Category Archives: Art

NYCB’s Amar Ramasar: I Saw Him First

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ramasarx.jpg A fabulously helpful anonymous tipster sent me my newest and sweetest crush: a boy who can DANCE! Said my anon-penned GMail:

Hey gang, I was reading a NY times article about ballet and it mentioned an Amar Ramasar, an Indian-American male ballet dancer with the NYC Ballet. How cool is that?!

…I hope you write about him! Bonus points if you include lots of Billy Eliot/Center Stage references. 😛

More about this gorgeous man, whom the Voice deems “extremely promising, both forceful and softly muscular” (hell yes!)

Amar Ramasar was born in the Bronx, New York. He began his studies at the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of New York City Ballet, in 1992. In addition, he studied at the American Ballet Theatre Summer Program and The Rock School of Pennsylvania Ballet. In July 2000, Mr. Ramasar was invited to become an apprentice with New York City Ballet, and in July 2001 he joined the Company as a member of the corps de ballet.[nycb]

I think I’m feeling faint. A brown face in the New York City Ballet? You can’t hear my eeeevil cackle, but I’m gloating over the fact that our DesiDancer is married, else I’d have to whip off my bamboo earrings (at least two pair), smear vaseline on my face and get DIRTY. I keed, I keed…I’m all about the “sistas before mistas” principle (ahem. until someone else comes up with a feminized “bros before hos”, we’re stuck with that).

Amar said the following about his unique situation:

I actually looked at my race as an advantage because there was no one who looked like me. In New York City Ballet especially, I felt my casting has always been great. The biggest one for me was Fancy Free because, if you think of the history of that ballet, it’s not necessarily the case that in the 1940s an Indian guy was one of the sailors fighting for America. But they let me do that here, and I thought, “I’m breaking boundaries that people automatically put up for a stereotypical white ballet.” [link]

So hot. Continue reading →

Rick-rock

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Check out this gallery of Bangladeshi rickshaw art (thanks, Gujjubhai). I especially like this tiger-borne palki:

Most worrying is the growing popularity of the prodigal son / criminal as a theme around town:

Perhaps it’s fitting that people park their derrières on bin Laden’s face.

Related posts: Pimp my ride, Rickshaw revival, Top Down, Chrome Spinnin’, Pulling more than your own weight, The next generation rickshaw

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Posted in Art

Intersections

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Yesterday in Sevilla, I saw Christopher ColumbusŽ purported tomb and learned that locally, ‘las Indias’ means the Indies, i.e. the Americas. Only ‘la India’ qualifies as the name of the country. ‘Indio’ means Native American, while ‘Hindú’ is the word for desi, even if you aren’t. That man was confused, confused, confused.

(I also learned that the cityŽs Plaza de España was used in Star Wars Episode 2, but that will excite only a few of you. A scary few to be sure 😉 )

Today I checked out La Alhambra, the Moorish fort built by Berbers from Morocco when they ruled Andalucía. It is a totally wild mashup of Spanish colonial and Islamic styles. Think Spanish tile roofs, square, unadorned towers and boring crenelations on the outside, arches, Arabic carvings and geometric patterns on the inside. Think Spanish coats of arms surrounded by verses praising Allah. Think Dehli’s Lal Qila meets Taco Bell. If I didnŽt know it was done that way on purpose, I’d think the Arabic brush strokes were steganography snuck in by marbleworkers held hostage.

Most major innovation happens at intersections. The 2nd gen process that some deride as ‘confusion’ is actually tremendous cultural innovation. And itŽs preciously short-lived, too– as the wheel of assimilation inexorably grinds away, this Cambrian Explosion too shall pass.

and,

Nothing is entirely original. The aesthetic I instinctively recognize as Indian is Mughal, i.e. Islamic by way of Turkish and Irani influence on Mongols from what is now Uzbekistan. The traditions saffronists claim are ‘native’ to India– those, too, came from some intersection, some borrowing, some adaptation somewhere.

P.S. Nobody looks at a brown man in Spain and guesses American– not even fellow Americans. I had the funniest conversation just now with a white woman who spoke fluent Spanish, and then all over again in Amrikan English. So the converse is true too, sometimes.

Related post: O Henry Continue reading →

The Dutch East Indies

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Here’s a Dutch photo project posing members of subcultures (rockers, surfers, ‘ecofreaks’ and so on) in similar clothes:

“By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity…” [Link]

The project includes desi women in Rotterdam:

When desis finally get their own high school clique name, it’ll be in some flick called Pretty in Pink, Orange, Red, Purple and Blue, and the name won’t be as lame as the ‘Massalas.’

On the other hand, the dike-desi look is similar to the British Asian bird uniform of London circa 2001: hip-huggers and three-quarters length fitted jacket with frock collar. Black.

See the entire photo project here.

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Tufteing the subcontinent

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Map of the world with each country scaled by population size

Above is a map of world populations: “the larger the country, the bigger its population. Each grid square represents a million people.” [Link]

When you eyeball the map, a few things leap out at you in a way that they don’t when presented with a table of numbers:

  • India has 1 billion people, or roughly 1/6th of the world’s population
  • Pakistan and Bangladesh together have slightly more people that the US. If there was still a “United Pakistan” it would displace the US as the world’s third largest country.
  • There are more people living on the subcontinent than there are on most other continents. More South Asians than Europeans, Africans, North Americans or South Americans. As a matter of fact, there are more Indians than people in these other continents.

The same website also presents similar maps of past and future population levels of the world from 100,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, 350 years ago (1650), 100 years ago (1900), and even a projection of the world’s population 150 years from now in 2150. [via BoingBoing]

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Journie hall of shame

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In a NYT review of a new Mughal art exhibit at the Met in Manhattan, Holland Cotter pens these lines:

Musharraf as Cupid?

