In spite of commercialism of this day, it’s always a good idea to let people you love, know it.
“Today we are obliged to be romantic
And think of yet another valentine.
We know the rules and we are both pedantic:
Today’s the day we have to be romantic.
Our love is old and sure, not new and frantic.
You know I’m yours and I know you are mine.
And saying that has made me feel romantic,
My dearest love, my darling valentine.”
by Wendy Cope (1945 – )
On a rainy sunday afternoon in Paris, you can get really sentimental about a good old Los Angeles Dim Sum!
A visit to my old pictures of these Har Gows or shrimp dumplings made me wax nostalgic…These little shrimp bonnets were a part of a delicious Dim Sum at the Empress Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles.
The Cantonese phrase dim sum (點心) means literally “touch the heart” or “order to your heart’s content”. Originally it was not a main meal, only a snack, and therefore only meant to touch the heart and even though it is now a staple of chinese cuisine everywhere, it reigns supreme in Hong Kong.
Let’s go back to L.A.’s Empress Pavilion. Golden rule: if the place is completely packed with Chinese people, odds are that the food is pretty good!
I have been to this restaurant where the “feeling” is more authentic (with huge round tables and frequent cart circulation). I love picking out my food from carts being wheeled around. It’s such a novel experience for a Persian (who always has to be coerced into taking some more food enrobed in taarof!)
Imagine waitresses with huge steaming carts full of exotic Dim Sum that they push around, and the excitement of choosing what you want from the cart. I love Cheung Fun or rice noodle roll that you see on the top shelf of the cart above and in your dish bellow:
“Travellers on the ancient Silk Road needed a place to take a nap, so teahouses were established along the roadside. Rural farmers, exhausted after working hard in the fields, would also go to teahouses for a relaxing afternoon of tea. People later discovered that tea can aid in digestion, so teahouse owners began adding various snacks and the tradition of dim sum evolved.”
Kai-lan (Gai-lan) or Chinese broccoli (or Chinese kale) is prepared in front of your hungry eyes,
The sharing act of dim sum is very important to the ceremony of eating it and drinking tea “Yum Cha” together as a unit. As I mentioned above, “Dim Sum” means point of the heart, so the act is supposed to warm your heart while you dine. Dim Sum is a breakfast and lunch time food. You will not be able to find it after 2pm!
I don’t particularly care for fried turnip cakes or potstickers but I always order them when I am taking people for Dim Sum for the first time:
I have been to the nitty gritty San Francisco chinatown Dim Sum places too; they are more authentic but can overwhelm you if you don’t drink a zillion cups of tea with your food:
My favorite remains the Los Angeles Dim Sum so think about me and drop me a line next time you are having some!
to see my other food posts:
This is my blog’s fourth Anniversary issue and what better subject than the amazing Nicolas Bouvier! He traveled from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan in 1953-1954 with his painter friend, Thierry Vernet.
I read his great book, The way of the world, last year; it started a bit slow but once that he got to Iran, I was hooked. This map traces their journey from Europe to Asia where Bouvier starts in Geneva and ends in Afghanistan:
His friend, Vernet, has kept a visual jounal by drawing what they see together and what Bouvier writes:
These images are my interpretation of their work and an homage to this delightful journal. “Ten years in the writing, The Way of the World is a masterpiece which elevates the mundane to the memorable and captures the thrill of two passionate and curious young men discovering both the world and themselves.”
They traveled with a small Fiat Topolino (above and below) that took them through hell and paradise!
What was striking about this little book was the fact that I didn’t have to lower my expectation of excellence: Bouvier writes with the ease of the poet that he is and the attention of an enthusiastic humanist…
He talks about “women buried in their floret tchador”: femmes ensevelies dans leur tchador à fleurettes.
He talks about how “Iran, the old aristocrat, who has experienced everything in life … and forgotten a lot, is allergic to ordinary remedies and needs special treatment. The gifts are not always easy to give when children are five thousand years older than Santa Claus.”
After finishing the book, I got curious about the writer and started the “research”! I compiled many images about this master Iconographer, I watched many of his interviews—from his youth until the last years of his life— and he sounds as fresh at the end as he did in the beginning.
The Swiss television has a great archive on the subject.
