Accidental Blogger

The Future of Jazz...By Way of South Indian Carnatic Music (Andrew)

One of the out-of-left-field suprises in jazz last year was the album Kinsmen, by Indian-American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa.  As a self-deprecating ethnic joke, his brother had given him a CD called "Saxophone Indian Style" -- but when Mahanthappa listened to it, he was amazed to hear South Indian Carnatic music played so well on the Western instrument of the saxophone.  Mahanthappa eventually sought out the saxophonist from "Saxophone Indian Style," who turned out to be Kadri Gopalnath, an acknowledged legend of Carnatic music -- and proposed that the two make an album together.

And the results have turned Mahanthappa into a critical darling.  He's been lauded by Gary Giddins, perhaps the most insightful jazz critic writing today, and Kinsmen's been named one of the best jazz CDs of 2008 by NPR, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and the Village Voice.

So my question for ABers, particularly any that have familiarity with Carnatic music, is what do you think? Is this CD getting overhyped due to the novelty of the concept, or is it truly, as Giddins puts it, "astonishing," "fascinating," and a "momentous achievement that will be around for a long time to come?"

You can get a taste of the sound of the Kinsmen band for free with the videos on Mahanthappa's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/dakshinaband

Moonwalks (Sujatha)

 RIP, Michael Jackson.

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 Buzz Aldrin wanted to be the first Moonwalker, but thwarted, in the final moments, by simple logistics.

"In the end the decision came down to logistics. The lunar landing craft's hatch was located on Armstrong's side. It would have too cumbersome, and perhaps even dangerous, for Aldrin to have climbed over his mission mate, so Armstrong went first."

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Here's a Mr.Bean who is a real artist, as opposed to a mere curator.

 "It has been nearly 40 years since Alan L. Bean walked on the moon as an Apollo astronaut, but he still wrestles with the experience every day, trying to recapture what he and other astronauts saw and felt in the medium of paint."

 

(The original Mr.Bean is of course, the one and only Rowan Atkinson.)

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Saved From The Savages

Nearly three years ago I addressed the issue of looted, neglected or destroyed treasures of the world - whether the value of rare, ancient art and artifacts should be measured in regional and nationalistic terms or do they represent the foot prints of history pertinent to all humankind and therefore qualify as global treasures? I wrote:

Those of us born in antique lands with long and continuously evolving histories spanning several centuries and millennia, will identify with the question I am about to pose. It pertains to the theft and sale of ancient artifacts that leave the countries of their origin and find new homes in the museums and private collections elsewhere in distant lands. Trafficking in art and artifacts flows exclusively in one direction - from the poorer nations to the more prosperous ones.  India, China, Egypt and much of the middle and far east have seen ancient religious and cultural artifacts leave native shores and surface in Europe and America.  The fact that much of the art was "taken" by occupiers and colonizers often without even an unscrupulous middleman making money from the sales, is a particularly touchy and often painful aspect of this transfer.

But the story is not as simple as it would appear on considerations of ownership alone.  Many valuable objects were taken or stolen during colonial times.  In the modern era after independence of the host nations, some were acquired legally while others changed hands illegally on the black market. Most countries now ban the sale or transfer of antiquities but rare and ancient artifacts continue to find their way into public and private collections beyond the borders. It is difficult to speculate on the possible fate of the artifacts had they been left where they originally belonged. Would the local governments and museums have had the will or the wherewithal to offer them the wide exposure and  pride of place they have come to enjoy in western museums?  Or would they have crumbled, gathered dust and disappeared altogether? Do poorer nations have the capability to care for their priceless ancient heritage?  Given the immediate economic concerns of more pressing nature, should that even be their priority? There is even a question about how much value locals assign to ancient stone piles and crumbling edifices from a long forgotten era. Can those who are embattled by today's precarious existence, worry about yesterday's fine art?  While "creating" art is the prerogative of the poor and the rich alike, is "preserving" art a luxury afforded only by the wealthy?   The dilemma is indeed a wrenching one - place of origin or centers of preservation and greater visibility?  This is a bit like asking, "Are endangered species better off in their threatened and disappearing habitat or in a well kept zoo?" Should destitute and incapable parents give up their children for adoption or let them struggle and languish in a desperate family milieu? Difficult to answer.

