Abha Dawesar Blog

Storytelling night, Melbourne, Australia

2011-02-24T09:26:00.002-05:00

From the Wheeler Centre's Story Telling Gala in Melbourne on Feb 11, 2011:

The other stories told that night can be found here.

To download ABC Melbourne's Conversation Hour with Jon Faine which includes a chat between Andy Griffiths, John Birmingham & myself go here.

Jaipur Literature Festival

2011-02-02T08:07:00.003-05:00

The BBC Forum event at the Vodafone front lawn can now be viewed here. It features Bridget Kendall of the Forum in conversation with Dayanita Singh, Jaishree Misra and myself.

D4FL 03-(81) from Dreamcast.in on Vimeo.

At Jaipur I also had the opportunity to interview Arthur I. Miller, the author of fascinating works on Einstein and Picasso, Jung & Pauli. Our conversation can be found here.

D5DH 01-(94) from Dreamcast.in on Vimeo.

This blog has moved

2010-04-28T08:15:00.001-04:00

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Entertaining Science

2010-02-19T10:42:00.002-05:00

Going forward I'm one of the contributors to the new Entertaining Science blog.

Roald Hoffmann, professor of chemistry at Cornell Universtiy and Nobel laureate, founded the series in 2002, and continues to host it with Stuart Firestein, profess of biology at Columbia University and the aid of a small cabal of other scientists. One can expect anything: readings , music, theatre, magic, arguments on controversial issues. The general idea is play with ideas, to talk to people about science. To entertain. And have fun.

If you're in the New York area then Entertaining Science takes place at the Cornelia Street Café on the first Sunday of the month, drop by! Otherwise follow the blog.

Bull and man

2009-08-15T02:39:00.003-04:00

Unlike the Spanish corrida (bullfight) which reeks of both cruelty and cowardice the Course Camarguaise is a local version in which the bulls are not hurt and are let into the arena to run with full vigor. A group of local lads (obviously utterly mad) with an insane appetite for danger enter the arena and try to get as close to the bull as they can. The objective is to remove the 3 attributes of the bull: ribbons tied close to the bull’s horns, glands that hang from these ribbons and a miniscule little rosette that hangs between the two horns and is well integrated into the hair in the front. To remove these attributes from the bull and score points they end up touching his horns and the front of his face many times; since the bull is not standing idly they must race to the edge of the arena and in one whooping leap cross over the fence and jump over to the balustrades to avoid getting gored.

Within the first few minutes of the Course on Tuesday one young man had already hurt his knee. The flying leaps over the arena are no joke even if there were no bull. Younger smaller bulls are also able to follow the raseteur across the arena and jump the red fence. It turns out that bulls are repetitive animals—once they discover they can jump over the fence, they do it again and again even if there’s no raseteur leading them there. There is a narrow track outside of the fence for the bull and ground level spectators are protected from this by wooden planks. Nonetheless the bull, his breathing, the sand he is kicking up, are all within smelling distance from the spectators at ground level. The bull’s charge vibrates through the wood.

The culture of the Camargue is centered on the taureau. Each village has its own votive festival lasting a week. Bulls are brought in everyday to the arena in the morning in a ceremony called the abrivado where a group of horses prevent them from veering off course. The course in the arena usually begins late afternoon when it is still quite hot; it typically involves 6 bulls that come on for 15 minutes each. The raseteurs must sustain their stamina through the whole show as the bulls progressively get heavier, stronger, and more aggressive. On Tuesday’s course de ligue the last bull didn’t wish to return to the bull pen once his 15 minutes were up. A simbèu (the docile bull of the herd which usually leads it through river crossings and passages) was sent out to herd the bull back to the toril. In Tamil Nadu during Pongal a similar event, the Jallikattu, is held. Unarmed men ride wild bulls to untie what’s tied to the bull’s horns. Of course, security barricades are entirely missing in the Indian version as the photos show making the event extremely dangerous and death tolls high. The Supreme Court even banned the Jallikattu for a period a result of injuries. The debate is extremely heated, with similar arguments being made by proponent of tradition and culture in Tamil Nadu (as in Nîmes and Arles).

At the end of the course a group of restless horses wait with their riders for bulls to be released from the toril. As each bull charges out the riders must swiftly gallop ensuring that the bull doesn’t take the wrong street in the village. After the course the bulls are even more aggressive. The audience which has emptied the arena to watch the send off or bandido must stay behind metal barriers. One man bent forward and got a gash on the side of his head.

The fête votive in Vauvert continues through till Sunday when it ends in a trophy event and a bandido with 20 bulls charging through the village before they get to the field. Cautionary signs everywhere of les manifestations taurines are not to be taken lightly that evening.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

2009-08-09T17:26:00.004-04:00

Camargue is already a slightly strange place with its pools of stagnant waters and strong smelling marshes. Sometimes it's had to believe that these utterly still pools are just a few short miles off the Mediterranean gulf and even reaching it. Yesterday was a bizarre mix of Feria fever and gypsy tradition on the Mediterranean seaboard.

Listen to the church bells of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer from Saturday afternoon 170_51.wav

Inside the church in crypt is Saint Sara who is brought out every year for a large gathering of Romas from round the world.

Despite the afternoon heat it is hotter inside the crypt than outside.

The corrida then and now

The other bridge to nowhere

2009-08-06T08:12:00.004-04:00

Alaska is not the only place in the world with a bridge to nowhere. To the left is the ascent to Pont des Tourradons (not too far from Vauvert in the Gard region of Southern France).

From the top of the bridge the view over the canal stretches on both sides. The route to the right takes you to the Mediterranean sea and the one to the left all the way to Avignon though more realistic is the approximately 20 km bike route
which forms part of the Canal du Rhône à Sète first constructed in the 17th century.

I took the road to the left Galliacian where there is another bridge that links Gallician to Scamandre, a 200 hectare natural reserve centered around a still water lake. Near Gallician several boats are docked. There are also several people who fish by the canal side even in the direct heat of the southern sun.

If one ignores the turns to the right and left of the Pont des Tourrodons and continues across the bridge, one reaches, within seconds, the end of the road which stops dead in its tracks!

Biking back from Gallician to La Laune, a small hamlet where the Writers Residence of Le Diable Vauvert is situated I took the inside road. Unlike the route parallel to the canal it isn't flat but it is less strewn with pebbles. Two large dragonflies flew in tandem beside me for a while.

Last evening Laurent Herrou and Jean-Pierre Paringaux drove me to the canal at dusk. The sky behind us was saturated a deep pink-orange and the full moon was still low in the sky. It reflected in the small étangs (still water pools) by the canal. Back at the residence we could see all the way to the Pont des Tourradons from the window and now the moonlight turned the waters on the horizon a glinting silver.

Stranger Love

2009-03-05T05:12:00.003-05:00

Just a shout out for the SAWCC conference this weekend in New York. Details are on the SAWCC site.

There's a terrific line up starting Friday night at 7pm with Jhumpa Lahiri and ending Saturday night at Bar 13 with a reading. I'll read from Family Values. Also if you're in Karnataka, check out this months The Bengaluru Pages for an interview with Saumya Ancheri on the novel. Lastly, if anyone wants to help me with a Telugu take on my book here's an article from Andhra Jyothy published last week. What does it say? I haven't a clue.

Phrenitis

2009-02-07T00:25:00.003-05:00

Of course the irony is that when there is a lot to be blogged one is in too much of a frenzy to actually do it! Where to begin and what to cover? You can read about some of my upcoming events further down in Bratislava (Art), Bangalore & Hyderabad (new novel Family Values), and New York (the Sixth Annual SAWWC Literary Conference sponsored by the New School & the Asian American Writers Workshop).

Family Values launched!
My new novel was released on the 20th of January in Delhi by the French Ambassador Mr. Jérôme Bonnafont who absolutely stole everyone’s heart with his wit and presence.
Penguin’s Managing Editor Ranjana Sengupta introduced the event and the President of Alliance Française in India, Mr. Varadrajan also spoke.

H.E Jérôme Bonnafont, Ambassador of France to India, myself & Mr. Varadrajan.

I’m very grateful to everyone who put this rather touching event together for me behind the scenes both at Penguin (specially Smriti!) and at the Alliance (Marielle, Tato).

Smriti, Marielle & Ranjana

The day after the launch I headed to Jaipur to lounge in the main hall of the book festival and heard Nadeem Aslam in a very thoughtful conversation with Shoma Chaudhury, Nandan Nilekani on his new tome Imagining India (don‘t miss his NYPL event with Tom Friedman if you are in the big apple in March), Wendy Doniger talking about her book The Hindus: An Alternative History to her former student Arshia Sattar, and most peppy of all, a town hall style debate on Madhu Trehan’s book, six years (?) in the making, Tehelka as Metaphor, with Manoj Raghuvanshi. The tent outside by the pool too boasted some interesting debates Ashis Nandy & Christophe Jaffrelot (Nandy roundly sounded off Jaffrelot for believing that since Europe had discovered the Enlightenment India ought to get there as well, a fantastic subject on which next time Jaffrelot should be allowed to debate) and Tulsi Badrinath who read from her novel Meeting Lives and performed one of its stanzas in Bharata Natyam. On the way back from Jaipur, as if echoing Madhu Trehan’s book and the passionate town hall debate on systemic corruption, I had a group of smartly-dressed twelve year old boys in red-blazer uniforms demand thirty rupees when I asked them where to turn at a traffic island for the highway to Delhi. At this age? Already? We’re going to need a bone-marrow transplant.

Daniel Georges, one of the curators of the international traveling exhibit Your Documents Now, says that the show is moving now from Berlin to Bratislava. It opens in Bratislava on the 12th of February. I have a piece in this show.

Some upcoming events for Family Values include:

Bangalore
Valentine’s Day at 7pm. Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, 32 Residency Road, opposite Gateway Hotel. I will be in discussion with fellow novelist Shinie Antony and we are hoping to cover the span of my four books under the theme Love: Erotic, Neurotic & Sclerotic. Rsvp: Hasan (93422 77977)

Hyderabad
21st February at 6pm. Book reading & discussion at Akshara Bookstore (most likely the West Marredpally location but subject to change). The Director of the Alliance Française Mr. Frédéric Dart will introduce me and Priti Aisola will give a vote of thanks. Please watch the events space for more details or call Akshara on 04027804626

Delhi
28th February 5-7pm. Panel Discussion on Family Values with Ravi Singh, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Penguin Books India, Novy Kapadia Professor Delhi University & Mrinalini Patwardhan Mehra, Novelist. I’ll field questions from the panelists. This is a terrific line up and I’m looking forward to it. Venue: Alliance Française, 72 Lodi Estate.

The Sixth Annual SAWCC Literary Festival
New York

March 7th 4:15-5:30pm Passing Strange: Race, Gender and Sexuality. Panel Discussion moderated by Svati Shah with Farzana Doctor, Chandra Prasad & me. Venue: The New School, 6 East 18th Street, 9th Floor.

Also March 7th 7pm. Closing Night Reading for the conference. I’m reading from Family Values. The other writers and poets reading are Meena Alexander, Farzana Doctor, Minal Hajratwala, S. Mitra Kalita, Yesha Naik, Amy Paul, Zohra Saed, and Purvi Shah. This event is at Bar 13, 35 East 13th Street which is walking distance from the New School where the rest of the conference is being held. Kudos to SAWCC for remaining such a vibrant organization after all these years and renewing itself repeatedly! If you are a South Asian Woman in the arts looking to get involved then sign up.

Brussels
I’m invited as a writer-in-residence at Passa Porta in Brussels in April. If you are passing through get in touch.

Finally, I had a massive computer crash (my computer would not reboot even after using a recovery CD for XP) and learned a lesson that cost me a lot of time. If you are running XP and have a password when you log in then your hard drive encrypts the data. Even if you remove your hard drive and run it in an external casing the data will not be visible. Many hours of web-surfing later I've found two good solutions: 1) The easier one is to link your hard drive via an external casing to a Windows Vista machine which will automatically ask you if you want to over-write your security settings and ownership; choose Yes. The data will be decrypted and you can save it. (2) Log into the computer on which you are running your old hard drive in safe mode. Acess the drive via explorer and choose the security settings with a right mouse click. You will find a tab called ownership, change that to administrator and make sure you have ownership at all levels, not just read only. You can now save this data. If you are not logged in in safe mode then even if you have administrative privileges the data remains opaque. To log in in safe mode press F8 several times on the keyboard as your computer boots up. If you have a quirky computer this won't work if you've used the restart option, you have to shut down, boot up and press F8. Well, if the publishing industry continues to nosedive along with the global economy I know where I can find a living. And dear monopolistic, Microsoft, if you are looking for guidance on how to write more meaningful error messages on your support site feel free to consult me, I have my prosthetic brain back now.

Art Basel/Miami & Budapest

2008-11-06T17:05:00.003-05:00

The Edge! a show judged by Bonnie Clearwater of the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art showing at Armory Art until November 8th in West Palm Beach is moving to Miami for Art Basel/Miami. It will show from November 17-December 12 at the Sheila Elias Gallery, 1510 NE 130th Street, North Miami, FL 33161. If you'd like to come check out my work there note that the opening reception is on November 30, 2008 at 6pm. I'm excited and looking forward to the show and likely to be in Miami for the opening. I have three pieces in the show.

I also have a piece in Your Documents Now curated by Daniel Georges & Rumi Tsuda who have done tremendous work getting the show to move from East to West across the globe. It started out in Japan and is now opening in Hungary. The show will open at 2B Galeriá November 28- December 30, 2008 with the opening reception at 6PM, Nov. 28th. I'm not going to be there but if you are, do check it out! 2B Galeriá Ráday utca 47, Budapest IX. ker. Along with more than 250 other artists I have an ID document I fabricated in the show. It's moving next to Berlin then Bratislava before going to Mexico.

Proust and a certain sense of time in our information age

2008-08-24T08:52:00.005-04:00

Véronique Aubouy has been filming people of all nationalities (but primarily in Europe, I believe) reading aloud from Proust's Remembrance. I first met her to read a section at the Luxembourg Gardens and learned of an upcoming phase in this project that would occur over the internet. That time is now here. Everyone is invited to read a page from Proust starting 27th September 2008 at 12pm GMT. You can participate in this project by signing up on Le Baiser de la Matrice. Véronique has worked with La Villette to develop a site where readings can happen simultaneously over a short period of time to produce a 170 hour film. I'm guessing that the internet-web cam filmed sections of Proust will eventually be shown along with the other parts in order. Since I read for Véronique there have been at least two such screenings. Among other features of this project one of the people who has read was a young boy and he reappears later marking the age of Proust himself in these narratives. More sadly, some of those who have read are no more. Participating in this project and becoming a part of this communal reflection on Time is an experience
I strongly recommend. Please pass the word to those around you.

2 Thursdays in a row

2008-07-06T19:15:00.004-04:00

Firstly but briefly, two of my drawings were accepted for Viridian’s 19^th international juried show in Chelsea judged by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator at the Whitney. There is a reception on Thursday, July 10^th from 5-8pm and all are welcome. So drop by! 530 West 25^th Street #407. Map.

A shout out to the energetic Farhana Akhter who founded Global Fusion and organizes monthly Global Fusion Arts events in Manhattan bringing together musicians, poets and visual artists. I participated on July 3^rd at Global Fusion’s event at Spark in Chelsea showing some of my paintings and was fortunate to meet several talented artists.

Thanks, Farhana! As Tania Sen said, Dawoud’s sitar playing held the evening together. Roopa Singh wrote some poems in situ that she shared with us. Watch out for Global Fusion the first Thursday of every month. Here are web links (if I could find them) to the artists who participated. Check them out, everyone has very different work ranging from C Bangs’ fascinating in-depth NASA work to Scott Munroe’s pencil strange modern biomorphic formations via surrealism (Veru Narula) and yogic images (Tania Sen).

Farhana Akhter
C Bangs
Roopa Singh
Veru Narula
Scott Munroe
Antonio Puri
Dawoud
Tania Sen
Ellen Woods
Tehniyet Masood

Animals in your kingdom

2008-06-06T12:13:00.002-04:00

I'm going to miss the opening of this exhibition where one of my pieces is showing but if you live in the Brooklyn area it sounds like fun.

Opening Party June 7 from 8 – 11PM ($10)
David Goldman plays the Lumiano at 9 PM
Visual Exhibit continues to be open
Saturdays 12 - 7 PM --- $2 p/person
June 7 through July 19

"Curated by Founding Director, Kathleen Laziza – Animals in Your Kingdom represents a versatile point of view where animals are fanciful, evocative, threatened, and threatening. The whimsicalness of the art is diversely expressed in paint, collage, photography, illustration and video. The selected artists are Julie A. McConnell, Barbara Rachko, David Platt, Reet Das, JD Siazon, Russ Revock, SJ Hart, Ingrid Vance Aubry, Abha Dawesar, Debra Friedkin, Michael Quirk, Monika Malewska, and Diana Ogaard, Azita Ganji. Including Interactive Art by William and Kathleen Laziza. "

Museum of Arts & Crafts, Itami, JAPAN

2008-04-18T10:06:00.001-04:00

For those of you out there in Japan just wanted to say that my artist's passport is showing at an international group show Your Documents Please currently showing in Japan at the Museum of Arts & Crafts in Itami (see link above). The show moves next to Yokohama (ZAIM) if all goes well. I guess if my passport has made it to Japan it's a sign that one day I will too!

It will also travel to:
HUNGARY (November 2008)
-2B GALLERY, Budapest IX. Ráday u.47 Hungary
SLOVAKIA (January 2009)
GALÉRIA Z ZICHYHO PALÁC, VENTÚRSKA 9, 811 01 BRATISLAVA
The curators for this show are Daniel Georges & Rumi Tsuda.

In the last several months I've been doing a lot of art and thinking about it (though I'm glad to say that I've done more of it than thought about it). I'm in the process of updating my site to include some images. Also, I'll post any announcements for the future on this blog.

Antiquity and its discontents---2000 year old staues at Hodal

2008-03-01T21:23:00.001-05:00

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About half-way between Delhi and Agra on National Highway 2 stands the city of Hodal. NH2 is a bit of a cliché with dusty industries, chimneys and swanky malls called fancy names like "Manhattan." There is even a government designated leafless "green belt" full of trucks and containers. As this highway past Palwal a small-town flavor sets in on the road. Hodal is located just a little ahead of here. Some 4 km off the highway from Hodal is the village of Saundhad where 2000 year old statues of Hindu deities were recently found according to an exclusive report in the Faridabad Times dated February 27, 2008. Ever since my family moved to Harayana a few years ago I've tried to get to know the area a little even though having been born and brought up in Delhi I still can only think of myself with reference to the megapole.

Om Bir of the village of Saundhad was kind enough to accompany us from the main road to the temple where .D. Verma of the Faridabad Times had reported the idols were kept. Saundhad, I was told, has a population of some 15,000 families. Despite its large size however it is very much a village. There is a palpable change in rhythm when one turns off the pukka road amid a herd of animals and follows the kaccha village road with its small houses and bales of fodder stored for animals.

The Badrinanrayan Temple is located beyond the village near a large tank called the Surya Kund which dates back to antiquity according to the villagers. The temple Mahant Parasuram is of the opinion that by reporting the find the local newspapers have caused a real problem for the village. He holds his hand around his neck to indicate that this is like a noose; the police will now hold him responsible for any possible theft of the icons from the temple premises.

Baba Nath and some other local villagers accompany us to the shrine of the goddess where the icons have been housed under lock and key with the exception of one large icon of a goddess dating back from antiquity that is kept outside the temple and has been freshly washed. It is impossible to eyeball the age of the statue. According to the Faridabad Times report the Archaeological Survey of India dated the statues as 200 years old, had them locked up inside the temple of the goddess and put it under police protection. The villagers are not happy about this. They want the temple to remain active, a place of worship where they can pay their respects every day. This is impossible with the temple barred and locked.

The police have gone on a "break" and we get to see the small pieces that have been housed inside the small temple in addition to the large statue of the goddess outside. Despite the report in the newspaper which was somewhat vague and suggested that these statues were recently discovered when the area was dug the villagers are vehement that the statues are not a recent discovery as the report claims. Baba Nath who is the priest under the mahant Parasuram goes as far as to say, "the newspaper report is propaganda." These statues have been lying outside the temple structure for years and years. They were not brought inside since they were broken (the paper had reported this) but in fact they have been on the temple grounds for fifteen, twenty or thirty years. No one can remember though Om Bir who is 31 says that for most of his life these pieces of antiquity have been lying around. In this short clip Madan Lal talks about the origin of the temple and there are shots from the inside of the temple once it was opened. Statues from antiquity are lying on the floor.

After some probing it comes to light that there are some more statues that haven't been "put inside" so to speak. These are lying under a tree near the Surya Kund itself. There is a recognizable lingam there and also a rather badly eroded statue of a goddess. Ants are crawling over a magnificent piece with figures and a dog comes over and hovers over the assemblage.

Mahant Parasuram and Madan Lal one of the villagers who has been talking to us get into an argument. (see clip below) Parasuram fears the worst for the statues and loathes the responsibility he must shoulder, he wants them taken away. He even implies that people like Madan Lal who talk about it are the ones who might one day make off with it (see the second clip). Apparently a while back there was an attempted theft of one of the statues but it was too heavy to lift. All sorts of rumors are thickly circulating in Saundhad, an otherwise sleepy idyllic village that is just starting to shoot into prominence following the report. After the Times article another reporter or two has been there but now they are sure more will be coming. The villagers divided as they are into at least two camps on the issue feel at moments that the goddess of the temple has decided to shower them with attention from the world.

There is an argument to be made for the heritage of this village to remain in it. The ASI could build a small museum on the temple grounds where the idols were found and also do some more work around the historic Surya Kund to date it and restore it. The Surya Kund has small monuments for its local devtas. If habitation in this region goes back to 11th and 12th century as Mr. Tanwar of the ASI is reported to have said in the Faridabad Times then these artifacts could illuminate the local history of the area. Once the idols are entirely removed from here and displayed out of context in another museum or worse put into storage some of their meaning will be lost. If there already exists a collection of this period then some of the idols could be re-united with it. No matter what villagers should not have to bear the responsibility of these gods from antiquity or be made to feel that when the outside world suddenly becomes aware of the objects that were always a part of their life they will be made scapegoats because of the high-handedness of the law givers.

