On The Margins

Wednesday January 30, 2008

[ Art (هنر) ] When Art Becomes Work

Art becomes work for these men.  Except for the thumping of the print blocks, their work can be as quiet as prayer. They make products that others sell. They themselves use suppliers, for paint and for print blocks. Those who carve the print blocks, have suppliers for carving knives and pear tree wood blocks of the right kind.

2008-01-30 23:18:19.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art cloth forms iran isfahan print technology

Thursday September 20, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Zero Degree Turn -- Persian TV mini-Series

Farnaz Fassihi of The Wall Street Journal ("Iranian Unlikely TV Hit"), Washington Post, Nasser Karimi of Associated Press ("Iran's Newest Hero Aids WWII Era Jews"), a certain teenage family member ("Persian Stuff: Zero Degree Turn") and now NPR ("Romance on Iranian TV Crosses Cultures") have all published stories and bits and pieces about "Zero Degree Turn," an Iranian TV mini-series shot in Paris and Budapest.

The mini-series involves a love story between an Iranian-Palestinian Muslim man and a French Jewish woman during World War II. It is based on the true story of an Iranian student-diplomat in Paris who saved some 1,000 French Jews by issuing Iranian passports to them as a means of passage to the safety of neutral Iran.

YouTube seems to have some pieces of some of the episodes. I hear that the theme song of the mini-series has become quite a hit in Iran, and every Monday night people gather to watch it. Here, in the U.S. it broadcasts every Friday night on JJTVN through free satellite connection.

(I also ran into a CNN character and political analysis of the mini-series on YouTube. Unfortunately, it was grossly, almost purposefully, inaccurate. While commenting on the mini-series, the reporters don't even bother with getting any of the characters correctly and blatantly confuse very minor characters for the major ones. However, I am hardly surprised. Much of the mainstream media's bar on accuracy in reporting on Iran remains fixed shamefully low.) 

2007-09-20 23:52:18.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
history iran persian tv war

Monday July 30, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Hands Cutting Things

A couple of hands cutting things:

2007-07-30 21:21:27.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art community hands technology

Sunday July 22, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Once

Don't let the trailers fool you.  Once, a movie from Ireland, casts a cinematic glimpse at the passion and art of music making. It refreshes the concept of the musical cinema while weaving multiple stories about separation—the enigma and engine of all art and drama (to restate a maxim first stated by the British art critique John Berger.)

Once mixes music and movement ("movie" = a little thing capturing movement) to appeal to the intelligence of its viewers. It "is," and "is not," simply a wonderful musical. It "is" because it is a movie with music and about music. It "is not" because it defies the Hollywood tradition of the musical containing large amounts of dance although it fills the space with simple movements of everyday life. 

If you like music, play an instrument, have been separated from instruments or people you love, or have made music with others, you shouldn't miss it. For more comments about the movie, see here. Other sources include: an NPR interview. It is also worth reading the official Once press kit to see how this John Carney movie came together.

Once: Winner of 2007 Sundance Film Festival, World Cinema Audience Award, Dramatic. Excellent piece of work. "R" rating for some use of four-letter words but no sex and no violence. A great story, very creative composition and magnificent music presented in a simple space.

See the Washington Post  ("For 'Once,' A Musical Strikes the Right Cord" and "Breaking into Song, Bursting with Ideas") and the Associated Press ("'Once' deconstructs and reinvents the movie musical intimately, brilliantly") reviews. I have given some more review links elsewhere.

2007-07-22 15:24:16.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art cinema collaboration movies music

Friday July 13, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Young Readers, the Apprentice and the Potter

In the last stretch of our drive back to Silicon Valley this past week, we had a chance to listen to the audio version of The Midwife's Apprentice by Karen Cushman, and the story ended, very conveniently, as we drove back onto our garage way.

Cushman's book reads not only like a wonderful novella but also as a meticulous work of historical analysis. It certainly has a very good potential for becoming a great movie---I would imagine, much better than any Harry Potter.

Perhaps, someone has already made such a movie, and not being much of a movie-goer, I just don't know about it.

I think the main premise of Cushman's book is that only through pain, suffering and persistence can one disclose new worlds and give birth to what is worthy of being.

Fear, in particularly fear of failure in its various forms, remains the greatest sin.

Harry Potter deals with fear as a hero among idols would but the midwife's apprentice awakens to the sinfulness of fear in its very opposition to the greatest gift given to everyone---life itself.

2007-07-13 00:55:08.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
books children family fear movies

Tuesday June 26, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] If one day you journey away ...

A French Canadian has produced an interesting rendition of Faramarz Aslani's "If One Day You Journey Away ..." (Agheh Ye Rooz Beri Safar) song in the original Persian. Her next goal should probably be works by Dr. Mohammad Esfahani, say the ones in his recent album Barakat.

