Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

A not-so-novel writing method

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Writer Ranbir Sidhu just finished a novel while locked in an architect-designed habitat for 30 days, 22 Å“ hours each day. The publicity stunt by Queens artist collective Flux Factory resembles another mentally focusing experience known as ‘poverty.’

The novelists lived in the gallery, in individual habitats built for them by architects and designers who, like the writers, entered a competition. Evenings, they ate together, meals served by local chefs. In addition, they could leave their pads for 90 minutes a day to shower, do laundry or walk on the building’s roof… There were nice writerly touches, like the two empty Scotch whiskey bottles perched on a shelf and a stack of books – including Strunk and White as well as Kafka – lined up near Mr. Bailie’s computer… “I liked the boundaries here… I knew what was expected of me. I was supposed to stay in my room a month and write a book.” [NYT]

Here’s an excerpt from the rough draft of the novel he wrote while on the hamster wheel:

“Here, check this out.” Cyrus clicked on a couple of pull down menus. “This sorts into gender. It compares violence against male body parts to violence against female body parts and plots them both against hits. Do you see?… It’s the violence against women that’s really getting us our customers…

“One thing we found that’s strange is this. Violence against dicks. Our readers don’t like that. You cut off balls, interest falls through the floor. You cut off the dick, and man, you lose the whole fucking stadium. There is silence out there.

“Our characters get to keep their dicks,” Cyrus said. “Unless they’re black or brown.”

Here’s Anna on National Novel Writing Month. For speed writing, few compare to the prolific Robert Louis Stevenson, who supposedly wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in under a week while binging on cocaine. (I assume he believed in method writing.)

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The Forsaken Land Wins at Cannes

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vimukthi.jpg Director Vimukthi Jayasundara this past May became the first Sri Lankan to ever win the prestigious Camera dÂ’Or award for Best First Film, or any award for that matter, at the world reknowned Cannes Film Festival for his Sinhalese language film Sulanga Enu Pinisa (The Forsaken Land). Jaysundara, who was trained trained at the Institute of the Cinema and Television of Pune, in India, shares the award at Cannes with an American, Miranda July for her work, Me And You And Everyone We Know.

When asked to talk about the film, Jayasundara said,

“If The Forsaken Land has something to do with my country’s history, it is especially through its conveyance of the suspended state of being simultaneously without war and without peace – in between the two. I wanted to capture this strange atmosphere… For me, filmmaking is an ideal vehicle for expressing the mental stress people experience as a result of the emptiness and indecisiveness they feel in their lives. With the film, I wanted to examine emotional isolation in a world where war, peace and God have become abstract notions.”

Thankfully, getting to see this film will be made easier by his win at Cannes as his film has found distribution in the U.S and in his native Sri Lanka.

More on Jayasundara and his win here, here, here, and here. Continue reading →

The bees’ knees, a memoir (updated)

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Japan throws its national muscle behind making vibrating toilets and Hello Kitty phones the size of a Tic-Tac. Venezuela and India dedicate themselves to making globally competitive beauty queens. Hodiernally, what do desi Americans do?

We make 12-year-olds in braces with salutatory spelling skills, says the NYT:

For many American contestants, the most uncommon words at last week’s national spelling bee were not appoggiatura and onychophagy, but the names of the top four finishers… All were of Indian ancestry. In recent years, descendants of Indian immigrants – less than 1 percent of the population – have dominated this contest, snatching first place in five of the past seven years, and making up more than 30 of the 273 contestants this year…

Crunching the numbers, desis are 16x overrepresented in the national spelling bee.

Excellence in a number of fields has always had a cultural tinge – consider the prevalence of Dominicans in baseball, Jews in violin playing, Kenyans in long-distance running. In 1985, when a 13-year-old son of Indian immigrants, Balu Natarajan, beat out his competitors by spelling “milieu,” it had an electrifying impact on his countrymen, much as Juan Marichal’s conquest of baseball had for Dominicans…

It’s not quite the same as Sabeer Bhatia’s adoring fans, but ok. I can personally confirm that desi parents dig rote drills for toddlers:

Indians are comfortable with the rote-learning methods of their homeland, the kind needed to master lists of obscure words that easily stump spell-checker programs. They do not regard champion spellers as nerds.