I have to admit that the year they spent in Iran was the most interesting to me— even though Serbia, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan had their own exhilarating charm. He even talks about my old school, Jeanne D’Arc of Tehran, in the years before my birth. The next couple of pictures of Bouvier are from their time in Tehran; this one from a modest hotel’s balcony:
He’s typing in the nude in the heat of the Iranian summer:
Most of all I loved the winter they spend in North west of Iran, in Tabriz:
The way he describes the long quiet winter in that city transports the reader to the depth of our common humanity; I laughed when he talks about the smell of hot Persian breads, Sangak and Lavaash in the snow or when he describes the frozen mustaches and beards of men in the freezing cold, the boiling water of samovars and the fact that everybody thinks only about three words: tea, coal and vodka!
Speaking of Persian breads, Bouvier suggests that only a very old country can make luxuries out of most banal routines; this bread has been thirty generations and a few dynasties in the making…
I was overwhelmed with nostalgia reading his beautiful poem about the onset of winter (Zemestan in Persian) in Tabriz:
I couldn’t find it in English so I translated it myself; first the original in French:
Novembre
Les grenades ouvertes qui saignent
sous une mince et pure couche de neige
le bleu des mosquées sous la neige
les camions rouillés sous la neige
les pintades blanches plus blanches encore
les longs murs roux les voix perdues
qui cheminent sous la neige
et toute la ville jusqu’à l’énorme citadelle
s’envole dans le ciel moucheté
C’est Zemestan, l’hiver
Tabriz, 1953
November
Bleeding open pomegranates
under a thin layer of pure snow
the blue of the mosques in the snow
rusty trucks in the snow
white guinea fowl whiter still
long red walls lost voices
who walk in the snow
and the whole town to the huge citadel
flies in the mottled sky
It’s Zemestan, winter
Tabriz, 1953
These images are based on the following books:
Bleu Immortel and The way of the world.
I read the “The way of the world” in french (L’Usage du Monde) but it has been lovingly translated by Robyn Marsack; I recommend it to all of you.
Que votre ombre grandisse or May your shadow grow!
I am finally in Paris—to stay. Looking for a job and an apartment and so happy that even the gray rainy days don’t make me homesick for my sunny California (yet)!
Everything looks kind of rosy in the Luxembourg Garden:
I am going to take you on a short promenade in Paris: in the morning you have a quick coffee in your hotel room,
If you are lucky you can see the Etoile with almost no traffic:
but if you are really lucky you will catch some new version of the Beatles crossing the streets:
and then you buy your metro ticket (and maybe cigarettes if you are one of my girlfriends),
from here:
and head down to your favorite café in Saint Germain,
or any other nondescript one like this one,
and watch people (something I am not very good at—coming from the U.S. where staring at others is considered a major faux pas):
and more people,
or watch them watch you!
Of course in Paris, everyone is a philosopher and you better get used to it:
and most waiters are annoying!
I personally prefer watching the iconic Parisian rooftops than people:
and temporary exhibitions like the one below:
Next, I will drag you to see the eternal Bonaparte (or Malaparte according to the rest of Europe!)
After lunch, you feed the little sparrows in Place des Vosges,
or see Quasimodo feed them in front of the majestic Notre Dame cathedral:
You may want to see the stage makers in the old Paris Opera house:
and hear me curse Chagall for the nth time for having defaced the original ceiling!
we can go see Dali and ask him why his Venus has open drawers…
From the Montparnasse tower you can see most of the landmarks:
I love this view with the Luxembourg garden as a blob of green in the middle of my photo:
And when you are dead tired you go back home but not before admiring the beautiful bridges of the city of light:
you buy some bread (low carb dieters beware) because that’s all you can afford if you buy anything else in Paris!
A glass of wine and a piece of cheese will be all you need,
you may admire the blue hour from your window:
you may read a little bit,
then you go to sleep and dream about great stuff…
and wake up to an early deserted Trocadéro:
and watch the rainy morning start in front of a bitter espresso in a very small cup:
and wonder about what the hell you are doing away from the sunny California and your friends and Cyrus,
and the good old Santa Monica…
but then you remember that you wanted to do that all your life and you better do your best to be happy in the land of Molière!
First day of Spring 2010 is the beginning of the Persian New Year of 1389—Happy Nowruz everybody!
