Udaan is a fantastic film. A coming of age adventure not just for the protagonist but also for Ronit Roy - from his weak, floundering beginnings in obscure flicks like Jaan Tere Naam (remember its undeniably catchy title song - "ये अक्खा इंडिया जानता है हम तुम पे मरता है/दिल क्या चीज़ है जानम अपनी जान तेरे नाम करता है." (translated as:"This, the whole India knows that I('ll) die for you/What is the heart O love! I pledge my life to you.")?), to his stardom in the saas-bahu sagas of Balaji Telefilms to Udaan in which he reinvents himself as the impossibly strict, tyrannical, borderline psychotic father and gives a brilliant, bravura performance.
Om Dar-ba-dar is the arbitest film NF's ever seen. Period. He very, very humbly posits that he didn't understand any-fucking-thing in the movie. Total overhead transmission.
Take that you David Lynches, you Luis Bunuels, you Andrzej Żuławskis. Yes take that! The mother of all supremely arbit films was made in India.
The film is shoddily made, the voice dubbing is horrible, the production standards are of dubious quality, that NFDC produced it, is cause for concern for the taxpayers, the plot is totally nonsensical, the scenes are crazily funny at times and the dialogues seem to be out of a random word generating machine.
No Smoking is just a very slick urban cousin and is just a couple of decades too late. Anurag Kashyap, take that, you too!
Kamal Swaroop's balls are bigger than Pamela Anderson's boobs.
Rather than spill more digital ink, NF'll direct you to read this fantastic review. Do read it and do see the film for a very rustic, very Indian kind of mindfuck.
#1: Pandora's music classification system is totally brilliant. #2: ... #1: So I create this Kumar Gandharva station right? #2: <*nods*> #1: And it totally gets what I like in Hindustani classical. It's so cool that an AI knows what you'll want based on what you want. It categorized my preference for Kumar Gandharva on the basis of his insane skills in improvisation, his transcending of musical gharanas, his favoring of vilambit laya over drut laya and went on to play Mallikarjun Mansur, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan Sahab and Ustad Amir Khan.
B: You see that Japanese girl over there? NF: Uh huh... B: She's very hot. NF: ... B: You don't seem to agree. NF: I don't think she's hot. But I think she's very cool though. B: Oh but you have to be cool to be hot. NF: Yes. Necessary but not sufficient.
(टाइटल काशीनाथ सिंह की कहानी "पाणे कौन कुमति तोहे लागी?" से चुराया गया है.)
...
दुबेजी लम्पट नगर के उभरते हुए पंडों में से एक माने जाते हैं. उम्र भले ही बीस/पचीस की हो, लेकिन अपनी पैनी सोच, विद्वता, हाज़िरजवाबी और सबसे गौरतलब - अपनी आधुनिकता के कारण वे लम्पट नगर के धार्मिक, ज़रा-प्रौढ़, मध्यवर्गीय तबके के विशिष्ट सत्यनारायण-भगवान-कथा-संचालक माने जाते हैं.
पण्डे भले हों, लेकिन पुराणपंथी और दकियानूसी वे कतई नहीं हैं. बड़ी ही खुली सोच है दुबेजी की. उनकी कथाओं-के-बीच-छुपी-हुई आध्यात्मिक/लोकज्ञान-वर्धक सूक्तियां (जो विशेषतः अपने तीसरे दशक की चौखट पर खड़ी महिलाओं में आश्चर्यजनक रूप से लोकप्रिय हैं) अक्सर अंग्रेजी फिल्मों, पाश्चात्य संगीत और उत्तर-आधुनिक साहित्य से प्रेरित होती हैं. अपने बिचारे यजमान भले ही इनके स्रोत से अपरिचित हों, यह अज्ञान उनके रसास्वादन के रास्ते नहीं आता है. अपने इन्हीं सब गुणों के कारण लम्पट नगर में दुबेजी की बड़ी पूछ है. आप ही बताइए, दुनिया में कितने पण्डे आपको मिलेंगे जो धोती-कुरता-गमछा धारण करते हों और ब्लैक सैबथ के हेवी मेटल पर हेडबैंगिंग करते हों? (उनके साथी पण्डे इनकी इस आदत को "मुंड-कम्पन" का नाम देते हैं.)
ओह! और आपको यह बताना तो हम भूल ही गए कि दुबेजी अपने घोंघा बसंत के स्कूली सहपाठी, पड़ोसी, घनिष्ठ मित्र थे (घोंघा भइया भी अपने बचपन में लम्पट नगर के निवासी थे).
खैर, इन सब बातों को जाने दीजिये. फिलहाल हम दुबेजी को लम्पट नगर के पहले लैंडमार्क-पुस्तक-भवन में प्रवेश करते देख रहे हैं. अपने धोती-कुरते-गमछे-हलकी-दाढ़ी में बड़े ही सुदर्शन लगते हैं हमारे दुबेजी! और वह काली छतरी, काले बूट और मैचिंग ज़ुराबें तो क्या खूब ही फबती हैं उनपर!
पहला आधा घंटा दुबेजी साहित्य सेक्शन में ग़र्क करते हैं. कामू और सार्त्र के गहन अध्ययन से उत्पन्न बोझिलता से मुक्त होने के लिए वे कुछ हल्का पढ़ते हैं और हास्य-व्यंग्य की विधा में सिद्धहस्त लेखकों की शरण में कुछ समय व्यतीत करते हैं. टॉम रोबिन्स, क्रिस्टोफर मूर, गैरी श्टेन्गार्ट आजकल उनके प्रिय व्यंग्यकार चल रहे हैं. वे अपने आप से वादा करते हैं कि श्टेन्गार्ट की "सुपर सैड ट्रू लव स्टोरी" ज़रूर खरीदेंगे, और आगे बढ़ जाते हैं.
खैर, अगला पड़ाव म्यूजिक सेक्शन.
एक लड़की बोस हेड फ़ोन लगाये म्यूजिक सेक्शन में कुछ सुनती हुई दिखाई देती है. लम्बे, काले बाल, घुटनों पर हलकी सी फटी जींस; एक लम्बी, ढीली, गहरे गले वाली टी शर्ट (उसके साइज़ से ज़रा बड़ी सी - "शायद उसके बड़े भाई की होगी" - दुबेजी आशापूर्वक सोचते हैं) जिसपर आयरन मेडेन के मैस्कट "एड्डी" की वीभत्स तस्वीर चिपकी हुई है. लड़की के हाथ हेड फ़ोन पर हैं और उसका सिर हल्का-हल्का झूमता सा दिख रहा है.
