In poker, when two beautiful monstrous hands go head to head 'till the very last community card; the river, eventually if one loses to the other in a very good combination with community cards, like one hand makes a full house and the other makes a four of a kind, it's called bad beat. Like pair of aces lose to pair of tens. There are times and situations in life that I call them bad beat too. The other day, a friend of mine was telling me a story of a young brilliant kid, a classmate of his, had barely stepped into seventeenth year of his life at the time, got overdosed with drugs and died right in front of his eyes. That's a bad beat. I believe life is an accident and most of the time it is a good accident. Indefinite factors have to coincide to give birth to a human being. When a man is born no one asks why, why did this happen. But when a life ends almost everyone takes a moment to think could this be prevented, even if the diseased is 94 years old.

Self off the shelf

Sleep deficit, confusion, raw emotions, pleasant surprises, unbearable occasional selfishness of the sexual partner and her unpleasant passiveness in many aspects and yet her craving for attention, and all don't leave any space for creativity and being with self. I've been away from myself and my thoughts and still feel lonely. Whatever it is, it's quite indefinable, not that I am trying to define a relationship, because this bizarre interaction between her and I (I can't even use "us" to describe this party of two) can not even be considered as any kind of relationships. I need to reset my mind. I wish she wasn't here anymore because she consumes me but she's not with me.

Exile

Abbas Milani an Iranian writer and an expert in history of Iran, in Lost wisdom: Rethinking modernity in Iran --a collection of essays, says Exile is when you live in one land and dream in another. When I was living back home in Iran, I had this sense of not belonging to that land for many reasons. I was dreaming in an imaginary land, and according to Milani's beautiful definition of exile, I was in exile when I was living in my mother land. I was constantly seeing myself living somewhere else and since my late teen age years I began considering my life in Iran as a temporary state of being and mind. Over every plan of my life there was this shadow of leaving the country, but never knew where to. Years passed by and I lived life the way it dictated me, I began settling down without losing the dream of the unknown land. Then I migrated to Canada. For first couple of years I was preoccupied with adjusting to the new life style. I was exploring and exploring. I had no time to dream. Then the reality of north-American life style started to bite. The financial obligations, the tight grasp of financial institutes and giant corporations on people's personal lives, the fear of instability in job market, barrier of language and many other things. You dream when you lack something or when you mind the reality. So I started to dream again but in a different way. I felt being home in Canada; yet not feeling quite accepted and welcomed by her. Now after seven years I've noticed that the dream has changed in a bizarre way. It doesn't occur in any land, it's free of any geographic sense. Even in my nightly dreams, most of the time, I can't identify the places of my dreams or nightmares. They are mostly formed by personages and the interaction between them. It feels like I am not in exile anymore, not because I have settled down in Canada, but because I've lost my utopia or I have lost the land of my dreams.

Fear of a season

To Sping and her strong spirit


She is afraid, but who is not? Life can be scary and unpredictable, yet so beautiful and full of wonderful surprises. She is afraid of loss. But how can you be afraid of loss before even reaching out for a grasp?

Spring is here or will she? I am happy and yet afraid, afraid of getting hurt and hurting. Being lonely is an easy path to choose. You don't need to worry about a thing; it's just dark, narrow, quiet and cold; that's all it is. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Do I want to stay there? Does anyone?

I can feel the breeze. Winter is long gone and Spring is already here. I swear I can feel it.

Historic burdens

I rented Egoyan's Ararat last week and watched it yesterday. I wish Egoyan had made that film differently. I love Egoyan's works, especially The Calendar. In my opinion, The Calendar is Egoyan’s best work. He is a great writer and a great artist. But with Ararat, he stepped on a ground full of politics and historic arguments which is the biggest distraction for an artist from their art. And by saying that I don't mean, artists should not care abut politics. I believe the most political artists of past and present time are those who reflect the politically incorrectness of human being in general in their art regardless of artist’s personal bonding, in which this case is nationalism. I am neither a Turk nor an Armenian and I am not writing this entry to deny the 1915 Armenian genocide by Turks. I look at it as another act of barbarism against human beings. It moves me as much as the Rwanda genocide moves me or the Bosnia ethnic cleansing does.
However, since Mr. Egoyan is a very powerful story teller, he has implanted few beautiful twists into the story which made me curious to get to the ending point. The story is told in bits and pieces, with a wonderfully designed structure of events, characters and places. But yet, at the end I found the film very sentimental. Egoyan, in his official website says At the press conference for The Sweet Hereafter at Cannes in 1997, a journalist asked me if the film couldn't be seen as a metaphor for the Armenian Genocide. It was one of the few times in my life when I found myself quite speechless. The journalist went on to suggest that many of my films had dealt with themes of denial and its consequences, and was interested as to why I hadn't dealt with the subject more directly. What Egoyan has done in his previous films is that he has shown the consequences of that genocide in years after, in lives of Armenians today and I believe that is as political as an artist can get, otherwise he/she will get drawn in sentimentalism.

When I was watching the bonus material in DVD, I found all the deleted scenes very interesting, with the exception of one; the scene the homosexual father is reading his son his favorite book, yet I couldn't understand why he eliminated those scenes. Perhaps, he was concerned those scenes could distract the audience from the central story.