Arriving Somewhere

And I may, just waste away
From doing nothing;
But you're a martyr,
To even less
To even less
To even less.

Dot Three

This too, shall pass.

Recent Acquisitions

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon and Crytonomicon and Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Busy days ahead.

Otaku-san : Part 3

A spoiler free description of some of the animes Nanga Fakir's been watching over the past two months or so follows.

...

Planetes : Planetes is about humanity in the year 2075. Efforts to colonize space are in its infancy and barring a station at Moon, much of the other heavenly bodies have not yet been molested. (Mankind plans to correct this mistake soon though.)

Planetes is also about space janitors. Waste management in space has become a big problem and previous missions' debris orbit the earth at various distances and are potential hazards for spaceships/stations/satellites orbiting/entering/leaving the earth. A collision will cause not only loss of property/human life but will also create more debris which if not cleared will obstruct even more space creating even more problems for future missions.

Enter the Debris Section - Technora Corporation's department responsible for clearing space junk and making the near-earth orbit a safe place for astronauts and space missions, the creation of which section was deemed necessary after an encounter with flying trash destroyed a passenger spaceship. The 26 episode anime concerns itself with the greenhorn Ai Tanabe who joins the ranks of debris-cleaners; her encounters with various members of the crew and the fate of her eventual love interest Hachimaki. (The second-in-command officer is an Indian called 'Arvind Ravi' - a very goofy, incompetent officer with hordes of children (seven actually) back home in India.)

The reason NF opines that this anime qualifies as a genuine masterpiece is the astonishingly high degree of realism, an attention to scientific detail generally not heard of, the socio-political ramifications of humans trying to colonize space (with the inevitable clash over the spoils of the aforementioned endeavors - the developed countries grabbing the lion's share and feeding the space-colonization machine while the developing/underdeveloped ones still mired in poverty and civil wars and therefore opposed to such ambitious ventures and demanding a more fair and equitable distribution of this new source of wealth - sometimes violently/resorting to terror tactics/sabotage); the effect such an endeavor in space must have on humans' psychology and their relationships and the long, arduous, lonely, claustrophobic space missions' fallouts on the human psyche and the questions it raises about what human communication/connection/love etc. is all about.

Basically an excellent, excellent watch. The only gripe NF had about the entire series was the sophomoric, mostly contrived humor that actually wasn't necessary and an ending that the feminists will not be really crazy about. But this very, very minor glitch shouldn't dissuade you from watching an absolutely awesome, wonderful series.

Neon Genesis Evangelion : To say that you're into anime and haven't heard of Neon... is saying that you're into Indian arthouse cinema and don't know what Ardhsatya is; or that you're into music and don't know what Pink Floyd is; or that you're into literature and don't know what Infinite Jest is. Basically we're talking of path breaking, forever-changing-the-course-of-their-field-after-they-come-along kind of works that in turn, have a major, polarizing effect on the audience.

Ever since its 1995 debut, the multiple prize winning series has been dissected, criticized, glorified, vilified, overrated, undervalued, and talked about in circles. On one level, it’s a standard mecha anime - the kind that the Gundam series had helped define many years before Neon... Basically your exact idea of giant robots with human pilots combating and killing the alien enemies of humanity after an apocalypse has drastically changed the nature of human existence on planet earth. But, as the director Hidaeki Anno would have it, the series nosedives into the heads of its fourteen year old protagonists, almost blithely giving up the affectations of having to deal with a story of giant robos trying to save humanity. The end result is a bleak, bleak series no fourteen year old can see without getting seriously mindfucked. Extraordinarily artsy, slow, brooding, (with long pauses and interminable silences at times) and grandly ambitious, the enigmatic anime invites comparisons to the works of David Lynch (talk of polarizing!) and can best be summed up as a science fictional Mulholland Drive. (Yes you have been warned!)

