A painting of me
  • Why we still love board games. 

    “German” games seem to be more popular than ever here in North America. I know lots of people that play Settlers now.

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Arusi Persian Wedding

   27 July 2010, early morning

I finally watched a documentary I had mentioned on this site some time back, Arusi Persian Wedding. The film is about a recently married American couple — Alex, a Persian boy, and Heather, a girl originally from the Mid West — who decide to travel to Iran to have a Persian wedding with the boy’s Father’s family. The film opens with the couple preparing for their trip. The girl converts to Islam and they have an Islamic wedding in California so she can get a Persian passport. The couple’s parents meet for the first time. (I feel like there is a back story there that probably could have been explored more.) There is some brief exposition on the recent history of Iran: the 1953 Coup, the rise of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution, and the hostage crisis. The remainder of the film is a sort of travelogue: they travel from town to town, meet locals, and take in the sites. The film ends with their wedding. All in all I quite liked the movie, though it felt a bit light. The movie perhaps tries to talk about too many things in such a short period of time. There are so many interesting things that could have been fleshed out more: Heather’s family’s thoughts on her marriage and her “conversion” to Islam; Alex being a foreigner in both America and Iran; the couple’s culture shock; etc. I think because of when the film was made, back when it wasn’t clear whether America would attack Iran as well, the film perhaps spends too much time talking to Iranians about how they love America. Regardless, I think it’s an interesting film to watch, if only to see what a Persian wedding looks like.

Comment [6]  

  • For Jessica. 

    Jennifer Lawler writes about happiness and raising her daughter. It’s a bit hard to get through, but it’s well worth the read. It doesn’t end like a Hemmingway novel, I promise.

    (via MetaFilter) # [1]
  • Liberals pan Tories' 'tepid' response to missing aboriginal women. 

    You ask yourself, if it was 580 white men that had gone missing in this country, would the response have been silence, inaction. Where else in the world — 580 murdered or missing people and we don’t have a national public inquiry into it. Unbelievable.

    I wonder what the Liberal response would be. They had a good solid decade to tackle this issue. Of course, that doesn’t excuse Conservatives for being equally useless.

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  • Cow Clicker. 

    It’s a satirical Facebook game about Facebook games.

    You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

    (via Neven Mrgan) #
  • 800 Wickets. 

    Muttiah Muralitharan, who is retiring from Test cricket, takes his 800th Test wicket.

     # [1]
  • Summer. 

    God damn, this lady can write.

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  • Long Division. 

    “Black people are coming for you white people. Rachel Maddow argues that is the underlying theme of the four major Fox News-only stories of the Obama administration: Van Jones, ACORN, the New Black Panther Party.” I love this lady.

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Rachel: Oh, well, actually we were just talking about me not going to Ross’s wedding.
Phoebe: Oh!
Rachel: It just might be too hard, given the history and all that…
Phoebe: Wow! This reminds me of the time when I was, umm, living on the street and this guy offered to buy me food if I slept with him.
Rachel: Well, h-how is this like that?
Phoebe: Well, let’s see, it’s not really like that. Because, you see, that was an actual problem and, uh, yours is just like y’know a bunch of y’know high school crap that nobody really gives y’know…
Rachel: (starting to cry) I’m-I’m sorry, I just thought that…
Phoebe: Alrighty, here come the water works.
— A conversation on Friends between Phoebe and Rachel. (I am reminded of it often when people start whining about stupid shit that doesn’t matter.)

  • The Military State Of Mind. 

    Sri Lanka is a militarized state and a generation is growing up thinking that this is normal. This may not be a such a bad thing. Is it?

    I guess it’s easy to mock Sri Lanka from the comforts of Canada. I mean, who the fuck wants to live in a police state? Apparently Sri Lankans.

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Art Space Tokyo

   21 July 2010, mid-morning

My copy of Art Space Tokyo arrived last night. I had actually forgot it was going to show up soon. I had donated to the project on Kickstarter a few weeks or months back: I am a fan of pretty books. I quite like Craig Mod’s writing on books and the future of publishing, so I thought this was a good way to indirectly thank him for his work online. I’m not entirely sure how useful a book about Tokyo’s art scene would be to me in Toronto, but hopefully one day I can take a trip to the city and check out some of these galleries. It would be interesting to see a similar book written about Toronto’s art scene — though it seems like many of our galleries come and go a bit too quickly.

Comment [2]  

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