Benway

Of all good things, sun-yogi's, kundalini, the tobacco-death ceremony in the Andamans, living on that island next to the forbidden North Sentinel island, of tripping on acid in Gokharna and swimming with dolphins, of all things herbal, of all things organic, of the heart, of the soul, of the spirit. The Benway to life, englishman, organic farmer, dashal village, himachal pradesh, the heart of the hinterland rests in his eyes.

Faultline

A Time And A Place

Kerala Chapter

The Floating Man, , Wayanad, Kerala (2009)

The Floating Man from Hinterland Films on Vimeo.

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Ghosts, Wayanad, Kerala (2009)

Ghosts from Hinterland Films on Vimeo.

Sabka Malik Ek

Psy-Baba now swooping down like a bird of prey. Video footage ensemble cast, silver-line, floating cloud. Sabka Malik Ek. See to the eye, catch to the mind. In his words. Later shot horses by the Beas grazing. Like being back in the lute ages. Synchronised serendipity, electric clock ticking backwards, a man out of time. Then, spring, then subodh, angry one-eyed baba, subodh's quiet friend ajith, the eeriness surrounding the dhuni at the temple, angry baba yelling, then subodh breaking into song "ye bhagwan ka maunder" and before that some light music to ease the atmosphere, "ud jaayega hans akela" and "papiha". Strange exposition, hand curling to venus-shape around neck, uncoiled or coiled serpent I don't know, I could only guess that he has a mind full of porcupines. And those strange scenes, three of us sitting one behind the other facing angry baba in silence, the 50-ruppee quarrel on scoring enough hash for one joint. The quiet chaos of the unsettled mind breaks through the unflinching leash of the winded soul.

And then it hit me…

Lamo

I can have moments crushed in turmeric paste, I can have the concept of infinity, the kinetic sumatra painting strange shapes in the sky, each one a different colour, a different tone, an ascent to the seventh.

You Can't Have It All - Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam's twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts, for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream, the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's, it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.

1600, 050710, Hinterland

Pretty Ms. Magpie posed for me on film today. File under "Wildlife Analysis".

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The Yellow-billed Blue Magpie or Gold-billed Magpie (Urocissa flavirostris) is a passerine bird in the crow and jay family,
Corvidae. It forms a superspecies with the Taiwan Blue Magpie and the Red-billed Blue Magpie. The species ranges from Pakistan to Burma with a disjunct population in Vietnam.

Blue upperparts with very long, graduated, black-and-white tipped tail. Separated from Red-billed by yellow-bill, and white on head, restricted to crescent on nape. Juvenile has olive-yellow bell. Broadleaved and coniferous forests. Resident; breeds 1800-3300m, winters down to 1000m.

Earth-realisation Pt. 1

Butterflies, apples, rain.
Apples with raindrops, pine's stretching through the passing clouds,
Those mountains, looking

I think there is emerging the need to document the nature in Hinterland using the music of Boards of Canada. Today morning I was shooting the apples in the rain as they get ready for the harvest. They look beautiful, half-red, half-yellow like that duality in man.

Strange Meeting: Mouli Marur

He spoke of locational micography, about moving the sound, about aurality as a means to typography, about the Chicago art scene, the need for an artists village in Naggar, a collaborative design programme that is art and sustainable at once. His name is Mouli Marur, Dean, Design Faculty, Art Institute Chicago which apparently houses the second largest collection of Renoir originals after Louvre. Strange meeting at Chai shop, Naggar. Chance, je taime. The visceral path is illuminated, Sumatra is home. x

Architecture

The architecture of an aunt
Made the child dream of cupolas,
Domes, other smoothly rounded shapes.
Geometries troubled his sleep.

The architecture of young women
Mildly obsessed the young man:
Its globosity, firmness, texture,
Lace cobwebs for adornment and support.

Miles from his aunt, the old child
Watched domes and cupolas defaced
In a hundred countries, as time passed.

A thousand kilometres of lace defiled,
And much gleaming and perfect architecture
Flaming in the fields with no visible support.

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Dom Moraes
Thanks M.