Children play on the mud road and some of the women knead fresh cow dung to make it into cakes they will dry out. The cakes are saved in small hut like structures that are incredibly designed and decorated in great detail. Decorations that are reminiscent of one of the geometric designs one the base of one of the statues from antiquity.

On the drive out from the village I let the camera roll one last time.

The French Tour Fall 2007, Stop#4: Montélimar

2007-10-09T16:22:00.000-04:00

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The regional express train TER that transports passengers from Lyon to the towns of the Drôme and Provence speeds past vast vineyards angled over hillocks. On the way to Montélimar I spot the Hermitage and Paul Jaboulet Ainé estates.
The Cafés Littéraires de Montélimar is organized by a small association of volunteers. A committee of readers reads books all through the year and decides on the authors to invite each year to the festival. This year for the first time the small village of La Garde Adhémar is hosting a café littéraire during the festival; it has taken some work and some convincing, I am told. One of the members of the association Christine drives us from the hotel to the medieval village some twenty kilometers from Montélimar which is perched on the top of a hill. She conjectures that La Garde (literally the guard or the army) was a lookout for the Adhémar (the local noble family) since the village is located high on the hills with a great view all the way to the Rhône river. The Rhône separates the Drôme from the Ardèche.

Night has already fallen but from the foothills one can spot the small ruin that is part of the village. In the main square a group of very serious men is playing pétanque. The referee is in a suit. The village dates back to the middle ages and has its own post office and a population of under 1500. On the hills just below the bell tower is a botanical garden that has all the species of the Rhône-Alpes. The café littéraire is moderated by Franck Daumas and held at the restaurant L'Absinthe. I’m absolutely touched by the incredible turnout. The committee of readers and other members of the association have worked hard with librarians and booksellers of the region to ensure that people attend events. Someone from the staff hunts for a microphone so that those seated outside the restaurant can also follow the proceedings.

The audience is hesitant to ask questions when Franck turns over the floor to them but they soon warm up. There are questions about India, about Babyji and about writing. Everyone now and then I get a question that betrays the as a writer. We finish up an hour later and when I’m asked to sign books I have my turn quizzing some of the audience. Many of them have traveled to India and others are, indeed, writers. The restaurant has a special menu for the evening and one of the choices is an Indian plate. This is how it comes about that I end up eating one of the best south Indian vegetable biryanis of my life in a tiny village in the south of France. L'Absinthe's owners have traveled several times to India and have obviously picked up a few recipes and some kadipatta.

The next morning we are taken to a nearby nougaterie which doubles as a museum. The Nougaterie Arnaud Soubeyran still makes nougat by hand and conducts a guided tour through the premises. Though we’ve had breakfast we take up the offer of a cake au nougat and some tea before being shown around. The nougaterie is fabricating calissons today. Originally a specialty of Provence somehow the delicacy made its way to Montélimar and now many provençal businesses order these from Montélimar. Nougat gets its whiteness from egg white. The nougaterie uses honey harvested from lavender fields (which it owns) and also grows its own almonds. A while back a local apiarist arrived with some bees and the nougaterie decided to display them in a glass case, the bees have been given an exit through a pipe out into the open but they come back to their hive in the evenings. The queen has a spectacular blue dot Franck Thilliez spots right away and is easy to identify through the glass, several worker bees are moving to and fro doing things for her. At the end of the tour we are offered some more types of nougats and calissons to taste. At the afternoon lunch served at the hotel dining room for the authors I’m too full to eat.

I’ve a rendezvous at three with students at the local lycée Alain Borne. A few minutes from the hotel, the lycée is having its break when Chantal the association president and I walk over. Some of the other writers invited to the festival are also addressing classes here and in another nearby lycée. My event is with students in the première, the seconde and the terminale. From what I understand of the scholastic system that means the students are high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors and a few students who’ve opted for a technical education. They are between fourteen and seventeen, a mixed group. The event is held in the library. The students have put up several displays about India, pictures, texts, studies and a collection of books. I take a look at them before sitting down. All the students have read extracts from Babyji and many have read the whole book, they have been asked to write about India and two texts have been selected for me. Marie-Charlotte reads her text first, it is poetic and rhythmic. The next text is written by Cassandre but is read by her and two of her classmates. After this the floor is opened to the students. They are shy to ask the first few questions but after that they don’t stop. For an hour and a half they quiz me about the book, about myself, about schools in India, about writing, about why the main character is a girl, about getting published, about the process of writing various drafts. It is intense, it is exhausting. It is, above all, profoundly satisfying. Their energy is contagious and their enthusiasm on a Friday afternoon at four pm is immensely flattering. I realize that with them I’ve let myself get carried away. The usual distance that I try to maintain as a writer is broken. When the teachers suggest we move to the réfectoire for a goûter littéraire and continue the discussion there I take a picture of them all saying I want it for my blog. Within hours one of them will comment on my French blog.

Saturday is the moment for readers to meet with authors. At the Village des Cafés Littéraires set up not far from the hotel the writers seat themselves at tables. Those browsing our books at the bookseller can drop by and ask us to sign. Two young teenagers Juliette and Charlotte who are journalists for a real-time gazette during the café drop by and interview me for their afternoon edition. The cartoonist Eric Vaxman draws us. Lunch is served in our hotel Le Relais d'Empereur (it has boasted the passage of Napoléan, Winston Churchill and Brigitte Bardot) which is located at the Place Marx Dormoy. One of the writers Eric Holder tells the rest of us that Max Dormoy a minister for the Popular Front who refused to sign over the granting of full powers to Pétain was assassinated in Montélimar with bombs that had been placed under his bed. His assassins fled to Franco’s Spain and were never persecuted. In the afternoon after lunch there is enough time to take a quick walk to the Château des Adhémar in Montélimar. Located on a small hillock it provides a nice outlook over town. It was constructed in the twelfth century.

My café littéraire in the evening is held at 9pm at a local teahouse La Caverne d’Ali Baba. The treasurer of the association Jean-François walks me over. I see faces I recognize from earlier meetings and many new ones. Harold David the moderator has come from Paris and works for La maison des écrivains. After the session I get a chance to speak one on one with many in the audience. Pia Petersen and Nathacha Appanah come to my event and we end up sitting and talking long after it is over. Pia is a philosopher by training who left her native Denmark to study in France and now writes novels in French. She’s bursting with political ideas of all sorts and regales us with stories about passports, civil status and run-ins with the bureaucracy that border on the Kafkaesque. Nathacha and I ask simultaneously if she’s written about it threatening that we will if she doesn’t! Nathacha’s café littéraire is the next morning and I’m going to miss it since I am leaving early. But we’ve bought each other’s books now—another way of being in touch. Earlier in the day leafing through her novels trying to decide which one to begin with I finally settled on Blue Bay Palace because the character Maya shares her name with my character in That Summer in Paris. I wonder for a moment if I would have written that book if I had known so many other writers at that time and if the novel would have been anything like it is if I had. I felt the isolation of the writing life and the absence of friends in the field so sorely then. The beauty of the festivals this month is that one gets to meet one’s readers and also ones confreres.

Christine Carraz who is the only employ of the festival (the others are all volunteers of the association) has handled all our logistics and our last minute issues with train reservations and transfers like a solid rock. Since the festival began on Thursday she has barely slept, whether one is getting back to the hotel past midnight or taking breakfast early in the morning she is always there with a smile. She drives us to the station in the morning, Eric Faye and Dominique Fabre are on the same train. Dominique will be in New York next year, his book La serveuse était nouvelle is being published in English by Archipelago Books under the title The Waitress was new. Only after I leave the train and head to the taxi stand do I realize I’ve not left my email with Dominique so I’m hoping he’ll come across this blog and contact me before his US book tour.

The French Tour Fall 2007, Stop#3: Manosque

2007-10-01T22:22:00.000-04:00

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Just before the high speed train from Paris comes to a stop in Aix-en-Provence it passes by several exposed limestone cliffs and one feels as if one is actually pulling up into a Cézanne painting. The authors invited for Les Correspondances de Manosque are received at the station by a smiling Valérie who puts us all into a small mini van. The ride from Aix to Manosque is an hour in low traffic. Despite the dark grey skies the ochre-colored cliffs bring cheer to the day.

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Even though it is only September the temperatures are not much higher than those in Paris and the weather conditions not a lot sunnier. We pass the L’Occitane factory along the auto route and I try to imagine the countryside in the height of the lavender season.

The festival at Manosque is a leisurely affair with time to digest what is happening and the possibility of doing things at one’s own rhythm. I’m staying with several of the other writers at a hotel just five minutes from the small center of the old city which has several large gates and a crisscross network of some fifteen or twenty narrow streets. I walk around and make it to the Place de l’Hôtel-de-ville only after 5pm when François Salvaing is most of the way through his débat. The session is animated by Pascal Jourdana who is also responsible for my being present as well. The Place de l’Hôtel-de-ville is a small square surrounded by cafés. A podium has been set up with a large bookshelf full of books. Salvaing holds forth on his new novel Jourdain. After Salvaing two novelists Gilles Leroy and Maurice Audebert are on for a session. Gilles Leroy is on the shortlist for four awards-the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina-for Alabama Song, an imaginative fictionalized biography of sorts about Zelda while Maurice Audebert is a philosopher who has just written a novel (his second) about Greta Garbo. They talk about the real personalities behind their books and also the fictionalized aspects of their novels. Someone in the audience is bothered by the fictionalizing of others’ lives but when the writers probe deeper it seems her discomfort comes from the fact that the people in question are famous.

By the end of the afternoon’s sessions everyone is a little frozen and happy to stand around the table set up in the square by the local bookseller La librarie du Poivre d’âne. While poivre means pepper and âne is a donkey I still haven’t cracked the idiomatic mystery behind the bookstore name. The conversation turns around the unseasonably low temperatures and those who were here last year say that it was incredibly hot during the festival, but I’m guessing that in 1901 the fall was as cold as it is today. There is a statue at one of the main gates showing a couple huddled together called La froid. Not the kind of thing you’re expecting when you head down to Provence.

Manosque, despite its modest population of some twenty thousand, has been hosting this festival for nine years inviting major authors and actors. The 9pm evening special each night is the reading of a text in the local theater by an actor of national repute. Tonight it is Julie Depardieu—yes the daughter of Gérard—and an actress in her own right. She does a staged reading, props and all, from the letters of Violette Leduc. One of the people I have just met is Achmy Halley the new director of the Villa Mont Noir where I will be spending some time next year. Violette Leduc, Achmy tells me, she was a close friend of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. In her letters to Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir referred to Leduc as the “ugly one” but she also thought Leduc was the most brilliant woman she ever knew. Leduc’s letters to her lovers Alain, Georges and Robert would be funny if they weren’t tinged with sadness. Intense and obsessive the letters follow a repetitive pattern of declaring dramatic love, suffering from rejection and repeating the pattern.

Friday morning is a day of discovery. I make the most of the sun in the morning to climb the small hill Mont d’Or (530m) to the north-east of Manosque. The climb is short but steep and I pass by many beautiful provencal homes along the way. Though in the south of France Manosque is actually located at approximately the same latitude as Portland, Maine. The vegetation as one climbs up gets more interesting. There are several plants that have been entirely populated by snails, at first sight I mistook these for flowers. There is another tree I’m unable to identify with very weird fruit. Mont d’Or provides a nice view of Manosque and the surrounding lands.

One of the special things at the Manosque festival which is centered around correspondence and letters is the omnipresence of écritoires. A word that can be translated as a writing desk but does no justice to the concept. Ecritoires have been set up in all sorts of venues including shoe stores, chocolateries, pâtisseries, boulangeries, cafés and boutiques. There is even an écritoire in the shape of a camera lens that can be used to write in the dark or with little light and one shaped like a kaleidoscope with mirrors. The population at large is encouraged to write letters (pen, paper, envelope and stamps provided for free by the post) and indeed people can be seen writing away furiously. I stop by a lovely art gallery run by the painter Anje Delaunay and write. Delaunay borrows from some of the ideas of Buddhist thangka art and appropriates it with his own style and indeed some of his works achieve the mysterious and the spiritual. I then wander into Empreinte a workshop for etchers, lithographers and print-makers. The workshop is run as an association with each of the artists paying a small membership fee in exchange for a key and materials. The artists “correspond” in images with artists from all over the world, sending there prints and receiving one that enters into a dialog with the work they sent. The idea is magnificent and in many of the “letters” that are on display (during the annual festival they exhibit the year’s correspondence) there is a visible and evident dialog between Japanese and Danish artists and Manosquins.

Today, Gloria one of the etchers from the association is volunteering. Visitors are encouraged to try this art form for themselves. While the artists at the workshop etch on a regular basis on wood, metal and linoleum, she proposes something very simple: a small square of thin plastic. I get to work with the tools. Once I’ve got my engraving I cover it with printer’s ink and we run it through the one ton press that is over a century old. I’m so enchanted I do another. I also meet Claudine Rovis a painter from Nice who is going to bring out a hand-made book L'Incendie précaire at another book festival next week. Her book is a collection of her paintings along with the text of a poet who has written specially for the occasion. We hit it off. Bernadette another of the members of the association drops by and I take a photo of the three ladies. If I can find a low-cost workshop like this in NY or Delhi I will participate in this other aspect of the literary festival for next year, corresponding in image with one of the ladies I’ve met. There are other options too, like engraving at home and substituting the one ton press for a rolling pin in the kitchen. The images are less beautiful but apparently it works! So in case you are interested you can too.

Muriel Barbery speaks in the afternoon about her novel L’élégance du hérisson. She has found herself on the bestseller list for over 53 weeks and the Place d’Hôtel-de-ville is spilling with people. I read her book in the spring and stayed up late into the nights to finish it before I left Paris (it was a borrowed copy). I find out she’s got a background in philosophy. She’s in and out of Manosque in a jiffy since she’s invited to Korea so I don’t get a chance to talk to her in person. In the evening I dine with Hubert Artus a journalist who is covering the festival for rue89 an online news site set up by journalists who worked for Libération. We head over to catch Edouard Baer for the 9pm show which is entirely sold out. The auditorium packed. My translator Isabelle Reinharez and her husband Georges call out to me; they have a free seat next to them. I’m in luck! Baer reads from Patrick Modiano’s Un pedigree: searing autobiographical pages about a horrific relationship between the young Modiano and his parents. After the 9pm reading there is a concert scheduled in another room of the same premises. I had missed Mathias Malzieu on Thursday but I catch Babx tonight. He begins by reading an extract from Novecento Pianiste (a novella I’ve read before) and then moves on to texts he’s set to music (Kerouac, Rimbaud, Baudelaire) and other’s he’s written himself.

The next morning is so gray I go right back to Empreinte and set to work on a few more etchings, try new things. At lunchtime it starts to pour and when I bump into Hubert again we take cover in an Italian restaurant offering a simple fare of bruschetta and pizza. The dessert however is totally unexpected, a duo of melting chocolate-caramel-à-la-fleur-de-sel cake. Exotic and delicious it is worthy of getting into more gastronomic menus. In the afternoon I catch snippets of Yannick Haenel who speaking of his book Cercle (also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis) says he wanted to compose this book much like a musician composes—a comment that immediately made me want to read the novel. I also catch bytes of Marie Darrieussecq (her novel Tom est mort is shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Femina) and Natacha Appanah (her novel Le dernier frére is shortlisted for the Prix Médicis). In the evening the dinner table is bigger than ever, we are 13 and I find myself across one of the only other non-francophone writers invited to the festival: Jamal Mahjoub. With an œuvre comprising some seven novels in English, Jamal is of Sudanese-British descent and currently lives in Barcelona. Needless to say he is a polyglot who speaks fluent Arabic, Spanish, and French in addition to his native English.

The 9 pm reading at the theater tonight is by Jacques Gamblin who has chosen to read from Romain Gary’s La nuit sera calme. A piece in which it turns out Gary has interviewed himself (clandestinely of course, much as he wrote his second Goncourt winning novel under the name of Emile Ajar). Gary holds forth on international politics and his time in the United Nations in the piece and some of his comments are clairvoyant. I skip the evening concert since I have my own débat the next morning.

Sunday is a sunny day. My translator Isabelle Reinharez (click on 25th september to watch her on tv) and I are on together for a Jeu double. Pascal Jourdana our moderator finds a balance between posing us both questions about language, about the book and about writing and translating. The hour flies quickly. We chat for a while after the event and then I head back to the hotel. A bus is taking the authors who are returning on the same train as me to Aix. On the bus Natacha Appanah and I chat through the crack between our seats. We haven't talked before and I'm heartened to hear our conversation can continue next week in Montélimar where we are both invited for the Cafés littéraires de Montélimar.

The French Tour Fall 2007, Stop#2: Nancy

2007-09-25T23:45:00.000-04:00

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The new TGV inaugurated in the summer hurtles east reaching over 320km/hr as we head to one of France's most important literary festivals of the autumn Le livre sur la place in Nancy. I'm expecting a pretty city but nothing prepares me for my sudden arrival into the dramatic place Stanislas after I check my luggage into the hotel and follow directions to le centre ville. With its gleaming gold highlights and its symmetric fountains, its paved central plaza and its open-air cafés it has me instantly in love.

A fountain at Place Stanislas

My publishers get me a last minute invitation to a luncheon hosted by Le Point, a national magazine with a lot of readers in these parts and a co-sponsor of the festival. We all find ourselves in the cave of a restaurant where the apéro is served. The basement has a damp odor that is somewhat intoxicating. Over warm crispy bread sticks I meet Le Point's marketing director Xavier who worked for many years as a professional magician. I'm hoping that before the salon is over I'll have a chance to see some of his sleights of hand. The lunch is given in honor of Michèle Lesbre the author of Le Canapé Rouge (ed. Sabine Wespieser). Her book has been chosen as the Coup de Coeur of this year's rentrée littéraire by Le Point (it is also shortlisted for the Goncourt). Despite the last minute arrangements there is a place marked for me at the table thanks to Marie-Claude and the restaurant dishes vegetarian versions of all four courses including a lavish pastry shell in the form a purse that is stuff with finely julienned vegetables and served with a delightful red sauce.

Franz-Olivier Giesbert who is the Director of Le Point speaks for a few minutes followed by the mayor of Nancy André Rossinot who has held his office since 1983. In a short but touching speaks he talks of his vision of Nancy as a tolerant and diverse city two words one rarely hears in France where public discourse is not all that politically correct. After lunch we all head to the place Carrière where the festival is being held. Along the way I find out from Franz-Olivier that it was France 5 who chose to name his Saturday night talk show Chez F.O.G and that among other books he has written one called The American which was published in the US in February by Vintage. A journalist wants pictures of F.O.G in place Stanislas for the newspaper and he insists that Tatiana and I get in the photo.

The place Carrière is located just off of place Stanislas. Communicating tents have been pitched up with local booksellers hosting authors at their tables. I'm signing at the bookseller Le Hall du livre between Tatiana and Pierre Pelot both authors published by EHO. (Pelot is the author of over ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY books!) A couple of high school students come and quiz Tatiana for a school project. Minutes after they leave another gang arrives and wants to pose the same questions. With admirable patience she agrees. Tomorrow they will come for me.

At 5:30 I have a radio interview with Laurent Pilloni of France Bleu Sud Lorraine who is running his show live from a tent pitched at the entrance of the festival. He is very funny and we chat for a quarter of an hour about Babyji after which I return with the others to the hotel. There is an official dinner for the authors invited to Nancy (some 450). Tomorrow, Saturday, will be a busy day at the salon and we will all be exhausted (130000 visitors pass through the salon over the period of one short weekend) but tonight we are still enthusiastic.

The sit down dinner is held at L'Excelsior where I am happy that our table seats not just our own crowd (EHO authors and Héloïse & Gilles) but also two nancéiens Michel Vagner (who has interviewed me in Paris many months ago) and Patrick Germain who are both journalists in addition to Christopher Mory who has among other things written a biography of Molière. The Excelsior is the perfect venue for hearing from Michel and Patrick about some of Nancy's art nouveau tradition and the école de Nancy because the brasserie itself is a work of art boasting Jacques Grüber's glasswork and chandeliers from Majorelle (in two days I will know more about this following a visit to the Villa Majorelle). They convince me as I snap some quick pictures of the mirrors and the ceiling that I must make time for the museum devoted to Nancy's golden age.

The interior of the Excelsior

The official dinner for authors that marks each of the literary festivals I am attending has already become familiar. Some of the same authors are invited to Nancy as Besançon but the big gossip tonight is that four (or is it five?) members of the jury for the Goncourt are present. When Dephine De Vigan who is shortlisted for the Goncourt walks by our table and says hello I decide to investigate the table of honor with my camera where in addition to the mayor and his wife the jury is said to be seated.

St. named after the Goncourts

Saturday is lost in a whirl of people. I sign books in the morning and briefly stop by the Hôtel de Ville of Nancy at lunchtime where a luncheon buffet is organized. The salon has been so packed and noisy that I need to decompress. I order a large tart à la mode on one of the terrasses and read (in English!). Most of the afternoon is taken up by a café littéraire hosted by Sarah Pollaci. I only know one of the authors at the round table Alex Taylor an Englishman who writes in French; he has been signing beside Tatiana at our stand. Next to me is Jakuta Alikavazovic, beside her Dorothée Janin followed by Gérald Bronner. It is a hard group to unite together but Sarah Pollaci manages to pose us all specific questions as well as ones that can be answered by the entire group. Alex has written a shocking memoir of his life as a homosexual and believes it is his first and last book (he lived in Nancy and worked in television and continues to be a journalist), Gérald's book is a kind of fantasy novel while the three of us women seem to be authors of literary fiction. Alex turns the tables on the audience and invites an old lady who has been smiling at him to speak up. She tells us she is 90 and that she's seen a lot of tomfoolery in her times; there is nothing that Alex or anyone else can say in their book that is going to shock her! You can see her hold forth right here!

