zadeblog

Peter Sarstedt Revival

2007-09-30T20:38:00.001-04:00

Just as the SNL offshoot, Waynes's World, brought out Freddie Mercury and Queen freshly remastered for Generation Next to make their own, so too does Hotel Chevalier, the thirteen minute outtake and/or prequel from from Wes Anderson's new movie, The Darjeeling Limited, bring us back to 1969 and Peter Sarstedt's London megahit of that year, Where Do You Go To My Lovely? with digitized and remastered immediacy

Peter Sarstedt was born in Delhi, and spent his infancy in Kurseong at the foot of the Himalayas, at a tea garden where his father worked, and was therefore a real Indian-Anglo-Indian, obviously more privileged than the folks depicted in Bow Barracks Forever-- since his parents chose to leave for England in 1954, a few years into Independence, like other Anglo-Indians who believed the end of the British Empire would bring them harm and left in numbers for Australia and Canada as well as England through the sixties-- but they really were of Indian blood nevertheless. Wes Anderson must have learned about this while making The Darjeeling Limited, because it was a hidden factoid in 1969 that would have earned Sarstedt wild fans in India, but at the expense of his following in England. It only surfaces now, when India is on a roll and all that doesn't matter so much any more, but is still not seen on his own web site. It's easy to see in these less hairy days that he is Indian, and I wonder how acknowledging that will play out.

In 1969. of course, I had no idea Peter Sarstedt was Anglo-Indian, and would have counted him less hip and more Cliff Richard if I had. But I was struck then, no doubt like everyone else, by his crisp and easy delivery of the franglais back and forth lyrics, the clarity evident even through the fuzzy recordings of the day. I had no idea who Zizi Jeanmaire was, nor how to spell her name, nor even for that matter who her husband, the great choreographer Roland Petit was, but I had heard Sacha Distel's cover of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, did know that Karīm al-Hussaynī, Aga Khan IV, was gorgeous as well as being the astonishingly wealthy leader of all Shia Muslims, that the Dowager Begum Aga Khan always wore saris, and last, but by no means least, that it was as cool to wear Balmain as to keep your Rolling Stones records at a swank address, nothing to do with the Beatles, much as one might love them.

Hotel Chevalier is famously available for free download at the iTunes Store, and so represents new and adventurous thinking in movie marketing as well as being a vehicle for reintroducing a worthy megahit of the 60's. As it happens, I went to the first ever, high-octane SAMMA conference this weekend, and Nusrat Durrani, SVP at MTV Networks, was one of the stellar presenters at the dinner reception, along with Aasif Mandvi. After dinner and outstanding performances, during which Nusrat Durrani showed a pastiche of his clips from the New York Marathon set to Pink Floyd's Breathe, I couldn't resist asking him if he had added Pink Floyd because they had been signed by Bhaskar Menon. He said no, he just likes them. But it turned out he hadn't heard about Peter Sarstedt being Indian-- so I hope something will come of that, because in these times, it's well to celebrate another Desi, in disguise for too long.

an excerpt from Roland Petit's Le_jeune_homme_et_la_mort

Patrick Makuakāne Presents Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu

2007-08-11T22:30:00.000-04:00

I missed the afternoon per-
formance at the National Museum of the American Indian,

but in the evening. I saw the most magnificent production of hula I have ever seen. The San Francisco dance company, Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu, delighted a huge audience at Damrosch Park in Lincoln Center. I'll mostly let Lin Cariffe's pictures of other performances of the same works speak for themselves.

Kumu Patrick Makuakāne is such a fabulous presenter as well as a mesmerizing choreographer that he brings the audience right into the show while the show itself plays sensuality, thought and feeling with equal command and force.
Lihau Hannahs and Kellen Paik provided highly evocative live music for the spectacular production, with thirty-two magnificently costumed dancers, who mixed presentations of traditional legends and tributes with two pieces of piercing satire and several touching, graceful modern pieces, including two set to Annie Lenox and Cyndi Lauper's most wistful songs, a brilliant capture of Peggy Lee's Fever, and a somehow heartrending interpretation of Tony Bennet's version of I Left My Heart in San Franscisco, with its illustrative gestures for "little cable cars" and "halfway to the stars"-- among other phrases -- casually revealing quite exactly what hula is about.

A man seated in the row behind me shouted out frantically that he couldn't see, and at least twenty people turned around to shush him, pleading with him not to spoil it for everyone, so swept up was the audience with the gentle but powerful grace and great wit of the show.

Clips from Antonioni's Blow-Up

2007-07-31T20:34:00.001-04:00

Antonioni's "achingly hip" Blow-Up

FASHION SHOOT

VERUSCHKA

YARDBIRDS

JANE BIRKIN

TENNIS

TRAILER (VANESSA REDGRAVE)

Obits:

BBC

New York Daily News

Al Jazeera

The Montreal Gazette

timesonline

Indian Express

Telegraph. UK

Xinhua.net

AVAAZ at Galapagos Art Space

2007-06-23T16:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, after dropping off Bear at JFK --
and being totally unaware that the Virgin Atlantic plane she had boarded was slated to stall on the tarmac for four hours, waiting for that evening's series of short storms to pass, and then take off without most of the food on the menu for passengers on the flight to London--I drove around aimlessly for a while, like anyone deprived of their young might, and decided to check in at the proudly independent Art Space still known as Galapagos.

There, the twenty-and-now-early-thirty-somethings still milled and jostled, partying hard without ever lighting a cigarette, because, as Director Robert Elmes has correctly said, "We have our whole lives to live and that is terribly important." The reflecting pool at the entrance is limpid and surprising as ever, but as Galapagos has prospered, it will be moving quite soon from Williamsburg to DUMBO. I considered Lillian Godchaux's Solstice VII, which was going on inside the storied Back Room, and had been described by Lillian herself as "A night of LSD and Native American freak-out driven folk and SF-based soary acid folk in hither, wildering, and bewonderment of this great Solstice VII of the New Water/Matter Era." But I was curious about AVAAZ, the act scheduled to appear on the Main Stage, so I missed Almaden, Zachary Cale and Feral Cat. Instead, I spent the same $7 and one extra $ on two under- priced drinks at the candle-lit bar, especially to watch some of the members of AVAAZ (not to be confused with Avaaz.org) setting up their fast-rising electroGLOBALdiscotek. Taking in their sleek looks, I wondered if they all had gone to MIT and now have day jobs at investment banks-- not that there's anything wrong with that.

The best version of Sea had just opened down the street when I first saw Galapagos. I had gone to N Sixth Street back then entirely because Dave Eggers and McSweeney's held their first and earliest New York events in the now fabled Back Room, while they were reinventing fiction and food, hilarity and social awareness all at the same time. They turned writing into performance art as well -- right there at Galapagos, where I recall a gentleman in his nineties telling a tale of death and playground slides to the sound of helpless yet respectfully muffled laughter-- and now they need our help getting past their distributor Publisher's Group West's bankruptcy, by reason of which they are suddenly out $130K in one fell swoop. Say it isn't so...They are making a valiant effort with their online sales of all manner of items McSweeney and also with their "Heartbreaking eBay Auction of Staggering Audacity"...

I pondered this tale of swinging through the ages by a length of tooth floss, and drank two drinks one after another as images of something like starlight played on the blue velvet curtains. These were soon drawn back for the laser light show streamed through whirling stencils in many-colored beams by dimmSummer, and young Pat Miscellaneous, bare-chested in chinos and a full dress, full length Cheyenne headpiece started rapping through the hai-chai remix that DJ Boo (aka Juggaknots) and I believe Bollygirl DK also had started up together. This was with and sometimes without a duet from--? Samera? Reena?. Then came DJ impala's entr'acte, and she played September, Billie Jean, Kiss, and just a few minutes of the long version of Marvin Gaye's Gotta Give it Up, but stopped while people had just started moving to this party-song-to-end-all-party-songs, to move on to Patti Labelle's original version of Lady Marmalade. How long ago it seems and yet not so far away at all. Meanwhile, silhouettes danced on the once again starlit velvet curtains, and cellphones flashed as taking pictures became general. Then came all-Desi recently schooled Bamboo Shoots, who are a really good, very special band that somehow brings the lead, rhythm and bass guitar plus drums format into the present moment. They were reviewed on Sepia Mutiny and played on Conan. Strangely, it was the Cold War era movie playing on the screen behind them that distracted, and because I'm not of the three screen generation, I spent at least fifteen minutes growing older trying to figure out who was who in black and white in Juliet of the Spirits. And then I had to go home while the band played on...and go to sleep, missing Butterthief and Suspicious Brown...

Evening, in which Mamie Gummer becomes Meryl Streep, Glen Close becomes their blood relative and Natasha Richardson plays Vanessa Redgrave's Daughter

2007-06-12T23:02:00.000-04:00

The movie's called Evening, and if there's only one film that people who think too much and feel quite a lot and like to be slightly but deeply scared should see this summer, this is it. AL invited me to the Walter Reade Theater preview, where Susan Minot and Michael Cunningham showed up after the screening to discuss their experience in co-writing the screenplay adapted from the book with Kent Jones, the man with a light touch

from the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Throughout the screening, I wondered about the marvelous filter effects on the dream sequences-- how they came on so wonderfully strong and obvious, then tapered off so gradually through the course of the story. Were they in the lens or a part of the editing? Faces were so closely imaged at the start of the story, and with so much particularity, that their natural asymmetry led the eye beyond conven- tional
judgments about beauty, although every actor was stunning by any measure. One had to look afresh at already famous faces, that then grew familiar very quickly in these new forms. The casting is as superb as the cast. Of course, but of course, Glenn Close was Meryl Streep's mother in another life! Speaking of measurements, Vanessa Redgrave's acting must be measured by the frame, not by seconds. That's how close up the view becomes in this unsentimental yet touching study of two deaths in played out counterpoint. While Redgrave certainly carries it, all the others absolutely rise to the occasion. Having seen and heard my own grandmother apparently having good time at a fair number of parties on her near-deathbed, I found that this tale resonated with me, and the telling of it, its production, seemed to create a convincing experience of the swing between over-
whelming wooziness and diamond hard clarity in the course of that personal time travel and that wandering out of body that heralds a slow death.

Drawing away, the big picture of the society that provides the setting for this surprising story is delivered au point as well. While the circumstances of the wealthy family seems casually depicted, there is an uncanny conveyance of how things are proportioned for the rich. The wedding is generously informal and correct, not ostentatious, and the bride's dress is not overly grand. This is how it has to be, in a summer setting among people who enjoy extreme cleanliness, rely on slightly stodgy design, established standards of comfort, consuming both hand made and manu- factured goods of quality, and who take proper care of inherited objects as a matter of course. Yet there is also a clear sense of the perilous crowding and living cheek by jowl that imprisons the rich or aristocratic or patrician. Their circles must always be suffocatingly small, the more so the richer or better-established they are, and marriage and even preferred forms of adultery must occur within that small closed circle. The comedy of homosexuality in these narrow straits raises its suggestive head several times in the film. Sometimes it happens mistakenly, as when the mother of the bride happens upon her daughter sharing her wedding morning jitters with her college friend and bridesmaid who has crept under the covers. Pshaw! Sometimes it arises unawares, but for real, as when that same bride's mother snatches away her son from his partner during a playful jitterbug for a masterfully bone-chilling rhumba, purposefully extinguishing any possibility of his attachment to another woman. Ouch! These people are not incorrectly depicted as being stifled or inhibited, though. There is nothing in recent film to compare with Glen Close's raw howl over Buddy's sudden young death.

There is faerie magic in the woods, but also there are different ways of seeing and treating a small cliff or those same woods, either as the border area between manicured grounds and Vast, Unknown, Dangerous Nature, or simply as perfectly familiar bits of the family's property. Playing off the difference in perspectives in a practical joke provides a bit of class-conflict that erupts into rage.

Alcohol always plays a leading role in Susan Minot's books. In making Buddy a far more central figure in the film than he is in the book, Michael Cunningham ties this story closer to the rest of Susan Minot's work. The two writers, live four blocks apart in NYC but quite naturally met at a wedding in Nairobi soon after SM had recovered the rights to her book after an earlier attempt to turn it into a movie. Despite their close collaboration (SM said the collaborative process with MC had been like a master class in screenwriting), they differed on several points. For instance, MC believes a book is always a work in progress, the print capturing only a moment in the process, whereas SM says a printed volume in your hand is a clear indication of completion and enables the writer to let it go. MC said that film cannot capture an inner life as well a a book, but SM pointed out that one's inner life occurs in images, not words.

But then, they spoke of shared delights in the making of the film, like watching Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave on a monitor outside the house, and being amazed to see them step into character and switch it on,, discarding their natural selves in a flash. They talked about filming at a Newport house of that genre known as a "cottage" that belongs to the Cushing family, rather than in Maine, as in the book, which would have proven overwhelmingly expensive to produce. They concurred on the problem of turning an entire book into a movie, where films are really short stories, and the more sympathetic form for adapting a novel into image format is a television series. MC spoke fondly of squabbling with cinematographer and director Lajos Koltai over lines about which he had second thoughts, but that Koltai wanted to keep. SM spoke about about Eileen Atkins having trouble with the cadence of the lines until SM explained that the nurse was Irish. They both spoke of Hugh Dancy's out of period long hair, and that Lajos Koltai had predicted that critics would be all about his hair. We shall see.

Scent of Lilies

2007-05-31T01:01:00.000-04:00

I was walking down 82nd Street day before yesteday, late in the afternoon, and realized that I had missed this year's Kips Bay Show House, which was being dismantled. Volunteering there had been one of my favorite "rites" of Spring for longer than I care to admit, but it's been more than seven years since I turned my attention to another event that raises funds for the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club. The Show House I missed was hosted by the brilliant Janna Bullock and RIGroup. This was a very different undertaking from what it once was, when I was one of a band of perhaps twenty young women who took turns watching the rooms under the auspices of the original Show House Committee. The Committee never changed from year to year, but were always there from dawn till dusk, in Chanel suits and ropes of pearls, fresh as proverbial daisies, and well into their seventies-- or so it seemed to me. The air was always scented with Rigaud candles and flowers, which competed with paint and varnish that was not yet cured. There were fads for peonies one year, orchids the next, and air plants another. One had to know what the antiques and paint finishes were, to explain them to visitors, and and make sure nobody fainted from climbing the stairs, as all the terrible things that can happen on elevators weren't covered in the insurance contracts. Once, Mrs. Mazzola decided to climb to the top and work her way down, and had to sit down at the top floor landing, which called for procedures reserved for extreme emergencies, in terms of the arrangements of those days. Luckily, a Chinese garden stool came in handy until a proper chair could be brought.

Climbing the beautiful staircases two and three steps at a time was a special treat for me, and the main reason I always went back. I was new to New York, and missed staircases, especially those massive marble ones with low risers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century houses of my hometown, Calcutta, on which one could jump about and play games. Between chasing up and down these newer but equally generous staircases, I enjoyed the fact that the visitors were colorful, international, dressed up, and wore great shoes. My first happy moment of extra responsibility came one year in the first and grandest house, which was on 66th Street and belonged at the time to Imelda Marcos, who lent it every year for the Show House. In the main drawing room situated on the second floor, as in a piano nobile, Robert Metzger had set up an early multi-channel music system around the edges of the room which featured a lush, over-the-top eighties version of period decor, with plenty of silk damask and passementerie, the console being cleverly tucked away, iirc, in cabinet with Boulle marquetry or similar. I was required to stand by a massive flower arrangement on a round table in the center of the room under a magnificent Russian chandelier, smile at visitors and explain the rug, and I noticed that both speakers deployed to the west were playing the same channel, as were the ones to the east. To my enormous delight, RM allowed me to pull out the console after the House closed for the day, fiddle with the wiring and fix it. That would never be done today, as the firms who do the sound would, first of all, never make that kind of mistake, and the House would certainly never allow a volunteer to touch the wiring.

A few years later, at the first Show House at 603 Park, also the last chaired by the legendary Rella MacDougall, I got to be her right hand gal at the entrance, where she handled tickets herself every day, transforming that job into a subtle performance that required her great wit. That year, the pantry, with its green-shaded light, big silver safe and humongous ancient icebox, was just cleaned up, because the idea was still only to present a decorated house, and the pantry was a perfect relic. One day, during that run, Mrs. MacDougall was hurrying to the Show House when a bag lady. as we called them then, stopped her to ask for help. Rella, being as warm-hearted as she was elegant, asked what she could do for her. The bag lady said, "Could you hold up this mirror for me?"and while Rella did that, the bag lady rummaged about her shopping bag, drew out and carefully put on a set of big false lashes.

