It started with a sticker. On the way past one of the countless food trucks in Lower Manhattan, where workers and bankers queue up before sunrise, after their shift or jogging round, and all wanting the same freshly brewed filter coffee. It‘s May, and I‘m in this stimulating, nerve-wracking city for the third year in a row, which has just about managed to push its mass graves of coronavirus victims to the outskirts of the city in order to face the looming catastrophe of the social and economic decline of the States with renewed vigor. For the second time on Mother‘s Day, I‘m visiting my friend, the artist Shirin Neshat, as if I didn’t have a mother of my own to visit. And as if I weren‘t myself the mother of a distant son who causes me grief because I brought him into a world that isn‘t waiting for him.
We both sleep poorly, for related reasons. The sticker immediately catches my eye: a flashy 1970s font, first name in capital letters, oversized like a superhero‘s, underneath, smaller, „for New York City.“ The name means nothing to me. But spontaneously, I think of that silly Adam Sandler movie in which he plays Zohan, an Israeli ex-elite soldier who stumbles through Manhattan in his second career as a cheap hairdresser who fucks old ladies, until the action of his past catches up with him. It‘s the dumbest movie ever made, and if it weren‘t so simplistic and irrelevant, it could actually be dangerous in its propagandistic portrayal of the IDF. To my shame, I find it very funny in places.
