Kathakali

Only after 28 years of my existence, I could appreciate the grandeur and entertainement of kathakali as an art form. And that too, after living in Kerala for the initial 22 years! I began enjoying kathakali by watching Doordarshan’s Malayalam channel. The channel would air performances with subtitles that helped understand and appreciate the dance better.
I came across this interesting memoir on kathakali today. After reading it, I thought I should list some info (not technical, but sources of info) I have on this magnificent dance form on my blog. I hope it will be useful for novices like me.

Anita Nair’s Mistress is one of the finest books published recently by Indian authors, writing in English. Though there are some research overheads related to kathakali and history of Ceylon, this book walks us through the nuances of rigorous training routines, the details of makeup, performances and stories (especially of Nalan and Damayanti which is juxtaposed with the lead characters, effortlessly). The novel also treats the subject of dilution of the art form, which is currently happening in Kerala and elsewhere in the world– marketed as tourism promotions. I have seen a board near Fort Kochi Junkar jetty, announcing daily kathakali shows for tourists (I am not sure of the authenticity of the organization which runs the show or the quality of these performances.)
In the novel, the protagonist, Koman explains the difference between appreciating a popular art form and a classical art form. I don’t remember the exact words, but the essence was that the more effort you put in understanding and appreciating a classical art form leaves you with more amusement and enjoyment, than the ephemeral pleasures you get from popular art.

I havent got a chance to watch Shaji N Karun’s Vaanaprastham. Though I came across the DVD, I didn’t pick it up as I want to watch this movie on a big screen which would definitely be spectacular! I am still waiting for a film festival, somewhere, to screen this movie.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, another kathakali connoisseur, might have lost it to Shaji N Karun for making a Feature based on kathakali, as Shaji gave might have given it a shot before him. Adoor would definitely have had a pet feature project on kathakali in his mind. He filmed a documentary on Kalamandalam Gopi (I haven’t watched this one too) and this would a treat for all kathakali enthusiasts. (Also, I read that Pune Film institute has announced a project of releasing all works of Adoor on DVD and we hope that this documentary is also on the list!)

I am listing some of the sources of information on Kathakali, which I have found useful:

Ernakulam Kathakali club is a reputed organization which conducts monthly shows at Ernakulam temple. I wish they had better cooling arrangements for the auditorium and mosquito repellents, especially for the annual shows which runs all night through.They give handouts of the plot printed in English and Malayalam which definitely helps to understand the katha.

Margi, Thiruvananthapuram has released a DVD of a performance of Kalyanasougandhikam. It is available in the Music Worlds and PlanetMs in India. Or buy online. I own this DVD and is an excellent way to get started - it grows on you as you watch it over and again. They also have DVDs of other dance forms like mohiniyattom and bharathanatyam.

The Kerala Kalamandalam, the prestigious and premier institute for Kathakali and other performing arts, gives info of the campus and syllabus on their website.

PS: The kathakali motif has been abused to a great extend by our tourism department, ad guys - commercials which show kathakali motifs range from Computers to Washing powders!- and priyadarshanesque song and dance sequences in movies. So, I decided not to put the picture of a kathaklai vesham on my blog and I came across this stunning photograph of kathakali students by a National Geographic photographer. I don’t have copy rights of this photo – pls don’t sue me!

4-movie Easter weekend

Try lending a DVD from Blockbuster in the US: You need to produce your US drivers license and a credit card even before you can look at the DVDs on the racks! And the late fees can kill, that you end up buying those DVDs. Netflix was a blessing, for the late fee part.

Now, I am here in Munich (in Germany, not the ones in US) and visited a DVD lending store near my hotel. In 10 minutes, I walked out with 4 DVDs (just 2 EUR rent each) with no deposit at all! It was a refreshing change from the ID and plastic driven contracts of the US.

