Drift Reality

We arrived at Juliana Airport in Saint Martin at about 3PM on Friday afternoon. The moment we stepped off the plane and I could feel my stress dissolve into the warm Caribbean air. After grabbing our suitcases we headed to the car rental place to pick up the “convertible” I had reserved the previous night. I was a bit surprised but undaunted when the car rental manager pulled up in an old white jeep wrangler.

“This is our convertible?” I asked.

“Yes, these are what people drive on the island,” he responded.

I turned and could see my companion skeptically eyeing up the car.

“Err…is this okay with you?” I asked, to which she responded in the affirmative. I turned back to the rental manager and asked, “Can you help me take the top off?”

After a few minutes of struggling with a mess of latches and zippers, a struggle I realized I would never be able to duplicate, we had the top off and the suitcases in the backseat. As we were gearing up to head off, a middle-aged woman from Boston who we had met on the shuttle from the airport to the rental car place leaned over and warned us not to leave anything in the jeep. With that, we set off for our hotel in Grand Case.

Getting ready to drive off in the “convertible”

The area directly surrounding the airport was actually quite a congested mix of cars, scooters, and locals shouting out unintelligibly. After a few miles, we turned onto Union Road, headed to the Dutch/French border, and the natural beauty of the island asserted itself.

Saint Martin is an incredibly lush, hilly island that is replete with a diversity of beautiful sceneries. Driving north along the western coast through Marigot up to Grand Case provided a great overview of what we could expect over the next few days.

Trying not to get lost in Saint Martin
Surprisingly (given my track record with getting lost) I managed to successfully navigate all the way to Grand Case and was filled with a sense of excitement as we turned off the road into the driveway for Hotel L’Esplanade.

My sister’s birthday was a couple weeks back and I decided to be a good big brother by taking her to one of the top salons in Washington, DC - Salon Bleu in Tysons Galleria. A close friend who I trust immensely recommended Anne, their senior creative stylist. It was a bit expensive but my sister proclaimed it was the best cut she had ever received in her life. Over the next few days she continued to mention how great her hair looked and how many compliments she had received so I figured it was worthwhile sharing.

Washington Post has an editorial review of Salon Bleu along with some pretty compelling reader feedback. The Salon also has a Web site you can visit for more information.

I was recently visiting a friend who lives in the West Village when I had the displeasure of encountering Socialista. As I was riding over, my friend wrote me the following text:

“Socialista is at 505 West St. between Horatio and Jane. Text me when you get here. Maybe your looks will get you in.”

I found the last line of the text a bit peculiar to be sure, but didn’t think anything of it until I arrived at the front door and saw a group of people standing outside negotiating with the doorman. I immediately knew that there was going to be some infuriating front door politics involved as I sauntered up.

“Hey, is there a guest list or something?” I asked one of the doormen, who was standing guard over the exit.

“Yeah,” he grunted. “There is a guest list.”

I began texting my friend that I had arrived when I saw several other people try to gain admittance to the club and be denied.

Turning to the doorman standing in front of the entrance, I asked, “Hey, what’s the deal with this place?”

“Well, you really have to know someone here to get in,” he responded categorically.

“I know my friend who is in there,” I responded.

“Who is your friend?”

“My friend is __________,” I responded knowing full well that this moron didn’t know who my friend was.

“I don’t know your friend,” he responded.

I resisted the temptation to blurt out, “That’s because you don’t know f#%k all,” and instead decided to call my friend and ask him to come out. It was freezing so while I was calling my friend I walked over to the place next door (not realizing it was connected to the lounge).

I walked in the entrance and immediately a man in the suit came up and asked, “Do you have a reservation? Because we are closing pretty soon.”

I looked at him and simply responded, “No, I’m meeting some friends here,” thinking ignorantly that this would be enough to get him to walk away.

“Who are your friends?” he responded. “Maybe I can help you find them.”

I took a quick scan about the place, which couldn’t have been more that 15′ by 15′ and repeated my friend’s name.

“Sorry,” he responded. “I don’t know him. Perhaps they are at the lounge next door? This is the Socialista restaurant.”

Realizing that this was my queue to stand outside I headed out and called my friend to come meet me. After a few minutes, he emerged from the lounge and we went to hail down a cab.

After coming home to DC, I decided to read up on the place. I found out from the Observer write-up that the owner, Armin Amiri grew up in Iran and it suddenly made a great deal of sense to me that the place was so pretentious (disclaimer - I am half-Iranian).

I sort of threw up a little in my mouth when I read his quote in the article:

“What I’d like to be done is a socialism as far as the door. . .What socialism really means is, I give you this and you give me that. And as the door goes, I’m gonna bring you into this nice atmosphere; hopefully, you’re going to bring your great energy in here. And that’s it—that’s the only even exchange I want with people.”