There is another disconcerting factor to consider here other than the priority and capability of less prosperous nations to preserve their heritage. The political tensions that can often overrun the national psyche in developing nations can put historical treasures at risk. Changing ideologies can make monuments and artifacts belonging to opposing political or religious camps vulnerable to vindictive abuse. Think the rampage of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Think Babri Masjid in India. Think the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. 

Ah, the Bamiyan Buddhas! I am not overly sentimental about the disappearance of antique treasures, especially those that are lost to the usual ravages of time. But I find their deliberate destruction for political or religious extremist causes repulsive. The demolition of the nearly 1500 year old colossi of Buddha, in the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan in 2001 by Taliban zealots was unforgivably barbaric, in my angry opinion. The images built in the Greco-Indian style that the local Muslim villagers had peacefully co-existed with for centuries, calling them by the endearing names of Big Neighbor and Small Neighbor, dated back to the Gandhara period when Buddhism flourished in Afghanistan. Ignorant religious fanatics thought nothing of reducing them to rubble for the sake of ideological purity, depriving the world of an awesome ancient record of inspired artistic tribute.   

Yesterday a friend and I went to see the exhibition Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The exhibit comprises ancient treasures of art, worship and craftsmanship, some archaeological finds dating back to the Bronze Age. The mostly pre-Islamic relics hark back to Afghanistan's  mercurial early history influenced in turn by early Greek and Indian conquerors as well as the central Asian nomads who passed through its rugged terrain. The art treasures were rescued and kept hidden by Afghan museum curators and art lovers from the rage filled eyes of the Taliban lest they too became prey to the same fate that befell the Bamiyan Buddhas.

My friend and I found the well designed exhibition admirable and the efforts of those who saved the treasures of their ravaged nation from disappearing, even more so. An excerpt from the museum brochure:

Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul explores the rich cultural heritage of ancient Afghanistan from the Bronze Age (2500 B.C.) through the rise of trade along the Silk Road in the first century A.D.

Strategically located on the commercial routes between China and India in the East and Europe in the West, Afghanistan was at the crossroads of civilizations in Central Asia. This unique blend of cultures and artistic styles is seen in nearly 230 artworks: Bronze Age incised gold vases; bronze and stone sculptures of Greek heroes; graceful ivory apsaras, the beautiful women of Indian tradition; Roman type glass vessels and plaster reliefs; magnificent Persian and Scythian style gold jewelry; as well as distinctively local works. Gold ornaments from the famed Bactrian hoard, a 2,000-year-old treasure cache discovered in 1978 but hidden from view until 2003, are included. Visitors also will gain insight into how the artifacts survived the recent decades of war and chaos and will learn the stories of heroic Afghans who risked their lives to save these and other national cultural treasures from destruction during Soviet occupation and Taliban rule.

More, including slide shows, on the Hidden Tresures exhibits in the National Geographic.

Past-Modern Art (Sujatha)

A few weeks ago, I saw the intriguing works of twin painters Amrit and Rabindra, better known as the Singh Twins via Asian Window. They have applied the techniques of Indian miniatures to contemporary Indo-British life, making for an intriguing and what they like to term a 'Past Modern' approach to painting.

They use the same vivid and highly detailed composition and techniques as the Indian miniaturists of yore, examplified here in the Padshahnama pictures of court life in the age of the Mughals.

Voices and Faces (Sujatha)

After all the world-wide interest in Susan Boyle, there are still some things about the phenomenon which are rather puzzling to me. On seeing the Youtube video for the first time, I was struck by how exaggerated the judges' and audience's eye-rolling and snickering seemed to be. Why should they react thus at the sight of Susan Boyle, who looked like a perfectly ordinary lady you might run into on the street, quite literally, if you were paying more attention to your cellphone than who was in front of you. Her speaking voice and dialect were a little hard to follow, but once she started to sing, barely two lines into the song, the amazing roar of approval, clapping, widened eyes and judge reactions seemed a tad bit too pat. Cue the artifice, the unseen signs prompting the audience to 'Stand up and clap'.
Her voice is amazing and true, and like other feel-good stories, says to the average underdog "Yes, we can...win over the world with the secret talents we unleash upon it." It's the stuff of childhood dreams, when soot-covered Cinderella is removed from her ash-filled corner, ensconced in a beautiful gown, parading in triumph in her glittering carriage. Only, in this case, the focus is on the fact that even a pretty dress and getup will not change the fact that Susan Boyle's face was pegged as ordinary, even ugly, by today's societal (or media-driven?) standards of 'beauty'.
From the Wikipedia link:

