Safe Havens Come in All Guises

The Awl, which has interesting reading habits especially of the British kind, linked to this letter (scroll down to “Keep Me In!”) to an editor from a man who’s been repeatedly hospitalized for suicidal depression:

I have been in and out of NHS mental hospitals for more than forty years. The first, following a suicide attempt, was Bethlem Royal, the old Bedlam, by then moved to a huge semi-rural site near Beckenham. On arrival my first feeling was of immense relief; I was in a safe place and didn’t have to worry any more… The fact that discharge was never mentioned merely increased my feeling of safety; when after six months I felt ready to face the world again I had no idea how to arrange to be discharged and was a touch afraid that if I asked they might try to keep me in – ‘section’ me, as it’s called. So one day I just walked out. No one came after me.

It really was the best thing I’ve read this nothing-happen day. And in a weird way, it reminded me of The Yellow Wallpaper.

Which is not so unusual, I suppose. I don’t know if this holds true for men, but for the women I know at least, it’s one of those stories that have a profound effect on you:

If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal – having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus – but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

 

Twat For Twit

I’m a few days late with this story – mainly because I can’t believe it is a story. Something about Shashi Tharoor using metaphors while tweeting. Yup, it’s as stupid as it sounds.

Twitter: bringing down governments in Iran, playing havoc with the box office in America and making politicians sweat in India. 140 characters at a time.

 

Holiday for a Sunday

Some things will automatically cheer me up, no matter what. Like a movie starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Bringing Up Baby leaves me in splits, The Philadelphia Story gives me the warm fuzzies, but I’m always in the mood for George Cukor’s Holiday.

A Philip Barry play re-tooled for the Depression, Holiday is the story of handsome Midas-in-the-making Johnny Case (Cary Grant) who tumbles head over heels for chance-met blonde ice-queen Julia Seton (Doris Nolan). The timing couldn’t be better for Johnny – he’s just about to strike it rich and then he’s off on that extended holiday around the world he’s been dreaming about his whole life. No work, all play, for the first time ever. What could be better than to share his good fortune with the most beautiful girl he’s ever met?

A spontaneous engagement later, he follows her back to NYC where he makes the discovery that his lady love is New York royalty and has a block-long mansion as well as eccentric family members to prove it. These include her father Edward (Henry Kolker), brother Ned (Lew Ayres) and sister Linda (Katherine Hepburn).

From the moment Johnny meets Linda, it’s clear they both march to the same drum beat. Linda is somewhat of a “madwoman in the attic” figure – her need for the warmth and affection that vanished from her world upon her mother’s death makes her the outsider in a family rigidly invested in wealth and its appearances. She literally creates a world of her own up in what used to be the nursery, where all the happy memories live, leaving the oppressive unhappiness of upper-crust living downstairs with her sister and father.

Her occasional partner in hi-jinks is her brother Ned, a gentle young man with sad eyes who spends his days soaking in alcohol. He’s the only person in the household willing to indulge Linda in her little games and plans – perhaps because she’s the only person who remembers that he was once something more than the son of the house, bending dutifully to his father’s thumb. Ned’s sadness doesn’t stem from the fact that he can no longer do what he loves the most, because he actually can; it stems from his recognition of himself as a coward, lacking the courage to stand up for his dreams in the face of adversity. He’s frequently exhorted to remember that he’s the Seton heir, but it’s clear that the prized Seton drive and will have been pretty much divvied up between the Seton girls. All he’s left with is the perspicacity that eludes his sisters.

In any other movie, the character of Julia would be written as a cipher that basically serves to underpin the awesomeness of Linda. In Holiday, Julia demands to be her own person. She wants to be a high society hostess: it is the role that she was born to play. The things that Ned ignores while wallowing in his drunken self-loathing and Linda disdains on principle with passion, are the very things that make Julia happy. Life has a certain rhythm to it and she likes it. She doesn’t see why she ought to give up her dreams and desires for ersatz ideas about life and liberty that sound like a load of rubbish to her.

