Boardwalk Empire: A paean

I just finished watching the second season of Boardwalk Empire, which means that the rest of my holidays are going to feel strangely, sadly empty and devoid of television. I don’t watch many TV shows (which makes me an inexperienced commentator, I guess), and there is absolutely no question of returning to Gossip Girl which, though always enjoyably and gloriously stupid, has surpassed even itself in recent seasons (or so Wiki-ing the synopsis indicates).

Though Boardwalk Empire has been (wrongly, unfairly!) likened to a “beautifully tailored empty suit” by a few dissenting voices, I think it’s gorgeous. Beautiful cinematography (the colours – sets and costumes – are stunning!), lovely atmospheric soundtrack, historical accuracy with an almost pathological attention to minute historical details… what ain’t to love? The Prohibition era was one of the most interesting periods of American history, flung into the melting-pot of burgeoning modernity and whatnot. (I’m reading about secularization right now, and while I don’t understand much… the writer talks about how some theories of secularization suggest that with secularization comes the privatization and marginalisation of religion, especially in the face of scientific post?/modernity – and yet the Prohibition is very, very much a manifestation of religion actually entering, affecting, transforming the public and allegedly totally ‘secular’ sphere in a radical way. As indeed are things like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, I guess…)

I started watching Boardwalk Empire while writing my essay on 1920s/30s Parisian film and literature, and while European avant-garde BE’s Atlantic City ain’t, the general cultural shifts brought on by modernity seem by and large the same – particularly in terms of gender relations. Of course BE depicts the rabid misogyny that was so much a structural aspect of its era, but I find it fascinating how it also shows the sheer dynamism of different types of women, how they each react to their restricted (or not) circumstances and carve out (or not) an autonomy for themselves within their domestic spaces etc. Some women fail miserably at escaping the domestic space even as they challenge the heterosexual structuring of that space (Jimmy’s wife); some are caught between church and illegal brewery (as exciting a binary as any), running from religion and unable to escape. Etc etc. It’s a historical snapshot that seems aware of the issues it inevitably raises with that historicity, but it takes (some) time and trouble to explore them. Some of the possible things one could read into it – questions and doubts about faith, whether faith is a positive influence or not – are (I feel) still relevant and interesting things to think about. (Is Nucky’s absolute lack of it, in any religious or non-religious sense, meant to suggest that faithlessness is sociopathic? Does religious faith do some basic paradigmatic thing right, if not in any actual doctrinal sense – where it seems to be inversely evil, almost, à la van Alden.)

But these are only retrospective thoughts; readings and projections, not – I think – any grand intentional social/theological critique or debate on the behalf of the writers and directors. Although I have noticed a lot of Scorsese films play on the same themes of faith/no faith, good/evil (and the sheer difficulty, if not downright impossibility, of this binary); maybe he set the tone for the series with his pilot episode? The best thing about Boardwalk Empire really is the fact that it’s a cracking story – one which sometimes makes Nucky-like sociopaths out of us all in our ability to approve of, if not enjoy, peoples’ heads being blown off with Tommy guns – which presents an indelible feast for the eyes. Atmosphere is everything; one should never underestimate how many nostalgic fantasies people can harbour – television, films and books are all such people can turn to. I’m certainly – maybe unfortunately, because Midnight in Paris was really quite bad – of the Scorsese/Woody Allen school of living in the past a little bit.

I am dreaming of….

Title-page of Henri Matisse’s Jazz. 

I found this in the library one day when I was expressly doing something else. But because I was (as always) dreaming of & in jazz, I decided to flip through this book on the shelves and because it was Matisse, and breathtaking, I took photographs too.

Jazz is, according to this essay/article on it (by Greg Kucera), the product of insomnia, and artificial lights; the child of a music-hall meets circus aesthetic. I think that’s apt enough: jazz is a nighttime madness, dogged by the stars and yellow lightbulbs. Colours that pop in one’s eyes because they’re caught in the headlights.

All pictures the product of Instagram, libraries and my procrastinating skills.

And just to finish this little word/photo vomit ramble up – if you didn’t believe that jazz belongs in the province of twilight/dark skies/faces lit up by cigarette ends, I give you – Glenn Miller & His Orchestra: Song of the Volga Boatmen.

books & musicks

Reality trying to mirror fiction (or front book-covers, anyways) as closely as possible.