The house at 603 Park is one room deep but quite wide, with a long, long Park Avenue facade, and commensurate taxes, so it stayed on the market for a long time, to become the default Show House for Kips Bay and other causes for some years. Thierry Dèspont created a memorable decor in the paneled room there, but I can't remember whether it was for Kips Bay or the American Hospital in Paris. Although pictures of rooms from recent years are available online now, rooms that came before live only in one's memories and in the old journals-- a stack of which were lost to me in a heist upstate, in which I lost about a thousand books as well. What remains in my head: Mark Hampton's cream, white and sisal drawing room on 66th Street, with the bureau plat placed like a sofa table, in which all the fine Georgian mahogany became beautifully abstracted; The grand yet hilarious dining room that Ruben de Saavedra created at 62nd Street, where the fabric hung walls were drawn aside at mirrored intervals, for busts of laughing moors to peek out; Richard Ridge's almost completely lavender bedroom, which a band of his friends left in a group, all crying out, "Nurse!"; the narrow room at 1 East 94th Street that J. Allen Murphy dressed in yellow and Benarasi gold brocade, including an unraveled paghri as a pelmet, hung with Mughal lanterns, which he dedicated to the Raj Mata of Jaipur. She came to look, and I was embarrassed to see her at Doubles while I was still wearing a dress from volunteering (so un-Indian and deeply frowned upon then, though pants were fine); Richard Ridge's dining room in which the Romney had been cleaned to within a micron of its life; the large bedroom that John Saladino turned into a frescoed bathroom with a brass punkhah, so insulted was he not to have gotten a drawing room, according to my friend who used to work for him. Recent memorable rooms include Odile de Schietere's Venetian drawing room with furniture from Ferrières, Michael Simon's dix-huitième in black, the cleanest stable in creation by Andrew Tedesco, Larry Laslo's black bedroom where the black Baccarat chandelier made its New York début,...

Diantha Nype was another reason I was there. Diantha had left Bryn Mawr to get married, which is like leaving Hogwarts to become a muggle, but then she out-Mawr-ed everybody by inventing the Show House-- it really was her idea to start with, although this will remain forever unsung, because it's totally not the credo to claim this kind of credit, considering how many other people have worked long and hard to make it happen. Nevertheless, start it she did, and so all show houses that exist, sprouting across the nation every spring and fall -- to Diantha we owe this most excellent concept. Of all the original Committee, it was she who was always second in command to Rella, she who addressed the robbery and she who created the public image of the Show House, as it is, was and ever shall be.

Anyway, having missed the new Show House, and missing the brio of the old days, it was a very happy touch of deja vue to see what Matthew Sudock of M Design has done at David Burke & Donatella, where I met C for lunch. The mix of Hicks in carpet and screens, with creamy walls, plain mirrors, backlit red dry arrangement, large and loopy chandeliers, cheery cherry leather seating and gigantic bouquets of red-and white striped trumpet lilies, all scaled for a nice tall New York brownstone, reminded me of the panache, the hint of improv and inventive flair of the old days. The food is great, and playful too, and the tuna and salmon tartare not to be missed

The Last Mughal and The First Empress

2007-05-10T09:34:00.000-04:00

English-speaking people who are deaf to aspirates and aspirated consonants in Indian languages can't say ghee, and tend to produce incorrect spellings like Ghandi and Dehli. Because of this speech impediment, the word sipahi, meaning soldier in Persian and Urdu, became sepoy for the British, who gave this misheard word currency by giving the Indian uprising of 1857 against themselves a misleading nickname --The Sepoy Mutiny. The Uprising involved not only huge numbers of mercenary Indian soldiers under British pay and command, but also Indian princes, their subjects of various classes, their armies and camp followers, the peasantry of those parts of the Gangetic plain then under direct British control, tribal peoples of the Himalayan foothills and Northern plains and motley others. By simplifying the facts, the spin machine of the British Empire was able to promote the idea nearly unimpeded for well over a hundred years that it was all a matter of animal grease (beef and pork tallow) needed to insert rounds into Enfield rifles. How this single matter was supposed to have offended both Hindus and Muslims so much as to give rise to the events of a whole year, in which Indian soldiers and civilians massacred British men, women and children, burned down their dwellings and destroyed key installations of the colonial administration is quite a mystery.

Apparently, at that time in England, a popular supple- mentary explanation for the Uprising was that everybody in India was completely enraged at having to learn to behave themselves under the wonders of British rule-- much the way we are told today that 9/11 happened because an unspecified "they" were "jealous of our freedoms."(e.g., see how it seemed to the Metcalfe family)

William Dalrymple is the first British historian to use material in translation from numerous sources written in Persian and Urdu , and among the first to use the palace and city records now stored in the National Archives, As a writer of popular histories, he has a tough row to hoe in terms of publicizing his perceptions and findings, novel and dangerous to some and not radically different enough for others. Still signing away on his book tour, I suppose, he is more inclined to discuss the hard causes of the Uprising during interviews than in this book. With respect to softer causes, like Evangelism, which he positions centrally, he doesn't indulge in overkill to make a point, but sometimes confuses anger with fear and takes at face value what he could examine a bit more critically. Animal grease and surging Evangelism were no doubt the last straw, but only because the orders to use them could not have been perceived as a simple misunderstanding after a century of many kinds of deliberate and outrageous British assaults on Indian culture, property, laws and human rights. About this, a variety of Indian and foreign-born people had already reached consensus many times, sometimes long before 1857. Those harsher provocations are not discussed in The Last Mughal, which focuses on events in Delhi, which was at that time still a grand and antique city in a state of preservation, home to an exquisite culture. One hopes WD is saving the tougher subject matter of how to assign responsibility for the background of the cataclysmic events of 1857 for another book. As it is, he has already told The Hindu that this book has made him more friends in India than in England.
KASHMIRI GATE IN 1880

The book is cause for celebration. The thinking is sensitive, the language is fluid and rich. It conveys the excitement of breaking new ground, and the pictures and line drawings at the start of each chapter are delightful. The two new maps parading as old ones, in which Metcalfe House seems to dwarf the Imperial Palace, Hindus seem to live east of the Ganges and 1857 looks like the 16th century, are very silly, but one can't let that get in the way. The British sources tend towards diaries and letters, and produce an up-close-and-personal effect, while the Persian and Urdu source material is more often drawn from professional writing of various kinds, so it generates a more public voice and panoramic view. Going back and forth between the two sides of the narrative, I felt as if I was walking up and down a seesaw, faster and faster, back and forth, until the final British-led bloodbath led onto the slow, grim comedy of the denouement.

As a child, I always wondered about the the strange reek inside the Mughal tombs of Delhi, something like ancient bird droppings, which was missing at the Taj Mahal. I'd been told that these crumbly, dark and elegant monuments belonged to the 16th and 17th KHOONI DARWAZA, WHERE THREE SENIOR PRINCES WERE STRIPPED, SHOT AND THEIR BODIES ROBBED OF JEWELRY
by MAJOR WILLIAM HODSON
centuries,and never thought about that again. Now, this book has brought home to me how recent was their ruin, how active the scent of death and decay that hangs about them still, that many of them were family mausoleums, and that my great-grandfathers had already been born before a long, gruesome seige and a grisly genocide was carried out in those environs in broad daylight. I remember the vultures were still all over Delhi more than a century later.

WD's recent article in The Guardian explores similarities between British thinking in 1857 and widespread present perceptions in the West about the Iraq War. From some perspectives, the similarities are obvious and striking; from others, the similarities are not fully admissible. It is certainly alarming to find that the mainstream press has reactivated the very same language
last used by the British in 1857 to describe the Uprising--- to describe THE IRAQ WAR TODAY.
It is disheartening to see that in the post-colonial world, complications and spiraling violence can still be as easily provoked and fed upon by occupying forces playing on internecine rivalries. It is unpleasant to remember that the Bush Administration claimed to have received their intelligence about WMD from British sources. It is strange to see Queen Elizabeth, who last visited Washington to bestow an award on George Bush Sr. for planning and executing the first Gulf War, now returning to reinforce the military alliance. Meanwhile, Tony Blair, who should probably, given the current scheme of things, be tried by a kangaroo court and hung up to dry, is being sent off on an international farewell tour instead. One must wonder, are her private assets not yet suitably diversified?
KASHMIRI GATE
I appreciate and enjoy The Last Mughal for the depth and decency and richness of its narrative, and will read it many times, but I don't see the point of setting out a new and elaborate defense to counter the British allegations of 150 years ago. The British position, developed to justify deposing the monarch, was that Bahadur Shah Zafar was singularly responsible for fomenting a pan-Islamic rebellion against the British stretching from West Asia across India. Although Saddam Husein might not have been plotting anything like that either, to draw any similarities by implication and suggestion is to stretch facts to fit the polemic. The question that goes unanswered is, did the British deserve it then, and have we and anyone else done anything to deserve it now? There is no question that the movements of 1857 included Muslim jihadis, as did others that came before in the multitude of violent eruptions that represented efforts to rid the Subcontinent of the British occupation. Surely the more important point is that these populist, pan-Indian movements brought about consensus across religious and cultural lines about British wrongdoing, and eventually gave birth to cooperative, sustained resistance, rather than belonging to or advocating for any religion. Today's popular resistances in West Asia carry forward a different set of historical grievances and cultural motifs, although they may one day coalesce and draw a motley set of movements together so that even Sunni and Shia will come to terms.

WD either avoids or misses a key opportunity to emphasize the crossover nature of the Uprising: When the sipahis call Zafar "Prithviraj," WD offers a literal translation, i.e., Ruler of the World. If this had been their intention, the sipahis might have called him Shah Jehan IV. Zafar was more Rajput than Timurid by blood, though he was also considered a Sufi pir, so the the sepahis were more likely referring to the heroic and legendary 12th Century Rajput emperor, Prithviraj Chauhan III, the last Hindu monarch to be seated at Delhi. But of course, at 82 years of age, though he might be the rightful emperor, Zafar could be no Prithviraj. WD suggests that if Zafar had led the charge to defend Delhi while the defense was on an upswing, he might have reversed the course of history. But at that point in the book, WD has already established that the aged cultural and spiritual leader was far too physically feeble to do anything of the kind. Except the occasional nut job, most European monarchs were by then pretty far distanced from being military leaders, and even if Zafar hadn't been as ancient and scholarly as he really was, his assuming military command would probably have been about as useful as having the present-day water colorist and gardener, Prince Charles, lead a mounted cavalry charge-- or for that matter, as helpful as planting Prince Harry in a foxhole in Baghdad.

JAMA MASJID
in 1885

In any event, the proposition that the Uprising was a religious war seems unnecessarily polite. In its bloodiness, both sides seem to have been, rather, engaged in an out and out race conflict, with everybody shouting ethnic slurs and racist epithets--one side yelling, "Kafir!" and "Mlechha!" and the other roaring back, "Pandy!" The ancient word, "mlechha," incorrectly translated in the text as "foreign barbarians," is not included in the glossary. The unsatisfactory wiki-definition wanders into archaeological matters in an obsolete and incorrect direction, but a site I found provides a definition closest to my understanding of the word. Consonant with its rude sound, and more likely in the context in which it's mentioned, "mlechha" denotes a person or a people belonging to a designated Fifth Estate, beyond the first four, that is, priests, warriors, merchants, and tillers of the earth. This archaic Fifth Estate comprised outsiders who disregarded rules of both ethics and hygiene. What could be more racist than that? There can be no doubt that the British reprisal was racist in nature, and not religious at all, even for the brief period when British-led Sikh troops occupied the Jama Masjid. A source of religious conflict like this present day anger against coerced conversion, and a concomitant effort to halt it-- livid as it may be, is a far cry from the blazing rage of the Uprising. Neither was it a martial contest for possession of a religious site. If religion itself were the underlying issue, Colonel Skinner's ST. JAMES CHURCH and any other churches within the walls of Shahjahanabad/Delhi would certainly have been demolished first, early in the game. But this was a contest for Shah Jehan's Red Fort and walled city, for the symbol of the Indian Empire of the Great Mughals, for which the British had, as it were, set their collective cap! My suspicion is that during the Uprising, religion served, more than anything else, as a clearly evident badge of loyalty. Preserving Indian religions and protecting the right to practice them was certainly a call to action that all classes could heed. Asserting those rights, however, could not have been more than an expedient means to putting an end to several aspects of social engineering the British had been engaging in on the way to seizing land and resources.

One especially aggravating piece of British social engineering that had been going on for nearly a decade at the time of the Uprising was a series of annexations of entire principalities and kingdoms under the Doctrine of Lapse, a policy devised by the Lord Dalhousie of the day, who was created a Marquess for his many pains. This unilateral initiative gave the East India Company leave to seize any principality or kingdom where the succession had to be arranged according to Indian law and customary adoption, or where the rulers were judged to be incompetent --by EIC officers. This doctrine enabled a sharp acceleration of, and in terms of scale, a leap beyond the earlier established British practice of foreclosing on landed estates in a creative manner, by claiming for steeply escalated and therefore unpayable and unpaid taxes. This systematized robbery had been going on since the Mughal emperor Shah Alam had granted the East India Company the diwani (right to collect revenue) of all of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa as well as the upper Gangetic valley, in 1765 -- in return for an annual tribute of a mere 2.6 million rupees, which Warren Hastings stopped paying after 1772, probably to line his own pocket. This so-called firman was in any case actually wrested from Shah Alam after the Battle of Buxar and the Battle of Plassey (or actually, Polashi) had made a de facto British puppet of him. By then, the Mughal dynasty was already eleven reigns into its decline. The formality only confirmed what had already happened, officially elevating the EIC from the tax exempt coastal trading entity it had earlier become by virtue of the firman of 1717, bestowed on them by the inguinally challenged emperor Farukhsiyar. Permission to buy 38 villages had certainly a disproportionate gift, made in gratitude for deft surgical treatment by one William Hamilton in the EIC party. But in 1765, instead of being tax exempt, the EIC became a virtual nizam -- out and about, collecting taxes, seeing and being seen, and handling imperial revenues as if they were private and personal cash in hand.
RAISED THRONE IN THE HALL OF PUBLIC AUDIENCE

Certainly, the granddaddy of all the unilateral initiatives launched on an unsuspecting world, which gave rise to so much of what Jan Morris has called "tchootzpah" would have to be the Royal Charter that created the EIC in the first place. That strange firman conferred legal authority on the EIC in territories where the British Crown had no sovereign rights or authority to start with, making its officers answerable to nobody in the theater of operation, and only a wee bit responsible to that distant Crown-- so long as the spooky feeling lasted. As a direct descendant of that cheeky Royal Charter from that other Elizabeth, Dalhousie's Doctrine was as bald a pretext for seizing land and resources as any invented ever since-- as unilaterally imposed, heedlessly arrogant and provocative as the Bush Doctrine is today. I'm still wondering where he got it from.

How would the Doctrine of Lapse have applied, say, to George III's family? When the Prince Regent's only child died in childbirth in 1817, the King himself was cuckoo in his old age. According to Lytton Strachey, the Prince Regent was too fat to father another child. There had not been a single legitimate child born to the six royal dukes, one of whom was a murderer, another a transvestite, a third living in a menagerie. Of the King's five daughters who had survived into middle age, every single one was either barren or unmarried. It took nearly two years to arrange a marriage for the cosily unmarried Duke of Kent with yet another German cousin, and to produce Princess Victoria. Had this happened in India during Dalhousie's tenure, the kingdom would have been annexed in a flash!

