Exorcising the Klimtmonster.

Didn't think about this. Argh. How expensive is gold leaf??

Oh but I may as well try and catch the wind...

He's like a hobbit. He even looks like Billy Boyd. It's silly-making, to hear this floofy pixiehobbitminstrel burring about black-eyed native girls. We all know what boys like him do in Mexico.


So I voted. A deformed purple exclamation mark on my left index fingernail proves that yes, indeed, I voted. What is there to say? I stood in line for half an hour early in the morning. It was breezy and nice. I said to my father, 'Look! A cat!' and pointed up at the ninth floor of a high-rise. My father did, and gravely replied, 'Your eyesight must really be failing. That's a pigeon.' I suppose I did wonder for a moment how the cat could swivel its head like it did... But I was far from the only person present with failing eyesight.
A little old lady with frizzy triangular hair scolded her not so little old husband as other old ladies snickered or looked away. The first polling officer outdid many of the hard-of-hearing voters: he was completely deaf. 'I haven't voted before.' 'WHAT?' 'Here's my library card.' 'WHAT?' The second polling officer was hard of seeing, and succeeded in detaching entirely my photo from said library card because he couldn't find the stamp. Eh.
I'm almost sure the machine I voted on was rigged. But no matter. It's not that kind of democracy anyway, and judging from the hysterical news coverage later in the day 'first-time voting' is overrated beyond all reason. As I said, no matter. My parents bribed me with yummy greasy fried breakfast; after which I promptly fell asleep, waking up not before three hours had passed.


'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Reread this last night, am going to the Tim Supple production later today. I'm quite excited by the prospect, although like any narrow-minded middle-class maiden I am a little worried about having to travel so late in the evening. Worse than any monstrous mouse, I tell you.

I was in the room when my mother was watching one of the Bangla TV programmes - you know the kind, with segments on cooking and health and law and fashion. The latter my mother watches to 'check out the competition', as I like to call it. Today's fashion segment featured a stinking rich, greasily complacent woman boasting about how she gives jobs to 'underprivileged children'. Um... does she know how creepy that sounds? My mother told me about this fifteen year old girl. She was hired by a boutique owner to do extensive embroidery on a sari. It was the girl's first real job, and did it with complete enthusiasm, staying up nights to finish it by lamplight. When she was finished, the boutique owner gave her... thirty rupees. The girl went home and cried because she would have thrown the money in the woman's face except when you're poor thirty rupees is better than nothing and it was - it is a form of prostitution but what can you do? I can't not hate these women with their fluorescent orange hair (a hundred henna treatments all gone wrong), with their mincing little-girl voices, with their expensive jewellery, going on these fucking 'women's shows' and making their name out of someone else's labour, the someone else invariably cheated out of her deserved pay.


Submitted my L&OA paper yesterday. It's twelve pages of doublespaced but solid prose. I'm quite sure it won't be boring, although I felt a little twinge of regret looking at everyone else's papers, all prettily foldered-up, with pictures to complement the text. I'm not big on the funky fonts, though, this is a paper and not a fan website. I have great hopes for my paper, I'll work on it some more.

Rap, or, I'm Not Kidding.

Re: my new fascination for rap as a form. I say rap as a 'form' and not as (misguided definiton of) 'lifestyle', because I have seen pictures of stupid NRI gangsta-rappa-wannabes and I cannot understand why people should wish to ghettoise themselves. I will be honest and admit that what I dig most about music is melody. And I haven't been listening to any rap lately. I also know very little about the history of rap beyond what was mentioned by the ubiquitous Professor Lal in one of the Lit & Other Arts classes. By the way, I like the name 'the ubiquitous Professor Lal', it has a lovely gangsta feel to it, I shall call him that from now on.

