#full of whimsy and scams for the public

[crayolascribblz]

alex hirsch I'm sorry I actually find him very endearing

[roobylavender]

care to share the books lol ? i myself am trying to get thru my tbr … it’s not looking too good 😞

the mid: one night wife by ainslie paton / i am aware this sounds terrible but in fairness the set-up justifies it a bit lol. basically it's about a girl trying to get her charity program off of the ground and miserably failing until one night she catches the eye of this guy who's a professional grifter masquerading as a venture capitalist. he grifts rich people and redistributes the earnings to the poor. and he decides to help her out by using her as his "one night wife" to scam all of these so-called rich people by pandering to them together as a charming couple. except she doesn't know she's being used. and ofc they'll fall in love with each other. etc etc. the premise genuinely is very interesting but idk for some reason i can't connect to the characters. paton was a journalist before she went into fiction writing so everything is very fast-paced and to the detriment of really developing any investment in the characters

the terrible: the mis-arrangement of sana saeed by noreen mughees / so this girl is thirty three and unmarried (shame! shame!) which would not normally be a problem except that her mother won't name her as her autistic brother's future guardian unless she's married bc financial and emotional security or whatever. so she goes through your standard string of rishta meetings. all the while pining for her childhood friend whom she hasn't seen in like eighteen years bc their families fell out with each other and he moved away. except that at work she gets assigned to this new project with the deputy attorney general of the state and lo and behold it's said childhood friend. but she doesn't know that bc he changed his name and it's been eighteen years. but he knows who she is. and they're going to fall in love or whatever. i'm not very far through this one but the mc grates on me bc she's ridiculously immature for someone her age. some of it comes down to personal preference i suppose bc i'm kind of fed up with desi women's obsession with austen and finding their perfect darcy/wentworth adjacent prince who will sweep them off of their feet. not that desi women aren't entitled to that kind of love but the way the mc narrates it she sounds positively juvenile and i can't take it seriously. also i'm already getting inclinations that her autistic brother is barely a character and merely a plot device so that's swell. and the icing on the cake is ofc the full display of deranged and exaggerative desi family dynamics bc what else do we have to display of our culture but obsessive marital practices

the long, but good: the zoya factor by anuja chauhan / interestingly this one is the most wish-fulfillment aligned of all three of these but the execution of the premise is so well done and it clearly knows how to handle its whimsy so i'm genuinely enjoying it. the mc works in advertising and she gets roped into working on a photo campaign with the national indian cricket team. the captain of the team is ofc a surface-level ass uninterested in the campaign and intent for the team to focus on practice bc they've been on a bit of a losing streak. one day the mc ends up having breakfast with the team and she lets slip that she was born the very minute india last won the world cup so her family has always joked she's lucky. the very same day the team ends up winning their game. so word gets loose and suddenly there's this outcry from the public and the team that she has to become their mascot and permanent good-luck charm. except that the captain is obv still an ass and a very hardcore believer in "my results are only the product of my work ethic and never a concept so ridiculously amorphous as luck" so there's some head-butting involved. the fame is going to go to her head, the captain's going to try to keep her grounded all the while falling in love with her bc she is all things considered relentlessly charming, and there will ultimately be the question of whether it's entirely healthy to place so much self-worth in the idea of your own necessity to someone rather than relying more on the idea that they want you for who you are. it's very good stuff and to make things even funnier the mc constantly compares the captain's eyes to chocolate-flavored boost energy drinks which i personally think is a fabulous jab at authors' tendency to describe eye colors with food items. so i'm having a lot of fun

[arcticdementor]

Thirty years ago, having tapped out of a Ph.D. program, I moved to Los Angeles (long story) and got hired at the top boys’ school in the city, which would soon become co-educational. For the first four years, I taught English. Best job I’ve ever had. For the next three, I was a college counselor. Worst job I’ve ever had.

…

I did not come from a religious family, but we had a god, and the god was art, specifically literature. Taking a job teaching “Ozymandias” to a new generation was, for me, the equivalent of taking religious orders.