Instead, in just the same manner as the sepahis sought out Zafar after their massacres of the British in and around their cantonments, the British, whose ideas of statehood and sovreignty were apparently still vested in their monarch, did exactly the same thing after carrying out their genocidal reprisal. One of the Delhi coterie, who enjoys a starring role in The Last Mughal, wrote that her husband had taken or "bought" (from whom?) what they decided must be Bahadur Shah Zafar's crown, taken it to Queen Victoria right after the collapse of Delhi and sold it to her for five hundred pounds. The 38 year old Queen quibbled over two chairs that she said ought to come with the headdress. In 1858, Lord Canning completed the gesture by proclaiming Victoria's assumption of sovereignty over all the East India Company's possessions, although this could have been The John Company's way of avoiding multiple charges against its officers and other kinds of challenges. Twenty years would pass before things settled down enough for Queen Victoria to "graciously" assume the title of Empress of India. and pass it down for three more generations to women of decreasing grandeur.

About the sipahis' and jehadis' killing of "innocent women and children," I think even very spoiled children should be regarded as innocent, but in the unfolding system of apartheid, women could not have been considered innocent, if only because their presence as breeders and their assertions of superiority were absolutely necessary for its implementation, a circumstance they were aware of and happy to act upon. If some ignorant slut, as quoted in WD's book, was able to address the deposed emperor not only in proudly broken Hindustani, but as rudely as she righteously claimed to have done, she must have had quite a bit of practice elsewhere. This revelation sent me to to my bookshelf to take another look at a strange volume I bought years ago called The Golden Calm. It's still in print and a lot of it must be read with a magnifying glass because of the low contrast between the faithfully reproduced yellowed pages and faded ink. It centers on the same crowd in Delhi as The Last Mughal, and makes available Thomas Metcalfe's commissioned paintings of the city and his eldest daughter's diary, interspersed with a rambling commentary from the insufferable, late 20th century colonial memoirist, M.M. Kaye. Careful inspection reveals much about Emily Metcalfe's style and circumstances-- an unselfconscious charm, to be sure; the mild trials of being farmed out to relatives in England in order to stay English; the collaborative efforts of colonial families in support of the Empire; slightly simpering racism about mixed blood within colonial ranks; complete ignorance of Indian people and society other than servants; a tendency to conflate quotidian familiarity with England with an education; and a warped sense of scale. This last is only to be expected of a young woman whose uncle, Charles Metcalfe, was able to declare English the official language in a place where, to stretch this estimate to its outer limits, English-speaking people comprised something below four percent of the population. Emily returned to India twenty years after Thomas B. Macaulay had delivered his appalling Minute, which turned education across India into a travesty for the next hundred years and more, and just over thirty years since the Scotsman David Ochterlony (at center, left) was in the habit of processing through the streets of Delhi with his thirteen Indian wives mounted on as many elephants-- something he could never have gotten away with in his native Boston. Emily Metcalfe's unmarried uncle and widowed father had been accustomed to livin' large themselves, so all the careful work of many guardians during her years spent in England as a relatively ordinary little girl must have been quickly undone.
HUMAYUN'S TOMB

In The Last Mughal, WD says the second Thomas Metcalfe was poisoned, according to contemporary reports, by the ranking queen, Zinat Mahal, who was motivated to do this because Metcalfe, as British Resident at Delhi, was supervising an intrigue to ensure the succession of an heir to the throne other than her son. I would say Metcalfe had no business doing any such thing at any time, and even less by means of trading a promise to enthrone the less favored son on condition that he hand over the palace to the British and go live in the 'burbs. Of course, the British painted Zinat Mahal as a shrew, but it's quite possible she was not the one they were looking for anyway. For there were other actors to consider, most of them unintentionally made accessible by M.M. Kaye. The first Thomas Metcalfe had been a major in the Bengal Army of the EIC, and later made his fortune as a Director of the EIC, upon which he was created a baronet, and purchased a suitable property in Berkshire called Fernhill Park, to serve as the family estate. Emily's uncle, Charles, the first born son, was eventually created Lord Metcalfe for his services as Governor-General of India, Jamaica and Canada, but died without an heir (as his three half Sikh sons didn't seem to count) from skin cancer, no doubt as a result of going out too much in the midday sun, so Fernhill passed and the baronetcy reverted to Emily's father. Thomas Metcalfe was by then living more or less after the ducal manner in Delhi, though without any commensurate ties to the land. If the floor plans are accurate and drawn to scale, Metcalfe House, his personal property in Delhi, featured a Palladian villa spread out over 22,000 sq feet of marble-floored and vaulted interior space above ground, housing extensive collections of Napoleonic memorabilia and a great deal of statuary, a huge library and "costly" Georgian furniture and paintings. A colonnaded veranda thirty feet wide with marble pillars ran the perimeter of the entire house, and even more finished space below grade, furnished with skylights, provided cooled reception rooms for use during the heat of summer. It was set in a thousand acre park, with pools and orchard groves and avenues looked after by over a hundred and fifty servants, including a series of ten people to say farewell to the master at the porte-cochère of a morning. In addition, he had made himself an exurban retreat near the Qutb Minar, by converting the interior of a family tomb and mausoleum belonging to a Mughal clan for his own residential use. This family had owed money to the British-run Delhi Bank-- and it takes no great leap of the imagination to figure out that it was probably a debt accumulated METCALFE HOUSE AFTER SEIGE AND BEFORE RESTORATION
for back taxes imposed by the British revenue collectors somewhere down the line. M.M. Kaye has rude things to say about that family's history, which predate her ability to verify or garner first hand information about anything she has to say by several centuries, so it seems Metcalfe had been spreading slander to cover his tracks, as bullies everywhere tend to do. So, although he was only working a 25 hour week, and his main business, apart from studying the culture, was to run, conduct and oversee interference in the royal succession at Delhi, there was certainly at least one other Mughal family who might well have wanted to have him poisoned.

What, after all, is the point of patronizing the arts and living in a new place to grow rich while at the same time arranging to tear apart the very fabric of the society that produces those arts and the economy that yields that wealth? One cannot deliberately expose other people to disaster without bringing on some of that risk and danger down upon oneself.

It was this skewed sense of scale and entitlement through which much that was Indian came to be belittled. The Himalayas were referred to as "the hills," while areas of India the size of France came to be known as "provinces." Indian languages were called dialects, and kings were demoted to stand guard as imperial nobles. Even the Koh-i-Noor diamond was cut way down to size, from 186.0625 carats to its present 105.602 carats, to increase its "brilliance," the better for philistines to admire it, and probably yielding many a major gem from the shavings, proudly worn on pinkie fingers across the land.

With royalty becoming nobility, and even being referred to as "Native Chiefs," the aristocracy and gentry became middle class (e.g., Mahatma Gandhi's forbears had served as prime ministers of a principality called Porbander, with an important port and a long history, which was two thirds the size of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, but he was identified as middle class). Landless families and skilled craftsmen were reduced to subsistence farming and working as household servants for the new rich, as indigenous industries failed.

Meanwhile, the downpour of loot and wealth into Britain was torrential and the British in India started staging court rituals in Mughal style at the grounds of the Red Fort, replete with so-called State Balls, given ostentatiously in the palace at the Hall of Private Audience--for their own monarchs, keenly wishing them to attend. These strange people took umbrage at any late breaches of 17th century etiquette, even from a ruler of highest rank, who had attended the fake durbars in 1877, 1903, and 1911, and on the third round, decided to go with modern clothes and modern manners. Victoria and her descendants, while seeming to want no part of it, eventually succumbed to the invitations and appeared for the first time the very year of that supposed outrage-- for apart from everything else, within the two generations it took them to accept the invitation, the nine children of Queen Victoria and her own first cousin Prince Albert, so advantageously positioned by their extraordinary national fortune, had all married so brilliantly that the heads of Europe's most prominent royal houses were all first cousins--and set to dominate the sub-caste of German princes and princelings who populate the royal lines of Europe for the long term.

Even today, it is only the hippest of the hip in the West who know to address a maharani correctly.

Forty years later, John William Kaye and J.B. Malleson published the British version of events, a six volume work called "History of the Sepoy War." Fifty two years later, in 1909, Hindutva founder Vir Savarkar published "The Indian War of Independence" in praise of the Uprising as a Hindu initiative. British authorities banned the book immediately. One hundred years later, on May 11, 1957, observance of the centennial was fairly muted; a simple ceremony was held at Rashtrapati Bhavan, a number of scholarly studies written by Indian historians were published, and the special flag of the 1857 revolutionaries — a green flag with a golden sun — was unfurled beside the national tricolor. I can't find any record online of anything anyone from Britain had to say that year.

This year, 30,000 youths marched from Meerut to Delhi, to mark the 150th anniversary of the journey of the three hundred sipahis who left Meerut for Delhi on May 10, 1857, arriving at the fortified Mughal capital of Shajanabad at Delhi on May 11, 1857, to ask Bahadur Shah Jafar to assume leadership of their movement to overthrow the British. This year, despite quarrels about food, they arrived to find vigorous celebrations at The Red Fort, choreographed by Rajeev Sethi . The BBC covered the 2007 sesquicentennial celebration (see Prime Minister's Address), added a remark or two about Britain being portrayed as a ghoul and provided a link to an earlier online dialogue among Britons about the need to start giving courses in the History of the British Empire in British schools, to reassess what had been done well and what was done badly --as if they're planning to do it again...
Historical atlas of the rise and decline of the Mughal Empire

Historical atlas of the British Occupation of India

Sam Sloan's Big Combined Family Trees-- the Mughal Section

INDIAN NEWSREEL FROM 1947

THE RED FORT IN 2006

BAHADUR SHAH ZAFAR"S GRAVE IN MYANMAR

Image sources:
http://www.thecityreview.com/mughal.html
http://www.islamicarchitecture.org/art/islamic-textiles.html
http://www.mapsofworld.com/travel-destinations/red-fort.html
http://www.indoislamica.com/photographs/photographs1.html
http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/2004/01-15Jun04-Print-Edition/011506200496.htm
http://www.piersallison.co.uk/photos/locations/india.asp
http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/svadesh/
http://www.hindustantimes.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/

The Narcissus is also a Flower

2007-05-03T17:32:00.001-04:00

CARAVAGGIO
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake,
beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. (scented)ROSEWORTHY!

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: MICHAEL DAVIS
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

--William Wordsworth, published Spring, 1807

...and now for the urban delight of cultivars....
BEERSHEBA (1923)
New Yorke rs for Parks, The Daffodil Project

American Daffodil Society

geocities Daffodil Garden

Char's Daffodil Ridg e

Narcissus of mythology

bluestone perennials

Heirloom Daffodils

JOHN WILLIAM WATER-
HOUSE

SALOME

RIP VAN WINKle (1884)

ACTAEA

DUTCHMASTER

DELIBES

MOUNT HOOD

CAMELOT

AUDUBON

SUNDISC

all these still abloom at The Secret Garden in The Conservatory Garden at 105th Street!

Sanjaya, Simon, Howard and Dave: Strange Brew

2007-04-19T11:01:00.001-04:00

And so it begins! Last evening, Sanjaya's surprise appearance on Jay Leno followed hot on the heels of Jon Stewart and Aasif Mandvi's brilliant partial birth abortion skit("America Decides") on The Daily Show about his being voted off American Idol. One was relieved to see the kid still on television, shy and charming, and free of anger as ever. And he was wise, saying he felt that he hadn't lived up to the potential Simon had seen in him, and had no hard feelings, taking the wind right out of the sails of anyone looking to pick a fight with him. He said he's not a Country singer and knew he had bombed when he saw his Tuesday peformance played back. Then he made a point that should not be missed. Who will win, he said, is "Totally unpredictable, based on each week's performance." That is to say, there is no way to predict who will win American Idol because you don't know ahead of time what genre is next on the calendar.

Clearly, many people have picked up on the perpetually and perennially boorish Simon Cowell's special animosity towards the kid, since he never bothered to disguise it, except in being careful, after Sanjaya's not-so-CBGB downfall, not to emphasize "American" when he said, ""Based on the fact that we're supposed to be finding an American Idol"... etc." Obviously, industry players know quite well that America Does Not Decide. But Sanjaya is an American kid, half Italian-American as well as half Indian. He cannot recognize Simon's carry-over-colonial style, nor Simon's oblique manner of exerting his strangely assumed authority, because this very American teen has no prior knowledge of where it's coming from. Each show gave us a glimpse of his utter bafflement at the way Simon treated him.

Simon Cowell is a denizen of another era, when Indian pop stars disguised themselves as Englishmen. Cliff Richard never made it to America at all, and mostly hid his Indian roots like Merle Oberon; Engelbert Humperdinck needed a ludicrous name borrowed from a deceased German composer to arrive piggybacked, if I recall correctly, on Tom Jones' transatlantic voyage; Freddy Mercury, Freddy Mercury, sweet Parsi boy from such a nice family in Bombay, was only identified as Indan posthumously and fictionally by Salman Rushdie in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. If you were Indian, you had to go through Britain to access the rest of the world. Nowadays, it seems, if you're going to be a rock star of Indian descent, you still need to count on positive guidance from the West to win support in India. The Indian press has been inclined in many quarters to report or redistribute more of the bad news about Sanjaya, and less of the good news --essentially, whatever is being said here -- although American Idol is shown in India a day later and audiences can figure it out for themselves (see Yahoo! Times of India, Indian Express, indiatimes, The Hindu, but see also NDTV). Is it possible that no Indian viewers noticed the American Idol band's complete unpreparedness and inability to support his very fluid but on target microtonal inflections that are a regular feature of Indian vocal music?

Howard Stern and the highly prescient Dave Della Terza of VFTW both have good reason to want to bring down American Idol. It's a bogus formula forced upon a home-grown art form. Clearly, the panel of judges is composed to reflect the notion that Simon Cowell is a WASP, but he is not. What extraordinary effrontery to suppose a fellow with a voice like an animated gekko's cantankerous cousin should sit in judgment of what works in America, let alone be its gatekeeper--even if he is Sony executive.

Perhaps the Idol routine makes sense in England, or once did. There isn't (or certainly once wasn't) any problem with looking for a pop song generalist there. Despite all internal distinctions (i.e., I can tell Johnny Rotten from Boy George, and still download Cream and Pink Floyd tracks when I'm feeling nostalgic), all British pop forms a distinct and unified subgenre in that it is always in some part a highly abstracted imitation of American music. But in the U.S. of A, where we never expected Bruce Springsteen to give us salsa, or Eddie van Halen to play Copacabana, or Beastie Boys to sing Motown, the Idol competition makes little sense. It is shaped like a baccalaureate of pop, with a series of courses administered in surprise sequence with a trip-you-up trickery aspect to the testing method that smacks of preparation for managing distant colonies in the midst of hordes of unwilling natives. In other words, the show's management can direct the sequence of styles especially to eliminate particular contestants on the management's whim. This sort of manipulation is not entirely unfamiliar to past generations in India who had to cope with the colonial imagination, but maybe now rock'n'roll natives should become more completely unwilling to put up with this nonsense.

Before

AI audition

Some Kind of Wonderful

Singout

Keith Olbermann

photo of Sanjaya by Shirley Halperin

What Kind of Woman is Jan Morris?

2007-04-13T23:38:00.000-04:00

This was the burning question that drew me back to the Celeste Bartos Forum for the second time in just five weeks. I had read nothing of her writing since she was James Morris back in my early adolescence, and it was time, I decided, to see for myself what time had wrought. The current pictures suggest both Barbaras Bush and Cartland more than anyone else, which I supposed to be more than a bit misleading, if only because I knew she had once climbed part of the way up Mount Everest as James Morris, a member of the team went to base camps with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay during their first ever conquest (see also The Beeb version) of Mount Everest. I was unaware of any particular fondness of Empire; perhaps I had forgotten to take it for granted in people of her generation.

Nevertheless, I felt distinctly annoyed when Simon Winchester rose to introduce his friend and mentor with a tale of his own last hurrah colonial adventures, during which he was moved to write to James Morris after reading his report of the first Everest Expedition. Morris advised him that if writing was indeed his vocation, then he should do nothing but write. This Winchester proceeded to do, abandoning his youthful colonial endeavors to serve as a reporter for a provincial journal back in Blighty.

I was interested to see that the Jan Morris of April 2007 was made in the image of a Home Counties lady, with a fluff of silver hair, wearing a sensible skirt, neatly crossed smooth knees clad in support stockings, nice heavy looking walking shoes on her feet, and a hearty, good=humored fresh-air look abut her. Paul Holdengräber, seated opposite, embarked on an effusive face to face homage, lisping and stumbling over jumbled syntax with the awed and half-choked discomfort and hand waving emotionality of a non-native English speaker confronted with the Real Thing. But Jan Morris, first of all, is Welsh and proud of it, and secondly, she is rather kindly, and responded as if all of that wasn't happening.