We return to the tables where the booksellers have us set up and sign some more. The salon is hectic and a public announcement calls for security guards to control the flow of people in and out of the tents. Repeated announcements ask visitors to frequently step out of the tents and get fresh air. Sitting cramped behind tables we are hardly able to move. In certain moments the flow of humanity ahead of us has been in such volume that no one can actually look at the books, as people jostle and heave we try talking above our usual volume to the readers who manage to resist the momentum and stop to ask questions. Two high-schoolers ask me why I write, when I first wrote, how I write etc for their assignment. The young booksellers helping the bookshop and selling our books have been standing on their feet all day. They offer us authors coffee and tea and water. At 7 I go back to the hotel exhausted. I have an hour of much needed silence sitting on the bed with a book. Later I meet up with Tatiana and Richard Andrieux. A musician by training he has just brought out his first novel José to much critical acclaim. The salon has been taxing for him as well and we each realize we've had to talk ourselves into freshening up and making it to dinner.

If the food in Nancy has been fabulous so far it has yet to reach its peak. Les Agaves is the very sommet of my gastronomic experience this weekend. The savory millefeuille with tomato and fresh goat cheese is crispy, the risotto with morels one of the best I’ve ever had. At dinner I meet Patrick Besson who delivers all his lines with deadpan humor and can never pass up the opportunity for playing a word game or saying something caustic. I wish my French were better so I could catch all of it. He wrote his first novel when he was just seventeen, it also happened to be the year when I was born. Stéphanie Janicot who I have met many times before is also there.

Sunday is a light day for me because the bookseller runs out of my books. I make the most of it by going to the Musée d’école de Nancy and the Villa Majorelle. The museum boasts many beautiful pieces in wood and glass by Emile Gallé the most important figure of the art nouveau movement of the école. Majorelle was his rival and the villa he built is from outside to inside, tip to toe, is a work of art. It was, also at the time it was constructed, a fantastic commercial showcase for Majorelle. Visits to the villa are only by appointment with a guide who tells us that everything from the tiles on the outside of the villa (an orchid design) to furniture inside was available for sale in both popular and “lux” versions for buyers. Majorelle also had the items photographed in their respective rooms and put them in a catalog that was sent out to customers.

The most exhilarating aspect of both the museum and the villa Majorelle is that one can see how expansive the art nouveau moment was in its golden age. It touched every kind of object and medium from glass to furniture and tiles to paintings. One reason for the incredible flourishing of this period was that Nancy in the late eighteen-hundreds became home to many of the French who fled parts of Alsace and Lorraine in the aftermath of the Prussian war. There was thus a gathering of important men of wealth in the town. Industry boomed as did glasswork and the iron foundry of Louis Majorelle. In more modern times nancéiens have remained independent of Paris boasting their own wonderful boutiques and gourmet restaurants because of the lack of a TGV. Until the inauguration of the high speed line in June it took some four hours to get to Nancy from the capital. Now however the life of the city is going to change. Patrick told me at dinner he already knows of someone who does a daily commute to Paris for work and lives in Nancy. For someone like me coming from the other direction however it is a boon. It’s not unthinkable to just hop on the train one day on a whim and have lunch, take in another museum and make it back for dinner to 75005.

The French Tour Fall 2007, Stop#1: Besançon

2007-09-19T23:36:00.000-04:00

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The heart of the town of Besançon in the Franche-Comté is circled by the river Doubs. The Doubs only leaves a small neck of land as it goes around the town and this was corked for the fortification of the town by a citadel in the seventeenth century. I now forget if Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic (briefly home of Egon Schiele and now the site of the Egon Schiele Art Centrum) has a similar citadel that blocks off its neck of land but the Vltava and the Doubs form rather similar horseshoe shapes as you can see from the Google Earth maps below.

Besançon, France Český Krumlov, Czech Republic

I am in Besançon for the annual literary festival sponsored by the town and organized by Pierre Défendini who lives in the south of France and organizes such festivals all over the country. It is the first of four-five long weekends that will be spent discovering la France profonde as everyone has been telling me.

For a big time lifelong fan of stone like myself this city has much to offer. Most of it is built with pierre de Chailluz a stone quarried from nearby mines and made de rigeur in the sixteenth century to avoid the accident and larceny engendered by wooden constructions. The buildings therefore, despite their classic architecture, sometimes give the vibe of a modernist two-toned contrasting palette.

The book festival is packed with people and the weather is unexpectedly divine. The sun pours down on the tents at the Parc de la gare d’eau where the 3 day affair is organized. The salon is busy with visitors streaming in and stopping by authors, posing questions, asking for autographs. The stands are run by booksellers in the region who are warm and eager. But staying indoors all day with the constant hum of noise and the heat of hundreds of bodies can be fatiguing. So on Sunday morning I take off with my press-attaché Anne-Laure Clémént who grew up in Besançon. Her brother Max joins us. At fourteen he already knows he wants to be a chef. I tell him that he must create more gourmet French options for vegetarians but he’s already aware of the problem since one of his friends is off meat and fish. The previous evening at the end of the day’s festival I had already walked around through the pedestrian town center and gotten mildly lost. I had come back to the official author’s dinner through the park with its magnificent plane trees.

Today Anne-Laure and Max walk me through the Battant, a former communist neighborhood across from the Doubs river (or rather outside the circle) and show me some fine courtyards and spectacular views of the Jura.

The neighborhood has changed and there’s a lot of new development; the bousbots and bousbottes have been replaced by the more universal bobos (deriving from bourgeois-bohemian).

This literary festival (Les Mots Doubs) as most others, has its moments of discovery. I’m interviewed live over France Bleu Besançon the local radio that is covering the event and quizzing authors. Marie-Ange Pinelli breathlessly and enthusiastically poses one question after the other. I ask if I can hang out for a few minutes and catch the next author. Jeanne Labrune author of L’Obscur (her first novel) and a seasoned director answers questions on parallels between film and literature. Later I’m in a multiple author panel Génération…romans with more writers I don’t know: David Foenkinos, Jean Philippe Blondel, Dominique L. Pelegrin and Murielle Magellan. The panel is recorded and will be put online soon.

Besançon’s most literary call to fame is possibly its son Victor Hugo who was born there in 1802 and wrote the poem Ce siècle avait deux ans the first stanza of which reads:

Ce siècle avait deux ans ! Rome remplaçait Sparte,
Déjà Napoléon perçait sous Bonaparte,
Et du premier consul, déjà, par maint endroit,
Le front de l'empereur brisait le masque étroit.
Alors dans Besançon, vieille ville espagnole,
Jeté comme la graine au gré de l'air qui vole,
Naquit d'un sang breton et lorrain à la fois
Un enfant sans couleur, sans regard et sans voix ;
Si débile qu'il fut, ainsi qu'une chimère,
Abandonné de tous, excepté de sa mère,
Et que son cou ployé comme un frêle roseau
Fit faire en même temps sa bière et son berceau.
Cet enfant que la vie effaçait de son livre,
Et qui n'avait pas même un lendemain à vivre,
C'est moi. –

The century was two years old! Rome was replacing Sparta,
Napoléon was already drilling under Bonaparte,
Already in myriad locations from the first consultation,
The Emperor’s forehead was shattering under its mask.
So in Besançon, an old Spanish town,
Thrown like a seed in the blowing breeze,
Born from Breton and Lorraine blood alike
An infant without color, or eyes or voice
So frail he was almost a chimera,
Abandoned of everything but his mother,
His neck bent like a frail blade of grass
Had his coffin and his cradle made at the same time
This infant that life was wiping off its book
And who did not even have one tomorrow to live,
Is me.

(the quick and dirty translation is mine!)

Anne-Laure walks me by a bistro called 1802 in memory of Hugo’s poem but we don’t have time to stop. The bistro’s place settings apparently all carry his poem. The Bisontins and Bisontines have a sense of history that is no doubt accentuated by the fact that the city has been making watches since the late 1700s. Wikipedia puts the number of watchmakers at 1000 in 1795.

A year before I was born Besançon’s major watchmaker LIP threatened by globalization and sinking profits risked a shut down. Anne-Laure tells me that the workers at that point took matters in their own hand and decided to continue making watches and going around the world personally to sell them. The film Les Lip, imagination au pouvoir is a documentary about the events. It is now on my list of films to watch. There seem to be a series of books on the subject too but their academic tone has me hesitating. They include Lip des heures à conter, Comment j'ai sauvé LIP, andL’affaire Lip et les catholiques de Franche-Comté. I would welcome any suggestions on films or books that treat this in an engaging way. You can surf LIP designs from the historic to the modern and buy their watches online.

At the risk of having lost all but the most patient readers of this blog I will end here. The next stop is Nancy in Lorraine, the birth place of Edmond de Goncourt and Eric Rohmer.

India's 60th in New York

2007-08-19T22:16:00.000-04:00

As usual the Indian parade passed by my window kicking up the kind of racket you can expect from any parade in New York. However this time round there was a float that was somewhat out of the ordinary even by India’s diverse standards. This one seemed to have found inspiration from Brazil during carnival time. How did London Beverage Cash & Carry (is that a big business or a small one?) get away with a float that had nothing to do with India and even less with Indian culture? One gentleman got rather angry and spat in front of the float saying it was against our culture. He’s right, but his ire would probably have been better directed toward the podium on Madison Avenue where all the bigwigs who make these decisions were gathered.

The sponsoring Federation of Indian Associations has previously prevented legitimate Indian sexual minorities from marching at the parade on the grounds that these were against the spirit of Indian culture; notwithstanding India’s own sexual diversity. However the same FIA it seems has no qualms of any kind when it comes to pure commercial propaganda on behalf of London Beverage. That the colorfully plumed bare-skinned dances of the carnival are not part of the sub-continent’s rather rich and varying heritage is not in question. That most Indians would find that kind of body flashing embarrassing in front of children that too on their national day is merely a fact though one could argue it’s their problem. But that FIA should choose to allow such a float to pass simply for advertising dollars when it denies real people of Indian origin the right to express themselves at the parade is a matter of double shame for them.

Illusions at the Guggenheim

2007-08-05T09:46:00.000-04:00

The Guggenheim is offering icy cool respite from the oppressive New York heat until September 5th in The Shapes of Space. The centerpiece of which without doubt for me is the Alyson Shotz glacial glass curtain showcased on the ground floor which is neither made of glass nor really 3-dimensional. Illusions, it turns out, cannot fool the camera!

Yuken Teruya's origami inspired trees are by far the most delicate pieces at the exhibition while Mika Rottenberg's video Dough is mesmerizing and grotesque. Tiny tots and oldsters alike crowd in the little wooden compartment and sit it out for a full cycle watching lumps of dough being kneaded and processed by gigantic hands.

copyright Guggenheim.org
One of Teruya's trees

Unfortunately not all of the pieces on show are of such fascinating shallowness (as Sholtz's work) or weirdness (as Rottenberg's) or beauty (as Teruya's). And at moments walking down the spiral I cannot help but give thanks to the spiral structure of the rotunda which only on rare occasions (the Russian exhibition for one) has managed to be overwhelmed by the art.

Two days to go

2007-06-30T19:13:00.000-04:00

If you're in New York you have until Monday to catch Van Gogh and Expressionism at the Neuegalerie. One of the first pieces in the exhibition is an 1890 rendition of the Farms hear Auvers that could practically have been signed by Cezanne. Then there are twin boat paintings, one a small ink study and the other the final oil on canvas that are sheer joy to behold. Soon after we are brutally thrown out of this mood and into the Klimts from the permanent collection. And somehow the moods of the Klimts just doesn't match the rest of the show. In all the shows I've seen over time at the Neuegalerie the Klimts seem to interrupt this one the most. But we move on to other things in the smaller room. There is lots of color and beauty in the exhibition even in the non-Van Gogh bits. But something about it just doesn't hang together. I walked away perplexed and trying to put my finger on why it doesn't work. If the purpose of the show is to display the Noldes and Kirschners and Schmidt-Rottluffs that mirror Van Gogh's style it achieves it. But there is something strangely unsatisfactory about walking through the rooms and rooms of mirrors, I felt there was no movement. The mad red splats of paint the "others" used often felt heavy. While so many works worked individually and mirrored the Van Gogh influence they remained static. Maybe the pieces were all too obvious. Though I don't think it was the obviousness that bothered me. I am agreed with the New York Times article (link in this blog heading) that one of the more successful couplings is Schiele's bedroom (see above) beside Van Gogh's. The real problem was that seeing the paintings that had been influenced by Van Gogh I felt I wasn't seeing anything essential by the "other" painter (whether the "other" was Nolde, or Kirschner). Schiele can hold his own anywhere but Kirschner would have been dwarfed but for his woodcuts at the very end of the exhibition. I could not help but think of the recent exhibition of German portraits from the 1920s at the Met that had been brilliantly curated or for that matter a Kirschner exhibition a few years back that came from London to NY. Despite the curatorial hiccups the works here are lovely so line up in the sun tomorrow!

On a bleaker note I'm reading Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi. Despite claims that this 1940s novel was an earth-shaking event I'd not heard of him before. I'm wondering if his legacy in India is less known than in Pakistan where he went after Partition. Ali quotes sublime passages of Urdu shayiri in the book. Delhi is palpable though the few mentions ever made of non-Muslim Delhi are condescending or snide or bitter. But it doesn't really matter since we don't often get to read from this perspective about Delhi. One of his characters Mir Saheb reflects upon the illness of his mistress: His wife was there, no doubt; and so were the children. But the world they lived in was a domestic world. There was no beauty in it and no love.

A minute at the MoMA

2007-06-17T22:04:00.000-04:00

Richard Serra is on at the MoMA. I first saw his Torqued Ellipses at DIA in 1997. On view at the MoMA are several new pieces including Sequence, Band, and Torqued Torus Inversion. Speaking of Band, Serra said: I wanted the speed of skin to configure the volumes as you walk them. I leave you to decipher that one.

Serra is an artist who has generated much controversy over the years. After a public hearing his commissioned work Tilted Arc which was installed at the Federal Plaza was voted to be removed by a jury. It was carted off to a scrap metal yard. Serra might well be right that art is not democratic and it's function is not to be pleasing. But Serra's work emphasizes experience over image; that combined with the costs of these huge pieces (Tilted Spheres by Serra at Toronto's Pearson Airport apparently cost $1.5 million) and their dimensions which necessitate the use of public spaces for their installation means tension is inevitable. On the one hand Serra has said that art is not for the public. On the other, the idea of infra-structural sculpture weighing 70 tonnes is hard to imagine outside of the public realm. These ideas in the end just might not be compatible.

The MoMA has put out a beautiful free pamphlet of Serra's work and the photos of his massive swirling shapes of steel as I look at them right now far exceed the experience of them earlier today*. This would probably be problematic for Serra who wants to get away from "the imagistic value of an object." The "psychological impact" of the sculpture which is what his work is about was unfortunately a little paltry for me.

*My moment at the MoMA was rather these two shadow lines of space and negative space.

Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson

2007-06-01T10:35:00.000-04:00

The Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson is located in a small impasse in Paris near the Gare de Montparnasse. Following my visit there yesterday I've added it to my list of favorite museums in Paris that include the Rodin and Maillol museums and the Musée de la vie romantique. These museums all share one thing in common: they are small and personal. They afford you the physical space and quiet needed to really spend time with an œuvre d'art. The FHCB is like these other museums except for its modern accents. The art deco roof as the director pointed out to me is all glass and luminous.

Each year the foundation holds a competition and names a laureate. This year's winner Fazal Sheikh is also a MacArthur fellow. The foundation presents (until 26 August 2007) two series of Shaikh's work "Moksha" and "Ladli."

Moksha portrays widows in modern day Vrindavan and bears testimonies to their lives. The photographs are accompanied by text that presents these women's stories. Sheikh's touch is both light and tender at the same time. The photos are intimist, a little like being inside one of Bonnard's domestic scenes (minus the color). They suspend time. Lingering over the image of one old lady after another one senses the weight and thickness of their lives, the passing of time that marks their faces. It is this aspect of Sheikh's photography and engagement that reveals the touch of a master.

© Fazal Sheikh from Moksha

The subject of Sheikh's series Ladli is no easier, bearing witness as it does to the status of the girl child. In this series, exhibited in another hall, Sheikh's narrative texts take on a different distance. He plumbs into the causes and deep-rooted sociological and psychological reasons that contribute to the suffering of these children. The stories are always hard but Sheikh's photographs allow us to see these young girls and women without the infliction of a third person.

Fazal Sheikh's works will be on display at the Pace McGill Gallery from October 18 -November 24, 2007

It’s that time of the year

2007-05-06T17:07:00.000-04:00

You can walk into the Met on a Sunday and walk around without jostling crowds and waiting in queues. There’s much to be seen. And some of it like Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí you should see soon because there’s a lot to take in and you might want to come back before June 3rd when the exhibition is slated to end.

The exhibition welcomes you with a small Picasso that marries Goya with Manet. The Catalan revival showcased in the exhibition owes a lot to Francophile painters and sculptors who made trips to France and were heavily influenced in both style and content by French art of the period. You can see Montmartre’s favorite haunts painted by Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas rendered here by the founders of Catalan Modernisme . In their palette and in their themes they bear so much resemblance to French painting that the first half of the exhibition could practically be shown seamlessly with French impressionism and works by Rodin and Maillol.

The Met will tell you that: At the turn of the 20th century, while the rapid industrialization of Barcelona created new fortunes and allowed for wide patronage of the city's artists and designers, poor immigrants worked in harsh and unjust conditions, leading to social conflict, labor strikes, and anarchist bombings. Although artists rarely made overtly political statements, they did look closely at both the wealthy bourgeoisie and the working poor. Paintings and drawings by Isidre Nonell and Picasso's Blue Period depictions of beggars, prostitutes, and the disenfranchised reflect on the striking differences between Barcelona's economic and social classes. But I have a bone to pick with them on Nonell whose painting Poor People Waiting for Soup
is on view. The Met cites his influences as Goya and Honoré Daumier where as to me the influence of Jean-Fraçois Millet is so evident and blatant that to skip the reference seems like a mistake. Any Nonell experts out there who can shed some light?

Some of Picasso’s more accomplished and sublime pieces are on view at the Met and any Picasso fan should be delighted. His Harem from 1906
is of course influenced by Ingre but I disagree once again with the Met that it’s Ingre’s Turkish bath or harem paintings that is the primary influence. It is rather the mood of Ingre's Angélique that permeates Picasso’s Harem. Picasso's Gosol Landscape has Cezanne written all over it (another reference I believe the curators decided to skip).

It is Dali fans who will be disappointed by this exhibition because there are fewer works by Dali than by Picasso or Miró or Rusiñol. There is, alas, not enough of Joaquim Mir whose landscapes share some of the strangeness of Max Ernst’s post-war work. And you’ll see one of Miró’s earlier pieces which tells you why he was so right to turn to contemporary expression in his own work!

My coup de cœur was one of Picasso’s magnificent blue period works La Vie. Decipher it!© metmuseum.org

Light light Lisbon

2007-03-31T10:47:00.000-04:00

India seems to be everywhere, presenting herself sometimes in highly unlikely forms like this restaurant in central Lisbon that marries Bengal with tandoori food. The mascot: dancing Shiva. Well, why not?

I check into my hotel on Liberty Avenue on Wednesday afternoon and decided to make the most of the remaining sunlight. I’ve been to the city once before for five days so I decide I can make it without a map. Within two blocks I tire of the traffic on the main road despite the large shady trees and the two teenagers in a sweet embrace by a fountain. I turn off into a narrow side street and find myself at Alegria Square where a madman is directing the odd car here and there. The park in the square has a seedy feel, a corner theater announces some kind of doubtful spectacle featuring women and dance. Lisbon is hilly and soon I recognize a set of stairs leading up to another level of the city. If memory serves me right then I’ve been here six months ago after dinner with some friends. Despite the wind and the cold we sat in the open night and had lemonade. At that time I hadn’t been able to figure out how we got there so now I give up all hope of orienting myself toward the Chiado and just continue to where my nose takes me. Soon I’m on a narrow street with tramways and even narrower sidewalks. I’m expecting somehow to reach a large square in the Chiado with nothing but the compass that was included in my urban brain at birth. The light is beautiful today as always, the patch of green on the Principe Reale that was closed off last fall is still out of bounds. No construction workers are in sight so it’s likely that prohibitive green netting will hide the city’s most magnificent vista overlooking the old fort for many more months to come.

Paris is the city of light. So how come Lisbon has this kind of light? A light light. An unavoidable pun that you must excuse. There is a lack of heaviness in Lisbon’s light morning, noon, and dusk. It’s not because of the sea. After all Greece is on the sea. It’s not the proximity to Africa. Morocco doesn’t have this light. My own theory is that the undulating off-white tiles that pave all of Lisbon’s many sidewalks have much to do with the quality of this city’s luminescence. They bounce off the light differently than the sidewalks and buildings in Paris (for example). The red roofs tinge the light with a rose accent and round it off. If the lumière in Lisbon is light and young and fresh there is a lot in the buildings and the roads that is old and sage. Even with little understanding of Portugal one can end up feeling nostalgic and old world when one is here. Beauty is to be found in hidden corners and by the way. Nothing announces it. Nothing celebrates it. That is Lisbon’s charm. For a walker like myself it is impossible not to notice the uneven undulating sidewalks. A few black stones provide shapes and patterns against a background of white. The sidewalks are functional and the stones are all in place but they rise and dip, there are no straight lines. A topographer would be able to map as much relief on the sidewalks as on the very hills of Lisbon. The tiles are wavy along both a two dimensional and a three-dimensional axis and I’d like to ask an expert in optics if flat even stones would create a different effect and alter the light. Even as I ruminate over this I’m spit out into the square I’ve been anticipating but from the opposite direction that I expect. This happens again a few hours later. Walking after dinner I wait for the Chinese pavilion, an odd eccentric nightlife venue with an improbable collection of objects to loom up on the opposite side of the streets but it is to my left just ahead of me. The next night heading to Buenos Aires, one of Lisbon’s small, charming, and perpetually overbooked restaurants I huff and pant up the steps once again approaching it as if in a mirror. To be in Lisbon for me is to be at once lost and not lost, to recognize something familiar and yet to find myself perplexed. For these and other reasons I know I will come back many times.

