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Kashk-E Bademjoon and Split-Pea Soup

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.  My job is particularly annoying me today.  I mean, it's not even what I'm here in LA for.  I'm an artist, for crying out loud.  But here I am, answering phones, making coffee, writing emails for other people, recording company shows on to a DVD only to file them in a "library" in the back simply because my supervisor said so.  Twenty one years of intense musical training, thirteen years of working for the man, eleven years of playing in hotels, dirty bars and clubs where only a few people care to listen, and some odd years of everything else later, I'm still paying my dues.  "Pas chi fekr kardi?", my mom says.  Yest

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Toomar

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Reza Aslan on Bebin TV

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Inspirations from James Allen

“The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, laboring humanity would perish” says James Allen, a twentieth century English philosopher, in his first book “ As A Man Thinketh”. And ‘they’ are the artists, those who bring the beauty before our eyes and ears.

 

As medical doctors are in charge of the physical health of a society, architects and engineers take care of the infrastructure of a city, and farmers prepare our food, artists maintain the wellbeing of the soul of a society. They transform the energy of life into the matter and bring it to our homes, cars, parks, and streets; they dream the unknown, and manifest it in music, painting, writing, sculpting, photography and all the art forms.

 

Artists define what’s being a human, what humans are capable of. They recreate the nature and the life force. They are at the center of the universe, the most connected with the heart of a society, its people, and its connection to the unknown. They can translate the mystery, and they are always one step ahead of the rest. They are dreamers, and only dreams can come true. Let them dream, lofty dreams, and let them cherish a beautiful vision, so it may be.

 

“Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which shall one day see and know.”  James Allen

 

By Bita Shafipour

12/19/08

 

Too easy

Shocked to the bottom

like ice-bitten grass

in a vacant lot

by the white blizzard,

 

people trudge through these

scant sidewalks with hands

tactless in gloves, ears

deaf under scarves,

 

unwilling still to

numb. Winter is fickle.

Clothed in red rags,

she seems to whisper

 

to passerby or

maybe angels the

thing is not to think.

So he and I sat

 

in the darkness and

spoke of lovers past,

pieces lost, and wire

threads snapped without

 

receiving ends. All

we said we’d do. Still,

we knew anything

less than this would be

 

far too easy. From

the window we watched

cashmere stab lilac

trees and northern lads

 

with clean innocence,

perhaps to show us

what’s left of beauty

after it freezes.

 

We felt our faces

grow wet before they

dried very cold as

mistakes often do.

Pistachio shells

A chill blows through the terrace,

November on her way, I say,

your lap full of nuts.

Pouting, you tell me that

no matter how much I may like them,

you like them ten, one hundred,

one trillion times more.

 

I’ve spent countless autumns

sitting out on this terrace,

not one of those with you

and your seven-year-old marvel.

 

The shells are becoming a small mountain at our feet,

you say that you’d make a necklace with them,

the longest necklace in the world

and I applaud your ambition with mild

envy. You are still, of course, only a child.

You have no idea what it is to desire a man,

to feel the pressure of time, to wonder at your

decisions or lack of them. Instead you collect

coloring books, instead your shoes match your

hair ties, you are the master of the fairy tale,

you know the latest gossip in the

second-grade classroom.

 

I could wrap myself around your innocence, it’s true.

And I’m sorry! I barely even remember growing up,

when, precisely, the shadows of adulthood began settling in

around my mouth. Now I eat pistachios

with lazy flair while you,

you crack open each shell as if the world

were unfolding in your very hands.

My heart, the woodcutter

Woodcutter, chop my shadow from me.

Free me from the torment

of seeing myself without fruit.

-Federico Garcia Lorca

 

This was never about perspective

was never about the sky,

falling fast,

its slow movement in rain.

Unless my fated angel changes his mind,

I won’t. Certainly not with these frigid

mornings, the way my legs push along the walk,

red scarf a manic bird clamoring against my throat.

 

Will I always carry on this way?

Preferring oceans to grasses, fires to snows?

I’m tired of having my hand on this gun.

Listen to how it clicks, cocks ready,

listen to how it flees with my courage.

Even my heart shields itself vehemently,

its flat surface trembles.

I know the bottom, it says.

I have reached down with my serrated tongue

and swallowed whole the orange tree

in which you spun your first dreams.

 

But it doesn’t know of the fruit,

of its ripeness, of the severity

with which I slice it in two.

Inside, it is seedless, it always was.

This only I know.

 

There is such a thing as a fall.

I do no profess to have had one,

but look at the sky dotted in white,

the half-circled moon, and wonder.

In these dreams, ragged branches

breaking visions,

I touch faces I don’t remember,

fear the rush of airplanes,

gallop years on false horses,

misunderstand the starlight again

and again. Then I wake

and climb down from this sleep,

considering my worth.

My heart calls out from the door

and I return.

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