Although Holiday is typically billed as the story of what happened to Johnny Case when he fell in love, the majority of the movie is a discreet clash of wills between the two sisters. Julia goes through her entire arsenal of tricks to c0nvince Johnny that her dreams are ultimately more worth the achieving than his – and the sheer beauty of it is, she does it in the guise of the perfect wife figure. Linda, on the other hand, is wild, mannish and unpredictable and isn’t really a “proper” sort of girl – but everything she does up until the climax is geared towards giving Johnny what he wants, willing to live out her dreams through him and Julia.

That kind of nuance in character is so amazingly rare, even all these years later, that it strikes me anew every time I watch Holiday. Julie the Conformist, willing to stomp all over her fiance’s dreams to get what she wants; Linda the Nonconformist, willing to live life second-hand so that the man of her dreams can have everything he wants, including her beloved little sister.

And then there’s Johnny, a working stiff, who comes up with a plan for early retirement that must have sounded outrageous in 1938. Eighty years later, Johnny Case would have been written about as a man who did something admirable with his life.

It would be easy to see Holiday as a movie that looks down upon wealth and mocks the manners of the upper crust – but it’s so much more satisfying when viewed as a film about the individual’s right to dream. Linda and Johnny each have dreams that frighten and excite them in equal amounts. Linda both longs for a life that celebrates the little things and doubts her ability to live such a thing. Johnny’s holiday is the beacon that guides his life, but a life without restriction and focus is something entirely beyond his ken. They lack the kind of conviction that Julia seems able to tap at will because they each desire something outside of their experience.

And yet they’re willing to close their eyes and make that jump. They’ll count the cost when they reach the bottom of that cliff because they hope the fall itself will be priceless. It’s all this and a ton of other things besides that makes Holiday so, so good!

 

Ethiopian First Lady Pulls No Punches

One of the more disorienting things for us as children, was to watch our parents have a humongous marital spat on this side of the front door and then, the moment that door opened, turn into these Stepford characters who were so harmoniously put together, they might as well have plastic genitalia and be called Barbie and Ken. Nor were they content to participate in this strange drama for an unknown public’s benefit by themselves: they insisted we learn how to duplicate their success too.

The first day of kindergarten, for example, I felt just as bad as all the other little children screaming their angry, frightened, red-faced heads off. But I don’t remember making a single peep all day. I just stood there in the middle of this new, terrifying world of strange, yelly toddlers with snot running down their faces and waited for the world to end without uttering a sound.

People can hardly believe it when I tell them this. “You must have cried a little?” is the usual response.

Of course I did. A lot, in fact. In private. With my ayah. A couple of weeks later when I’d finally settled in and gotten comfortable with the idea of school. It felt really good. In retrospect, I wish I’d joined the mass hysteria in kindergarten and let it all out – I might have liked school better.

So it always touches a chord when I come across someone like Azeb Mesfin – controversial and award-winning AIDS and women’s rights activist, businesswoman, Member of Parliament, knockout, mother of three and wife to Ethiopia’s Prime Minister. From the pool report of the arrivals at the G20 dinner hosted by the Obamas:

Next arrives Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, who clearly did something in the car to anger his wife because she glares at him, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Obama, and anyone unfortunate enough to cross her line of vision.

The Obama’s both look slightly taken aback by her. Wonder what happened in the car? The Ethiopian First Couple are quickly dispatched inside.

Clearly, she doesn’t have my mother’s voice echoing in her head. I’m all for this new model of political wife who lets it all out.

 

You Don’t Nom This Baby

"Does it want to eat me?"

This baby noms you!

So a woman in Indonesia gave birth to a 19 lb baby. That’s 8.6 kgs to those on the metric system.

Happily, the mother had a C-section unlike this other lady from 1913 who (presumably) delivered her 19 lb infant the old fashioned way. But the New York Times says that lady was a fatty fat married to a fattier fat so… um, it didn’t matter? I don’t know what the NYT is trying to get at here – what does her weight have to do with her birthing apparatus?

Hm.

Excuse me for keeping things short, but my lady parts are trying to run away.

