Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Witch of Webstock



A magic potion, some frog legs (and heads), ashen spice, toppled red wine, a brewer's guide and the dingy pire - and the mind has alrady spread the web for the perfect conniving plot. The outcome has been lived over and over again and the satisfied Gringe-like-grin has been viewed through the fully satiated mirror.


Only the compartmentalised life has confined one to the walls of a office cubicle and the terrain for the perfect war has been constructed online. I hate to admit it, but I have turned into the online haunting witch. There are stories to be filed, assignments to run to, interviews to finish, people to be met, homes to be found, photos to be clicked, calls to be made and lives to be got. But one sits and spews out venom, spills out hatred and adorns with love the many pages of facebook and the like.


A final settlement with the Devil has still not been carried out and the sodden sorrow of not meeting those lips still lies fresh. So while I wait for the rejection to go stale and I grab onto what I know with viscious possessiveness. In the meantime, a 2B pencil found its way to me and I made use of the printing paper to give a visual to a yet again mooring self. All this while I've finally rid myself of the self-imposed chastity belt that I have been wearing around my left small finger for the longest time. It's winter (or the solemn promise of one) and I still haven't found that warming embrace all season.


But when the cribbing will stop, the frowns will disperse into princess sparkles. Only I'm enjoying the whining a lot more than I usually do. It's the perfect romance with self-indulgent misery. Fascist or narcisstic? I think its down right witchy. Recovering....still... kindly adjust.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Epiphany


Ponderings from an evening gone wrong.
Are there amends oh Father?

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Universe in suspended Libido


Blue. I love the colour. I don't think I've ever mentioned this before. There's something mildly passionate about it. Like a drink passed around on street corners or that gentle kiss from suburbia that you can almost taste on your moist lips when you sit back and recount it. I saw blue again. Only this time it coloured my screen. A freak attendance at a movie screening got me face-to-face with passion. Those rare times when I dared to mix the withering promise of personal fun with a professional inuendo to be inspired, left me stranded in a universe of suspended libido.

'Across the Universe', a tale that arose from putting the Beatles revolutionary songs together took a skeptical and a lil jaded me through a trip to Neverland and back. At the time, I refused to ackowledge it. But the Beatles injected potency and the latent imagery took me through a flashback on time. Julie Taymor's ’60s musical fantasia reveals its intention to use the Beatles’ catalog to tell two stories at once, one personal, the other generational.

Pscyhedelic, carnivale, repost, art in motion, Bono, Salma Hayek, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin ... if a flower culture pot broke, it'd be through the eyes of a Beatle monger. Somewhere around its midpoint, 'Across the Universe' captured my heart, and I realised that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.

A visceral peak arrived with 'Strawberry Fields Forever.' The screen turned into an artwork by 'Jude' in which rows of bleeding strawberries are pinned to a white surface transmting into a hallucination of strawberry bombs raining over Vietnam. The dreamiest reverie, set to 'Because' begins with a tableau of nine friends blissfully lying on their backs in the grass in a mandala pattern. The circle disperses as Jude and Lucy find themselves in a watery blue sky where clouds melt into liquid, and the entwined lovers are themselves floating underwater. Most fanciful of all is a largely animated sequence in which Eddie Izzard is Mr. Kite, the ringmaster of a psychedelic circus with a dancing chorus line of “the blue people.”

Amid the phantasmagoria are several star cameos. 'Happiness is a warm gun' erupted with five Salma Hayek nurses tedning to the wounds of a disillusioned soldier. Bono, acid guru, Dr. Robert, a Ken Kesey-Neal Cassady fusion sings 'I Am the Walrus' at an acid-drenched party.
When 'Helter Skelter' and 'Walrus' broke onto the screen, I wanted to grab the hand that rested next to mine. Only it was somewhere lost swimming in pop-corn.

The spirit of counterculture goes with the flow. Its scenes, songs and witty roughhouse choreography seem to be spun off from the Beatles’ movies 'A Hard Day's Night' and 'Help!' And then theatre meets art on screen when those artistic body contortions erupt suddenly as happens when you jump onto the fields... all dissolving into a stream of consciousness with only occasional punctuation. And though I stuck to my distress at my failing date of the much-planned evening, I refused to accept the visual treat and storyline of the narrative. The same way its oh-wow aesthetic refused to adopt a critical distance from the sex, drugs and rock n roll bit of the '60s.

And just like my accidental evening, the movieleaves itself wide open to derision, complaints and endless nitpicking. But it couldn’t have succeeded any other way. The movie is completely devoid of the protective cynicism that is now a reflexive response to the term “the ’60s.”

There is only one constant - love. And non-believers, cynics, bystanders can only gape and sigh. For they too long for the loving lust. For I too long for the same madenning magic that once made me feel so alive. But then again, its all Across the Univese with Jude!
PS: I am PMSing. Kindly adjust