यह देखना काफी आसान है कि लड़की ज़रा भी बन-ठन के नहीं आई है. और यह देखना उससे भी ज़्यादा आसान है कि उसे बन-ठन के आने कि कोई ज़रुरत नहीं है. उसके पूरे व्यक्तित्व से एक अलसाई मादकता टपक रही है; एक लापरवाह, लापता सी नैसर्गिक खूबसूरती, जो ज़रा चढ़ी-चढ़ी, उबासी भरी आँखों से आपको देखती है और बेबस सा कर देती है. सैद्धांतिक/दार्शनिक तौर पर दुबेजी इस प्रकार की सुन्दरता से भली-भांति परिचित हैं. यह खूबसूरती एक अजब प्रकार के वैभव से उत्पन्न होती है जिसकी व्याख्या करना ज़रा मुश्किल होगा. इस ख़ास प्रकार की खूबसूरती में धन के माध्यम से खरीदी हुई एक अलग-ही प्रकार की अत्याधुनिक/उत्तराधुनिक शिक्षा से उपजी साहित्य-संगीत-कला-रसास्वादन की क्षमता, बोरियत से भरी हुई बड़ी बड़ी गोल आँखें और आम खूबसूरती के पैमानों के लिए एक अनूठी हेय दृष्टि आरक्षित होती है. खैर, इसकी व्याख्या दरअसल समय खराब करने सरीखा है इसलिए इसे फिलहाल ज़रा रहने ही दीजिये.
गहन आकर्षण से खिंचे हुए दुबेजी अचानक से अपने आप को इस लड़की के समक्ष पाते हैं.
लड़की की बोझिल, अलसाई हुई आँखें धीरे धीरे खुलती हैं और अपने हलके हलके झूमते हुए सिर के ठीक सामने एक सत्रहवीं सदी के नमूने को पाती हैं. एक तीखी टेढ़ी-सी मुस्कान उसके चेहरे पर फैल जाती है. दुबेजी अपने जीवन में पहली बार अपनी धोती में हलचल महसूस करते हैं और एक दबी हुई झल्लाहट से जेब के अभाव को कोसते हैं.
और एक टांग ज़रा पीछे किये, एक हाथ कमर पर डाले, अपने खुद की एक टेढ़ी मुस्कान से उस लड़की का प्रतिकार करते हुए दुबेजी कहते हैं:
Scene: The Café. The Instrumental Variables in a pre-match huddle.
...
NF: These quizmasters are from the Psychology department. Shishir: Yeah? Nick: You bet your sorry ass they'll have us answer questions like "Who in 1956 wrote the seminal paper 'Mindfuck'"? Shishir: He he he... NF: Just to piss them off, to every question they ask, we should answer 'Freud'. Shishir: Make that 'Freud' or 'Your mom'. Nick: He he he... NF: He he... Shishir: <*reclines back*> Both of which are very Freudian. NF: Or Fraud-ian?
...
Lexical jokes just don't crossover well into verbal domains.
While reading Stories of your life and Others Nanga Fakir was reminded of Greg Egan and in particular, of the story collection Luminous. This is tall praise indeed for the remarkable Ted Chiang who's admitted to being inspired by Egan. (For the uninitiated, Greg Egan is probably among the most brilliant talents in the contemporary science fiction world. In particular, the short story Reasons to be Cheerful by Egan is one of the best short stories NF has ever read - all genres, all time periods, all langugages included.)
Ted Chiang is not what you'd call a prolific writer. In over twenty years of writing career, he's written only a handful of short stories, but nearly all of them have met with overwhelming critical acclaim and have been showered with literary prizes left, right and center. Indeed, a small body of output need not detract from the artistic merit of the creator in any way. Examples of Indian Ocean, Rohinton Mistry, Andrei Tarkovsky, William H Gass, Terence Mallick come almost immediately to mind.
Science Fiction can be of many varieties. Look for example at William Gibson. His stories are terse, prose somewhat minimalistic and themes mostly sociological - how science/technology permeates societies, how the street finds its own uses for things, about the evolution of the common sphere where technology and human society intersect and the evolution of artificial intelligence and how the aforementioned process parallels human evolution. Another example is Neal Stephenson who writes sprawling, interminable novels (both Cryptonomicon and Anathem are close to a thousand pages with the former being his magnum opus and the latter a not-so-satisfying experience) which deal with his preoccupation with overly grandiose themes - philosophy, mathematics, technology and economics with complex storylines that integrate these disparate thematic influences into one unified whole. Philip K Dick focused on metaphysical themes and his not very lit and sometimes outright pulpy literary output was characterized by simple but thought provoking plotlines, twist endings, druggy atmospherics and obsession with pop culture, advertising and paranoia. Asimov and his cohorts were technological utopians - J G Ballard - the exact opposite.
Ted Chiang's fiction however, is not grandiose, or with a hidden agenda of its own. It is in fact deceptive in its utter, utter simplicity and straightforwardness. His best stories are nothing but thought experiments - not very clever or convoluted or look-at-me-how-smart-I-am type. And his stories have a component that is very, very rare in science fiction - indeed in most genre fiction (which is why even mediocre, run-of-the-mill literary fiction writers turn up their noses at genre fiction) - that of a lively, throbbing, understated but readily identifiable human connection in its simple, unobtrusive, unassuming, even self-effacing, turning-attention-away-from-itself prose.
The best stories in his collection are Hell is the absence of God, Liking what you see: A documentary and the eponymous Story of your Life. There are some very deep issues explored in these stories from a remarkably fresh, wonderfully new perspective. NF is tempted to include blurbish introduction to these stories but realizes the spoiler potential of this exercise and so decides to refrain from the same. Nevertheless, he recommends all and sundry to indulge in this edification program and follow the writer; and to those who're not shy from trying their own hand at writing science fiction, there's probably no other writer whose stories will make you think harder and from whom you'll learn more fruitfully than Chiang.
Scene: A not-so-swanky, not-so-jam-packed restaurant. Ordinary people sit, eat, talk and go about their ordinary, day-to-day, somewhat shallow lives.
#1: It's been a while, knowing you, being with you.
<*#0 eyes #1 with a faint amusement*>
#1: Perhaps I am not putting this well. Perhaps words are not meant to capture this well. Perhaps even the tiniest range of emotions can't be expressed in hopelessly limited constructs such as language.
#0: <*A little baffled*> What are you talking about?
#1: The fact that I love you? that (subliminally perhaps) I've been in love with you the moment I set my eyes upon you, that you complete me, that knowing you is knowing what Plato referred to as what it was to find your other half as it exists out there in the world, the finding of which and eventual communion with which is what gives meaning and purpose to a life otherwise so full of misery, suffering, shallowness and pain.
<*#0's (rather lovely one might add) cheeks are suffused with a deep blush. Intensely self conscious, she tries to fight the giant grin that's stretching her lips from ear to ear.*>
#1: Will you marry me?
<*#0 contracts into herself. A barely audible "yes" escapes her luscious lips. Gently, she holds #1's hand and gives him a look full of affection - a moment/instant/freeze-frame for which all humans in the world would gladly sacrifice a limb or two. #1 will later recount this scene and recall the thin, watery film stretched across #0's eyes, about to attain critical mass and fall off, float across those cheeks as a million dollar dewdrop tear.*>
#1 stands up and addresses the small restaurant crowd.
#1: Guys, I am extremely happy to let you know that the greatest woman on earth has just consented to marry me!
<*Cries, claps and cheers all around*>
#17: Whoa! #19: Way to go man! #13 (to #11): Ah it's so touching! Reminds me of our time.
Date: Oh this is so romantic! Ghongha Basant: He he he... Date: What are you smirking at? Ghongha: Another divorce in the making?
