Cauldron of Hate

Death and The Maiden (1994)
Directed By: Roman Polanski
IMDB
My Rate: 5/5

In some Latin American country a brutal fascist regime has been subverted. Paulina Lorca (Sigourney Weaver), a former political activist who has been tortured by that regime now lives in some coastal suburb with her husband Gerardo Escobar who has also been an activist but now is a lawyer and tries to litigate the dogs of the previous tyrant. Paulina still suffers from the trauma of the tortures but has never thoroughly disclosed the traits of the torments she had been through. One rainy night incidentally she recognizes her torturer accompanying her husband to home. Time to get revenge. Time to get things even. Time to have a straight-up talk with Gerardo.

Considering myself in a situation like that, I thought what would be the best thing to do? As an observer you may say, yes, that's the best time to get revenge. Take an eye for an eye. Rape him if you have been raped! There he has sat, his hands are tight, he has no power, you can adjudicate, you can torture him and get his confession, and finaly you can execute him. Better slaughter and butcher him. But how many people really can do that? Can I kill somebody who have done the worst things to me? Am I capable of applying justice even if I'm totally in the right? I'm afraid I am not. I think I am not.

The Magic Lantern

We, Persians, are famous of unique demeanors and grooves, some are righteous, some are culpable. One of the latter ones is our inclination to necrolatry not in its literal meaning but in the way that we tend to praise long eulogies for the mortified ones and exaggerate about their virtuous traits when just before they die, we completely ignore them or in the case they present or support some contrary or unique idea, we destroy them as much as we can.

I felt the same when I wanted to write about the news I read today in the papers: "Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman Passes Away In The Age of 89".

Sometimes you find the great ideas and people so late. A couple of months ago I watched my second film of him, Winter Light, my first film of him was Wild Strawberries. I was astound with what he does with lights in his films and how simply, with no action or much effort he presents the most complicated cognition of human-beings and God relativity in Winter Light. It was very impressive. So I bought his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, and collected around 20 of his films with the help of a friend. I was about to define an "Ingmar Bergman Project" for myself, but I postponed it, to deal with "some more important stuff"*, anyway. Now that he's dead, I should be Persian.

* ...and who knows which is which and who is who...

Signals And Systems

Finally you find somewhere quiet, you sit down and close your eyes for a moment, you take a deep breath, play your media player to listen to your favorite songs, you inhale deeper and deeper, you ventilate your lungs more and more, you feel your heart beating slow down, you stretch your hands and feet, and enjoy the blood rushing through them, this is heaven... but suddenly your phone rings! RING .... RING ... RING ..., and you sell your heaven to a phone call that 99% of the times is not a matter of life and death. It seems inevitable, it's like we're conditioned to such things like a phone call. When it rings you give up everything to answer it! Who has set it as a rule? How has it penetrated in our minds? How many times has it happened to you?

Phone calls are not the only example of this situation. We do things in certain ways that we have used to them. But just think about doing them in some other style. Maxwell Maltz suggests: one morning when you go to work, as you fasten your shoelaces, and you always put the right lace on the left one, this time do it vice versa, and see how the world changes within you.

Next time it rings, just smile to it, and tell I won't answer you, and see how some strong feeling of joy spreads in your veins. Of course there's a caller ID function and you can call him or her back a couple of minutes later, but feel that you have the choice, you are not a slave of a human made signal, you are free, just don't let it ruin your moment of glory.

P.S. To friends: hey don't test it on me, I am the one who suggests it to you so exempt me from your experience, thank you. ;)

Different Worlds, Same Idea

As I told somewhere before, I sometimes check my old mp3s and make selections of them. This time I was investigating Chris de Burgh's songs. In his first album (1975 - Far Beyond These Castle Walls), there's a very mellow, romantic and oneiric song called Satin Green Shutters. He depicts his hopes and dreams of having "the most beautiful house in the world" and having his love of life forever and having "the most lovely children in the world". I know that at least his last wish came true a few years ago, when his daughter, Rosanna won the miss world title. Many people were fascinated here because Chris de Burgh has many fans in Iran.