She had been urged to speak about the enormous PR coup that he had pulled off by making sure the conquest of Everest was reported to coincide with The Coronation of QE II (see video and fruity-voiced commentaries). No doubt this timing assisted doubly in securing a knighthood for New Zealander Edmund Hillary. For the 8,000 people in Westminster Abbey and the millions who watched this twilight imperial coronation (Pakistan, Srilanka, South Africa and others were still subject nations) through the modern miracle of television, the nearly simultaneous planting of a Union Jack atop the world's highest mountain still seemed to be a crowning achievement of Empire, arousing cheers that quite eclipsed the sound of its last gasp.

As Jan Morris reminisced, she leaned back and gazed into the far distance above, a gentle smile playing across her face. She said that, rightly or wrongly, for good or bad, it had been a thrilling moment in the history of an island people who had conquered the entire world through a combination of "talent, tchootspah and...greed!" This, I felt, was a bit Barbara-Bush-at-the-Astrodome, not to mention a touch Cartland,. and of course it left out the other essentials of mercantile colonialism -- deepest dishonesty and the drive to defraud, so stunningly exemplified at the top of the imperial hour in Macauley's Minute. But the audience had an appetite for this, as if starved of Masterpiece Theater

Speaking of Venice past and present, her voice was not quite that of a woman, retaining enough of its former masculine timbre to prompt me to look for male habits and gestures. It's true that a woman's voice often deepens significantly with age, but it is still recognizably feminine, and somehow this part of the transformation had stopped halfway. She flung her arm unashamedly across the back of her chair, which women rarely do in public without correcting themselves sharply, even in the Home Counties, although she crossed and recrossed her knees with considerable grace. Her jaw, I thought, was angled at a feminine tilt, but her nose was still proportioned as a man's with regard to the rest of her face. Her halo of hair was fluffed nearly symmetrically all around but not definitively styled-- perhaps that kind of feminine vanity is still a stretch for her. The women of all ages around me seemed to reek of estrogen in comparison.

She explained that she is not religious, except for trying to cultivate the sort of kindness and personal compassion the Dalai Lama advocates, a value she pointed out is universally adopted by the major religions. This did not inhibit her from reading out a story from her book, a mild joke at Tenzing Norgay's expense: Tenzing, flush with success, was seen knocking back liberal amounts of some remarkable vintage from the cellars of Lancaster House at a celebratory banquet, prompting another dinner guest to remark on his appreciation of fine claret. The literary audience laughed uproariously -- as audiences at such gatherings tend to do, to show they get the joke-- about the naiveté of both Tenzing and the other guest. I think the bigger joke is that Tenzing did appreciate a good claret first off after all.

The glorification of Empire as an ongoing PR initiative for the People of the British Isles is both irresponsible and dangerous, as it relies on perpetuating myth and falsehood. Entertaining the fantastic fallacy that a handful of Britons made a military conquest of the world has helped lead us will-nilly into the present nonsensical "war" at a staggering cost of lives and money. In fact, the British mercantile classes spent centuries establishing themselves in a network of pocket locations and only gradually accumulated enough wealth and connections in situ to hire indigenous mercenaries (i.e., not Blackwater)and flex their new found military strength as an extension of their one-sided management of business and commerce. Astonishingly, this is still not common knowledge in America. In India at least, the British merchants were for a long time more like the Barbarians who eventually took over the declining Roman Empire, and quite unlike Roman plutocrats themselves. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, pomp and circumstance, perpetuated on Masterpiece Theater through fantastic works long after the fact.

Whereas William Blake once asked, rhetorically, "Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?" in the case of Empire the answer is a resounding Yes! Of course, such mind games must be accomplished through all the viccisitudes of homesickness and alienation, numbing isolation, discomfort, raging hostilities and supreme boredom of the imperial adventure. After its demise, though, anyone can make of it whatever they please, and dream on, although it's time to focus on the damage done instead of its stolen and largely mythical glory.

Afterwards, I struck up a conversation with Vibuthi Patel, who seemed to think Jan Morris had the permission of her advanced years to keep with the veneration and celebration of imperium. I thought otherwise, but bought the second book anyway, because it's called The World. After JM had signed it with her favored punctuation, an exclamation mark, I asked her how she likes William Dalrymple's work. Hesitating a long moment, she admitted that she was not fond of the histories, and couldn't manage to read the Mughal books, such is her aversion to the new take on events. So instead, I taught her how to say "chutzpah" properly, with a better mouthfeel. For this exercise, she generously offered up her ear at close range not once but twice, and roared with laughter to hear my rolling velar rasp.

William Dalrymple at the Asia Society

2007-03-28T23:12:00.001-04:00

On Monday evening, I remembered almost too late that everyone's favorite Mughal scholar was scheduled to talk about his new book at The Asia Society, so instead of catching some much needed sleep, I hauled myself over to the Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium and found a seat in the fifth row. All around me, Desi ladies sporting various degrees of chic chatted away or strode about purposefully. The author was busy too, standing by the apron of the stage and signing books for those who needed to stay far ahead of the game. I was squeezed between two elderly gentlemen, the one giving off an aroma of old books and ancient tweed, and the other practicing a distinctive style of patterned and belabored breathing, so I had a really hard time staying awake.

Eventually, after a number of complimentary remarks in the way of mild jokes from various ladies about learning more about ourselves from an Englishman, Vishaka Desai introduced WD, who took the podium and read some passages from his new book, alternately scintillating and gory, as I registerd through a fog. I believe he was showing this picture on the screen when the slide projector went on the fritz and I dozed off. Then he was showing another slide, of a 1858 lithograph by J.R. Turnbull showing how the British Officer's Mess was set up at the Red Fort after the massacre, sacking and looting of Delhi... or rather, of the fugly mess they made there with mediocre mahogany furniture set out in rows across the white marble intarsia Diwan-i Khas (Private Audience Hall) of Shah Jehan and his descendants... and I dozed off again, my thoughts blurring the image of the lithograph with memories of this story and this image, among others.

Finally woken up by all the clapping, I consoled myself that I'd soon read the book anyway and look at the pictures as long as I liked. All I'd managed to catch was that WD seemed to be proposing that the Uprising had failed because Dilliwallahs can't get along with Biharis and looked down on them then as they do now. Maya Jasannoff appeared and exchanged a few pleasantries with WD about Zafar being more poet than warrior, which is not news, so I figured there must be more. WD was saying that working with the previously untouched Urdu and Persian papers in the National Archives in Delhi was like finding new source material about the French Revolution. He put forth his thesis that it was a war of religions, and remarked that the language of that war is being used once more without any apparent gain in understanding. I noticed he pronounced Meerut the way I had heard it (mis)pronounced at Tolly-- "May-root" --which I figured must ibe customary for some people. Then the Q & A began. I had raised a sleepwalking hand, but the photographer posted at the apron of the stage beat me to it. He started out saying that Biharis have created value wherever they went, including Long Island, and seemed to refer as well to the incident in Canada, back in 1914, recently documented in Ali Kazimi's film, Continuous Journey, during which a Japanese vessel with predominantly Sikh (and now apparently Bihari) passengers wh intended to immigrate had been turned away. Suddenly ladies were flapping their hands and enjoining him to desist and urging me to ask my question. I was fascinated, and wanted to hear more, but pulled myself together and asked, How comfortable was WD using the term "Mutiny"?

He said he had been asked that question all over India (where it's called The First War of Indian Independence, even though there was no second war, not counting a relatively small sideshow during WWII). He didn't use "mutiny" himself, he said, but there had been a mutiny, that was a fact-- did that answer my question? Well no, it didn't-- I wanted a chat about conscience and permissibility, but realized this was an auditorium rather than a cocktail party, and I was hardly in top form, so I said, fine, sure, whatever-- I had served the ladies' purpose.

Afterwards, in the line for book signing, a student recently returned to grad school at Columbia from vacation in India held out her Indian edition for me to compare it with my American one. "This book is all the rage, as a present, I mean- everyone's giving it to their friends as gifts for any occasion." The jacket was of heavy, finely-printed stock in vivid colors, the pages were well cut at the fore-edge, it seemed to open flexibly. "Not quite a nice as yours," she said. I looked at mine and felt its pages, which had a tad more bonding but the same print quality. "It couldn't have been produced in India at all, thirty years ago," I told her. "Well, I guess it's pretty good," she said. "Anyway, it was six hundred rupees-- so, like, ten dollars to your thirty." I balked at this, and decided that couldn't be right. "That's the exchange rate now, is it?" I asked her, wondering what she studies and eats for breakfast, kids these days...She shrugged. "Okay, so fifteen," she said.

Now, having brought it home, I'll read it. Meanwhile, here' s William Dalrymple's own synopsis.

Buglisi Dance Theater's New Works

2007-03-18T23:33:00.002-04:00

Mira Nair and Jhumpa Lahiri Discuss The Namesake

2007-03-10T23:55:00.001-05:00

This evening at the NYPublic Library, when Paul Holdengräber introduced Mira Nair and Jhumpa Lahiri with the namasake joke,* he was met with a polite chuckle, but when Mira Nair explained that "nama-sake" had been a standing joke throughout shooting The Namesake, she raised a belly laugh.

A couple of hours before, I had left the Paris Theater with an uncharacteristic lump in my throat, so there it was, not just rapport, but rather, her extraordinary frankness and benevolent expertise in playing the audience like a harmonium. The crowd was gathered at the Celeste Bartos Forum, apropos of which Mira Nair noted that Celeste Bartos had financed her early films, This no doubt jump-started her career as an independent film maker. Then, these two beautiful women who had become great friends had a riveting chat with the audience about the process of turning a novel into a film, alternating Jhumpa Lahiri's reading of a passage with clips from the film to illustrate various points.

JL said she had had no first hand experience of death when she wrote The Namesake, whereas MN had lost her mother-in-law just before reading the book. Indeed, the brief post mortem caress, something I have seen in life, and only dimly understood until now, is more exploratory in the book, but mostly emotional in the film. JL and MN talked about how time is telescoped in the transition, and how sometimes four pages of prose are conveyed in a few seconds of film but then a single sentence is becomes an entire scene. Much of what JL said resonated with me--how she didn't have a clear visual impression of her characters as she wrote, how a book once written must be set aside for good. She said the film was as a grandchild to her.

MN's choice of Nitin Sawhney to produce the music was a masterstroke, much as Mychael Danna for Monsoon Wedding. The composed score and the music MN wanted imported, like the specially commissioned rap song for the head shaving, as well as some of the State of Bengal track that I've embedded here, are so finely integrated into the action that one barely notices the music as a separate event. Allyson Johnson's editing is precise and sensitive, and the soundtrack overlaps frequently through transitions to sweep the narrative along, yet it's so grounded that the effect is not vertiginous at all. The documentary element remains powerful throughout, and MN has captured the Kolkata hand-pulled rickshaw wallah only a moment before Buddhadeb managed to pull them from the streets by means of the Calcutta Hackney-Carriage Amendment 0f 2006.
Meanwhile, a New York birthday party features a cake of the moment from The Cupcake Cafe.
As for everything else, cicatrix wrote an especially touching review on Sepia Mutiny.

The first surprise guest in the audience was Kalpen Modi, looking suitably rumpled and goofy, and standing at the rear with his "agent," MN's son, Zohran. MN invited KP up to the stage to share some private jokes about foot massages and yoga, and to join in the Q&A. The second surprise guest was Tilotama Shome, who played Alice in Monsoon Wedding. She said her understanding of Bengali men was that they are not given to emotional display, so how could Ashoke Ganguli be so demonstrative with Ashima ? MN explained that people want to see a love story and there isn't much time to tell it on film, things have to be conveyed with a look or a gesture. The last question was one I had in mind-- why did Kal Penn speak Bengali for the first time after shaving his head? The woman was American-- how could she tell? But Mira Nair explained that Gogol would have used Bengali in that situation, although he was unaccustomed to it, and I had to admit that pretty much covered it.

*About nama sake, I'm ashamed to say the play of Roman and Bangla script in the movie titles made my head spin, but I'm happy that the Bangla ay/ae has its foot curled up into a lower case a in the film's logo, which pretty much takes care of the pronunciation problem so long as you can read Bangla.

Bear and Counterpoint Sing at Irvine 1/13

2007-03-06T02:59:00.000-05:00

Counterpoint's parody of "For the Longest Time" for Big Game Week at Berkeley, Fall 2006

Romio Shretha's Gigantic Books

2007-02-22T16:47:00.000-05:00

The best things I saw last Saturday were Romio Shrestha's new book and his last book. They are both two feet long and commensurately wide. One of them is said to weigh only 5.5 pounds, but I have my doubts. Both books mainly comprise beautifully produced pictures of Romio's ecclesiastical paintings, and at about eighty bucks, are way underpriced. About the rest of what I saw, here, with some added links, is
what I posted yesterday to Sepia Mutiny:

"On Saturday, I went to ABC Home on 19th and B'way, to check out their India promotion, and ended up taking a wrong turn into what they are calling their marigold theater for the duration of the promotion (..."our platform for arts, wisdom and healing" according to the brochure). It's a sale room hung with mostly Benarasi
saris at one end to form a stage, and partially peopled with random wood or alabaster murtis, mostly of Krishna and Ganesh, and strewn about with flea market chairs and variously sized cushions all upholstered in more Benarasi silks. The cushions were for the audience, who had to take off their shoes at the entrance, as if entering a temple, but actually to keep the cushions clean. One had already been offered Deepak Chopra teas, unsalted cashews and dried fruit near the entrance and told to consume them before entering the marigold theater.

Retail personnel wafted about in ghagras and dreamy expressions, acting as bouncers because Patti Smith was there. There was a collection of very large thangka-type paintings of Tara up on the walls too, by Romio Shrestha, who wore full Tibetan ceremonial dress, and, as it turned out, had become friends with Patti Smith at William Burroughs' funeral-- but that revelation came much later. I claimed a flea market chair while ABC's Creative Director made her faltering speech about being overcome by spirituality and the sound system started up with New Age violins mewling away, and wondered how this would play in India if a shop in Gurgaon were hung with ball gowns and scattered with creches and madonnas and pietas, and everybody had to sit in little gold ballroom chairs and cross themselves while a store executive talked about his admiration for the West. Anyway, there might as well have been incense, since Romio asked everyone who felt like it to close their eyes while he talked about how much the female principle was needed in the world today. Quite a few women did close their eyes, clearly confusing spirituality with self-hypnosis, while the violins went on. I realized actual religious teachings of any sort would never do for these people. When Romio had called Patti Smith a goddess the third or fourth time, it was her turn to take the mike and play and talk and sing, so the mewly music was turned off and she did her own wailing-growling thing and played her alternately musical and bizarre chord progressions, explaining that she could perform her most difficult works with ease because of the positive energy in the room. The room was of course full of people acting out their perceptions of spirituality and behaving like they had taken opium, with a few Indian onlookers at the edges wearing vacant expressions. Patti Smith explained that her last song was about William Blake, a 19th (okay) century Londoner who had addressed the inequities of his day by claiming that all people contained the Divine within --whatev, it went to show how gullible/malleable you had to be. After all this was done, and the audience told they could disperse, it turned out that all this was to sell four books, two quite remarkable and under-priced ones of Romio's paintings, so huge that only a strong man could pick up both at once, plus one by Patti Smith about her own life and -- Deepak Chopra's... Kama Sutra. I asked a woman how long she though India would be reflexively connected with this sort of spiritualty. Her eyes glossed over while she thought. 'M-m-m-m-n, forever!' she said."

Alabaster Ganesh from ExoticIndia.com

The Hundred Year Mark - R.J. Horner & Co.

2007-02-01T01:47:00.000-05:00

a

In the Seventies it was all about Thonet. In the Eighties, you either did not want to or could not buy Belter and Meeks. In the Nineties it was Stickley, preferably the actual old stuff. So, now that the century is well under way, I thought I'd take a look at what is newly qualified to call itself antique and on its way to becoming the next fad. It looks like R.J. Horner to me. Made of Cuban mahogany, or figured maple or oak, and featuring crazy curly decorations on straight frames, heavy on the griffins (gryphons), paw feet, shields and crests all around and somewhat Italianate in form, it seems a strange candidate for New York City taste, but what do I know? They were at 61, 62, and 63 West 23rd Street at the turn of the last century.

