DIRTY DIAMONDS III, 
a short text by phillipe azoury

Not far from Via Mozart, the roofs of the houses shelter grand terraces and never-ending swimming pools, 
shadowed only by hundred year-old trees. A deserted alleyway on a burnt-out day in mid August; Milan is 
bursting with such an absence of noise that one can, sitting on the dusty ground, face pressed against 
the rusty gates of a park filled with pink flamingos, make the effort to look up towards the hard blue 
sky and be rewarded with far away echoes from Pirelli's heirs dunking tantalizing little cousins in 
one-piece bathing costumes underneath the diving board, to celebrate their first summer. Elegance and 
"eau pression".

You are acquiring, thanks to the accumulation of time and fatigue, a strange time sickness: different 
cities are merging within you. Your sense of direction is good, in its own particular way: you cannot 
trust more than a faint memory of light that you may have seen fall once or twice upon a view. It's a 
risky method, as long as there is only one sun. 

Chronic case: the first afternoon in November you were looking for a record shop in the small streets 
of Gemmayzeh that was situated (you were sure) on the second floor of a building on rue Gouraud still 
bearing the livid scars of civil war. You had to hurry, night falls in only a few seconds on the 
seafront, and the shop was still missing….

The Milanese bourgeoisie is not making life easy for you this afternoon. You were still a young boy 
back in the 70s when wives, accompanied by interior designers with their bloated fees, chose the façades 
for the prestigious houses covered in dead wooden planks. They blacken under the constant presence of 
the Mediterranean sun. Now the damage is done, Milan's burnt façades resemble those of the Marina of 
Tripoli - war or no war. Up to you to find your way (or not).

You have to face facts; the record shop (overpriced actually, but it is still possible to pocket a 
few records once the vendor's back is turned) is based in Thessalonica - not in Beirut at all. Do 
you remember now? (Tomorrow it might be summer)

The last few meters leading to the beach are always the hardest (for the nerves). Putting up with 
the slight incline of the ground, screams getting nearer, the heat of exhaust pipes, the empty 
sound of beached shells, crossing the road when the eye is still recovering from the blinding 
attack of sea blue tents lined with white. They are always the same in those countries where the 
weather is too beautiful, too hot, too long, all year round. 

The neon in the sports hall distributes northern lights in an ad lib way that perpetuates a feeling 
of Indian summer. On the screen of the treadmill, kilometers go by and below, the number of calories 
lost in twenty minutes - a number that is most likely equal to the number of soldiers disappeared in 
Iraq that day (indifferently broadcasted by CNN, alternating with the latest trends of the Dow Jones 
on the newsreel ) - but you choose, with a single leg movement, to focus on the Hezbollah channel 
where a preacher-like sermon marries well with the Dutch gabber pouring out of the speakers - all 
background sounds to a nauseating scene; post modernism (this filthy little bug) loves to expose us 
to it when we are too weak to resist.

The torrential rain beating on the roof of a phone booth in Bangkok, two weeks before the heavy 
rain season, gave out the same smell of slightly rotten chlorophyll as the rain that fell on 
another phone booth that afternoon in August when you were dialing and redialing the same number 
of a phone that was not ringing. Nobody had told you that to ring out of Spain you needed a dialing 
code. You had totally given up. 

That summer when the Talking Heads put a great gorilla with kind doggy eyes on the cover of their 
latest album (a weaker album that you didn't buy that day, preferring to get a Pussy Galore EP), 
Nick Cave was wearing a sublime black T-shirt on the cover of NME magazine which read : My Best 
Friends are Smith & Wesson. This made us go gaga and we remained seated for hours while the others 
took off without a penny to fetch a handful of churros - or something. 

Some are barefoot, the dirt on their feet is no longer rejected; it symbolizes an era. You can 
feel the camphorated smell of sweet haschich a mile off. There is something undisclosed in their 
grace, almost clandestine. The two things have become inseparable in any case: there is no more 
grace other than in the murmurs of secrecy, grace only survives when endangered. The other boy, 
the one that refused to lend you his pistol, is walking too fast to realize that his pockets are 
now empty. He shouts out a name under the bridges, the echo magnifies the shout and it seems like 
an army is after you; the plastic Jesus is elegant (the costume is from a film by Bresson) and 
white as an aspirin tablet. The belt from your suede jacket is hung like in the photo shoots 
because you have to look good to be able to accomplish the insane task you have set yourself. 
The boy (and the echo that follows him like a shadow) freezes on sight of you - although he 
should know that if you had wanted to shoot yourself in the head, you would have pointed the 
gun in the other direction. The small caliber metallic-grey bullets hit the water one by one 
in the Seine. Not to make rings but as if to test the sound.  

Phillipe Azoury