Later, in the same day, I was running with my friend in the park as our regular sports schedule. He talked about a poor worker of a freight company who had rented their house many years ago. He said although he had a poor family but he always talked like he had enough money for everything. He always had bigger dreams than his pocket. They moved out and they had no contact with my friend's. But yesterday, oddly enough, the door bell rang and yes it was that worker with his wife riding a precious brand new BMW to come over my friend's family. He now owns a freight business himself and has sent his son and daughter to university. He is wealthy and happy with his family as he always thought so.

It was a nice coincidence to me. It doesn't matter what you are or how big or small your scale is. How much you are famous or how rich you are. You'll become what you think of yourself.

Here's a couple lines of Chris de Burgh's Satin Green Shutters:

"Where your dreams are, put your hopes, you know they will not fail you,
Where your love is, put your heart, oh what would you do if your dreams came true?"

Which One's Pink?

That's been the classic vexing debate after Pink Floyd's break up, between Roger and David's fans. The question comes from what Roger had heard in a convention in the early days of Pink Floyd. Someone had asked: "Oh by the way, which one's Pink?" thinking that Pink Floyd is a band member name. That made Roger to write Have A Cigar later for Wish You Were Here Album. A song about fame, fortune, money, and "riding the gravy train" in music industry.

Thanks to my introducer to Pink Floyd, he gave me the video of a cover band called "The Australian Pink Floyd". A pack of very talented Australian guys who could make themselves the most prominent and serious cover band, at least the only one that I know. The video is their concert in Liverpool in 2004. They have covered the whole Dark Side of the Moon and a bunch of other songs incredibly great in a big stage imitating all those post-Roger concerts style. The audience were enjoying themselves completely because although the music was greatly performing, the men behind the microphones were not the legendary official band members, so one could just say: shout and scream, who cares? This ain't Pink Floyd! The same idea was supported by the band themselves! They had replaced the classical pig with a funny giant kangaroo dancing during One of These Days (that scary song)!!! That made me laugh about an hour insanely! I enjoyed it a lot.

What I'm thinking now, is what Roger was saying in Live At Pompeii video. Answering questions about the expensive and unique equipments they used to perform their music, he said:

RW: This is the question of using the tools available when they are available! And more and more now there's all kinds of electronic goodies which are available for people like us to use. If we can be bothered and we can be bothered... It's like saying give a man a Les Paul guitar and he becomes Eric Clapton, you know, and it's not true! Give a man an amplifier and a synthesizer and he doesn't become whoever, he doesn't become us... I'd like to say if we were at a gig, it could be nice sometimes to say: Go on then, there it is, get stuck in! In fact open the show, it's gonna be 4000 people in here in half an hour, get out there and knock them out man, and then they'd say: Oh but we don't know the equipment and need time to rehearse! So we'd say: So did we about four or five years ... if people come to a concert and they don't like it, they don't come again!

and in another argument:

RW: Steve you're good at your job, but you could never produce a record so it's silly of you to try!

Steve: No rubbish! if you take a crappy enough group with only twelve songs...

RW: that's not we're talking about!

Steve: We're talking about producing works of art, or Pink Floyd records! That's 0.01 percent of the market, there's plenty of other crap going on!

RW: We are not talking about it at all, we're talking about a record producer who is in charge of a recording session. In order to be in charge of a recording session you need to have a minimal, not minimal, you need to have a fairly extensive knowledge of what the equipment is about and what music is about and what rock and roll's about, well steve knows what rock and roll's about but he got no idea of what the equipment is about, he's got very little idea in terms of technicalities, he knows what he likes.

Steve: Plenty of people have produced very successful records on that basis!

RW: Who?

...

RW: All Im' saying is in the finished article the only thing that's important is whether it moves you or not, there's nothing else as that important.