And so when a job opened in the college-counseling office, I should not have taken it. My god was art, not the SAT. In my excitement at this apparent promotion, I did not pause to consider that my beliefs about the new work at hand made me, at best, a heretic. I honestly believed—still believe—that hundreds of very good colleges in the country have reasonable admissions requirements; that if you’ve put in your best effort, a B is a good grade; and that expecting adolescents to do five hours of homework on top of meeting time-consuming athletic demands is, in all but exceptional cases, child abuse. Most of all, I believed that if you had money for college and a good high-school education under your belt, you were on third base headed for home plate with the ball soaring high over the bleachers.

I did not know—even after four years at the institution—that the school’s impressive matriculation list was not the simple by-product of excellent teaching, but was in fact the end result of parental campaigns undertaken with the same level of whimsy with which the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.

…

The new job meant that I had signed myself up to be locked in a small office, appointment after appointment, with hugely powerful parents and their mortified children as I delivered news so grimly received that I began to think of myself less as an administrator than as an oncologist. Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them. They, in turn, began to hate me. A college counselor at an elite prep school is supposed to be a combination of cheerleader, concierge, and talent agent, radically on the side of each case and applying steady pressure on the dream college to make it happen. At the very least, the counselor is not supposed to be an adversary.

I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.

Some of the parents—especially, in those days, the fathers—were such powerful professionals, and I (as you recall) was so poor, obscure, plain, and little that it was as if they were cracking open a cream puff with a panzer. This was before crying in the office was a thing, so I had to just sit there and take it. Then the admissions letters arrived from the colleges. If the kid got in, it was because he was a genius; if he didn’t, it was because I screwed up. When a venture capitalist and his ageless wife storm into your boss’s office to get you fired because you failed to get their daughter (conscientious, but no atom splitter) into the prestigious school they wanted, you can really start to question whether it’s worth the 36K.

Sometimes, in anger and frustration, the parents would blame me for the poor return on investment they were getting on their years of tuition payments. At that point, I was living in a rent-controlled apartment and paying $198 a month on a Civic with manual windows. I was in no position to evaluate their financial strategies. Worst of all, the helpless kid would be sitting right there, shrinking into the couch cushions as his parents all but said that his entire secondary education had been a giant waste of money. The parents would simmer down a bit, and the four of us would stew in misery. Nobody wanted to hear me read “Ozymandias.”

…

During those three years before the mast, I saw no evidence of any of the criminal activity that the current scandal has delivered. But I absolutely saw the raw materials that William Rick Singer would use to create his scam. The system, even 25 years ago, was full of holes.

…

And it was through these broken saloon doors—the great power conferred on coaches, untimed testing, and the ease with which an application can be crammed with false information—that Singer pushed unqualified students into colleges they wanted to attend. He told the parents to get their kids diagnosed with learning disabilities, and then arranged for them to take the test alone in a room with a fake proctor—someone who was so skilled at taking these tests that he could (either by correcting the student’s test before submitting it or by simply taking the thing himself) arrive at whatever score the client requested. (“I own two schools,” Singer told a client about the testing sites, one in West Hollywood and the other in Houston, where his fake proctors could do their work.) He allowed coaches to monetize any extra spots on their recruitment lists by selling them to his clients. And he offered a service that he called “cleaning up” the transcript, which involved, at the very least, having his employees take online courses in the kids’ name and then adding those A’s to their record.

All this malfeasance has led to the creation of a 200-page affidavit, and a bevy of other court documents, that can best be described as a kind of posthumous Tom Wolfe novella, one with a wide cast of very rich people behaving in such despicable ways that it makes The Bonfire of the Vanities look like The Pilgrim’s Progress. If you have not read the affidavit, and if you’re in the mood for a novel of manners of the kind not attempted since the passing of the master, I recommend that you and your book club put it on the list for immediate consumption.

…

Ever since the scandal became public, two opinions have been widely expressed. The first is that the schemes it revealed are not much different from the long-standing admissions preference for big donors, and the second is that these admissions gained on fraudulent grounds have harmed underprivileged students. These aren’t quite right. As off-putting as most of us find the role that big-ticket fundraising plays in elite-college admissions, those monies go toward programs and facilities that will benefit a wide number of students—new dormitories, new libraries, enriched financial-aid funds are often the result of rich parents being tapped for gifts at admissions time. But the Singer scheme benefits no one at all except the individual students, and the people their parents paid off.

