A band that feels like rainy days, heartbreak, digging through old photos, melancholy, and regret… and getting over all of the above. Like Nico, but male vocals and no German accent. Sample lyric: “Let me not be too consumed with this world / Sometimes I want to go home and stay out of sight for a long time.” You’re welcome.
Breaking News: San Francisco good for shopping, eating
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
There’s a lot more to write about my trip, all the reasons I didn’t want to come back home, but I want to get all the materialistic stuff out of my system first. You’ve been warned.
Something about traipsing up and down all those hills makes it really hard to gawk at people like you can in New York, but I still really like San Francisco. Even if its buses do have ridiculously slippery seats that ensure you slide into some homeless man’s lap every time said buses come to an abrupt stop. And they always stop abruptly, and there is always a homeless man, with arms wide open, ready to catch you. In fact, on my last trip to the city, when I went up sans escort, one such man pressed his phone number, written on a piece of brown paper torn from a grocery bag, into my hand as he left the bus. Ahem.
Still, is there another place in the world with people that are so genuinely, almost creepily, friendly? I daresay, there is not.
And the shopping. I should not have spent any money on this trip, which was solely intended for business networking, enlightenment, and edification - all three of which, I am happy to report, were attained. [Can you attain "business networking"? Probably not, but let's just roll with it.]
But so were a pair of super-classy gray suede heels and a freaking sweet wrap sweater that I have had my eye on for two years (count ‘em). I finally broke down and bought the latter because it is inherently ridiculous and more than a little embarrassing to fetishize a sweater. As for the former, I have no excuse except they were really pretty. I also bought a pashmina (it hurts just to type this word) on the street, which I probably won’t wear again because I saw a super-hippie wearing the same one the next day, and if it makes me look half as ridiculous as it did her, that’s $15 that would have been better spent if I had thrown it right in the trash.
Of course, some of this shopping was to compensate for the fact that I had forgotten that San Francisco is a cold, windy place, particularly in February, and also that I had packed for the trip after taking my cold medicine, which rendered me totally incapable of packing things that were weather- or occasion-appropriate anyway.
And some of this is just that I’ve been living in the West Valley for too long, exiled in chain-store, mall-dominated shopping purgatory. I would probably argue now that San Francisco has the best-edited clothing stores of the top three U.S. shopping cities (NY, LA, SF, obviously), especially when it comes to shoes. Everywhere I turned, beautiful shoes. And there was a store in Hayes Valley with clothes that were so great, I actually considered, for one very brief moment, buying a super-plain top with a price tag in the triple digits because it was so cheap in comparison to the rest of the store, and I just wanted a memento. Like walking into Prada and buying a key fob. I slunk out with a business card instead.
Also: fantastic food, even in the ‘burbs. Especially in the burbs, especially for breakfast. Although, when it comes to the city I know I’ll never eat clam chowder at Fisherman’s Wharf again (and will never again go to Fisherman’s Wharf, if I can help it), and eating just one custard bombolini (bombolino, aka fantastical Italian donut) from the pretentious coffee place at Ferry Plaza is quite enough.
One final plebeian thought: maybe it’s because San Francisco doesn’t have the super-late bar culture of New York, but every place we tried to go for dinner at 6 pm on a Saturday turned us away, one with a wait of 2 hours. Either the city’s foodie scene thrives on the early-bird special or there’s some serious over-population going on. It could also be that San Francisco’s hipsters, unlike New York’s, subsist on more than a diet comprised solely of coke and PBR. ‘Tis a mystery.
Pearl or Potato
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Last night, the moon hung so low, so close to the earth, that I lost sight of it as I drove through Encino on Ventura Blvd. It dipped behind the squat minimalls, this deep orange moon, some omen for the Valley.
Anyway. I found a good quote by a French mime (yes, very ironic), Etienne Decroux, about the importance and superiority of quality. I will share it with you: “One pearl is better than a whole necklace of potatoes.”
I have been thinking about this quote for weeks now, because I keep getting to this point, where I am now, that it becomes clear that almost everything I do is to learn the difference between pearls and potatoes. It’s embarrassing even to think about the long list of abandoned projects that sounded like a good idea at the start but ended up being duds (Err… spuds? Sorry).
