Three days, almost...

...and I'll be back in The Inward Arc - Transvisionary Centre for Art & Aesthetics with Joy. In a few days I'll be having nice chai in that gorgeous electric blue woodenhouse, watching people walk by, hearing Cheengu cheengu, cheengu, watching Joy write those filmnames with yellow, blue, red chalk, todays screenings at Inward Arc... writing with so much care, his supramentality in his paintings, 108 ways of seeing, Om-Sheela, such positivity and then Sai Baba Mahadev passing by, coming up, we light up, then hot spring, then Chauhans, Guraans, oh Je Taime Vashisht!!!

The Business of Mourning (Andrew Tracy)

Film culture today seems rather akin to the model of an expanding universe, traveling ever further outward while that which is known about what it already encompasses becomes increasingly infinitesimal. As ever more discoveries, old and new, become ever more available to an ever more passionate, articulate, and interlinked cinephile community, the giddy thrill of discovery is accompanied by a palpable anxiety about the integrity of the medium itself. Even as images flood to us as never before, we remain fearful of their being taken irretrievably away. Gorging on cinema, we’re continually beset by a sense of loss, warily eyeing each new technological bogeyman as if it heralded the end of the purity we’ve imagined for ourselves.

The digital daemon, on both the filming and viewing side, is only the latest in a long line of developments that lay dormant for years until a certain set of conditions allowed them to bedevil our perpetually distressed consciousness. As with so many of its “revolutionary” forebears, the noise it’s generated from commentators informed and less so is primarily a lot of guff—which is not, of course, to say that it has no implications for cinema’s future. Like any other tool, digital opens up some options, precludes others, and allows some to remain the same. It’s another agent of change in a medium that has been predicated on change from the beginning. “A transitory blip in the history of the visual arts,” Kent Jones dubs it in his excellent collection Physical Evidence—not a lament, but a recognition that cinema only came into existence in the first place through the intersection of some profoundly disparate and arbitrary forces. Digital is simply another forking path for a bastardized medium that will proceed on its own merry way largely irrespective of our fervent hopes and wishes.

Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about where it’s going. Thing is, though, that all the anxiety about the future of the medium, and the experiments being undertaken within it, can only be articulated in terms of the past. Whatever else they are, the frequently cited standard bearers of this “revolution”—your Miami Vices, your Zodiacs, and Inland Empires—are pitched at a thoroughly familiar level of cinematic comprehension (yes, even the Lynch). Textures have changed; intentions have not. And while the former certainly conditions how we perceive the “film” in front of us, the familiar frameworks of understanding built into the latter push us continually back into the concerns of the past. Perpetually backwards-looking as we are, the best we can hope for is to better order that past in order to comprehend our still-unknown present.

All of which is to ask the simple question: is there any “filmmaker” who faces the shifts within his chosen medium with such blissful unconcern as Chris Marker? Marker’s swearing off of film for good in the Nineties had nothing of an iconoclastic air about it. As new developments tend to do, video had accentuated a preexisting condition rather than initiating an entirely new one: in Marker’s case, making the affinity of material and metaphor in his work all the more identical. “These images are not the substitute for my memory, they are my memory,” Alexandra Stewart intones in Marker’s perpetually surprising 1982 master text Sans Soleil. Though Marker has been supplanted from his own experiences by the record he’s kept of them, pushed even further away by the interpolation of the filmed records of others, it can be said that his aesthetic is founded precisely upon losing images—losing proprietorship over them, seeing them taken away and transformed by each successive incarnation. It’s a condition he highlights through the many winking mediations in his work, such as attributing the text of Sans Soleil to the letters of one “Sandor Krasna” and articulating it through the inimitable voice of Stewart.

Like his fellow recluse Godard, Marker is forever concerned with the meaning of the image, but where Godard’s palimpsests overload those images with meaning both visual and aural, the meaning of Marker’s images is being forever stripped away, and any trace of his “authorship” with it. Recall in Sans Soleil “the Zone,” his friend’s image device which renders the political struggles of the Sixties as abstract images of colored electronic movement, creating an impression of struggle, an emblem which Marker says is “more honest” than the traps of context and explanation. Material and metaphor: the Zone is both an active transformation and intervention into the image and a representation of the operations of time—a relentless process to which Marker blissfully consigns his own images at the end of the film.

