The following is the list of books that Nanga Fakir's read in the past six months:
1) Brisingr (Christopher Paolini)
2) One Hunrdred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
3) Much obliged Jeeves (PG Wodehouse)
4) Batman RIP (Grant Morrison)
5) Heavy Liquid (Paul Pope)
6) Midnight Days (Neil Gaiman)
7) Maus (The Complete) (Art Spiegelman)
8) Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) [Repeat]
9)-19) Transmetropolitan (Warren Ellis)
20) The Motion of Light in Water (Samuel R Delany)
21) Accelerando (Charles Stross)
22) Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
23) The Banyan Tree and Other Stories (R K Narayan)
24) Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
25) Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas R Hofstadter) [Repeat]
26) The Short Story Collection (Tolstoy)
27) 100% (Paul Pope)
28) Ghost World (Daniel Clowes)
29)-35) Sin City (Frank Miller)
36) I Saw You (Edited by Julia Wertz)
37) The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)
38) Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
The playlist further consists of the following books (which NF reckons will take him a further 3-4 months to finish):
1) Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) {the book that NF's currently re-reading}
2) India: A Million Mutinies Now (VS Naipaul)
3) Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (David Foster Wallace)
4) Inside Mr Enderby (Anthony Burgess)
5) Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
6) The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
7) Nausea (Jean Paul Sartre)
NF has been planning to take a break from reading fiction for a while now. He hopes to finish another (carefully handpicked) ten books or so and then leave off and stay sober for about six months. Should be a good experiment. Let's see if he can pull it off.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Saturday, July 25, 2009
The Orgasmothon Continues
Featuring John Nash, Bob Aumann, Eric Maskin, Sergiu Hart, Peyton Young, Rohit Parikh, Al Roth among others.
Link - The Game Theory Festival.
...
Also, The Film Festival! (Link)
...
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men arrives on Tuesday and is next on the playlist.
...
Ah orgasm, spare me thy forbidden pleasures!
Link - The Game Theory Festival.
...
Also, The Film Festival! (Link)
...
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men arrives on Tuesday and is next on the playlist.
...
Ah orgasm, spare me thy forbidden pleasures!
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Moment of Zen
Question: "Have you ever had sex with a relative?"
<*Ominous background music; the camera swerves; the old man on the seat grimaces visibly (he's originally from Lucknow, it turns out!); the Soul Searching Subroutine is activated; his relatives are on the show and are now looking at each other (perhaps in wonderment) (Was it him/her he fucked?)*>
Answer: <*reluctantly albeit*> "Yes".
"Let's see what the polygraph machine has to say."
Polygraph Machine: "The old man speaks truthfully. It was a dark winter night when he came home drunk..."
...
The show is called Sach ka Saamna and (thankfully!) all its episodes are there on Youtube.
The premise is simple. Answer twenty one questions truthfully ["Ah but what is truth?", the philosophically minded among you would ask; NF: "Didn't you know? This deep philosophical problem was solved a little after WW II. The Polygraph Machine boasts of stellar success rates. As much as 61% according to a '97 study!"; "Huh, that's a little better than pure chance!", you counter; <*Nanga Fakir goes to an adjoining room for a minute or two*>; NF: "The machine says you're lying. It also says you're an absconding sex offender."] and you could win one crore rupees. Just like KBC, the initial questions are sitters [cf. "Have you ever gone without bathing for more than a week?";"Have you ever thought of killing your husband?"; "Have you ever stripped naked in a public place?" {actually this question was posed to Vinod Kambli who confessed to having done it. Turns out that Sachin Tendulkar put him up to it!}]. The later ones...not so.
"Do you remember the names of all the people you've slept with?"
So all those plagued by darkness, all those battling terminal diseases, all those who think life has no meaning, all those contemplating suicide as a way out of this whole ungodly boredom can turn their attention to Youtube now.
It's as the late George Carlin said - "When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front-row seat." However, as in other fields of endeavor (business, science etc.), India is giving America a run for its money. The Chinese, since they don't believe in democracy, haven't caught up with such sophisticated standards of TV production yet.
"Do you have illegitimate children?"
But frankly, who will be interested in knowing sordid details of ordinary middle-aged housewives? So in a clever marketing move, the contestants will more often than not, be wannabe B grade celebrities, many of them from the same Saas-Bahu franchise which made them a household name in all of India. As again, the common, poor man loses out on earning one crore rupees and washing his dirty linen on national television by the moneyed, second tier celebrity bandwagon. Arundhati Roy is proven right. Yet again.
"Would you sleep with other men if your husband doesn't come to know of it?"
Nanga Fakir is also all taken up by the new breed of writers of such insanely groundbreaking TV shows. He knows for a fact that all of them are recruited from the Hogwarts School of Advanced Misanthropy and Indian Institute of Pure Cynicism - none of which are easy to get into. The entrance exam consists of raping an old woman to death and shooting a baby on her face in front of her mother.
So all those afflicted with the Truth Syndrome who want to earn a little easy cash on the side - Welcome!
Link to the TV Show the concept's been filched from - The Moment of Truth.
<*Ominous background music; the camera swerves; the old man on the seat grimaces visibly (he's originally from Lucknow, it turns out!); the Soul Searching Subroutine is activated; his relatives are on the show and are now looking at each other (perhaps in wonderment) (Was it him/her he fucked?)*>
Answer: <*reluctantly albeit*> "Yes".
"Let's see what the polygraph machine has to say."
Polygraph Machine: "The old man speaks truthfully. It was a dark winter night when he came home drunk..."
...
The show is called Sach ka Saamna and (thankfully!) all its episodes are there on Youtube.
The premise is simple. Answer twenty one questions truthfully ["Ah but what is truth?", the philosophically minded among you would ask; NF: "Didn't you know? This deep philosophical problem was solved a little after WW II. The Polygraph Machine boasts of stellar success rates. As much as 61% according to a '97 study!"; "Huh, that's a little better than pure chance!", you counter; <*Nanga Fakir goes to an adjoining room for a minute or two*>; NF: "The machine says you're lying. It also says you're an absconding sex offender."] and you could win one crore rupees. Just like KBC, the initial questions are sitters [cf. "Have you ever gone without bathing for more than a week?";"Have you ever thought of killing your husband?"; "Have you ever stripped naked in a public place?" {actually this question was posed to Vinod Kambli who confessed to having done it. Turns out that Sachin Tendulkar put him up to it!}]. The later ones...not so.
"Do you remember the names of all the people you've slept with?"
So all those plagued by darkness, all those battling terminal diseases, all those who think life has no meaning, all those contemplating suicide as a way out of this whole ungodly boredom can turn their attention to Youtube now.
It's as the late George Carlin said - "When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front-row seat." However, as in other fields of endeavor (business, science etc.), India is giving America a run for its money. The Chinese, since they don't believe in democracy, haven't caught up with such sophisticated standards of TV production yet.
"Do you have illegitimate children?"
But frankly, who will be interested in knowing sordid details of ordinary middle-aged housewives? So in a clever marketing move, the contestants will more often than not, be wannabe B grade celebrities, many of them from the same Saas-Bahu franchise which made them a household name in all of India. As again, the common, poor man loses out on earning one crore rupees and washing his dirty linen on national television by the moneyed, second tier celebrity bandwagon. Arundhati Roy is proven right. Yet again.
"Would you sleep with other men if your husband doesn't come to know of it?"
Nanga Fakir is also all taken up by the new breed of writers of such insanely groundbreaking TV shows. He knows for a fact that all of them are recruited from the Hogwarts School of Advanced Misanthropy and Indian Institute of Pure Cynicism - none of which are easy to get into. The entrance exam consists of raping an old woman to death and shooting a baby on her face in front of her mother.
So all those afflicted with the Truth Syndrome who want to earn a little easy cash on the side - Welcome!
Link to the TV Show the concept's been filched from - The Moment of Truth.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
To watch Rakhi ka Swayamvar is to audit a crash course in Enlightenment. Earlier, reality TV had Nanga Fakir convinced that there is hope for humanity; the show in question makes him want to be a first rate philanthropist.