The beginning of the series itself lets us know that the pilots of the EVAs (who have to be fourteen year olds, we're told) are not in total control of the machines and that there's much more than meets the eye. Couple it with the most reluctant hero (in Shinji Ikari) ever conceived of, comparison with whom makes Humphrey Bogart's film-noirs'-reluctant-hero-character look like a self righteous white missionary in Africa; a memorable character in the tortured, enigmatic Rei Ayanami; the brash, insufferable (and German) Asuka and the cold, calculating, Machiavellian scientist Gendo Ikari (who also, almost incidentally, doubles up as the father of the hero Shinji) and you get the absolute best character sketch ever done in anime history.

The series starts off slow and ponderous. It picks up in the middle with some juvenile comedy and some attempts at utilizing some standard tropes of anime conventions - all this done somehow in a half hearted, lazy way, as if merely trying to keep up appearances. Complexity sets in the middle and the Angel-busting-mecha-action takes a backseat to give way to a plot that gets thicker. The final seven or so episodes however, send the protagonist kids through sheer hell, torturing their minds, crushing their souls and battering hard their already fragile egos with the touching delicacy of a blacksmith presiding over a neurosurgery.

Nanga Fakir remembers a quote from some writer who was once asked the formula for writing a good story. The writer's supposed to have replied something to the effect that one should spend the first half in trying to let the reader fall in love with the character and the second half in making horrible, horrible things happen to those lovable protagonists. Was this what Hideaki Anno had in mind? We can only guess, for the last two episodes happen inside the head of the hero, with the total abandonment of any kind of pretense of connection with what had happened in the past and we see the hero introspect and torture himself for over two episodes trying to come to grips with what his existence might mean. The series ends with the iconic scene in which all characters gather around Shinji and congratulate him on his victory over his inner demons. (<*NF in a very scholarly tone*>: See attached figure.)

You've been amply forewarned. You'll either love the series or totally tear it to shreds.

...

End of Part three; Part four to follow.

The Big Picture

Alan Taylor's The Big Picture column for the Boston Globe does it again! This time's it's Russia, one century ago. Stunning pictures, breathtaking views and killer resolution color pictures from a hundred years ago.

Russia in color, a century ago.

If you're not following The Big Picture at Boston Globe, you're missing out on the big (and so beautiful!) pictures.

Burn bitches, burn.

August 19th, 2010, from Comedy Central's World News Headquarters in New York, this is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

With Nanga Fakir in attendance.

...

The guest was Jennifer Aniston. NF thinks he spotted Vatsa peeing in his pants a bit when she turned back and waved at us. Or maybe it was just tears of joy squirting from sundry tiny orifices all over his body. We don't know just yet.

Otaku-san : Part 2

It wasn't with a heavy heart that Nanga Fakir left the cosy confines of NIT S'kal, armed with the dubious distinction of being the worst Chemical Engineer the institute had managed to manufacture till then; having barely graduated thanks to jaded, world-weary and sick-to-death-of-NF's-shadow professors who let NF get the passing grade in all courses and a certain someone called AK whose lightning speed of effortlessly solving problems in exams would cause the answer sheets to burst in flames.

And so it was that NF's second stage of anime viewing began. Cowboy Bebop was watched next - another Watanabe masterpiece that featured his trademark use of soundtracks (in this case, Jazz) as a main, series-defining construct, featuring an assortment of characters - wild, unruly, laidback, quietly proficient lone wolfish men and women with mysterious pasts. Serial Experiments Lain - the short, cyberpunkish, a little surreal and very, very artsy anime series followed next, a blurbish introduction of which should be that it's the story of a little, lonely girl whose receipt of an email from a recently dead classmate turns her to investigate, the quicksands of which aforementioned investigation pull her deeper and deeper into the recesses of the Wired - an internet like communication system.

NF had also seen Ra sing praises of the series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya whose hilarious, wonderful theme song featuring the famous Mikuru Asahina and her Mikuru beam and an entreaty to 'c'mon let's dance baby' compelled NF to follow the non linear, bizarre, juvenile-yet-very-funny series. In fact, since he thinks the theme song is so incredibly funny, he has decided to embed it here itself. Watch it!



