Not This Girl. Not at All

Most people I know read the NYT. And a fair few follow Maira Kalman's And the Pursuit of Happiness. So this is a pointless post. But I like the pop of colours in this illustration, so here it is.

அம்மாவின் பொறந்தநாள்

My mother would have been 65 today. I miss her immensely.

In love longing
I listen to the monk's bell.
I will never forget you
even for an interval
Short as those between the bell notes.

Izumi Shikibu

Lawrence in Thirroul

It had been awhile since we went to Thirroul so this weekend my brother and I drove down to the seaside town on the South Coast. We first went there because of a chance reading of DH Lawrence's uneven novel, Kangaroo. Lawrence wrote the book when he spent a few months with his wife Freida in Australia in 1922. It has a lot of moaning and groaning about Sydney ("Great swarming, teeming Sydney flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally"), the emptiness of Australia and its people and a shadowy fascist organisation with which the narrator (always a Lawrence stand-in) gets involved. Nevertheless, it is Lawrence and therefore interesting. In particular, its description of the land and surrounds sounds fresh even today. Here for example, is his description of his journey to Thirroul, which he fictionalised as Mullumbimby in the novel:

"The land grew steeper—dark, straight hills like cliffs, masked in sombre trees. And then the first plume of colliery smoke among the trees on the hill–face. But they were little collieries, for the most part, where the men just walked into the face of the hill down a tunnel, and they hardly disfigured the land at all. Then the train came out on the sea—lovely bays with sand and grass and trees, sloping up towards the sudden hills that were like a wall. There were bungalows dotted in most of the bays. Then suddenly more collieries, and quite a large settlement of bungalows. From the train they looked down on many many pale–grey zinc roofs, sprinkled about like a great camp, close together, yet none touching, and getting thinner towards the sea."

The collieries must have had some resonance with Lawrence, given his novels. Remarkably, the cottage where Lawrence lived (called Wyewurk) still exists though it is in private hands. Given the brief visit, there is nothing by way of a museum, indeed most Australians are unaware that the writer passed through the country. Consequently, a modest plaque at the end of Craig St. is the only marker.

Lawrence's visit inspired a set of Garry Shead's paintings (below). The novel itself was made into a film, though not one that is well-known.

This weekend, the weather was as Australians are wont to say, glorious. Some fish and chips and a dip in the ocean later we took a few pictures of Craig St. where Lawrence lived. Our quasi-literary pilgrimage was followed by a visit to the Indian temple at Helensburgh. It takes awhile before a temple is integrated with its landscape, in Helensburgh like a Lawrentian novel, the old in a new setting simply lacks an "inner life". The Gods look quite lost in the bush setting.

Pics on top: Plaque at DHL Reserve; the sea from the reserve; DHL bungalow(looking very much like Army bungalows in India). An older image of the house with DHL posing here.

Rusty Peters' Waterbrain

My interest in aboriginal art first arose due to a write up on the east Kimberely paintings in a Qantas inflight magazine. The paintings had a sparse, spiritual quality and used natural ochres (in fact each region in Australia has its characteristic art and I will try and post on them from time to time) and something drew me to them. Subsequently, I caught the exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery. One of the paintings caught my attention because it was a visual philosophy tract - though we needed a written explanation. The 12 metre long painting was called "Waterbrain" and the artist was Rusty Peters.

Waterbrain

The painting takes you from the time before you are born, when your spirit resides in water to the development of consciousness, initiation into adulthood and finally a return to the waters when you die. The way I put it does not do justice to it, below are some excerpts from the description (copyright for this text rests with Rusty Peters, Frances Kofod and Jirrawun ).

"We all start out as babies lying down, then we crawl, then we walk as here in the middle (of panel three), then we start to run. This is the same for black and white. Our brain comes from the water."

"Here at the top (of panel three) it shows how we progress from walking to running. When we were in the water we did not think about anything, but once we start running we start to understand and have our own ideas. The water brain leaves us and our parents and teachers start to tell us how to live. We grow up and start talking. We regain our memory and begin to think. This is shown by the brown part in this panel."

"The next part (panel five) is about our education for life. My grandfather taught me how to live......All knowledge is passed on from old to young by black and white."

That exhibition also made me (till then a collector of junk prints) look at art and its collection in a new way. As one of the artists writes "we don't want people to say look isn't that a lovely picture that the aboriginal has painted? We want things to be real and we want places of importance to be left alone so people can go through and see it. And then sit down in peace and think clearly of the happiness of the surroundings, of how we pass through our generations".

