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. ;)

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?"

One Week Father

Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) (2003)
Directed by: Andrei Zvyagintsev
IMDB
My Rate: 5/5

The portrait that is carved in my memory about a Russian movie, is a black and white, long and boring film whose story usuallys happens in a village fully covered by snow with poor muzhiks living there, very few words uttered and so on, everything converges to dejectedness in those films.

After a long time of watching western movies, this one was handed over me. The only thing it has in common with that style is it's minimum words. This, along with astonishing scenery, blur and cold colors makes it a very calm and relaxing film.

It's the story of two youngsters, Ivan and Andrey, who have not seen their father since they were very young. The only memory is a family picture hidden in the attic. But suddenly the father comes back out of nowhere and takes them out to a short trip which lasts longer than expected. He teaches them how to be a man, he says: "Use your hands" in response to feeble boys' complaints facing to physical works for the first time.

It's a tribute to fatherhood I think, in contrast with Pedro Almodovar's Return and it's highly recommended as well.

Cold as Ice

La Tourneuse de Pages (2006)
imbd
Directed by: Denis Dercourt
Gog's Rate: 4/5

My devotion to french cinema is nothing new, I enjoy quite a lot movies coming from our northern neighbours for many reasons: the real/credible stories, whirling plots (which do not frame the spectators), the beautiful scenery and cinematography are common in these films, or at least more common than they are in the cinema which comes from the other side of the Atlantic.

The film 'The Page Turner' is not a typical french movie. At the very beginning, I had the feeling of watching a Merchant-Ivory film, no feelings, no gestures, very few words,... pure seriousness. A very cold movie, with a cold-coloured cinematography.
I don't know if I should tell something about the plot: The daughter of a low class family plays the piano, but it's rejected in the last minute, as the teacher makes her lose her concentration during a exam. Years later they meet again, and the teacher (who doesn't remember the girl at all) wants her to turn the pages on her concerts.

I would strongly recommend this movie for the uneasiness which causes the young belgian actress Déborah François, the rare atmosphere which is breath all over 85 minutes. The ending is (also) great. I would rate it '5', but I saw it yesterday, and I may still be under the influence of such a fine piece of machinery, which lies inside this film.

His Mysterious Ways

Babel (2006)
IMDB
Directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu
My Rate: 5/5

Impressive, breathtaking and real! They are the first expressions that came to my mind describing it. Babel is composed of 3 stories occurring in Morocco, Mexico and Japan, connected to each other in a curious way and as we may expect from Iñárritu (the director of 21 Grams), with a slight time shift. But that's not the point that makes the film so interesting. The point is that it is so much real like a bitter story of "somebody else" you read in a newspaper everyday. Sort of disastrous stories that we read a lot about these days. The stories you wish that somebody could have done something to prevent them, but that's not possible. Somethings happen with no intension, they just happen. I don't know if we should call them God's will. People here normally call it so.

The main theme of the film is the human's solitude. The lonely human who is nothing apart from his family and his home, who is afraid of strangers and who is nothing if left alone and not supported by the family. We are still as vulnerable as a lonely kid in a desert.

The title of the post comes from the film Constantine. In the last scene John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) says: "He (God) does his works in mysterious ways, some people like it, some don't." Some people may like this film some don't. It depends on how you interpret the world.

Captain

South Korea started her car industry lunge at the same time Iran did. They improved day by day, but we produced that junk product over and over for more than 30 years and we were proud to call it our national automobile. Koreans developed other industries and we developed ideologies. The result is that today we are a great market for Korean cars and electronic goods. I use a Korean monitor on my desktop. Korea is a symbol of economic development for Iranian economists.

During 1996 Asian Cup our national football team defeated Korea 6 - 2, that was a great achievement because even in football we have been always behind them. The man of the match was today's best scorer of the whole football history in the world: Ali Daei, who scored 4 of 6 goals.

