace?

After all, this is not an academic exercise

What makes music boring? 

Fleet Foxes, the National, Bon Iver, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: my friends really rate these bands, but I’m a bit meh about them. In What Makes Music Boring, Steven Hyden notes that describing a piece of music is boring doesn’t refer to its inherent characteristics, but simply means that it didn’t resonate with us. When Hyder thinks a piece of music that other people like is boring, his main feeling is disappointment, rather than superiority because he’s more discerning or has higher tastes.

Non-fiction writers, particularly reviewers and journalists, tend to frame their critique around a piece’s supposedly objective qualities. It’s true that expressions like ‘I feel’ ‘I think’ ‘It seems to me’ ‘I guess that’ can be tiresomely repetitive, and come across as self absorbed. Representing things as personal opinion/experience, rather than fact, could also be perceived as undermining the reviewer’s authoritativeness: i.e. why don’t they just back themselves by making a judgement?

In my view, non-fiction writing that takes a experiential, subjective approach is more meaningful. Debate and analysis of facts has its place, but is ultimately limited given that things don’t exist independently of how they’re experienced. I find writing most interesting when the author interrogates their own experiences openly, as well as imagining how others in the story might be feeling.

How did they conceive of the issues they protested about?

Media coverage of the pay dispute between Victorian nurses and the government has so far been limited to recounting the history of the dispute and outlining the competing positions of both sides, with a little analysis. I appreciate that journalists probably don’t have the time or inclination to do a Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion for a state industrial dispute. But in addition to the recounting of facts and arguments, it would be interesting to find out more about the underlying ideological frameworks, perceptions, and experiences of the various participants in the conflict.

It’s a fight of sorts, so the parties in dispute take diametrically opposed positions and argue over the facts. The structure of the situation means that they’re not interested in exploring ambiguities (although perhaps they do need to consider them in anticipation of an eventual compromise). But how do you get the truth when neither of the sides have any motivation to find the murky truth that exists in between their polarised positions?

It’s my experience that being politically active, either party-political or issues-based, makes it easy to jump on a bandwagon. Sometimes you need to. As an advocate, lobbyist, or a decision-maker representing one side of a conflict, spending too much time pondering the grey areas can do your head in.

My instinct is to sympathise with the nurses. The government (simplified version) wants to reduce nurse numbers, replace nurses with ‘lower-skilled’* assistants, and reduce nurse-patient ratios, in order to save money. I’m not sure whether the money saved will be thrown back into the health system. It kind of sounds like a bad idea, doesn’t it? If something sounds like a bad idea, and you don’t have the time to find out the facts, is it fair enough to assume it’s a bad idea?

But surely there are certain tasks, like cleaning, wiping up, etc, that could be done by other workers that haven’t gone through nurse training, and hence are paid less. And is it necessary to have a completely inflexible nurse-patient ratio; are there absolutely no settings where numbers could be reduced?

I really do hate the word ‘efficiently’, I feel like it probably represents an ideology that don’t agree with. But if you’re the government, and you have a certain amount of taxpayers money to spend, don’t you have a responsibility to make sure money’s not being wasted?

There are a few problems with the government’s position though. What are they doing with the money they save? Will it be thrown back into the health system, where the funds are desperately needed? (Sorry if there’s an obvious answer to this that I don’t know, but I’ll bet there’s not). And how will the added ‘flexibility’ by implemented in practice? Given the shonky ways things are often done, it seems inevitable that corners will be cut, and patients’ care compromised. Maybe it’s better to have inflexible rules when it comes to heathcare, even it does mean that the government’s not saving every possible penny.

A friend told me he overhead a conversation between a young nurse and an old nurse on the tram yesterday. You could tell by looking at them that they were really nice people, he said. One of the nurses saw the other wearing a red shirt and then asked if she was going to the protest, and pulled out her own red shirt from her bag, taking it out of its wrapper.

He found the subsequent conversation disappointing. His description of it was something like: Old nurse: Are you going to the protest? Young nurse: Yes. Old nurse: hopefully a lot of people will be there. Young nurse: Yes… and on like this, in a kind of repetitive way. He’d been hoping to hear some discussion about the issues and their perspective on them.

Now it’s not like these guys exist for the purpose of holding ‘interesting conversations’ to appease bored commuters. But this story interested me, becuase when I was at the protest yesterday, I was wondering how many of protesters had formed their views by reflecting upon the issues in light of their own healthcare experiences, and weighing up all perspectives. Or was it more about banding together, doing it for the team?

I always get caught up in protests; they have a grand narrative feeling, giving me the sense that you’re immersed in a reality larger than yourself. I feel like there’s a war and I’m on the right side; a problematic feeling, I think. This one had a wholesome, celebratory feel. The music was perfectly rousing – they were playing ‘I see Red’ – and the protesters reminded me of a lovely, usually political dispassionate mum or aunty who’s been stirred into action on this one occasion by the absolute worthiness of a cause.

Looking at them, I wondered how they conceived of the issues they were protesting about. Were they really passionate about healthcare, with well-worked out reasons why they didn’t agree with any reduction in the ratios? Were they just there to support their mates? Did they have a well-founded feeling, borne of their experience, that actual implementation of the so-called ‘flexibility’ provisions would result in a reduction of health standards?

One thing I found a bit disingenous was that the speakers kept saying this was not about pay, it was about nurse-patient ratios, which was met by loud cheers from the crowd. But if you look at the Australian Nursing Federation’s log of claims, an 18.5% pay increase is first on their list. Conditions are obviously vitally important too, for both patient and nurse welfare, but perhaps it would have been more honest to say that this is not just about pay.

I understand that the issue of respect and resourcing for nurses is intrinsically linked to their willingness, ability, and capacity to do their job properly, which of course affects patient welfare. And I’m not doubting the commitment of nurses, but I do wonder how many would protest if the issue was purely about patient welfare. Perhaps that’s an irrelevant and not entirely helpful question given that nurse and patient welfare will always be interdependent.

