Thank you. For making work play.

Image courtesy: www.apple.com

Identity

A friend sent me the link to a video today that reminded me of Amin Maalouf’s In The Name of Identity.

Maalouf keeps reiterating that we are not born but rather made - and that we make and remake ourselves - in relation to the world in which we live and the choices that it presents to us. It is a point that bears repeating, he says, because a failure to recognize the fluidity, multiplicity and malleability of identity is not only misguided but also dangerous. The danger is twofold. First, a failure to recognize the complexity, the multi-dimensionality of the Other makes their dehumanization easier. Second, imposing on the Other a rigid, singular (and usually inferior) identity will provoke them, in anger and defiance, to pick up arms to ‘assert their identity.’ This, he says, is how ordinary men are “transformed into butchers.”

Amin Maalouf’s In The Name Of Identity, subtitled Violence And The Need To Belong has been by translated from French into English by Barbara Bray and published by Penguin Books.

  

After seeing the video, I looked up Moira Kelly (no, not the actress). To read more about her, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moira_Kelly_(humanitarian)

Destino

Chanced upon Destino today. After watching the six and a half minute movie, I dug a bit and discovered an interesting story. Wikipedia says, "Destino is an animated short film released in 2003 by The Walt Disney Company. Destino is unique in that its production originally began in 1945, fifty eight years before its eventual completion. The project was a collaboration between American animator Walt Disney and Spanish painter Salvador Dali, and features music written by Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez and performed by Dora Luz. It was included in the Animation Show of Shows in 2003." Please double-click the image to go full-screen.

Director: Dominique Monfery

Producers: Baker Bloodworth & Roy E Disney

Written by: Salvador Dali, John Hench & Donald W Ernst

Music: Armando Dominguez

Music adaptation: Michael Starobin

Editor: Jessica Ambinder-Rojas

Studio: Disney Studios France

Distribution: Walt Disney Pictures

Memories

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart. (Murakami). This two-decade old song and its new rendering did exactly that.





Lyrics: Kaithapram Damodaran Namboothiri
Music: Ousepachan
Film: Pookalam Varavayi (1991)
Rendered by Neha Nair with Yakzan, Rex Vijayan, Sreenath Bhasi, Tao and Ben Sam for Rosebowl. Director: Sumesh Lal. Director of Photography: Vipin Chandran. Camera: Sujith, Pradeesh. Editor: Jobin Sebastian & Team. Sound Design: Tennyson. Design: Suresh. Lights: Cameo.

Why Are We So Full Of Ourselves?

Khalil Gibran

I emailed a few lines of Khalil Gibran to a friend today. Simply because his daughter (thankfully) has a mind of her own. And the father can't stand it. The father, who is the wise man when it comes to handling other people's problems - crystal clear, reasonable, sensible, evolved, in sync with the times and the epitome of the kind of balance even Gods might crave for. Why do parents have to make asses of themselves when it comes to their own children? Why do they make the same mistake over and over again? Why can't they find new ones? I know my friend is too full of himself to let wisdom come anywhere near him right now. But he's always extolled Khalil Gibran to high heaven - come to think of it, that has always been after a couple of drinks...

"Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable." 

Apocalyptica

It was just about a year ago that I discovered a band that has been in existence for the last eighteen years - Apocalyptica. It was a search for cellists that led me to these amazing artists who, for me, added fascinating dimensions to the cello and lead me to explore genres like progressive and neo-classical metal. The title of their compilations sums up what they have done: A Decade of Reinventing the Cello.
A band from Helsinki, Finland, Apocalyptica was formed in 1993 when four cellists, Eicca Toppinen, Paavo Lötjönen, Max Lilja and Antero Manninen gathered to play Metallica covers at Sibelius Academy. Today, in addition to Eicca and Paavo, the band features Perttu Kivilaakso and Mikko Sirén. All of them play the cello; Mikko also plays the drums.
Across the years, they have released seven albums, two compliations and over a dozen singles. Wiki says they have sold over four million albums to date.
Here are two of my many favorites. The first, Quutamo, performed at the Helsinki World Championships in 2005. And the second, Apocalyptica's version of that old Metallica classic, Nothing Else Matters.