A few days ago (though it feels like light years and lifetimes) I was sat in the college library – which smelled of dead rat, one (or some) of which was presumably beneath the floorboards… – and frantically hashing out an essay on Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and ‘cinematic bodies’. Don’t ask me what that latter is, because I just don’t know!

But feelings of exaltation, desperation, pessimism and general agony all aside, I came across a couple of songs which really should go onto any soundtrack built to accompany the reading of Jean Rhys’s early fiction – all novels or short stories about sad and desperate women, seeking solace in drink & loving Paris but desperate to look right (think size 0 culture is bad? Imagine living in cosmetics heyday…)

Compliments of my iTunes on shuffle, I give you two particularly relevant songs (or two nice atmospheric songs with relevant lines which really make sense and seem poignant and heartrending/lifechanging after 12 hours in the library aka ‘ratland’):

1. Dance Anthem of the 80s – Regina Spektor. Note particular aptness of those climactic lines towards the end: “I went walking through the city, like a drunk but not, with my slip / showin’ a little, like a drunk but not, and I am / one of your people, but the cars don’t stop…”

2. Chelsea Hotel no.2 – Leonard Cohen. Just because it’s sad and about hotels, and all of Rhys’s heroines live out their sad lives in dingy little hotel rooms (which almost, in the final analysis, seem kinder than the world outside!). This could be the bathetic end to one of those novels.

 

I wish I had the patience to trawl through the worrrl’ wide web and/or my iTunes (which is quite big, insolent though it is to use ‘and/or’) and find more songs so I could build a decent ‘OST’ to the (cinematic ho ho!) reading experience that is reading Rhys. Unfortunately I don’t.

But I will leave everyone with these beautiful lines from Barnes’s Nightwood anyhows; that book confused me a whole lot, but moments like this one pop out at you and make you sad and exalted and astounded all at once.

“as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained…”  (Nightwood)

Hello again!

Back in The UK with them lovely sunsets again (and with Instagram, to boot!).

I don’t really have time to read the news here, since there is just (already) too much work and too many books to read. Too many long words and complicated theories of time and whatnot that I can’t get my head around…

So I have decided that I will update this blog in such a way as to incorporate my work….with book reviews and literary rants! If all my reading and work goes well, I will, hopefully, finish Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ tomorrow and Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ by next Tuesday.

(Ha. Yeah, I know. Ulysses in a week. Tried it before. It didn’t work. One only can hope.) Well, at least y’all can follow me on this odyssey (hohoho) and see how I do!

Two more days until…

View from inside college.

View from window

Birds.

….I’m back in Oxford! One doesn’t realise how much one loves places or cities until one has to go away, or come back. I’m so glad I have another year there, even though it’ll pass probably as fast as – if not faster than – the past three years have. Wonder if anyone else feels suddenly too old, hurtled to a point they never intended to reach by life itself (and more such unexpected stops along the way). I sometimes do.

But whatever. OXFORD. SOON. A place I love filled with people I love. Can’t wait to be back!

 

 

On recluses & hermits.

On the 30th of August, Beirut’s latest album, The Rip-Tide, was released. Beirut hadn’t taken an unusually long break between albums or anything: Beirut’s previous EP had been released in 2009, but it wasn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea (it was markedly different from his previous Balkan/French chanson sounds – it was recorded with a 19-piece Mexican funeral band!).

Image sources from http://fuckyeahzachcondon.tumblr.com/ (although it doesn't belong to them either).

But nonetheless, this new album still had quite some hype surrounding it, and it doesn’t disappoint. There are elements of some of his previous sounds in its different tracks – for example, redolences of A Flying Club Cup in ‘Port of Call’ – to entirely new sounds, like his slightly-Sufjan Stevensy sound (unusual for Beirut, who’s better known for his musico-cultural experimentation) in ‘Santa Fe’. But this is not going to be a track-by-track analysis of Beirut’s music, or the minute fluctuations in his general sound: artists experiment, and we are grateful for that. If Beirut had cut 3 albums & 5 EPs all with the same type of sound and theme running through them, it would have made this world a little less interesting. Sometimes you miss, sometimes you hit – this new album is very definitely the latter.