*I’m not totally convinced about calling them ‘lower-skilled’, which implies a hierarchy of professional worth. I guess ‘lower-skilled’ could, in this context, mean something that is easier to learn, i.e. it takes less training? But in many contexts, it seems like ‘lower-skilled’ is used as a lazy synonym for ‘paid less.’

Prisoner privilege stories

One of the tabloid media’s favourite stories is about good hardworking Australians’ taxes being spent on prisoner privileges. This has even extended to the criticism of special treatment (ie flatscreen TVs) for prisoners in the Metropolitan Remand Centre, which is for people who haven’t actually been found guilty by the courts yet.

On Herald Sun logic, if you’ve committed rape or murder, or even if you’re suspected of such, you’re a bad person, and you don’t deserve anything. In fact, the public interest would be best served by keeping you in a dark hole and feeding you curds and whey. It wouldn’t do much for your rehabilitation, but this doesn’t matter, because you’d be in there for life anyway. Although life imprisonment, thinking about it, would be fairly costly to the taxpayer too. But let’s not think about it!

Recently the Herald Sun ran a piece about the Port Phillip Prisoners’ Committee asking for things like more money for phone calls, photographs in the visitor’s centre, 1.25 coke bottles on the canteen list, jelly crystals, and a better choice of chips. The committee is chaired by the notorious Julian Knight and other serious criminals, and the main thrust of the story was  ’murderers and rapists demand lollies and chips.’

Of course, the tabloid media want a flashy story to sell papers, which usually involves focusing on the gruesome, shocking, outraging details. * It’s probably pretty easy to find these kind of stories in a maximum security prison, not just because of its inhabitants’ history of horrible behaviour, but because of the dehumanising effects of deprivation of liberty and forced institutionalisation. In this context, you’d surely expect a bit of unhinged unreasonableness.

But in my (limited) experience dealing with prisoner issues in a previous job, small things – like getting sunscreen while working outdoors, being able to do your education, getting lollies or having access to toaster – take on immense importance to prisoners in their colourless, de-individualising world. These things represent small pockets of interest, or differentiation from others, and become ways to maintain interest in life, identity, and self worth when you’re in prison.

This is not to say that all the requests of the prisoners’ committee are reasonable, or should automatically be granted. It’s also unclear whether the prisoners’ committee effectively represents the rest of the prison population, and whether its specific demands accord with majority wishes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was extremely unrepresentative: isn’t it true that these kind of committees, even outside of prison, often attract the power seeking characters?

Requesting sterilised hair clippers seems pretty reasonable. Not sure about the lollies, although I must say, I also don’t really care. Would restricting prisons to healthy food be a good thing for prisoners’ mental health, or just mean in a small kind of way, and counterproductive to their rehabilitation? And how does the amount of taxes spent on these things compare with wasteful government spending in other contexts?

One thing’s for sure: if the readers of our more highest circulating newspaper are able to maintain any personal reflectivity and intellectual curiosity after imbibing these brain-numbing stories daily, then I’m very impressed with humanity. **

*If all you read was the Herald Sun (particularly online), you’d think Australian society was made up of sexual assailants, child molesters, mob crime, illegal immigrants, graffiti vandalism, sexy celebrities, and cute animals. Oh, and corrupt anyone-paid-by-taxpayer, and red tape.

**The comments suggest otherwise, but then who are these online commenters? Someone should do a psychological study on them. Especially the Youtube commenters, who will get into all-out warfare with each other over a Lady Gaga clip.

It was not necessarily ‘interesting sad’ to her

I was born at the worst possible time,’ an older person said to me recently. It would have made a good beginning to a story, I thought, fascinating over a darkness I’ve had the luxury of not experiencing. It turned out she was born during the depression, and grew up during the Great War. She lost a fiance to the war, and ended up remarrying, to someone she described as ‘a good man’, with whom she had a long and happy family life. But it still seemed painful to talk about this early loss; it wasn’t necessarily ‘interesting sad’ to her.

Life offers up examples of this ‘cruel hand of fate’ stuff every day, but for some reason it was only when I heard this war story that I got a sense of the disbelief and resentment you would feel if political circumstances, which often seem so distant, swept in like a hurricane to destroy your life plans. I wonder if governments would be more reluctant to go to war if they had to hear all these tragic individual stories. Should such life-affecting political decisions ideally involve a pure, disinterested analysis of deaths vs. lives saved*, or is this too coldly abstract?

On a slightly different note, I’ve also been thinking lately,  it’s not like lives have an internal logic or satisfying resolution, although we may seek to construe them that way. They’re more like a novel that arbitrarily cuts off because it’s got a fixed number of pages, ending in the same way each time. Your partner and friends are becoming senile, ill, or dying; your own physical health is deteriorating; you might have to live in a home.  Is it a myth that old people are more accepting, that because of many years of experience and reflection, they’ve often ‘come to terms’ with past or present sadness?

It could be a lonely and difficult time, although maybe there are also other, happier realities to ageing. Maybe t’s just like adapting to any form of continually experienced life unpleasantness: you just try to seize the more beautiful moments when they come, and really relish them.

*Not that they do in practice, of course. The real reasons for warmongering, I’m led to believe, are usually far murkier.

Review: This Is Not A Film

A day in the life of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, This Is Not A Film is a portrait of oppression’s grey daily grind, its stifling tedium. At the time of filming, Panahi’s under house arrest awaiting appeal on a six-year jail term and 20-year ban on making films. The film is set in his home, recording and reconstructing his daily movements. We see Panahi strive to maintain his spirits and sense of self in the face of crushing circumstances.

Panahi, along with Abbas Kiarostami, is part of the Iranian new wave school of cinema, and both are heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism; Panahi acknowledges Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief as ‘the most important film of his life.’ Of Iranian film, it’s largely only Panahi and Kiarostami’s translated films that are available in Australia. Kiarostami’s Taste of The Cherry is probably my favourite of these. I can’t remember its plot: all that comes to mind is a stark mountain landscape, a man walking around by himself, something being buried, a lump of sadness, and a soaring sense of beauty.