It’s not that Indian parents don’t see spellers as nerds. It’s that they don’t even know the meaning of the word. (Vinod is in the habit of saying, ‘Malayalees are the nerds of India. Of India!’) In a country with an insane level of competition for a vanishingly small number of good college slots and government jobs, being studious wasn’t an epithet, it was a necessity.

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iRiver South Asia Playlist

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One of my favorite things about visiting South Asia, in recent years anyway, is the unique (despite overly repetitive) playlist of MTV India. Sure, some really awful Bollywood songs are included, but where else will you hear a track with such poignant lyrics like “just chill chill, just chill” repeated over and over again, right? So after being in Sri Lanka for over a week, I have added some of the following to my iRiver music playlist. And if you want to have this argument, I like the iRiver better than the Ipod, but lets not make this post an iRiver vs. iPod one.

Bombay Rockers— Rock The Party. This Danish duo, includes one desi and one gora exactly and approximately. The gora sings in English, and the desi of course sings in Hindi. How novel of an idea? The song is catchy, but the track’s music is not original, the lyrics are not really intricate, and it seems like the Rocker’s are trying a little too hard to be Europe’s answer to the Neptunes (trucker hat, bandana around the wrist and all).

Daddy Yankee—Mirame. To be fair, I actually put this on my playlist before I left the states (along with Raje Shwari and Beenie man’s Below the Waist and her track Country Style with Petey Pablo), but this spindi (Spanish + Hindi) reggaeton track is hot, so I had to give it a plug.

Abhijeet Sawant—Mohabbatein Lutaaunga. India’s answer to Kelly Clarkson, Reueben Studdard, and Clay Aiken, all rolled into one. Sawant was the winner of “Indian Idol” and can really belt out a tune. It is a little corny, and in the video of this song he does some weird forehead pointing thing, but some of his tracks are catchy, this one in particular.

The Rishi Rich Project—Dil Mera.—This track is on the Kya Kool Hai Hum Soundtrack. I haven’t seen the movie, but the trailer makes it look hip, and having the Project participate, makes the film even hipper. I was actually pleasantly surprised to hear a lot of Raghav and Jay Sean tracks all over the radio here in Sri Lanka. Sonu Nigam, Jayesh Gandhi and Amrita Kak— Just Chill. I had to put it on, just to laugh. This is apparently the opening track for David Dhawan’s new movie Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya, starring Salman Khan and Sushmita Sen. Remember to “just chill chill, just chill.”

Blaaze-–Bunty Aur Babli. This is the lead track for the movie of the same name starring Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee. The song is a rap song and the video has Amitabh lip-synching, quite ridiculously, along to the lyrics. Its unfortunate because the movie looks good. Continue reading →

Giants, dwarves and lemurs

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Like that VW ad, NYC sometimes has moments of spooky synchronicity. Like the time two weeks ago when I hailed a cab to SoHo. The fellow who picked me up was an uncle crooning along to Hindi ghazals in the direction of his steering wheel. After crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, we passed a Sikh guy with a black pug and a cute Punjaban walking toward chic bar Mecca. A block later, a group of desi high school kids sounded their barbaric yawps over the sidewalks of the world. The louche lounge turned out all Arabic and Hindi tunes, Turkish lanterns and Bombay tones; ’twas hookahs and wine, you know the kind.

 

Similarly, both major movies released last weekend, Madagascar and The Longest Yard, had desi influences. In the animated film Madagascar, a major character speaks in a comical desi accent mouthed by Ali G. His Julian the lemur king is pompous and faintly ridiculous, though aside from the accent he’s funny in his own right. The sound isn’t exactly Sellers, but this movie confirms the cycle of immigrant visibility: first ignored, then laughed at, then accepted. (And finally The Man? Only in spelling bees.)

 

The hilarious thing is, American movie reviewers couldn’t place the accent. It was clearly a desi parody, though rounded off via the West Indies or just the fertile mind of Sacha Baron Cohen. Reviewers guessed all over the map: Eurotrash, Middle Eastern, Caribbean. Here’s what the director said:

We had this two-line character, Julian, and we got a tape of the show “Ali G” with Sacha Baron Cohen. He came in and he invented this Indian accent. We gave him a couple of lines and he turned them into eight minutes of dialogue. We were just in tears on the floor and thought, “This guy has to be the king.” So that was just a two-line part that he invented and it turned into that role.