At Work

It is a pity that the painting is now most likely in a private collection and few photos exist apart from a small one at the Art Gallery site (it was chosen as a Director's favourite). The painting is not a drawing room centrepiece but one that should belong to the nation.

The Art of Piet Oudolf

In childhood, my bedroom was simply a glorious mess. At age 12, I started to clean up and decorate. And because I had a thing for grasses, the first thing I stuck in a vase was a composition of grasses and large canna leaves. All these years later, I can still remember that intense pleasure of creating something and staring at it for hours till it was no longer novel or immensely beautiful to my eye.

I still love grasses. Every train ride in Sydney affords a momentary stab of pleasure for train yards seem particularly good hosts. Grasses are marginal creatures - growing in derelict spaces in masses, their heads ethereally beautiful white clouds or wispy pink strands.

Piet Oudolf is something of a founding father of the New Perennial or New Wave Planting movement. Native grasses and flowering perennials are more often than not massed to form compositions of drifts, especially in city spaces. They bring colour to urban landscapes but more importantly, the grasses (as can be seen in the pictures above) bring a sense of the natural world to the city that formal floral displays do not. The pictures do not capture it but grasses are particularly susceptible to wind and light (as the NYT article on Mr. Oudolf points out he pays particular attention to these elements) so that motion is integrated with the visual spectacle of the garden. This is why we are always moved by, for example, wheat fields. As the article makes clear, Mr. Oudolf is also interested in the poetry of decay, in the form of things in the winter of their life.

Unfortunately, few of Mr. Oudolf's books are available here though Kinokuniya does stock a few. The text in the books is not fully illustrative of the philosophy behind the gardens, Mr. Oudolf's site itself is a fairly good resource.

NYT article on Mr. Oudolf here. Pictures in the NYT also reproduced here.

For an Australian garden that is decidedly the art of not gardening, see here.

Writing it down

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

Leonard Cohen

Paris on Film

Paris Vu Par, six segments on the city, was made a few decades ago and mostly featured shorts from Nouvelle Vague directors. It is a slight, if interesting piece -Godard injected a bit of misogyny, Chabrol a hint of menace and Rohmer departed from his usual template of misguided youth in love.

Last year there was Paris Je T'aime, equally slight and impressionistic eighteen 5 minute segments set in different parts of the city. They all succeed to some degree. In keeping with the times, few of the directors are French. While each segment has its merits, four stood out for different reasons.

The only segment that bears a resemblance to the Nouvelle Vague is of a man trying to leave his wife only to find she is terminally ill (Bastille). The similarity lies in the story in voiceover, the motif of the red coat and a simultaneous slightness and depth.

Salles and Thomas bring an outsider's view to "Far from the 16th". Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace) is very effective as an immigrant babysitter who starts by singing a lullaby to her own child at a creche and ends with the same lullaby at her employer's flat on the 16th arrondisment. She should be in every movie that is made, if only to enhance it a little.

Conversely, if Christopher Doyle's segment of Hong Kong fantasia plonked on a Paris setting is any indication, he should never make a film and stick to lensing.

The last and most effective segment has Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) following a middle aged American tourist taking in the sights of the 14th arrondisment. Like Bastille, it uses a voiceover with the actress speaking heavily accented French. It is the most effective segment because it provides the sights of the arrondisment, links the protagonist's journey to the city and is poignant and hopeful. Most remarkably it is a contained, compact 5 minute film - it doesn't feel rushed yet there is no superfluous moment and nothing more to be said.

Spotted on Etsy - New Orleans Debris

I like - no adore the colour mauve - in combination with silver it suggests dreams, the light of dusk, nights under a full moon, melancholia, tranquillity and so on. It is the perfect colour, not as cool as blue but not overly hot either. And what's not to like about an aesthetic sensibility that combines a delicate decay with the brooding mood of Southern Gothic? I was particularly drawn to this because it looks like it is dyed in various concentrations of the Violet Chelpark Ink that was once a proud possession.

I also love the tropics and in celebration, a work that combines its two elements - weathering and vivid colour.

Both works are by an artist from New Orleans.

The Remaker of Signs

Last week, the ABC's Sunday Arts program profiled Rosalie Gascoigne. Her career really started at age 57 - I remain fascinated by people whose work peaks at a late age (e.g. Penelope Fitzgerald). It is as if the chaos and disorder of youth is suddenly distilled and perfect. The materials Gascoigne worked with are quite "tough" and large - road signs, fences and the like - not exactly watercolours of flowers.