Dude, do you even know what socialism is? Have you ever been to f#%ing Cuba? Were you on drugs when you did the interview?

Reading on, I struck upon a real gem from Amiri: “Back in the old days—you know, the 1940’s—when you went out, it was all about respect. You respected the establishment; it was very chill. And when a single man went out, if he wanted to pick up on a woman, it was very classily done. These days, unfortunately, there’s not much, you know, class left.”

I’m not even going to dwell on the fact that Amiri was negative thirty years old in the 1940s. Instead I’m going to dwell on the fact that this idiot is talking about socialism and 1940s style when his place is so obviously about pretension, elitism, and a tacky effort to actually be stylish while failing miserably.

Style isn’t imposed by an owner. Style evolves over time because a place cultivates relationships with patrons and creates a unique experience for them.

I couldn’t understand how someone could be so ignorant until I saw the picture of Amiri in the article. You can tell Amiri is desperately trying to look stylish but ends up looking like a hairy version of a young Dustin Hoffman, except not as good looking:

Amiri, are you trying to seduce me?

It turns out there are quite a few reviews of Socialista in the blogosphere - none of them too flattering, further affirming the fact that bloggers are smart. Joonbug did a nice little recap. of Socialista if you want to read more.

My opinion is next time you are in the West Village do yourself a favor and keep walking by this place.

Once upon a time I dreamed of making film. While I was teaching English in Korea, I applied to USC and UCLA film schools and was summarily rejected - two additions to what has become quite a litany of rejections I’ve encountered through the years. After pouting for a month or so I said to myself, “F%#k it, I’m going to make a film anyway,” and I borrowed some money from my family, bought a camera and started filming everything I could over in Seoul.

When I returned to the States I spent an entire Summer teaching myself how to edit, and produced a 60-minute piece I dubbed Miguk.

Over the years, Miguk has been watched by literally hundreds of thousands of people, many of them prospective teachers who wanted to learn about what life was like over in Seoul before going. I’ve connected to dozens of people through the film and one of them is now running what I consider one of the top online resources on life in Seoul.

He was recently kind enough to provide a review of Miguk on ZenKimchi for which I am very grateful to him.

Over the past few years it has been a rarity for me to be truly touched by a movie to the extent that I would exert any time or thought into writing a review of it. I tend to be much more of an angst-driven writer and therefore it takes stinkers like Transformers or X-Men 3 to get me off my ass and writing.

Last night however I saw Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven and I found myself completely entranced by a story so simplistic and humble that the screenplay would have probably been used as toilet paper by your typical Hollywood executive.

I can sum up my thoughts on this film by saying it is everything that a film should be, and everything that your typical Hollywood blockbuster is not. Now I have no idea what a typical Iranian film budget is, but I think Children of Heaven could have been produced over here for somewhere in the range of 200K.

Consider this: Mel Gibson made $25 million for starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s (who I consider one of Hollywood’s top directors) Signs. His salary alone according to my random ballpark estimate probably was about 125 times what the film budget for Children of Heaven.

 

Dakota Fanning ain’t got nothing on Bahare Seddiqi

Now I’m not trying to be a hater because I’m definitely a fan of Hollywood and over the past few years have really enjoyed a lot of the hits that are straight Hollywood-productions. I’m really just trying to make an over-arching observation of the differing production methodologies used byHollywood versus Persian film, and their respective results.

Children of Heaven could have only been conjured in the soul of a real artist and produced with no other intention than to bring that vision to life.

Your typical Hollywood film? Probably conjured in an executive board room and produced with the intention of generating enough revenue to ensure an appropriate return on investment.

Ironically, it is the fact that most of these Persian filmmakers don’t have a substantial budget to work with that is their ultimate liberation.  The beauty in the stories they conceive is resident in the characters and the narrative that manifests, not in the empty Hollywood gestamkunstwerk of CGI and celebrity luster, a place where artistic beauty is not conceivable.

At any rate, I realize now I haven’t even talked about the film itself.

I haven’t talked about how the boy and girl manifest quintessential gender characteristics of persian men and women, the representation of class distinctions in the film or the symbolic significance of the shoes themselves. That’s because that stuff is boring.

The film is about a young boy who loses his sister’s shoes, what transpires after that initial event and the love that exists between them.

It is about the soul of Persian culture.

That’s it.

Go see it.

Now.

In the wake of the altercation, the dark-haired woman and light-haired woman have found a nearby park and begin to discuss the situation. The discussion gradually begins to evolve into something much broader and a realization is made between the two of a underlying connection in their thought processes.

As the dark-haired woman walks the light-haired woman back to her apartment, the light-haired woman shares an experience from her past that enlightens the situation in the present.

With this realization in mind, the dark-haired woman returns to her apartment and equanimity is restored.