[The great Greatbong has covered the story in detail. Do read him. Here's the link.]
...
Statement of Purpose:
भई लाइफ में टांग खींचने वाले बहुत होते हैं, लेकिन हाथ पकड़ने वाले बहुत कम. दोका (sic) देने वाले बहुत होते हैं, लेकिन मौका देने वाले बहुत कम.
...गज़ब भारत की अजब कहानियां मैं आप तक पहुँचाऊँगी.
(Loose translation for the Hindi disabled follows.)
Brother there are many in life who pull your leg, But those who hold your hand - very few. Many who betray, But those who give (you) a chance - very few.
...I will bring Incredible India's wondrous stories to you.
...When the plaintiff gets overwhelmed by her emotions and spontaneously walks out, delivers a soliloquy Shakespearean actors would be proud of, bares her heart open and expounds on the love between brothers and sisters; sisters and sisters and other assorted permutations and combinations thereof.
...An outraged audience auntie condemns the loose morals and rampant lying much in the spirit of Hugo Chavez decrying American imperialism.
...A shocked Rakhi Sawant after hearing the plaintiff swear on the holy Quran. Note the black and white background - a subtle nod to the black and white basis vectors that span(m?) the human nature vector space and give us such heartwarming TV shows that give us these naughty little peeks into the awwwing cuteness within.
...The maulvi saying he doesn't condone beating of children in madrassas. (Read: We don't have no sex with supple young boys in here.)
...The audience thirsty for blood.
...Dude says WTF?
[A little back story: Plaintiff claims dude is 'practically' a brother. Dude says "Totally". Rakhi Sawant exposes their lies by broadcasting their porn video (yes!). Turns out it was brothership with privileges. The audience wants blood. Dude says WTF.]
The only recourse now left to these two lovers is to marry. It comes in handy that the couple is Muslim and that the Dude has only one previous wife and just four other children. The maulvi blesses the couple and everyone lives happily ever after.
Which brings us back to this random Surd in the picture who gets up and sings praises of god whose presence was proven by this little romantic escapade undertaken by the couple. (Don't ask how. The dude is a Surd.)
A somewhat sad little consequence of not having as much time as you used to have (cf. undergrad years) is that when it comes to consumption of art/entertainment, your ability to experiment, be adventurous and watch a totally arbit film on the LAN just because the title is redolent of a hot ninja woman massacring a phalanx of hideously deformed, bloodsucking zombies; indulge yourself a little and watch Hatim_tai, Himmatwala and Justice Chaudhary back to back; listen to Backstreet Boys' desire to want it their way; listen to "In the night no control, kya kahoon kuchch to bol" on repeat mode - basically consume something just plain bad/of dubious artistic quality - plummets harder than the price of BP stocks after an oil spill.
What the fuck's up with that?
In the words of Yuri, pronounced with a marked air of solemnity after the two hour, three dimensional disaster-of-an-experience also referred to in some circles as Resident Alien: Afterlife, "Life is just plain too fucking short for consumption of bad art".
It's a testament to the flatout wretchedness of the human condition; the nasty, short and brutish nature of existence; a reminder of the sad, inevitable end that awaits one and all.
Enough of the Ramin Bahranis however, the György Pálfis, the Nuri Bilge Ceylans, the William H Gasses, the Jonathan Franzens, the Roberto Bolaños, the Faith No Mores, the Eels, the Flaming Lips, the Snow Patrols.
Enough.
Time now for some defiance - some deeply meaningful Judd Apataw flicks, some classic, soul shattering Raj Babbar films, some heartwrenching Sameer and Anjan poetry, some Jersey Shore.
A spoiler free description of some of the animes Nanga Fakir's been watching over the past two months or so follows.
...
Planetes : Planetes is about humanity in the year 2075. Efforts to colonize space are in its infancy and barring a station at Moon, much of the other heavenly bodies have not yet been molested. (Mankind plans to correct this mistake soon though.)
Planetes is also about space janitors. Waste management in space has become a big problem and previous missions' debris orbit the earth at various distances and are potential hazards for spaceships/stations/satellites orbiting/entering/leaving the earth. A collision will cause not only loss of property/human life but will also create more debris which if not cleared will obstruct even more space creating even more problems for future missions.
Enter the Debris Section - Technora Corporation's department responsible for clearing space junk and making the near-earth orbit a safe place for astronauts and space missions, the creation of which section was deemed necessary after an encounter with flying trash destroyed a passenger spaceship. The 26 episode anime concerns itself with the greenhorn Ai Tanabe who joins the ranks of debris-cleaners; her encounters with various members of the crew and the fate of her eventual love interest Hachimaki. (The second-in-command officer is an Indian called 'Arvind Ravi' - a very goofy, incompetent officer with hordes of children (seven actually) back home in India.)
The reason NF opines that this anime qualifies as a genuine masterpiece is the astonishingly high degree of realism, an attention to scientific detail generally not heard of, the socio-political ramifications of humans trying to colonize space (with the inevitable clash over the spoils of the aforementioned endeavors - the developed countries grabbing the lion's share and feeding the space-colonization machine while the developing/underdeveloped ones still mired in poverty and civil wars and therefore opposed to such ambitious ventures and demanding a more fair and equitable distribution of this new source of wealth - sometimes violently/resorting to terror tactics/sabotage); the effect such an endeavor in space must have on humans' psychology and their relationships and the long, arduous, lonely, claustrophobic space missions' fallouts on the human psyche and the questions it raises about what human communication/connection/love etc. is all about.
Basically an excellent, excellent watch. The only gripe NF had about the entire series was the sophomoric, mostly contrived humor that actually wasn't necessary and an ending that the feminists will not be really crazy about. But this very, very minor glitch shouldn't dissuade you from watching an absolutely awesome, wonderful series.
Neon Genesis Evangelion : To say that you're into anime and haven't heard of Neon... is saying that you're into Indian arthouse cinema and don't know what Ardhsatya is; or that you're into music and don't know what Pink Floyd is; or that you're into literature and don't know what Infinite Jest is. Basically we're talking of path breaking, forever-changing-the-course-of-their-field-after-they-come-along kind of works that in turn, have a major, polarizing effect on the audience.
Ever since its 1995 debut, the multiple prize winning series has been dissected, criticized, glorified, vilified, overrated, undervalued, and talked about in circles. On one level, it’s a standard mecha anime - the kind that the Gundam series had helped define many years before Neon... Basically your exact idea of giant robots with human pilots combating and killing the alien enemies of humanity after an apocalypse has drastically changed the nature of human existence on planet earth. But, as the director Hidaeki Anno would have it, the series nosedives into the heads of its fourteen year old protagonists, almost blithely giving up the affectations of having to deal with a story of giant robos trying to save humanity. The end result is a bleak, bleak series no fourteen year old can see without getting seriously mindfucked. Extraordinarily artsy, slow, brooding, (with long pauses and interminable silences at times) and grandly ambitious, the enigmatic anime invites comparisons to the works of David Lynch (talk of polarizing!) and can best be summed up as a science fictional Mulholland Drive. (Yes you have been warned!)