Her initial work has the exuberant, brilliant yellow of road signs but her later work is more quiet and contemplative. Gascoigne's husband explained the link between landscapes around Canberra and the art pieces, which was quite interesting as it explained the patterns she chose for her work.

Brief bio at wiki.
Image Credit 1
Image Credit 2

Aquatic Fern

The Nardoo, a water fern that grows in Australia. Taken by Shiv at Mt. Coot-Tha Gardens, Brisbane. Click for larger view.

Depardon's Modern Life

Raymond Depardon, who made the excellent "Tenth District Court: Moments of Trial", has a film screening at the French Film Festival this March in Sydney. The film, "Modern Life", is part of a triptych, though the ending suggests that he will be back for another film. Depardon's film profiles peasants in what I think is the region of Occitan over a year (there are bits here and there which indicate that he has been following the families for awhile, though perhaps not with a precise time lag like the Seven Up! series). Occitan appears to be a hilly province - it is a difficult land and as one of the subjects says it requires passion to work it. Most of the peasants are in fact herdsmen or keep livestock. Most are also old and the few young people who appear struggle in different degrees to make a living off the land. The families vary, from uncles and a newly married nephew to families with sons to a young couple trying to acquire land and rear goats. Depardon observes and sometimes prods his reticent subjects, the film doesn't have any particular agenda except perhaps to record Depardon's love of the land and the peasants and the inevitable disappearance of a way of life. Depardon uses a number of "pillow shots" between his visits, usually following a road while seasons change. These shots are very effective in establishing the landscape. While Depardon states that he likes the autumn landscape, I liked the winter scenes (very evocative of Frost's Snowy Evening poem). Dogs also make their appearance at each stop - including one who only understands the Occitan language and one who proceeds to bite the farmer being interviewed. Like all French documentaries set in the countryside, there is something soothing and gentle in the film even as it records conflicts and failures. And also something universal, witness the sweetness of a 70 year old Germaine urging one more biscuit on the documentary makers or the 80+ year old Raymond (not the director) paying a tribute to his parents who "did more with less".

Clip of the film here.

The theatre was surprisingly crowded today, this was not a film I would have thought would be so popular. Partly, it maybe because this evening is the Mardi Gras. People were already taking their street-side seats when I left and Hyde Park was full of people in costume. Most of Japan also seemed to have descended to record the event, they seemed particularly excited to get themselves photographed with a dog collared group.

Toxic Gap Syndrome

Its been several months since I strolled through the CBD.

Last month, while walking around the city, I found that the major arteries (George & Pitt Street) are having a makeover. Pitt Street Mall in fact is having an overhaul while parts of George Street have already got new stores. These stores tend to be repetitive, much in the manner of finding Gap stores every few metres in the US a decade or so ago. Oxfam, which used to be on Pitt Street Mall has relocated as have a number of smaller stores. The renovation will likely increase rents so one can expect that few of them will return. Small business seems to be slowly vanishing from the city. Unlike Melbourne which has built is reputation on small eclectic stores in its laneways, Sydney's city centre has become a vast emporium for major retailers.

Pitt Street Mall on sale

Sydney has a reputation as a soulless city of shiny surfaces. Much as one would like to resist stereotype, sometimes it seems the reputation is deserved.

View from my Window

This morning, walking to work the purple asters at the florist's immediately caught my attention. I bought a bunch and they have been brightening the office today. Here they are on the ledge looking on to the city streets and a tiny bit of the harbour. Its taken on my mobile so not the best pictures ever. Click to see a larger view.

Murray's Myrtales*

Given that there are more than 700 species of eucalypts in Australia, it would appear that this is a country where they have roamed far and wide and endlessly invented themselves depending on where they found themselves. No other tree is as emblematic of the country, its omnipresence an indication that the tree is not an accommodating soul. All this has everything and nothing to do with Murray Bail's endlessly inventive novel, Eucalyptus. Part fairy tale, part botanist's manual (such evocative common names as Pumpkin Gum, Yellow Jacket, Barber’s Gum, Kakadu Woollybutt, Manna Gum, Gympie Messmate & Bastard Tallowwood pepper the book) and part post-modern collection of innumerable truncated inconclusive parables, what most permeates it is whimsicality and wisdom. It starts off with a princess in a tower (no, not really its just Ellen Holland up on a tower slapped onto a NSW property) a beauty speckled with birthmarks and beauty spots whose hand may only be won by the man who can correctly name all the eucalyptus species on her father's property. This fantastic yet simple premise results in a Mr. Cave who identifies all the trees but cannot tell a story. Not so the Stranger who haunts the eucapytus groves of Mr. Holland’s property and takes each tree as the starting point for a modern day fable ("In one of the harbourside haciendas in Vaucluse lived a small bright-eyed woman in gold sandals who had been married and divorced so many times she had trouble remembering her current name"). Each of these stories naturally has something to say about Ellen’s situation - or perhaps not. Who will win the speckled beauty's hand? Bail's story is singular, erudite, raises questions on how we live our lives. It is also hugely playful - its’ most marvellous random excursion is the National Geographic photographer who comes, records and names all the trees without him or anyone else being aware of it (Bail I am quite sure doesn't like photographers).