In part 2, the dark-haired woman is startled by a mysterious phone call. She looks at her phone and immediately gets dressed and leaves her apartment, and the man who she had been sleeping in bed with.

As she walks down the street, she sees flashes of the man from Part 1 who is teetering while sitting on his bed. As she frantically walks through the city, a couple in an alley nearby begin arguing.

As the dark-haired woman continues to pace through the streets, the couple’s fight begins to crescendo. It becomes violent as the dark-haired woman turns the corner. She sees the altercation and shouts. The man looks up in surprise and quickly dashes away, leaving his counterpart - a woman with blonde hair - crying as she leans against the alley wall.

Towards the end of my time in London in 2006, I got a small group of friends and acquaintances together and produced a short film based on a reverie I had about five years ago when I was living in San Diego.

I got a call in the middle of the night from a friend who had been pulled over by the police. The person that had been driving the car had pulled it over at the first site of sirens, and then dashed into the woods nearby, leaving my friend behind. The police officer refused to let my friend leave because she was intoxicated but allowed her to call me to pick her up.

Annoyed that I had been awakened, I got into my car and began driving over. While on the empty San Diego highways, this strange story began to play out in my head completely unprovoked.

Five years later I decided I wanted to produce the story in video so I wrote up a short screenplay and asked some people I knew to help me. I don’t think anyone clearly understood what the story was about although they all had the good grace not to poke fun at me for wanting to produce an incomprehensible short.

At any rate, the video is split into three parts. In Part 1 of the Phoenix and the Lion, a man is eating pills while poring over a photograph of someone he once knew. He lays down in his bed. Before he falls asleep, he makes a phone call.

In another part of town, a dark-haired woman awakens from a bad dream she was having. She moves over to the sink and begins mulling over something while she inspects her reflection in the mirror.

This past weekend I decided to take the initiative and seek out a new restaurant in DC.

After a bit of digging, I struck upon Rock Creek Restaurant in Bethesda, MD (incidentally, why is it that every restaurant’s Web site either looks like it was built by a college student in 1996 or tries to be uber-hip with ridiculous amounts of flash and a lounge soundtrack).

I haven’t been to the gym in about a month (since I dislocated my shoulder), I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to eat healthier.  At any rate, what appealed to be about the place was their emphasis on “delicious meals with nutritionally balanced ingredients.”

So I made a reservation and checked the place out.  It was probably one of the best dining experiences I’ve had in DC for the past few months.  The first thing I noticed was that the service was amazing - our waiter was laid back and friendly to the point that I thought he might have been taking bong hits in the kitchen except for the fact that was remarkably sharp and on-point -

The food was perfect - I had a perfectly grilled filet mignon and my companion had some well prepared (and fresh) crab cakes.

What’s more, they have a number of wine ‘flights,’ or samplers that allow you to try several of their wines.  We had the Alsace Summer flight, which consisted of a Willm Pinot Blanc, Trimbach Riesling and Trimbach Gewurztraminer.  The Riesling was particularly tasty.

I polished the meal off with a Grahams 10-year port and we shared a very solid creme brulet.

On a side note, when I initially ordered a glass of Warres Otima 1o-year the waiter came back and said, “Sorry, we are out of the Warres Otima but in its stead, would you prefer the Grahams 10-year?”  His use of old English phrasing, ‘in its stead’, almost made the night worthwhile in and of itself. 

All in all, my experience at Rock Creek Restaurant in Bethesda reminded me that DC can in fact be a great place to grab dinner, and I’m planning on putting the Rock Creek Restaurant in Friendship Heights on my short-list of places to try next.

I normally try to steer clear of writing about political issues on Drift Reality, mostly because my own background in the subject area is so pitiful.  However, sometimes a perspective just seems so intuitively sensible to me that I can’t help but offer up my opinion.

For a while now, the National Iranian American Council (of which I am a member) has been a voice of reason (as well as the only perceptible voice of the Iranian American community) with regard to foreign relations between the US and Iran.

Just a week back, their efforts to oppose US democracy/insurrectional funding in Iran was chronicled by the Washington Post.  Saman Zarifi from Human Rights Watch was quoted in the article as such: “Giving tens of millions of dollars to support Iranian activists inside Iran is counterproductive. First, Iranian activists don’t want it and can’t get it. Second, it supports Iranian government efforts to cast activists as foreign agents.”

Yesterday, Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute delivered an op-ed through the Post, defending democracy/insurrectional funding in Iran, where he claims, “Successful democracy promotion must have teeth.”

Personally, I wonder if Rubin has spent any substantial time in Iran or with Iranians for that matter.  It just strikes me as more than a little peculiar that many neo-cons who take hard line, passionate stances on foreign policy issues simply have no personal vested interest nor experience in said issues.

I’ve posted links to both the Rubin article as well as the NIAC Web site so you can decide for yourself about this issue.