There were tables and armoires and hat stands and bookcases and desks too.

In Kolkata, that hotbed of antiquarian activity, my mother once found and domesticated a pair of armchairs that I think must be related to this bestiary. Nobody knew what the hell they were....
This robust looking sofa sold on December 4th, 2004 for $13,225

The slightly restrained but completely gargoylicious item below and a pair of matching armchairs went for $51,750 on January 15, 2007

Companion pieces to a massive sofa (right)

Pictures from:
moisan-inc.com, pointpleasantgalleries.com
goantiques.com and nealauction.com

This animale below and its matching chairs are estimated to fetch $20,000, but will probably do better

Below-- almost, but not quite Horner!

first below (too tasteful--wrong!) and further below (too frumpy!)

Republic Day Parade 2007 in Delhi

2007-01-26T14:54:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's odd to feel homesick for a military parade, but how many armies have a camel corps with historic uniforms and an entire, functioning regiment of mounted cavalry ? The Border Security Patrol salutes President Kalam

I haven't seen the Republic Day Parade in Delhi since I was twelve, but every year I wish I could see it on TV, which is never quite the same thing-- so here's what the online life can do. This year Captain Tunku Ismail Ibrahim, grandson of the Sultan of Johor Baru, in Malaysia, led the mounted column of the 61 Cavalry before the President and President Putin, right along with the parade of modern armaments.

The Presidential Cavalcade, above, and Brahmos Cruise Missiles below.

The Desi ceremonial marching style is concentrated in the upper body, the sharply swinging arms making intricate patterns as the parade regalia flashes in all its spectacular hues. You can't see this in stills, but in these two pictures, the Central Industrial Security Force is seen in two different marching positions and lighting situations.

After the tanks, missiles and military tableaux, the folk dancers go pirouetting for miles, the monks chant and the floats from all the states remind viewers of the interwoven lives of a thousand flourishing ancient and modern cultures. And then, for pure sappiness, there are marching bands of children and teenagers singing and playing Saare Jahan Se Achha.
Below, some of the hundreds of hildren in the Parade

As I have a dim memory of how dessicated the land was even fifteen years after the colonial period ended, this parade still seems to me a signal reminder of all the sources of recovery and growth, while the strange combination of senti- mentality and stoicism in the Beating Retreat ceremony is a real tear jerker -- though all of it is fogged over a bit by tales of current security checks and LeT arrests.

Videos of last year's Parade from Wilderness Films are available through Google, most of them for a small fee-- it seems there's a slowly growing need to alleviate Indian parade homesickness -- it's nice to know there are others pining for the misty chill and slanting sunlight of an early, red-graveled, January morning in Delhi that warms up quickly by noon to turn into a pottery blue backdrop for the closing flypast.

Pictures are all of 2007, from Rediff (Ranjan Basu/ Saab Pictures), The Hindustan Times and The Hindu, except where shown on linked pages.

New Revolutions, New Materials

2006-11-19T13:24:00.000-05:00

Ever since Antonia Fraser used her then-newly-forged family ties to reopen the case of Marie Antoinette, the spate of outpourings from Antoinettists has gathered speed. The latest to fall into my hot little hands was Caroline Weber's Queen of Fashion, subtitled "What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution," a work whose underlying thesis seems to be that Clothes Really, Really, Really Matter. A plethora of carefully amassed and fascinating factoids and cartoons are assembled in a somewhat unfortunate substrate of contrived polemic, circuitous reasoning and tiresome repetition, just to make point after vacant point about the symbolic significance of the queen's wardrobe. Unfortunately, the effort also requires us misinterpret the lively, tongue-in-cheek French habit of adopting styles as badges and commentary, and to see it instead as being the very source and engine of change.

I confess, though, that the little sight-bytes and juicy gossip were enough to make me carry on reading, in spite of my irritation with the basic misunderstanding that persuaded Ms. Weber to refer to the royal wardrobe as "clothing," "apparel," " fashion choices," and other such dreary substitutes, as if Marie Antoinette had been accustomed to doing battle and scoring points at Filene's.

Among other things, Ms. Weber is plain wrong about muslins coming from Rotterdam and Scotland-- they came from India, or rather, from Dacca, and everyone with well-heated houses all across Europe was wearing them. One only needs to read a bit between the lines to realize that this very young queen must have decided to have her coutur¡ère and assistants dress her, instead of all her aged and manipulative ladies in waiting, for no better reason than that a poisoned dress was not likely to be the instrument of her death in late 18th Century France. These were modern times, and my guess is that she took the position that all those biddies with hereditary charges to handle her person could start, accordingly, to mind their own business.

More than that, though, Ms. Weber nearly misses a huge slice of The Antoinette's contribution, which Antonia Fraser already covered both thoughtfully and well-- that is, her parallel effect on the future of interior design, where we feel her influence still. It was Marie Antoinette's idea that refinement, comfort and originality in private décor spelled chic, and that this could be achieved just as well by using printed cottons and lightly embroidered linens as silk brocades, velvets and tapestries, and through the use of painted finishes instead of gilding. I don't think she did this in a particularly Germanic way, although that is another curious thesis that persists.

Springing back to the present on that note, Andrew Dent of Material Connexion gave a talk sponsored by Verandah Magazine at the D & D Building last week, about new materials for use in interiors. He explained that material science is but a distant contributor to the development of new materials. Instead, Dr. Dent demonstrated what Marie Antoinette must have known -- that it is the imaginative use of existing materials and technologies that yields products that can change the face and substance of interior design.

The new transformations of substance are not, however, intuitive. Yellow Pages compressed with no glue at all can make something that looks remarkably like yellow Sienna marble, and that works, with the addition of a sealant, as resilient and sustainable synthetic flooring. Sustainability and clean air are key for these new product lines, and glues derived from soy are being used, not only because they are renewable but because they don't exude toxic fumes. Concrete can be made elastic through the use of embedded glass fibers. New kinds of bark cloth that look and feel like leather can be used for upholstery; a cork wallpaper that was passed around made me think that a noise-muffled room cloaked in this stuff could allow a crystal sconce or two to be hung on it without sacrificing too much. Fabrics synthesized from kernels of corn and bamboo are now made with safe glues. The new possibility of perpetual reuse of the same substance gives polyester a new and better name than before. Glass radiators are already a reality, instead of the scrap-generating metal ones we're used to. Wool makes fire retardant insulation. LED strips can safely backlight wood or onyx. Silver coated fabrics are anti-bacterial and therefore already being used in hospitals. Why not nurseries and car interiors?

Material Connexion , with offices in New York, Cologne, Bangkok and Milan, does not sell any of these materials, but advises clients on their use through an extensively catalogued library of renewable materials. Among adherents are Michele Oka Doner, Dror Benshetrit, Patagonia, Target and B & B Italia -- and who knows but the ghost of Marie Antionette.

Meanwhile, Ségolène Royal, another Woman in White, seems set to revolutionize French politics, pare down excesses of presidential pomp, and turn her country's attention to environmental issues. If what she wears really really matters, what she's wearing to this revolution will underscore the purity that she is said to embody, and which her rival Nicolas Sarkozy, whose personal life has known turmoil, seems to lack. In any event. whether it is because of her protectionist inclinations or other factors, she is already being compared to Jeanne d'Arc. Stranger still, however, the thought of a President of France called Madame Royal.

Ustad Amjad Ali Khan with Amaan and Ayaan

2006-10-29T04:33:00.000-05:00

The Dalai Lama sent his blessings and good wishes to his friend Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and his sons, and to the audience to enjoy the beautiful music last Saturday. It was an apt beginning, since, as Amjad Ali Khan Sahib said in the program notes, you can't be abusive or tell a lie through pure sound.
As this is the centennial year of the launch of the Satyagraha Movement, he started his solo with a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi in the form of two songs, Vaishnav Janato, in Raga Khammaj, and Ram Dhun, in Raga Ghara. The alaap, or first movement, which is an exploration of the notes without tabla, was brief and lamenting, but by the jhala or third movement, Ram Dhun was ringing out with both sets of tabla in a fourteen beat cycle, like Satyagraha gathering force.

The extraordinary warmth and clarity of the acoustics at Carnegie Hall make a real treat even better. The views are fine, too. Again with the bird binoculars, I watched closely as he launched into Raga Kamod and both Tabla masters began to develop complex time schemes in ten and fourteen beat cycles. I saw that the heavy silk electric blue kurta that the maestro wore (not the one above) was self-embroidered with butis and that a truly fine painted antique shawl lay over his feet. The beautiful tanpura player with parted bangs glittered softly in self-beaded black while keeping the true tonic on the tambura and "sympathizing" with style and humor. Samir Chatterjee, tabla master of the Farrukhabad style, had on a kurta printed with tablas. Opposite, tabla master Sukhvinder Singh, (see video), a disciple of the great Kishan Maharaj of Varanasi, and also a recording partner of Ry Cooder, wore a less innovative but nevertheless fine embroidered cream silk kurta. The rug seemed to be a huge old Bokhara. Amjad Ali Khan Sahib explained that his father had invented the technique of playing the fretless sarod with his nails, rather than by holding down notes with his fingertips. This is how he makes his instrument weep and sing like a human voice with an impossible range.

He and his sons, who are also his disciples, are the First Family of the Sarod and comprise the sixth and seventh generation of the Senia Bangash Gharana, named after their family. Their ancestor brought an instrument called the rabab to India from Afghanistan in the 18th Century, which the family developed into the sarod in India. When Amman (left) and Ayaan (right) came onstage, they both exuded glamor, but there was no mistaking the star quality of the baby of the family. They each gave their first public performances at eight, and are closely matched as performers, though with completely different styles and sarod voices. Amman wore watermelon silk with a panel of pale gold zirdosi work. Ayaan, who ran his fingers through his hair in the manner of a Doon school boy, yet still landed on the time cycle with panache. wore sapphire blue with the darker gold zirdosi work hanging stalactites off his shoulders. Yes, they have a new hit album called Reincarnation (hear a clip at the link), and a video to go with it, both topping the Indian charts for thirteen weeks, and yes, they've played electronica with ex-Allman Brothers Band member Derek Trucks, and played every possible venue worldwide. They showed their youthful brilliance onstage, interspersing their family technique with the use of their fingertips, sometimes to strongly percussive effect. I have never heard two sarods played at once before; the effect of two powerful musicians playing an evening raga at fast tempo was electrifying. Then Ayaan anounced his father's return to the stage, saying he would never play after him.

The brothers in Mumbai, August 2005, at the launch of their album, Reincarnation; An Electronic Odyssey

With father and sons playing variations on folk ballads, the simpler, familiar forms made for a gentle but rousing evocation (for me) of Baul singers -- if only because I've never heard Bihu from Assam. The concluding Carnatic Raga Mishra Kirwani was evocative too, as I've been watching Bharat Natyam lately. For the jhala, Amaan and Ayaan started echoing their father's phrases in an alternating dialogue, eventually playing in unison with him for a resounding conclusion. In closing, Amjad Ali Khan Sahib reminded the audience that in Indian classical music everything is improvised; the performance is not rehearsed. He thanked his wife, who was in the audience, then presented the musicians and thanked his tanpura player especially.

Ustad Amjad Ali Khan's most recent album, Moksha, was released by Real World Records.

Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan (aka The Bangash Brothers, below) recording at the at the BBC Mailbox Studios. They recently published a book about their father called Abba... God's Greatest Gift to Us

The Juilliard Jazz Orchestra at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola

2006-10-26T00:46:00.000-04:00

Last Wednesday, when the lights went down over Noah Kalina's understated and acoustically successful interior at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola, the view over the Park at dusk glowed and the skyline glittered as eighteen fresh young faces took the stage. As the downlights gradually took over from the view, there was some talk in praise of WBGO 88.3FM while the legendary composer and bandleader Gerald Wilson appeared to conduct the evening's performance.

Now in its fifth year, The Juilliard Jazz Orchestra gives its audience a unique opportunity to observe stars in the making at that point where nuanced expression takes over from crisp and polished technique. the evening's program comprised a selection of Gerald Wilson's sophisticated compositions, including Blues for Manhattan and a piece written in tribute to Mexican matador Carlos Arruza. It was a pleasure to hear the Orchestra's seemingly easy precision and tight coordination, and both moving and amusing to hear their youthfully vigorous interpretation of Mr. Wilson's contemplation about Romance. I was especially impressed with and taken by certain performances: Sharel Cassity on alto saxe, Peter Mazza on guitar, Peter Reardon-Anderson on tenor saxe, and Matthew Heredia on bass. I think the whole room was riveted, as was I, to hear pianist Mayuko Katakura alternating her smooth and subtle delivery of complex passages with outright pyro technics and emphatic phrasing.

Gerry Wilson, whose long career encompasses years with Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, has also taught at Cal State and UCLA for decades. His compositions run the gamut from blues to swing and onward, and often feature Spanish themes. (Mr. Wilson is also, if I'm not very much mistaken, the father of the great Anthony Wilson, who has played with Diana Krall since her earliest days.)

Trumpet virtuoso Sean Jones,
at 27, plays lead trumpet for Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and is at the same time an Assistant Professor at Dusquesne while teaching at other schools, and a widely admired and much recorded soloist who played on Gerald Wilson's 2003 CD, New York, New Sound. His strikingly mature, fluid and warm virtuosity remained sympathetic to the Orchestra, which was sweet.

(The Roster: Saxophone --Sharel Cassity, Alto (and Flute), William Reardon-Anderson, Alto (and Flute), Thomas Gardner, Tenor, Peter Reardon-Anderson, Tenor, Paul Nedzela, Baritone. Trombone --Marshall Gilkes alternating with James Burton, Willie Applewhite, Paul Tarussov, Christopher Crenshaw. Trumpet--Lee Tatum Greenblatt. Brandon Lee, Etienne Charles, Satoru Ohashi, Kyle Athayde. Piano -- Mayuko Katakura. Guitar -- Peter Mazza. Bass--Matthew Heredia, Drums -- Jerome Jennings.)

-Sean Jones has three albums out, Gemini, Eternal Journey and a new one, Roots(which explores gospel), all available at amazon.com.

-Click on this link for MP3 downloads of selected recordings Gerald Wilson made between 1968- 2003.

-Pictures of this year's Juilliard Jazz Orchestra by Peter Schaaf are published here by kind permission of the Jazz Studies Division of The Juilliard School.

Picture of Gerald Wilson from Jazz News, of Sean Jones by Morrice Blackwell from jazzreview.com

Farewell Proscenium Arch! Cedar Lake Ballet

2006-10-21T15:46:00.000-04:00

The tickets are green- meaning the dance company hands out large cards with mysterious instructions to roam the "installation," that are of course immediately returned by each member of the audience on entering the performance space. Everyone in the unsuspecting audience tries, at first, to position themselves advantageously or politely, depending on mood, personality and learning, but that's not the point. The dancers may say, quietly, "I need to be here", and gently move you aside from any location before it begins.

As far as i know, the performance began in front and off center, on the glass table under the video screen mounted on the ceiling, but it may just as well have started by the far walls. Anyway, it went up those walls, and in front, in suspension from bungee cord-like things, wth no reference to any surface, and up near the high ceiling and under the table. The audience took a few moments to loosen up and start wandering (and wondering)-- nobody saw everything, because it was everywhere. Everyone saw something extraordinary. It is ballet, but the strong, beautiful dancers of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet (see video by scrolling up from the MEDIA tab at this link) dance with their hair and elbows, on pointe or barefoot or in gym shoes, in pair and groups and alone. The look is something faerie, the feeling something Fellini--is this not some ruin after the fall of Rome? Sometimes one must hang up one's classical tutu-- why not on the wall? The lighting often tells you where to look, but not always-- it depends on where you happen to be. Costumes and props dance in new ways too, as does the video accompaniment. Here is a man shaking up the pannier he wears, there is a novel pas de deux going on,with dancers wearing giant mouthguards, and accompanied by Edith Piaf singing La Vie en Rose.

