Ari siletz biography channel

That takes courage of a rarer sort. Friday, October 05, The Real Story. The Iran Agenda The real story of U. Policy and the Middle East Crisis. At the time there was no Tehrangeles. The Westwood legal offices I visited last year to fix my Iranian passport mess used to house the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. As an aborigine of sorts, Erlich has no grievances against the Iranians who have colonized the Westwood of his childhood.

On the contrary, he seems to delight in the cultural upgrade. His latest book, The Iran Agenda : the real story of U. Not because of old memories of a neighborhood now transformed; but because this seasoned journalist writes in a tradition now mostly abandoned by the US media. Erlich identifies his sources by name, and gives references which independently corroborate his statements.

In short, their views tracked the political consensus emanating from Washington. Rather than proceeding from reality, they filtered their reporting through a Washington lens. When a Washington official makes a statement, even a false one, the major media dutifully report it with few opposing sources. The value of The Iran Agenda is its usefulness as a tool of argument in discussions with curious Americans who ask us to be their tour guides on the Iran subject.

But it takes a professional like Erlich to organize these floating facts into an engaging story with a strong moral. To undo years of skilful propaganda, equal skill is needed. And Erlich is certainly a talented story teller. During winter months, the snowy roads are accessible only on foot or by tractor. Suddenly, young women in green pants in the distinctive Kurdish head scarf were walking along the road.

They were female guerrillas. PJAK claims its troops are almost 50 percent women. For example, I was under the impression that Kurds were mostly Sunnis. This figure makes a difference in my thinking on the Kurdish issue. Erlich goes on to remind his readers of other ethnic minorities, the Azeri, Baluchi and Arab Iranians, who could destabilize the Iranian regime.

Little of this is intelligently discussed in the US media. For obvious reasons even the Iranian media tend to keep the lid on news of ethnic unrest. But repeated over time, the distortions discredit the exile media and, by extension, all exile opposition. Nor do I trust the clerics in Tehran to stop their belligerence. A pro-peace, pro-democracy movement exists within Iran.

I think people in the United States need to build one as well. Tuesday, October 02, Benedictus, the play. Displaying artistic chutzpah, the creators proudly declare that Benedictus has been put together by committee. Instead of the expected chaos however, a curious Darwinian order emerges from the multiplicity of perspectives. Benedictus is a collaboration of Iranian, Israeli and American artists.

This composition in itself immediately gives form to what the play will be about: the Iran-US-Israel conflict. I had hoped a less obvious theme would assert itself, but though one can occasionally negotiate with God, there is no arguing with reality. Subtlety takes longer to evolve. The character Ahser Muthada, an Iranian born Israeli arms dealer, projects the Israeli point of view.

Ben Martin, traumatized into alcoholism by his experience as a hostage in the US embassy crisis, is the American. Ali Kermani, an out-of-power Iranian reformist president, takes on the burden of being the Iranian. The three come together in Rome, each with their own agenda. Muthada is there to beg safe passage out of Iran for his Jewish Iranian sister He has good reason to fear for her safety because the US is only hours away from invading Iran.

That would be the alcoholic Ben Martin, who is now a US ambassador. But nothing is as it seems, as they say. Plot twists reveal surprising hidden motivations, and in the tradition of sophisticated drama, each character sees the others more clearly than he sees himself. Sadly, Kermani does not put up a worthy defense. Another reason is that the collaborating artistic team is composed of Iranians, Israelis, and Americans who disagree with the regime.

The main reason however is artistic: Al Faris who plays Ali Kermani is not in love with his character. His comfort zone in Bendictus is the introverted, opaque type who, in his self righteousness, considers his opponents beneath emotional sharing. Though the Kermani character is certainly an upgrade from the terrorist types Feris has sometimes portrayed in mainstream films, he has to labor to operate outside those familiar unemotional parameters.

Ali Pourtash, on the other hand ingeniously lodges his character, the Israeli-Iranian Asher Muthada, into our hearts and minds. Muthada throws his arms around Kermani when they first meet in the secret negotiations chamber at the Benedictine monastery. They were childhood friends in Iran before the revolution. They played soccer on the same team.

For Muthada, Kermani has the smell of home, of youth, adventure, idealism. The sight of his old friend takes him back to the time when they both Looked hopefully to the future instead of bitterly into the past. Muthada is reluctant to let go the hug. Kermani, on the other hand, hesitates to embrace Muthada. Like a loyal traditional wife Muthada even remembers what foods Kermani likes.

The wealth Muthada has accumulated as an arms dealer is the result of his shrewd and non-judgmental assessment of human realities. While the young Kermani rose to power by exploiting idealism, Muthada could not pretend to transcend his fellow man; he got rich participating in the genuine savagery of our human nature. All this and more is reflected in the brilliance of the Muthada characterization both by the writer Motti Lerner and by the actor Ali Pourtash.

