Sketch; 27.3.2010

My cousin's pencil sketch of my mother as a young woman.

Romantics: Desperate and Otherwise

The ABC has just finished screening Desperate Romantics here. In the UK, it seems to have set off a mini Pre-Raphaelite revival with its apogee being a exhibition of their art during the London Olympics in 2012. The serial announces itself as "inventive" so of course it takes remarkable liberties with the lives of the artists (principally Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt), with a great emphasis on their sexual lives. But all in all it's impish, high spirited and good natured in tone and a great deal of fun to watch. And of course it's got people talking about the artists - though one may question if a revival is required after all. The Pre-Raphaelite manifesto may sound idealistic but the art itself is largely middling, though they were sort of the avant garde of the day.

My own knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelites before watching the series was ancillary at best. In an over heated phase of my life I read a great deal of poetry by Christina Rossetti (Promises still remains a favourite), of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems I had read only "The Blessed Damozel". I had seen many reproductions of Millais' Ophelia. And I knew a great deal about Ruskin, in part because he was one of the Mahatma's influences and a few decades back one paid more attention to the great man's reading list. As it happened, Ruskin was one of few portrayed in a rounded way in the series, helped along by Tom Hollander's portrayal.

I can't say that the series in any way prompted me to explore more of their work though I did find myself liking Millais' A Huguenot on Bartholomew Day and Rossetti's painting of Jane Morris (both below), the first intentionally medieval in tone, the second very much Victorian. As an aside, I have a feeling the Pre-Raphaelites were associated with the Artistic Dress Movement and the use of vegetable dyes, but the costumes in some paintings as well as in the series appear to be infleuenced by the brilliantly coloured synthetic dyes that followed the discovery of mauveine.

Both paintings have an element of kitsch to them. But both also suggest why kitsch/pop culture - whatever one may call it - is more likely to resonate and repeatedly find expression through the decades than high art. They both possess the "hook", something that reels us in ineffably even if the head is theorising otherwise.

The "inventiveness" of the series also extended to William Morris. I possess a book on the man and he is by all accounts nowhere close to the buffoon of the series. Morris' prints are in fact sublimely beautiful. They err neither on the side of excessive sentiment nor on the avant garde and edgy. Instead they possess a timeless, organic beauty. There is a seriousness to Morris' work and thought which is completely absent in his representation in the series and arguably his work has survived better than that of the Pre-Raphaelites. Then again, the series is a bit of a lark and nothing much should be read into it.

Weekend in Pictures

A while since I put up polaroid pictures though I keep taking - and manipulating - them all the time.

Did a spot of painting. Since my work is desk bound with words, words and more words, I try to keep the weekends for walking and doing something with my hands. Still working off simple Indian motifs, this one was inspired by bright Benarasi sarees. I don't care overly about technique, its great fun to splash bold colour. Also found the cousin's painting of a squirrel done when she was about age 9-10. She is of course an actual artist and needs a separate post rather than having her work reside beside my school level stuff.

Went to the city and photographed the clock at QVB. With the throng of shoppers it is rare that one stops and admires the ceilings and fixtures of the building. Took home the "barista style" coffee cup that is being introduced in city coffee shops - and at a reasonable price. It is expected to last about 3 years. All the convenience of takeaway without the guilt of throwing away the cup.

Found the most glorious Freis chiffon dress which fits me beautifully, perfectly. Joy. Also started some knitting. The wools are often so beautiful though that I am tempted to pile them on and display as with these wool toadstools of last year.

Alice and Linda

This weekend I was in Newtown and passed by the place where I had my African braids done circa 2003. And remembered and retrieved the piece below:

I meant this to be a story about my African braids. Instead it may well be the story of Alice and Linda.

Having nurtured a hidden desire to have African braids, I finally decided to take the plunge. I was long deterred from doing so a) because no one would do it in India and b) I wasn't sure if I would look like a modern day Medusa or Winnie Mandela. Anyways, while sauntering in Newtown (Sydney's alternative inner city suburb), I espied Afrique Ali, providers of all things to do with African hair and decided to offer them my locks. I was under the mistaken impression that the only participant in the exercise would be my locks - my appointment day would swiftly disabuse me of this notion. For I arrived to find bags of synthetic black hair billowing around the place. As it turned out the procedure of braiding is simple but tedious. Sections of your hair are taken and braided along with the synthetic hair to form a plait. This way the style lasts a few months and you feel that your dollars were well worth the parting (no pun intended). Also the hair looks even and glossy and all things that shampoo commercials promise. But you are also carrying double your weight on your head for the next few months.

Afrique Ali is run by Alice, a woman from Ghana who has been here 13 years. Ghana I understand is 80% Christian and Alice is devout in her faith. She has a brood of three, two daughters in their 20s and a small boy who runs around the salon providing much entertainment. This is one of two outlets and very busy this Saturday. Around 5 African girls run the show alongside the ubiquitous Chinese hairdresser. I am to spend the whole day getting my hair done, thus making up for a lifetime of non-appearances in a salon. Happily this means that I was privy to every kind of hair deal made with Alice. Thus, I soon learn how corn rows are done, beads added, braids repaired, dreadlocks fashioned, hair blow dried and how men with a few wisps of hair can offer about half an hour of instructions on what should be done to the wisps. At times, I must admit the salon resembles the chimps in Taronga zoo, what with all the grooming, plucking and teasing. Coffee and food often arrives. It all adds up to a most convivial experience.

