Ascending and Descending to Nowhere...एम सी इशर आणि स्वामी मधील मठ

नीरज (गोपालदास सक्सेना), मेरा नाम जोकर, 1970:
"...दुनिया ये सर्कस है
और  सर्कस  में
बड़े को भी, छोटे को भी, खरे को भी
खोटे को भी, दुबले भी, मोटे को भी
नीचे से ऊपर को, ऊपर से नीचे को
आना-जाना पड़ता है..."

आमच्या मिरजेच्या घरात लाकडी जिना होता. खूप पायऱ्या नव्हत्या  त्याला. दिवसात कित्येक वेळा मी त्याचा वापर करत असे.

आम्हा सगळ्यांना त्याची इतकी सवय होती की आवाजावरून समजत असे कोण जिन्यात आहे आणि कोणत्या पायरीवर आहे.  (अनेकवेळा कोणी त्याचा वापर करत नसताना सुद्धा त्याचा आवाज येत असे!)

एखादे वाद्य ऐकल्यावर एखाद्याला वादक ओळखू येतो तसे जिना आम्ही वाचू शकत असू.

मिरज सुटून आता जवळजवळ ३५ वर्षे झाली.  मात्र त्याचा आवाज शेवटपर्यंत माझ्या बरोबर राहील.

ती माझी Ascending and Descending ची आयुष्यातील सुरवात!

एम सी इशर यांची चित्रे मी लहानपणा  पासून अनेक पुस्तकातून, अनेक ठिकाणी पहात आलो आहे. त्यांनी एक प्रकारचे मायाजाल माझ्यासाठी तयार केले आहे.    

ह्या चित्राचे नाव आहे 'Ascending and Descending' आणि ते तयार झाले १९६० मध्ये- माझ्या जन्म वर्षात. जणू मला ही त्यांच्या कडून भेटच मिळाली.

Steven Poole, The Guardian, June 2015:

"...The mathematical trickery in Ascending and Descending’s staircase is not the subject of the image. Escher was never a surrealist. But in this picture, it becomes clear that he was a kind of existentialist. He had long admired Dostoyevsky and Camus, and in a letter to a friend while he was working on Ascending and Descending he explained: “That staircase is a rather sad, pessimistic subject, as well as being very profound and absurd. With similar questions on his lips, our own Albert Camus has just smashed into a tree in his friend’s car and killed himself. An absurd death, which had rather an effect on me. Yes, yes, we climb up and up, we imagine we are ascending; every step is about 10 inches high, terribly tiring – and where does it all get us? Nowhere.”..."

Wikipedia: "Escher suggests that not only the labours, but the very lives of these monk-like people are carried out in an inescapable, coercive and bizarre environment.".....अरे, हा तर जीएंचा स्वामीमधील मठच!

मारित अन् / मरणाला रांधा !....Any Question That’s Not About Carpentry?

#सदानंदरेगे९७

प्राक्तन

बेथल्हेम्च्या सुताराला
आहे झाला
मुलगा गोरा
आकाशस्थ ग्रहांनीं ज्याचें
लिहून ठेवले आहे
प्राक्तन :

करिल सुरु हा
मरणघडीला
परंपरागत
आपुला धंदा,
गोलगोथाच्या घाटीवरती
जुळवित नातीं
खिळ्यांफळ्यांशी
मारित अन्
मरणाला रांधा !

( ऑक्टोबर १ १९५३, 'अक्षरवेल', १९५७ / १९८६)

खालील चित्र पहा...

येशूला अपेक्षित आहे की त्याच्या (बहुतेक) धार्मिक प्रवचनानंतर गोळा झालेले (मुळात फार कमी!) लोक त्याबद्दल कोणी प्रश्न  विचारतील पण सगळे प्रश्न आहेत येशूच्या व्यवसायाबद्दल - सुतारकामाबद्दल!

कलाकार: एमिली फ्लेक , दि न्यू यॉर्कर, एप्रिल २०१८

James MacNeil Whistler, Edward Hopper, D G Godse and the the Nocturnes

ह्या संबंधातील पूर्वी प्रसिद्ध झालेल्या दोन पोस्ट पहा

१> जानेवारी ३० २०१७ ची "गोडसेंचा गोंधळ : कुठाय चांदण्यातील मखमली नीलिमा?...James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Two Nocturnes"

२. जून ३ २०१९ ची "सीमारेषा अस्पष्ट आहे, अंधूक आहे: व्हिस्टलर, व्हॅन गो , द ग गोडसे ....A Reality More Real Than Reality"

अलीकडे लॉकडाऊन , quarantine वगैरे गोष्टींमुळे एडवर्ड हॉपर  या महान अमेरिकन चित्रकाराची कला पुन्हा एकदा पुढे आली  

जोनाथन जोन्स गार्डियन मध्ये मार्च २७ २०२० ला लिहतात:

"'We are all Edward Hopper paintings now': is he the artist of the coronavirus age... With his deserted cityscapes and isolated figures, the US painter captured the loneliness and alienation of modern life. But the pandemic has given his work a terrifying new significance... We choose modern loneliness because we want to be free. But now the art of Hopper poses a tough question: when the freedoms of modern life are removed, what’s left but loneliness?"

He was aware of James MacNeil Whistler, whose pictures were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1910, and chose an approach to the island that reflected Whistler’s “Aestheticism.”

Gerry Souter writes in his book 'Edward Hopper: Light and Dark':

"... Whistler’s moody tonalism was in direct opposition to the Impressionists. In fact, Whistler’s apparent move to the past, the Nocturnes, are closer in spirit to modern art than is Impressionism. The concentration in the Nocturnes on purely formal values of colour and line traces a direct descent to the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century.  His use of thinned oil paints applied spontaneously to create images from his memory must have especially appealed to Hopper..."

