Humanity Must Be Created

"Mankind is born, but humanity must be created-created with inspiration, with infinite patience and love, as an artist tries to achieve a masterpiece. And men have often died so that the myth might come true...We still are , and will be for a long time, condemned to heroism."
Romain Gary

The Dead

James Joyce's The Dead, makes me alive!
Watch a scene of the play...
Read the short story from Joyce's collection of short stories Dubliners .
watch a scene of the beautiful film. The final film of legendary director John Huston, starring Anjelica Huston and  Donal McCann

Tehran

Tehran, today.

Conversation!

First woman: I'm tired of fighting...
Second woman: I love to fight!
First woman: Fighting over smallest things gives me a kind of  inferior feeling ...
Second woman: I was born a fighter...fighting gives me power...weakness makes me angry! (By giving her voice a strong tone, she tries to impose her superiority)
First woman: I fight peacefully...
Second woman:  Peaceful gestures are signs of inferiority! You should be more aggressive...
First woman: you don't have to raise your voice!

Rhapsody in August

 Rhapsody in August a film by Akira Kurosawa with Sachiko Murase, is a tale of three generations and their responses to the atomic bombing of Japan.

War is to blame!

 "Grandma"

These days!

These days I remember scenes from The Great Dictator!

And... the chairs scene...the Barber Shop...

Brutal sanctions and Gogol's Overcoat

The brutal and ruthless sanctions in Iran have made life miserable for the ordinary Iranian people. They're pressured twice. As I'm reading Nikolai Gogol's "Overcoat" again, this line takes me to people's intimate lives there: "....he (Akaky Akakievich) even accustomed himself to going entirely without food in the evenings; but instead he was nourished spiritually, bearing in his thoughts the eternal idea of the future overcoat."

Danae

Danae, 1891 Alexandre Jacques Chantron

Chasing Ice

A few years ago I saw  MICHELANGELO  ANTONIONI's Beyond the Cloud. Mesmerized by the film, I read That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director. It was in this book where I found out that Antonioni predicted a disaster caused by Global Warming and the erosion of glaciers in Alaska. Later Stanley Kubrick made an unfinished film "Artificial Intelligence" showing the extinction of  humans and how Manhattan is buried under several hundred feet of glacial ice.

Tonight I listened to James balog who talked about documenting the erosion of glaciers in Switzerland, Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska  in Bill Moyers and Company.

Watch  the OFFICIAL TRAILER for 2012 Sundance Award-Winning film "Chasing Ice," opening in theaters starting November 2012.

Helena Modjeska

                                                     Helena as Ophelia


Helena Modjeska whose actual Polish surname was Modrzejewska, was a renowned actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles.
Watch the trailer of Woman Triumphant, a movie based on Modjeska's life.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers  was an American writer. She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some poetry. Her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the U.S. South. Her other novels have similar themes and are all set in the South.

Watch a wonderful scene based on this graceful novel.

Bertolt Brecht sings Mack the Knife

The original song 'Die Moritat von Mackie Messer' Mack the Knife sung by Bertolt Brecht  from the 'Threepenny opera'.
Here is Lois Armstrong's version in London 1956. He grew up with lots of characters just like Mack the Knife.

Pirate Jenny

A beautiful piece sung by Nine Simone: Pirate Jenny, live 1964.

 "Pirate Jenny" (German: "Seeräuberjenny") is a well-known song from The Threepenny Opera composed by Kurt Weill, with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. The English lyrics are by Marc Blitzstein. It is probably the second most famous song in the opera, after "Mack the Knife".

 Lyrics:  Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill (1928)

You people can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors
And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawking
Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell
In this crummy Southern town
In this crummy old hotel
But you'll never guess to who you're talkin'.
No. You couldn't ever guess to who you're talkin'.

Read more... 

Anne Kerry Ford also sings Pirate Jenny 
And, Ute Lemper  in German and English

                                                      Lotte Lenya as Jenny

And...Lotte Lenya ...