It is tale of love, heartbreak, devotion, betrayal, family-values, dark secrets (the list could go on) and features a simple Indian girl steeped in age old customs and traditions who wants to play the part of a traditional-housewife-by-day and a sleazy-foul-mouthed-cabaret-dancer-who-can-crush-your-balls-to-dust by night. It also boasts of the highest number of WTF/Jesus-fucking-Christ exclamations from the audience per episode.
The show is gripping, enthralling, masterly suspenseful and full of Shyamalanesque twists and turns where delivering campy dialogue with a serious face is your biggest asset (that and performance of fiery Taekwondo fight moves on cheesy, filmi soundtracks). It is a watershed moment in the history of Indian television as it takes the two most explosively successful ideas - reality TV and saas-bahu sagas and amalgamates them into a unified (w)hole whose inexorable success is a testament to the greatness of human civilization.
And so it was that Nanga Fakir saw entranced, the exploits of a psychotic stalker who's been stalking Rakhi for over three years; the smartass commentary of the Astrologer who's got a hook into everyone else's character (and who very considerately went up to offer a hassled Rakhi a little sip of Bacardi at which she threw a tantrum and complained that her TV persona is totally orthogonal to her true Indian self and that she doesn't 'drink'. Little did the poor fucker know that the only thing she likes drinking is the dessicated soul of a small town, starry eyed, publicity hungry Neanderthal schmuck like him); the prayers for regrowth of the destroyed balls of the big hunky contender ('Luv', he's called) offered by Rakhi with a seriously cool Nirupa Roy expression; the serenading of Rakhi by a very genuine-looking Kashmiri cop (whom Rakhi respected the most...(now that's a compliment)); the badly acted tortured expression of shock on Rakhi's face as the same cop announced that he already had a wife and three kids and they were cool with his being on the show (imagine the kids (and perhaps their mom) in Srinagar rooting for their laugh-of-the-underground-terrorist-crowd dad) and the ingenious elimination protocol - a mithai (sweet) for those who've qualified for the next round and evil stares and heartfelt sorries for others who leave with heavy hearts, heavier baggages and even heavier pockets.
Another thing that struck NF as he kept watching episode after episode on youtube was that all contestant were from UP plus Delhi plus Mumbai (okay one Rajasthani too). Period. Apparently people from South India have more self respect than Northies. What is counter-intuitive however, is that there was absolutely no contender from Bihar - the land most ignoramuses like to make fun of at the drop of a hat. From personal experience, Nanga Fakir knows that Biharis are the simplest, hardest working and the most down-to-earth people that there are. (Every now and then, they freak out and go on a kidnapping spree but that's forgivable in the long run.) The people who were in overwhelming majority were small towners from UP (from places like Rishikesh, Kanpur, Lucknow (yes...<*sighs*>), Bulandshahar etc.). Heh...jobless fuckers!
On second thoughts, maybe the producers of the show thought that Southies wouldn't be funny enough (intentionally/unintentionally) and so were not good enough to be in the final sixteen. Because, out of twelve thousand odd people from all places in India, who volunteered to be on the show (including an 87 year old!) surely there must've been some not-so-self-respecting Southies. Plus the fact that they can't speak Hindi and that Rakhi's English/regional language skills are surely worse than her acting couldn't have helped matters much.
The blogosphere is lit up with lively discussions of "Will she...won't she?" - whether Rakhi will end up marrying the winner of the show. Most seem to think that a brief marriage and a speedy divorce assisted by Balaji Production lawyers will follow.
But what then about the cameos of the actors that are the surrogate family of Rakhi (read the saas-bahu franchise) - the truism spouting self proclaimed upholders of Indian culture and tradition who drop in shlokas with timed precision (and blissfully unaware, mispronounce all Sanskrit words with amazing consistency)? What about the claim of Rakhi Sawant being in actuality a simple girl who's misunderstood by all? What about the sanctity of marriage?
What about future TRP ratings?
NF has his doubts.
For answers to these and many more questions, stay tuned.
It is tale of love, heartbreak, devotion, betrayal, family-values, dark secrets (the list could go on) and features a simple Indian girl steeped in age old customs and traditions who wants to play the part of a traditional-housewife-by-day and a sleazy-foul-mouthed-cabaret-dancer-who-can-crush-your-balls-to-dust by night. It also boasts of the highest number of WTF/Jesus-fucking-Christ exclamations from the audience per episode.
The show is gripping, enthralling, masterly suspenseful and full of Shyamalanesque twists and turns where delivering campy dialogue with a serious face is your biggest asset (that and performance of fiery Taekwondo fight moves on cheesy, filmi soundtracks). It is a watershed moment in the history of Indian television as it takes the two most explosively successful ideas - reality TV and saas-bahu sagas and amalgamates them into a unified (w)hole whose inexorable success is a testament to the greatness of human civilization.
And so it was that Nanga Fakir saw entranced, the exploits of a psychotic stalker who's been stalking Rakhi for over three years; the smartass commentary of the Astrologer who's got a hook into everyone else's character (and who very considerately went up to offer a hassled Rakhi a little sip of Bacardi at which she threw a tantrum and complained that her TV persona is totally orthogonal to her true Indian self and that she doesn't 'drink'. Little did the poor fucker know that the only thing she likes drinking is the dessicated soul of a small town, starry eyed, publicity hungry Neanderthal schmuck like him); the prayers for regrowth of the destroyed balls of the big hunky contender ('Luv', he's called) offered by Rakhi with a seriously cool Nirupa Roy expression; the serenading of Rakhi by a very genuine-looking Kashmiri cop (whom Rakhi respected the most...(now that's a compliment)); the badly acted tortured expression of shock on Rakhi's face as the same cop announced that he already had a wife and three kids and they were cool with his being on the show (imagine the kids (and perhaps their mom) in Srinagar rooting for their laugh-of-the-underground-terrorist-crowd dad) and the ingenious elimination protocol - a mithai (sweet) for those who've qualified for the next round and evil stares and heartfelt sorries for others who leave with heavy hearts, heavier baggages and even heavier pockets.
Another thing that struck NF as he kept watching episode after episode on youtube was that all contestant were from UP plus Delhi plus Mumbai (okay one Rajasthani too). Period. Apparently people from South India have more self respect than Northies. What is counter-intuitive however, is that there was absolutely no contender from Bihar - the land most ignoramuses like to make fun of at the drop of a hat. From personal experience, Nanga Fakir knows that Biharis are the simplest, hardest working and the most down-to-earth people that there are. (Every now and then, they freak out and go on a kidnapping spree but that's forgivable in the long run.) The people who were in overwhelming majority were small towners from UP (from places like Rishikesh, Kanpur, Lucknow (yes...<*sighs*>), Bulandshahar etc.). Heh...jobless fuckers!
On second thoughts, maybe the producers of the show thought that Southies wouldn't be funny enough (intentionally/unintentionally) and so were not good enough to be in the final sixteen. Because, out of twelve thousand odd people from all places in India, who volunteered to be on the show (including an 87 year old!) surely there must've been some not-so-self-respecting Southies. Plus the fact that they can't speak Hindi and that Rakhi's English/regional language skills are surely worse than her acting couldn't have helped matters much.
The blogosphere is lit up with lively discussions of "Will she...won't she?" - whether Rakhi will end up marrying the winner of the show. Most seem to think that a brief marriage and a speedy divorce assisted by Balaji Production lawyers will follow.
But what then about the cameos of the actors that are the surrogate family of Rakhi (read the saas-bahu franchise) - the truism spouting self proclaimed upholders of Indian culture and tradition who drop in shlokas with timed precision (and blissfully unaware, mispronounce all Sanskrit words with amazing consistency)? What about the claim of Rakhi Sawant being in actuality a simple girl who's misunderstood by all? What about the sanctity of marriage?
What about future TRP ratings?
NF has his doubts.
For answers to these and many more questions, stay tuned.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Maps and Isomorphisms
Warning: Very long post. Maybe boring for those not into either films or mathematics.
...
Disclaimer: The word 'isomorphism' here is used in a very loose, non-mathematical sense. Probably a better word would be 'similarity/analogy' but that wouldn't sound cool enough.