The only problem is we cannot hear her play her guitar here. For that, we may consult the young duo of brothers playing the song:

2007-06-26 18:37:11.0 -- Comments [3] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
canada french music persian

Wednesday June 20, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Multiple Dimensions

Tonight, I finally finished watching Kevin Kline's Hamlet, and as I was going back and forth across various scenes, I was immersed in the fullness of the subtlties in this production, not in its theatricality but in the superb delivery of its performance.

While, in recent years, multiple renditions of Hamlet have kept arriving on DVD --and I have seen several of them over the years-- the best so far, must be Kline's. It was apprantely recorded in a New York Shakespeare festival and released in 1990 under the Broadway Theatre Archive series. By comparison, Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet, a movie and not such a bad Hamlet, proves to be a rather weak cinematic imitation of Kline's theatric production. (Let's not even touch on Mel Gibson's Hamlet, which is even more poorly done in comparison to Kline's.)

It is the logic of Hamlet --or rather what we know of it-- that any good theatric production must preserve and propagate to the audience. The visual fanfare of cinematic productions (Gibson's and to a lesser extent Branagh's) obscure that logic. It is as if the visual display pleases the eye but deafens the ears (the heart?) to the story. In describing the logic of Hamlet, Lajos Egri says it right:

Literature has many tridimensional characters--Hamlet, for instance. We not only know his age, his appearance, his state of health; we can easily surmise his idiosyncrasies. His background, his sociology, give impetus to the play. We know the political situation at the time, the relationship between his parents, the events that have gone before and the effect they have had upon him. We know his personal premise, and its motivation. We know his psychology, and we can see clearly how it results from his physical and sociological make-up. In short, we know Hamlet as we can never hope to know ourselves.

In a good play, every scene works to advance the story and its premise. Not an extra word. Not an extra move. 

2007-06-20 23:58:18.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art drama play shakespeare

Thursday May 31, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Tehran Metro Art

Route: Line2 Station: Azadi Art Name: Winter Artist Name: Ali Mehdi Heidari Dimensions: 4.95*2.40 (meter) Art Kind: Tiles

To view Tehran Metro art pieces, turn here.

2007-05-31 23:21:31.0 -- Comments [7] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art tehran

Wednesday May 09, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] May It Live Multiple More Millennia

Having downed my wine glass filled with orange juice at one of the JavaOne parties, I left San Francisco for San Jose on 280 at around 11 pm Tuesday night.

As I was reflecting on the day and all the stimulating conversations I had had with my colleagues at Sun and with people from companies as widely different as IBM, Zimbra, Amobee, Funambol, Oracle-Tangosol, Hyperic, RedHat, JBoss, Ericsson, Motorola and others, and with people who are using PostgreSQL and Java DB I was also flipping through the albums on the iPod connected to the car stereo and landed on the first track of Kayhan Kalhor's Nokhosteen Deedar-e Bamdadi ("The Original Dawn Visit"). This is the same Kalhor of the Silk Road Project, and the track I believe to be his best work by far. The genius Kalhor has gathered and focused in this album should be sufficient to let Kamanchech (a multi-millennial Persian string instrument) speak to future generations for multiple more millennia (far longer than any computers or computer languages can survive).

I should point out that the faint-hearted may have some difficulty grasping the work. However, our daring to stay the course of drawning ourselves in Kalhor's musical expressions will prove rewarding as we open the locks we habitually put on our minds.

In summary, Nokhosteen Deedar-e Bamdadi demonstrates Kalhor's genius most convincingly and proves that the living tongue of the Kamancheh can proudly speak volumes to modern audiences for the foreseeable future.

(I believe I obtained the album in a summer trip to Iran in 2005 and unfortunately I do not find it on the Amazon CDs from Kayhan Kalhor to make a good recommendation.)

2007-05-09 00:34:27.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
music persian

Saturday May 05, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Neghar-ghari Art Exhibition

A scene from Neghar-ghari Art Exhibition, Tehran.

For more photos from the exhibition, see here and here. 

2007-05-05 16:44:20.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art tehran

Sunday April 22, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Architecture without Architects

Ahmad Kavousian took this (top, left) photograph of the village of Masule in 1975, and the photo on the right, probably taken in the city of Isfahan just in the last year or so, is from Alieh, who has posted some other, amazing photos from wonderful Isfahan, the capital of the Safavids. (Thanks go to Pooya for sharing his Flickr contact list.)

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architecture art photography

Friday March 16, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] The Largest Carpet in the World

One record for largest carpet in the world is being outweaved by another.

2007-03-16 17:47:19.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art carpets design persian weaving

Monday February 19, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon

The 20th-anniversary exhibition of In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon ends at the Cantor Arts Center after a national tour.