The last series that NF followed in his second wave of anime viewing was the killer, somewhat absurdist, somewhat blackish comedy Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei (which translates to "Goodbye Mr Despair/Goodbye Teacher Despair"). It features a school teacher Nozomu Itoshiki - a person so extremely negative and pessimistic that it's uproariously funny; his plans, attempts and eventual failures at committing suicide and his class of equally crazy-in-their-own-way girls most of whom end up falling in love with their teacher which leaves their object of affection totally baffled and aghast. A model for the protagonist is the legendary Japanese writer Osamu Dazai whose multiple, failed suicide attempts are the inspirations for the highly stylized, very funny antics of the school teacher. Anyone planning to start off on anime, this series is a very good place to begin things from.

Highly recommended!

It was after these two waves that NF sunk deep into anime anhedonia, a phase that lasted for more than a year. He tried to pick up an interest in the popular franchises Bleach and Naruto but after a long period of sometimes-interested-but-mostly-disaffected viewing, he stopped following the same and does not see himself following the never ending series anytime in the future ever.

However, all of a sudden, totally unanticipatedly, the last month saw NF take a plunge into what he now terms as the third wave of anime watch.

...

End of Part 2. To be continued in Part 3.

Otaku-san : Part 1

It was another arbit, nondescript final year evening/night when Rohan Choukkar approached Nanga Fakir in his final block abode (Room 188, H Wing to be precise) and convinced him to look at what he claimed was the next big thing in the not-to-be-taken-lightly business of killing time. Since killing time is the second name of Nanga Fakir and since Rohan was, notwithstanding his talents, a mere naïve junior, NF inwardly smiled and braced himself for a rather boring half an hour he would have to kill as a favor to this brat.

What he saw then however, was the first episode of Samurai Champloo - a 26 episode anime by Shinichiro Watanabe. By the end of the first episode, NF had been taken in by the totally slick style, wacky, idiosyncratic storytelling, dazzling visuals, a quirky, groovy soundtrack and an aestheticization of violence that seemed out of place in a mere cartoon - Japanese or not.

Unbeknownst to NF, the dark master of all arts and entertainments obscure and idiosyncratic - Ra - wielded considerable expertise in such matters. ("It's pronounced 'Ae-ni-may'", he jadedly answered NF's question: "Do you follow 'Ae-nai-ms'?") He smiled evilly and rubbed his hands in glee as he took NF aside and led him to his lair in the G Wing and exhibited his machine slaves downloading 'copious amounts' of anime. (NF doesn't know if Ra uses 'copious' copiously anymore.)

And so it was that NF found himself in the company of Ra, following his lead in finishing anime after anime, often teaming up with him to watch the following in either G or H Wing, high or dry: Elfen Lied (the much hyped first few minutes of awesome violence made way for a mediocre series featuring countless instances of totally gratuitous and sometimes unintentionally funny nudity), Ghost in the Shell - SAC and Second Gig (What a series! It remains one of the best anime series NF has watched ever) and Death Note which was airing during the final sem and every Thursday (or was it Wednesday?), courtesy Ra, the LAN would be aglow with yet another new episode for which NF would have waited with bated breath and barely concealed impatience the kind of which had not been seen since the end of The Jungle Book on Doordarshan's Sunday morning kid's slot.

...

To be continued in Part 2.

Another One Bites the Dust???

Vinay Deolalikar of HP labs claims to have shown that P ≠ NP (no surprises there!). Apparently mathematicians and computer scientists are excited and this one seems to have some genuine chance of success.

Those with enough background/technical know-how and most importantly, enough time at their hands are encouraged to visit the following link: CLS Blog.

...

<*pops open champagne bottle in anticipatory celebration*>

Found Footage - Part Three

Part One; Part Two

...

Shuchikar is busy compiling the unreleased filmography of his recently deceased mentor Andy Umbrage. Unbeknownst to him however, we have managed to find a cozy little corner wherefrom we can secretly spy on him, view the avant-après garde never before seen films pushing-the-medium-up-to-its-maximum-stretchable-limit-till-the-medium-tears-apart-noisily-and-reveals-an-inside-out-perspective-on-the-vacuousness-of-the-aforementioned-pushing-the-medium-up-to-its-maximum-stretchable-limit approach and record the impressions that these works of art have on our troubled, tortured, self doubting, potential genius-in-the-making protagonist.

