Christmas

Blue Christmas: Hydrangea

On a Christmas break but things are still quite busy and am taking a quick break from a spot of work.

We had a family lunch on Christmas day which turned out to be a lot of fun. My little niece was of course at the centre of it all and it turned out to be a water filled event, she in her little pool, we under the sprinkler bought for her.  As a gift, I made her a book called A Short History of D_ Up Until Now which integrated her Dad's pictures of her and my text.  It was immensely enjoyable making it and looking at all the ways in which she's grown.  The niece is probably going to be an editor, she carefully absorbed the contents of the book and laughed a lot but also pointed out the errors in the text (my toy house is green, yellow and red and not green, yellow, red and blue!).

Later she curled up in my lap and lay for awhile. She often does this, in these moments she is like a small, warm animal enjoying being held and stroked. When I think of her it is always associated with the feeling of her in my arms.

After the heat of Christmas, its been wet and today when I came into the city the rain was beating down. The Christmas trees around the city look slightly ghostly yet twinkling in the mist. But there are people in the city and from my window I can see that the boats are out in the harbour.  I think I have been in Sydney over every Christmas break and I like the city at this time, emptied of the daily commuters and festive and relaxed.

Old Times. New Times.

Work is very busy. Plus the little bit of time I have has been spent on late night hanging around news sites thanks to wikileaks ☺ But I don’t blog on work or politics so I will turn my thoughts briefly to music I recently blogged about. Partly because its been my background soundtrack for the past few weeks. Most of this has been a fair few rousing Decemberists songs. And can I say that if was 25 I might have entertained the thought of having a wee crush on its lead singer, Colin Meloy?!

Quite a few Decemberists songs are like old timey stuff made fresh. Like someone rummaged through old ballads, sea shanties, agricultural work songs and the like and made up whole new tales. Plus they love songs of doomed love. There is a degree of artifice and hyperliterateness about the lyrics of these songs for which I think the band has been criticised (as well as for its small degree of musical plundering) but I quite enjoy these new constructions from old materials. And Meloy's distinctive voice. Some of the songs are political but as always happens its when the personal seeps into a song that it becomes both simple and touching as in this song about the birth of his son.

Now in spite of the aforementioned potential crush, Meloy is no matinee idol. Johnny Flynn could be or well at the very least he needs to be put in a period film fast.

Flynn’s songs are also clearly influenced by British and American folk songs. His songs are also hyperliterate but unlike the Decemberists he is far more reflective and perhaps far more elegant in the construction of his verse. One of the reviews on the singer touched on his possibly being the best songwriter of his generation and this may well be true, I can't think of any other singer I have liked as much as Nick Drake. He is nowhere as well known as Mumford & Sons and Marling, perhaps his songs are not as accessible. Also they seem to be primarily poetry. And there do seem to be a few of his poems around, like this one. 

And keeping with the old timey theme, I have also been reading tweets of old sporadically and amusing myself. "Several at this place are becoming attached to the outside world by having telephones put in their houses" - indeed!

And last, it’s been ages since I bothered with the foreign Oscar winners. Too many seem intended for a bourgeois audience who can congratulate themselves on their good taste. I had Babette’s Feast somewhere in my chest of DVDs (!!) but dug it out just this Friday. Based on an Isak Dinensen story, it turned out to be both old timey and unexpectedly good. Maybe the slowness, the philosophical nature of the film was a welcome respite after a long week.

In a Forest

In the woods we return to reason and faith - R.W. Emerson

Several years ago in the midst of a fractious, deeply unhappy love affair I took a trip to Saputara. It was ostensibly an effort to recapture some of the initial spark of the affair though truth be told it was clear it was not going to happen. Still, P and I packed for the week and my trusted Maruti 800 was put into service with the two of us alternating the driving.

Driving clears one’s head. So does any movement, we think often of getting into a bus to no particular destination.   Already leaving Mumbai, the air felt a bit clearer in more ways than one.  We stopped for fresh fish and sweet tea at a shack by a lake.  Then on to Nasik where P had worked for awhile in a factory. We walked around a bit, the lanes were flanked by fields, the moon shone down.  We took a tour of the factory, oddly enough the cool gleam of the machines on a night shift was the beginning of some peace between us.

The Mumbai-Nasik road is a thoroughfare.  There are trucks, cars, small towns, people on the move, the flow of commerce.  Pulling away from Nasik things change.  The roads are not as busy, the countryside full of vineyards.  The rainy season had just ended leaving everything verdant.  One could sleep on an arm resting on the window, feel the sun on one’s face.  We expected  Saputara to be some distance after we passed Gujarat but suddenly it was upon us.  A hill station of sorts, this was the off season and the hotels lay empty.  Most were ordinary and built for a predominantly Gujarati  clientele, the staff a motley lot who had hotel degrees from small towns.  We initially checked into one of these till P, ever intrepid, found a picturesque State tourist cottage on a cliff.  On this we agreed,  its rusticity, its lack of conveniences. 

Time passed slowly, amicably.  The usual help ferried up the toast-tea-oily omelet breakfasts of government circuit houses. We walked around the quiet town, ate at the few hotels.  One night we heard singing from a village down below the cliff side.  Ahead of Saputara stretched the Dangs, the songs were tribal.   The next day we took the car into the forests.  Forests in a manner of speaking, for there was a road, small vehicles, tiny hamlets.  Still, the roads passed trees filled with sunlight, rivers in which women and children swam, all around a different world to the one we had left.  We drove up to Ahwa, which for a district headquarters was fairly pitiful,  largely because the Dangs was tribal, neglected, poor.   At the midday hour when we arrived, the streets were full of children in uniforms.  The politics of the Dangs was evident in Ahwa, not long back the district had been embroiled in clashes.  It wasn’t just the clashes.  We had stopped by a river only to step on broken beer bottles.  And not far from where we stopped, a few men, possibly small time businessmen from elsewhere, had set up an alcohol party.  Their spot commanded a view of the river, no doubt to better spot the near naked tribal women who swam there.  In the town, we went to see an Ayurvedic centre where medicines were being packed.  The man in charge had come from up north; he took it upon himself to explain the “loose morals” of the locals.  It appeared alcohol flowed freely, women frequently left their partners.  To us he had every appearance of having a mistress of his own.

