Thanks to my film-maker friend Paromita Vohra, I have just finished watching Agnès Varda’s “The Gleaners and I” (2000). The 81-year-old Ms. Varda has been in the news recently for her new documentary—reviews of which mention the earlier film (”Ms. Varda is picking through the world, close to home and far afield, finding images that please her and give her pause, like her wrinkled hand, the one not holding the camera, that she scrutinizes with rue if no obvious regret.”) Her style is pure documentary, and pure essay, striking in its mix of observation and memory. My favorite moment in the film was one when the film-maker paused in the presentation of facts about the world to say that what she has been trying to do is record with the hand holding the camera the signs of change in the other hand, the horror of it, she said, the horror of advancing age. Here’s another recent appreciation of Varda and her style of creating “a sort of living, moving collage.”

(Paromita, aaj DVD bhej raha hoon. Pukka!)

Tags: Agnes Varda

Congratulations to all those who worked hard to achieve this.

Tags: Gay rights, India

Debanjan Roy
INDIA SHINING I (GANDHI AND THE LAPTOP)
Edition 2 of 5
2007
Aluminum cast, paint
27 x 46 x 30 in.
Go here for more

(H/t: Aparita Bhandari, who alerts us to the SAJA tie-up)

Tags: Debanjan Roy, India Shining

I have been reading with great pleasure the stories in Delhi Noir, edited by Hirsh Sawhney, and published by Akashic Books in its noir series. This is a book that I recommend highly, and not only because it introduces writers about whom many have so far remained in the dark.

Why write about the night if you cannot write about dirty money? Each of the stories I have read in the book so far have done precisely that. But more than that, I felt that the stamp of the genre had allowed the writers to experiment with a voice. So that the description “Delhi noir” means the achievement of a style, and that style is partly the place that is being written about. Here are some lines that have stayed with me from the stories I have read: “She places a goodbye tongue in his mouth, like she’s depositing cash at a government bank—rightful, superior, slightly disdainful of the clerk on the other side of the counter—and goes” (Ruchir Joshi, “Parking”); “The guns looked so much smaller than in the movies” (Meera Nair, “Small Fry”); “So right now, with his left hand Jishnu da was ‘making baingan bharta,’ in his own immortal words” (Siddhartha Chowdhury, “Hostel”); “So if you read this story, go and buy a little pickax and get yourself to Delhi right away. It’s not far at all, and it’s the only way left to make it big. The other ways you read about in the papers and see on TV are rumors and lies, nothing more” (Uday Prakash, “The Walls of Delhi”).

There are more stories waiting for me in the book. Maybe tonight. With the ice cracking in the glass beside me.

Tags: Delhi Noir

Chen Wenling
“Riding to Happiness”

This corpulent bestiality portrayed so stunningly by Wenling cannot be true of every place. In fact, even in the Chinese context, bureaucratic happiness via the exploitation of development schemes must belong more to the city than the countryside. There is brutality in the rural areas too, but there is less fat to go around. There, the have-nots are at war against the have-littles.

Talking of development, here’s a recent report by Sudeep Chakravarti on Lalgarh, in West Bengal, where the events have proved an axiom: “anger makes warriors of the meek. The state doesn’t get it. Maoists do.” At one point Chakravarti joins some Maoist marchers walking past “a collection of dirt-poor, dark hovels mocked by signs that proclaim ‘electrification’ under the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikran Yojana.” One of the marchers tells him, “We have little but our pride…” And Chakravarti writes, “It is a no-win for the state. If its forces do not arrive, the state will cede territory to Maoists. Or, there will be a bloody battle. Simple folk will die. Others will be made fearful, resentful, angry. And Maoists will leverage this negative energy.”

Click here to read a review of Chakravarti’s book on Indian Maoists: the reviewer is Toral Gajarawala, and the piece appeared in the National, which is published from Abu Dhabi.

Tags: Chen Wenling, Hindustan Times, Indian Maoists, Lalgarh, Sudeep Chakravarti

My friend Maya Kovskaya sends me this poem to honor the memory of Neda Agha Soltan.

On Angels
Czeslaw Milosz
(1911 - 2004)

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can.

P.S. Click here to listen to Simin Behbahani, Iran’s national poet, reciting two of her poems about the recent events. (Thanks, Abbas)

Tags: Czeslaw Milosz, Neda, On Angels

Photography begins to appear as performance. Incredible, in all senses of the word.

(H/t: @porousborders)

Tags: Peter Funch, Photography

Richard Kim’s fine eulogy begins thus:

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, is dead of a heart attack at the age of 50. In the next few days we will be treated to endless eulogies mining the rich archive of his music, dance, videos, performances and especially his purported habits, hobbies, misdemeanors and alleged crimes. After all, what writer could resist mentioning the various critters and tchotchkes he collected: the hyperbaric, youth-preserving oxygen chamber, the Elephant Man’s bones, his pet chimp Bubbles, the Beatles catalog, Neverland Ranch, Macaulay Caulkin, Elizabeth Taylor, his many noses, skin pigments and hairstyles, his one bright white glove. I certainly can’t.

These mutations will inevitably be placed in the tragic narrative of his decline. We will be asked to remember Jackson in his prime–as the smiling, dancing, “P.Y.T.” black child star who outshone his less talented siblings in the Jackson Five or as the pop-and-dance virtuoso who transcended Motown by bringing us “Thriller,” “Beat It” and “Billy Jean.” Forget the eccentricities and footnote the accusations of child abuse and molestation (he was never found guilty). Those are but sad stains on the larger spangled fabric of his life and career.

Well, I am here to say: fuck that shit.

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(H/t: Lisa Duggan)

Tags: Michael Jackson, Richard Kim, The Nation

I like art that deals with the everyday but remains brightly creative and whimsical. The above from here.

Here, the artist writes: “If you give me $1,626 I will go to the small Okinawan island called Taketomi and send you an envelope filled with star-sand (don’t worry, I’ve been there before, I know where to go). I will send it from there.” You can donate any amount you want, but you have to give at least a hundred bucks to that fund to get back any star-sand. I know, I know, we are in the middle of a recession. In which case, consider another option that the artist offers: “If you give me $3 I will send you an empty envelope. It is like sending you nothing. Or at least, it is sending you something that has traveled a journey that is the distance from me to you.”

(H/t: Audrey Sprenger)

Tags: David Horvitz

If you want to make high-brow small talk at one of President Barack Obama’s cocktail parties, don’t bother brushing up your Shakespeare. Try reading Urdu poetry.

As POLITICO’s Ben Smith points out in his blog, Obama showed off his intellectual flair by evoking a standard of Pakistani culture in a recent interview with Dawn, a popular English-language newspaper in Pakistan.

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H/t: Asad Haider

Tags: President Obama, Urdu Poetry