Ghost Dance Sequence

Ghost Dance Sequence from Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (via)

On Disclaimer Dogs and Blogging Bitch!

As for every tooth, there exists a sly bacteria who, in his heart, wishes to make it his/her home, to live there in holy matrimony, till its dental demise. So for every post there is a disclaimer which, if you do not state, keeps swaying in your mental map to remind you that what you write is utter common sense, and at worse pretentious nonsense. I know, for the next post, my disclaimer should be clean and clear, "I haven't read Nabokov and have read only one book by Dostoevsky, yet I have the balls to field them." I have found that if not stated and surrendered, disclaimers bark in every sentence in the form of clauses, in all grammatical flavors driven by guilt of ignorance and fear of quarter-knowledge.

A real intrepid blogger (I thought I should write "writer", but thought otherwise) is one who can dare to be politically incorrect, trust his readers and leave loose ends. He can say something like "All Art is Divine". A mouse-hole meek blogger will write, "I feel that a work of creation that comes within the tenets of art, acceptable art, with time and thought, must ultimately turn out to be a divine experience, given the observer is able to get it". The more funny part is that the latter serpentine sentence will seem better to a blogger audience which actually caters to his own common sense and associated insecurities, for this is a post-modern age. To say this in more literary way, he relates to (or identifies with) the fellow blogger.

One point here, beyond disclaimers, is choice we make to read. Would you like to read a politically incorrect, raw personal blogger, or a well rounded blogger who gives you all the perspectives on something and never lets you know what he himself feels, and when he does try to, with his umpteen clauses, what we get is a stink that he knows a lot. I feel the second type of blog gives you a buffet when you have just asked "Do you drink?" I also don’t like the idea that a blogger, a baby-blogger-reviewer, should be excessively well-read and educated in matters of literature, philosophy, films and music. If he is so, fine, but it is not a requirement of any sort that he had seen The Seventh Seal, to talk about death. I know (disclaimer alert !) , to appreciate art we need to know some back ground, but my idea of blogging is not reading the perfect prose to get the perfect insight, I am not “giving” myself to the blogger’s post, but it is to get the tone of noise in the room full of random, insightful, new, left over and co-product ideas. I am more interested in allowing myself to wonder that such views still/also exist. If I need to read a review for the purpose of getting myself enlightened I know where to go, or I will, in my capacity, figure it out. And here comes the beauty of all this so-called crap generated on blogs, because it allows you to choose your own crap - pick and choose, slice and dice. It is the onus of the reader, his onus to read and comment and write correctively, if he wants to. I am not defending blogging etc, what I am saying is that it is as stupid to restrict the type, quality, who-should-write-what etc of blogging as it is preposterous to restrict breathing in common atmosphere because we know its polluted.

The first type of blogger is a blogger who inhales freely, and vomits profusely. His thoughts are philistine, much like the comments on a Bela Tarr youtube video, but it does tell us two things that look good to me, he saw the Bela Tarr video and he wants to express. Also, from the perspective of a good reader, they can be easily dismissible posts, but not entirely without fun. Actually they are so unintentionally funny at times, that they give you most divine pleasure, which intellectuals reserve in brain banks for the so-called real arts.

The second type, the know-all, and read-all type, is a little dangerous blogger, and requires more effort from the reader’s side. He, of course, knows more than you, so it’s difficult to trash him, and even laugh at. Slowly, in a few cases, you start admiring the honesty and knowledge of the person and in some case, you start admiring the flow/pun/taste of his writings, even if you are not very satisfied with the content, and in others you get more insights about the general quality of writing in professional circles than that particular post. We have read bloggers, who in their free time write and get published, and we now know that they make slips too on their blogs, which is not anything bad. Actually, in some way, it breaks that myth among people that a writer is always well studied, well researched and right. I am not saying that, if at times, they wrote badly, gives me the right to write because I write badly all the time, but one can try, its harmless. What I mean to say is that it does open our eyes and it does, in one way or the other, make you demand better from them.

There is one more, the most pathetic, breed of bloggers, a blogger who is an artist (or artist-will-be) in one-half of the heart and a pure unknowing thief in the other half. By saying he is an artist, I mean, that he is taken by that admirable urge to write, but god had played a trick on him, a devilish trick to give him all the teeth to chew, but none to bite - the holy cow, the opposite of dog. He behaves like an old man from rich-literary country, who tells the brilliant folk-tales from his country to the alien masses, but being a part-time artist, he, fearfully and carefully, dresses them up in his own fashionable clothes. The artist in him, I know, can die otherwise, but he survives on folk tales, internalizing them, and then beautifully puking them on paper. No search engine can detect him, except himself, for he puts borrowed notes on his mundane music, just to survive. He is, to borrow from Chekhov’s The Seagull, a gambler with no money. One must pity him, for he is a victim of desire, and a misfit to fulfill it. One must pity him for he knows the double pain of pulling out the wrong tooth by the dentist. For he, with bad breath, can not kiss.