So we wandered, mellowed and more friendly than we had been in the past months. At a botanical garden with neat hand painted signs identifying species, the trees loomed over us.  A sign informed us of a village with an inhabitant who had been to the Festival of India, we went in and bought a few pieces made of the local bamboo.  The man patiently fixed the horns of the deer while we sat and watched.  The deer seemed alive, their grace somehow captured in that piece of wood. The village was neat, small houses, small lots with greens.  Then the drive back in darkness, the faint snatches of song from the valley.  Then the hilltop cottage, alone and mysterious in the night light. 

Some days later we drove back.  Driving to the Dangs, we had imperceptibly slipped into a different way of life.  Returning felt different. By the time we hit Mumbai and stopped at a local café to eat, the shock of immersion in what was our life was disorienting.  I went home to meet my uncle who had taken ill, P flew back to tackle his own demons.  By the end of the year, my life felt unravelled and it would take more than a few months and a move to another continent to put it all back together again. It was not a happy time, it was not a time of reason or calm, it was not an admirable time.

For a long time I used to think of the Dangs. Not as a brief romantic interlude though it was that.  I am drawn to forests and hills, to mists and cold, to houses on cliffs.  To deer, to the whirling of birds in skies.  The closed nature of hill people, the grubby faces of their children.  To rivers, to women who freely revel in its waters.  I used to close my eyes and think for the longest time of how little all this was present in my life.

Making Things

There was rain predicted for the weekend but it turned out to be sunny, if a little cool.

My craft skills are amateurish but I like making something or the other, I suppose it is relaxing in the way some people may find cooking or playing a game to be a restful hobby.  My earliest memory of making something was my mother, brother and me making cards for his birthday party when he was 6 or 7. My mother had found an old book with sweet animal illustrations which we used to make the invitation cards.  I still make my own cards.

Most things I make happen serendipitously.  I find things when walking or something may catch my attention in the shops and I pile them up in boxes and then just put them together when I am making something.  The pieces above were found over several years in different places, the felt background was a little dyeing experiment.  I am undecided on whether to leave it as cards or to frame them.

 

Left over fabric scraps are part of the beginnings of the tee shirt above that I started this weekend - I don't know yet how it will go though I might be painting a bit on the hem when I have the time.  The jewellery purse below it is complete, its a shoulder pad from an 80s dress. I have been putting these to many uses and I fear I may soon be buying dresses for the pads.  The brass bit was a lost earring I found on the street. I quite like how it all came speedily together. 

I pretty much use the same approach with the house.  My brother and I have never really planned the look of any place we have lived in, we rely on an inner aesthetic coherence when we acquire (or retain) things piece meal.  Neither does it follow any particular order, I like propping up paintings on the floor.  By and large most places we have lived in have had an organic and folksy element with a definite pop of colour.  I like to bring the outdoors in a little bit and that frond must be the largest thing I ever carried in.

Train Commute Reading

The slow slow nature of reading on a train commute meant I have taken awhile to finish two books.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is an accomplished book but so quiet in its tone that one hesitates to leap forth as it were and announce to the world at large, “you must read this book!” Even though it is entirely deserving of such an emotion.  The short stories, largely set in rural Pakistan and in the drawing rooms of the country’s rich, are beautifully written but underneath the cool and precise prose runs an acute understanding of the life of the characters that populate the book.   Rather loosely structured around a zamindar sort called K.K. Harouni, the book is - rather surprisingly for our age - anchored in a feudal way of life where the master’s immense wealth and power flows from land. The preface to the book is a Punjabi saying, “Three things for which we kill - land, women and gold” which pretty much sets the tone. This wealth and land supports a whole ecosystem of employees and hanger-ons, some merely trying to survive, others lording it over their own minor domains and feathering their nests and in one of the stories, nurturing political ambitions.  Remarkably the book doesn’t take any sides, though the stories make it clear that everyone in one way or the other pays a price.  To my mind the fact that it not a polemic but a study of the mores and morals of a society is one of the strengths of the book. It isn’t that the stories are without compassion; in fact the even narrative only renders poignant the fate of some of the characters. The story “Saleema”, for e.g., ends with one of those lines that suddenly catch at one’s heart when it refers to a child who begs in the streets, one of the “sparrows of Lahore”. “A Spoiled Man” is similarly affecting.  A few of the stories, like “Our Lady of Paris” and "Lily” are wholly urban in tone and slightly reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories.  I particularly liked Lily, where a society girl marries a farmer but is unable to leave behind her old life. The odd one out in these stories is “About a Burning Girl”, where a judge has to settle a case involving his bearer and the lighthearted first person narrative on how everyone is complicit in “fixing” a case only underlines the horrific nature of the crime (the stove accident so common in the subcontinent).  Many of the stories are set in the Punjab and I hadn’t thought much of the natural beauties of Pakistan but here they are in this book, particularly in Lily where the title character and her paramour venture out into a countryside marked by hills and the river Indus.  It’s perhaps descriptions of lives like this as well as the structure of the stories that results in Chekhovian comparisons in the book blurb.  The comparison is not unjustified.