The argument that the scheme hurt disadvantaged applicants—or even just non-rich applicants who needed financial aid to attend these stratospherically expensive colleges—isn’t right either. Elite colleges pay deep attention to the issue of enrollment management; the more elite the institution, the more likely it is to be racially and socioeconomically diverse. This is in part because attaining this kind of diversity has become a foundational goal of most admissions offices, and also because the elite colleges have the money to make it happen. In 2017, Harvard announced with great fanfare that it had enrolled its first class in which white students were in the minority.

…

In the recent past—the past in which this generation of parents grew up—a white student from a professional-class or wealthy family who attended either a private high school or a public one in a prosperous school district was all but assured admission at a “good” college. It wasn’t necessarily going to be Harvard or Yale, but it certainly might be Bowdoin or Northwestern. That was the way the system worked. But today, there’s a squeeze on those kids. The very strong but not spectacular white student from a good high school is now trying to gain access to an ever-shrinking pool of available spots at the top places. He’s not the inherently attractive prospect he once was.

[ratherhavetheblues]

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S CLOSE-UP “This is a case of petty fraud…”

© 2017  by James Clark

   We live in one of those eras where whole nations (or nation-links) have been widely regarded as irredeemably perverse and evil. Over the years, Catholics, Jews, Communists, gays, Japanese, Germans, etc. have been subjected to fierce and massive opposition. Therefore, when approaching a film notable like, Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), a rare artist refusing to cut ties with (though not a supporter of) militant Islam (within Iran), there is a special preparatory requirement to make very clear that our stalwart is, first and foremost, a citizen of the contemporary world, which is to say, the secular, cosmopolitan world.

   In view of this, we’ll put forward a glimpse of the heart of Kiarostami’s work, a glimpse which Michelangelo Antonioni would be touched by, not to mention many other modern filmmakers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh9-uKavbu0  

  Only an artist alerted to an imperative of dynamics brooking no capitulation to ancient enthusiasms would find necessary that those enveloping thrusts comprising Roads of Kiarostami take the spotlight. Kiarostami’s eventual semi-exile (the regime being happy about his festival winnings, but increasingly suspicious about the content of the material and therefore suspending any further financing), whereby his final two films—Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012) were produced in, severally, Italy and Japan—comprised a distress that the oddity (uncanniness) he had romanced from the days when Persian Iran was Muslim-Lite had been targeted by a stream of volcanic, though tempered, spleen. But in our film today, Close-Up (1990), that ingredient of nausea is abated. Our special investigation of this surreal saga, then, has to do with those winning roadways and their comedic (Jarmuschian) whimsy remaining a viable navigation even where Paterson-like thought-police pose challenging roadblocks.

  Therefore, we put into abeyance the convolutions of this narrative, in favor of that spectacular jigger of mirth which constitutes, in flash-back, the onset of the bemusing difficulties hogging most of the attention. In Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise (1984), Eva, bored with snowy Cleveland (and, before that, bored with antiquated Hungary), can’t resist getting taken for a ride to exotic Florida by her deadpan and big-talking cousin, Willie. In Kiarostami’s delighted reinvention of that sputtering shot for the stars, he brings to our consideration the lady of a bourgeois house in Tehran, Mrs. Ahankhah, boarding a local bus on her way to a very predictable home, and—bus experience lacking the heights of Persian excitement—she’s more than merely tolerant of a fellow-swarm (Hossein Sabzian), reading in the seat next to her, from a book he’s just bought, pertaining to the hot auteur, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and his hit, The Cyclist, and going on to tell her that he is the golden globe who wrote the screenplay in question and directed the film and (with the lady urging, “I hope we [particularly herself and her film-arts-avid two sons] meet again) soon declaring  that he’d love to put her and the rest of her family into a new creation. (Herewith we have not only the useful precedent of Jarmusch; but also Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik (1952), where a bored honeymooner, Wanda, runs off (as against a visit to the Vatican, with her far less volatile groom) to play a part in a photo-comic shoot starring a big-talking celebrity the romantic aspects of whom she has been crazy about for years.) Though Mrs. Ahankhah does not take her marching orders, as Eva does, from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and his “I Put a Spell on You,” she does, in the presence of the rough-edged fellow-passenger, come into a realm of fantasy. (“Please take it. I wrote it… If you like, I’ll autograph it,” the big talker proceeds. She, like Wanda, cues up her windfall to settle her mind about the implausibility: “Famous directors have their own cars…” (He’s researching new scenarios.) She also rushes his way, due to her sons’ having graduated as engineers but only having found less impressive work, the notion, “My boys will be thrilled!”