The beginning of the series itself lets us know that the pilots of the EVAs (who have to be fourteen year olds, we're told) are not in total control of the machines and that there's much more than meets the eye. Couple it with the most reluctant hero (in Shinji Ikari) ever conceived of, comparison with whom makes Humphrey Bogart's film-noirs'-reluctant-hero-character look like a self righteous white missionary in Africa; a memorable character in the tortured, enigmatic Rei Ayanami; the brash, insufferable (and German) Asuka and the cold, calculating, Machiavellian scientist Gendo Ikari (who also, almost incidentally, doubles up as the father of the hero Shinji) and you get the absolute best character sketch ever done in anime history.
The series starts off slow and ponderous. It picks up in the middle with some juvenile comedy and some attempts at utilizing some standard tropes of anime conventions - all this done somehow in a half hearted, lazy way, as if merely trying to keep up appearances. Complexity sets in the middle and the Angel-busting-mecha-action takes a backseat to give way to a plot that gets thicker. The final seven or so episodes however, send the protagonist kids through sheer hell, torturing their minds, crushing their souls and battering hard their already fragile egos with the touching delicacy of a blacksmith presiding over a neurosurgery.
Nanga Fakir remembers a quote from some writer who was once asked the formula for writing a good story. The writer's supposed to have replied something to the effect that one should spend the first half in trying to let the reader fall in love with the character and the second half in making horrible, horrible things happen to those lovable protagonists. Was this what Hideaki Anno had in mind? We can only guess, for the last two episodes happen inside the head of the hero, with the total abandonment of any kind of pretense of connection with what had happened in the past and we see the hero introspect and torture himself for over two episodes trying to come to grips with what his existence might mean. The series ends with the iconic scene in which all characters gather around Shinji and congratulate him on his victory over his inner demons. (<*NF in a very scholarly tone*>: See attached figure.)
You've been amply forewarned. You'll either love the series or totally tear it to shreds.
Alan Taylor's The Big Picture column for the Boston Globe does it again! This time's it's Russia, one century ago. Stunning pictures, breathtaking views and killer resolution color pictures from a hundred years ago.
August 19th, 2010, from Comedy Central's World News Headquarters in New York, this is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
With Nanga Fakir in attendance.
...
The guest was Jennifer Aniston. NF thinks he spotted Vatsa peeing in his pants a bit when she turned back and waved at us. Or maybe it was just tears of joy squirting from sundry tiny orifices all over his body. We don't know just yet.
It wasn't with a heavy heart that Nanga Fakir left the cosy confines of NIT S'kal, armed with the dubious distinction of being the worst Chemical Engineer the institute had managed to manufacture till then; having barely graduated thanks to jaded, world-weary and sick-to-death-of-NF's-shadow professors who let NF get the passing grade in all courses and a certain someone called AK whose lightning speed of effortlessly solving problems in exams would cause the answer sheets to burst in flames.
And so it was that NF's second stage of anime viewing began. Cowboy Bebop was watched next - another Watanabe masterpiece that featured his trademark use of soundtracks (in this case, Jazz) as a main, series-defining construct, featuring an assortment of characters - wild, unruly, laidback, quietly proficient lone wolfish men and women with mysterious pasts. Serial Experiments Lain - the short, cyberpunkish, a little surreal and very, very artsy anime series followed next, a blurbish introduction of which should be that it's the story of a little, lonely girl whose receipt of an email from a recently dead classmate turns her to investigate, the quicksands of which aforementioned investigation pull her deeper and deeper into the recesses of the Wired - an internet like communication system.
NF had also seen Ra sing praises of the series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya whose hilarious, wonderful theme song featuring the famous Mikuru Asahina and her Mikuru beam and an entreaty to 'c'mon let's dance baby' compelled NF to follow the non linear, bizarre, juvenile-yet-very-funny series. In fact, since he thinks the theme song is so incredibly funny, he has decided to embed it here itself. Watch it!
The last series that NF followed in his second wave of anime viewing was the killer, somewhat absurdist, somewhat blackish comedy Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei (which translates to "Goodbye Mr Despair/Goodbye Teacher Despair"). It features a school teacher Nozomu Itoshiki - a person so extremely negative and pessimistic that it's uproariously funny; his plans, attempts and eventual failures at committing suicide and his class of equally crazy-in-their-own-way girls most of whom end up falling in love with their teacher which leaves their object of affection totally baffled and aghast. A model for the protagonist is the legendary Japanese writer Osamu Dazai whose multiple, failed suicide attempts are the inspirations for the highly stylized, very funny antics of the school teacher. Anyone planning to start off on anime, this series is a very good place to begin things from.
Highly recommended!
It was after these two waves that NF sunk deep into anime anhedonia, a phase that lasted for more than a year. He tried to pick up an interest in the popular franchises Bleach and Naruto but after a long period of sometimes-interested-but-mostly-disaffected viewing, he stopped following the same and does not see himself following the never ending series anytime in the future ever.
However, all of a sudden, totally unanticipatedly, the last month saw NF take a plunge into what he now terms as the third wave of anime watch.
It was another arbit, nondescript final year evening/night when Rohan Choukkar approached Nanga Fakir in his final block abode (Room 188, H Wing to be precise) and convinced him to look at what he claimed was the next big thing in the not-to-be-taken-lightly business of killing time. Since killing time is the second name of Nanga Fakir and since Rohan was, notwithstanding his talents, a mere naïve junior, NF inwardly smiled and braced himself for a rather boring half an hour he would have to kill as a favor to this brat.
What he saw then however, was the first episode of Samurai Champloo - a 26 episode anime by Shinichiro Watanabe. By the end of the first episode, NF had been taken in by the totally slick style, wacky, idiosyncratic storytelling, dazzling visuals, a quirky, groovy soundtrack and an aestheticization of violence that seemed out of place in a mere cartoon - Japanese or not.
Unbeknownst to NF, the dark master of all arts and entertainments obscure and idiosyncratic - Ra - wielded considerable expertise in such matters. ("It's pronounced 'Ae-ni-may'", he jadedly answered NF's question: "Do you follow 'Ae-nai-ms'?") He smiled evilly and rubbed his hands in glee as he took NF aside and led him to his lair in the G Wing and exhibited his machine slaves downloading 'copious amounts' of anime. (NF doesn't know if Ra uses 'copious' copiously anymore.)
And so it was that NF found himself in the company of Ra, following his lead in finishing anime after anime, often teaming up with him to watch the following in either G or H Wing, high or dry: Elfen Lied (the much hyped first few minutes of awesome violence made way for a mediocre series featuring countless instances of totally gratuitous and sometimes unintentionally funny nudity), Ghost in the Shell - SAC and Second Gig (What a series! It remains one of the best anime series NF has watched ever) and Death Note which was airing during the final sem and every Thursday (or was it Wednesday?), courtesy Ra, the LAN would be aglow with yet another new episode for which NF would have waited with bated breath and barely concealed impatience the kind of which had not been seen since the end of The Jungle Book on Doordarshan's Sunday morning kid's slot.
Vinay Deolalikar of HP labs claims to have shown that P ≠ NP (no surprises there!). Apparently mathematicians and computer scientists are excited and this one seems to have some genuine chance of success.