The performance is highly choreographed or it would be dangerous. When dancers come shooting by, they need to be somewhere at exactly that moment. On Saturday, a woman from Philadelphia told me she saw a performance in which the dance company moved through an entire house....yet I'm certain nothing I saw at Cedar Lake Studios was ever seen before. If dance is the precursor to the lyric, it came from outdoors, and need not forever be captive to the stage and all its demands and rankings.

On Friday, the kids of the Sanskriti Center gave a Bharat Natyam performance of stories from the Ramayana, which ranged from the adorable to the astonishing --when it came to Devika Urvashi Bhise and Sonia Anjolie Trehan, who, at sixteen, are carrying much of this art forward by themselves.

It was also the weekend of the White Wave Dance Festival in DUMBO, where Young Soon Kim had arranged for eighty seven (87) dance companies from near and far to show their stuff--much of it innovative, with glimpses of sheer brilliance, but there are almost no pictures for this post, which is why I have plans for Tuesday.

Pandit Birju Maharaj and the Nature of Rhythm

2006-10-07T16:49:00.000-04:00

Last Wednesday, Sepia Mutiny posted a piece about Kathak in San Francisco, and mentioned that Pt. Birju Maharaj would be in New York on Friday for a performance. For me, this was like hearing Nijinsky was in town to dance one last time, and right across the Park, too.

Briju Maharaj is the greatest living exponent of Kathak, as well as being the inheritor of the Lucknow Gharana, which has produced, arguably, the finest form of Kathak, leading other forms through at least two centuries. He has been known as a legend in his time since earliest youth, which led me to believe, as a child, that he was already advanced in years. This and other other delusions gave Friday's simply irresistible opportunity an urgent tone, which meant that I had to set aside my tickets to the New Yorker Festival.
At Symphony Space, the crowd gathered in the lobby in a semi-social manner, with that style of Indian nonchalanace sometimes interpreted as chaos. The guard was provoked to speak out: "All those here for the In'nian Show, step to your left!" she cried. But there was no-one there who wasn't, although everyone shuffled a tad to their left and eventully lined up. Time was on hold as the audience drifted in and the musicians, including Utpal Ghoshal on tabla, Jayanta Banerjee on sitar, Debasish Sarkar and a beautiful young woman who sang wih soft precision, treated the meandering house to a sophisticated warm up.
Normally, I rail against lecture demonstrations, but here the lecture was pithy and the demonstration not to be missed. For his first appearance onstage, Pt. Maharaj wore a a fine golden necklace over his pale cream Akbari jama, tied on the right, embellished with Benarasi brocade borders, and cinched with a matching patka over white churidars. He explained that nature/God gives us the elemental heartbeat wherein is derived the teen taal or sixteen beat measure, upon which all things are based. No matter how complex the variations we engage in, we return to the first beat, One, to complete a cycle. Because the heartbeat responds to emotional changes and physical movement with its own variations, he said, the emotive and descriptive components of a narrative can be closely depicted through fine rhythmic variation. This he demonstrated briefly with his ghunghat (bells), even portraying silence and calm with a low rustle denoting something like a Brownian movement, punctuated with low level events that barely scraped the narrative threshold.

Then came robust improvisations on teen taal, followed by superbly enunciated narratives, original bohls he had composed, depicting episodes in the life of Krishna. Saswati Sen, one of Guru Maharaj's primary disciples, and a famous teacher herself, opened her presentation using a time cycle of nine and a half beats, then used various similar complexities to render Valmiki's highly emotional story concerning the seduction of Ahalya, wife of the Maharishi Gautam, by the demi-god Lord Indra in disguise, followed by her punishment by ossification and subsequent rescue by Lord Rama.

By then,
I was seeing
for the first time
exactly what
my own Kathak guru, Prahlad Das,
had meant by his mild but constant admonition, "Arms like snakes, hands like butter, and remember that each of your bells represents a star in the sky."

The second half was all performance, and presented Mahua Shankar (below, center), whose extraordinary duet with Saswati Sen showed how soon the mantle would be passed to her. Maharaj highlighted the interplay of tabalchi and dancer before launching into tales from the Udhav Geeta, in which Krishna tells his friend Udhav stories of his youth. In the final piece, set in Raga Kirwani, Saswati Sen and Mahua Shankar again filled the entire stage, their brilliant long ghagras awhirl over bright churidars that matched their cholis, demonstrating amazing coordination and counterpoint, beautiful balance and sinuously suggested mudras. There was, nevertheless, an additional, idiomatic subtlety in Saswati Sen's every movement that I could barely catch, let alone describe. This level of subtlety was still to develop in Mahua Shankar's sparkling peformance, despite her virtuosity and fluid grace, but it will surely follow. Perhaps one just has to live that much longer to know time and timing as such an old friend.

Something had possessed me, at the end, to watch the finale of dazzling footwork by all three from the aisle, through binoculars, the better to make a swift exit and chase down to Chelsea. There, I found T.Coraghessan Boyle, poet-in-perpetuity of the Mid-Hudson Valley (Californian though he might be nowadays), wearing a choker of beads much shorter than Maharaj's over a bright T-shirt and an unsalted butter colored jacket. He was explaining to Andrea Lee and everybody else at Cedar Lake Dance Studios that his writing life followed a certain rhythm, which made him intersperse novel writing with short story telling. Andrea Lee, who wore black, with turquoise pendant earrings, demurred and said that only short stories offered the possbility of perfection-- something like a bohl, thumri or a gat, I suppose...

pictures from: asvari.org , pratappawar.com and Kalpana.it

Remembering Scavullo

2006-09-29T16:42:00.000-04:00

Last evening, Liz Derringer arranged a party for Sean Byrnes at New World Stages to launch Francesco Scavullo - A Photographic Retrospective, which I gather is the biggest exhibition of his work to date. This follows on the benefit auction of originals at Sotheby's last April. The former movie theater provided a suitably stark backdrop for several series of limited edition, comprising eighty hand-developed silver gelatin prints made from unretouched negatives, under Sean Byrnes' supervision. Togeher, these presented a tour de force of the iconography of the sixties, seventies and eighties, with everyone caught in full bloom at the height of their extremely personal beauty. Of course, every image was arresting, but a few in particular caught my attention downstairs: one of David Hockney's head, another of Andy Warhol with Jed Johnson, a strikingly positioned picture of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, and another of Carmen Dell'Orefice taken in 1948. Upstairs, people exclaimed softly over the Hollywood Women and Song portfolios, where Lena Horne's smile and Ravi Shankar's eyebrow and the very young and bewigged Liza Minelli shone along with a carefree Susam Sarandon, Goth Deborah Harry, a tidy young Pavarotti, a fresh, laughing Janis Joplin and a very Elizabethan Bette Midler-- all styled with what looks like a light touch today. Of course, it was a really, really good party, and it is remarkable that all of these and many more are available for purchase online.

This portrait of Oriana Fallaci wasn't in the exhibition; it certainly doesn't belong in any of the portfolios -- but it is on flickr.com, and is of the moment in its way, so I thought I'd put it in here for that and all the other reasons that might come to mind.

John Van Alstine Outdoors (sort of)

2006-09-24T23:35:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday I was exactly where I planned to be and that proved to be very lucky indeed. I don't go to Hudson every weekend, although I should, but John Van Alstine had sent word of an opening on September 16, at the John Davis Gallery on Warren Street, where some of his life-size (as opposed to indoor) sculptures would be shown. I had missed an "open studio" he held at Wells earlier this summer, with Caroline Ramersdorfer, so although this was not quite the same as seeing the works in an open setting, it was nearby, which made it easier.

When I last saw the John Davis Gallery, it was in the throes of restoration. It is complete, with the carriage house area turned into galleries at three levels. The rope pulleys for the elevator once used to move whatever was manufactured there is now apparently functional, although nobody is sure what it was originally used for. In the top floor gallery that evening there hung Robert Reitzfeld's sinister B2 Bomber quilts and watercolors, a single silhouette motif variously interpreted, including a series ominously named "Sleep Safe America." and an especially alarming a baby quilt.

Below, Ben Butler's cedar "Beast" lay coiled at the back,

but the graveled courtyard, or sculpture garden, was otherwise dominated by JVA's works.

There was a soaring "Chalice" rising firmly at an impossible angle, with an elegant small loop at its base denoting a handle-- one of a long series (another "Chalice" seen here is in the park at Wells). John said some people tend to see the vessel inverted, as weaponry landing headfirst. This is not entirely surprising, as an act of recognition, since the cup of the chalice is made from the nose of a fuselage -- in any event, the chalice is not so figurative as to be taken literally either. It was meant to be seen in changing light, impossible after six p.m. in that charming setting, and particularly at this time of year, so I saw little of the effect of the textured surface of the vessel. Certainly, it was interesting to be able to amble around each piece, noticing the precision of composition and accuracy of the alignment of various elements. One guest became fixated on the meaning of the word "Cudgel," as another series is named, and was happy to report eventually that John said the word meant "blunt instrument." Blunt or not, this particular cudgel, weapon, was attractively poised in mid-flght (bang bang JVA's flying slate cudgel came down upon 'is 'ead....) There was another piece, possibly of a new series, that I heard John describe as "Hula," which certainly had a notable swiveling element in its midsection.

With so much poetry of violence and anti-violence in the air, I was perhaps not entirely taken by surprise to be only the second to discover a terrible burglary that same weekend. However, the spirit of violence seemed to move on like the shadow of a cloud across mountains by Monday, as I worked together with two friends, who had been not just Good but also Extremely Clever Samaritans when they caught the burglar red-handed, and not only gotten the necessary information out of him but written it down as well. I did some other stuff, and the New York State Police (as opposed to the Sheriff's Office) valiantly set forth and caught the burglar, threw him in the slammer (aka House of In-Laws in my mother tongue) -- for at least a couple of days before he was out again on bond, but with the stolen items recovered, antique dealers on Warren Street put on notice, and the burglar looking forward to plea bargaining ... This seems truly magical to me, the art of catching burglars. Although I do have a history of catching thieves, once letting a fellow go after giving him the fright of his life, I know I can never do it alone, especially when it comes to burglars, and I would not even have been able to play my part were it not for JVA sending me a post about the opening that particular day at John Davis' gallery!

On Monday, too, my friend Fortuna called to say she was off to see HH the Fourteenth, who, after his travels to Ulan Bator and Ottowa, had landed in the fairy mountains across the river and driven down to Woodstock to address the peaceful, and was now back at the KTD Monastery in the Catskills. More on this later...

The Sculpture Garden show at John Davis Gallery runs through October 8th.

Anish Kapoor's NYC Sky Mirror

2006-09-22T11:24:00.000-04:00

I saw it yesterday by chance, a lucky accident, as I had forgotten it was coming, so it was not in my plans, but I was stopped short on its Fifth Avenue side --which is convex and tilted towards the street, both factors making this its inclusive face. Caught unawares, I was compelled along with many others to stare at it, and at myself and others in it, observing ourselves as never before, all members of the midtown street scene viewed from above. (The windows at Saks, Bendel and Bergdorf don't count; one looks through them, not at them.) The Sky Mirror is a seemingly weightless yet obviously hefty object with extremely fine edges to the segments, which comprise an abstraction of a primitive representation of the sun. It has perfect looking contours, and is set on a friendly, low platform. There is of course no part of the sky reflected on the street side-- those views are seen from its other, concave, and possibly therefore exclusive, private and quirky, upside-down side, with a view of the reversed reflections of Rockefeller Center pointing downward. The raised concave surface gives most people below a miss, eliminating them from the reflection and enabling a more abstracted image for the interior view. The moving sky above or behind appears and changes in surprising ways as one walks around the plaza, because the Sky Mirror itself is variously reflected in shop windows along the promenade, its reflection bright enough to keep one's focus on the surface of the plate glass. One aspect of the Mirror that the stills on this page can't convey is that the reflection is in constant motion, so one is never fooled into thinking that one's eye has captured and held a moment.

I think it's a stretch to say that there is irony involved in seeing the top of 30 Rockfeller Center pointing towards the ground, after 9/11. On the other hand, it does make the top of the building accesible to people on the ground, and is certainly very pretty in its magnification and exploration of symmetry.
It is 33 feet across and weighs 23 tons, as is widely reported, and looks more like a huge blob of mercury than steel, even having been rained on at its unveiling. Will New Yorkers get enough of looking at themselves by October 24?

Strangely, Anirudh Bhattacharyya of CNN-IBN describes this installation as "Indian reaches for Manhattan Skyline," but I could not see any evidence of this, despite Anish Kapoor being a Dosco who took a slightly alternative path. Sky Mirror is but one of a series and if anything, it serves as a preview for the sculpture Anish Kapoor will create for the World Trade Center Memorial.

Click here for a view of AK's 'Cloud Gate' in Chicago.
Pictures from artnet and Architectural Record

Ritu Kumar's Royal India

2006-09-08T13:52:00.000-04:00

Cover: Princess Indira Raje Gaekwad of Baroda in 1905

a look inside the book

When Ritu
Kumar opened her first boutique in Kolkata, off Park Street, in what was then called The Burlington Arcade, what she was doing seemed both obviously patriotic and exceptionally clever. I have a ghagra outfit from those days with a choli and odhni block printed to match in a motif and colors nobody had seen before, yet the fact that it was ready to wear took a lot of attention away from the fact that she was working to keep the art of block printing in future business. As Ritu's reach grew, she drew in many more traditions of fine workmanship into her design fold, and led the way for a new generation of designers to use the vast resources of extraordinary textile work still available from master craftsmen in India -- for new purposes, directly descended from their original use. Until then, the only new application of these arts had been occasional use in European couture, for which leadng designers would occasionally co-opt the craftsmanship for use in Western ornament made to order for non-Indian taste and then only when India happened to be "in." Now, these arts are regaining their vitality as the lifeblood of modern Indian design, which is a very different situation.

Costumes and Textiles of Royal India- When Ritu published this lavish present-
ation of her decades of study through Christie's Books in 1999, and shared the depth of her scholarly, historicist expertise so succinctly, this offering sparked and spurred a new movement to revive the development of Indian fashion. Since then, some of the images in this book have become iconic, and several are seen in other contexts online. One online journal, shaadi.com, shows the photograph from the book of Nawab Mansur Ali Khan and Begum Ayesha Sultan of Pataudi, or, if you will, Tiger Pataudi and Sharmila Tagore, as if it were their wedding picture. It is not; they were well into their glamorous middle age when it was taken, and she is wearing her mother-in-law's wedding outfit, not her own.

That first edition of Ritu's book went out of print too soon. Now republished by Antique Collectors' Club, this first American edition makes a veritable feast of scholarship readily available again. If I recall corectly, the first edition was so exorbitantly priced as to make one keel over as if hit with a coffee table; this edition is just very expensive, but needs a coffee table underneath anyway, for true convenience of handling and the slightest touch of ease in reading it.
Read the foreword by Martand Singh
Referencing everything from archaeological artefacts to family collections of clothing, as well as minatures of many schools, and oils by a plethora of portraitists, this book delivers a depth of perception rarely seen in any culture, and a range of understanding that should belong to all cultures. It is also beautiful to look at, and there are helpful diagramatic line drawings at the end that show the cut of traditional items of stitched clothing that are customarily worn with additional items of unstitched clothing. This tome is to scarf tying manuals as bobbin lace making is to macrame.

There is too, the presentation of highly worked and ornamented fabric and the use of pattern as an integral part of design and style, not simply decoration. A full text about textile techniques mastered in different parts of India explores seven kinds of resist dyeing, four traditons of print and cloth painting, embroideries and appliques (my aigu key isn't working), finishes, motifs, traditional buttons and fastenings, edgings, facings and types of texturing. As all this goes forward again, Indian fashion is reawakening to resume its place as the oldest, most complex and varied source of textiles and traditional apparel in the world.

Not unexpectedly, the glazed and haunted look of nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian royalty in the many painted portraits is replaced with cheerful vigor and unabashed grace and panache in the contemporary portrait photographs. This, regardless of the loss of privy purses and a multitude of privileges that must have come at a heavy price in lost self-determination.