Words, Words, Words.

John Naughton's article titled Now anyone can 'write' a book. First find some words... was published by guardian.co.uk yesterday. The story is all about the Kindle opening up publishing to the masses, which is creating a deluge of e-books, many of which are cut-and-paste jobs or rehashes of content published before.

Understandably, all the people in the world who even remotely suspect that they have a book lurking somewhere inside of them have taken to writing thanks to the Kindle platform, with its almost zero cost publishing option and the total absence of middlemen, including an editor! With the sale of Amazon's e-books overtaking printed ones, it's rapidly becoming a free-for-all.

Here's an excerpt from the article. "It's only when one peruses the cornucopia of literary productions available on the Kindle store that one detects the first scent of rodent. One of the most prolific self-publishers on the site is Manuel Ortiz Braschi. When I last checked he had edited, authored or co-authored no fewer than 3,255 ebooks. Mr Braschi is clearly a man of Herculean energy and wide learning, who ranges effortlessly from How to Become a Lethal Weapon in Two Weeks (£1.40) to Herbs 101: How to Plant, Grow & Cook with Natural Herbs (£0.70) while taking in Potty Training! The Ultimate Potty Training Guide! (£0.69). Having inspected Mr Braschi's The Miracle of Vinegar: 65 Tried and Tested Uses For Health and Home! (which, at £0.69, works out at about 30p per screenful of text), I can testify that he is no Delia Smith. But at least he appears to write – or at any rate compile – his own stuff. In that respect, he represents the quality end of the Kindle self-publishing business... Kindle self-publishing, in other words, is metamorphosing into a new kind of lucrative spam. The pollution of a potentially interesting and valuable space in this way is depressing enough. But why is Amazon allowing it to go on? Could the fact that it takes a 30% slice of every transaction have anything to do with it? I only ask."

On a personal note, leaving aside the economics of who's making money and who's not, the world has always rejected fly-by-night writers and recognized the good ones - even if it be after their time. This process, this balance, if one may say so, is achieved by the readers of the world. Now, take a look at what the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has to say in their soon-to-be-updated 2007 survey To Read Or Not To Read: A Question Of National Consequence: "There is a historical decline in voluntary reading rates among teenagers and young adults; a gradual worsening of reading skills among older teens; and declining proficiency in adult readers."

Literary reading is in dramatic decline, with the steepest rate of decline - 40 percent - occurring in the youngest age groups (34% in the UK). They may surf the web, or the read the occasional newspaper, but they do not read books - fiction or non-fiction.

The rate of decline is increasing and according to the survey, has more than tripled in the last decade. According to the NEA Chairman, "this report documents a national crisis. Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflect a general collapse in advanced literacy. To lose this human capacity - and all the diverse benefits it foresters - impoverishes both cultural and civic life."

Now, this is something to be worried about - a world where there is an abysmal fall in reading and a meteoric rise in publishing. One wonders if the balance will be easy to achieve.

 

Evelyn And The Art Of Listening

Rahul Chawda and Roby Mathew, friends in Bangalore, after enjoying the post Listen With Your Eyes Closed, offered a fascinating parallel perspective - Evelyn Glennie and listening to music with your whole body. Quite a game changer. After listening to her, I felt that we should try to allow music to envelope us the way water does (which is perhaps how 'immersed in' evolved). It is not easy - but I guess across time each one of us will figure out our own unique way of doing it. Apart from dispelling the general attitude towards loss of hearing and adding yet another layer to that existential question people who reproduce sound grapple with - are they here or are you there, what Evelyn Glennie does is simple - she gives us a fascinating perspective on sound and its infinite interpretations.


