Wish you were here...

What is he now, 63? You couldn’t guess. His age has been well hidden behind his nice, seemingly young posture and his thick cluster of grey hairs. He hasn’t changed that much nor the world he has been tastefully criticizing for more than three decades.



They still keep getting us to trade our heroes for ridiculous mediocre ghosts. "Hot ashes" are still the only deal we have for our rain forest trees, well maybe in addition to Limber and Soya!. Apparently we have no other choice than to exchange our "cool breeze" with the warmer-by-the-day globally hot air in the decades to come and finally, have we experienced such an annoying "cold comfort" ever before through out the history?!



Does it make any difference if Maggie should bring the child back home form Falkland or Tony from southern Iraq?

Pictures of Sadam, Bin Laden and Bush in Fletcher memorial was "a mute reminder" of the fact that although there are no Brezhnev or Begin anymore, or non of the group of Latin American meat packing glitterati are still in power, the world has never been in shortage of senseless, megalomaniac madman’s to be added to the Ghost of Mc Carhty!

And it seems, as much as we run over the same old ground, all that we find is the same old fears.



Anyway, Roger Water’s live in Montreal was much more than a usual rock concert for me as well as thousands of fans who had been gathered in Bell center, from curious sixteen years old teenagers to nostalgic men and women in their sixties. It was more a quasi-religious ceremony to admire a legend among the thick smoke from the scene, mixed with the thicker smoke from the audience’s weeds! where none of those elaborate details, like the fancy special effects, the humongous flying pig with the name of "Bush" on his ass, or none of those great performers like the impeccable black female back vocals or the lead guitarist who was also carrying the burden of an old man who couldn’t scream as loud as he did when he was young, were able to deviate the attention, even for a second, from the maestro himself, who was walking around in his black t-shirt with his base guitar and taking pleasure of the his numerous fan’s genuinely sincere and unstoppable applause, possibly for the last times!



At the end and before leaving the scene, he looked at the crowd and shouted, Montreal, I’ll be back…Roger, we both know that you most probably wouldn’t, but thanks anyway, for the music I heard with you and for fulfilling one of my life-long dreams, to see you, live in concert.

An animated film inspired by the Persian architecture

it's really amazing...

I want this car so bad!

Funny Comercial

"In a zoo in California, a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of
triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the
pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size,
they died shortly after birth.

The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started
to decline in health, although physically she was fine. The
veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a
depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate
another mother's cubs, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing
news was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to
the mourning mother. The veterinarians decided to try something that
had never been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of one
species will take on the care of a different species. The only orphans"
that could be found quickly, were a litter of weaner pigs. The zoo
keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the
babies around the mother tiger. Would they become cubs or pork chops??
Take a look........ you won't believe your eyes!!"

The great journalist, writer and controversial interviewer and surly one of my favorite women of all time, Oriana Fallaci, died yesterday, in a hospital in Florence.
I personally, will never forget some of her unbelievably courageous interviews specially those with Shah, Khomeini and Kissinger. She was one of those phenomenons that can hardly be replaced any time soon.

The magic of Beshkan!

We Iranian claim a plethora of the world’s civilization’s advancements and heritages which to me, where sometimes is not far from the reality, almost always is much too exaggerated indeed.

However, I have to admit we’ve offered the humanity something uniquely exquisite which is our good old “Beshkan”! and to my big surprise, although we’ve never tried to keep the technique as secret, like Chinese people and their whole silk production procedure, it has been remained so far mostly in our hands to the point, you can almost recognize an Iranian by his or her “Beshkaning” skills!

Apart from its intended purpose, which is to accompany the notorious “Shish o Hasht!” beat, and the fact that it suits “Baba Karam” so well, it has an unbelievable use in daily life of an immigrant in Canada.

Whenever you’re stuck in an unpleasant discussion, you’ve made a politically incorrect comment that has been created an awkward silence or you’re involved in a debate where there’s absolutely no way out, just do the “Beshkan” out of the blue and watch how this little Persian heritage draws the attention stronger than Scarlet Johnson’s ass and changes the subject quicker than “Bin Laden is going to attack soon!”

I also want to propose to Iran’s delegation to UN, to use “Beshkan” to diverge other delegation’s attention from the nuclear issue to this seemingly simple but elaborate noise-making machine! Just imagine the look on John Bolton’s frustrated face, combined with his “Sha’boon-Type” mustache, asking Mr. Larijani “How was that?! Am I doing it right? Why mine isn’t making any sound?!” while he’s trying to imitate the hand posture!

