Notes on a Rain-washed Day

Today the rains came knocking. The sliding window drag me closer to the million drops each bursting onto the slippery coconut leaves, before taking a head-dive into gravity. The surface of the lake trembled; its days of torpor melted into fanatic drum-beats riding from distance, the surfaces carousing shrill pitches of merriment, of festivities not marred by fervid downpour. The white of vision clouds the ethereal dull grey cover. The wide-eyed wonderstruck is on a diligent visit to every mandap, her raincoat on, her hands carrying modak from the last mandal. At fifteen minutes past six, when the bulbs lining the streets have not yet woke up, and the day's damp soaked in much of her vigor, she sat down with her mates, chatting. Loudspeakers stood faint, the automotive parts of the small machinery grudgingly made hollow spaces - finite corridors. Droplets, incessant, trickled down on canvasses, and zari-bordered gowns still looked crisp. Mother kept on calling, it's time for home. Today is Sunday, the heat not so bad now, the tiredness bearable. For the little girl has so much share, for she fears what if the rains washes away the remnants of tiny million particles of joy.

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Maharakta Ganapati | 16th c. Tibet.

Of War and Play: Notes on The Thin Red Line

In ‘The Thin Red Line’ by Terence Malick, American troops pass by jungles with a statue of Buddha hidden ever so distantly, and then barge in to fiercely intimidate an utterly submissive brunch of rag-tag Japanese army who flay their arms sideways, heads lopping in dreary fatigue, as if embodying figure of bloodied Christ. As opposing factions during the World War, they fight the battle of Guadalcanal, amidst the swaying shades of green and diverse scenery, serving as a perfect antithesis to the gore, inhumanity and personal horrors.

       

At times, the identification of each of the voice-over characters dissolves as one blends into the other, each with their inner monologue sharing worldviews and philosophies. Whether one is reminiscing about the heavenly abode, metaphysical existence or lady-love homogenizes into fluid rhetorical ruminations - the thought-boundaries of individual identity blurs when the basic tenets of humanity are under siege. And perhaps there could not be better private dreamscapes than one gifted by Nature itself - its patterns, colours, moods and motifs are eternal objects of wonder. It is simply not the act of gazing at the Nature bountiful, from the perspective of being enamoured by the profundity, but that it itself is the fantastical vista which warring soldiers seek recourse to in the face of devastation. The gaze of escape does not take flight to some place off the charts, but finds solace, fixated here - ‘hami asto, hamin ast’. 

Youth rushes towards its own annihilation as war entices them with the halo of far-reaching public glory and eternal remembrance. Even though his ‘ass is blown off’ in a sudden, rash act, the soldier wants him to be remembered as one died fighting heroically; a timid soldier commits his first shoot-down of the opponent and earnestly seeks acknowledgement from colleagues to vindicate his self-worth. The naiveté of his belief that one stray death might bring the war to a close is an ironical chuckle at the abject loss of innocence.
Humanity exhibited by Staros is in stark contrast to Lt. Col. Tall whose inhumane ways to treating foot-soldiers as nothing more than fallouts of a violent situation, only in order to further his accomplishments and ambitions he has waited so long. Tall's benumbed sensibility can only muster institutional recognition in form of badges and wartime merits as rewards for Staros standing tall amidst open mayhem. 

Bell’s recollection of his beloved, depicted as choreography of entanglement, intimacy and bodily actions of touch and romance, come forth multiple times, all accompanied by his own voice-over. In one such occasion –“You give calm a spirit ... understanding ... courage - the contented heart” - the deeply evocative oneness is palpable; yet the viewer is not rushed to sympathy towards Bell on her appeal to separate. The film’s own agenda of focussing on distressed soldiers barely represents the female associates far away. As such, Hill’s partner’s projection appear only as inchoate object of desire, nothing much of skin and bones, who speaks not; the silhouettes and touches of her being the escapades of a jarred male mind.  

The contemplative questions, loaded with enormity of existentialism, at times seems naive, which may be because they come emerge from minds of novices walking into combat, or probably, all deeply existentialist questions are apparently poised simple. 