What really interests me are the conditions under which this album has been produced, and what it suggests about some of the best contemporary American bands making music today. An article/interview in The Guardian two days ago drew comparisons between the way in which Zach Condon sealed himself off to write this album, just as Justin Vernon (frontman for Bon Iver, who released their own loooong-awaited second album just a few months ago) did for his first album (For Emma, Forever Ago). The Guardian writes:

When Condon began working on the new record, he moved for six months during the winter to a log cabin in upstate New York. “Chopping wood, cooking duck…” he laughs. “I got really lonely.” It was an idea stolen almost wholesale from Justin Vernon, who famously wrote the first Bon Iver album in similar conditions. (“We joked about it. I said: ‘Sorry, man, I ripped you off.’”) But it allowed him to continue to find a new outlet for his imagination and escapist tendencies, adopting the habits and persona of an American backwaters recluse even while writing a record about home.

It got me thinking a lot about the sentiments that underlie a lot of this music coming out of America. Though they aren’t mentioned in The Guardian article (probably because they didn’t shut themselves up in a log cabin to write their music), Fleet Foxes are another band which channel that kind of log-cabin, lonely-mountaintop sound. There seems to be a move away from the sounds & beats that characterize a fast-moving urbanity (neon lights and all that) to sounds that characterize lonely night drives through sparse desert lands, or to guitars strummed softly and slowly beside a campfire. This is music made to echo against night-skies and to reverberate through empty unobstructed land (nature).

धर्म – Dharma

I spent one amazing – hellish, turbulent, but beautiful – summer in India, dealing with power cuts every other hour,  so with no television, no Internet, nothing – nothing except for one Fleet Foxes album & Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. It was a hugely solipsistic experience – I had to be entirely immersed in something besides my own puny life, and so I immersed myself in American backwater-beauty: melodies, words, poetry. Fleet Foxes’ album (in case anybody’s wondering, their debut album – Fleet Foxes) and Kerouac’s novel seemed to fit together perfectly, as if the one had been written for the other. Fleet Foxes’ layers of sparse, sometimes a capella, harmonies echo the mountaintop meditations and winter-forest hymns of Kerouac; there seemed to be some kind of necessary relationship between songs about ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’ and Kerouac’s own Desolation Peaks.

(A man called Vincent Moon in Paris did these amazing Take-Away Shows, all of which he posted up on a website called La Blogothéque. The whole idea behind these ‘take-away shows’ is that artists play their songs in exotic locations, usually with sparse instrumentation & in a public space (lots of them are played or sung on the move through streets and whatnot). Most of them are, like this one, taken in Paris; all of them have beautiful colouring. Fleet Foxes performing ‘Sun Giant’ & ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’, the latter in the Grand Palais.)

In the novel, Kerouac ends up working alone in a log cabin, on ‘Desolation Peak’; the novel takes a new turn in its probe for understanding of the consciousness. To me, the Kerouac of then doesn’t seem too different from the Zach Condons & Justin Vernons of now. There seems to be this theme of straining to get away from the city, from the pressures of society and modernity (then & now), that springs up in American culture every now and then. Pangs of American asceticism.

To be in some river-bottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call ‘do-nothing’. I didn’t want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy’s ideas about society (I figured it would be better to just avoid it altogether, walk around it) or with any of Alvah’s ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.

The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac

ねじまきどりクロニクル (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

Two nights ago, sometime close to 3am, I finally finished Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’. It has been a while since I found a book which could make me stay up against the odds of an alarm clock set to 7:30am, but Murakami’s masterpiece has indeed succeeded. For that I owe him a big, big ‘thank you’: I was wondering if the consequences of an English degree were that you couldn’t just relax with a book any longer; if work and pleasure were conflated to the point of no return. I have discovered that to be untrue!

One of the most exciting features of this book, besides the hugely engrossing narrative (which will always be the primary reason any Harukami book sucks one in so completely, and makes one read like a demon into the dawn), is its inexplicability. I know people like me are far and few between, but… in the hope of finding some kindred spirits, here goes: I actively hunt for spoilers and plot summaries, desperate to know what happens before I even reach the middle of the book sometimes (Wikipedia has been a great friend of mine in this respect). So naturally, with such a thriller as ねじまきどりクロニクル, I did my level best to find a coherent and all-encapsulating plot summary on the net. And for the very first time in my life, I failed to. Almost every review site (inc. Wikipedia & Goodreads.com) told me the same thing: “This book is terribly difficult to write about. I can’t even begin to try and explain what happens in it; I’m not entirely sure myself.”

