after a long time i feel like i need to post. this in spite of the fact that there has been a lot- almost too much going on- most of it connected with the fact that we leave today for berlin- presenting cinema city at the berlinale- or the berlin international film festival. kausik is making his bioscope; i have been working on a book; and then there is all the other stuff- calendars, interactive maps, etc.
meanwhile some film updates- this time two films from the marathi film renaissance- ‘harishchandrachi factory’- which is feel good fluff. not as slapstick and not really as funny- but adamantly heartwarming- and yet manages not to get sickly sweet. the girgaon reconstructions were too set like for my own tastes. i much preferred the gender sexuality complexity of ‘natrang’ at least while it was complex. atul kulkarni is perfect as the wrestler turned nachya and the music is pretty good- especially the lavni. the background score though owed too much to sanjay leela bhansali. it tells us what emotion to feel- like a sign. too luscious for the narrative.
Anyway- more from the berlinale much later- 21st is when I am back.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
top hat . hairspray . chance pe dance . anvil- the story of anvil . blood
i love musicals. with their over- the –top song and dance set pieces and their characters full of charm and wit easy to love and laugh with. top hat’ is this classic fred astaire and ginger rogers farce from the 1940’s. some mindless plot about about mixing up identities is merely an excuse for some gorgeous dancing in pure white luxurious hotel rooms styled in florid hollywood art deco or in pavilions in the rain, and that lovely dance sequence in an italian hotel. and the conversations between the players are funny and sexy. ‘hairspray’ is john waters super camp tribute to college films of 1980’s looking back at the fab 60’s- think ‘grease’. while ‘grease’ could be seen as a classic to uphold all of the heteronormative values of the american dream- waters exaggerates these to show just how gay middle america really is with its big hair and over the top smiles. subversive but so endearing. nothing like that can be said of the awful ‘chance pe dance’. while shahid kapur and genelia try to make the best of it by being unwaveringly charming and perky the film plods along the same old same old route- delhi boy comes to bombay to make it big… and eventually through reality television does. and you know something is wrong in a dance film when you cant remember a single song. having hear raves about this film about a metal band which having had its 15 minutes of fame (by playing beside bon jovi, of all the people, in japan) in the 1980’s disappeared into nothingness; i thought it would be more than merely a rockumentary from vh1- it was not. except that it was also a reality tv show that follows the band as it scrounges together the money to record their 13th album. ‘blood’ which i just saw early morning today was a gorgeously made anime set in post-war japan. the last vampire is hired by the us to kill the shape shifting monsters. it all happens one halloween night. nothing earth shattering in terms of plot- in spite of the shallow metaphor regarding war thrown in at the end – how we kill each other in wars- but so so beautiful. to watch.
top hat . hairspray . chance pe dance . anvil- the story of anvil . blood
i love musicals. with their over- the –top song and dance set eices and their characters full of charm and wit easy to love and laugh with. top hat’ is this classic fred astaire and ginger rogers farce from the 1940’s. some mindless plot about about mixing up identities is merely an excuse for some gorgeous dancing in pure white luxurious hotel rooms styled in florid hollywood art deco or in pavilions in the rain, and that lovely dance sequence in an italian hotel. and the conversations between the players are funny and sexy. ‘hairspray’ is john waters super camp tribute to college films of 1980’s looking back at the fab 60’s- think ‘grease’. while ‘grease’ could be seen as a classic to uphold all of the heteronormative values of the american dream- waters exaggerates these to show just how gay middle america really is with its big hair and over the top smiles. subversive but so endearing. nothing like that can be said of the awful ‘chance pe dance’. while shahid kapur and genelia try to make the best of it by being unwaveringly charming and perky the film plods along the same old same old route- delhi boy comes to bombay to make it big… and eventually through reality television does. and you know something is wrong in a dance film when you cant remember a single song. having hear raves about this film about a metal band which having had its 15 minutes of fame (by playing beside bon jovi, of all the people, in japan) in the 1980’s disappeared into nothingness; i thought it would be more than merely a rockumentary from vh1- it was not. except that it was also a reality tv show that follows the band as it scrounges together the money to record their 13th album. ‘blood’ which i just saw early morning today was a gorgeously made anime set in post-war japan. the last vampire is hired by the us to kill the shape shifting monsters. it all happens one halloween night. nothing earth shattering in terms of plot- in spite of the shallow metaphor regarding war thrown in at the end – how we kill each other in wars- but so so beautiful. to watch.