Like Kiarostami, Panahi tells small, humble stories about ordinary people, often women and children, who find themselves trapped in a practical and existential crisis. The cinematography is often rough and grainy, yet studied and beautiful. He uses amateur actors, and the focus is on the characters, depicted in a patient, tender but unsentimental way ­– you get a sense that Panahi is fascinated by human beings and their predicaments.

This Is Not A Film‘s credits describe it as an ‘effort’ by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and documentary maker Motjaba Mitahmasb, referring to the filmmaking ban. It appears to be partly fictionalised, as the scenes correlate with each other and there’s a symmetry between Panahi’s plight and that of the character in the film he wanted to make. Fiction construction probably helped to condense Panahi’s lived experience into 75 minutes.

It begins with Panahi slowly eating a typically simple Iranian breakfast: pita bread, jam, and butter, and fiddling on his phone. He is filming himself with a fixed camera. The apartment’s aesthetic and tasteful surrounds, with large mounted paintings and photographs, shelves of books, beautiful Persian rugs and cheerfully coloured flower pots, speak of wealth, cultivation, and refinement.

Panahi phones his friend Mirtahmasb, asking him to come over because Panahi has ‘an idea’. We get a sense of the ever-present threat here when Panahi tells Mirtahmasb he doesn’t want to say too much about his idea over the phone, and not to tell anyone he’s coming over.

Soon afterwards Panahi is on the phone again, this time to his lawyer. We can hear the woman apologetically telling him that because his crime is political, none of her legal arguments will work. In the absence of international or domestic pressure, Panahi’s sentence will either be confirmed or only slightly reduced.

Panahi tells her it’s unlikely Iranian filmmakers will risk standing up for him, and suggests, laughing darkly, that he should pack his bag and leave it by the door, in anticipation of a probable jail sentence. Then he abruptly ends the phone call and stares at the camera for a moment.

‘I must remove my cast and throw it away,’ he says at one point, speaking directly to the camera. He is comparing himself to a character in one of his early films, The Mirror, a little girl on a bus who rebelliously declares she ‘doesn’t want to be in the movie anymore’, throws off the plaster cast she’s wearing on her arm, and gets off the bus.

When Mirtahmasb arrives, Panahi tells us he’s going to evoke the film he wanted to make. He checks with Mirtahmasb: there’s nothing in the court ruling that stops him describing his films, is there? He explains that the film is about an Iranian girl in a lower-class conservative family. She wants to study liberal arts, but her parents won’t let her, and they lock her up in her room. The symmetry with Panahi’s own dilemma is obvious.

Panahi’s concentration is absolute as he uses tape to mark out the miniscule size of the girl’s room, and positions a chair to represent her small window. There is a boy, outside, staring at the window, he explains, and the girl develops a relationship with him. Panahi’s favourite moment in the film is when the girl’s sister visits him and advises the girl to go with the boy. But in the end, the boy turns out to be a secret agent.

Panahi later shows images of some of his other films, explaining how his amateur actors often drive the emotion of the film by themselves, and describing the use of setting to convey emotion. At one stage he pauses, frustrated at the futility of trying to convey an unmade film through pure description: ‘If we can tell a film, why not make one?’

In another scene, Panahi, checking the internet, comments ‘everything’s blocked.’  It’s a good metaphor for the predicament of someone living in such a maze-like regime, where there’s a barrier to everything you try to do. The level of control exerted by the state is sometimes ridiculous, if not funny: reading a government website, Panahi tells us, ‘It says here that we [the government] directed the Berlin Film Festival.’

In much of the second half of the film, Panahi takes the camera himself, accompanying the good-looking young trash collector on his rounds. The guy’s reaction to Panahi appears to be a combination of the delightfully warm Iranian hospitality and politeness, and genuine awe at being in the presence of the artist. It turns out that he’s also completing a Masters in Arts research, with very little chance of being able to find a job in his field.

This Is Not A Film may have been a poor strategic move, but perhaps Panahi felt that staying human required him to resist, and share his experience with the world. As Mirtahsab says to him at one stage, ‘What matters is that this is documented. It matters that the cameras stay on.’ It’s unnerving, heartbreaking really, to see someone with such creative vision be prevented from realising it. In a less brutish world, Panahi would be remembered as an artist, not a political cause.

Narrative therapy

Someone was telling me about narrative therapy the other day. From what I understood of our conversation, narrative therapy assumes that everyone has their dominant stories, which marginalise a whole range of other important stories.

On a more systemic level, dominant stories include ideologies, such as capitalism and patriarchy, and perhaps even feminism and democracy. Whether these stories have a positive or negative effect is beside the point, but the fact is that any kind of ideological framework obscures ways of thinking that don’t fit with it. The therapist helps the patient deconstruct their dominant narratives and unearth the more marginal stories, to find different ways of understanding their identity, and help them work out how to live as that person.

I think about it like this: when people ask you about a particular situation, without thinking you’ll often give a similar run-down of events each time. The story you will tell is compatible with accepted understandings and template modes of thinking, and it’s socially acceptable. But there are a whole lot of other alternative realities behind it that you won’t even acknowledge to yourself because they don’t quite fit into your dominant story.

To give a simple example, you go travelling, and someone asks how it is. The story you tell will be ordered and have a definite plot. It will fit with their expectations about what they are going to hear. Anything that doesn’t fit with the plot, that is ambiguous or contradictory won’t be included. But there are other stories, memories or thoughts will linger in your mind for years to come. Sometimes you catch yourself thinking about them and wonder, why am I thinking about that? And often, dismiss the thought pretty quickly.

Narrative therapy seems like a pretty useful idea for thinking, personal development, and creativity in general. Politics, maybe, too? The Occupy movement is interesting to think about from this perspective. It won’t give a list of demands that ticks the boxes in the dominant template, similarly, it’s not anti this or anti that. It’s more abstract and cosmic in outlook; trying to find a new, more real, textured and nuanced way of thinking about things and doing things.

