Category: Arts
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Amoral Cartoonists
How a cartoonist’s brain works should be a serious topic in psychology and behaviorism. Just imagine the combination of all the maladies of an eccentric person from narcissism to insecure introvert to passive aggressiveness and the list goes on. The result is a jam-packed creative irony with big strokes of intentional mischievousness. The final result…
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Persian Pianist
Arshid Azarine’s music is a fusion of Jazz, and Eastern-Afro Melodies, combined with his Persian background. He has collaborated with Persian artists, inside and outside Iran. And he has a single in works, featuring Sussan Deyhim. http://world.idolweb.fr/ohrwurm-records/arshid-azarine/persian-sketches-for-piano/3760191120150.html https://www.facebook.com/ArshidAzarine
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A Surrealist Cartonist
Gürbüz Doğan EKŞİOĞLU is drawing cartoons since 1977 and holds a total of 64 awards of 23 of which are international. The Turkish cartoonist had participated in numerous national and international collective displays. He has drawn many cartoons and illustrations for various newspaper and magazines like The Forbes, The Atlantic, The New York Times as…
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Manitas de Plata Plays and Salvador Dali Paints
On the occasion of 92 years of Manitas de Plata, the site manitasdeplata.fr offers you an exceptional and very rare video for the first time. At this oaccasion, Manitas de Plata offered later a unique spectacle to Salvador Dali, who painted a rider on his horse during a second private concert.
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An Iranian Dark Blues Song
“A Plagued Garden” is a sad song about a land that has been neglected and deteriorated by war. A song that carries away Abdi Behravanfar every time he sings Iranian folk music of south intertwined with the elements of dark Blues and Jazz…
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Golnar Singing Free Jazz in Persian
Golnar Shahyar started her first musical training by playing piano at the age of 11. At 16 she moved with her family to Canada. A few years later she chose Vienna to pursue her dream of becoming a musician. She was a student of jazz singing in University for music and performing arts in Vienna. …
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Nastaliq: The Persian Calligraphy
The short video presents calligrapher Manzar Moghbeli demonstrating the nasta‘liq script. Notice the measured and deliberate pace of writing, the slow twisting and turning of the pen to modulate each stroke from right to left, and the arrangement of letters and words in relation to the baseline and to each other. Nastaliq: The Genius of…
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ّIranian Post-Surf Psychedelic Rock
The band Muckers was founded by the guitarist, Emir, in 2011, who says he’s influenced by an array of contemporaries, from punk to garage rock to indie music. https://soundcloud.com/the-muckers-1/as-if-she-cares The original sound of post-surf and psychedelic rock, verging on punk has its audience still today. As a genre its been enjoying a resurgence all over…
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Toronto TIFF 2014 and Emersonian Walk
I Had a daily pass for 20 films for Toronto International Film Festival and it cost me $10 each. This year every movie I saw was great. It realty was… Maybe the the new generation of filmmakers have more visual culture or the technology of film making has become more handy and accessible. Even the…
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When David Fincher Makes Ads for Gap
The creative mind behind movies such as Fight Club , The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Seven made a few commercials for Gap. All of them are somehow weird but fun to watch:
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Iranian Living Room
Middle East has been the center of attention for the last decade or so not only by anthropologists or sociologists or even economists but by the ordinary people of all walks of life. This time the orientalisim is not organized curiosity of gathering the information for the old ways of colonialism, this time it is…
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ٔThe New Yorker’s Diet Cartoons
http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/bob-mankoff
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The Tragic Song of These Days
We are proud individuals living on the city But the flames couldn’t go much higher. We find God and religions to, To paint us with salvation. But no one, No nobody, Can give you the power,To rise over love, And over hate, Through this iron sky, That’s fast becoming our minds. Over fear and into…
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EBay’s Iranian Founder’s $3 Million Gift to Louvre
EBay founder Pierre Omidyar is known for the “venture philanthropy” of his Omidyar Network, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support micro-finance, governmental transparency, and social media in developing countries. He also ventured into the arts with a gift of $3 million to the Louvre for research and educational projects on Persian…
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Tehran Noir – Collection of Stories
Launched with the summer ’04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Includes brand-new stories by: Gina B. Nahai, Salar Abdoh, Lily Farhadpour, Azardokht Bahrami, Yourik…
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No More Clichés – A Poem by Octavio Paz
Beautiful face That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun So do you Open your face to me as I turn the page. Enchanting smile Any man would be under your spell, Oh, beauty of a magazine. How many poems have been written to you? How many Dantes have written to you, Beatrice?…
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Forbidden Movie
After a long day at work, and to get away from it all, I decide to treat myself to a movie. Once I get there, and as I am getting off the cab, I see a crowd of religious fundamentalists, opposing the screening of the movie, with signs in their hands. I am used…
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Khayyam’s Quatrains and Electrnic Music
Baroot, a new Iranian band (formed by Nooshin Abedi and Javad Safari in 2011) intention is to mix electronic music with folk music. In their first album “From Void To Void”, I have chosen a song that in a whispering tone resembles one of Khayyam’s quatrains. This song clearly reveals a pleasing depth and freshness…
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The Oldest Song in the World
In 1972, after 15 years of research Prof. Anne Kilmer (professor of Assyriology, University of California) transcribed one of the oldest known pieces of music notation in the world. The tablets date back to approximately 1400 B.C. and contain a hymn to the moon god’s wife, Nikal. Remarkably, the tablets also contain detailed performance instructions…
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Men Without Father
When our plane landed, no one from the family had come to the airport to greet us. I thought maybe because I hadn’t told them the exact time of our arrival, they weren’t able to make it. Early in the morning we hit the road, going north. Our daughter was sleeping in the car, when…
