A Self-Indulgent Work of Staggering Banality

I've been meaning to update this thing for awhile, and I haven't had the heart to do so for lack of anything to say. Lately, though, I've realized that I never really had anything to say, and that most of these entries have been self-indulgent disjointed rants which have nonetheless amused some of my friends. Perhaps it is precisely the pointlessness of my posts which has made them appealing to the few who like them, and thus, it would be folly to bide my time waiting for inspiration when I should just write.

Today, I've been feeling the urge to write again, and this time, however weird and tangential, I think I have something to say. Thus, this article could be the most intricate and entertaining entry I've posted so far-or the most disappointing, ill-thought out, meandering tissue-of-horseshit I've ever foisted on you people. I suppose we'll let history decide, lol.

Lately I've been "meditating" on the idea that "everything is connected", that fluffy sounding New Age truism which, according to some, has found some confirmation in quantum theory. This idea though is a fascinating one. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and I am now being affected, in ways I could never conceive, by international and historical forces outside my control, by people I'll never meet, by books I'll never read, by events I'll never hear about in countries I'll never visit. It's when these interesting patterns suddenly reveal themselves, in even the most trivial form, that I feel I catch a faint glimpse of the sheer scale and intricacy of the world and it's history, and that is truly something special.

I'm enrolled in Anthropology 101 right now, and we've spent the last few weeks discussing Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. In ten days, it will be Darwin's two hundredth birthday, and so I've been frequently finding him in the news. Several times I've found myself listening to a story about Darwin's upcoming birthday on NPR while driving to my Anthropology class to talk about him for two hours.

Much has been made of the fact that Darwin and our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, are the exact same age having both been born on the same day (February 12th) in 1809. Several articles in the February issue of the Smithsonian's magazine have made much of this fact, and it's symbolic and poetic implications. For my part, I took Poli Sci last semester in the same classroom in which I'm now taking Anthropology, but I guess that's not much.

But driving back from Anthropology today, I heard on NPR that Wedgwood China was in serious trouble. The English China company had apparently merged with Ireland's Waterford Crystal, and now both were in trouble, planning to go their separate ways, and possibly on the verge of bankruptcy. I found this interesting since Wedgwood's founder, Josiah Wedgwood, was the maternal grandfather of Charles Darwin, and the Wedgwood fortune was part of the reason Darwin could afford to neglect his studies and take that now famous pleasure cruise aboard the HMS Beagle in 1829. Indeed, it was Wedgwood who persuaded Darwin's father to allow him to go.

When I got home, I made myself some lunch and then set out to run my big errand for the day: mailing two books back to my cousin in India. One was a copy of Q and A the 2005 novel by Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup and the loose basis for this year's Oscar favorite Slumdog Millionaire.The second was a 2009 planner put out by an Indian Newspaper, the Deccan Chronicle. I guess that each year's planner has an Indian historical figure- theme, because this was a Tippu Sultan-themed planner with his biography on the first page and countless portraits of the South Indian monarch displayed throughout. The planner was tempting to keep since it smelled like India and would be a wonderful talisman and reminder of home to have throughout this challenging semester. Nonetheless, I had to return it. My cousin sent both of these books to me as a gift, and as I am no longer speaking to her, I can't accept them.

I don't know what it is about my cousin, Y. but for as long as I can remember I've found her simultaneously compelling and horrible. She is almost fourteen years older than me and seems like my antithesis in every way. She is a neat, precise and determined professional, the editor-in-chief of the Chennai Deccan Chronicle, who is charming and yet secretive, protective of her privacy and (as far as I can tell) adept at Machiavellian social-combat if her bubble is threatened. I'll admit, right off the bat, that my issues with her are pretty trivial, but I simply feel that I've been ignored and condescended-to by her for the past twelve years, and this has all come to a head very recently. After feeling evaded and talked-down-to in a series of emails we exchanged, I sent her a vitriolic missive, intending to force her to talk to me or end our relationship for good. She never replied, and a few weeks later I discovered that she'd blocked me on facebook.