Tanya Gold wrote in The Guardian that the difference between Boyle's hostile reception and the more neutral response to Paul Potts in his first audition reflected society's expectation that women be both good-looking and talented, with no such expectation existing for men. In a similar vein, a columnist on Salon.com wrote that Boyle's performance reminded people that "not all fortysomething women are sleek, Botoxed beauties", going on to say that Boyle's sudden fame came from her ability to remind her audience that, like them, she is a normal, flawed and vulnerable person, familiar with disappointment and mockery, but who nevertheless has the determination to fight for her dream.

Several media sources have commented that Boyle's success seemed to have particular resonance in the United States. Writing in The Scottsman Craig Brown quoted a U.S. entertainment correspondent who compared Boyle's story to the American Dream, in that it represented talent overcoming adversity and poverty. The Associated Press described this as Boyle's "hardscrabble story", dwelling on her modest lifestyle and what they saw as urban deprivation in her home town., The Independent New York correspondent David Usborne wrote that America is a country that will always respond to "the fairy tale where the apparently unprepossessing suddenly becomes pretty, from Shrek to My Fair Lady". Piers Morgan, one of the show's judges, also commented on the unusual power this story seemed to have in the U.S., stating that "Americans can be very moved by this sort of thing." He likened Boyle's rise to fame from poverty and obscurity to that of the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, who was the subject of a series of Hollywood films.

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A meteoric rise to fame, fuelled by the technology of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter, as well as major exploding coverage on the network and cable channels. It's hard to believe that this was a reflection of something that happened in January 2009, followed by months of careful editing and virality being unleashed around April 11, 2009.

Talent notwithstanding, the media is unleashing reams of commentary along the lines of "Looks aren't everything, talent is." and "Isn't it amazing how wonderful her voice is, despite her looks and those terrible beetling eyebrows?", "Will she or won't she have a makeover?"

I will confess that I'm amazed by all this silly pontification (Kindly ignore the fact that I'm indulging in it here, as well). Doesn't day-to-day life teach all these millions of people that talent can be wrapped in unlikely packages? Don't they know of mailcarriers or janitors or unprepossessing matrons who share their secret talents with the small circle of friends, untrammeled by the spotlight and glare of airbrushed magazine covers and HDTV?

I seriously doubt it. This is just a temporary phenomenon, even with the huge numbers involved. Tomorrow everyone will be chasing after the next viral thing to hit the internet. But for now, Susan Boyle has achieved her dream, and given fuel to a few million other dreams as well.

(Cross posted from Fluff-n-Stuff)

RIP, Dr. Kutner (Joe)

Kutner committed suicide on House.  First, if you don't watch House, you're missing out.  Second, and this is really cool -- this happened because Kal Penn is leaving to go be an associate director of the White House Office of Public Liaison.  How often do you see an actor do that?

Slumming at the Oscars

Okay, so we haven't talked about it here despite the hoopla. Slumdog Millionaire that is. But today I came across this hilarious video that is worth posting. I am flummoxed by the mass appeal of the movie which swept this year's Oscars and a bit amused when people ask me slightly breathlessly if I am happy about its stupendous success. Friends of my age haven't bothered but two young people at my gym made the friendly overture of mentioning the Oscars "miracle" to me. I am wondering if other Indian Americans are being asked about Slumdog too.