Respect and WCs

As I came to Austria, I created a blog and published an article (I wouldn't call it a "great article") about surprising things that I found in this country with the following picture:

The text said more or less:

"It's incredible that nobody ever had the simple idea of printing in toilet paper something different from flowers or stripes. It's a channel for spreading ideas or knowledge, or at least, that may have thought the manufacturer of the roll in the picture.

Question: In which year were the first football world cup held?
Answer: 1930

This roll is a monograph on football. I have to confess that when I found it, I unrolled a couple of meters, just to read some questions more. I left it as I found it. Sure you'd have done the same. It's tempting"

Later on, it was Monkey who proposed that such trifles (or -french-based synonym bagatelles) make a difference between modern, open minded countries and developing countries. Respecting the knowledge, and respecting each other is the basis to produce more intelligent citizens and a better society.

I do agree.

Inventing History

My father was a radio buff before his illness and old age could take that interest from him. That habit gave us the chance to always have those foreign radios sounds spread in our house every morning before we leave for school or every night when he got back from work. So during the war years we had the chance to listen to BBC, VOA and DW before we know anything about satellite TV channels, and they had become a pre-school-have-to-listen-everyday besides Pink Floyd's Time intro in The Calendar of History programme from the national radio.

Speaking about history, VOA Persian radio channel, had a history section too, which used to review some important events in the United States history happened in the same day. I can never forget the day the anchor said that: "today is the day Mr X brought the WC indoors for the first time in US history, and from then people started to build their WCs inside their houses"! I remind how much we laughed for the matter me and my brother. How important that could be to be written down in the history pages of a big country?!

Now speaking about 300 the movie, offended as any other Iranians by a country with 200 years of history with history books god knows how much thicker than ours having 7000 years of art (not history), and humiliated recently in Dubai, a country with less than 30 years of history, scanning my eye like a potential criminal or smuggler as an arrival welcome, I say that's all our own fault! Our own failure!

It's the matter of self respect. If you do not respect yourself, you shouldn't expect it from the others, how powerful it may be over you (US) or how panicked (UAE) it could be from you, if Iranians learn to respect each other, other things can get better. I bet there's no way out and I don't see any sign of it.

P.S. To know more about toilets, bathrooms, and WCs and their relationship to the self respect, I encourage my friend Gog to put an English copy of that great article about Austrian Toilets. Thanks in advance Gog.

Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun

To follow the path:

Look to the master,

Follow the master,

Walk with the master,

See through the master,

Become the master.

Chain of Goodness

Sometimes some things happen to make you explore one new level of life. I don't think it's just coincidences. When you decide to change, or moult, the season changes, the world around you changes to make you able to do it, but just one should be careful enough to grasp and grab the happenings. And they're not like a great job offer or a winner lottery ticket. They can be a 2 minutes song, a short novel, a delicious food or an inside murmur.

I just recognised this strange harmony of events and happenings talking to my friend M. who was truely obsessed with his everyday struggles and bad people around him. I just told one sentence to him and today he called and told me that single "tiny microscopic thing"* could change his mind and he felt better. He participated in a class of the great Persian computer science professor Caro Lucas today, catching him right when he was speaking about Artificial Intelligence philosophy, and how he felt even much better today after the class. He just grabbed it and he'll see how the chains of events will happen to make him feel greater.

The same thing has happened to me since last 3 months. I read about Psycho Cybernetics, I overcame a paradox about my future life style, I started this blog and writing about everything in my mind, and one of my wishes, which I thought it's very big, but it's not, is simply coming true in the next week! That chain of events is happening to me and I can't believe it. I learned to not get overwhelmed with stress and anger and ruin my days. And yesterday I just discovered a couple of great inspiring blogs that made my day (you can reach them from the links section). And that's in the chain. Everything is in the chain, I just should be careful to follow them.

* Comes from Tim Burton's Corpse Bride!