Moti, Kathy & Lamo: Friends from Zenpark

What a wonderful day. Moments captured out of time in the realm of that superhuman Kundalini power. Five senses, five elements, plugged in, uncoiled - open environment. I watched "The Bear" with a little 6-year old boy called Lamo. His father is Iranian and his mother is half-Polish/half-German. Shiva-power all the way, what a jam. Friends straightaway like some karmic connection mercurial wheel. Later I met Lamo's father and mother. What a family. Part of the absolute, just being part of that pure consciousness, that earth, that timeless personal denouement juxtaposed with the sky, the earth, the stars and the sea. Free spirits part of no cliche, part of no society, just wanderers tasting the earth, feeling the air, living in Gokharna sometimes, sometimes in Hrishikesh, sometimes in Vashisht. Anywhere is home as long as nature is in control. Lamo is taught by his parents, a real living experience. A wonderful fresh look at the way 24 hours is spent. Then we ate at the local Himachali wedding some wonderful dal, rajma, rice and khadi. Over dinner learnt that Lamo is vegan, nature boy, offspring of his matrabhoomi, of his uber-conscious parents, his internal spirit riding the crest of the waves of what them wannabe city-kids call cool.

The Birth of QuroBear™

...and another chapter begins. Dara Okat in and as the curious QuroBear™ from Hinterland.

The sun, the sea, the sky, the clouds

Its the closedness that causes that spot of plastic in the sun, that military headway before the meadow, that acquisition-driven set of ideals, that connectedness with the external. The bardo will come and get you and sweep you from the concrete floor into the grass, barefoot, silken like the shine of the web in the summer sun...

Kheer Ganga & the presence of God

I stepped into the spring, looked up at the moon and smiled. I am in the hands of God, in the womb of life. Kheer Ganga, je taime.

Ashokan's letter

A Day of strange serendipitous events (Pt. 3): "Why?"

What a day? Serendipity on Mt. Hinterland with the introduction and felicitation of the young Nitin Gopi, film-fanatic, English-humour friendly, young 21-year old version of my good friend JP. Serendipity # 1, so Shanks him and me are sitting in my room, Sai Baba working the chillum to perfection and Shanks says he plays with Hypnotribe and Nitin says he has been to one of their gigs and Shanks says he was the flutist, violinist and Nitin goes, "Fuck" and remembers how he loved Shanks the most in the band. A cauldron of kinpa. Suddenly the images meet, the trajectories connect and the heart loses a beat. Later over dinner, he asks what movies I have done and I mention Kunigunda and suddenly Serendipity #2 kicks in. He says he has seen it and describes the scenes in the film. Of how Mark walks towards the camera in jump-cuts, and suddenly he remembered the point of contact from KP's facebook page and from there mine and from mine and introduction to me through pixels and for him also an introduction to Kiarostami from my favourite films section... woah, I couldn't believe it. Shocking even more for him, young boy out in the Himalayas looking for the point of least resistance and voila, torrential proverbial rain pouring. Two more minor offshoots from the evening, one when I said I didnt like Kill Bill and Shanks and Nitin go "Why?" in unison and in similar high-pitched frequencies, and two those four Sony batteries looking up at Shanks from the same angle, those close-call frequencies disrupting the monotony of forward thinkers. A time for silence and concentration. Listen and watch closely, there are many intervals God uses to come into contact with humanity and their ridiculous ways. Sensational, really...but I wonder. Why?

A Day of strange serendipitous events (Pt. 2)

A very strange day. Strange in a good way. I decided to head out to Naggar. Home. Took Sumatra out after a few spins with a peculiar black herb extract. Connected, ethereally, root chakra full power. What a ride. Then I decided to take the pedestrian path to my house in the hills. Took the wrong one, got completely lost in the wilderness, forest everywhere, tall tall trees, that wonderful smell. I wasn't scared, I have heard the bears sometime come down to the valley. Maybe I should get the XY costume out and in working condition, full nature, herbal power. While I was wandering and terribly lost, panting like my heart was going to burst out, woah, and then it happened. I think Guru Vasisht sent someone to help me find my way back home. I bumped into this very bizarre american violinist, someone I met in Benaras in Feb on that first SR-visit. I didn't really connect with her so I wasn't really excited to see her, but she was there to help me find my way back home. Well, how weird? Utterly and totally like Lynchian bizarre, no? Then I sat in my veranda. To enjoy this you really got to earn it and that's what I like about it. You then realise how valuable that space is, in silent oneness with trees, above everything, looking, just looking, standing still. Not thinking. Its good to earn it. Body and soul, totally and completely in union with the motherpower. Electricity, cosmic electro-hyrdrologically brilliant...