The title appears to reference Fitzgerald, yet “All the Sad Young Literary Men” is an unpromising title for a book that has its charms.  This book on umm- melancholic literary sorts-follows the ambitions of three literary Americans with pronounced reference to both Jewishness (and hence Israel) as well as Russia.  Their experiences are necessarily shallow, perhaps even intentionally shallow.  There are lots of references to historical events in the context of personal events.  In spite of a knowingness to this, it can at times be irritating if an author is setting out the differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and relating it to girl trouble on an American campus.  You don’t mind the history but wish it had been more personal e.g. about the non-English speaking immigrant parents of one of the characters who seem to demand a novel of their own. In the end it seemed a bit like a Godard film. It has moments of sly wit, it is acutely political but ultimately it is a tale of young men and their girls served up with a small dose of misogyny.

Summertime

 

Its early summer here; the days are warm, the skies are blue and the evenings cool. I set out to photograph the blue jacarandas before their brief glory disappeared but ended up taking lots of photographs given that the gardens up and down the streets are all in bloom. Pictures here.

And here below is Sam Cooke's version of a famous song, Summertime. 

And just for added measure here is the great Paul Robeson's old timey version.

Akhmatova in Translation

Reading things in translation, one is never sure if the meaning is lost. Take Anna Akhmatova's poem, The Last Toast, of which numerous versions exist on the Net.

I drink to home, that is lost,
To evil life of mine,
To loneness in which we’re both,
And to your future, fine, --

To lips by which I was betrayed,
To eyes that deathly cold,
To that the world is bad and that
We were not saved by God.

Another translation:

I drink to the wreck of our life together,
And the pain of living alone.
I drink to the loneliness we share--
My dear, I drink to you.

I drink to the trick of a mouth that betrayed me,
To the eyes and the look that lied.
I drink to the terrible world we inhabit
And to God, who never replied.

The second one is far more elegant and understandable (in translation i.e.) but the first may well be a literal translation. And in some lines, the intent appears to be different.

Still, whichever way it is translated, there is an immediacy and beauty to Akhamtova's poems. And she was clearly a woman who knew how to convey much by being both elliptical and economical with words.

Three From India

It isn’t until I came to Sydney that I started watching movies on a regular basis. The foreign films on SBS were a catalyst – as were super cheap DVDs from a brother based in SE Asia :-)

In spite of the movie watching I still feel a bit bemused by visual media, well at least the entertainment part of it.  There’s something a little strange about an entire industry composed of people play acting so we can be as the saying goes, amused to death.   Theatre aka playacting has been around forever, nevertheless it feels different.  For one it is a labour intensive enterprise which limits the endless reruns of television or movie halls.  And at least some parts of it are part of a continuing tradition of storytelling, like an annual Ram Leela.  So watching grown up people act out endless made up tales can sometimes feel like a waste of time.

Of course in the world at large the appetite for manufactured tales only seems to be increasing.  And perhaps nowhere more so than in India which must surely lead the world in terms of sheer output, both on the big screen and by way of television. A pity then that in this vast outpouring, there is hardly anything of merit. One may extol Bollywood’s campiness and joy and there are blogs devoted to it as an art form but to me it often seems like the ice golas of my childhood, highly coloured and sweetened on the outside but tasteless once past the surface. And while Indian arthouse films have conventionally existed in the slipstream of popular cinema and are a welcome corrective to the general dross, many simply aren’t as good as films made elsewhere. Of the movies I picked up while in India this is true of two movies that I saw recently, Ishqiya and Love, Sex aur Dhoka.  On their own they are a change from the bewildering mess of most Indian movies (here I include lauded movies like 3 Idiots, which did its best to live up to the latter part of its title) but they still fall way short of the movies that normally find themselves awarded on the festival circuit.

Ishqiya is part of a genre that can best be termed the bawdy UP sex caper though to be honest the only similar movie I have seen is Omkara which is hardly a caper.  Still one knows the type, an ostensibly rustic film set in Northern badlands featuring bad ass men, lusty wenches and accents broad enough to convince urban filmgoers that the whole enterprise is entirely authentic. Ishqiya is no different though I can’t seem to recollect the mandatory item number with the usual mirchi laundiya descriptors.   Though Ms. Balan’s character is of that type even in respectable widowhood.  Add to this two small time crooks on the run and you have the classic caper. Then add to the mix a comic villain, a smart ass kid with the best dialogues, a few songs and it all jogs along nicely enough till it falls apart quite spectacularly half way through and limps its way to a supposedly clever ending.  Any resemblance to the real UP is purely coincidental.  It could have been better to be truly enjoyable, as it is I think one is supposed to feel grateful that it exists at all. 

Khosla ka Ghosla was a nice enough addition to the kind of cinema Indian filmmakers do best, i.e. the joys and travails of the middle class. I can’t quite trace its origins but the genre certainly peaked with the charming and inoffensive movies of the Chatterjee-Mukherjee brigade in the 70s and even some Ray-Sen movies in many ways belong to this genre.  Few movies effectively capture Delhi, all of Dibakar Banerjee’s do, though this Delhi is a far cry from the Delhi of Chashme Buddoor.  Similarly Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! was also very effective in immersing the viewer in the Delhi of the lower middle classes but somehow its faintly surreal tone was lost on me.  And the Paresh Rawal bit weakened the film.  LSD seems a companion piece on the nature of modern India but it too fell short in far too many ways.  It does have an affecting middle section (maybe its the actors who made this section) but on the whole it never rose beyond the ordinary.  It is not your average Bollywood flick for sure but surely by now this is a filmmaker who should be measured against his international contemporaries. And if one does so, the movie falls short. The different modes of filming for the three sections (briefly, the honour killing, the sex tape and the sting operation), the general observations on a voyeuristic society where everything is filmed, and the stories themselves never really transcend the obvious and you have the feeling you have seen it all before.  In short, the richly bizarre, cruel, delicate, subversive and contradictory realities of India far outstrip any attempt at fictionalisation and the movie itself fails to see beneath this surface.