Countdown: 10

"...My mother was so obsessed with education and the idea that childhood and adolescence and what everything was about preparing for a life that was gonna start later. and I suddenly realised that life wasn't gonna start later you know it starts and darts and happens in a little time and at any point you can grasp the reigns and start guiding your own destiny, and that was a big revelation to me. I mean it came as quite a shock.", Roger Waters

Countdown: 15

The Final Cut is probably the hardest to get and the most political Pink Floyd album. That's why most of the fans don't like it as much as the other conceptual albums. It's obvious, when you talk about politics everybody gets offended or as Roger himself says, you can't write rock and roll withought offending people.

This album contains Roger's deepest concerns and worries. You know when you are young, you shout and cry, you protest, you follow philosophies, you praise your intellectual heros, you fall in love, you win, you lose, but in that particular middle age, when you pass your youth, when you are 40, that's when you comprehend your deepest desire.

You see that you were just immitating the philosophers you didn't believe in the bottom of your heart. You find that your loves and goals were not the ones you really looked for, you find that most of the issues you've been struggling and fighting for are not changeable, you see that you can't avoid death, you can't deny God, you can't change the world. You imagine what if you were young again having today's vision.

40 is the age of wisdom and here's the words of wisdom, Roger is driving in his car and he faces another sun in the sky, a nuclear bomb explosion that finally makes minority and majority, powerful and weak, even steven.

Two Suns In The Sunset

In my rear view mirror the sun is going down

Sinking behind bridges in the road

And I think of all the good things

That we have left undone

And I suffer premonitions

Confirm suspicions

Of the holocaust to come.

The wire that holds the cork

That keeps the anger in

Gives way

And suddenly it's day again.

The sun is in the east

Even though the day is done.

Two suns in the sunset

Could be the human race is run.

Like the moment when the brakes lock

And you slide towards the big truck
You stretch the frozen moments with your fear.

And you'll never hear their voices

And you'll never see their faces

You have no recourse to the law anymore.

And as the windshield melts

My tears evaporate

Leaving only charcoal to defend.

Finally I understand the feelings of the few.

Ashes and diamonds

Foe and friend

We were all equal in the end.

Radio: "...and now the weather. Tomorrow will be cloudy with scattered showers spreading from the east ... with an expected high of 4000 degrees Celsius"

Brilliant Beatiful Blue

You may have felt sometime that somebody is watching you over from behind or from a nearly far distance and you turn back and see that yes, a friend or a stranger is looking at you. It sometimes happens to me. I can't tell when I have this third eye open it's very unconscious. Yesterday afternoon I was walking to the company to do some extra work and I felt the same but this time from high above in the sky, where it was a long time I had not take a look at it!

I just stood and didn't want to miss that brilliant beautiful strange blue in the sky. It was 4:30 pm, and the sky wasn't that sunset red, it was partially cloudy with a magnificent dark blue in a proudly fluffy full of rain cloud. I wish I had a camera to take some photos of the scene through some awkward buildings in that alley. It was a blue that I had just seen in photoshop!

Anyway it feels like the winter is passing and Esfand (March) is coming with it's great unsteady weather. Spring is on its way, just about 44 days to Norooz and the moral of this story is: sometimes look at the sky.

Be The Change

This is a quote from Nelson Mandela I grabbed from Anousheh Ansari's spaceblog:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone.And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Read A Book Instead

I'm just considering how much time do I waste on everyday habbits. One of them is TV. I regularly don't watch TV. But I never lose a hot national football match or Olympics games or FIFA World Cup matches. There's a nightly comic series and an artistic film each weekend which is always censored. So I'm lying. I do watch TV. I waste my time watching a football match for 2 hours fed by commercials, a nonsensce excitement and maybe grief after the match, I waste my time to watch that comic series in beg for a laughter in 60 minutes. I waste my time watching a censored film God damn it!

And all for what?

So here's my rule, my plan: Never Watch TV! Whatever it's showing, how hot the match is or how important the news (lies) are, how rare the late night weekend film is. Instead, if I feel very tempted to watch it, ok I'll give it my finger and I'll take a book and start to read. I'll read a book and I won't waste that 2 hours anymore. That's it. That's better now.

