Nero's Death

Mary Beard, TLS, August 2016:
"...For me, the unsettling star of Lust and Crime was a huge painting by the Russian artist, Vasily Smirnov (1858–90) depicting the aftermath of the death of Nero himself – forced to what was always said to be a rather cowardly suicide after some key legions rebelled. It is a wonderful encapsulation not just of death but also of the loss of power: the corpse of Nero lies alone on a bare floor in what is obviously an empty palace, with just three loyal women appearing in the background to take him for burial, all other attendants, soldiers, and trappings of empire gone. The only decoration, tucked away to one side, is the famous ancient statue of a small child either playing with a goose, or else strangling it (the toddler’s intentions are impossible to gauge). The message is clear: the man lying lifeless centre stage had governed Rome with no more responsibility than a small boy..."

Artist: Vasily Smirnov, 1888

I'm a Cartoon because My Mother too is Dead

Today January 3 2021 is my mother's 15th death anniversary

Sarah Boxer writes in The Atlantic, July-August 2014 issue:

“...Bambi’s mother, shot. Nemo’s mother, eaten by a barracuda. Lilo’s mother, killed in a car crash. Koda’s mother in Brother Bear, speared. Po’s mother in Kung Fu Panda 2, done in by a power-crazed peacock. Ariel’s mother in the third Little Mermaid, crushed by a pirate ship. Human baby’s mother in Ice Age, chased by a saber-toothed tiger over a waterfall.

I used to take the Peter Pan bus between Washington, D.C., and New York City. The ride was terrifying but the price was right, and you could count on watching a movie on the screen mounted behind the driver’s seat. Mrs. Doubtfire, The Man Without a Face, that kind of thing. After a few trips, I noticed a curious pattern. All the movies on board seemed somehow to feature children lost or adrift, kids who had metaphorically fallen out of their prams. Gee, I thought, Peter Pan Bus Lines sure is keen to reinforce its brand identity. The mothers in the movies were either gone or useless. And the father figures? To die for!

A decade after my Peter Pan years, I began watching a lot of animated children’s movies, both new and old, with my son. The same pattern held, but with a deadly twist. Either the mothers died onscreen, or they were mysteriously disposed of before the movie began: Chicken Little, Aladdin, The Fox and the Hound, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, The Emperor’s New Groove, The Great Mouse Detective, Ratatouille, Barnyard, Despicable Me, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and, this year, Mr. Peabody and Sherman. So many animated movies. Not a mother in sight...”

Artist: Zohar Lazar, The Atlantic 

He is NOT checking his phone. He is checking his watch. It's 1944!

Artist: Peter Arno, The New Yorker, 1944

He is NOT checking his phone. He is checking his watch. It's 1944!

Calvin and Hobbes: The Last Great Newspaper Comic

Calvin and Hobbes was last syndicated 25 years ago, on December 31 1995

Artist: Bill Watterson, The New York Times

फेसबुकावरील स्मारके...Status of My Facebook and Wikipedia Pages at the end of Year 2020

Starting August 15 2007, I have created a few pages on English Wikipedia: 

Vasant Sarwate, T S Shejwalkar, M V Dhond, D G Godse, Y D Phadke, S D Phadnis, Sadanand Rege, Natyachhatakar Diwakar,  Chintaman Vinayak Joshi.   

Starting June 2011, I have created and maintained a few Facebook pages too. Yearly, I publish stat for them. 

Here it is for 2020.

I do not promote my pages directly or indirectly. I almost never send invitations to like my pages. I almost never tag anyone in the posts I post on them. 

I am quite happy the way the pages have reached all sections of Marathi speaking people across the world using social media. 

फुटलेला तरी व्हॅन गाॉव आणि सदानंद रेगे...Van Gogh and Sadanand Rege

                                                       "  १- व्हॅन गाॉव

मी
व्हॅन गाॉव् ...
मी
सूर्यफुलांच्या शय्येवर
निजलों  एका वेश्येला घेऊन
अन् दिला तिला
माझाच एक कान कापून ...
            ई ऽ ऽ ऽ ऽ
अखेर हिरव्या सांवल्यांच्या डोहांत
आत्महत्या केली मीं
तिची मी
उन्हाची
पिवळीजर्द ... विवस्त्र किंकाळी ऐकून
... "
(पृष्ठ ११-१२, , 'निवडक सदानंद रेगे', संपादक : वसंत आबाजी डहाके , १९९६-२०१३)

 

 

Give Us Some More Commandments....

Artist: Mick Stevens, The New Yorker, August 2012

टोकयो स्टोरी आणि नटसम्राट....Why Aren't We Subtle?

