So I finally was persuaded to give ebooks a shot and i may be on my way to being converted. On Wednesday I spent the whole day in bed reading books on my laptop. It was disconcerting to open microsoft reader and see that the library on my laptop already contained books with titles such as Interstellar Service and Discipline. (You are reading this, Certain Person, I know you are! Next time, warn me that you have left behind android porn on my laptop) After choking a bit, I started on the books I had downloaded. There is actually a murder mystery for every mood. Australian aborginal,Chicago gay, countryhouse parody, hardboiled futuristic, frilly with spandex, welsh priests... academic murder mysteries are dime a dozen now. I was in the mood for a bookish murder and was disappointed to not find Joanne Dobson (working class professor in snooty New England college keeps stumbling on bodies) online but I did find the first of the Dido Hoare series by Marianne Moore. Dido runs an antiquarian bookshop, has a father called Barnabas and a policeman lover. Only he is a wee bit married. Very nice.
I have also started reading the Thursday Next series. Comic detective fiction in a parallel dimension Britain where books are immensely important. Thursday next, our heroine, is a detective in the squad in charge of literature-related crimes (arguments about Shakespeare sometimes lead to murders). She has a pet dodo called Pickwick and in the first book, The Eyre Affair, somehow ends up inside Jane Eyre. It is beautifully loony and set in a world where Wales is a socialist republic and genetic engineering is really common.
Meanwhile has anyone caught sight of this insane goth-girl version of Jane Eyre, the illustrated version by *cough* Dame Darcy? It looks fascinating.
Once you get past the name, her illustrations are rather fun. Here is something nice called Dolls do Heroin. Not from Jane Eyre!
Monroe's last sitting, photos by Bert Stern. And horrendously horrendously recreated this year with Lindsay Lohan.
This information comes via a new blog which I want to guard jealously for a while longer.
I haven't read EM Forster since I was 16 when I read them all in a fury of Merchant Ivory. From that point of pure ignorance and my dubious feelings about A Passage to India, I had to be told that my favouritest book Zadie Smith's On Beauty was a tribute to Howards End. Now, two whole years later, I am re-reading Howards End and enjoying it enormously. It is an incredibly energetic, witty novel, only foiled by my On Beauty flashbacks. I am halfway through the novel and still comparing it to On Beauty. This is a bad thing. Like being abroad and constantly converting local prices into rupees. Very unfair to a brilliant novel.
UPDATE: It's wonderful and wonderful. Go read.
Never have I regretted being in North India so much before. When I found Krish Ashok's site yesterday I had to cackle all by my lonesome. Ashok is an IT boy, amateur violinist, writer, graphic artist and all-round crack person. His website is full of astonishing schematic diagrams and photoshopped ads all shot through with the funniest lingo that ever had juice on Besantnagar beach.
A sample from his wedding flowcharts:
And the facebook newsfeed of the Mahabharata
In five days it will have been six years since the Gujarat riots. Teesta Setalvad is planning to build a museum in Gulbarg Society.
Read it here.
If you are a freelance writer, photographer, editor, cartoonist, designer, translator, juggler....
1. Don't work for free. Ever. Not even the first time.
2. Do not listen to Falana publishers in Delhi, when they tell you that they love your work but they are just not in a position to pay you for the wonderful photographs you took of the Naxalites watching Om Shanti Om in Rajamundry. It is just what they need for their book but would you consider waiving their fee? No, you wouldn't. Can you imagine them saying the same thing to the phone company or the electricity board?
3. When people tell you what fee they will pay you, take a few moments to think, before going into orgasmic agreement. If necessary, tell them you will call them back. Take some time to calculate the most realistic number of hours you will spend on this project and still have a life.
4. Consult other people about the payment practices of your potential client. Is your client prompt about paying? Do they make you fill yards of forms and then lose them?
5. Be relaxed and gracious when negotiating terms and conditions. There are other jobs out there if this client is going to be an ass.