I’m sure if Bush knew how to do it, he would use it in every white house press conferences, singing “Injaa beshkanam yaar geleh daare! Oonjaa behkanam yaar gele daareh (Public would bitch about me, no matter what I do!)” “pas nemishkanam (So to hell with the opinion poles!)”

And all the reporters would reply “Beshkan (Come on!!!)”

And the fox news correspondent would say “chegade balaaii delbar…namiri elaahi delbar! (We’re going to suck up no matter what you do or say!”

Strike of corssed legs!

Finally women realized how to use the most powerful weapon of all!

The very real tragedy of poverty here in the United States...

Islam Vs Christianity

Pablo

Pablo is sitting down on the pavement in front of a chessboard. Everything has been set up. A timer, a Jamaican flag for his side and a flag of Quebec for the opponent’s.

His father needs treatment and he needs money for that. He doesn’t ask you for money, he challenges you to beat him in a chess game. Fare and square!

You have 3 minutes to win, but if you look at his sharp, determined face, you’ll realize that it won’t be easy.

Photo 1 - Photo 2 - Photo 3

What the F...!

Why we live?

You have no idea how much I envy religious people. If you’re religious, the answer is simple. In fact, all the answers are simple. God wants us to do this, God wants this to be that way and so on…it’s very much like spelling French. Those 11 letters at the end of that word are mute and don’t ask why. That’s the way it is!

All you have to do is to read your holy book, or as I’d like to call them, “everything you need to know about everything!” and if you still haven’t read it (which ironically is quite common among religious people!) and you don’t feel like reading it either, you can ask the next clergy you see, next time you go to your mosque, synagogue, church or temple.

Seriously, if you’re lucky enough to be able to believe in “The great book of fairy tales for grown ups”, It is that simple. No excavation, no theory, no experimentation, no logic, no thinking of any kind and most importantly, no conscience, whatsoever. After all, you’re doing what God's told you to do, so why bother!

Anyway, I’d come back from the hospital. Tiered and depressed. I thought, “there is only two things in the world that can possibly make me happy right now, a cute furry kitty or a Woody Allen’s movie!”. Since obviously I didn’t have any choice, I took my glass of port, and started watching one of the Woody’s Masterpieces, Manhattan.

Five minutes to the end, there was this amazing scene which I absolutely adore, in which, Woody (here Isaac) is so depressed and in a self-therapeutically action, he lies down on a couch, recording his voice as if he’s talking to a shrink. He’s asking himself….

"Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... um... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh... the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face... "

And then, I closed my eyes I though about all the beautiful things for which, life worth living for. And the list went on and on and on and on….

it’s so good to be alive…even as an agnostic!

Parking lot in Munich

An absolutely amazing commercial!

Hezb-o-llah! insurance company!

Elephant in the room!

In the South East Asia, where elephants are widely used as a mean of transport as well as to carry heavy stuff, an intriguing technique is implemented to tame them which simply is tying the baby elephant’s foot, with a strong rope to a massive tree, on a regular basis so the efforts of the baby elephant to rescue itself remain fruitless.
As the elephant grows up, the poor creature, gradually accepts that the tree is always stronger and eventually stops even trying to get rid of the rope.
As soon as the illusion established, they can tie a huge elephant to a relatively weak trunk of tree with a tiny rope and the animal will stand still like a little puppy, tied up to a Parcometer!

As I was reading the article, I tried to remember, what was the last time I made a serious effort to examine the seemingly unbreakable ropes and the invincible trees, tying me to the ground, to see maybe I’ve become strong enough to break them apart! Can you remember your last effort?

They keep on burying our dead
They keep on planting their bones in the ground
But they won't grow
The sun doesn't help
The rain doesn't help
And all we've got is a giant crop of names
And dates...

Regina Spektor - Lacrimosa

By the way, She’s coming to Montréal this October. Anybody wants to come?

the Cutest ever!

That' s so fuuny and beautiful

I found the meaning of life, the height of the creation!

Check out Melissa Theuriau, this inexpressibly desirable French Anchor.

We really do need more of the anchors like her to at least, make the constant flow of catastrophically painful news, a touch more bearable!

Scream of the ants

“Shahr e Zobaale haa (Scream of the ants)”, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s latest movie, is a story about a couple, a mildly spiritual/religious woman and an seemingly atheist/ex-communist, spending their honey moon, traveling through India to meet “the complete man”. A philosophical journey through which, Makhmalbaf tries to portray human suffering; and I have to admit that he has been quite successful since at least I, experienced an excruciating pain watching two extremely untalented actors, uttering the most stupid, cheesy, retarded ideas for the whole 91 insufferable minutes!

