Wednesday, April 25, 2007

hello

Somewhere between your eyes is a vortex. It is a point of concentaration of all your efforts. When you think, your physical being actually crunches around it, efforting nothing but an idea. Your eyes narrow down, your forehead wrinkles, your retinas wobble with effort, your chest forgets to breathe, your abdomen and hands are still because of their strength, but your fingertips automatically clench themselves, your gender is ripped off you, and forgotten, your legs stiffen, and your toes span out. You become an antenna of reception. You become co-ordinated and concentrated one thing, and then the idea hits you. Everything relaxes. You breathe. Your lungs heave again, not yet tired of the industrial revolution. Your fingertips start a terribly slow dance... watch the after you leave their control, they weave like the tendrils of a seaweed, swaying to the deep waves of an infinite sea. Your head obliterates all notions. And thankfully but unfortunately enough, your gender surges back into you. In some however, it creeps back slowly. Hesitant and shy.
The vortex in the middle of the skull clears, and out pops a tear. Thats when the fingers stop dancing, and gently punch those tears away from the face. The tears leave behind a slightly moist face, which cools you like iced silverware. It makes you wonder. And marvel. You break out of the trance induced by the television in front of you. You might even take the liberty to chuckle. You are, at the least, amused, entertained. But that is when you really start comprehending. You already had the thought, then you begin to understand it, slowly.
Television shows a series of hallucinations that most of us believe are perfectly real. Nothing seen on TV is real. Something happens. A cameraman decides to show it from a particular angle. You are seeing one eight of what you can see if you were actually there. The anchor will have a good look around, and sum it up for you. It will be an incalculable fraction of what you would have perceived if you were there. Even if the anchor is totally honest, there are time restrictions, language restrictions, clothing restrictions, easy words and short sentence length restrictions. News reaches us from only one side of the battlefront. We can never get the whole picture. Seriously, this is true. Most Indians are going through their lives not knowing there was a third element at Kargil. Not knowing that there were soldiers from three camps at Kargil, not two. The Government of India has hidden this information from you.
It is an easy extrapolation to all sources of information actually. The media and society both together form a fortress of mirrors and prisms around you. You are blinded by the light that is bouncing about everywhere, but essentially the same. The light has mesmerized you and made you go bonkers. It is the light of the television. You resent it, your fingers reach for the remote but cannot pick it up, it is too heavy.
You resent the television that you are watching. But then you watch it in a state of suspicion, and the vestiges of the tears bring about a sparkle in your eye. The reflection of the television in your iris is shimmering and shaking on the tiny film of salty water on the eyeballs. It is slowly leaking out, but that is a minuscule trickle. It cannot even be felt by the pores of the skin. Your are alive and alert, and mesmerized, but you glimpse the cause of the mesmerosis. You see a pattern in the television. You notice a sequence. And you begin to see a conspiracy. It is a theory, but it has no truth in it. It is void of sense. It is paranoid and whimsical. It is a string of coincidences brought together ineptly. It is delightful because of the pattern. Humans dig patterns. Cave painters and Fibonacci both loved the idea of things repeating themselves in a natural harmony. The beats of the music. The beats of the heart. Any form of art is an expression of this love of pattern. Every piece of art tries to break the existing patterns and make a new conformity. That is why we like to solve crosswords, play word games, make things like so-duku a nursery activity, and the likes. We also like to solve patterns, and identify them. That is the work of the critiques of the art forms. Any critique of a critique is senseless and redundant, as this is the criticism of criticism. It is not the criticism of art. Your criticisms are therefore, empty and void, and meaningless, because they are forged to fight an imaginary psychological battle. That is when you are bereft of identity, you have criticized too harshly. Look at every single criticism you have made, they have an origin in intense resentment of some thing you believe to be true about yourself. Hey Karan Johar films are too fucking emotional I would rather watch Jackass; is a criticism on critiques who called his films to be made for the masses. Karan Johar would have been appreciated more as an art film maker, with the kind of techniques and the symbology that he uses. You do not like Karan Johar films because they represent your association with a section of the "unthinking masses". You would not like to be that townie who still flaunts "polo sport" T-shirts. You hate the color combinations too. You want to be more classy. That is why Karan Johar is hated by the Bombay youth so much.