Immersed in the book, you begin to note the musicality and the nature in train stops - RedFern, Wolli Creek, ArnCliffe, Banksia, RockDale and so on.

I wanted to bookmark too many parts of the book, here are just a few bits from it.

"Her father had warned her about men. Did that include fathers?"
"…the formidable instinct in men to measure, which is often mistaken for pessimism, is counterbalanced by the unfolding optimism of women, which is nothing less than life itself; their endless trump card."
"A person meets thousands of different people across a lifetime, a woman thousands of different men, of all shades, and many more if she constantly passes through different parts of the world. Even so, of the many different people a person on average meets it is rare for one to fit almost immediately in harmony and general interest. For all the choices available, the odds are enormous. The miracle is there to be grasped".

* Myrtales is the order to which eucalypts belong.

Must Love (or Hate) Slumdogs

The little film that went to the Oscars is suddenly the subject of intense debate. Mr. Rushdie, whose book was really "The Memoirs of a Malabar Hill Superdog who married a Dung Goddess" found the tale of a Dharavi dog in deep dung who found a pot of gold and a pretty girl quite implausible. Ms. Roy, purveyor of poetic prose on Matters of Serious Concern like Poverty, also weighed into the debate (there is a lot of money in writing about poverty after all). Slumdog has been called touristic, poverty porn, life-affirming, Bollywood goes to Hollywood and the like. It has no particular politics of its own but has been read politically. India, quite at ease with its drains but very sensitive about the drain inspector’s report, appears to alternate between self-congratulation and phoren/self loathing. Suddenly, the film is freighted with everyone’s hopes, fears, neuroses and anxieties.

Mr. Boyle is a well-known filmmaker but he is not from Hollywood, indeed he himself went to a modest, homecoming celebration of sorts. His movie nearly went straight to DVD till it had its own fairy tale culminating in the Oscars. Slumdog happens to be set in the slums of Mumbai but is hardly a statement about poverty or the slums and that’s an important distinction. The film and screenplay simply marries the source novel with the improbable conventions of Bollywood (transplanted to another genre you see how wildly unrealistic yet good natured these are) and his kinetic style. But it could have really been set anywhere - public housing in Britain, favelas in Brazil, rural China - with the requisite cultural modification. In fact, the film has something of the zeitgeist of the day, an arthouse film set in a non-white country without the standard elements of the white saviour. This zeitgeist maybe cliché tomorrow but for the moment Slumdog rules. Also, the film has some precedence in Black Orpheus, set in Brazil's favelas and directed by a Frenchman and responsible for popularising Bossa Nova (much like Jai Ho reverberates around the globe today). And both Slumdog and Black Orpheus show that a film may be expunged of white characters but not racial politics.

Additionally there seems to be some confusion between making a film and being indebted to the source material. One would think from reading the papers that the betterment of Dharavi's children lies solely in the hands of the makers of the film. Indeed, it is almost as if expiation for making the film, they must pour all the money back into the slum. It is an interesting line of thought, particularly since Dharavi has been extensively filmed, photographed and written about.

In the end, Slumdog is just a film and the Oscars a marketing exercise that awards prizes to popular, well behaved dogs with gravitas. Yet, every year the Oscars are treated with the utmost importance as if they are indeed the final arbiters of great cinema, as if they are life itself. One good outcome of the Oscars may well be that dogs, like monkeys, will enjoy a better reputation in India. Let's start with the cricket. A rebranded Pups of Punjab (Clarke naturally included) may well win the Twenty20 and Vijay Mallya's private jet really should be emblazoned with Bulldog Millionaire.

Image: Afternoon at Dharavi Slum

Sheet Music

No matter how thick the walls, apartment living brings with it a great deal of noise; slammed doors, children screaming, the thump of furniture being moved, taps running et al. Now and then you are startled by unusual noises. Perhaps not entirely unusual but at least I have been rarely woken up by les sons d'amour.