Yet Marker is not indulging in some postmodern vanity about the absence of meaning. Meaning is the structuring absence of his entire project—the grin of his images is merely the meager visual evidence of the unseen cat. Marker is not a “creator” but an arranger, ordering the trace remnants of a felt but invisible past with the tools presented to him in the present. “I’ll have to give these images to my friend Chris one day, see if he can make any sense of them,” says Laura (Catherine Belkhodja), the protagonist of Level Five; “Chris, the editing wunderkind,” she slyly adds. Marker’s last feature, and his first on video, divorces him even further from the visual and verbal text he’s devised. Ostensibly the video records of Laura’s attempts to reach her dead lover by completing his computer program reenacting the Battle of Okinawa, the last and most ferocious conflict of the Pacific War, Level Five forgoes any idea of cinema as a “pure” medium, placing it instead as one element within a vast media interface, a resource to be accessed within a larger project of memory reclamation.

Yet even as it opens with a quotation from Gibson’s Neuromancer, the ubiquitous ur-text of such speculative fictions, Level Five’s vision of ultramodernity has a charmingly musty air about it. The menu screens, multiple monitors, and overlaid graphics that delineate Laura’s physical and virtual workspace seem like visions of a future conceived in the past. Rather than inadvertent quaintness, however, the bluntness and functionality of the instruments at her command retain a seductively mythic quality: a dream of labyrinthine interiors, of unending possibilities for connection and evolution seems to lurk within the unadorned casings and matter-of-fact command functions.

Marker understands the romance of technology even as he slyly undermines it. Laura likes to taunt the computer by substituting nouns for verbs in her command orders, leading to such perplexed declarations from the poor unit as “I don’t know how to shoe,” “I don’t know how to baguette,” and so on. The expanding media universe in which Marker situates his perpetual concerns provides no answers, but rather sharpens the pertinence and pathos of the questions. Just as in Sans Soleil he fantasized about a visitor from the future whose total recall makes him nostalgic for forgetting, Marker’s ventures into new media simply provide more means of entry to the unrecoverable, unalterable, and unknowable past that fascinates him. Marker’s “future” is not a projection of speculation and fantasy, but an abstract space shorn of the necessities of living in the present: a space literally out of time, a space whose removal from the helplessly chronological experience of time allows the possibility of accessing that already passed time which is the sole source of meaning.

Marker can thus be said to be both the most and least materialistic of “film”-makers. Film for him is not the simultaneous Holy Grail and lying whore which pains Godard so, paradises lost and regained with every strenuous effort. Where Godard’s invocations of classical music, painting, literature, and poetry compound his images with extrinsic doses of cultural capital, a reactionary striving for Truth within his loved and hated medium, Marker’s unconcern with the discrete qualities of his material blends them into a whole which is both seamless in its presentation and dizzying in its conceptual and stylistic leaps. Even as Marker ceaselessly draws attention to the fragile, exclusionary, and distorting properties of the filmic image, those images stand in equivalence to all the other evidence with which we seek to make some sense of the cinematic century and the post-cinematic one that follows it. Marker’s catholicity blithely forgoes any essentialist propositions about the “innate” qualities of the medium employed. Film, video, computer —all are simply extensions of our searching, questioning, occasionally lying eyes and ears.

To deny that each progressive extension entails a loss as much as it does an advance would be foolish; to proclaim that our consciousness of that loss would be effaced as well at least equally so. There has never been a pure state from which we have fallen, but it is the unyielding belief in such a state that drives us to create meaning out of the partial and unspeaking fragments that we possess. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and nostalgia for that which we never had is perhaps the most powerful of all. The intentional or unintentional task of the new media will forever be to articulate the loss, imagined, or actual, of that which preceded it, and in that business of mourning find the only justification for its existence. As Sans Soleil’s images enter the Zone in its final scene, dissolving into meaningless patterns of light and color, Stewart wonders “Will there ever be a last letter?”—a question whose optimism is as pointed as its rue.