Daei has had the undeniable position as the team captain till the last FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany. But that wasn't easy for him to hold the position. As he got more and more famous he became the target of the most envious critics inside Iran. From one side he became the best scorer of all time with 100+ goals in international matches, but from the other side he was cruelly criticized by the media because he had some deficiencies during some matches and the media and people following them wanted him to retire. Finally all pressures made the national team coaches to omit the long term captain from the list.

He didn't gave up. As he was playing in a mediocre team in Iranian Premiere League, he accepted to coach that team in the middle of the season, and in the end, that mediocre team was the champion of the league with Ali Daei's last goal. He abandoned playing football with glory and with all the envious people who always tried to destroy him.

I once read somewhere describing Daei's personality, it said: "He is the kind of men that has plans for everything, except for his death". And I saw him in an interview when he was asked: "Is there anything in the world that you like to exchange football with it?" and he said: "I exchange football with every good thing in the world. Football is just a small part of my life, I've got many other plans and issues that I like to follow, football isn't my everything."

He is the man of his plans and fighting for his plans.

Non-Linear World

11:14 (2003)
IMDB
Directed by: Greg Marcks
My Rate: 4/5

We have a famous and beautiful poem in Persian literature, I can't remind the poet's name. It tells the story of an eagle that spreads its wings and flies to find something to hunt, but is hit itself by a hunter's arrow. During falling down the eagle looks at its wing and the arrow and finds his own feather at the tail of the arrow, it sighs:
"At who we should protest? We're responsible for what happens to ourselves." (the whole effect and beauty of the story is in the Persian the poet has used, and you can't find any of that in my translation!).

Most of the time these effects are not so apparent as that eagle observed, because the universe is so complicated. The nature is curved and non linear, that's why works of art that follow the style of nature are more affecting. 11:14 adheres the same scheme. A very simple story told in a non-linear way, from different points of view of different observers and effectors. this kind of narration is supported with some butterfly effect philosophy make an incredible movie from a young and independent director. I can compare the narration to the way of "21 Grams", (but in a more simple way, 21 Grams was much more complicated), and the character design to Tarantino's characters with all their stupidities.

Move It!

It's always the matter of time Mr Shellman! So move it!

The Girl In Scarlet

Schindler's List (1993)
IMDB
My Rate: 5/5
Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Oskar Schindler is a German businessman who comes to Poland in the first days of occupation by the Germans in 1939. During the evacuation of jews from the cities, he picks some of them for labour to establish a factory producing utensils for the German army. His factory then becomes a refuge for the fugitive jews who prefer labour to death. Watching the Holocaust happening, shocks Schindler and makes him to spend all the money he has gathered from the factory to buy jews' lives from SS officers by bribing them and saving the jews from being slaughtered in Auschwitz concentration camp.

It's in black and white mostly, except that deeply affecting scene when Schindler watches the slaughter from a vantage point and he sees a little girl in scarlet dress running for her life and the only coloured thing in the scene in the little girl. Very touching. The film has many of these emotional peaks showing that how people suffer and what war has done to them...

Behind any war, is some stupidity and behind the stupidity is some ideology. In 1945, when Germany is defeated, a Russian soldier enters the camp and with the Russian accent tells them: "You are liberated by the Soviet army!". Yes, liberated but bound to another ideology that supports killing of the people for another purpose, another kind of groove, another 45 years for another ideology, and then another.

How many do we need?

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.

Easy Movie

View From The Top (2003)
IMDB
Directed by: Bruno Barreto
My Rate: 3/5

After a hard day arguing with a "dog", and after my fit of hatred was put out by listening to Animals, it was the time to bring my attitude back on track, probably by watching an easy movie. My random choice was successful and surprisingly supporting the idea that I'm reading a lot these days: having clear and detailed vision of your future goal and strive to get it.

Donna (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a small town girl always wished to see the world but she never had a chance to even leave that small town. After a break up with her boyfriend, she incidentally watches a famous and successful stewardess in TV, and that sparks a will in her heart to gain whatever she wishes. It's a simple, easy and delighting romantic comedy. I liked it.