my car

Here is my beautiful Nissan Maxima 1996 which I just got hand-washed a half hour ago, so it’s probably never been this clean since I’ve owned it. It’s amazing how fast a white car gets grimy here, especially when it’s parked on the street. Dried dirty water stains from the overnight sprinklers, juice from the palm trees, a thick layer of dust covered by a thick layer of pollen, pollution gunk.

I think I counted 13 palm tree reflections in the window :-) It still amuses me to see palm trees. It’s so….California!

25 degrees

So today, breaking all the rules of my health-related diet (no wheat, no red meat and no cheese) Nic and I went on an adventure to 25 degrees, deemed best burger bar in LA by some food critic in an airplane magazine I picked up on my way to the US last month.

It’s named for the number of degrees that makes the difference between medium rare and well done cooking for the meat, and the decor, as the web site aptly describes is “bordello meets burger bar”. I guess that’s why I felt like the place was seedy…

Burgers were fine, wouldn’t “break three legs off a duck”, if you know what I mean. Mine was better than Nic’s :-) but what I found interesting was the listing of cheeses on the “build your own burger” menu:

THE CHEESE 1.50

farm house cheddar / cow / lightly sharp / firm / england

st. george / cow / waxy / porous / semi hard / tart finish / california

crescenza / cow / soft / creamy / grassy / tart / california

midnight moon / goat / gouda style / semi hard / lightly sweet / nutty / california

mezzo seco jack / cow / firm / dry / mild finish / california

emmi gruyere / cow /woody / robust / swiss alps

smoked mozzarella / cow / creamy / smooth / smoky oak /california

american / cow / classic / oils / america

red hawk / cow / triple cream / lightly salty / long pungent finish / california

benedictine / sheep / goat / cow / creamy / mushroom taste / long finish / wisconsin

prelibato gorgonzola / cow / salty / soft / long pungent finish / italy

burrata /cow /soft /mild / california

Now that’s pretty impressive…

Picture of Nic’s food:

The best part of the day was driving from Westwood to Hollywood, which was a lot of fun…sunny, clear, good music.

Nic showed me where Nicolas Cage lives, which made me LAUGH as I admired his beautiful brown dobermans, it was my first drive through Bel Air and I kept hearing the Fresh Prince soundtrack in my head (to which I think I know most of the words).

Then, we drove through Sunset, which was lovely, in a strange way. The wide avenue with the short buildings, straight as far as the eye can see, terraces everywhere, big billboards with movie posters and Gucci ads, the mountains in the distance…LA is surreal, bustling, but surreal.

On the way back from the restaurant we had our pictures taken at Grauman’s Chinese Theater with a scary horror movie figure who has a white face punctured with nails and carries a sickle.

As I nestle next to him to take a picture, he turns his sickle blade towards my camera-wielding brother, who can clearly read the word “TIPS” painted in red bloody ink.

:-)

LA.

French Lessons

“French Lessons” by Alice Kaplan

She carves out such beautiful writing from words I know and experiences I’ve had. She expresses these so sparingly, elegantly, sometimes even so crudely that I can’t imagine what I could add.

She writes a memoir, and her memories of childhood are so precise. Detailed. Vivid, worth retelling. Her writing is compelling, true and pulls out of the readers their own experience. Read the reviews from the link above, proof if there ever was that a book is good: what it can elicit from readers about the book that has become a mirror where they see the reflection of something they share.

Kaplan’s fusional and painstaking relationship to a foreign language she is trying to absorb is fascinating if you’ve ever tried to learn another tongue. Reprogramming your thought process, speaking differently, forming alien sounds with previously unused parts of your mouth-tongue-throat-vocal chords.

I don’t know if you will find this passage as interesting as I did, but it is a small example of what I like about the book…maybe not the best, but it is compact:

“I spent a lot of time reading, and sitting in cafés with “l’équipe,” my team of girlfriends, and writing in my diary about André and what he meant. He wanted me to be natural, and I wanted him to make me French. When I thought back on the way the right side of me had swelled up, my neck and my ear, and my eye, it was as if half of my face had been at war with that project, Half of me, at least, was allergic to André.”