The two girls who first set to work on me are from Sudan and have been here three years. The girls in Afrique Ali are all small and shapely and ironically have had their curly locks straightened by irons. The Sudanese girls speak a functional English and are sisters. They have much catching up to do and pretty soon the Sudanese dialect is hanging like a cloud over my head. Alice admonishes them once in a while but the girls are irrepressible and have no time for a professionalism which asks them to be silent and respectful of their customers. No doubt they are further encouraged by my go-ahead. They ask me if I miss home and in the same breath say which of us doesn't? There are not many Africans in Sydney but they tell me the number has been increasing of late. Though it is probably wrong to club them all together. Alice and the Sudanese girls - apart from the hair braiding - seem cultures apart.

Alice is the boss and in control. Through the day she does the bills, instructs the renovators, chats up regular locals, and does hair. Only with the Chinese hairdresser, the hardest working of the lot, does she unbend a little and allows some of her grave demeanour to relax. She is clearly the stern matriarch of the premises. Newtown's rough trade drifts in once in a while, men who want to proposition the pretty girls and sundry trouble makers. Alice is equal to it all. On one occasion a bunch of tough queers stand outside yelling and demanding that their hair be done. Alice imperiously tells them to grow some hair and then try their luck. They hang around disconsolately for awhile after that and then disappear.

Part 2 of my hair dressing is done by Alice's elder daughter Linda who comes in after teaching dance classes elsewhere. She is 25, petite and lovely and must have her share of admirers. She lives on her own but is a mixture of assurance and obedience. Her mother's and the church's influence is clear, this is an elder daughter who will overstep the line only at the cost of her own guilt and shame. The mixture of a girl who is smart and hopes to make it and is yet innocent and will follow the rules laid out for her is all too familiar (I suspect many Indian mothers would love her!). She has a Fiji Indian friend and thinks highly of Indians in general. At one point she laughs and says you Indians seem to travel everywhere! I ask her about racism in Africa, whether Indians indeed are the worst offenders. But she dismisses it. She says Africans are far too casual in all matters, they are not "strict" and "disciplined" and cannot abide people who are so. When she finishes, she stands back and admires her handiwork and says with quiet pride, "It is very neat".

At 7 in the night when I leave, every one is still hard at work. It will be awhile before Alice, Linda and the Sudanese girls go home. The best hairdressing of the day has been on a young Vietnamese boy who has corn rows done and looks rather spectacular. He looks at the mirror and smiles at his reflection. I can only speculate on his night on the town....

Post Script: I didn't look like Medusa or Winnie, as always I looked "the little Tamil girl experimenting with her looks" (ah genes). But it was fun while it lasted.

Improvisations

Excerpts from Conrad Aiken's Improvisations: Light and Snow:

I. The girl in the room beneath
Before going to bed
Strums on a mandolin
The three simple tunes she knows.
How inadequate they are to tell how her heart feels!
When she has finished them several times
She thrums the strings aimlessly with her finger-nails
And smiles, and thinks happily of many things.

VII. The day opens with the brown light of snowfall
And past the window snowflakes fall and fall.
I sit in my chair all day and work and work
Measuring words against each other.
I open the piano and play a tune
But find it does not say what I feel,
I grow tired of measuring words against each other,
I grow tired of these four walls,
And I think of you, who write me that you have just had a daughter
And named her after your first sweetheart,
And you, who break your heart, far away,
In the confusion and savagery of a long war,
And you who, worn by the bitterness of winter,
Will soon go south.
The snowflakes fall almost straight in the brown light
Past my window,
And a sparrow finds refuge on my window-ledge.
This alone comes to me out of the world outside
As I measure word with word.

Weekend

1. This weekend the yoga teacher introduced us to a new workout. Still a little sore from it.

2. On the street, I spotted a woman who was perhaps on her way to a dress party. She was in a brownish constructed cape, a black tapered skirt, flesh coloured stockings with a black line down the back, heeled shoes, an elaborate hat and bright red lipstick. In short, she looked like something out of a 50s reproduction plate and quite, quite spectacular. Causing us to do a further double take was her companion, a girl dressed in jeans, a tee and dishevelled hair. It was as if two eras had collided and there was no contest as to which was better. Still, the 50s girl did seem a tad trussed up, body and soul, and you could imagine her in a "weren't the 50s repressed" movie. Nevertheless who knows. Perhaps the idea that the 50s were repressed has as much truth as the idea that the present is free spirited. In short, pinch of salt.

