You saw it here first.

What is Dishwalla's 'Opaline', sonically, but sweetly angstful Calipop washed with electric guitars too sensible to explode? Nevertheless I listen. It's great morning music.

I've been working and took a tea break to read the newspaper. And. And. And. I'm a little shocked, because Brokeback Mountain is in town. Now that I can go to see it I'll hate it, I'll hold it up standards and find it lacking, I'll fall off my seat laughing at Gyllenhaal's 70s porno moustache. I will blink a little stupidly because I expected Owen Wilson to pop out of nowhere (because Owen Wilson would be my first choice for this movie, I don't have to explain why). But Canada, she acts with madness in her method. I know this simply by looking at the stills. And yet I know her beauty is the beauty of motion. She has something of Middle-earth, so sentient is she. Oh my, Brokeback made it this far.

I wish I'd read Kannada literature before. In a way, because I still haven't, because I don't know the language. Sensitive, these issues. Everything is so interesting.

Unpleasant reminder

that I am all too human: I completely forgot about the double period with ADG on mediaeval Christianity. While the classes were going on I was tucking happily into a book of poetry at the DL. Ragini had completely forgotten as well, and there's nobody else in Ugh One with Chaucer and Langland.
I can't quite believe it. Missing one class wouldn't be too horrible, I suppose. Missing two... ye gods and little green fishes, my mind is going.

I was petting a George Harrison book - lavishly laved with photographs, of course - at one of those swanky chainbookstores and realised that to me, as to countless other fans, the Beatles don't represent anything particularly radical. They're comforting and familiar. Here there be perils, such as questions about art, scepticism over a celebrity-philia that falsely equates pictures of rockstars with the contents of family albums in terms of emotional value, and the simple fact that, horror of horrors, this has nothing to do with the music.
Screw that, I say. I'd have bought the damn thing, but the price reminded me of the real world and nasty things like capitalism and professional leechcraft. Haha.

The personal is political. And vice versa.

I put my caramel coloured shirt on the wrong way. I noticed while pouring myself a glass of water, and cannot be bothered to put it on right now.




Filling out forms is a bit of a nightmare, because I'm always afraid I'll write something that'll disqualify the wrong document. One little detail... Reminds me of Algebra exams, where invariably I would finish with flourish - after having written two x instead of two x squared. For someone who loves details in so many things I'm dangerously casual. So my endsem exam form is still tucked away in my notebook.

Thinking about the semester that's about to end I'm terribly disappointed. Not in myself. Careful and frequent analyses of the situation, and I'm convinced I've been getting a lot of really bad vibes off the two core courses. Correction: the way the professors have handled them. Yes, I'm criticising professors. I've been reading about education and thinking about it since I was in junior school; now that I'm in college, the real fun's just begun.

So it goes like this: Postcolonialism is exciting and vitally important, but there are too many texts, not enough theory, not enough time. Much of it is new to me, some of it I already knew, but as I see it, the point of this is to increase awareness and enable us to articulate. Instead, we've been going through subtle or not-so-subtle guilt therapy sessions. As for Literature and the Other Arts, our esteemed course leader's favourite hobby... wait, it's actually his profession... is to demean his students; his most visible tactic, to tell them to think for themselves but really expect them to agree with him on everything; his catchphrase, 'you should all know this by now'.

'The educational system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give.' -- [Pierre Bourdieu]

I'm not going to add a little disclaimer here - no offence meant! I'm no expert I'm just giving my opinion! Really he's the greatest guy ever! I'm going to say: since when was university teaching about telling students almost all the time that they're stupid, they're shallow, they don't know anything, even their 'own culture'? Why does he think we turn up for classes, participate even at the risk of being the target of yet another needless insult to our basic intelligence, bother to read up on topics not within the confines of the syllabus? Perhaps I'm alone in feeling this way. I hope I'm not, because that would be, well, doubly troubling.