 

At Least They Have a Sense of Humor

A very nice lady from Saavn wrote me an email after noting all the, ahem, Blue love on this blog and made the following offer:

Saavn wants to give your readers the chance to own Blue, the entire album. The first ten readers of your blog who email us at bluemusic@saavn.com will get to download the album. The next ten can download the song “Chiggy Wiggy.”

I don’t know if they’ll withdraw the offer upon further reflection but check it out. Here’s what Aspi thinks of the music.

 

Cheery Tuesday

I wrote something and it made me sad. Therefore this.

“In case of an accident, the glove compartment drops open and we all pray.”

It never gets old. If they modeled the ads for the Nano on this, it’d become a cult item in minutes.

 

Wanted Not Unwanted

Directed by Prabhudeva, Wanted is the kind of movie where the guy woos the girl of his dreams by sticking his fingers in her mouth and asking her to blow. I enjoyed every second of it.

The remake of Telugu blockbuster Pokiri (“inspired by Infernal Affairs“… in an alternate universe maybe!), Wanted is full of gory action, mesmerized by mammaries, scattered with lame one-liners, populated by skeezy characters who’re occasionally rape-inclined, and set to the kind of thumping soundtrack you devoutly hoped had died with the 80s. It is, in short, that rare beast: everything the trailer promised.

When Greasy Haired Killing Machine Radhe (Salman Khan, miraculously minus moobs and looking much better than he has in years – that’s right, stay off the booze kids!) meets King of All Evil Gani Bhai (a deliciously cartoonish National Award winner – I say it because it’s fun to note! – Prakash Raj), he tells him, “You look like a villain from a B-grade Hindi movie.”

I had to grin because that’s what this is – an unpretentious B-grade tentpoler with A-list backing. It’s Transformers for the budget-challenged: the Americans blow up giant robots for their amusement, we blow up human beings because they’re cheaper and emote better when their brains are getting bashed in. The plot, such as it is, goes like this:

In a Mumbai wracked by gang wars, Radhe is a “one man army” who only owes allegiance to the biggest bhai of all – Money.  One day, on a short break from all the killing and maiming, he’s transfixed by a Magnificent Bosom with Excellent Oral Hygiene called Jhanvi (Ayesha Takia). This turns out to be a bit of a problem as he’s not the only fan of her bosom – it’s an advanced Uncle Magnet model, you see.

Seriously. She can’t walk down the street or even sit at home without fat uncles hitting on her. And yes, her bosom is indeed that magnificent. As a fellow bosom-holder granted unfettered views – once even lovingly framed against a back-up line of bikini-top clad dancers jumping up and down for maximum effect – I would like to say: Congratulations & Well Done on all your success!

Given a choice between rapey uncles who constantly invade her personal space (Mahesh Manjrekar has this character down to a fine art by this point) and a totally buff uncle who might have an overwhelming love for Brylcream but at least doesn’t play grab ass or grossly proposition her widowed mother, Jhanvi wisely plumps for Radhe.

Unfortunately, his lack of rapey-ness is the best thing about him. She dutifully trudges along in his wake, watching with appropriate horror as he efficiently and brutally hacks into people who’ve pissed him off. “Did you think I was some petty criminal?” he demands as she stares at him like a bunny rabbit at a French chef sharpening his knife.

In between all this crazy love talk, there’re a dozen asides about an ill-equipped police force, corruption, drugs, extortion, the politician-criminal nexus and a bunch of other things that you really don’t pay any attention to. I mean, you could – but what would be the point? This is a movie about Salman Khan beating up a whole lot of men (and one woman), romancing a pretty young bosom thing, and singing a few songs with mostly naked women.

Like the Tamil and Telugu blockbusters that gave it life, Wanted doesn’t ask much of you other than your time and money. In return, it’ll give you a couple of hours of satisfying dishoom-dishoom and its best shot at eye candy. When you compare it to the 80s when all the South gave Bollywood was movie after dreary movie about fucked up families and uppity women who needed a beating to set them right, this is so much the better deal!

