Through a glass shimmeringly

When bad things happen, they sometimes decide to squeeze in as much as they can within a very short spell of time. How else can I explain the fact that I've stepped on and broken both my glasses in the last 7 days? STEPPED ON for chrissakes! I mean what kind of a nerd steps on his own glasses. and on both occasions, I was perfectly awake and sober...
Anyway, that has left me looking at the world as if its a Monet painting...all colour and shimmer and indistinct shapes...don't ask why I can't get either of them fixed. Well, I live in a bit of hellhole called Vasundhara Enclave, far away from anywhere. Going to town acquires a totally different connotation when you're here. So yes, I'll do it one of these days, but meanwhile, the days continue to shimmer!

Blue Room

Blue Room

Smoke and mirrors
Summertime’s at an end
In this blue room with your pictures
My cold eyes stare and wait

Is this your perfume
Or is this your face?
A blue room with your pictures
And an ocean of regret

A mix of rhythms
The tune is blowing down
A blue room with your pictures
And a young man blowing

Where do you go to my lovely
When the night comes to an end?
A blue room and pictures
Are all that remains.

- Bibek Bhattacharya

21.08.2006

Hour Of The Wolf

Another post from the hour before dawn, from the hour of the wolf, when monsters creep out of our nightmares, when most people die, and children are born. This day began long ago, and much was said today, but in the vacousness of an empty day, nothing was really said. Did we all dream different versions of the same dream or do we really believe that our love speaks like thunder and cool summer rain in a grove of old banyans?
I don't know. Maybe you only understand these things in retrospect....to inspect by looking back. Who hasn't had the nightmare when he is walking down an endless corridor that twists and turns? Every second you believe that the shuffling beast following you is just around the corner, about to show itself and destroy your sanity with its appearance. You quicken your steps and try to escape it. You are safe till you see it. But there's no true escape. Only waking, and a postponement of vision. If you ever see it, and not wake up, you are either in a story or somewhere terrible. Is retrospection like that? Is sanity really that fragile, is reality real?
You might allege I dwell in cliches. But who has ever explained them? One man's fears are another man's comedy. But we talk and talk and talk. But do we talk so that we may get a response? Who is this other who responds? Is our speech just a means to itself? An endless mantra, signifying nothing? A succession of lovers, but no love?
I don't know.

A Hard Day's Review

A superb review of the movie by the legendary Robert Ebert

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Roger Ebert / October 27, 1996

When it opened in September, 1964, ``A Hard Day's Night'' was a problematic entry in a disreputable form, the rock 'n' roll musical. The Beatles were already a publicity phenomenon (70 million viewers watched them on ``The Ed Sullivan Show''), but they were not yet cultural icons. Many critics attended the movie and prepared to condescend, but the movie could not be dismissed: It was so joyous and original that even the early reviews acknowledged it as something special. After more than three decades, it has not aged and is not dated; it stands outside its time, its genre and even rock. It is one of the great life-affirming landmarks of the movies.

In 1964, what we think of as ``The '60s'' had not yet really emerged from the embers of the 1950s. Perhaps this was the movie that sounded the first note of the new decade--the opening chord on George Harrison's new 12-string guitar. The film was so influential in its androgynous imagery that untold thousands of young men walked into the theater with short haircuts, and their hair started growing during the movie and didn't get cut again until the 1970s.

It was clear from the outset that ``A Hard Day's Night'' was in a different category from the rock musicals that had starred Elvis and his imitators. It was smart, it was irreverent, it didn't take itself seriously, and it was shot and edited by Richard Lester in an electrifying black-and-white, semi-documentary style that seemed to follow the boys during a day in their lives. And it was charged with the personalities of the Beatles, whose one-liners dismissed the very process of stardom they were undergoing. ``Are you a mod or a rocker?'' Ringo is asked at a press conference. ``I'm a mocker,'' he says.

Musically, the Beatles represented a liberating breakthrough just when the original rock impetus from the 1950s was growing thin. The film is wall to wall with great songs, including ``I Should Have Known Better,'' ``Can't Buy Me Love,'' ``I Wanna Be Your Man,'' ``All My Loving,'' ``Happy Just to Dance With You,'' ``She Loves You,'' and others, including the title song, inspired by a remark dropped by Starr and written overnight by Lennon and McCartney.

The Beatles were obviously not housebroken. The American rock stars who preceded them had been trained by their managers; Presley dutifully answered interview questions like a good boy. The Beatles had a clone look--matching hair and clothes--but they belied it with the individuality of their dialogue, and there was no doubt which one was John, Paul, George and Ringo. The original version of Alun Owen's Oscar-nominated screenplay supplied them with short one-liners (in case they couldn't act), but they were naturals, and new material was written to exploit that. They were the real thing.

The most powerful quality evoked by ``A Hard Day's Night'' is liberation. The long hair was just the superficial sign of that. An underlying theme is the difficulty establishment types have in getting the Beatles to follow orders. (For ``establishment,'' read uptight conventional middle-class 1950s values.) Although their manager (Norman Rossington) tries to control them and their TV director (Victor Spinetti) goes berserk because of their improvisations during a live TV broadcast, they act according to the way they feel.

When Ringo grows thoughtful, he wanders away from the studio, and a recording session has to wait until he returns. When the boys are freed from their ``job,'' they run like children in an open field, and it is possible that scene (during ``Can't Buy Me Love'') snowballed into all the love-ins, be-ins and happenings in the park of the later '60s. The notion of doing your own thing lurks within every scene.