Sumatra came home. :)

Home, Hinterland

Nutshell

Just read a review of Doshi, probably the best so far. Feels great to read that and remember the times Bijoy and me had going to all those places and just being together observing those wonderful landscapes without perspective. And now I am living that dream slowly, that dream of being with nature, immersed in it. Its all coming together well, slow but really nicely. I have a really good feeling about this move and this house is really like from some fairytale book, appletrees outside my window, apricot trees, fig trees, surrounded on three sides by the mighty pines and in front opening out to the valley, looking from above, and onto the Beas river and onwards to the himalayan panorama. And all those bird sounds all talkiing in that visceral language, so many wonderful different frequencies then finally merging into the frequencies of my tibetan bowl resonating through the wood in the veranda and in the house...
In so many words that's where I'm at. :)

...and to quote Osho Ji

Human consciousness has not grown for centuries. Only once in a while someone blossoms - but in millions of people, the blossoming of one person is not a rule, it is an exception. And because that person is alone, the crowd cannot tolerate him. His existence becomes kind of humiliation; his very presence feels insulting because he opens your eyes, makes you aware of your potential and your future. And it hurts your ego that you have done nothing to grow, to be more conscious, to be more loving, more ecstatic, more creative, more silent - to create a beautiful world around you. You have not contributed to the world; your existence has not been a blessing here but a curse. You introduce into the world your anger, your violence, your jealousy, your competitiveness, your lust for power. You make the world a battlefield; you are bloodthirsty, and you make others bloodthirsty. You deprive humanity of its humanness. You help man to fall below humanity, even sometimes below animals.

So many wonderful things, little things, big things, people, moments, silence, space... all in one day. Vashishta, je taime.

Image (Circa 2001)

It begins tomorrow. But, It could end tomorrow. It could end now. Right now. Like gone.

The Last Calligraphers (May, 2010)

Medusa at the Optometrist

Who is X, who is Y?

W# (Full film)

W#: Victor Wooten's language of music. Divided into 4 parts. Please see it in full screen, queue it up and watch them one after the other in HD.

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W# (1/4) from Hinterland Films on Vimeo.

W#

Victor Wooten is an American solo bassist, composer and author.

Born to Dorothy and Pete Wooten, Victor is the youngest of the five Wooten Brothers, the other four being Regi, Roy, Rudy Wooten and Joseph Wooten, all of whom are highly regarded musicians. At age two, brother Regi taught Victor to play bass, and by the age of five, Victor was playing in front of crowds with his brothers in their family band, The Wooten Brothers Band.

Wooten is most often seen playing Fodera basses, of which he has a signature model. His most famous Fodera, a 1983 Monarch Deluxe which he refers to as "number 1", sports a Kahler Tremolo System model 2400 bridge. Fodera's "Yin Yang" basses (designed/created for Wooten) incorporate the Yin Yang symbol - which Wooten often uses in various media - as a main focal point of the top's design and construction. It is often mistakenly thought that the Yin Yang symbol is painted onto the bass, but in reality, the symbol is created from two pieces of naturally finished wood (Ebony and Holly, for example), seamlessly fitted together to create the Yin-Yang pattern.

Though Wooten's basses receive much attention, his most frequent and consistent response when asked by his fans about his equipment (or equipment in general) is that "the instrument doesn't make the music ... you do". He'll often go on to state that the most important features to look for in a bass are comfort and playability. During a question and answer session at a 1998 concert, Wooten stated that "If you take a newborn baby and put them on the instrument, they're going to get sounds out of it that I can't get out of it, so we're all the best." This philosophy seems closely related to Wooten's approach to music in general, which is that music is a language. According to Wooten, while speaking or listening, one doesn't focus on the mouth as it is forming words; similarly, when a musician is playing or performing the focus shouldn't be on the instrument.

As well as playing electric bass (both fretted and fretless) and the double bass, Victor also played the cello in high school. He still plays cello occasionally with the Flecktones. This is the instrument to which he attributes his musical training.

A Bear Film

a bear film from kris anka on Vimeo.

Sumatra, 300410

Hemu said, "Thinking of you, the way your hair looks... trying to remember the fabric of your hands."
Heru said, "102hands of you and me at total."

Slow Dance by Matthew Dickman

More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dinning room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky
are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-cord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a shear white dress
covered in a million beads
comes toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutang slow dance.

by Anna Quindlen

This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen at the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was awarded an Honorary PhD in February 2008.