Another description of the post is in terms of functions that map domain spaces (film directors) to extremely 'dissimilar' target spaces (mathematicians).
...
Nanga Fakir has always wondered at isomorphisms lurking at a structural level in a wide variety of apparently unrelated disciplines of human endeavor. This post is about such isomorphisms in the (apparently unrelated) fields of Mathematics and Films - in particular, the similarities in the manner of work of some mathematicians and some directors. It is unfortunate that NF doesn't know even half as much as he would want to know about either discipline and so the possibility of errors is significant. (Hence it is a blog post and not an article in the New Yorker.)
1) Kim ki Duk & John Milnor : The former is a Korean film director and the latter is an American Fields Medalist.
That which brings them both together is the quality of minimalism in their works.
Kim ki Duk has been known to make films with hardly any dialogue at all and with each passing work, relying more and more on non-verbal cues, quiet, subtle gestures and dry, unusual humor. Milnor on the other hand is not only a legendary mathematician who's won all possible math prizes left, right and center, but has also won the Steele Prize for mathematical exposition. The books and notes written by him are thoroughly minimalistic - in fact sometimes notoriously so. (The standard lemma-theorem-proof-corollary style is followed in a sparse, somewhat austere style and the Proof sections of his books are peppered with remarks like "Not hard to prove", "Easily shown to be true" etc. - much to the frustration of your average math graduate student.)
Perhaps it was Hemingway who said that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Both of them seem (consciously or otherwise) to adhere to this view, for in both their works, taking anything away from what is there, necessitates the collapse of the entire edifice - the mark of a true minimalist. (NF sometimes fancies himself as a minimalist in the sense that he tries hard to put the minimal amount of effort required to barely get along. He wonders if he's a true minimalist though. Any lesser effort and we'll know the answer to that question.)
2) Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr & Alexander Grothendieck : There is no catchword here (like 'minimalism') that can be invoked to compare the two directors with Grothendieck (seen in picture here). In fact what is probably more at work here is the obsession with purity, perfectionism and mind-boggling care for details which is the hallmark of all these artistes.
This is easily seen to be so in the case of the two auteurs in question - both of them are obsessed with insanely long cuts (some of them as long as eleven minutes), excruciatingly slow camera movements, artsy and extremely highbrow literature, shots of breathtaking beauty and concerns with questions that are of deep philosophical value. The camera lingers on each shot, hovering on the subjects as if unable to tear itself away, trying to absorb the fleeting moment and record it forever. The concerns for purity and technical wizardry over audience-friendliness (and here the audience are considered to be arthouse regulars and not those who line up to buy tickets for the latest Transformers flick), the demand for patience and faith in the vision of the director (which is rewarded at the end by a deeply ambiguous and artsy climax which may or may not make any sense) and the paramount consideration of cinematic beauty over everything else make them to be champions of cinema as a pure, high art medium.
In order to see for yourself, look at the following videos:
a) A sequence from Tarkovsky's Stalker.
[probably one of the best sequences in world cinema]
b) A 'short' scene from Satantango - the seven hour plus long movie (yes, you read that right!) from Bela Tarr.
Like his counterparts in cinema, Grothendieck (Fields Medalist, greatest mathematician of the 20th century, according to some) was obsessed with purity and methods of great abstractness over more obvious routes to problem solving. In fact, his was such an abstract take on matters in Pure Mathematics that it is inaccessible to a lot of working mathematicians themselves, let alone the common man. His style of Mathematics - often dubbed 'Fortress Mathematics' (built around his cult of followers) was a major dampener for many-a-young wannabe mathematician who were overwhelmed by the technical virtuosity demanded of them to even begin to understand what was going on. Again, concerns for stellar, unimaginably stringent purity and an open disdain for anything even slightly contaminated (read less general/abstract - woe to applied mathematicians - the hacks who dare defile the sanctity of math!) make him the counterpart to Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr.
3) Quentin Tarantino & Benoit Mandlebrot and Paul Erdos : Cinema for Tarantino is not a meditation on deep matters (cross Tarkovsky, Tarr). He's definitely not into minimalism (cross Kim ki Duk). What's he into then?
Filmmaking for Tarantino is an expression of sheer joy. It's also about being all-over-the-place like a jumping, hyperactive kid suffering from attention deficit disorder high on methamphetamine. It is about exuberance, aesthetic violence, non-linearity, dialogue (his characters never seem to shut up) and a breakneck, blitzy pace. He doesn't care about conventions or boundaries or classifications. He breaks rules, bends them, amalgamates genres, rips off others' work and gives them a new spin and constantly reinvents and pushes the boundaries of filmmaking all the fucking time.
Somewhat similar was the approach to mathematics taken by Mandlebrot and Erdos. Mandlebrot was repelled by the Fortress Mathematics so in vogue when he took up studies of Math. His was a more intuition based, a more qualitative approach (often called 'Open Mathematics' by some). He was genre defying and refused categorization of any kind. His work in pure math soon spilled onto areas like Information Theory, Fluid Mechanics, Economics and Physics (one of his papers was on the stability of cotton prices over the years). Nassim Taleb considers him his guru and chief mentor.
Erdos is a legend in himself. His versatile work in Graph Theory, Number Theory, Analysis, Combinatorics and several other disciplines was the work of someone obsessed with and totally in love with what he was doing. [Perhaps it was he who said "When I am depressed I do math to become happy. When I am happy, I do math to stay happy".] Again, the hyperactive-all-over-the-place-kid effect can be seen here. His encouragement of budding young mathematicians, geeky sense of humor, astoundingly large collaborative body of work that changed the way Mathematics was done and championing of Open Mathematics makes him the ideal counterpart of Tarantino in Mathematics - perhaps even more so than Mandlebrot.
...
Perhaps more such maps will be discovered by readers of this blog, maybe not in the same two fields, but perhaps in others where such isomorphism have not yet been discovered.
...
Disclaimer: The word 'isomorphism' here is used in a very loose, non-mathematical sense. Probably a better word would be 'similarity/analogy' but that wouldn't sound cool enough.
Another description of the post is in terms of functions that map domain spaces (film directors) to extremely 'dissimilar' target spaces (mathematicians).
...
Nanga Fakir has always wondered at isomorphisms lurking at a structural level in a wide variety of apparently unrelated disciplines of human endeavor. This post is about such isomorphisms in the (apparently unrelated) fields of Mathematics and Films - in particular, the similarities in the manner of work of some mathematicians and some directors. It is unfortunate that NF doesn't know even half as much as he would want to know about either discipline and so the possibility of errors is significant. (Hence it is a blog post and not an article in the New Yorker.)
1) Kim ki Duk & John Milnor : The former is a Korean film director and the latter is an American Fields Medalist.
That which brings them both together is the quality of minimalism in their works.
Kim ki Duk has been known to make films with hardly any dialogue at all and with each passing work, relying more and more on non-verbal cues, quiet, subtle gestures and dry, unusual humor. Milnor on the other hand is not only a legendary mathematician who's won all possible math prizes left, right and center, but has also won the Steele Prize for mathematical exposition. The books and notes written by him are thoroughly minimalistic - in fact sometimes notoriously so. (The standard lemma-theorem-proof-corollary style is followed in a sparse, somewhat austere style and the Proof sections of his books are peppered with remarks like "Not hard to prove", "Easily shown to be true" etc. - much to the frustration of your average math graduate student.)
Perhaps it was Hemingway who said that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Both of them seem (consciously or otherwise) to adhere to this view, for in both their works, taking anything away from what is there, necessitates the collapse of the entire edifice - the mark of a true minimalist. (NF sometimes fancies himself as a minimalist in the sense that he tries hard to put the minimal amount of effort required to barely get along. He wonders if he's a true minimalist though. Any lesser effort and we'll know the answer to that question.)
2) Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr & Alexander Grothendieck : There is no catchword here (like 'minimalism') that can be invoked to compare the two directors with Grothendieck (seen in picture here). In fact what is probably more at work here is the obsession with purity, perfectionism and mind-boggling care for details which is the hallmark of all these artistes.
