Farewell Auteur

I return home, close to midnight.

I log on to Guardian online.

On the home page, there is a picture from the Seventh Seal; Grim Reaper is standing on the rocks. There is a caption: Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007.

I stare at the picture. Then my synapses fire and it hits me. Bergman is dead. The auteur of gloom is no more.

I remember the only time I watched a Bergman movie. When my heart took a leap at the haunting ‘dance of death’. And afterwards, even as my knees shook, I understood that Seventh Seal was not a parable of dark pessimism. It was about hope. About losing faith and finding it again. About stumbling on the meaning of life.

So I guess, the joke was on Death. He didn’t win. Not even today.

Bullshit by Bing

Came across an ‘inspiring’ book in library yesterday.

‘100 bullshit jobs and how to get them’ by Stanley Bing.

Felt reassured to find that advertising still tops the list of bullshit jobs.

Followed by other fulfilling vocations like Ayurvedic Healer, Motivational Speaker, Critic, Book Editor, Investment Banker, among others.

PS: Though the content is all bullshit, Bing wraps it up with a catchy book title (a previous one was called ‘Sun Tzu was a Sissy’). He would have made it big in advertising. Pity.

The hits just keep on coming

Life hit a new low this weekend.

First that Harry Potter thing. Another skin-crawling spectacle of hype and hysteria. The ‘universally ecstatic’ reviews. Kids and grown-up idiots scrambling towards bookstores. People who don’t even read a newspaper, devouring the 759 pages in one day. And claiming to be terrified, devastated and overjoyed after finishing the book. It's as if everyone is in the throes of a collective orgasm.

It riles me, because I tried to read those tomes and found that they strained my patience and common sense. How can anyone find the energy to read this babel of spells and witchcraft? Why not profitably employ that stamina to read 'War and Peace', 'Ulysses', 'Finnegan's Wake' or some equally mind-numbing classic?

Second, to add insult to injury, some goddamn Brit university conferred an honorary doctorate on Shilpa Shetty. For her glorious contribution towards promoting cultural diversity.

Somebody give me a long, thick rope.

Another day for me in paradise

Yesterday was interesting.

Reached Kochi by bus at the witching hour. Watched awful Tamil movie songs on the hotel TV for the rest of the night.

Made an hour long presentation in the morning. Put on my best smile and slurred my way through the PowerPoint. Wound up, shook hands and exited.

Went straight to a joint near the office. It’s high noon. Had a big serving of chicken biriyani first. Then downed three vodka & soda in quick succession. When the alcohol hit the stomach, it actually sizzled.

Hit the road again. Came across a colleague. Went to another joint with him. Knocked back two pegs. Light as a butterfly but still standing on two feet.

Got on Janshatabdi in the evening. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t read. It was like sitting inside a blender. A vibrator. For some strange reason dead mosquitoes were falling on our heads.

Got off the train at Trivandrum. Walked straight to Kirthi. Guzzled three more vodka & Pepsi’s. Fit.

Slunk into home without attracting attention. Browsed internet till sleep finally overwhelmed the mind. Had a great sense of well-being before I passed out. ZZZZZ...

Payback

I was re-reading Maximum City and came across a para that was very perceptive.

It’s an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, and your sister will stay at home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations behind you. You dare not turn around. You have been witness to all the petty humiliations they have suffered to get you to this place. You now need to deliver. Your sister is married, your mother is sick, and your father will retire next year. You carry a heavy burden of guilt for having heedlessly taken the best of everything. So when you go out with your matriculation certificate or your BA and find there are no jobs – you look for other ways of making money.

You will look for other ways of assuring your family that their investment wasn’t lost. You can take beatings, you can take rejection, but you can’t face your family if you don’t do your duty as a son. Go out in the morning and come back at night, or go out at night and come back in the daytime if you have to, but take care of the family. You owe it to them; it is your dharma.

