Amir S. Salehi’s formative years could be described as eclectic and transient. As the result of war and other circumstances, Amir grew up in several different countries where his exposure to a wide gamut of socio-economic groups would deeply imprint him both as an actor and an individual. As bombs fell around him and his mother, Amir sought refuge in the magic of cinema. He fell in love with film’s ability to inspire and educate even as it transported you away to another world. Amir endeavored to become a part of that movie magic and today he is active both in front and behind the camera as an actor and producer.

Like his childhood, Amir’s education was varied and well-rounded. He graduated from George Mason University with a B.S. in Biology along with a heavy emphasis on theatre electives. He later moved to Ohio where he obtained his Juris Doctorate in Law. Amir now divides his time between his successful entertainment law firm in Brentwood and the pursuit of his acting career.

Amir has studied with Janet Alhanti, Eric Morris and Kevin Will. He has also appeared on The E-Ring, Mind of Mencia, and starred in the acclaimed play Friends & Enemies.

The time spent abroad as a child left Amir with an indelible love for travel, wanting to see all the beautiful people, cultures and landscapes the world has to offer. He is grateful for the experiences of his youth and believes very strongly in the importance of a healthy childhood. To that end, Amir has been an active volunteer with the Free Arts for Abused Children Organization since 2002.

http://www.amirassante.com/

POINT OF RELEASE

Synopsis

4/6/2010

Copyright Chris Martens – martenterprises@comcast.net

He’s got a fastball that blinds batters; a curveball that humiliates them. He’s the best high school pitching prospect in Queens and the scouts are swarming. What they don’t know is that every time Christy Farrell takes the mound he’s worried about a lot more than just the strike zone sixty feet away. He’s thinking about another strike zone at home where his younger sisters live with their mentally unbalanced mother.

Based on a true story, POINT OF RELEASE takes place in 1974 and it follows the final season of the St. Francis Terriers and their troubled star, Christy Farrell. It is a story about a young man who only wants to play baseball yet is forced to make a decision that will determine the fate of himself, his mother and his two younger sisters and in so doing define for himself the meaning of family.  It is a tragic story because not all of them will survive. It is a hopeful story because some of them will. It is a powerful story because all of it is true.  In the end POINT OF RELEASE is the story of gifted teenage athlete and the bitter price he must pay to enter adulthood.

Haunted by the tragic death several years earlier of a younger son, the Farrell family teeters on self-destruction. Their father could not cope and he simply walked away. Their mother, Betty, battles daily with painful memories and lacerating guilt increasingly finding comfort in her own imaginary worlds. Their grandmother, Nana, lives in strict Catholic denial, believing that mental illness is not a disease at all but only a broken covenant with God. And son, Christy Farrell, finds release in his own artificial world, one defined by straight lines, simple rules and immutable logic: baseball. It is a world where he can dominate, where he can overpower, where he can find simple meaning. It is a world where he can be a hero and little boys don’t die.

But reality has a way of intruding on even the most carefully constructed escapes. And as their mother’s fragile sanity continues to crumble, Christy painfully comes to accept the fact that his two little sisters are increasingly at risk. As the Championship season marches on the strike outs mount, the victories count and success envelopes Christy Farrell so closely that he can breathe it. But just as the Brass Ring comes around fate puts up a road block and nothing going forward will ever be the same.

At times moving, funny, coarse and sweet, POINT OF RELEASE is the story of Christy Farrell’s painful awakening as he is forced to decide between following his dreams and saving his family.

Copyright Chris Martens – All Rights Reserved. martenterprises@comcast.net

The Doors

By D.J. Nettleton

http://www.musikrave.com/music/the-doors

“O, This is the end, beautiful friend
this is the end, my only friend, the end Of all, elaborate plans the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end I’ll never look into your eyes..again

The Killer awoke before dawn.
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall.”