India is the real subject here; you can hear it and taste it in this painting, as spicy as a vindaloo…

That’s what confident cooks and ambitious artists do to the recipes they inherit… A vegetable curry or a peach cobbler can take many inventive forms and still be intensely curryish or delectably peachy…

… there is a picture… of an episode from the fifth and last section of “Khamsa.” And it is pure, melting-on-the-tongue confection. [Link]

I dunno, does a vindaloo make you gag? What clichéd hell is this? Cotter writes with all the insight of Apache Indian. This reads like a kindergarten newsletter hot off the dot matrix printer, clip art carelessly pasted into a Print Shop template. Using a spice metaphor for Indian culture is like complimenting Rosario Dawson on her breasts. Y’know, work a little harder.

As for the art, Mughal miniatures are absolutely gorgeous, but the exhibit in Connecticut sounds far more innovative, an art version of the game of telephone:

One artist would create an image on a sheet of paper, then mail the sheet to someone else, who would add to it before sending it on to the next artist. Part improvisation, part calculation, each finished painting both is and is not the sum of its parts…

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Posted in Art

Lurid scapulæ

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East Village denizen Anil Gupta is one of the best tattoo artists in the U.S. (thanks, Ennis). He’s known for his miniature reproductions of fine art. Here’s Seurat and a quarter. It’s sly, painting pointillism at the pinprick end of a tattoo pen:

Gupta draws a straight line from gaudy to Gaudí, from Bollyboards to nipple art:

“So how did you end up reducing the world’s greatest masterpieces into miniatures?” … He explained that as the son of a man who illustrated giant movie posters for Bollywood, he used to paint eyes that were two stories high. “Maybe,” he said with a deep-throated chuckle, “inventing the miniature was my form of rebellion…” [Link]

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The peacock

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Congrats to our hottie stepsister Pardon My Hindi for finally launching a tee and tank store featuring Raag*’s luscious designs. Unlike our graphically-challenged asses, they actually feature original artwork:

He’s also posted a beautifully designed online magazine with photos of a Bombay circus, his exploits tagging the LES with babu stickers and an interview with Koushik Ghosh, who’s got a new downbeat album coming out on the same label as Peanut Butter Wolf:

Koushik specializes in making that hazy, hip-hop-based downbeat sh*t that you could easily compare to contemporaries such as Four Tet (who released Koushik’s first single on his Text label), RJD2, and DJ Shadow. What sets Koushik apart from the others is a beautiful ’60s psych-pop element that tends to pervade throughout. [Link]

Listen here.

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Indo-Caribbean arty party

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SAJA presents

West Indies Records
art photos with Caribbean roti at Arts India in Manhattan. Maybe they’ll spin some chutney.

Building Bridges – The Indo-Caribbean Diaspora

… a panel discussion about the culture of the Indian communities in Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname, New York City, and beyond. With photography, Caribbean food…

  • Rohit Jagessar, owner RBC Radio, historian, film director, “Guyana 1838″…
  • Ramin Ganeshram, journalists & author of “Sweet Hands: Island Cooking From Trinidad and Tobago”
  • Preston Merchant, documentary photographer
  • Annetta Seecharran, executive director, South Asian Youth Action! (SAYA!)
  • Karna Singh, director, Heritage & Preservation Program, Rajkumari Cultural Center
  • Darrel Sukdeo, freelance journalist (moderator)

Also check out this gallery of 45s sung by Indo-Guyanese musicians.

Related posts: Kitchrie cultural fest in Queens, Sampling chutney, Caribbean desis aren’t feelin’ the love, NYT reviews Naipaul’s ‘Magic Seeds’, Desis in Trinidad

Tuesday, October 25, 2005, 6:30-8:00 pm, Arts India Gallery, 206 Fifth Avenue, 5th floor, New York, NY (between 25th & 26th Streets; R or W trains to 23rd St.); free, no RSVP

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The tao of Manschot

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I know of only a few people in the world doing pop art or Web design incorporating Bollywood kitsch, and we had at least two of them at the wonderful Brooklyn meetup on Sunday. (Arzan the hobbyist chef played heeeero. He slaved over the stove for four hours making dhansak, kebabs and delicious flan-like custard.) An ill-fated piece of Skylab could have taken out a significant part of the worldwide Bollykitsch talent pool. And then where would we be without snarky, arty, phillum-referencing tees?

There’s a dark side to all this. Like the children of atheists and their relationship to religion, Turbanhead’s babies will never know Bollywood irony-free. Like the preacher’s daughter, Pardon My Hindi’s future kids may rebel and turn into weepy Chunky Pandey fans. How ironic that would be. I spy, with my little eye, something that starts with K. There’s no escaping the ferric fate of the children of the kitsch.

I bring this up because one of my very favorite Bollykitsch artists, a Dutchman named Johan Manschot who did Diesel’s kitsch Indian theme a couple of seasons ago, has just sold out published a mainstream coffee table book on Bollywood. It’s called Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema:

… I’ve published a brand-new book… about Indian Cinema… [it] has been launched on the international press conference of the IIFA awards in Amsterdam… [I] was the one who [presented] the book to Mr. Amitabh Bachchan! And… presented the first signed copy to the alderman of Amsterdam…

The Web site, which uses a Bombay street scene theme, has song snippets and video clips from some of the classics. Here are some book samples. You can buy the glossy, $35 book here.

Whether or not you’re into the coffee table format, you must check out Manschot’s art.

Previous post here.

Related posts: Blood brother, Kitsch Idol, Blog bidness, Kitsch-mish, Happy Diwahanukwanzidmas

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