It is notable how the new works of the late filmmaker incorporate settings, themes and concerns of science fiction, previously dismissed by him as adolescent fantasies of socially inept, autistic geeks. In fact, Shuchikar still cannot ascertain if this new fascination that the director showed was a parody ridiculing the ascendancy of the geek squad or a genuine late appreciation of the genre, for his science fictional tropes are often awkward, irrelevant, idiosyncratic and often totally orthogonal to the subject matter in his films.

His unreleased filmography includes the following films:

Soliloquy : Umbrage's first digitally shot venture. The film credits indicate only one name - that of Jenny Nosecondname in what would be her fifth collaboration with the director. ¹

The scene shows a dark room, so dark in fact that one can't make out anything at all. There is a vague appearance of someone sitting in a couch or a recliner, speaking in a monotone. From the voice, it can be ascertained that the figure is a woman and Shuchikar remembers the voice well enough to know it's Jenny's.

You claim that crudely speaking, music is for the head or for the feet. So I come along and ask you what does it mean and you respond with a smirk on your face (which I can't see now since it's so dark) that The Who, Marvin Gaye, Dick Dale, Cream, Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, Deep Purple, Hendrix etc. - these are for the feet. Okay, I say and you continue with your 'for the head' brand of music - The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, you say and give me a smug smile. Ha! I laugh. Where does Pink Floyd go? And you fall off your high chair, tumble down, roll about, pick the katana and commit harakiri.

Yes, where indeed does Pink Floyd go?

The lighting in the room is not back, but the room seems to have been bathed in some sort of strange glow. Blacks are becoming slowly, oh so slowly, greyish; the change in luminosity is barely enough for Shuchikar to make out the outlines of the couch and Jenny's figure. The grey scale manipulation of the image seems slow, deliberate and displays a mastery of technical aspects of film technology and image processing/editing that Umbrage wasn't known for. Greyness seems to be seeping into the image, at the expense of the black parts - as if blackness were being drained off/greyness was pumped in slowly. Meanwhile, the soliloquy of the unnamed female protagonist continues and the camera, excruciatingly slowly, in a long, slow take begins focusing on what seems to be the outline of the face of speaker.

Take the example of progression of, say, rock music. You start off with certain basic set of themes - guitar based music for example, with easy, singable, likeable, short pieces. Then slowly you see complexity set in. The bands become more ambitious since they see that the competition warrants them to be different from the herd so that it's cooler for the fans to proclaim themselves as their fans and thereby appropriate from the bands the 'differentness' from the herd. So now mainstream rock music (which started off itself as a 'rebellion') begins to exhibit aversions to its own popularity and crumbles under its own weight and branches out as different 'kinds' of rock music. Some of these new forms are more mainstream friendly, some are rabidly otherwise. So you see critics coming up with taxonomy programs for labeling these movements with weird, sometimes funky names that in a sane world should make no sense at all. What does technical death metal mean, or indeed jazz punk? Is it that one is at liberty to take the basic building blocks (Blues, Jazz, Punk for example) and combine and permute them in any arbitrary order to label that which passes for music these days?

The pitch of the delivery has steadily been climbing, mimicking the monotonous increase in the greyscale level of the scene. The face of the protagonist is somewhat visible now. It's a beautiful, beautiful face that bears marks of supreme erudition and thoughtfulness. Even though the soliloquy steadily descends into a rant, the beauty, intelligence and profound sincerity of the face creates a deep impression on the viewer.

The camera begins to zoom out now and the image is more than well lighted to make the objects in the room visible. As the rant continues and becomes harsher, for the first time, the viewer gets to see the entire figure of Jenny Nosecondname.