I know, I know, it is just a harmless icebreaker. I thought it was cute that the two young acquaintances approached me with a smile and kind of "congratulated" me for the success of Slumdog. Of the three, only I had hated the movie. And why didn't the film sit well with me? Well, not because it exposed the seamy side of India Shining. India is a huge, complex and multi-faceted country. People anywhere can believe what they wish about India. I myself harbor many complaints and much anger in my heart about the inequities of Indian society. What director Danny Boyle showed in the movie about the heartbreaking squalor of Indian slum life is exaggerated but not entirely incorrect.  But that is not what the movie is about and why it won awards and accolades. It was the puerile, unrealistic and gaudy triumph of the underdog in the story that made it a hit - with just enough sexual tension, cruelty and filth thrown in the mix to complete the image of India that appeals to much of the world. Here is Indian journalist Tarun Tejpal expanding on what I said. (link: Usha Alexander, another non-fan of the Slumdog)

One feels awe not for the film, but for its miraculous journey. Clearly, in an increasingly low-brow ocean of publicity and hype, the idea of true excellence is a drowned raft.

Not shorn of the hype, but because of it, to an Indian, the film ought to disappoint. It tells me nothing that I don’t already know; and it tells me things I know to be not true. Unlike Amitabh Bachchan I have no problems with the film focusing on India’s abject poverty. That focus is salutary, and crying out for further exploration. My problem is the opposite— that it trivialises it. Uses its excreta and chopped limbs to tell a dubious story that leaves the viewer not disturbed but cheerfully smug. You leave the seat exhilarated, not in pain.

The film tells a very big lie: that India’s poor have a happy shot at leaping out of their misery into affluence and joy. One day you can be in the crap heap — diving into excreta — and the next running down a slum girl who may have failed to make school but seems to have managed to walk through Vogue’s offices on her way to teenage. With a stunning lack of plausibility you see the slum child Jamaal grow into a refined public schoolboy who must surely be eating cucumber sandwiches for lunch. India’s wannabe wealthy — billionaires among them — would slice their fingers to boast such a sophisticated son. For that accent alone, they would throw in their toes too.

Aw! Gee! The camera is shaking, the story is sprinting — there is no way anyone can tell if a few chapters have fallen out, several links of logic lost. You have to be grateful Jamal only grows up to be Dev Patel. Given the absence of any need to explain the miraculous transformation, he could well have become Brad Pitt or Prince Charles. To further celebrate the carnival of implausibility, Master Dev acts with the cool flatness of the cucumber sandwich (that he surely must be eating) — no neuroses of the slums tarnishing his soul.

For those celebrating the authenticity of the film, here’s a secret: the makers clearly had no interest in verisimilitude. It’s been the rough approach of artists working the India material for the last hundred years. It arises from a clear understanding of “audience”. The awgee mobs filling theatres around the world, and paying in dollars or some such muscular currency, cannot tell the difference between Hindi and Hindu or the vast distance between Mumbai and Agra. Much like the American tourists at the Taj Mahal, who cannot distinguish between an unlettered, ignorant urchin and a licensed guide.

Update: I wonder if African-Americans are becoming similarly wary of being congratulated on Obama's election to the presidency. Apparently,they are :-)

An Indian Revolutionary in Mexico

I guess to be perfectly accurate, in Mexico he was more of a "green" revolutionary - a Norman Borlaug of sorts.

This is the first time I have heard of Pandurang Khankhoje, an Indian nationalist who traveled the world seeking support for India's freedom from British rule. For a while Khankhoje settled in Mexico where he applied his training as an agricultural scientist to help Mexican farmers successfully grow sturdier varieties of corn. For his efforts and his popularity, Mexican artist Diego Rivera painted a picture of the revolutionary scientist at the head of a dinner table, sharing bread with others. Although I have seen numerous paintings by Diego Rivera, I was unaware of the painting of Khankhoje, just as I was of his life story.  (Thanks to my sister Mandira for the link to the story)

Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje, born in Wardha in 1886, was an angry young man who wanted freedom for India and dignity for Indians. He was raised on stirring tales of 1857 and was in constant trouble with the British police who had a long history sheet on him. The fiery young revolutionary had to flee India when the British spread a dragnet for him.

He became a founder-member of the Ghadar Party in America (many of whose members were executed by the British) and worked unrelentingly to gain international sympathy for the cause of India’s freedom.  Khankhoje’s adventures took him to Japan, Russia, Persia, the US and finally to Mexico, where he settled with his devoted Belgian wife, Jeanne, and had two daughters, Savitri and Maya. A stauch believer in the tenets of the Holy Gita, he started free agricultural colleges for the Mexicans, successfully experimented with varieties of corn, pioneering Mexico's ‘Green Revolution’ and was part of the country’s vibrant artistic and intellectual circle. The image (right) is of a mural by the great  Mexican artist Diego Rivera showing Khankhoje distributing bread to the nations of the world.