The 8th arrondissement

2007-03-16T08:16:00.000-04:00

I came across this statue for the first time yesterday on a walk near the Grand Palais. There was a mysterious plaque nearby saying that the maple sugar (tree?) was a gift from Montréal to Paris. I’m not sure whether this had anything to do with the statue which seems an allegory of sorts. Babyji was officially released yesterday in Paris (Thank you to all who sent me good wishes). Here’s a photo of la vitrine indienne of the Librairie Privat-Julliard where the signature was held. I'm signing tonight at Violette & Co (102 blvd de Charonne. Just as an fyi my interview with Frédéric Ferney of Le Bateau Livre is viewable this week online.(Why? But O! Why do I have such a hard time consistently following the rules of accord? Can a foreign tongue learnt in adulthood ever become entirely instinctive?).

Paris noise

2007-03-14T07:52:00.000-04:00

If you’re feeling nostalgic about the last time you were in Paris then here’s a quick update. The Seine is more swollen than I’ve ever seen it before. Several of the lower quays are flooded, the sun is out, the sky is blue. At the Maison européenne de la photographie you can see yourself diffracted and refracted on nine different television screens in an installation by Catherine Ikam/Louis Féri. Few people on opening night yesterday (Merci, Sylvie!) really wanted to see themselves from the several unflattering angles promised. On the top floor you can chuckle at the black and white images by Richard Kalvar whose works display an acute sensitivity to many things including humor, topography and dissonance. They never bore and they have the advantage of being beautiful. Then descend to the basement to find out all you wanted and more about celebrity Trash. Bruno Mouron and Pascal Rostain rummaged through Halle Berry’s and John Travolta’s garbage for you. They sorted it, they classified it, they placed it on a black surface, and then they photographed it from far up to give you a pretty picture. The Making Of film shown in the small room beside the trashy pictures was, for me, a lot more fascinating than the images themselves. There’s also something for those of you who get pleasure from seeing photos or videos of stimulated people. To each his own! If you are in Paris tomorrow then I’m signing my book and you’re welcome to drop by for a drink at La Librairie Privat-Julliard next to the metro Solférino, 229 boulevard Saint-Germain in the 7th arrondissement which in addition to the Matignon and several other very ministerial structures also is home to two of Paris’ most personal museums the Rodin and Maillol museums both of which have exceptional exhibitions about which I hope to talk about soon. My access to the 7th arrondissement yesterday was during peak evening traffic from the bridge (shown below) at Place de la Concorde to the Assemblée Nationale. The picture is about as noisy as the experience was.

France Musique

2007-03-08T03:17:00.000-05:00

Here's a photo of the Luxembourg Gardens on an early morning.

Also, if you're interested in Indian classical music I'm invited to François Castang's program A Portée de Mots (France Musique) later today. You can tune in on the internet at 6 am EST or 11 am GMT and click on the "direct" mic. If it's archived I'll place a link later.

Paris, Paris, Paris

2007-03-02T08:32:00.000-05:00

I've overcome the fear of exposing myself to total ridicule by starting a French blog. So if you read French then by all means go there. Though my posts will be a lot shorter in French than in English they are going to take much longer to write. So I'm keeping with the image-heavy word-light accent this blog took on in India.... Here are three store fronts in the 6th on rue du Dragon, rue Bonoparte, and rue Jacob.

Are you a writer going through a difficult period?

2007-02-26T22:13:00.000-05:00

Trying to get published? Already published and trying to publish another novel...... disheartened, depressed or feeling all-round low because of the daunting publishing process? I just read this very touching piece by Mary Anne Mohanraj a Chicago based writer who also organizes a literary festival with a South Asian bent every couple of years (Kriti/Desilit). I really enjoyed her collection of short stories Bodies in Motion. She's generously sharing her personal travails with her second book here. Mary Anne, here's wishing you the very best of luck on this one.

Raju -- Biscuit Maker

2007-02-18T00:21:00.000-05:00

Here is a short film on Raju. During the Surajkund Crafts Mela he had a stall outside the fair grounds. Usually his roadside cart is in the nearby residential neighborhood.

Simple Pleasures

2007-02-07T06:48:00.000-05:00

There is something to be said for ambling across the street and into what is probably India's largest crafts fair. You can find more or less everything at the Surajkund Crafts Mela (on till mid-Feb) from sour tamarind pickle by the kilo to a red metal robot designed in Chennai that tells you your own personal future for five rupees. Here are some photos....spot the man amidst his larger than life wares!

The Life of a Delhi Monkey

2007-02-03T06:32:00.000-05:00

Here is my first attempt at digital video. The camera is shaky and the sound mixing leaves a lot to be desired. You'll need to increase the volume half way through in order to hear the voice over which recorded a notch lower than the music. Enjoy! And, those of you who are seasoned film-makers, feel free to tell me how I can improve.

The Delhi Diary

2007-01-26T01:03:00.000-05:00

Nowhere is it truer than in

India

that a picture is worth a thousand words. That combined with the fact that I’m spending most of my time on writing means this blog is going visual for a while! This one goes out to all of you who are elsewhere right now…

Featured below: a typical Delhi high-tea experience from off the road yesterday.

I’m soon going to post share my first experiences with Digital Video. Currently under production is a short film on Delhi’s monkeys so come back!

This blog is linked to popdex.

New York Jewish Film Festival

2007-01-11T17:52:00.000-05:00

Daniel Schweizer’s WHITE TERROR is a very courageous film that delves into the rise of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Western Europe (primarily Sweden), the United States, and countries of the former Soviet Bloc. Schweizer gained incredible access to leaders and members of these groups in several countries and was able to interview them in depth. In the film he explores links between these different groups which are rooted, frequently, in different ideologies ranging from extreme right wing religious movements to punk music. These diverse groups are however able to come together in the cause of “white power” a notion that seems to hold sway regardless of whether the neo-Nazis are white Americans with a view that their culture is victimized or Russians making Nazi salutes in the Red Square and thus anything but marginalized.

Schweizer’s digs into the rhetoric of these groups, their methods of operation, and how their hate burns. At an early moment in the film, a leader of the Swedish groups responsible for a variety of racist videos talks about the music that has been used to pass the message in extremely business like terms. Just like mtv has a whole package with music and video, their group too has exploited the advent of DVDs to spread their message more effectively. Gone are the days of mere audio cassettes and LPs. Instead, matching the intense hate of the lyrics is gruesome historical footage from the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. These videos are often targeted at high school youth.

The journey that brings Schweizer to Sweden takes him to the United States where neo-Nazis are living in a state of high alert and often practicing a leaderless action policy which gives them the flexibility to act autonomously. Schweizer has made two other films Skin or Die, a documentary, and Skinhead Attitude, a feature film. Some of the people he interviews in White Terror he had already met before. Schweizer also interviews historians and spokespeople of the anti-defamation league, human rights groups, historians, and civil rights activists who shed light on the respective extreme right movements of their respective countries. In the aftermath of the murder of Nikolai Girenko a group of Russian neo-Nazis added more people to their hit list. Schweizer followed up with one such lady who matter-of-factly said she wasn’t going to think about these threats because they would stop her from doing her job which was to fight the “contamination of hatred.”

This contamination of hatred can, indeed, be fought. As Schweizer shows in the story of Tim Zaal an ex-skinhead who now speaks on tolerance and his own transformation. Schweizer tells us that post 9/11 America has become so focused on the outside that we have stopped monitoring what is happening inside, a lengthy part of his documentary is dedicated to showing us what is happening within. When I walked out of the theater I was rather shaken up and somewhat disoriented by fear. But a few blocks of the Upper West Side with smiles from a bunch of faces, none my own race, reminded me that all of us who live here in New York have a lot to be thankful for. Of course there is plenty of racism, walking around Baxter Street in Chinatown a Mexican-American street vendor and a Chinese-American street vendor with carts besides each other were fighting over a client. “Go home to your country” one of them yelled. “You go home to yours” the other retorted.

You can watch White Terror at Lincoln Center on Mon Jan 15@ 8pm or Wed Jan 17 @ 1 or 8:30pm.

Other films showing at the festival include Amos Gitai’s News from Home/News from House. Gitai says early in the film that a documentary film-maker’s job is excavation while that of someone filming fiction is akin to an architect’s. Like Schweizer’s work Gitai’s film too is part of a trilogy. Gitai encounters people who are involved with or have lived in or are living in a specific house. The stories span Palestinian families and Jewish ones. In search of those connected to the original home Gitai travels abroad. Some of the interviews are more fascinating than others. A beautiful Palestinian woman of eighty tells him that she has never worn a veil and that she likes wearing flowers in her hair. I like freedom, she says, don’t you? If you trust a woman she becomes good, she says. And my father trusted me. Gitai allows the different parties on both sides speak for themselves and tries to tell their human story. The result is touching though there are moments that are incredibly sad. Wed Jan 24 @3:30 and 8:15.

For a full schedule click here.

4 kadin 3 yatak

2007-01-11T00:20:00.000-05:00

Strange as it may sound that is the title of Babyji in Turkish! I just received a copy of the book in the mail and thus found out that it had been released in 2006. Does anyone know what the title means? You can check out more on this site.

Lost in Lille 3000

2006-12-08T11:49:00.000-05:00

Rue Faidherbe, the main drag in Lille running from the station into the old town has taken on a royal Indian look with its colossal majestic distinctly South Indian elephants. The train station is lit up, the illuminations making the shape of Mumbai’s Victoria Station. The opera house announces an Asha Bhosle concert and the central square announces a Christmas market. Lille is celebrating India and welcoming all hues of artists from the sub-continent: writers, singers, musicians, painters. It is also continuing with its own Christmas time celebrations with a gigantesque wheel that offers rides at night.

Yesterday the Villa Mont Noir some 30 kms from Lille hosted an evening L’Inde plus vaste que le monde (India, bigger than the world), the title originating form a work of Borges. The villa was the home of the writer Marguerite Yourcenar when she was a child and now serves as a resident for European writers. It is also active in the cultural and literary life of the region. Just 500 meters from the Belgian border it also happens to offer visitors an amusing view of border commerce: the French side is almost rural while the Belgian side is choc-a-bloc with tabacs selling cigarette-rolling machines, chocolate shops hawking edible Santas, and colorful Indian bags at low prices. Bailleul the nearest small town, almost entirely destroyed in the First World War and reconstructed since boasts a gorgeous monument in a modest location off the town square: a magnificent woman with arms open to the sky, a monument dedicated to peace.

Yesterday evening, the French writer Sébastien Ortiz (a nom-de-plume) engaged in a debat with me (in French of course). The debat littéraire is a rather French thing somewhat in-between an interview and a discussion. I received the first hundred pages of the French translation of my novel a fortnight back and the experience of reading myself in French has been truly novel (no pun intended). It has been an opportunity to see my own work afresh with new eyes. The book, in a sense, is no longer my work because all translations appropriate and reshape texts. There are many peripheral questions that I have been asking myself since this happened. If I were writing in French would my style resemble that of the translation? And if not, then what is gained and what is lost? Is style largely untranslatable, in which case what is really left of Mallarmé’s poetry in English?

A small extract from Babyji was read by Hélène, a local actress. Hélène’s rendition of the first chapter of Babyji was different than my own reading in my mind of the French version. As an actress she knew how to interpret the text to an audience. What had sounded like a competent but prosaic translation in my own hands now came to life with Hélène’s voice. Strangely enough someone else interpreting my work aloud to an audience in her own language was more authentic to the spirit of the original English version than my interpretation of my own work in a foreign language. It is easy to shrug this aside by attributing it to my less than perfect French but my own view is rather more poetic: the reader takes the book and turns it into something else and by transforming it is able to remain loyal to the potency of the original version. What I am saying about translation of course holds even for texts that are not translated. When we read (or see art) we constantly apply our own experiences and vision to the work we are consuming.

Seeing India in Lille is akin to these issues of translation, at least for someone like me who speaks languages from both places. When cultures (or texts) are transposed they are eventually touched and changed by this new contact. Do the Indians who have come to Lille for the festival these past months see their own heritage differently? And do I, as an expatriate, see India with a variety of different filters both American and French? The answer to most of these questions is, simply put: Yes. For someone like me, already familiar, with elephants in royal robes sporting gilded ivory tusks, the ones in Lille have transformed the rue Faidherbe into Mysore.
The grand majesty of the main road in Mysore that cuts its market into two (I don’t remember the name) has somehow magically appeared in Lille. I have never seen the road in Mysore with elephants but something about the distribution of matter and weight between the road and the Lillois rooftops and the volume of the elephants that have been erected creates an impression of Mysore. No surprise then that these pachyderms along with the immense Diwali lights that are interspersed between the elephants don’t seem kitschy to my eyes.

Art (and the urban environment which itself is a sort of created art) contains the potential for transcendence and also the potential for intense subjective interpretation; moreover these two aspects are not mutually exclusive. There is thus, always, an implicit dialog between the creator and the consumer. Today in Lille, I decided to reverse the roles being played and exchanged my writer’s hat for that of a tourist. I was richly rewarded even after accounting for the incessant rain and the labor of hauling suitcases across the vast Place de la République to access Le Palais des Beaux-Arts.

L’Homme Paysage is an exceptionally broad exhibition around the theme of anthropomorphized nature spanning several centuries and over one hundred works in all media ranging from sea-sponges enforced with copper to delicate xylography. John Isaacs’ sculpture features a large sagging man infiltrated with urban structures. A Coca Cola sign floats around his heart, small scale models of buildings and trees and skyscrapers merge into his flesh. If this piece is too large or too obvious there are smaller older pieces by Arcimboldo and Joos De Momper. Javier Perez has taken white horsehair and dyed it red to create a sculpture of animal capillaries. A charming wall with small covered screens hides over a dozen interpretations photographic and graphic of different versions of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. And a Japanese work pre-dating Klimt that might easily have served as his inspiration for his Danaë.

L’Homme Paysage cast in a different light something I myself said a few times yesterday in response to questions both from Sébastien (pictured here)
and from the audience. When pressed on what gives a diverse population like India’s a sense of unity I stressed that it is important not to lose the idea of the actual geographic entity that is India. The notion of her sacred geography transcends a mere religious interpretation, and the corners of the country, its mountain and river valleys are inherently connected to the Indian consciousness in both historic and cultural terms. The dialog between creator and consumer has a parallel in the dialog between body and landscape.

2006-11-30T22:05:00.000-05:00

“Everybody got his suntan of 30,000 watts," said Bob Holman today when he described the experience of the subjects photographed by Chuck Close. In making daguerreotypes of his artist friends, Close decided to compress the light that would normally flow into the camera with a two and a half minute exposure into one second by using intense lighting. Close was thus able to marry the highly detailed low depth-of-field black and white images of daguerreotypes with spontaneity of the subject and clarity in the photograph.

Aperture is displaying daguerreotypes, photogravures, pigment prints, and tapestries by Chuck Close through January 4, 2007. The Aperture Foundation has also put out a book A Couple of Ways of Doing Something with photographs by Chuck Close and poetry by Bob Holman.

In a packed room tonight Holman and Close spoke to Lyle Rexer who began the evening with a small presentation on the interaction between poetry and visual art over the past thousand years.

Holman’s poems that go with the images of the books are from the long tradition of praise poems. Holman described these as coming from the African oral tradition where “as long as the dinars flow so does the praise” (I quote from memory) and usually when the dinars stop flowing one sees the “other side of the poem.”

For each of the portraits featured in the exhibition Holman has a poem (and often a different sort of poem). Rexer showed this slide of one of James Siena’s works and Holman said that he had used the topology of a similar work by Siena for the concrete poem he had written to go with Close’s portrait of Siena. For the portrait of James Turrell Holman has a precise numerical poem that captures the idea of a beam of light.

Close said that his interest in daguerreotypes was partly because of their intimacy. Daguerreotypes capture the subject in a mirror image and hence the image is true only for the subject of the photograph. Because of their book like size daguerreotypes must be viewed by single viewers and are visible only from some angles, therefore there is a natural dialog with the viewer that Close said appealed to him.

The most fascinating aspect of the discussion at Aperture tonight was the extent of collaboration between Holman and Close and the subject of the portraits. Both Close and Holman knew the artists featured in the book. Holman spent time with the artists who are portrayed and was an interlocutor during the making of the picture often (as in the case of Siena and Terrell illustrated above) using the very structure of the poem and its graphic to reveal some part of the subject. Close said he doesn’t have people laughing or crying. He tries to be neutral and believes that the face carries visual indications of the lives that these people have led. In his paintings (which are also made from photographs) he has captured pores and surfaces and with his daguerreotypes now he has given us the blemishes and hair follicles of his friends and what he knows about them.

“A brilliant, sinister time..”

2006-11-29T15:35:00.000-05:00

...is how the Metropolitan Museum describes Berlin between the two wars in its Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s. The exhibition will run until February 19, 2007. The galleries feature Otto Dix, Christian Schaad, Max Beckman, and George Grosz among others. Dix’s unflattering portraits of the many people who sat for him were so troubling that one of them, Karl Krall donated it to the Nationalegalerie in Berlin within a few months. Dix, himself handsome like some of his sitters, decided however not to view himself with same distorted vision he applied to the world in painting himself!

Part of the exhibition are two rooms of drawings including one which has several works by Dix of war victims and the horrendous mutilations they suffered. The Met provides excellent background on the period and the ravages that frame the context of the art on display. There were one hundred thousand prostitutes often widows and mothers who had to support their families and over one and a half million wounded permanently disabled soldiers returned to Germany after the war. Little wonder then that George Grosz paints himself in the corner of one of his vast paintings as a man with stumps.

Grosz’ and Dix’s engagement with the larger issues of their time is somewhat like Goya’s work after the Napoleonic invasion of France and the brutalities suffered by the population. Goya in his drawings and etchings never hesitated to show, closely and upfront the cruelties and corruptions embedded in our nature and Grosz and Dix don’t either.

Portraits by Christian Schad provide for a welcome breather. While many of these works have been shown previously at the Neue Galerie,New York in 2003 in the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, one or two are fresh. Many of the portraits in the exhibition have common themes and common links but in their actual execution there is a breadth of style that makes this show particularly enjoyable.

Sabine Rewald the curator has done an outstanding job putting the hundred pieces of this show together and one can only hope that she will curate something soon that will bring together art from the 1800s with Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich or Symbolists like Arnold Böcklin.

Whitney: the pulse of American Art

2006-11-22T16:39:00.000-05:00

There is nothing better to shake off New York’s sudden chill and disagreeable gray than a visit to see Kiki Smith’s blacks, whites, grays, papers, jars, and sculpted forms at the Whitney. There is something here for those who seek the conceptual in art and just as much for those who yearn for figurative expressions and myths of yore. Beasts, body parts, chimeras, bodily fluids… Smith has them all. The Virgin Mary is exposed to us minus her layer of skin, like a Body Worlds exhibit, the musculature of the deltoids prominent. Just a few feet away is Mary Magdalene in bronze covered with satyr-hair looking rapturously up at the sky. All around are women and girls, the female of the species, in different stages of development, in moments of exchange and confrontation with other life forms (often animal) and other lives (their own). These women and girls are haunting and beautiful, sometimes damaged, at other moments on the verge of damage. They emerge and regress and recoil. They seek and mourn.

There are all sorts of filters: art history, religion, environmental issues, myth… one can use to interpret Smith’s work. But I found myself looking at the pieces, drawn in by them, responding to them without the clutter introduced by over-thinking. In the different moods they evoke, their beauty and ugliness, their suspension above the air, their textures, their fragility and solidness, I found myself in a one to one dialog with the work itself. So many of these works exist. That is to say, not just as the objects they are but with the full force of life one usually associates with living creatures. The magic of Kiki Smith is that despite (and not because of) the multiplicity of ideas and influences, materials, media, and techniques she uses, she does not lose sight of what lies at the heart of art, life, or things.

Smith is able to use physical matter to do all sorts of work for her. In Pietà her self-portrait with a dead cat, we don’t need the knowledge that this is a self-portrait nor the historical tradition starting all the way from Michelangelo to fully and utterly engage with the emotions of the piece. Smith’s light-handed lines and the surface of the paper (somewhat crumpled) give us an immediate sense of the ephemeral.

Art is always subject to individual interpretation, there is no experience of it outside of the human mind, each viewer’s mind—his particular histories, knowledge, ideas, and moods. Smith approaches the viewer with a check-mate, she comes in at you at all sorts of visual, conceptual, tactile, conscious and sub-conscious levels to draw you out and regardless of the frequency at which you are humming chances are she’s in tune with one of them. She does this over and over again with paper and sculpture, glass and thread, bronze and wax, grey and black and white and silver. Indeed paper itself is no longer paper in her hands, it has dimensionality, sensuality, form. There in lies her genius.

Recent articles on this show appeared in the New York Times and the New Yorker. You can also see some short video clips on PBS of Smith and her work.

Stranger than ficti(*)n

2006-11-12T18:42:00.000-05:00

There are so many different layers at which one can choose to relate to the confrontations and connections thrown up in Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction that I want to begin with Autobiography of a Yogi where Paramhansa Yogananda emphasizes the power of the spoken word and our ability to make truth from intention. The novelist Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson) in Forster’s film has killed the protagonist in each of her previous novels. She is now writing about an IRS officer Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who happens to exist, who is living the life she is describing, and who begins to hear a third person omniscient narrator in the sky deconstruct his days and describe his inner thoughts.

Which of course takes us to something rather more mundane in our own lives: being able to see ourselves for exactly what we are from the outside. In Crick’s case, the novelist’s voice describes how many times he brushes each of his thirty-two teeth but this voice tumbles out of the typed pages of her manuscript into Crick’s ear. For those of you who have seen the film, my question is: Would Crick have seen his life for what it was—somewhat devoid of real pleasure—without this third person narrator telling him exactly what she saw? In other words, did she manage to save him even as she decided to damn him?

Now Kay Eiffel has writer’s block and doesn’t quite know how to finish off her character or her book. In order to get some inspiration she sits around in soggy cold rain, stands at the end of the kitchen table to imagine Crick leaping off a building, visits the ICU of a hospital dissatisfied that the patients are not yet in the throes of death pangs. As the movie unfolds she will come up with the idea of the perfect ending to Harold Crick and therefore potentially produce her best work to date.