Monday, January 04, 2010
avatar. beaches of agnes. man on wire. the return
decidedly under whelmed by the pull-out-all-the-stops spectacle of avatar, i am not sure as to why some of the mega-budget did not go into writing a tighter script- or even imagining an alternate world a little more creatively. after all aren’t pandora’s strange blue people merely another version of hollywood’s neo-colonial obsession with the purity of untouched nature and those tribals who have this supposedly intimate connection with it. weirdly (and typically) this romanticism against technology is played out through a cinematic shock and awe juggernaut like you haven’t seen before. if only the imagining of the ‘other’ world went beyond the 'saawariya' blue and the floating mountains with some jurassic park creatures thrown in for thrills.
in ‘beaches of agnes’, agnes varda looks back on her life through the beaches that she knew growing up. often moving in the beginning, the film traced her history thorugh the people she knew, anecdotes about people she knew and staged installations thorugh which she wanders on the beaches. unashamedly sentimental, especially when it comes ot speaking about her late husband, some parts, i must admit made me cringe. but isn’t that going to be so when someone speaks straight ot the camera about the obsessions that have driven them so far. two images stand out from the film. the first, right at the beginning when a complex mirror game si set up on a beach; and the other at the end when she takes us to a pavilion completely made of film strips.
the build up to the tightrope walk between the two towers of the world trade center is described way too long- interspersed with stories of and from the team of madmen who planned it. thankfully in ‘man on wire’ 9/11 is not mentioned, except elliptically. the whole film is a straightforward talking heads documentary with a few staged historical shots hrown in for good measure. but everything does not seem to matter when he steps out into the sky and hangs suspended over new york, or between the towers at notre dame or from the sydney bridge. this is a strange kind of terrorism that makes beauty awe inspiring. i don’t mean to make too harebrained a parallel but was it a similar kind of feeling when we sat and looked at the wtc collapse? disbelief at the obsessions that leads ordinary men to such extremes to challenge the status quo?
the ‘return’ seemed to be an allegory. from the authoritarian father who has disappeared from the lives of the two boys and returns to teach them to be men, to the journey across the water to a deserted island where more tests of manhood are waiting, to the fear that leads to the tragedy at the end and the water beneath which everything is buried. maybe these were over-readings prompted by the few tarkovsky references thrown i at the beginning; maybe not.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
idiosyncrasies / bioscope
what is one to make of this one- a mosque at the corner of linking road sells thai massages (original - like in bangkok) on its facade; or the next image which is a man in a dhoti and kurta in the middle of the street at juhu with a placard that says- 'apne dharm par chalo- sabse prem karo' on one side and its english translation- 'everybody follow your religion- love everyone' on the other side. and he smiles as the drivers of the cars wave at him.
and some images of the bioscope- under construction.
3 idiots. la luna. u. dreams of taleem. hunger
i understand the fascination with ‘3 idiots’ completely. it knows its target audience like the back of its hand. if only i was proved wrong and it didn’t but the laughter in all the predictable places in the hall and the gushing enthusiasm of everyone who has seen it shows that the team behind the script and the marketing knew exactly what they were doing. it must be only me, grouch that i am, that the fart jokes, underwear jokes and the piss jokes were plain juvenile; or that the caricaturish stereotyping of outsiders like studious tamilians or the poor or the sick was vicious. and in between all of this crowd pleasing ( for the target ausience is clearly the 22 year old almost adolescent men who would idolize pissing on doors as a sign of rebellion- or 39 year olds who wish they had done so in the non-existent glory days of their pasts) is the sermonizing- all done by the incredibly annoying aamir khan. he preaches to the principal, the parents, the girlfriend, the friends and to us about what learning is, what love is, what duty is, what truth is. and if this was not enough he does it while pretending to be a college kid by slouching his shoulders and raising his eyebrows and looking jaunty. that’s all it takes for a reviewer to say he acts well. around him is a cast that does not ham it as much. madhavan is workable while sharman joshi actually manges to be likeable. and even kareena kapoor is better. but joining aamir in the awful annoyance category is boman irani who rehashes his domineering patriarch role yet again- but this time with another fake accent.
another awful- but quite ina different way- was bertolucci’s ‘la luna’. an opera singer and her lustful relationshiop with her son- in italy. a ridiculous plot made even more so by everyone being just so serious about all the ridiculous mom on son sexuality. some rubbing, some kissing- all lit in gorgeous golden light. soap opera arty style.
