God the heat.

I've been licking the fridge clean of all kinds of yummy summer fruits. Aam, well, of course, but also talshash and lichoo - such chastely pale watery jellyish things.


While writing songs - rather heavy on the lyric side, alas - I occasionally stop and think, why do I even need a defined 'chorus'? Or for that matter a 'bridge'? But the basics are basics for a good reason. The real challenge of songwriting is not even the songwriting part. And yes, one of the songs is dedicated to an oddly charming, quite alarming man with a disproportionately large head on his queenly shoulders. It promises to be by turns lustful, worshipful, scathing and cold. (I've been learning from the Wainwright-McGarrigle school of the politics of lovehate.)


I was almost forgetting. Last night I watched an entire episode of a reality TV show! It was called 'The Cut' - you know there's plenty of design school wank to be found where people have 'clothing artist' after their name. These shows never fail to amaze me - we have here successful (well, one measure of success at least), smart young people who are getting The Big Opportunity to prove to the world their successfulness and smartness, but all they manage to prove is their (callow) youth. Tommy Hilfiger (did I spell that right?) is the Donald Trump, here, as the ugly corporate panjandrum with hair that would be ashamed to grow on the arse of an... ass. And the tagline? Is the brilliant, cutting 'You're out of style. Take the runway.'

Um! Let's see. There were pushy, desperate, people, of course. Poor teamwork, predictably. On one team there was a straight white woman who had to work with a gay black man;she harrassed him and in doing so made an revolting clown of herself. On internationally broadcast telly. People must have really fucked up brains if they can take so unquestioningly to heart that all publicity is good publicity.

I have a tremendous distaste for any smart successful young person who can say without collapsing into self-deprecating humour that they are the best and they always win and they don't know what being second is. Crass, crass, crass. But then reality TV was never supposed to be about reality - it's about TV, and this sort of earnest pronouncement is good for a laugh. Because suspense is impossible in a medium where every day brings a new cliffhanger.

But this is old hat. I missed this week's 'House', bah.

'... of nothing in particular'

I looked at the first Sin City book today. The story bored me to death but I was hooked to the gorgeous stark art. Come to think of it, I thought the artwork was unnecessarily fussy. Comic geeks, feel free to kill me for the sacrilege.

I have a Holy Bible now. The inside cover says

Presented to :-
Dr B.D. Agarwalla F.R.C.S.
4 Bishop Lifnoy Road
Cal-20.

With best of compliments of :-
Michael Bhattacharjia
Gideon Association.
C/o "Waldorf"
24-B Park St. Calcutta 16.

Today was a beautiful day. Today was a beautiful day in Kolkata. Today was.

A gem! Truly, a gem!

Found in a PoCo theory book:
... whereas Western gynocriticism heralds the pen(is) as responsible for fathering texts and the female ink/milk as a possible lubricant for the blank page.

I read gender theory and literary theory and it's a lot more fun than you'd think, but the sheer hilarity of it shines through, sometimes. As it does up there.


One of the recent Da Vinci Hullaballoo articles somewhere quotes flamboyantly gay actor Ian McKellen. What? Ian is one of the least flamboyant actors around. He brings the snark, you idiot journo, prepare to be decimated. But it reminded me of how much of a cliche it's turned into, like troubled rockstar, only more pervasive. If you're gay you are by default flamboyant. If you're straight and you regularly talk to the press about your sexual exploits, you're not labelled flamboyantly hetero (Eva Longoria, I'm looking at you). The undertone is, however, that 'flamboyance' is somehow disturbing. The world likes its gays withdrawn, depressed, closeted, dead. Woe unto them if ever they express a lack of shame or guilt! Of course, Lesbians Don't Exist, except in the liberated (COUGH) fantasies of straight men, so there are no flamboyant lesbians. But wait, what does it then mean whenever the players of the Brazilian football team are written up as 'the flamboyant striker' etc etc. ? Oooh.


When I was at school, a lot of girls who watched the football World Cup were mocked by the boys for supporting teams because the players were attractive. I call bullshit. First of all, boys, there happens to be something aesthetically delightful about grown men piddling around on grass in shorts and translucent jerseys clamouring after a BIG BALL. (Incidentally, going by the spirit of the PoCo book sentence I quoted, perhaps the reason why goalies are so frequently villified is that they're in the sole feminised role in their team? Their job is to resist, if in vain, penetration? I like this little theory of mine.) Second! Make fun of your fellow fans only when you've pulled that twice-life-size David Beckham poster off your own wall.

You can crush us, you can bruise us, but you have to answer to...

Increasing reluctance to reveal much of my thoughts. The world filtered through my ego, slick/shoddy rainbows in puddles of petrol.

I've been drawing and writing, though. And have rediscovered the Clash.

So. Hello, of sorts. Recommend a contemporary work of fiction in either Bangla or Hindi. Sharp, smart, bitter, possibly on crack. Go on, I've bookworms burrowing my brain through and they demand tastier morsels.




Beastly!

With Gaaaa-wd on our saaaa-ide

I am ITCHING to skip straight to the Johnny Cash.

