All I Need......

I am off on another trip. Back to Dharamsala and Mcleodganj after two years. Even if it's for three days, I'll be back on the road with friends. Eager to leave and and eager to come back, with joy and the mountain air in me...to friends, dreams and writing...what else do I need?! 

Home 

i have traveled to lands

and made them home

with people

known and unknown

faces and spaces

have taken me in

when i knew not

what home meant

i yearn for that place

where i can be called 

your own, 

if home is where the heart is

let it be shown 

--Harman, 27-04-09

Of water and underwater.........

Off late, I have discovered a new Love for water, and things that go deeper....into the blue yonder...

I came across an interview with Werner Herzog on filming Encounters at the End of the World. You can read it by clicking HERE.

It takes me back to some brilliant deep-sea shots of a diver swimming in an alternate world of strange creatures that lurk and survive at the end of the world....at the deep end. They are spell-binding. It is a strange existence. Set to out of the world music by Henry Kaiser, you will be awed and maybe it just might reduce that inner fear of a shark-chase! (Are you reading this Sushmit?!)

Oh and this interview mentions a new film that Herzog is working on, which will be produced by David Lynch! Now that should screw my head right up!

Whether Herzog creates the obstacles in his way, or merely films them, the results are the same: there is ecstasy, awe, horror, a kind of bitterly compromised transcendence. "The distinction between fiction and documentary is the last thing I would spend a sleepless night over," he says. "It's all movies for me."

Beautiful Losers (2008)

Tagline: Make Something From Nothing

Summary: 

The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups, or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine, and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics. Over the years, the group has matured, and many have become more establishment-oriented; but no matter, their independent spirit has remained steadfast. The story of the Beautiful Losers will be a retrospective celebration of this spirit.

[Source: IMDB]

I read about this documentary in NYT last year. The subject really fascinates me. I'm unable to locate it online. 

"I don't get it....."

"Everything you can imagine is real." - Pablo Picasso

I studied a brief history of art in my Film Appreciation course at FTII two years ago. The first picture was a cave painting. As soon as man could find something to scribble with, he did it on the walls of the caves. He drew animals, human figures and pictorial stories of everyday life. As early in time as cavemen, we have wanted to talk about our situation in this puzzle that is life...to understand our surroundings, it's mysteries and our feelings. Art is but an expression of ourselves. As time has moved, mediums have changed....to photographs or the moving image. 

Art movements moved beyond replicating or recreating life around us, to other levels. Levels of impressionism, expressionism, surrealism and abstraction. According to Picasso, "All children are born artists. The problem is how to remain an artist after one grows up." When we were children, we saw the world through innocence, drawing the sun, moon, mountains and stars as we "thought" them. I still find children's doodles so much more artistic than a perfectly drawn and painted picture of still-life fruits. I enjoyed art class thoroughly in school. Colors, brushes, palletes, dirty cloth, mess.....I loved it and still do. But my art teacher was an inattentive ass. He never gave me high marks and I would just scrape through. In my kindergarten, I still remember how much I was scolded for coloring outside the line of a circle. Why is our education system so immune to children's needs of not just learning but exploring and enjoying art?

This brings me to the point of abstraction. When young, the system wants you to ape and think in line. Once you are out of school and college, and working, the system wants you to "think out of the box" or "laterally" to increase profits for the company. This is where abstraction comes in. To go beyond and think of life in terms of dreams and heightened imagination. "Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth."--Picasso again..... 

Why does everything have to make sense immediately? Take poetry. Not all poetry can be "understood" at one go. You can learn it's meaning, but understanding can happen anytime. I'll give you an example of myself. When I was studying literature in my graduation...I studied, P B Shelley's Ode to a Skylark. I loved the poem...it just spoke to me...and my Bengali Prof was very dreamy. I learned what it meant and gave my exams. But I understood it only some years ago. It's opening verse is, "Hail to thee Blithe spirit, Bird thou never wert....that from Heaven or near it, Pourest thy heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art." I haven't appreciated unpremeditated art until recently. Films/books/music...which flow effortlessly. A quote from the film The History Boys goes, "You don't always understand poetry? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it... whenever."

I look at all abstraction with the same thought. It may not appeal, may not make sense for now....but if it has entered my subconcious at some level, there will come a time when I will gloat in it. I think of it from the creators view. His/her imagination made him/her to create what I am looking at now. They wanted to say something in a way they wanted to....they created it for themselves......for all great art is made for oneself because it's one's own expression. 

David Lynch's Eraserhead and Dali-Bunuel's Andulasian Dog have to be the most abstract and warped films I have ever seen. I do not claim to understand them completely or "get" them. They are a piece of art for me.....to make my own meanings out of it. An artist always has an idea behind his art, but when it's thrown to the public, he opens it to interpretation. No doubt I'd enjoy knowing what was his idea behind it too. While watching Eraserhead, I was holding my head in my hands, and wondering what I was going through. But it left me thrilled! Exalted! I still think of those images and enter an alternate world. That for me, is the escape through art that I love.  