Those with enough background/technical know-how and most importantly, enough time at their hands are encouraged to visit the following link: CLS Blog.
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<*pops open champagne bottle in anticipatory celebration*>
Shuchikar is busy compiling the unreleased filmography of his recently deceased mentor Andy Umbrage. Unbeknownst to him however, we have managed to find a cozy little corner wherefrom we can secretly spy on him, view the avant-après garde never before seen films pushing-the-medium-up-to-its-maximum-stretchable-limit-till-the-medium-tears-apart-noisily-and-reveals-an-inside-out-perspective-on-the-vacuousness-of-the-aforementioned-pushing-the-medium-up-to-its-maximum-stretchable-limit approach and record the impressions that these works of art have on our troubled, tortured, self doubting, potential genius-in-the-making protagonist.
It is notable how the new works of the late filmmaker incorporate settings, themes and concerns of science fiction, previously dismissed by him as adolescent fantasies of socially inept, autistic geeks. In fact, Shuchikar still cannot ascertain if this new fascination that the director showed was a parody ridiculing the ascendancy of the geek squad or a genuine late appreciation of the genre, for his science fictional tropes are often awkward, irrelevant, idiosyncratic and often totally orthogonal to the subject matter in his films.
His unreleased filmography includes the following films:
Soliloquy : Umbrage's first digitally shot venture. The film credits indicate only one name - that of Jenny Nosecondname in what would be her fifth collaboration with the director. 1
The scene shows a dark room, so dark in fact that one can't make out anything at all. There is a vague appearance of someone sitting in a couch or a recliner, speaking in a monotone. From the voice, it can be ascertained that the figure is a woman and Shuchikar remembers the voice well enough to know it's Jenny's.
You claim that crudely speaking, music is for the head or for the feet. So I come along and ask you what does it mean and you respond with a smirk on your face (which I can't see now since it's so dark) that The Who, Marvin Gaye, Dick Dale, Cream, Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, Deep Purple, Hendrix etc. - these are for the feet. Okay, I say and you continue with your 'for the head' brand of music - The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, you say and give me a smug smile. Ha! I laugh. Where does Pink Floyd go? And you fall off your high chair, tumble down, roll about, pick the katana and commit harakiri.
Yes, where indeed does Pink Floyd go?
The lighting in the room is not back, but the room seems to have been bathed in some sort of strange glow. Blacks are becoming slowly, oh so slowly, greyish; the change in luminosity is barely enough for Shuchikar to make out the outlines of the couch and Jenny's figure. The grey scale manipulation of the image seems slow, deliberate and displays a mastery of technical aspects of film technology and image processing/editing that Umbrage wasn't known for. Greyness seems to be seeping into the image, at the expense of the black parts - as if blackness were being drained off/greyness was pumped in slowly. Meanwhile, the soliloquy of the unnamed female protagonist continues and the camera, excruciatingly slowly, in a long, slow take begins focusing on what seems to be the outline of the face of speaker.
Take the example of progression of, say, rock music. You start off with certain basic set of themes - guitar based music for example, with easy, singable, likeable, short pieces. Then slowly you see complexity set in. The bands become more ambitious since they see that the competition warrants them to be different from the herd so that it's cooler for the fans to proclaim themselves as their fans and thereby appropriate from the bands the 'differentness' from the herd. So now mainstream rock music (which started off itself as a 'rebellion') begins to exhibit aversions to its own popularity and crumbles under its own weight and branches out as different 'kinds' of rock music. Some of these new forms are more mainstream friendly, some are rabidly otherwise. So you see critics coming up with taxonomy programs for labeling these movements with weird, sometimes funky names that in a sane world should make no sense at all. What does technical death metal mean, or indeed jazz punk? Is it that one is at liberty to take the basic building blocks (Blues, Jazz, Punk for example) and combine and permute them in any arbitrary order to label that which passes for music these days?
The pitch of the delivery has steadily been climbing, mimicking the monotonous increase in the greyscale level of the scene. The face of the protagonist is somewhat visible now. It's a beautiful, beautiful face that bears marks of supreme erudition and thoughtfulness. Even though the soliloquy steadily descends into a rant, the beauty, intelligence and profound sincerity of the face creates a deep impression on the viewer.
The camera begins to zoom out now and the image is more than well lighted to make the objects in the room visible. As the rant continues and becomes harsher, for the first time, the viewer gets to see the entire figure of Jenny Nosecondname.
She is dressed badly, skimpily and her overly exposed body bears the marks of numerous tattoos - most of them extolling the virtues of living fast and loose and championing the fulfillment of all carnal desires. Her legs are spread out wide and on the insides of her right thigh can be seen a huge pink tattoo proclaiming "I heart sex", with the heart being the somewhat angular cardoidish, red symbol so commonly referred to as the heart shape. The walls of her room has pictures of Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Backstreet Boys and Lindsay Lohan. The rant has become a full fledged shriek against the lack of quality and intelligence of modern music and the greyscale level of the scene has reached whitish proportions so much it hurts the eye and in one final, continuous swoop of incomprehensively loud noise and glowing white light so harsh that one can't make out anything in the room, the screen goes totally white and all activities cease.
And then comes over a badly cutout figure of an astronaut who takes off his helmet, winks at the camera and flashes a corny thumbs up sign on which is tattooed "The End."
1. A promising undergraduate in the Cinema Studies department of the University at the time of her first collaboration, Jenny was also once the big, great, larger-than-life, true love of Shuchikar at the time when he was a devoted disciple of Umbrage. In fact, it was he who had suggested to Umbrage to cast Jenny as the actress after the sad demise of the director's wife for the film "No Obfuscation, No Prevarication" for which he was the Assistant Director.
No sooner did her voice fill the room, than Shuchikar experienced a sharp, painful pang. He hadn't seen her in over two years now and as her monologue occupied the enclosed space aided not in small measure by the surround sound equipment, her suppressed memories took form and flooded his mind.
It has been suggested and not without reason if you care to ask, that little girls are the closest approximations of actual angels we humans deserve. So when such an angel decides to just break, break your heart and ask with actual, unfeigned, utter matter-of-factness "Okay you cunts, let's see what you can do now", "Show's over motherfuckers"; hack through limbs and mercilessly rip apart bodies of unfortunate cocksuckers who get in her way (her words, not ours) with Joan Jett in the background urging her to not give a damn about her bad reputation, what is it that we can do?
What we can do and indeed, what we should do is to weep out loud without fear of looking ridiculous and rue her loss of innocence, hold her close in our arms and just plant a big, fat, sloppy kiss on her blood stained, squeeze-worthy cheeks and promise to become her abject, abject fans, for Chloë Moretz as Hitgirl is the sweetest, most wonderful thing to have happened to cinema in recent history.1
She was the only saving grace of the unbelievably pretentious and manipulative crap of a movie called (500) Days of Summer and single-handedly takes what-would-otherwise-have-been-yet-another so-called postmodern take on the done-to-death genre of superhero movie to a wonderful, entertaining, often very violent, yet at the same time hilarious, delightful experience.