She is dressed badly, skimpily and her overly exposed body bears the marks of numerous tattoos - most of them extolling the virtues of living fast and loose and championing the fulfillment of all carnal desires. Her legs are spread out wide and on the insides of her right thigh can be seen a huge pink tattoo proclaiming "I heart sex", with the heart being the somewhat angular cardoidish, red symbol so commonly referred to as the heart shape. The walls of her room has pictures of Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Backstreet Boys and Lindsay Lohan. The rant has become a full fledged shriek against the lack of quality and intelligence of modern music and the greyscale level of the scene has reached whitish proportions so much it hurts the eye and in one final, continuous swoop of incomprehensively loud noise and glowing white light so harsh that one can't make out anything in the room, the screen goes totally white and all activities cease.

And then comes over a badly cutout figure of an astronaut who takes off his helmet, winks at the camera and flashes a corny thumbs up sign on which is tattooed "The End."

BACK TO POST

1. A promising undergraduate in the Cinema Studies department of the University at the time of her first collaboration, Jenny was also once the big, great, larger-than-life, true love of Shuchikar at the time when he was a devoted disciple of Umbrage. In fact, it was he who had suggested to Umbrage to cast Jenny as the actress after the sad demise of the director's wife for the film "No Obfuscation, No Prevarication" for which he was the Assistant Director.

No sooner did her voice fill the room, than Shuchikar experienced a sharp, painful pang. He hadn't seen her in over two years now and as her monologue occupied the enclosed space aided not in small measure by the surround sound equipment, her suppressed memories took form and flooded his mind.

See Film, Will Review

It has been suggested and not without reason if you care to ask, that little girls are the closest approximations of actual angels we humans deserve. So when such an angel decides to just break, break your heart and ask with actual, unfeigned, utter matter-of-factness "Okay you cunts, let's see what you can do now", "Show's over motherfuckers"; hack through limbs and mercilessly rip apart bodies of unfortunate cocksuckers who get in her way (her words, not ours) with Joan Jett in the background urging her to not give a damn about her bad reputation, what is it that we can do?

What we can do and indeed, what we should do is to weep out loud without fear of looking ridiculous and rue her loss of innocence, hold her close in our arms and just plant a big, fat, sloppy kiss on her blood stained, squeeze-worthy cheeks and promise to become her abject, abject fans, for Chloë Moretz as Hitgirl is the sweetest, most wonderful thing to have happened to cinema in recent history.¹

She was the only saving grace of the unbelievably pretentious and manipulative crap of a movie called (500) Days of Summer and single-handedly takes what-would-otherwise-have-been-yet-another so-called postmodern take on the done-to-death genre of superhero movie to a wonderful, entertaining, often very violent, yet at the same time hilarious, delightful experience.

Fuckin' A. Anybody not pathologically averse to some healthy dose of violence has to love the film.



Having delved rather deeply into the emergent field of extreme cinema for the past year or so, NF had naïvely come to think that there's only so much that can now catch him by surprise, only so much that can even remotely tickle his nerves - jaded, hardened in the extreme, toughened by a series of weird, ultraviolent, nonstandard, bizarre films from the far east. And frankly speaking, if there were a danger of ever finding more mindfucking films, the threat had to come from Japan or South Korea. Hungary was more of a Bela Tarr territory - slow, epic, deep, brooding, suffering from long, exquisite shots and acute melancholitis.

That NF was woken from his dogmatic slumber and not just woken up but shaken hard and slapped tight and plunged into subzero, icy cold water was what Taxidermia did. The film is obsessed, simply obsessed with the human body and the sundry fluids that are inputted in and outputted out from it. From it, is derived the film's odd sense of beauty, dazzlingly slick cinematography, pervasive grotesqueness and a very subtle, very dark and very often, very bizarre sense of humor. Most humans that walk, talk and populate this earth will at least at one point of time, simply feel disgusted, perhaps recoil in horror and yet find themselves laughing crazily - all within the unfolding of a single scene. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is highly, highly, highly non trivial. To compare the experience of the film and György Pálfi's vision to that of Cronenberg or to Terry Gilliam or to both combined and high on acid is just plain missing the point, for there is striking originality in the director's vision that is flat-out awesome just because such purity and singularity of vision is so fucking rare.