Those were the chilling, hypnotic lyrics from “The End” by Jim Morrison and the Doors that I heard for the first time as we sat around a campfire, stocked well with a keg of beer, a bag of goodies and a portable cassette player in the middle of a pine forest in Fairfield, CT…and we were all speechless. We listened intently to the distant and perfectly paced notes of reverb from Robbie Krieger’s Gibson guitar dancing in the shadows, with the simple shakes of tambourine hissing like a rattlesnake, a stark yet simple intro as the words unveil the story of a murderous Norman Bates; of a man who wants revenge on his father and bliss with mother.

I became fascinated with The Doors that night and the legend of one James Douglas Morrison. But first some of the back story.

Back then (mid 1970′s) there was no cable tv, internet or cell phones. But there was an explosion of great music in every genre..from the 16th century flutes sounds of Tull to the island groove of Marley, to superior storytellers like Dylan and Neil Young, to the progressive adventure of Pink Floyd and Yes.

This vast content on vinyl plus massive, affordable concert touring made music a plentiful source of entertainment and curiosity for the next mega-hit band. Everyone!..jocks, gearheads; glittergals and of course those who did nothing but party would rush to the record stores when Zeppelin, The Stones, Skynyrd and dozens of great new bands like The Blue Oyster Cult or Boston would release ground breaking debut albums.

One night a friend of a friend’s older brother got one of the first copies of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. This dude also had one of the best stereos in town- a
400 watt amp with JBL’s.You heard 20 seconds of the beat and riff of “Kashmir” and knew that Page &Plant & Bonzo once again topped themselves!
That was a great feeling; taking knowing right away that you heard a historic recording before it even made it onto the airwaves!

For about 10 bucks you could go to the New Haven Coliseum and see Bad Company and Foghat warm up for the Edgar Winter group..a month later they were headliners! I also witnessed bottles breaking on the drumkit of The Ramones; chased off by the drunken, rowdy, general admission crowd who came to see Johnny Winter play the blues and not some unknown punk band blaring out two minute songs that seemed to be just noise! (Of course I hated them too until I knew better in later years.) Or the night a totally convincing Ray Davies at the Palace Theatre in Waterbury (capacity 2,500) swayed by the stage like a drunk during The Kinks “Demon Alchohol”. Or the mania of the Frampton Comes Alive tour­. My buddy Bob and I made the hour trip to Colt Park in Hartford in the back of a pickup truck sitting on lawn chairs with a cooler full of tall boys when Frampton raced onto the stage, tripped and a broke a rib but kept playing to the huge crowd of hippies and teeny-boppers.

But there was something mysterious and fascinating about the Doors music that turned them into my favorite band (at the time as a sophomore in high
school) even though Morrison had been dead for half a decade perhaps it was the smooth, baritone voice or the way he worked the arena crowds and ad-libbed with the audience on “Absolutely Live”. Or maybe it was the fact that Morrison was totally unpredictable and no one including the members of the band knew what he was going to say or do next.

I heard “Light My Fire” and “Love Me Two Times” thousands of times along with their other collection of FM hits – but when you went deeper into their library you could cue up much more complex and thematic material, ­poetic visions of war (The Unknown Soldier), Conquistadors (Spanish Caravan, The Crystal Ship, Land Ho!), gorgeous love songs (Indian Summer), mayhem (Peace Frog), hard driving, original blues (Road House Blues): “I woke up this morning and I got my self a beer! The end is always near.”

Morrison told Rolling Stone Magazine’s Ben Fong-Torres how his career got started after dropping out of UCLA Film School: ” I never did any singing. I never even conceived it. I thought I was going to be a writer or sociologist, maybe write plays. I never went to concerts,­ one or two at the most.

But I heard in my head a whole concert situation, with a band and singing and an audience..I was living down in the beach in abject poverty..it was a beautiful hot summer, and I just started hearing songs. I think I still have the notebook with those songs written in it.”