My mother returned from India a few weeks ago, and she brought me these books from Y. It felt like a slap in the face. It was as though she was writing off my anger as some childish temper tantrum. It was her way of being better than the whole problem. And plus it seemed, blatantly, like a tactic. She's known for her hospitality, for lavishing gifts on people and for adamantly accepting nothing in return. But she's much stingier with people she knows well, and seems to give gifts and do favors only to win people over. Feeling like I couldn't keep both these gifts and my integrity I decided to mail them back. This package is the silver bullet and the horse's head in her bed. It is an act of vengeance, a weapon, a tactic and a message.

Q and A is a story of Love, Tippu Sultan's life, a story of War. Tippu, the “Tiger of Mysore”, was a brutal Muslim ruler who forcibly converted Hindus on pain of death. In Karnataka, there is a spot called Tipu's Drop, where the Sultan's men would hurl recalcitrant Hindus to their death. Still he made gifts of jewelry and land grants to Hindu temples in order to curry favor with Hindu rulers. (These highly political “gifts” seem similar in intent to the books given me by my cousin, how fitting, then, his likeness on the cover of that planner.) He also waged a series of long wars against the British, the Anglo-Mysore wars. A drawn out clash between East and west which would claim his life in 1799. “Mohammed Faisal-Iftekar” (the pen name of an anonymous Pakistani writer) referenced Tippu in the title of his 2006 novel, The only King to Die on the Battlefield.

Like the war between Tippu and the British, the feud between Y. and myself is a clash between east and west, but the act of mailing back her books feels to me more like an act of vengeance than an act of warfare. Perhaps the best known revenge tale in modern times is Alexandre Dumas' The count of Monte Cristo. First Published between the years 1844 and 1846 (or from the year Charles Darwin began, tentatively, to outline in writing his theory of natural selection to the year Abraham Lincoln was elected to his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives.) The count of Monte Cristo also seems to me a classic David and Goliath story, Edmond Dantes is persecuted by well-connected noblemen who conspire to have him imprisoned for life. On making public his theory of natural selection, Darwin made an enemy of the Church of England, and risked association with revolutionary France (then under the rule of the “citizen king” Louis-Phillipe, former employer and ally of Alexandre Dumas). John Wilkes Booth probably thought of himself in similar terms when he assassinated Lincoln on April 14, 1865, I've often viewed the conflict between Y. and myself this way as well.

Jules Verne, also French, created his own enduring revenge-obsessed character, Nemo captain of the Nautilus. Nemo was an Indian nobleman whose family was killed during the Sepoy Mutiny. Nemo's name is Latin for “No One” and Greek for “I give what is due”, some believe Verne took his name from the Scottish motto “Nemo me impune lacessit” or “No one impunes me unpunished”. Like Yagna and myself, Nemo is Indian, and like the other characters in this story he is David, in this case fighting the Goliath of Imperialism and in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a literal giant monster.

The character Nemo is also allegedly the nephew of Tippu Sultan.

Whew! Thank god for wikipedia. Moving right along., Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. While taking in a popular play by playwright Tom Taylor entitled Our American Cousin, about “the introduction of an awkward boorish American to his aristocratic English relatives” (I think that one is self-explanatory). Taylor also served as Editor-in-Chief of Punch magazine, which inspired an Urdu-language Indian spinoff, Awadh Punch which, like Nemo, was a thorn in the side of India's British rulers.

Y. is also the editor-in-chief of an Indian newspaper.

Awadh Punch had a series of ambitious and intelligent young writers associated with it, which helps explain it's success. The Deccan Chronicle, likewise owes it's success to its charismatic owner Venkattram Reddy. His story looks more like William Randolph Hearst's than Awadh Punch's, however. Alexandre Dumas appears to have had a similar savvy when it came to dealing with newspapers and this allowed him to maintain his extravagant lifestyle.

William Randolph Hearst's life became the basis for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, (and the story of the battle between Welles and Hearst which ensued is another David v.s. Goliath story). In the movie, Charles Foster Kane erects a pleasure palace/hideaway in which to essentially imprison his wife. That Palace is called Xanadu, named for the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “...In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately palace build...". Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's grandfather was a great patron of Coleridge, giving him enough money to live on without working so he could focus on his art.