The whole film can be summarized as a sequence of some truly magnificent scenery and exquisite cinematography that has been completely ruined by the idiocy of a man who knows how to use his camera but not his brain!

Inject the content of a gravely depressed, high school teenager’s diary, edited by his housewife mother, into a very well made documentary about India and voila, you’d have “Scream of the Ants”!

Couldn’t anybody around Makhmalbaf reminded him that since 15^th century, the question “Why God has created poor people?” has not been considered a philosophical question for God’s sake, but the one a six years old might ask the parents over the dinner table!?

And you know what can make those “100 philosophical questions for mentally challenged Soccer mom’s” even more intolerable?! Asking two actors, whose acts are unacceptable even by the standards of a kindergarten’s play about talking pumpkins, recite them out loud, in a way that can easily be outdone even by a well-trained parrot!

Apart from two monologues; one by the guru-type who allegedly stops the train by his eyes, and the other by the German monk, who for some reasons, speaks English with a funny Indian accent; one can find the most idiotic, unreasonable, childish ideas, expressed in the most banal, unnatural and corny way possible in a movie which is so shattered that nothing, even all those mind-blowing scenes and even the exquisite beauty of the actress, “Mahnour Shadzi” (VOA’s dazzling gorgeous anchor, also known as “Luna shad”), can make it a dash less painful to watch.

Put this movie next to M. Night Shyamalan’s recent disaster, Lady in the water, and you’ll have every possible reason to burn down a movie theatre and feel happy about it!

For heaven's sake, can somebody tell me how a woman, so preoccupied by spirituality doesn’t know who Dalai Lama is?!!

Dear Makhmalbaf, that Scream was not from the ants, but from those wretched audience in the theatre, who couldn’t fool their badly-insulted intellects, even with all those eye-catching, artistically-done images. When a skillful pianist has a horrendous, crow-like voice, maybe he should just shut up and not overshadow his brilliance in playing the instrument, by his unforgivable voice! Please keep your philosophical point of views to yourself and do not scream them in our ears.

Just by doing that, you can make the world, slightly a better place!

An apology!

I'm sorry. It's been a while I haven't written anything serious.

There're myriad of reasons for that. I have not been quite in the mood recently. I'm spending a lot of my time working and the rest in the hospital, visiting my friend and as you may well know, none of those places are fun or inspiring whatsoever. I'm not even in love, to write some romantic stuff or poetic crap for God's sake!

Although I have to admit that a super cute intern; a beautiful, tall, dark-haired, Persian MD, makes the hospital's environment much more pleasing, but it takes far more than that for a hospital's atmosphere, one the most depressing places in the world for me, to be able to be considered tolerable.

In the past two weeks, I thought a lot about making some drastic changes in my life, like taking my camera and travel to Tibet, but then I realized that I need money for that so I need to work and consequently I was remembered why we work in he first place!

So for now, I'm going to keep on working but meanwhile injecting some entertainment to my life, like starting to learn a new dance probably, doing extensive photography, exploring new restaurants and café in town and enjoying my new camera, all in addition to my regular reading-and-watching-movie-ritual! I'm also thinking about taking some courses at school. Besides, Woody Allen's short stories, a buried treasure that was uncovered for me by my brilliant intellectual yet fun and crazy friend, Naz, are on the way (from Amazon!) and also, the Canadian fall, short but breathtaking, is coming soon for us to squeeze every second of it.

I expect each one of those; give me tons of new materials and motivation as well, to write. We'll see.

I also look forward to my upcoming trip to Toronto in two weeks. Although TO is not my favorite town but I've always heavily enjoyed my short but fruitful stays there and it was full of great surprises most of the times. Not to forget that some of my dearest friends live there, and I add to this wonderful collection some new pieces every time. Speaking of good friends, thanks Maryam and Naz for your great moral support during this period. You have no idea how much I appreciated it.

By the way, I’m thinking about moving to Europe and start studying something completely different, like studying architecture in Barcelona or Prague for example. I just want to experience studying something exciting in an old European town, before it’s too late. Well, I’m not going to do that soon, but soon enough and certainly before I become a money-addict, mortgage-owed, workaholic gear in the capitalism’s elaborate machine (and this has nothing to do with my recent Castro story :)). Any interesting idea about what to do and where to go, would be immensely welcomed.

P.S. Long weekend, I love you so much.