James Abbott Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold-Old Battersea Bridge, c.1872-1875

“…In Hopper’s Blackwell’s Island, the scene is moonlit and composed in the manner of Le Bistrot with the bridge span occupying the left side of the canvas. A tug boat chugs in midstream beneath the Queensborough Bridge and lights wink on in houses scattered along both banks. A few stabs of zinc white create a single reflection of moonlight, grabbing the painting’s almost geographic centre. It was with paintings such as Blackwell’s Island as well as many of Hopper’s later works that abstract painters acknowledged a kinship in use of colour, line and planes…”

Edward Hopper,, Blackwell’s Island

Setsuko Hara@100

Today June 17 2020 is 100th birth anniversary of Setsuko Hara (1920-2015).

After seeing a Setsuko Hara film, the novelist Endo Shusaku wrote "We would sigh or let out a great breath from the depths of our hearts, for what we felt was precisely this: Can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?"

In year 2012, I saw two Japanese films  'Late Spring', 1949 and 'Tokyo Story', 1954. Both masterpieces by Yasujiro Ozu, both starring Setsuko Hara.

Watching them was like reading G A Kulkarni's (जी ए कुलकर्णी) 'Kairi' ( कैरी)  one more time. Such tenderness, such lyricality, such beauty, such simplicity and yet very little sentimentality...While I had known GA's story for more than thirty years, where was 'Tokyo Story'?

I am glad I did not 'meet' Ms. Hara at a more impressionable age unlike Ms. Nutan. If I had, I would have madly fallen in love with her, would have lost the sleep for a few days.

Ms. Hara's partnership with  Mr. Ozu reminds me of Nutan's partnership with Bimal Roy.

Setsuko Hara, in Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece 'Tokyo Story'

Photograph courtesy: the distributor of the film or  the publisher of the film.

In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anari, 1959

Image courtesy: Wikipedia

Ms. Hara foreswore the acting profession in 1963 and became a Greta Garbo-like figure. Nutan never did anything like that but she too remained an enigma for me.

They both- June borne- look stunning on B&W screen. While they are there, I look at nothing else. I also notice  a touch of melancholy that goes with an incredible amount of beauty. 

That's what makes them special.

Rodents and Girls Under 8: The Soft Totalitarianism of Political Correctness

Peter Thiel, October 2011

“Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. Taken together, these two interrelated domains reassure us that the 19th-century story of never-ending progress remains intact. Without them, the arguments that we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment — would gather far more force....”

“It was offensive to people who haven’t turned eight.”  

Artist: Bruce Eric Kaplan, The New Yorker, June 2015

Artist: Harry Bliss

क्लीओपात्राची तेलचिंधी, मधचिंधी....What Came Before Condoms?

(पृष्ठ : १००, 'जाळ्यांतील चंद्र', म वा धोंड,१९७७ १९९४/१९९८)

रघुनाथ: रघुनाथ धोंडो कर्वे, शंकर - शंकर धोंडो कर्वे , दिनकर: दिनकर धोंडो कर्वे , भास्कर: भास्कर धोंडो कर्वे
अण्णा : धोंडो केशव कर्वे

तेलचिंधी सारखे घरघुती उपाय....

किती प्राचीन होत तेलचिंधी?

Stacy Schiff, 'Cleopatra: A Life':

"...Had she wanted to, Cleopatra could have availed herself of volumes of advice on contraception and abortion, some of it surprisingly effective. Nothing better revealed the conflicting tides of science and myth, enlightenment and ignorance, between which she lived than the literature on birth control. For each valid idea of Cleopatra’s age there was an equally outlandish belief. Hippocrates’ three-hundred-year-old recipe for inducing miscarriage—jump up and down, neatly touching your heels to your buttocks seven times—made some of the first-century measures look perfectly reasonable. A spider’s egg, attached to the body with deer hide before sunrise, could prevent conception for twelve months. This was no stranger (or more effective) than attaching a cat liver to one’s left foot, but then it was also asserted that a sneeze during sex worked wonders. In Cleopatra’s day crocodile dung was famed for its contraceptive powers, as was a concoction of mule’s kidney and eunuch’s urine. Generally the literature on abortifacients was more extensive than that on contraceptives; the time-tested ingredients for a morning-after pill were salt, mouse excrement, honey, and resin. Long after Cleopatra, it was asserted that the smell of a freshly extinguished lamp induced miscarriage. At the same time, some of the popular herbal remedies of Cleopatra’s age proved effective. White poplar, juniper berries, and giant fennel have qualified contraceptive powers. Others—vinegar, alum, and olive oil—remained in use until recently. Early diaphragms existed, of wool moistened with honey and oil. All offered better results than the rhythm method, of dubious benefit to a people who believed that a woman was at her most fertile around the time of menstruation...."

Early diaphragms existed, of wool moistened with honey and oil.

Cavafy and Lockdown

Al Jaffee RETIRES at age 99...Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions

The Washington Post reported on June 6 2020:

"Mad magazine’s iconic back-page Fold-In is about to fold it in. Finito after 56 years. Because Al Jaffee, officially the longest-working comic artist ever, has decided to retire at age 99.

 So to mark his farewell, Mad’s “Usual Gang of Idiots” will salute Jaffee with a tribute issue next week. It will be the magazine’s final regular issue to offer new material, including Jaffee’s final Fold-In, 65 years after he made his Mad debut..."

When he turned 94....