Michele Roohani

Another Valentine’s Day and another excuse to say I love you to people who matter—in the universal language of poetry and roses…

I am in love,

with  Italo Calvino but he doesn’t care much about me…I have to dedicate a post to him!

“Mon bel amour mon cher amour ma déchirure
Je te porte dans moi comme un oiseau blessé
Et ceux-là sans savoir nous regardent passer
Répétant après moi les mots que j’ai tressés
Et qui pour tes grands yeux tout aussitôt moururent” Aragon

Let’s stay in Europe with an Irish poet:

“Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.” Seamus Heaney

Some sexy poetry from the good old English poet:

“The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I’d like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I’d like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.” John Fuller

I wish all of my friends a very sweet Valentine:

One last poem from Fereydoon Moshiri:

بگذار که بر شاخه این صبح دلاویز
بنشینم و از عشق سرودی بسرایم
آنگاه به صد شوق چو مرغان سبکبال
پر گیرم ازین بام و به سوی تو بیایم
خورشید از آن دور از آن قله پر برف
آغوش کند باز همه مهر همه ناز
سیمرغ طلایی پر و بالی است که چون من
از لانه برون آمده دارد سر پرواز
پرواز به آنجا که نشاط است و امیدست
پرواز به آنجا که سرود است و سرور است
آنجا که سراپای تو در روشنی صبح
رویای شرابی است که در جام بلور است

“I’d like to be your only audience,

The final name in your appointment book,

Your future tense.”

If this wasn’t enough to satisfy your Valentine’s cravings you can see more of Valentine 2009 here and Valentine 2008 here.

To hear all the above poetry read by a great voice go here.

all the flowers in this post are from Marsano in Zurich http://www.marsano.ch

Red—no matter what other name you call it by— is the color of  passion, anger, courage, sacrifice, warning, fire, sin, revolution, love, power, etc…

red is my favorite color and these are some samples of my reds; let’s start with a red heart or a scarlet letter:

red tomatoes,

red fish,

red Persian rug,

red literature,

a red fountain pen,

and a red pencil,

red lips,

a hot red car,

another hot red car,

an aspiring red rose,

and a real red rose,

lovelorn poppies,

red peppers,

high calorie red,

a small red door,

and a slightly bigger one!

the fabulous Miss Wendy:

Los Angeles’ red light district,

red beads,

wine is one of my favorite reds,

red steps in Prague,

and red steps in Buenos Aires,

a disobedient red strawberry shortcake,

and a red blog…

and this is the end of my Red post.

“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.

And what a year 2008 has been…The fresh 2009 better be better! I don’t remember people looking forward to retire a year (and their president) so eagerly.

The optimist in me hopes for:

“Another fresh new year is here . . .
Another year to live!
To banish worry, doubt, and fear,
To love and laugh and give!

This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest . . .
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!    William Arthur Ward

The realist in me screams back:

“New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.” James Agate

I’ve been reading this extremely entertaining book about V.S. Naipaul—The world is what it is—and realizing more and more how his anger towards banality, mediocrity and simple pettiness of people makes sense (of course he is obviously not a nice man). I have written about him before and my interest in him was sharpened after I read in the BBC about this biography of his being published without him changing a word of it. Now, that’s courage…

A  good article about the book and the five years it took Patrick French  to write it was published in The Nation ; a fascinating glimpse of the mind of the “supreme egotist”.

I find Naipaul’s banter with Derek Walcott amusing; read about it in The Telegraph.

Two Nobel Laureates from the West Indies fighting like children—cute!

Ian Buruma describes him well: “Naipaul’s voice, which some younger writers are tempted to mimic, cannot be defined by citing his opinions on race, the colonial experience, India, literature, or anything else. His views are frequently designed to shock and outrage.”

Cynicism (at its best) jumps at you from every page of French’s book and Sir Vidia’s lucid prose has kept me awake all last week. I empathize when he says: “my life is too short, I can’t listen to banality”.

Like Naipaul, I have refused to engage in wishful thinking all my life and if this makes me a cynic, be it! “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

added on 12/23/08—I keep looking for him—just read James Wood’s article, Wonder and Wounded: He is socially successful but deliberately friendless, an empire of one: “At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.”

added on 12/27/08—”Artists cannot claim immunity from decency.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

I agree to a certain point with her but I don’t believe that artists should be judged by their personality (ies)—Picasso must have been an impossible man with his lovers but I can’t deny his art…

Is Naipaul “mad, bad and dangerous to know” like Lord Byron was? Read this very good article in Times by Magnus Linklater.