Since the omniscient narrator does not stop, Crick sees a psychiatrist (Linda Hunt) who dryly diagnosis schizophrenia but adds that he could see a literary expert. Enter Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). The professor assiduously makes lists of questions to ascertain which book Crick is playing a part in. The voice has already warned Crick of “his imminent death.” And Crick must now find the author and convince her not to finish him off before she types up her last pages.

Professor Hilbert opines that Crick should choose to die since he must do so one day and by choosing his death now in a book he will be part of a story that will live on forever. Kay Eiffel, meanwhile, is smoking a gazillion cigarettes a day and weeping at how many people she has earlier sent off to an early end. Crick himself is trying to excavate the important things he must do to live his life to the fullest before his time comes.

Well played with many inspired moments this film is a mediation on poetry in our lives and the sometimes inevitable confrontation between life and art. To live more fully we must choose art but for those involved in its creation and consumption there is a real-life price involved. One possibly worth paying…

Conversation(s) with a Master Painter

2006-10-19T14:23:00.000-04:00

Viswanadhan is one of India’s great painters. To get to know his immense body of work spanning four decades will take a lot of time. I have just started to learn more following a recent meeting with the master and some studio visits. Viswanadhan’s life and work have been marked by several milestones that have shaped his art—leading him to film, influencing his palette, affecting his choice of medium. In his journeys back and forth from India and in his continual will to infuse his work with what he is becoming, there is both depth (philosophically speaking) and surface (visually speaking). Whether Viswanadhan’s works and words resonate with me because I am a writer, and hence an artist of sorts, or because I am, like him, from that triangular sub-continental mass that is India, I have no idea. He is proof, in matter and in spirit, that there is no necessary dichotomy between the two; any dichotomy is there only as an invitation to jump across, to make a new journey forward so we can come back again to where we began. Since one of his works is currently on exhibit in Paris we will be speaking together at a formal conversation as part of the exhibition’s program.

Exposition collective CARTON ROUGE
Peinture-sculpture-photographie-vidéo

Sunday 29 October 2006
18:00h
Dialogue with Viswanadhan

L’Atelier Tampon-Ramier, 14 Jules Vallés, Paris 75011
For information and reservations call 06.60.73.53.46

Paris je t’aime & all about dreams

2006-08-21T10:16:00.000-04:00

With many vacationers back this week the cinema halls in Paris have announced a three day special. Trois euros trois jours. Next time it rains—which is likely to be within the next hour or two—step up to the challenge of loving Paris in crappy weather by stepping out of the street and into the theater. While there might not be dozens of new films recently out you might want to see there are definitely three. The first of which is the magnificent collage of short films, each shot in a specific neighborhood, by directors ranging from Gurinder Chadha to Ethan & Joel Coen. You will find fantasy and humor in some and a sadness in many. The points of views taken by these directors are varied: universal tales of immigration, displacement, and poverty; inevitable stories of tourists who discover they are in for more than they bargained; love stories with twists and curls. In the end some vignettes are more successful than others but the overall experience is rich. It is a treat to pass from the Coens to Walter Salles and Daniela Thomson, from Assayas to Oliver Shmitz, all is so short a span of time. Someone in the line ahead of me tried to buy her ticket in English. The usher told her she wouldn’t follow the film if she didn’t speak French and indeed most of the documentaries are in French. But she argued that she was here to see Paris and she was right. With these directors the small matter of language does not get in the way.

La Science des Rêves (dir. Michel Gondry Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and La Tourneuse de Pages (dir. Denis Dercourt) are two other films to watch for. For anyone who has a reach dream life, Gondry’s film captures with many quirky touches the story of a young man who sometimes reverses his waking moments for his dream ones and vice versa. Goudry’s tactics on the screen include scenes with many toy machines and cardboard cutout cities that in the end, somewhat surprisingly, work. At one moment Stéphane dreams his hands are larger than him, the caricatural portrayal in the film is believable at a sensorial level. The success of this film lies in jumping over some of the hurdles posed by our reason and giving us a lifelike experience of someone else’s interiority which is far removed from ours. Much of the film is in English so you can follow along what is essential to the plot.

La Tourneuse de Pages is a psychological film with a plot that is not too hard to predict. A young girl is thwarted in her aspiration to win a piano competition and returns years later to work for the husband of the same woman (a concert pianist) who was responsible for her failure. She wins the affection of the couple and the trust of the concert pianist who is now going through a phase of extreme nervousness following an accident. The pianist entrusts her with turning her pages during a performance. The actors all interpret their roles to near perfection. With Pascal Greggory and Catherine Frot you’d expect no less. But the young woman who plays la tourneuse Déborah Français is also subtle. The role of a calm, cool, calculating, unshakeable woman out to get even is a perfect showcase for this relatively unknown young actress. The music of this film (both that played by the concert pianist and the soundtrack) combined with the tension-filled and often wordless interaction between Frot and Français make this film totally absorbing. It is entirely in French, however I’d be surprised if it didn’t have a US screening at the NY French film festival in April.

Goya in the Parisian Rain

2006-08-14T06:33:00.000-04:00

At moments it might seem debatable that any city, even Paris, can remain beautiful under the black shadow of an umbrella. The hottest July in history has given way to what is likely to be the coldest recorded August—Parisians brought out their winter coats yesterday in mid-summer. If you want to get away from the gloom of global warming and this new century’s many wars go and see Goya. The Mairie du 5^e Arrodnissement directly across the Panthéon houses not just the offices of the town hall but a fabulous Seurat inspired wall mural of the Tuileries à La Grande Jatte by a painter whose name I could not decipher. They also have on exhibit, until the 15^th of October, Goya’s L’œuvre Gravée. For anyone who caught Goethe’s collection of Goya’s at the Frick this is a comprehensive extension of his small format works.

These etchings on engravings include a selection of portraits of political dignitaries, illustrated proverbs many of which are idiomatic and need some reflection, and his rarely seen work on the French invasion of Spain by Napoléon. Goya let’s the calamities of the war speak for themselves. In front of his illustrations of its horrors and atrocities we can step out of our times to find a universal perspective outside of history and reflect in a new way on what we witness today. Goya recorded the famine and civil suffering that went in hand with the war as well but a vast number of the works present are direct reports from the battlefield. A pile of dead bodies with casualties on both sides is simply labeled We are born for this. One of Goya’s detractors said that it would be better if Goya left stains of paint and didn’t try to make faces out of them. In the haunting old women and men and the suffering of all ages on display at 21 Place du Panthéon no observation could seem less lacking in insight.

The exhibition also has a short series of Goya’s works devoted to bull-fighting, a wonderful opportunity to examine pieces that in my view directly inspired Manet. While Manet’s admiration of the Spanish masters and his travels to Spain are well known, in Goya’s bullfight series you can find the Goya’s Manet used as the reference frame for his bullfight painting that hangs in the Frick. The same low arena wall, the same experience of being inside the ring. There is another Goya that shows some people on a balcony, Manet, I have no doubt, painted his Orsay painting of his step son and wife in the balcony window in direct homage to this one.

THIS Summer in Paris

2006-08-09T08:28:00.000-04:00

I’m taking a Frenchward twist this summer to fill you on things to do (fun and otherwise if you get here in the month of August when your Parisian friends are all away on vacation) and to talk about some of my own projects in the hope that it’ll make more disciplined.

Le Grand Palais across the Invalides on the other side of the ornate Pont Alexandre III has a weird exhibition of machines used in performances on until the 13^th of August. These contraptions have served on film sets and were often conceived in the late eighties and nineties though they have an air of the 1800s about them. Some twenty orange vested guides walk from set to set explaining how each machine works and demonstrate its principles. Unfortunately to get their jokes you must speak French but the basic demo is self-explanatory. Don’t miss the cannon that shoots out eggs (no really!) or the person strapped in a circle to the inside of a large wheel who manages to play a set of drums as she is rotated within the wheel. Despite these few oddities, the real reason to visit Le Grand Palais is not the temporary show but the structure itself. Created for one of the Exposition Universelle this building with its immensely high glass ceiling and magnificently exposed green-pipe skeleton that keeps it aloft is worth a visit. A charming wooden bar serves refreshments, another more enticing one offers a view from the heights. This building is unlike anything you’ve seen. So go.

Also I have started my open-ended very long term Pont Neuf Project. This is an attempt at roughly (as in very roughly) sketching the gargoyle men that dot the bridge. Don’t ask why… The project got off to a rather rocky start on the 2^nd of August since the south-eastern exposure of the bridge, which was also my point of departure, is undergoing some heavy duty travaux. It is therefore noisy, polluted, and unpleasurable at the moment. Here is the seventh man starting from the left done in ink on paper. Along the way I hope I’ll stumble on more about the Atelier of Germain Pilon which produced some if not all these faces. There is a rue Germain Pilon in the eighteenth but cela n’a rien avoir avec le pont. There are also two fallen gargoyles at the Musée Carnavalet (which by the way is a free museums) one can inspect at close quarters. By the time I’m done with half the bridge, as in a lot of faces, I’m wondering if my hand will get even rougher and more impatient or the opposite. I’ve never had a long term project like this so let’s see where it goes.

Finally a reminder, if you’re in town on the 14^th of August, that is next Monday, then I’m reading at the historic Shakespeare and Company 37 rue de la Bûcherie across the river from the Notre Dame.

Shabd Star this Friday

2006-07-19T09:27:00.000-04:00

My interview with Ashok Vyas of ITV will be aired this Friday at 2pm in the literary program Shabd Star. In Manhattan and Queens they broadcast over Time Warner cable on channel 77 and 501. In the Bronx you can catch it on Cable vision.

N’awlins

2006-06-30T14:54:00.000-04:00

Glen who drove me from the airport in New Orleans last Sunday told me as soon as we met that the city of New Orleans was really excited about the ALA and that the ALA had given the locals a tremendous boost by hosting the annual convention in their city. This was a refrain I heard many times in the next few days that followed from hotel staff as well as people in other commercial establishments. Full marks to the ALA to host their annual convention here.

Glen drove me some twenty minutes out of the city to show me around. Water levels were clearly visible on the structures outside and X’s and numbers indicated how many people had been found by rescue workers. The insides of these houses have been gutted and a few people in the vicinity are starting to rebuild but the streets we were on were almost entirely devoid of people. Glen said that he and his wife drove to his in-laws’ house when they were told to evacuate. Two trees that fell in the storm the following night destroyed his car as well as his wife’s. Another tree on the roof forced the family to leave in Glen’s daughter’s car which was intact. Now, in June, the repairs on Glen’s house are almost complete. He told me several times in the hour or so we spent together that everyone had focused on the negative side of the calamity, there was a lot to be said for the fact that despite the scale of the disaster there was a massive and orderly evacuation and comparatively speaking fewer deaths than a calamity of such “biblical” (Glen’s description not mine) proportions would suggest. Driving me through a somewhat posh cemetery (New Orleans has above-ground tombs) he pointed out the tomb of a steakhouse heiress that cost $600,000 and spoke of New Orleans as a city of both “elegance and decadence.” He told me about traditional Mardi Gras balls and the local Krewes in the season. And he asked me why I was there. When I told him about the Stonewall award he made a note of my novel saying, “In my kind of job we often have to wait a few hours a day in the car. I can read it then.”

The Stonewall Award ceremony the next morning was fun. Joshua Gamson who was the Israel Fishman Nonfiction award winner spoke about Sylvester of his book The Fabulous Sylvester: the Legend, the Music, the 70s in San Francisco. I received my plaque and honors from Lindsey Schell. Here is a photo of us (thanks, Skip!)

For whatever reason there were several flight cancellations that day and two of the authors who were to speak at the Gala Author Tea organized by FoLUSA
couldn’t make it. I was asked to step in at the last minute (I was planning on going anyway as a member of the audience) and speak. Harry Paul spoke about Revved, Laura Numeroff read from her enchanting children’s book, Mary Jane Clark spoke about her new novel, writing and the Fragile X syndrome, Bob Greene spoke about his memoir And You Know You Should Be Glad. I spoke about my own relationship to reading and writing and the project out of which That Summer in Paris came to be. Here is a photo with Susan Schmidt of FoLUSA who got me to feel comfortable right away when I got there and introduced me. (Thanks again, Skip)

My ride back to the airport (I wasn’t destined to get on this flight) was fascinating. Alphonse had been driving a fair bit the past few days for the ALA. The city hasn’t hosted anything this size since Katrina and everyone had been working overtime. He told me he had met a lot of writers and we got started on a discussion. He has been working in New Orleans since the era when some businesses carried signs saying Dogs and Cubans not allowed. He was able to get a job with the city since he was able to pass off for an Italian and speaks a few words. Alphonse’s story is riveting and unique, he’s gone to bed hungry and spent a month in the Waldorf Astoria. He’s met Ernest Hemingway in Cuba as a child and as a result of a rough encounter with one of Hemingway’s cats still has what he calls “respect” for cats fifty something years later. Like Glen, Alphonse spoke with humor and insight about his life, the recent calamity (which took him back to machine guns, violence, and death from his childhood years in Cuba), the system and the administration, people, and family.

Despite not having welcomed a convention the size of the ALA, the city of New Orleans was very well-prepared. The only hitch in the whole trip I experienced was due to NY. It seems that if the breeze blows or the rain patters La Guardia experiences interminable delays. The flight coming in from NY was woefully late. The crew deplaned for lunch. The passengers were boarded. Then we were deplaned and asked to wait. Eventually the flight was cancelled. Airline officials booked a planeload of us into hotels and gave us vouchers. I found myself at a motel off the highway with a single restaurant serving cheese fries (these were vegetarian), and some sort of corn pudding in a tiny dish. The rest of the menu was pretty heavily meaty including the regular fries which were dipped in bacon. The wait staff got 5 points from me for the friendliness on the response card and the diversity of the food offerings got a low 1. If I hadn’t had a 4am wake-up for my flight the next morning I would have gone back into the French quarter with its spontaneous musical life and the oldest opera house in the country for excitement. Here is a picture of some young gentlemen playing on Bourbon Street. I could have stood by the corner and listened to them play for many hours.

It’s true the economy is depressed and will take time to pick up. But not all the businesses in N’Awlins are just brick and mortar establishments. You can support the city’s economy from where you are by using local New Orleans’ merchants via the web. Just two examples are Laura’s candies (here’s a photo I took of a humorous sign in the store) and the Gallery of Light. It’s impossible to photograph and replicate the art there. The lighting in the store is designed to showcase the effect of lighting variations. When I walked in two state troopers were turning the light dials around to see how the paintings turned from sunny daytime scenes to crepuscular ones. For all of you fraternity boys and sorority sisters who partied it up for Mardi Gras in N’Awlins way back when, go back with the babies and spend a weekend turning those dials!

The Flowering and Passing of Love

2006-03-24T14:35:00.000-05:00

The one hundred and thirty odd works on display at Edvard Munch: The modern life of the soul at the MoMA showcase Munch’s career of over sixty years, rich with the influence of the outside world and solidly rooted with each passing year in his own style and his own feelings.

Rue Lafayette, 1891 marries Caillebotte’s perspectival use of a grand avenue and Parisian buildings (Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877) along with three of Caillebotte’s balcony paintings. Munch’s balcony is made with hasty swirls but the pattern on the grille emerges in the shadows it casts. The man standing on the balcony in a top hat is like Caillebotte’s except in that he is faceless.

Munch’s early self-portrait from 1881-82 when he was still a teenager shows us an almost romantic figure, a clean boy. One that doesn’t fail to remind me for some reason of Klimt’s Portrait of the Pianist Joseph Pembauer done later in 1890. Klimt seems to have been influenced by Munch in the early twentieth century but it’s unclear he would have seen any of Munch’s work so early. A later self-portrait hung in the same room as the first one was done in 1886 a year after Munch met his first love Milly. This slightly older Munch has a bad boy look even though he stares at us from the corner of his eye just as he did at eighteen.

Mourning and love of every type are intertwined in Munch. Inheritance I, 1897-99 depicts a woman with a naked baby on her lap. The red blotches on the baby suggest he’s sick or worse. His eyes are huge and his stare fixed, the eyebrows hoary; as if he has already passed through life. The woman’s head is bent and she has a white kerchief in her hand suggesting her tears. Right next to this baby who is almost dead or dying hangs Madonna in the Churchyard, 1896 in India ink and watercolor. The woman in this one is standing. The fetal skeleton on the side holds a bow and two arrows. Motherhood and death, love and the grave go hand in hand.

Vampire, 1893-94 shows us a man with his face turned down toward the woman’s body just like in Ashes, 1894. The position of the bodies themselves do not suggest vampirism. The woman in the painting has flowing and fiery red hair that can be taken to symbolize rivulets of blood but it seems like the title of the painting is not the original one given by Munch who intended to call it Love and Pain. In Ashes, the woman’s white dress is emphasized by her brightly colored bodice. The dress is split open almost all the way down until the crotch. Her mood suggests that she has been in a moment of revelry that is over; she faces us directly. The man in the painting on the other hand is turned away from us and his face buried in his arms. In one of Munch’s graphic works where he once again takes up Ashes, the placement of the figures is different and so is the mood. The man is less to the edge of the piece and now buried into his own hands, the woman’s mood less easily identifiable but possibly more drunken on the revelry that has passed. Munch returned to the same faces, that of his lover and his self in minute variations in different mediums.

In Angst, 1894 a stream of haunting faces stare at us. The faces closest to us have a few discernible features but as they recede they have only eyes and then just hollows. Ghostlike beside a red sky, these people are silent and miserable. A misery that was visible in Despair, 1892 which pre-figured The Scream for Munch. He is alone to the side on a bridge while two figures hover far away behind him. Though Munch said of Despair that he felt a loud unending scream piercing nature the mood of the painting itself is silent because of the faceless figure of Munch in the foreground and the faceless people in the background. In Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1894 the stream of strange ghostlike figures seem to be coming home from a joyless modern place, their steps heavy. The loneliness of the individual, the dreary quality of our communal existence and the isolation of our crowded spaces make the experience of these three paintings somewhat like that of being in a burial ground.

Love regenerates, even if the intimacy of it has the tone of a dirge. In his 1892 painting The Kiss the male figure (Munch) is facing the side and the woman is not visible. They are faceless in a dark room that has a window from which you can see other windows down the street. The other windows are lit. Their own love is dark. Light comes from the outside. The version of The Kiss from 1897 is even darker but more intimate. The outside world is sealed off from it though a sort of parted curtain is visible in the lower left. The couple is still faceless but there is a sense that the man is melting into the woman and they are more unified with each other because of the brush strokes that form a sort of halo around their combined forms. In the woodcut The Kiss III, 1898 the couple is indistinguishable, the forms of the man and the woman and the immediate space around them is all one in color and texture. Because one views such art in public spaces encumbered by the presence of other bodies and voices one doesn’t have the privilege of sealing off the world of the painting hermetically. A lady with a southern drawl remarked, “Apparently he liked painting the kiss.” To which one of her companions replied, “You’d think he’d say been there done that.” One kiss then is like another, one lover like another, one self like another, one faceless ghostlike modern soul on the street like the others. In a way Munch recognized this malaise of our times but in another he fought it. The loss of life and of love, its mourning and passing, are recorded and re-recorded, observed in detail, the experience altered. In the case of the painting By the death bed, 1895 a family is gathered to mourn the passing away of a member. The woman at the forefront and the bearded man beside her are more visible than the rest of the family which has only eyes. In a lithograph from 1896 by the same name the mourners are more clearly visible, two ghosts now haunt the wall in the back and the hands of the dead body seen from our perspective suggest someone small has died.

Love entails an ending. In Separation, 1896 the male figure clutches at his heart with red hands while a woman in white, her hair and dress blowing behind her, glides away from him with her head held high. It seems as if she has walked away and metamorphosed from an apparition to a real woman, liberated in some way by their separation. In Separation II, a lithograph from the same year, the woman’s scarf/veil is ornamented and the man simply dejected, resigned to his suffering. The ocean to the side is bluer and the woman now free, she has completely left behind her earlier existence. If couples separate they also come together, at least symbolically. In Metabolism, 1899 a large work, the man and woman face each other. We don’t see the intimacy we saw in one of The Kiss pictures but nor do we see the pain of Separation or Vampire. In Metabolism as well as in one of Munch’s later paintings Nude Figures and Sun, 1910-19 we see hints of Koloman Moser’s work from the same period, his strange use of color to stake lines into his paintings, his extravagant use of colored sunlight.

The Dance of Life, 1899-1900 which greets the viewer on entering the show, features a couple in the center dancing. Other couples behind them are incidental but in motion. The central couple are flanked by a woman in a white dress to the left and one in a black dress to the right. Both these women face the dancing couple. While these figures are heavy with symbolism, Munch seemed to have explored their symbolism differently in 1895. In the acquatint and drypoint Women II, he showed us a naked woman in the center of the painting facing us full front. To her left is a woman in white and to her left a woman in black but both are turned away from her. These women, virgin and death come back to us in The Dance of Life but in it they face the dancing couple. Maybe Munch decided that all the stages of our existence our linked. The virgin already containing seeds for love and love pre-figuring in its very nature, the void. Munch’s women are lovers, sisters (two died, one rather young), his mother (who died when he was less than ten) and his models.

In The Artist and his model I, 1919-21 the model is dark-faced as if traumatized while the painter behind her looms like an ethereal figure. The studio is in shambles, the artwork hanging in the back not very clear, and the tools of the painter’s life nowhere to be seen. The interiors have a kind of Matisse-having-a-breakdown feeling to them. Weeping Nude, 1913 recalls a Kokoschka nude though Munch’s is slumped over so that she is all hair and no tears, her legs akimbo. In the 1916 Metabolism, a small graphic work, a pregnant woman stands under a tree with budding leaves in the full sun. Skeletons play at the bottom of the tree on the earth. It is in our nature to consume our experiences, to devour each other, to love and move on, in a sense to cannibalize. Though in the after-time of introspection things are changed. Kiss in the Field, a 1943 woodcut done by Munch when he was eighty shows us a couple that are so merged together in harmony with each other and the surrounding fields that they have faded into a distant memory. Looking back across a lifetime the searing and rending that is love softens into a gentle past event.

