Time To Embark On Time Travel

Michael Crichton, 'Timeline',  1999:

“....Kate said, “André, come on.”

There was a short silence. Then: “I’m not leaving,” Marek said. “I’m staying here.”

“André. You’re not thinking right.”

“Yes, I am.”

She said, “Are you serious?”

Kate looked at the Professor. He just nodded slowly.

“All his life, he’s wanted this.”

Chris put the ceramic marker in the slot at his feet.

:

Marek watched from the window of the gatehouse.

“Hey, André.” It was Chris.

“See you, Chris.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“André.” It was Kate. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Good-bye, Kate.”

Then he heard the Professor say: “Good-bye, André.”

“Good-bye,” Marek said.

Through his earpiece, he heard a recorded voice say, “Stand still — eyes open — deep breath — hold it. . . . Now!”

On the plain, he saw a brilliant flash of blue light. Then there was another, and another, diminishing in intensity, until there was nothing more.

Doniger strode back and forth across the darkened stage. In the auditorium, the three corporate executives sat silently, watching him.

“Sooner or later,” he said, “the artifice of entertainment — constant, ceaseless entertainment — will drive people to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that exists for its own sake, that assumes its own shape. And what is the most authentic of all? The past.

“The past is a world that already existed before Disney and Murdoch and British Telecom and Nissan and Sony and IBM and all the other shapers of the present. The past was here before they were. The past rose and fell without their intrusion and molding. The past is real. It’s authentic. And this will make the past unbelievably attractive. Because the past is the only alternative to the corporate present.

“What will people do? They are already doing it. The fastest-growing segment of travel today is cultural tourism. People who want to visit not other places, but other times. People who want to immerse themselves in medieval walled cities, in vast Buddhist temples, Mayan pyramid cities, Egyptian necropolises. People who want to walk and be in the world of the past. The vanished world.

“And they don’t want it to be fake. They don’t want it to be made pretty, or cleaned up. They want it to be authentic...."

“When Brooklyn became unaffordable, we moved to the Middle Ages.”  

Artist: Michael Maslin, The New Yorker, March 2017

Covering Both Nipples

“Can someone please invent clothing that will cover both nipples?”  

Artist: Avi Steinberg, The New Yorker, March 2017

A Barber who Shaves you in Silence...Orhan Pamuk and I

Orhan Pamuk says in  “Other Colours: Essays and a Story”:
 “…In those days Istanbul boasted many humour magazines, of which Vulture was the most distinguished; because their embroideries of news and enlargements of urban myths offered the fullest expression of this spirit of resistance, they were available in all barber shops of my childhood. Today, there is always a television blaring, drowning out older channels of communication and so greatly reducing the power of gossip and resistance in the city's coffee houses and barber shops; it should not come as a surprise that, with the advent of television, the golden age of Istanbul's humour magazines, which once enjoyed a combined circulation close to a million, also came to an end. (Years later, when I went to a barber shop in New York and saw that the men waiting to be served were given not a humour magazine but a copy of Playboy, I was not terribly surprised.) …….

When I was a boy waiting my turn at the barber shop, flicking through the pages of Vulture, stopping now and again to study locally drawn caricatures of citizens aghast at the prices of things, enjoying jokes about bosses and their secretaries, stories by the popular humorist Aziz Nesin, and cartoons lifted from western magazines, my ears were always alert to the conversations around me. Of course the topic discussed at the greatest length was football and the football pools. Some, like Toto, the head barber, would, as he moved among the three customers in the three chairs, offer up his thoughts on boxing or the horses, which he played from time to time. His barber shop, which bore the fanciful name Venus, was at the end of the passageway across the street from our house in Nisantasi. Toto was a tired and sulky man with white hair, and the other of the two older owners was irritable and bald, while the third owner was in his 40s and sported a thin Douglas Fairbanks moustache. I remember he was less interested in chatting with his customers about high prices, new shops in the neighbourhood, singers and stars of the day or domestic politics than he was in discussing international affairs and the state of the world…

… Once, after a customer had had his shave, taken off his apron, allowed the boy to comb his hair, given out his tips, and left the shop, the Fairbanks moustache-sporting owner, who had shown him such courtesy and deference only moments earlier, began to curse this man's mother and his wife: this was how I discovered that the adult world was populated by duplicitous types whose anger was deeper than anything I had known in my child's world. At the barber shops of my childhood, they used scissors, huge clippers they would angrily toss away when they didn't cut well, combs, cotton balls to keep hair out of the ears, cologne, powder and, for the grown-ups, cutthroat razors, shaving cream, shaving combs and white aprons. Today, apart from a handful of electric appliances - like the hair dryer - the tools have not changed much, and this must remind us that though Istanbul writers have never recorded their traditions, these barbers (who have been using these tools for centuries, gossiping as they work) must have been speaking in the same way for just as long…

Barbers also performed circumcisions and other small surgical procedures, some in their coffee houses and others in separate establishments: this gave them a central importance in Istanbul society..

That was when I understood that a barber who shaves you in silence, without drawing a word from your mouth or sharing any neighbourhood or political gossip, and cursing no one, is not a barber at all.“

At Miraj, until I turned nine or ten, Gangaram Gaikwad would visit our home to give us a crew cut. Later it was our turn to visit him once a month. Gangaram was a dapper looking young man who looked less of a barber and more of a photographer or a tailor. Gangaram’s shop, run jointly with his grim looking elder brother,, used to be always crowded and, even if it wasn’t, elders always jumped the queue to push us back. I remember some times it used to take hours to get the job done.