How Many Do We Need?

This is a part of a transcript of Roger's Amused To Death premiere in Toronto, 27 August 1992, fourteen years ago, right after the first Persian Gulf war, when it was bomb and blood in Bosnia. I found it among the old documents I think it comes from the website: www.ingsoc.com.

Jim Ladd, the host of the show, asks Roger the big question I like to have it here for a review:

Jim Ladd: In this particular work as in all of your work, you are adressing these issues. There was a time that you and I both lived through, I think everybody in this room lived through, called the 60's when there was a movement where we thought we were going to go out and change the world for a better place. Has there just been too much information come at us now? Is it possible to rally people again? How shocking does it have to be? How many people do we have to see rolled over by the tanks? How many great albums like Amused to Death before people will say, 'That's it. I draw the line here. We're going to do something.'

Roger Waters: Well, it's more complicated than that. The good thing about television, which is what this album is about, is that it is a two-edged sword. And it can cut through a whole bunch of bullshit. And some of it does. That's why it interests me so much. Is that it either is the prime tool of the market forces, but equally it can the prime tool for us to look at ourselves and to educate future generations. And for us to start thinking about what the nature of human life really is. And what we want it to be. And it does that. It does both those things. And it's doing it really fast. That's the other thing that interests me is that history appears anyway to be speeding up. Events follow one upon the other really quickly now. It doesn't take you like five days to get from Boston to New York or from London to Manchester like it used to when you had to get on a horse and ride.

Carter Allen: As you were saying, television is a double edged sword from the fact that for example that in the Persian Gulf we kinda did witness a tv show as presented by our government. We saw only what they wanted us to see. Not like the Vietnam war where we saw people coming back in body bags. Do you remember seeing blood and guts in the Persian war? You didnt' see it.

Red Beard: Well, hang on. The Vietnam war was a ground war and I think that is the very important distinction between what happened...what we saw on television this time around. And we touched on it earlier, it wasn't a real person being killed with a smart bomb it was a blip on a screen, like a video game.

Happy Yalda

It's Yalda Night tonight.
A surprising fact that I learned about it a couple of years ago was that Yalda, originally being a Mithraist Persian ceremony which also celebrated in Mithraist Roman empire, was adapted to become Jesus Christs's birthday when the Roman empire accepted christianity. Romans accepted the day, with a tolerance of 4 or 5 days because of intercalary, with it's symbol, the famous christmas tree.

Centuries later Persians lost most of their ceremonies and symbols after Islam's hegemony. But they also kept some of their ceremonies, symbols and heros, adapting their old beliefs with the new religion symbols just as the Romans did.

That's just where I'm going to have a doubt on religious and ancient beliefs, customs or traditions; That none of them seems very original. People either naturally have adapted their national customs to their religions, and vise versa or being forced to do so during some foreign country's dominance; Both of the cases happened a lot in the history of the middle east, especially in my country.

So where have all those original ideas gone? How can you trust the stuff you're fed by the society as beliefs and customs and traditions? I'm not against traditions as far as they keep people good for themselves and others, but when it comes to raising wars for traditions and beliefs I become absolutely against them. I am Muslim and your Christian, This is our promised land and that's yours, We do things so, and you don't, We believe in God and you don't. Fanaticism kills everything. It kills the beliefs that have made them too, soon or later.

You've heard the story of the Easter Island?

That's enough. Let's enjoy our Yalda and our Christmas for now! :)

Fuel, Fire, My Desire

A perfect image that a man can imagine for his appearance, can involve a fit and tall body, stylish haircut, intent face probably having a footprint of an old scar, penetrating looks, strong, warm and deep voice, dark fashionable clothes, and the whole masculine charismatic issues that can affect everybody and make respect without any need to self expression.

Having a great talent in music and all the mentioned characteristics plus a pure natural juvenility has made James Hetfield a very affecting celebrity.