However, despite his busy, useful life in Mexico where he felt safe and welcome, Khankhoje pined deeply for his homeland. He saw her gain freedom and came home for good, settling in Pune, re-reading his beloved Gita and the Upanishads. He passed away in 1967. His pediatrician daughter, Savitri Sawhney, who married into the Indian Army, has written a wonderful account of her father's life, called I Shall Never Ask Pardon (Penguin India, 2008, Rs 399). This inspiring and moving Indian life story is truly worth celebrating. Here's a taste:

From frumpy to foxy - reincarnating the first First Lady

A second post on the same day about altered images - or at least an extrapolated one. This one does not involve plagiarism or copyright infringement. Rather it is an exercise in the restoration of national vanity.

The president of the United States is widely perceived to be the most powerful person in the world. So far only males of the species have occupied the august office. Their mates, the first ladies, have played public roles that have ranged from ceremonially ornamental to activist partners. Apparently, it irks some folks that any consort of a US president should be perceived as "frumpy," even if the woman in question has been dead for more than two hundred years. The very first First Lady, Martha Washington is the lady in question.  Her likeness in existing portraits, most of them painted in middle age, are as one historian describes it, of the double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard variety. So, armed with ultra modern technology, a few historians and museum curators embarked upon a mission to revise or rather, photo shop history. With the help of forensic anthropologists at the Lousiana State University's special project known as Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services, or FACES, a new image of a twenty five year old Martha Washington was created by working backwards from her middle aged visage. This painstaking Benjamin Buttoning of the first lady has yielded a satisfactorily attractive and lissome young woman and revamped her "dumpy" reputation.  

  This just in: Martha Washington was hot. Or at least hotter than we thought.

Our image of the mother of our country, vague and insubstantial as it is, is drawn from portraits painted after her death showing a frumpy, dumpy, plump old lady, a fussy jumble of needlework in her lap, wearing what could pass for a shower cap with pink sponge rollers rolled too tight underneath.

But today, 250 years after Martha and George tied the knot, a handful of historians are seeking to revamp the former first lady's fusty image, using the few surviving records of things she wrote, asking forensic anthropologists to do a computerized age-regression portrait of her in her mid-20s and, perhaps most importantly, displaying for the first time in decades the avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day.

Take that, Sally Fairfax.

History is about to be revised.

"We always see Martha with a withered face in her old age. But she was quite a beautiful woman in her younger years, and Washington loved her deeply," said Edward Lengel, senior editor at the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia. "What's happening now is revisionist. But I think it's a whole lot closer to the reality of what she was."

The full story in the Washington Post here.

Purloined Image of Hope and Change

The famous Obamaicon with which we recently had some fun on A.B. (here and here) has now become a subject of controversy.  The Associated Press is alleging that artist Shepard Fairey used an AP photo to create the image without permission. The AP wants a share of the credit and compensation.

NEW YORK (AP) — On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year's presidential campaign: a pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.

Designed by Shepard Fairey, a Los-Angeles based street artist, the image has led to sales of hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers, and has become so much in demand that copies signed by Fairey have been purchased for thousands of dollars on eBay.

The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington.

The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.

"The Associated Press has determined that the photograph used in the poster is an AP photo and that its use required permission," the AP's director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement. "AP safeguards its assets and looks at these events on a case-by-case basis. We have reached out to Mr. Fairey's attorney and are in discussions. We hope for an amicable solution."

"We believe fair use protects Shepard's right to do what he did here," says Fairey's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a lecturer at the Stanford Law School. "It wouldn't be appropriate to comment beyond that at this time because we are in discussions about this with the AP."

Fair use is a legal concept that allows exceptions to copyright law, based on, among other factors, how much of the original is used, what the new work is used for and how the original is affected by the new work.