6. As far as possible, get things in writing. Even if it requires a few more emails back and forth in the beginning, it is better to have things spelt out.
7. One way to calculate your fee is this. First calculate the number of projects you can do per month. If, for example, each project takes a week to do ( a week of 8 hour days, not a week of not eating and not sleeping) then you can only do four projects every month. And if each month you need X amount of money to live on (perhaps without eating truffles or holidays in Bali) now each project needs to pay you at least (X divided by 4) rupees. Perhaps at first you may not be able to charge this, but this is what you should aspire to having and very soon.
8. If you are doing something for friends or acquaintances, you must still be paid. Charge on a sliding scale if need be. If the local streetchildren's shelter wants you to design their newsletter surely you can give them a discounted rate. But don't give the same rate to Orient Longman. No matter what they say. Even if they say that they say that the publishing house is run by dyslexic orphans from the tsunami.
9. Some clients like to frighten you off by pretending that it is cheap and shameless of you to keep talking about money. While you earnestly ask them of about the last three payments they will want you to a. admire the sunset b. drink some more juice c. talk about Mother Teresa d. meet that other designer who never charged anything. Ignore all these tactics and demand your payment. Your client no matter how he talks, also subsists on the filthy lucre that he doesn't give you any of. And so do you.
10. Remember you are not desperate. There is a market out there for what you do, if you do it well. Believing that what you do is important is strictly your domain. Don't look to clients to prop up your self-esteem. Don't ask them whether they think your work is good.
11. When you go to meet your client for the first time, dress extremely well. To make myself very clear, dress rich. For some reason people like to pay rich freelancers (who look like they don't need money) much better than poor freelancers (who look like they need a good fee.) Don't tell your clients that you need the money for your father who has cancer. They will immediately pay you less and pay you late.
12. Be on good terms with other freelancers in your business. Remember, you are all in it together. Share information about clients' fees, payment practices, idiosyncrasies generously. The only people who benefit if you hide this sort of information are crooked employers who hope to make a killing each time with a newcomer who has not been warned.
13. If payments are delayed beyond standard industry practice (and find out whether standard industry practice is idiotic. They frequently are) then begin copying emails to other people. Mails to accounts can be copied to commissioning editors and senior editors. Mails to the movie director for whom you translated 30 hours of Swahili songs, who has not paid you after 6 months, must be copied to the friendly and slightly malicious reporter. If Save the World India has not paid you after a year, copy all mails to Save the World International.
14. If clients scream and say they will never employ you again, take heart. You don't want to be employed by them again.
15. Ladies, practice makes perfect. Forget what your mother taught you. Once you have had a 65-year-old priest screaming at you in the middle of a seminary that you are a shameless materialist (even though he was the one who spent all the funds alloted to you) and you have walked away with a cheque in your trembling hands and throat hurting from the clear enunciation of 'Give me my money', things always get better.
More tips from MP, the Queen of Freelancers
16. The other thing you need to worry about is, "Would you mind doing this as well?" - repeated x times. Then, when you remember that you've been using your compliant smile a little too often, and do the calculations that the chasing iamb so usefully described, you realise that the "this as wells" have worked out to three times as much time as you originally promised.
17. After that, you learn to insist on contracts. You also remember to check carefully for a clause hiding in there somewhere which says "and any other work that the Director might assign from time to time" and insist, smiling (read fangs showing), that this be removed. You continue displaying those fangs when they apologise and tell you "sorry, that is a standard format we use."
18. You resist attempts (once the org has realised what an astounding range of skills you have) to have them recruit you for a full-time job since paying you a regular salary will get them all those skills, and not just the ones needed for Project X, and work out cheaper for them than employing you project by project.
19. You learn not to be embarrassed about giving your card to other potential employers, never mind that your current employer is standing right there. Why should you? You've never made any bones about being a freelancer or spoken any marriage vows. (This doesn't hold true if there are obvious IPR/info sharing violations at stake, but otherwise it does.)
