New Year 2013 Celebrations

My first New Year in USA was made completely memorable by my friends at New York: Rohit, Karthik, Vinit along with two new friends - Debashree and Jasdeep, joined by Neelima straight from San Francisco on the New Year! We went around the Times Square looking at the craziness of people to see the ball dropping event. It was for the first time after coming to USA that I saw a density as huge as something I would see in Mumbai everyday! Immense security and pretty organized New York streets allowed us to cut across the avenues to move to less crowded areas. The bars were full, the pubs shouted loud, the streets were lit up - New Year celebration was all around.

Strolling around the Rockefeller center whose courtyard was turned into a skating rink, and looking around the beautifully lit Christmas tree, we went towards another part of the city, quieter and as merrier as the above. We chose a beautiful cafe to hang out, where we went insane at our table - actually a blackboard! We architects and lawyers from Harvard, Cornell and Yale took over our drawing skills drafting out a construction sheet on the table. Occasionally we corrected each other to show guidelines, formatting and essential details! We soon had to order extra chalk exhausting that kept on our table.

Our next session at the night was a long game of Pictionary with Bollywood movies. And let me see if anyone of you can guess the drawings below. Some were so funny and obvious that mere 4 blanks did the job. Others were quite intellectual. Debashree proved to be the most prolific drawing out iconic scenes from movies, while Jasdeep did a good job of guessing some despite not being good at drawing!

We went home late, by around 1 30 am when we started a 6-player Ludo - something retrofitted with the old Ludo version, that Rohit had! The game went on non stop for 4 hours, when we finally decided to retire leaving the game unfinished!

On a round of New Year Resolutions on the next day in a south Indian Restaurant, where everyone decided some, I had none. In the meanwhile, Karthik asked me to visit Boston instead of returning back to New Haven. While I went into my grey zone, Neelima made me go for it, asking me to be more instinctive this year. I thought for a while and dived in. And I think that was one of the better decisions I made. I thoroughly enjoyed Boston - a great city, with great friends, great buildings, and absolutely unforgettable moments.

Boston Story next.

Happy New Year 2013

New Societies

These days I have suddenly started to take a lot of interest in things in process. Primarily this is in relation to music production and film production. My interest has geared towards, and gearing towards "how" things are made and can be made. In what ways can ideas be realized. I discovered some really interesting projects documented on Youtube and some such places. If any one is interested, one must look at:

• The Music Project by Tehelka
• Sneha Khanwalkar's show Sound Tripping
• Making of various films
• to some extent Dewarists
• A Capella Groups
• Short film and Animation groups
• Comic and graphic novel artists
• Writers, poets, painters, artists etc

Technology has enabled every one in large capacities eliminating the need for any partners in the production of a sale-able commodity in today's world. But there is some really cool stuff happening out there which is completely overshadowed by mainstream and popular things that we are overtly masked by. There is a rich repository of music, films, interviews, rough cuts, recordings - a lot of material yet unexplored. If only one had the time to look at the immense amount of energy put into such things, there is so much that one could do.

The digital revolution can inverse the notion of the capitalistic way in which most societies are ordered, because it empowers a seemingly insignificant entity to an unbelievable audience. It allows filtration of choice and gets you an appropriate outreach. Although this process happens subtextually, many of us are not still exposed to so much that may interest us. While this may not always get media covering, I am sure it helps these individuals their survival.

The fast changing ways in which culture mutates and creates "new" identities for peoples are regrouped through the channel of the Internet. Internet thus creates completely new societies, sometimes although virtual, through the thread of "common interest". So get there and reach out to the person/group/activity that you like doing. It's just a matter of typing vague phrases on Google and the gaps will be prompted to you by the Internet itself.