Abstrakt Kollision

AbstraktKollisionFreshness. Featuring Hierarchy, Rocky Road, Rebel, Skeletal Error, Core, Saraswati, Alpha, Entra Trenata, Dryday, Crossroads, Digital Destruction, Digital Sunrise Pt. I, Exodus110, HorseWithFrenchBun, Mixedfeelings, Sevenhundredyearsback, Severesky, SkeptikSky, Trikon Mithi, Visible Path, Watersecrets

3, 2, 1 Room 1, Inward Arc

Cosmic Intelligence Transmitting Images To My Head. :)

11:47 to 00.02 (Moondance)

Magic every night. We have wands and we wave them in the sky letting the Moon do her dance. Peaking quietly, half-moon in waiting. Looking. Seeing the stupidities of man and probably laughing at Inspector Jigantar, Constable Babantar and Driver on our way to the wine shop. A wonderful evening of Wooten baba's sonic love, Gary Willis, Vadrum's Barber of Seville, of talking in Visra after S left, seemed like for hours on end as our minds relaxed unable to fathom the Visceral world of the void sentence, a tendency to be nothing for a few minutes, to let the mind sleep, our own unique form of meditation, of that slip of the tongue "Kudrat Ka Mela", Omo (inhale) & Azu (exhale), such moments captured and scripted for future film ideas... then those 15 minutes going back home, looking at the moon over the bridge to the sound of Truffaz's "The Dawn". And then that final moment, car parked, I thank Shiva for life, for everything and as soon as I say that, watchman appears from nowhere and greets me like he has never before, Shiva sending cosmic vibes via the human form. Transcendent. There are so many things that are completely out of our grasps. Or maybe I'm reading into everything too much. Moment-unanalysis needs to happen. So, time to stop thinking, time to live in the absence of thought, the abstrakt kollision of Visra.

The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov, designed by John Gall.

Moon & I: Monologue

11:39, time out of hand. I stop to think of the cosmic being, the living, breathing earth, look up at the sky and the Moon makes her appearance again from behind the passing black clouds, every once in a while, like a smile, looking at all those men in exile, waiting to make it to the other place where everything will be understood, where everything will be simpler, where love and warmth will find their way. Prior to that, a string of events...
Meeting M, diverse-enthusiast, I was introduced to his life, of his love for cars, his dream of producing a film called "0&1", of doing K2K (Kanyakumari to Kashmir) in his Gypsy, getting NDTV to cover it, he has charted out his life on the blueprint of his mind, its all clear. And that wonderful ending to the evening when JG made fresh Dosa's and Coriander Mint Chutney. All in all, the magic stayed another night, keeping me company day after day as I understand and constantly think of topics like impermanence, the body electric and the oneness of life. I'm waiting here, I seethesea.

And with Tagore, the sun... :)



Last Poems #13

The first day's sun
questioned
the new appearance of being –
Who are you?
There was no answer.

Years went by.
Day's last sun
asked the last question from the shores of the west
in the soundless evening –
Who are you?
There was no answer.

----

Rabindranath Tagore wrote until the end which came for him on August 7, 1941. This poem is from Final Poems recently published. They are translated from the Bengali jointly by Wendy Barker Saranindranath Tagore, a great grandson of the venerable Tagore.

According to the authors of Final Poems, this poem is the most famous of Tagore's later poems in the Bengali language. They point out its similarity to the Creation Hymn of the Vig Reda (c. 2000 BCE). This hymn begins with the unforgettable line, "There was neither nonexistence nor existence then."
It ends with these lines:

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence
was it produced? Whence is its creation? The gods
came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who
then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself,
or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in
the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does
not know.

Question (By Tagore)

God, again and again through the ages you have sent messengers
To this pitiless world
They have said, 'Forgive everyone', they have said, 'Love one another --
Rid your hearts of evil.'
They are revered and remembered, yet still in these dark days
We turn them away with hollow greetings, from outside the doors of our houses.

And meanwhile I see secretive hatred murdering the helpless
Under cover of night;
And Justice weeping silently and furtively at power misused,
No hope of redress.
I see young men working themselves into a frenzy,
In agony dashing their heads against stone to no avail.

My voice is choked today; I have no music in my flute:
Black moonless night
Has imprisoned my world, plunged it into nightmare. And this is why,
With tears in my eyes, I ask:
Those who have poisoned your air, those who have extinguished your light,
Can it be that you have forgiven them? Can it be that you love them?

