Wednesday, July 01, 2009

In Which He Does a Yoko Ono

It is said that Yoko Ono once stood up on stage and shouted long and hard (perhaps with the accompaniment of some background music for name's sake) that fateful, eternal query "Why?", swooning and shaking and stressing first the "Ai", then the "Wh...", then some mixture of the two and finally following it up with some good old fashioned mindless screaming into the microphone. Knowledgeable critics holding seriously hardcore degrees in various genres/sub-genres of liberal arts from awesomely badass ivy league universities nodded and smiled in smug appreciation of the avant garde musical performance.

"A cry of a wounded soul...a manifestation of the existential dread. The eternal Why", they said.

This is where Nanga Fakir does a Yoko Ono reprise.

Don't say you weren't warned before.

...

Nanga Fakir: "Vaaaaaaaaieeeeeeee?"

<*picks up his phony spectacles and gives a meaningful look*>

<*a couple of lit theorists write books about the hermeneutics/semiotic implications of this symbolic gesture by Nanga Fakir; another one about the 'meaningful look' is adapted into a film which unexpectedly headlines the Chchapra Film Festival and becomes a cult favorite*>

...

[Interesting little footnote here (I so see why David Foster Wallace found endnotes and footnotes so irresistible - even though they seem to piss everyone off): Little did Yoko know that this idea of an existential howl would be (unbeknownst to them) quite independently, lifted off by the duo SatyaVrat and Nanga Fakir in the first block hostel in that famous song which was to be the first Brahmasmi chart topper - "जीवन बर्बाद हो गया" (Life is destroyed). I doubt if the village dwelling runts had any conception of avant garde, but the idea was the same. The same line would've been put on an infinite loop and the self proclaimed charismatic swooner SatyaVrat would howl and blast through the pithy line (that by the way, NF claimed was a perfect description of the human condition) over and over again interjecting it with lyrical comments, improvised aalaaps and some (yes...) good old fashioned screaming. Nanga Fakir had also planned to direct an avant garde music video which was to feature bare asses and hairy testicles of mountain goats juxtaposed with footages of Gandhi, Amitabh Bachchan, David Gilmour and Chuck Norris. He hoped that the lit dons would pick up various sufficiently vague highbrow/ironic-lowbrow references peppered throughout the video to make it a brilliant contribution to the cinematic literature on the human condition right next to the works of Stan Brakhage and Tarkovsky and ensure a local fan base for the band. The avant garde experiment went too far however and the band never recorded the song or shot the video - an even more poignant summarization of the human condition according to some (cf. "Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines").].

6 comments:

Bejin Hakumei said...

Hang on (in quiet desperation).

Arvind Krishna said...

To add to the many lit references in an attempt to look pseud, your attempt to use footnotes which are comparable to(if not longer than) your actual text( in content, if not length (unless, of course, there is a correlation between the two in which case this digression will be redundant(or is tautology the word I am looking for?) ) ), reminds me of the deliberate delineation of foreground/background in M.C. Escher's paintings that was pointed out in Douglas Hofstadter's book.

Anyway, I lost track of the point I was trying to make.

ankurpandey said...

It seems to me that society has come to accept whys, only that it requires it to arise after whats and hows. Not to deny that these academic whys shamelessly eclipse any essence of primordial nature in what-should-have-been-whys, I much prefer them over enterprenurial whys that our cultural icons shout out loud so very often.

PS- Go Krrish(na)

Nanga Fakir said...

@AK: I think the point you were trying to make is: "Enough with this David Foster Wallace infatuation. Take the fucking red pill already!"

Or am I wrong?

@SatyaVrat: I am tempted to say "You lost me", but somehow, I know what you end up saying. And THAT scares me!

Arvind Krishna said...

It wasn't meant to be that harsh. This post was very funny. Please continue with your DFW obsession. Its better than your Chuck Pahalniuk obsession because it makes for longer blog posts, which is a good thing.

Nanga Fakir said...

<*is all smiles and happiness inside*>