Just as I finish and send my master's thesis - I find the perfect academic website: Make Your Own Academic Sentence.
Choose academic jargons from four drop down boxes and the website gives you a perfectly formed meaningless academic pearl. Absolutely fabulous!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sexscapes from Amsterdam
 |
| It is red red red in Amsterdam |
All tourists to Amsterdam religiously take a tour of its notorious red light district. And are dutifully awed by it. No matter how much you have read about it, how world weary you are, how primed you are for the experience: the reality of Amsterdam's canal-lined sex lanes will leave you overwhelmed. It is the shopping arcade of prostitution. Women of all ages, colours, sizes and catering to all kinds of festishes are casually displayed in windows like candies for your pick. Nothing is left to the imagination including the price of the experience: 50 euros for a mere hump, another 5 for moaning, another 10 for a caress, another 15 for her to kiss back, more for some oral... you get the picture. It is in-your-face, unashamed, unsentimental and utterly commercial. And it will leave you awed. I was awed.
But what is more amazing - and something you learn only if you live in Amsterdam - is how quickly, how unbelievably fast, you stop noticing the sex romp around you. It hit me two months into the city, as I was pedaling my way to the university early one morning. As I glanced around, I noticed a bored sex worker in dominatrix attire sitting in front of her window, perhaps waiting for a customer to walk in for a early morning quickie. Her window was in the basement of what looked like a respectable residential block, and was sandwiched between a bakery and a dress shop. The bakery had just opened and the smell of warm freshly baked bread was in the air. The dress shop had an hour to go before it opened. There was little excitement or sense of the forbidden anywhere - it was just another banal morning in Amsterdam with a sex worker, a baker and a university student (me) going about their lives in an everyday city street. And to me, it was priceless.
I wonder, if Kienholzes manage to capture the banality of Amsterdam's sexscapes!
***
BBC reports on Hoerengracht.
Monday, November 9, 2009
On the Edge
My quest for a magazine writing job started today in a tiny artsy magazine-and-book store in the Old Street neighbourhood of East London. Yes, the same Old Street where you meet slightly-built men walking around with dainty handbags and women carefully dressed-up to look like garbage bins. In other words, the "edgy" neighbourhood of Old Street.
The shelves inside the store were groaning with thick, thick magazines filled with endless glossy pages of edgy fashion. The shoots had girls looking like garbage bins -- with artfully-arranged messy hair, carefully-spread eye shadow, and meticulously tattered clothes against graffiti filled backgrounds. And, of course, slight men with faraway eyes, beautifully manicured hands and an occasional handbag tucked away in the background.
So here's the question: What happens to "edge" when being edgy becomes the norm? If everyone is trying to different from the norm, does being normal become edgy?
***
A magazine I actually liked: Under the Influence.
The shelves inside the store were groaning with thick, thick magazines filled with endless glossy pages of edgy fashion. The shoots had girls looking like garbage bins -- with artfully-arranged messy hair, carefully-spread eye shadow, and meticulously tattered clothes against graffiti filled backgrounds. And, of course, slight men with faraway eyes, beautifully manicured hands and an occasional handbag tucked away in the background.
So here's the question: What happens to "edge" when being edgy becomes the norm? If everyone is trying to different from the norm, does being normal become edgy?
***
A magazine I actually liked: Under the Influence.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Lost in Translation
Men Who Stare At Goats is an odd film: its plot has a definite beginning and middle but strangely, no climax. It begins in a special 1980s US military unit that is trying to harness the psychic powers of its men to change the dynamics of war. It was goofy as hell but it definitely worked, we are told. The film’s middle lies in the encounter of journalist McGregor and a former psychic warrior Clooney in Iraq sometime in early 2000s: Clooney is on a secret mission, and McGregor is hoping to find a story. Only there is no special mission, no story, and Clooney's psychic powers are never put to any real use.
At the end of the film, Sid and I were left wondering what the hell was it all about. Why did the director tell us so definitely that the psychic powers were for real: that the “Jedi warriors” may seem comic but they could indeed travel through time and space, and kill goats by staring at them? It left us feeling that something serious lurked behind all the jokes. But why were we made to care about the psychic powers, if they amounted to nothing in the larger plot? If they had left the reality of the psychic powers ambiguous, we could have accepted the film as simply absurdist, and enjoyed it for what it was.
The fault, I think, lies in the adaptation of the book to the film.
The author of the book on which the film was based, Jon Ronson, said in a Q&A that followed the screening of the film that his novel turned dark in the second half. The characters of Clooney and McGregor found psychic powers being used to torture prisoners in Iraq, and the plot surrounded their dismantling the programme. But the moviemakers felt that too many dark films had been made recently on the Iraq War, and they wanted to keep to the funny side of things, explained Ronson.
Obviously, in the process of filtering out the darkness from the second half of the plot, the filmmakers failed to examine if the plot still functioned as a whole. Their failure highlights how novels, films, poems, art constitute bodies of work, where each decision regarding language, style, tone, words, colour is meant to provide continuity and progression. You cannot tinker with one aspect and leave the rest unchanged.
In other words, you can make men stare at goats but you better make sure it means something as a whole.
Ron Johnson talked about his book and the film at Screen on the Green theatre in Islington on Nov 6, 2009.
***
* Watch the trailor (which by the way has the funniest bits of the film): http://www.themenwhostareatgoatsmovie.com/#home
* Screen on the Green often holds Q&A with filmmakers. Next on its agenda is Q&A live via satellite with director Richard Linklater and stars Christian McKay, Claire Danes and Zac Efron of the film Me & Orson Welles.
At the end of the film, Sid and I were left wondering what the hell was it all about. Why did the director tell us so definitely that the psychic powers were for real: that the “Jedi warriors” may seem comic but they could indeed travel through time and space, and kill goats by staring at them? It left us feeling that something serious lurked behind all the jokes. But why were we made to care about the psychic powers, if they amounted to nothing in the larger plot? If they had left the reality of the psychic powers ambiguous, we could have accepted the film as simply absurdist, and enjoyed it for what it was.
The fault, I think, lies in the adaptation of the book to the film.
The author of the book on which the film was based, Jon Ronson, said in a Q&A that followed the screening of the film that his novel turned dark in the second half. The characters of Clooney and McGregor found psychic powers being used to torture prisoners in Iraq, and the plot surrounded their dismantling the programme. But the moviemakers felt that too many dark films had been made recently on the Iraq War, and they wanted to keep to the funny side of things, explained Ronson.
Obviously, in the process of filtering out the darkness from the second half of the plot, the filmmakers failed to examine if the plot still functioned as a whole. Their failure highlights how novels, films, poems, art constitute bodies of work, where each decision regarding language, style, tone, words, colour is meant to provide continuity and progression. You cannot tinker with one aspect and leave the rest unchanged.
In other words, you can make men stare at goats but you better make sure it means something as a whole.
Ron Johnson talked about his book and the film at Screen on the Green theatre in Islington on Nov 6, 2009.
***
* Watch the trailor (which by the way has the funniest bits of the film): http://www.themenwhostareatgoatsmovie.com/#home
* Screen on the Green often holds Q&A with filmmakers. Next on its agenda is Q&A live via satellite with director Richard Linklater and stars Christian McKay, Claire Danes and Zac Efron of the film Me & Orson Welles.
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