First Day First Show

Sreekumar was peddling tickets for ‘Sivaji’ and for a moment I was tempted. I wanted to break out of this stupor, and perhaps diving into the first day-first show melee could have done the trick. Doing something stupid just for the heck of it is supposed to improve creativite impulses.

Sadly, wiser counsel prevailed and I didn’t take up the offer. I am too lazy to sit through the ear-bursting, eye-popping, nerve-racking Rajni Routine for 3 hours. If I was 11 years old, I would have loved every bit of it.

I have watched only one movie on the first day-first show. ‘All About Woman’ is exactly what you think it is about. In my defence I must say that I was young, impressionable and probably, overloaded with hormones. Which, perhaps, explains this drastic decline in cinematic taste – from Bergman to English dubbed Hindi soft porn. (I read that Paul Schrader also spent time watching porn flicks. But then, he went ahead and wrote ‘Taxi Driver’, while I did zilch.) I ‘learned’ more about a woman’s body but not her mind, which turned out to be the real thing. Damn.

Anyway, to cut a lamba story chotta, I lost my specs, one chappal and two shirt buttons during the stampede towards the counter. Afterwards, I took an oath never to repeat the experience. Ever.

Happiness

I don’t usually hunt around for quotes. But today, I came across one that was interesting. I don’t remember the exact words, but it roughly says, ‘Happiness is about finding something to love, something to do and something to hope for’. Hmmmm…

Crossing another millstone

I turned 30 this April.

It’s a scary experience, especially for me. You are not young anymore and you have nothing to show for your years. It’s just the time to wonder - how did I screw-up my life with such perfection?

I look in the mirror and I see a fat, dark man with a funny mustache and no prospects. And to think of all the resolutions I made over the years!

At 21, I was renting and watching 4 movies everyday from Collection Videos, making a mess of my eyes and studies. I wanted to be Stanley Kubrick, if not Scorsese.

At 23, I ditched movies to enter the world of literature. I dreamed of being a best-selling, Booker prize-winning novelist. Like Arundhati Roy meets JK Rowling. Hoo-Hah!

At 25, I thought: forget it, who wants to be the literary toast of the season? Why settle for ephemeral fame like Roy/Rowling, when I could become a cult writer. You know somebody like Saint Exupery or Roald Dahl. Basic English, child-like sketches and a big fan following. Yeah, I could do that!

At 27, I thought, shit, I would settle for being at least a Ruskin Bond. God please, I beg you.

At 30, I still haven’t written a line.

It’s the law of diminishing expectations all the way. I look forward to a bleak future with great trepidation.

There is something about Toni Collette

I first saw her in Muriel’s Wedding. And I was hooked. Everything I saw later just added to the allure. Sixth Sense. The Japanese Story. In her Shoes.

She has large teeth, a big bottom and thick legs. More full hipped than petite. In a way, she is the antithesis of a typical Hollywood beauty, a woman who is not the sum of her parts. Because when she smiles, she is the sexiest woman alive. And there is an amazing element of honesty in her performances that has you rooting for her.

I wish I could get a copy of Little Miss Sunshine.

David vs Goliath?

A really cringeworthy campaign. But I couldn't stop laughing.

Image: From agencyfaqs

It says, perhaps, everything that needs to be said about advertising.

Location Production Footage: The Last Temptation of Christ

The film was released in 1988 and probably the bulky video camera had just appeared on the scene. But even that doesn't explain why a great director like Scorsese seems so clumsy with the camera and sets up some cringingly juvenile shots.

The actual film is a class apart. The movies I love most are movies about redemption and 'The Last Temptation Of Christ' is the acme of this genre. More on that soon.

Oddballs and Geniuses

Joe Queenan, the wonderfully opinionated cultural critic, is writing the 'A to Z of Classical Music' in the Guardian. I wouldn't resist the temptation to filch some interesting bits and paste it here. I was more interested in the life stories than in the nuances of composition. So here's the part about Mozart and Debussy. Those interested in Mahler, Glenn Gould, Faure and others should log on to the music section of Guardian. Nothing you haven't heard before, but presented to you with gratuitous dollops of merciless opinions.