The way she ties in language acquisition, cultural experience, her longing to become one with French, with a skin eruption is brilliant because she elevates a crass physical symptom to a higher meaning, and she wraps all the facets of her life experience into the language.

And that’s what language is. It’s everything, skin eruptions, cafés, difficult sounds, grammar, vocabulary, Céline, controlling new sounds, meeting people and being alone. That’s why it’s so hard to learn well, because it requires you to let go of what you already know and embrace a completely different way of saying even the most elementary of things.

It doesn’t happen too often for me to read writers who erase the desire for me to write. That’s my criteria for a good book. 1) I can’t put it down 2) It makes me feel there’s no reason for me to write because they’ve said it all and better than I can!

Writers so good they make me feel like I’m a blank slate, like there is no other book but theirs, and like they’ve spoken all the words, and there are none left for me.

The last time I felt this way was with the Poisonwood Bible….

Dad and Richard Quest

So we dropped off my beloved parents at the airport this morning, and as we’re parting, in the middle of our farewells at the “white zone is for loading and unloading of passengers only” curb…Dad runs off, with his red carry-on in tow, after a tall, tan and handsome man in an elegant trench coat.

He catches up to him and animatedly starts talking to him, making big gestures, smiling…and Mom, Nic and I look at each other, interrupted, and all say “Dad knows this guy? Who is he?”. We shrug and wait for dad to come back, it’s one of those conversations you can see from far away is not going to last too long so we hold off on speculation.

Good thing too, cause dad walks back with a beaming smile; turns out the elegant man in the trenchcoat at LAX is Richard Quest!
Dad loves his show, and told him about his plans to found a museum in Congo and even invited him to come to Pointe-Noire!

When he was in Johannesburg a couple of months ago, dad bumped into Samuel L. Jackson who was boarding a mini-bus and talked to him for a little bit (Mr. Jackson was in South Africa checking on the work of his foundation) but when he was asked for his business card he could only answer “I don’t have one”.

Luckily, Nic and I insisted he get business cards printed during their stay in the US, just in case, so,this time around, he had one to give out!

:-) Maybe Richard Quest will eventually make it to Congo, how cool would that be? To be continued….

Cowboy Kissinger

“The main point arises from the fact that I’ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn’t shoot. He acts, that’s all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western…this amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.”

-From the transcript of the Heny Kissinger interview by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, late 1972.

Fun photos from Oregon!

Ok…so now for some light stuff.

Still Nic’s photos. I only raided or “recycled” (as Bassi Baba is likely to point out ;-) a few of them. The rest is here, it’s worth a detour…I’ve left out some pretty crazy stuff.

First off..I’d like to say. Oregon is BEAUTIFUL. I looooooooveed it! It was my first time really appreciating it and seeing this much of it. We usually stayed so little and this time…stayed a whole four days! :-0

When we arrived, the first thing we saw when we walked through the doors of the Medford airport was of course my grandmother, so happy to see us, screaming for joy and kissing us and just bursting with happiness. That was the best arrival I’ve ever had and the warmest welcome.

The SECOND thing I saw was my mind’s picture of what an “Oregonian” is. And I realize there is a bit of prejudice involved, but it was confirmed to me by Oregonians. So I don’t feel so bad about it.

The wife of a friend of the family was waiting for her husband who arrived in the same flight as us and she was wearing a fleece sweater, a warm fuzzy scarf, and had coffee in a paper-cup. I just always imagined that’s what Oregonians looked like! So I blurted out something like “thanks for looking so Oregonian!” and she just howled. Then I realized I was so tired that my “filter” for filtering stupidity had just turned off and I’d actually said that. oooops….

This is in Ashland, Nic and I playing around with feathers from one of those Renaissance stores…he looks demented. As usual.

Ashland has a fancy Shakespeare festival sometime I think in the Spring, I’m too lazy to check online to give exact dates. It’s very well known though and the city is very artsy, extremely pretty. There’s a stream that runs through it (the WHOLE city was flooded in 1997, the river overflowed and ran through the streets, it was pretty dramatic, there were pictures in lots of storefronts where the damage was most severe).

