Flying In This Festival Season....

“No, this is correct—you’re both in 28-B. We no longer offer individual seats.” 

Artist: David Sipress, The New Yorker, August 2014

Virat Kohli Turns Vegan....Why?

Artist: Alex Gregory, The New Yorker, May 2003


" Indian national cricket team captain Virat Kohli has reportedly turned vegan to improve his fitness."
 

Teresa Wright@100...She Had a Lovely Face, a Nice Shape

#TeresaWright100

Today October 27 2018 is 100th birth anniversary of Teresa Wright, a great actor who acted in such wonderful films like Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Pursued (1947), Mrs. Miniver (1942)...

Francois Truffaut on ‘Shadow of a Doubt’:

“With the exception of the detective, the casting is excellent, and I imagine you were very pleased with the performances of Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright. Her portrait of a young American girl was outstanding; she had a lovely face, a nice shape, and her way of walking was particularly graceful.”

अँस्टेरिक्स आणि काफ्का ना जोडणारा दुवा.....Anthea Bell Dies

“.....(Anthea) Bell, who worked from both French and German, translated texts by authors including Sebald, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud. She first began translating Asterix in 1969, coming up with some of its best jokes and puns. In her version, Obelix’s small dog Idéfix became Dogmatix, and the druid Panoramix became Getafix. The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation describes her work on Asterix as ingenious and superbly recreated, displaying “the art of the translator at its best”....

...(Will) Self said that he had read Bell’s translations all his life, five years ago convening a translators’ symposium to discuss the “vexed problem” of translating Kafka, at which Bell shone. “Particularly inspiring was her analysis of his humour as a writer – incomprehensible to English readers until mediated by this very fine and very great mind,” he said....”

 (Alison Flood, The Guardian, October 18, 2018) 

मी आयुष्यात अँस्टेरिक्स कॉमिक्स वाचले वयाच्या २१व्या वर्षी , १९८१-८२ साली (आयआयटी मद्रासच्या अलकनंदा आणि ब्रह्मपुत्रा होस्टल्सच्या लेन्डिंग लायब्ररीमुळे ) आणि त्याच्या प्रेमातच पडलो. पुढील काही महिन्यात सर्व अँस्टेरिक्स संपवले. ते वाचताना जाणवायच की हे भाषांतर फार सुंदर झाल आहे... पण ते कोण करायच ह्या कडे कधी लक्ष दिल नव्हत, ऑक्टोबर २० २०१८ पर्यंत! 

('अँस्टेरिक्स' अत्यंत महाग, 'महाबली वेताळ' पण फार परवडायच नाही.... भारतातील कित्येक पिढ्या कॉमिक्स ला मुकल्या आर्थिक कारणांमुळे. मला स्वतःला सर्व सुपरहिरो- Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man इत्यादी  - टीव्ही किंवा सिनेमामुळे पहिल्यांदा समजले, पुस्तकांतून नाही.)

पूर्वी लिहलय त्याप्रमाणे माझ्या वडिलांनी स्टीफन झ्वैग यांची काही पुस्तके मराठीत आणली आहेत पण ती जर्मन मधून इंग्लिश मध्ये कोणी आणली याकडे कधी लक्ष दिले नव्हते, ऑक्टोबर २० २०१८ पर्यंत!

Sebald, Kafka, Freud सगळे आवडते.. जास्त कमी वाचलेले.. Anthea Bell बाईंचे आपल्यावर उपकार आहेत...  शिवाय विल सेल्फ (Will Self) अतिशय आवडते टीकाकार, भाष्यकार... ते एवढ कौतुक करतात म्हटल्यावर काहीच शंका उरली नाही...

courtesy: copyright holders of Asterix comics and Oliver Kamm

अपुरा, नित्य नवा राहिलेला मोरगावचा नंदी ....D G Godse and Morgaon's Nandi

ऑक्टोबर २०१८मध्ये मोरगावच्या गणपतीला गेलो होतो. द ग गोडसेंचा 'अष्टविनायक', १९७५/१९८१ लेख वाचल्यापासून जायचे होते. मुख्यत्वे तिथला नंदी पाहायला...

पृष्ठ : १११-११२, 'समन्दे तलाश', १९८१

सौजन्य : गोडसे यांच्या साहित्याचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स

मंदिराच्या ऑफिस मध्ये बरीच पुस्तके मिळतात, त्यांना विचारले: नंदी वर पुस्तक आहे का?.... "नाही"... नंदीच्या ऐतिहासिकतेबद्दल एक ओळ कुठे लिहिली नाहीये... तिथे एक सूचना दिली : अष्टविनायक ही लोकप्रिय धार्मिक स्थळे तर आहेतच पण त्याच बरोबरीने ती ऐतिहासिक स्थळे सुद्धा आहेत.. तेंव्हा गाईड उपलब्ध असल्यास त्या अनुषंगाने लोकांना माहिती सांगता येईल.