Last week the night air was unexpectedly warm and I had trouble staying asleep. Sometime around 2:30 am, the low murmur of a man and woman conversing. For a moment, it seemed to come from outside my flat. By the time my mind had adjusted to the fact that it was the people next door, the unmistakable sound of a woman just before la petite morte. Then more soft conversation and silence. I was both embarrassed and amused, my neighbours ignorant of me next door presumably went back to sleep.

When I water my plants, I often catch glimpses of the apartment next door (the apartments have a slatted divider). Last week the bedroom progressed from strewn suitcases to a new bed with peach sheets. It appears it was fittingly inaugrated.

This Life: Bodies

My first encounter with the culture of thinness was when I started “proper” work in my late twenties and encountered a whole generation of early twenties who spoke an entirely different language on the suitability of their body parts. Suddenly I was surrounded by women who didn’t just speak the language of thin and fat, but wailed about the fat upper arm, the fat thigh and so on. That the waxing and waning of body parts and its sculpting would cause so much anguish was both astonishing and laughable to the 28 year old me steeped in the idea that having a sculpted mind was the most important object of life.

In the years since, the culture of thinness is now so pervasive that no one gives it a second thought. Women and increasingly, men, are all part of the cult of size zero and parents worry about "chubby" babies. The gymnasium is the high temple of the body. The more literal minded governments amongst us would have it legislated. Indeed thinness has become a medical ideal, the thin are perplexed when they are diagnosed with illness, and the fat are asked to lose a few pounds even when the reasons lie elsewhere.

Thinness has always equated starvation or limited food or increasingly “correct” food. In unfortunate circumstances, it is shorthand for famine, disease and malnutrition. In other circumstances, it suggests self-control and asceticism. Somewhere along the way, in a world which is perceived more and more via visual media, it suggests both self control (the person who eats a “healthy” lettuce sandwich and who is relentlessly physically active) and also an aesthetic ideal.

In the West, the culture of thinness is partially historical, witness the tiny waists that corsets provided or flapper girls or the cult of the ethereal beauty from time to time. There doesn’t appear to be any such corresponding notion in India and at least in recent memory, generations of naturally thin women were routinely asked to stack on weight to raise their matrimonial prospects. Still, in my mother’s family where the women are naturally thin, it is a prized possession and they were very much given to casting an appraising eye over anyone who diverged from this ideal. Perhaps they were an aberration, perhaps it is part of the psyche of simian communities to observe and comment on anything outside the standard deviation. I digress, but I think that provided thinness is not a sign of poverty, it remains valued even in cultures that seemingly celebrate curves and lumps.

Thinness is inextricably intertwined with food. And in the past two decades, the discussion on food is both complex and well, abundant. Increasingly there is a food caste system with its own high priests (Obama himself seems to have more than a touch of gauche hipsterism) and attacks on those well known empires of gluttony are common. It is a culture in which food and size fetishism is seemingly at its zenith.

Historically, a culture’s anxieties rested on the ideal female body, now thinness is slightly more democratic. Completely unstatistically, it would appear that fewer women gym than men. The female response is usually the lettuce sandwich (or the cabbage diet or the tea diet or a weight pill, a whole industry rests on diets). Men tend to gym and nothing is more symbolic of male narcissism. Again, age 28 seems to have been a watershed – my first encounters with men who obsessively gymmed to – yes – sculpt that thigh, that upper arm and so on. Mark Greif’s sharp essay, Against Exercise, assailed the modern gym but it is hardly likely to dent subscription numbers. Gymming is also completely different from an outdoor, physical life – as is obvious from a century of representations of masculinity in cinema. It is artificial, intended to embody a cultural ideal.

One of the insidious aspects of popular culture is that one is drawn into criticism of it. For e.g., both sides of the fence will continue discussing female thinness (Vogue perhaps supporting it while making soothing noises of empowerment, the feminist making it part of her polemic and likely facing the tag of hairy, fat, lesbian) even though food and size fetishism are essentially trivial in nature. Perhaps my time is better spent elsewhere. I suppose it’s the ubiquitousness of the topic that gets to one; these days one may not begin any conversation without discussions on weight and exercise - which instantly casts a pall of boredom. More seriously, various friends struggle with their weight and it is a source of embarrassment, their relationship with food instantly conflicted. Exercise can become so important that it precedes any kind of interaction – the interaction itself is not validated unless one is present at it gym buffed. I do not write this in praise of fat or the couch (though I am comfortable with both). And the cult of bootylicious and McWhoppers is equally tedious. I only ask that both be banished from public pulpits, the matter is perhaps best left to the individual.