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"I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk or your life on a bus or in a car or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank accounts but also your soul.
 
People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter's night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've received your test results and they're not so good.
 
Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends and them to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.
 
You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon or found a lump in your breast?
 
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and first finger.
 
Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.
 
It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the colour of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.
 
I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the back yard with the sun on your face.
 
Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived".
 
 

Five, five, one, zero

One week to go. May the 5th onwards, Hinterland will come alive. God bless the idea of togetherness. It should be like coming home. Coming home to the absolute law, coming home to you, your heart chakra. :)

luluwolf.com

W# (Victor Wooten and the language of music)

Sumatra's Diary: 220410

So now that Sumatra is with me let me take you through the corridors of what. Route three-not-three, no? Today on my way back from the lake I saw the lonely faces of the, er what they call the middle-class, their routine, templatised life, their morning walks, their corporate talks, those "got to up those stocks" talks, living room crocs, dotdotdot. You know what I mean. The routine of things, that sticking to and of time, those boundary lines, those same hello's, flirting in the pantry over morning tea before the Monday morning catch-up meeting which happens after the timesheets are distributed and we begin working our mechanical hands and brains on auto-pilot fearing that one day we might die alone and poor. The feeling that I was not on that side of the fence comforted me. That bardo thing brought back of how we got to go through the hell of one thing be it greed, lust, pride to come out to the top and see the other side of the spectrum. You reach that atomic interval. But no, nuff said, they are there, I am here, everything is everywhere. And that's it no? We could be finished this very second.

Tx S, you really seem of the earth, of the sky, of the clouds, of the leaves, of the seas, of the rivers, of the oneness that is us and that one-in-all, all-in-one thing.

Sumatra, Hinterland

Sumatra xx2-1804

Born in Hinterland: 18 April, 2010 (Original date of birth - 1988)

Type: Motorbike

Impermanence in Benaras

Thezenve, Hinterland

To touch the earth, feel the leaves, smell the clouds,
To walk the earth, smell the leaves, feel the clouds, love the earth...

100handsofHinterland :)

May

Few more days to May,
So, I quietly stay
and wait to break that transient ray
into permanent daylight, day after day...

Maternal Shift

Like those old storytellers weaving stories of those long gone days when the sun shone brighter, the grass looked greener and the water happier. A tonal ascent in a certain life. A discovery of that path, that visceral path, that intangible pattern, that randomness...

They spoke in that peculiar language called Viscera. It sounded like the trees laughing. Suffixed with "ha's", following their idols of pataphysics with their twisted yet deconstructionist views of life, their unformulaic ways of being nature itself, being the experience rather than experiencing. Here, Hinterland is born, in irregular numbers, uncertainties and Wabi-Sabi. Zen, too. Slow, still, like that moment by the stream when the cherry-blossom flowered on me and I could almost hear the water dreaming. Hinterland is here, hinterland is you. Hinterland is one, that motherpower absolute, that one truth, that "dharma".

In that stillness there is that point in time when nothing is heard. Nor is anything said. Everything is understood. Everything is simply everything. No labels, no you's, no me's. Just that simple nothingness that no one makes a fuss about. Its now time to be. Just be the experience of nothingness, that zeropower. That is hinterland. This is hinterland, too.

The grass that day made me cry. I felt the earth's heartbeat next to mine. I lost the I-carapace completely. The concept of time disappeared. A maternal shift happened, that nature thing you know? And when those falsetto's echoed in the wilderness, I sensed transcendence swooping downwards like the Mother of God, at that moment deep into the night when all life somehow seemed asleep and unconscious.


* Wabi-Sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The phrase comes from the two words wabi and sabi. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". It is a concept derived from the Buddhist assertion of the Three marks of existence, specifically impermanence.

Development of the "Viscera" script

Hinterland is for everyone and no one,
Hinterland is everywhere and nowhere,
Hinterland is you, Hinterland is me,
Hinterland is xx, Hinterland is xy.

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Sun, sky, clouds, hills, river, earth...
(Finally the start of something new, arriving somewhere but not here...)

AbstraKt Kollision

Ft. Dryday, Rebel, Womanturningaway, The Servile, Mixedfeelings Pt. 1 and 2... among others. The pieces are nearing completion. 100handsdotcom will be freshfreshfresh from Hinterland very soon.