When a film is strikingly original, its influence shapes so many others that you sometimes can't see the newness in the first one. Godard's jump cuts in ``Breathless'' (1960) turned up in every TV ad. Truffaut's freeze frame at the end of ``The 400 Blows'' (1959) became a cliche. Richard Lester's innovations in ``A Hard Day's Night'' have become familiar; because the style, the subject and the stars are so suited to one another, the movie hasn't become dated. It's filled with the exhilaration of four musicians who were having fun and creating at the top of their form and knew it.

Movies were tamer in 1964. Big Hollywood productions used crews of 100 people and Mitchell cameras the size of motorcycles. Directors used the traditional grammar of master shot, alternating closeups, insert shots, re-establishing shots, dissolves and fades. Actors were placed in careful compositions. But the cat was already out of the bag; directors like John Cassavetes had started making movies that played like dramas but looked like documentaries. They used light 16mm cameras, hand-held shots, messy compositions that looked like they might have been snatched during moments of real life.

That was the tradition Lester drew on. In 1959 he'd directed "The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film," starring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan among others: It was hand-held, anarchic, goofy, and contains the same spirit that infects "A Hard Day's Night." Lester had shot documentaries and TV commercials, could work quick and dirty, and knew he had to, because his budget was $500,000 for ``A Hard Day's Night.''

In his opening sequence, which shows the Beatles mobbed at a station as they try to board a train, Lester achieves an incredible energy level: We feel the hysteria of the fans and the excitement of the Beatles, intercut with the title song (the first time movie titles had done that), implying that the songs and the adulation were sides of the same coin. Other scenes borrow the same documentary look; a lot feels improvised, although only a few scenes actually were.

Lester did not invent the techniques used in ``A Hard Day's Night,'' but he brought them together into a grammar so persuasive that he influenced many other films. Today when we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of ``A Hard Day's Night.''

The film is so tightly cut, there's hardly a down moment, but even with so many riches, it's easy to pick the best scene: The concert footage as the Beatles sing ``She Loves You.'' This is one of the most sustained orgasmic sequences in the movies. As the Beatles perform, Lester shows them clearly having a lot of fun--grinning as they sing--and then intercuts them with quick shots of the audience, mostly girls, who scream without pause for the entire length of the song, cry, jump up and down, call out the names of their favorites, and create a frenzy so passionate that it still, after all these years, has the power to excite. (My favorite audience member is the tearful young blond, beside herself with ecstasy, tears running down her cheeks, crying out ``George!'')

The innocence of the Beatles and ``A Hard Day's Night'' was of course not to last. Ahead was the crushing pressure of being the most popular musical group of all time, and the dalliance with the mystic east, and the breakup, and the druggy fallout from the '60s, and the death of John Lennon. The Beatles would go through a long summer, a disillusioned fall, a tragic winter. But, oh, what a lovely springtime. And it's all in a movie.

John: John Lennon Paul: Paul McCartney George: George Harrison Ringo: Ringo Starr Grandfather: Wilfrid Brambell Norm: Norman Rossington TV Director: Victor Spinetti

Feline Mind Games

I just left my house. My first own real house. I loved it. Dunno why exactly. Perhaps it was the balcony. Possibly. It was a wonderful balcony...to sit and watch the cats, or read a book. Ah, those winter days I spent there! I think I was reading Moby Dick then. Yeah. I lay luxuriously in my armchair-part of a set of two that me and Rudder bought from a kabariwallah on the roadside. My feet were up on a cane stool. I had my phone beside me and the cigarettes. For once Psycho the cat was behaving himself, sleeping his fat ass in the sun. He was following a patch of sunlight like a drunk and yawning shamelessly. Me, I was lost in Ishmael's adventures and in the nature of the three mates of the Questod and watching the shadows lengthen.
The sun would on the wane but it'd be warm enough. Sometimes I'd stare at Psycho for so long that he'd open his eyes a crack and look at me. He lay purring in his sleep. Occasionally he would raise his head, squint at me sleepily, decide that I was too far away to touch him and sighing contentedly- I imagine- go back to sleep.
And so it would get to 4 and I'd feel like having some tea. Psycho would start up at the sound of the chair scraping the floor. I'd go in, make myself a large mug of tea- I like loads of tea- get the bourbon biscuits and go back to the chair. The greedy fucker would look on expectantly, sleep forgotten. 'Damn it,' he would think, 'he is having those uninteresting things again. These humans have no taste.' Then he'd get up, arch his back, stretch his legs- and retractable claws- yawn like a maniac and twitch his tail. Then he'd decide that the house needed investigating. So he'd creep past my chair- primed to run like crazy if I so much as sneezed- and go up to the balcony door. Look in, look at me, swish tail, look in again, give me a final look and stalk in. He'd go to the kitchen door and find it bolted. 'What cruelty,' he would think. A minute later I'd see him coming out, looking at me with a mixture of disgust and apprehension. Creep by me again. I'd make some sound just to see him jump up and hurry to his 'safe' porch on the wall. Back there, he would curl up again.
Me, I'd forget all about Captain Ahab and take a nap.

Down in the valley

Down in the valley a woodfire burns
Clouds scatter in the dawn
Give me some tea then, and breathe in the air
You can see the world from here
-Bibek Bhattacharya

War

Anthony and Cleopatra sail down the Nile
In Empire's vast shadow
Lamps are lit, libations prepared
A heifer is bled
Under a full moon
Caesar's camp glitters like a jewel
The divine Augustus cut off from pleasure
lusts in the sand
The Sphinx keeps its secret
The goatherd's hands tremble
-Bibek Bhattacharya