    Exaggerated thrills do in fact constitute a veritable implosion defining one of the two phenomena which Kiarostami sends our way with sensuous panache and thematic wit. The film begins with a sensationalist/ journalist, Farazmad, accompanying two military police, in order to cover the fraud’s arrest at the home of  Mrs. Ahankhah (more accurately known, in line with customs confusing to us—as is a local police force run by the federal government—as Mrs. Mohensie) and her quasi cinema pre-production family artists, roped in by way of Hossein having obtained the phone number of the thrilled boys, from which the troupe forms up at a theatre showing The Cyclist, as a first step to more magic. The SWAT trip has been made in a taxi for the sake of not alerting the supposed hardened criminal, another nod to big-deal, Willie, and his excursion to supposed wild things. (Kiarostami’s trade-mark setting of the interior and immediate exterior of cars having much to do with Jarmusch’s motif as to automotive [mis-] adventures.) “Things might be tricky,” the sensationalist hopes, not having a clue about how really tricky this matter is. We would soon be privy to the law and order timbre of Tehran, by way of Kiarostami’s interviewing the police captain and hearing the latter maintain, “As you can see, we’re very busy here…” We can see, as the interview proceeds, more than a dozen officers standing about, eavesdropping on the welcome novelty the interview represents. That picture of drift includes a trooper re-lacing his boots, and thereby providing another bemusing diversion.

   Unimpressive sensationalism hits the jackpot, though, in one area we might overlook, namely, Hossein, the sputtering powder keg, whom the judge, in hearing him defend his bizarre trespassing, declares his reality to be “a case of petty fraud.” Before casting some light on the defendant’s erudite sophistry, it does, I think, make a lot of sense to hear from his mother (in a hijab, but still revealing her vigorous rural roots), who petitions the court to “forgive” him. She cites his unemployment, forcing her to support them all. (“The first seven years were peaceful; then his wife began complaining about the poor housing, and she left with one of their two children.”) Perhaps, like Mrs. Ahankhah’s college grads, he does some odd jobs; but, like them, his heart is not there (though Mrs. Ahankhah does at one juncture point out that the mechanical engineer has become a going concern in his bakery sideline). Hossein derives from a far more modest socioeconomic strata; but he lacks not only certification but a will to forego that fantasy fixation upon his entitlement to crafting “thrilling” cinematic discoveries. During his long-winded moment in a court being, from his perspective, a more sombre jumbotron usually touching off any number of well-rehearsed, orgasmic ingratiation, he insists that as sublime as it could get would be his showing, as an actor, his pain as elicited by an unforthcoming horde of public enemies. The filmmaker he impersonates, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (b. 1957), was an ardent supporter of the populist theocracy coming to power in 1979. He was an outspoken enemy of those, like Kiarostami, who had produced something other than hurtin’ sagas, when the Shah was nudging the country into the modern world. Kiarostami, then (almost miraculously fending off that tsunami—but a tsunami comprising those finding diversion in watching someone tying his shoe-lace), would find in his coverage of the trial itself and the more or less bombastic self-dramatists being part of that “petty” blip, a way to, while seemingly giving a break to the pains of marginal energies, quietly disclose that second phenomenon transcending the farcical first—that first which Jarmusch pinpoints as “jerking off.”

    Hossein, after a lenient imprisonment of a few days, tearfully meets his hero, good old Mohsen (invited by Kiarostami to bring his celebrated skills to the architectonic of who walks and who talks), and heads off behind the auteur of The Cyclist’s moto (under the other than teary camera of the master of ceremonies, who tracks the ride under the auspices of a deliberately sputtering sound-system). The salt of the earth stop at a flower market, where the one who was told by his hero, “Stop that!” [blubbering] has chosen a bouquet of yellow blossoms, setting off a stern demand, “Not yellow!” At the now-familiar locked gates of the victims of the scam, the latter part of the ride being restored to unhindered kinetic possibility of a world without excuses, the celestial figure chirps into the security phone, “You’ll see him in a different light!”