Wikipedia tells me, "Dame Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie, (born 19 July 1965) is a Scottish virtuoso percussionist. She was the first full-time solo percussionist in 20th-century western society... Glennie has been profoundly deaf since age 12. This does not inhibit her ability to perform at the international level. She regularly plays barefoot during both live performances and studio recordings in order to better "feel" the music. Glennie contends that deafness is largely misunderstood by the public. She claims to have taught herself to hear with parts of her body other than her ears. In response to criticism from the media, Glennie published Hearing Essay in which she personally discusses her condition."
Here's Evelyn on TED Talks:



To read Evelyn's Hearing Essay, visit http://www.evelyn.co.uk/hearing_essay.aspx

Listen With Your Eyes Closed

A few minutes ago, while I was frantically searching for a document, tucked away between a pile of papers, I found my lost Hemant Kumar collection, which had one of my all time favorites. Wanting to put that into my scrapbook, I did a search on You Tube and found the song. But I was devastated. Though I have never seen the movie Kohra, my own visualization of the song had grown so much on me across the last two decades that I was horrified by the sight of the ungainly hero (Biswajeet, You Tube tells me) walking around in formals, replete with curls and a dangling cigarette, wearing an infuriatingly smug look, which I suspect was worn - one knows not why - by many passionate heroes from a distant past. 


Increasingly the world seems to see music as much as, if not more that it hears music. Very often, predesigned visual packages thwart the most rewarding experience that music offers - your own little mind-trip through a zillion fragments from the past, from dreams, from wishful thinking, from present reality and from possible futures... Anyway, here's my favorite Hemant Kumar song. Might not be a bad idea to listen with your eyes closed.

Maya Beiser And Her Cello

My love for the Cello has introduced me to a fascinating range of cellists, ranging from Pablo Casals to Yo-Yo Ma and Apocalyptica. Today, for the first time, I came across Maya Beiser on TED. Here's a brief profile of Maya: 

The founding cellist of the Bang on a Can All Stars, Maya Beiser is a frequent collaborator with artists across the spectrum of creativity - visual artists such as Shirin Neshat, video artists such as Irit Batsry - to produce groundbreaking multimedia concerts. Composers who write for her follow her passion for melding influences - Middle Eastern sounds, classic and modern tones. Her newest project Elsewhere is described as a CelloOpera. This is an imaginative retelling of the Biblical legend of Lot's wife, created by Maya's dream team - director Robert Woodruff, composers Missy Mazzoli and Eve Beglarian, writer Erin Cressida Wilson and choreographer Karole Armitage. Now, enjoy.

This Is Not The End Of The Book

Last evening, while at The Modern Book House in Trivandrum, I came across 'This is not the end of the book', a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière curated by Jean-Phillippe De Tonnac.

Published by Harvill Secker, the book was translated from French by Polly McLean this year. 
I guess this conversation is what I will be preoccupied with this weekend. Here's a sample I came across in The Guardian (guardian.co.uk, Sunday 22 May 2011). Going by the content, I guess this must be from the chapter 'All the books we haven't read':

Umberto Eco: There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read. Who has actually read Finnegans Wake – I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?

And yet I've a fairly accurate notion of what I haven't read. I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then. The Mahabharata – I've never read that, despite owning three editions in different languages. Who has actually read the Kama Sutra? And yet everyone talks about it, and some practise it too. So we can see that the world is full of books that we haven't read, but that we know pretty well.

And yet when we eventually pick them up, we find they are already familiar. How is that? First, there's the esoteric explanation – there are these waves that somehow travel from the book to you – to which I don't subscribe. Second, perhaps it's not true that you've never opened the book; over the years you're bound to have moved it from place to place, and may have flicked through it and forgotten that you've done so. Third, over the years you've read lots of books that have mentioned this one and so made it seem familiar.

Jean-Claude Carrière: There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life. The terrible grief of the dying as they realise their last hour is upon them and they still haven't read Proust.