See David Oistrakh perform the Clair de Lune. I may be musically illiterate and tone deaf but I can't help feeling moved.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKd0VII-l3A&NR

Mozart

Arguably bringing more sheer beauty into the world than anyone who ever lived, Mozart was rewarded by the fates with a preposterously unhappy life. His childhood was sabotaged by his musician father, who pimped him out as a juvenile circus act; his aristocratic employers showered their wealth and praise on butchers and charlatans; he married badly; he was constantly in debt; he had bum kidneys. He was short, his hands were stubby, and, oh yes, his face was marred by smallpox. He died at age 35, and no one knows where he is buried. Anyone who believes that life is fair should try being born in Afghanistan or study the life of Mozart or just go straight to hell.

D is for ... Debussy, Claude

The ugliest man to ever write beautiful music, Debussy was an anti-social misanthrope who even the French found unpleasant. Arrogant, shunning human company, emotionally scarred by being short, fat and afflicted by an irregularly surfaced forehead, and regularly pitching camp with women given to recreational suicide attempts, Debussy was the last composer to write music that was both fiercely cerebral and unabashedly emotional (Ravel, though a charmer, was basically a bargain-basement Debussy). After Debussy, classical music would continue to be thought-provoking, but it would never again be sublime.

Debussy is the first truly modern composer, the first to repudiate the concept of music as literature, to focus purely on the emotions triggered by specific sounds. He hated Beethoven, loathed Mozart, ridiculed Brahms and thought Wagner was weighing down western civilization. He liked Satie, who posed no threat.Ironically, Debussy's anger, personal unhappiness and penchant for hooking up with women likely to shoot themselves if not watched carefully cannot be found in his music, which is uncompromisingly beautiful; no composer's work was ever more disconnected from his personality than Debussy's.

Officially, Debussy is referred to as an Impressionist because he lived at the same time as Monet, Pissaro and Sisley, but the term is a misnomer, like calling the Clash proletarians; Impressionist painting, it too a reaction against the obsessive story-telling qualities of the art that precedes it, prides itself on having almost no intellectual content, while Debussy's music, sometimes lush, sometimes melancholy, sometimes playful, is immensely cerebral. Debussy is more like Cézanne, the father of modern art, who painted canvases purged of all sentiment (no parasols, no rippling flags, no Sunday picnics, and definitely no puppies) that nevertheless managed to be radiant and inspiring.

Debussy's body of work is smaller than that of many other composers, but almost all of it is of the very first order. Only Chopin and Schumann surpass him as a composer for the piano; La Mer is arguably the most successful tone poem of them all; and Pelléas and Mélisande is an opera that is literally like no other, the anti-Carmen, in that it forced the singers to stop hamming it up and actually try singing for a change. Just as Matisse's work is about color, Debussy's work is about sound. With one or two exceptions, Debussy makes all living composers sound pitiful, particularly the academic mafiosi that regularly win Pulitzer prizes in America. Someone once said that the saddest thing about Debussy's music was that it initially seemed like a glorious sunrise when in fact it was a bittersweet sunset. This is correct; when Debussy died, classical music began to die with him.

Credit: Joe Queenan/Guardian

The Write Way?

This is an impassioned piece by Edmund Morris that came in The New York Times last year and is reproduced unabridged. It’s about the lost art of penmanship and how creativity can become depersonalized in this age of computers. Interestingly, I didn’t read this from the paper but on the online edition of nytimes. Paradoxical, but there you have it.