But as you’ve seen, this doesn’t go down well in our reductionist political landscape, where things need to have a nature, purpose and function, and ambiguity, uncertainty, slowness and softness are often painted as bad. Even if the movement peters out, interesting ideas have a long life, and will often resurface is some shape or form.

In Iran, looking for…something

A slightly navel gazing but possibly interesting reflection on a trip to Iran (in 2004). 

Iran made me realise that oppression isn’t always cataclysmic or dramatic. On a day-to-day level, it’s tedious and stifling. Iran looks normal and modern in some ways. In the cities, you can go out dinner with your friends at a nice restaurant, wearing excessive makeup and dressed to the nines (perhaps with your headscarf pushed back as far as possible and rebellious three-quarter pants), discussing poetry and art. But you always have to keep the rules at the back of your mind. Even the most routine activities frequently require a consideration of how the rules might apply, and a weighing up exercise about whether to break them, as Iranians often do. And you regularly see pyjama-suited mullahs and religious police roaming the streets, presumably with little else to do but get people in trouble. What an eyesore.

More ephemerally, I think there’s a general psychological weight to living under an oppressive dictatorship, a heaviness of mind. Iranians seemed depressed, although this may be an unreliable impression, as I was only there for a month. Previously, without giving it much thought, I’d assumed that as we are all subjected to some kind of constraints, whether social or legal, unless people (or their friends) are being physically targeted, their happiness level will naturally adjust to their circumstances. But of course, there are degrees of constraint. Most Iranians have friends or family that have suffered at the hands of the regime, either now or in the past, and they live under a real threat of state-based violence.

I visited Iran overland from China and Pakistan when I was 21. At that age, I welcomed experiences that were strange, confronting, even unpleasant, as a necessary step on my journey towards enlightenment and becoming an ‘interesting’ person. So yes, there was an element of wanting to make myself feel shiny by traveling to extreme places, but also a genuine search for understanding. It’s worth asking whether visiting developing countries was the only way to achieve this, but I definitely learned things on that trip that I now carry with me every day.

In this novelty-seeking state of mind, I was initially fascinated by what it would be like to live in a theocratic dictatorship. But I quickly got tired of having to observe the many rules about what you can wear, do, say. I remember small things, like falling asleep on a bus sleep, becoming aware that my hijab was slipping off and that people were staring at my hair, and having to wake up to readjust it. Or getting hungry during Ramadan while out walking with a friend, and the only solution being to get in a taxi, duck down, and scoff two oranges in quick succession. Of course, I was in Iran by choice, so these were only trivialities to me, but they were wearing nonetheless.

In Pakistan, the rules were stricter, yet they didn’t feel as oppressive, perhaps because they were socially rather than legally enforced. I spent time in both countries during Ramadan. In Iran, I saw people walking along scoffing bits of bread in their mouth, or having a sneaky cigarette in a dark corner. I never saw anything like that in Pakistan. I’d also wear the hijab there, but only in really conservative areas. One time in Pakistan I was in a marvellously character-filled, but definitely rough, old bazaar in Peshawar and a man came up to me and said, ‘Put your headscarf back on, they might kill you,’ gesturing at the market crowd.  I’m think he was pulling the piss but I couldn’t be sure.

Most Iranians I visited would take their hijabs off as soon as they entered the house. But toward the end of my trip I was visiting my Swedish–Iranian friend Bahrum’s family (more about him in a minute), and when I went to whip it off before going into their house, he said, ‘Hang on, don’t assume.’ He suggested it would be more polite if I entered the house wearing it, and then he could gauge his family’s reaction to me taking it off.

Most of the Iranians I spoke to were critical of the theocratic dictatorship, expressing visceral hatred of mullahs and a sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes qualified, appreciation for the West – I was surprised they talked about politics so openly. Nobody said they wanted a revolution, though – after all, they’d had already one, with high hopes, and look where that ended up. Some Iranians even suggested to me that America should bomb their country, which seems like a terrible idea. Only one person I spoke to was supportive of the regime. Of course, there’s an in-built bias to this story, in that the pro-Western Iranians were probably more likely to speak to foreigners (and perhaps, to speak English?).

What most captivated me about Iran was the sense of poetry and mysticism embodied in its language, poetry, architecture and cinema. Persian is a very lyrical language, and not dissimilar to French. Not being able to speak Persian meant I couldn’t get a full sense of Iran’s cultural traditions, but I liked the vibe I got: transcendant, mystical Persian poetry; realist, highly allegorical New Wave cinema; Zoroastrian fire traditions; elaborate mosaics; and elaborate paintings on the ceilings of buildings of Persians drinking wine and generally being sumptuous. A lot of these traditions dated back to pre-Islamic times, and when I asked Persians about their culture, they’d often remind me that they weren’t always Islamic, as if they were saying ‘This is what we’re really like.’

The architecture took my breath away: beautiful gardens, graceful lines, tranquil spaces, perfectly placed bodies of water.

I recently visited the Taj Mahal in India, a melancholy, moving piece of architecture. I wasn’t surprised when I found out it was built by an Iranian architect.

Iranians may live under a crude, unmannered regime, but most of the people I met were educated, cultured, and sophisticated. Public appearances are important. People are very polite, and put a lot of effort into their external appearances. For the girls, this can mean plastered makeup and in Tehran, plastic marked by little plastic bandages over their noses. Bahrum commented to me, somewhat bitterly, that Iranians have two faces.

There’s a word for Iranian politeness ­– taarof ­– and one aspect of this is that if someone offers you something, you usually decline it once, even twice, before taking it. But people were so generous to me: they’d almost always offer the third time. This hospitality extended to asking me to stay with them, and I did, quite a few times.

Looking back on that, I don’t understand how I was so trusting, but it never worked out badly. The worst thing that happened was that I felt a bit claustrophobically cosseted. Like, for example, I’d sniff and then next minute there’d be a tissue in my hand. And I’d be discouraged from going for walks by myself: your hosts would always send someone with you, or make it a bit of an event.