So, here are the movies I watched over the Easter weekend:

Adapatation
Dir: Spike Jonze
Written by: Charlie Kaufman

The expansion of GNU (of the open-source league) is "GNU's Not Unix". This recursive stuff fascinated me, then. Like the Ouroboros. Snake thats eating its own tail. And Charlie Kaufman is one who makes a living out of this! Remember how John Malkovich enters his own portal in Being John Malkovich.
I picked this movie from the DVD rental store as I wanted to watch something I had not heard much about - about the plot or even knowing whether it was a hit or not or what the critics think about it. The only thing I knew about this movie was the director Spike Jonze and later the opening credits showed that the script was written by Charlie Kaufman (of Being John Malkovich).
The movie starts off from the sets of the movie Being John Malkowich showing real life characters (Malkovich, John Cusack etc.) and Kaufman himself (played by Nicholas Cage), who is the narrator and protagonist. Its a mix of real life characters and fiction and the movie is about making of the movie itslef - a bit complex to write this down:)
Its innovative, engrossing and refreshing. And its about flowers too.

Sideways
Dir: Alexander Payne

Thanks Aj again, for reccomending this! :)
It is interesting that the friends in this movie (Miles-Jack) and in The Big Lebowski (Dude-Walter) are so different in their behaviour and interests (except for one - bowling and golf!), they even hate each other for most of the things the other guy does, still they are buddies and always together.
Maybe I should buy a DVD.

Melinda and Melinda
Written and Directed by Woody Allen

Decided to check out a 00's movie of Woody Allen. This is much on the beaten track on how the plot can be made into a comedy or a tragedy, with both the stories running in parallel. Allen manages to keep us alert and entertained through out. The whole movie is about affairs, breakups and all kind of relationships and this would have looked like a TV soap, if it had been made by a lesser film maker. Allens gets the right characters, dialogue and the right music in!

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Dir: Michel Gondry
Written by: Charlie Kaufman

Another Charlie Kaufman movie for the weekend. So, you all know what this movie is about. One good thing about this movie is that there are no technical eplanantions or jargons thrown out like other sci-fi movies. And this is no sci-fi movie either. Its a bit complex like Memento (the sequence), and I am not really into these kind of movies, but I enjoyed watching this.

Allen movies: Part 1

I wanted to write about the movies of Woody Allen on my blog soon after I finished watching September. Then I got this urge to write after watching Zelig. Now that I watched Hannah and her sisters last night, I have to write about it!

After watching Annie Hall back in 2003, I never came across any of Woody Allen movies. When Aj told me that he has bought a DVD box set of Woody Allen, I wondered whether he had made so many movies! And when the DVDs arrived, I started watching them one by one and the first couple of movies were the typical Allen ones, with the characters that comes to your mind when you think of him. Sleepers, Shadows and fog and Love and Death.

Shadows and fog had a mega star cast (J. Malkowich, William H. Macy, Madonna!) and the character of John Cusack was memorable. Sleepers was a satire on society and there's very little I remember from Love and Death.

For me September was the real shocker. I never expected such a serious, emotional-high-voltage drama from Woody Allen. The movie was shot in just one location (studio, maybe) inside a big house where the story takes place. Later I read somewhere that Allen actually filmed the movie again, from beginning to end, changing the cast - and it didn't cost much to the production house!

Much has been written about Manhattan. You can find them here, here and here (I cant insert those hyperlinks!:)

Zelig revealed the real genius of Woody Allen to me. A mockumentary, this was an audacious attempt to film the funny story of a person who transformed into the person whom he met. He became a doctor when he spoke to a doctor. The movie had some original footages and in the beginning of the movie I thought it is a real documentary - with those footages of Scot Fitzgerald et al.

Everything you wanted to know about sex.. and Bananas were laugh out loud funny. Another woman was a dissection of emotions, much in the league of serious movies of Allen, with a superb performance by the lead actor (Gena Rowlands as Marion Post).

What struck me about Interiors was that throughout the sensitive drama there was no background score and the scene where a record is played, that was the most dramatic scene of the movie!
Radio days was beautiful and I wonder how he could make a movie out of that! It is just about growing up with radio, events related to the broadcasts and events about radio personalities!