3. I rented Julie & Julia and felt quite differently from the critics. I have never seen Julia Child on telly neither have I read Julie Powell's blog. Perhaps a better acquaintance with Ms. Child might have made me appreciate Ms. Streep more. Then again her performance should stand alone. As it was, after a point "look how jolly, boisterous and sunny Julia is" got a bit grating. There seemed to be a lot more interesting tension in the Powell household but the focus was so much on Julie cooking Julia that the underlying conflicts felt a bit undone. Coincidentally, Abigail Trafford at the Washington Post did a piece on Child's forgotten collaborator. Trafford's lines "To me, this preoccupation with cooking was beyond bourgeois. With the passionate but simple-minded righteousness of a 20-year-old, I never wavered. Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal" would always trump Louisette's Poulet a la Creme." captures the sentiment of a certain generation of women (of which I am a part).

4. I admired ephemeral dresses. And listened to Ane Brun's take on heartbreak and red wine. And read a vintage inspired blog that I arrived at rather randomly because I am slightly obsessed at the moment with all things Nordic.

From A Mercy to Something New

Like with people, it is possible that one’s relationship with a book or an author is a slow burning affair that suddenly ignites.

I own a couple of Toni Morrison’s books, I dip into them occasionally only to set it aside. It’s not that I don’t like the books, indeed Morrison can be said to be my kind of author, which is why these books were gifted to me. Somehow I never get around to finishing them. So the other day when I picked up her new book, A Mercy, I expected it to meet a similar fate of being unread and yet being a comforting presence on my bookshelf. Instead I read it in a week. Morrison’s book of the United States at the dawn of the making of a new nation is a somewhat sparse work with multiple voices, though the principle voice is of its black narrator. There are a number of European characters, many leaving behind a continent riven by religious wars. There is the Native American. Morrison places her enquiry of the nation that is to come, complete with the sins of displacement and slavery, at a homestead where these characters meet. The enquiry feels incomplete however, for e.g. the central premise of what exactly freedom is remains strangely somewhat unexplored. The novel starts off promisingly enough and then peters off; perhaps this needed to be a longer novel. But you are very much aware that you are in the presence of a great novelist, a novelist whose prose is as rich and lyrical as her ideas. Indeed I had forgotten the pleasures of somewhat overwrought language and sentiment, every book after all need not follow the strictures of Strunk and White. Yes, there is a danger of it falling into cliché, as happens with Morrison’s sole Native American character, Lina, whose empathy with nature is a little over stressed. As is the colourless yet fierce piety of some of the Europeans. Nevertheless you are willing to forgive Morrison all this, because they are minor things in a book that is so imaginative and rich with treasure.

Jumping from A Mercy to the tres facile but staying with the African-American theme, I saw a rom-com on the perils of dating for modern Black American women-with a twist. Normally it is a genre I avoid but a Jezebel article piqued my curiosity. Something New is to a large extent very much in safe rom-com territory with an uptight, career minded heroine (Sanaa Lathan who has a quiet sort of charm) and a looser, earth boy hero (Simon Baker accessorised with a dog, orange truck, Rachid Taha tape and a nice line in mild snark) but happens to be a interracial romance. Everyone looks perfect, everyone moves through idyllic surroundings, every character and situation is slightly contrived. To boot, it has one of those unreal endings contrived to get the leads together. So much to my surprise, stripped to its basics, there was something curiously affecting about it. For one, it turns the spotlight on prejudices amongst an affluent, educated black community though it is somewhat of a gentle enquiry and a bit undone by not providing any background for its white hero. This itself sets it apart. Secondly, it doesn’t patronise it’s heroine. So many romantic movies these days have harridan, control freak, career women desperate for marriage and devoid of charm as protagonists that you wonder in which misogynistic hell these movies are dreamt up. Something New’s heroine is uptight, ambitious and prejudiced but the script and the actress playing her allow us to see her shyness, insecurity and basic decency. Yes, she wants to find the right man and get married but the movie doesn’t demean this desire. Further the movie places her in an unfashionable profession, accountancy. At her job she is honest, she is serious. This is one heroine who does loosen up but also makes Partner. I can’t remember any movie, let alone a rom-com, that last did that.

The film happens to be written and directed by women. Beneath the big name directors there seems to be a small swell of women film-makers making different kinds of films, which are not necessarily art-house. Which is kind of nice.

The Start of Autumn

Elsewhere it is spring but here right on cue, the first day of autumn was cold and rainy after a sweltering summer. It fitted my mood of today.

Aimless and sad thoughts floated through my mind the past week. I wanted to write a poem for my mother but the verses were broken, even if the sentiment wasn't. Instead I read the poems I once wrote for her that she never read. All of one February - so far away and so recent - I had sat beside her and known she was slipping away, day by day, second by second. Then March came and she was no longer there and it was like her sentiments in a poem I once wrote:

"March is the sadness that I will not see
All the ways you grew."

The forward thrust of life requires us to forget. But should one? The pages of my mother's life were short and valiantly as she tried to write on it, the ink ran and little was written. As the years pass, the expression of grief recedes even if grief itself doesn't. But I never forget her even a single day, for in forgetting my mother and I would both be lost in this world.

Outside the rain falls unperturbed and the world is wet and green.