Episode Forty-Two: The Interview: Samah

This filmmaker is one of Sparks' best friends. The miracle is how, at age 8, Samah met someone he didn't even know he needed. In this longer interview, hear how, through the decades, they've been there for each other in big ways and small.

Transcript

I always say like,

I love you.

And he'll always be like,

I love you 3000.

And,

And the 3000 is a reference to Tony Stark or something,

But the three comes from Shakespeare.

Like if I tell you once,

I tell you twice,

I tell you thrice,

Know that I mean it.

That is,

I think a perfect encapsulation of,

Of how he processes the world,

Right?

The three times it's from Shakespeare,

But the 3000 is from Tony Stark.

Really,

I'm somewhat uncomfortable talking about myself.

It's partly like what,

What have I contributed to the world that merits talking about myself?

But I would say it,

If I was at a party,

I would say,

Hi,

I'm Samah.

Oh yeah,

It's actually telling.

I would start with them.

Uh,

The person I'm talking to,

Which is,

Which I,

You know,

I like you,

I do interviews,

Right,

As a filmmaker.

And maybe that's partly how I've come to life is telling the stories of others.

And they're a proxy for these bigger things.

We all are.

I was listening to an interview with Jad Aboumrad,

Who does radio lab,

And he was doing an interview with Terry Gross.

And they were talking about this series with Dolly Parton,

His dad,

This amazing kind of connection between Dolly Parton and his dad,

His dad became like friends with Dolly Parton because he worked as a doctor.

Um,

But anyway,

He made this point about being an in-betweener and I mean,

My dad's from Iraq,

That's a big country.

But he's of Persian descent and his Jewish background and his family converted to the Baha'i faith.

My mother is a white person,

A Scotch Dutch,

English,

Irish,

You know,

American,

White American.

And they are so different from each other.

Like sometimes when my dad is,

Um,

When people have met my dad and they found him a bit eccentric,

They'd be like,

But it's cultural,

Right?

And I,

And I'll be like,

Well,

Have you watched The Office?

You know,

Michael Scott,

He's a very,

Very,

Very,

Very,

Very,

Very,

He's white,

He is super white.

But he would not attribute like 90% of who Michael Scott is to his being white because he's a very unique white man.

And that's how I feel about my dad.

He was basically like,

If Michael Scott grew up in Baghdad.

My mom was kind of like a church mouse,

Very quiet.

So anyway,

I grew up with,

These are my parents.

I grew up in Santa Fe,

New Mexico in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood.

And very specifically say Hispanic,

Because as I was growing up,

They didn't want to be called Latino or Chicano or anything like that.

They were the own thing.

And I was the quiet white boy who wasn't quite white.

It's people have this image of Santa Fe too,

Which I experienced because my dad had an Oriental rug store and my uncle had a,

You know,

After coming and seeing what my dad was doing,

He started his own gallery.

So I was exposed to both sides,

The poverty,

The lower middle class side of Santa Fe and also this high end thing.

And you know,

That makes for a very different set of experiences.

It's good.

We're going to talk about sparks because I feel like he was definitely a big part of my,

My life.

Did you want to be a filmmaker when you were a child?

Was it,

How did this arise?

I wanted to write comic books.

So that's pretty tied to my friendship with sparks.

I wanted to write and draw and I met sparks at book mountain.

And I remember they would have art contests and I remember once I drew Spiderman and there was like a thought balloon and then,

And I was like,

Show this to sparks and he was like,

Oh,

That's good.

And then I was like,

Oh,

Well,

One,

One thought balloon,

I'll add another thought balloon,

Make it even better.

I was like,

Ah,

You lost it.

And I was like,

Oh,

That's a lesson,

A hard lesson about more is not necessarily more,

Sometimes you have to pull back as an artist.

Did you grow up in a religious household?

Yeah,

I did.

And I probably wouldn't have existed without that religion.

My mother converted to the Baha'i Faith in the seventies.

She went on pilgrimage to the Baha'i World Center where the prophet founder of the Baha'i Faith was buried.

And my father,

Not like a super religious guy,

He was there for three days and he met my mother at the Pilgrim House and he got regular photos.

He said,

Well,

Can I have your address and I'll send it to you.

And I was in a correspondence and they got married and they lived on Santa Fe Avenue.

I was born in Santa Fe Avenue.

Was your dad smooth?