This is easily seen to be so in the case of the two auteurs in question - both of them are obsessed with insanely long cuts (some of them as long as eleven minutes), excruciatingly slow camera movements, artsy and extremely highbrow literature, shots of breathtaking beauty and concerns with questions that are of deep philosophical value. The camera lingers on each shot, hovering on the subjects as if unable to tear itself away, trying to absorb the fleeting moment and record it forever. The concerns for purity and technical wizardry over audience-friendliness (and here the audience are considered to be arthouse regulars and not those who line up to buy tickets for the latest Transformers flick), the demand for patience and faith in the vision of the director (which is rewarded at the end by a deeply ambiguous and artsy climax which may or may not make any sense) and the paramount consideration of cinematic beauty over everything else make them to be champions of cinema as a pure, high art medium.
In order to see for yourself, look at the following videos:
a) A sequence from Tarkovsky's Stalker.
[probably one of the best sequences in world cinema]
b) A 'short' scene from Satantango - the seven hour plus long movie (yes, you read that right!) from Bela Tarr.
Like his counterparts in cinema, Grothendieck (Fields Medalist, greatest mathematician of the 20th century, according to some) was obsessed with purity and methods of great abstractness over more obvious routes to problem solving. In fact, his was such an abstract take on matters in Pure Mathematics that it is inaccessible to a lot of working mathematicians themselves, let alone the common man. His style of Mathematics - often dubbed 'Fortress Mathematics' (built around his cult of followers) was a major dampener for many-a-young wannabe mathematician who were overwhelmed by the technical virtuosity demanded of them to even begin to understand what was going on. Again, concerns for stellar, unimaginably stringent purity and an open disdain for anything even slightly contaminated (read less general/abstract - woe to applied mathematicians - the hacks who dare defile the sanctity of math!) make him the counterpart to Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr.
3) Quentin Tarantino & Benoit Mandlebrot and Paul Erdos : Cinema for Tarantino is not a meditation on deep matters (cross Tarkovsky, Tarr). He's definitely not into minimalism (cross Kim ki Duk). What's he into then?
Filmmaking for Tarantino is an expression of sheer joy. It's also about being all-over-the-place like a jumping, hyperactive kid suffering from attention deficit disorder high on methamphetamine. It is about exuberance, aesthetic violence, non-linearity, dialogue (his characters never seem to shut up) and a breakneck, blitzy pace. He doesn't care about conventions or boundaries or classifications. He breaks rules, bends them, amalgamates genres, rips off others' work and gives them a new spin and constantly reinvents and pushes the boundaries of filmmaking all the fucking time.
Somewhat similar was the approach to mathematics taken by Mandlebrot and Erdos. Mandlebrot was repelled by the Fortress Mathematics so in vogue when he took up studies of Math. His was a more intuition based, a more qualitative approach (often called 'Open Mathematics' by some). He was genre defying and refused categorization of any kind. His work in pure math soon spilled onto areas like Information Theory, Fluid Mechanics, Economics and Physics (one of his papers was on the stability of cotton prices over the years). Nassim Taleb considers him his guru and chief mentor.
Erdos is a legend in himself. His versatile work in Graph Theory, Number Theory, Analysis, Combinatorics and several other disciplines was the work of someone obsessed with and totally in love with what he was doing. [Perhaps it was he who said "When I am depressed I do math to become happy. When I am happy, I do math to stay happy".] Again, the hyperactive-all-over-the-place-kid effect can be seen here. His encouragement of budding young mathematicians, geeky sense of humor, astoundingly large collaborative body of work that changed the way Mathematics was done and championing of Open Mathematics makes him the ideal counterpart of Tarantino in Mathematics - perhaps even more so than Mandlebrot.
...
Perhaps more such maps will be discovered by readers of this blog, maybe not in the same two fields, but perhaps in others where such isomorphism have not yet been discovered.
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").].
"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").].
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Infinite Zest
Disclaimer: This is not a review. Probably a tribute.
Warning: Very long winded, meandering, totally unfunny post. Unintentional hilarity not ruled out though.
...
It's a book that's a thousand and seventy nine pages long, exhausting, engaging, irritating, funny, heavy, deep, casual, brilliant, non linear, madly extravagant and freakishly intelligent. But most importantly, it is genuine, sincere and does not suffer from cleveritis (David Foster Wallace's {henceforth referred to as DFW} own neologism for smart superficiality). Reading Infinite Jest is like falling in love with a difficult person - an experience that's frustrating, endearing, annoying, heart-tugging and so totally worth it.
The wide variety of topics it touches on include dysfunctional families, substance abuse, terrorism, depression, avant garde film theory, loneliness, game theory and mathematics, prodigies, pop culture, black humor and science fictional parody (among others that NF must've failed to notice). DFW was a former tennis prodigy who wrote an undergraduate thesis on Modal Logic, studied creative writing in grad school before enrolling in Harvard for a PhD in Philosophy (Mathematical Logic) only to drop out later (a later non fiction bit by him is called Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ - apparently a highly technical piece not for the casual reader). Among those who know NF would've guessed by now that such a writer bio is sufficient for NF to go ga ga even before having read the book. But herein comes the important bit - even though it is somewhat easy (?) to write deep books which turn out to be great but are soul deadeningly boring, the truly non trivial task is to write a deep book that turns out to be great and is hugely entertaining - in fact is uproariously funny. DFW accomplishes that and more.
The word most used to describe DFW's style is maximalism - the exact opposite of minimalism - the use of multi-clause, page long (in fact sometimes 200 word long) sentences that use sesquipedalian (a NewsWagon 'in' joke; polysyllabic) jargon-laden words in the same breath as street slang, acronyms and plentiful word play [example: O.N.A.N. - Organization of North American Nations - a megastate described in the book and referred to by the abbreviation throughout. Onanism in English means masturbation.] with generous use of end notes and footnotes throughout the text (NB: this paragraph is made up of a single (multi-clause) sentence with multiple use of brackets making up for the effect of end/foot notes and pays tribute to DFW's preferred style of sentence formation - an example of maximalism in action).
In particular, the manner in which his highly erudite, bombastic linguistic calisthenics are interrupted by very lowbrow street language reminded NF of Manohar Shyam Joshi's idiosyncratic, cult book Kuru Kuru Swaahaa - another book that is great, deep and laugh-out-loud funny. Consider Wallace's description of his previous work The Broom of the System and its "covertly autobiographical" nature:
A flip side, however, of this florid, lexically obsessed, often taxing flamboyance of style is that his one-time girlfriend gave up reading his 67 page break up letter (Caution: The Onion reports). There's irony for you, another of Wallace's themes.
The main concern for our Tarantino of fiction was to help readers “become less alone inside”. He was against the idea of smart, cold writers withholding themselves and wallowing in ironic, clever, superficial, detached cynicism. And this is what is so compelling about Infinite Jest - an immersion into storytelling that is totally committed and extremely passionate. The emphasis on the heart, more than the head is what finally won NF over. This is also evident in his praise of St Paul, Rousseau and Dostoyevsky - his favorite writers:
and
A more appropriate title of the book would've been A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - something that the book definitely is. Perhaps equally appropriately, Dave Eggers (the actual author of A Heartbreaking Work...) penned the Foreword to this book.
Nanga Fakir recommends his friends and readers of the blog to fall on their feet and mourn the passing away of this mental titan. For those who can tolerate a huge, fat, highbrow work of art - this is it - the most compelling, ultimate experience. The probability that you'll be changed by the time you end this book is high (including the possibility that it takes you years to finish the book abandoning it midway n number of times and coming out a changed person merely having been bludgeoned by Time).
For those who've been sufficiently intrigued, see the following:
Roger Federer as a religious experience
The Unfinished
The lost years and last days of David Foster Wallace
and
Wallace reading a passage from his book:
Let's end the post by reading a little something on assignment plagiarism from the endnotes of Infinite Jest:
<*Sigh*> So true!
Warning: Very long winded, meandering, totally unfunny post. Unintentional hilarity not ruled out though.
...