Because there is something too easy about this brand of cynicism, this kind of reckless sarcasm. There's something loathesome and self-congratulatory about it. I'm not upset because I'm not doing fabulously this semester. I'm upset because these two courses are amazing, or would have been, and I could have finished my college experience remembering them above all others simply because of how radical they are. Clearly I won't. I've been painting more than reading. Thank you, professor, you've indirectly (oh, the blinding irony!) led me to take up again something I had neglected for years.



Being unempowered and brainwashed and loserly as I am, I shall end this post with a picture of the beautiful, always surprising Peter Murphy, because beauty is balm for the soul.



And yes, those are fishnets.

Shanti.

Creak squirr yaaaawn

Suddenly I want to go to Turkey. It snows there, in some parts, sometimes, as I've read, but I'm sure it's just as elaborately stifling as... here. Or perhaps not. To sustain such a fantasy one must improve on its basic mechanisms. The same principle as any 'plausible' fiction.

Sometime this week I'll take a whole day off, sleep on it. Maybe I'll come up with something interesting. But it doesn't work like that.

I still remember how personally cheated I felt when I read that what they call an eye transplant is merely a corneal transplant. All our pudding men crumble. A dab of icing, and his smile falters. His body is a feast of ants. We feign surprise, although they have only followed the path through our clumsy walls.

I'm getting addicted to Animal Planet again. Watched a documentary about crocodiles in Mauritania yesterday. Field-toned naturalists who don't hump animals and screech about how beeeyoooiful they are - most refreshing.

One two three check

My sketchblog is up.

Fannish nostalgia and general soppiness.

turn your face to the green world
use well the days

I don't apologise for the fact that, despite everything, I'm a Ringer. Tolkien geek. Wishful Middle-earthian. Potential wearer of Frodo Lives! buttons.

Because, come on. Frodo lives. Seriously, really, truly does.

'All the water of Bombay', hahaha

The 'Filmi Shakespeare' paper was quite interesting - although I'm not surprised at my utter ignorance. Movies don't like me very much. Even really good ones. They shy away from me and mine. Let's hope frustrated cinephiles in theatres across Kolkata never find out.

A friend has been telling me all sorts of horrific gossip about Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst and such. I'm really into gossip these days - listening more than spreading, I'll admit.

Tomorrow is a very special day. It's not on any conventional calendars. It's silly and magnificent and pathetic and profound, and I'll probably make a post about it.

Have rediscovered the music of Cher. She's one of those pop stars who simultaneously think they're better than they really are/are better than they seem to think. The first song I heard by her was her cover of Marc Cohen's (I think it was this way round...) 'Walking in Memphis'. Since then I've had the mixedfortune of listening to several of her other hits, often accompanied by puzzling music videos, where often she resembles fantasy/scifi heroines from alien worlds. I'm convinced this is something pop culture theorists have not looked into too closely yet. I've even seen 'Moonstruck'. I think vocoders are evil (except when used by Imogen Heap) and should be kept out of her reach. I wonder how many facejobs it took her to look like a mummy at the far end of 50. That was not a typo.
It has been said that, after a nuclear holocaust, only cockroaches and Cher will survive.
I hope she goes on making guilt-inducingly addictive pop songs well into her 80s. Because I'd pick Cher over cockroaches any day. Although I love cockroaches and harbour them in my home as if they were beloved pets.

In case this has not been passed around many times already.

Take kep! - Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog.
Includes the most creative Brokeback Mountain spoof in recent history. Or in all its brief history.

Taken out of its filmic context 'I wish I knew how to quit you' sounds rather less emotional. But what about: 'I WOLDE I KNEWE HOW OF THEE I MIGHT BE QUITTEN!'

Heee.

My Perfect Man. Hearts and flowers optional.

A while back I got tagged for this meme.

MY PERFECT MAN.

It's impossible to write or read that phrase without wanting to cringe. Not just the heterosexist assumption -or the dubious status of that word 'perfect'. It's just one of those sentences, along with 'I can explain' and 'I accidentally pushed a marble up my right nostril when I was sixteen', that are inherently embarrassing. Fact.