Broadway Danny Rose proved that Allen can do serious roles too. He really made me sympathize with the character.
I remember this funny dialogue from the movie:
Tina is talking about her husband:
Tina: They shot him in the eyes.
Danny: Oh my God, he's blind?
Tina: He's dead...
Danny: Of course, the bullets would go right through...
:)

Alice had one of those catchy background scores. Someday I should dig up those IMDB archives to figure out the musicians and tracks Allen has featured in his movies.

Hannah and her Sisters, I should say, is the perfect and most fulfilling Woody Allen movie I have watched so far. It has Manhattan, Allen in his typical role, laugh out loud jokes, emotions, affairs, great background score, literary references, search for God, meaning of life, ace performances, Thanks giving dinner...
Manhattan is beautifully captured in the movie, that I am sure it wont look that beautiful in real! The river, city streets and even the architecture. Michael Caine gives a splendid performance (Guess he won an Oscar for supporting role - I'd like to see all the nominations and wins of all these movies on IMDB, someday).
Another surprise I got from the closing credits was that John Turturo had a small role in the movie. I scanned through the DVD and found that its a 1 minute role as a script writer for TV. The music is so beautiful in the movie, that if I come across the soundtrack in any music store, I'll just grab it!

I have a bunch of DVDs more to go, before I post part 2 of this and start watching those movies again!

Alternative Career for Musicians

So you wanna leave everything behind, start a new career, do something that you'd like to do and start a new life?

Those who are engaged in routine jobs think of artists as people who enjoy what they do. But, it is now a known fact that musicians, at least, are tied by the contracts and guidelines of record companies, not free enough to do what they really want to do - till they find an appropriate indie label or start a record company of their own.

For Chris Rea, his recent illness gave him the impetus. He wanted to pursue his interests in painting, link them with his music, and for music- he has returned to his roots.
He has released a 11 CD set book pack of blues tracks (130 songs!) called "Blue Guitars" with a three piece band "The Fire Flies", along with prints of his paintings and liner notes - on his own record label "JazzeeBlue".

I like Chris Rea for his uplifting melodies like "Looking for the summer", "Windy town", "Driving home for Christmas". I don't think I'll like him sing the blues and I may not invest $85 for this box-set, but I am glad that he is doing this!

The American Dream

Columbia Records has released the 30th anniversary edition 3CD set of Bruce Springsteen's monumental Born to Run album. Interestingly, a book of stories had come out (not related to the box set release) based on the song Meeting across the river from the album, early this year. 20 writers have woven their stories around the song plot where the protagonist is released from the jail and waiting to meet his girlfriend and the ‘man on the other side’. You can read the first story online on Amazon. As per the review, though the plot is the same, the authors have leveraged on the silences in the song (which can be attributed to Springsteen's sparse lyrics) and the stories are quite diverse.
Probably they were filling in words for the saxophone playing throughout the song, which creates that haunting atmosphere!

Meeting Across the River: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song (Paperback)
by Jessica Kaye, Richard Brewer (Editor)
Bloomsbury USA (July, 2005)

I’ll post a review update, if I can get hold of the book!

Rock Snobbery

Recently, Splangy Radio featured a program on “Rock Snobbery” via Podcast. They defined a Rock snob like this: A Rock snob buys the Astral Weeks CD when he is 18. Hey buys a Velvet Underground CD when he is 21. At 24, he buys the same Velvet Underground album on an LP!

I was laughing out loud all through the program as the things they talked about were so similar to the snobbery I exhibited in this part of the world. Well, my Rock Snobbery peaked out when I was 23-24.

