The Chasing iamb

Some odd conversation with Bottle Imp started me thinking. Who is my favourite character in Indian writing in English? I don't know! It should be shocking but it isn't... what characters has IWE thrown up so far that you feel attached to them afterwards... as if they meant anything.

My responses surprised me a bit.

Akilan of No Onions Nor Garlic ranked very high.

YoungUncle from Vandana Singh's series

Toby from one of the short stories in Nalini Jones' What you call Winter

Sartaj Singh from Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay

Bharat from Kavery Nambisan's The Truth about Bharat (Almost)

The cook in Kalpana Swaminathan's Page Three Murders

Thin, thin, thin pickings...

Which ones are yours?

Meanwhile: I love Patricia but really! I mean really!!




Via: Patricia of Booklust

There are videos now for the wierdest things. Books! IPL cricket teams. Even NGOs, that last bastion of anti-aesthetics. Some of these NGO videos are surprisingly charming.

A music video by the exec director of International Rivers




Good clean feminist fun from Feminist Majority

I may learn to love Josh Brolin, the hottest Hollywood moustached lead since Tom Selleck. He has a great strut and a great grinning-lean-over-a-fence but did he really hit Diane Lane? How sad is it that he was the highlight of both American Gangster and No Country for Old Men? For me, I mean. How can two movies be so technically right yet do so little?

F

What I want for my birthday

Trekked to Okhla to the Vadehra Gallery to see Click, an exhibition of contemporary Indian photography curated by Sunil Gupta and Radhika Singh. Scooted around at a rapid pace without making eyecontact with anyone. Was out of there in half an hour but it was worth the trek. While some images were remarkably blah, there are at least half a dozen really interesting photographers. Here are some of my favourites



Vivan Sundaram, Marxism in the expanded field: Geeta's bookshelf




Ishaan Tankha, Superhero Junkyard



Zui Patravali, Omani Tree and Arab





Joseph M Daniel One (Revisit)


There are a few more images, some very special, I thought... but I can't find images online right now

So I finally was persuaded to give ebooks a shot and i may be on my way to  being converted. On Wednesday I spent the whole day in bed reading books on my laptop. It was disconcerting to open microsoft reader and see that the library on my laptop already contained books with titles such as Interstellar Service and Discipline. (You are reading this, Certain Person, I know you are! Next time, warn me that you have left behind android porn on my laptop) After choking a bit, I started on the books I had downloaded. There is actually a murder mystery for every mood. Australian aborginal,Chicago gay, countryhouse parody, hardboiled futuristic, frilly with spandex, welsh priests... academic murder mysteries are dime a dozen now. I was in the mood for a bookish murder and was disappointed to not find Joanne Dobson (working class professor in snooty New England college keeps stumbling on bodies) online but I did find the first of the Dido Hoare series by Marianne Moore. Dido runs an antiquarian bookshop, has a father called Barnabas and a policeman lover. Only he is a wee bit married. Very nice.

I have also started reading the Thursday Next series. Comic detective fiction in a parallel dimension Britain where books are immensely important. Thursday next, our heroine, is a detective in the squad in charge of literature-related crimes (arguments about Shakespeare sometimes lead to murders). She has a pet dodo called Pickwick and in the first book, The Eyre Affair, somehow ends up inside Jane Eyre. It is beautifully loony and set in a world where Wales is a socialist republic and genetic engineering is really common.

Meanwhile has anyone caught sight of this insane goth-girl version of Jane Eyre, the illustrated version by *cough* Dame Darcy? It looks fascinating.



Once you get past the name, her illustrations are rather fun. Here is something nice called Dolls do Heroin. Not from Jane Eyre!



 

            


Monroe's last sitting, photos by Bert Stern. And horrendously horrendously recreated this year with Lindsay Lohan.

This information comes via a new blog which I want to guard jealously for a while longer.

