Valentine

Poem by Carol Ann Duffy (the first Scottish, female, openly gay person to be named the new Poet Laureate)


Not a red rose or a satin heart.


I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.


Here.
It will blind yoi with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.


I am trying to be truthful.


Not a cute card or a kissogram.


I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.


Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.


Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

(Carol Ann Duffy)

Black Birds Are Falling From The Sky

Black birds are falling from the sky
Falling
Shriveled facsimiles of each other.

Black birds are falling from the sky
Falling
Into fresh brewed coffees and tete-a-tetes.

-VC

The Interesting Mr Jim Jarmusch {article taken from a film magazine}

"Rather than finding a story that I want to tell and then adding the details, I collect the details and then try to construct a puzzle of story. I have a theme and a kind of mood and the characters but not a plotline that runs straight through"

Jim Jarmusch is a filmmaker interested in what goes on in the margins of life. He is not concerned about the “whats” or the “whys” of people’s actions like most filmmakers, but rather in how they got there. “I realized a couple of years ago that I get lost sometimes watching films because my mind drifts away”. It is the time between jump cuts that are the basis for many of Jarmusch’s films. He is interested in documenting the mundane events that most people take for granted and shows that they too are filled with fascinating moments. His films are populated by characters who seem to have no real direction in life, who just happen to stumble into adventures – much like real life itself. 

Before dropping out of New York University, Jarmusch learnt many about technical aspects of film that would serve him later on, but he had to relearn how to work with actors. Like his idol John Cassavetes, Jarmusch is a very actor-oriented director. He creates the characters first, often with a specific actor in mind, and then “the plot kind of suggests itself around the character” (5). Before any filming takes place the actors rehearse scenes that are never filmed, but are done in order to convey more personality in the character when the cameras roll. This process results in believable, three-dimensional characters complete with their own idiosyncrasies and nuances.

While he does avoid major Hollywood studios, Jarmusch has no problem collaborating with well known actors. His first experiment was with Night On Earth (1992), which featured famous movie stars, Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, and Rosie Perez. Jarmusch returned to the structure he used so well in Mystery Train, but expanded its scope. Night On Earth is broken up into five stories that all occur at the same time but in different cities all over the world with the action restricted to taxi cab rides. Jarmusch uses these encounters as springboards for interesting, often hilarious, sometimes tragic discussions ranging from acting in movies to circus clowns to sex with farm animals.

The impetus for making Night On Earth stemmed from Jarmusch’s interest in the little moments of life that most of us take for granted.

If you think about taking a taxi, it’s something insignificant in your daily life; in a film when someone takes a taxi, you see them get in, then there’s a cut, then you see them get out. So in a way the content of this film is made up of things that would usually be taken out (9).

Night On Earth not only transforms this potentially mundane exercise into something special, but it also manages to avoid the hackneyed cliche of the world weary cabbie to present touching insights into the human condition with situations that run the entire emotional spectrum.

Night On Earth‘s structure would be a precursor to Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) which also played around with several simultaneously occurring stories and a large cast of characters but with more commercial sensibilities. That film’s success not only coincided with a lull in Jarmusch’s output, but also signaled a changing of the guard in the American independent scene. Jarmusch’s methodically paced, dry-witted comedies were no longer in vogue, having been replaced by a louder, flashier wave of new filmmakers with overt pop culture sensibilities.

Pictures from 'Night on Earth'

About Pedro Almodovar's film 'Volver'

Haunting Beauty-

The richness of Almodóvar's Volver.

By Dana Stevens (2006)

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the only directors who, a quarter-century into his career, remains an international brand name, his every new film anticipated and talked about the way Bergman's or Godard's or Antonioni's used to be. Volver ("To Return") is his latest in a long run of wonderful pictures. In it, his once-kitschy obsession with color and surface continues to deepen into a big, bold, almost painterly style.


Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) is a janitor at the Madrid airport who lives with her adolescent daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) and her drunken, lay-about husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre). Raimunda and her hairdresser sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas), return to their La Mancha village to visit their senile auntie (Chus Lampreave, who's played marvelous old biddies in several Almodóvar films). There, they learn that locals have spotted the ghost of their dead mother haunting the family home. But is this just village superstition, or does their mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), have something she still needs to accomplish on earth?


The fact that Irene soon shows up in Sole's car trunk with a suitcase full of flowered housedresses doesn't necessarily resolve the question of whether Volver believes in ghosts or not. What the film does believe in, clearly, is women. As in some of the director's earlier dramas, such as All About My Mother and The Flower of My Secret, this is a largely gynocratic world, where traditional women's concerns—a well-cooked meal, a bargain on groceries, the right haircut—matter deeply. An act of violence early on lends the film some thriller elements, and there's no shortage of goofy quick-hide-in-the-closet farce, but at heart Volver is a straight-up domestic drama, almost a telenovela, with revelations, reversals, and tearful reunions.