The majority of Munch’s self-portraits are hung at the end of the show. In 1903 Munch is in hell, his naked torso surrounded by flame, his face scorched. And from then on we see how he has made it to the other side. Despite the dark motifs and the melancholy Munch manages to let the world in. Like Munch’s bad boy self-portrait from 1886 his Self-portrait in Bergen from 1916 has a Schiele-esque tone to it. Munch is seated on a balcony, beneath him the life of the city goes on. Even in The Night Wanderer, 1923-24 though Munch paints himself alone, he is outside on a balcony, the world, in other words, is acknowledged. In Self-Portrait during the Eye disease I from 1930 he is a skeletonic Scream-type figure amidst a colorful ribbon of ruin that looks like a universe that has melted. In Self-Portrait between Clock and Bed made two years before his death in 1942, Munch faces us squarely, his hands by his sides and his feet opening to us in a soft V-shape. His whole body and his life (the room, the painting of the woman to the side, the bed) are offered up to us.

And we know that despite everything he faced he has come through.

How to end up alone…

2006-03-12T20:29:00.000-05:00

Stephane Brizé’s Not Here to Be Loved is a well put-together tango film with a somewhat predictable plot. The entire film motors along on the strength of Patrick Chesnais in the lead role and the music. Chesnais’ acting is powerful, we’re convinced from the start that he’s incapable of really expressing his desires and his affections for those around him just as his father—who he regularly visits at a nursing home—is. Chesnais’ relationship with his own son in turn is of the same genre. Chesnais has taken over his father’s business as a bailiff and his son in turn has joined him at the office. The work is dreary and often heart-rending and Chesnais does it without a flicker of sentiment. Then one day he walks into a tango lesson. The romance begins. It moves on. For more than three-fourths of the film Chesnais and the female lead Anne Consigny pull us with them. But in the end too many well-placed cues lead the viewer right where one would expect and the film loses its freshness.

As a director Brizé has extracted phenomenal performances. He has escaped the biggest obstacle along his way, that of making a tango film that was a different tango film. But as a scénariste and story-teller he could afford to turn the heat up a little and make the plot more compelling. In his next film he shouldn’t be afraid to try it because with Not Here to Be Loved he’s shown he has the rest of the pieces in place.

The film shows again at Walter Reade on Monday March 13 @8:45 and Wednesday March 15@6:15.

Rendez-Vous 2006

2006-03-11T09:39:00.000-05:00

The annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema has kicked off to an incredibly promising start with the screening, among others, of Danièle Thompson’s Orchestra Seats. Aside from the sharp, just-on script that pulls in the three stories of a pianist, an actress, and an art collector into the intimate world of a server at the local bar, Jessica (Cécile de France), who has just arrived from Mâcon to Paris in search of a job, the film—despite its moments of comic relief and romance—offers meditative moments on the practice of art, its production, and its presentation.
The stories within Orchestra Seats can be parsed in multiple ways, transversely as stories of disenchantment and renewal, fractally as tales of different kinds of love—filial, romantic, artistic, and directly, without any mediation, as critical turning points in the professional trajectories of its protagonists. The principal players the pianist Lefort (Albert Dupontel),Versen (Valérie Lemercier) the soap opera actress, and old man Grumberg (Claude Brasseur) the collector are all at some kind of crisis point in their lives. Lefort’s existence as an acclaimed pianist has become entirely claustrophobic. In a beautiful dreamy scene we see him playing to a group of people in a cancer ward while in an all too real moment in a concert he asks the audience if they’re not all feeling a bit too hot. Versen is a soap opera star with the power to move the masses but dreams of being cast in a film as Simone de Beauvoir by Botinski (Sydney Pollack). Grumberg, in his sunset years, has acquired a young mistress and plans to sell off all the Brancusis, Matisses, Légers etc that he has collected. Enter Jessica the naïve and untouched, wide-eyed girl from Mâcon who has just started at the bar across the street. Directly and not so directly we will see their worlds and their ups and downs not just through their eyes but hers. As Danièle Thompson put it after the screening, she’s the clear light that bounces off the others, that illuminates them.

Lefort’s wife Valentine (Laura Morante) is also his manager. Unstintingly devoted to his career she is unable to come to terms with the precipitating crisis. When Lefort learns that Grumberg is auctioning his lifelong collection of art he marvels aloud to his wife. Valentine in turn remarks that Grumberg is not an artist, he is an investor. Then finally, he’s like you, Lefort says. At the moment when Valentine must choose between Lefort the pianist and Lefort the husband where will her loyalties lie? For that matter, is Lefort the stuff-shirt pianist-on-tour different from a possible future Lefort who plays the piano but on his own time and in shirt sleeves? Where do we draw the line between the practice of art and its presentation? Versen who is being offered more and more money per episode of her popular soap is craving to act in another sort of film, and dreams of high art and its directors. Her life is the opposite of Lefort’s. It touches and brings tears to the eyes of Jessica and those like Jessica, ordinary women. When she is considered for a dream role by Botinski, it is Jessica who in a passing moment, delivering a drink, has said of Versen, she can be all women at once. Yes, there is a difference between high art and low art, the popular and the elevated, but there is also art, the thing in itself, and Thompson has managed in this feat of a film, to get closer to the thing in itself.

Danièle Thompson co-wrote the film with her son Christopher who plays old man Grumberg’s son. The story of father and son, their hinted-of-past of mutual recriminations and rapprochements, the two women they have shared, the art collection that has divided them, unfolds with a sort of attention that slowly takes over the film. One cannot help but wonder what it was like for a mother and a son to write this story of a father and a son, the real story of art and of love behind this film.

Orchestra Seats will play at the Walter Reade again today as part of the festival at 1:15pm and then at 9pm.

When in Bangalore…

2006-01-28T10:38:00.000-05:00

The Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath on Kumara Krupa Road is having an exhibition of 50 South Indian artists until February 3rd. KN Ramachandran’s tableaus of local markets emanate with life while still belonging to impressionism rather than realism. Francis Bacon meets the Matrix in Bhagyanathan’s rendition of a bicycle coolie in pale hues. Srinivas Reddy’s terracotta of three green creatures replete with devils, hell, torture, and space aliens is unusually successful. If you want to know how contemporary South Indian art is incorporating the modern, the local, and the ethereal without any bewilderment whatsoever go and check out this show. It is a fresh break from the larger Indian art scene even if many of these artists are nationally known.

The Parishath also has an astounding permanent collection on its upper floor: Two rooms of the Roerichs (father and son) and a full suite of Indian twentieth century art starting from the Tagore brothers. Gaganendra Nath Tagore’s lithographs circa 1925 provide a biting commentary on the brahmin hegemony of his times. There are also pen and ink works by Rabindranath Tagore, and watercolors by Abanindranath Tagore. However the heart stealer is a tempera work by Debi Prasad Roy. In the rooms you can view works by Arpita Caur, Ganesh Pyne, Anjolie Ela Menon to name just a few. An entire gallery is dedicated to the New York based world renowned artist Dr. Krishna Reddy’s prints. Don’t miss Insect.

A separate section showcases Mysore paintings known for their gold (leaf/foil/liquid) work. While the themes are from standard Hindu mythology some of the marginal narratives on the works show yogis in highly improbable and sometimes anatomically impossible poses. 18th and 19th century portraits of the Wodeyar ruling family can be found in this section (Mysore painting flourished under their patronage) though it is the small watercolor studies and smaller portraits framing the showcased canvases that demonstrate the delicacy of the artists’ works.

The Parishath grounds are pleasant though the building is extremely unfriendly to wheelchair users and anyone needing easy access since each room is at a different level. The upper floor is badly in need of the renovations that it is currently undergoing. In the meanwhile it would be good to see the security somewhat tightened and the level of illumination improved.

Padamsee's Palette

2005-12-17T21:54:00.000-05:00

Akbar Padamsee's photo show at the Galerie Romain Rolland is pleasing. A short statement by the artist says that he is a painter looking at photography and it is true that what characterizes his successful foray into black and white nudes is his use of light and the sense of detail he is able to get on skin. However it is in the small section to the right side of the gallery with his monotone watercolors in shades of pale brown, working with a narrow and singular palette, with light but rough strokes, that he truly shines. The photographs are possibly too aesthetic. The portraits in watercolor stand unapologetically raw. They are direct and distinctive. Most of all they are done without any heavy handedness whatsoever, the painter does not need to make his point...his point is there..simply and elegantly put . The confidence in these pieces is calming. This show is on view at the Alliance Française in Lodhi Estate.

Make time in Delhi this week…

2005-12-15T23:28:00.000-05:00

The art scene at the India Habitat Center is hot. Rajiv Puri’s show of landscapes, many bordering on the abstract are a treat to behold. The brisk strokes of his palette knife when combined with some of his forest and field impressions lend several of the canvases at this show a rather Klimtesque effect.

Also on at the IHC is a show by multiple artists. Two pieces here stand out in particular. Bikash Poddar has a water color landscape reminiscent of Watteau; three tiny figures in this work are dwarfed by their surroundings and somehow also hovering half way out of the canvas thanks to the sheer lightness of his medium. That this kind of painting is still done at all, is lovely. That it is being done with a distinctively Indian flavor is magnificent.

Ajay De’s untitled charcoal and oil that greets the visitor on entering the group show is…well…stunning. De’s control over his draftsmanship reminded me of Odilon Redon’s pastels and drawings (now on display at the MoMA in NY). De’s use of light is masterful and the mood of the work evocative. Just to see how this man uses color you should make a trip to the IHC. I hope to discover some more of his work in the near future. If you know how I can reach him let me know.

The New York Avignon Film Festival

2005-11-07T20:00:00.000-05:00

New Yorkers can treat themselves from November 9th to 13th to some new films from France. While the annual Rendez vous with French cinema held in the Spring at Lincoln Center showcases already famous directors the NY-Avignon film festival often brings the opportunity to view some less known but enormously talented directors. It also boasts a short films section. One of the great films not to be missed at the festival this year is Deadlines by Ludi Boeken and Michael Lerner, an English language film set in Lebanon. The film is complex in its covering of the suicide car bombing of the US Marines in Beirut. The pace of the film never slacks, Stephen Moyer in the lead role as a journalist is on-the-money and the political crisis is not over-simplified or dumbed down for us. Despite treating a subject from the past, the film offers us a glimpse of the middle-east that is no less pertinent today. The American interests portrayed in the film make one wonder about present day Iraq. At the same time Deadlines remains fair and sympathetic to the different political interests in the region. It is showing on Sunday the 13th at 6:30pm.

The black bile of madness and genius

2005-10-17T16:30:00.000-04:00

It is unlikely that the chefs d’œuvres currently on view at the Grand Palais in Paris will be reunited ever again after their lifetime in the Mélancolie cycle is over. The exhibition is a thorough exhumation of the melancholic self in religion, in western society, in literature, in medicine and psychology, and in art itself. The paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs, sculptures, objects, and morbid ensembles that are presented range from antiquity to the twenty-first century.

On the simple level of comprehensiveness this exhibition is incredibly well put together, examining as it does various tints of melancholy through the ages. It demonstrates that the reigning perceptions of melancholy refracted back to the idea of melancholy itself. In the middle ages when it was considered a disease, it is the hells of François de Nomé and red devils tempting Saint Antoine that best capture the meaning of melancholia. However after the enlightenment as we approach our own times, given the testimonies of writers and artists, she becomes somewhat à la mode. La mélancolie, best represented as a young and beautiful woman by Constance Charpentier. Once we pass our own time (what a notion!) and enter into post-modernism we have inmates of mental hospitals, and the self-representing self (as in the case of Artaud and Nebreda).

On another level, those of the individual pieces assembled, this exhibition is nothing short of spectacular.

Who knew that Blake was not one of the few writers to produce art? There are self-portraits here by Charles Baudelaire and Antonin Artaud and two pieces by Victor Hugo. There is an Odilon Redon piece of Des Esseintes from Huysmans' A Rebours and a portrait of Nietzsche by Karl Bauer. A handsome drawing of Picasso from 1900 along with two self-portraits in oil by Goya crown the vision of the melancholic turned inward. The wealth of Goyas in the exhibition range from large oils to small paintings of cannibals and fools in a playground to drawings like Saturn devouring his children.

Almost the entire catalog reads like a collection of jewels. Valenciennes spectacular Vesuvius hung with a precision one can never hope to find in today’s overcrowded museums where the best details of paintings are lost because of the glare. Watteau’s Les Deux Cousines, a piece so delicate you will forget he’s a bore. Grien’s sketch of Saturn still pulsing with energy around the neck some five hundred years later. Ferdinand Bol’s Seated old man from St. Petersburg surely one of the great portraits of all time. The death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis bathed in the baby blue pallor of death, the scene entirely still but for the vivid knots of the bedspread which rise into the air ever so frequently to remind you that it is the man who has died and not everything around him; inanimate, it continues, in a fashion, to live. Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead deserves its own museum. Franz von Stuck’s Lucifer and L’Enfer are guaranteed to pierce the thickest of skins. It is true this exhibition should come with a health warning; the Grand Palais is indeed harboring the devil himself including a handsome one in bronze by Feuchère.

You will be sweetly ensorcelled and when you walk out two hours later than you intended, the Parisian sky will be a deep blue, Georges Clemenceau will be striding between the silhouettes of the trees on the Champs Elysées, and the low hanging moon will make you weak. You will be bewitched all right, this art still has that power.

At the Orangerie du Sénat--Paris

2005-09-13T04:33:00.000-04:00

One of the best things about spending time in Paris is that if one is consumed by a vision of Hippolyte Flandrin’s Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer on a Wednesday afternoon one can go to the Louvre and see it for real before it closes for the night. Less than fifty meters from the Flandrin one can check out one of Géricault’s several small studies for his immense masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa done in his twenties. The studies that pre-figured the final painting are themselves masterpieces, emotionally charged and, in the case of the esquisse in oil and pen, hauntingly beautiful.

One of the best things about spending time in any city is to stumble, par hasard, into a contemporary art show and come out with images that blaze no less in the mind’s eye than those of Flandrin or Géricault.

He is here. He is twenty-two. In him you can see glimpses of the dazzling expressionism of Egon Schiele, the compassionate but unerring vision of Lucien Freud, and at times even the gentleness that makes Matisse’s harmonic colors akin to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. His name is Maxime Chanson and he sees with the vision of an old man, renders with the confidence of a master, and experiments with the liberty of a child. See him.

Response to Babyji in India

2005-07-11T14:17:00.000-04:00

Since Babyji was released I've been asked at every reading what the reception of the book has been in India. The novel was finally released in India earlier this month and reviews are beginning to appear.

India Today, July 18, 2005 says: Like Lolita, Babyji describes with complete lack of restraint the details of Anamika's sexual escapades knowing fully well that they will be judged reprehensible by many. But like many "scandalous" novels, it is a very pointed investigation of morality and perhaps a call to refresh the "rule book".

The Telegraph, Calcutta calls it a significant new novel. Mumbai's Mid-Day also has a review. You'll need to scroll down the site for these two.

June 30th Fundraiser

2005-06-30T15:44:00.000-04:00

Emergency USA is hosting a fundraiser for its activities in the Sudan tonight. Book reading, documentary screening, music and all. Come out for a good cause.

Elevator to the Gallows (Acenseur pour l’échafaud)

2005-06-24T18:52:00.000-04:00

Jean-Pierre Melville meets Eric Rohmer.

Black and white beauty. This film is a must see and is released today widely in North America.

Moreau plots with her lover Maurice Ronet for the death of her oil magnate husband who is Ronet’s boss. Ronet ends up leaving his coat and revolver in his automobile and running back up to take care of a rope he has left hanging from the dead man’s window. A young florist who has noticed Ronet ends up praising him to her boyfriend who decides they should steal Ronet’s car for the weekend. Ronet meanwhile is caught in the elevator of his building as the power supply is turned off for the night.

We watch the young florist and her boyfriend play out their fears and dreams as they run wild with Ronet’s convertible. Ronet exhausts himself trying to pry his way out of the elevator while Moreau searches high and low for her lover ending up eventually at La Madeleine at 5 in the morning and hauled to the police station mistaken for a woman of questionable character.

Ronet is a precursor to the quintessential Alain Delon role in later Melville films. He speaks little, dresses dapper, and has a hazy past. The dialogs of the young florist Véronique and Moreau pre-figure what we see years later in the dialogs of Rohmer’s films; both women have an exaggerated sense of love for the men in their lives and for love itself.

Moreau plays an evolved variant of this role of unfaithful wife in the Malle film Les Amants made a year after Elevator and later in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Funny and dark. Great performances, a suspenseful plot, and a key of sorts to so much that was to come later in French cinema.

Weltman's voice

2005-06-19T17:32:00.000-04:00

It was nice to remember today that Sunday mornings weaving through the streets of Soho can involve more than just milling tourists and screaming fire engines.

Carolyn Weltman is a UK born artist with international recognition who continues, as her website says, to bring her art directly to the people. So yes, Prince street still boasts some real art that can arrest you in your steps and take you far from the quotidian. Carolyn’s mixed-media work (giclée prints, computer designs, sketches) belongs to that narrow zone of overlap between Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. She said she’s less angry than Schiele and indeed her work expresses a different sentiment than Schiele’s but in the strength and sensibility of the lines there is a Schiele-esque refinement. Just as in the perspectives and poses there is a hint of Klimt’s cabinet (recently exhibited for the first time in a comprehensive exhibit at Musée Maillol in Paris).

I asked Weltman who her favorite artists were. For draftsmanship Leonardo she said. She only became familiar with Schiele when she started showing her work to the public and people told her about him. Given the erotic content of Weltman’s drawings it isn’t surprising that the resemblance is obvious. I however just went through the archives on her site and found a sketch of New York and the Chrysler building. And somehow wasn’t surprised to see that this atypical piece by Weltman bears heavy resemblance to Schiele’s atypical early work (he drew trains and village vistas).

As a writer one tends to think of voice as the driving force of a narrative. Yann Apperry told me in a conversation recently that he searches for the voice when he wants to write a book. Qui parle? Weltman’s lines retain a unity whether they are sketching a shoe or a building or a woman. And I cannot help wondering if lines are for an artist what voice is to a writer. While she might share the voice with Schiele the story she is telling is her own. I cannot wait to check out some of the original and larger pieces of her work in Chelsea where she is permanently represented by Art at Large.

Louis Malle’s World

2005-06-07T19:16:00.000-04:00

The Silent World (1956) is a somewhat strange film in which one can see a kind of prototype for both Luc Besson’s The Big Blue and James Cameron’s Titanic. Made by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle the film is an artistic documentary of sorts that chronicles the life of marine explorers and the sea-life they are exploring. The Walter Reade’s site says, “Louis Malle was just 23 when he was asked by author and undersea explorer Cousteau to help him make a film that could be a kind of illustrated companion to his immensely popular book also entitled The Silent World.”

It is unclear which language this film was made in originally. The version screening at the Walter Reade seems almost dubbed in English at moments and this is distracting. Some of the attempts at acting/dialog between the real life explorers are a bit off. One of the divers who gets the bends is asked to go into a decompression chamber, at this point the narrative voice of the film is broken so that he can ask the captain if he must go into the chamber. Apart from a few annoying instances such as this where the divers seem to be trying to act like actors acting like divers, the film is captivating and beautiful.

We see the depth and wealth of the sea floor, the exploration of a shipwreck (that and the monsoon storms the ship weathers feel so much more real than the studio created special effects of the Titanic), the daily life on sea. The score is allowed to take over from the narrative when the ship encounters a school of dancing porpoises. These prefigure schools of dancing dolphins. Tragically, a baby dolphin ventures too near the ship and is injured. Malle and Cousteau capture the inevitable dance of death that follows with beauty and an unwavering eye. The baby dolphin’s death seems to be radioed across the ocean surface within minutes. A school of sharks come to feed on the carcass. The narrator calls it an “orgy.” The ship’s crew at this point decides to avenge the dolphin. What follows is rendered all the more sharp by the narrative silence. In these short minutes we are shown the full nature of our situation, our abuse of our power over nature, our capacity for sympathy, our despicable hypocritical morality, and our lust for blood. Unlike the sharks who simply follow their hunger and biological drive we humans hide our monstrosity behind convenient masks.

The Silent World will screen at the Walter Reade on Sat June 25: 12:30; Mon June 27: 1 Wed June 29: 4:15 & 8:30 as part of Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle. The festival is a near complete retrospective including Malle’s seven-hour film Phantom India. For more information on the film screenings check out the Walter Reade website.

Claire Denis and the Angular Gyrus

2005-05-31T23:39:00.000-04:00

Since I’ve been getting flak for not loving Claire Denis’ L’Intrus (The Intruder reviewed here before) I decided to check out a 1996 Denis film Nénette et Boni. Unlike L’Intrus the dialog of this film is incredibly strong and there’s more of it. Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri who play the siblings Boniface and Nénette respectively perform magnificently.

Denis uses images with the same versatility as she does in L’Intrus. But for me these cinematic movements went much further than they ever did in L'Intrus. In Nénette et Boni the image, the displacements of desire, love, and relationships are intensely potent because they go till the very edge of meaning but they deftly step away before falling into vagueness.

Moments and scenes are connected sometimes by story, at other times by image and yet others by dialog. This kind of loose association leaves us free (and presumably Denis to create without the suffocation of a formula) to reflect, digest, and revel in the many gorgeous moments of this film. The film begins with a man trying to sell phone cards to a group of Africans in Marseille. It cuts to Nénette swimming in a pool. Later when Nénette hangs by a phone booth we see the card vendor again; he is trying to talk a man into photographing his phone card. He claims his daughter loves phone cards and he’d like to show her this card. Nénette as we’ll later find out is pregnant. She’s also a daughter who sided with her father after a divorce while Boni her brother lived with his mother.

Boniface first appears to us reading from his smutty journal. In rather Bataillesque fashion he swears over his mother’s grave to procure the baker’s wife. Vincent Gallo plays the baker and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi his wife who in Boni’s words is "built like a brick shithouse." A fact that doesn’t stop Boni from investing his energies in her. Scenes in the bakery that involve Tedeschi and the many imaginary scenes that run through Boni’s head are priceless. In the way they are shot, in how little is said and how much conveyed.