The movie is not for the faint hearted, not for those with weak stomachs, not for prudes, not for those who're turned off by secretions of bodily fluids and definitely not safe for work. The film is covered in vomit, sweat, piss, semen and bucketfuls of blood. And yet the sense of humor that permeates the atmosphere is not just scatological or sophomoric/slapstick but more preoccupied with irony and tragedy.

It is unfair and just plain obscene to see such scorchingly original a movie have such a small following. Perhaps the trailer might help. If not, you're all just a bunch of philistines.




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BACK TO POST

1. The only thing that comes even close is Ivana Baquero as little Ofelia in del Toro's brilliant Pan's Labyrinth.

T'has been brought to our attention

...that Sami (a.k.a. Somnath) saw the film Inception with director Anurag Kashyap and gave him a very sweet, heartfelt, personal blowjob at the end.

Sami - the man, the machine.

Nostalgia Nystagmia

The child is grown, the dream is gone.

Oh the irony!

That the Dutch - the land of players like Johann Cruyff, Marco van Basten and Dennis-fucking-Bergkamp (what a man!) - were beaten by the very same tiki taka/Totaalvoetbal brand of football they pioneered and passed on to Barça in favor of a rough, street fighting, trench warfare game epitomized by the spectacularly dirty killer-on-the-loose van Bommel.

Three cheers for our Paul the Octopus!

Found Footage - Part 2

Part 1 here.

...

We see Shuchikar in the recently deceased Andy Umbrage's office located on the sixth floor of the Arts and Cinema Studies department. He was informed of his late mentor's bizarre suicide by a call from Umbrage's lawyer who let him know that it was the express wish of the late artist that his one time protégé Shuchikar be informed of his demise wherever and whenever it comes to pass and that his many unreleased (and some of them incomplete) films, still housed in his office in the University be made available to him and that Shuchikar be the sole custodian of the same and decide on whatever he thought was appropriate vis-à-vis their release to the general public/art/film/academic community.

So we see our hero in the environs he hasn't visited in quite a while and we watch him sympathetically - indeed somewhat admiringly as well (he's the hottest underworld filmmaker these days) - as he lazily casts a glance around the office that used to be such an important part of his life a few years ago. The place is stacked with books that lie around somewhat haphazardly not just on the shelves but also on tables and the floor. The walls in front of him are bare except for a giant poster of Takahiko Iimura playing chess with Michael Bay who's dressed in black cape as Death, recreating the iconic scene from The Seventh Seal by Bergman.

The table in front of him carries on it a sealed box with Umbrage's unreleased films. He's decided to take them home and watch them on his projector and write short reviews of the same before deciding their fate as regards their release. He's also decided to not participate in the discussions on and regarding the death of his mentor and the symbolic significance/interpretations of the particular manner in which he killed himself, the latest of which is that Umbrage's head-in-the-sand-legs-in-the-air suicide was supposed to mirror the ostrich's cowardly behavior. As a dyed-in-the-wool symbol-minded artist, Umbrage would have been thoroughly amused at this turn of events, Shuchikar thought. Indeed, nobody in the present art world championed Duchamp's art semiotics more than Umbrage who's first major performance was opened by the following lines:

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Interestingly, the aforementioned first major performance of Umbrage had ended in disaster (for him personally) as he, just after quoting Duchamp had jumped off a small cliff, all naked but for a quill in each of his arms and had fallen down thirty feet or so directly and had broken every major bone in his body. This piece had created a sharp rift in the art community where some praised the artist for his extraordinary courage, some praised him for symbolizing man's eternal quest for flight which in turn was interpreted as progress, some praised him for choosing ostrich quills as symbolic feathers (since quills also stood for 'the pen' which is not only mightier than the sword but metaphorically represents all creativity itself and in having chosen an ostrich quill, Umbrage had underlined the inevitably tragic nature of all such creative, artistic endeavors) and the remainder praised the act and its dénouement (or the lack of it, as some commentators quipped) as standing for the personal danger to bones and (remaining) limbs that artists the world over have to face up to alone, singlehandedly, notwithstanding the collaborative nature of art and the jaded spectator's as-important-as-artists role of bringing out the art in art.