हिंदी में आलोचना के स्तर !

निर्मल वर्मा के हिंदी में आलोचना के स्तर पर विचार।

मेरा अनुभव इतना निराशा जनक रह है कि अब मेरी पुस्तको कि प्रशंसा होती है तो न तो ज्यादा ख़ुशी होती है और जब बुरायी होती है , तो कोई बहुत अफ़सोस भी नहीं होता। मैंने यह देखा कि हिंदी आलोचना में यह कोशिश कम रहती है कि पुस्तक का संसार क्या है और फिर उसकी शर्तो पर उसकी आलोचना या तारीफ की जाये। जब कोई आलोचक यह नहीं करता तो वह किताब में कुछ ऐसी चीजे चुन लेता है जो कि उसकी आलोचना का आधार बन जाती हैं। अपने में यह बहुत अधूरी प्रशंसा या आलोचना होती है। इससे एक आलोचक एक किताब का समग्र मूल्यांकन करने में बिल्कुल असमर्थ होता है। [...] और यह बात हमे अपनी संस्कृति में भी दिखाई देती है जहाँ हम नायपाल की किताब को लेकर इतने नाराज़ हो जाते हैं पर उसकी ठीक से आलोचना नहीं कर पाते। नीरद चौधरी का विरोध करने वाले कितने लोग मिल जायेगे पर नीरद चौधरी ने भारतीय संस्कृति के बारे में जो लिखा है उसके खिलाफ जो प्रतिक्रिया देखने में आती है, वह केवल एक पूर्वाग्रह , एक आक्रोश , एक नकली किस्म की देश भक्ती प्रधान भावुकता में चुक कर रह जाती है। [...]

Chekhovian Hero

A delightful passionate paragraph by Vladimir Nabokov where he describes Chekhovian hero.

What rather irritated his politically minded critics was that nowhere does the author assign this type to any definite political party or give him any definite political program. But this is the whole point. Chekhov's inefficient idealists were neither terrorists, nor Social Democrats, nor budding Bolsheviks, nor any of the numberless members of the numberless revolutionary parties in Russia. What mattered was that this typical Chekhovian hero was the unfortunate bearer of a vague but beautiful human truth, a burden which he could neither get rid of nor carry. What we see is a continuous stumble through all Chekhov's stories, but it is a stumble of a man who stumbles because he is staring at the stars. He is unhappy, that man, and he makes others unhappy; he loves not his brethren, not those nearest to him, but the remotest. The plight of a negro in a distant land, of a Chinese coolie, of a workman in the remote Urals, affects him with a keener pang of moral pain than the misfortunes of his neighbor or the troubles of his wife. Chekhov took a special artistic pleasure in fixing all the delicate varieties of that pre-war, pre-revolution type of Russian intellectual. Those men could dream; they could not rule. They broke their own lives and the lives of others, they were silly, weak, futile, hysterical; but Chekhov suggested, blessed be the country that could produce that particular type of man. They missed opportunities, they shunned action, they spent sleepless nights in planning worlds they could not build; but the mere fact of such men, full of such fervor, fire of abnegation, pureness of spirit, moral elevation, this mere fact of such men having lived and probably still living somewhere somehow in the ruthless and sordid Russia of to-day is a promise of better things to come for the world at large - for perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.

Excerpt from Lectures on Russian Literature by Vladamir Nabokov

An Incident ...

Read this post by Vidya. She points us to the horrifying fact, how people around us take general decisions on pattern behavior based on very specific events, adding bit more to their already normalized list of observations, with casual media and reports for their easy help, and how they take unshared thinking for something destructive. I don't know why, it reminds me of this funny incident.