Coleridge was a freethinking follower of William Godwin, and thus likely opposed to the racist outlook of his era's Imperial powers. Imperialism shaped the lives of many people in this story, from the bitter Indian submarine captain Nemo, to Dumas (the son of an Afro-Carribean former slave, his race caused problems for him all his life) to Darwin (whose theories would be misinterpreted and misrepresented by the Eugenics Movement and the Social Darwinists, in fact, his own son would become a follower of eugenics) to Lincoln who, of course, was the great emancipator.

Lincoln presidency was characterized by the American Civil War, and, despite a cynical outlook toward politicians in general I have a bit of a soft spot for him. He would ultimately pay a high price for his role in that war, and so “Faisal-Iftekar” to the contrary, I think Lincoln could be considered another king who died on the battlefield.

Vietnam was another war which colored the terms of many U.S. presidents. To me, (as well as thousands of assassination buffs) however, the one who payed the highest price for his role in that war was JFK who also suffered a high profile assassination in 1963, the year Vikas Swarup, author of Q and A. was born. Swarup is a Indian diplomat, and Kennedy placed an emphasis on diplomacy, wanting to create an atmosphere of detente.

And what are diplomats if not communicators. Communication is the bridge between people and is antithetical to war. (“What we have here is a failure to communicate” says Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke, another David and Goliath tale.) Though Kennedy tried, it is Reagan who is remembered as the great communicator. Reagan, second in popularity only to our doomed President Lincoln.

In the story of Y. and myself, there is no communication. In fact it was a lack of communication from her end that caused the whole house of cards to fall in the first place, but then I'm sure in this I am equally culpable.

In any event, this package is a message, a form of communication. Hermes, the messenger god, god of communication, gave Perseus the weapons by which he slew Medusa. So too, will I, using this message, confront my own Medusa, my own Goliath, and as it travels straight and true across the Pacific, with what lives will it intersect? And what will be the ramifications of its arrival?

Last Tardy Thoughts on Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is continuing to hang around in the headlines and on the news long past her sell-by date. At least as far as I'm concerned.

I admit that it's troubling to see her still plotting. I figured she'd fade peacefully into obscurity like she should, and so since she hasn't I suppose it's best for someone to keep tabs on her.

Nevertheless, we're still just beyond the point where Sarah bashing is relevant and amusing, and so I hesitate to bring her up. I hesitate also because, as I mentioned in my last post, it's almost unforgivably pretentious to assume that anyone gives a shit how I feel politically. Disregarding that, here goes:

I read reccently on Wikipedia about an interesting phenomenon called "anal-winking". According to them, a certain Dr. Stuart Horn discovered that "a noxious or tactile stimulus will cause a 'wink' contraction of the anal sphincter muscles and also flexion". A controversy emerged from this, when another doctor, a Bruce Woodling "developed the anal wink test, which he alleged was an indisputable diagnostic indicator that a child had been sodomized."

Wikipedia goes on to say that these ideas have now been "utterly discredited", and calls them pseudoscientific. Specifically, they say "Woodling's pseudoscientific testimony during the trial of Ray Buckey contributed to Buckey spending five years in prison without bail. Buckey was later released without conviction".

This is, of course, very sad. And it's unfortunate that Woodling's negligence may have cause innocent people to suffer this sort of persecution.

Nevertheless, I think in the case of Sarah Palin, Woodling's assertion may still hold true:

"When an asshole winks at you, you know there's gonna be some ass-fucking involved".

Man, Fuck Bipartisanship!

So, I'll have to admit, when I found out Obama had won the election I was pretty happy. I was convinced that he'd lose, for one reason or another, and that we'd end up, once again, ignorantly marching into our past. In fact, I was so relieved when I found out he'd won, that I forgot for a moment that Obama is a fucking "moderate".

