It's Rez
Explore my blog and learn about life adventures living in New York City and traveling around the world.
Explore my blog and learn about life adventures living in New York City and traveling around the world.
In May, 2020 I was approached by the Dr. Lezli Levene Harvell to co-produce a new project under her The Iconoclast Dinner Experience. Her goal was to find a way to give her already established platform a voice that can communicate with the culture. My main goal is to turn show ideas into full and thorough episodes. Therefore, Lezli and I tag-team her Mondays “Deep Dive” episodes. I am responsible for garnering research and potential show guests, developing interview questions, transcribing and editing the scripts once the recording session is done.
Below are episode #25 & #31, which are examples of how we develop the deep dive episodes. Lezli and I spend hours stressing the topic and trying to find different ways to reveal the truth that’s in the pudding as we use food to tell the stories of ones culture. The show also has weekly Friday episodes called “On the Yard” where Lezli’s daughters Zuri and Nava join her to talk to HBCU students about worldly topics that effects them such as climate change, politics and more.
It’s officially the holiday season. Lezli is joined by Detroit-based Iconoclast Dinner Culinary Honoree and owner of Flowers of Vietnam, George Azar. He shares a brief update on the most recent shutdown in Michigan and how he's impacted as a restaurant owner. They also explore what it was like growing up as a Palestinian Christian in Southwest Detroit, George's feelings on how being an Arab Christian impacted how the Arab-American community received him, and how his family celebrated as well as what was on the table during the two most important holidays in his home; Easter and Christmas.
Lezli continues this five-episode theme with Dr. Panivong Norindr, author of Phantasmatic Indochina French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature, as well as Samia Errazzouki, Ph.D. candidate examining early modern Northwest African history, prior to which she was Morocco-based journalist. The three explore how French Imperialism bound their countries’ histories and people to each other, the 1992 Academy Award-winning film Indochine serving as a “French Gone With The Wind”, The Myth of Tangier, snake charmers, and static fictional narratives that preserve a colonialist fantasy of these regions that have endured in tourism, novels, films, and culinary culture.