The director hasn't completely left camp behind, in that you have to have a high tolerance for melodrama to see past the apparent corniness of his plot twists. But even if you're allergic to cliché, don't roll your eyes too soon. This is lush, fertile, emotionally rich filmmaking: The ideas sneak up on you slowly, but the feelings clobber you like falling safes. No matter how jaded a viewer you are, the idea of a dead mother—or any lost object of love—reappearing out of the past to make peace with the living has an archetypal force that's hard to get around. When Irene's ghost (who's hiding from Raimunda because of an old quarrel between the two), overhears her daughter singing a gorgeous Gardel tango that she used to sing to her as a child, I guarantee you will not care that the director's trying to get you to cry. You'll just do it.

As much as it's a tribute to maternity and the feminine life force, Volver is a celebration of a way of life that's particularly Spanish. The portrait of village life, as personified by the plain-spoken neighbor Agustina (Blanca Portillo) is loving and precise: Though gossipy and insular, it's also a place where ghosts bake you batches of cookies to take home. And when Raimunda takes over the restaurant next-door to her house as a means of making extra money, the lavish meals she cooks are filmed with an avid, not to say greedy, pleasure. You know how some French movies all but force you to go out for red wine and cigarettes afterward? This one will send you to the nearest tapas bar for sure.

Penélope Cruz, who's been so painful to watch in English-language roles over the past few years, reminds us that she really can act; she just can't act speaking phonetic dialogue. In her native language she's witty, wry, and elegant—perhaps more Grace Kelly than Anna Magnani (who's explicitly referenced in the film when a character watches Visconti's Bellíssima on TV), but a delight to watch. And Carmen Maura, the former Almodóvar star who broke with the director after Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is superb as Irene, the wonderfully earthly ghost who makes cookies, giggles at her own farts, and helps shampoo the hair of her daughter's clients. The fact that, like Irene, Maura has come back 17 years later to make amends only adds another dimension to this story of loss, return, and the possibility of forgiveness.

Bananas and Electral: The historical importance of Bharatanatyam and its...

This is from the blog of a famous young Bharatanatyam dancer, Aranyani Bhargav. This blog post speaks of many issues that I am interested in highlighting for the documentary film I am making.

Bananas and Electral: The historical importance of Bharatanatyam and its...: "When Bharatanatyam is learnt, many dancers eventually see themselves as carriers of an ancient tradition that has been preserved by dancers ..."

Questions we never thought we would raise

The other day, my childhood friend Y and I had one of our marathon discussions. We realized that there are certain things about turning twenty-five that we just can't ignore, like many things that we turn our backs upon if it seems to disturb our constructed equilibrium.
We have also had a sort of snobbish pride about being liberated women- brandishing with the snide weapon of feminism with all our might. It's like when we used to think it was our right to walk across Bangalore city in the middle of the night, defiantly challenging the world. It was later that i realized that one had to (at times) settle for the conformity of things whether we liked it or not. No more dangerous night walks without a 'valiant' man to protect us and all that jazz!

One thing that i never expected would affect me was this whole concept of settling down and marrying. Recently I've come to realize that people (whom i never expected) have decided to throw caution to the winds and settle down- the thing that was dreaded back when we were in college didn't seem that unimaginable anymore.

So, anyway, as I was telling Y- there I was the other day, feeling emotionally raw about my relationship status and all that, when boom, right on cue my (extended) family stepped in to try and convince me to be open to the idea of 'looking around'. As my aunt and cousin brother put it, "Twenty-five is not young age anymore. If you don't get to it you'll miss the boat and won't get the best of the litter'!!!!  And for few moments (after having a laughing fit in my head) my aunts' words actually began seeping into my mind and a tiny voice somewhere started agreeing with her! I was shocked and horrified at my self for falling for their rehearsed speeches, and for a day I went around with a heavy feeling in my stomach and feeling old and vulnerable.
The next day ol' feminism was back with a familiar tone. Of course, women always get the wrong end of the stick. They are expected to get married earlier where as men have the liberty to wait and 'choose'. I was furious at the attack on the system of my equilibrium-ed life. It seemed like the big bad patriarchal system had finally come knocking or my door. I looked around and realized there were others with the same duvidha - "Oh so this is not only my thing. Phew!"

Then Y made a point that was equally alarming. Maybe the idea of settling down wasn't all that bad as we had always made it seem.I kept insisting that I didn't want to, but a few doubts kept creeping into my mind; No, I didn't want to end up all alone and no, it wasn't wrong that people around me were choosing to settle down. But I felt people had begun to change their attitudes; And I felt a pressure- that pressure that I was being left behind while people were moving in another direction.