With that in mind, I guess you’ll forgive me for not going lengthily into the plot details of this book! The basic story is as follows: Toru Okada lives comfortably with his wife, Kumiko. But one day their cat goes missing, and from thereon, Toru Okada’s whole life begins unravelling. ‘Unravelling’ is just another word, in this instance, for the narrative line of (roughly) breaking down; meeting interesting new people; having bizarre adventures; and finally, finding oneself again (sort of). The book is difficult to encapsulate. It spans many different episodes (it is structured as an episodic ‘chronicle’), and many different places (from Tokyo to the historical Manchuria during Japanese occupation; from bars in Sapporo to the Mongolian hinterlands). Characters float (an apt word to describe them, I feel, given that so many of them are surreal mystics, harbingers of unexplained powers) in and out of these pages, weaving their way around the Toru Okada’s life and the reader’s confusion.

Curling up to read!

“Confusion” often has negative meanings, but I hasten to add that – yes, while Murakami’s book is confusing, while many things are left unexplained, I think this is the great beauty (and perhaps one of the key meanings) behind it. Life is inexplicable. Life is weird. Like Toru, we’re just going to have to float through it and hope we don’t run into any ominous water-related prophecies. Equally, life is alienating: one of the most shocking and stark things about this story is the way it shows the breakdown of domestic ‘normality’. It really forces the reader (or at least, readers like myself) to confront how much value they place on a standardized, stereotypical view of relationships and family. And how often those values or that sense of security can be overturned, even without the artistic license of surrealist tropes.

This sort of urban-tragedy mysticalism isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is mine, and so I absolutely loved this book. It doesn’t bother me that things are left unexplained (even though it usually does – like in Lost, for example). The brilliant thing about Murakami’s writing is that it’s so intriguing that, after a while, you begin to forget that you ever wanted ‘answers’, and enjoy the story for what it is – an endless stream of occasionally-answered questions. And for an answer-orientated culture like ours, perhaps this is exactly what is needed – an embracing of uncertainty, a realisation that uncertainty can also be beautiful, that beauty isn’t the domain of answers alone.

‘Learned helplessness’

I think the West missed a trick, because it adopted — certainly in Africa and many of the poor emerging economies — an attitude of “do what we say and not what we do.” The whole idea of incentives, which has been the backbone of the success in Western economies, is not something the West transplanted into places like Africa. The approach to economic development in Africa has been focused on aid; it’s been focused on what someone called “learned helplessness.”

From article, ‘The Seesaw of Power‘ (Dambisa Moyo in the NYT. May I add – she is so beautiful!)

Fascinating.

I have always been a believer in that pithy statement on the subject (whose statement, I don’t know!) – “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Aid is like a dumping a boatload of fishes in the man’s village. Necessary of course, at times of pandemic and natural disaster – but I don’t feel it is really viable in the long term. Certainly in places like India, aid is horribly misused, and very little (if any) of it actually trickles down to the impoverished masses who need it.

I wonder if it makes more sense for people to invest directly in infrastructural development &/or institutions, instead of relying on governments to do it or doling out lots of money without really looking at what ends it is used for, to whom and where it goes.

My parents (and wider family generally) have an interesting way of dealing with the whole business of charity, one that I admire significantly (not only because it appears to make vast amounts of sense, but also because it has shown results).

That poverty and suffering will not be eradicated through a momentary dumping of money somewhere-or-other is evident. India, and various parts of Asia generally, are highly unequal societies: in Malaysia (for example) people have “maids”, who live sometimes a very cloistered life, and India anyone from the middle-middle to upper-middle class probably has maids, drivers, cooks & cleaners. Vast amounts of serving-people, and a stark domestically-concentrated juxtaposition between the have and have-nots. The terms in which the latter are viewed by the former are often disturbing and sometimes, disgusting – the paradigms of possession, class superiority, etc. all play into it.

But this is an issue stemming from some wider social malaise – the means of alleviating it lie not in said individual family’s hands, but really, the country’s hands generally. My parents, however, seem to have found a really inspiring and effective way of doing their bit – they pay for the education of their workers’ children. My mother put it this way; “we can’t really change the first generation, but what we can do is ensure that future generations have the skills & abilities to live a better life, & bring up their children with better opportunities.” And of course look after their parents in their old-age, as is demanded by many of Asia’s cultures.