The city center is quaint now and a little yuppie-ish. Stores with custom-made jewelry, art boutiques-specialty stores that corner the market in super-expensive rare-wood furniture that costs thousands of dollars, vegetarian organic restaurants, fancy expensive clothes…

Honestly, Ashland felt less like a real town and more like the Oregonian set of a TV series…like Gilmore girls meet Northern Exposure meet Desperate Housewives.

I KNOW it sounds awful when I say it that way, and that’s not my intention. It was a lovely little town. But the reality is that it is a place where a lot of wealthy people come to retire, and it has a big festival once a year, and it had that feeling of being almost like a stage or a set, that get used once in a while and the rest of the time retain the vibe of being set up to be used at a later date…

It almost felt like I’m describing the Oregonian variant of a Southern California town! hahaha…..

That, and everyone just seemed to be walking and talking “in character”. They were playing the part of the Oregonian townsfolk, wearing North Face and other expensive looking winter clothing and comfortable shoes, muted dark greens and yellow rain proof parkas, long hair and beards, knitted caps…

But aside from that, the randomness of the signs, and the price of the real estate (houses in the park area at the mouth of the town ranged from $300, 000 to $2.9 million), the oh-so-perfectness of everything from the flowerbeds to the details on the storefronts and the sidewalks, the people playing along so perfectly, even the ducks were on cue…

Here are a few pictures of the randomness…

The sign (which should really be an emblem for my blog) at the entrance of Lithia park (silly name, doesn’t it just SOUND like a Wisteria Lane name??) for the duckies that are wading around in the pond:

(too bad I can’t post up the video Nic took of the ducks landing in the pond. DOZENS of them just landing on after a short flight, it was HILARIOUS!)

And this, which has to be my tied with the couch as my favorite photo of the whole trip:

isn’t it just too absurd? I LOVE this photo so much. Nic’s got such an eye.

(someone beheaded Lincoln; a donation was made to replace his head this Fall but Nic and I think that once it’s replaced, someone is just going to bat it down again)

Oh and here’s my tie for favorite picture of the trip. This couch was just sitting there in the middle of a field at the entrance fo the town off the exit of the 5 Highway North (yeah, the same one we have down here that is congested all day):

family history

Little stroll down Zein family history lane… :)

First time I saw a picture of our old family home in Egypt! (My grandma’s brother is a little boy in white shorts on the steps in the entrance, but you can’t see it very clearly…)

This is a photo of My grandma and her first husband Fawzi and Cherif as a cute little baby (he was “cute” but still a force of nature):

Mamie Bahia as a young woman (in her twenties, I think she already had my father by then, sometime in the mid fifties, living in Morocco): (isn’t she BEAAAAAUTIFUL???)

This is Mamie Bahia and Earleta O’Neal (was Flemming): they were two original Baha’i pioneers to Spanish Morocco in 1954! They’ve known each other for fifty years! Earleta and her husband Jerry made it to Medford all the way from Las Vegas, it was SO wonderful to meet them!

These last three pictures are of my grandmother’s pilgrimage to Israel in 1976 with my parents who had just been married a year or two. Those of you in Haifa will recognize familiar faces!

Mamie Bahia and the second Japanese Baha’i, Saichiro Fujita (he became a Baha’i in California in 1905); he lived the end of his life in Haifa, Israel:

This is a photo of Mamie with Mr. Ali Nakhjavani and Mr. Fujita; Mr. Nakhjavani who until recently served on the Universal House of Justice lived a long time in Africa, and was one of the founding members of the Baha’i community in Uganda in 1951 (my parents loved them so dearly, they named me after his lovely wife, Violette):

Mamie Bahia and Mr. Hooper Dunbar! :-) (Mr. Dunbar is an American Baha’i who pioneered to Central America and is an accomplished painter, and is still currently serving on the international governing body of the Baha’i Faith in Haifa:

Family pictures

So here are some family photos, courtesy, as always, of the family photogapher, Nic.