Beethoven's Paper Trail

MY first reaction to the announcement last week that a major Beethoven manuscript had been discovered in a Pennsylvania seminary was an aching desire to see it. (The ache will not be gratified until the work goes on exhibit at Sotheby's on Nov. 16.) To see it. How often we use that phrase in a tactile sense - as when, for example, we ask a jeweler to unlock his cabinet and bring out a Rolex so we can feel its cold, thrilling weight on our wrist. Eye contact is enough, though, when we cannot gratify our animal desire to caress whatever is unattainable, inimitable or worshipful.

Beethoven's manuscripts are revelatory, because he was an intensely physical person who fought his music onto the page, splattering ink, breaking nibs, even ripping the paper in the process. Not for him the serene penmanship of J. S. Bach, whose undulant figurations sway like ship masts over calm seas, or the hasty perfection of Mozart, or the quasi-mathematical constructs of Webern. Their writing is the product of minds already made up.

Beethoven was so full of ideas that to fire them out - to see which were precious metal and which mere dross - was a process in which he needed to involve his eyes and his hands (not to mention his heels drumming out rhythms, and his voice howling and groaning: landlords were forever giving him notice). Long before he went deaf, he was perhaps the most prodigious sketcher in musical history, unable to walk around a room or, I regret to say, sit down on a toilet without doodling hieroglyphics on every reachable surface. Even when perambulating around Vienna at a hyperactive clip, he was always stopping to scribble something in a notebook that seemed to be an inseparable part of his left hand.

One such scribble was the "lightning flash" theme that begins the second movement of the Ninth Symphony. It struck Beethoven one night as he was emerging from a bright interior into darkness. To page through his sketchbook of the period, and see it suddenly appear amid clouds of murky musical thought, is to feel the electricity of genius.

The newly discovered manuscript - an 80-page piano version of his famous "Grosse Fuge" for string quartet, Op. 133 - dates from 1826, the last full year of Beethoven's life. It is reported to be typically three-dimensional, with erasures worn into holes, and a large patch of rewritten music spackled onto one page with sealing wax. Since the "Grosse Fuge" is the single most pugnacious movement in Beethoven - 15 minutes of furious contrapuntal combat, adored by Stravinsky - what we will be seeing at Sotheby's promises to be as much an artifact as an autograph.

Somebody who still works like Beethoven is the French artist Bernard Dufour. His drawing hand substitutes on camera for that of the actor Michel Piccoli in Jacques Rivette's masterly film "La Belle Noiseuse," about a painter struggling to execute his final masterpiece. One notices, as the hand reaches out to select a pen and jab it into the ink bottle, the violence of its movements, impatient yet tentative, as if wondering in which direction to discharge its energy. The sketchpad lies white, waiting to be savaged by the looming nib.

Then down the sharp thing comes, at a deliberately obtuse angle, so that the first line is not so much drawn but dug out of the paper. Nor is there as much ink running as you would expect; the artist seems to be daring his inspiration to dry up. More swoops and gougings, then suddenly a deliberate splash of ink, which the heel of the hand smudges across some cross-hatching ... and lo, the curve of a naked woman's thigh materializes out of the whiteness, and art begins to happen.

It is moving to watch, because we can feel Mr. Dufour's love of struggle, his sheer joy in being bespattered, stained and even resisted (when a sketch obstinately refuses to cohere) by the materials at hand. Such relish is of course characteristic of workers in the plastic arts. But with the decline of painting and drawing in recent years, in favor of hands-off processes like video recording, performance art and installations farmed out to contractors, even artists are putting less and less of themselves into their work - with the result that what there is of it, is cold. I had to spend a few weeks earlier this year looking down from my window at Christo's orange hangings in Central Park, and got back from them nothing but a sense of manufactured lifelessness.

I worry that further withdrawal of the body will increasingly depersonalize creativity in our computerized age. It is already a given that many young architects can't draw, relying on circuitry to do their imaging for them. Nor can many of them model, never having built things with their hands as children, and felt the pliancy and fragility of structures, the interrelationship of empty space and solid mass. Recently my wife and I bought a country house designed by just such an architect. It looked great until we discovered that the main floor sagged in the middle because it lacked the kind of central support that a child, 40 years ago, would have sensed was necessary in the foundation.