Umberto Eco: When people ask whether I've read this or that book, I've found that a safe answer is, "You know, I don't read, I write." That shuts them up. Although some of the questions come up time and time again: "Have you read Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair?" I ended up giving in and trying to read it, on three different occasions. But I found it terribly dull. 

It's In Our Nature

Here's another film directed by Bruno Aveillan. The music composer is Bruno Coulais and the creative director is Pierre Desfretier. Remarkable. Please double click inside the frame to go full screen.

Where Will Life Take You?

Whether you love the brand or not for the right or the wrong reasons, here's an evocative film created for Louis Vuitton, directed by Bruno Aveillan. The soundtrack is by Gustavo Santaolalla and the Creative Director is Christian Reuilly. Released in 2008, I chanced upon the film again just now as I was browsing - thought I'd share it with you. Ideally go full screen. 

Why Still Read Poetry?

Yesterday, I posted a poem and suddenly, traffic to this blog dropped by more than 70%. And my stats counter told me that there was only one page-view for the poem!
So I thought today I'll post a brilliant piece written by Karthika Nair titled Why Still Read Poetry? This was first published by The Hindu Literary Review in June 2009.


Why Still Read Poetry?


I shouldn’t be able to remember it with such exactitude. After all, as John Steinbeck remarked in Sweet Thursday, “Change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers in the grass.” But poetry was neither discreet nor gentle with me: it did not ruffle the curtains; it tore them down and the house alongside, in three distinct gusts.

"...un ankhon ki mehekti khushboo"

The first came at 14, through an unlikely source: “Bhoole Bisre Geet” on All India Radio, a bedtime ritual in the midst of the darkness ushered by a mandatory load shedding. Perhaps it had to do with the total focus induced by night but the lines exploded in my head: humne dekhi hein un ankhon ki mehekti khushboo/haath se chooke ise rishton ka ilzaam na do/sirf ehsaas hein ye,/rooh se mehzooz karo/pyar ko pyar hi rehene do, ise rishton ka ilzaam na do.


This opening quatrain from an old Hindi film song displaced poetry from a clinical study of assonance, alliteration, metre and metaphor in the works of immortals alphabetically arranged in an I.S.C.E curriculum. “I have seen the wafting fragrance of your eyes,” wrote Gulzaar and synesthesia became tangible. Poetry could bend, stretch, torque and detonate the senses. Sounds had smell, sights took on texture and everything in the world turned fluid, interchangeable. Cosmic laws got rewritten. Poetry became a magic mirror; one that saw, not darkly as in the Bible, but tangentially; not removed from reality, but up close, much closer than usual lenses allowed.

The second came quite close at heel, a double second as it were. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate arrived like some great mythical bird, maybe the griffin, showing off the sheer wingspan of poetry, giving new sense and direction to elements often considered old-fashioned and irrelevant: rhyme and rhythm, cadence and structure. Written in 663 sonnets, the book captured — almost literally — everything short of the kitchen sink: a treatise on nuclear warfare, metaphysical questions of death and love, advise on pruning grapes, to my favourite below — a pungent tirade on the presumed irresistibility of babies: How ugly babies are! How heedless/Of all else than their bulging selves –/Like sumo wrestlers, plush with needless/Kneadable flesh – like mutant elves,/Plump and vindictively nocturnal,/With lungs determined and infernal/(A pity that the blubbering blobs/Come unequipped with volume knobs),/And so intrinsically conservative,/A change of breast will make them squall/With no restraint or qualm at all./Some think them cuddly, cute and curvative./Keep them, I say. Good luck to you;/No doubt you used to be one too.


Poetry, I discovered, could tell a tale — or multiple tales, as The Golden Gate had demonstrated — just as prose or drama; tell it with verve and wit, passion and power. Formal poetry, with its musicality, its intentness and attention to detail became a portal towards a ‘parallel universe’, as a friend calls it, one peopled with acrobats and contortionists, dancers and lion-tamers that went by the names like sestina, terza rima, ghazal, rub’ai, pantoum and more.