Especially in the context of the last eight years, I think that the word "moderate"should be considered a pejorative term which translates, roughly, to "dipshit". I've said it once, and I'll say it again: fuck bipartisanship! Haven't conservatives done enough damage to permanently exclude themselves from the political process? But I guess that's just hopelessly naive in a country where Karl Rove is sitting pretty on Fox news, and actually presuming to give Obama advice, like some kind of concerned grandfatherly senior politician. Or where a conservative caricature like Sarah Palin was actually given a shot at the Whitehouse instead of desperately hidden by the RNC, lest her very existence drive the final nail in the coffin of their credibility. Or where the son of an east-coast millionaire CIA spook can masquerade as a small government Texas populist, disgrace himself terribly, and yet be around long enough to endorse another drunken loutish son of priviledge attempting to pass himself off as a straight talkin' "maverick" war hero from Arizona.

Anyway, that's enough ranting. I don't want to make the pretentious mistake of assuming that other people give a shit about how I feel politically. But one more thing: I've noticed that no matter what gains democrats make, they never seem to be able to shake off this image of them as weak humanist fairies who piss and moan about civil rights and compassion until they need the big strong conservatives to come in, guns blazing, and bail them out. If a democrat wants to succeed, he has to move right, and if he does so, he earns the honor of...comparison to a badass animal?

Come on! "Blue dog" Democrats? What the goddamn fuck, you guys? How come, if some democrat hates abortion or thinks we're being "too soft on the blacks" he becomes a Badass Blue Asskickin'Dirty Dawg Dem! I mean, shit, if I didn't know better, I would think that political discourse in this country is inherently slanted right. But what the fuck do I know?

Anyway, prop 8 passed in California, proving once again that even us latte-sippin' left-coasters can be total monstrous reactionaries just like everyone else. I had a thought today at work. Wouldn't it be funny if snack foods had really unappetizing names? Like if, instead of "goldfish" they were "Sweetass Cheez Flavored Fish Krackerz", and Cheetos were, like, "Cornilicious Artificially Flava'd Cheddar Nukes", or something? Just a thought.

*sigh*

...erm...

One thing I've noticed, lately, is the phenomenon of white celebrities with East-Indian names. What the fuck is with this? Did their parents think this would be cute? Devendra Banhart, Uma Thurman, Radha Mitchell (whose full name, by the way, is Radha Rani Amber Indigo Anunda Mitchell) this is so offensive, and so potentially destructive it's not even funny. It seems like, wherever I go, everyone has some ass-backwards highly idiosyncratic take on India. Either you have white hipster types talking about how "super spiritual" it is, who wear kurtas, decorate their rooms with Krishna and Buddha statues or batik tapestries, and visit their fucking "gooroos", or, turning away from this in revulsion, people who lash out at India itself to get at these hipsters, making the country itself effectively the battleground for some intellectual proxy war between competing bands of hip urban whites. For example, Matt Cale, the in-house movie critic for the website ruthlessreviews.com, in a review of the Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited once referred to Calcutta as "the world's largest open sewer". Matt Cale is sophisticated man who typically leans to the left, and so this was particularly jarring coming from him. Really, though, his beef wasn't with India, it was with the aforementioned vacant Western pop-Orientalists, desperately seeking meaning in their lives, who turn to India and other eastern
countries to find salvation in the exotic religions of these countries. Instead of saying that, though, he had to talk shit on India. I mean what did India ever do to him? What has India to do with the idiots who blindly embrace it or the bigoted cocksuckers who, just as blindly, shun it.

I mean are we all ready to throw in the towel with this whole cultural-relativism thing? Are we going to start measuring every society by the standards of the West? Has Matt Cale ever considered the fact that the filthy streets of Calcutta are almost identical to the streets of any post-colonial third world country and that maybe, both he and the orientalists he hates so much are more culpable, in a way, than the people who live in that "open sewer"? OF COURSE he fucking has! He's a well-read, educated person, so how the fuck dare he condemn India for the sins of a bunch of confused acid-burnouts and bohemian dipshits? And the worst part, is that there seems to be some mingling between these two categories of wretched fuckers. Recently, I saw hipster-orientalist swine Devendra Banhart's music video for his song "Carmencita", which takes-the-piss at Bollywood films and Indian religious serials, it reinforces all the most offensive religous and cultural stereotypes, and is, in short, Indian minstrelsy.

