Pars Arts

The Pit of Despair

And watch it through the very end. There’s a nice, erm, surprise ending…

(hat-tip: Iranian.com)

Artist Asa Soltan Rahmati’s Venice Digs

The mysterious lady in the bathtub above is Asa Soltan Rahmati, Iranian artist and co-owner, with her filmmaker husband Shaheen Cheyene, of an amazing house in Venice, CA that’s the subject of a recent home renovation story in the LA Times. Soltan Rahmati’s work deals a lot with identity and nostalgia, and I’ve been following her career from afar since I bought this awesome tank top she designed, nearly six years ago. It’s cool to peek into her life/work via this story, too. From the story:

The well-ordered plan doesn’t mean a certain level of chaos doesn’t reign within this home. For this couple, reconciling their personal aesthetic with their architects’ design philosphy meant departing from the sort of tastefully arranged modernist vignettes one might see in a Design Within Reach catalog or Robertson Boulevard storefront. Rather, they spread their vast accumulation of belongings throughout the house in a carefree fashion, a celebration of artful disorder.

To actually get an idea of what that really means, see the photo gallery of their dreamy house.

(Photo: Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times)

Maykadeh Restaurant, San Francisco

Pars Arts is on a mini-hiatus as I scour San Francisco for the best neighborhood to move to… and last night took me to dinner at Maykadeh restaurant in North Beach.

I heard from one source that this is a fantastic restaurant, and another assures me it’s not the best Persian food in the Bay Area. I hope the second source is right, because the kabob koobideh was slightly mushy, the shishlik lacked seasoning, the kashke bademjan was lacking in acidity, and the little faloodeh noodles didn’t taste quite right.

I will say that their Persian Martini (with pomegranate juice) was nice and strong, and tasted great. Their service was also really great, the photos on the wall are beautiful, and the sink in their bathroom is really cool. Unfortunately, none of those things (besides the martini) are edible.

So if you’re in the San Francisco area, pray tell – where do you go for really good Persian food?

Marjane Satrapi Q&A in the NYT Magazine

Check out this Marjane Satrapi Q&A. Persepolis comes out here in the US on December 25. Usually these short Q&As are really boring, but this one? No, definitely not boring:

Are you suggesting that veiling and unveiling women are equally reductive? I disagree. We have to look at ourselves here also. Why do all the women get plastic surgery? Why? Why? Why should we look like some freaks with big lips that look like an anus? What is so sexy about that? What is sexy about having something that looks like a goose anus?

I never really thought about goose anatomy. I looked when I was on a farm in France.

Atta girl, Marjane!

Frontline: Showdown With Iran

On October 23rd, PBS will begin airing a Frontline examination of U.S.-Iranian relations, ominously called Showdown With Iran.

The title and previews for this show seem to beat war drums; I’m encouraged only by the fact that PBS is airing this special. PBS has a long history of being even-handed in its political coverage and I will reserve judgment until I’ve watched the program in its entirety.

Local listings can be found on the website. If you miss the program it can be viewed online as well. From the PBS Frontline website:

As the United States and Iran are locked in a battle for power and influence across the Middle East — with the fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon looming in the background — FRONTLINE gains unprecedented access to the Iranian hard-liners shaping government policy. In Showdown with Iran, airing Tuesday, October 23, 2007, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE examines how U.S. efforts to install democracy in Iraq have served to strengthen Iran’s position as an emerging power in the Middle East.

“You will not find a single instance in which a country has inflicted harm on us and we have left it without a response,” deputy head of Iran’s National Security Council Mohammad Jafari tells FRONTLINE in his first television interview. “So if the United States makes such a mistake, they should know that we will definitely respond. And we don’t make threats.”

There are increasing signs that the Bush administration is seriously considering military action before it leaves office if Tehran continues to defy U.N. demands that it cease enriching uranium for its nuclear program — a program the Iranians insist is for peaceful purposes. “The president has said repeatedly that it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons,” former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton tells FRONTLINE. “If action is not taken in terms of regime change or, if need be, the use of military force, the question of when Iran achieves nuclear weapons is entirely in Iran’s own hands. And that is extraordinarily undesirable.”

But Richard Armitage, President Bush’s former deputy secretary of state, warns, “It would be the worst of worlds for an outgoing administration to start a conflict.”