Language of the Dead

Notes

AHER/I's concept of Notes. And how he uses it to document the advice he needs to give to young musicians, of disciplining them with key words like Time, Professionalism, Duty, capital T, capital P, capital D and of XY1-1111 and how he documents magic on the phone, those moments that often escape from the grasps of time, poems, sightings of the moon, of moments of love and warmth, of those kinetic moments post-Gx-genome, of ideas and thoughts in Visra. How differently we all see the world, how differently we utilise our minds and our hearts, how strange all this really is. Its beyond belief. The violin could be three notes lower and we would never know what hit us. Really...

11:11 & The Moon

After a wash of Nu Taq K, I stepped out from J-Ganter's place to see the headless moon, my eyes like two little windows. And discovering the music of Jagjit Singh again, 17 years later and I still remember the nuances in those heartfelt songs. I remember those tapes I had of "In search" & "Insight". And I'm constantly thinking of that one annoying little thing, of my file (life) and if the "increasedeleteescapedefeat" procedure is being carried out on it, my ascii heart still in waiting. Driving back, looking at the moon at 11:11 through my window and a strange poem rests on my head and heart.

I miss much,
the eternal touch
of that girl from Kutch.

----

Three minutes later, the sound rings from the pixel transmission centre of friendship or a brotherhood, of a moment waiting to be held in my fingertips, fists clenched around plastic, the heart and the bubbles, bringing the lungs to the forefront of that second when the water is dreaming, when all the air rises, enters and is finally let out, fumes in unison with the mind's psychotropic ways...

On "Exodus110"

File: Exodus110, If_en_blafen_sho & If_shan_bashen_Ko
Visra, the language of the dead, and the stories of two friends Ifenblafensho & Ifshanbashenko who meet "here" (on earth) and then "there" (in heaven) where they talk in Visra and everything is understood. The language of the heart finds no boundaries in translation or communication, it transcends all boundaries. It lives after death when all language has disappeared, when the time has come only for the soul to speak, only for love's most deepest contact, a real contact of two souls. Not like in these times when love has to be so carefully evaluated and analyzed before it can be accepted and reciprocated. Ifenblafensho & Ifshanbashenko are waiting to move to that space of superconsciousness, where we can say hello to our departed German friend.
Ifsoroha is here, now. Right here, right now.

Peripetics by Zeitguised

Peripetics from zeitguised on Vimeo.

‘Peripetics or The installation of an irreversible axis on a dynamic timeline’

Zeitguised made a piece in six acts for the opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn, including the evolution of educational plant-body-machine models and liquid building materials.

Length: 5000F/ 3min 20s
Sound Design: Zeitguised with Michael Fakesch

23rd September. I remember the day fifteen years back. On the thirteenth floor of Barton Centre, Ebony Restaurant. With a million thoughts of love and that auroral image of A. I'm not there. I'm here. Now. Period.

Bizarre Banalities of a day

A day that started with that strange moment after my haircut when I felt Mahesha, the auto-driver had the same eyes as mine.
Of later, when the mind said to the heart, "Dont be silly" and the heart replied, "C'mon Billy". To document some moments in point form. She has her own string section (and J-Ganter replies "She comes with strings attached"), possibility of opening scene in a film. Of the man who transcribes Viscera and understands its deepest meaning in the spell check, of J-Ganter's txt "sorry for me is waiting for you"...and talking of txts, that midnight rally, those Navratilova-esque safe shots and that moment when the ball hit the net, over and out, of the ascii-magic of computers and how the processing unit converts all the 1's to 0's in the deletion procedure, of looking at the time at 11:11, car-clock colon's blinking in 4/4, re-discovering Kailasa's Jhoomo Re, reaching home and as I'm going to sleep after an exhausting day, the time 00.00, my ascii heart erased of all the potential of a real love, all metadata in the recycle bin, all one's converted to zero's. Its time to leave. Really. To disappear...

To end with that lovely quote from Sans Soleil. I'm paraphrasing here -
"Only banalities interest me, I have chased it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter"

JVS

The Life of Jigantar, ex-cop, dramaturgist.
In the ongoing series of documenting the language of Viscera, the language of the heart, the two friends Babantar and Jigantar meet up to see what's happening in the world today only to be surprised by the sonic un-intelligence of the corporate world only to be consumed in total unfiltered entertainment, sifarha va jigantar trifola gulpetaga begum. This is the beginning of the avant-garde.

Back.
*Insert Grunge riff here* :)

To...

