ceruleanedge's blog

Glimpses

The first notes of a familiar song
The moment you emerge from an underground tunnel
When the sunset glints in glass and catches your attention
When the night wind blows and plays with your hair
The waft of a nostalgic scent
The pages of a well worn book
Frayed edges of a beloved photograph
That old pen you treasure, even if it doesn't write anymore
The scent of freshness after rain
When you hear the tongue of your motherland, so far away

Top Tens of the Decade (the Noughties, Oughties, Naughties...)

I was challenged by someone to come up with top tens of the decade in these following categories, and decided I would record them here for posterity. Counting from January 2000 to December 2009.

Movies:

Lord of the Rings trilogy (counting as one)
Amelie
2046
The Fall
Monsoon Wedding
The Motorcycle Diaries
The Fountain
Munich
Paradise Now
Howl's Moving Castle

Books:

After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Harry Potter (from the 4th book onwards) by J.K.Rowling

Tracks:

Backdrifts - Radiohead
Psyche - Massive Attack
Try - Nelly Furtado
Flightless Bird, American Mouth - Iron & Wine
Narc - Interpol
The Past and Pending - The Shins
Hyperballad - Bjork
Volcano - Damien Rice
Auf Achse - Franz Ferdinand
U Plavu Zoru - Pink Martini

The Brothers Bloom

My brother writes cons like Russian poets write novels, with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism, and he cast me as the vulnerable anti-hero. That's why you want to kiss me.

Enter fall.

The time of brooding walks, Radiohead & Bjork, dry skin and cold toes. The signs of decay in the city are a bit eerie. But coats and boots are so reassuring and cozy. Let's see how winter arrives.

Remember this moment

A gentle, autumn-hued breeze blows. I'm listening to Spanish rhumbas and French chansons. The lights in the park are fluorescent globes, not garish. Cops stand in a corner, conferring. People walk by dressed as devils, angels, superheroes and New Yorkers. It's Halloween. Some are coolly disinterested, some exuberant. Kids, big and small, kick around a soccer ball, cheered on by an old man in a trench coat. The ball bounces and glides, disturbing leaves and rolling under benches. An airplane passes overhead. The old man shouts advice. The ball flies and dives into the empty fountain in the center. People check their phones. Some flick ash from cigarettes. A soberly dressed man walks by with bright pink butterfly wings worn over his gray coat.

A girl comes up to meet a boy. "Hi!" she gushes and he rises from the marble bench smoothly. One less waiting person. One more happy couple. The sky glows an orange-pink, reflecting the city's lights. I smell faded cigarette smoke and dry leaves. Another witch. Another pirate. Little girls in fluffy princess costumes. The boisterous soccer-playing kids disperse, leaving behind a cold, empty stone passage in the square. I feel outside this constant stream of life, and yet intrinsically connected. A few drops fall. Then a few more, enough to start blotting the ink on my paper. I get up to walk, and soon we are all ensconced in our umbrella-shaped spaces, no longer touching.

Delhi 6

This review is actually a few weeks old:

Thinking I'd watch a predictable, comfortable Hindi movie, I turned on Delhi 6.  Boy was I off.  Despite its minor flaws, it was a very unique movie with an amazing ensemble cast, great music and a strange, disturbing, yet enlightening plot.  Roshan (played by Abhishek) comes to India to accompany his sick grandmother (played by the graceful Waheeda Rahman).  In Delhi, he discovers the quirks and squabbles of the local people.  There's a weird urban legend doing the rounds about a trouble making black monkey, and as people blame their very human problems on the supernatural phenomenon, the city's inhabitants get superstitious and nervous.  One day they're life long friends, the next day bitter enemies.  Roshan becomes entangled in their lives, exposing their prejudices with his foreign eyes, and showing them their better selves. 

The problem I had was the plot, while unique, meandered and didn't tie together well.  The screenwriter couldn't decide whether he wanted to write a social commentary, a satire or a love story, and the end result is a precarious balance of all three.  The acting was top notch, even from the leads.  I've never seen Sonam Kapoor act before, but she was pretty decent.  The notable performances came from Divya Dutta (who I thought was Vidya Balan) as an untouchable, Vijay Raaz as a policeman and Atul Kulkarni who plays the village idiot.  Most of the stereotypes of India were pretty accurate, unfortunately, especially the unflattering ones.  It shows the stupid superstitions, the way we cling to religion whenever uncertainty comes along.  It shows the ugly explosions of communal violence that wrack the country from time to time.  Some of the parts of the movie were really powerful and I wish it had been tighter so the pacing was better.  Overall, it was shot beautifully, except for that one CGI song which is half Delhi, half NYC.  I would definitely recommend at least one watch because it has the capacity to generate discussion, despite its flaws.

cobblestones

The deep blue, lonely night sky, ghostly clouds.
I walk on wet cobblestones
and the wind protects my longing.
Droplets falling from the sky, carefree, shining.
Orange lights and sparkling puddles.
The cold is damp, but comforting as it enters my body.
I feel because I live and I live because I feel.
The stars and moon are far away,
watching over thousands of other ignorant travelers.
Infinity, so vast, so cool, like I want to swallow up the universe
and understand my existence in time and space.

Little Ashes

The light that blinds our eyes is not art.
Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.

-Lorca

I have always been fascinated by Salvador Dali, both his art and his persona.  Many credited him with being one of the first artists to create a public image of himself, having recognized the importance of ego.  He craved recognition of his genius and was meticulous in constructing an aura around his life and art.  If he were alive today, he would probably be splashed across all the tabloids (and willingly, at that).  His art was this playful, seductive, disturbing melding of reality and decidedly Freudian dreams.  In most of his paintings you can almost sense Dali winking at his own cleverness.