James Hetfield, I think, is the successful type person. He has used his best talents and characteristics to make it to the top for twenty years. Strong self confidence has made him like an idol on stage who can laugh satanically, scream and shout to his audience with a strong language but make them completely satisfied letting their all rage to pour out.

This self esteem has made James and his band to change their musical style during these 20 years. Just when they are one of the top hard rock and heavy metal bands, they perform bluesy music. When they become top again as a rock band, they experience a symphonic rock concert with Michael Kamen. In their most famous years as an influencing rock band, they give a full album of other bands cover songs!

And this reminds me of the book, "Who moved my cheese?". They are always looking for their new piece of cheese.

Psycho Cybernetics

Dr Maxwell Maltz (1899-1975) was a plastic surgeon. What brought him into psychology was the point that he observed most of his patients' lives change dramatically with a simple surgery to resize their noses or ears or removing a scar from their faces. Was it really their new face that led those patients' lives into a better and successful ones? No. It wasn't their new face actually but their new "self image" they created after the surgury.

I'm just reading this great book and I read somewhere it was the best seller at the time, and I should say that it's not an old fashioned book at all. Dr. Maltz tries to express and develop the idea that human brain acts like a servo-mechanism, it is based on the simple rules you can apply for such mechanisms. But of course the whole system is much more larger than that. Ok, now what? We have this great machine within ourselves. The most powerful and complicated mechanism in the whole world. But why most of us are "the failure type"? Because every mechanism is designed for a goal. If you do not set a proper goal or if you set a bad goal for the system, simply the result is a failure. This is the very essence of this book. To provide the reader the way to create a "true" and successful type "self-image, and that's what many people really lack but don't know anything about it. The idea seems very obvious, and you can say well, I know the whole about it, but if you read it you can see that no, you don't know the whole about it!

The Man I Adore

There are always people who inspire you or affect you strongly in some way. For me, Roger Waters has been much more than this.

The first time I started to know him, I was 19, knowing nothing about music, studying in our cold weary room, in the dormitory, with walls full of the pictures of "the dead" Persian poets and authors, me and my roommate used to cut or copy from magazines or books and pasted them on the wall. We had always something playing in my roommate's tape recorder, most of the time it was some Persian nostalgic sad pop song my roommate liked a lot. But suddenly out of nowhere there was a different tape in the tape recorder, that sounded extremely different. It was a very hysteric song that without knowing any English you could imagine that it's taking place in a court, there's a trial and somebody is being condemned. Wow, how can a song provide you such an image without understanding the lyric?

It was Trial, from The Wall Live In Berlin, I knew later. I had a chance that one of my friends, Ehssan, already knew the band. "It's Pink Floyd", he said. "They're great! The one with ugly voice is called Waters, the one who has the nice voice is Gilmour!", he continued, and he gave me the tapes of "The Division Bell", "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" and "Animals" respectively. That was the start.

I became a mad collector of their works, and the more I read Roger's lyrics and interviews, the deeper I penetrated to his songs. I mostly was affected by Animals (the one that Roger doesn't like a lot himslef). The ruthless way he categorised people with that strong raging music and singing. That was wonderful. From the other side, the way he complained his emptiness in "Nobody Home", always made me think about the way I was going to choose to live. In a word, he was my moral teacher, my big brother that was always in my head. The one who taught me many things. The one who made me have good vision and have great respect to him.
Thank you a lot Roger!

And that's really my passion: To spend an afternoon with him, talking, drinking, and playing music! I did so a couple of times in my dreams, but that was just a dream.

Whew! I feel better now that I took my time to say a simple thank you to him. I really owed it to him.

The Lion On The Flag

There's a Persian proverb saying:

We are all lions, but lions on the flag

That's the wind who makes us attack

Yes it was the wind of Anousheh who made us feel better to be a Persian. To read and think about success. To sleep and wake up with that smile Anousheh suggested. But where is all that joy, honour, courage and energy I felt those days? It seems as the wind stopped blowing, I stopped running.