I’ll Take You There, Staple Singers, City In The Sky
Harry Connick Jr. - With Imagination (I’ll Get There), Harry Connick, Jr., Blue Light Red Light
Who’s There?, Guru, Streetsoul
Reach Out I´ll Be There, The Four Tops, Soul ! - The Very Best Of Motown CD3
There She Goes Again, The Velvet Underground & Nico
Monday, Wilco, Being There
There Is A God, Staple Singers, City In The Sky
Harry Connick Jr. - Blue Light Red Light (Someone’s There), Harry Connick, Jr., Blue Light Red Light
There’s More to Life Than This, Björk, Debut
Smithereens, Annie Lennox, Songs of Mass Destruction
Without Love (There’s Nothing), Tom Jones, TOM JONES
If There Is A Hell Bellow, We’re All Going To Go, Lou Donaldson, Say It Loud !
There Will Never Ever Be Another You, Chet Baker, The Best Of Chet Baker Sings
I Saw Her Standing There, Beatles, Please Please Me
Kodachrome, Paul Simon, There goes Rhymin´ Simon
There Will Never Be Another You, Count Basie And Joe Williams, The Greatest!! Count Basie Plays, Joe Williams Sings Standards
There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart), Eurythmics, Greatest Hits [Europe]

So much of the Dutch art and culture internet presence is a long and controlled lecture that is at times lovely and fascinating but keeps its distance from us and what we might want to say about it. Isn’t it time for a change? I ask you…

Purchase Iran: View From Here, a book of photographs

From A Love Letter from Iran, a review by author Kamin Mohammadi:

In describing Iran one is in danger of wearing out that age-old cliché — this is a land of contrasts — and Tori and Kamran’s book does not attempt to explain away the complexity or many contradictions or try to make sense of them. But within the atmospheric range of images and bittersweet essays printed here, they beautifully capture and communicate the immense charm of Iran, its ability to enslave the heart, and the tenacity of its hold over the affections in spite of the frustrations of living there. Most of all, this book is a visual love letter to a country that can befuddle the mind and nourish the soul all at the same time.

Read the rest online at Payvand.

Available in select bookstores. Click here for availability in Amsterdam.

Click here for a flash preview of the book.

Pay with a credit card or a Paypal account:

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The price of $23.00 does not include shipping. Shipping takes 1-3 weeks.

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Iran: A View from Here features photographs taken over three years of living in Iran. It is a personal account that features images of Iran that not only include the snow-covered mountains and desert expanses that surround the county but also images that define the culture of Iran: images of mourning and celebration, of day-to-day life, and of special events. We’ve captured an Iran that eludes the casual visitor and often escapes the notice of professional photographers. To order a copy of the book, click on one of the “buy now” buttons above.

The cost of the book is $23.00 plus shipping and taxes. Shipping is $2.50 per book in the US and about €6.80 per book outside the US. >

“The most elaborate method to try to understand Iran is captured in the pages of this book. To live in Iran like Tori and Kamran have done, means riding a constant rollercoaster of impressions. Every time you think you have it all figured out, Iranians surprise you.”

–Thomas Erdbrink

Thomas Erdbrink is the Iran-based Middle East correspondent for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC. He has worked and lived in Iran since 2001.

Kamran and I saw the documentary film Landscapes Unknown II, which was astounding in its portrayal of the artist’s vision. The filmmakers Melle van Essen and Riekje Ziengs were able to bridge the distance between the the viewer and the artist and, in a sense, give us new eyes to see with.

At one point, the artist Frans Walon who is completely obsessed with capturing the things that he sees says that we all secretly hope that after death we will continue to see. When I heard that, I realized that, of course, he is correct.

If you are in Amsterdam, you can see the film at the International Film Festival (IDFA) at these times:

Tuschinski 2, Thu 29 Nov. 12:30
Tuschinski 4, Fri 30 Nov. 19:00
Compagnie - Grote Zaal, Sun 02 Dec. 16:30

Okay, I am a complete idiot. I hope some of the designers of Stumble Upon read this so that I can tell them how angry I am. I read something like: “add your contacts and see who else is on stumble upon.” SU showed me a page of people I knew. I clicked on “add” or something like that and it added every single contact in my address book.

Years and years of effort to avoid sending spam, automated emails, and other annoying crap down the drain. I’ve avoided opening viruses, avoided sending on chain letters, avoided joining endless annoying viral networks only to have all my credibility ruined by a misleading interface. Am I alone?

Where can I complain about the horrific information design?

In the Netherlands, the evidence of thoughtful design is everywhere: the bike paths, the traffic crossings, the newspapers, the garbage collection, and the café menu, to name but a few. Here, design has become a habit, a way of life. The belief in its power is fundamentally unquestioned.