The third movie I saw Wake up Sid doesn’t seem to fall into the conventional Bollywood/Arthouse divide. Rather it is an indie film on the lives of self-absorbed twenty somethings that owes much to its American progenitors. But because it doesn’t want to be anything else than a slight, coming of age roman à clef, it has its charms.  It is undemanding and sweetly performed, though Ranbir Kapoor at times reminded me of a line from a Keith Gessen novel where Gessen tartly observes that people’s expressions were now down to the few arch mannerisms of television shows. Surprisingly, in spite of the slightness it had a genuinely affecting ending, helped along by this song.

This song works but on the whole can Indian cinema leave song interludes behind?!

And now to non-amuse myself for awhile.

Things I Made

Doilies. Tea. Beads. Sequins. Buttons. Fabric scraps. Needle&Thread.

I took put of my boxes of embellishments last month and decided to work on some plain tops I had as gifts for people I know. All are variations on the same theme.

1. I can't crochet so those pieces were bought.  The T and the crochet pieces were overdyed and the rest was just a matter of putting the crochet pieces, sequins and beads together.

2. Much the same for the piece below.  The T and the crochet pieces are however tea dyed, the dye held up quite well.

3. For the linen piece below the pieces were slightly varied. I pieced together the small and larger crochet pieces along with black beads for the brooch like embellishment. The shoulder embellishment is brass beads, the centre floral motif  is from vintage cloth. Both have bee beads, my current love.

I particularly like the little pocket (below) which is part of a piece I found in a flea market, I like the Australiana of the eucalyptus embroidery. And the single hummingbird - so hard to get these beads.

4. And the last picture has the vestiges of 80s vintage frocks. Along with twigs, the shoulder pads from these frocks make for rough and ready blooms :-)

Charles & Rebecca (may) hold hands

Slow Club's wistful ode to the possibilities of an almost coupling up at different stages of life.

One Day

Extract from Tagore:

Rainy Day, Frank Benson

"I remember that afternoon.  From time to time the rain would slacken, then a gust of wind would madden it again. 

It was dark inside the room, and I could not concentrate on work. I took my instrument in my hand and began a monsoon song in the mode of Malhar. 

She came out of the next room and came just up to the door. Then she went back. Once more she came and stood outside the door. After that she slowly came in and sat down. She had some sewing in her hand, with her head lowered  she kept working at it. Later she stopped sewing and sat looking at the blurred trees outside the window. 

The rain slowed, my song came to an end. She got up and went to braid her hair. 

Nothing but this. Just that one afternoon twined with rain and song and idling and darkness. 

Stories of kings and wars are scattered cheaply in history. But a tiny fragment of an afternoon story stays hidden in time's box like a rare jewel. Only two people know  of it."

Tarana-e-B___

When I started college in Bombay, I was a dreamy, self-willed girl who had spent a good part of her life moving between cloistered cantonments. I was simultaneously countrified and a sophisticate, in fact I had arrived from a small town in Gujarat. Like always I simply became friends with people who took an interest in me, changing schools had taught me that this was the easiest path for friendships that were fluid and lasted only till the next posting. A Tamil girl I met was my first friend in college till I was lured away by newer friends. I say lured because the hurt in the girl’s eyes was my first intimation that friendships at that age were heartfelt and because I felt helpless in so being tugged away. One of my new friends was a girl called B___ who was a very quiet and elegant girl. At this point my father had been allotted a large 1930s bungalow that was ramshackle and boasted servants quarters that were filled with people and strangely buffaloes. This was all borrowed glory – we even had bed tea - for my parents had very little money of their own; these years were in fact very straitened and fraught with the conflicts that a lack of money always engenders. B on the other hand came from old wealth and lived in a leafy corner of Malabar Hill in a three storey house. It wasn’t however very showy because her folk had been Gandhian so the whole set up spoke of hushed wealth. But I hardly noticed this constrast in our lives. B was rather reserved and selective so I am not sure why she decided I was a suitable friend, in fact I was one of very few friends. Her mother encouraged our friendship and I would often be at her place or she at mine. One of the things that perhaps drew us close was that we cultivated a stern kind of musical purity and listened only to Hindi songs of the 40s and 50s and little else. Within this we had strict hierarchies which meant the usual favourites like Kishore ended up least favoured. Like with many teenage girls this dreamlife of listening to records and discussing the songs, writing down the lyrics, thinking about the words ran parallel to our ordinary lives of study and family. I had another more insistent dreamlife which was curtained from my friends, including B, simply because they did not read the books I did. This life went its own way; the only people who might have seen hints of it were my mother and brother. B in fact may not even have appreciated this side of me because it was the opposite of her demure, understated persona.

My parents had purchased a record player in Bombay which was a bit of a luxury, previously all my knowledge of songs had come from the radio. Joining college had also meant that I got pocket money though I did little with it. B had a very good record collection which she was always supplementing and this meant that occasionally I would use this money to buy records. The songs would fill our vast drawing room through which filtered light streamed - there was something romantic about listening to music in that room. This room was also our best room and my mother had squirreled some money away for its plush blue Persian carpet on which we lay listening to the songs.  Along with the old songs, we also thought it fit to cultivate long tresses and wear traditional clothes, it made for a sweet composite picture though I say this myself. And I say it because I think this part of my life had an old fashioned sweetness, a chaste romantic feeling that did not always exist in the other parts.