It's a book that's a thousand and seventy nine pages long, exhausting, engaging, irritating, funny, heavy, deep, casual, brilliant, non linear, madly extravagant and freakishly intelligent. But most importantly, it is genuine, sincere and does not suffer from cleveritis (David Foster Wallace's {henceforth referred to as DFW} own neologism for smart superficiality). Reading Infinite Jest is like falling in love with a difficult person - an experience that's frustrating, endearing, annoying, heart-tugging and so totally worth it.
The wide variety of topics it touches on include dysfunctional families, substance abuse, terrorism, depression, avant garde film theory, loneliness, game theory and mathematics, prodigies, pop culture, black humor and science fictional parody (among others that NF must've failed to notice). DFW was a former tennis prodigy who wrote an undergraduate thesis on Modal Logic, studied creative writing in grad school before enrolling in Harvard for a PhD in Philosophy (Mathematical Logic) only to drop out later (a later non fiction bit by him is called Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ - apparently a highly technical piece not for the casual reader). Among those who know NF would've guessed by now that such a writer bio is sufficient for NF to go ga ga even before having read the book. But herein comes the important bit - even though it is somewhat easy (?) to write deep books which turn out to be great but are soul deadeningly boring, the truly non trivial task is to write a deep book that turns out to be great and is hugely entertaining - in fact is uproariously funny. DFW accomplishes that and more.
The word most used to describe DFW's style is maximalism - the exact opposite of minimalism - the use of multi-clause, page long (in fact sometimes 200 word long) sentences that use sesquipedalian (a NewsWagon 'in' joke; polysyllabic) jargon-laden words in the same breath as street slang, acronyms and plentiful word play [example: O.N.A.N. - Organization of North American Nations - a megastate described in the book and referred to by the abbreviation throughout. Onanism in English means masturbation.] with generous use of end notes and footnotes throughout the text (NB: this paragraph is made up of a single (multi-clause) sentence with multiple use of brackets making up for the effect of end/foot notes and pays tribute to DFW's preferred style of sentence formation - an example of maximalism in action).
In particular, the manner in which his highly erudite, bombastic linguistic calisthenics are interrupted by very lowbrow street language reminded NF of Manohar Shyam Joshi's idiosyncratic, cult book Kuru Kuru Swaahaa - another book that is great, deep and laugh-out-loud funny. Consider Wallace's description of his previous work The Broom of the System and its "covertly autobiographical" nature:
the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this midlife crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction . . . which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6°F calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct
A flip side, however, of this florid, lexically obsessed, often taxing flamboyance of style is that his one-time girlfriend gave up reading his 67 page break up letter (Caution: The Onion reports). There's irony for you, another of Wallace's themes.
The main concern for our Tarantino of fiction was to help readers “become less alone inside”. He was against the idea of smart, cold writers withholding themselves and wallowing in ironic, clever, superficial, detached cynicism. And this is what is so compelling about Infinite Jest - an immersion into storytelling that is totally committed and extremely passionate. The emphasis on the heart, more than the head is what finally won NF over. This is also evident in his praise of St Paul, Rousseau and Dostoyevsky - his favorite writers:
“what are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.”
and
"I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love."
A more appropriate title of the book would've been A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - something that the book definitely is. Perhaps equally appropriately, Dave Eggers (the actual author of A Heartbreaking Work...) penned the Foreword to this book.
Nanga Fakir recommends his friends and readers of the blog to fall on their feet and mourn the passing away of this mental titan. For those who can tolerate a huge, fat, highbrow work of art - this is it - the most compelling, ultimate experience. The probability that you'll be changed by the time you end this book is high (including the possibility that it takes you years to finish the book abandoning it midway n number of times and coming out a changed person merely having been bludgeoned by Time).
For those who've been sufficiently intrigued, see the following:
Roger Federer as a religious experience
The Unfinished
The lost years and last days of David Foster Wallace
and
Wallace reading a passage from his book:
Let's end the post by reading a little something on assignment plagiarism from the endnotes of Infinite Jest:
...the congenital plagiarists put so much work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren't so much lazy as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them. About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism - whether it's dishonesty or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what - Hal hasn't developed much of any sort of take.
<*Sigh*> So true!
Monday, June 22, 2009
The Road (Part Four): Blues, Booze, Schmooze, Snooze
Being in Chicago and missing out on Blues is like being in Bihar and not getting kidnapped. From June 12-14th was the '09 Chicago Blues Festival. It was fun and it was free. And yes before I forget to mention, they allowed Nanga Fakir in!
Those who know him well, see through his carefully cultivated, fake, sophisticated exterior and smile (perhaps fondly?) at the country bumpkin that NF essentially is. They see a little kid from a sleepy B grade township who takes himself a bit too seriously for his own good (and has no sense of humour to boot) with fingers rammed deep in his nostrils observing carnivals, freak shows and big ass concerts with practised nonchalance. Don't let his noir-ish-Humphrey Bogartsy-sick-of-the-same-old-thing world weary attitude fool you though. The kid inside isn't dead yet. Sometimes he makes a sort of guest appearance. And each time this happens, he's snubbed hard and sternly told to go back to his room to study for the upcoming exams. Every now and then however, he sneaks out for an ice cream or something and has a blast. The Blues Festival is a case in point.
Grant Park overflowed with freeloaders and blues aficionados of all shapes and sizes. Just being in their midst and glancing at people whose names were stuffs of legends in wannabe lit circles back there in S'kal was reason enough for NF to wear a smug grin for the next few weeks and look down upon other normal people with the kind of patient disdain that benevolent Kung-fu masters reserve for their apprentices.
Usually NF is quiet, introspective, silent and keeps-to-himself kind of a guy. But then sometimes he gets pleased with himself for no apparent reason and if presented with a suitable opportunity, jumps on the beer-is-good-for-health bandwagon. And then those unfortunate enough to be around, witness what NF's roommate (henceforth referred to as Mota) refers to as "awakening of the inner mausi" phenomenon. There is an explosion of garrulousness and subsequent metamorphosis of NF into a pain-in-the-ass chatterbox.
And so it was that NF met AB (a closet smoker for 37 years), CD (a black dude who somehow reminded NF of Curtis Loew and kept muttering every few minutes or so "...the music man...the music" with an incredibly serious air that probably had more to do with ganja than with any serious guitar work), EF (a run-of-the-mill Obamaniac - they're so many of them!) among others.
He still thinks however, that Rudy Wallang and his Shillong based blues band Soulmate would've kicked some serious ass and are better than most of (nay, make that all) the local blues bands in the festival (which were a jarring note in an otherwise pleasant symphony). (For the uninitiated, Rudy Wallang's "Not Those Funking Blues Again" is the best Blues instrumental song NF's listened to...Okay, maybe not the best, but you should get the picture now.)
Other memorable encounters include the one with Lisa [the fat Blues singer in Bill's bar who so floored NF with her cover of Sinner's Prayer (Ray Charles original?) that he walked up to her (slightly tipsy one might add) and shamelessly announced that this was the best cover of the song he's heard {seriously, how many covers of the song had he heard?} and that she's better than many of those who performed at the Blues Festival a couple of days earlier. I think NF saw a slight amusement in her eyes as she smiled and took the compliment graciously.] and with the Unknown Philologist who was an expert in Indian languages and thought that Tams were a chauvinistic group. As someone with a good many close Tam friends, NF fought with the guy tooth and nail so much so that the Philologist asked "You don't seem to be a Tam. Or are you?"
The previous week has been spent listening to John Lee Hooker, Susan Tedeschi, Etta James, Duane Allman, Buddy Guy, Clapton and other serious badass musicians.
<*Wonders if all this Blues should make this post entitled to be labeled under 'Blues'*>
.
.
.
<*Nah, not really*>
...