Guess what we all got from Santa Claus this year?

It’s been a horrendous holiday season and my images below illustrate the Christmas mood of Rodeo Drive:

The real estate market is so bad, they are giving away whole buildings!

The haute couture has a small “sale” sign but no buyers…

The Christmas decorations are as gorgeous as ever but with no money to spend, people are just not in the mood,

and the  Cinderella slipper has to wait for a better (non-bankrupt) prince.

The doormen at Prada are waiting in vain too— the headless/moneyless client is entrapped in Koolhaas’ quirky cell:

Last year’s night version of this was way more cheerful…

Africa’s still bleeding in spite of De Beers pretty windows:

An exercise in futility if you ask me but Harry Winston is still showing off its ridiculous necklaces.

The poinsettias are effortlessly beautiful and everywhere—they keep bringing a smile to my face without costing an arm and a leg.

An espresso and the man of the year to wrap up the day.

It looks like we’re going to have to take Einstein’s advice, whether we like it or not: “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

This is a collective smile, thousands of miles long…

Take a look at these pictures of the big smile here and read about it from Christiane Amanpour here.

A paradigm shift my friends, a paradigm shift of biblical proportions…Read Thomas Friedman’s excellent article here and Judith Warner’s amazing piece here.

“We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” Barack Obama

Coming back from Europe, reality hit me with the softness of barbed wire! The U.S. is paralyzed with fear and uncertainty and the world is watching in horror the rapid meltdown of greedy and extreme American Capitalism—of the unregulated kind thanks to Reagan.

These are hard times and people can’t “go to the mall” anymore like their president suggested a few years back but Sarah Palin sure did with her shopping tag of $150,000—read Dowd’s interesting column here. Remember Obama’s tattered shoes?

Watch out  for the trick…People have been affected by the real estate massacre and there is blood on the streets everywhere— massive layoffs have not started yet. This cartoon of Ed Stein is funny and sad at the same time:

I don’t know about you but I prefer my autumn in its original colors of yellow/orange and the Halloween sweet and funny. If you miss my jack-o-lanterns click on my last year’s Halloween post.

I couldn’t resist including my picture of this classic Morgan—it has the perfect colors.

Exploration of the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty. I hope that the elections bring some degree of order and certitude; chaos scares the hell out of me.

Usain and Hussein have been on my mind in the past week; the lightning Bolt—aka the fastest man alive—and Hussein Obama. I made this image for my son who wanted a poster of Obama using a photo by Callie Shell of Time magazine:

“A Paradigm Shift is  a change from one way of thinking to another. It’s a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change” according to Thomas Kuhn; he believes that Change is difficult and that human beings resist change— awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes. A Paradigm Shift is when a significant change happens—usually from one fundamental view to a different view. In most cases, some type of major discontinuity occurs as well. Khun thinks that “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions cause one conceptual world view to be replaced by another view”.

My question for you boys and girls is that what makes one cling to the atrophied McCain—aka the off-line American—over the uber-eager Obama? I didn’t vote for Obama in the primaries but neither can I  imagine voting for mister “I want to relive vietnam ad nauseum”…

What are these posters from the good senator’s camp? Martin Luther King, the second coming? I frankly like my version better.

Another paradigm shift came this last week of the Olympics with the other Hussein or Usain:

What can I say? the man can run! Look at him here on cruise control going the 100 meters on 9.68 seconds; this guy with all his antics was a breath of fresh air.

Claude Verlinde and Jacques Poirier are two underrepresented French painters. They are both master illusionists/image makers/mirage makers.

I fell in love with the above painting when I first got introduced to Verlinde’s work in Paris. We all know hollow people, lacking in real value, sincerity, or substance – we have all met shallow people lacking in depth of thought, or feeling. In Persian we call them “hollow drums”: noisy but empty.

Thanks to the internet we can know of something without really knowing about it. We used to have to read, to see, to hear something in order to be able to talk about it but not anymore folks! everybody’s an expert.

I’ve been wanting to talk about V.S. Naipaul for the longest time. Every time that somebody tries to eat up my life/time, I remember the writer’s fabulous statement reported on BBC: “my life is too short, I can’t listen to banality”.

Staying with the trompe l’oeil of Verlinde and Poirier, take a look at this very clever ad:

You can see the rest of these very funny ads here.

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