I think abstraction is a challenge. To take the image, the words, the music and store it in your head. It is someone's imagination.... and it might just make sense someday!

"I don't think about art when I'm painting. I try to think about life." - Jean-Michel Basquiat

Space. The final frontier........ 

I've been wanting to watch the Star Trek series for a long time. Some people have told me it's silly while others write great things about it online. But, I would never watch the show on TV when it played a decade or so ago. Though Persis Khamabata appealed in all her baldness, for some reason I was never hooked on to it. Despite me, being a science-fiction fan. 

Hmmm I'll wait for the new Star Trek film.....and hopefully get inculcated into it's cult followers.

Which brings to me the fact that I haven't read Stephen Hawking's - A brief History of Time either. Why didn't I? Sitting on my ass with no work, I'm questioning myself right now, but I don't know. 

"My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the Universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."

Stephen Hawking 

I think I am a sort of goal-less individual....with no major ambitions at my wise age of 26....of the kinds "I want to be a CEO by 35" or "I want to have children by 28" or "I have to finish my film by 25 because well, so did Orson Welles."  

My goals seem more like dreams...not given complete form, but there at the back of my mind....which I hope will take shape when the time is right. Like doing something....where I have a space of my own...a freedom to create and imagine and get lost. Or learning how to swim, so I can jump into the Ganga in Rishikesh with the white-water rafters...and maybe go Kayaking. Or looking up Eurail pass and youth hostel budgets in Europe while idling at work.

 
So, for now the Hawking quote is good. 

"For you, time is not a system but a flowing of the present." - An FB quiz result

"People who are so artistic, so intelligent -- you are interpreting what they are trying to express. You have taken a trip into this brain, you are a tourist in this fantastically interesting brain. People always say to me that I do such strange films, but it's not that I'm looking for something so different necessarily, it's simply that I meet a person who strikes me as intelligent and interesting and I want to take a trip into their brain."

Isabella Rossellini 

Some random off the cuff musings while sitting bored with a sprained arm muscle.....

Give....

Give me a thought

and I'll fly from there

take you along

To where our mind takes

Give me a drink

I'll mystify

and reflect your

soul in it

Give me you

I'll learn something new

of all that your are each day

and I'll give you myself 

--03-04-09, Harman....for a potential lover :P

Up

Never far

Never near

Roads 

and Destinations

Up and down

Left and right

the Centre

Never far 

---03-04-09, Harman....for Nitin V George

Grow Young with Me

By Justin Case

grow young with me
throw down our canes
and soak our brains
with endorphins
until our joy annoys the McCrap out of everyone around us
among their occasional shouts of
oh get a room, already

let's play like children
sing like drunks
and fill our trunks
with colored pebbles from the beach
and dance like two people with centipedes in their shorts
amid the occasional glances of
people who wish they had some, too

[Source: verybadpoetry]

The Importance of Being Idle

I don't mind
As long as there's a bed beneath the stars that shine
I'll be fine, if you give me a minute, a man's got a limit
I can't get a life if my heart's not in it

--Oasis

Everybody seems to think I'm lazy
I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find there's no need (there's no need)

Please, don't spoil my day, I'm miles away
And after all I'm only sleeping

Keeping an eye on the world going by my window
Taking my time

Lying there and staring at the ceiling
Waiting for a sleepy feeling...

Please, don't spoil my day, I'm miles away
And after all I'm only sleeping

-- The Beatles

[Photo Credit: Sushmit Ghosh]

You're right, this blog IS getting too heavy. 

I think I need to step down the evolution ladder and become a single-celled organism. An Amoeba. That's done then. 

I also think that morning's are a great time for these wonderous thoughts to emerge...my ancestors believed that the morning was a sacred time. It's true. 

I am moping around work in my Osho chappals, my hands in my back pocket, checking out my reflection on transparent doors, wondering how fat I am. I don't want to think how fat I am or will be someday. Why are we multiple-celled organisms? 

Sloppy amoebas have it good. They can pro-create on their own too without intercourse. Why would they do that though.... 

I think I want to be an animal then. 

No, don't wana end up on a plate with my mouth open. Single-cells are just fine, with their one nucleus, mitochondria and jazz. A refreshing new habitat. 

I'm just a little person

What is it about Charlie Kaufman, that throws you into the delight of complication?
What a feeling. I'll call this the Kaufman emotion - one that I feel after watching anything written by him, or as right now in the film Synechdoche, New York ---his first directorial venture.

Oh Charlie, you speak to my soul...in the same convoluted manner that we all speak to our own souls and those of others around us. Because this is your story....and also ours. Exactly how Cayden in Synechdoche says, "There are millions of people in the world. And none of those people are as an extra, they're all leads in their own stories."