20. One thing I disagree with — do do work for free now and then, sometimes even for "unworthy" folks. Bread cast upon the waters can be redeemed, I guarantee, at 10 p.m. on a dark night in Rajgiri in rural Bihar when a hotel room (flooded, but safe nevertheless) offers itself without advance reservation and with kind staff making hot phulkas for you after the kitchen has closed.
Ellen Furney rocks. Though I am inclined to think that her fags are less fabulous than mine. South India says nyaaaaaa to Seattle. Do do check out her Lust Lab of the week. She's the visual cartoony equivalent of Dan Savage.
This cartoon is a visualisation of Margaret Cho's beautiful piece.
To stay on the subject of porn and good cheer... The Notorious Bettie Page is a wonderful movie. The original Ms Page was a one-of-a-kind creature. In the 1950s she was famous equally for her cheesecake photos as well as for appearing in bondage magazines. In 7 years she appeared in more magazines than Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford together. She did some Broadway plays, was an early Playboy pinup and then disappeared from the scene. In the 70s she somehow became a punk icon. More recently she is the star of some (rather boring) comics.
Bettie Page Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page
Very few of the fetish films she did survive today because of a government crackdown (just after which, she disappeared) but to even see one is enough to embrace her goofiness. A goofiness that director Mary Harron and Gretchen Mol brings to a movie version (shot partly in colour and partly in black and white). I don't like ingenues but Gretchen Mol who plays Bettie Page is the messiah of ingenues. She reclaims girl-next-door. She is the orange juice and sunshine that would make you shed your black lipstick and Malayalee boyfriend with a rock band. She and a completely sweet cast of characters make a surprisingly heartwarming movie. Not that the director of American Psycho can make a sentimental movie but this is It's a Wonderful World for pomo-addicts.
There have been complaints that this movie ignores the seamier side of the porn business. Harron's interpretation is gloriously free of judgement but it is not Disney. I think it would be a mistake to take Bettie's naivete at face value. It is in the texture of the movie (its ironic use of music, its refusal to create an artifical moral resolution) than in the naivete itself that you see Bettie's courage and in turn Gretchen's courage. JM Coetzee asks in an essay on Clarissa what the appropriate response is for a man to soul-wrenching beauty? In Bettie's case her geeky photographers are awed and gratified at her ease and enjoyment of posing nude. In one crucial scene Bettie (on an impulse) posed nude in a sunny park for a photographer. Many reviewers' response to this scene has been an identical awe and gratitude to Gretchen Mol.
Gretchen Mol has an unusual story too. She started wonderfully. Discovered by a talent scout when she was a hat-check girl she was catapulted into movies. Woody Allen, Spike Lee, named IT girl, then came a Vanity Fair cover where her nipples showed through her dress. This cover is said to have started a round of gossip which basically translated to 'girls who show skin probably can't act'. And that was that for a good long time. After doing a lot of bit roles came this movie. If you watch her in it, you can't imagine anyone else playing Bettie Page.
A sequence from The Notorious Betty Page
Silly Footnote: Throughout the movie I kept thinking that somewhere Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon must be sticking pins into voodoo doll of Mary Harron. Then I read in an interview of Harron that one of the reasons she made the movie was because she was inspired by the experiences of her actress stepmother Catherine Mckinnon. I choked for one minute then realised that this was a completely different person.
A James Bond movie marathon. Can there be anything more wonderful? All the cheesiness, all the corny pick-up lines, the globe-trotting, the discovery that every house has a man who has watched Goldfinger six times... surely nothing can be a better pick-me-up. In my scheme of things, it has been as good as the afternoon two young ladies and I watched (back-to-back) one soft porn-movie, Caligula and When Harry Met Sally. (However I may outvote Bond after watching five versions of Pride and Prejudice back-to-back.)
Some movies do require more stamina from viewers than the others of course. Live and Let Die is so incredibly racist I was not sure whether I wasn't watching a spoof... Undercover Brother Returns perhaps. Pierce Brosnan, whom I like otherwise, seemed to have been in the most tiresome Bond movies. Sean Connery is positively villainish. I forgot. Bond-marathon-fun includes all the endless speculation about which Bond was better. I have never particularly cared so far but I came screeching to a halt with Daniel Craig.