He sounds smooth.

Like Sparks,

He is one of a kind.

He is very,

I mean,

Totally different,

Totally,

Totally different person,

But a great storyteller and very charismatic in his own way.

I mean,

I think,

Yeah,

I think that was smooth.

I think he's not always smooth.

He's also a very,

There's a lot of blunt force in him too.

I'll give you a few examples,

One more sweet than the other.

One is I was gaining a little bit of weight and he's like mending a rug in his store and he just stops mending his rug and then he reaches over to me and pushes his finger into my belly,

Like the Pillsbury Doughboy,

And then he,

And then he goes back to mending his rug.

And I was like,

What are you doing?

What is that?

He's like,

Nothing,

Nothing.

And then a sweeter example where I was visiting an Albuquerque,

Like my parents moved to Albuquerque and I was like,

Hey,

Let's go to Santa Fe and see things and I was like,

We need to go to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

I've never been there.

You know,

I hadn't been there a few years ago.

And,

And he says,

Ah,

No,

I don't want to.

I was like,

Why not?

He's like,

I've been there.

She's not going to pay anymore.

So I grew up as a Baha'i in a Baha'i home.

My dad,

Not being like a super observant person.

He wasn't doing like the regulatory prayers or fasting or his relationship to it was pretty,

Was different.

It was more cultural.

And my mom was very much like a believer.

For me,

I,

That was definitely the most important thing is,

Is that spiritual core.

With a refuge for me and a mental,

Always meant a lot to me.

And it was like,

Felt like a plank I found adrift in the ocean that rescued me was in the midst of kind of a hostile environment growing up was this idea of the oneness of humanity.

Some rough areas.

I mean,

I got knocked out with like a metal pipe and the boys and girls club.

I remember spinning out of a merry-go-round and knocked unconscious and nobody came.

My mom didn't believe me.

I had a teacher in the second grade.

I remember finishing it before everybody,

Usually I was like so distracted and I finally finished something for everybody else.

I knew everything was correct and I brought it to her and she,

Without even looking at it,

She just wrote F and she said,

Correct it.

And,

And I was like walking away and I,

Everything was right.

So I brought it back to her.

I didn't say anything.

And then she wrote like S plus meaning a C as though I had corrected it.

All of this to say,

It's not so much woe is me,

But I felt very much apart from the area where I was growing up.

So for me,

The refuge was this notion like of God,

The oneness of humanity,

Which is very different from the sense of religion that I,

That I saw in my peers who would say,

Do you believe in the devil?

And I was like,

No.

And I told you,

You can't believe in God.

I haven't met many Catholics in my life who have very sophisticated understake thinking and thoughts.

And I can't say that that was the case in 1980s Santa Fe among the Hispanic kids I grew up with growing up in that environment where you're basically a minority as both white and then this weird name and strange dad who came to school with his mustache and his Brown skin and his cowboy hat.

I like,

It was like,

He's like so goofy,

You know,

Yeah,

They would call me Samataktumachi.

My last name is Tukwacik,

Which I think is the wittiest insult of them all.

But anyway,

This coherence that I came from that view of God and humanity and destiny of the human race,

That we would eventually become one.

We're here to realize our potential as individuals and to better the world.

Like these things did rescue me.

Sparks was a big part of exposing me to things that I wouldn't have been exposed to at that age.

Like between the ages of eight to 12 totally opened up the universe for me in the realm of fictional storytelling.

I was pretty much like into superheroes.

Like most children between the ages of five and 10 when they're getting into comic books,

But I think it all started with a love of story and imagery and language and my friendship with Sparks was a key part of that,

I think.

He informed my storytelling more than any single person and not in this deliberate way.

Right.

It's obviously very natural and unconscious,

Although he's very intelligent and thoughtful,

But it's just sort of his gift to the world is his way of seeing and speaking.

Yeah,

It's,

It is interesting.

He likes to call me his godsend.

There was never a time when he would have been able to take over my material needs,

Which is how I thought of a godfather in its materialistic sense.

Like if your parents die or something,

But spiritually,

Emotionally,

He was a constant presence in my life for most of my childhood and adolescence.

I mean,

I don't know if anybody else thinks it's a godfather,

But I think it's really cool.

I think it's a really cool and precious story.

It's one of the things I treasure most in this life.

It's just,

It's such a strange thing that happened and could happen.

