On The Margins

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.

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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.
 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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art exhibition iran museum painting tehran

Monday October 30, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] Films For Bostonians

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston hosts a showing of Iranian films from November 10 to December 3, 2006. (Thanks go to the East Coast colleague who pointed me to the film festival at MFA.)

I highly recommend "Cease Fire," a film made by director Tahmineh Milani only last year. It is really a man vs. woman farce complete with a character who is seeking a sex transformation surgery. (Yes, they make movies like that in the Islamic Republic of Iran.) I should add that "Cease Fire" falls far short of the usual films Iranian directors have dished to international film festivals but it is a great example of Iranian pop films which rarely make it abroad. "Cease Fire" has broken all previous box-office records in Iran. Of course, that is nothing to compare with the numbers from Ballywood or Hollywood.

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Friday October 27, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] Cartoon for the Weekend

Several years ago, I bought a DVD of cartoons called Best of the Best: Especially for Kids. In it, there is a cartoon music video based on Albert Wade Hemsworth's 1949 song "Blackfly". Hemsworth, a career draftsman for Canadian National Railway Co., wrote many classical Candadian folk songs. Since a certain young child at my home has rediscovered this cartoon collection, I've been wondering if anyone had posted the cartoon music video. A quick search on YouTube resulted in the following, which can actually be synchronized with the actually DVD.
 

You may also want to visit National Film Board's web site in memoriam of Hemsworth.

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Wednesday October 25, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] Talking of the Master

When writing about Kayhan Kalhor earlier, I hadn't expected to see another interview with him so soon. In his interview with The World, he discusses his recent work with Erdal Erzincan.

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Saturday October 21, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] A Poetry That Demands Its Own Music

I've written about classical Persian music in an earlier entry. Having just seen the first half of a DVD depicting the production of a Persian classical music concert, I ended up doing a search on one of the performers and ran into an interesting NPR interview with the master kamancheh player, Kayhan Kalhor. If you're interested in ancient Persian poetry and music (e.g. Rumi and others), I recommend listening to this interview, which also contains commentary on a piece of classical Persian music.

A good way to get an audio-visual experience of classical Persian music is to attend a concert. In the area where I live, Stanford University and UC Berkeley have traditionally carried these concerts for the last 15 years or so despite general sanctions against Iran, which have been in effect for the last 26 years. In 2002, the masters travelled to multiple U.S. cities for their performance. I do not recall any performances in the last year and don't know when there will be one in the Bay Area again, anytime soon. (Getting your hands on the Hamnava ba Bam DVD could be your next best substitute to attending a concert. The copy I have can be played easily on an iMac or an EMEA-region DVD player.)

Some samples of classical Persian singing, performed by Homayoon Shajarian (Muhammad Reza Shajarian's son) can be found here.

2006-10-21 23:28:19.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday October 09, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] Awakening

My daughter Yasmine, who enjoys fictional literature, rarely sees me read any.  So, she was very surprised to find me relax for half an hour this weekend reading Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska, in his Other Places, which I borrowed from our local library when we last visited it. "Plays are easier to go through and they can have so much to say in such simple ways," I explained to her. In fact, I've been reading several short plays recently, and Pinter (the winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature) has enough of them to form a body of work worth a special study.

Having been inspired by Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, Pinter's A Kind of Alaska recreates a single experience of 'awakening' from encephalitis lethargica, a disease which spread through Europe in the winter of 1916-1917. Over the next decade some five million people fell to it with about a third of them dying. Some survived unscathed, others woke up from their 'sleep' by the drug L-DOPA some fifty years later.

I should add that in Pinter's Other Places, the play A Kind of Alaska precedes another called Victoria Station, which is a hilarious farce, the unfolding of which packs all kinds of meaning, which can only be uncovered in actual performances. In other words, the question "What is going on here?" can only be fully answered in real performances of the play.

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Thursday September 14, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] Lessons for All

Lessons for All ...

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Saturday August 12, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] What is going on with movies?

Adrianna is recommending "Little Miss Sunshine."

This movie attempts to pursue the same tradition as "Me and You and Everyone We Know" or even "The Squid and The Whale" although it pales in comparision with both when it comes to its exploration of real emotions. Nevertheless, it is a well-meant attempt.

Movie makers in America are finally paying some attention to stories of real family emotions and family problems in America. I use the word family because all these movies are centered around children and their adult care-givers.

This practice of involving the emotional relationships with children goes back to the Italian tradition but it has been utilized and enhanced in modern movies from Iran, too. For example, see "Color of Paradise" or other Majid Majidi movies.

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Thursday August 10, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] Poetry Under Siege

A friend of mine was once encouraging me to translate Rumi. I tried but every time, I was drawn to simpler work by more modern poets. Translating poetry from one language to another is a very tricky job, often failing at every attempt.

Tonight while on my way to feed a friend's pets (a dog, two rabits and a few birds) in Saratoga, I accidentally tuned onto a program that included the recitation of a rather unusual and long epic poem translated from Arabic to English.

Coptic poet and educator Matthew Shenoda was giving a moving recitation of "State of Siege", a poem by the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. Apparently, Darwish is one of the most prominent contemporary poets in the Arab world.

You can find the recitation on the archive of the "Voices of the Middle East" for August 9, 2006. (The poem begins at minute 27:00. The first 27 minutes of the program includes an interview with Azmi Beshara.)

(Note that this is neither an endorsement of the program, nor the poet nor the reciter. Let others judge.)

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Tuesday August 01, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] At the Golestan Palace

Gholestan
Originally uploaded by M.Mortazavi.

Another post from flickr.

This photo was taken in mid-July, 2006, at the Golestan Palace in Tehran.

The girls had been there before with their mom. Although I was born and lived in Tehran until I turned 17, this was my first time to visit the palace.

Large parts of the palace gardens were destroyed by Reza khan (founder of the Pahlavi dynasty) to make room for government offices and ministries.

What remains is a reminder of the splender of the Qajar kings' compound. Portions of the compound were built, in an even earlier era, during the Safavid period.

Today, the compound includes some splendid photography. Some of the photos were taken by Naserddin Shah himself.

2006-08-01 15:55:47.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday May 11, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] Photo Blogging

I used to think I was one of those rare photo-blogging species but there are more.

Checkout The Washington Post's online discussion with the founders of Photolog.

2006-05-11 23:10:35.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Friday April 21, 2006

[ Art (هنر) ] A Simple Story

Majid Majidi's Baran tells a simple story — of spite, love and healing, experienced by a young man of apparently measly origins. While the original languages used in this movie are Persian (of Iranian and Afghan varieties) and Turkish (of the Azeri variety), much of the story comfortably unfolds with little use of language. (Subtitles are available in English and other languages.) What are Majidi's movies about? What does he aim to accomplish? Here is a simple summary: Majidi focuses on the subtle process involved in the emotional education of human beings. That simple objective forms the core of his movies. However, that simple objective by itself cannot produce a cinema worth watching. To complement and accentuate his simple objective into an art form, Majidi constantly finds, magnifies and shares a beauty of vast proportions in the simple scenery of his stories. (Earlier, I've reviewed another one of Majidi's movies here.)

2006-04-21 19:43:05.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.