This stuff totally makes you teary eyed!

<*sounds of muffled cries of gratitude*>

Found Footage - Part One

After having lived a rich and fulfilling life, Andy Umbrage took his own life last night. As a cross platform, multi faceted artist (he was a celebrated painter, poet, filmmaker, musician, art theorist, performance artist and socialite), his suicide comes across as a major shock to his not-so-many-in-terms-of-sheer-numbers but small-but-rabidly-devoted-and-deeply-influential trendsetting powerful artist and patron fans across the world. Expect festchrifts and tributes in plenty and obscure and often very subtle homages in the form of jump cuts interspersed with sickening footages of tigers eating humans in graphic detail and a brown, long haired boy pleasuring himself in the shower - a sly wink to Umbrage's now notoriously famous film "The Revenge of Mowgli" - by arthouse filmmakers across the globe.

Umbrage is not survived by his wife and children. They died seven years ago while protesting against tree felling in the jungles of Amazon. They had bound themselves to immense redwood trees with metal chains and although this was sufficient to deter the tree fellers, it certainly wasn't enough for the creatures of the night who were seduced by this grand gesture on the part of the Umbrage family and secretly paid them a visit to thank them for this magnanimity. The following day, Mrs. Umbrage's face was found chewed off and the body of Master Umbrage was nowhere to be found, metal chains notwithstanding. As this news traveled, a visibly perturbed Andy Umbrage declared this the Ultimate Performance Art of the century.

When the police arrived to the scene of the suicide this morning in Mr. Umbrage's house, they found the tiling on the floor destroyed and dirt all over the house. They also found a shovel near the deceased Mr. Umbrage's corpse. A copy of the novel The Tunnel by William H. Gass was also found. Umbrage had dug out a pit and had committed suicide by putting his head inside it and had covered the space with dirt. Presumably the cause of death was due to asphyxiation. As rigor mortis had set in, the police found the head and neck stuck into the ground and the torso and legs stiff and erect and pointing towards the ceiling. In the outstretched, clenched hands of the deceased, the police found a suicide note with only a few words etched on it in red ink - "Who's your daddy now?"

Critics are already claiming that the suicide was part of another profound piece of performance art. They are basing their claims on the terse suicide note and interpreting this act as a revolt against the recently-in-vogue tendencies of the neo-bourgeois artists who've been committing suicide painlessly and are claiming that by dying in such a grisly fashion, he reminded everyone that committing suicide ungrislyly is seriously uncool and such people are better off existing which in turn (the existence, that is) can only be either horrible or miserable. His detractors on the other hand simply point out that this was another attempt on his part to one-up his dead wife (with whom he had a long standing rivalry) and by the suicide note, he simply wanted to remind her who her daddy was.

The obituary is brought to halt by noting offhandedly that Andy Umbrage had many gifted disciples and that Shuchikar was once his protégé who'd rebelled against his style. Hearing the sad demise of his teacher, however, he decided to open up some windows into his past and pay a last visit to his dead mentor.

Miscellany

• Those of you with extra, disposable cash are directed to the following link - Science Fiction Anthology - which features a short story by Shuchikar - a close friend of Nanga Fakir and Ghongha Basant.
  
• It is said that the song Professional Widow by the crazy-alien-from-outer-space-visiting-earth-in-the-guise-of-the-absolutely-brilliant-Tori Amos is about Courtney Love (cf. "Don't blow those brains yet/
  We gotta be big boy/We gotta be big"; "Give me peace, love, peace, love/Give me peace/Love/And a hard cock."(See also the 'peace, love (and empathy)' reference in Kurt Cobain's suicide note.)). If it's true, then she's just harsh. Harsh, harsh, harsh.
• Recent acquisitions are Gravity's Rainbow and V. by Pynchon. NF also dithered for a real long time over the question of To-Acquire-or-not-to-Acquire Cryptonomicon by the great Neal Stephenson. He eventually decided to not acquire the voluminous (1100 pages to be precise) tome deferring the acquisition to some perhaps more opportune time. Meanwhile, back on the bookshelf, the pile of unread books keeps climbing higher.
  