In this film, he has so successfully given some words, characters and visuals to the ever difficult questions of life and death. Questions we ask ourselves at so many points of life. When the character of Cayden (fashioned after Kaufman himself?) is not sure of what he is trying to achieve through the concept of his next play, his actress (played by Michelle Williams) says, "It's good that you don't know...when you know that you don't know, it is the first step to knowing."

The beautifully and immaculately constructed screenplay, is nothing but the circle of life that gives birth to its real, fictional and on-stage characters, lives and dies like a being and a world unto its own.

"The end is written into the beginning".....a line uttered by Cayden's love-interest........says it all for me. For it is isn't it in any written, spoken story just like life? A story that goes on and on, and never sees an end till death. Yet, it still goes on.
And as always, Kaufman blows you away with that one long monologue from one of his characters:

"As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time."

Some of the songs have been written by Kaufman himself......and my favourite goes, "Somewhere maybe someday maybe somewhere far away............."

I cannot express myself anymore. Excuse me, as Cayden says, "It's Complicated."

Handmade Productions Present.........

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Mis-en-scene: Harmanpreet Kaur :)

Meditative Rose by Dali

"I don't do drugs. I am drugs."

Salvador Dali

Old and Gold.........some pictures from Delhi -6

[Photo Credit: Harmanpreet Kaur]

Time Warped 

Whenever I visit a historical monument I'm struck by the fact that I am existing in two time periods. The present and the past. I feel I'm passing through pillars of infinite stories entrenched in their bricks, and floating in the space between them. What had passed through these, centuries ago? Star-crossed lovers or players of political intrigue? 

Aren't we encasing time all the time? In our architecture, our dwellings, our walls, and forms of art and businesses. We will come and go, but these will remain, and be at the mercy of those who come later.  

We are time-travelling all the time. There is a time-machine. Inside us. If we can go back in time through our memories, can we do that physically too someday? And can embedded clairvoyance be perfected to know the future? This stuff of Science-fiction is definitely plausible. 

But do we want to do that? Is the mystery of the order.....best left mysterious? 

Meanwhile, I'm still happy to revisit old forts, and spin yarns of the past and the future in an alternate reality.  

All this reminds me of a movie - that I've never been able to watch in it's entirety - Kate & Leopold (2001). Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman. The tagline says:

 

"If they lived in the same century they'd be perfect for each other." 

I've never guaged this one - a romantic science fiction sort, where two people meet across time periods. No, I'm not anti-love or anti-imagination.......and maybe I'm just being my cynical self.....but I don't get it! Maybe I'll re-visit it someday to get over my prejudices, because I genuinely like this quote from the film:

"Time. Time, it has been proposed, is the fourth dimension. And yet, for mortal man, time has no dimension at all. We are like horses with blinders, seeing only what lies before us. Forever guessing the future and fabricating the past." 

Idiot-ing the Box

"You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot."

Those are the words of the character James Reston Jr from Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon...and one of the many moments in this engrossing film, that made me really feel the interlacing of politics, media and power.

When I saw All the President's Men, it spoke to me not just a story of a momentous turning in the history of American politics, but it made me feel the power of print journalism. Frost/Nixon however, reveals the inherent dichotomy of television journalism for me. An anchor who is more of a performer, backed by serious researchers buying his way into an interview of a lifetime.....botching it, due to the nature of his subject, trying to save it....and only succeeding because of the nature of his subject.

It's a challenge to simplify complex issues in television journalism. And a bigger challenge not to oversimplify complexity, and remove it altogether. Love it or hate it - the tele won't go even if Werner Herzog says....."Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossing hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials."

Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skywards.

Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.

At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.

Out of my heart a bird flew skywards. And it waxed larger as it flew. Yet it left not my heart.

Kahlil Gibran

Through my lens, looking at you

I love the feeling of strangers smiling into my camera. Travel Portraiture fascinates and haunts me. I wish I could capture every face I saw. Every face I see. Some pass by so quickly and stay in my mind forever. Some smile, while others stare through.

I enjoy imagining what it'd be like for that cute American or Spaniard to spot himself in one of my photographs online on sharing websites like flickr.com. Would I fill him/her with the same joy as they filled me with? Not just when my shutter clicked, but endlessly as I look at them now and then. These collection of faces are not just pictures of people frozen in time. They are experiences. A Treasure trove of real people, preserved in photo chemicals. 

That they are strangers, makes them more attractive and mysterious. I dream about their back-stories and write these set of words........for you and for them.

Look at Me

As I look at You

My Lens is your Mirror,

And my Window

To your Soul

Say what you feel

With your Face

And I'll preserve You

Spacial Void

It began from a void

An Emptiness 

Hollow and bare

But a million particles

Burst open

Life, small and big

Yet alone

In a mass of humanity

In our loneliness

We must bear

Exude and Consume

Ourselves

Tiny specks of Air

Random atoms

and Molecules

Zipping across lanscapes

Searching, uniting, breaking

Living and dying

In this spacial void

-- Harman, 03-03-09