But all along Gangaram never stopped smiling, Radio Ceylon hummed and local gossip sizzled. I remember the late Vasant Pawar’s (one of the most talented music director of Marathi film industry who died young) daughter used to frequent the place to chat up with Gaikwad brothers and occasionally play cards.

For our monthly visit, we were incentivised with a rupee or two to buy peanuts for our return journey but I guess the real incentive was spending time at Gangaram’s shop, listening to adult gossip!

Artist: Golvalkar, Vangmay Shobha, March 1961

Breakfast ही कथा अशीच , फुलझाड उगवावे तशी सहज ताजी...Breakfast at Tiffany's @60

Truman Capote , 'Breakfast at Tiffany's', १९५८:
"... Also, she had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy's adolescent voice. She knew all the show hits, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill; especially she liked the songs from Oklahoma!, which were new that summer and everywhere. But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pineywoods or prairie. One went: Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk...."

"... पण Breakfast वाचल्यानंतर काही स्वत: लिहावे ही इच्छा बऱ्याच काळापर्यंत ठार मेली. काही लोकांच्या painting मध्ये रंग जिवंत, ताजे वाटतात, तर इतरत्र तेच रंग पोतेऱ्यासारखे होतात. (ही नवी आठवण सुट्टीत मी oil मध्ये थोडे landscape करण्याचा प्रयत्न केला होता. त्या अनुभवाचे हे ज्ञान !!) Breakfast ही कथा अशीच , फुलझाड उगवावे तशी सहज ताजी; पण मनात आठवण ठेवून जाते. तरुण (व सुंदर) स्त्रीच्या चालीप्रमाणे शैली अशी लवचीक, सहज पंचेंद्रिये इच्छापूर्ती- स्वप्नरंजनाने भरणारी असावी. आपल्या पुषकळशा कथा मनाचा एक कोपरा गढूळ करतात. ..."

(८-७-१९६२, 'जी.एं, ची निवडक पत्रे: खंड २', पृष्ठ ११०, १९९८)

किती गोष्टी वरील पत्रात पहाल? ३९ वर्षीय अविवाहित जीएंचे चित्रकलेचे ज्ञान आणि त्यांची पेन्टिंग्स, तरुण स्त्रीच्या चालीची लवचिकता....

Breakfast at Tiffany's हे पुस्तक त्या नावाच्या सिनेमापासून (१९६१) वेगळे करताच येत नाही जीएंनी सुद्धा तो सिनेमा वरील पत्र लिहायच्या आधी बघितला असायची शक्यता खूप मोठी आहे.

सोबतच्या चित्रात सिनेमातील ऑड्री हेपबर्न आणि तिचे Orangey नावाचे मांजर

Painter With Light: John Alton@120

Five Books: Who is the greatest cinematographer of film noir?

Barry Forshaw: John Alton. He is a genius who made the work of directors such as Anthony Mann look even better. The classic image of men in trench coats and hats silhouetted against smoky, rainy streets.

A scene from Canon City, 1948

तीर्थातील पायऱ्या उतरताना....Hugo Steiner-Prag and GA

जी. ए. कुलकर्णी, 'लक्ष्मी' ('दीपावली'/ दिवाळी १९७५), 'पिंगळावेळ', १९७७:
"... लक्ष्मीच्या अंगावरून झर्रदिशी काटा सरकला, व तिला पूर्णपणे रिते झाल्यासारखे वाटले. ती भानावर आली, तेव्हा ती म्हातारीचा हात धरून तीर्थातील  पायऱ्या उतरून खाली आली होती, आणि तळव्यांना थंड पाण्याचा स्पर्श होत असलेली तिची पावले तो हिरवा पडदा बाजूला सारण्यासाठी त्याखाली सरकली होती." 

The Way to Horror, 1915–16

 कलाकार : Hugo Steiner-Prag (Bohemia, now Czech Republic, 1880–1945)

Big-bosomed, Blonde, Glamorous, Unattainable...Anita Ekberg@90

Shawn Levy, 'Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome', 2016.

"...(Anita) Ekberg was the very type of woman that Fellini was always drawn toward with an almost infantile eroticism: big-bosomed, blonde, glamorous, unattainable. She was, as he said, a creature from his imagination or from a movie screen, descended to Rome in mortal form: “healthy as a shark,” Fellini said of her, “emanating the heat of a summer day.” “Oh my God,” concurred Tullio Kezich, Fellini’s friend and biographer, who had permission to witness firsthand the gestation of the new movie, from the script stage through production and editing to the release, “her splendor was incredible, her outsized, totally exaggerated beauty!” To marshal a bona fide sex goddess into the film—with all the personal trappings and implications she bore—was, in many ways, the very point, as Kezich would later say, of what Fellini was doing: “The idea for the film is inseparable from the idea of Anita Ekberg.”..."

Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain scene of La Dolce Vita

Photo courtesy: ALAMY

Balloon Vision of Bullshit Job

sad corporate future

“I wanted a balloon puppy, not a balloon vision of my sad corporate future.”  

Artist: Farley Katz, The New Yorker, February 2016

What Did Sisyphus Say to Camus?

Albert Camus: 

"The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy"

 ('The Myth of Sisyphus', 1942)

Artist: Existential Comics

We Will Shut Out Nothing!...Charles Dickens and Saul Steinberg

Charles Dickens: 

“Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you! You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!”

Artist: Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker, November 1968