Fuckin' A. Anybody not pathologically averse to some healthy dose of violence has to love the film.
Having delved rather deeply into the emergent field of extreme cinema for the past year or so, NF had naïvely come to think that there's only so much that can now catch him by surprise, only so much that can even remotely tickle his nerves - jaded, hardened in the extreme, toughened by a series of weird, ultraviolent, nonstandard, bizarre films from the far east. And frankly speaking, if there were a danger of ever finding more mindfucking films, the threat had to come from Japan or South Korea. Hungary was more of a Bela Tarr territory - slow, epic, deep, brooding, suffering from long, exquisite shots and acute melancholitis.
That NF was woken from his dogmatic slumber and not just woken up but shaken hard and slapped tight and plunged into subzero, icy cold water was what Taxidermia did. The film is obsessed, simply obsessed with the human body and the sundry fluids that are inputted in and outputted out from it. From it, is derived the film's odd sense of beauty, dazzlingly slick cinematography, pervasive grotesqueness and a very subtle, very dark and very often, very bizarre sense of humor. Most humans that walk, talk and populate this earth will at least at one point of time, simply feel disgusted, perhaps recoil in horror and yet find themselves laughing crazily - all within the unfolding of a single scene. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is highly, highly, highly non trivial. To compare the experience of the film and György Pálfi's vision to that of Cronenberg or to Terry Gilliam or to both combined and high on acid is just plain missing the point, for there is striking originality in the director's vision that is flat-out awesome just because such purity and singularity of vision is so fucking rare.
The movie is not for the faint hearted, not for those with weak stomachs, not for prudes, not for those who're turned off by secretions of bodily fluids and definitely not safe for work. The film is covered in vomit, sweat, piss, semen and bucketfuls of blood. And yet the sense of humor that permeates the atmosphere is not just scatological or sophomoric/slapstick but more preoccupied with irony and tragedy.
It is unfair and just plain obscene to see such scorchingly original a movie have such a small following. Perhaps the trailer might help. If not, you're all just a bunch of philistines.
That the Dutch - the land of players like Johann Cruyff, Marco van Basten and Dennis-fucking-Bergkamp (what a man!) - were beaten by the very same tiki taka/Totaalvoetbal brand of football they pioneered and passed on to Barça in favor of a rough, street fighting, trench warfare game epitomized by the spectacularly dirty killer-on-the-loose van Bommel.
We see Shuchikar in the recently deceased Andy Umbrage's office located on the sixth floor of the Arts and Cinema Studies department. He was informed of his late mentor's bizarre suicide by a call from Umbrage's lawyer who let him know that it was the express wish of the late artist that his one time protégé Shuchikar be informed of his demise wherever and whenever it comes to pass and that his many unreleased (and some of them incomplete) films, still housed in his office in the University be made available to him and that Shuchikar be the sole custodian of the same and decide on whatever he thought was appropriate vis-à-vis their release to the general public/art/film/academic community.
So we see our hero in the environs he hasn't visited in quite a while and we watch him sympathetically - indeed somewhat admiringly as well (he's the hottest underworld filmmaker these days) - as he lazily casts a glance around the office that used to be such an important part of his life a few years ago. The place is stacked with books that lie around somewhat haphazardly not just on the shelves but also on tables and the floor. The walls in front of him are bare except for a giant poster of Takahiko Iimura playing chess with Michael Bay who's dressed in black cape as Death, recreating the iconic scene from The Seventh Seal by Bergman.
The table in front of him carries on it a sealed box with Umbrage's unreleased films. He's decided to take them home and watch them on his projector and write short reviews of the same before deciding their fate as regards their release. He's also decided to not participate in the discussions on and regarding the death of his mentor and the symbolic significance/interpretations of the particular manner in which he killed himself, the latest of which is that Umbrage's head-in-the-sand-legs-in-the-air suicide was supposed to mirror the ostrich's cowardly behavior. As a dyed-in-the-wool symbol-minded artist, Umbrage would have been thoroughly amused at this turn of events, Shuchikar thought. Indeed, nobody in the present art world championed Duchamp's art semiotics more than Umbrage who's first major performance was opened by the following lines:
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Interestingly, the aforementioned first major performance of Umbrage had ended in disaster (for him personally) as he, just after quoting Duchamp had jumped off a small cliff, all naked but for a quill in each of his arms and had fallen down thirty feet or so directly and had broken every major bone in his body. This piece had created a sharp rift in the art community where some praised the artist for his extraordinary courage, some praised him for symbolizing man's eternal quest for flight which in turn was interpreted as progress, some praised him for choosing ostrich quills as symbolic feathers (since quills also stood for 'the pen' which is not only mightier than the sword but metaphorically represents all creativity itself and in having chosen an ostrich quill, Umbrage had underlined the inevitably tragic nature of all such creative, artistic endeavors) and the remainder praised the act and its dénouement (or the lack of it, as some commentators quipped) as standing for the personal danger to bones and (remaining) limbs that artists the world over have to face up to alone, singlehandedly, notwithstanding the collaborative nature of art and the jaded spectator's as-important-as-artists role of bringing out the art in art.
After having lived a rich and fulfilling life, Andy Umbrage took his own life last night. As a cross platform, multi faceted artist (he was a celebrated painter, poet, filmmaker, musician, art theorist, performance artist and socialite), his suicide comes across as a major shock to his not-so-many-in-terms-of-sheer-numbers but small-but-rabidly-devoted-and-deeply-influential trendsetting powerful artist and patron fans across the world. Expect festchrifts and tributes in plenty and obscure and often very subtle homages in the form of jump cuts interspersed with sickening footages of tigers eating humans in graphic detail and a brown, long haired boy pleasuring himself in the shower - a sly wink to Umbrage's now notoriously famous film "The Revenge of Mowgli" - by arthouse filmmakers across the globe.
Umbrage is not survived by his wife and children. They died seven years ago while protesting against tree felling in the jungles of Amazon. They had bound themselves to immense redwood trees with metal chains and although this was sufficient to deter the tree fellers, it certainly wasn't enough for the creatures of the night who were seduced by this grand gesture on the part of the Umbrage family and secretly paid them a visit to thank them for this magnanimity. The following day, Mrs. Umbrage's face was found chewed off and the body of Master Umbrage was nowhere to be found, metal chains notwithstanding. As this news traveled, a visibly perturbed Andy Umbrage declared this the Ultimate Performance Art of the century.
When the police arrived to the scene of the suicide this morning in Mr. Umbrage's house, they found the tiling on the floor destroyed and dirt all over the house. They also found a shovel near the deceased Mr. Umbrage's corpse. A copy of the novel The Tunnel by William H. Gass was also found. Umbrage had dug out a pit and had committed suicide by putting his head inside it and had covered the space with dirt. Presumably the cause of death was due to asphyxiation. As rigor mortis had set in, the police found the head and neck stuck into the ground and the torso and legs stiff and erect and pointing towards the ceiling. In the outstretched, clenched hands of the deceased, the police found a suicide note with only a few words etched on it in red ink - "Who's your daddy now?"