Even if "Devendra" was an actual Indian, which he's not, this shit would be unforgivably offensive. He'd be betraying his own culture and whoring it out to white audiences for cheap laughs. But as it stands, it's worse! It's fucking racist!

Who does this bastard think he is?

On another note, I see that, since the Democrats need an old-guard, salt-of-the-earth hero to rally behind (particularly one who's dead or dying) to compete with Republican Reagan-worship, that they've decided to suddenly canonize Ted Kennedy. I guess even dudes who let their mistresses drown to death deserve second chances.

Fuck!

...ugh...

So, it's nine a.m and I still haven't slept. Not because I can't, but because I don't want to. See, I don't know for a fact that I can't sleep because I haven't tried yet. Maybe, as soon as I hit the sheets I'll start to doze. Maybe not. As such, it would be inaccurate to say I can't sleep, more precise to say I haven't yet, and don't want to just now. But in either case, I must apologize in advance. I am writing this, again, because it seems to need updating, and not because I have anything to say. This, compounded with my lack of sleep may make for a really sucky piece, so be warned.

Instead of sleeping I watched two documentaries. One about Charles Bukowski, the other about the Bloods. Both Bukowski and the bloods are from Los Angeles. Also, the five men interviewed in the Blood movie seem like essentially good people molded into violent, hard bastards by circumstance. This is equally true of Bukowski.

I found out some interesting things today. First of all, one of rapper Li'l Wayne's favorite bands is Nirvana. Also I learned that Charles Bukowski hated Mickey Mouse, that character being, for him, representative of society's great effort to hide all horror and evil and violence under some artificial, expertly manicured facade. Disney depicted everything in their cartoons: hunger, violence, greed, war etc. but cute. And that sickened him.

I learned that hearing cute girls tell anecdotes about their butts can be very appealing, but I think I already knew this on some level. I learned that seventy-nine percent of people who visit the site Streetgangs.com (at least those who participated in the poll) think that Barack Obama is going to win in November.

I also learned that sometimes, even when you think you can tell a set of twins apart, one from the other, you really can't, and you'd better hope that that doesn't lead to anything awkward.

On another note, a strange thing happened to me at work today. There's this blonde woman who always comes in with a bunch of her friends. She has a really awful facelift and gives off trophy-wifeish vibes, and she's really loud and eccentric and it's hard to deal with because she's friendly and irreverent, but somehow gives the impression that if you take any liberties with her, she might blow her stack and endanger your job. Anyhow, she comes out of a theatre while I'm sweeping up and tells me it's freezing in there, and asks could I put the heat on or turn the air conditioning off? I say sure, and she says

"good cuz, it's so cold in there. See?" and she grabs my wrist. I think maybe she wants me to feel her hands, which would be forward enough, but she bends down and touches my wrist with her nose.

Weird huh? I mean, it didn't bother me. Hey, her nose was cold, she had a reason to be upset, I'll certainly give her that. I wonder if she has any idea that this behavior could be construed as weird, or offensive. I wonder if this was some sort of come on?

I'll let you people mull that over.

...huh...

Well, I guess I screwed the pooch on that one. I really did intend to write a series of thoughtful pieces about my trip to India, little journal-like bits which would catalogue the emotional highlights of this trip and try to evoke, for the American reader, the complex experience of a young NRI as he tries to understand himself in the context of the ancient culture and complicated family he was born into.

This, of course, begs the question: "What American reader?" Who the fuck did I want to write all this for? Probably me. Also, I've been to India before. This was only one of many trips I've taken in the last ten years, so why did I expect this one to bear literary fruit? Well I dunno. In any case, maybe next time I go I'll write a fuckin' book.

My dad is listening to some weepy love song by Gordon Lightfoot. That kind of stuff always makes me a little maudlin. Gordon Lightfoot confuses me, he seems too talented to be so mediocre. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

I wonder if I should publish this post. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere, really, and I think I'm only writing it because I haven't updated in a while, and I stubbornly refuse to let go of this blog. The act of writing stuff down and throwing it up on the internet for all the world to see is really the kind of high narcissism which I find addictive. In the months I've had this thing, I don't think I've attracted a single foreign reader. At least judging by the comments, the only fools who've peeped the hectic steez on this rantpage have been people I know. Which is nice, because it means that I have some friends who care enough to check this thing from time to time and read what I write. But, and I'll own up to this, I think at bottom I'm really writing this to get laid. This shouldn't surprise anyone, really. I do lot's of stuff to get laid. Like shower, try to look okay, try to be reasonably functional, I mean, really, almost everything I do is done to either get play, stave off death or unhappiness, or both. This is most likely true of most people.