While the play was being created, there were intense moments of political disagreement between the various factions of the artistic team. It seems Faris wished his character could be portrayed as more trustworthy. The biggest mistake however, was made by Iran. This was two years ago. Today, as war with the US creeps closer, the seriousness of such negligence in appreciating the communication power of art is more apparent.

Of course, not everyone can benefit from communication; sometimes art is just therapy. The American in the play, Ben Martin, is psychologically devastated by his experience as a hostage. His captors at the US embassy in Tehran used to click empty guns against his temple. Earl Kingston, who portrays Martin, does such an adept job of projecting this trauma that one wonders if the man is psychologically fit to be in any decision making loop regarding Iran.

Benedictus succeeds as entertaining and thoughtful theatre; its failures are the failures of our time not of the artists. Therefore its flaws are just as watchable as its strengths. Founding artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian and director Mahmood Karimi Hakak have delivered a work of high artistic quality. This includes attention to details sometimes neglected, such as music and sound design.

Mitchell Greenhill starts the mood with melodic Middle Eastern flavored music, but as war nears he greatly enhances the foreboding developments with disturbing cello notes. Ultimately though my favorite statement in the play is delivered by set designer Daniel Michaelson. Ostensibly to make the small stage appear bigger, he has created a physical perspective by converging the lines of the stage walls towards a vanishing point.

At this singularity there is a door where the players enter into the secret negotiations chamber to hammer out deals. Of all the multiple ideological perspectives presented in the play, this singular physical point, the entrance into the negotiating room, represents the unifying principle of Benedictus. These days its easy to find images of the ugly crowd in Iran chanting slogans.

In most other pictures this geometric property is absent. The two issues are mingled in a not-so-easily-drawn demarcation. The history of Persian civilization is much more about higher intellect than it is about radicalism, and superstitious religiosity. Why is he so honored? In small part because his influential book on arithmetic taught Europe how to write numbers and do arithmetic in the efficient way we do now.

It was extremely cumbersome to do multiplication, division and fractions and advanced mathematics in Roman numerals, and the absence of the number zero was a huge impediment in the development of European science and mathematics. In his book, Khawrazmi compiled the methods of Indian mathematics which Europe then adopted wholesale.

Ari siletz biography channel

In larger part Khawrazmi is honored today because he is known as the father of algebra-- which is a shortened version of the title of another of his books Al jabr va moghabelat. Khawrazmi and other Iranian mathematicians like Al-Karaji 10th century , born in a town a few miles west of where I grew up in Tehran, helped develop the easy way in which engineers and scientists set up equations and go about solving them in the algorithmic way that they do now.

The emphasis of Persian algebra on the use of algorithms is a leap of the intellect roughly analogous to the invention of the computer, because algebra is a machine that lifts a huge burden of thinking from us by reducing analysis to mindless operations—the way we let software do most of the work these days. Prior to algebra, problems had to be reasoned through every step of the way.

Using Algebra as a lever, mathematics could now bite off much bigger problems than it could chew in the past. He says, "Look at the world of animals and birds. They have all that is necessary for defense, protection and daily life, including strengths, courage and appropriate tools [organs]. Stones that are huge near the mountains and where the rivers have a violent current.

Stones that are of smaller size at a greater distance from the mountain. And where the streams flow more slowly stones that appear pulverized in the shape of sand. Or Where the streams begin to stagnate near their mouths and near the sea. If you consider all this you can scarcely help thinking that India was once a sea, which by degrees has been filled up by the alluvium of the streams.

He proposed that a body stays in the same place or continues moving at the same speed in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. Our affection for these men of science is encoded in the myths and legends I grew up with. In a story reminiscent of some we tell today about the antics of the brilliant American physicist Richard Feynman , Ibn-Sina is said to have been such a wonderous physician that he could no longer stand being mobbed by his patients.

Instead he had a rope one end of which was in the waiting room and the other in his office. The patient held on to one end of the rope and ibn-Sina, holding on to the other end, would diagnose him. This alchemist is credited with the discovery of alcohol and its use as an antiseptic in medicine. He is also believed to have discovered sulphuric acid.

Razi was a genius of classification. For instance he compiled a description of all the glassware and instruments used in standard chemsitry until recent times. The Hollywood image of the mad scientist cackling over beakers, tubes and alembics goes back to Razi. Persians and Arabs fight over Al-Haytham because he was born in Basra, a town that now sits just inside the border with Iraq not very far from Bushehr where Iran is building a nuclear reactor.

Basra went in an out of the Persian empire as the empire expanded and shrank throughout history. It is highly likely that the ethnicity of this great physicist was Arabic-- unlike the other scholars I have mentioned, who were ethnically Persian. But the very fact that Persians fight to claim Al-Haytham suggests the zeal with which the Iranian civilization collects and protects scientific heritage.

