Under the Sign of Saturn

Susan Sontag, reading from her essay "The Last Intellectual," 1978. (Real Audio)

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- The audio from The New York Review of Books.
- The latest issue of Dissent has an article On Susan Sontag by Paul Berman.
- Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

The Eyranian's Wedding

I used to call The Eyranian the "guru" of Iranian blogers. Reading his weblog made me addicted to checking it every hour to see if there is any new post or comment I haven't read.

Today I am going to his wedding. I never thought reading someone's blog can take you to his wedding one day... strange things happen in Blogestan. Any way, The Eyranian's readers are not going to have "From My Dating Files" any more, but what can we do? This is the way the life is. It changes.

I wish Pedrum the best in life, both inside and outside the internet.

When can we get rid of God?

A family lights a candle at a section of the Kennedy Expressway underpass in Chicago, Illinois where a yellow and white stain on the concrete underpass has left what many believe to be an image of the Virgin Mary. Hundreds of faithful and curious people have visited the underpass since it was discovered 10 April 2005, leaving flowers and candles(AFP/Jeff Haynes)

So it is not just in Iran that people can see Khomeini's face in the moon. Idiots are everywhere...
The only thing I can see here is just dirty stain from water and probably salt from a homeless peeing there.

Believing in god is like cancer. You take it out from people's mind, and it comes out from somewhere else. Is it a mental disease? Is it a brain problem that majority of people have and a minority haven't? When can we get rid of these disgusting sacred objects? When can we get rid of God?

Clay Bennett on American Security

From Clay Bennett, Christian Science Monitor.

Molotov Cocktail

The letter N has a funny story about Iranian revolution of 1979 and her grandmother's involvement in making Molotov Cocktails.
The story reminded me of the revolution years. I was a child back then, but I vividly remember everything: the enthusiasm, the hope for the future, and the hatred toward Shah. "Har gohi biyaad behtar az ine!" ("Any piece of shit would be better than this one") This was what he said repeatedly in those days. A few years later he regretted saying that. Not because he wanted the Shah back, but because he —like many others— understood how wrong the policy of "anyone but Shah" could be.

When overthrowing a government is the only goal —and nobody knows what is going to replace it— it is not a surprize to see it replaced with another "piece of shit."

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The painting: "Molotov Cocktail" by Alexander Kosolapov. More details here.

Look at me

To me, a movie is good if some of its images, dialogs, and moments come back to me the day after watching it. A movie is even better if it brings me questions I have no answer for. Look at me was such a movie for me today, and I feel its moments come back to me for a few days. It is a beautiful movie, very French in the tradition of Eric Rohmer, and consequently very unpopular, I think. Last night I saw the movie with only three other people in the theater.
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Searching for the movie's website, I found this great photography project. It is an online exhibition of snapshots: old photographs of unknown people looking at us. Here is what the website says about the kind of photos it exhibits:

These photos were either lost, forgotten, or thrown away. The images now are nameless, without connection to the people they show, or the photographer who took them. Maybe someone died and a relative threw away their photographs; maybe someone thought they were trash.
Some of the photos were found on the street. Some were stacked in a box, bought cheap at a flea market. Showing off or embarrassed, smug, sometimes happy, the people in these photos are strangers to us. They can't help but be interesting, as stories with only an introduction.
The "Look at Me" project started with a few photos found by Frederic Bonn and Zoe Deleu in a Paris street in 1998.
The collection now contains 464 photos.

The website gives the regular family photographs a new dimension. The photographs in this website do not stand as a replica of their subjects anymore. The nature of the snapshots is changed by the anonymity of the subjects and the way they are presented there. Unknown family photographs are transformed to a metaphor: an ironic metaphor for all the efforts we make to eternalize ourselves by printing our image on a rectangular piece of paper.

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- The Photograph from Project Look at me. To submit a photo to this project click here.
- Look at me's trailer here.