I thought I’d jot down some stuff from my snob years for budding Rock snobs. Here it goes:

Five artists Rock Snobs should rave about:
1. Nick Drake (Unfortunately, Drake’s Pink Moon was featured in a Volkswagen commercial recently, making him a bit “popular”!)
2. The Stooges
3. Velvet Underground
4. Jeff Buckley
5. Television

Five easy tricks to become a Rock Snob:
1. Always specify timelines as “Since Dylan went Electric…”, “After the British Invasion..” etc.
2. Lester Bangs. Mention his name at least twice in a conversation. Call him Lester. " Lester.. who?” “Bangs. Lester Bangs. The man who coined the word punk.”
3. If you stumble upon some artist whom you have not heard much, blindly state that His solo work is superior! Clicks most of the time.
4. Talk about Producers and production. State that this artist delivered better with that producer.
5. Last but not least: Trivia! Very often we come across rock rookies who proudly show off their knowledge by quoting Cobain’s suicide note and stating that the lines are from Neil Young’s My My, Hey Hey. Ask them about Neil Young’s Cobain tribute album (Sleeps with Angels) or about whom did Young write the song My My Hey Hey (Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols).

…and if you have it in you, walk out of a party where they play “I just called to say I love you”!

Chords, Coffee and Cigarettes

For reasons I cannot explain
There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland
I’m going to Graceland
-Paul Simon, Graceland

These words sum up the feeling one gets after watching Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. The movie narrates incidents of three sets of tourists visiting Graceland, the cradle of rock ‘n roll, connected by a common thread of a Radio music show being played in the background.

There is something about the movies made by people who have a passion for music, even though the movie is not centered on Music as its theme. For instance- Tarantino, Cameron Crowe, Coen Brothers. You can expect a monumental Soundtrack for sure, apart from the musical references in the movie. References like - how Jackie plays the record of The Delfonics when Max Cherry visits her to get back his gun in Tarantino’s Jackie Brown or this whacky conversation centered on Elvis in Tony Scott’s True Romance:

In a cocktail bar in Detroit, Clarence Worley is trying to pick up an older lady named Lucy.

CLARENCE to LUCY: In "Jailhouse Rock" Elvis’ everything rockabilly's about. I mean he is rockabilly: mean, surly, nasty, rude........... I'd watch that hillbilly and I'd want to be him so bad. Elvis looked good. I'm no fag, but Elvis was good-lookin'. He was fuckin' prettier than most women. I always said if I ever had to fuck a guy... I mean, had to, 'cause my life depended on it... I'd fuck Elvis.

(Lucy takes a drag from her cigarette.)

LUCY: I'd fuck Elvis.

CLARENCE: Really?

LUCY: When he was alive. I wouldn't fuck him now.

CLARENCE: I don't blame you.
(they laugh)
So we'd both fuck Elvis. It's nice to meet people with common interests,
isn't it?
(Lucy laughs.)
--True Romance (Written by Tarantino)

After watching Mystery Train, I browsed through Jarmusch's filmography and my admiration for him grew when I read that he directed Neil Young’s concert documentary Year of the Horse (though he is a bit overrated as the Godfather of American Independent movies). He also had musicians like Tom Waits and Screamin’ Jay act in his movies! The background score of these movies were entirely different from the Spielbergian Philharmonic scores (Dead Man had a score by Neil Young on Guitars).

Hmm…I wanted to write something on interesting musical references in movies, but digressed to Jarmusch’s movies. But then, I aint no good to write on movies... At least these movies gave me enough pointers to quality music, not to mention the sheer bliss of watching them!

Roll over Beethoven?

Western Classical Music. Is it for me?

Kubrick's movie, A Clockwork Orange made me, at least, give some attention to this genre of music. Music has a major role in this movie, especially Beethoven's 9th symphony.
The only other entry to my memory on Western Classical was what my friend told me when I was in college, that the electronic music you just heard while the car was backing up, was Mozart’s some symphony. Later i found out that it was Fur Elise by Beethoven.

Where I lived was with my Dada and Mum in municipal flat block 18-A Linear North. It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now to give it the perfect ending was a bit of the old Ludwig Van.
Oh bliss, bliss and heaven. Oh it was georgeousness and georgeosity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in spaceship gravity all nonsense now as I slooshied I knew such pretty pictures.
-- Alex, A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess )

Ludwig Van Beethoven. Ah, he is not for me. Music without words?