मी बराच वेळ नंदीचे (श्री नंदीकेश्वर) निरीक्षण करण्यात घालवला.... वरील गोडसेंच्या लेखातील परिच्छेद नंदीवरील त्यांच्या लेखनाचा छोटा भाग आहे. मूळ पुस्तक जरूर वाचा.

दुर्दैवाने पुस्तकात नंदीचे चित्र वा फोटो नाही... जेमतेम ४ (सामान्य दर्जाचे) फोटो आहेत ... ते पुस्तक coffee table book स्वरूपात, चित्रांनी नटवून काढता आले असते.. माझ्या साठी ते तरीही एक सर्वोत्कृष्ट पुस्तक आहे...

खालील दोन फोटो मुद्दामहून दोन वेगळ्या अँगल मधून दिले आहेत.... 

देदीप्यमान, दुर्दैवी रिटा हेवर्थ...All Her Life Was Pain,..Rita Hayworth@100

#RitaHayworth100  #RitaHayworthBirthCentenary

Today October 17 2018 is 100th birth anniversary of Rita Hayworth

Gore Vidal, 1989:

"....Five years later, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I first beheld the relatively lean Orson Welles. (“Note,” Mercury Player Joseph Cotten once told me, “how Orson either never smiles on camera, or, if he has to, how he sucks in his cheeks so as not to look like a Halloween pumpkin.”) On his arm was Rita Hayworth, his wife. He has it all, I remember thinking in a state of perfect awe untouched by pity. Little did I know—did he know?—that just as I was observing him in triumph, the great career was already going off the rails while the Gilda of all our dreams was being supplanted by the ever more beautiful Dolores del Rio. Well, Rita never had any luck. As for Welles…."

Bhaichand Patel. The Asian Age, Dec 4 2011:
"...Balraj Sahni, a classmate of Chetan in Lahore, was roped in to write the script, plagiarised from the Hollywood film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Geeta Bali was to play one of the two lead female roles. The other went to someone fresh out of college, Kalpana Kartik (real name Mona Singha) who was related to Chetan’s wife. She later became Mrs Dev Anand. One of Baazi’s strongest attractions was its catchy music composed by S.D. Burman and sung beautifully by Geeta Roy, soon to become Mrs Guru Dutt. Neither of these two marriages worked, but let us not go into that!
Baazi’s story centres on a seedy gambling club and one of its patrons, played by Dev Anand. It was a dark film made in the film noir style borrowed largely from Warner Brothers’ productions starring, most times, Humphrey Bogart. This short-lived trend in our cinema had begun earlier with Gyan Mukherjee’s Sangram, with Ashok Kumar playing a gangster, and continued with films like Jaal, Aar Paar and CID..."

Gavin Millar, LRB, 1990:
"...The title of Barbara Leaming’s new book is a quotation from Welles, Rita Hayworth’s second husband. She told Welles, in later years: ‘You know, the only happiness I’ve ever had in my life has been with you.’ ‘If this was happiness,’ Welles reflected subsequently, ‘imagine what the rest of her life had been.’ On Leaming’s evidence, despite rows, infidelities and estrangements, Welles seems to have been the most loved and the most genuinely loving of her five husbands. The first was virtually a pimp who tried repeatedly to sell her to Harry Cohn, the lecherous head of Columbia Studios. She never succumbed. Aly Khan seems to have loved her, but outside the bedroom preferred the company of card-players and horses. Dick Haymes was a brutal, abusive, manipulative drunk. Her brief marriage to the director James Hill was a last misconceived attempt to find calm and stability away from the film business. It was typical of her that she had chosen a man determined to reestablish her career. She was divorced from him by the judge who had married her to Orson Welles 18 years before. She swiftly declined into the illness, popularly believed to be alcoholism, which, much too late, was diagnosed as Alzheimer’s.
‘All her life was pain,’ said Welles. Leaming will not be categorical about the allegations of incest with her father. But Welles clearly believed that when Eduardo Cansino drafted his 12-year-old daughter Margarita into his flamenco act in vaudeville, casino and beer-hall, she became something more than his dancing partner.
If she had no choice then, she appears to have been unable ever to break out of that pattern. When she married Orson, she encouraged him to leave Hollywood and go into politics, as he was tempted to do, so that she might escape too. Friends from her early days found her ‘quiet and shy. If she hadn’t been so beautiful, she would have been a wallflower.’ ‘I don’t think she’s glamorous,’ said a woman friend. ‘I just saw her in a completely different light: a very sweet, adorable homebody.’
Hollywood was not about to let her turn into anything but a sex symbol. A typical horror: when she found out that GIs had fixed her pinup to the Bikini bomb and dubbed it ‘Gilda’ after her, she was so shocked that she wanted to go to Washington and hold a press-conference to dissociate herself. Harry Cohn wouldn’t let her go; he said it would be unpatriotic. When she was not owned by her men, she was owned by the studio. Her reward was to be denounced, frequently and with refined hypocrisy, by the gutter press, particularly in Britain.
There is little here about her screen personality. But it is clear that despite herself, despite Hollywood even, something happened in front of the camera. Some irresistible vitality burst out, along with her beauty, especially when she danced. Astaire admired her enormously. But when she went home in the evening she would burst into tears, fearing that she was an inadequate partner to the great perfectionist...."