The stories of laundrymen’s sons in boardrooms and the cook’s daughters in software companies at the end of the day really is very inspiring. Education has the potential to change the future of generations to come; material gifts would have helped perhaps one or two people, if anybody at all.

Image via Wikipedia

On laurels & schools, & some personal gripes.

“And while preps and toffs are at least mildly comic elsewhere, in India privilege seems wholly admirable. Ascribed status is still valued as much as, if not more than, achieved status.”

From article, ‘Schooled in elitism’.

The article speaks about educational snobbery in India primarily, but is entirely relevant to a large portion of the world I think. I think it’s very interesting for people to point such underlying, perhaps even unnoticed (yet very much present) sentiments & prejudices. Not least because we live in a time when education is seemingly a premium product, one that demands vast amounts of money from those who want it, which (allegedly) adds status, skill, employability, et cetera. Is this really true? I think it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: people think education does all that, and so society works and ploughs on with that premise-as-axiom.

But another key point is made in the quote above. It is a situation of ‘ascribed status’, not necessarily ‘achieved status’. This distinction is interesting on many levels; not just in relation to education, but also in relation to Indian pride-in-family, pride-in-tradition, etc.

My parents are especially loquacious on the topic of the eminence of my (very ancient) forefathers, and it really bothers me how willing some people are to [a] rest on somebody else’s laurels; when it’s bad enough to rest on one’s own!  AND YET (in other respects) how unwilling they are to  [b] question whether said great-forefather’s attitudes and beliefs are really viable in our own time. My personal belief is (and so strong is it, I am willing even to rephrase that opener: “I know“) that they absolutely are not.

A love-letter to cities (in pictures)

This post will focus mostly on my favourite photographs (& memories, because the two are by and large synonymous in contexts like these) of two particular cities: Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. A love-letter to South-East Asian metropolises; to the shapes of the lines that demarcate sky-space and city-space in this particular region of the world.

μητρόπολις - mētrópolis

Orig. Ancient Greek: ‘mother city’

OED on contemporary usage: ‘a very large & busy city’

So without further ado. (On this note – I always hear people say ‘without further adieu‘ with a very pointed and falsely French stress on that last word. Am I entirely, entirely wrong in thinking ‘ado’ makes more sense? Have I been getting it wrong my whole life? Maybe it’s time for a quick grammar-induced panic-attack Google search…)

What I love most about cities are their lights: the colours they emanate, and the sheer state of life & being it signifies. So lights are for rooms, homes, cities: all of those spaces are lived in, loved in and loved by. The above is Kuala Lumpur, and the bottom is Singapore.

I love this picture for the stories it tells: people are hugging, posing, staring, photographing, holding hands, etc. - all in the glow of the omnipresent city. It watches like a mother; not far away from its root definition - μήτηρ (mḗtēr, “mother”). I guess I'm having a ''plump Buck Mulligan" moment - "she is our great sweet mother". This is a view of Singapore's gorgeous skyline, from the Esplanade area. It's beautiful because people really do live and love in the glow (I won't say shadow) of the city behind.

Dear Malaysian skyline. I see it every night before bed, and every morning when I wake up (though not in such glorious close-up... this was taken from Sky Bar, which has alcohol & the most amazing view - double win!).

Took this just last night, in the pouring rain, in the center of town. Life is lonely for an umbrella in the big city. Capitalism reminds me that life has some sort of sense of constancy: it isn't all tragedy & soul. Some of it is just plain soulless and that's beautiful. It's wonderful.

(This is how I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s too: in a world of goodbyes and love stories, Holly Golightly finds comfort in the clinically mass-produced (and yet exclusive, of course); in shop windows and their perfectly pre-arranged world. Nothing is out of line. Everything is designed to attract. There is simply no room for tragedy, soul-searching, hello and goodbye, love or loss on those window-display shelves, I’m sure. And so Holly goes-lightly. I always find pretty shops and big glass windows with lots of expensive, over-valued things extremely comforting. Almost the most comforting thing in the whole world. Isn’t that slightly disgusting?)

Dawn.