Writing does not, of course, rate high on the tactile scale of things. But a screen of glass impregnated with pixels now gleams in front of practically every young person who wishes to commit words to - I was going to say paper, but will avoid the anachronism. Today's words, dit-ditted downward, flash off somewhere at the speed of light and assemble themselves in electronic limbo. Seen through the glass darkly, they look seductively perfect, every character proportional, every paragraph in alignment. Why mess around with them? In any case, if their orthography is not quite correct, a default "word processor" (ghastly phrase) will alter them to its liking.

A couple of years ago I had a disillusioning residency with students at the University of Chicago who wished, or thought they wished, to master the art of narrative nonfiction. Cyberspatial innocent that I am, I was at first puzzled by the weird uniformity of their written "style," if that's the word for prose equally composed of I.M.-speak and catchphrases downloaded by the megabyte. At last, like the girl in "Stage Door Canteen," I caught on. But what was even weirder was the way these not-unintelligent seniors looked at me as I lectured them on Tolstoy's frenzied chicken-scratches all over proofs of "War and Peace," Capote's yellow-paper drafts of "In Cold Blood" and Nabokov's exquisite watercolor diagrams, illustrative of metric schemes in poetry yet at the same time touchingly reminiscent of butterfly wings. What freaked me out was the students' collective gaze, not uninterested, but uninvolved. They weren't listening so much as watching. To them, I was just the latest in a lifetime's succession of images, another talking head.

I doubt I'll see any of them when I go to look at the "Grosse Fuge" manuscript next month. Why should they bother? They can already "access" it on the Internet. But without seeing the real thing, with actual light falling on its scuffs and blotches, will they ever feel the desperate energy of a dying Beethoven, imprisoned in the cavern of his own disability?

Credit: Edmund Morris/NYT

The Nightie Nightmare

It has the sturdiness of sackcloth, the durability to outlast repeated washings and a deserved reputation as the ultimate male repellent. Ladies of Kerala, we are talking about your favorite dress: the ubiquitous nightie. Not to be confused with the skimpy negligee or any itsy bitsy item with lace and frills, the nightie is commonly defined as a simple housecoat, usually oversized and in single colors. A staple of the middle class, this forbidding apparel (as the name itself makes amply clear) is meant for nighttime dressing. But such narrow sartorial definitions have never put off the nifty keralite woman. So the nightie is worn round the clock, day in and day out. With such devastating results, that it gives a whole new meaning to the word eyesore.

Why is it so popular? It is the perfect dress to slip on (literally!) for the long hours of backbreaking housework that most women have to endure. The inevitable stains, sweat and grime are easily assimilated. Men hung up as they are on matters like beauty and high fashion never mull over such practical details.

The nightie has even traversed the generational gap and class distinctions. An eighty-year-old grandmother is as likely to wear a nightie as a ten-year-old girl. Women, who labor in the sun and do grueling manual jobs to make a living, often go to work in a nightie. Just as their middle class counterparts, ensconced in their comfortable homes, go through the daily grind of housework in this popular battledress.

So who should have the final word on nightie? Those who argue that high fashion should be sacrificed at the altar of comfort and utility? Or should we listen to those who plead for esthetic dressing, for attire that is sensible and sensuous?

What say ladies?

Last Place on Earth

I usually do all my reading lying down on my bed at night. I never read sitting at my study desk. It brings back bad memories of cramming for my exams.

Bedside reading does have potential after-effects. You might end up on the fast road to cataract. You might develop an incurable variant of the slipped disc (Posture!). You might even fall asleep. Remember, you were warned.

On the plus side, it’s a great way to test a book. Is the book engrossing enough for you to stay awake? Is it as they say in publishing, a gripping read? In the waiting room, yes. But in bed, while the tempting sleep lies in wait? That’s the real litmus test for a book.