I went into this movie with a great deal of pent up rage about various things that took place last week and I cannot begin to tell you how relaxed I feel after watching Salman Khan beat the living crap out of legions of extras.  Hooray for Wanted!

PS – I’m still not watching Blue. Uh-unh, Akshay Kumar. We broke up a long time ago.

 

The Ugliness of the Indian Male

With a title like The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions and an opening paragraph that reads,

Every English-speaking Indian man between twenty-five and sixty has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to, and the curse of communalism… Why did a bunch of grown men in the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries write about the same movies, novels, journeys, and riots? Why Naipaul? Why not nature? Or Napier? Or the nadeswaram? Why Bachchan? And not Burma? Or Bhojpuri? And, most weirdly, why pogroms and chauvinism? Why not programmes on television?

you’d expect author Mukul Kesavan’s own attempt at the four things he posits as integral to the Indian English-speaking male experience to be a fairly caustic effort. And so it is. Surprisingly, Ugliness is also a collection of essays that’s oddly sympathetic to and gentle in its understanding of the very subjects that he lampoons with such elan. It’s eclectic in its scope, interesting in its ideas, often hilarious in its wit, and occasionally uncomfortable in its truths.

The opening essays, for example, in which he meditates upon the Indian man’s ability to pull hot chicks while grabbing his junk on street corners, mining for boogers in public with “little oinking sounds of pleasure” and a generally careless disregard for all matters of appearance, are written in a style that takes no prisoners. And yet, they’re written as part of a series that explores a readily apparent truth: Indian film is populated by incredibly beautiful women who routinely fall for unfortunate-looking men… and this is just how we like it. What really made me appreciate that passage, more than its well-deployed snark (of which there is plenty), was that Kesavan managed to leave an essentially depressing idea on a lovely little note about gender relations.

It is a neat trick he deploys often.

Following the “Ugliness” chapters is one on sport in which he discusses the difficulty of finding a team to cheer on. Buried in witticisms about the sorry state of English cricket and the virtual invisibility of Indian sportsmanship, is a light exploration of race resentment that shouldn’t be comfortable reading.

In his chapter about Georgette Heyer (wherein he categorizes her as a “cloven-footed alien”), a gentle melancholy permeates the recognition of an anti-Semitic subplot in The Grand Sophy. It’s a rare moment of unlooked-for clarity that strikes close to the heart of any reader, especially those of a post-colonial bent who’ve long had to grapple with their love and affection for the work of various racists.

He’s equally adept in the use of whimsy, as in the case of a 1996 visit to the Ram Janmabhoomi. An insightful chapter about votebank politics in Uttar Pradesh that’s still relevant today for those who wish to understand why the Congress is so thoroughly screwed in the home state of its dynasty, it ends on a farcical note when Kesavan and his friend are “chased” back to Lucknow by L.K. Advani shouting political inanities in “a pink carriage with a pink loudspeaker”. I laughed out loud.

In between the fun and games, he talks about the newspaper business and the role of English in “translating the chaos of vernacular life”; the alien-ness of a rural India whose “title deeds were all in urban lockers”; the Madrasi man’s uncomplicated love of dance that embarrasses the more inhibited North Indian man; and a quite wonderful little passage on Istanbul and colonialism that notes almost in passing that relics are created when “things stop belonging to the worlds that made them” – a fate that has yet to befall the Sultanahmet but should be familiar to Indians.

Towards the end of the book, where the longer essays reside, he presents a chapter called “A New History of Indian Nationalism” that reads like a handy and intriguing companion piece to longer works on the same (it originally appeared in the book Contemporary Perspectives: History and Sociology of South Asia), before winding things up with “Secular Common Sense”, published (in expanded form?) as a book in 2001.

It is here, in its last third, that the one great flaw of Ugliness begins to overwhelm it. As a collection of essays written over a considerable period of time, it’s a book that must have required a fair amount of updating and editing. I can’t speak to the former (the essays mostly stand the test of time), but Kesavan must have blanked on the amount of repetition that pockmarks his book. By the time I finished reading it, I had to wonder if the original title was The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions for People Lacking Comprehension Skills.