   You’ll definitely never see him in a different light—that incipient light which Mrs. Ahankhah displayed in the bus. From Kiarostami’s perspective, the only different light that matters has to be light-years distant from moralist caretakers. Close-Up brims with multi-layering, self-serving verbosity. Its Antipode, which, in the best of all worlds, would be its salient antithesis, is a phenomenon of sensuous dynamics absolutely or nearly silent. The way this latter sphere comes to bear confirms the film as part of an agile reflective task  to convene a full-scale consideration of what has not, to date, been taken into account. (During the trial, the defendant pleads, “My love of art should be taken into account.”) After the journalist’s non-stop gabbing in the taxi— “It’s a hot news item!” [as hot as all those wonderful YouTubes keeping people up all night]—the taxi driver, waiting for the arrest to take place, has some quiet time. He had mentioned being a former air force pilot, on which the populist newsman rattled off a dopey formula which carries a sense far beyond populism: “Air forces on the ground; ground forces in the air…” (The latter also, on seeing the location of the scene of the crime, poses the unintentional wisdom implicit in, “How strange, my greatest story should take place on a dead-end!”) The cabby steps out to the deserted road and soon his eye catches the long-range presence of jet-streams coming from each wing of a big jet, against a deep-blue sky. Dynamic cogency that requires no hype. From a pile of rubble by the curb, he finds a discarded bouquet of tiny flowers (by contrast with the huge spray ferried by the two revolutionaries to the family more or less dreaming the Persian Dream). His final bit of free-time involves nudging with his foot an aerosol cylinder having lost its jet. It jauntily rattles downhill, a reminder that air forces on the ground can stage a kinetic rally of ground forces in the air. (This Heraclitean dialectic comprising another aspect of the Persian Dream. Kiarostami has found an actor who resembles the Shah of Iran to play the part of a grounded high-flyer.) Farazmad, the dispenser of smallish dreams—his headline off the presses in deliberate cliché-style reading, “Bogus Makhmalbaf Arrested”—scrambles door-to-door along the street where the Ahankhahs live, trying to find a tape recorder to use in covering the official incarceration. As he enacts this let-it-all-hang-out idiom, he, in his frenzy, kicks into the air that aerosol can, sending it along that trajectory as before; and the promise therewith of some improvement revisits us at a level of wit and wisdom only one of the greatest filmmakers could manage. (One later rare shining moment occurs during the police raid, as seen from inside the comfortable home. There are a few graceful trees in the yard, their golden autumnal leaves being a relief from the virtually non-stop gracelessly calculated opportunism. We learn that Hossein—dead to anything living—moots cutting them down during the “pre-production.”)

   A frequently floated interpretation of this subtle filmic disclosure is to enthuse about the methodology of filming an actual event by including those who lived it. (“Based on a true story,” the credits point out.) The nub of this insistence is to construct, in the Makhmalbaf style, a great heart stirring in the midst of marginalization, having become a slam-dunk for the patrons of hot docs. In Kiarostami’s interview at the jail with Hossein, pertaining to filming the trial, he asks, “Is there anything I can do for you?” “You could make a film about my suffering,” he quickly replies, failing to have well perceived or cared that that is not the kind of film Kiarostami wants to make. (During that interview, our helmsman asks if the prisoner knows his body of works. Hossein’s affirmative lacks any enthusiasm for a mode of production clearly intent on energies he does not wish to experience. Solidifying this impasse is the filmmaker’s reply to the request to construct a vanity vehicle. “I can’t promise anything…” The gulf separating the two figures captured by Kiarostami’s camera in the visitor’s area of the prison could be said to center upon the ego-drenched melodrama of The Cyclist, wherein an Afghan refugee in Iran stages a sensationally self-destructive 7-day marathon bicycle exhibition with a view to gaining funding for the sake of his critically ill wife. So sold on the ultimacy of that intent, Hossein insists the lesser-in-his-eyes obscurantist convey to his superior that “The Cyclist is part of my life!”  