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s performance moves along without cause for note until a chance encounter with Boni in the mall. They sit together for a coffee. She talks nervously about a radio program she’s heard on pheromones, on how men, women, animals, truffles, and truffle pigs are all emitting this scent out in the ether that carries no smell but all these signals. As she talks and Boni listens wordlessly we see her for what she is, an ordinary baker’s ordinary wife and not as the fantastic larger than life female that Boni has been imagining her to be. The scene is delicate, in perfect balance. The acting exactly right, the dialog just taking us as far as we need to go. Yet later alone Boni's imagination once more gets the better of him.

The real story of the film is of course that of Nénette the sister and Boni her brother. Denis builds this story as the rest of the film brick by brick. With scenes of violence, anger, tenderness, and memory between the siblings. A scene of Boni on the beach in another day and age, a photo of the mother, enough to guide us into the story and see it through the eyes of the siblings. Enough. And this was my problem with L’Intrus, there wasn’t enough. In that film the father-son relationship was obscured by noise. In this one both the noise and the silence work together to tell us the real story. The Tindersticks soundtrack is not continuous, not overwhelming. The film itself both art and story.

Denis is an artist. And she uses that license to push on the edges of what a story is in L’Intrus. In Nénette et Boni the metaphors, images, words, and songs are all in the service of the story. No doubt those of you who love L’Intrus will tell me it’s just me who doesn’t get the metaphors there. Possibly. We don’t know yet that there is a sliding scale involved in the comprehension of metaphors. Science only knows so far that the angular gyrus is located at the "junction of areas specialized for processing touch, hearing and vision." One day we might know enough of the basic functioning of this part of our brain to submit the metaphorical understanding of Denis’ films to further testing. Maybe the difference between those who prefer L’Intrus to Nénette et Boni stems from the displaced axis of the angular gyrus.

ManBooker International 2005--People's Choice

2005-05-25T14:12:00.000-04:00

For all those of you who haven't gone in and voted for your choice for the ManBooker International please http://www.manbookerinternational.com/peoples/ cast your vote. You can see my vote on http://www.manbookerinternational.com/peoples/comments.php?authid=18.

A change of air from Paris

2005-05-07T21:58:00.000-04:00

I read recently in an article in Le Monde (which I haven’t been able to recover since) that the French find the classification of Anglo-Saxon literature almost ridiculous and it might be said rightly so. The author of the piece asked if one could imagine the French having special prizes or literary categories that classified Tahar Ben Jelloun as a Moroccan writer the way the UK so easily classifies Hari Kunzru as an Indian one. Applied to literature in French the idea is absurd. Eliette Abécassis might write about Israel, Yann Apperry might write about America but their books are treated quite rightly as part of the French canon and awarded their merits as such.

The United States and the UK have almost made an industry of the classification of books. If we must all submit to the Starbucks era nomenclature (decaf mocha, skim soy, no sugar, grande please) then I want to forward the idea that we should classify the book and the not the author. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a novel in verse sent in California. The author splits time between the UK and India. Must we apply our coarse perspective of Indian to what is a beautiful book that salutes Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin? Our perspective of Indian is too coarse to classify Indian cuisine even in a city like Paris which doesn’t begin to boast a range of Indian cuisine. In a city like London or New York the cuisine is shamefully better classified than the literature.

But why kvetch? (You will notice that since I have been subjected to this classification myself my kvetching too is circumscribed by this identity) Who has escaped this after all? Not the Nigerians, not the Eastern Europeans, not the South Americans. One is lucky if one can get in a mention of the name of the country instead of an entire region. But does anyone think of Paul Auster as a Jewish writer? For that matter, despite several novels dealing with very Jewish themes we don’t think of Philip Roth as ever being only a Jewish writer. We think of him as being first and foremost an American writer, the American writer. I am naïve enough to hope that it is just a matter of time and good writing. If there are enough books from India that are different enough we will cease to be treated like cuisine and instead be treated like holiday destinations (already much more specific: Kerala, Rajasthan, South, North, mountain, beach). And finally one day the classification would have become minute enough, cellular enough to cease to make any sense. Amitav Ghosh will then remain in the memory as a writer. Period.

What we risk losing, and it is not little, is a precious book once too often. A writer of a nationality that is not quite à la mode. Never mind that the book is universal, the writing crisp, the story our own in the way true art always belongs first and foremost to the viewer. On this visit to Paris I’ve recently read one such book in French by Ornela Vorpsi. Vorpsi grew up in Albania, moved to Italy at 22 and learnt Italian. She wrote her novel in Italian but was living in France and was published here in translation before the release of the novel in Italy (upcoming September 2005, Einaudi). It turns out that while various European publishers are busy having the novel translated into their respective languages America thinks that no one is interested in Albania! If we continue our classification of literature along these lines we can be sure that ever fewer people will be interested in ever fewer countries. These prophecies risk self-fulfillment partly because of the marketing within the industry which relies heavily on classification.

Till I moved to the United States in 1991 I don’t think I was much aware of the nationality of any writer I read. Often the stories themselves were set in certain places and the back cover gave away information. But I never thought while reading a love story by Carlos Fuentes that he was Mexican. I couldn’t escape thinking that Kundera was Czech but it was because his novels grappled actively with the state of the regime. It was always the interior of the novel that determined how I thought of it and how I classified it. In that sense it was organic, holistic, and most likely a nomenclature that would have sat well with the author himself or herself.

Thematic classifications of novels of course do exist. One hears of coming-of-age novels, family sagas, etc. This kind of classification is relatively defunct outside of the academic world; most people walking into a bookstore to browse seem to read not by theme but by ethnicity (excluding genre fiction). Last year I picked up three books that dealt with writing by Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, and Marguerite Duras. I wanted expressly at the time to read about writing since I am a writer. It was a sort of self-assigned homework I’d given myself qua writer and this informed my intention. Never mind the nationalities of the authors, in the end, even the theme itself faded in face of chapters that were powerful and I found myself simply a reader. A reader qua reader reading these books. And I was liberated.

In the end books are here to set us free. By binding them to our limited visions of the day, to fad, trends, columns and categories it is not so much the books but ourselves that we are imprisoning.

Babyji out in Italian & Spanish!

2005-05-06T18:52:00.000-04:00

For more on Babyji in Spanish http://www.alfaguara.santillana.es/alfaguara/index.html
For more on Babyji in Italian http://www.feltrinelli.it/SchedaLibro?id_volume=5000454

Film: A star is just a stone...

2005-04-02T17:13:00.000-05:00

Sometimes one stumbles upon a work for which one is, above all, grateful. Even as I was watching Stone Reader, I wanted to clasp Mark Moskowitz’s hand and thank him profusely for his gift. Moskowitz’s real life quest for Dow Mossman the author of The Stones of Summer turned into the film Stone Reader. I for one am unable to separate Moskowitz’s quest from the film and feel indebted for one as the other. I went to the bookstore today to find The Stones of Summer, a book no longer out-of-print or lost thanks to Moskowitz’s film and his endeavor Lost Books Club.

Upon reading The Stones of Summer, Moskowitz sets out to find other books by Dow. When nothing turns up he decides to go looking for Mossman. For those of us who have gone looking for the writers behind the books we love, this quest is intuitive. Analyzing this desire, dissecting it, subjecting it to psychiatric topology is another matter and mercifully Moskowitz steers clear of this road. What he does do is honor Mossman’s work by producing his own work of art. Very soon into the film Moskowitz says, "I began to understand that what I was looking for was not just Dow which of course only made me want to find Dow that much more."

In his hunt for Dow, Moskowitz encounters other writers from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop who took classes with Dow, professors, literary agents, editors, and even the man who originally designed the jacket for Mossman’s book as a freelancer. Moskowitz’s love for the book is so pure and infectious that the men he meets discuss the books they love in turn. These discussions inevitably involve talking about writing, its meaning, and the toll it sometimes takes on the writer. Many writers have disappeared after producing just one book. Some of the writers Moskowitz finds are obsessed with why.

Bill Murray at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop worked closely with Mossman when he was working on The Stones of Summer. Mossman in turn dedicated his book to Murray. When Moskowitz shows up to interview Bill he tells him nothing about what he is seeking but poses questions that lead quickly to a mention of Dow. Murray says of Dow: It was so traumatic for him to go through the experience of writing a novel, it was a big novel too…I tried to help but you know there are times you can’t help. You need the guys in the white coat and the jacket and he needs sedation to be put away for a while because the novel…you live it. It’s an obsessive thing.

Most of the men Moskowitz interviews in his search for Dow are writers and as they speak about the books they love one has the sense of looking up at the night sky full of stars. Familiar shapes and structures begin to emerge. Stars joined by jotted lines that form constellations. Constellations that our ancestors named and recognized many hundreds of years ago. One writer leads to another and another. From Mossman to Faulkner and Henry Roth, to Isaac Bashevis Singer. To Dickens and Shakespeare via Balzac and Proust.

Frank Conroy the author of Stop-time who runs the Iowa Writers’ Workshop says, "It’s like food. There are some pleasures that never run out and books are one of them….you feel the pleasure of another human soul on the other side of the book and that makes you feel less alone and less trapped in your body and less isolated. You feel that you are the brother of the author and the two of you are working together. It’s a very profound and moving experience it’s almost spiritual." It is the same urge that led the Vedic Indians four thousand years ago to plot the night sky and maintain records of passing comets, eclipses, stars. The Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, all the way until Copernicus were propelled by a desire to feel less isolated, somehow immortal. As the universe turns geometrically flat and fills with cold dark matter and our perceptions shrink to fit our latest science and its theories, we are no longer sure for how long we will have our beloved Cassiopeias, Dippers, and Bears. Moskowitz’s film is a testament that we still have our books and our writers.

thursday 3/30 on cable

2005-03-30T18:12:00.000-05:00

if you want to watch an interview with me you can tune in tomorrow at 6:30pm. its channel 77 or 501 on time warner cable. mercifully i don't have a television machine (as my friend curt quaintly calls it).

Books beyond the radar—The Illusionist

2005-03-28T17:33:00.000-05:00

Originally published as Le Rempart Des Béguines Françoise Mallet-Joris’ novel The Illusionist is an easy but lovely read. The narrator Hélène lives in a small provincial town that cannot help but remind us of the one in Flaubert’s novel. There, mercifully, the comparison ends. Hélène’s father is a widower with wealth and political aspirations and little energy for his daughter who whiles away her time day-dreaming. She says, "I forgot that I was not yet sixteen, and at times I would be overwhelmed with the desire to run away. It would be better, I thought, to beg by the wayside than to have to go on dying of loneliness! As I walked in the streets I became so lost in reverie, my steps were so weighed down with desires, as well as a feeling of guilt, that I lost all notion of where I was going. It seemed to me that with one step more I might reach the horizon…"

Being both bored and imaginative, it isn’t long before Hélène seizes the opportunity to make an unsolicited visit to her father’s mistress Tamara. Tamara is young, somewhat Bohemian, and nothing like the other townsfolk. Hélène and Tamara begin an affair. As their relationship evolves and takes several sharp turns, Hélène grows into a young woman. Tamara grows into an old one. We see the archetype of the crazy cold French heroine in Tamara, Breton’s Nadja from the eponymous novel, Flaubert’s Emma. One of Tamara’s other suitors, an artist by the name of Max Villar, befriends Hélène and soothes her. He says, "My child, you’re too young to understand Tamara’s motives. You’re sixteen, you can’t imagine what it is to be thirty-five." By then we are invested enough in Hélène to wish that she never understand what it is to be Tamara.

Despite the somewhat spotty English translation (I’m going to try to find the original) Mallet-Joris’ narrative keeps a sweet languor. Entirely lacking in hysteria it gives us an immediate sense of Hélène’s journey and allows us to walk the road with her. When the book came out in 1947 it created a stir but by 1970 Mallet-Joris was a member of The Goncourt Academy. Guy Casaril made a film based on the movie. If you have suggestions on where to find it please email me!

It is impossible to read this novel without thinking of the other book about a girl, her father, and his mistress: Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan. Unfortunately I read that one too in translation. That book was permeated by the sea and the sun, the narrator was less analytical. The biggest contrast in the two works is in the father figure. In Mallet-Joris’ work he is benign, somewhat secluded, and clueless. In Sagan’s work his virility leaps from every page.

Beyond Bollywood--Bawl your brains out

2005-03-22T22:27:00.000-05:00

Rudaali (dir Kalpana Lajmi 1992)

Rudaali refers to a professional mourner who’s been called to mourn a death. When the film begins, we see an ailing Amjad Khan cursing his fate at neither being fully dead nor quite alive. He’s a zamindar (liege) in the village and well aware of his unpopularity. He chastises his servants, his son, and his bonded laborers that none of them well shed a tear when he dies. He therefore asks for a Rudaali (played by Rakhee) to be brought in.

I’d been looking forward to seeing this film for many years and am sorry to be a tad disappointed. Gulzar’s dialogue and Dimple’s acting are definitely the best parts of the film. The film won Dimple several Best Actress awards. Gulzar’s dialogue captures with finesse and texture the many layers of caste and economic conflict in the village. Dimple is afraid even her shadow will send people to hell while the upper caste landlord—played by Raj Babbar who takes a shine to her—assures her that this is all based on the false myths of brahmin logic. The village brahmin is a suitably sleazy character in this film who, like the dying landlord and his munshi, is out to make a quick buck. When Dimples husband and mother-in-law die he tells her she must give him 50 rupees ($1) for their last rites. Dimple shows up at the ailing zamindar’s to borrow the money and he tells her she can have it in return for 15 years of bonded labor to him.

Most of the people are relatively low, beating on each other in hard times and never missing an opportunity to hurt others. Dimple’s husband is a perpetual drunk and her mother-in-law hurls insults even while on her deathbed. Later Dimple’s son brings home a whore as his wife and this woman too curses like a sailor and acts nasty to Dimple. It is only in the moments with Raj Babbar and under his gaze that Dimple is bestowed simple human dignity. When he first takes a liking to her he tells her that he can buy women but he doesn’t want to do that, he likes her. He asks her repeatedly to look him in the eye and convinces her it isn’t a sin.

We see Dimple’s story as she relates it to Rakhee who suggests that Dimple become a Rudaali like her. It’s a life of dignity, you’re given both money and respect, Rakhee tells her. Dimple however is unable to cry; she has dried up. She didn’t cry when her husband died or when her son left. What can possibly make her cry?

Dimple tackles her role with subtlety not giving in to the temptation of over-acting, trusting Gulzar’s lines to carry her through. Raj Babbar’s performance complements hers. Shot in the Rajasthani desert the landscape is simple but gorgeous. However, in the end, the chest-beating and the repetitious songs didn’t work in favor of the movie all the time. Rakhee and Raghuvir Yadav put in somewhat mediocre performances and the film while solid stops short of being excellent.

French Film Fest 2005---Claire Denis and Claude Chabrol

2005-03-20T18:44:00.000-05:00

Clare Denis and Claude Chabrol

I

The best part of watching Claire Denis’ Intruder—not yet shown in France—was having Denis answer questions afterward in a melodious, halting, long-winded, roundabout, and somewhat evasive way. Having Lou Reed and Willem Dafoe in the audience sitting like anyone else in the fifth row was another bonus and hearing the reverence with which questions were posed to Denis—generally including the word metaphor or significance—a crucial part of entertainment. It was necessary to redeem the evening for me as I was still trying to make simple prosaic sense of 123 minutes of footage. In the absence of this sense, of a tight plot, of a movement from A to B, I needed to be lulled (and not the only one, I noticed) by the lethargic music of Denis’ voice as she told us that for her the film was like an arc. You had to see the gesture, these were not the exact words-it was the gesture of her hand moving across the hemisphere as the protagonist Louis goes from Europe to Tahiti.

Go and watch Intruder if you would like to “watch” “metaphor” on film and a lot(like 80 minutes) of septuagenarian male mammary close-up. Denis said that S.A. Staples who wrote the score wrote a loop, which was not exactly her idea for the film in the beginning but then it worked. Yes, it works. It works because you think you’ll eventually get some answers, some narrative clarity, and that score keeps you hoping till the end when you realize you’re not getting it. What there is to get from this film is vintage Denis, cinema as movement, as poem. Not always my thing but even less so when I’m being promised continually through a somewhat contrived plot that there might be a plot to discern. If you loved Beau Travail you might love this one.

There are many beautiful cinematic moments. Beatrice Dalle on a sledge with a pack of six dogs carrying her through the snow, the camera is jerky and shaky, puts you in the experience. Louis’ dogs eating a heart (is it his? He’s just had a heart transplant). And, the most beautiful, a blind woman in Korea (I believe) giving Louis a massage, feeling his knots, his pain, touching his chest which has been cut open for the heart transplant and grotesquely stitched back. When she touches him we know that she knows everything she knows through her tactility, it’s her way of apprehending the world and she possibly sees what no one else can see about Louis, his haunted past, his pain and needs. That scene is the most precious one in the film and the camera captures it intimately without putting any distance between the viewer and the act.

Why Denis and Chabrol in this one piece? Because as artists they’ve both reached that place where whatever they do is art. But once you reach that place and lose your enemies you could easily find yourself filling their shoes. In Denis’ case the things that make the film work also run counter to it and make it work less rather than more. The film could stand to get rid of 20 if not 30 minutes of footage. Since the plot is loose and disjointed its not hard to do. In its absence all we have is the camera lingering and capturing beautiful things. But the camera lingers too long and fails to escape noise. The editing unfortunately is way too reverent just like most of the questions at Walter Reade were. Some noise can highlight the music, equal decibels of noise and music and the music is lost. Not entirely but a little. In the end the balance isn’t quite there. Denis predicted while introducing the film that the audience would be less enthusiastic and somewhat long-faced when she’d come back for the Q&A after the screening. She was right. But my long face wasn’t because the film was depressing or because of the brutal end but because in the end it had failed to touch me in the places it mattered, my heart, my head, my stomach.

II

Like many others in the Walter Reade last night I had hoped that this Saturday night was going to be the big one. Chabrol and Denis—two masters back to back. When Chabrol’s film opened, the cockles of my heart warmed on seeing the entirely handsome Benoît Magimel impeccably dressed and (playing Philippe) perfect son and brother on the screen. That he caresses and feels particularly attached to the green bust in the garden that the family calls Flore is even more endearing.

Enter Senta The Bridesmaid who resembles Flore the garden bust. They fall in love. The story begins. And we wait till the very end to find out if Senta is a somewhat dreamy girl who spends her time making up macabre stories or stark raving mad. She tells Philippe that all lovers must prove their love for each other by planting a tree, writing a poem, having sex with someone of their own gender, and killing someone. You get the drift.

Claude Chabrol has done too good a job this time round and ended up defeating himself. That Chabrol at seventy-five is engaging with young people and their stories is not in itself a problem. That the film ends up feeling not about adolescence but adolescent is. Senta and Philippe are young but not teenagers, they just seem it in the film. The acting is competent enough, Laura Smet who plays Senta was there for the screening and said that Chabrol hadn’t wanted her to prepare for the film yet she did. Magimel has a lot of finesse and even the minor characters pull through for the most part. The part that is broken and doesn’t work is the love between Senta and Philippe. That love can render people blind is not what is disputable. How someone like Philippe without a grain of darkness in this film can sustain un amour fou for a girl who is at best off her rockers and at worst a killer is never evident, the leap of faith never made. We don’t believe it. For a psychological film like this to work we need to see the psychology at work at some point, either in gesture or dialogue or visually. Possibly Chabrol spent too much time on Smet and ignored Magimel where the key to the leap could have been found.

Smet said to the audience that she had trouble getting out of the mindset of Senta after the film. She had prepared for the film by sleeping a lot and reading the original Ruth Rendell story on which it is based. Senta is a girl who spends a lot of time in isolation and Smet for three or four months after the film found herself also living this life of self-imposed isolation. This is a fine thing for an actress. When someone in the audience asked Smet whether she though Senta was crazy she replied that the girl had un grain but wasn’t crazy mad in her view. I wasn’t alarmed on behalf of Smet because it simply shows that Smet truly put herself in Senta’s head. You and I after seeing the film might and would be right to take cause with that.

I suspect that Chabrol immersed himself so completely in the story that like Smet he could no longer clearly see the girl for what she was. If he had approached the story with full-on adolescent vigor as a story seen only through Senta’s eyes I think it would have been more successful though possible even less palatable to the audience.

French Film Fest 2005---Me and My Sister

2005-03-19T16:18:00.000-05:00

For those of you who love Isabelle Huppert playing Isabelle Huppert go watch the film. Everyone else wait for some of the other films that are soon going to come to the States with the other talented actors who acted in Me and My Sister (Catherine Frot & François Berléand) and skip this.

Alexandra Leclère has delivered a competent but unexceptional first film without jarring flaws and without anything remarkable. The dialogue gets a B- grade. The cast is so competent that it could have acted with closed eyes and probably did. I can’t imagine Huppert needing a single direction for the film since she has played the same role in each and every film for the past ten years or longer. In some of the other films (Piano Teacher, Merci pour le Chocolat), a lot more was demanded from her. In this one, the director seems happy to let Huppert, the angry, mean, jealous sister, get away with playing bad on medium heat. Frot’s role demands moments of overacting since she plays the small time provincial sister in Paris for a few days to meet with publishers who’ve shown interest in her novel. Despite our sympathies for Frot who is ridiculed by her sister every few minutes in the conversation, we’re unsure if Frot has anything much going for her till she shows up for her interview and we see her buzzing the door for Editions Grasset no less! Berléand is cartoonish as well at first. He’s shown first taking his wife (Huppert) against her will in bed. But he somehow seems to escape through the caricaturing instincts of the director and delivers a believable performance. Tired of the blind hatred Huppert is turning against her sister he tells her he’s been sleeping with a dead woman for ten years…that he could do…but he won’t be with a jealous woman which is what she’s become. When Huppert buckles in the kitchen and falls hurting her back, Berléand is tender, loving, yet firm in his opinion that she should apologize to her sister. Huppert doesn’t.