हे सगळ वाचून मला, जीएंच्या खालील लेखनाची पुन्हा आठवण झाली:

"...मी मॅट्रिकला असताना एकदा शिरसी नावाच्या गावी गेलो होतो. तेथे माझ्या दुपटीहून थोडी जास्त वयाची स्त्री दिसली होती. ती सुंदर होती असे म्हणणे understatement होईल. ती देदीप्यमान होती. तिने लग्न मात्र एका काळ्या सामान्य माणसाशी केले. तो अत्यंत बुद्धिमान होता व विशेष म्हणजे त्याला sense of humour फार आकर्षक होता. तो कुठेही गेला, तर 'मी रमाचा नवरा' अशी ओळख करून देत असे व मग मोठ्याने हसून ''असे सांगितल्याने ओळख पटते. रमालाच ओळखणारे लोक जास्त!" हा प्रेमविवाह होता आणि तो विवाह दोघांनाही अतिशय सुखाचा झाला याचे लोकांना आश्चर्य वाटे... रमा नवऱ्याआधी वारली. नंतर त्याचे जीवन हबकल्यासारखेच  झाले. त्याने नोकरी सोडली. थोडा पैसा होता  खरा, पण तोही त्याने वापरला नाही. बंगळूरला त्याच्या भावाचा कसला तरी छोटा कारखाना होता.  तेथे तो दिवसभर बसून असे म्हणे. आज रमा नाही, की विष्णुदास (हे त्याचे नाव) नाही. पण इतक्या वर्षानंतर ती आठवण झाली, की मोसमाबाहेर जाईची वेल उमलल्यासारखी वाटते. 'रमा' हे नाव आकर्षक नसावेच, पण त्याबद्दलची ही आठवण मात्र ओलसर सुगंधी आहे... "
(पृष्ठ १८९-१९०, 'जी एं. ची निवडक पत्रे', खंड १, १९९५)

आयुष्यातील पहिली कित्येक वर्षे, मी फक्त मराठी वाचत असताना, ज्या खूप कमी हॉलिवूडच्या नट्यांची माहिती झाली त्यातील एक म्हणजे रिटा हेवर्थ. बाकीची नाव म्हणजे ग्रेटा गार्बो, मेरिलिन मन्रो, एलिझाबेथ टेलर, सोफिया लॉरेन.

माझा असा अंदाज आहे की रिटा हे नाव भारतात, विशेषतः सिनेमात, लोकप्रिय व्हायला त्याच कारणीभूत असाव्यात.

Big or Small Breasts....Guillotining of A Queen 225 Years Ago

#QueenMarieAntoinetteGuillotined225

Today, October 16 2018, 225 years ago, Queen Marie Antoinette was guillotined.

I came across a study in The Telegraph, UK speculating how historical figures would have looked today.

This is how Marie Antoinette looked then….

And now the transformation for today....
 

"Her three-foot tall hair has been let down and her unusually high forehead concealed with a trendy fringe. Known for her crooked teeth in her youth she has been given a full modern-day orthodontic treatment. Teased for her small breasts as a teenager, she has been given breast implants."

"Known for being fashionable and changing clothes three times a day, Marie Antoinette is dressed in a modern designer dress. Reported to express how she was feeling through the accessories in her wig, she is wearing a flirty Philip Treacey style hat.Her modern day portrait also shows the  her fully-made up in colourful make-up."
 

But unfortunately the first thing that comes to my mind with her name is : guillotine....

Notice how, like the queen,  the original caption of the cartoon below has been transformed.....

The actual caption is : “Who has the time anymore? Now it just sits there, gathering dust.”

Artist: Emily Flake, The New Yorker, October 2011