#नटसम्राट५०
आज २३ डिसेंबर २०२० ला नटसम्राटच्या पहिल्या प्रयोगाला ५०वर्षे पूर्ण होत आहेत

Jonathan Crow, April 2019, Open Culture:

“Beginning in 1992, Sight and Sound started to poll famed directors about their opinions. People like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Leigh and Michael Mann. So what is the best movie ever made according to 358 directors polled in 2012? Kane? Vertigo? Perhaps Jean Renoir’s brilliant Rules of the Game, the only movie to appear in the top ten for all seven critics polls? No.

Instead, the top prize goes to Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

It’s a surprising, an enlightened, choice. Ozu’s work is miles away from the flash of Kane and the psychosexual weirdness of Vertigo. Tokyo Story is a gentle, nuanced portrait of a family whose bonds are slowly, inexorably being frayed by the demands of modernization. The movie’s emotional power is restrained and cumulative; by the final credits you’ll be overwhelmed both with a Buddhist sense of the impermanence of all things and a strong urge to call your mother....”

टोकयो स्टोरी मधले काही संवाद: 

 

< But it surprises me how children change.

Shige used to be a much nicer person before.

She did, didn't she?

When a daughter marries,she becomes a stranger.

Koichi has changed, too. He used to be such a nice boy.

Children never live up to their parents' expectations.

Let's just be happy that they're better than most.>

They're just selfish. Demanding things and then leaving just like that.

That can't be helped. They have work to get back to.

But you have yours too.

- They think only of themselves.

- But Kyoko...

Asking for mementos of mother right after her death! I felt so sorry for poor mother. Even strangers would have been more considerate.

But look, Kyoko, I thought so too when I was your age. But, as children get older, they drift away from their parents.

A woman has her own life, apart from her parents......when she becomes Shige's age.

So she meant no harm, I'm sure. They have their own lives to look after.

I wonder...But I won't ever be like that.  Otherwise what's the point of being part of a family?

You're right. But all children become like that eventually.

You, too?

I may become like that, in spite of myself.

Isn't life disappointing?

Yes, nothing but disappointment.> 

 
'टोकयो स्टोरी' (Tokyo Story, 1953) हा अत्यंत कौतुक झालेला, नावाजलेला आणि माझा अत्यंत आवडता सिनेमा हा बऱ्याच प्रमाणात मोठी झालेली मुले आणि त्यांचे त्यांच्या आई-वडिलांशी संबंध या विषयावरच आहे पण त्याच विषयावरचे मराठी नाटक 'नटसम्राट' , १९७१ हे इतके भडक  आहे कि वाटले आपण मराठीत टोकयो स्टोरी सारखे नाजूक का होऊ शकत नाही?

आणि म्हणूनच मग टोकयो स्टोरी इतके जगभर गाजते पण नटसम्राट भारत/ भारतीय लोक ओलांडून क्वचितच कुठे गेले ते त्यामुळेच का? 

 

(टोकयो स्टोरी चा प्रभाव नटसम्राट वर नक्कीच पडलेला आहे असे मला वाटते.)

नियती, भास, द ग गोडसे, जीए, हॉर्हे लुईस बोर्हेस...Wyrd, Greek Sense of Fate, the Vastness of the Sea.

नोव्हेंबर २०१७ मध्ये मी हॉर्हे लुईस बोर्हेस (Jorge Luis Borges) यांचे 'Conversations, Volume 2', २०१४ पुस्तक चाळत होतो.  बोर्हेस यांच्या दीर्घ मुलाखतीचे हे पुस्तक आहे.

"...BORGES. And that brings us to the suspicion that the real hero of The Iliad—for us, and perhaps for Homer too—is Hector.

FERRARI. The Trojan.

BORGES. The Trojan, yes, and the title is proof, The Iliad, that is, it refers to Ilion.

FERRARI. To Ilion, that is, to Troy.

BORGES. Of course, because it could have been called the Achillea, like The Odyssey, but no, it’s called The Iliad. Both have a tragic destiny, since Achilles knows that he will never enter Troy, and Hector knows that he’s defending a city that’s condemned to fire and extermination. Both are tragic figures, both struggling, well, Hector for a lost cause and Achilles for what will be a vengeful cause but at a time when he’s already dead, a cause whose triumph he will never see.

FERRARI. One appreciates the Greek sense of fate there.

BORGES. Yes, and then, the vastness of the sea, because in the action of The Iliad we have the battles and also some scenes between the gods . . .

FERRARI. Yes, but it’s very interesting to see the way that each character in The Iliad submits to the fate of the gods, to the Greek sense of fate, we could say.

BORGES. Yes, well, the gods are also subject to it.

FERRARI. In their turn.