I need to throw this knife out the window,
My hands are turning red, the blood rushing to my head
My heart like an anchor, holding my thoughts like a thread.

I need to throw this strife out the window,
My face is holding unwanted genetic information
And traces of that ultimate descent into subjugation.

N. Singh, the man out of time

A very heavy day. Full of information, sensorial, arterial, visceral. Of all those things that happened, I loved that phone call with TV, of pink Giraffe's, of Benares meets Diesel cherippu, classic articulation, my friend for life, that long call with DT, the way I became that floating string back in the air, that vulnerable kite, flying about with no direction or purpose, of how I can never base anything on life, of expecting absolutely nothing, being now and surrendering to nothingness, like that leaf flying about...this will be my life as I know it. Impermanence is the only thing I can count on. And ofcourse the ten fingers of my hand, the ten seconds that we have, nothing more, nothing less.

Then...

An epic evening. Unexpected. Chandrakanth, Inspector Jiganthar and me finally connect like three dots. Energies overwhelmingly powerful as we discuss ideas for a set of experimental films to be shot in the language of Viscera, subtitles open to receive topics ranging from Love, Fear, Loss, Disappointment, Anger, Politics. Of two friends talking in an unknown language, sometimes saying nothing, just listening to music. The electricity in the room was quite brilliant, Jean-Luc Ponty exploding through the Yamaha speakers, until we were disturbed by an uninvited visitor at 11pm, the cult of N. Singh. As soon as he entered, aural transfers went berzerk. He broke time. A third party- application. He would be that uninvited guest who roams around the city disrupting time and breaking connections by bringing his life's problems into the lives of others. He spoke with no filters revealing his innermost problems to strangers. After an uncomfortable confrontational episode, he left and we returned to the room to talk. Chand told me about N. Singh's wife who has apparently gone nuts. Then, from that thought, Chand was reminded of this very strange story of a boy who he once knew, who was in a coma for about five years, whose brain was operated (experimented) on fourteen times, his father and how he met him, man in white and white who was around the neighbourhood looking for a Xerox place, accidently landing up in Chand's office. A man part of the criminal intelligence outfit Octopus. All these people, their characters and their lives were out of a film. Of how Chand tried to teach painting to the "mentally withdrawn" child as he made labels on the painting with tags like sky, earth, river. Of how the brain is so fragile, a little out of balance and we have absolutely nothing. This boy has lost all memory and the only things that still remain are those basest of human experiences, the sun, the sea, the clouds, of how he would get up, lost, and want to leave to see Chand and not realise he is in his presence, of getting him out of the studio, circling the neighbourhood and coming back to calm the mind, of how he lost it totally due to his hate for his parents, breaking everything in Chands studio. Then those strings of serendipitous moments, both Chand and me saying "Who" at the same time, those brilliant sparks going off between Prax and me, as always, a type of visceral extravaganza everytime we meet. God is great for giving me this. And so much more. How can I ever be unhappy?

And in the end, as the three of us looked at the mic facing the wall, the only thought that crossed our minds is "When is the wall going to speak and say something, how much longer can a mic wait...?"

Three-point trajectory (Development)

Idea for a film:
Naseeruddin Shah. Aging pianist. Lives in an old wooden house, high ceilings, sculpture, art, steinway grand piano, Chopin notations scattered everywhere, culture, books, films, music. Invites his compadre, experimental artist Om Puri over for dinner to celebrate a re-union of sorts, a meeting after many many years, and Om's new love, a 25 year old film student. Possibly Deepika Padukone. Cool, contemporary, avant-garde outlook on life. 2 hours, one evening. Shot in real-time. Dinner, music, dialogue and possible chemistry going off between Naseer and Deepika as he begins to re-imagine Chopin at twelve o' clock, midnight. Of the meaning of love, insecurity, infatuation, age-difference, confrontation, sincerity, of a long-term friendship, impermanence of love and other things of the heart. What a young girl could do to shake the equation of an ethereal bond between two aging friends. Is love really required? How do you decide what's more important, a friendship or a (fleeting) love? Answers to the basest of human questions. Is art the bringer/giver of presence? Is the elusive artist more attractive than the artistic lover?