Both B and I loved Talat Mahmood and our favourite record of that time was "In a Blue Mood". For a long time I knew the exact order of the songs on this record, the words were burnt into my head. Soon after we started looking for more obscure records of his, these records were often not available and we would put in a special order. The record would turn up weeks later, in the meantime we thought with pleasurable anticipation of the songs we would listen to and what we might like best. One of these records was Tarana and this record is the reason for my post. When it arrived – we had both ordered a copy – we could not get enough of it. Surprisingly none of these songs had ever turned up in Chaya Geet, in any case we were rarely interested in the visual bit of the songs. But here is a song from the film and it turns out it is in its own sweet way a lovely illustration of the play inherent in Indian romance. Song starts a minute into the video.

By then the ease with which I slipped into friendships was accompanied by an effort to maintain them, so I stayed in touch with B for a very long time till in the usual way we drifted apart and lost touch.  Still she is bound up with the more refined parts of my girlhood and I could have asked for no better companion.

PS: Another song from the same film here. The song feels vaguely voyeuristic, as if one someone had filmed a private moment. Which is not altogether surprising given the leads were as they say "involved".

My Green Romance

The Sorrow of Young Werther

Over at The Onion, someone coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG), defined as the kind who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”.  But even before Elizabethtown, MPDGs existed and have a long history as this Amazing Girl post shows.  MPDG’s are sometimes attainable (film representations of Pocohantas suggest this type) but something of the term conjures up the kind of whimsical, flighty girl with artistic pretensions who is quite unattainable and quite casually and deliciously shatters a sensitive boy’s heart.  Think Anna Karina in all those Godard movies for example. The apogee of the type is possibly (500) Days of Summer, a film that is a bittersweet ode to manic pixie dream girls everywhere and is aimed at a certain kind of male audience.  Less commonly, manic pixie dream girls sometimes pop up in women’s films too, as the ditzy kind of girl lent weight by a partner with more nous and gravitas, e.g. Confessions of a Shopaholic.   Bridget Jones was - well at least a MP - with significantly more poundage and a great deal more clumsiness. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is therefore an enduring type. As long as young, dreamy women with long hair and poetic affectations exist, so shall the MPDG.

Imprisoned on long flights awhile back and quite completely brain dead, I sampled some of the recent romantic films on offer.  And my extremely random yet completely true survey of recent romantic films indicates that for the moment the MPDG is lying very low indeed, at least in films aimed at women. Instead the recent movies are full of perfectionist careerists with lonely, sad sack lives. The ring, the wedding, the perfect man are secret desires sublimated under an air of confidence and a career in good shape, though keeping true to the type mind numbing and detailed wedding plans are covertly drawn up.  All these women wear sharp designer power suits, impossibly high heels and have everything terrifyingly and worryingly in order. It is possible the type exists though I have never met one, maybe they have arrived as an antidote to the Bridget Jones era.  It is another kind of enduring stereotype after all, the prim miss literally letting down her hair.  But the type has mutated (or is the word transmogrified) into a harridan for our times so that Ms. Super Efficient is often humourless and uptight and must face all the loneliness and angst traditionally ascribed to the successful man before finding true love.  These women in fact are like a rash all over the guy movies too. In a movie like Knocked Up their appearance can be put down to residual misogyny or more charitably as a catalyst for the maturation of the protagonist but their appearance in women’s films is a bit puzzling, if not a mild exercise in self-flagellation. But women apparently want this if the success of these films is to be believed.

The Farmer Wants a Wife

So who is cast opposite these women? It turns out that this century’s idea of the hot, desirable man one can jump into bed and matrimony with is Green Earth Man. If he is not actually growing tender plants in moist fertile mud and generally communing with nature, he is at least doing something related that requires him to be gruff, vaguely hirsute, attractively dishevelled and having some kind of organic matter up his fingernails. He is often younger and quite possibly earning much less than Ms. Super Efficient.  In The Back-up Plan he is running a cheese farm (truly!), in Leap Year he owns a picturesque, rustic pub and at one point does some gardening, in Valentine’s Day one of the leads is a florist and in Something New he is landscaping in picturesque, autumnal surroundings.  The new Australian film, Summer Coda, appears to have an orange farmer. Once in  awhile - and this is the most regrettable part of the films - he also dishes out Petruchio-esque humiliation. By the end of these films the heroine, if still in her Louboutins and Prada (for we also live in an age of unbridled consumerism), has managed to sufficiently unwind and find true love in the arms of Green Earth Man.  In fact these men seem to be popping up with alarming regularity outside of the typical romantic film. In the super lush art-house flick, I Am Love, Green Earth Man manages to tick an astonishing number of boxes. He is much younger, has a veggie patch, cooks and runs his own restaurant - though here I note that he is cast opposite Tilda Swinton who looks less like a harridan and more like an extraterrestrial beamed down onto the streets of Italy (and I also note that I adore ze Swinton). In the lesbian arthouse drama, The Kids are all Right, he is more a disruptive romantic  - and a organic restaurateur.