But Karan Johar is an amazing film maker. The Classes have a notion that they understand and comprehend everything that the masses thinks. They do not. Anyone who wishes to find this out, please watch a Bhojpuri. Do you understand it? If not then wake up, more people in India understand that than you do. Karan Johar makes amazing films for them. He uses big stars, and hides extremely strong values of family and society within his films. They reach out subconsciously and make you a socially concerned person. Karan Johar films intentionally propagate extremely strong values, successfully and responsibly to the "unthinking masses", in ways they can alone understand. Urban people, do not understand how artificial a basketball appears to the masses. The clothes that the characters wore, and their mannerisms, were too cheap and gaudy for Mumbai, but for the masses, it satisfied the same antediluvian need that the screen gods and goddesses of chandrakanta and mahabharata used to wear. The get up of the characters were positively deified for the masses, they would worship these heroes like gods. There are some crazed ass fans out there, trust me.
And Karan Johar just got better. He evolved. His latest effort opened up a social dilemma. A fundamental one that the whole of Indian society is faced with right now. Noticed Karan Johar's films? They started a slow emigration. The stories have been forged around characters first in India, then half in India, and finally, totally abroad. The Indian population is right now faced with this crisis. A lot of people have gone out of India. Even from the small towns and villages, they have gone out and found some work abroad. You will notice this being shown in the recent films. Countries not before seen on screen have shown up more and more often now. The world map of India previously consisted of only the cricket playing nations, China and America. We knew of no other country before that. Malaysia, Thailand and various European countries have slowly blossomed. We emigrate everywhere from Egypt to Norway. There are Indians forming a considerably demographic in every continent.
If you believed that, also believe then, that the Americans own the moon. Sharh Rukh Khan is a celebrity despite the classes being unable to name one piece of good cinema. Even if they go for Swades, Shah Rukh Khan is not a celebrity because of that film. Celebrities are celebrities because of the people. Art people dont like celebrities actually, but they will still fumble in their groins if they meet one. Thenatica is like the porn of the classes. There are various mental reactions to naked bodies, one is no better than the next, and none must be judged, but the primal physical reactions of the bodies to such visual stimulation is the same. It gives everyone, uniformly, the same psychological jerk. That is the body's reaction to four million years of evolution, that is the inertia of the genes that no film can hope to overpower.
Imagine cinema powerful enough to overpower the reflexes designed by evolution. Imagine cinema that can use technique to evoke responses that are placed out of context, and are therefore overpowering psychologically. Show porn to the classes, and thenatica to the masses. The world will be bereft of erections. No one will get turned out. It will become a sad, impotent world. It will have a world that will have seen a pluralist viewpoint on the issue of cinematic representation of sex. It will be a world, where there will be an overlap of two kinds of sexual imagery, and a cubist form will be born. An argus. A thing that has eyes everwhere and sees everything. It is the true high art. That transcendental form of cinema that has lights, cameras, thoughts and then action. Cinema can do this. Montages can show a series of images in what appears to be a pattern, as if a climax is going to be reached, and then arrives at a totally different climax, getting hold of the same reaction for totally different purposes. The primal reflexes of the body are programmed in ways to conserve a lot of energy. They are designed to work in extreme situations, and the more extreme the situation, the more of these reflexes come alive. For mild stimulation, as in the onset of the night, the pupils dilate to take in more light. For scary situations, the pupils dilate. Things became doubly scary in the night. Unfortunately, the night was also a perfect time to have sex. For the caveman, it represented a time when he did not have to be aware of prowling predators and stealing cousins. Sex was the time when humans were most vulnerable. crimes of sex are therefore, the most unaesthetic. Many a caveman has had sex against a single fire. The mental imagery has evolved on a psychological plane parallel to the ones of our bodies. James Bond was naked when he was beaten on his balls. The film maker managed to evoke a different psychological response from one normally associated with naked forms. A better film would draw upon the imageries formed by naked forms itself to create a powerful scene. The most imitated scene of the previous decade has been the bullet time shot of Neo in the Matrix. It can be easily pictured in the mind. That is its beauty. Look at Neo's pose. He is leaning back, he is relaxed, the part that is most exposed to the coming bullets is his pelvic region, he is leaning back exactly like a girl in porn films. And yet, he escapes. It is like his manhood was his shield. Men will be satisfied by watching the matrix, but very cleverly waylaid. The Wachowskis go right ahead and climax that particular scene by having Trinity mutter a spell. She says "Dodge this" and Smith goes to being smithereens.