N. Gopu - D. Okat (Exchange)
NG
Wow, interesting subject, bro. Very interesting...I can totally picture it in my head. Art, love and all that you have mentioned. Quirky characters, intelligent dialogues, some deep philosophy at midnight. You should definitely get down and work on this man. And since you are in this frame of mind, have you seen Jules et Jim?

DO
No whats that...
I sent the idea to a friend and this is what she added to it...
----
Very nice, but would tweak the central idea/characters a little since the young woman/mentor love angle has been done to death. What if during this reunion between the two, the neighbour (young woman who lives alone) has locked herself out and has to spend a couple of hours with them in naseer;s flat till her spare keys arrive. This way everyone is starting from point A. No one has any prior stake on the woman hence each one tries to out do the other.

Makes any sense?
----
Nice, no? Remember Srika saying "NICE" and that granmom type of chin...

NG
Oh, I didn't know the young girl would be a protege.

My two cents, bro..

In my opinion, if you take the second idea, there isn't any 'conflict', no? So it becomes fully character driven, which is also nice. I didn't like this 'outdoing the other in a span of 2 hours' idea much da. Then it would be just better to keep it like a conversation between 3 intellectuals, on the topics you've mentioned, without introducing any romance. Just some chemistry at the most... Plus, I feel, locking herself out by mistake seems too forced. It would take you some effort to establish the premise here, but, with your version, its all there.

I like your take man, without keeping a protege mentor relationship, though. Om puri dating this girl who seems too good to be real. This way the woman also feels comfortable to open up on such topics...

"Is love really required? How do you decide what's more important, a friendship or a (fleeting) love?"

It would be more dynamic if Naseer and this 'couple' talk on such topics..Naseer getting more and more fascinated by this woman, as she puts forward her perspective on different subjects.

Also, in the second version there isn't really a scope for introducing topics like "meaning of love, insecurity, infatuation, age-difference, confrontation, sincerity, of a long-term friendship, impermanence of love and other things of the heart".
There wouldn't be any 'confrontation' or 'insecurity', no?

This is a superb subject , bro..Loved it. Keep working on it man..

Fin, for now. Building procedure to begin. *Halo*

Little-ities

Ethereal bond, circa 1977. I love my brother for all that he is. x
----
And then later
Impermanence (Live at the Electric Crystal Table, 150910)
"In impermanence, lies all of life", I realized as I wished S Babantar (the spirit of Aryakaanthe) goodbye. Of the solar and the lunar, Shiva's calling, that Kundalini awakening, of the cosmic way and how strange everything really is, our bodies, our minds, the tricks they play, the moments they wear and tear, of our deepest sincere emotions flying on a thin string of kite, flying about with the possibility of sudden death, of love and how it can end immediately with no prior warnings, of that minority of Army X coming back full circle to impermanence as its dressed in white waiting for the red to stain it once and for all.

I'm coming to terms with many things. Of them I love my hearts band, those trumpets, violins, string section, pizzicato overriding the electricity of the music, those flourishes of guitars, open chords, those sweeping voices riding the clouds on those darkest of nights, that band I'd like to call it Impermanence.

"Ence"

Impermanence, like that wolf at the door, waiting to come in, wearing purple socks, grinding its teeth into the wood.
Transience, like that moment out of time, waiting to dissolve, wearing a feather hat, a minor threat that's no good.
Subservience, like that child on the edge, waiting to drop, wearing nature's clothes, coming crashing down like it should.

A line,
The Radius of the Sun,

A circle,
The Heart of the Moon.

----

J-Ganther K and me meet again, the chain broken, two-day absence, hearts connect and as we look at Superman posing the only thing that came to our minds is Compon K (switching the amp before switching on the comp, primal f**kup, dislocated day), that secret language of the soul, uncontrolled breath, a sort of meditation finding its way, speaking in tongues bringing us closer than we could ever imagine.

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
----
Emily Dickinson

A pink crayon, a white piece of paper, a ribbon, an eye, hundredhands and three-hundred thousand thoughts of love as they make patterns and shapes formed from a dream of a curious love, a memory of her face and the touch of her heart, her technicolour love, those 16.7 million colours...

The curve of the G

I love the way light attaches itself to an object, how it makes the shapes change, the shadowtricks, those lemon yellow twelve'o'clock afternoons, lunch on nice plates, the black and grey diagrams forming abstract rhythms inside my head, those electro-beats decorating that cup of tea sonically, the first half of the poem suffused in idealism, that felicity and how inherently out of our grasps our most honest expressions are, that first ray of light as it enters the room, that first look of love, that first smile that keeps immediacy always waiting at the door, like a smiling wolf or maybe an amiable chromosome bear singing in the key of B-Flat minor, the way the sound appears and fills the room... fully...