The appearance of the type is not altogether surprising.  Everything “eco” is suddenly fashionable.  Broodingly soulful young men are as likely to fall prey to the romanticism inherent in Green Earth Man as to Manic Pixie Dream Girls. In fact in real life MPDGs are all over the internet writing for a female audience where they blog their fashions, their essential whimsicality, their prettiness, their artiness and are often accessorised by a cute Green Earth Man who puts in an appearance once in awhile on the blog.  So why are they cast opposite shrill harridans with kind hearts in the movies? Is it because these films are aimed at older women who jumped onto the career merry-go-round and the wealth of the last decade and are now wanting to step off a little, if at least by way of a chilled out partner?  And as part of the new zeitgeist, are the men also younger and more relaxed and happier to leave the controls in the hands of a woman? Not long back Mills & Boon celebrated its anniversary with a film, Consuming Passion: 100 Years of Mills and Boon.  In the film Emilia Fox’s character matches up the type of M&B hero with the social milieu of the time. For example, in a Post WWI world of few men,  the heroes were much younger. The 60s counterrevolution resulted in romances set in foreign locales with swarthy Sheiks and Counts. So are the new films aimed at a particular generation of women tired of their own pool of suitors (many of these films also have a negative male lead who is an insensitive corporate sort) and is the modern career woman still secretly marking time before settling down to marriage with Green Earth Man? Films aimed at an older generation for e.g. are different, as a whole slew of Meryl Streep films like Mamma Mia, Julie &Julia and Its Complicated show the post 50 woman looking for romance is an earth mother who can bake a great cake.  Whatever be the case, Bitchface Harridan with a tender heart is not in the least bit interesting and I for one will not be mourning her hopefully imminent passing.

So will Green Earth Man himself persist in our cinemas ? As a protagonist there is something to be said for him for he is a lot better than the creepy benefactor of a movie like Pretty Woman but I won't hold out for his longevity.  Also given the rumoured allure of MPDGs it is likely he will next mutate into whatever it is that the MPDG wants and her sisters will merely follow.

As a postscript, I note that the tart literary girl rarely ever appears in romantic films. The only one I can recall is Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral (who was properly tart and not cutely tart) and she unfortunately was left holding a torch for a supposedly unattainable Mr. Grant.  But their absence in the chick flick is fortunate.  For if my assiduous study of subtitled movies on SBS is any indication, the tart  literary girl is having a very good time indeed and can often be found in these films right in the midst of a supremely decadent ménage à trois.

Flower. Memory. Song.

Pictures of flowers are not art unless they are done by Georgia O’Keefe and perceived as sexual metaphor (though the artist herself was slightly cross with these interpretations). Instead their images are everywhere as short hand representations of trite emotions, as easy photography. The Victorians made a brave stab at creating an entire language based on flowers and quaint and courtly as this is, theirs is an age of such florid sentimentality that it has fallen by the wayside. To admit to liking flowers is perhaps now on par with expressing a love of teddy bears and red hearts. But I like them and particularly their careless blooming in spring. Just today for e.g. I saw the sloping end of a railway station ablaze with the gold and red of flowering weeds and it made me happy in an irrational, unpredictable way. So I can’t help photographing them. As I did on a walk awhile back. I particularly loved the way the azaleas looked like snow deposited in front of the house and the last of the rain on the ipomoea. 

Azalea Snow

Pink bauhinia

Ipomoea

Magnolia

But I like the sturdiness and colours of grasses too and if I had to choose I would perhaps live in a house full of grasses inflected with a few flowers. 

__*__

In better times the middle of October would have meant wishes for my uncles whose birthdays lay barely a day apart. The first time one faces any kind of loss, its intensity burns away so much that you are shaken, purified, every detail and date burnt in your memory. Then it happens once too often and you grow resigned, a little tired. You understand that even these emotions are impermanent and everything will be obliterated by time. It becomes easy to present yourself to the world as if unmarked. But somewhere deep inside it still remains incomprehensible and a small kernel of grief ebbs and swells with the days. I feel sorrow for my uncles, for the sudden cruel way in which things ended. Some days I miss them and search for the gaps in their lives, look for clues in old pictures for the young men they were.  And I want then to conjure them up once more and wish them a happy birthday. 

__*__

I have been listening to more English folk, e.g. Barnacled Warship, this week. Like most of Johnny Flynn’s songs it has the strange quality of seeming archaic and modern.  I like his songs well enough but I am strangely taken up by the lyrics, the language in them. It’s been a very long time since I wrote poetry but reading the lyrics jogged some dormant part of my brain.  I haven’t got to the poem stage but a few phrases that could form the basis for a poem flash through my mind once in awhile.  Perhaps a fuller immersion in poetry is needed!

Cronulla Saturday

Though the Shire can be a thing of loveliness, fringed as it is by the Royal National Park, I rarely go there. And it is even rarer that I go to Cronulla, I had been there just once one summer when the place was an endless expanse of (mostly white) young limbs on the beach. From the beach, Kurnell was visible lending a certain chill to the landscape. The beach mall was no different from that of any Australian seaside town, if a little charmless. It all spoke of the stifling boredom of the worlds described in coming of age novels like Puberty Blues or a movie like La Spagnola. I have rarely felt as out of place as on that day. I was in no particular hurry to return.

After the moderate weather of the week, today was blustery and overcast. Though I prefer the dramatic atmospherics of cold, windswept beaches, overcast suits me fine. I have never taken to the intense Australian sun though elsewhere I cannot get enough of the sun. This morning on a whim I therefore decided to go there, Cronulla is distant but still reachable and I felt like being near water. It turned out to be a pleasant day. There are vestiges of the past in the suburb; the station still has a milk bar, the fish and chips shops haven’t entirely moved out. But something of the inner city has diffused to the suburb; there is Berkelouw, organic coffee shops, buskers and a bookshop that I remembered from my last visit. Of course this exists alongside the suburban nature of Cronulla, at the beach there was bad music and even a few dismal beachside sermons. And plenty of kids decked out in Billabong and Roxy, the ubiquitous surf labels in these parts. As always, in spite of the weather, there were people in the water. The scraggly vegetation of the beach was in bloom, even if the weather has been inconsistent Sydney’s flora speak of spring. The sea was tinged grey but becalmed. Perhaps it was the day, but the characteristic lugubrious silence of Australian towns lay over the suburb even though there were plenty of people around on a Saturday morning. But the silence was friendly, not lonely as it sometimes can be.

