My November Guest

It's been another hot November weekend. Just the time for a late autumn poem:-)

My November Guest
Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

mumbai twenty-six eleven

The ABC had a short doco today on the terror attack of last year. Still so incredibly sad, this post is simply in memory of those who died last year.

My cousin, Ramya, was part of a Nat Geo doco on the attacks. She is a Mumbaikar and spent months on it so it must have been an emotional exercise. Given the lack of cable here, it may be awhile before I catch it.

Climategate

Normally I don't post stuff on politics or science though I follow both. So this post is a bit of an exception.

I have been following the news stories on “climategate” (I am using the popular term though attaching gate has becoming something of a cliche), which appears to have first broken at Air Vent, when I can. Outside of a few science and climate blogs, it appears to have been largely covered by the right wing papers (quite naturally) though it does raise reasonable doubts about the conduct of the researchers involved. Most of the press appears to have taken a hands off approach and some have suddenly turned ethical and not published the hacked material. There is a good deal of discussion on the science itself, a posting by a climate researcher and the group appears to be fairly key researchers but I don't mean to get into that as I do not work in the area. The point that got my attention is the bit on the submission of documents in response to an FOI as well as the characterisation of the material as hacked. It all reminded me a bit of Glenn Greenwald’s effective rebuttal of Joe Klein’s rant.

The media publishes all kinds of material, mainly salacious, under the pretext of “public interest” but are apt to invoke privacy when the material compromises them as with Klein. Likewise scientists. In a profession based on transparency and counter-checks, it is odd that the emails actively discuss ways of evading FOI requests. Like the closed clique of Washington politics who Greenwald lambasts in his article, the whole process of influencing peer review, manoeuvering the appointment of editors and creating the Catch-22 of not allowing publication of papers by researchers who come to different conclusions and then dismissing the authors for not publishing in peer reviewed papers speaks of a clique that doesn’t seem to be answerable to anyone, least of all the public (nothing here that you can understand, move along seems to be the general approach). It’s a pity that most news sites and blogs have been dismissive (apart from Monbiot) – their only stance appears to be that it doesn’t compromise the decades of research by many groups on climate change or change anything at the UN sponsored fest at Copenhagen. This may be so but it still doesn’t address some of the issues raised by the emails. Then again, after many years in research, all of this is hardly surprising.

TN Sleaze

There is clearly something in the water in Tamil Nadu. In the mid 80s it was a video of unsuspecting schoolgirls lured into compormising positions that was doing the rounds in Thanjavur District. And some salacious tale that has been duly filmed always seems to be around from my experience.

The Collared Shirt

One of my favourite pictures from the Sartorialist site is the one below shot in Delhi.

I think it's the shirt that does it for me for it reminds me of young Indian girls a few decades back who wore the buttoned up collared shirt with a skirt and preferably pigtails done up with ribbons. Why this is on the Sartorialist is of course because along with the rest of the outfit it is a contemporary interpretation of the shirt-and one that is very well done.

Judging by the pictures on flickr few girls wear the skirt-blouse these days though I did spot this charming picture (also below) on the site.

And here is another one that incorporates the shirt into a dress inspired by Kahlo. Here simply because all things Kahlo are generally aesthetic.

Four Films

A few weeks ago I happened to see The Dreamlife of Angels which follows two girls in a small town in France. Both girls are drifters in different ways. Ill-paid jobs at a clothing factory bring them together and soon they are living temporarily in the house of a girl in a coma. One of the girls, Marie, has a mother who is a victim of domestic violence and is rather fearful and closed in nature. Inevitably her barriers fall and she falls in love with an unsuitable man which results in her descent into paranoia and the break-up of the friendship. The other, Isa, discovers the diary of the coma girl and begins to visit her and read to her from her diaries. In the interlude before all this, the girls also flirt and establish a friendship with the bouncers at a club who are sweet on them. Things escalate, Marie dies and Isa returns home. The ending of the film is in yet another factory as Isa starts a new job and the last lingering shots are of each of the women around Isa working (if one observes a pattern in my random posts it may be that many touch on women working at what are seen to be menial or tedious jobs!). The movie’s exploration of young working class women is very effective and it has generally good performances. But at least part of the movie’s success rests on Elodie Bouchez’s gamine Isa, her performance is very tender and warm-hearted. As an aside, doing the inevitable google search, I found the inevitable way out article :-) This one is on Gregoire Colin, who plays the cad. More than Mr. Colin, I am in total agreement with her views on Mr. Pitt!

The reason I saw Dreamlife was because I had seen Bouchez in a movie that is probably my favourite coming of age film, Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds. Techine’s film, set during the Algerian War, has four young actors who sort of represent different aspects of the country. Standing in for Techine himself (the film feels autobiographical) is Francois who is sensitive and well-read and just coming to terms with his homosexuality. Bouchez, plays Maite, young and earnest and a girl who has absorbed her mother’s communist principles and is a little in love with Francois and later with Henri. Serge is the rustic who has his way with Francois and would like his way with Marie and also has a brother who is killed in the war. Lastly, Henri is the new boy and a pied-noir, full of resentment at being forced to return to France and at the abandonment of French-Algerians. Techine’s film essentially follows the usual coming of age set-up i.e. the experiences of the group over a summer and how they are changed by it. But unlike many other films it also grounds its characters in an adult world and explores the different ways in which they themselves move towards adulthood. Plus it is subtle, warm and rich with details. Bouchez is the only woman and all three boys are a little in love with her or admire her. And she is entirely admirable in the role bringing both strength and vulnerability to her character. Trailer here.