Critics are already claiming that the suicide was part of another profound piece of performance art. They are basing their claims on the terse suicide note and interpreting this act as a revolt against the recently-in-vogue tendencies of the neo-bourgeois artists who've been committing suicide painlessly and are claiming that by dying in such a grisly fashion, he reminded everyone that committing suicide ungrislyly is seriously uncool and such people are better off existing which in turn (the existence, that is) can only be either horrible or miserable. His detractors on the other hand simply point out that this was another attempt on his part to one-up his dead wife (with whom he had a long standing rivalry) and by the suicide note, he simply wanted to remind her who her daddy was.
The obituary is brought to halt by noting offhandedly that Andy Umbrage had many gifted disciples and that Shuchikar was once his protégé who'd rebelled against his style. Hearing the sad demise of his teacher, however, he decided to open up some windows into his past and pay a last visit to his dead mentor.
Those of you with extra, disposable cash are directed to the following link - Science Fiction Anthology - which features a short story by Shuchikar - a close friend of Nanga Fakir and Ghongha Basant.
It is said that the song Professional Widow by the crazy-alien-from-outer-space-visiting-earth-in-the-guise-of-the-absolutely-brilliant-Tori Amos is about Courtney Love (cf. "Don't blow those brains yet/ We gotta be big boy/We gotta be big"; "Give me peace, love, peace, love/Give me peace/Love/And a hard cock."(See also the 'peace, love (and empathy)' reference in Kurt Cobain's suicide note.)). If it's true, then she's just harsh. Harsh, harsh, harsh.
Recent acquisitions are Gravity's Rainbow and V. by Pynchon. NF also dithered for a real long time over the question of To-Acquire-or-not-to-Acquire Cryptonomicon by the great Neal Stephenson. He eventually decided to not acquire the voluminous (1100 pages to be precise) tome deferring the acquisition to some perhaps more opportune time. Meanwhile, back on the bookshelf, the pile of unread books keeps climbing higher.
The absolutely too-crazy-to-be-real match's venue should be shifted from the Wimbledon to the Lord's. They play test matches there, don't they?
The Droste Effect in Escher's Print Gallery. Very sexy!
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A brief technical article, explaining the Droste Effect and techniques used in making the video can be found here. To follow the article, a working knowledge of Complex Analysis is recommended (but not required).
Oblivion is quintessentially DFWish - longish stories that meander and digress and ruminate and dwell on details in a way that is typical of the fiction of DFW. Compared to his previous short story book - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which has been made into a not-so-bad film by John Krasinski), the stories are longer; and the humor - much more subtle and dark. Apart from Incarnations of Burned Children (click on link to read the story - one of the most killer, heart rending, brilliant, absolutely unendurable-in-what-it-describes pieces of short fiction with an unforgettable, devastating-yet-uplifting last line1), which is only two and a half page long, the others are somewhat lengthy and take their own sweet time to build up and have a nasty tendency to hang around somewhat languorously in your head a long time after you're done reading. Don't expect twist endings, clever plotting or character building; the stories have an amorphous, hard-to-point-but-easy-to-experience quality that compels you to revisit the book again and again and the experience is augmented after each such iteration.
The best stories in this volume are clearly the aforementioned Incarnations..., Good Old Neon, Another Pioneer and The Soul is not a Smithy.
If there were ever a quintessential, representative, archetypal work that summarizes, condenses, distills and weaves into one all the multifarious, hidden, interconnected-yet-divergent themes that any writer (or for that matter, a director or musician etc.) might address in her entire oeuvre - if there were a single piece of work that characterizes completely, a creative mind and typifies her Weltanschauung - then Good Old Neon is definitely DFW's representative work.2 It opens with:
My whole life I've been a fraud...
...
...all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people.
The narrator is a hyper-self-aware, obscenely well educated and an intensely self critical, successful, modern yuppie. His bouts of self criticism and perception of his own shallowness and remarkable ease with which he can manipulate people's opinion of him drives him to despair and eventually to suicide. The prose stretches the limits of self consciousness and relentlessly probes the very limits of communication amongst humans.
...what goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant...
The story Another Pioneer is:
derived from an acquaintance of a close friend who said that he had himself overheard this exemplum aboard a high-altitude commercial flight
The aforementioned story turns out to be a quasi-mythological tale of a wonderboy in a prehistoric society who seems to have answers to all possible questions, albeit in a literal, somewhat robotic manner - so much so that he becomes the chief counselor of the village and a clique of wise people emerges who charge the villagers to frame their questions and anxieties in precisely the correct form so that the response of the wonderboy is meaningful. (The garbage-in-garbage-out paradigm of programming and the way the wise-people-of-the-village construct is mapped on to the modern day programmers of computing behemoths is unmistakable.) However, jealous of the village's subsequent prosperity, the neighboring village's wise man 'bugs' the system and the boy transcends his previous (autistic) savantness and becomes wiser - but in a somewhat grotesque way.
In The Soul is not a Smithy the narrator recounts a violent episode from his childhood, in which he and three classmates were allegedly held hostage by a deranged substitute teacher. However, he never quite gets to it, as he's preoccupied with the story that he was imagining at the time, visualizing it in the panes of the schoolroom window - a story of a blind girl and her lost dog, which becomes increasingly bizarre as the real world situation around him becomes life threatening.
...
Believe it or not, but Nanga Fakir has begun reading Infinite Jest again.
<*must... not... give in to... temptation. must... resist*>
1. Although decontextualized, it should still hit you hard enough to sit back and take notice. It ends with the child...
having learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.
2. Like Annie Hall is Woody Allen's, Eraserhead is David Lynch's, Slackers is Richard Linklater's, Adaptation is Charlie Kauffman's, Godaan is Premchand's, Laal Teen ki Chchat (Red Tin Roof) is Nirmal Verma's, Neuromancer is William Gibson's...
D: So what does your name mean? NF: Huh...what does yours mean? D : Uhh...it means an Ocean. NF : Yours? B : Peace. NF : And yours? A : Halo...as in around the sun. NF : His I know - Wise Hero. Right? S : <*Nods*> D : So...what does yours mean? Or is it like one of those American names like Todd that probably means your parents thought your were a toad when born? NF : <*Smiles*> Well, let me think and give you a precise answer.
<*Thinks*> NF : It means 'Novel Bliss'. 'Novel' as in novelty and not a novel. D : Novel Bliss. B : Novel Bliss. A : Novel Bliss. D: Ha! Just like being on drugs. Right?
Ghongha: How's your life-as-soap-opera metaphor holding up? Girl: <*coyly*> That metaphor's metamorphosed. <*smiles*> Ghongha: ... Girl: ... <*sporting a quizzical-something-wrong(?)-type-expression*> Ghongha: I think I just fell in love with you.
...
Nanga Fakir's planning to capture more incidents from the life of his close friend Ghongha Basant. Shuchikar - Ghongha's closest friend and roommate for four years in college (and the exact opposite of Ghongha in personality (read suave, smart, glib and raconteur par excellence - quite the ladies' man) - promises me to help dig up on Ghongha's stories - past, present and future.