I told Y that I felt that our liberal backgrounds and education sometimes ended up working against us in a sense- what if we were raised to believe that marriage was the be all and end all of everything- and that it was the mans duty to financially secure the house- then maybe life would have been simpler.
Theses confusions about wanting to explore would never have arisen; we would never have felt spoiled for choice!

'The Song of Wandering Aengus' by W.B. Yeats

"I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun."

The random exhibitionist that resides in us

Merriam Webster defines exhibitionism as: the act or practice of behaving so as to attract attention to oneself.

So basically every letter of every word typed out before you is a glaring example of this definition. Every time I type a word on a public forum such as this one, im painfully aware of its public nature.. and yet I feel a compelling boorish necessity to go on washing my laundry in the waters of the world wide web.

And this is us these days. Whether we are introverted social underdogs,  mad socialite butterflies, whether we’re squeamish in crowds, pseudo intellectuals, cat-lovers, post colonialists (the list can go on) we are all exhibitionists.

Ive seen a lot of people stick up their noses at the mere mention of blogging and yet they will ardently express their discontent on a prompt Facebook status update.

So yes.. here lies another example of random exhibitionism.

Cucurrucucu Paloma

http://youtu.be/bkAZJxDNj4Q

This is a beautiful song from Pedro Almodovar's film 'Hable con Ella' (Talk to Her) (2002). I watched the ilm last night and it still lingers in me. This song has become forever a part of me.


Here's an English Translation of the lyrics:

Cucurrucucu Paloma

They say that at nights

He simply went through by just crying

They say that he wasn’t eating

It simply didn’t suit him just taking (some food)

They swear that the sky itself

Was vibrating by listening his weeping

How he was suffering for her,

And even when he was dying he was calling at her:

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay he was singing

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay he was wailing

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay he was singing

He was dying from mortal passion.

That a sad dove

Very early in the morning will sing

At the lonely house

Whose small doors are widely open

They swear that this dove

Is no other (thing) than his soul,

That is still waiting

For the unhappy (woman) to return.

Cucurrucucú dove, cucurrucucú don’t cry.

The stones never, dove,

What will they now of loves?

Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,

Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,

Cucurrucucú, dove, don’t cry anymore

'The Word'

'Down near the bottom of the crossed-out list of things you have to do today,
between "green thread" and "broccoli" you find that you have penciled "sunlight."
Resting on the page, the word is as beautiful,
it touches you as if you had a friend and sunlight were a present he had sent you from some place distant as this morning -- to cheer you up, and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure is a thing, that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember? that time and light are kinds of love, and love is no less practical than a coffee grinder or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly without a clue but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile proclaiming that the kingdom still exists, the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
- to any one among them who can find the time, to sit out in the sun and listen.'
 
-- Tony Hoagland

There are some songs that you hear (or watch) once and they cling to you like an annoying child- no matter how much you try to coax them off! One such song is 'Oh hip-hopper mujhe pyaar to kar'. Damn! And now that I've pointed out the afore-mentioned song its already playing in my head full blast!

I had the misfortune of chancing upon a song on youtube by Alisha Chinnoy called 'Abhi Toh Mein Jawaan Hun'. It's a remixed version with full dhinchak booby video and all. So anyway, the song was watched out of my confounded curiocity and BAM it got lodged in my brain. And Thats not the worst of it!
The other day my aunt was visiting and ,as has been the recent trend with my extended family, sat me down to talk about how I should be open to the idea of settling down and getting married. I had the greatest difficulty in keeping a straight face through this conversation because guess what was playing out, full HD video and all in my head- "ABHI TOH MEIN JAWAAN HUN, ABHI TOH MEIN JAWAAN HUN!

Here's the video... its a riot! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b-TxgPbDkw

A sculpture I came accross in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha.

I took this picture while walking along the Dal Lake, Kashmir. I find it amusingly picture postcard-like.

I love the feel of this picture. Took it in Rajasthan..

Preludes- A poem by T.s. Eliot (one of my favourite poems)

I

The winter evening settles down


With smell of steaks in passageways.


Six o'clock.


The burnt-out ends of smoky days.


And now a gusty shower wraps


The grimy scraps


Of withered leaves about your feet


And newspapers from vacant lots;


The showers beat


On broken blinds and chimney-pots,


And at the corner of the street


A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.



And then the lighting of the lamps.


II


The morning comes to consciousness


Of faint stale smells of beer


From the sawdust-trampled street


With all its muddy feet that press


To early coffee-stands.






With the other masquerades


That time resumes,


One thinks of all the hands


That are raising dingy shades


In a thousand furnished rooms.