The End
Those who know him well, see through his carefully cultivated, fake, sophisticated exterior and smile (perhaps fondly?) at the country bumpkin that NF essentially is. They see a little kid from a sleepy B grade township who takes himself a bit too seriously for his own good (and has no sense of humour to boot) with fingers rammed deep in his nostrils observing carnivals, freak shows and big ass concerts with practised nonchalance. Don't let his noir-ish-Humphrey Bogartsy-sick-of-the-same-old-thing world weary attitude fool you though. The kid inside isn't dead yet. Sometimes he makes a sort of guest appearance. And each time this happens, he's snubbed hard and sternly told to go back to his room to study for the upcoming exams. Every now and then however, he sneaks out for an ice cream or something and has a blast. The Blues Festival is a case in point.
Grant Park overflowed with freeloaders and blues aficionados of all shapes and sizes. Just being in their midst and glancing at people whose names were stuffs of legends in wannabe lit circles back there in S'kal was reason enough for NF to wear a smug grin for the next few weeks and look down upon other normal people with the kind of patient disdain that benevolent Kung-fu masters reserve for their apprentices.
Usually NF is quiet, introspective, silent and keeps-to-himself kind of a guy. But then sometimes he gets pleased with himself for no apparent reason and if presented with a suitable opportunity, jumps on the beer-is-good-for-health bandwagon. And then those unfortunate enough to be around, witness what NF's roommate (henceforth referred to as Mota) refers to as "awakening of the inner mausi" phenomenon. There is an explosion of garrulousness and subsequent metamorphosis of NF into a pain-in-the-ass chatterbox.
And so it was that NF met AB (a closet smoker for 37 years), CD (a black dude who somehow reminded NF of Curtis Loew and kept muttering every few minutes or so "...the music man...the music" with an incredibly serious air that probably had more to do with ganja than with any serious guitar work), EF (a run-of-the-mill Obamaniac - they're so many of them!) among others.
He still thinks however, that Rudy Wallang and his Shillong based blues band Soulmate would've kicked some serious ass and are better than most of (nay, make that all) the local blues bands in the festival (which were a jarring note in an otherwise pleasant symphony). (For the uninitiated, Rudy Wallang's "Not Those Funking Blues Again" is the best Blues instrumental song NF's listened to...Okay, maybe not the best, but you should get the picture now.)
Other memorable encounters include the one with Lisa [the fat Blues singer in Bill's bar who so floored NF with her cover of Sinner's Prayer (Ray Charles original?) that he walked up to her (slightly tipsy one might add) and shamelessly announced that this was the best cover of the song he's heard {seriously, how many covers of the song had he heard?} and that she's better than many of those who performed at the Blues Festival a couple of days earlier. I think NF saw a slight amusement in her eyes as she smiled and took the compliment graciously.] and with the Unknown Philologist who was an expert in Indian languages and thought that Tams were a chauvinistic group. As someone with a good many close Tam friends, NF fought with the guy tooth and nail so much so that the Philologist asked "You don't seem to be a Tam. Or are you?"
The previous week has been spent listening to John Lee Hooker, Susan Tedeschi, Etta James, Duane Allman, Buddy Guy, Clapton and other serious badass musicians.
<*Wonders if all this Blues should make this post entitled to be labeled under 'Blues'*>
.
.
.
<*Nah, not really*>
...
The End
Friday, June 19, 2009
The Road (Part Three)
Good books cost money. Which people who have time don't have.
Good books cost time. Which people who have money don't have.
Nanga Fakir falls into the first category. That is why he has to resort to extreme measures in order to recover money invested in good books. Time - that's something he has in plenty.
Reading books in well mannered reading establishments on couches that ingest you partially, dragging you into quicksands of serious, hardcore comfort is Nanga Fakir's idea of bliss. Every time he walked the isles, the sexual tension in the atmosphere became unbearable and he felt that his balls would explode. And so NF prepared himself for some serious reading spread over the course of a week or two and finished the following:
1) 100% - Paul Pope
2) Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
3)-9) Sin City - Frank Miller
10) I Saw You - Edited by Julia Wertz
11) The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Sin City has got to be the most awesome comic book ever. And yes, this includes giants like Watchmen and V for Vendetta. The neo-noir style, the exaggerated contrasts of black and white, the minimal, pithy text, the multiple POV manner of story telling and the absolutely killer story lines make it the most marvelous comic book NF has read. (In particular, That Yellow Bastard is hard to beat as the best comic ever.)
Somnath, you were so damn right.
I Saw You is an anthology of various strips drawn by many comic book writers with the common theme of missed connections - stories inspired from real life encounters between people who thought they caught brief glimpses of their true loves.
Overall, it was a nice, routinely good read. As again, Julia's strips were among the best. Example:
Some more can be seen here.
The White Tiger was a really fast, terrific read. Adiga's witty, smart, sometimes angst ridden sense of humour really comes out well and nothing seems forced or contrived. And yes, there is seriousness in the book too. Loads of it.
...
Another part and then he thinks he'll let go.
Good books cost time. Which people who have money don't have.
Nanga Fakir falls into the first category. That is why he has to resort to extreme measures in order to recover money invested in good books. Time - that's something he has in plenty.
Reading books in well mannered reading establishments on couches that ingest you partially, dragging you into quicksands of serious, hardcore comfort is Nanga Fakir's idea of bliss. Every time he walked the isles, the sexual tension in the atmosphere became unbearable and he felt that his balls would explode. And so NF prepared himself for some serious reading spread over the course of a week or two and finished the following:
1) 100% - Paul Pope
2) Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
3)-9) Sin City - Frank Miller
10) I Saw You - Edited by Julia Wertz
11) The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Sin City has got to be the most awesome comic book ever. And yes, this includes giants like Watchmen and V for Vendetta. The neo-noir style, the exaggerated contrasts of black and white, the minimal, pithy text, the multiple POV manner of story telling and the absolutely killer story lines make it the most marvelous comic book NF has read. (In particular, That Yellow Bastard is hard to beat as the best comic ever.)
Somnath, you were so damn right.
I Saw You is an anthology of various strips drawn by many comic book writers with the common theme of missed connections - stories inspired from real life encounters between people who thought they caught brief glimpses of their true loves.
Overall, it was a nice, routinely good read. As again, Julia's strips were among the best. Example:
Some more can be seen here.
The White Tiger was a really fast, terrific read. Adiga's witty, smart, sometimes angst ridden sense of humour really comes out well and nothing seems forced or contrived. And yes, there is seriousness in the book too. Loads of it.
...
Another part and then he thinks he'll let go.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
The Road (Part Two)
Being bookless while traveling can be a harrowing experience. A real nightmare. Totally.
A walking distance away (which for NF is anything within a one/two mile radius) from his place in Evanston was Barnes and Noble. It is common knowledge among those who know him that Nanga Fakir is drawn to bookstores as pigs are drawn to feces. The analogy extends even further. Both NF and the pigs then like to drown themselves uninhibitedly into the arms of their objects of desire, squeaking with delight and producing the legendary "Oink, Oink" sound.
And so it was that a pig named Nanga Fakir was let loose in a cultured, sophisticated and well mannered reading establishment.
He wanted to treat himself to a good book. It became even more important because he'd forgotten about his own birthday a few days ago. And so he began his search, sifting through the pile of books that lay in a sort of majestic arrogance in front of him.
There were (are) many books on his list. Michael Chabon has been one of the writers on the list for quite some time now (especially his books The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman's Union). Also on the list has been Thomas Pynchon and his magnum opus Gravity's Rainbow (legend (perhaps apocryphal) has it that Pynchon wrote the first draft of this book on an engineering blueprint after his application for graduate work in Mathematics was rejected by UC Berkeley). Truman Capote, Cormac McCarthy, William Gibson's Spook Country and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (which came with very high recommendations from AK) were also given serious consideration.
The list also consisted of other giants whose names NF drops casually in mundane day-to-day conversations (unfortunately) to people with no lit propensities thereby making a fool of himself with appreciable frequency.
The book he finally settled on however, was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The writer had come to his notice when the lit establishment was shaken by his suicide last year. Apparently the writer was afflicted with a particularly severe form of unipolar depression for a long time. However, the thing that intrigued NF most was the obvious awe with which lit giants wrote his obituary. Plus the description of Infinite Jest as a massive work on multiple, disparate themes set in the future with an underlying bizarre sense of humor that accompanies the narrative, decided the question. Currently however, Nanga Fakir is struggling with the difficult to read thousand plus page tome at the rate of twenty odd pages an hour.
