Friday, July 4, 2008 
Meet Payam Bavafa, songwriter/guitarist in a San Francisco-based experimental rock band called Sholi. The band’s most recent EP, “Hejrat,” features an awesome cover of Googoosh’s song by the same name. We asked Bavafa, the group’s sole Iranian-American member, what Persian music means to him, and why he and his bandmates - drummer Jonathon Bafus, bassist […]
Filed under: MUSIC, NOSTALGIA
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Iranian singer Elahe (also spelled “Elaheh”) died recently, following by just a few months the death of Mahasti. There are a few great videos of her on YouTube, below. This one is very scratchy but it looks like it’s from the ’50s, and the camera work is so strange:
This video is more recent but unfortunately […]
Filed under: MUSIC, NOSTALGIA, OBITUARIES, VIDEOS
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Before there was the big GOOG, another “Goog” sang and danced her way into the Iranian consciousness. Googoosh, sort of an Iranian Joni Mitchell (meets Judy Garland, meets Tina Turner, meets Olivia Newton-John, etc.), either turned 56 yesterday or turns 57 in April - even Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know. In any case, no Persian […]
Filed under: MUSIC, NOSTALGIA, VIDEOS
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My father was in town a few days ago, helping me move to a new place. I hadn’t seen him in over a year and it was good just to sit and talk again. Over a few games of backgammon, he caught me up with what family and friends were up to. My hometown of […]
Had she not died in a car accident 40 years ago, Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad would have turned 72 years old last week. Farrokhzad was the Sylvia Plath of Iran: beautiful, depressed, unconventional, feminist, and she died very young, though not of suicide. Married in her late teens, she had a baby and got divorced […]
Filed under: NOSTALGIA, POETRY
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My old hometown weekly has four excellent feature stories about Iran, Iranians, and Tehrangeles this week. The photo above belongs to a photo essay by Teun Voeten called This is Iran, Too, which shows how un-Ahmadinejad Iran and Iranians really are. I’m also very excited about Mehammed Mack’s story, In Search of Home, in which […]
Filed under: NEWS, NOSTALGIA
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I’m on a big Vigen kick lately (it’s also spelled “Viguen,” in case you want to search for his clips on iTunes). He was called the “Sultan of Jazz” and was sort of the Elvis of Iran, and I was pretty stoked to meet him twice in LA (once after he performed and once in […]