Brutish, bull-necked, plainly a prole in a dinner-jacket, changing Bond before my very eyes... forcing a Bond movie to have a narrative. Shocking. With the addition of the most beautiful woman in the world, Eva Green, I vote the new Casino Royale the best one so far... of course there are other Bond movies that are simply more fun to watch, because they are more solidly in the B-movie genre. But decades from now, when I have another bad week that can be fixed with a Bond-movie marathon, I will thank Craig for making me join half the human race. The half that has strong feelings about Bond movies, I mean.
Here is Craig making a very different kind of entry.
The second sequence is a very lovely piece of animation and also has killer music
Never say Kozhikode unless you want to meet Malayalees. I was on a postage-stamp sized dance floor in Jaipur and made the mistake of yelling a sentence including 'Kozhikode!' across at someone. (Why?Can't remember now) Three ladies leaped at me to mark me as a sister under the skin, since I had got the 'zh' right. The madly hilarious Sarayu Srivatsa, who only a moment previously had decided she was Gama, had gone into a deep wrestler squat and was slapping her thighs... stopped. 'Kutty! Me too!' she screamed.
Behind me I heard another yowl of sisterhood. And there was a leather-jacket wearing stylish woman I had been ogling in the afternoon , cooing 'Kutty! at me. 'Who are you?' She laughed and said, "Jaishree Mishra.' 'Mishra?" "Endu cheyaam?" she sighed. We giggled at each other and she went away. Later it was brought to my attention that I had asked Takazhi's granddaughter whether she was a Malayalee.
In other news, I succumbed to the blitz about Sara Paretsky and bought Total Recall. I am happy to report that it was very satisfying. VI Warshawski is (barring Kathleen Mallory) probably the coolest detective ever. Of course with Kathleen Mallory, one is told over and over again that we can't like her. Warshawski, smartalecky, lovely, competent Warshawski is incredibly likeable. The plot is elaborate enough without being convoluted and the writing intelligent without sidelining the mystery.Now I am wondering about the Paretsky essays.
In the final scenes of Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures, new Discworld movie moghuls CMOT Dibbler and nephew Soll watch a huge image of a woman (a 50 foot image, to be exact) carry the Librarian (who is an orangutan) up a tower. As they watch the giant woman carrying the ape, they both remark worriedly to each other that for all its spectacular value, something was not quite right about what they were watching.
I've had similiar feelings about most monster movies. It has been difficult to decide which one is a worthier candidate to despise, Jaws , Godzilla, Jurassic Park or that intriguing turkey of a movie, Anaconda. Therefore, I have largely contented myself by not watching them. (King Kong is different because it taps into a bestial, sexual vein in its loopy way).
Last night, quite by accident, I found myself 20 minutes into a monster movie before I had realised it was one. Gwoemul (The Host) is a Korean movie which elegantly lets you know that Hollywood should shut shop and find other pursuits. Gardening, perhaps.
In Gwoemul a mortician in a US Army base in Seoul is ordered to pour toxic chemicals into the Han river. A few years later, fishermen spot it. Later, an acerbic suicide spots it in the river moments before he jumps in. A while later, the monster, inevitably, attacks. Simple-minded, lazy Gang-du is caught up in the attack and his little daughter is one of the people the beast carries away and is seen eating. Seoul is whipped into a panic by the US and by the media about a virus that the monster carries. Since Gang-du had come in contact with the monster he and his family are quarantined. While in quarantine, Gang-du gets a call - from his daughter. For the rest of the movie, Gang-du, his father and siblings try to get the little girl back.