Two years later:
Satyajit Ray's My years with Apu is a good read, even though you are not interested in making movies. In this book, Ray tells us about his passion for Western Classical music. Unavailability of Western records in Calcutta and their heavy price tag made it impossible for him access more of this art, till he made acquaintance with this gentleman in Calcutta who had a vast collection of Western Classical records. They spent evenings listening to records and Ray could borrow them from him (He was none other than Nirad C. Chaudhary!).

Ray's passion for this art form made me more curious. But the curiosity faded away with time.

6 months later:
In the opening chapter of Pankaj Mishra's Romantics, he introduces this lady who spends her time reading and listening to Western Classical music.

One morning as she lay in her sagging charpoy, her legs partially exposed in a way i thought immodest, the oval frames of her sunglasses accentuating the whiteness of her skin, a mysterious haunting melody floating out of her room - Beethoven's Archduke Trio, I later came to know....
--The Romantics, Pankaj Mishra

Mysterious haunting melody. I couldnt wait any longer. I hooked on to Internet and downloaded the 9th symphony. The whole of A Clockwork Orange soundtrack. And some more Beethoven tracks.
Later, I told my brother about this new interest of mine. Was this a sign of getting old? Strangely, he had been listening to Western Classical lately and gave me some pointers to start with. He said that Vivaldi's Four Seasons - Summer rocked! (He is also a novice who thought that Vivaldi was nothing but some kind of bathroom wear, till recently!).
So, I have been listening to these tracks for a couple of weeks now. And they do rock!

PS: I still play those nursery-rhymish Paul McCartney tracks!

Of Mice and Men: The Ghost of Lennie

I read about John Steinbeck and his Grapes of Wrath in the Sunday Magazine of The Hindu and in my next visit to library, I browsed through his books. Grapes of Wrath seemed to be a thick book which would have taken ages for me to read. I found a slim volume in between the books, titled Of Mice and Men. I read the novella the same day I borrowed it. Dark and haunting, I didn’t feel that I have read a great work (In fact, I was not knowing that it was a critically acclaimed and popular book). But the lines in the story kept coming back to me. “Will there be rabbits, George?” - The lines in the book were so lyrical that I thought - If I were to write a song with a book as its theme, this would be it. (At that time, Mark Knopfler had just released his ‘Sailing to Philadelphia’ album inspired by the book Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon). I started singing the lines which haunted me from the book – “Will you let me tend the rabbits, George?” - to the tune of Dire Straits’ Romeo and Juliet. (May be due to the ‘Sailing to..’ connection or the Shakespearean connection… or may be I felt that Knopfler’s rendition of the song -which was never written- would be perfect to match the mood of Of mice and men. )

IMDB tells me that there are a couple of movie versions of the book. A 1992 make directed by Gary Sinise, features Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie. I am looking forward to watching it!

Songs in the key of life

Sometime in April (04), the Suprabhatham programme on Asianet featured the writer Sudhish. I had not read any of his works, still the programme was engrossing, as they talked about his writings and his love for music (and he sang pretty well too, on the programme). I just went out and grabbed his book, Aatmagaanam. Though most of the songs and artists he was raving about were not of my generation, the passages really made me search for my Aatmagaanagal too. Another book I read in this genre was the seminal work by the British writer Nick Hornby (of Hi-Fidelity and About a boy fame), “31 Songs” in which he narrates his memoirs on 31 of his favourite songs (features British and American Rock n’ roll and popular music). There is always a moment you can attach to a favourite song of yours - the wetness of a monsoon, an adrenaline-pumping high school crush, a dry exam study-leave or something as silly as fragrance of a perfume. Reading these books would be real treat for music buffs who feel that music has got something to do with their lives, if not change the course.

Sit back, turn on the music and sip your black tea while its pouring outside!