Putting my nationalist hat back on, the great Persian Empire scientist Al Haytham studied the reflection of light by curved mirrors, and refraction by water and the atmosphere. He investigated the magnifying power of lenses, discussed rainbows, binocular vision and so on. Siletz has a graceful manner in telling stories that leads the reader into territory that feels unfamiliar at the outset, but brings understanding of the commonality of the human condition by the end.

His stories have an autobiographical feel to them, but they are fiction. They are based on his childhood experiences in Iran and are written with an eye towards enlightening American audiences about life in Iran. One of my favorite stories was "The Dog" for it showed the cultural differences in how dogs are perceived between Iranians and Americans.

The funniest aspect was showing how his Iranian family was surprised to hear that anyone could make money selling dog food, dog toys and dog soaps. Because dogs, while not forbidden are considered to be unclean. A favorite line of mine was "Give a parched Iranian the choice between a glass of water sniffed by a dog and a glass of radioactive waste, and he will have to think about it.

Join the discussion. Can't find what you're looking for? Sharon Sadler was born and raised in California. Her people hail from the British Isles and Holland. She has lived in, and observed the interface of people and nature, in cities, suburbia and the country. She forever wonders what was left at the shores of ancestral mother lands, what void remains, that compels European and other immigrants to own, dominate, misunderstand and destroy the venerable mother earth who supports us here on this continent.

His works have been anthologized in several collections. Hale Thatcher was born in St. Louis, Missouri in January After college he lived a nomadic life for many decades. Most of his work was written in the wilderness in many sanctuaries, retreats, islands, estates, cabins, shacks and camps throughout the Pacific Northwest. Father likes tennis, and his doctor wife prescribes herself tranquilizers.

The son plays guitar and likes to take his girlfriend to the beach. He eats steaks with fries and ketchup. The young soldier has had an encounter with and Arab child who was running towards a checkpoint with a suspicious looking school bag over the shoulder. In this play, Lerner brings to light the hidden cost of war to Israeli society. She has only humiliation, prison, and suicide missions to work with.

There are plays that attempt to weave the East and West views of the Middle East conflict into the same story. Artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian has been wise to paragraph each part of this single tragedy as separate plays. Otherwise the balancing act would have pulled towards an intellectual debate--as it usually does--instead of tugging at our hearts first one way then the other, the right way to tear something apart.

As a kind gesture to her audience Yeghiazarian has inserted a light-hearted comic relief in between the blood, sweat and tears plays. Then Yeghiazarian marches us back to Israelis and Palestinians for more bruising, eye-opening, and well-acted theater. This review just covers series 1 of the festival plays. Series 2 has a different set of plays, including a work starring Iranian film actress Vida Ghahremani.

Wednesday, November 11, Tehran artists in San Francisco. One day, strolling down the streets of Tehran, I noticed that somethings are near and somethings are far. Big deal, I said to myself. Everybody knows there is a here and a there. But why did this thought feel like a find? Why was I inspired by it as though I had just heard a Hafez verse?

For some reason, I felt compelled to give life to the sensation so that it can trot out on its own and share itself with other people? Fortunately, I am a Hafez of sorts myself. I work in a different medium, photographs that hang in a gallery instead of verses written in a book. The poet inside me said I should grab a camera and take a picture of this…this whatever it is.

Just guessing! I moved on, promising to come back to Mohajer later. Attracted by the red paint defacing a set of photographs on another wall, I made my way through the crowd to see what that was all about. Nothing at first. Just pictures of busy Tehran streets, each with a red ribbon painted over it. Musician Arash Sobhani, had no trouble spotting it.

But forgetting or ignoring what is there, leaves scars as noticeable as the wounds, the artwork seemed to argue. His hand was clenched as though pressing a chord into a guitar neck. The two artists had understood each other well! As a result everything, both far and near is in focus see above photo. If our minds worked like pinhole cameras, Iran would have no paradox of focus.

It is all just there! Splitting the worlds of near and far with color instead of focus, the outer realm is gray, wintry, and silent, while the inner realm is sunlit and talkative. Promising again to come back to Mohajer, I was attracted by a double-image black and white video on the opposite wall. The left and right videos seemed identical, and at first I thought this must be one of those contraptions where the image becomes 3D if you stare at it the right way.

The game was far subtler, however. Among the crowd entering and leaving a busy Tehran subway station, there was one passenger present in the left video that had been digitally erased in the right one. Finding this person takes patience and a strong will to know. The blurb next to the photo said the absent person represents arrested protesters who have disappeared in the recent uprising.

Had she recently lost someone close to her? Did her work also reflect the shocking realization that the outside world shrugs obliviously at the emotional hole inside of us when we lose someone dear? Again, a young Iranian artist was contemplating the inner versus the outer. In this case Razavipour had connected the two realms. Her nation too had a part of its heart torn out.

On the inside there was emptiness where there used to be love, on the outside the missing chunk was in the shape of freedom.