Aronofsky goes further ahead. Eight frames. Eight frames captured from the movie. The eight frames is the signature shot of the movie. The one element of the film on the posters. There is always that magic element put by the film makers on their posters. It is the hammer in Zinda, the basketball in KKHH, the Bridge in KANK, the blood in Passion of the Christ. Nothing but the eye of sauron is scarlet in the nine odd hours of cinema that the Lord of the Rings trilogy is. The one element of the film on the poster for Requiem for a Dream is an eye. The eye is a powerful symbol. A powerful one, beyond that of the Illuminate or America. It is the symbol for a watcher. A watcher is a scary concept, it makes us aware of being observed, conscious of our shame, exposed to a judging entity. This judging entity does not have to be God, we are judged in every eye that photons bounced off from us reach. We are all scared of being watched. We all, uniformly, take devious pleasure it watching too. The paparazzi survive because of this. And conspiracy theories represent the worst form of psychological pleasure. Conspiracy theories are fantasies of being watched. Conspiracy theories establish pre-existing patterns into a chronological order and form, and place them in front of the audience, and the audience takes pleasure in being watched. It is like actually fantasizing about rape. This is the kind of brilliant dark art that the series "lost" is. Now Aronofsky used that one eye, and showed a visual representation of a reflex action on screen in eight frames. Eight frames of pupil dilating makes you dilate your pupils. The signature shot, is a trick on the audience. It is like a joke on them. It is showing them the very technique of the hip hop montage used in the movie. Every singly harsh cut in the movie makes your pupils dilate in an effort to see more clearly. It is harsh on your eyes. Requiem for a Dream makes you access that vortex somewhere in the middle of your eyes. That is why Requiem for a Dream makes you feel drugged. Aronofsky made Pi first, fully aware of the effect of drugs. Max mentions that the pupils constrict when drugged. Aronofsky then designed a script around the idea of a lot of things drugging society. The idea that society is merely a bunch of people psychologically reacting to different things around them. It is an effort to break people out of such reactions. It is an effort to show clashing and jarring perspectives in a manner where the audiences of the cinema would be aware that the cinema is drugging them. It is a brilliant film, because people dilate their pupils when they are horny and scared.
When an individual is drugged, the reflex actions increase because of a paranoia that sets in by the over perceptions of the world around them. People start seeing fake patterns in the things around them. They are called hallucinations. They actually, visually, stimulate the eyes. They are unnatural, because the brain is programmed to trust the eyes. The eyes are the most important barrier between the vortex of our soul and the everythingness of the cosmos. It is the bridge between the God and the Devil. It is the platform for the experiment of the universe. It is a sacred lense of light, that condenses information into our brains. Hidden in the string of hallucinations that the eyes see, is that one true reality.
Nothing like billowing out slender smoke strings in the first rains of an oncoming monsoon, the heat and energy stemmed up in your body is slowly release, and you relax against a sky of clouds so tiny, that it looks like a colossal blanket of silver lining. The thunder is mild. It shakes society in frequencies that the human ear cannot hear. Civilization gathers dirt every time it goes around the son. Mother Nature patiently continues to bathe its dirty baby every year. The waters from our plastic blocked gutters, gutters where murdered men are let to rot, gutters where the products of the industrial revolution are secretly let loose, gutters filled with the feces and urine of unnatural food stuffs, are the gutters from where the water evaporates and rains on us. Civilization took rain away from you. Civilization got rid of the very thing that brought life in an emptiness of space. Civilization no longer respects life.
We play with the idea of aliens on a psychological infliction of the human race. we are alone. We have to face it. All we have is each other.

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