• The absolutely too-crazy-to-be-real match's venue should be shifted from the Wimbledon to the Lord's. They play test matches there, don't they?
  

Recursion

The Droste Effect in Escher's Print Gallery. Very sexy!




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A brief technical article, explaining the Droste Effect and techniques used in making the video can be found here. To follow the article, a working knowledge of Complex Analysis is recommended (but not required).

DFW is not a Quickie

Oblivion is quintessentially DFWish - longish stories that meander and digress and ruminate and dwell on details in a way that is typical of the fiction of DFW. Compared to his previous short story book - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which has been made into a not-so-bad film by John Krasinski), the stories are longer; and the humor - much more subtle and dark. Apart from Incarnations of Burned Children (click on link to read the story - one of the most killer, heart rending, brilliant, absolutely unendurable-in-what-it-describes pieces of short fiction with an unforgettable, devastating-yet-uplifting last line¹), which is only two and a half page long, the others are somewhat lengthy and take their own sweet time to build up and have a nasty tendency to hang around somewhat languorously in your head a long time after you're done reading. Don't expect twist endings, clever plotting or character building; the stories have an amorphous, hard-to-point-but-easy-to-experience quality that compels you to revisit the book again and again and the experience is augmented after each such iteration.

The best stories in this volume are clearly the aforementioned Incarnations..., Good Old Neon, Another Pioneer and The Soul is not a Smithy.

If there were ever a quintessential, representative, archetypal work that summarizes, condenses, distills and weaves into one all the multifarious, hidden, interconnected-yet-divergent themes that any writer (or for that matter, a director or musician etc.) might address in her entire oeuvre - if there were a single piece of work that characterizes completely, a creative mind and typifies her Weltanschauung - then Good Old Neon is definitely DFW's representative work.² It opens with:

My whole life I've been a fraud...

...

...all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people.

The narrator is a hyper-self-aware, obscenely well educated and an intensely self critical, successful, modern yuppie. His bouts of self criticism and perception of his own shallowness and remarkable ease with which he can manipulate people's opinion of him drives him to despair and eventually to suicide. The prose stretches the limits of self consciousness and relentlessly probes the very limits of communication amongst humans.

...what goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant...

The story Another Pioneer is:

derived from an acquaintance of a close friend who said that he had himself overheard this exemplum aboard a high-altitude commercial flight

The aforementioned story turns out to be a quasi-mythological tale of a wonderboy in a prehistoric society who seems to have answers to all possible questions, albeit in a literal, somewhat robotic manner - so much so that he becomes the chief counselor of the village and a clique of wise people emerges who charge the villagers to frame their questions and anxieties in precisely the correct form so that the response of the wonderboy is meaningful. (The garbage-in-garbage-out paradigm of programming and the way the wise-people-of-the-village construct is mapped on to the modern day programmers of computing behemoths is unmistakable.) However, jealous of the village's subsequent prosperity, the neighboring village's wise man 'bugs' the system and the boy transcends his previous (autistic) savantness and becomes wiser - but in a somewhat grotesque way.

In The Soul is not a Smithy the narrator recounts a violent episode from his childhood, in which he and three classmates were allegedly held hostage by a deranged substitute teacher. However, he never quite gets to it, as he's preoccupied with the story that he was imagining at the time, visualizing it in the panes of the schoolroom window - a story of a blind girl and her lost dog, which becomes increasingly bizarre as the real world situation around him becomes life threatening.

...

Believe it or not, but Nanga Fakir has begun reading Infinite Jest again.

<*must... not... give in to... temptation. must... resist*>

...

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1. Although decontextualized, it should still hit you hard enough to sit back and take notice. It ends with the child...

having learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

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2. Like Annie Hall is Woody Allen's, Eraserhead is David Lynch's, Slackers is Richard Linklater's, Adaptation is Charlie Kauffman's, Godaan is Premchand's, Laal Teen ki Chchat (Red Tin Roof) is Nirmal Verma's, Neuromancer is William Gibson's...