Notes on Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut weaves ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’, a novel of non-linear mosaic set in anecdotal style, as a narrative of confronting personal horrors as well as an imploration to mankind to address its own absurdity in the horrors of war. It is a concatenation of self-reflexive footnotes with the protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s adventures in factual reality and intrusions from fictional realm intercutting as workings of a troubled mind. Vonnegut resurrects mythical/ historical episodes like destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, enslavement of children at Children’s Crusade, the 1760 devastation of Dresden, Nazi violence on Jews, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, napalm bombings and daily body count from Vietnam, assassination of Kennedy and Luther King Jr. in order to arrive on death, senseless cruelty and injustice of the Dresden bombings by Allied forces. The act of absolution by literary devices is attained by exorcising traumatic encounters vis-a-vis hallucinatory travels both in time and space, complemented by satire through exaggeration and ridicule, and hearkening science-fiction motifs. Lines are blurred as to what constitutes the author’s justice towards personal memory and fictionalized incidents of self, or the projected self in the protagonist, as at the onset itself he writes “all of this happened, more or less”; followed by a submission which reads that the “war parts, anyway, are pretty much true”. 

It is the unbearable reality of wartime which pushes boys to commit crimes beyond their age and reason, motives beyond their pale, which they justify along the heroics of ‘The Three Musketeers’. Being ‘listless playthings of enormous forces’, the soldiers perform the ‘duty-dance of death’, enforcing personal and collective tragedies. They enter the ‘morphine paradise’ while responding to authority’s call of self-righteousness – commit atrocities defeat the greater evil or massacres end war sooner – who bear no responsibility for committed acts.  

The good and justly heroic accounts of war embodied in glamorous enactments a la Frank Sinatra or John Wayne do not fit the writer’s menu; as he delivers scathing subversion of mass media dissemination and patriotic discourses. Tralfamadorians get puzzled as to why humans ask ‘why’ things happen and their belief in free-will. Human acceptance of inevitability and obvious drawing towards fatalism meets ridicule form Vonnegut as he observes the ritualistic nature of humans, to be a “bug trapped in amber”. Alternatively, it can be said that his criticism of human tendency to escape from threatening reality is satirically portrayed by slipping into dream worlds, pretending nothing can be done about it. 

Billy relapses into Tralfamador, in an assemblage of recurring imagery, as his post-war life is void and the fruits of modern existence are lost on him. Vonnegut highlights contradiction as Billy finds solace in senility and the opposition between Earthlings and Tralfamadorians as fact and fiction. The recurrent mention of Adam and Eve hints at the chasm of purity to which a return seems necessity after the ravages of war, as is the wonder of what the birds sing to after a massacre. In biographical tone, Vonnegut states his pacifist stance as the narrator advises his sons not to comply by ‘massacre machinery’ ever. While being interesting specimens at Tralfamadorian zoo, Billy and Montana copulate to produce offspring, thus balancing the human drive to destruct itself with the drive to continue the race. The slaughterhouse where Billy is kept as a prisoner in Dresden becomes an image of human beings dehumanized by war, hanging like butchered animals on hooks. It stands as a metaphor for human existence in which suffering and death are commonplace. Through the ever-recurrent “So it goes”, Vonnegut expresses resignation at the face of death, every death that takes place, and ridicules it to point of being immaterial, hinting at inanity and helplessness in the face of annihilation of life-force.  

Art v. Design

(Art, Design & Society course post) 

ART

Close Contact
Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford
1995-1996
C-print mounted in Plexiglas

The agony of body dissatisfaction is projected by mounting the female body on Plexiglas which distorts the proportions and creates a supernatural form. Perception of beauty and discomfiture of the excess are at loggerheads.  

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DESIGN

Images from production of The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson. Image 1 is of thumbnail sketches by Wes Anderson mapping out the young Author’s introduction of the hotel and its few guests in the 1968 sequence. Image 2 is a Photocrom image of the Grandhotel Pupp in the spa town of Karlovy Vary (then Carlsbad), Czech Republic.This hotel inspired the Grand Budapest, and this town inspired Nebelsbad, Zubrowka, where the story is set. Image 3 is the completed miniature version of the hotel, in front of a green screen into which tree-covered mountains will be added digitally in post-production. 

The Laws of Medicine by Siddhartha Mukherjee

(Art, Design & Society course post) 

Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee's 'The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science' turn clinical anecdotes and medical research fragments into parables and aphorisms, that illustrate the largely incomprehensible and complex, yet exciting, world of medical practice. To undertand why practitioners need to 'make perfect decisions with imperfect information', the writer reveals nuances in the study of the 'soft science', which is still largely obfuscated without many governing laws, absolutes; and relies a lot on 'in-liers', outliers, biases and intuition. 