In a simple twist of fate, (yes that’s a Dylan song!) Ray Manzarek, a keyboardist and friend from his UCLA days stumbled upon a much thinner Jim hanging out at Venice Beach. Jim told Ray he lost a lot of weight from taking acid and not eating and mentioned his songs on paper. After convincing Morrison to show him his lyrics, Manzarek was blown away after reading the lyrics and hearing Jim sing “Moonlight Drive”.

“Let’s swim to the moon/let’s climb through the tide Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide Let’s swim out tonight love/it’s our turn to try Parked besides the ocean on our Moonlight Drive”

And that is how the Doors were born, Manzarek telling Rolling Stone.
“He had great lyrics and was a poet..”Moonlight Drive” was Jimmy Smith, Ray Charles, funky organ, just being cool and bluesy and he had death in his lyrics!” At the end of “Moonlight Drive” he says, “Come on baby, gonna take a little ride, go down by the Oceanside, get real close, get real tight, baby gonna drown tonight”. Morrison was the first rock n’ roller that I ever heard who brought death into the equation of youth; and I thought it was just brilliant. When Morrison came along and I heard those lyrics,” I said, ‘This is it.’ To get a rock and roll band together with a guy who was so amusing and so much fun and so knowledgeable and was writing original
lyrics- I said ‘Yeah, let’s do it Jim’, were gonna go all the way with this one!

Of note, Robbie Krieger wrote their biggest hit “Light My Fire”.

Here are my top 10 Doors Songs

1. The Soft Parade
2. Soul Kitchen
3. Moonlight Drive
4. The End
5. Light My Fire
6. Peace Frog
7. Indian Summer
8. LA Woman
9. When the Music¹s Over
10.Riders on the Storm

Also check out the live version of Little Red Rooster and Gloria covers

Bob Dylan — the epicenter of lyrical music

By Yancy Pelter

http://www.musikrave.com/music/bob-dylan-the-epicenter-of-lyrical-music

For me, Bob Dylan is the epicenter of lyrical music. Everything that came before him was a prelude to his genius. Everything that came after was possible because of him.
I am too young to have remembered his early days when he “rambled out of the Wild West” and roared into New York City on a snowy day in 1961. I came of age musical age about ten years later.

The experience that blew me away was the utter brilliance of Blood on the Tracks. I think I may have read Pete Hammil’s piece on the back jacket before I even played the album. Hamill’s tribute changed my life. I had to find out more about Dylan and this “oracle of Camus.”

So I did. It was 1974, and I somehow scrounged up enough coin to buy all his back albums. The highlight of this pivotal purchase was the frenzied trilogy of Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. I played them over and over that summer, much to the dismay of my sister who was in her Jesus Christ Superstar phase and my father, who thought Dylan was a communist with a sore throat.

There was a particular song on Blonde on Blonde that hypnotized me with its expressive brilliance and enthralling beat. Performed with a slow, methodical tempo by a host of venerable Nashville session musicians, Visions of Johanna contains the most astonishing lyrics I’ve ever heard to this day. In fact, Great Britain’s Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, pronounced that it contained “the greatest song lyrics ever written.”

To hear someone sing: “ The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face, where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place,” was not only new to me, it was as if these words were not possible before Dylan—in the same way that Willie Mays’ famous catch in cavernous centerfield of the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series was not possible before he came along.

The best way to read the song is to take it all in at once, as if you are studying a painting in a gallery. Dylan is master manipulator of time, so expecting the song to follow a liner progression is futile. Instead, the time sequence, not to mention the point-of-view of the narrator, changes line-by-line. By the end of the song, I feel just like the narrator when Dylan concludes:

He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

Yes, my conscience explodes and all that is left is the art itself – the visions of Johanna.

It’s 30 years later I still am trying to find out more about Dylan. He is constantly changing and retooling – staying ahead of expectations. How does a 21-year-old write Blowing the Wind, or a 24-year-old write Like a Rolling Stone or even a 57-year-old write Highlands. No one has the answer to that, not even Dylan. I really believe he tapped into the vast creative pool of the collective unconscious, and we are the fortunate recipients of his effort.