The Paradox of Our Age

We have bigger houses but smaller families;
More conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
More knowledge, but less judgment;
More experts, but more problems;
More medicines, but less healthiness;
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We build more computers to hold more information to
produce more copies than ever but have less communication.
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods but slow digestion;
Tall man but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It's a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.
----
Dalai Lama
(Thankyou, D)

3,4,5,6,7,8,9 & The Age of Aquarius

...and to think of those six nights, those seven days, that time, that sky, those walls, the colour and the shape of her eyes, the way she looked straight into my soul, the things she said, a kind of blue, the closeness, those lockups - options one to ninety nine, wine, of those light moments in the rain, eyes adrift in Mondy's, that comfort of black, the way the eyes see and only see, that thing we call time, the hands of time, its inconsistency, moments fluttering about like butterflies, the archaeology of dreams, that first wink, blinkety blinky blink, that first x on the sealink, cinematic moments for posterity, Xiva's third eye smiling as I miss my flight, extended glances into the night...

The Last Calligraphers

The Last Calligraphers from Hinterland Films on Vimeo.

The Musalman (Urdu: مسلمان) is the oldest Urdu-language daily newspaper published from Chennai in India. It is an evening paper with four pages, all of which are handwritten by calligraphers, before being mass-produced with a printing press. According to the Wired and The Times of India, The Musalman is possibly the only "handwritten" newspaper in the world.

The newspaper was founded by Janab Syed Azmathullah Sahib in 1927. It was inaugurated by Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, the president of the Madras session of the Indian National Congress. The newspaper's office has been located at the Triplicane High Road in Chennai.

After Janab Syed Azmathullah's death, the newspaper was edited by Janab Syed Fazullah sahib, who died on 26 April 2008, at the age of 78. In 2007, Fazullah had expressed fear that the calligraphy might die with him, since his sons were not interested in carrying on the calligraphy tradition. Fazullah's son, Syed Nasarulla, had stated that he has no interest in calligraphy, and "there will be changes", when he takes over.

The calligraphers, known as katibs, work in a little corner of a 800 sq. ft. one-room office. They don't have many facilities — only two wall fans, three bulbs and a tube light. As of 2008, the calligraphy team consists of one man and two women, who work almost three hours on each page of the hand-written newspaper. The hand-written product is processed onto a photo negative and mass-produced with a printing press.

The newspaper's office often hosts renowned poets, religious leaders and royalty, some of whom contribute to the pages.

The newspaper consists of four pages. The front page is for national and international news, the second and the third pages are for local news, and the fourth page is for sports. Some space is left blank at the bottom right corner of the front page, in case there is some breaking news.

As of April 2008, the paper is sold for 75 paise a copy, and has around 22,000 subscribers.

IF is the middle word of LIFE

Death is close, very very close...and life is inherently and mysteriously out of our grasps.

"The Word" by Tony Hoagland

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning -- to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue

but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

- to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.

Time & other things...

Night. Thoughts of time. Who decided on that pause and how long it should be, one second to the other. Why sixty seconds, why sixty minutes, why twenty-four hours? Because of the sun, because of the moon? Why anger, why grudge, why time sends its hands onto us with such aggression. And then all the puppets on the floor dancing to its rhythm trying to keep up with money & appointments. In the final earth, the redemption will be for the one who has no recollection, interest or concern for time. Its these puppets I am scared of most. These humans... the ones who live for time and money, those idiots who say "time is money" and those strangers I thought I knew. How way off the mark I am... how far out on the periphery I stand. Looking... its time to get away again.

And then I remembered the high points of the evening, Ji To Ke and his yellow-insulation tape on his temples, making him more oriental than he already is, the disgusting job of telling him about the disgusting job, that last analysis of Reverse Khan, Nimhans employees analysing that cigarette butt for hints and clues and that ongoing dream of Jigaanthar and me speaking in viscera, all gibberish, like the heart's air, like the Dara Okat monologues, that field of lilies and those 24 frames per hour of a mysterious face at sunset time...