A 'lawless, uncertain' discipline must be having at least certain basic tenets, Mukherjee thinks, and goes on the present a lucid, unambiguous trail, citing astronomer Tycho Brahe, scientist Lewis Thomas, Bayes theorem, the Uncertainity Principle, randomized double-blind studies, in a fantastic delightful read. The complex ideas are given delicate shape by the free-flowing juxtaposition, and fine writing style. To bring in wider human cognizance and understanding into the complex processes that occur within the human body is revealatory. It also throws light into how abstract notions based on certain pre-study and episodic knowledge grow up to be widely regarded facts or axioms in a scientific world, thereby giving the non-scientific populace observations about how the medical discipline understands human being and existence, and how it understands itself.

 

Rage Against?

Prior to the celebrations of International Women's Day this year, a sculpture was unveiled at the business district of New York, on the 7th of March. It was named 'Fearless Girl'. The four-feet tall, frock-clad figurine of a young girl child is sculpted in bronze, who observe astutely at someone or something at a distance from her. Her staid is firm, bold and her head held high in defiance. Artist Christen Visbal got commissioned to sculpt it from the State Street Global Advisors, an investment conglomerate, who claims that the piece of art is an act of respect to women and acknowledges the contribution of women in corporate world. In a plaque at the base of the figure, it reads: “Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference.”

But to whom is the girl defiant at? On the footpath she stands, in a few meters distance, lies another bronze state - the three ton massive enormity of a bull figure - the iconic 'Charging Bull' of the New York Stock Exchange fame. As a symbol of one of the most important stock indexes of the world, the imagery associated with the bull is not quite unknown to us. To a naive sight, the small girl child is throwing a challenge at the raging, flaring bull. The muscular rage and enormous physicality of the bull embodies the masculine essence and dominance, to the front of which lies the fearlessness of a gentle girl. The imbalanced gender-ratio in corporate and business domains is at the crux of criticism meted out by the artwork. The sculptor of the bull, Arturo di Modica, has raised several pleas to have the 'Fearless Girl' removed from the vicinity of the Bull. 

When global economy took a nosedive in 1987, Italian resident di Modica, in a wish to salute the indefatigable American spirit. gifted the sculpture of 'Bull' to the city of New York. Incurring an expense of two years' of time and 350 thousand dollars, the artwork itself was considered to a piece of guerilla art at its own time. Arturo dedicated it to the poeple at large and considered it to be his personal statement; he did not speak for any corporation or enterprise. For over thirty years, as US economy has aggresively expanded and capitalism has become a hallmark of hope, the Bull has acquired a remarkable cultural stature in the heartland of the world's most important financial district.

What was once a national icon of hope has, over time, became a dear artefact of the capitalist classes and mega-corporations of the liberal market economy. Meanings attributed to art undergo revisions, as true to the whims and cultures of time, and dominant tastes of eras. To come to think of it, the entire strength of being that the girl epitomizes loses its steam in the physical absence of the bull figure placed in opposition to it. She might then be a girl, but the definition embodied in fearlessness loses relevance. The girl is a guerilla artifact in response to the bull, not a guerilla artefact in immediate response to the underpinnings of gender-imbalanced corporate boardrooms. What was, till the moment prior to strategic placement of the girl, an icon for something noble, now stood for patriarchical dominance and heavy-handed subjugation. Who imposed this meaning, is a question of utmost relevance. State Street Global Advisors, who commissioned for this artefact for the anniversary of their Gender Diversity Index fund, has their NASDAQ ticker which reads - SHE. To read this in relevance of what is written on the plaque below: "... SHE makes a difference" In a ploy to drive sentiments towards something truly urgent, a pressing issue, a cause of deep concern, the coproration makes the onlookers chant their own name, if one reads the finer print. 

The campaign revolving around this four-feet tall sculpture was implemented by McCann, a widely renowned advertising and branding agency. Needless to say, it rode enormous PR ride and spin to say what it had to say. The campaign was feted with three awards at Cannes Lions, advertising world's biggest annual festival. It takes a worldwide famed advertising agency to dismantle the voice of a guerilla artefact to position itself as the next-big guerilla artefact. Subversion often acts as the voice of the oppressed to lay claim to their speech. In this case, it acts to further the promotion of a capitalist's mode of protest. 