My top ten Dylan songs:
1. Visions of Johanna
2. Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
3. Like a Rolling Stone
4. It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall
5. Tangled up in Blue
6. Masters of War
7. Tombstone Blues
8. Hurricane
9. Ballad of a Thin Man
10. Ain’t Talkin’

A woman returned to her Cumbrian home to find a near perfect imprint of an owl on her window.

The bird had apparently crashed into the window of Sally Arnold’s Kendal home, leaving the bizarre image – complete with eyes, beak and feathers.

Experts said the silhouette was left by the bird’s “powder down” – a substance protecting growing feathers.

Mrs Arnold said she could find no sign of the owl, so assumed it had flown off without serious injury.

She said: “Our first concern was for the welfare of what we suspected was an owl and we opened up the window to check if it was still around.

“Fortunately, there was no sign of the bird and we can only assume that it had flown away probably suffering from a headache.”
‘Very uncomfortable’

Experts from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) confirmed the bird was most likely a tawny owl because of its size and shape and the fact that they appear in gardens more regularly than others.

Val Osborne, head of the RSPB’s wildlife inquiries team, said: “We don’t very often see an imprint of a bird that’s flown into a window that’s this clear and where it’s pretty obvious exactly what kind of bird it is.

“This would have been very uncomfortable for the bird but thankfully it looks like it survived as Mr and Mrs Arnold couldn’t find it anywhere close by. Sadly, many birds aren’t so lucky.”

Birds often collide with windows or start to attack them, especially at this time of year with so many young birds around, the RSPB said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-14111152

Ashley Whittaker in Little Blue Pill

Los Angeles, CA:  Lu Parker attends a private reception at the British Consul-General’s residence with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Prince William and Kate Middleton .  (July 8, 2011)

Lu Parker & Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attend the Dream Gala for Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. Saturday, May 7, 2011.

May 20, 2011, Los Angeles: Lu Parker & Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pose with their friend Mary Hart at Hart’s retirement party from Entertainment Tonight.

Avon Walk for Breast Cancer: Santa Barbara Sept 17-18, 2011

http://info.avonfoundation.org/goto/jentaylor

My Aunt Maureen lost her battle with breast cancer. My best friend Kelly, her sister Kim, and their mom Myra are all survivors. My friend Allison lost her sister. My stepmom Irene is a survivor and her friend Danelle is in treatment right now. Since I signed up for this walk I found out 3 other friends have been fighting this in silence. I don’t know about you, but I can keep adding to this list of people who have had or were affected by breast cancer.

I don’t want my 2 year old daughter to ever have one of these lists. I want her to be sitting with some friends one day and say “Wow. Remember when people got breast cancer? I’m glad that doesn’t exist anymore.”

This is why I am walking. I believe that we can end it in my lifetime. I believe we can all make a difference. And I believe that this is where I ask for your help…

Thanks for visiting my Avon Walk page. I’ve committed to participating in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. It’s a big commitment, one that will require me to spend the next several months training and fundraising. But breast cancer is a big disease, one that still affects far too many people, and I’m determined to do everything I can to help put an end to it. The money I raise will be managed and disbursed by the Avon Foundation Breast Cancer Crusade to help provide access to care for those that most need it, fund educational programs, and accelerate research into new treatments and potential cures. I’ll be just one of thousands of people that will walk up to a marathon and a half over a weekend, raising awareness of the cause and educating even more people.

I can’t do it without your help. Though I’m required to raise at least $1,800 in donation, I plan to raise much more!

I hope that I can count on your support.

You can make a donation to my fundraising campaign right here on the website by clicking on the pink “Donate Now” button. If you prefer to write a check, just contact me and I’ll send you the information and form.

As I prepare for this exciting event, I plan to update this page frequently so that all my supporters can follow my progress, so please visit often. While you’re here, you might want to spend some time on the site to find out more information on why this event is so important, and the organizations and people that will be helped by the money we all raise.

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Taylor

http://info.avonfoundation.org/goto/jentaylor