Michele Roohani

Wildfires, burning out of control, are continuing to threaten thousands of homes in California. A lot of people are going to lose theirs today. You can’t help but to have this incredible sense of the fragility of everything. As human beings we are wired to think that everything will stay the way it is, safe from sudden and intense changes…

We’ve had a very dry summer and the global warming is not helping. It is pretty scary to watch (even on TV) a fire that “jumps the freeway”. In my last post, I said that we have only one season here but I have to correct that because we have four: the earthquake season, the mudslide season, the fire season and the last but not least the Oscars season - each as unpredictable as the others in its outcome.

Just found these images (above) by Pooya Monajemi on BBC. Like Dante, we may all need our guide getting us out of Hell. “What region of the earth is not full of our calamities?”Virgil

The arbitrariness, the randomness of it all is astounding…”You did or did not escape the fires?” That could be the current definition of a Californian. The two images (above) from yahoo say more about these devastating fires.

I took the picture above from my car, trapped on the closed down freeway 14 near Sand Canyon, a couple of hours ago - I still have the smoke on my hair.

Una furtiva lagrima
negli occhi suoi spunt�…

A sullen and secretive tear
That started there in her eye…

Una furtiva lagrima, Nemorino’s aria from L’Elisir d’Amore

Pavarotti died two days ago. I remember the first time i heard him and got my operatic learning from this chubby affable Italian with a voice from heaven; I had this one cassette and kept listening to it for months in my car in the early eighties. I was trying to “educate” myself in OPERA (and a little bit of latin and italian to understand his lyrics in the pre-internet era). I later bought the CD, and the rest is history…I couldn’t be indifferent to his death, so I put together some of the pictures that I could find from the Metropolitan Opera and I made the image above. The photo below is Pavarotti in 1968.

Incidentally, a very dear friend of my family, Jamshid Askari, passed away last week at exactly the same age of 71; he was as gentle and kind as an angel with a beautiful voice to match. Roohash Shaad.