III


You tossed a blanket from the bed,


You lay upon your back, and waited;


You dozed, and watched the night revealing


The thousand sordid images


Of which your soul was constituted;


They flickered against the ceiling.


And when all the world came back


And the light crept up between the shutters,


And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,


You had such a vision of the street


As the street hardly understands;


Sitting along the bed's edge, where


You curled the papers from your hair,


Or clasped the yellow soles of feet


In the palms of both soiled hands.


IV


His soul stretched tight across the skies


That fade behind a city block,


Or trampled by insistent feet


At four and five and six o'clock;


And short square fingers stuffing pipes,


And evening newspapers, and eyes


Assured of certain certainties,


The conscience of a blackened street


Impatient to assume the world.




I am moved by fancies that are curled


Around these images, and cling:


The notion of some infinitely gentle


Infinitely suffering thing.




Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;


The worlds revolve like ancient women


Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

- T.S. Eliot

Thoughts at a traffic signal

Order is such a whispy fleeting concept, seemingly grounded. Chaos on the other hand can break out like a tidal wave with the smallest nudge. It can sweep over our realities and wash over our beliefs in a blink of an eye.

I think about this while stuck in the midst of a traffic jam. All those metallic machines with automotive parts, grinding and halting, fuming and impatient- my auto seeming feeble and fragile compared to the bulky Land Rover or the glistening Merc right next to me.

You also realize how vulnerable you are in that huge crowd of strangers. What if there was a person who came confidently, grabbed your bag right out of your hands and dissolved into the busy street right nearby. What can one do in such a situation but watch dumb-founded, stuck in that messy human-machine mesh.

Or when an apparently irrelevant discussion between two people is taken one step to far with a communal tinge. That one, mad spark between two people can collate into a communal catastrophe, a city burning, life-long friends turning against each other in the pretext of upholding a certain man-made identity-pride.

Chaos titillates Order in such a way- waiting behind a seemingly normal façade to jump out from the cracks and crevices when least expected. After all, Order is just a man-made concept, designed to make life run smoothly. But in whose mind was this or that order dreamed up and who has to bear the consequences of its fragility? Which made-to-order Order are we living by and at whose expense?

Deserted spaces in our backyards


Deserted spaces of our lives

Deserted places of our dream worlds

The deserted spaces of our minds



deserted spaces



Deserted spaces of our cities

Deserted spaces of our streets

Deserted spaces of our doorframes

Deserted spaces of our childhood fantasies



Deserted spaces



Deserted spaces between our bodies

Deserted fingertips, deserted toes

Deserted footprints, deserted mindsets

A deserted space that nobody knows



Deserted spaces…

 
-V.C.

"And don't forget who in you, in this dense forest, was lost and found"

-'Fados' by Carlos Saura

Stop-motion animation

I have been working on a stop-motion animation film for a while. It is such an interesting yet challenging process because it demands a lot of patience. Stop-motion animation involves taking many photographs of moving inanimate objects or figures and putting them together in order to create the illusion of movement.


We have been working on the script in detail and I’ve come to learn a great deal about the nuances of script writing- each loop-hole and dramatic element is considered and worked on if necessary. The craftiness of this medium makes it unique in the field of animation. It involves 3d miniature sets and figures made from a range of materials.

The last short stop motion film a group of us made for a curtain raiser of a film festival was made by trial and error. It turned out to be pretty good but by the end of it I was having dreams about the million tiny movements we hadto make of the figures before each picture was clicked. each of those pictures, when edited together created the illusion that those figures moved around on their own. Stop-click, stop-click was all i dreamt for the next few days!
The results are usually amazing though!

Why must the little buds fold over
                                   each other,
The white sheets of the bed crumpled
                                       and restless,
Listless sleep and the nights' mind so full
                               of fear, love, doubt.

I am many things, I am nothing.
at once lovely, at once fearful,
at once a bickering lover.

I want to question, to go forth into
the lonliness of exploding life
and hold That in my arms and caress it.
But it is fleeting, it runs...

Thoughts

Life has so many twists and turns... It's like a whirlwind of confusion- a glass of chilled champagne with thousands of bubbles struggling their way to the top only to burst into the atmosphere with amazing zest!

How does one make sense of this world? Life is amazing for sure... but how do you go about it in a fulfilling way, is the hard part.
Being sad is just an emotion that can be dealt with like a spoilt child; give it enough attention and it will leave you alone for enough time to live, love and experience yourself for just a fraction of time, though once it's back you have to nurse it no matter how much you hate its presence.

The past and the present don't seem to agree with each other but they try hard to ignore each others presence... it's almost funny to see their obstinate beings not daring to stare each other in the eye.