कुछ रोज़ से वक़्त कुछ यूं गुज़ारा जाता है - शाम को उठना, तनिक चहलकदमी उपरांत काम की कोशिश और जबड़ा फैलाए, लार टपकाते, इंतज़ार में बैठे मौत के घंटे से (जो मई के अंत में बजने के मूड में है) चंद लम्हे चुरा कर नागराज और ध्रुव के रोमांचक कारनामों का लुत्फ़ उठाना और उनके भीषण पराक्रम और धमधमात्मक लड़ाइयों का; और महामानव, त्रिमुंड और ड्रैकुला सरीखे मंजे हुए दर-शैतान खलनायकों के चीर हरण और मान मर्दन का ऐसे कुछ लम्पट ब्लॉग पोस्ट्स में बखान करना. ...
ये पोस्ट निम्न कॉमिक्सों के अध्ययन के आधार पर लिखी गयी हैं: १) परकाले २) ज़लज़ला ३) ड्रैकुला का अंत ...
'धमधमात्मक' नामक शब्द का कोई अस्तित्व नहीं है. (लेकिन चूंकि सुनने में सॉलिड लगता है इसलिए इसका ऐसा इस्तेमाल किया गया, जैसा इस्तेमाल किया गया.) ...
पांडू/सत्यव्रत का नया हिंदी ब्लॉग ज़रूर देखें - सॉलिड कवितायें. ज़ीरो लम्पटगीरी.
There is a scene in Shutter Island in which the warden (a cameo of sorts played by Ted Levine who is more famous for flashing his dick and skinning his victims as the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs) and DiCaprio ride in a jeep and have a little talk about violence. The jeep is ambling through the woods as Ted Levine leans over and conspiratorially remarks how similar the two of them are - how they're both 'men of violence' and relish this streak in themselves. There is considerable menace in his voice - a hint of vast reserves of physical energy just barely held in control by his better sense, to be unleashed with considerable pleasure at the slightest opportunity that walks around and decides to present itself. The warden is aware of the enjoyment he derives from blood and finds in DiCaprio an accomplice that shares the guilty pleasure in much the same way. There is considerable understated violence and hint of some big, impending disaster in the sinister smile and casual wink directed at DiCaprio - insinuating some deep, profound, primal connection between them - the kind that is prized precisely because it's so rare - the elusive bond that blood brothers, soulmates, mystics et al. claim to share.
DiCaprio is horrified at the thought and yet by the end of the scene indicates his willingness to flex his muscles and not back down from the fight if the warden were foolish enough to initiate one. "Attaboy", the warden's response seems to say. DiCaprio gets out of the jeep and walks away. It could've easily been the best scene of the film.
The theme of not backing down and never running away from a physical fight is a somewhat recurring theme throughout the movie ("You've never backed down from a fight haven't you?", remarks the German doctor (played by Max von Sydow) when they first meet in Ben Kingsley's mansion) which theme's supposed to reinforce in the audience an appreciation of the gritty, hard, tough, (if-need-be)-more-violent-than-you-can-imagine motherfucker DiCaprio's character's supposed to portray. And herein lies the biggest flaw the film - the miscasting of DiCaprio as the gentle-outside-but-uberviolent-beast-lurking-inside character that his persona just doesn't reflect at all. The entire (tongue-in-cheek one might say) premise of the film - it might just be better to die a good man than stay alive a monster - relies fundamentally on DiCaprio's characterization as the monster.
Make no mistake about it - DiCaprio is a great actor. For those who've been his sworn enemies ever since Titanic came out need to look at his absolutely brilliant role in the film The Basketball Diaries (orders of magnitude better than his more celebrated Oscar nominated role in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?). DiCaprio was, before the superstardom of Titanic, with good reason, an indie sensation. He's himself conceded that perhaps rather than Titanic, he should've acted in the abso-fucking-lutely awesome Boogie Nights by the brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson. In particular, he is able to evoke the hallucination enforced loneliness and intense sense of loss that his character is haunted by throughout the movie; but for all his awesome acting skill, he just can't fit the part of the monster he's so thrashed out to be. Scorsese has made the little, harmless Joe Pesci far more intimidating and monsterish in his previous flicks.
And so, as Ted Levine gives us a chilly yet casual glimpse into his ambient low-level, loosely chained violent side, we groan and curse him for misjudging the intense, smart, yet fundamentally weak DiCaprio as his counterpart.
Sigh, sigh, sigh.
Deniz is right when she says we don't expect this from Scorsese.
David Foster Wallace didn't give out interviews generally; and most of the ones he did end up giving were either print or radio. (Two notable exceptions are the interviews he gave to Charlie Rose.) So to see him respond to questions on screen was a rare privilege. (However, such intimate/direct knowledge of people whom you love/idolize in a somewhat blind, larger-than-life way can sometimes be a rather jarring experience. After having joined the abject-fans-of-Nirmal-Verma cult, Nanga Fakir was jolted to hear his voice reading a passage from one of his books. His voice was weak, pathetic and old-womanish - not the rich Gulzarish baritone NF had hoped it would've been.)
So when Nanga Fakir came across the 84 minute youtube interview of the (erstwhile) saddest person on earth, he watched it with a little hesitation. Let's just say that he was not in the least disappointed.
The interview is conducted by a German team and the interviewer is a girl with a thin, squeaky voice (who gives the impression of being blonde, thin, studentsy and a little on the plainer side) and is overawed by the interviewee. The interviewee is a nerdy/geeky looking mental titan, incredibly shy and self conscious and nervous and mindful of his own self consciousness and obvious unease that he exudes in front of the camera. He's also very honest and earnest and is very much uneasy when the interviewer asks him big, grand philosophical questions (Cf. first question: "Do you think humor comes out of something sad or is it a cliché?"). DFW's is aghast that such questions are being put to him. He twitches, bares his fangs and grits his teeth. Intense surprise contorts his face and yet, to his credit, he decides to answer such questions in all seriousness0.
To see for yourself, here's the screenshot of the guy when this question's put to him:
The screenshot above is funny. DFW's face gives the impression of a deflated balloon. And yet, time and again, as these questions are put to him, and as he gets ready to answer them honestly and in detail, a spasm of painful contortion zaps his face. He repeatedly asks, full of self doubt and misgiving after each such answer: "Does that make any sense to you?", "You're not going to use that for the interview are you?", "I doubt if it makes much sense." and "I can hear in my head a voice making fun of this stuff.". It is clear that the problem of meaningful communication among humans comes to the fore here - something that David Foster Wallace has written about numerous times. He refers to it in the interview also when talking about the purpose of good art and how it helps one consciousness transcend its being trapped in a body and reach and enter another, howsoever fleetingly. Hence his response "Since it can't be talked about directly, we need to make up stories about it."
However, the best thing about the interview (apart from the fact that it is one of the really rare pictures/video of the man without a bandanna and long hair) is that it is uncut. So you can see the microphones being set and the off camera crew passing off-hand comments on DFW's on-screen persona (in one such encounter an off camera voice jibes - "You're pontificating" to which DFW rolls his eyes over and says "Yeah, yeah") and the clear discomfort of David Foster Wallace at being treated like an important "writer".
Here's the first part (of ten) of the interview on youtube.
One wishes the son of a bitch hadn't killed himself!