Reader, let it be understood without any doubt remaining whatsover that music is above almost everything else, for me. Even above literature. There, I said it. No big deal, really, multitasking brains and opposable thumbs, y'know. But still. I can't claim to have heard more music than anybody or the coolest bands or anything - and I don't care to, that sort of declaration has nothing to do with music and everything to do with the distended, diseased ego even so-called 'music experts' often fall prey to.

However, my musicobsession should not be construed as indicative of an indiscriminately open mind. I am willing to try anything twice - I will make the effort I sometimes I do not even make for books or for people - but I will not stand being talked down to - my experience as a musician and a listener deserves simple human respect, and a little more from hacks who take the easy route and say, for example, oh, you don't get Jimi Hendrix, you're a loser.

I don't get Jimi Hendrix. What does that mean? Precisely that. I don't get Jimi Hendrix. What it doesn't mean: that I'm somehow 'inferior' or 'ignorant' because I don't enjoy his music.



Oh, and by the way: the next person who says that Queen the band are 'not worth talking about' needs to... do either of the following:
1) Listen to their damned music already. Don't open your mouth before you've opened your ears, idiot.
2) Accept that this is their own opinion and that it does not allow them to stomp childishly over people who like Queen. Music is not about power, or at least it should not be and why perpetrate when you can progress?



I think Frank Zappa is the shit. It's ok by me if you think it's shit. You want to discuss it? Let's agree to disagree and START FROM THERE. Let's shake hands. Or just shake your hips. Music is fun. It's not your kingdom and bands are not your phantom army. Listen and let listen.

Five things.

1. My mother apparently watches Animax. I'm speechless.

2. I am making a new mixtape. This one's for my useless arse of a brother. Haven't planned the tracklist yet, but Janis Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz' has to be in there somewhere. Because, as we all know, it's a song of great social and political import. I am a potentially compulsive maker of mixtapes. I don't make them for people I like or love, I make them for people who want to listen to new things. Surprisingly few people, would you believe it. And this puts me in an awkward position, because my brother does not want to hear new things. He wants to vegetate under the influence of Eurotrashy technotrica. I'm ashamed of him :[ Or maybe they think I'm going to stuff their ears with artery-splitting industrial rock. Which, for the record, I rarely listen to, and only two or three bands. Mixtaping is so horribly indie, but I get an enormous satisfaction out of introducing music to people. I like to hear things like: 'Wow, I thought she was a a certain kind of singer, you know what I mean? But actually she's amazing.' This is the best, though: 'I listened to it, and I want more!' Loyal readers (yeah, right), feel free to ask for one of these spifftacular compilations, and I'll come up with one sometime after the first week of June.

3. 'My' room in this flat is an utter downer. One wall is all desk and shelves, another is tedious porcelain and glass goods I am told would make us thousands at the auctioneer's. Another is window and door. The one wall I have relatively free is badly lit. I've decided to put up a noticeboard there, to pin photos, drawings, reminders, quotes and other miscellany on. Is that a very teenage thing to do? I'm afraid I can't care. Waking up to the sight of Morrissey waggling bouquets of flowers and wearing one of his blinding 80s shirts would be heavenly. And I'll finally remember to do all those chores I'm supposed to.

4. Last week I saw my first Pasolini film - his take on the Canterbury Tales. It was hilarious, it was porny, it had Ninetto, it was - well, almost everything I expected a Pasolini film to be. I'm actually more familiar with his literary work - read his first two novels and many of his poems in translation. And of course I've read about him. I don't think I was prepared for the level of slapstick sexviolence, although I think I took to it better than, oh, twenty- or thirty-odd other students in the AV room did. A lot of nervous giggles and meaningful silences in the air. The last sequence, with demons in lurid body-paint shitting out churchmen and welcoming the new denizens of Hell with some thorough buggering, nearly had me in splits. And that's interesting, because the joke of this film, the comedy if you will, was so blackly malicious it wasn't really funny anymore. Ah, don't you love tortured avant-garde cultural icons. They're there to make you feel better about yourself. If you dare.

5. Bob Dylan is gonna be a radio jockey. Cue news items starting: Hey Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me... There're rumours of a new biopic on him featuring five or six different actors as Dylan. Very cool idea, especially as it seems they're not going for physical resemblance. The article also said that Julianne Moore is going to be in it, but not as Dylan. Bah, why not? A woman playing the Sainted Not-yet-dead White Male Bard of Classic Folkrock - that would be cooler than Antarctica. Although let it be stressed that these are rumours - which when Dylan is concerned are cranked out with unholy speed and regularity.

mapless

you've conjured the snow. now make
a circle, inhale
with caution. learn this tongue
of precious metal. do not
call, for it will come
in its own time: that sullen
wing, that slow reverb.

I just wanted to tell you

that if I were any more in touch with my inner child I'd probably be a paedophile.

Here, have this.





Also, the Tim Supple Dream was seriously delish. And had some seriously dreamy and funny actors, too. For some reason I misread the brochure and thought we were going to walk out onto the greens with the play. That would have been quite interesting, though.

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.