Gwoemul works on many counts. The beast (large, though not Kong-size) conveys both bestial agility and a degree of intelligence that makes it quite possible for you to scream without embarrassment. And no matter how much airtime the beast gets (quite a lot, and in daylight) you rarely have a moment to register that it looks preposterous or even think cynical thoughts about special effects. Too much is happening on screen for any of that. Gwoemul has the basic monster plot and a fabulous, eccentric narrative. Important, interesting, well-developed characters (people you root for fiercely) die, so you wll have actual reason to panic and even weep, rather than wince. And as if this wasn't enough. Joon-ho Bong, the director also displays a deft hand at introducing a great background score, at pure black comedy and at enough US-baiting for North Korea to give an unprecedented stamp of Commie approval to this, the highest-grossing South Korean movie ever. Bong has thoroughly enjoyed himself making this film. Look at the eyes of the American doctor who comes to talk to Gang-du in the last half-hour of the movie and you will know what I mean.
The first half of Atonement is pretty and inclined to warm the cockles of anyone who likes World War II romances or English countryhouse movies. It's a rare filmmaker who gets golden summers wrong. So we have amidst a lounging crowd of siblings, cousins and guests in a mansion, Briony Tallis, highly emotional thirteen-year old who sees what she thinks is her beautiful older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is being attacked by their neighbour Robbie (James McAvoy). He was after all monstrous enough to use her as messenger to deliver an obscene letter to Cecilia.
Of course then things go very wrong. Briony's precocious cousin Lola (yes,yes we get the Lolita bit but did Benedict Cumberbatch have to be such a silly villain?) is found raped and unable to say who did it to her. Briony already inclined to think very badly of her erstwhile childhood hero tells the police that she saw Robbie doing it. Young Robbie may have gone to Cambridge and be Cecilia's brand new lover but he is still the housekeeper's son. No one has any reason to doubt Briony. Cecilia's acid testimony having been discounted Robbie goes to jail and then to war as a common soldier.
Things also go very wrong for the movie. From the point that Robbie goes to jail the movie become patchy and frequently irritating. The young Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) is a child without much of a sense of humour. But much of that happens in the first half unfairly encourages you to laugh at her. Even the sex-in-the-library scene (an idea I am much in favour of) is less inclined to heat than mockery. The grown-up Briony (Romola Garai) seems distressingly moronic and has perhaps even a hint of sex-starved voyeur. Since the movie sets her up this way, it makes it difficult for us to empathise with what she supposedly is --- a young girl suffering for a single error of judgement. The hospital scenes with marching nurses lean towards absurdity. Just as one warms to Briony's courageous handling of a delirious soldier along comes Matron, looking like Morticia Adams.
Then there are the war-in-France scenes. James McAvoy is perhaps the only redeeming factor in this part which is unappealing to even WW2 suckers like me. The rule that the hero of a war movie must have a wise-cracking, silly companion is faithfully maintained. At the Jaipur Lit Fest, Christopher Hampton said that the budget for the scenes in France shrank considerably until they decided to just have the one long beach scene with a thousand extras. This scene packed with the cruel,grimy and the picturesque becomes short-hand for all the pointlessness of war. But by then one is already fed up. So even Briony 3 (Vanessa Redgrave) making her much-discussed atonement failed to interest. Atonement is a rather odd combination of short-shrift and over-kill.
Cecilia Tallis' green dress is the high point of the first half of Atonement. You may be a little surprised at how much attention you pay to the green dress but perhaps not. Keira Knightley is one of the most beautiful faces in Hollywood and as much as she is impaired by her marionette-like carriage, in repose, she is dazzling. What will surprise you is how much attention you pay to costumes as Atonement progresses. The nurses' pinafores, the grown-up Briony Tallis's Joan-of-Arc like clothes at Lola's wedding and at her sister's flat, the clothes of the pile of dead orphans found in a woods in France. While watching Atonement, you occasionally feel like you ought to feel a little more but are constantly distracted -- as if attending the funeral of an relative you don't remember at all.
PS No green dress has ever been contemplated so much since Scarlett O'Hara wanted an apple-green, watered-silk ball dress. If you are truly obsessed with the green dress then here is all the dope.