This eight year old boy meeting this late thirties,

Early forties black man,

Who was always on the margins of society,

Always like the mayor of wherever he went.

In 2019,

There's been,

I mean,

The thing is this has happened multiple times or I would find sparks or he would find me,

Like somebody who had mentioned somebody about his godsend and they would call me,

We would get his ID in place and his social security payments back in place and then,

And then he,

You know,

Was mugged again or something and he lost the ID or,

Or some,

Some other huge setback.

In 2019,

This was the second or third time that I'd lost touch with him.

And it was the dead of winter.

And I was very concerned about him.

And he had mentioned that he'd been sleeping in a baseball dugout.

So I went to my friend,

Stevens to spend the night and I arrived at Stevens place at 2 AM and he had forgotten to leave the door unlocked for me and I didn't want to wake him up and then I thought,

Well,

I'm hungry.

So I went down to some bar and the rail yard area and I ate there and then.

And I was driving and there's a park there.

And I remembered he had mentioned this park and I was like,

Is that the park?

And so I parked,

There's like a part of a train there in that park.

It's pitch black.

There's no lights there.

And so he mentioned that the baseball dugout,

I didn't,

I didn't say baseball dugout,

So I,

But I see this football field or soccer field and I walk out and I see a body lying there and I go and I try my light and I was like sparks and it was not sparks and I was like,

Sorry,

You know,

And then I went and found another guy and he was also not sparks then I was like,

I'm sorry.

I was walking in and I just felt like it was kind of hopeless,

But I did see a baseball,

Like it was hard to see anything that was so dark as using the light of my iPhone.

And so I see the baseball dugout and I stand,

I walk over and I see a body sitting upright with sunglasses on and it's very,

Very cold,

So cold.

And he's dressed appropriately as one can be.

And,

And I say,

Sparks.

He says,

Yes,

This deep,

Honeyed baritone.

And I was like,

You don't,

You don't sound surprised to hear from me.

Like it's 2 AM and we haven't spoken in four months.

Like you don't see it all surprised.

And he was like,

Well,

And his rich voice,

He's like,

I was dreaming and I,

I was riding the Bubba,

His deceased terrier,

Whatever dog,

Uh,

Like Thalcor from the never ending story.

And it was very bright because of the two moons of the never ending world.

And when we landed,

You know,

Bubba turned to his tiny sized dog self.

So he's urging him on towards me and he sees me in his dream in the distance.

And as he heard me say sparks in his dream,

He heard me in this world.

How people respond to him says a lot about them,

Their character,

Where they're at.

You know,

I don't want to say that people who have like have responded negatively are bad people,

But there's,

But there's a deeper,

The people who are kind and patient with him,

They're,

They,

Those are people who can see more deeply,

He is a treasure,

But also he is a magnet for other treasures.

One of your questions you were going to ask about magic.

Have I experienced magic in my life?

And the answer is in some sort of supernatural sense.

No,

I'm not like sparks who has had these ethereal visions or was visited by aliens or whatever,

No past lives to recount,

Like I don't,

That's not been my experience,

But what I have felt there's a Hadith in Islam that's quoted in the Baha'i writings and a book called the seven valleys,

And it says God speaking to us,

We will show them our signs in the world and within themselves.

We will show them our signs in the world and within themselves.

And I have felt so often the synchronicity,

You know,

That what,

What Carl Jung would speak of that synchronicity in life,

That to me has been truly magical,

More magical than any abracadabra,

The rabbit out of a hat,

Breaking the laws of the physical world,

That's a spectacle,

But the miracle has been the magical synchronicity of seeing the signs of the divine in the world and within myself mirroring each other.

That to me has been the magic and the journey that led to sparks in this position is a great example of that.

I feel so often in my,

In my life that that is how the divine makes itself known to me.

And you could explain it away,

Like I'm primed to see it or whatever,

But,

But even if that's the case,

Vision requires the,

The held and the,

The beholder that the magic is between them.

And in fact,

This is an important story from sparks from when I was eight years old,

We were sitting outside of book mountain and we were looking over on the curb and I said to sparks,

My mom says,

You seem like a nice man.

And he replied,

Your mom is a wise woman.

And I said,

I said,

Why do you,

Why do you say that?

And he said,

Because she said,

Seems not is.

And I was like,

What do you mean?