Ritu deep in thought

Yasho Rajya Lakshmi of Jammu and Kashmir as seen in the book and now on the family web site
ritukumar.com has less exalted but very attractive offerings available online at incredible prices.
"For centuries India's royalty promoted the skills of spinners, weavers, dyers, printers and embroiderers, commissioning textiles from renowned centres of excellence across the subcontinent. Delicate muslins from Dacca, fine silk brocades from Varanasi, complex woollen weaves from Kashmir – all were transformed into costumes fit for kings.
Acclaimed designer Ritu Kumar's celebration of thousands and years of craft and fashion is one of the most attractive books and a testimony to India‘s astoundingly rich cultural heritage." --ROYALTY MAGAZINE
more about Ritu from shaadi.com

Fall Vogue Rising

2006-08-31T23:07:00.000-04:00

Is something unusual happening in Paris or is this really about somehing new happening at American Vogue? The editorial pages of this year's customary encyclopaedic

September issue are suddenly swirling with truly spectacular high style, after many, many years. Buried in a plethora of edgy fall advertising one discovers Anna Wintour's best editorial writing in a long time, a beautiful piece that puts her at the forefront of notable chroniclers of a swiftly changing world.

The Spanish Riding School

I confess, my first reaction to Kirsten Dunst on the cover and the tribute to Sofia Coppola's brilliant rock movie was, Oh, good, a little fantasy for a change, but that's just a costume! And a counterfeit Jeffrey "Joseph" Jones in my head scanned the layout and sniffed, "too many fonts!" Then I saw that between Grace Coddington and Annie Leibovitz, they had made it easy to see that the dress on the cover and the other dresses Milena Canonero designed for the movie are distinctly modern --as much attuned to contemporary tastes as the retroussé noses and chiselled chins in the pictures. Here are distillations rather than imitations of the 18th Century pannier hoop dresses so often on view at The Met from The Costume Institute. In fact, the dresses especially made by Rochas, Oscar de la Renta, Chanel Haute Couture, Alexander McQueen, DiorCouture/John Galliano, and Balenciaga/Nicolas Ghesquière for Vogue and Kirsten Dunst in the Teen Queen spread all show what a very long way the technologies of substance, heft, cut and drape have come since Rose Bertin kicked things off. What an interesting idea, too, to bankrupt other people by example-- if that is indeed what Marie Antoinette did, I hope nobody will lose their shirt trying to live like Michael Chow.

Supposedly, Rose Bertin said, "There is nothing new except what is forgotten." But that is not quite right. Things advance. Of course, the new shapes and proportions have an ancestry within a single generation of living memory. Now, two amd a half inches of excess hair shorn off the Kawakubo-Rykiel bob, and rendered anew in the color of lacquered cherrywood tops off the longest equine neck ever seen. Here are the proportions of leg and dress launched in 1967 as cartoons, in the sense of preliminary sketches, by Pierre Cardin and Rudi Gernrich. This time, in 2006, the other idiomatic shape of wide legged trousers and tiny jackets reveal an expertise and flowing confidence and precision of proportion impossible to achieve the last time around. Still, the new developments bear a strong link to 1967-68, the last time the world spun into heady dissent and outright revolution.

Perhaps without irony, amid all the renewed celebration of the art of high fashion and taste, Daphne Beal's article about new fortunes made and new enterprises managed by good looking young women in India focuses on the emergence of India's recently consumer-oriented economy, and the social dynamics of mass production and mass communication. (Despite the sour little remark from the understandably baffled and "recently departed" Elizabeth Bumiller, quite a few Americans now in their prime and living in the U.S. have always known that India matters.) The markets for processed food and recorded entertainment and cars are hardly new to India, although foreign investment is growing by leaps and production is diversifying fast. One thing that is brand new, though, is the rising confidence of city dwellers in the reincarnated art of developing new forms of Indian dress. Now, with Tao Kurihara's new take on unstitched clothes taking the stage over here, is this not the moment to get rid of petticoats under saris? That clunky practice was originally adopted in the 1870's by Indian rajkumaris and zamindarnis, to jibe with the nadir of style then dictated by that other Germanic princess, the widowed Queen Victoria, the very antithesis of Marie Antoinette and her court.

Much that is presented in this issue is elevated and unified by the variety of veiled or masked faces, whether it's that netting, fine as mist or chunky as a catcher's face guard, or Takahashi's sinister hoods, or the painterly use of makeup-- all creating the fascination of mystery and distance, just as the therapist recommends.

A note of thanks for the end page's closing affirmation about "the synchronicity bewteen high fashion and hgh art." People are gong to keep this one on tables, then on bookshelves and eventually for years in their attics.

Portraits of Marie Antoinette by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun are all over the Internet.....

That Summer in Paris

2006-08-23T22:31:00.000-04:00

That Summer in Paris is a book about writing, about writers and their writing, painting and sculpture and music and writing, painters and writers and sculptors and musicians and writers, old and established writers and aspiring young writers. As such, the words “writing” and "work" appear often enough in the text to each become a sort of mental jaw-breaker. Other than that, all is variety. A dizzying array of museums, streetscapes, cafés, restaurants, apartment dwellings and one suburban villa provide the backdrop for an amusing story line based on the proposition that older Indian writers, even the great ones, have trouble writing about sex.

In the ordinary course of things, and counting Hanif Kureishi as a Briton, one might imagine that this chokehold on erotic expression, or at least on spelling things out - to which Salman Rushdie once admitted - is a collective inhibition imposed by social or political constraints. One conjectures that such constraints might have been in full operation, say, until Vikram Chandra exploded the mold. In this one particular, though, Abha Dawesar doesn’t make the mistake of conflating personal problems with public matters. Rather, her heroic old gent is bubbling within from his highly-colored yet basically unspeakable memories that feature guilt- and consequence-free incest and happy mid-life paedophilia, as well as an episode of Bollywood-inspired sadomasochistic adultery. It seems his fictionalizations have left too much to the imagination. Helpfully, Ms. Dawesar's own most fluid voice emerges in flashbacks about seduction and arousal and, very occasionally, mind-bending, seismic consummation, which goes to show that young Indian writers going forward will not suffer from whatever was ailing the oldies in times past.
I found many of the discussions about art, or rather, The Arts and a smattering of Philosophy, to be somewhat stilted, possibly because the material is unsuited for unfiltered use as conversational dialogue. The narrative is dotted, too, with implausible assertions and assumptions that might be the result of youth or inexperience – not least the sustained subtext of public art in well-frequented urban places invariably stimulating private arousal in old men and young women, never mind the notion that very short ten year olds can’t hear what is being said two feet above their heads. There are also quantities of uncomfortable prepositions, persistent intrusions of high school French, and a smattering of showstoppers such as, “The government buildings along the way stilled her restlessness.”

On the other hand, I was delighted with the frequent reference to a carefully and playfully built imaginary oevre of a fictional master storyteller, and the narrative device of continually using flashbacks of varying length to throw light on the present. The introduction of food, with a sad formula for Dal Sans Masala for One, threatened at first to swamp the story with bad recipes and worse menus (buns, mustard, beer and portobello mushrooms), but instead, the use of food grew with the telling to embrace considerable gatronomic expertise, a highly suggestive and indeed climactic sampling of cheeses, and, curiously, the tossing of at least two half-eaten chapattis into the trash and a hunt for a Parisian subsitute for pakoras, the last appearing soon after a mid-story change of race.

All in all, this is a merry romp to somewhere, and I wish all those who pick it up an enjoyable read. For those who need illustrations, Ms. Dawesar has posted those reproduced here and many more pictures at:
abhadawesar.com

Brand Vogue

2006-05-22T00:35:00.000-04:00

A substantial and informative editorial in the April issue of American Vogue had this to say about the Internet: ‘…in a world flooded with information and images, and opinions about fashion and so forth, how does Vogue keep its authority? … (we) keep three things in mind: 1) Aim high --very high….2) Have fun....3) Keep your influence by exercising it.

No doubt managing the production of an encyclopedic tome of advertising and content every month is a heroic -- indeed, Herculean -- task, but the editorial content is still the reason one looks at Vogue (we can see many of the ads in other magazines). Sadly, the editorial content of American Vogue is no longer providing the constant visual reordering and reexamination that gave its earlier versions their cachet. While American Vogue has turned to positioning itself as a socio-political arbiter and instructor for normative though expensive taste in the United States, in other countries, other editions are still carrying the torch for the art of dress. Sienna Miller exudes considerable mystery and glamor on the cover of British Vogue, and shows her extraordinary knees, but only looks cute on the cover of a recent American issue. On the June cover of American Vogue, such an extraordinary being as Uma Thurman is made to look nearly unremarkable--quite a feat --even as the copy trumpets that she is exceptional, a "Single Mom, Insanely Gorgeous."

Nature does create human beings who reeducate the eye, so that either one or two startling features - whether it’s a strangely high bridge on a long nose, bones that eclipse the musculature, disquietingly wide set eyes, iconic legs, a swan neck or a short upper lip - reside in perfect harmony with the rest, or the entire cast of features takes on a simultaneous twist, unique to the individual, a distinction that manifests itself independently of race. All this has not gone away in the present production of human beings; such people are on the ramps in numbers and in those uncharted multitudes of images online, even on Vogue and W's own spin-off website, style.com. But they are just not being properly celebrated in print by American Vogue any more. Where is a close examination of the extraordinary looks of Jade Parfitt, Oluchi Onweagba, Hye Park, Britni Stanwood or Freha Beha? In its several older international editions, Vogue has long fostered such occurrences of extraordinary physical variation and turned these people into a presence as icons of the public imagination. Its domain has never before been the milquetoast appeal of regular features and doll-like limbs and torsos. For celebrating the strangeness of true human beauty, and to evolve ways of learning to see it, it has always been the way of art to make that strangeness even more so, and it has long been Vogue’s role to make high art out of dress as an extension of the face and body.

The outer limits of creative dressing and the art of constantly reinterpreting the body should still be what it’s about, not the practice of daily chic for successful professional women. Such chic would surely grow from within the individual who gained a continually re-educated eye. An image of a woman made very rich by marriage, heavily pregnant, well and beautifully exercised and boarding her husband’s jet in a gold bikini may be fun, but it is an image of consumerism, not art or design.

One thing that provokes my nostalgia for the inspired lunacy of the Vreeland years is the loss of American-sized scale still extant in her time. Everything American was larger and bolder then, and expressed with a unique flamboyance and generosity of gesture that has now given way to a constricted kind of convention, as if career considerations still demanded dumbing down one’s dress sense -- which they don't, thanks in large part to the earier work of American Vogue itself. Which woman is it who can succeed professionally yet still needs nearly paint-by-numbers instructions on how to dress instead of having her eyes opened by radically new and demanding images? Out of those earlier times came, for instance, the uniquely American manner of mixing the simplest-looking and most disciplined couture with, say, tribal jewelry from distant parts of the world, combining Masai with Mainbocher, Cherokee regalia with Madame Grès. There is nothing comparable happening now. There are still distinctive British, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Greek and Russian styles of luxury dressing, and to some extent a distinctive Australian manner, perhaps thanks to the smaller -- dare I say niche -- markets in which they are developed, and their distinctiveness is clearly expressed in their respective editions of Vogue. But American Vogue has lost its way in defining an ongoing, distinctive, high-end American idiom of dress for any or all parts of the country.

Teen Vogue now occupies the niche that Enid Haupt's Seventeen once created and then vacated in the process of chasing market share. It remains to be seen if Teen Vogue will serve as a feeder for grownup American Vogue, if that itself becomes nothing more than high-end pablum and a redundant pedestal for all things British, especially when British Vogue speaks so eloquently for superb creativity in Britain.

If the $3500 shoe is only extraordinary in materials and execution, but not in concept, it remains pedestrian, and is a sign of what the market will bear rather than news of exceptional inventiveness, no matter where it is made. Where the formerly $300 shoe has become the $800 shoe, neither by reason of style nor as art, astonishing as that may be, its arrival is still only news of a new wave in consumerism and inflation, and its object will soon enough go the way of all knock-offs, even if the madly-priced first shot is made from the underbelly of baby crocodiles tanned with sperm whale blubber for three and a half years, cut by the one and only master of such things by the light of a new moon in August, formed on custom-made ebony lasts, then stitched by young nuns with small and lotion-free hands....

Superbrand Vogue is not new. The word vogue is not itself all that exalted; its etymology has something to do with small boats, and the idea of being carried away on a wave of fashion. Yet there has long been a Vogue Brand, developed in connection with the magazine, which has consistently signified something loftier than what to buy next. It seemed nothing less, even in its early, numerically limited international editions, than a celebration of the most rarified appreciation of human beauty. Not the banal recognition of regular

features and limbs and torso, but the startling reordering of thought when confronted with the new, such presentations empowered by the editorial luxury and panache of being authorized to introduce surprises. Now, instead, we are obliged to admire conformity and manufactured luxe, just the way Jennifer Anniston is obliged to rework the ending of a movie to satisfy a test market’s disposition. If American Vogue is still to be counted as the flagship edition, yet displays such a dumbing down in pursuit of market share, then surely this represents a form of brand dilution for all editions of Vogue, worldwide.

The move from couture to expensive prêt-à-porter demands the worship of the normative body—no more Twiggy as poster child for wraithlike atrophied-looking muscles (Kate Moss and others after her never were as skinny), nor any truly Amazonian turn of shoulder and rippling muscles like Veruschka’s. In terms of celebrating the human form, actors may be a fine addition to the visual menu, but for the purposes of celebrating human looks in particular, they are no substitute for the few people whose looks alone can carry them to fame.

While it’s a good thing that Condé Nast finally sent someone to have fun at Lakmé Fashion Week, if Vogue is going to have a Mumbai edition, there is one extra-aesthetic idiom, long set forth in older international editions, that should be set aside, even if market research indicates certain benefits for sales in America, and firmly put to bed: It has been the barbaric practice, at least since the ‘Sixties, as I recall, to set up location shoots for spreads where a waxed and polished blonde model is centered among men of other races who are seen as providing services to her, whether as camel drivers, fishermen, coolies or cabbies—in the last instance that I remember, Vikram Chatwal was sportingly announced as a kohl-wearing, emasculated cabdriver. This April’s issue turns from the “service” theme to a “separate but having fun” halfway house, as yet another blonde, this time Karolina Kurkova, is pictured here walking scantily clad among fully clothed men, including a driver who might carry her bags , and there sitting apart from deeply tanned Brazilians standing around, separated by her coloring and her seatedness, along with her polish, as if polish and liberty couldn’t exist apart from pallor – except that one of the fully dressed men is Pharrell Williams, who is allowed to massage a near-naked Karolina with lotion and escort her. The message of miscegenation is still clear, if modified. But now, that message, instead of being snotty, seems provincial and (no other word will do) finky—why relinquish the practice by degrees instead of doing away with it altogether?

Rock the Cradle! Bal des Berceaux 2006

2006-04-27T22:54:00.000-04:00

supporting children's causes
for sixty-five years!

Bal des Berceaux in New York Social Diary:

2004 (scroll down)
2005
2006 (scroll down)

Nepali VIdeos

2006-04-22T12:04:00.000-04:00

Rally in NYC in support of the "Nepali Revolution"
(see NYC Rally Video)

After Dr. Karan Singh's visit to Nepal, starting April 19, five days into the Bikram Sambat or Baisakhi New Year, King Gyanendra issued a message to his nation on Friday, announcing his intention to transfer exceutive power to a seven party coalition government pursuant to Article 35 in their Constitution of 1990, but curfews are being ignored as protests continue. Among other shortfalls, Gyanendra has not revoked Article 127 of the Constitution, which gives the monarch means to oust an elected government.

Here's a short list of links to recent articles, blogosphere sources and Google videos.

The Hindu, April 23

Himal Editor Kanak Mani Dixit, writing from prison, in Outlook India

full coverage in The Hindustan Times

BBC News on April 23

Nepal Highlights video

Democracy for Nepal (blogspot)

Prakash Poudel (above, right) sings Paicha Paicha-- rap video in Nepali

Pin Plan videos

Dendi Sherpa Metok Thangbo video

The Rising Nepal (right wing)

United We Blog for a Democratic Nepal

nepalisong.org

Pratyush Chandra in CounterPunch

From Hindustan Times on 4/25:

"NEPAL’S KING Gyanendra, in a televised address to the nation late on Monday, agreed to reinstate parliament and called its session on Friday. Coming a day ahead of the massive rally called in Kathmandu by the Seven-Party Alliance, the announcement is a key concession for the pro-democracy forces. Sources said the SPA may accept the revival of parliament as its members could then constitute a constituent assembly to amend the 1990 Constitution and remove Article 127, which gives the king the right to dismiss elected governments."