On the way back I bought a few jonquils (or perhaps daffodils). Then on the train a lot of old people headed elsewhere, all friendly smiles. Back home, the jonquils go quite nicely with a vintage vase I bought. Now the melancholic darkening late afternoon, the jonquils, the slowly approaching end of another day are as tranquil and simple as the morning stroll.

Long Weekend

The Labour day holiday has meant a long weekend and the onset of Daylight Savings, a firm sign that we are now in spring. Even though Sydney's weather hasn't been complying and today has seen cold, wind and rain.

The niece turned 3 recently and of course remains the apple of my eye. She had a small party today and was quite busy with her friends so we didn't get to play our silly games which consist of fake swimming, yelling in rooms to hear echoes and the like, very little can keep children amused. I find myself a little surprised to be entering these games but soon she will be a schoolgirl and rarely home so we all in fact make the most of her pre-school time. Though hearing the words "let's do it again" for the 25th time can strike a faint chill even in the fondest aunt's heart. As part of her gifts she got the sketch below which is by my cousin from a photograph taken when she was 1. The other picture is of a tee I dyed with tea (!) and then embellished with a few lace and bead bits I had. My niece is likely no hippie chick but right now she wears all that is given to her so I think the tee passes muster!

Last week my train reading consisted of The Believer. It had a fascinating account of the Radium Girls case, a landmark case for industrial health and workers compensation. The carelessness with which radioactive material was handled (the girls used it as nail polish), the precautions for scientists which didn't extend to workers, the selling of Undark or iridescent paint as safe, a legal case in which the workers were sought to be discredited by the company, all feel uncomfortably familiar. In spite of the outcome of the case and changes to the way occupational health is viewed, you are left with the feeling that it can recur again. The magazine also had an interesting interview with Robin Nagle, anthropologist with New York city's Department of Sanitation. Her take, every single thing you see is future trash, is a sobering reminder of how ephemeral everything in our life is. And yet Nagle also points out that the successive layers of trash on which cities are built also provide clues to what we were and how we lived. Nagle in fact wants a Museum of Sanitation and has had trouble getting it up though creating trash is a universal human activity.

Last week I also finally finished seeing a 6 part serialisation of Mansfield Park made in the 80s. Given the vast number of recent slicker Austen productions, it is a little hard to see past the stage like settings, the ordinary acting, the limited budget. And yet once you get past that, its leisurely literalness seemed far truer to the book than any recent adaptation. Mansfield Park isn't a very popular book and I often felt it was because it was boring, in fact it has more troubling overtones than the rest of Austen's work and had Austen not chosen an overtly moral tone is perhaps more interesting than the other books she wrote.

And on the subject of trash, its been a while since I bought anything new apart from office wear. This is because my local charity shop has an immense amount of vintage stuff at throwaway prices. The dress I recently bought is pictured below, its kind of Mad Men meets Madras plaid, I am planning to wear it for one of the Christmas parties that will be soon upon us.

And lastly a happy song for the weekend. I have been listening to this particular song from Noah and the Whale way too much recently (does this confirm my liking for twee folk/pop?!). Its cheery and young but also slightly wistful, and none of this is lessened by the fact that the guy and the girl broke up before reaching the 5 year mark.

My Mother's Books

It is possible my grandfather, a boy from a village who barely finished his education, was the first in our family to fall in love with reading. So maybe I read because he did. But my literary tastes themselves I owe to my mother. My mother had a well-stocked bookshelf and the books on it were the first adult books I read. I still own many of her books and they are both a memory of my mother (undoubtedly the most influential person in my life) and my own experience of reading them. And because she had been a literature student - or perhaps despite it - she had a fairly eclectic collection which spanned everything from the classic canon to pulp fiction as the following list shows.

The Classics: My mother had, as I said, a Bachelors in Literature. In fact at the time she got married, she had been offered a teaching job at her college and in the ordinary course of life would have taught there and perhaps retired as a respectable lecturer. Instead her gypsy existence as an Army wife found her eventually in Delhi where she often supplemented her meager collection of collegial books with books bought from the pavements for Rs.2-5, often these were classics. This was all she could afford though she would often take us for a bookstore browse and on occasion buy us a Blyton. As a child, I thus leafed through the books of Austen, Dickens, Eliot and the like for the illustrations and my first and only attempt at writing a play was at age 13 from my mother’s copy of The Pickwick Papers (which I still possess). These books I always associate with my first memories of my mother as a person. I was 6; my mother was very young, running a house and trying desperately to write and be something other than wife and mother. Which she did all her life with varying degrees of success.

French Authors: When I first started reading Maugham, my mother gave me a quick rundown on the author – gay, the semi-autobiographical nature of Of Human Bondage, he was briefly a doctor, he was influenced by Guy de Maupassant. The last bit had resulted in the spare prose normally found in French novels. It was a style my mother greatly admired and she had a few translated French books including Maupassant. There were charming novellas by Colette and the works of Francoise Sagan who my mother quite admired. Both Colette and Sagan wrote about French ingénues, but my mother also read darker French fiction. Like many young people of her day, she was influenced by existentialism and the writings of Sartre. And then there was Jean Genet, perhaps a forgotten author now, whose Lady of the Flowers my mother much admired. Its themes made it a prohibited novel when I was young and by the time I was an adult I had graduated to the fashionable authors of my day like Kundera and Marquez and never got around to reading Jenet. Existentialism itself seems a little pickled and distant these days. But one’s inclination for the French novel remains.