Leclère may yet make a good film in the future. The frustrating thing about Me and My Sister is that it plods along a rather predictable path all the way till the end. We can see what it could have been but isn’t. We see Huppert playing her archetypical role (someone please cast her as Mother Teresa or the world will forget she’s actually acting!) as soon as the film starts and nothing changes whatsoever in her acting or her character. She seems to pay lip service to the idea of getting a job (spurred by envy for her sister) but in the end not much comes of that. She finds out her best friend is sleeping with her husband and screams at the woman. Yet after the incident she remains unremittingly mean to her sister who is nice to her. There is a momentary deviation twice or thrice in the film when she asks if she was bad or says she hates herself but even that feels old and stale. An actress like Huppert, given the roles she chooses, needs a somewhat more complex psychological role to play. Me and My Sister can never decide if it wants to be wicked or funny or sweet or accessible and as a result simply ends up a little bland despite one sister hurling insult and injury in the direction of the other. In contrast Eros Thérapie with Frot and Berléand which should be coming here soon gives more satisfaction even though it isn’t seeringly ambitious. Watch out for it.

And oh! A special invitation to you Huppert fans out there who loved this film to comment on it on this blog.

French Film Fest 2005---Bad Spelling

2005-03-15T23:29:00.000-05:00

Rarely do we see a film so well put together that there isn’t a moment when one is less than completely engaged with the story. Jean-Jacques Zilbermann has created a fantastic and entirely transcendental tale guaranteed to take us back—regardless of age or nationality—to the days of our own youth and our years in school. Despite the plethora of personalities we will recognize from our own teenage years, there are no cardboard characters in the film.

The main character Daniel (played by Damien Jouillerot who we are sure to see again) says at a couple of points in the film that he was "born in detention." His parents are the founders of a boarding school and the film begins at a point when Daniel has switched from being a mere day scholar to a boarder in the dorms. It doesn’t take long for the class bullies to turn on Daniel since he is the son of the tyrannical principal. The boys are all struggling at that awkward age with some problem on another. Daniel’s is the delayed onset of puberty. In order to avoid taking a shower with other boys he’s willing to be placed out of all group activities. But he isn’t shy of using the secret set of keys stolen from his parents when one of his classmates Zygelman, a gentle newcomer, wants to retrieve some jam in the middle of the night. The boys are caught and punished, a friendship ensues. At one point Zygelman helps himself to the panty hose of a popular girl Suza-Lobo and spins a tale to Daniel as to how he came into possession of these tights. Daniel insists on safekeeping them for Zygelman lest he get into more trouble but is caught by the bullies who try to strip Daniel down. They find the stockings and are willing to let him get away in return for the sordid details. Eventually this incident spins out of control and the entire school is punished. The boys are slapped one after another by the tyrannical principal (Daniel’s father). When it is Daniel’s turn, his mother (the head of studies at the school) asks Suza-Lobo if Daniel is responsible. Suza-Lobo who has kept mute while all the other boys are getting hit says NO. Daniel is let go. His classmates now beat him, urinate on him, and subject him to worse humiliation.

We see Daniel back in his parents’ home (attached to the school) locked up while they picnic in the garden. He isn’t complaining, he has full access to the fridge and a break from the harassment of his classmates. He invites Zygelman in from the escape hatch in the bathroom and the two raid the kitchen and the liquor cabinet. They start to wrestle and as the tension mounts Daniel finds himself astride Zygelman, the winner. Zygelman asks what Daniel wants from him. After a pause Daniel says he wants help with his bad spelling. He has lost one of his few friends, a boy who has corrected his spelling mistakes for years. We realize that Daniel is truly too young to want anything else.

The bullying of his classmates and the oppression of his parents increase unchecked till Daniel one day gets violent in retaliation. He is warned by his parents that if he doesn’t change he will find himself at a nearby reform school. A school reputed to inflict greater corporal punishment than this one. If Daniel is to come out on the other side he must do something. He helps Griset, an insouciant classmate, steal a large box of chocolate candy from his father’s office. Later when Daniel is pummeled by bullies, Griset comes to his rescue. Daniel suggests that they go into business together selling the candy they have stolen, estimating they can make 1000 francs. Griset an anarchist says that the sticks of chocolate candy are metaphors for dynamite. They set up a co-operative. The business thrives and the tables turn. When the dorm teacher catches the boys, Daniel bribes him with an enormous piece of Bayonne ham and appeals to the man’s leftist temperaments. Everyone starts buying from the co-operative and donating items stolen over the holidays. Daniel ensures all sales are recorded. Except for Daniel’s tyrannical parents and a couple of teachers, everyone is au courant, in the know, at the time of the final climax.

Zilbermann shot the film in the school where he himself had studied. Introducing the film today, he said that he had worried about how he would recreate the way the school had been in the past but discovered instead that it hadn’t changed at all in the intervening time. His main challenge was to turn this place which had been a place of unhappiness for him to a place of happiness in the film. Zilbermann has accomplished more than that, he’s ensured that the school is a place of unhappiness for the entire audience before transforming it into a happy place. As Daniel suffers and struggles we endure with him.

The role of Daniel won Damien Jouillerot the César nomination for Best Promising Actor. Zilbermann had initially intended the film as a comedy but Damien Jouillerot—who lost some 70 pounds for the role by switching to Diet Coke—according to him brought a profound dimension to the film making it something more. One can only hope that American distributors will see how much more. I for my part cannot wait to find and watch his other films including L’Homme est une femme comme les autres (Man is a woman like the rest), Tout le monde n'a pas eu la chance d'avoir des parents communistes (Everyone wasn’t lucky enough to have communist parents).

French Film Fest 2005---Tickets, Shows etc.

2005-03-15T12:17:00.000-05:00

Since people have been asking me....you can get a full listing of the films showing at the Rendez Vous with French Cinema 2005 on the website of the Film Society of Lincoln Center http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/programs/3-2005/rendezvous05.htm. Also, since I've received emails pointing out the shows are sold out, just as an fyi you can usually get tickets standby if you go before the show (atleast during the weekdays).

French Film Fest 2005---Les temps qui changent

2005-03-14T01:01:00.000-05:00

In LES TEMPS QUI CHANGENT André Téchiné has extracted the best performance we’ve seen from Gérard Depardieu in recent and not-so-recent memory. Téchiné’s extraordinary accomplishment in this film is that he effortlessly achieves a graceful balance between the genre of French vacation film (country home, pool, family reunion) and that of French film shot à l’étranger. Téchiné’s LOIN was very much defined by Morocco, the experience of being abroad, out of France. The only film that comes close to the same harmony as LES TEMPS in certain moments is LE SOLEIL ASSASSINÉ (Murdered Son) a seaside film starring Charles Berling and directed by Abdelkerim Bahloul. A film sorely missing from this year’s Rendez Vous when a mediocre film like Tell me I’m pretty is being included with what is otherwise a formidable lineup. LE SOLEIL takes place in another former French colony Algeria and Berling plays the poet Jean Sénac who runs a radio program in French just like Deneuve does in this film and one reason it would have complimented LES TEMPS. The resemblance between the films ends with the radio station characters. LES TEMPS is about love and the four principal characters in the film. LE SOLEIL is about a hero.

Catherine Deneuve introduced the film on Sunday to a spellbound audience that gasped on seeing her. The same age as Téchiné (both are 1943 born) Deneuve has continued to remain alluring and compelling in all her recent work and was no less so on stage. She thanked us for coming to see French films, French films with English subtitles no less. The film proposed the question, she informed the audience, as to whether the first love of one’s life can also be the last love. An audible sigh went through the screening room.

Depardieu arrives in Tangiers in search of Deneuve the first love of his life after convincing his company to post him there to oversee the construction of a new television studio facility. He sends bouquets of flowers anonymously and even consults a local Moroccan woman responsible for his leisure and entertainment to teach him how to cast a spell on Deneuve to win her back. When he finally has a face to face encounter with her he is flat on the floor outside a grocery story having hit his nose and damaged the cartilage. Deneuve’s husband rushes on hearing the noise and informs Depardieu he is a doctor. As if the circumstances are not humiliating enough Depardieu has an attack of diarrhea when Deneuve spots her husband and comes up to them both. Depardieu’s performance is irreproachable. He is contained, mature, passionate, and poignant. No mean feat given the general tendency to exuberance in his acting coupled with the challenges Téchiné puts his way in terms of the stupefying and the ridiculous all of which he pulls off with pathos.

Enter Deneuve’s son played by Malik Zidi. Home on vacation he fails to warn his parents in advance that his girlfriend and her son will make the trip with him. His girlfriend is there in search of a twin sister who has decided that for twins to become whole and heal they must cut contact with their siblings. Zidi spends his time back home in Tangier rekindling a relationship with a former male lover who eventually diagnosis his problem saying that--you are half French and half Moroccan, half man and half woman you’re indecisive. Lubna Azabal who plays Zidi’s girlfriend is plying herself with sleeping pills while Melki spends most of his time in the swimming pool, drinking, and watching his medical practice decline. The family is gathered in a house in Tangiers away from the bustle of the city, each tending their own problems and imperfectly, imperceptibly, trying to make peace with the flaws and humanity of the other. The father with the son’s gay-side, the girlfriend with the rupture from her twin, the mother with herself and the men in her life. Unrushed and human to the core they all lash out in moments and then arrive at a different understanding, evolve.

The love story or rather, at this point in the film, the non-love story between Depardieu and Deneuve happens in the background. He wants her back he tells her, he wants to spend the future with her. They are walking and she says there is no future the forest they just left behind is over and now there is the cliff and its nothingness. But there is the sea in front of the cliffs and across the sea there is Spain, the beginning of Europe he says.

Téchiné’s genius in all his films is that they end up more like living entities with the hum and heartbeat of the passage of time, the complexity and evolution of characters taking place both within and outside time. The beauty of his films is like condensed sunlight and the dialogue is always just so. LES TEMPS is quintessential Téchiné, to be cherished dearly.

French Film Fest 2005---36 Quai des Ofèvres

2005-03-12T12:28:00.000-05:00

A policier the way it should be! Oliver Marchal the director of the cop film 36 QUAI DES ORFÈVRES was also an inspector in the criminal brigade in Versailles before he took to cinema. It’s a different story that he became a cop in the first place because of cinema, because of Melville...it is always heartening for someone in the business of creation (whether art or literature) to know that life follows literature follow life and we're part of a recursive cycle. After seeing Marchal’s film I met with Maryam Keshavarz the critically acclaimed director of THE COLOR OF LOVE. We swapped stories of when we had both made something (in her case a film, in mine a story) and months later found real life mirroring the art that had been produced. A scene, a moment, an episode, we’d already lived in the process of creating it and then gone through it once more for real.

Back to Marchal. I heard Marchal speak after the screening of his film at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center yesterday. He described Gérard Depardieu who plays the bad cop as un chien fou--a mad dog, in that Depardieu on the set needs to touch people and grip their arms and talk and connect using flesh, space, and smell. Daniel Auteuil who plays the good cop on the other hand is a "cerebral actor" in the words of Marchal. Auteuil was nominated for a César for Best Actor for the film. This contrast that Marchal raised between Auteuil and Depardieu took me back instantly to another film, a comedy, in which they’ve played together—THE CLOSET(Le Placard) directed by Francis Veber. In that film Depardieu plays the hulky male frat boy grown old and falls in love with Auteuil who is rumored to be gay but really isn’t. A successful comedy, that film nonetheless hangs on the exact same dynamic between the two actors that 36 does.

I’ve been thinking of actors in terms of the roles they play (Isabelle Hupert in almost all her films) and also in terms of acting-pairs like some binary star system. If Depardieu and Auteuil are an obvious pair that come to mind since they play polar opposites in 36 then a less obvious pair is that of André Dussollier and Auteuil. Dussollier was nominated for the César for Best Supporting Actor for his role in 36 and plays the senior policeman who has to choose between Depardieu and Auteuil. Dussollier like Auteuil, is a cerebral actor and the distance between them in 36 is not much different than the way their dynamic hung, suspended between tension and the possibility of mutual understanding in UN COEUR EN HIVER (A heart in winter?) directed by Claude Sautet. In that film the men are partners in a violin repair service, Dussollier rustles up the business while Auteuil is the expert luthier. Auteuil gives Emmanuelle Béart (Dussollier’s girlfriend) the eye but when Béart falls for him he rejects her.

According to Marchal, Depardieu gave his fullest from the start and then as a director Marchal found ways of fine tuning the performance. And while, in contrast to Depardieu, Auteuil might be cerebral in 36 he is glacially cerebral in UN COEUR. His entire success as an actor lies in fine-tuning his art at the very extremes of human consciousness. He uses barely perceptible and implausibly subtle expression to carry him enormous distances between masochism, depression, violence, mirth, and rectitude. Just look at his eyes in SADE, MA SAISON PRÉFERÉE (My favorite season), L’ADVERSAIRE (The Adversary), LA FILLE SUR LE PONT (Girl on the bridge), LA VEUVE DE ST. PIERRE (The Widow of St. Pierre) and you will find revealed in those eyes a range of human types that few of us could dare to live.

French film-maker Cédric Labourdette

2005-02-06T12:21:00.000-05:00

The word museum refers to a place where a work of art is displayed. Not surprisingly it is derived from the Greek word mouseion, the shrine of the Muses. In classical myth the Muses were the daughters of Zeus who presided over the arts and sciences. The museum today is a strange place, the majority of people within one at anytime are more than likely to be tourists rather than locals. In NY they come from Mexico, Canada, India, Japan, France, and everywhere else. In Paris, Rome, London, and Prague too museum visitors belong to elsewhere. In the diverse nationalities of tourists that populate it at any hour a museum is not very different from an airport.

"In museums," as filmmaker Cédric Labourdette says, "even the tourists are not without beauty." Labourdette has made two films in India and it was in Delhi that I met him for the first time. We were both part of that grand displacement of people that takes place from continent to continent on a casual basis in the modern world. In Paris I get the chance to see the films he shot in India and also a film called See in this Issue. Located in the un-cartographable territory between essay, documentary, film, and painting See in this Issue is filmed in museums and gardens in Paris: primarily the Louvre and Rodin museums and the Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens.

The camera innocuously observes women looking at art, strolling, and connecting with each other. The images are played back to us in slow motion. The observer of the art is herself unaware that she is being observed. Moving in and out of public spaces with hundreds of tourists, Labourdette captures extraordinary events that could never have been contrived like a scene where a young boy and girl in the Louvre stand back to back to measure their relative heights. Labourdette says that he shot for several months and then used five minutes of footage out of three hours of rush for the final film. In slow speed the five-minute film is forty-five minutes long. I should call it an experience rather than a film. One observes the museum observer and the art that she is observing. We are observers like her, she is like the art she is observing. We slow down to the pace of the images and to the music. The music flows like a river within the film, it is organic, it is original, and it is, like the film, also a work of art. Frédéric Ligier who composed the original score has also spent time in India, most recently when he conducted musicians for the opera Fakir of Benares.

There are some particularly beautiful moments in the Galerie Michel-Ange at the Louvre when I notice that the camera has gone straight to my own favorite statue by Bartolini: Dircé. Cédric says that he uses slow motion partly to hold beauty and slow it down. For me the film itself is an object of beauty, a work of art no less than the art it is filming. The women it is filming are beautiful and are almost art too. The genius of this film is that it succeeds in being both a record of art and art itself. Later, when I leave the room I find that I have been slowed down to the pace of the film, hypnotized. I take the métro in the wrong direction and am an hour late for my next rendez-vous.

Time. Time regained, time lost, time slowed, time speeded up. These are experiences common to us all. And yet when a work of art is able to create one of these effects consciously I am startled. The memories of Paris that I carry in my head now include images from See in this Issue. To the catalog of my own favorite marble and bronze sculptures has now been added Cédric’s regard (a French word that can only be translated poorly in English as glance) toward these things, his particular vision.

Beyond Bollywood—Smita Patil

2005-02-05T21:35:00.000-05:00

Pairs

It began as an intuition about actors and actor pairs. An intuition that has gathered strength beginning with my initial foray into French films. I initially saw Arth (1982, dir. Mahesh Bhatt) with Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, and Kulbhushan Kharbanda because Azmi and KK act as a couple in the film some 14 years before they play together in Fire (1996, dir. Deepa Mehta). Kharbanda is the stuffy husband in both films and Azmi, the wronged wife in both. In Arth, she walks away in the end after asking her husband if he would have forgiven her her trespasses (he is asking her to forgive his). While, in Mehta’s film she evolves into a woman no longer content to just leave a husband for a life alone but to go ahead and embrace an altogether new life. Arth seemed to me a statement of vast import for India circa 1982. Smita Patil who plays the other woman is not depicted in the Bombay film industry archetype role of the period as low, indecent or vampish. Playing a mentally disturbed film actress in the film, Smita eventually recovers enough to get rid of KK herself. The two women, wife and mistress are decent in their own ways to each other and, for once, the self-absorbed jerk is cast aside by both. To balance the negative male role of KK, Mahesh Bhatt introduces two ancillary male characters.

Arth was not my introduction to Smita Patil. She and Amitabh Bachchan acted together in Shakti (1982, dir. Ramesh Sippy). A regular Bollywood potboiler about a police inspector and his son in which Patil and Bachchan took their clothes off in one of the first nude scenes in a mainstream Indian movie (that I ever saw at any rate). Arth led me to Bhumika (1977, dir. Shyam Benegal), another film where Patil plays an actress. Over-reaching in its ambitions as a story, Bhumika suffers at moments from bad editing. But there are marvelous vignettes throughout the film that more than compensate for Benegal’s inability to focus at times on what he wants to get across. Patil carries off the role of a successful actress, troubled at home, disenchanted by a husband who is much older than her, unable to truly engage romantically with the assorted filmi* men who wish to consort with her with great elan. In particular, this film prefigures what could only have been a deep intestinal rumbling in the urban Indian belly at the time: Naseeruddin Shah playing the role of Sunil Verma articulates a post-modernist existentialist position to Patil about god, death, and love. Shah works with mediocre dialog and next to no precedence in Indian cinema and pulls off the role with charm. The morning after Patil suggests they kill themselves together and Shah offers her an overdose of sleeping pills we come across a scene that tells us why existentialism can go only so far in India. The scene is wonderful and Benegal’s imagination at its acme here.

Naseeruddin Shah and Patil also act together in Chakra (1981, dir. Rabindra Dharmaraj). Set in a Bombay slum Shah plays a man perpetually on the run from the law. Smita Patil who has run away from a village and set herself up in the slum has an affair with Shah and with Kulbhushan Kharbanda, a man on the right side of the law, trying to earn a living as a truck driver. The performances of Shah and Patil take a backseat in comparison to the life of the slum. The younger generation, Patil’s son on whom our hopes are pinned has the same life as the older man, Shah. Prostitution, robbery, and murder dominate. Patil is equally at ease playing this role as she is playing the high-flying and adored actress of Bhumika and Arth.

Patil and Shah act together in possibly one of the best Indian films ever made, Mirch Masala (1985, dir. Ketan Mehta). Shah plays a subedar in the colonial service camping on the outskirts of Patil’s village as he extorts taxes and payments in cash and kind from the village folk. At the very outset of the film a brief chance encounter between Shah and Patil (a married woman) establishes Shah’s desire for her. The rest of the film revolves around how he intends to fulfill this desire and the extent to which he is willing to abuse his power to do this. A towering drama about the tension between man and polis, the tyranny of rulers, the baseness of each man when he is for himself, and the fierceness of those with pride and principles, this film is at once a masterwork on colonialism, money, power, lust, and gender. With an extraordinarily rich palette and the profoundly circumscribed canvas of one small village, Ketan Mehta achieves a work of art that is unparalleled all the way from its surface to its depths. The cast is magnificent and Shah and Patil never once get self-conscious in the roles they play. Their characters subsume them entirely as they should.

Patil and Shah play together again in Manthan (1976, dir. Shyam Benegal), an idealistic film played by India’s most idealistic actor Girish Karnad. No one else can pull off these do-good roles without stickiness, this is Karnad’s forte. Karnad, a vet, comes to a village to set up a dairy cooperative. Early in the film, we see the instant affinity between Patil and Karnad, a matter that has some import later. Naseeruddin Shah plays a low caste leader who must get his people to rally together with the upper caste in order to set up the cooperative without letting the caste tensions get the better of all concerned. The villagers struggle with the idea of leaving their caste hierarchies behind as they try to align their economic interests together. The machinations of the local dairy lord who has been repressing the villagers involve using Patil, a low caste woman, against Karnad. Karnad and the cast of urban progressives who have come to the village to set up the cooperative have to play their roles very finely to not seem patronizing. Benegal as the director is extremely finely tuned to the variety of roles these men can fit and is able to get a rich spectrum of motivations across through the secondary characters.

Karnad and Patil play equals in Subah (1982, dir. Jabbar Patel). Patil is Karnad’s wife and lives a bored life in a provincial town with his family. She wishes to live and work as the superintendent of a woman’s reform facility some 300 miles away. Karnad, playing a somewhat unlikely and progressive husband for circa 1982, agrees. The bulk of the film shows Smita Patil in a dignified role as she brings her educational experience, integrity, and idealism to bear upon the daily running of the reformatory. The Board of Trustees who run the institution are at best indifferent to the plight of the inmates and loathe to cede any control to Patil. This role is a great natural counterpoint to Patil’s role in Arth. In Arth, Patil is convincing as a mentally disturbed pill-popping actress who’s emotions and imagination are literally too large for her to contain within her person. She is also constantly in need of a man (KK) to function in her day to day life. In Subah, Patil is a woman who travels away from her family to find fulfillment in her work, and despite all the instabilities of the reformatory which surround her, maintains a steel will, iron discipline, and a humane approach all at the same time. As prostitution, jealousy, lesbianism, self-immolation, and corruption all lead the reformatory to go into a tailspin Patil stands above it all without any pomposity. A role that once again, required walking a very thin line. There is one amusing scene that dates the movie. When two inmates are found and exposed as being involved with one another, the rest of the inmates lobby for these two girls to be thrown out. The Board of Trustees wishes the same. Patil argues that they are just ill and need psychological treatment and fights on their behalf. Watching this scene one has to marvel that from Subah to Fire, from 1982 to 1996, Indian films have come a long way. If Patil had been alive in 1996 would she and Azmi have been cast as lovers?

*for more f-words.

babyji

2005-02-05T21:17:00.000-05:00

it looks like my readers have decided to comment on the book here!