I fell in love with Shakespeare And Company the first time I set foot in Paris when I was barely 18. The bookstore, located in the 5th arrondissement, on Rue de la Bucherie, was a bibliophile’s paradise. The brown, timeworn facade, its windows covered with numerous posters of literary and cultural events, was irresistibly inviting. Stacks and racks of books welcomed you at the entrance where a slew of youngsters browsed through the books and magazines or sat under the majestic tree adorning the pavement and attempted to become part of its history. Since then, for me Shakespeare And Company has become synonymous with Paris and I have visited the bookstore every time I have stayed in Paris. I have seen the city change, but Shakespeare And Company has remained the same and the few new wrinkles has added something new to its almost hundred year old charm.

This afternoon, when I visited the bookstore again, the place had yet more of a significance to me. A few days before leaving Los Angeles, I had tried to buy a David Sedaris book, for a light read on the plane, and as I looked for a bookstore around my neighborhood, I was stunned to realize that there were no bookstores left in Sherman Oaks, or the Valley in general. At a time when electronic tablets, eBooks and Kindles have taken over, and books have become novelties, Shakespeare And Company has turned into a Mecca, a historical relic of some sort, which reminds one of the days when books were still considered sources of wisdom, knowledge and entertainments and had their special place on pedestals called book shelves. Now, as I write these lines, sitting at a cafe a block away from my favorite bookstore, a young mother sits at the table across from me. Her little girl, hardly 6, opens an impressively large book and starts reading. A breeze of optimism blows my way and I think to myself “All is not lost yet.”

I just watched a fascinating documentary called “The Last Tightrope Dancer In Armenia” and I was so moved, that I was bawling out loud during the last half an hour of the movie. May be it was the state of mind that I was in, but the movie touched me profoundly. The full length documentary is about the dying art of tightrope dancing in Armenia, concentrating mostly on two old men, who are retired from the field but are intent on keeping the ancient art form alive. The two rivals have their own apprentices who at very young age are already tired of the horrid conditions of their métiers.

Directed by Inna Sahakyan and Arman Yeritsyan, the 2009 film, in Armenian, with English subtitles, is the winner of the Grand Prix of the 19th International Festival of Ethnological Films. The film, which has also garnished more than a dozen awards for Best Documentary in European festivals, very skillfully tackles the topic of posterity both on individual and cultural levels. The tightrope dancer is a potent metaphor for everything beautiful that is disappearing without substitute.

A friend of mine brought me half a pound of Kopi Luwak (coffee) from Indonesia. The coffee was delicious and as I read about it, I found out that the island of Sumatra in Indonesia is famous for its Luwak coffee. The archipelago is the home of an animal called Paradoxurus, also known as Luwak. This little animal is a cross between a fox and a monkey and lives in the trees. Apparently one of their favorite foods is the red, ripe coffee cherry. They eat the cherries along with the beans, and as the bean goes through their digestive system, it undergoes chemical treatment and fermentation and, of course, comes out with the animal’s excrement. The farmers collect the beans from the forest, wash them, roast them, then grind and sell them. Luwak coffee, or Pea Berry coffee, is considered the most flavorful and the richest tasting coffee in the world. It is also the most expensive coffee on the market. The Luwak choose and consume only the very best cherries on the coffee plants, and that is why this coffee has such a rich flavor.

As I was sipping the coffee, I thought an artist or an intellectual is a kind of Luwak. Whatever an artist consumes finds its way through the digestive system and comes out in his shit, and people pay top dollar for it. The difference between a good artist and a mediocre one is that a good artist knows how to be selective when it comes to cultural or intellectual consumption. In this day and age, when one is constantly bombarded by a barrage of words and imagines, the lines between the trivial and the profound, between the mediocre and the good, have blurred so much that it has become almost impossible to uphold high standards in the consumption of art and culture.

I suppose we are what we shit.

I was informed recently that one of my plays “Pink Elephant” was translated into Greek and will open in Athens in June.

“Pink Elephant” was written 28 years ago at the height of the Lebanese civil war. Originally written in Armenian, the play premiered in Los Angeles and hit a nerve. The audience’s reaction was phenomenal. During the following few years, the play was translated and performed in Scotland, England and the United States, garnering rave reviews for its compelling dialog and timely topics.

One would hope that today, after so many years, the themes of war, bloodshed, tyranny, destitution and alienation would become outdated, yet sadly, it seems that they are as relevant today as they were so many years ago.

“Pink Elephant” was my first full length play. Until then I had written a number of short plays. In my attempts to touch on universal themes, I had shied away from specifics, keeping everything on a broad level. My characters had generic names. The settings could be anywhere on earth and the dialogs bordered on abstraction. With “Pink Elephant”, I learned that as a writer, the more you go into specifics the more universal your work becomes. I realized that audiences can relate to any character as long as the character is human, real, and has dimension.

After the opening night in Sacramento, the young American director approached me and said, “Do you realize how much work it took for these actors to find references to what they were doing. Almost everything was foreign to them: What is an Armenian? Where is Lebanon? What are Armenians doing in Lebanon? What is a civil war?” And yet, I was amazed by how the actors were able to relate to the characters and how the American audience was able to identify with what it was watching.

I am truly happy that the play has now found a voice in Greece, the birthplace of theater as we know it, and I sincerely hope that some day war, dictatorship, and destitution will become irrelevant topics.

Someone once asked Fellini why he makes films. He answered that it’s like asking a hen why she lays eggs. So, why do I express myself? Because it’s biologically impossible for me to shut up!

With the launching of my new website, I decided to start a blog as a fresher, more immediate and intimate way of expressing myself. Blogging and tweeting are two words that do not exist in my handy 1997 Webster’s dictionary. Come to think of it, even my spell check does not recognize the word “blog” and the only reason it accepts ‘tweeting’ is because it thinks I’m chirping.

Blogging and tweeting are two things I’ve never done before, but I’m hoping that I will have fun with them. This should be an interesting learning process for myself and my friends. I will write about whatever I deem is worth sharing: thoughts about a movie I have seen, a book I just finished reading, an album I discovered or simply opinions about some experience I am going through.

Cheers!!