As of midnight last night, Valiasr st, the longest thoroughfare of the city, has been turned converted to a 1-way street going north. I still don't get exactly why they did this--I watched a talk show last week on which an expert was saying that making Valiasr one way would help speed up traffic and reduce pollution (?), but the problem seems to be that before conversion North-South traffic was just about as bad as South-North traffic and they haven't converted any other streets to one-way running south. I just spoke with a friend who lives in Jordan and she was complaining that traffic was unbelievable (ie unbelievable by Tehran standards, not American) today because now everyone heading south takes Jordan (named after an American doctor--now renamed Africa Boulevard but everybody still calls it its pre-revolutionary name), the other main North-South road running through central Tehran. So I think it may be faster to walk the several miles from class back home down Valiasr. I think buses are still allowed to run southward down Valiasr, but their going to be even many times more hot and crowded and sweaty than usual since everybody will have the same idea.
Walking home was what I got stuck doing with last night at about 1230, without enough money for a darbast taxi. I'd just spent more money on a meal at a posh Jordan restaurant than I'd spent in the previous week, finding myself, arguing dependency theory and Islamic political mobilization to the economic neoliberalism and secularism of a guy who'd until a few weeks ago been working for Press TV, the official English-language news agency of the Islamic Republic of Iran, over tagliatelle scampi and pannacotta.
There were a couple guys in the dinner group who'd just terminated their relationships with Press TV, both of whom had Iranian parents but had grown up in the West. The guy I mentioned (let's call him Jimmy) had been sent out to pasture because of his connection to the Mousavi people, and was now talking revolution openly enough to make me look around the restaurant nervously. It was the kind of place where I couldn't imagine Basijis hung out, but was equally the kind of place where everybody would understand English (the lingua franca at our dinner table--I've been getting so lazy lately about speaking Persian).
The other Press TV guy (alias Johnny) had been working for them right up through the election campaign, had interviewed various candidates etc. Then immediately after the election, he was sitting down at the office doing a fluff piece on the Ahmedinejad victory when he saw the news that thousands had gathered in Azadi Square. Then that it was tens of thousands. Then hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million. I've got to go, he told his boss. Go, the boss grinned, and he never went back. That was the day when they tried to burn the Basij headquarters near Azadi and the first protesters were killed.
The two, along with a couple other journalists at the table, reminisced about all the stuff the Press TV team had gotten away with-- featuring interviewees from Tel Aviv, live interviews with anti-Chavez activists during his state visit, etc. From their talk it seemed like their bosses were generally sympathetic, held back only by their own bosses. Made me wonder how far up the chain of command of the state media machine you have to go before you get true believers who aren't trying to quietly undermine the official message.
Jimmy told me he was done with journalism. The plan now was to start a hip restaurant called Green Path of Hope. I'll put a picture of a Leprechaun next to the name and it will take the Basijis at least 5 months to figure out what it means, he said.
Hichkas, the Iranian rapper, also came up in conversation. My own experience of Iranian rappers has been that they're all talk, so I'd been surprised a week or so ago by the story of an American-Iranian classmate:
He's friends with a rapper here named Sahand, and one time in the middle of the night got a call from this Sahand asking him if he had $2000 cash. Sahand's crew had gotten into a fight with Hichkas's, he said, and Hichkas had chopped off one of his friend's hand with a sword. They needed the money for the hospital, to get the hand reattached.
I doubted the veracity of the story, but liked it enough to propagate the gossip anyway. Another journalist at the table said he was good friends with Soroush/Hichkas and he actually wasn't violent at all, so I guess the story was nonsense after all.
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