In previous years, I have talked a lot about Haft Seen (seven S’s on the new year’s spread) and the calendar; for this year, I decided to tell you which of the seven really symbolize Nowruz for me. One is Sabzeh or wheat sprouts (above) and the other is Sonbol, the hyacinth (below):
I am still in Los Angeles and the Wilshire Corridor is awash in Nowruz banners like this one:
My little sabzeh looks lonely among downtown high-rises:
Being close to the L.A.’s flower market, I left to take pictures early morning and I wasn’t disappointed. I loved the fragrance of these gorgeous stocks,
and the beautiful tulips that scream “spring is here” in so many colors:
I bought as much as I could carry and rushed home to take pictures.
As a child, I remember listening to the Iranian singer, Pouran Shapouri, sing Eyd oumad bahaar oumad…
in our new Eyd dresses (new year’s dress) that my mom had made for my sister and I.
Vigen’s song, Shokoufeh (blossom), was another of my favorites as the harbinger of Nowruz.
يكي دو روز ديگر از پگاه
چو چشم باز ميكني
زمانه زير و رو
زمينه پرنگار مي شود
زمين شكاف ميخورد
به دشت سبزه ميزند
هر آن چه مانده بود زير خاك
هر آنچه خفته بود زير برف
جوان و شسته رفته آشكار ميشود
نگار من
اميد نوبهار من
لبي به خنده باز كن
ببين چگونه از گلي
خزان باغ ما بهار ميشود
سیاوش کسرایی
Sabzeh shows up in the new year celebrations in many countries:
Let’s not forget my favorite, the goldfish:
Goldfish in a bowl represents life and the end of the month of Esfand (pisces).
for more on the traditions of Nowrouz: NoRuz, Norouz, haft-seen, haft-sheen, etc…
Norouz 1388, the blooming of a new year
Pouran singing about Eyd
a great slide show of Nowruz gold fish farms
ca·lam·i·tiy:
1 : a state of deep distress or misery caused by major misfortune or loss
2 : a disastrous event marked by great loss and lasting distress and suffering
This “bar-coded” child is the symbol of the total helplessness of people in Port-au-Prince.
I am heartbroken by the utter distress/despair of Haiti. So much misery and suffering caused by a few seconds of random natural violence…
“Tout est enfin divisé
Tout se deforme et se perd
Tout se brise et disparait
La mort sans conséquences”
“Everything is finally divided
Everything is deformed and lost
All breaks and disappears
Death without consequences” Eluard
I wonder how Basquiat would have seen all this suffering in his fatherland; he painted some prescient images in 1980’s…
Damon Winter has taken striking pictures of the inconsolable Haiti.
An expression that can mean anything means nothing; when you want to please everybody, you please nobody.
Enrico Fermi, the great Italian physicist, killed all the aliens in 1950 by asking this simple/innocent question: “if extra-terrestrials exist, where are they?” This question has become the Fermi Paradox.
Even though I am a science fiction fan I do agree with the skeptics that, Houston, we have a problem:
a) the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) program to detect radio transmissions from other civilizations has been a failure.
b) the question of the Great Silence remains unsolved; if life is common, why don’t we detect their radio transmissions?
Today is the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing (July 20, 1969).
I remember the thrill of hearing about it on a hot summer day in Iran; the moon has not looked the same since!
Unlike my father, I am a lousy philatelist (postage stamp collector) but I was able to find the above page I bought in 1994—on the 25th anniversary of “the big step”—among my loose leaves.
The Drake Equation—an attempt to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way with which we might come into contact— is still fascinating to me but I see its light getting dimmer with every “silent year”…
This once serious equation looks more and more like this cartoon from this very funny site:
To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the moon, Google is offering Internet users a virtual trip to the moon.
I empathize with Fermi’s passion for clarity. I am simply unable to let things be foggy. The Drake equation is literally meaningless because “an expression that can mean anything means nothing.”
Related and Suggested Posts and Resources:
Carl Sagan explaining the Drake Equation.
Google earth lands on the moon.
Other Life not likely to be intelligent.
A wise man once said: Father’s Day should be nine months before Mothers’ Day and in some crazy way, this statement makes sense! For men, fatherhood is a byproduct of sex. At least, that’s what evolutionary psychologists tell us. Through the millennia, Children of men have been caused by our sexual instincts as a species and not through rational analysis of the concept of fatherhood. The same goes for other animals. Whether an organism has a one day lifespan like the mayfly or if it lives for a couple of centuries like the bowhead whale , the life of all organisms appears focused on survival, finding a mate, and producing offspring.