As it happened, last week SBS also saw it fit to screen two movies that dealt with colonialism in Africa. The Wedding Song is set in Tunisia but it is not particularly about Europeans in Africa. Instead it explores the friendship between a Tunisian Jew and a Muslim and the strains put on their friendship in the wake of the French capitulation to the Nazis. It is distinctly feminist in tone; in fact it creates a luxuriating and intimate feminine world - with more than a tinge of lesbianism - which is under strain from masculine influences. Unsurprisingly it is directed by a woman and like many other movies directed by women, it is lensed in a rather sensual and tactile manner. I don’t think it quite gets where it wants to but it was still an interesting piece of cinema. The Murmuring Coast, also directed by a woman, is set in Mozambique and deals directly with the effects of colonialism on both parties. At it’s centre is a Portuguese woman who comes out to Mozambique to marry and is repelled both by the change in her husband and the brutality and indifference of her fellow countrymen. It too draws a distinction between the feminine and masculine worlds of the colonisers, but it is also more political in tone dealing as it does with the last years of the Portuguese colonial experience (the movie is set in the 60s and of course Portugal was in India too until that decade). This movie too is beautifully lensed and evokes the period with its mix of idealism and despair very well. Plus it is one of those films that have a pervasive sense of atmospheric melancholy and decay.

Pelicans

Clearing computer junk today and stumbled on these pictures taken in the winter of 2006 in Kiama by a friend, Michelle Wang, who currently lives in Shanghai. Normally I am not a fan of pictures of exceptional clarity but I really liked these. We were amused by the pelicans, a few were indifferent, one was quite the diva both aloof and vamping it up for Michelle's camera and one was quite eager to pose and stuck close to her. Click on picture for a larger, clearer view.

Below picture taken on the way to the blowhole. Norfolk pines & blue skies = classic coastal NSW landscape.

Words+Gardens

Words I read this week:

taupe, teal, louche, lambent, solipsism, epicene, versimilitude, saxifrage, pompoms de coton, poet shirt, obstreperous, bathetic, gemütlichkeit

I was flummoxed by a fair few.

And an extract of Villiers-Stuart book on Mughal Gardens which discusses swimming arrangements for purdah ladies and bad British design.

"To return to the swimming pools. Certainly there is nothing so exhilarating as a swim in the open air; but among the changes due to the British Raj and the consequent copying of European fashions, one of the greatest drawbacks to Indian women must be the loss of their fine water gardens. Indeed, in India we all lose by the neglect of Indian garden art, but none of us lose more of health, delight, and happiness than the gentle purdah ladies, whose lives are, in truth, rather cramped by contact with our ideas when this entails the loss of their beautiful terraced roofs and pavilions, and the introduction of the open, exposed garden which they cannot enjoy. A recent instance will illustrate my meaning. On the outskirts of a famous Indian city, not far away from the old Mughal gardens in which I was sketching, fine new buildings for a girls school were about to be opened. The school was a strictly purdah school-a comparatively new idea. The daughters and future wives of the Indian rulers and nobles were to be educated there, and fitted to become in after life good and helpful companions to their husbands and sons. By the particular advice of our wise Queen-Empress, their own best traditions and customs were in all cases to be adhered to. The opening ceremony was made an event of special importance. Princesses and officials wives were gathered to meet the great lady who had snatched one day from a long round of other duties in order to be present. One could imagine how beautiful and useful the buildings to be opened might be-an Indian garden of girls; a modern maidens palace, such as the garden-bower of Kadambari, the Gandharva Princess. One could picture the dark arched entrance; the main building with its cool fountain court and airy terraced roof; the pavilions and class-rooms built against the high enclosing garden- walls; the swimming pool and the swings; the cypress walks, the squares of flowers and fruit trees, the plots laid out in grass for games,-the whole combining to unite the best of Indian and English common-sense and art with the pleasant freedom of complete security. And the reality? It was a large, solid, red-brick building of the British public institute order, with praiseworthy 'Indian' trimmings by way of decoration, but with little Indian feeling; low walls, a gravel sweep, a dry, bare-looking garden, the whole surrounded with hideous matting screens-for was not this a school for purdah girls?"

Arranged Marriage

Whilst in India I had a brief chat with one of my nieces, a girl of 18 with a great deal of self-possession. I asked her if she had a boyfriend and she replied that she didn’t and that she is a “one man woman”. I was a little surprised to find this phrase still around but what she meant was that she had no intention of “fooling around” before she got married. As she wanted this marriage to be a happy occasion, she expected to have an arranged marriage. The happiness of this occasion I found could be marred by many things, most of all her father’s old-fashioned attitude to marriage. Girls who were “fooling around” however did not appear to contemplate a future different to hers, most appeared to be like the 20 something I met on a flight to Kolkata who had plenty of boyfriends with whom she engaged in varying degrees of intimacy but was eventually planning on an arranged marriage.