So I couldn't decide whether I'd like to declare that my perfect man doesn't exist because nobody's good enough, or ironically list every pedantic requirement I can spontaneously concoct, or simply post another picture of Hugh Laurie looking stubbly and pale and intellectual and distant and sexy, or just talk about MY PERFECT WOMAN instead.

All of those would be equally do-able.

But for once I'm taking a meme more seriously than perhaps it could ever be worth. I'm going to tell you what would make a man my perfect man.

Being (pro-)feminist.

'Man is a political animal', they write in textbooks all the time. Interchangeable with 'rational', 'scientific', 'social'. The curious thing about this rational, scientific, social, political animal is that he has constantly proved himself, to carry over the generalising 'he', a venomous, appalling, needlessly violent, malicious, murderous WOMAN-HATER.

The bad news, which is not really news at all, being that even men who are not overtly misogynistic contribute more or less directly to the hysterical hatred of the 'other' (sex) to the point where people can write books with titles like 'Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' and be taken seriously. That's one piddly little example. I could spend my lifetime listing others and I'd never exhaust the inventory.

I don't need to, because there's a handy little word to effectively sum it up: patriarchy.

So that the most radical and convincing thing a man could ever do, in the context of this perfect-man-for-me-shit, is to be, unequivocally, actively, painfully, wholly consciously be counted of his own free (hah) will of this number, this thing called 'feminism' that is so reviled, so un- (as opposed to mis-) understood.

Because hair colour, sense of humour, taste in music? Those are all negotiable. Or even non-negotiable. Those are all small things, secondary things compared to this.

This is what is important. If you think I'm exaggerating beyond all hyperbole, and that it's really very simple, and you can name lots of men you, why, personally know! who qualify for this ONE criterion, think again. You can probably count them on one hand (or finger, if we're reading by joints). If at all.

Art Supplies R Us.

I wish I could emulate that mirrored 'r' shape here.

There are some people who ooze complacence but haven't the slightest idea exactly what they're dealing with. One of the shop assistants at Kumar's Concern - I've always known he was a smirky patronising wet turd, and I should have remembered that that combination is always inherently pathetic. I want watercolour inks, you walking talking oil slick, and that means watercolour inks. What are watercolour inks used for? Why, what a profound question. I believe they do what they say on the label - then again, how dare I presume to tell art store people about art supplies?

I'm not a cheerful believer in the 'customers are always right' school of thought, but I don't think I ever signed up for the one that goes 'the people running the shop are less likely than anybody else within a ten mile radius to be an arsehole'. He came up, at any rate, with something called 'photo colour'. Then someone else made one of those faces condescending old men always find it necessary to make at younger women and said he had never heard of watercolour inks. Well, isn't that marvellous.

-----

In PoCo we've moved on to Caribbean poetry. I think we had two classes on the Cambodia issue. Pitfalls of the semester system, yes, but sometimes I have the feeling that the B.A. English course at J.U. is like Englitt: A Crash Course. We're certainly breaking speed records. Then the scramble for exams. Perhaps I ought to be sitting with my nose in a book twenty hours a day. Or agonising over my dangerous, insulting involvement in the perpetration of stereotypes and spreading the poison of a colonised mindset. O may my poor brain not break under the pressure.

Have wiped two years' worth of dust off compoota screen.

Cannot believe how shiny all the pictures look now!

I love Ray Davies' voice so so much.

I need my Kinks fix, this weekend. I listen to these beautiful songs and feel a little angry that people hardly talk about them. It's like the 60s canon has only room for four or five people, and everyone else is 'not as good'. As I discover more and more of these bands, I'm a little shocked by how many of them are generally, criminally neglected. And as the header says, the voice. Not even the Beatles had a voice like this, a voice I hear and immediately want to sing along with.

Currently stuck on 'Waterloo Sunset'. It is love.




TV is fascinating. Just yesterday I caught two very hmmworthy shows.


One: America's Next Top Model. Because tv, especially this brand of 'reality tv', is so carefully scripted, it's amazing how much shit people are capable of spouting. So we have six girls travelling to Japan to be judged on their 'commercial value', literally and literally.