Once I arrived at a dodgy bus station late at night by mistake; I’d meant to go to Tehran and I ended up in Karaj instead (a nearby city, but now becoming like an outer suburb of Tehran).  There were all these seedy men whom it seemed (to me) were circling like sharks. I was over-tired and paranoid, and didn’t feel like I could even trust the transport operators. Then this beautiful young girl came up to me and asked me the polite Persian equivalent of ‘What the fuck are you doing here by yourself?’ I subsequently romanticised the experience in a group email:

‘I was surrounded by several shady unshaven men who I was trying to ask where a hotel was but they didn’t speak any English. Then alighted an angel, with a beautiful moony face shimmering out of her chador, and big black eyes, she said ‘come’ and I followed blindly. She took me out to her car where sat her kind-faced father and her big brother bouncing her baby brother on his lap. I stayed with that family for two nights and got the treatment of a queen, which I submitted to with grateful infantile surrender.’

Viewing through this wide-eyed idealised prism definitely meant that I missed some of the texture and detail of experiences. At the same time, staying with that family was a pretty idyllic experience, as far as idylls go. It was just like staying with family friends anywhere in the world. When we got home, the girl’s mum was cooking dinner, a kind of Iranian spaghetti. She couldn’t speak English, but as she was serving up the dinner she launched into the song ‘Happy Birthday,’ giggling.

The girl was really kind to me but without making me feel like a freak. Her English wasn’t great, but it was somehow really easy to talk to her – I felt like we could have been friends at school. We watched the news with her Dad, who when the Ayatollah came onto the screen, turned to me and said in a winking, conspiratorial way, ‘Shayturn, Shayturn’. The Persian equivalent of Satan.

As they were driving me to the bus station, they gave me a present. I felt a bit bad, because after all the hospitality they’d shown me, it should have been the other way around, although I don’t think they would have let me venture off by myself to go gift shopping for them. A similar thing had happened to me in Pakistan –  I think it’s just extreme Muslim hospitality.

It felt like people were nicer in Iran and Pakistan than anywhere else. I remember saying to Bahrum, ‘People in Pakistan and Iran are so nice!’ He replied, throwing up his hands, ‘Everyone everywhere’s nice!’

I first saw Bahrum walking down the stairs at a backpackers in Isfahan. They had an old school backpackers there, probably a relic from the hippy trail days, and male and female travelers could stay in the same dorm (how that slipped through the moral police’s net, I’ll never know).

I liked Bahrum as soon as I saw him: long dark hair in a ponytail, skinny with spider legs, blackish eyes and a craggy, friendly face. I couldn’t quite place him: he looked Iranian and spoke Persian, but no Iranians had long hair, and he dressed like Westerner. The Iranians generally didn’t know what to make of it either – they couldn’t tell if he was foreigner or Iranian, and at one hotel, they thought he was a Sufi dervish.

Bahrum’s story was that he was involved in the Islamic revolution in the 1980s, as a Communist. When it all went wrong he caught a boat to Dubai with only a few dollars to his name. He was 21. He then fled to Sweden as a refugee, spending the next twenty years there. So he’d spent about 20 years in Iran, and 20 in Sweden. He didn’t feel fully a part of either culture, and tended to complain about both.

Bahrum was now 43, and this was his first visit back to Iran, to visit his family.  After staying with them for a while, he felt a claustrophobic, so went to stay at this backpackers in Isfahan he’d heard about, presumably for a bit of foreign company, and maybe as a way to meet girls, too.  Now I don’t know whether the whole story was true, and I’m not even sure why I question it – everything that happened seemed fairly consistent with it.

Here’s how I romanticised Bahrum in my group email:

Bahrum is a decidedly crazy man living in a perpetual state of cultural homesickness that he is not afraid to complain about. He told me jokes and disconnected stories which I struggled to understand and wouldn’t let me pay for anything [this is pretty typical Iranian hospitality] I can say his smile would light the hearths of half the people of Iran (God knows they need it). ’

At that stage I was starting to think I believed in God too, in a religiously polygamous kind of way. To an extent, this tendency stemmed from a simplistic conclusion I’d drawn from positive experiences in Pakistan and Iran, i.e. ‘religious faith makes people honest and kind.’ I also had a desire to transcend the material specificities of things, the arbitrary constraints of language and intellectual frameworks, and gain a higher understanding.

I was influenced by Bahrum too, who’d give thanks to God all the time but wasn’t religious. One night we were walking stoned around the riverbanks of Isfahan once and I asked him if he was a Muslim. He threw his hands up and said, ‘I love God!’

What I now somewhat disparagingly call my ‘spiritual stage’ continued when I got back to Perth, and involved diverse activities like reading books on every type of religion, but particularly Sufism and Buddhism; sleeping on a yoga mat and never buying anything; and discreetly clasping my hands together in silent prayer whenever something good happened to me, thinking that such gratitude would bring positive karma. It was a bit cheesy, but I’m also slightly sad that stage is over.

Bahrum and I spent about three days just walking around Isfahan, mostly on the riverbanks and bridges. It was a dreamy, poetic time, aided by the amount of ganja we smoked as we were walking around, out of a coke can bong. Of course, I romanticised it in my group email:

‘We spent three days just walking, and smoking, and talking, and talking, amidst Isfahan’s beautiful, waiting lights.’

When I refer to Isfahan as ‘waiting’, I think meant ‘waiting for democracy.’ Which sounds a bit trite, but Isfahan had a beautiful sense of possibility, and I did wonder what it would be like under a democratic government.

Isfahan’s stone bridges were filled with quaint, beautiful teahouses. You could sit in the arced window of the bridge drinking tea, smoking nargile, and looking out at the water. Boys and girls would sit together in an obviously intimate kind of way, presumably on illicit dates. I guess the teahouse owners just turned a blind eye to it. I heard that the government shut down some of those tea houses a few years ago, purportedly for anti-smoking reasons, but more likely for social control.