‘up’ was much better. pixar animation about a man who after losing his wife takes his house on a trip to south america to fulfill her dreams. beautifully made and really quite moving in so many parts. even though in the later half the villain leers and action sequences are par for the course, the beginning is lovely – especially when the house lifts off the ground for the first time and soars through the city.
‘dreams of taleem’ was sunil’s tribute to chetan datar. a play within a play where a diector (probably datar) and his lover rehearse 1 madhavbaug- a play written by datar about coming out to a mother. extremely moving in so many ways the themes echoed against one another in the narrative and the sudden flourishes of camp whether devdas or the men in silver tights made sure that everything did not become too preachy.
‘hunger’ told the story of bobby sands who starved to death in the 1980s in dublin to protest against the british governments stand in northern ireland. the film follows characters around the prison where he is being kept for a long time including a prison guard and other fellow prisoners through their days in confinement before a conversation between sands and a pastor sets up the finale where in excruciating detail bobby sands dies. beautifully made.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
bhiawandi . annual days and lecture series. visitors
some time last week paul and me took a long arduous drive to bhiwandi to the offices for water supply, agriculture and small dams for data on the tansa river valley. and on the way we were caught in the smoke and squalor of the road and the heavy truck traffic of this industrial town that lies almost completely below a flyover by passing the main town. a truck scratched my side and i pitied the man and could not pick a fight .
a follow up the dutch trip took place in the conference room in school where we discussed collectives, partnerships and strategies for new alliances for architecture in the city.
the dinner at country club, andheri
the iudi conversation on 'alternatives to the master plan'
the iudi conversation on 'alternatives to the master plan'
dad in college
mitali from the first year who won the gold in the commonwealth chess championship
mitali from the first year who won the gold in the commonwealth chess championship
in college the soap opera of the school continues. tears flow, tempers rise and it constantly seems like the world is falling apart at the seams- what with workshops where magic and music, graphic novels and the ubiquitous btech all compete for space- along with the cinema city exhibition being readied for berlin and the ‘looking east’ conference on asian cities. us looking at them?? regardless the chinese and the taiwanese guests were wonderful. joan du spoke of the shenzen area; professor shih wei lou of time and sheng huang showed his beautiful warm work` with a sense of humor that was most refreshing. especially after watching so many traumatized urban design proposals to save the cities of india. the recondition of design is assumed to be a problem- which means that the only way to see cities is through trauma. trying this. this is not to say that all is hunky dory. btu our resolutions to the conflicts within cities is always then based on some presumptions of what can solve them- and in the urban designers vocabulary these are – connectivity, merging, uniformity. this reminds me of the undisciplined city conference and the fundamentally unresolvable conflict between the vitality of the city and the static nature of policy.
as you can imagine, it is social life time all around too. medha is getting married in february and the kelwan was held in borivili which i could not attend because of the annuals. we met them the next day though along with the rest of the family.
and later we were surprised by kiran, karen, alison and feroz along with kiran’s girlfriend jessie from australia.
feroz, kiran, jessie, karen and alison
gauri
Sunday, December 13, 2009
days of heaven . police, adjective
i find it hard to be able to understand what to make of ‘days of heaven’. a story about three iterant laborers who swindle a rich lonely landowner for his property. not that the story mattered much- or at least for me it didn’t. not even the landscapes or the time that they represented (1919)- for me the film was only about the gorgeous way it looked- bathed in a perpetual golden light. (a ‘magic hour’ film) i was told. the most incredible for me was the scene where the locusts descend on the fields and rise in dark clouds across the sky until an angry fire burns everything to the ground.
it was just yesterday that i wrote part of the brief for this years ‘reflections’ on our gangtok and leh studies where i present a case for the disintegration of known word and meaning associations into constellations of meaning. police, adjective, a romanian film about the gap between law that civilizes and the “right thing” to do. a police inspector spends days following three youngsters after they are reported to have smoked hashish. the law insists that he prosecute while he dithers. it is only when faced with the unflinching clarity of a dictionary defining ‘conscience’, ‘law’, ‘moral’ and police that his humanity is laid to rest.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
dark city .goodbye solo. code 46 .meet me in st louis. a christmas tale. tulpan. and duluth/ the possibility of an island/ the city and the pillar
if there was a theme through all my fever films over the past few days holed up at home it must be the possibility of another place that always exists.