And quite frankly, if I were a mayfly with a single day to live, I’d also put mating at the very top of my list! Once that first item is checked off, we humans preoccupy ourselves with the arts, culture, and entertainment in order to fill the remaining hours of the day. Voila! But let’s not get off the subject. Father’s Day is the day we celebrate Fathers. And since I just became a father a month ago and am still a freshman on the subject, I would like to salute those fathers who came before me.
But what are the merits of fatherhood? Other than our biological instinct for sex that results into children, do we have any rational reasons for this act? The project involves so much work and sacrifice that one may wonder what’s the utility of the whole thing. It starts with dirty diapers and ends with a lifetime of anxiety over safety, health, and happiness of our child. An old, Persian expression says, “Children are hard, only for the first one hundred years!”
Yet, when a child smiles, learns, and grows, and especially when she pays her parents back with emotional pride, all those sleepless nights and anxieties melt away and the entire ordeal appears worthwhile. Or does it?
I want to pose these questions to the fathers and others out there, and to those who consciously or unconsciously chose this path. I’d like to ask you to make your case for or against fatherhood in today’s world of dynamic change and uncertain future. Are we leaving a better place for our children, or has our greed and recklessness destroyed our economy and environment irreparably? Is it still a responsible act to bring children into this world given the future challenges?
It’s been two years since I started this blog and I just have to make this post fabulous…I’ve been wanting to write about the new Kindle for a while but I have felt guilty towards books!
As many of you know I am a shameless bibliophile but even though I am a rather “early adapter” of new technologies, buying a Kindle has not been a priority (you can carry a big chunk of your library—1500 books— and the neighborhood’s news stand in one Kindle).
I am tactile and love touching books and feeling the pages, the type, smelling the paper, the ink, etc…this little soldier guards my books valiantly!
This one—Herman Hess’ Narcissus and Goldmund— was one of my favorites and I have read it in three languages during the past 30 years (talking about obsession!) and I can’t imagine getting the same pleasure from reading it on Kindle…
Could I have appreciated Jean Michel Maulpoix‘s poetry without his signature blue covers? No paper?
Would he have wanted to be read on a gadget? Knowing him, I would say non!
“Blue makes no noise. It is a timid color, without ulterior motives, forewarning or plan; it does not leap out at the eye like yellow or red do, but rather draws it in, taming it little by little, letting it come unhurriedly, so that it sinks in and drowns in it, unaware.”
I can read Lukacs or Gopnick on a Kindle but not the Shahnameh (even writing about it is sacrilegious). One of my favorite blog posts is the one I wrote about this passion of mine.
I audited a bookbinding course on my last trip to europe and was pleasantly surprised to see that this beautiful art is not dead.
people in the atelier were restoring old books—resewing the pages, making new covers, etc—with a lot of love, attention and reverence. These fonts were for leather book jackets:
Is Amazon.com cannibalizing its own industry? They are the makers of Kindle.
I have to admit that even I would love to have all the newspapers I read daily, on one gadget. The gadget that carries most of my books to choose from on a trip; I guess all I am saying is that it’s very hard to read poetry on a machine—wouldn’t these beautiful poems feel/sound better on paper?
i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
e.e. cummings
“Parfois je me fais presque honte
De croire autant ce que je ne crois pas.
C’est une variété de rêve
Avec le réel au milieu.” Fernando Pessoa
Thank you all for the kind comments and support through these past two years.
Revisit my post on books here.
A book is a present we keep opening—again and again…
“Real security is the ability to tolerate mystery, complexity, ambiguity—indeed hungering for these things.” Eve Ensler
Behind bars, these tulips have lost their beauty and have only gained a false sense of protection.
Real security means contemplating death, not pretending it doesn’t exist. We are prisoners of our fears or the fears of our fathers; uniformity becomes the only acceptable way…
“When security becomes the center of your life, you can’t travel very far or venture too far outside a certain circle. You can’t allow too many conflicting ideas into your mind at one time as they might confuse you or challenge you. You can’t open yourself to new experiences, new people, and new ways of doing things.”
Self-imposed rules prevent potential disasters but they also ensure mediocrity—Salieri’s mediocrity against Mozart’s genius…Too scared of trying new things, we stay secure, in control and alone.
According to Charlie Jones , “the only difference from where you are right now, and where you’ll be one year from now, are the books you read and the people you meet.”
For a great example of passion for life and risk taking that leads to success see my popular post about Gustavo Dudamel.