Yet even here, there are pockets of doubt. Imagine how much more difficult it is to come to a shared agreement when the value of design has never been firmly established and in a culture where the fundamentals of communication differ dramatically.

The speaker found herself in that situation when she did design work in Iran. For four years, she lived and worked in Tehran: a city that has forgotten design after just thirty years of explosive growth. There are no orderly traffic crossings, no thoughtfully organized neighborhoods, and few carefully designed restaurant menus. (There are, however, great posters.)

In this talk, Tori Egherman will discuss some of the communication issues that arose when she and her husband did work with Iranian companies and civil servants.

About the speaker: Tori Egherman is a partner with her husband in Ashtary Design. She is an American who has lived and worked in the U.S., The Netherlands, and Iran. You can read about her experiences in Iran at viewfromiran.blogspot.com.

Click here for the slideshow

Where are your fellow travelers from?” the police officer asks Kamran as we are about to board the train.

“The Global Arrogance,” Kamran answers. The police officer laughs, stamps our tickets and sends the three of us through the gates where we hurry to meet the overnight train.

The train leaves the station exactly on time. A couple of minutes after departure, a porter comes by with clean sheets. We fold the seats down and make our beds. “This is great,” our British friend says. “I just love the train. It’s so comfortable, so great to sleep in.”

“The cabins were larger when I was a kid,” Kamran comments. It’s his first train trip in Iran in more than 25 years.

“No, you were smaller. Trust me.”

At 5 the train stops and we are woken up by the call to prayer booming in over PA system.

“They never let you forget where you are,” our friend says sleepily.

We pull into the train station and take a cab into the city where we are meeting friends of friends who will take us out to a Nomad encampment some 2 ½ hours outside Esfahan.

We make our way through highways, small towns, dirt roads, gravel roads, and tarred roads and, after a spot of car trouble, head towards our destination where there is one teenage boy and some sheep.

“They’re at the wedding,” he tells us. “They’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

There are weddings everywhere in the encampments. We passed one on the way here and now our hosts are at another. We manage to get ourselves invited and are quickly surrounded by huge groups of young and old, women and men, boys and girls, all curious about the two foreigners in their midst. “George Bush is very, very dangerous,” a teenage boy says to me.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” I ask jokingly.

“Afraid of you… No!” they laugh. “You are afraid of us!”

“Terrorist,” says a boy pointing at his own chest. The others laugh. They know we think of them as terrorists.

Read the complete account at View From Iran…

Click here for the slideshow

Iran: View from Here

Date: Monday, September 10, 2007

Time: 7:00 PM - 08:00 PM

Location: Champaign Main Library on Randolph and Green

Even though Kamran was born in Iran, he left during his teen years and saw the same images of Iran that people outside Iran saw: images of the Iran-Iraq war and women in black chadors, flag-burning, fists in the air, and demonstrations. These are the images of Iran. It seems unimaginable that that Kamran, someone who fled from the worst excesses of the Islamic revolution, would bring his American Jewish wife to Iran or that she would willingly go. But he did and she did.

What was it like for an American to travel in Iran? How were we greeted? What was it like to try to conform to the necessities of Islamic law with its prohibitions on public affection and alcohol, and the restrictions of women’s clothing? What about photography? How did people react to the camera?

These questions are some of those addressed in this talk.

In the introduction to the photo book Iran: View from Here, Kamran writes:

Tori and I came here with a bag full of our large format camera equipment and our heavy tripod. We both are used to setting up and controlling our images, but in Iran everything was set up for us. We did not come here to photograph Iran. We thought we would take some portraits of my family and the people we meet here. We never took the large-format camera out of the bag. Everything happened too fast and too powerfully and too emotionally. Our high-tech digital low-resolution camera is the only camera we used or misused. We took thousands of pictures, and we missed thousands of pictures. We still don’t have a single picture of Persepolis or the tomb of Hafez. Our small camera went almost everywhere with us; it fit easily into our pockets and easily into our lives.

We took the pictures that presented themselves to us. This may not be the Iran you dream of or imagine – an Iran of wild parties or religious fervor or battle – but it is the Iran we experienced. I will have to leave before I can know if I will miss Iran.

The book is available for sale at Pages for All Ages in Savoy and online at ashtarydesign.com. Tori will also have copies available at the library for the low, low price of $22.00. Hope to see you there!

The Champaign News Gazette featured our book in their Sunday September 16, 2007 book section.

If you can read German, there is an article about us at sueddeutsche.de

If you happen to be in Shanghai and read the Shanghai Evening Post, make sure to look for the interview with Tori.

In Impressions magazine: Iran: A View From Here 2003-2006

In Persian Mirror: Review of New Book ‘Iran: A View From Here’

In Payvand: A Love Letter from Iran