Okay, cool, so now I'm waxing philosophical. See you never know where these things will go when you start them.

Another quick thing about Lightfoot. I really like that song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". Many people who know it, don't. It has been variously reamed out by the likes of Seinfeld and Dave Barry, but why? It's not a bad song, and anyway growling out "folk" songs with campy old-time pioneer and maritime imagery is kind of his gig, and so what? More power to him!

Anyhow, on a totally unrelated note, I've been hearing some rumbling to the effect that Barack Obama is too skinny to be President. Now, this could very well be true for all I know. I mean, we all know how much brute strength and sheer physical stamina is neccesary to adequately dispatch the duties of Commander in Chief. For example, when, inevitably, Barack Obama finds that his country needs him to defeat Lex Luthor and Fu Manchu in hand to hand combat or intercept an incoming ICBM in midair and pitch it into the sun, well, then we'll probably all wish we'd elected a more hale and hearty president like the septaugenarian John McCain.

But, yeah, I mean I don't really like Obama that much. I'll vote for him because I actively dislike the opposition, but I'm not a huge fan. I will say this, though: It seems like Obama has been the victim of more fierce mudslinging than I remember ever seeing. It would seem that Obama is a runty, elitist slum lord who hates America and the working man, has a black militant wife, attends a black supremacist church, and wants to piss all over the second amendment so that his friends in Hamas and the Weather Underground can come in and fuck us all up. Huh.

Well friends, I'm sure you're all tired of this bit by now, tune in next time when I'll piss and moan about my job, talk about pears, and try to tie both in with the kennedy assassination or something. Cheers!

Bande Mataram!

So I am currently in India, on one of my annual trips to the motherland, where I will attempt to disgorge from my fouled system the white man's poison, cleanse from my corrupted consciousness the oppressive shackles of Patriarchy, cut from my diseased flesh the parasites of anthropocentrism, avarice and false piety. And suckle from the life giving breast of Bharati, bathing in her gentle streams and sitting as a king at her table.

Or something like that. In any event I'm here, and I'm here for two solid months. This will be the longest block of time I've ever spent in this hot, bright, gorgeous, loud, fragrant, malodorous, beautiful, blessed, rotten fucking country. As I write this, I am forced to steal precious time at the keyboard in between photographs. My cousin is getting married, and the whole family is gathered in the living room of my aunts house taking more pictures than Ansel Adams took during his whole career. I'm sweaty, disheveled, dazed from jet lag and uninterrupted travel, and a little worried that I may have inadvertently pissed off one of my uncles. I'm something like the loveable jackass of the family, and that act can get tiresome after awhile, for everyone. Still and all, I'm happy. Happy to be back in a country that has always captured my imagination, evoked intense and complicated emotions, and never failed to effortlessly crack my hard agnostic shell, albeit temporarily.

Traveling here via Taiwan and Malaysia, with a long series of connecting flights, one hotel stay and endless hours spent waiting at various terminals, it occurred to me that we should perhaps devise a way to quantify poise, grace, and savvy while traveling. Writing about Leonard Cohen, Tom Robbins said that he was a man of the future, equally comfortable hailing a cab in Paris and giving a lecture in L.A., or something to that effect. If such a scale were devised I wonder how I'd fare. Apart from a rather stressful moment when trying to get to the hotel in Malaysia, and an unfortunate episode, just moments from meeting my Uncle and cousin at the airport in Hyderabad, when I was reamed by a duplicitous customs agent who charged me $160 to bring in my cousin's wedding jewelry, it was a smooth journey.

This is hopefully the first of many updates which I'll post while I'm here. Hopefully they will be most edifying for the two or so people who regularly read this fucking thing.