(thanks, man…)

This has to be my favorite, of Mamie Bahia and her two boys, Kamal (my dad) on the left and Cherif:

Mamie and Nic:

Three generation of Zein women:

Here are a couple of family shots in Ashland (home of the Shakespeare festival):

And finally a shot of the Congo Zeins at one AM in Denny’s (the “real” America as dad likes to say; diners and breakfast food in the middle of the night…only in the USA…):

Homeland (in)security

We’re packing to leave Medford in a few hours and this morning brought a revelation of how inept Homeland Security is.

If you haven’t flown recently within the continental US, consider yourself lucky. They’ve stepped up the security measures before boarding but they haven’t stepped up the training of airport security employees so what you have is one uniform(ed) chaos from beginning to end. This includes a lot of ridiculous events and much impatience and irritability on the part of passengers who understand things are inefficient but may not be able to isolate why.

Right after September 11, the immediate security measure was to ban all forms of blades, scissors, knives etc. from the cabin but to allow them in checked luggage. This marked the end of my Leatherman companion knife which was confiscated from me and thrown in a garbage can.

A few years ago, the incident with Richard Reid, the shoe bomber added the lovely boarding component of removing your shoes before you go through the X-Ray machine.

Earlier this year, the London incidents (foiling a plan to blow up planes using liquids in toothpastes and liquids) made the process even more circus-like in randomness by requiring all liquids to be either chucked in large grey trash cans or checked in luggage (for toothpaste and shampoo bottles).

So now…let’s pass in review everything we have to shed or take into account when boarding: check or chuck all knives and bottles of liquids, take off your shoes, belts, wallets, coats, keys everything and place them in individual grey bins. Walk through the X-ray machines arms splayed waving your boarding pass. Get dressed once you’ve been “inspected”.

So this time around, boarding in LAX, same circus.

Some poor guy forgot to take his wallet out of his back pocket. He was practically strip searched for about fifteen minutes by a very serious agent who had announced to everyone there “He set off the alarm!!!!!!”

We managed to pass through with no problem.

This morning, packing his computer away, my brother opens one of the pockets of the carrier case, and finds… a BOX CUTTER.

The very instruments that set off the Homeland Security crazy measures by enabling the terrorists to take over the planes.

The actual exact instrument. And it was in his case the entire time, flew with it in the plane etc.

I’ve flown in and out of Israel countless times in the last few years and had to brave extreme security measures there, but the thing is, they were so well trained and flawless that I didn’t mind. They were just perfectly rigorous. In the States, any security measures annoy me to no end because the employees have no idea what they’re looking for. I think they just don’t have any concept of real threat and can’t see the forest for the trees. They’re so strict on the bottles and the shoes and the alarm ringing for a little wallet that they let a box cutter in.

Here’s a photo I shot right before leaving Oregon…(with Nic’s camera): (as he commented on his Flickr: high terrorist alert in Medford, puh-leeeeze!)

Why English rocks

I’m not saying that English is going to be the world language…(although in some ways–Business, the Internet–it already is), I’m just saying it rocks so much, mainly for the reason that Barbara Wallraff exmplifies every month on the last page of The Atlantic in her “Word Fugitives” section: it’s playful, flexible, malleable.

You can invent new words at will because it’s such a bastard language. If you don’t believe me, read “Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson. Fantastic! It’s a biography of the English language filled with cool facts and history, endlessly entertaining (makes a case for English as the world language).

Anyway. About “Word Fugitives”…People write in, like this month’s Gerry Poster of Greenville, S.C. requesting a new word to describe the “intense and absolute skill or knowledge that is required to operate something technological and that will become worthless when a newer program or machine is sold.”

The answers are published the following month, and the people whose invented words or puns get published are credited and receive autographed books.

This month, they published terms to describe the “heap of stuff that new parents find themselves toting around with their baby”, and the words sent in were very cute: (this is a little wink to all you new parents out there… :-)

parentphernalia
babyphernalia
pedephernalia
heiraphernalia
pueriphernalia
paraphernatalia
postpartum possessions
infantory
bairnecessities
child splay
impedimenta
mother load
adinfantitems