Difficult books can sometimes end up a lot of fun he thinks (think of difficult children sometimes turning out to be brilliant adults or Kurosawa's boring period pieces turning out to be thought provoking experiences after a never ending couple of hours). The examples of Neuromancer and War and Peace come straight to mind. That is why Nanga Fakir hasn't given up on fat works and intends to complete Gravity's Rainbow and Dhalgren someday.
The sly dog NF also managed to filch the Pulitzer prize winner Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond and India: A Million Mutinies Now by V S Naipaul from his brother's rather modest book collection.
Being so heavily loaded on books, one might think Nanga Fakir decided to call it a day.
"Not really", he says.
...
To be followed by Part Three.
A walking distance away (which for NF is anything within a one/two mile radius) from his place in Evanston was Barnes and Noble. It is common knowledge among those who know him that Nanga Fakir is drawn to bookstores as pigs are drawn to feces. The analogy extends even further. Both NF and the pigs then like to drown themselves uninhibitedly into the arms of their objects of desire, squeaking with delight and producing the legendary "Oink, Oink" sound.
And so it was that a pig named Nanga Fakir was let loose in a cultured, sophisticated and well mannered reading establishment.
He wanted to treat himself to a good book. It became even more important because he'd forgotten about his own birthday a few days ago. And so he began his search, sifting through the pile of books that lay in a sort of majestic arrogance in front of him.
There were (are) many books on his list. Michael Chabon has been one of the writers on the list for quite some time now (especially his books The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman's Union). Also on the list has been Thomas Pynchon and his magnum opus Gravity's Rainbow (legend (perhaps apocryphal) has it that Pynchon wrote the first draft of this book on an engineering blueprint after his application for graduate work in Mathematics was rejected by UC Berkeley). Truman Capote, Cormac McCarthy, William Gibson's Spook Country and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (which came with very high recommendations from AK) were also given serious consideration.
The list also consisted of other giants whose names NF drops casually in mundane day-to-day conversations (unfortunately) to people with no lit propensities thereby making a fool of himself with appreciable frequency.
The book he finally settled on however, was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The writer had come to his notice when the lit establishment was shaken by his suicide last year. Apparently the writer was afflicted with a particularly severe form of unipolar depression for a long time. However, the thing that intrigued NF most was the obvious awe with which lit giants wrote his obituary. Plus the description of Infinite Jest as a massive work on multiple, disparate themes set in the future with an underlying bizarre sense of humor that accompanies the narrative, decided the question. Currently however, Nanga Fakir is struggling with the difficult to read thousand plus page tome at the rate of twenty odd pages an hour.
Difficult books can sometimes end up a lot of fun he thinks (think of difficult children sometimes turning out to be brilliant adults or Kurosawa's boring period pieces turning out to be thought provoking experiences after a never ending couple of hours). The examples of Neuromancer and War and Peace come straight to mind. That is why Nanga Fakir hasn't given up on fat works and intends to complete Gravity's Rainbow and Dhalgren someday.
The sly dog NF also managed to filch the Pulitzer prize winner Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond and India: A Million Mutinies Now by V S Naipaul from his brother's rather modest book collection.
Being so heavily loaded on books, one might think Nanga Fakir decided to call it a day.
"Not really", he says.
...
To be followed by Part Three.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Road (Part One)
He was bored, down and confused. His birthday was coming up and his ass was about to be totally whipped. So Nanga Fakir decided to travel.
It's funny how despite the fact that he is more interested in books than in people, traveling always cheers him up and clears up his mind. It probably makes him think that something is happening. Other things remain the same however. He does the exact same things on the road as he does off of it (reads books and comics, checks email, sleeps for twelve hours, coordinates with governments for world peace etc etc).
In particular, walking around new places aimlessly excites him the most. Does he observe the beauty (or the lack of it) of the new surroundings he's walking through? Not really. He's so self engrossed that all he can pay attention to is the pleasure of thinking the same things over and over again in an area that has a different shade of background noise than his usual haunts'. So is it the destination that holds his interest? No, it's the clichéd journey.
I bet if you deprive him of books, he'll get bored to death even on the sets of The Jerry Springer Show (which by the way, he totally hearts); and so it only made sense to see him pack Inside Mr Enderby and The Road as he decided to visit Chicago for pointless rides in the subway, pleasant and shivery random walks around Evanston and most importantly - free beers (for the sake of which he had to endure the company of an old woman who leaked mustard farts in fifteen minute cycles on the airplane).
The city welcomed him with open arms in the guise of a black beast-of-a-woman twice his size and thrice his age who promised to show him "a good time" (NF has never been more frightened).
Soon enough, putting the aforementioned traumatic experience behind him, he decided to visit an old schoolfriend who he considers to be among the few select humans in the epsilon neighborhood of his own smartness (Nanga Fakir thinks he's awesome but we know better, don't we?). The promise of free beers and a sailing expedition in Lake Michigan removed remnant hardwired traces of laziness and set his focus straight. He didn't yet know (he'd totally forgotten) that it was his birthday that very day and would be reminded of this late in the night well into his nth beer. Very characteristically, it would come across as a dumb shock as he would realize that he'd wasted one more year having learned nothing from life (or as some would say, the lack of it). Had it not been for the beer and the company, it would've meant one more pointless bout of bitter introspection.
The biggest discovery of the trip however (which has obviously got nothing to do with the trip per se) was Julia Wertz and her Fart Party. Nanga Fakir is always taken by surprise when he finds autobiographical accounts of insignificant humans totally engrossing. It was not for the artwork that he read Julia's comic. She didn't claim to offer any deep insights into the nature of things either. She was her usual, bitchy, whiny self with no pretenses and no illusions about what she was setting out to do. It must take an enormous amount of presumptuousness to post details about your life and expect junta to take an interest in it. It must take an obscene amount of courage also.
Here's NF's favorite post from the Fart Party - a terrific piece about cravings for solitude. Go Julia!
Part Two to follow up shortly.
It's funny how despite the fact that he is more interested in books than in people, traveling always cheers him up and clears up his mind. It probably makes him think that something is happening. Other things remain the same however. He does the exact same things on the road as he does off of it (reads books and comics, checks email, sleeps for twelve hours, coordinates with governments for world peace etc etc).
In particular, walking around new places aimlessly excites him the most. Does he observe the beauty (or the lack of it) of the new surroundings he's walking through? Not really. He's so self engrossed that all he can pay attention to is the pleasure of thinking the same things over and over again in an area that has a different shade of background noise than his usual haunts'. So is it the destination that holds his interest? No, it's the clichéd journey.
I bet if you deprive him of books, he'll get bored to death even on the sets of The Jerry Springer Show (which by the way, he totally hearts); and so it only made sense to see him pack Inside Mr Enderby and The Road as he decided to visit Chicago for pointless rides in the subway, pleasant and shivery random walks around Evanston and most importantly - free beers (for the sake of which he had to endure the company of an old woman who leaked mustard farts in fifteen minute cycles on the airplane).
The city welcomed him with open arms in the guise of a black beast-of-a-woman twice his size and thrice his age who promised to show him "a good time" (NF has never been more frightened).
Soon enough, putting the aforementioned traumatic experience behind him, he decided to visit an old schoolfriend who he considers to be among the few select humans in the epsilon neighborhood of his own smartness (Nanga Fakir thinks he's awesome but we know better, don't we?). The promise of free beers and a sailing expedition in Lake Michigan removed remnant hardwired traces of laziness and set his focus straight. He didn't yet know (he'd totally forgotten) that it was his birthday that very day and would be reminded of this late in the night well into his nth beer. Very characteristically, it would come across as a dumb shock as he would realize that he'd wasted one more year having learned nothing from life (or as some would say, the lack of it). Had it not been for the beer and the company, it would've meant one more pointless bout of bitter introspection.