Walking around the river, you’d catch young guys playing guitar and smoking pot in shadowy corners of the bridge. At night, the teahouse windows became burnt orange orbs shining onto black water. I remember Bahrum and I talking about music while staring at the water. He said he didn’t generally like music that much (this seemed insane to me) but Pink Floyd were the exception. ‘How good would it be if Pink Floyd stood played on the water there,’ he said. ‘Yeah, that’d be really nice.’

Bahrum and I decided to travel around Iran together in this green van he’d bought. But then his father got sick, and he needed to go home. He told me it would only be a few days, so I flew (very cheaply) home to Shiraz with him, staying with his family on the farm for a while, and then in a hotel in Shiraz. Bahrum kept saying, trying to convince himself as well I think, that we’d soon drive away in his van and start our travels.

Then his Dad died, and I had to leave. I caught a 24 hour bus to Tabriz. As soon as I got on the bus, I started crying, convincing myself that I’d been in love with Bahrum, although it’s also possible I was just tired and lonely. Later on, I convinced myself that I regretted nothing ever happening with Bahrum. It could have, but I didn’t want it at the time.

He’d never made a move on me, but he did made some suggestive comments, after which I told him that the age difference was too great. ‘I know this well,’ he said, as if he never expected anything at all. And I remember looking at him thinking he was just too physically old. It’s easy to regret things in retrospect, and I think my infatuation with Bahrum was probably highly contextual and conceptual. My do-nothing instincts were probably right.

The bus trip to Tabriz was the worst of my life. The bus driver was being very kind to me, offering me tea, a blanket, a pillow, and some kind of tablet. I only drank a little bit of the tea, because it was already 1.00 am in the morning and I didn’t want the caffeine to wake me up. I didn’t take the table though, not knowing what it was.  The driver let me sit in the back of the bus where there was a bed. I went to sleep.

When I woke up, we were at the bus station and the bus had stopped. The driver was leaning over me and pressing on my shoulders quite hard. I remember being pretty sure he was going to start trying to have sex with me, although it’s possible he could have just being trying to wake me up. I tried to wake up, but couldn’t break out of my sleep, which is really unusual for me. Eventually I did though, screaming, pushing him back, and running off the bus. He didn’t try to take it any further.

I didn’t think about this at the time, but later I wondered whether he might have put a date rape drug in the tea. It wasn’t the first time I had troubles with men in Iran. Most were kind, helpful, and gentlemanly, but some would follow me in parks, shopkeepers would try to feel me up, and at one hotel in Shiraz, one of the hotel guys kept trying the door of my room at night. The cost of sexual repression, perhaps, combined with outdated cultural attitudes toward women, and the standard sexual harassment experienced by a solo female traveller.

Somewhat annoyingly, many of the other female travelers I met didn’t have any problems at all, which slightly made me feel like it was my fault (was it what I was wearing, my lack of discreetness, my red hair?) although I did later hear of one solo traveler being raped in Iran (as could happen anywhere).

My obsession with Iran continued when I got home, and involved watching as many Iranian movies, translating Persian poems as I could, and even taking Farsi lessons. It also involved getting an Iranian boyfriend refugee boyfriend who, despite being was warm and kind, spoke little English and was fairly chauvinistic: i.e. he’d pay for everything and might have lend me his jacket if I was cold, but would also beseech me to brush my air, and once, slightly ridiculously, offered to pay for a breast enlargement. We had little in common.

Before this short-lived relationship ended, I asked the Iranian boyfriend to help me my friend Bahrum in Iran. Surprisingly, Bahrum picked up the phone. He was now married and had taken over his father’s farm. He invited me to visit him and his wife. ‘I can really show you around now, you can help us on the farm, we can all travel around together.’ A nice thought, although I don’t think it will happen.

And Yet…fashion

I came up with a new genre of fashion yesterday at the Harvest festival. It’s called ‘And Yet…’ It’s when someone’s wearing something disgusting, and yet…it looks absolutely brilliant on them (you think, but you can’t be completely sure – in this sense it’s a very indeterminate category, and influenced by a number of very subtle factors. So it’s often very hard to tell whether something fits into the ‘And Yet…’ category).

There were a number of ‘And Yet…’ outfits at the festival, including a girl wearing a tan skirt suit, and another girl wearing bright blue sequinned shorts with curtain-like threads hanging down the back of them. Inner Melbourne women are very good at this kind of fashion. Not because they’re young, or hot (although I think hotness, subjectively defined of course, does help you slip into the And Yet…category), but because they have creativity, confidence, and panache.

Guys not so much, sadly. Theoretically, it’s a totally gender neutral category, but as we all know, guys aren’t encouraged to dress up, and particularly not to be experimentally fashionable. Most of the well-dressed guys I saw yesterday kept it fairly plain, and of those I saw that did experiment, they were more likely to be in the ‘Just plain wrong’ category than the ‘And Yet…’ That said, I love it so much when guys make an effort with fashion that I’d be happy to flex the ‘And Yet’ category in the interests of affirmative action.

I think it’s sad that guys aren’t encouraged to dress up more. In the city pre-races the other day, I heard one young guy say to another, ‘You look great mate.’ I love to hear that. But he was only wearing a suit – definitely better than the standard wife-beater and boardies, and potentially quite hot, but not overly eye-inspiring. Suits are a bit penguinish, really.

I went to a wedding in Fiji recently, where the tradition is for guys to wear a skirt-like thing and a colourful floral shirt. The Aussie guys got into the spirit of things, and everyone was complimenting them on their outfits. And I sensed they were loving it. It was nice – usually it’s all about how the women look, with the guys being a mere appendage to the feminine adornment.

‘While some may think X, others may think Y’ – Return to Earth by Lally Katz

‘I don’t get it,’ a man behind me pronounced loudly at the conclusion of Lally Katz’s Return to Earth. I wanted to sock him for his lack of empathy – didn’t he understand that others might be reacting to the play differently from him, that their reactions were equally valid, and that they weren’t asking for his opinion?