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But I am a bit scared of the universalizing tendencies due to the medium through which such ideas route themselves and proliferate. The English language, the digital media and the computer screen (image) leave out a lot many things that are essential for the receptivity of any kind of art form. Art forms are not only rooted in their visual cultures, the way in which they are primarily mediated and projected. They are often more rooted in their places through their environmental conditions and settings. For example, the seas and storms reflect the Western Classical music forms, the bountifulness of the Bengali countryside reflects in the Rabindrasangeet, the tragedies (the theatre) echo the evolving morals of the European societies, the African masquerades are absolutely ritualistic,  the clothings of various places is a direct response to the climates people grow up in. As all such forms are channeled through the Internet - through medium of image, music and text - much is flattened, much is circulating, mixing and pairing up - not that this hasn't happened in the past. But the time over which such fusion occurs has relatively changed and hence these new formations are very shortlived. It is the time-space relationship that configures the life-span of these forms. We live in a world of moments and momentariness. We like momentary pleasures, momentary joys, momentary gossips, news, events...We consume moments for moments to pass moments. Every moment is a new moment. These moments make up momentum of an event, which to is momentary when considered in historical time.

I conclude remembering Heidegger whose philosophical thoughts summarize that one needs to ground oneself hard on the roads of the countryside to get one's foot print, an impression.

(Hence it is very laborious to define and trace the self.)

Impressions are not momentary, impressions last longer, stay firmer and require some strength and work, only to be revealed by some archaeologist of the future to be able to give meaning to our otherwise fleeting present.

Kiss

"An art professor once told me that in composition, elements should either overlap or there should be some space between them; that it produecs discomfort when things where tangential. he called this phenomenon kissing..."

John Baldessari, Kissing Series: Simone Palm Trees (Bear), 1975. 

"The basic concept was not try to destroy or be provocative to the architecture, but to melt in. As if I would kiss Taniguchi. Mmmmm." (said with closed eyes and elaborate flourish, a bright yellow down vest,. and a heavy Swiss accent).

"Behind the scenes with Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body out (7354 cubic Metres)"

-Kissing Architecture, Sylvia Lavin

Kissing may mirror suckling, turn into grooming, generate oral fixations , find sublimated means of expression, and even be erotic. Kissing may be self soothing and appeasing. But ultimately kissing is something you cannot do on your own. Kissing always involves the surprise of the difference of another mouth that is like yours but not yours. kissing is not a collaboration between two that aims to make one unified thing it is the intimate friction between two mediums that produces twoness --- reciprocity without identity - which opens new epistemological and formal models for redefining architecture's relation to other mediums and hence to itself.

-Kissing Architecture, Sylvia Lavin, p.54-55

Kiss

A world that has just been turned around

I told them: "I miss dirtyness - I miss the dirt around, the bottles lying, the pan masala packets, the spit, the dead mice, the crushed pigeons, the rotting flowers, the smells, the leaves, the sweat, the closeness, the density, the air, the smog, the dust, the stains, the layers of peeled posters..."

They just made faces.

I now live in a place where colourful fall leaves are blown away from the pavements using diesel operated blowers. Dried leaves are removed using small vans which blow them and collect them. Clearing off tree leaves is a cultural activity. Skeletal remains of leaves outside their houses are collected by families and pushed into large paper bags which are bought from supermarkets!Similarly, snow shoveling is also a ritualistic activity. Although every thing looks perfect all the time, I wonder how people strive towards making it more perfect. The constantly work towards clarifying the lines they have drawn on earth - including those between road and the pavement, pavement and building porch, porch and house, rooms within house...

These spaces are maps personified. Every line on the map is a real manifest. All representations of their space work towards leveling themselves out - they try to match each other to an extent where everything is real.

I simply ask - "Is this really real?" A place I imagined through greeting cards, paintings - which I always thought were only drawings, only representations! I now live in a world that was never alive to me. A strange predicament between the real and the unreal hits me.

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All views eyes frame are photogenic
All mind is turning schizophrenic


Of notions that have turned reverse
Spaces that strongly feel averse


Searching my filthy beauty on the street
Was present right under my seat

In search of real I struggle around
A cobweb under my chair I found

Reality finally hits the ground
My world has just been turned around.

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