On a more general note, it is not to be expected that a book that dares to be this frank and contrary about a variety of subjects Kesavan himself decrees of enormous interest to his presumed reading public will win universal favor. The English-speaking Indian male (and female) who picks up this book will find plenty within its pages to challenge, infuriate, and repudiate. But how can anyone resist at least a peek at a book that includes gems like this ditty from a Parsi play called Indersabha:

Raja hoon main quam ka, Inder mera naam,
Bin pariyon ke deed ke, mujhe nahin araam.
Suno re mere dev re, dil ko nahin karar,
Jaldi mere vaste, sabha karo taiyar.
Takht bichao jagmaga, jaldi se is aan,
Mujhko shab bhar bhaithna, mehfil ke darmyaan.

You’d have to be as humorless as those long ago Hindi playwrights who lost the battle for a paying audience to these cheerful Parsi writers to hate The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions.

 

There Will Be Blood

Viggo Mortensen is hot. Like, incredibly so. Apart from that marvelous face and that totally sick body, Aragorn writes poetry in multiple languages, is a trained swordsman, translates poems, established a publishing house for offbeat artistic ventures, paints (you can see his work in A Perfect Murder, the only movie ever to make The Goop look sexy), sings, owns his own label, takes brilliant photographs, and makes interviews sound like performance art. Oh, and in his off time he acts and impresses the pants off people like Roger Ebert and David Cronenberg. He’s so awesome, Dennis Hopper introduces his work.

The only thing vaguely off-putting about him that I’ve ever come across is what appears to be his distressing desire to cross dress as a grandma (click on the pics too, that’s the sweetest little embroidered shirt you’ll see outside of your granny’s wardrobe). But even that’s kind attractive coz it’s not cookie cutter movie star apparel.

Little wonder then, that Viggo fans aren’t your average actor-lovers, satisfied with the random comment or two on blogs and dedicated fan sites. They mean business.

For the past year, for example, the Weinsteins have been sitting on a Viggo-starrer, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. From the sounds of it, it’s a pretty faithful rendering of the book, which is not the happiest of stories (too much of an understatement?) ever so beautifully told. Originally slated for the end of 2008, The Road will finally make it’s appearance this November 25.

Unfortunately, if the crowd at TIFF is any indication, 2008 would have been a better fit. This year, Oprah and Tyler Perry have the heartwrenching market all sewn up with Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, already being hailed as a work of art since it made its bow at Sundance; and the male performance everyone is talking about belongs to George Clooney in what’s being described as the zeitgeist-capturing Up in the Air.

Reactions to The Road, on the other hand, have been pretty much mixed to middling with grudging allowances for Viggo’s work despite the surfeit of Vitamin Water that apparently awaits us post-apocalypse. A few people have waded in with positive reviews, but it’s not anywhere near a slamdunk unlike the other two.

This is not an acceptable state of affairs in the land of Viggo. For the past week, the internet has been fairly seething with resentment for the no-taste hacks who would dare impugn a work of such monumental artistic value as The Road. I mean! The Road! Cormac McCarthy! Father and son! Pulitzer prize! Cannibals! Road trip! Apocalypse! Despair! Charlize Theron! Babies roasting on spits! What the hell do you philistines want?

Well, Clooney and Matt Damon in The Informant! apparently. Or at a pinch, Robert Duvall.  Yeh sab tum logon ka racket hai, Manish Malhotra! …. er, sorry, wrong industry.

I can only imagine the vitriol that awaits poor Colin Firth, who won Best Actor at the Venice fest, if he makes off with the top prize for his performance in A Single Man, freakin’ Tom Ford‘s debut, recently bought by the Weinstein’s with an eye to the Oscars.

Hmm. Actually, I just went back and read the first two paragraphs and now I’m going to be pissed if he doesn’t get nommed. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s some kind of clever Wiki con that just rolls up ten different people into one. Either that, or they cooked him up in a lab somewhere.

My God, Viggophilia is contagious!