But I also have a tendency towards visible bodily reactions and comments in movies, so this was a good lesson for me.

I’ve experienced a spate of bad (or what I think is bad) theatre since I moved to Melbourne (here’s an example), and was feeling negative about Melbourne Theatre Company, too. So they’re trying to attract young people, with $30 tickets for under 30s, but they don’t offer concession tickets. That said, you can go in at 9.00am and get Early Bird tickets for $18, admittedly a good discount on the usual $80. But then you have to sit in an awkward seat. At the last play we went to (which I found appalling), there were spare seats in better locations, and the ushers were quite reluctant to let us move – they asked us to wait until the lights went down.

But Return to Earth is really something. It’s about a Alice (she changed her name from Erika, presumably as part of some kind of awakening), a girl who’s been away for a while and comes back to Tathra, her hometown. The first scene sees her sitting with her mum and dad on the couch while they explain a game show they like to watch, one where you have to guess what answer the other contestants will give. That’s so wonderful, says Alice, wide-eyed. ‘You have to really understand humans.’

On her apparently long journey away from Tathra and into ‘outer space’, as it’s referred to, Alice has had ephiphanies that she’s now unable to communicate to anyone at home. Her parents are also apparently unable to understand why she was away for so long. But back in her ordinary yet absurd hometown, a place where the auto-repair and hospital are next to each other so that they can mend cars after accidents while people get treated and her mum is cross-stitching a doggie from a missing dog poster, she’s trying to find beauty in the everyday.

She wants to fall in love, and have a baby, and she romantically affixes herself to an emotionally intelligent fisherman and auto-mechanic. She wants to be a character in a soap opera, to be constantly shocked but never surprised at what people do. This comes across not as a self-aware coping mechanism in an uncomfortable environment, but an earnest imaginative endeavour. There is a genuinely poetic element to her imaginative fantasies and reveries, but by being so self-absorbed, as her friend points out, she misses the detail and texture of the reality that others are living.

In some ways, Alice is annoyingly oblivious, self-absorbed, and simplistic. But I think she’s a representation of a way of thinking more than anything, and I identified with her. I do that: romanticise things and get so wrapped up in my fantasies that sometimes I miss what’s actually happening, so that when I share my fantasy with people, they’re like, ‘What the fuck?’

There were a few awkward moments, parts where you could see the director’s (or writer’s?) manipulations and constructions too obviously, and it was a bit jarring. For me, most of these moments involved the inexplicable antics of Alice’s slightly insipid niece, who had cancer. But overall, I was amazed by the sophistication of Katz’s perceptions about people and their tensions, and the idea of the pull of a romanticised fantasy world versus the sometimes mundane (and often, nothing else) realities of home and family.

My friends suggested we go for a drink afterwards to analyse the film, and I almost didn’t want to – wanted to keep it to myself. It turned out that one liked it and the other didn’t, thinking Alice’s character was insufficiently developed. At some stage last night, we got to talking about reviews, particularly reviews about consumer items, and how, in an attempt to tell people whether or not something will appeal to them, they often use some kind of variation on ‘While some may think X, others may think Y.’ This would probably be a good template for a review of Return to Earth, but I’m not going to write it.

Your honour will see that we are in for some inclement weather: Occupy Melbourne and the right to protest

‘Your honour will see that we are in for some inclement weather’, Ron Merkel QC pointed out at a Federal Court directions hearing today, trying to persuade the judge to make an interim order allowing Occupy Melbourne to put up their tents in Treasury Gardens pending a final decision on their case. Basically, Occupy Melbourne are seeking an order to prevent the City of Melbourne from evicting them, but until such time as the proper trial occurs, they are asking for an interim order to allow them to put up their private tents, a large tent for cooking and eating, and some protest banners.

James Muldoon, the litigant from Occupy Melbourne (as I understand, he’s not representing the group – they don’t do things that way) has challenged the council’s power to evict protesters on the basis that it unreasonably limits the constitutional freedom to political constitution (one of the few human rights protected by our constitution, and it’s not even written there – it had to be implied by judges). The Victorian Human Rights Charter is relevant too – as a public authority, the council is bound to act compatibly with human rights.

On 4 November, the City of Melbourne served a notice of compliance telling Occupy Melbourne that they had infringed by-laws the use of anti-camping and for using portable advertising signs (i.e. political banners). Occupy Melbourne sent letters to the police and council to see whether they could stay in the gardens over the weekend. The council didn’t respond, but the police told the protesters that they could stay there, for now, as long as they didn’t erect tents. Protesters asked police if they could sleep under the tarpaulin, but police said this was also a structure. Signs were OK, but as long as they didn’t put them on the ground or stick them up anywhere. The police said that as long as the protesters complied with these conditions, they wouldn’t be evicted over the weekend.

Yesterday, Occupy Melbourne applied for a permit to camp in Treasury Gardens, which at the trial today, the Council promised to respond to within 48 hours. Last night, the Council of Melbourne submitted an affidavit saying that they wouldn’t enforce the notice. This meant that at the hearing today, Occupy Melbourne amended their application for an interim order to ask for the following specifics:

• A tent not exceeding 8m by 8m to be erected and used for kitchen and sleeping between 9.00 pm and 9.00 am
• Personal tents for sleeping between 9.00 pm and 9.00 am
• Signs on tents not more than 1.5m by 4.00m saying ‘Welcome to Occupy Melbourne, Welcome to Direct Democracy’

Merkel pointed out that occupation of a public place was central to the global occupy movement, and therefore an important aspect of the Occupy Melbourne protest (he also noted that even if there are only a few people actually sleeping out, there’s a social media aspect to it, which involves an even wide group).

Actually, the camping aspect of Occupy Melbourne is something I’ve struggled with a bit. It seemed to make more sense in America, where Wall Street is an obvious symbol of corporate greed. But in Melbourne, I think most people just saw the protesters as an annoyance. ‘Occupy Melbourne’ – it doesn’t make quite as much sense as ‘Occupy Wall Street’. I think that’s why Robert Doyle, an experienced politician, felt like he could say all those ridiculous things in the Sunday Herald Sun, the most widely circulated newspaper in Australia.