On sleepless nights you will discover ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ or ‘Ulysses’ to be highly effective cures for your insomnia. I found ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ had the potency of a tranquilizer (metaphorically speaking, of course). Three pages of Marquez and I am already snoring.

But then, you might end up with a book that perks you up like a flask of coffee. It happened to me with Roland Huntford’s “The Last place on Earth”.

This is a big book and a pretty old one at that. There are charts, tables, maps, black and white photos, and glossaries. On the cover, there are portraits of two men, one dour with intense piercing eyes, the other suave and handsome. The po-faced man is Roald Amundsen; the sensitive looking guy is Robert Falcon Scott.

On December 15, 1911, at 3 o’ clock in the afternoon, Amundsen, Hassel, Wisting, Hanssen and Bjaaland planted the Norwegian flag at the Geographic South Pole. There is a scratchy old photo of the moment. Four men with weather-beaten faces clad in thick eskimo suits stand near the fluttering flag. At the corner of the picture is a sledge dog, basking in the sun and in this moment of glory.

They had gone where no man had gone before. With the languor of a picnic trip, they would make it back to the ship and into the history books. One month later, Scott and his team would reach the same spot. Their deeply flawed expedition would then perish in the icy expanse of Antarctica.

The basic premise of this book is about the race for ‘the last place on earth’, the unexplored continent of Antarctica and the crowing jewel at its center, the South Pole. On a deeper level, it’s about leadership, teamwork, courage and the yearning to explore. It’s also about professional jealousy, ignorance, spite and thwarted ambition of men. As the blurb says “ Amundsen’s ambition was to reach the South Pole; Scott’s above all, was for fame and heroic achievement. This book shows, in the most vivid and unforgettable way, at what cost, to themselves and others, each was granted his desire.”

Amundsen was unsentimental. His team used Eskimo dogs for transport and food. The Brits were squeamish about this. They didn’t believe in dog transport and they didn’t like eating dogs. That was just for starters. From the depleted content of their rations to their obsolete navigation and strategy, from their overweening belief in motor transport to their condescension for the Eskimo lifestyle, everything went to pieces from the day one.

What’s the point of this book you may wonder? Amundsen won, so he is the hero, right?

Wrong. From the day the frozen bodies of the British polar party were found in a collapsed tent, they eased out Amundsen from the stage. The diaries written by Scott would salvage his reputation as a martyr, a heroic figure struggling against the odds of nature. Here was somebody the British people could look up to, somebody who was a part of their legends now. Amundsen was the interloper, the villain of the piece, the cunning Norwegian who had stolen the prize from the brave Englishman. He was banished to obscurity.

Huntford takes up the cudgels on behalf of Amundsen. Amundsen is revealed as a genuine leader, a man who loved his men enough to bring them back alive. He never disregarded traditional wisdom. He wasn’t out to conquer nature, he knew better than that. He was a taciturn man, a man of few words, a shoot straight guy who never buckled under pressure. He wouldn’t write to save his life, and perhaps that was the reason for his downfall. He was a man of action, not a writer who could spin a web of words to obfuscate and bedazzle.

Antartica may now be a drab piece of real estate. But when Amundsen began his journey, his every step was as pioneering as that of the first moonwalker. The places still have the resonance of mystery and adventure: Ross Ice Barrier, Mc Murdo Sound, Bay of Whales, Trans Antartic Mountains, Mount Erebus and Terror…

For Amundsen, there was no escape from Scott’s death. A sense of guilt for having won the race weighed heavily on his conscience. A few years later, on a rescue mission to the North Pole, Amundsen dissappeared. His body was never found. Like the old norse warriors of the yore, Amundsen sailed away into the oblivion, fearless and alone.

My synopsis hardly does justice to this great book. It’s a rare piece of meticulous research, reportage and storytelling.

Read it. You will never regret losing your sleep.