The other half of this double gust, T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, not only reinforced the impression left by its companion but unveiled another vital component: compression.
Do I dare/Disturb the universe?/In a minute there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Crispness, lack of indulgence for elaboration, restraint … they entered my lexicon here, proving how impactful verse could be in its spareness, its telegraphic quality of summing up and implying emotion, fact or state of being.


It took a few more years for “Lady Lazarus” to sweep in. Sylvia Plath’s poem did not just blow away the house, it snagged inside my eardrums, seared mind and tongue, left scratches on language and labels:
Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well.


Jeanette Winterson says is all when she calls language a finding place, not a hiding place. This then is what draws me inevitably to poetry: the truth. Not factual, lyrical or narrative truth, but truth of expression and of emotion. The ability to pin down and identify the source and delimit its contours. Pain, love, fear, hate, even restlessness… They become bearable when given a voice, they get reduced to manageable proportions and they become shareable.


I never felt it voyeuristic to read Plath’s work; it felt like signing a covenant with someone who had perhaps suffered from the loneliness of not having her words reach far enough, and would be as empowered as I, the reader, by my act of appropriation.


Still reading poetry? Yes, still. Just as I am still breathing, still working, still thinking, still – hopefully – learning: human actions that are not circumscribed by any era or erudition, technology or trend.

Blood Memory. By V. Penelope Pelizzon

Hunched in the bath, four ibuprofen gulped

         too late to dull the muscle cramping

                  to sate a god who thirsts

         monthly for his slake of iron,

I am just a body bleeding in bad light.

But after an hour, as the wrenching wanes,

I run more water in, remembering

         when I was a girl my mother knew

                           one cure for this pain

                           and, while I cried,

         carried me mugs of tea and whiskey

                  clouded with sugar cubes.

In a palm of pinkish water, I scoop up

         a burl of my flesh, almond-sized.

                  The tissues settle, livid

red to nearly black as I tilt my hand

                  against the light to see it

glistening like a ruby cabochon,

                  appealing as it appalls,

            recalling one future, years ago,

            that would have borne itself on my blood

                           had I allowed.  

                  The question swims into view:

would I harbor another life now?

Last spring, I sat above the harbor in Naples

                  with three friends whose children,

         after a week’s vacation, were all

safely back at school. Palpable,

                           the holiday mood

         a morning freed from offspring brought!

(I’d felt a guilty pleasure I’d go home

         not to cook someone’s lunch,

                           but to read.)

Still, it wasn’t long before our talk’s

         compass needle trembled north

                  toward the motherland:

soccer games in the Flegrean fields,

                           ancient sun

            reborn and swaddled putto-pink

            in mist above the fumaroles;

                           rococo

                  messes of gelato;

first words, whose honeyed gravity

                           weighed on me

                           like a toddler’s head

         snugged below my chin in sleep.

                  Then, Serena described

         troubles at her daughter’s school.

Their new principal refused to pay

         the local gang’s protection money.

                           And so, the teachers

         arrived at work one day to find

         the hutches where the children kept

rabbits and a little clutch of chicks

                           overturned.

                  From the playground swings

                  the throat-cut animals hung.  

         Next time we come for you

someone had written across the door in blood.

                  Now the parents wanted

                  the principal to pay:

            that was how these things were done.  

                           Screw her ideals,

                           Serena heard.

That bitch is going to get our children killed.

         A blade bossed with oyster floats,

the harbor glinted below Serena’s voice.  

         Into that water, Apicius wrote,

                  the Romans tossed slaves

         to glut the eels they’d later eat

with tits and vulvae, succulently cooked,

                  of sows who’d aborted their litters.

                           And from that water,

                  fishermen pulled a girl

                           who’d been under

                           at least a week.