The biggest discovery of the trip however (which has obviously got nothing to do with the trip per se) was Julia Wertz and her Fart Party. Nanga Fakir is always taken by surprise when he finds autobiographical accounts of insignificant humans totally engrossing. It was not for the artwork that he read Julia's comic. She didn't claim to offer any deep insights into the nature of things either. She was her usual, bitchy, whiny self with no pretenses and no illusions about what she was setting out to do. It must take an enormous amount of presumptuousness to post details about your life and expect junta to take an interest in it. It must take an obscene amount of courage also.
Here's NF's favorite post from the Fart Party - a terrific piece about cravings for solitude. Go Julia!
Part Two to follow up shortly.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Another Webcomic
A nice, cute webcomic by Julia Wertz - The Fart Party.
The subject matter centers mostly around little autobiographical details of a short, skinny, often foul-mouthed artist who cribs a lot. You'll sort of like her.
The subject matter centers mostly around little autobiographical details of a short, skinny, often foul-mouthed artist who cribs a lot. You'll sort of like her.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
In which he takes a Resolution
Nanga Fakir is going to drown himself in Mathematics, Philosophy, Films, Reading, Writing and Travel.
He will read like a madman, with the fury and mad intensity of one who is consumed by the burning fever of knowing everything about everything.
And yes, he will write. Oh yes, he will. I will make sure he does so.
He will read like a madman, with the fury and mad intensity of one who is consumed by the burning fever of knowing everything about everything.
And yes, he will write. Oh yes, he will. I will make sure he does so.
"[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation."
Orhan Pamuk (The Black Book)
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Friday, May 08, 2009
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Enforced Nostalghia
What S'kal gave me was the company of some absolutely brilliant people whom I love with all the testosterone that can be packed in a couple of (battle fatigued?) testicles. Some of them will rise up and be successful tomorrow. Some of them will give up and wallow in their laziness. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that whenever I will meet them over a cup of coffee or a mug of beer and listen to what they have to say, I will grin in approval, chuckle in satisfaction, think in earnest, bite with sarcasm, mock with a coldly calculated cynicism, even seethe with anger but never ever, oh thank god, never shrug with indifference or nod with boredom.
PS: To be taken with a pinch of salt (read composed while high).
PS: To be taken with a pinch of salt (read composed while high).
Monday, April 27, 2009
Webcomic 2.0
If the sample below does not compel you to follow The Perry Bible Fellowship, you are a lost cause.
(Click on image for larger size).
Link
(Click on image for larger size).
Link
Thursday, April 23, 2009
DD : Dental Disappointment
Quoted from a recent email (without permission of course). Don't let the typos get in your way!
Sounds like a Cartman gang ambush to me.
dear instructor,
this is your student, XYZ. i had gotten involved with something serious over the weekend, 10 unknown attackers jumped me and knocked out one of my tooth. i was no present for monday's class due to serious dental pain and dental appointment. i was prescribed a high dosage of codein which has rendered me unfit to attend class for this week. please excuse me missing today's quiz as i would like to make up monday's class and the quiz at a later time. i do have a doctor's note for the date of tues as well as the presciption notice. thank you.
Sounds like a Cartman gang ambush to me.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
More Additions (Part 2)
1) 3-Iron (Korean): Kim ki Duk's fixation with minimalism continues with this baap of all romance movies. The director takes a love story, rips it down to its barest essentials, sucks off all dialogue (between the main two leads, there is only one dialogue - the clichéd "I love you" at the very end), adds a touch or two of quiet, meditative humour here and there and manages to produce probably the greatest romance movie I've seen.
You don't know the meaning of 'shock and awe' until you've seen this film.
Since it is such a bloody brilliant film (it merits a place in the "Beyond AA" part of my list), let me post a picture.
2) Stardust Memories (English): A 1980 Woody Allen classic. With many scenes filched (as tribute? as parody?) directly from 8½, the usual staple of failed romances and Woody Allen's role as the famous film director more known for his "earlier, funny movies" (a running joke throughout the film), it is easily my favourite Allen movie beating even the impossible to beat Deconstructing Harry, Annie Hall and September.
Quite a feat!
3) Bad Guy (Korean): Hint 1: Kim ki Duk, Hint 2: Romance.
Another warped. twisted, demented love story as can be conceived only by Kim ki Duk. Seasoned, hardened veterans of the twisted/extreme cinema movement are also in for a shock by the climax.
Enough said. Go watch.
4) In the Mood for Love (Cantonese): For some great films, you use words like "brilliant", "powerful", "beautiful" etc. For some others you can use "kickass", "unbelievable" and "stunning". For some great cinema however, you're simply stumped for words. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact emotion that washes over you by the time the movie ends. Perhaps it is awe, perhaps it is an urge to kneel down and wonder what hit you.
Welcome to the cinema of Wang-Kar-wai!
I think his movies merit a separate post by themselves in which I rant, rave, kneel, worship and grovel at the fragmented, labile and madly, madly stylish romances of the Hong Kong auteur. So here I will stick to a short account of the awesomeness that this film is.
But first, a still.
Tony Leung (the Shahrukh Khan of Hong Kong) is brilliant. Maggie Cheung is a dream in a cheongsam. The last time (before In the mood...) I felt so moved after witnessing an overpowering more-than-your-mortal-ass-can-conceive-ness was when as a thirteen year old I read The Idiot and hated Dostoyevsky for the book's climax.
And I'd thought I was jaded! What a pleasant surprise!
And you know what the best part is? It is only a prelude to the final installment of the trilogy - 2046 which is even more brilliant than In the mood...
<*is exhausted after singing so many hosannas*>
2046 and others will be covered in the next installment.
You don't know the meaning of 'shock and awe' until you've seen this film.
Since it is such a bloody brilliant film (it merits a place in the "Beyond AA" part of my list), let me post a picture.
2) Stardust Memories (English): A 1980 Woody Allen classic. With many scenes filched (as tribute? as parody?) directly from 8½, the usual staple of failed romances and Woody Allen's role as the famous film director more known for his "earlier, funny movies" (a running joke throughout the film), it is easily my favourite Allen movie beating even the impossible to beat Deconstructing Harry, Annie Hall and September.
Quite a feat!
3) Bad Guy (Korean): Hint 1: Kim ki Duk, Hint 2: Romance.
Another warped. twisted, demented love story as can be conceived only by Kim ki Duk. Seasoned, hardened veterans of the twisted/extreme cinema movement are also in for a shock by the climax.
Enough said. Go watch.
4) In the Mood for Love (Cantonese): For some great films, you use words like "brilliant", "powerful", "beautiful" etc. For some others you can use "kickass", "unbelievable" and "stunning". For some great cinema however, you're simply stumped for words. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact emotion that washes over you by the time the movie ends. Perhaps it is awe, perhaps it is an urge to kneel down and wonder what hit you.
Welcome to the cinema of Wang-Kar-wai!
I think his movies merit a separate post by themselves in which I rant, rave, kneel, worship and grovel at the fragmented, labile and madly, madly stylish romances of the Hong Kong auteur. So here I will stick to a short account of the awesomeness that this film is.
But first, a still.
Tony Leung (the Shahrukh Khan of Hong Kong) is brilliant. Maggie Cheung is a dream in a cheongsam. The last time (before In the mood...) I felt so moved after witnessing an overpowering more-than-your-mortal-ass-can-conceive-ness was when as a thirteen year old I read The Idiot and hated Dostoyevsky for the book's climax.
And I'd thought I was jaded! What a pleasant surprise!
And you know what the best part is? It is only a prelude to the final installment of the trilogy - 2046 which is even more brilliant than In the mood...
<*is exhausted after singing so many hosannas*>
2046 and others will be covered in the next installment.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Billu'ed
He refused to budge, stuck it out for eleven long months and continued to show The Man his middle finger.
Nanga Fakir's long, dark tresses were mowed down mercilessly last night. He now sports an ex Auschwitz inmate look. He knows it'll be the latest in thing on the Seventh Avenue soon.
Nanga Fakir's long, dark tresses were mowed down mercilessly last night. He now sports an ex Auschwitz inmate look. He knows it'll be the latest in thing on the Seventh Avenue soon.
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