If the statistics are right, at least 95% of marriages in India are still arranged. It persists even amongst the middle classes, where education and employment for women is now common. It is not that Indians are immune to romance; the arranged marriage for example comes with its own romantic mythology. But in “real life”, as Indians are wont to say, tradition often trumps love. In some cases people expect to bypass entanglements and segue straight into adulthood by way of the family approved marriage. In others, a failed love affair is often followed by a retreat into the familiar world of the arranged marriage. And sometimes, the desires of early youth and a liberal upbringing where the ideal of romance is more commonly found in a French movie than a Bollywood flick, give way to the somewhat dispiriting landscape of relationships in India as one grows older. People are left on the cusp, hoping for a romance around the corner and unwillingly submitting to the process of having a marriage arranged. Whichever way it is arrived at, the hold of the institution over the Indian imagination seems far too firm to be dislodged by any of the changes that sweep the country from time to time. One may depart from a traditional upbringing and sometimes move to foreign climes and habits but many return like homing pigeons to the traditional marriage.

Even those of us opposed to the notion of arranged marriages thus grow accepting of it. You cannot after all force a revolution in mating mores.

And yet I couldn’t help thinking that far-fetched as it may seem, the arranged marriage is a continuum of attitudes that prevent people from entering a temple. For the persistence of the arranged marriage is also the persistence of caste. As an example, it appears likely that caste considerations will dictate the arranging of a marriage for the 18 year old niece. Change occurs within castes but intermingling and introducing new modes of living into the family still seems to spark off tension. Last month, for e.g., Chetan Bhagat released a book that is a fictionalised account of his own marriage and the parental opposition that preceded it. In one of his interviews, he touched on its potential to kill the tenderness and sweetness of a love affair. Even accounting for deeply held beliefs it can at times seem that something dark and fearful lies at the heart of the psychological violence (and often physical) directed towards falling in love in India. And whilst other forms of caste discrimination are not as visible these days, with the arranged marriage it is upfront and we are presented with the notion that it is purely parental love and duty directing us to our predetermined futures.

And of course there is the great adventure of love itself. Cristina Nehring bemoaning the anodyne love of our modern age in her book, The Vindication of Love, writes of being “derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love”. Her book takes its title from Wollstonecraft who combined her intellectualism with the messiest of love lives. Indeed Nehring’s book is partly a defence of Wollstonecraft’s feminist reputation. And of course the idealization of romantic love, nay passionate, unheeding love of the kind Nehring describes, has a long history in the West. Perhaps Nehring is taking the argument to its extreme and most people’s romantic lives fall between the two poles. Yet - admitting for appearances being deceptive - it’s hard to see the young people I met in India committing themselves to any such passion. And more importantly approaching it with the truth it deserves.

Slow Saturday with Jacarandas

Today was pleasant and sunny so I went to the Rocks and the Quay. The jacarandas are in bloom so I spent some time with them drinking lemon sencha tea as I couldn't lay my hands on lavender tea.

Walking back, there were a band playing on Pitt Street Mall (above). They seemed to be enjoying themselves and in fact were pretty good and had a sizeable crowd listening to them.

The lemon sencha and a cool afternoon also allowed me a leisurely read of the newspapers. I am afraid I laughed immoderately when I read Richard Glover's account of a Keating day (read only if familiar with Oz politics and Keating's massive ego). The laugh scared away the pigeons but the seagulls are built of sterner stuff and hung around. Also noted that the indefatigable Don Watson (previously speechwriter to Keating) is continuing his assault on weaselly management speak. Much needed when even shootings happen in a Soldier Readiness Centre.

Links for today

Regretsy kept me laughing all of today (most fun if you are familiar with that handmade emporium, etsy).

And as a lemonhead and chocophobe, this article hit all the right notes.

Caravana / polly&me

It appears that Caravana has shut shop, at least I can’t find them on the Web.

Caravana, started by Cath Braid and Kirsten Ainsworth, was profiled by ABC in my first years in Australia. The story in itself, of two Australian girls creating fashion in a conservative and idyllic place, Chitral, was remarkable. Subsequently, I read their profile in Dumbo Feather, Issue 3. I have seen their pieces in Cambodia House in Paddington and they are as rich and beautiful as the visuals below. They draw a great deal on daily life so that they are more than just clothes with pretty designs (pictures below from here).

Happily it appears that Cath Braid is working on a different project, polly&me, and it appears to have expanded to include artworks - I quite like the idea of Gupshup! Some of the artwork is really interesting and I am adding the site to my list to follow its progress.

It can’t of course be easy but I admire women who go off to completely different places and set up a business. I find Ock Pop Tok equally interesting, both in terms of its textiles and it's back story.

Nina Kinert

Nina Kinert is Swedish, a singer and I am kind of enjoying her opaque lyrical stylings on motorcars, bumblebees, dandelions and chocolates (inexplicably Wiki tells me it was used to spruik Saab).