   What does soon transpire (due to Kiarostami’s intervention with the court to expedite a court date) is the product of Hossein’s many years of portraying himself as, first of all, a directorial genius—on the basis of a deluge of saccharin films from many sources (Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist being a recent craze, released in 1989)—and, in a whimsical pivot, an even more gifted actor. The Ahankhah family spokesman for the plaintiff is the (double-threat) arts-enthusiast-civil-engineer who describes incidents where the pious charismatic very much harbors monetary predations upon the star-struck affluent, by which his long purgatory could be ended. With “rehearsals” underway, there comes a moment when Hossein, leaving for home, asks the now-accuser for a ride on the youngster’s motorcycle, a gambit drawing from the fantasy-auteur a threat that, were the kid to get into a crash, thirty or forty of his cronies would ransack the tidy home. This quip engenders a chuckle; but then the opportunist asks for and receives 2000 tomans for travel expenses and contingencies he’s not inclined to describe. “I needed it,” he maintains to the judge. His argument that the fraud (from the perspective of others) is essentially a failure to understand that he is indeed at the heart of cinematic verity— “I really was him” [Makhmalbaf]—is delivered with soap opera keening and self-pity. After a day with the star struck family, during which he feels their “respect,” including their still vague consideration to fund the scenario for the up-coming hit, The House of the Spider,  he describes himself being “confident” on the basis of the multiple “trust.” But, every melodrama needing a shot of conflict, he tells the assembly (at one point he tells Kiarostami that he’s his audience), “I had to shed that role” [on leaving the “set”] … I was still the same poor guy… I developed a complex” [about living the hero of Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist and not being able to thrill the world with rare skill], which “audience” Kiarostami would describe as bathetic, if he were not making his statement in film action.

   Within Hossein’s desperate obsessions, there may obtain jets of sterling possession having nothing to do with Makhmalbaf’s plodding and occasionally murderous self-importance. Just as kicking an aerosol can can hardly be understood as engaging a cycle of creative sensibility, the predatory quagmire Hussein has chosen to settle for has virtually nothing to do with art as an elicitation to a lifetime of vigorous daring and buoyant joy, which (given the fondness for antiquity) must always seem strangely new. At the beginning of the interview with the family of unwelcome notoriety, Mr. Ahankhah tells Kiarostami, “I don’t know what your intentions are…” We, having been given the opportunity to contemplate a case of pettiness far outstripping the con man who would maintain he is above jerking off, can come to terms with the vast outrage darkening world history while still, as with the lady of the house, keeping options open, such as they are.

   We’re left thinking not of the presumptuous pest, but the far more nuanced maturity of Mrs. Ahankhah. After her first coming aboard Hossein’s vision of 1001 Nights—from her purchase, forestalling the deadly boredom of her family and circle—she fades into the background. Sitting, silently, in the court, she seems to have startlingly aged (with far more grey hair apparent than on the day when she first saw some daylight in the situation of Hossein). Within the domestic scene visited by Kiarostami, the stilted and phoney self-promotion by the men relegates her to the function of servant. Her husband brags, “I knew from the start exactly what was going on. And I always had the situation well under control. I led Mr. Sabzian along, as a lesson to my children…” The prissy civil engineer reams off a river of excuses and others’ faults to impress upon the notable that he’s an overlooked treasure. He denounces the lack of “raw material” as a factor of the poor employment picture. (The irony of a dearth of “raw material” far more appreciated by the interviewer than the interviewee.) He slaps down the only remark that day his mother finds to hold promise, concerning his brother’s beginning to find value in his bakery management work, with the vacuous snobbery, “I prefer artistic work to selling bread… My brother didn’t study all those years to sell bread…” He finds outrageous that the reporter (getting something right for a change) has portrayed them as simple folk. And that brings us back to the lady of the house and her apparent dead-end.

   Kiarostami, like Jarmusch, knows that the gift he can generate with his films is as much about the alert viewer than the dazzling architectonic Hossein being, in addition to his fixity of primitivism, near [close-up] and yet so far. The taxi driver, being brought up to speed by the reporter about the identity theft of the filmmaker, declares, “I don’t have time for movies. I’m too busy with life…” And yet his readiness to track dynamics far surpasses the cinephile’s going nowhere, within the purview of what a movie means to Kiarostami. Asking for directions to that dead-end which may not be entirely a dead-end, they come to a couple of pointed conclusions: “Ask an adult.” And, confronted by a farmer taking his livestock to market, “We’re off to see a turkey of our own.” Mrs. Ahankhah mentioned enjoying The Cyclist. She didn’t add that it was a highlight of her life. Where would such superior judgment go, in a place like Tehran? Houdini-like Kiarostami had his ways. The already straitjacked lady might decide, after the farcical fling with Hossein, to cut back on her viewing (migraines being so useful). Were she ever to encounter a Kiarostami film, would she become intrigued? Were she never to see another film, her being on the spot would not be over.