The Modernists: My mother was of a generation where the Modernists, roughly I would say the authors who wrote between the two great wars, were studied. We didn’t have very many books at home because they were expensive but my mother would often discuss Forster, Woolf, DH Lawrence and the like. This early introduction led to a bit of a love affair with the modernists, no other fiction is closer to my heart. Among my most treasured possessions is two small hard bound books my mother won as a prize. Apart from its sentimental value, these two volumes of short stories have pretty much every author who wrote between the wars and in the 1950s. Amis, Murdoch and the like are missing but there is Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Stella Gibbons, Waugh, Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and much much more. I have read and re-read these stories very many times and yet they always give me great pleasure and on each reading I have a particular favourite. It also introduced me to a lot of authors who have by now fallen into obscurity but still remain part of a particular sensibility that I quite like.

Pulp Fiction: Very briefly, in my late teens I belonged to a lending library and read every single piece of trash produced at that time. Then it abruptly stopped and here I depart from my mother. For like most of her family, my mother was more postmodern than I can ever be in her cheerful, casual mixing of the vulgar and the classic. We always had a huge number of Chase, Erle Stanley Gardner and Agatha Christie books passing through the house. There were the airport novels like those of Arthur Hailey or Sidney Sheldon. Suddenly my mother would fall into a M&B phase and books with titles like Obsession, Temptation and the like would be strewn around the house, I recall Charlotte Lamb being a particular favourite. Somehow my brother and I never read these though I did give airport novels and of course Christie a spin. Still they remain a part of the map of books we inherited from our mother, albeit like obscure islands on the margins.

Feminist Literature: When I was sixteen my mother gave me two books to read which are seminal works of Feminism. The first was The Second Sex, a book my mother often said had saved her life, and the second was Greer’s provocatively titled The Female Eunuch. Even at that age I understood that de Beauvoir's was the superior book, much more complex and ambitious in its undertaking than Greer’s book could ever be. I have since read it almost every single year of my life and still have the copy my mother gave me that I duly covered in lavender paper and plastic for preservation. Subsequently I read Millett and Freidan, the latter by way of a then fond boyfriend. My mother herself had made the difficult journey of being lost and unsure, marked by a sense of being different, even mad to a better understanding of herself through feminism. But the nature of her upbringing in an orthodox milieu with a limited vision of life had at many times in her life left her conflicted. These dualities in fact so marked her life that when I was seriously in love and contemplating matrimony, she was simultaneously sad that I hadn’t sought an arranged marriage and that I hadn’t spurned matrimony altogether. In contrast, I was brought up free and relatively uncomplicated. I have often stumbled and fallen hard and fast but each time I have picked myself up because my mother gave me the greatest gift of all, a belief in myself and my individual destiny undefined by a relationship. If feminism saved my mother’s life, it has underpinned mine. Yet my life is not what my mother would have wished for me. But I think she would also be happy to see that somehow, armed with what she has given me, I have stumbled on, albeit imperfectly, untouched by the conflicts that undermined her life. That is to say my mother gave me wings and I have rarely been hesitant to use them (even if some of the attempts were misguided!).

In the Mood for Blues

Towards the end of a long week and after a fair few wordy posts this month, a bit of a frivolous and pictorial post in praise of blues.  Being a person who tends towards the earthier end of the spectrum (think browns, mossy greens, mustards and rusts), my sudden appreciation for blue has taken me slightly by surprise.  The other day, for e.g., I spotted a duck egg coat of a particularly handsome sobriety that I instantly coveted. So far the appreciation remains firmly on the side of indigo, midnight blue and smoky blues. I think I will give the brighter blue of skies a miss.  I turned of course to etsy for this compilation given how easy it is to colour search, the collection is a bit biased towards my recent textile+dyeing obsessions.



Blue Wool







Stone Bracelet



Indigo Dyed Dress



Cloth Cuff





Wools



Earrings



Some Folk for Sunday

I haven't been anywhere Portland but I hear it's the coolest city on the planet at the moment. This is all hearsay but it seems to be some kind of hipster haven full of creatives  who make music, have a DIY culture, are green and gainfully employed in selling coffee to each other. The latter bit has even reached the concentrated capitalism that is Sydney's city centre where every other greasy spoon cafe and Thai hole in the wall appears to be closing to make way for tastefully decorated places selling organic coffee and small sweets. Anyhow while drinking coffee at one such place I heard Portland band The Decemberists and they grew on me. A lot of their songs have a sort of mythical quality to them and are richly poetic, so right up my alley.  This one, We Both Go Down Together, for e.g is like an updated and quirky version of the kind of songs in which star-crossed lovers plunged to their deaths and works both ways (you may need to click watch on you tube - there are likely some embedding problems). 

As it happens, my knowledge of any kind of music, bar old Hindi songs, is rather poor. I wouldn't be able to name the Decemberists influences. I have never heard the rock, punk staples of my college life, e.g. Pink Floyd and the like. I don't know any new best-selling acts. I have rarely been to concerts. Though I do tend to be drawn towards folk influenced music and have a passing acquaintance with Dylan and Baez. It so happens that folk influenced music is having its day in the sun, albeit it is dappled sunlight and not the blazing summer sun under which Lady Gaga stands.  So I can say with some confidence that I finally have at least a nodding acquaintance with the sounds of the day. So here is another song I have been listening to, this is by Laura Marling whose age belies her gifts. This song was apparently influenced by letters sent from a wife during WWII.