kinds of freedom

I’m slightly in shock and don’t really know how to respond to this news about bin Laden — for one thing, I found about it from friends’ Facebook statuses, and that alone kind of freaked me out — and then there were the exhumed 9/11 memories to be dealt with —and then there was the fact that even though bin Laden was (to borrow a phrase from Eddie Izzard) a mass-murdering fuckhead, my country still assassinated somebody, and I can’t really accept the equation of that to “justice being served.”

So between feeling deeply confused about all that and anxiety about my show opening this week (The Odd Couple — do come see it, if you’re in the area!), I slept terribly and feel rather out of it, and am compelled to make lists.

Things that make me feel human:

1) I don’t care how many mediocre films Woody Allen has made, he is still my hero forever just for this scene: a minute and a half of Manhattan.

2) Mozart probably didn’t know this, but he wrote Don Giovanni for Cecilia Bartoli: Batti, Batti, O Bel Masetto.

3) Ai Weiwei (whose name [Ài; 艾] is a homophone for ‘love’ [ài; 愛]) is fighting for freedom of speech in China, has been censored and harassed by the government for years, and is now being held in custody for undefined “economic crimes.” Here is his TED video.

Things we like III

1) This beautiful and inspiring TED talk by Zainab Salbi on Women, wartime and the dream of peace. Salbi grew up in war-torn Iraq and is the founder of Women for Women International, which works to help women in post-war zones rebuild their lives and communities. She’s a passionate and eloquent speaker, and she quotes Rumi, so of course I love her.

2) Fereshteh Najafi, who is like an Iranian Paul Klee. I particularly like her series Tara, The Princess, and Searching for Free Human. The image below (her most Klee-esque) is from Tara.

3) Wikipedia! For two reasons: 1) for having audio samples of Finnish, an absolutely wonderful language that unfortunately I don’t speak at all; 2) for having long been my source for accidental poetry and unexpected syntax, most recently in the message from writer Kartika: “I started writing Wikipedia to take away the sad feeling I had whenever I searched for a general and important article that didn’t exist yet in my language.”

4) The fact that Jim Carrey and I are entirely agreed on what constitutes a dream come true.