If you live in the Bay Area, as I do, or if visiting here, I highly recommend that you make it to Cantor for this exhibition, which will end on May 6, 2007.

Cantor Art Center has sponsored a lecture on Avedon's work for this Thursday, February 22, at 6:30 pm.
 

2007-02-19 01:26:56.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
american art photography

Sunday February 11, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Color of God

Now that I've just mentioned Bahman-e Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly, I should probably also mention, again, Majid Majidi's Color of Paradise, another Iranian movie worth a very close viewing. In the original Persian, the sub-titled movie was called Ranghe Khoda, or Color of God. This movie tells the story of a father and a son, a blind boy who yearns for home.

2007-02-11 22:58:16.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art film iran

[ Art (هنر) ] Turtules Can Fly

Recently, I had a chance to watch Turles Can Fly, another Kurdish film made by the Iranian film-maker Bahman Ghobadi and winner of several international prizes in 2004 and 2005. It depicts an almost surreal world of children living in a ruined Kurdish village and refugee camp in Iraq, near the city of Arbil. Disillusionment comes in a world caught between brutality, wars and invasions, and hope looks for cracks in the walls of this world.

2007-02-11 08:22:52.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
film iran kurdish movies

Monday January 22, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Solaris Deskop + Sun-Intel

I don't know what the default Solaris ("Nevada," Solaris 11, build 55+) desktop is made of but whatever it is made of, it looks and works great. I've only begun exploring it, and it is proving very sticky, meaning that once you start working on it, it is hard to let go. In terms of look-and-feel and real-time user-level performance (not to mention other measures), it competes extraordinarily well with the very best Linux desktops I've ever used, including the ones I'm using now. In my environment, i.e. a 2003 two-CPU Gateway desktop located in building 17 of MPK, it is blazingly fast, and it is not even the latest Xeon. Little wonder: Check out the Sun-Intel announcement coming soon here. The WSJ report on the deal, based on analysts' predictions, can be found here. Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has just posted about the announcement.

2007-01-22 10:05:19.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
business computing desktop history partnership solaris

Wednesday January 17, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Box Office Hit in Persian

The Persian (Iranian) box office hit of last year was Tahmineh Milani's Cease Fire.

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film iran marriage persian

Sunday January 14, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Light on Character

If you'd like some light but insightful reading on character with plenty of literary illustrations, consider Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing. I ran into Egri's book in an independent bookstore quite accidentally. Egri's book reads as crisply as it must have read back in 1942 when it was first published as How to Write a Play. The first Touchstone edition, which I have in my hands came out in 2004. In this day and age, if a book survives past 60 years, let it be named a modern classic!

Prior to plunging into Egri's writing, you may want to consider reading A Doll's House or Tartuffe or something more modern, perhaps Betrayal.

2007-01-14 01:20:09.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
books drama plays theater writing

Thursday January 04, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Snow Flakes

Small tourist towns such as South Lake Tahoe, near where I was fortunate enough to ski with my wife and daughters over the Chirstmas holidays, can still sustain independent and small businesses such as the Neighbors Bookstore. We went there to supplement the books we had bought or borrowed from libraries back home--one must have alternatives to skiing when snow pack is insufficient. In the very small but well-stocked drama section, I was yet again fortunate enough to find and buy the single copy of Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in The Creative Interpretation of Human Motives that still stood on the half full shelves.

I found this passage particularly apt given how it started:

Science will tell you that no two snowflakes have ever been discovered to be identical. The slightest disturbance in the atmosphere, the direction of the wind, the position of the falling snowflake, will alter the pattern. Thus there is endless variety in their design.  The same law governs us all. Whether one's father is always kind, or only kind occasionally, or kind but once, or never kind, will profoundly affect one's development. And if the paternal kindness coincided with one's happiest and most contented moments, it might pass unrecognized. Every move hinges upon the peculiar circumstances of the given moment. 

There you have it -- lots of philosophy packed into a fragment from one paragraph by Egri, found on a cold snowy night in South Lake Tahoe with no laptop in sight.

Notes:

For the physics of snow crystals, see here.

2007-01-04 23:09:21.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art character dramatic flakes plays snow structure theater writing

Thursday December 21, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] A Painting Biennial in Tehran

While looking for a photo of yalda celebrations this year, I ran into this interesting photo from the scene of The Fourth International Painting Biennial of The Islamic World in Tehran, Iran. Click on it and you'll see a larger image at Flickr. I believe the biennial started in the last week of November, and it looks like it ended today, December, 21, 2006. Here are some other pictures I found. It would be good to see more photographs of this exhibition. (As another example, check out this work.) There does not seem to be a website for the biennial or one that actually displays all the paintings. I believe my friend, and ex-Berkeley-ite, Bobak Etminani, also has several paintings on display in the biennial.

2006-12-21 20:59:38.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
art exhibition iran museum painting tehran