And he pointed to this wall and he said,

What's the color of that wall?

I said,

It's pink.

And he said,

You mean it seems pink.

And I was like,

What do you mean?

It is pink.

And then he started talking about quantum physics and the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty and how,

When atoms were decomposing,

They behave differently under observation than when they were not being observed.

Now I don't want to claim that any of the science is like accurate or a hundred percent correct,

Take it with a grain of salt,

But this is how he was explaining it,

You know,

So he's basically,

And then he said,

So what we observe chain is changed by,

By the observer.

We change whatever we see.

We help make it what it is through our perception.

I've thought about it ever,

Ever since.

I,

You know,

The magic is in the interaction,

You know,

Like we're the chemicals reacting to each other.

He's just an enchanting human being in a way that's all of him.

He has something that is all his own and intangible and magical.

Think of this quote from,

From Baha'u'llah,

The prophet founder of the Baha'i faith.

And he said that,

You know,

People of the,

Of the African continent,

The African diaspora,

That they were like the pupil of the eye,

That though dark and color are the portal through which the light travels and is reflected.

I do see that in sparks.

He is the people of the eye,

This mysterious being who is full of light and a true griot,

Truly one of the keepers of the story.

It seems like sparks lives in this in-between in this interstitial space.

It's,

It's really interesting.

You bring up living in that in-between space because one of my dearest friends,

His name is Jerome Bernstein.

He is a Jungian psychoanalyst and I went to high school with his son,

But Jerome is a Jungian psychoanalyst,

He also has written quite a bit and he wrote a book called Borderland.

I remember he told me a story when he was in the sixties working in Navajo land.

And they asked him to head up their cultural department or something.

He's like a Jewish man,

You know,

Like white American Jewish man from the East coast and he's like,

Why do you want me to do that?

And he's being asked by the Diné people and he's like,

Well,

We've been listening to you and we've been listening to you listen to us.

Now I thought that was a really beautiful story.

So he wrote a book called Borderland and it is all about this space of people who they have like a gift.

And at the same time that it makes it hard for them to function in this society.

Spiritual territory now,

You know,

Not just this clinical diagnosis,

But that there's something that they were picking up on in this,

In this age of transition of the human race and I do feel like people like Sparks,

There's not many of them and there's only one of him.

But sometimes people can occupy this space and they are like prophets.

And sometimes because they are at the margins of society,

That they're not valued for what they are and what they represent.

And there's this line in the Baha'i writings,

You are the trees of my garden.

You must give forth goodly and wondrous fruits that you,

Yourselves and others may profit.

The idea that this is the secret of wealth.

When we generate goodly and wondrous fruits for ourselves and others.

And I would think about Sparks who has worked in his life.

He ran Bruce's comics.

He told me an amazing story and I actually recorded it and I can send it to you.

But he told me he went to like big adventure comics and he went inside and he saw these like adults,

Young,

Younger adults,

Middle-aged adults,

Like kind of looking at him and talking to each other and whispering.

And then suddenly one of them comes up to him and says,

Are you Sparks?

He said,

Yeah,

Yeah.

And they said,

You made our childhood magical.

You introduced us to so many comics and now we're doing that with our children.

And they applauded him.

They applauded him.

And the light in his eyes,

Like the ending of Mr.

Holland's Opus was,

It made me so happy.

It makes me so happy to see my friend appreciated for who he is.

Even when I was a child,

The owner of Book Mountain,

I think what's the best of intentions and within her,

Understandably was concerned about this very odd friendship between an eight-year-old boy and this like poor black man.

You know,

Like who hung out in her bookstore a lot.

And she called my dad,

Well,

She told my mom first and my mom was like,

Whatever.

When they called my dad,

She called my dad and my dad freaked out.

And he was like,

Who knows what he would do to him?

And I get it.

I remember once I was talking with,

We were outside his apartment building on Cerios and there's like eight kids who I had seen,

They were like from a poor Hispanic area.

There was this apartment complex called the Sangre de Cristos.

But it was rough.

There was a lot of stuff going on there.

And I had a friend,

Anthony Sandoval,

Who lived there and they were harassing him.

And then they recognized me with him because he was like a nerd.

But anyway,

I had been with him in those buildings in the Sangre de Cristos and they recognized me and they saw me and there was like eight of them.

And they were surrounding me like a pack.

I think they even might've had a knife.

