Or Is It Just A Crazy Dream?

Really missed my corner, my book. The big changes were confusing, catastrophic, unbelievable and fast. Moving abroad, moving to a new track, new people, new language, losing a most beloved...I can say it is not a wind, but a thunder taking you far far away from the person you used to be, makes you feel older the way you get older every time you listen to The Final Cut.

In memory of Khosro Shakibai (1944 - 2008), Hamoun that we loved.

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Good reason to get back to my corner: I need concentration and motivation and I need them seriously. I live in an environment filled with negative energy, filled with stories of failure. People strive but they are never rewarded what they deserve.
There are lots of things to complain about. But I won't. This is my good corner and I want to keep it clean, happy and motivating as it was before. So here we go again:

Last week a good friend sent me a link to the excerpt of an Oprah show, introducing Randy Pausch. And good things come to you when you are in need. You just have to be cautious to grab the right thing. And I did. I downloaded the full stroy, and I gained my nearly lost hope and courage again.

Randy is a Carnegie Melon computer science professor. He is 47 and suffers from liver cancer and doctors say that he's going to die in a few months. He prepares his last lecture in the university and gives invaluable, enchanting, memorable and impressive lessons to the audience. Watch for yourself:

Celestial Voices

There's something magical in Celtic music that makes my spirit soar beyond mundane boundaries every time I listen to it. I don't know how the Irish could keep loads of those great old melodies during the time and why we, Iranians, couldn't. I wish we could. Those Celtic melodies divinely express a spectrum of different senses from wisdom, joy and love to the deepest grief. Iranian musicians say that in Iran we have just kept the grief part during the time, and lost most of our vivacious melodies, that's why we are now the top sad nation in the world. Without music we are spiritless and gloomy.

Anyway. It's been some days that I can't change my playlist to play any other item than Loreena McKennitt's songs. Her voice is unique and makes part of me departing during any of her songs. Mixed with some eastern instruments she sometimes shifts to new age style. In 2006, she gave an album called An Ancient Muse, 9 years after her last album in 1997. In 2007 she had a concert in Alhambra, Spain. This video is from that concert:

Do You Find Me Sadistic?

La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) (1968)
Directed By: François Truffaut
IMDB
My Rate: 4/5

I was surprised to learn that this film is the archetype of Kill Bill's plot. How intelligent Tarantino is.! Kill Bill is just another intelligent hybrid movie! As you may guess, the story is like this:

In the wedding day, when the bride and the groom come out of church with the guests around them, out of nowhere the groom is shot and the despondent bride pledges a revenge the other day in the same church. She finds the the killers' names and addresses and makes her "DEATH LIST FIVE" and crosses out the names one by one. But of course there's no sign of Tarantino violence or martial action in this film. The bride is a woman and uses the women's tricks to seduce her victims and commit her cold blooded revenge.

This is the second time that I see the original model of a quite new film that is based "totally" upon the older one. Fortunately both new films worked great and were more interesting for today's taste. The other one was Abre Los Ojos by Alejandro Amenabar which is remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky. Certainly Abre Los Ojos is a genuine film but it has some small flaws in the ending scene when the main character, César, is going up and down the building to figure out that the building is not real. In Vanilla Sky these kind of small flaws were patched, and of course some unique sense of sadness is imbued in the film with great selection of music used in it. About Kill Bill no further explanation is needed that it quenches the today's audience need to watch bloodshed, suspension and thrill.

Acoustic Simple Pleasures

1. JOJO /kho-kho/, that's how Spaniards represent evil laughter. I'm happy that I can pronounce that /kh/ sound. Regarding to this page at least 309 million English speaking people in the world can't pronounce it!

2. Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta wore a mask in the whole movie, he made a revolution with his sonorous voice in the movie, and made me remember his conversation with Neo, in The Matrix, forever:

...In one life, you're Thomas A. Anderson... program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number. You pay your taxes. And you help your landlady carry out her garbage...

3. The first CD I burned for myself, was a collection of Eloy albums. The German rock band who took his mystic name from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, one of my favorite books to read over and over as a teenager, where human beings in some future time are divided into two castes and the delicate, rich, healthy, lucky and aristocrat caste is called Eloi. Eloy is categorized as a space rock band. The heavy organ and bass fills that each play a major role in the songs, always make me high. I call it the natural high feeling. A sense of Floating, which is the name of one of their albums.

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...

Infinite Creativity

The Five Obstructions (2003)
Directed by: Lars Von Trier & Joergen Leth
IMDB
My Rate: 5/5

Some call it an aristocrat fancy game of two intellectual directors. I don't see anything wrong about it even if we consider it so.

Actually it's a meta film. Von Trier challenges his favorite director Joergen Leth on remaking one of his earliest films called The Perfect Human, which is a unique short film about how the director sees human being as a series of motions, habits, manners, actions and reactions. Over these shots of a single actor and actress, Leth asks questions like "What does the perfect human think about?" and so.

To do so, Von Trier sets very random and spontaneous obstructions for Leth, on his way to remake the short film. Like that when they speak about smoking a Havana cigar, Von Trier comes with the idea that his first episode should be filmed in Cuba! You can read about the obstructions here.

What made me so fond of this film is what it left me in the end. Just like Von Trier's masterwork, Dogville, you are imbued with some feeling of vague awareness that is hard to express in words and questions like who is who, how things are done, how a spark of an idea leads to some splendid consequent that no one has ever thought about it. How infinite the human being's creativity can be? Does it make the human perfect? I don't know.

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. ;)