killing denouement

I came across these killer Iranian graphics from Belog today – mostly posters and book covers, and all pretty sick. I don’t speak farsi so I can’t be sure but the one on the left seems to say something like “(her?) song incites/stirs”? Speaking of the script, I taught myself to read it when in Mumbai/Srinagar earlier this summer – it’s pretty close to Arabic, except with a few more letters and joined differently. Which works fine reading Urdu, but Kashmiri not so much – though I do have a fair amount of years before I’d need fluency for PhD research.

These images are from the 1971 and 1967 yearbook editions (“Ettela’at Sal”) of long-running newspaper, Ettela’at which calls itself “the only Persian daily newspaper published outside Iran”. It’d be interesting to see one published today, if they’re still even being made? I especially like this flipbookish advertising mechanism from the cover of the 1967 edition.

These next images are political posters, all done circa the 1979 Iranian revolution- I wonder what’s being put out, if anything these days? I kind of suspect it’s probably to be found on Twitter, which I should probably figure out how to navigate sometime, but still creeps me out in its hyper-techocratic be-connected-in-140-characters-or less. Though not as much as “Augmented Reality”, in which iPhone users can point their phone at things to retrieve data on them. Perhaps it’s useful for places – they give the example of visiting a museum or the Eiffel Tower, and having the opening/closing times and admission fees brought up on screen. It also works for people though – ostensibly for security purposes but imagine the access nightmares – ” sorry you can’t dine here, you make less than 20k a year and livein the wrong postcode” or similar. Like any border or technological barrier worth its salt it is never something that is enables access but instead something that is denied. It seems unknown how accurate these will be though – would they not recognise someone with a beard, or would it be more like airport iris scanners that are fairly inescapable?

And finally, some mid-late 70s RIPAH -the Review of Iranian Political Economy and History – and the supercurious/mysterious Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den. The texts are seemingly available in full here, and seem pretty interesting, if long. They’re described as

“a legendary series of Iranian books containing classified US documents that were found in the American Embassy in Tehran when it was taken over by revolutionaries. These books are very hard to come by, and until now there has been no concerted effort to post them. In 1977 Iranian students seized an entire archive of CIA and State Department documents, which represented one of the most extensive losses of secret data in the history of any modern intelligence service. Even though many of these documents were shredded into thin strips before the Embassy, and CIA base, was surrendered, the Iranians managed to piece them back together. “

“They were then published in 1982 in 54 volumes under the title “Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den”, and are sold in the United States for $246.50. As the Teheran Embassy evidently served as a regional base for the CIA, the scope of this captured intelligence goes well beyond intelligence reports on Iran alone. They cover the Soviet Union, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. There are also secret analysis of arcane subjects ranging from the effectiveness of Israeli intelligence to Soviet oil production. Most of these documents are labeled “Confidential” or “Secret” and remain classified to this day”.