away from the perpetually dark city that transmogrifies every night into a new configurations- where identities are erased and reassigned is ‘shell city’- on a postcard and a billboard; and as an enormous poster on the edge of the city- beyond which is nothing. a bikini clad woman mechanically waves at us to join her in the sunlight and to walk in the waves. the perpetually shifting city rebuilds itself every night but this other place always stays. away.
all joy and laughter and pretty petty little things make up the musical ‘meet me is st louis’. in idyllic suburban st louis where the biggest show in the universe is being readied – the worlds fair. the two sisters vie to get married to their respective beaus as new york plays the part of the other place pulling them away just as their dreams begin to take shape. the big city where they will live in a flat away from everything that they know can never replace the pastoral friendliness of the small town that is anyway soon going to be the center of the world with its dazzling display of electric pavilions and neo classical splendor. judy garland’s voice quivers in the gorgeous ‘have yourself a merry little christmas’.
in a very different context- this time the steppes of kazakhstan- the theme is echoed. the suburban house is now a yurt where asa lives with his wife, her husband and their kids. his dream is drawn on the collar of his soldiers uniform. it is a yurt in the desolate landscape lit by the sun and the stars. tulpan is the girl he needs to marry to set up home and whom he will never have. the only eligible girl on the steppe. the city and the port where busty women will have their way with him and where he can be free (and has been) holds no interest for him. he has seen the world and settles instead for the dust storms, the sheep and the news of the world recited to him by his nephew rote from radio kazakh. stunning landscapes and lovely film.
‘a christmas tale’ was all it might have been if it was a hollywood weepie starring, i don’t know, diane keaton (?) as the dying matriarch whom the entire family gathers around to support and donate bone marrow to so that she survives. except that it was not. catherine deneuve plays the dying mother of a completely dysfunctional but strangely lovable family. a sister has banished a brother from the family and the mother has almost no capability of affection. more bergman than spielberg.
in code 46 delhi is a place for bat specialists and in shanghai in a sterile building called the ‘sphinx’ a woman is making fake ids for people to get out. an investigator who can read minds with a empathy drug finds her out and falls in love with her only to discover that she shares exactly the same dna as his mother. but more than the tale of love torn apart by the horrors of biotechnology gone mad, the landscapes were fantastic- the desert outside shanghai, the dark liquid lit city and the grubbiness of the ‘outside’ where people fall once they don’t follow the rules.
does solo live in this outside? a taxi driver originally from senegal in small town american where he meets william – another man on the edge of the american dream- who long for his family under cover. like ‘ a taste of cherry’ the pact is for the solo to drive william to a place outside the city where he is going to kill himself. solo find himself again in his family though and william disappears.
the ideal place for future man is an island. in ‘the possibility of an island’ the story of a very human comedian is told juxtaposed with those of his exact clones who have descended from him. they sit alone in a room surrounded by an empty landscape listening to the life of their ancestor- with its sexual obsessions, jealousies and fear of loneliness and death. eternal life has to be an island.
more novels: ‘the city and the pillar’ gore vidal’s really not that controversial gay love story. it seems so tame today but it must have created a furor when it was released. murakami’s ‘the wind up bird chronicle’ whose surreal intertwining stories make profound metaphors of everyday objects- like the deep well in which he finds himself. outrageous and hilarious is ‘duluth’ – another gore vidal. here two women die in a car caught in a snowdrift. one is reborn as a tv star who remembers who she was in her earlier avatar and the other as the heroine of a harlequin romance. somewhere along the way the narrative also picks up a sadistic blonde policewoman who likes to shave the pubic hair of mexican immigrant and a red spaceship shaped like a tack on the map of the city.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
photopost and descriptions : nai in the netherlands / 'the undisciplined city' in delhi
maritime training institute / school
modernist homes in rotterdam
from my hotel window
the smell of garbage in the air really hits you when you step off the airplane after 7 days in the cold wet overcast cities of the netherlands. the nai hosted a workshop where 9 of us sat in conference rooms and discussed slums and social housing all day. in amsterdam we lived in style. the lloyd hotel designed by mvrdv with its dining room that shoots up 6 floors and the capital ‘d’ designer rooms. mine was on the top floor with a dormer window overlooking the harbour, prasad and rupali had the signature bathtub in the middle orange room while ainsley’s room became a bathroom with a turn of a wall.