One questions thus because it squanders an extremely valid and important discourse for easy points in sectarian feminism. Moreover, it fails to see inclusivity of a wider populace. Could the image have sustained its statement if it was placed in some other footpath, away from the sight of the bull? Was it worthwhile to invite skirmishes, stray discourses in the public art domain? Could the sculpture have been that of a girl of some other proportions (so as not to invite the obvious contrast between the figures) and both of them standing resolute beside one another, in good faith, taking the challenges head-on, together?         

  

   

From Art and Nature Sonnets by Francis PB Osmaston. London 1911.

On Confessing and Letting Speak

When Battleship Potemkin made its appearance in 1925, a film critic of the German newspaper Berliner Tageblatt wrote - 'This is not a picture, it is a reality.' Eisenstein steered the form of the film to transpire beyond the realms of the accepted reality of the screen. Ironically, the 'stylized' depiction of blood-soaked devastation made the spectator feel that the film, and thus the spectacle of war itself, has never appeared so 'real'. Impression of reality in cinema undergoes several treatments to 'create the real', and the claim to authenticity is one met with utmost suspicion. The closing minutes of Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman's animated war memoir, rekindles the question of depiction in the similar vein as the film exorcises the horrors of conflict and mayhem.  

The last two minutes of the film are not static images or photographs, but footages shot during the aftermath of Sabra and Shatila massacre of September 1982. The cinematic cosmos that the spectator had occupied so far suddenly crashes into reality populated with hordes of woman wailing in the streets, mourning in high-pitched ululations. The camera sneaks from behind the phalanx who walk through a lane lined with debris and corpses. The scenes cut to close-ups of the bereaved, who now face the camera and with flailing arms and uncontrollable bodily gestures evoke their pain, angst, loss and suffering. 

The actual footage is a tumultuous departure from the animated documentary mode of recollection and rebuilding collective narratives. The fantastical telling impressioned as recognizable reality (via commendable tehniques of animation) is now in conflict with an inalienable starkness that shrouds the conscience as fever-dream. The previous eighty-eight minute universe, which could probably be dismissed by a sceptical assessor as figments of post-traumatic minds trying to grapple with tyrant psychosis, nows stands dazed how reality has reconstructed itself to be the better depiction. It tells the tale better, and the viewer is horrified beyond the pale. Words require no translation, the palettes needs no adherence to color tone, and severed bodies are not antiseptic images fit for general consumption. 

The film is a statement of conscience-call, conundrums of memory, and the myths of factical interpretations. It is borne out of the sense of partition from crimes done and shaking off the yoke of guilt - the personal act of absolution. Yet it hearkens trauma for reconstruction, creating a domino-effect on the lives of the army-brethren. Each of  the protagonist's friends narrate their associations - secure life gossiping on the couches teleport to rag-tag beaches or forests where men gun down RPG-trotting teenager in tune with piano - which are set-piece formal, almost insular to the calamity they had inflicted upon themselves and others decades ago. The blood spilled have calmed their own to the point of being passive narrators. The listlessness with which the passive feet floats in the dead of the ochre-dripped night is reflective in the manner in which the protagonist wishes to recuperate of the dissonances of perception. It almost clouds us, the phantasmagorical events get an envelope of animatic treatment, dissonant audio landscape, only to the point of empathizing for the memory that fails to take shape.

But what about the memory the rings loud with its authentic viscerality; the one that needs no virtual re-creation, storyboards and story-arcs. A strip from reality delivers 'an instrument of ballistics'. It speaks of the maker's anxiety in no unambiguous terms - the utterances of the women take no shape of the spoken and translated dialogues, but rather the primordial cry rings true of its purpose. The viewer makes note to the rude awakening, to the sights and sounds that fill the frame. Subtitles do not appear, because there cannot probably be any voice in which cinema can let herself speak, rather than her own - her own quivers in her own sounds and somatic resonances of her language. If the film is symptomatic of the repentance depicted via animation, the end is a reminder that reality is a keen note-taker, recording faithfully, with unrepentant indexicality. The image of the wailing woman remains fixated on the spectator's path of denouement, sans syntactical ease via mode of annotation. Reading images of war-reality is an act of insurmountable comprehension.     















References: 
Closely Watched Films - An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Techniques. Marilyn Fabe. University of California Press, 2004.

On Purpose

Lee Freidlander | Bargone, Italy | 1965