         She may have been the missing one

         the papers were reporting on  

                           whose photo showed her

         lippy, grinning, seventeen.

                           A week in that wake.

She was scoured of identity.

                  Water’s thick in Naples

                           as martyr’s blood

         rusting in ampoules in the cathedral,

where it liquefies on schedule

                           —and it does;

                  I’ve seen the miracle—

                           to show the city’s

            still protected by the saint.   

         I can’t remember, six months later,

         loggy in my cooling bath,

if some net had hauled these images

         writhing up at me that morning

                           as we sat together

                           near the harbor,

         or if they’d tangled in my thoughts

that same evening after Serena’s dinner  

                  honoring Women’s Day.  

                           Across Europe,

lapels flickered yellow wicks of mimosa,

                           marking the feast.  

                           And in Naples,

                  flowers fumed for women

burned on the flank of Mt. Vesuvius

                  where they’d been sewing

         sweatshop zippers on fake designer bags.

         But as it did with everything,

the city managed to transubstantiate

         horror into carnival.

                  With Theresa and Ellie

         I’d walked home late along the harbor.

Fireworks seethed above the bobbing masts.

         Mirroring those harrier stars

         the water seemed to flame, while

                           drowned in lights

         the Lungomare phosphoresced.

                  Scooters rippled through

                           the reefs of cars,

         barely slowing for schools of boys

                            and women in flocks,

                  stiletto-heeled, who stalked

         screeching over the cobblestones.

                        From an alley’s mouth

                        a gobbet of men disgorged.  

One, drunker than the others, loomed

         over and bent his face to mine.

                  Where are your babies? he hissed,

                  spit pricking my skin.

                           Get home to your babies.  

         Not just drunk but whetted, his glare

         stropped beyond seeing and testing its edge.

                           You’re over-the-hill

                  for trolling—is that what he meant?

         Or was he putting all women away,

                           including the vampire-

                           lipsticked teens?

Whatever he meant, he meant to make us bleed.  

         I wince, drain chill water out,

                  drizzle in a little

                           more of the hot,

         and wonder at this habit

of holding others’ words as worry stones

         to fidget absentmindedly

                           when thought goes slack.   

         Agates of fury, quartzes of scorn.

                  Cold in my ear’s palm,

the hematite heaviness of a final no.

         And I still turn over my mother’s words,

                                    costly pearls,

                  handed me years ago

in a college project on oral history.  

         She took my assignment seriously,

         agreeing to an interview

                  as if it would allow

                  her, too, to wash

through the wrack of half-forgotten truths.  

         Painstakingly on tape

                  she recorded her life,

         lapped by sluices and hesitations.  

Her years in the Women’s Army Corps,

         screening films on safety and hygiene

                  to bored enlisted men.

                           Her depression.

Decades as a secretary. Marriage.  

         Until, near side B’s close, there gathered

                  a final, muscled wave:

         how, when she was well past forty,

                           her bleeding stopped.  

         At first, she thought it was her age.

                  Then—slowly, sickly—

                           she understood.

                           She’d tried to find

         a doctor who would help her, but

                           (her voice cresting, breaking)

five months along, it was too late,

         even if she’d had the money.  

The tape’s hiss like receding surf.   

                  So here I am, at daybreak,

                  adjusting the taps with my toes.

         I think we are shelled animals,

hauled at by tides, sleeking invasive grit

                  with our nacre. I think of her

hiding in the tub for half an hour

                  to read; think how pleased

         I was, finding her, to pull her

                           back to me.

Little plumes of my flesh rock in the swells,

                  but my body is bland now,

                           yielding as kelp,

            and with my toes I pull the plug.   

Drained, I need a couple hours of sleep,

         then I’ll start the day again.

                  And maybe, if I’m sleeping late,

                           the dream will come,

                  one that intrigues me almost

         more than it disturbs, in which

                           I’m falling, bound,

into a bay of blood-threshed water.


Courtesy: www.poetryfoundation.org