Occupation of public space is obviously conceptually related to what Occupy Melbourne are protesting about, ie private appropriate of public goods and unfair distribution of resources, which might well include public land (and note, one of the first motions passed by Occupy Melbourne was to support a Treaty). Members of the Occupy movement also say that camping is an important part of their movement too, in that it creates a unique atmosphere for generating ideas, a sense of community, and that it’s a social leveller.

But  I wonder if, given the political climate in Australia, the focus on actually occupying space that people don’t actually have any negative associations with (i.e. City Square, Bolan Lane, the State Library, Treasury Gardens), will do more harm than good, distracting people from other important issues.

On the other hand, perhaps if Occupy were able to camp in public for a while, public attitudes would become more positive, as people see that they’re not a bunch of dirty hippy layabouts, or that even if some are, that’s not necessarily such a threatening thing. Actually, my experience so far is that, while there are naturally the usual freaks that are always attracted to these kind of things, there are some smart, switched on people involved in the movement.

Merkel’s arguments about the council by-laws seemed, broadly, to be as follows (and please excuse me if I have not got them quite right, my head was swimming a bit with the legal stuff):

• Prima-facie (on the face of it) case that political signs are not caught by the clause in council by-laws that prevents advertising, because advertising tends to be commercial in-nature.
• Even if anti-advertising provisions are interpreted to include political signs, they are invalid under the Commonwealth Constitution to the extent that they limit political communication.
• The Council, in the way they apply the law (and the decision about the permit), have a duty to act compatibly with the Victorian Human Rights Charter, including the freedom of association and political communication.
• The anti-tent provisions may be invalid to the extent that they are used to prevent political protest, and therefore infringe the implied constitutional right to freedom of political communication.

Merkel also referred to the Evans case, in which the Sydney Federal Court struck down World Youth Day Regulations that made it a crime to ‘annoy’ participants at World Youth Day, allowing political protesters at the event to hand out condoms without fear of punishment.

The hearing today touched on bigger questions about who controls public space, and how we should cooperate to share public space. Merkel’s lawyerly rhetoric was entertaining too; I generally find such words lofty and elite, but in this instance it was comforting to hear those words of power turned around to make the less powerless seem like the legitimate and genteel ones, those on the side of common sense.

In Merkel’s words, the police eviction of 21 October (‘the October regime’) was ‘unseemly’ and ‘disastrous…the public believed it was a public place, but Doyle seemed to consider it his private backyard.’ Letting people camp in the Gardens, but denying them shelter for health and hygiene, was ‘arbitrary and capricious’ and not letting people put up a tent after 9.00 pm in a public gardens was ‘absurd’ – after all, how could that possibly interfere with the amenity or beauty of a public area?

Having to protest without identifying yourself with banners was ‘the antithesis’ of a political protest, he said. He said that there was a ‘reasonable apprehension’ that if the Occupy Melbourne protesters were not granted a ‘minimal subsistence level’, they might take the view that they have a constitutional right to put up tents and the police can’t stop them. And then it got a bit dodgy. Merkel pointed that he didn’t represent the movement, only the litigant, and suggested that there might be ‘mayhem’ if the protesters were not allowed to put their tents up, and that if forcibly removed, the protesters may feel they are ‘entitled to physically fight my learned friend’s [the other lawyer’s] authorised officers.’

Merkel seemed to me to be implying that the protesters would riot if they didn’t get their way, and that’s how the judge interpreted it too. This was a bit out of the blue given that one of the Occupy movement’s first resolutions was that their protest would be peaceful, (and having met some of them, I can tell you they’re not the rioting type). But that said, Merkel was, in general, excellent.

The City of Melbourne lawyer’s main arguments seemed to be that it would be an inappropriate exercise of judicial power for the judge to the protesters ‘extra’ to what they had now through an interim injunction allowing them to put their tents up, i.e. to change the ‘status quo’. He argued that allowing the protesters to stay (for now), but not put tents, signs, or any other infrastructure up, did not infringe on their right to political protest. ‘There is no evidence that not having a tent will stop anyone protesting’, he said. This was met by sighs and shaking of heads from the Occupy Melbourne people in the back row, who’d actually experienced the reality of sleeping without shelter.

In support of this argument, the City of Melbourne lawyer relied on the litigant’s affidavit, which said that he would personally keep protesting even without a tent. However, the lack of security in their accommodation, combined with being forbidden to put tents up, has actually discouraged a lot of Occupy Melbourne people, existing campers and, I suspect, potential campers. In City Square, there were 70 or 80 people camping, and now there are only 20, despite Treasury Gardens seeming like a lot nicer place to camp.

The judge seemed unwilling to grant the interim injunction allowing protesters to set up tents, particularly as the situation was likely to change depending on whether or not Council would grant the permit. Merkel asked for an adjournment to allow Muldoon to prepare an affidavit about why not having a tent would actually impede on their ability to protest. The Council wasn’t keen on the adjournment, accusing Merkel of ‘keeping his powder dry.’ In the end, a compromise position was reached and the directions hearing was adjourned until 2.15 pm on Friday. ‘Unusually’, noted Merkel during the case, ‘Occupy Melbourne come to seek rule of law, rather than the rule of power or the rule of men.’ I’m not sure the distinction is so clear-cut.

And at Occupy Melbourne’s General Assembly that night, the ‘inclement weather’ Merkel was referring to arrived in the form what was, for Melbourne at least, a fairly dramatic thunderstorm. Still, Occupy Melbourne voted to respect the authority of the court, and opted not to put up tents.

*Update: I wasn’t able to go to the adjourned directions hearing on Friday but apparently Occupy Melbourne’s request for an interim order so they could put their tents up was denied. However, the substantive case will go ahead, with a trial date yet to be set.*