Fib 55

2006-04-15T21:41:00.000-04:00

grass,
pear,

cherry,

daffodils,

and forsythia-

magnolia trees in full bloom!

tints, tones and shades of bark, recent winter’s camouflage,

and sharp tracery of bud branches remind me that my word painter and light painter
are flown an enormous blue sky from here…. for springtime solace, I resolve upon the ineluctable brilliance of unseen logic!

--thanks to gottabook (gottabook) and sepia mutiny's anna and abhi

grass from mpburton.com, pear from greenousebed.com, cherry from Virginia's Garden, daffodils from Archie Miles, forsythia from newtonconservators.org, magnolia tree from R3Photography, bark from staticflickr.com, budding branches from photos1.blogger.com , sky from btinternet.com

Horrible People at High Speeds

2006-04-09T12:42:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday, Helene Golay threw one of her hallmark book signing cocktail parties at The Corner Bookstore, an established tradition in Carnegie Hill, providing authors with a reliable draw of devoted readers, high grade mixed nuts and other literati. This party, for master cartoonist Edward Sorel and his latest gem, Literary Lives, went by at the pace of power networking or speed dating.

After signing several copies, Mr. Sorel announced that he was required to speak, and delivered some pithy remarks covering the topics of the hour: why The Atlantic Monthly? (better print quality); why not Balzac? (too sad and mushy for this book);Photo of Honoré de Balzac from Free Public Domain Books

and a sample exposé about how nasty was George Elliot, aka Mary Ann Evans of Warwickshire. In a pinch, Mrs. Sorel reminded her husband of the family name of the unfortunate juvenile (Cross), who, being publicly identified on honeymoon as George Elliot's son rather than her husband -- soon after the death of her first
Picture of George Elliot from Christian Theological Seminary live-in innamorata and agent (somebody else's husband) and that of her good friend, his Mama -- tried to jump to his own death in the Grand Canal in Venice (too shallow), but was fished out and made to live happily enough for a while longer if not ever after, then to proclaim forever after in print that his brief marriage to this overbearing woman twice his age had been a veritable sojourn in paradise.

A flash question and answer session ensued. Someone piped up with the top question to end all answers: "Where do you get your ideas?"
Without hesitation, Mr. Sorel demurred, saying the correct question to ask was, 'Why do such horrible people create great works of art?'
Photo of Lillian Hellman from Perspectives in American Literature
There are at least three ways to read Literary Lives. One can either go through the astounding synopses of the disastrous personal tales of Tolstoy, Yeats, Ayn Rand, Proust, Lillian Hellman Norman Mailer et al. (what about John Updike?) as quick as the cocktail party at The Corner Bookstore, or examine the delicate yet pointed wit of the drawings, and indeed the subtleties of the layouts, for hours, days and weeks, or first do the one and then the other, which is my own preferred method. One can also go and see the originals at the Davis & Langdale Gallery at 231 E 60th Street through April 22.

Photo of Leo Tolstoy from screenz.com

Contemporary Indian Masters at Auction

2006-04-01T22:18:00.000-05:00

It is an irony that custodians of art can make so much more money from a given work than the artist. Yet custodianship entails work of another sort, and both the creator's and the collector's credibility are eventually measured at least as much by coin as by any other calculation. With the emergence of Indian

above,
Tyeb Mehta
- from glenbarra.com modern and contemporary art in international sales, the rise in returns has been steep, lately, if a long time coming. Now, quite suddenly, it feels as if every fan of Desi art just won a quinella.

Building on the success late mid-century horse - M.F. Hussain of last fall's auctions, two sales held last week - at Sotheby's on Wednesday and at Christie's on Thursday- together kicked off what will become regularly scheduled sales of Modern and Contemporary Indian paintings in New York. As almost everyone knows by now, almost every lot at both auctions outperformed all expectations. It was heartening to watch as it happened.

The morning sale on Wednesday at Sotheby's was well attended, with many CIOs (that's Collectors of Indian Origin) in attendance. I spotted a few familiar faces, with and without paddles, and the phones were fairly busy while Tobias Meyer applied his cool and cordial wit and swift gavel. Hussain and Souza were well represented, and consistently exceeded expectations, though not by as much as Satish Gujral, or Ram Kumar or Shinde. Tyeb Mehta’s Falling Bird went for $1.248,000, and Syed Hyder Raza’s Tapovan fetched $1.472,000.

Jamini Roy's mohila from cthome.net

The next afternoon, the more enclosed saleroom at Christie’s (Rockefeller Center) was packed, and the phones a hotbed of activity. A larger number of works on offer in the mid-priced range seemed to reflect a quirkier Triptych by Anjolie Ela Menon aesthetic, all going forward in a more jocund and familiar atmosphere with more Indian experts and specialists involved, and Hugo Weihe’s merry brogue lending a
festive note to the
proceed-
ings.The Souzas
and Hussains spanned more periods, and the Bengal schools were better represented,
including Ganesh Pyne's moonlit cow from indarpasrichafinearts.com Ganesh Pyne and Shyamal Dutta-Ray. A mixed media work by the reclusive Vasudeo Gaitonde went for $1,472,000.

"This sale is hot," said a former Spence mom, now working at Christie's. One young woman who had flown in from Miami said, "I'm in sticker shock!" A middle-aged lady mused, "Now I can tell my mother exactly why she shouldn't sell her Satish Gujrals just yet." Another woman, who had collected contemporary
Indian art since she was sixteen and had come from China for the sale, noted with satisfaction, "I'm a multimillionaire now."

Sunil Das' motion sketch from indianartcollectors.com

But as Jolly Lolly of Tolly once noted in another context, “For what it is, that’s a song.”
Paritosh Sen's "kal katta" masalchi from contemporaryindianart.com

Syed Haider Raza (read interview from Outlook India )

Vijay Shinde

Except where noted, the images here are from SPEAR Art Museum.
Sotheby's makes catalogues of past sales available online, while Christie's sells only print editions of their catalogues.

Elsie de Wolfe Would Weep

2006-03-25T11:25:00.000-05:00

Nowadays you have to book early to get a table at Lady Mendl, the unmarked tearoom and curiosity that opened in 1994 at Irving Place, near Gramercy Park. It’s easy to forget that there are houses on the avenue there, and go looking for The Inn at Irving near the house where Washington Irving lived for a time, which lies diagonally across.
Picture of Lady Mendl tearoom interior from teamap.com

The second townhouse of the pair (built in 1834 without ornamental effusion) has been added to expand the Inn above, so the entrance to Lady Mendl now spans the two first floors and creates an impression of spaciousness. There's a little lobby with a round table loaded with a giant vase of flowers, behind which a congenial receptionist, who will direct you to a separate place for coats, is found seated at a tidy little bureau plat. The decoration sort of goes with the millwork that was probably added late in the nineteenth century, though it would probably make both Elsie de Wolfe (aka Lady Mendl) and Syrie Maugham, her rival and co-conspirator in painting the world’s woodwork white, choke and gag. It’s a puzzle why the designers of the tearoom missed this well-known fact about her position on these matters when there is a huge and well preserved example of Elsie de Wolfe’s work at 62nd and Park (yes, she did the new building too). This is not where she lived wth Miss Marbury either. Anyhow, looking around at the busy patterning, the intentionally mixed, sometimes tufted, and otherwise variously upholstered armchair seating, the presence of embroidery, plant stands, and other Late Victorian accoutrements, and also at the dreadful, chunky millwork stained either pale pine or somewhere between mahogany and ebony, the confused total effect somewhat endearing in its earnestness, it’s not hard to see what made Edith Wharton despair and head for the Berkshires to vent.

Leaving Victoriana: Interior by Elsie de Wolfe, picture from vintage
designs.com

At three in the afternoon, the tables are laid more or less for dinner, and the menu announces that High Tea is forthcoming. Unaccountably, this starts with a mesclun salad, which might encourage you to believe that a New York variation on High Tea, with patés and cheeses, if not pigeon pie and Scotch Woodcock, could soon appear, never mind the time of day -- but you would be wrong. Instead, regular afternoon tea is rendered as a series of courses after the salad and a change of plates. This means if you don't eat your smoked salmon and cucumber sandwiches, you won't get your tiny scones with all that clotted cream and jam, and if you don't eat up your scones you can't have your pate feuilleté or paté au choux. While stuffing oneself, there is a selection of teas, including infusions that are no relative of tea. Lady Mendl, who famously said, “I don’t take soup. You can’t build a meal on a lake,” would probably have scorned all of it in favor of moving along quickly towards the cocktail hour and a Pink Lady.

Nevertheless, the service is constant and smiley without being overbearing, and it is tempting to overstay one’s welcome instead of running away to Payard or the new Sant Ambroeus downtown or Teany. Still and all, New York's answer to High Tea and more High Tea is Sunday Brunch, not this.

Above: Picture of Elsie de Wolfe from NYSD

Lady Mendl in later years, not taking tea. Picture from atwaterkent.com

The Turquoise Bee

2006-03-23T02:48:00.000-05:00

On the subject of writers dying young, I turn to the story of Tshangyang Gyatso, the egalitarian poet who, as His Holiness the Sixth Dalai Lama, refused his monastic vows, and instead lived hard to produce a body of songs and poems still loved, revered and sung by Tibetans today (hear Dadawa’s 1998 recording of The Sixth Dalai Lama's Love Song). This year marks the tercentenary of his early and mysterious death.

In the wake of the recent fundraising campaign for New York’s Tibet House, my friend Fortuna Valentino invited me to meet Robert Thurman, who was giving a lecture and presentation about HH the Sixth that evening. It was a great pleasure to watch Dr. Thurman read out the poems of Tshangyang Gyatso in sonorous Tibetan, while deconstructing earlier translations and providing his own.

Lobsang Gyatso, The Great Fifth, was the first Dalai Lama to gain control over all of Tibet, which he accomplished with the help of the Khoshut or Dzungar Mongols, eventually withdrawing from public life and dying at 65, before his gigantic winter palace at Lhasa was completed. His standing regent, or Desi (not to be confused with the other word) Sanjé Gyatso - believed by some to be his son - sent out the customary search parties, and in about two years found a remarkable young boy in southern Tibet with a history of extraordinary events surrounding his birth, but kept the little boy in hiding as a virtual prisoner for twelve years longer, first at his birthplace of Mön, and later at Tsona and Nakartse.

Meanwhile, to keep the death of the Great Fifth a secret, Sanjé Gyatso engaged in a variety of eleborate subterfuges, using impersonators on ceremonial occasions and arranging for long retreats. Finally, at fourteen, Tshangyang Gyatso was brought to the court, recognized and ordained. Presumably, Potala was closer to completion by then.

As it turned out, the Sixth had no interest in monasticism. It is said he enjoyed archery and song, and inviting his friends to Potala, where he set aside protocol to serve them food and tea himself. He walked instead of using the state palanquin, gave public discourses and lived at times in a tent on an escarpment outside the palace. As Dr. Thurman described him, he wore blue silk robes and jewels in his long hair, called himself The Turquoise Bee, although his novitiate name meant Ocean of Melodious Song, and spent as much time at the taverns and brothels below the palace as he did seducing aristocratic beauties. Most notably, though, he wrote a body of such fine paeans in praise of all women alike, as well as the wine consumed in quantities in the process, that they are still sung today.

Lovers who met while traveling
Were fixed up by the wine-shop woman
If trouble or debts are born from this
Please take care of her for me

Dr. Thurman suggested with a twinkle that this Dionysian way of life was simply a case of Raging Hormones, but also said that HH The Fourteenth Dalai Lama believes that the Sixth considered the time was ripe for a return from monastic to dynastic rule. Because of certain notable lines of his poetry, still others hold out that the Great Fifth had adopted the teachings of the Tantric Nyingmapa towards the end of his life, and that the Sixth was merely bringing forward that interest in a new incarnation. In any event, when the time came to take his full monastic vows from his tutor, the then Pachen Lama who was abbot of Drepung Monastery, he not only refused, but returned his novice vows, threatening suicide if his wishes were not respected.

Desi Sanjé Gyatso, himself a bon vivant, is said to have developed a paternal fondness for the Dalai Lama, despite his frequent exasperation with the young man's behavior. Over the years, he had maintained the alliance that the Great Fifth had established with the Dzungars, who were hostile to the Manchu, whereas the Manchu emperor, Kang Hsi, had forged an alliance with the Mongolian Qosot leader, Lozang Qan (see a more detailed account). The Desi had tried to kill Lozang Qan twice, but instead, in an ensuing battle, the Qan defeated the Desi and beheaded him, leaving the Dalai Lama unprotected.

On June 11, 1706, the Qan removed Tshanyang Gyatso from Potala to the nearby Lhaku Gardens, declaring him a dissolute, now deposed, but when troops tried to remove him to take him to Beijing, they met with huge resistance from both laity and monks, who spirited him away to Drepung. On June 29, when the Qan's artillery opened fire on the monastery, the Sixth, then twenty-four years old, gave himself up to avoid a massacre, and left this poem to be conveyed to his love of the moment:

That bird—white crane
Lend me your skill of wing
I will not go far
I’ll return from Litang

Some reports say he lived on, but the Manchu court issued a statement that he had fallen ill on the way to Beijing and died at Kunganor on November 15. Nevertheless, many say he was murdered. Either way, the emperor Kang Hsi approved and signed a proposal to abandon his body. Then, it turned out that the Seventh Dalai Lama was indeed born in Litang.

The Sixth had earlier planted three sandalwood trees at his birthplace, Tawang, now in Arunachal Pradesh, and predicted that they would grow into identical shapes before his return. To the amazement and dismay of the people of Tawang, the trees first grew into the same size and shape, and then burned down in 1959, just before the present Dalai Lama, then twenty-four years old, passed through Tawang in flight from Tibet to exile in India.

Dr. Thurman spoke about the concerns that led him to discourage a film production about British and Russian interests in Tibet at the turn of the last century, which threatened to depict nothing but strife among Europeans played out in khaki tents in a bleak and dreary landscape, leaving aside the presence of Tibetan people altogether - which I dare say would have been much in the manner of The Jewel in the Crown (or the short story called Servants of the Map, written without the much-rewarded author ever setting foot in the place she writes about so mistakenly). He said that His Holiness had voiced his own objections. “Where would all the Tibetan girls be, and all the Tibetan weddings?” he said.

HH The Fourteenth Dalai Lama when young from ranglung.com.
(click on other photographs for links)
A few articles about the Dalai Lama's proposed visit to China:
St. Petersberg Times,
Peoples Daily Online
UNPO

Death of a Writer

2006-03-20T02:31:00.000-05:00

A list of links to my preferred pages about Rachel Corrie, who died on March 16th, 2003:
In Memoriam
rachelcorrie.org
Rachel's War
e-mails to her family published in The Guardian
links to more articles
electronic intifada
Who Remembers Rachel?
Haaretz.com
The Second Death of Rachel Corrie
Vanessa Redgrave in CounterPunch
Too Hot for New York
Philip Weiss in The Nation

Palais Royal

2006-03-11T03:12:00.000-05:00

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2006 opened with Palais Royal! , the bright comedy written and directed by Valérie Lemercier, who plays the lead role as well. Speeded up with snappy editing by Luc Barnier, it's even cleverer than it looks at first, and exposes every trick of fictionalization ever used in a book, play or movie. The predicaments in which modern royalty finds itself could apply anywhere in Europe, but the requisite spliff jokes and certain other sly digs occur in England. The crisp pastel and gesso bedroom and kitchen décor is spot on, as is the stream of visual gags, large and small, from the triple strand of pearls worn with the first two strands entwined, to state visits in vaguely Germanic and Indic parts of the world played out in skewed tempo, to the compulsory visit from the sober-looking Nordic third cousins, a tiara dipped in spinach soup, and some pointed instruction in state dinner table manners that sends up all the upstairs-downstairs teacup ministrations served up in British costume dramas. Is this what would happen if Catherine Deneuve were Queen of England? The British release scheduled for April must be another big joke. In addition, this film has the silliest score (by Bertrand Burgalat) to come out of anywhere since Ennio Morricone made La Cage Aux Folles sing and dance.

Preview material and coronation mugs are available at:
Palais Royal! and through Gaumont
all photos from Gaumont