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All that jazz

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I don’t know why more people aren’t fans of jazz music. Is there anything better than sitting in a dark corner of a jazz club with a whiskey on the rocks in one hand and a melody that sounds different to each listener tapping out through the fingers of your other hand? Agastya directs us to Indian American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa.

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Named a Rising Star of the alto saxophone by the 2003 and 2004 Downbeat International Critics Poll, Rudresh Mahanthappa is one of the most innovative young musicians in jazz today. By incorporating the culture of his Indian ancestry, Rudresh has fused myriad influences to create a truly groundbreaking artistic vision. As a performer, he leads/co-leads five groups to critical acclaim. His most recent quartet recording Mother Tongue on Pi Recordings has been named one of Top Ten Jazz CDs of 2004 by the Chicago Tribune, All About Jazz, and Jazzmatazz to name a few and also received 4 stars in DOWNBEAT. This CD reached #8 on US jazz radio charts and reached #1 on Canadian jazz radio charts.

The saxophone is just cool. I wanted to play one in elementary school but they stuck me with the tuba, and according to my therapist it’s still a relevant issue. My hope was to learn how to play one and then marry a girl that played the violin so we could make lots of talented babies together.

Listen to a bunch of Mahanthappa’s recordings here. If you want to see him live there are a number of upcoming dates.

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Raja Wilco

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Check out the lyrical stylings of desi rap group Raja Wilco, about whom I can find damn near nothing on the Net except that they’re from Jersey. Fobio Patel says:

These tracks were ripped from Raja Wilco’s CD “Raja That!”, the 10-4 Sampler… May I draw attention to the fact that tracks 9 and 10 are missing. All of them, especially Raj Makhija and Raja Wilco should feel shame for even including those tracks on their CD. They had such a good thing going, and then tracks 9 and 10 totally fucked them up. It made my ears bleed. I’m bewildered by their extreme lapse in good judgement.

Notable tracks:

  • ‘Chalo Chalo’ and ‘That’s Life’: great filmi and bhangra samples (can anyone name them?)
  • ‘Peter Pank’: interesting syncopation and a reference to a Spanish punk comic:
… the anarchic 80s trash culture comedy PETER PANK, mixing JM Barrie with Johnny Rotten… The best Peter Pan adaptation ever created wasn’t Spielberg’s, or Hogan’s, or even Disney’s. It was made in the 80s, in Spain. In comic form. And it featured sex, drugs and enough rock and roll to get Elvis out of his secret retirement and send him on tour with zombie Sid Vicious and the ghost of Eddie Cochran.
  • ‘Maharaja’:
Yo, I enter the picture like Shah Rukh Khan
Puffing a sto’ like Salman Khan…

From Oldbridge, Edison…
home of the desis…
Brunswick… Cherry Hill…
Freestylin’ under the Brooklyn Bridge
with Crooklyn kids…

You can listen to all the tracks, except the ones Fobio despises, at his site.

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Movies and sausages

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Otto von Bismarck apocryphally joked, ‘Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made,’ and we all know what happened to him. So here are snapshots of two yet-to-be-completed movies as they’re fed through the meat grinder.

The Namesake: Kal Penn photoblogs a day of shooting The Namesake at Calcutta’s Howrah Station:

The press had somehow found out that May 29th had been secured as the day we were shooting at the station, and they saw fit to publish that as news. So in addition to hordes of reporters, photographers, and camera crews, we also had a lot of people standing around watching. I don’t mean “a lot of people” as in 80 people on some street corner in midtown. I mean thousands…

See the photos, watch the video.

Life of Pi: M. Night Shyamalan has dropped out of the Life of Pi film project to focus on his mermaid tale. Alfonso Cuarón, who directed the excellent, dark, third installment of Harry Potter as well as Y Tu Mamá También, may now fill the director’s chair (via Anangbhai):

Fox appears to be breaking with Shyamalan over his decision to make his next picture Warner’s Lady in the Water instead of Pi, an adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning bestseller by Yann Martel. Unwilling to wait a year and a half for Shyamalan to finish Water, Fox was happy to take a call from Cuaron’s reps at William Morris offering his services.