After 9/11, the Bush administration hoped to drive a wedge between Iran’s people and their Islamic rulers by installing democracies on two of Iran’s borders. “If things had gone better in Iraq,” says Hillary Mann, the Iran expert on the National Security Council during the run-up to the war, “then yeah, I think Iran was next.”

“I think Iran is more secure now, courtesy of the United States,” Bolton says. “We have removed the Taliban regime from Afghanistan, which they viewed as a mortal threat. We have removed Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which they viewed as a mortal threat.”

Before invading Iraq, the Bush administration rebuffed a series of overtures from Iran’s reformist government — among them offers to help the U.S. stabilize Iraq after the invasion — which culminated in a secret proposal for a grand bargain resolving all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Iran, including Iran’s support for terrorism and its nuclear program. The U.S., which had branded Iran part of the “axis of evil,” decided on a confrontational approach.

Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, believes the Bush administration’s confrontational approach discredited Iran’s reformists and inadvertently helped bring the new hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. “The wars of 2001 and 2003 have fundamentally changed the Middle East to Iran’s advantage,” he says. “The dam that was containing Iran has been broken.”

Paris Marashi at PopTech

Iranian-American Paris Marashi is one of the few live bloggers at the PopTech conference. Check out her posts on her blog and at Sounds Iranian.

Kiosk Review on LAist.com

As promised, my review/post about Kiosk is up now, on LAist.com. Please leave comments, pass it along, etc.!

Persepolis: Los Angeles Screening in November

Don’t you hate it when film reviewers employ stale cliches about films, like,”You’ll laugh; you’ll cry…”? I do, too. Yet here I am, only having watched the trailer and “Making of Persepolis” (available on the film’s beautiful website), and I know for a fact that when I finally see Persepolis on November 10th, I will laugh (“Eye of the Tiger” never sounded better), and oh, how I will cry (“Here, I’ve made you another swan…”)…!Along with co-writer-director Vincent Parranaud, Marjane Satrapi and an army of artists have literally animated the pages of her overwhelmingly successful graphic novels, Persepolis; each image has been hand-drawn, traced in black felt tip, and filmed to create the final, highly-anticipated product. The result evokes what I believe is the raison d’etre of film adaptations (animated or otherwise) yet is so rarely achieved: an exhilarating visual experience that not only stands equal to the experience of the original page, but deeply intensifies it through the spectacle of the moving image.

Released in France in late June 2007, the film adaptation of Persepolis seems to have succeeded in this endeavor, having taken home the Jury Prize at Cannes, and already selected to represent France at the 2008 Oscars. After what feels like an eternity of anticipation, Persepolis has finally also been screened at various film festivals in North America (Toronto, Telluride, NYC, Austin, L.A.), and is set for limited release in the U.S. in December 2007.

For those of you Angelenos/as like myself who just can’t wait, your next opportunity to see the original French release is at the American Film Institute’s 2007 AFI FEST , which will screen Persepolis on November 10th, following a tribute to Catherine Deneuve, the renowned French actress who lends her voice to the film. (The English version will be a dub featuring Sean Penn, Iggy Pop, and Gena Rowlands, to name a few…I’d suggest going for the French original!) Here are the details:

PERSEPOLIS Screening
Saturday, November 10th 7:00pm
ArcLight Theatre 10 (map)

Shirin Neshat in the New Yorker

The New Yorker has a piece on Shirin Neshat this week, and there’s a slide show on their website: check it out. The image above is from Neshat’s film “Zarin,” which is based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s excellent feminist novel, Women Without Men.

Blog Action Day: Tehran Smog

Today is Blog Action Day, when thousands blogs have committed to posting about the environment; according to a Global Voices translation, 500 of these are Iranian blogs.

Hopefully some of them are writing first-hand accounts of Tehran smog, which, according to an AFP report from January, kills 3,600 a month. That’s 120 people dying every day from respiratory problems caused by smog. 120 a day! The city is surrounded by mountains, which trap smog on days that aren’t windy, and its 3 million cars are to blame for high amounts of carbon monoxide in the air.

The Iranian government has daily air quality updates online… any word from the inside on how accurate this is?

[Photo: amirsnaps]