paul chaderjian

Once there was and there was not … 1. [[[ dIS aPPEAR fROM hERE ]]] It’s Tuesday, and he’s on an Airbus, 32,972 feet above land, waiting for a computer network to ping him and beg him to return. Flight SU 106 is racing to Los Angeles from Moscow, where he has had a layover on his journey from Yerevan, Armenia — the faux Homeland — to his real home in the US. Weeks earlier, he had told his new boss in Armenia he was thinking about a three-month break. A freelance assignment in the Arabian Gulf would stall the process of his full repatriation to the Homeland, which actually was not the place his forefathers had lived for centuries. The sage advice he received was to just make a decision, stay or go, and just “move on.” It’s a win-win situation, his boss had said, but his heart was still torn. He had flipped a 50 AMD coin to see if he would pack up only months after arriving. The conflict was that he had come to this place to try to fill the large hole in his conflicted heart. I...

BY PAUL CHADERJIAN Once there was and there was not … Fall 2013 will forever be imprinted in my mind with a melancholic pop song about our enigmatic obsession with the Homeland. In my mind’s eye these days, Arabo Ispiryan’s cinematic music video plays in repeat. As the young protagonist picks up an older relative at Zvardnots airport, as they drive past our monuments and landmarks, Arabo professes his yearning for the Homeland. He serenades her about wanting her to beckon him, let him return home. Why a love song about our abstract desire to be one with the Homeland would haunt me while I stand and live in her bosom has been puzzling me since I heard “Tun Im Hyreni” for the first time a few days ago. Arabo Ispiryan - Tun Im Hayreni Arabo sings of embracing a place that we collectively long for, a place that’s been bullied, pillaged, burned. He sings of sons enslaved by foreigners, of a nation whose springs have turned to fall. He sings of wanting to wash our anc...

by Paul Chaderjian A column for the Asbarez newspaper Once there was and there was not … Sometimes if you’re watching the clouds, the genius algorithms of our connectivity and oneness in the universe spell themselves out in plain sight. Last Sunday, I was watching large jumbo jets landing and taking off from the Honolulu International Airport, passing through the few well-defined, fast-moving and magical clouds over Hickam Beach – a private military beach at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on Oahu. My friends had taken me to the beach on my last day of a quick visit to Honolulu. The night before, I’d watched the stars of Hawaii Five-0 ram a black van into a bench on the driveway of the out-of-use emergency department at Leahi Hospital. The actors had then fallen into gurneys, sporting fake gunshot wounds to the arm and gut. While Hollywood was making media content on Oahu, a group of friends was doing the same 8,000 miles away. I wouldn’t find out abou...

BY PAUL CHADERJIAN It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. This wasn’t how it was scripted.   < #inhale > I don’t know where you are and what you’re doing, but I imagine you two floating in slow motion in the middle of a vast, serene, white place full of clouds, hearing echoes of conversations from the wretched world far below. Here, we are chattering simultaneously, posting, blogging, liking your photos, and it’s all reverberating through you and in you, even though it’s all meaningless, circular, and empty noise that mortals, like the ones you left behind, consider dialogue. Our voices in this loud place run together, separate, sound foreign, fake, but they continue to sound. Perhaps there is music in your new place, in the background, a harp lessening your harsh transitions from the here and now to there, the eternal. Here, we wish the clocks could turn back to a simpler time before Friday, to a time when you hadn’t died, hadn’t succumbed to fat...

by Paul Chaderjian May 13, 2013 On the edge of this multicultural  metropolis, miles shy of the suburban promises of Americana in Orange County, thousands of cars have come to a halt on a massive multi-laned interstate in Buena Park. Cars, new and old, foreign and domestic, weave an incomprehensible tale of multicultural harmony in our globalized 21st century. Inside the inner sanctum of isolated metal boxes on rubber wheels, radios blare the latest sensational headlines. A young Chechen is charged with heinous crimes that morning. The son of a dictator is threatening to make war in the Korean peninsula. Anonymous is shutting down the Internet in protest of unconstitutional reversals of privacy laws. A Bruno Mars mix sounds from the woofers of a fancy black SUV driven by a young lawyer. A cancer surgeon listens to the Oprah network on Sirius XM broadcasting Dr. Phil’s talk on marginalization and belonging. Meanwhile a traffic reporter in a chopper above tells his TV audience ...