One of the things they have to do is act for an advertisement for some kind of Japanese food. One of the girls can't make herself swallow it; she ducks under the table and spits the food out into a glass. Reality tv is all about moments like these. As the judges put on various faces of malicious delight barely disguised as horror, you get the sense, shit, this girl's in trouble. And she is. Tyra Banks, who hosts the programme, looking remarkably like a sour blanched b-movie vampire, shakes her head, says things: 'As a model you have to respect the product.' The others chip in gravely, clearly enjoying it. 'A model has to have humility.' 'You have to CONNECT with the product, you have to convince people.' And, here is the crucial part, 'You want to be a top model, you gotta suck it up.'

To be a top model, you have to suck it up. Because that proves your dedication. Your determination, your desperation, your reason for being.

As a model, you have to respect the product. Because as a model, you're no better than a product. Bow down before it, for it provides your livelihood. Don't shit where you eat- eat what you shit.

But wait. There's more. The Japanese client, who doesn't speak English, consults gravely with his translater, who informs the girl that she has 'insulted the client, Japanese food and culture and the Japanese people'. When that girl spat out a lump of something she couldn't swallow because it made her gag, she obviously didn't realise the symbolic portentiousness of that simple act. She failed to grin and bear it. THUS SHE INSULTED JAPAN AND ITS PEOPLE AND ITS FOOD OMG!!! Now, I'm all for certain forms of what is dismissed as 'political correctness', but the line is sometimes quite fine. This is crossing it. Does anyone with two brain cells to rub together seriously watch a tv commercial and assume that whichever actor/model is DOING THEIR JOB by HAWKING that product loves it and uses it all the time? That is fucking ridiculous. The tv ads/ reality show industry is based on lies, on hypocrisy. It is so funny that it's not funny at all, that the already dehumanised human model is supposed to bow to THE PRODUCT.

And hey, I hate sushi. Maybe I shouldn't go to Japan, because if I did I'd be polluting the country with my anti-Japan sushi-hating. Hahaha.



Two: It's the Christian channel! And, gasp, we are looking at... Biblical muppets! Longhaired Texan Samson is being milked of his secretz by falsetto-voiced Delilah! But before you laugh - cuuut. It's really a little cowboy lad watching them muppets on the teevee. And his mother is not amused. 'CHORES COME FIRST', she declares, busting a few blood vessels as she faces her lazy bum of a son. The son is not amused. He whines. Then he goes out and cuuut. Little cowboy lad meets littler cowboy lad. The following hilarious exchange occurs:

Little cowboy lad: Let's go down to the old mine-shaft.
Littler cowboy lad: But I'm afraid we'll get caught!
[they go anyway]

ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I'M THINKING? Damn straight.
Or not so straight. Giggle.

I AM A RAPPER NOW.

A rapper-in-training, that is. I don't have street cred and I don't have bling, but who cares when all you need is RAP?

O blaring trumpets of atonal sapphire perfectibility! O curmudgeonly cormorants. Beware, I say. Beware, as Gaiman made someone say somewhere in a grungy comic book, of the ideas of March!

I lied.

All of this is a lie. Or multiple lies, symbioticking. Nobody knows me, least of all myself.

We will stop with that. Our important public service message ends there. To proceed.



I love 'House'. I love Hugh even more. He looks so different and yet not different at all, here. You know there's hope for mainstream teledrama yet when a character can be this disconcerting. Oh his gorgeous gorgeous bloodshot eyes.

I'm listening to the 'Brokeback Mountain' soundtrack. I'm thinking of starting over, none of this hopeless eraser-jobbing. Rather palimpsests. The heart of the onion. An onion by any other name. Skinned deep.

To proceed.

I found myself listening to the Sgt Pepper album almost 24/7 recently. Does anyone else feel an inexplicable urge to turn the volume down when side 2 starts? We were taaaaaalking, shhh shh sh-sh-SHUT UP. It's a little embarrassing.

Anyway, here is the sort of thing I do in class while industrious others are busy taking notes or staring and nodding at the professor.