Today, I don’t feel any closer to a pearly existence, instead still worrying constantly that I am devoting my energy to a long string of potatoes. I may have the problem of premature potato-identification. That is, sometimes I determine a thing is lame before it truly proves itself a waste of (my) time. Sometimes that thing feels too big and the payoff too small. Sometimes the thing is actually not lame at all but still big, and the payoff is huge, but I feel too much of a potato - too small and not talented enough - to take it on.
One thing that has helped me with all this recently is reading. More specifically, reading about people who are famous and successful and once felt like potatoes themselves. One of these people is Steve Martin, who started his life doing magic tricks. Now he is very famous and very successful and I respect his work ethic, even if his recent film, Shopgirl, really creeped me out. His memoir, Born Standing Up, is not a riveting read, but that is exactly what makes it a reflection of his process of becoming himself - he did the thing he cared about over and over and over again, learning and refining along the way until he became a success. He worked in obscurity for a long time and could have quit any time, but he didn’t.
It’s an extremely powerful thing, self-determination. At the same time, what happens if you choose something to do over and over and over again, and do that, but then realize it was the wrong thing? What if you don’t really know what you like? What if the thing you like… you never become good at? A necklace of potatoes.
These are the things I think about at 2 AM, when I’ve spent all day and night miserable with an illness that feels like Bubonic Plague Lite. Suffice to say, I am short on NyQuil.
Come again?
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Tonight, watching Dariush Mehrjui’s newest film, Santouri, I thought my eyes would pop out of my head when I saw some Persian insults I always thought rather tame (naa-mard, for instance) subtitled “fuck-face,” “dickhead,” and “faggot,” among other choice terms.
Granted, the film is about a junkie, so these words captured the spirit of the dialogue, even though they were most certainly not literal translations. The shock value of seeing these words in an Iranian film kept me almost as engaged as the plot. It reminded me of one very proper Iranian lady I know, who says the word “shit” like it’s nothing, when she would never, under any circumstances, say the Persian equivalent.
Salty language just doesn’t mean that much in a tongue that’s not your own, which makes diaspora life twice as fun.
Totally Zen
Friday, February 8, 2008
At the Zen Buffet on Victory Boulevard, if you come late for lunch, they want you to check how much food they have left before they seat you. Everything looks fine, so we stay, and the hostess walks us to a booth by a window looking out onto the vast parking lot. I can see my mom’s Jeep from where I’m sitting, and the massive Golfsmith store, and the Nordstrom Rack.
Behind me sits a famous Iranian stage actor, by himself, digging into a plate of chow mein. He’s married to an even-more-famous Iranian actress who successfully crossed over to American films a few years ago, which makes every Iranian proud even if her last few films were not that great.
Her husband is very handsome, probably the best-looking man in the entire restaurant, with a lined, dignified face and jet-black hair. He is tall, which I know because I met him once, a few years ago. But because he is sitting down, I see for the first time a little bald patch on the back of his head.
There is no way he would remember meeting me. It was too long ago. I consider saying hello anyway, but I don’t have much to say beyond hello, and he spends most of his time scribbling in a notebook or talking on his cell phone.
So I focus on my food. This place serves Chinese and Japanese dishes, with an American touch. That means everything is covered in cheese: Cheese Potato, Cheese Spinach… and Cheese Mussels, Cheese Clams, Cheese Crabs. The last one sounds like a disease, and it’s the only Cheese Dish I try. It’s delicious - little crab shells filled with a mix of crab, herbs, and melted white cheese.
The actor gives directions on the phone, in Farsi: “Come to the shopping center with the Best Buy, I’m in the Chinese restaurant on the right side.” The wheels on the busboy’s cart squeak slowly past. A man at a table two feet away chews the ice from his water glass, and it sounds like teeth breaking.
I pull a short black hair from my salt-and-pepper squid. Lunch ends.
Office Blog
Friday, February 1, 2008
I’m mildly obsessed with Mindy Kaling’s shopping blog, Things I’ve Bought that I Love. Take this gem about dressing up in winter, for instance, something to which I am totally relating right now because I am flying to New York for work tomorrow and have nothing to wear but ugly sweaters and jeans that don’t fit well:
I am going to New York for the week of Valentines Day, and I hear it’s a mausoleum of ice and wind. I’m terrified.How am I going to wear my adorable little Nave dress and walk down Grand Avenue
Those cruel Brooklyn hipsters will make fun of me for shivering. And what if the wind knocks my skirt up? Unlike Carrie Bradshaw, I won’t be wearing Jeffersonian pink knickers. Probably I’ll be wearing brown Target super-panties, which are great in their own way but dreadful to look at.