I finally got around to reading the religiously syncretic yarn which starts in Pondichéri and stars a piscine Patel. The Booker book is solid, quality writing, though old-fashioned in style. I do like writers who break the rules of language when required, but that’s not the complaint here. The book’s psychotropic island scenes and its entire narrative arc remind me of Jules Verne and other 19th century adventure authors. There’s also a genteelness and reserve which belongs to an era when women wore corsets and men wore fedoras. It’s an oxymoron, a survival tale that’s not in-your-face in any way. Like Shyamalan, it’s Hitchcock in a De Palma age.

Previous posts: 1, 2

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Rambo IV- Holy Wars

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Just who is Rambo? From Wikipedia:

The first movie begins with the titular character – John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone – returning from the Vietnam War and searching for an old Army buddy. After discovering that his friend had died of cancer, and being escorted to the town limits by the local sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy) who “doesn’t like his type”, Rambo defiantly walks back into town. Sheriff Teasle arrests Rambo, and brings him to the station where he can be “cleaned up”. During a forced shower with firehose, where he is beaten, Rambo has a wartime flashback of his experience as a POW in Vietnam. Temporarily losing touch with reality, Rambo escapes from prison and hides in the local mountains.

So basically we have a guy with a lot of guns who has lost touch with reality and fled to the mountains (see here for example). Hmmm, where to send him next? Well why not have him shoot some Muslim terrorists, and film it partly in India? From Rediff.com (tip from Punjabi Boy):

The shooting for Rambo IV, also titled Holy Wars, is scheduled to begin in Sofia, Bulgaria, in January 2006.

Filming also scheduled in the US and — you better believe it — India!

…an early draft of Holy Wars, freely viewable online, revolves around a different race-situation, one which Stallone has been alluding to ever since 9/11 happened.

John Rambo, a committed family man, is an environmentalist working at the UN headquarters in New York. Suddenly, the UN HQ is besieged by Islamic terrorists. The sadistic fundamentalists are holding the world to ransom. There isn’t a better man to go after the bad guys than Rambo, but the tale sees a twist because he knows his Afghani-adopted son is part of the terrorist squad.

What the F%ck! The John Rambo I have grown to love could never be a “family man” and an environmentalist working at that sissy U.N. What is this crap? But it gets worse. Who will play Rambo’s adopted Afghani son if the filmmakers have their way? I’ll give you a hint. He has six fingers.

Rambo’s Afghani-American stepson (or his Afghani-adopted son, going by the draft we read) is slated to be played by — hold your breath — Hrithik Roshan!

The treatment note describes the character as similar to Altaf in Mission Kashmir, and calls him ‘in many ways, the Rambo for the twenty-first century.’

Talking about Hrithik, it mentions a resemblance between him and Stallone himself, and talks about how the young Indian stud currently has all the staying power needed to make the first truly big crossover Indian-American film.

Taking things into perspective, it’s important to remember than nothing has been signed yet — there have been no official announcements regarding the cast of the film, with the obvious exception of the inevitable leading man, Sly himself.

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Guru Dutt Comes to Washington

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Perhaps it is because Time Magazine put one of his movies in its Top 100, or perhaps it is because his films are just plain good. Regardless, I am pleased to type that The Smithsonian Institution will be screening 5 of Guru Dutt’s works, each newly restored by the National Film Archive of India including Pyaasa, which was included in Time’s list. I liked Pyaasa, but I liked Kagaz Ke Phool and Chaudvi Ka Chand more. All three of these films will be screened, in addition to Mr. and Mrs. 55 and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. I haven’t seen either of the last two, but its Guru Dutt, so it should be good. If I was in DC, I would be most looking forward to Chaudvi Ka Chand. Think Moh’d Rafi and his amazing voice swoon, “Chaudvin Ka Chand Ho, Ya Aaftaab Ho…”. But I digress. The movies will be screened throughout June and the schedule is as follows: Mr. and Mrs. 55, Sunday, June 5, 2 pm. Meyer Auditorium Pyaasa, Friday, June 17, 7 pm. Meyer Auditorium Chaudhvin Ka Chand, Sunday, June 19, 2 pm. Meyer Auditorium Kaagaz Ke Phool, Friday, June 24, 7 pm. Meyer Auditorium Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, Sunday, June 26, 2 pm. Meyer Auditorium Continue reading →