I'm not sure,

But it was,

It was,

It was about to become serious and then sparks came out and carried them away.

And I mean,

Another memory I have in him is like,

I came,

I had experienced some kind of humiliation and middle,

Some kind of middle school humiliation.

I came in and I put my jacket and my backpack down and he looked at me.

He's like,

Are you okay?

Yeah.

I was like,

Yeah.

And I was on the verge of tears and he had these dark sunglasses on me.

He took them off and he had these,

This,

This gaze,

Which is full of love or can be full of anger,

Whatever.

You don't think it's very important.

He told me that,

Um,

And he,

In a school,

Like he was like taking a class at the college of Santa Fe when it was still run by the Catholic church.

And there was a brother there and somebody asked him the opinion about something and they said,

Well,

We should ask our friend sparks before he gives us his dagger eyes.

And the sparks says,

You know,

I prefer to think of them as laser eyes,

Actually.

So anyway,

I had this experience,

This humiliation,

And I was just on the verge of tears and,

And he had a sunglasses on.

He's looking at me and it's with sunglasses and he leans towards me and he takes off the sunglasses.

And there's like this way,

Like this attention,

Like they say attention,

Love is attention.

So he,

With this concentrated look,

I don't know if anybody's ever looked at me like that.

He just peered right into my soul,

Right into my heart.

And I just burst into tears.

I mean that the memory is like,

It's that,

Not even the memory,

But that like bond,

Like that heart bonding.

That's why I would not rest until he had a bed to sleep in.

I almost want to do big things in the world because that's how his influence can live on in the world.

I always say like,

I love you.

And he'll always be like,

I love you 3000.

And the 3000 is like a reference to like Tony Stark or something,

But the three comes from Shakespeare.

Like if I tell you once,

I tell you twice,

I tell you thrice,

Then thrice,

Know that I mean it.

That is,

I think a perfect encapsulation of how he processes the world,

Right?

Should the three times it's from Shakespeare,

But the 3000 is from Tony Stark.

So he'll be like,

I love you 3000.

Did he tell you the story of how he got his name?

He was in like a multi-story home.

And when he was a small child,

Like I think the whole family was together.

And they would call it,

His nickname was Butch at that time.

And one day he went to this upstairs area,

Like the attic area or something.

And there was this light bulb and somehow I really don't understand how this is possible,

But I believe he's telling the truth.

There was this filament,

The bulb wasn't on or something.

And he would make contact.

He would touch it and it was maybe weak enough light,

But he would touch it.

And he had like,

It wasn't so shocking.

It was just a little bit of a spark and he,

But he became habituated to it.

And he would come up and he would just do this thing where he's like a little,

Like little electricity junkie,

Get absorbing this shock.

So one day his mother realizes he's being awfully quiet and there's a rainstorm going on.

And she's a little concerned.

And so she walks out and he turns around and there's the strike of lightning and thunder and she passes out.

And when she comes to,

She says that around his head,

There was a big shock,

Like that's kind of astonishing.

Yeah.

And that was one of the first stories I heard when I was eight.

It's an origin story.

As he said,

It's like,

It's like,

It's basically,

It's a more interesting origin story than Peter Parker ever getting bitten by a radioactive spider.

You're right.

It is an origin story.

Wow.

Without insects,

Which I appreciate.

I mean,

I like insects,

I'm a beekeeper,

But when they're crawling on you and you don't know that they're there,

I get a little squeamish.

And yeah,

I love to see them come.

Waiter or the disappeared even thought episodes.

Episode 41 and episode 42 and the stories from both Sparks and Sama.

I hope you've enjoyed these episodes as much as I've enjoyed producing them.

I'm so grateful they shared the story of their friendship with me,

Of how they met,

The trials and tribulations they've seen,

And how their friendship has withstood and still stands firm.

Thanks to Sama for his stories for episode 42 and thanks also to the creators of the music used.

Frank Schroeder,

Lilo Sound,

Alexander Nakarada,

Chilled Music,

And Winnie the Moog.

For complete attribution please see the Bite-Sized Blessings website at bite-sized-blessings.

Com.

On the website you'll find links to other episodes,

Change makers,

Books,

And music I think will lift and inspire you.

Thank you for listening and here's my one request.

Be like Sama.

Cherish your friendships.

Cherish those you love.

And don't forget to tell them every day.