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In Khorasan – Iran,Taxi Drivers Are Poets Too
Due to my work in beverage industry, I travel to the city of Mashhad, Khorasan Province, quite often, once a week at times. Mashhad is the center of Iran’s beverage industry and the city’s airport is also a point of origin and destination between several cities in Iran. As part of my stay in Mashhad,…
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Portraits – Iranian Men in last 10 Decades
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"Light in Babylon" and "The Women of Teheran"
The trio of an Israeli singer of Iranian origin and a Turkish santoor player accompanied by a French guitarist create a fusion that incorporates music from different regions as well (Turkish, French and more). They are based in Turkey, Istanbul and perform in Turkey and in Europe. Here is their take on the force to…
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When a Toddler is Modern Dance Choreographer
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When Ancient Eve is In love
Simin Behbahani’s poems paint one of the most nuanced narratives of modern Iranian society. Her poems offer apertures into the daily life of Iranians, and reveal its subtleties and paradoxes. “From the Street,” a series of poems written between 1983-85, are realist representations of the uncomfortable economic and moral realities that plague Iran; the stories…
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Shokoofeh Dezfuli, the Iranian Visual Artist
The background, depicting the feel of the moment, of melancholic nostalgia, of a winter day with evergreens, adorned by the snow, is brought to life by a female figurine. She stands on the snow with no footprints left of the road taken, and a nostalgic look. Fixed on the distance, as if remembering the past…
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Tehran Got a Makover
These days when you’re walking or driving through Tehran, you could clearly see that the mega city has a thrive to show that it can be beautiful too. The Murals created by Iranian artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo brought a new look to a mega town that usually suffocates from polluted air made by more than a…
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Anthology of Short Story by Iranian Diaspora
Published as an e-book, Incubus, ( بختك-“Bakhtak“in Farsi) is a collection of fifty seven horror, at times blunt, stories written in Farsi by different Iranian writers, living inside and outside Iran. According to his forward to the book, Mehdi Ganjavi, who along with Mehrnaz Mansoori and Naser FarzinFar, oversaw the project from start to finish,…
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Persian Epic Dance
“Sohrab and Gordafarid” is inspired by the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), a masterly rendition of Iran’s national history in verse by Ferdowsi. Sohrab is born of a night of love between the great Persian hero Rostam and Princess Tahmineh, the daughter of the king of Samangan. Seeking his father, Sohrab goes to Persia. Although still…
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Fiddler on the Roof & Iranian Jewish Wedding
To see a truly happy gathering of Iranian Jewish community and a charming Iranian Jewish man that suddenly comes in a wedding like Fiddler on the Roof and dances an Iranian hit song is heartwarming. Post by Ali Sadeghi.
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Zahra Fakhraee’s Cartoons
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Unforgettable Love Sentence in Iranian TV series
“I fell in love at exactly fifteen minutes to three, on a hot summer afternoon”, narrates Saeed, the main character of the Dayee Jaan Napoleon (Uncle Napoleon) TV series. As he is looking at the old clock, showing 2:45, Saeed, gradually, takes us through a journey of becoming of age. And what follows, is a…
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Wondering more about the Coen Brothers’ latest film
The Coen Brothers are no help and never will be. Go ahead and ask them. Fresh Air’s Terry Gross recently tried. She asked them how they write their films. “It’s mostly napping,” Ethan Coen answered. The Coen Brothers have been evading answers for about 30 years now, since Blood Simple came out in 1984. Asked…
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Tehran, City of Lies
Ramita Navai is a British-Iranian writer and journalist. She works as a reporter for Channel 4’s foreign affairs series Unreported World. Her investigative journalism from the countries that struggle through crises such as Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Egypt, El Salvador and specially Syria brought her an Emmy award. While working as Tehran correspondent for THE TIMES…
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Dig Me in Hip hop Cemetery
They have got everything, well almost, they couldn’t bring the girls bu the big old engine Chevrolet, tattoos, ear rings, oversize tee-shirts, graffiti, skate boarding and the attitudes are much like the old time Block party rap. When for the first time in 1979, The Sugarhill Gang cast a phrase: “I said a hip, hop…
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Frightening Cartoonist
Zlatkovsky is an artist of grand visions, creator of visual worlds, even visual universes. Creative visions, existential, sometimes frightening, sometimes beautiful. Visualization of thoughts, values, love, life and sex, political concepts, portrayal of intellectual models… He was growing in Russian family with its traditions, but had an opportunity to taste European artistic culture, to better…
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Hatsune Miku, the Virtual Singer
Hatsune Miku, whose name means, “first sound of the future,” is a singing voice synthesizer with a humanoid persona, created by Crypton Future Media, Inc. and featured in over 100,000 songs released worldwide. In Japan, Hatsune Miku is a major phenomenon that grew out of fan-created songs. She has appeared in numerous popular video games…
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Cartonist Who Didn’t like Politicians
One of the most famous caricaturist of the world David Levin who has an archive of more than 4,000 published works, didn’t like the politicians. As a left wing artist, he did his best to show the real face of the politicians in America and all around the world. His well known dislike of Kissinger…
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Lotfi Master of Persian Music
Mohammadreza Lotfi (January 7, 1947 – May 2, 2014) spend all his life preserving and celebrating Persian classical music. He created numerous recordings with master such as, Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Shahram Nazeri, Hossein Alizadeh, and Parviz Meshkatian. Lotfi was one of the best contemporary masters of the Tar…
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Iranian Casablanca
The return of Amir’s ex girlfriend, Nazli, now married to a Deutsch citizen, makes things more complicated, stirring up long withheld emotions, desires and memories. A bridge, between old and new, the past and the future, the tradition and the contemporary, values and desires, staying and leaving, keeping and letting go. A bridge to cross…