the first day we met in a conference room in the new jazz center overlooking the city. ‘unsolicited architecture’ is an interesting turn of phrase. architecture that has no client but has a concern. on the first day we spoke to architects in the netherlands now but who originated in countries from around the world including brazil, colombia, south africa, china, indonesia and spoke of parallels and differences between policies and implementation in those countries. when a metaphor becomes the way in we see so many reciprocities. ‘disease/resource/ organism/ commodity… fine… but weapon???’
that evening we walked a long walk down newly developed piers along the waterfront where housing that ranged from tiny houses to enormous bulky brick dinosaurs protect inner courtyards and face out to the rain. across the water on some of the other piers was ‘the whale’ and an enric miralles housing project.
the second day we spent at the hotel and were visited by a few architects who had come to mumbai in september. 2012 architects showed us some of their work were kitchen sinks and windmill propellers become façade cladding and a playground respectively. the ‘harvestmap’ locating local resources was a terrific idea.
that evening i saw my favorite building in the netherlands. ‘the ship’ by de klerk is a post office and a housing project on the outskirts of the old town. red brick moulded into an expressionistic sculpture with intricate details and perfect scale. while most of the other work in the netherlands was essentially about surfaces and floating boxes- here the building worked in all scales- form the urban gesture of the tower and perimeter block to the organization where different units combine together in complex ways to the delicate and exotic detail on the surfaces.
dinner that night was at a fancy restaurant in an old hospital- the ‘smart’ project. in a room nearby- art exhibitions and on the plate- rabbit’s foot.
the inner city of amsterdam is excruciatingly pretty and touristy in a good way. even the red light area and other such sleazy entertainment is safe and easy. i am not so sure whether i liked it more than the much uglier and grittier rotterdam where we went the next day. completely bombed out in the war the city is filled with the anonymous modernism of post war reconstruction. today it is even the site for so much contemporary avant garde architecture that the netherlands architecture institute set up its center here. and what a center it is. huge exhibition space (where the ‘open city’ exhibition took over the whole space) an archive that ole walked us through and the offices where had our meetings. on the first day we were told about the urban renewal plans of the state in the netherlands and the evening we met zus- architects who have squatted an old neglected skyscraper. they spoke of the tenuous relationship they share with city authorities and the original owners of the building and of the plans they have for saving the building from demolition- including opening an exhibition/art space on the ground floor off the street.
we were supposed to go for an architecture tour on thursday morning but were completely rained out. but still we ventured huddled under our umbrellas to the harbor and looked across at the new bridge and the renzo piano skyscraper. a water taxi took us then northwards for more walks down the windy piers and up the gigantic maritime university. later the mvrdv offices were close by and we walked through their projects around the world.
on the way back we went through the kunsthal- close second on my favorite buildings list. like corbusier, mies and some roadside mall have been put through a blender and remixed into a modern art museum. postcards and toys. the last conversation was about discursive space and blogs reared their illegitimate head again. perhaps i need to spend more time on this again.
the possibilities regarding what can emerge are promising. too many different agendas perhaps. dinner was at a lively moroccan restaurant.
the ‘free day’ was spent waling around the streets of rotterdam. hanging boxes (again) bridges, housing projects (like the cubes), designer shops and later supermarkets and clothing stores and rupali and ainsley go crazy shopping.
and then we are back for hardly a day and i am off to delhi for a workshop called ‘the undisciplined city’ organized by the center for policy research at the habitat center. a cross disciplinary exploration regarding the informal city- discussion revolved around the nature of policy and the difficulties it has capturing the dynamics of the informal or the ‘undisciplined’. solly deconstructed all attempts at clarification by extolling the values of obscurity. and screwed us architects in the process - or challenged us to find new modes of practice. i wonder sometimes whether the aesthetic rather than the functional role of architecture can allow that space of intervention where architecture is not about making and breaking but rather about creating new possibilities. is architectures role then addressing the genius loci / myth of a site as a mode of re-reading the city. is this the lesson surrealist games can have for imagining the city. isn’t that what our second year projects have been about? cyborgs / tarot cards / exquisite corpses… as methods of rereading existing situations in new ways. other conversations further simplified the city into mutually exclusive formal and informal binaries, but almost everyone felt the need for new ways of speaking. the second day we spoke of the jnnurm largely and its successes and failures. bureaucrats, economists, social workers, political scientists, urban planners and architects promised to speak to each other again- soon.
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