I took an interest in the work of Tupac Shakur and of Notorious B.I.G. - see, any art form or instution will be rife with Dead Males, whether Black or White. No I will not quote Michael I-love-children Jackson, thank you. Who else? Hmm, does Eminem count? I think him tiresome, immature and masturbatory to a disturbing extreme. Yes, and of course Public Enemy's 'Fears of a Black Planet', whose cover I once spectacularly misread as 'Fears of a Black Plantaganet' (I blame History cramming, but it's still charming).

Let me put it this way. I am going to listen to rap this summer and contemplate how a young brown middle-class feminist can appropriate and transfigure that experience. I have been writing rap, and because the internet is a crazy place and I am a crazy person I shall record my songs in .mp3 and force my friends to listen to them. Thence, naturally, to a lucrative record deal. Don't expect any gyrating women in the video, though - oh, all right, I'll throw in some dashingly pretty multiracial dancer boys. Happy? Good.

It is like a vacation.

Vocative.

O ... o. o. o.

The stench from the canal.

Only connect.

Everything is wonderful.

I have to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Thank you for the teenage angst.

I don't dig the sleazy businnessman/sex tourist look you've got going on, and your obsession with your testicles is about as bizarre as your militant vegetarianism, and to be fair I don't even like most of your songs, but there's just something about you, you silly old man. I will hear you sing a cover version of Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive' before I die. Or you do. Dear me, I'm so cruel. In any case, you shall have some of these digestive biscuits, for I have too many.

Endsems may be delayed by about a week because of voting. So I hope and pray. Who needs one and a half months of summer holidays anyway?

I have to buy at least five books, all college-related. This decision made after coming to the sad conclusion that I cannot borrow them, and it would be impractical in the extreme to make photocopies. It would be so nice to have a scholarship. Bah.

A man of means by no means

Reading by candlelight is interesting. If I'm really caught up in the book, the flickflickshadowflick makes it such a sensuous experience, even if the book itself is, say, Jung's 'Modern man in search of a soul' (you know what depths of despair a person is plumbing when they dredge up that title). So, yes, summer is here. Summer in Kolkata is always going to remind me of woesome things like mortality, and winter of freedom and warmth and wellbeing. Oh the joys of varying perspectives.





'Brokeback Mountain' on Sunday, the cheapest ticket, which was a meagre one-thirty rupees. My pockets have phantom pain. It was beautiful. It wasn't perfect, but if I put aside the criticism and consider what it means to me, it means a tremendous lot. As it did to many other viewers, I am sure. This may or may not include the group of giggling high school boys sharing the same row at Inox Forum (all dressed in virginal white...). I'm in half a position now to contribute, if belatedly, to the BBM-vs-Crash debate, but I don't particularly care for the Oscars (anyone in their right mind will tell you it's all about the gowns, and even the gowns are getting ugly), and after everything I've read about 'Crash' I can't come away wanting to see it instead of BBM a second time - or even saving up for 'V for Vendetta'.



Speaking of theatres and films. Apparently it's unusual, for someone like me (read 'J.U.D.E student') to not be a regular theatre-and-or-cinema- goer. Apparently this means I am stodgy (what I heard before college as, inevitably, 'bhalo meye, podashona kore, disco-fisco-e jaye naa') and lead a sad, sad life. I do actually have a sad, sad life, but not sad-as-in-pathetic.
There were some screenings of the 'right' kind of films, recently, that I saw posters of and wanted to go to. I'm talking about the Fell Beast Fellini. I should have gone. But I had no time. Horror of horrors, that must mean she's cramming for exams that are, well, a whole month away!
I've suspected this for a while: people who are ambitious, even aggressively so, but do not go around tooting and tuttling trumpets - there's this popular assumption that they're so radical they must be not radical at all. The seventh circle of Pomo hell. Occasionally, I admit, I feel like promoting my various talents (how many people in college who know me know that I sing? I paint? I swim?), but screw that. I'm going to do things my way, and not because I need the most impressive resume/a raving fanclub/whatever. That's what punk is all about.

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.