since the main computer of the house has crashed taking with it the fast (only relatively) net connection i have been checking mail on the laptop which has its advantages (i am sitting in front of the tv right now) but means that i have been unable to rd my phone of the photographs i clicked from wednesday to today. i haven’t blogged either as i was waiting for anand to come fix the comp before i posted. but since it seems like that’s going to take longer than i thought; and because too many things have happened meantime this post cant wait anymore.
wednesday was a long day. it started out in college with the auroville presentation by the third year. while some salivated over the architectural experiments, others were skeptical of not only the ‘maa’ dreamt utopia of white skinned spirituals, but also of its pseudo anti paper money stance. the day was planned as a series of gallery hopping after surabhi joined us at andheri station, but not before benita and me dropped in at sheila’s for a meeting on project possibilities that included ideas for rental housing for migrants. at chemould tushar’s monuments and edifices were anti monuments proposed to be placed in nonplaces. comic book drawings, a video where tushar becomes the lions on the ashoka stambha and fragments of body parts mutating into monuments lying around the gallery with tiers all around. navjot for her bombay shots exhibition has asked some of the inhabitants of the city about the spaces that they loved in it. after having conversations with them, she went ahead and photographed the spaces with a digital camera where she superimposed a mug shot of them on photoshop. the images were beautiful and affectionate. bose had curated a show of “work” by talvin singh that was a ridiculously pointless sound installation surrounded by mediocre fuzzy photos framed.
but the main event of the day was the screening of a film on the german owner of edward theater at edward theater – ‘gertrud’. the interior of the theater is all sky blue with white frills, steep tiers with surprisingly comfortable wooden seats. the movie was unfortunately a silly tribute with over the top pandering by all the brown employees of gertrud’s warmth, affection, generosity. if i had seen the film any other time or place i would have completely cringed but here, as each of the employees clapped every time they came on screen, i could not help but feel some kind of fuzzy nostalgia for a bygone time. i wonder whether i am going to feel the same about the fame adlabs alucobond facades in another 20 years.
more movies this week. ‘darkman’ – sam raimi before spiderman enjoying the very over-the-top of the comic book film genre. liam neeson plays a man whose life is shattered when his girlfriend stumbles upon a real estate scam and has to take on the persona of ‘darkman’ whose skin disintegrates in sunlight.
‘the world’ – jia zhangke’s ironic look at globalization and its discontents in china shot almost completely at the ‘world park’ in beijing where the monuments of the world have been recreated in miniature. ‘visit the whole world without leaving beijing’. a love story unfolds in between the miniature eiffel tower and the pyramids. relationships fracture in the new landscape. beautiful and sad.
closed doors and stuff inside the magazines syndrome – odd film about an odd man. a notoriously reclusive assamese novelist whose face has never been seen is the subject of this documentary of sorts, except that without ever seeing the subjects face the only choice the film maker seems to have is to illustrate a few speeches in stylized montages of mirror shots, fast and slow motion movement and multiple shots of everyday acts that stand in for deeper metaphorical ideas.
‘the lake house’ where keanu reeves and sandra bullock love each other across two years in time through a series of sappy letters. even for a film that i expected to be awful, this ended up being worse- what with its cringeworthy architectspeak and soaring violin end.
yesterday there was a concert by padmatai at her son in law’s house- which happens to be the bungalow of the vice chancellor of bombay university in the middle of the kalina campus. it was her 89th birthday and she was in full form with anecdotes about her father who allowed her to sing in spite of being from a ‘good’ family at the age of 6. besides her sharp sense of humor and her tart one liners the singing was still incredible.
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