Swans reflecting elephants

Anyway, the point of that long intro was to lead into the movie Little Ashes.  The movie focuses on the intense and turbulent relationship between Dali and Frederico Garcia Lorca, Spain's great poet.  Dali remained mysterious about the extent of their relationship but scholars have long speculated that the two artists were lovers, or nearly so.  The film, directed by Paul Morrison, does a beautiful job of not only depicting their relationship but the social and political atmosphere of pre-civil war Spain.  Fascism was on the rise and Franco was in the offing, and the fresh, intellectual and artistic minds of Spain were troubled by the storm clouds of the late 1920s.

Dali & Lorca (in Little Ashes)

Within that atmosphere, Dali (played by Robert Pattinson) and Lorca (Javier Beltran) met for the first time.  Now, since this is a fictionalized version of the story and we have no way of knowing what really happened, I will only speak of the film version of the characters.  Pattinson takes Dali through an intriguing transformation from an awkward, effeminate and paranoid student, through stages of vulnerability, discovery and passionate honesty, to the eventual rise of his overconfident "genius" and artifice.  Lorca, the perfect foil to Dali, is sincere to a fault, idealistic, insecure and plagued with doubt.  The characters not only suffer for their art, shrugging off the scorn of society with bravado and grappling with their quest for meaning and authenticity, but they also suffer greatly with their sexuality.  As Dali and Lorca are drawn to each other, they exert a powerful pull on each other but Dali, for some unexplained reason can never fully give in to his emotions, intense and raw as they are.

Apparently, in real life, Dali said this in a conversation: 'He tried to screw me twice... I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn't homosexual, and I wasn't interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dali's asshole.'  It could be my reading too much into it, but it does sound slightly defensive, as if he's denying that he ever held any attraction to Lorca.  This is the Dali artifice speaking, the flamboyant, artistic genius, not Salvador, the melancholy dreamer.

Little Ashes

Getting back to the film, I was honestly expecting Pattinson to bugger it up somehow, but save for a few slips with his British accent, he carried off the emotional honesty of the role pretty well.  (I wonder how many of his Twilight fangirls have seen this movie, and if they have what they thought about it.)  One of the more brilliant scenes is when Dali returns from his trip to Paris and talks to Lorca in his room.  One moment, he is gesticulating and talking self-deprecatingly about how the critics adore him and the next he is devastated by this feeling of unfulfilled love for Lorca.  Lorca was the less entertaining part to play, but Beltran's characterization was strong and authentic.  One of the more notable side characters was that of Magdalena, Lorca's friend and would be lover.  Whether or not you think the film is based on true events, it is worth watching for the questions it raises about politics, art and sexuality.

...on the shore

Just finished Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.  

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

Like all of Murakami's books, finishing the book is like waking up from a long, blurry, beautiful and wrenching dream.  It was long, like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but actually more complete and planned.  With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I often felt like Murakami wrote what he had dreamt and didn't follow through with proper endings. 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel

Haruki Murakami

Of course, that is true realism in a novel, when it doesn't "finish", because rarely in life do incidents finish and rarely do they have some obvious significant meaning.  Kafka on the Shore, like his others, has some profoundly disturbing bits, but also some deeply enlightening bits.

One thing I realized with reading Kafka on the Shore is there is an archetypal female protagonist of Murakami's that I have come to hate.  She is the absent and damaged wife in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the chronically depressed girlfriend who sucks everyone into her private darkness in Norwegian Wood, and the tragic, oedipal, distant librarian in Kafka on the Shore.  I'm not sure what makes me so mad about these women, but they are weak-willed and yet they have the power to throw other's lives off kilter.  I'm sure they are written as characters to evoke sympathy, but in me, they evoke a powerful contempt because of their aloof, otherworldly allure, their submissiveness and their black-hole proportioned personal tragedies.  They never talk about their problems, convinced that no one can make things better.  They just become whirlpools of despair, sucking up everyone else in their path.  In Murakami's books, the bright, lively girls tend to lose out to the tragic memory of these archetypal melancholic women.

Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami

Anyway, despite that, there are always characters in Murakami's books I fall in love with.  However, they tend to become secondary characters.  In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it was the quiet Cinnamon, a gentlemanly mute who has reached the height of elegance and dignity.  In Kafka on the Shore it was Oshima, the equally elegant, yet eloquent and unflappable librarian's assistant.  I guess what I'm trying to convey with all this is Murakami's talent for writing such realistic, flesh-and-blood people into such fantastical, surrealistic novels.  The characters are all familiar, some endearing, some antagonizing, but the stories are so off-the-wall that you can't help but be riveted by their originality.

Just to give you a taste, here are some quotes from Kafka on the Shore:

"Narrow minds devoid of imagination.  Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems.  Those are the things that really frighten me.  What I absolutely fear and loathe.  Of course it's important to know what's right and what's wrong.  Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected.  As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.  But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive.  They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here."

"The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us.  Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people.  It wasn't a metaphor, even.  If you trace it back further, it wasn't even a correlation.  Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness.  The physical darkness outside and inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two.  They were directly linked."

an ugly carnival: tondeurs

I thrive on stories with ambiguous morals.  This story amidst the celebration of D-Day is an interesting counterpoint:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/05/women-victims-d-day-landings-second-world-war

The strange movie "Head in the Clouds" with Charlize Theron and Penelope Cruz sort of addressed this issue.  I was surprised by the reference to For Whom the Bell Tolls in the article.

Also reading an interesting book at the moment called "Blood Kin" told from the point of view of a deposed president's chef, barber and portraitist.  None of them have names so it's vague and universal but the details are visceral.  Will post quotes and thoughts later.

The barber part just made me think of Sweeney Todd which I saw about two weeks ago.  It's extremely bloody and yes it was morally ambiguous but it was not satisfactory for me.