Jyoti Basu, Constructed to Destruct, 2004


Today I enquired whether I could be transferred to Mumbai and I was told that it was possible. Happy. Happy. Happy. All of last week was such wonderful fun. Mumbai is always perfect for me but it never gets better than January in Mumbai. L was like a girl with a new toy. She who has been everywhere and done everything, loved Mumbai so much and so volubly that I felt it was a compliment to me. We ate, walked about,  hopped in and out of taxis as if it were a caper movie. One evening  Dippy Diplomat, baby and husband drove us across Mumbai to a gallery  in Mazgaon. We drove 2 hours for a 20 minute sojourn at a crazy gallery. Crazy-full of Mallus of every shape, size and colour. L and I reeled, recovered and giggled uncontrollably. Then we jumped into another cab and drove to Churchgate to eat croissants.

I want to move now.

In other news I found the Subodh Gupta piece that ARoy was talking about when I interviewed her about male sex appeal. Alright then.

Lonesome Cowboy



 Hiropon


Should artists, even pathbreaking ones be allowed to talk? The pullout quote on Mr Murakami's homepage says " I express hopelessness." Oh dear.

Three more chapters of Annatales are now online here. This time I am doing it over Fa Mulan's protests who thinks it can be published. (rolling my eyes now)

Yesterday with Fa Mulan was a perfect day. Lazy morning followed by trip to the Shehar and Jama Masjid. Sheermal at Karim's and a nap at Lodhi Gardens. It was so perfect that the spot we found to sleep in was out of reach from any of the sprinklers. Then we wandered around NGMA gawking, really gawking at the Amrita Shergills.  Her women...how luminous their eyes are. I have never been enamoured by still life before but I think i might change my mind now.

Hot chocolate and then we were back home.

   

Sylvia Plachy was  born in Budapest in 1943. She was 13 when she fled Hungary for America, sneaking across the border, hidden in a cart. In Hungary Plachy's family had been in hiding because of their Jewish origins. Plachy is now a photographer well-known for her wit and her observation of the dramatic in the everyday.

The absurd picture below is called Attack.






Lulu below is from her Self-portrait with Cows Going Home series when she returned to Hungary for a project.





A picture of the woman herself at the Berlin Wall. Plachy once collaborated with Tom Waits. Oh and Adrian Brody is her son and frequently her subject.

The exhibition of contemporary Japanese art is on till Monday at the NGMA. You should probably go. There is one frightening room with insane videos running simultaneously on all four walls. If you scoot in and out of that the rest is mostly fun. Mistuko Miwa who does oils that replicate large format photography is my favourite. Tomoaki Ishihara who does huge photographs of himself in front of well known works of art is also fun. Look out for the Noritoshi Hirakawa series of women posed demurely in men's loos. I rolled my eyes but you may not.

I was looking at a sweet playful little piece of video art at the exhibition when L the lovely Tastenazi, informed me that some people are now building their houses around video art in their collection. Her description of her favourite, a house with a pool built around a light tree made it sound like it was silent art... unlike the pieces I heard drove their owners crazy (because its insane to have your walls talking to you all the time but whats the point if you are going to switch it off as if it was a toaster?) The actual display of video art, the lavishness or elegance of the showcase, must be the only way in which a collector can set herself apart from anybody with a DVD burner. Proof of ownership is being sold as a perk of course in this crazy new world of art collection but that's just a joke. Here is assume vivid astro focus aka Eli Sudbrack's full room installation from 2003. Here is a report of how it was sold.




"To reproduce the whole installation, a collector would have to buy one of each element, at a total cost of $150,000. The defining elements—the installation's floor, walls, and ceilings—were in an edition of three. But the five sculptures, priced at $5,000-$15,000, were in an edition of five while the $2,500 decals and $5,000 video were in an edition of 10. Thus, the total list price of products available from the Whitney show was $600,000, minimum."

Of course it was all sold. Most of this gives me a headache to think about. Though I did think it was coolwhen the owners of a Banksy mural put it up for saleand included their house (free) as part of the deal. They prefered that to prospective owners of the house whose first demand was that the mural be painted over before they moved in. Oh you prosaic darlings.

Jamil Baluch's sculptures in front of Pakistan's new National Art Gallery





Waseem Ahmed's Burqa




Aisha Khalid's Silence with Pattern

Who's going to point out that the empress has no clothes?
Notice (do do check out the performances on her website) that nothing has changed in 13 years.