BORGES. I think the word that symbolizes fate, in Greek, is equivalent to ‘wyrd’ in Old English. That’s why the three witches at the beginning of Macbeth are also the weird sisters, that is, the fatal sisters or, rather, the Fates. Those sisters are also the Fates and Macbeth is an instrument of the Fates and of his wife’s ambition. How it affects him, well, when she says that he has too much of ‘the milk of human kindness’. That is, one feels that essentially he isn’t cruel, that he’s driven by the prophecy, by his faith in the prophecy which Banquo for his part doesn’t share, because the witches appear, they make their prophecies, they disappear, and Banquo says, ‘The earth has bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them.’ So that he sees in the witches the chance phenomena of the earth, bubbles...."

नियती (destiny) हा शब्द जीएंमुळे खरा माहित झाला... destiny म्हणजे fate (नशीब) नव्हे ....

"Most people use fate and destiny interchangeably, but they aren’t the same. Fate is the life you lead if you never put yourself in the path of greatness. That’s the direction your life moves in without any effort on your part. That’s your fate. Fate is a negative and is defined as the expected result of normal development. Normal development. Never taking a risk is your inevitable fate.

Destiny is your potential waiting to happen. It’s the top tier in the grand scheme of possibilities and where your dreams come true. You have to be willing to take that first step to reach your potential, even if it’s a risk. With great risk comes great failure."

नियती चा वापर भासांनी अतिशय प्रभावीपणे त्यांच्या 'प्रातिमा नाटकात करून घेतला असल्याचे प्रतिपादन द ग गोडसे (D G Godse, A Search शोध द. ग. गोडसेंचा) करतात...

सोबत दोन परिच्छेद - एक जीएंच्या पिंगळावेळ, १९७७ मधील आणि दुसरा गोडसेंच्या 'नांगी असलेले फुलपाखरू', १९८९ मधील....

भासांच्या महानतेची (कदाचित आणखी एक) ओळख करून घेण्यासाठी गोडसेंचा लेख जरूर वाचा... अर्थात नियती चा असा प्रभावी वापर भासांच्या नंतर (गेल्या जवळजवळ 2500 वर्षांत) भारतात कितीजणांनी केला याबद्दल मला शंका आहे ...

जीए म्हणतात तसे भासांच्या रामायणात रामाला सुद्धा नियती पासून सुटका नाही..."देवदेवतांनादेखील नियतीचे नियम" !.....

दोघांच्या साहित्याच्या कॉपीराईट होल्डर्सचे आभार....

तुझें आहें तुजपाशी...Black Narcissus...Victory of Earthly Desires

काकाजी:
"… आपल्या देवासला पावसात हजारो बेडकं ओरडतात मेंडकी-रोडवर, ओहोहोहो! काय खर्ज लागतो एकेक बेडकाचा- असं वाटतं, की  कोणी दशग्रंथी ब्राह्मण वेदपठण करून राहिले आहेत बेटे ! काय ?"
(पु ल देशपांडे, 'तुझें आहें तुजपाशी', १९५७)

Neil Armstrong, BBC Culture, November 2020:

"...The longer they spend in this wild, elemental place, the more the women’s religious calling is clouded by very earthly desires. One becomes obsessed by her garden, planting it with flowers instead of vegetables. The nun who is particularly good with children yearns for a baby of her own. Sister Clodagh is troubled by memories of a youthful love affair and the increasingly tormented Sister Ruth lusts after Mr Dean, a somewhat dissolute Englishman who lives in the village. There are further ripples in the undercurrent of repressed longing when the handsome young nobleman being educated by the nuns has his head turned by Kanchi, a beautiful village girl. Eventually, the undercurrent becomes a torrent and the dam breaks..."

 ब्लॅक नार्सिसस नावाची BBC-FX यांनी तयार केलेली टीव्ही सिरीज नोव्हेंबर २०२० मध्ये दाखवली जात आहे. Rummer Godden यांच्या त्याच नावाच्या कादंबरीवर ती आधारित आहे. 

त्यावर आधारित आधी १९४७ साली एक उत्तम सिनेमा निघाला होता , ज्याचे कौतुक Martin Scorsese सारख्या निष्णात सिनेदिग्दर्शकाने केले आहे.  (आपल्या हिंदी सिनेमातील अभिनेत्री निम्मी ह्यांनी तर त्यांचा काही सिनेमातील लूक कांची सारखा केला होता असे वाटते.)

  Jean Simmons as Kanchi

 मी तो सिनेमा नोव्हेंबर २०२० मध्ये पहिला आणि मला अतिशय आवडला... आणि मजा म्हणजे तो बघताना पु ल देशपांडे यांचे 'तुझें आहें तुजपाशी', १९५७ आठवले.

 का?  ते समजण्यासाठी तो सिनेमा, टीव्ही सिरीयल पहा किंवा कादंबरी वाचा. 

 Kathleen Byron as Sister Ruth and Deborah Kerr as Sister Clodagh