Kaling is easily one of my favorite actors/writers on The Office (followed closely by Paul Lieberstein, who plays beleaguered HR guy Toby) which is one of the only shows on network TV worth watching. If it ever comes back on again, I’ll be very happy to start watching again. Until then, at least I can get a mini-dose via Kaling’s blog.
Adventures in Farsi: Kharbozeh
Friday, January 4, 2008
I don’t have the best hearing. I’ve always been just ever-so-slightly deaf. Not deaf enough for it to really matter (i.e., I don’t wear a hearing aid and medically, I don’t need one), but my hearing is such that I frequently mishear words and sound quite stupid upon repeating them.
So it should not really be a surprise that for most of my childhood, I mistakenly thought the Persian word for cantaloupe, “kharbozeh,” was pronounced “khargoozeh.”
So I pronounced it “khargoozeh” without really thinking about it until, at perhaps nine or ten years of age, I said it quite loudly in a Persian supermarket, in the presence of lots of proper Iranian ladies. Apparently my half-yelling, “Maman, can we buy some ‘khargoozeh’?” across the little produce section actually meant, “Mom, can we buy some donkey farts?”
Obviously, I blame my parents for this. True, I have bad hearing. But clearly, they must have been horrible listeners. Why else would they have let a crucial misnomer like this slide for years and years, quite literally?
Of course, from this experience and many others like it, I am extremely paranoid about making mistakes like this now. It’s a detriment to my Farsi language skills to be self-conscious about speaking Farsi, to be sure, but I’m far too old - and surrounded by far too many smart Iranians - ever to play off an error like that as cute. In fact, I think it is a huge liability to speak incorrectly when, for instance, I am interviewing someone and it’s important that they take my questions (and me) seriously, and that our conversation is natural.
So, what do you think? Is it better to make horrible mistakes in a professional capacity, as one perfects one’s mother-tongue? Or is it wiser to speak English, even in interviews with Iranians, which most subjects understand but which definitely does not yield the best answers from them because their best language is Farsi. I’m partial to the former approach, if only because it’s a question of access to certain subjects, and lately, the former has become my modus operandi because my Farsi is only going to get worse if I don’t use it. But I am curious about how other people would approach this issue, and if the poor Farsi is forgivable as long as the interviewer is trying.
On Airports and Sisters, and Shahrnush Parsipur
Thursday, January 3, 2008
As I get ready to pick up my fashion-plate little sister from LAX today, on her return from a trip to England (quick note here that my sister is far cooler than I will ever be, though she expects a certain level of chic from her older sibling, and this is why I have to worry about how my hair is going to look today), I’m also looking at this post about shoes in airport security lines, from T Magazine, and shuddering about the recent time I tried to circumvent the system by wearing flip-flops so I wouldn’t have to take them off. Much to my dismay and disgust, airport security made me take them off anyway, so that I was barefoot in the airport, like some sort of feral child.
It is hard to imagine an American experience much worse than air travel and a place worse than our airports, and that is really a shame. It would not be difficult for them (you know, Them - the TSA and the rest of the mad conspirators that think lip gloss is a potential bomb threat but let monkeys hidden in hats slip through) to make it more reasonable. But because it’s an experience that is hard to boycott, and there are few alternatives if you don’t, say, own your own jet, there is little reason for them to change anything.
And the airlines are all mediocre, too. Even Virgin America, which distracts you with a shiny entertainment system (that has only worked properly about half the time I’ve flown them), is just another airline, even if it is dressed up like a really fun, Eurotrash dance club.
Completely unrelated, I interviewed Shahrnush Parsipur recently and here it is. She’s pretty amazing, and I did the whole thing in Farsi, which was quite a feat.
SMITH Magazine Six-Word Memoir
Sunday, December 23, 2007
A while ago, someone sent me a link to SMITH magazine’s six-word memoir project and I fired off my six words on a lark.
I got a mass email from them last night and it turns out my submission will be in their book. But I have absolutely no idea what I wrote. I can’t remember. Hopefully, it’s not embarrassing. And if it is, well, at least it’s only six words worth of embarrassing.
Update: “Pop split; I write him in.”