When I went to hospital to see one of my relatives, the person next to him was a young lad from a village near my home town. He started talking to me in the dialect I totally adore. And when we discuss our hometowns, we usually discuss, how they have changed and how everything is on a downhill. He was a brilliant young man, with exceptional power to narrate. When the topic came to day-to-day thefts in our hometown, he told a story. And he told the story with millimeter precision, the way the thieves planned it, and the process of execution with all the specifics, more like a classic detective novel, very unlike the crime reporting on TV. To this, the people in the ward were first absorbed, then amused and got little astonished and suspicious. And one of the old men, his relative, spoke in that lovely matter-of-fact voice, "Savre, dacait banega, m'haara budhaappa kharaab karega" [ Savre (an abuse which is used in a loving way, but basically means pig), will you become a dacoit, Will you spoil our old age]. And the whole ward was full of laughter. The young lad didn't take it too hard, replied "ya haspital hai, chillave na" (This is hospital, don't shout), and started eating his meals.

Robert Bresson Links

I sometimes wonder why Robert Bresson's films, in spite of being so precise, stripped down and without frills, are so interesting to see. This sequence from Pickpocket has every answer. See the action and the faces, and of course the hands.

Here is a small TV interview with Bresson. Here is a transcript of a long interview that appears in the book, Encountering Directors. and this is an absolute tribute to Bresson (link via).

Lars von Trier's The Boss of It All

Lars von Trier's new film The Boss of It All is releasing in US on 23rd May '07, acc. to imdb (official site here). Here Lars von Trier uses something called "Automavision" (here he discuss it in an interview), which is used to limit human influence/intervention in the film, and due to which, the film does not have a cameraman. It seems Automavision is "choosing the best possible fixed camera position and then allowing a computer to choose when to tilt, pan or zoom." Now, the question is what is the film all about, as reviews suggest, it is about the enterprise who hires an actor to impersonate a fictional "the boss of it all". But it seems it is as much about the process of acting and directing, as it is about the enterprise and office who deal with all this. Some reviews here.

Billy Wilder on Monroe, Chaplin and God !

In the collection of interviews with directors, the most funny and humorous interview is that of Billy Wilder. When asked about the difficulty of working with Marilyn Monroe, he quipped, "Look, if I wanted somebody to be on time and to know the lines perfectly, I've got an old aunt in Vienna... but who wants to look at her?" Here is what he has to say about Charlie Chaplin

Now, on the subject of collaboration, there are a lot of people who are so
ego maniacal that they will absolutely not permit another name on the script.
Take the famous story of Chaplin making Monsieur Verdoux. Orson Welles came up
with the idea. With Chaplin it was not only that he wrote it, only only that he
directed it, not only that he acted in it, but he also composed the music, which
most of the time he stole. But before I go any further I would like you to know
that Mr. Chaplin, up to the moment he started writing dialogue, was an
absolutely unique genius. He was a God, just so that you don't think I'm
demeaning Mr. Chaplin.

And this is what he has to say on the notion of "Thinking Actor"

I'm terribly fond of Jack [Lemmon]. We understand each other very well and its a
pleasure to work with him. He is a thinking actor, but not an argumentative one.
By that I mean if we start shooting at 9 o'clock, he would be there at 8:15 and
would come to my office and say, "Hey, I've got a great idea! Look, why don't you
do this?Blah, blah, blah, blah." And I just look at him, and he says, "I don't
like it either." And he walks out.

This time his name is Andreas !

Like Hour of the Wolf (trailer here), other neglected film of Bergman is The Passion of Anna, which Bergman says, he made to correct Hour of the Wolf. I saw The Passion of Anna long back, and don't remember a lot from it. This is the film where characters come in front of camera (link without subs) and tell the viewers what they think of the characters they play. It is innovative, but it dooesn't play very well, especially with the two male actors. What I remember most vividly is that The Passion of Anna ends with a mysterious line which says "This time his name is Andreas", when Andreas (played by Max von Sydow) is killed in an accident. Here is the part of interview where interviewer tries to resolve why Bergman did that.

Samuels : What was the meaning of the last line: "This time his name is Andreas".

Bergman: [Laughter] We will be back

S: I don't understand. It can mean that she's a man-eater. Because her first husband was also named Andreas, or it can mean that another human being has been destroyed in the world, "This time his name is Andreas", or that another Bergman character has been destroyed, this time named Andreas.

B: I will tell you; its much simpler. It means a sort of giving up: "This time his name is Andreas." You must feel behind the meaning another that you cannot define. For me, it expresses a feeling of boredom.

S: I don't understand.

B: I mean, "This time his name is Andreas"; But I will be back, and next time my character will have another name. I don't know what it will be, but this boring character will be back.

S: Also you ?

B: Yes. [Hearty Laughter]

and finally here is Liv Ullmann in a close up monologue from the film.