The Giant (double) Sweep

Here is an instance of art inadvertently augmenting life, captured in a photograph. The picture shows snow being cleared in front of the Denver Museum of Art after yesterday's heavy winter storm. The art work behind appears to be lending a hand.

 

Math Art

Long time reader and family friend, Jatinder Bhatia has sent me the link to an upcoming Math-Art exhibition in Washington D.C. (Dean, don't throw up your hands yet!)  The interesting thing about the exhibition seems to be that the mathematically inclined artists have deliberately expressed math concepts as "real' art. While most of the pieces are two or three dimensional visual depictions, I also came across at least one poem (see JoAnne Growney). For the list of selected artists and links to their works, see here.

Jatinder's friend Suman Vaze is one of the featured artists whose acrylic on canvas painting, Monge's Theorem (see image below) will be on display at the Math-Art exhibition. Suman is a high school mathematics teacher in Hong Kong and she describes her love of art and math thus:

  "I seek to depict interesting mathematical truths, curiosities and puzzles in simple, visually descriptive ways. Mathematical amusements inspire the color and form in my paintings, and I try to strike a balance between the simplicity of the concepts and their depiction in art. The logic and balance of the discipline is beautiful, and I like art that both stills and stimulates the mind – these are the qualities I strive to capture in my work."

Congratulations, Suman and thanks, Jatinder!

(Image posted here with the permission of the artist)

They Got Game!

With an interesting life story, at the end of his tenure Barack Obama will  surely chalk up many firsts for American history books. We already know that Obama loves basketball and is a decent player himself.  Known as Barry O’Bomber in high school, he told Barbara Walters that he had dreams of turning pro until he realized he wasn’t good enough. (So, the presidency of the United States was his second career choice?)  Obama often joked on the campaign trail that on becoming president he would dismantle the White House bowling alley (he is a lousy bowler) and will put in a basketball court. Now it appears that he not only loves the game but also trusts and fraternizes with other hoopsters. He married Michele Obama whom he met through her brother, a star player at Princeton and now the basketball coach at Oregon State. Obama's partiality towards the game goes beyond his circle of family and friends - he has picked the best "basketball cabinet" in White House history. The burgeoning Obama cabinet will feature several basketball fans and fanatics. I see this as a positive development for the nation's future.  An energetic pick-up game of BB where cabinet colleagues sweat and vie for a bouncing ball without much talk, is good for the mind and body - a healthy competition with no time for back biting. Far better than golf which offers colleagues and rivals many opportunities for conspiring and conniving.

Barack Obama, the US President-elect, has boasted that his Cabinet will be the first in US history that can hold its own on a basketball court.

His latest nominee is the 6ft 5in Arne Duncan, who made his name reforming the Chicago school system and has been picked as Mr Obama's Education Secretary. Mr Duncan was the former co-captain of the Harvard basketball team and played professionally in Australia after graduating. He was also chosen to shoot a few hoops with the Democratic candidate on Election Day.

“I did not select Arne because he’s one of the best basketball players I know,” Mr Obama said yesterday. “Although I will say that I think we are putting together the best basketball-playing cabinet in American history.”

For a full list of future cabinet members who could figure on Obama's White House team, see here. The list left out Paul Volcker, who is 6ft 7in and played basketball for Princeton. Although not a cabinet member, the ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve was picked by Obama to be the chairman of his Economic Recovery Board. At 81, I doubt that Mr. Volcker will join others on court as a player or referee. But he could act as the coach. He still got game, I am sure.

Mimi Radhakrishnan: Artist, Story Teller

On my last trip to India, I did not have an opportunity to go to an art gallery or museum but I did have two enjoyable art related encounters. One was the search I undertook for a recently published but hard- to- find book about my first art teacher, the late Abani Sen, which put me in touch with his son whom I had last seen as a school girl. The other was meeting artist Mimi Radhakrishnan who later pleasantly surprised me with a gift of the book I was looking for. 

Mimi is an artist and a published author of fiction. In fact, I had read her book of short stories several years before I met her in person. During a meeting in her home, I had the pleasure of touring Mimi's studio. I saw several finished paintings as well as some works in progress in preparation for an upcoming exhibition in 2009. (An added treat was viewing a few samples of her husband, renowned sculptor Radhakrishnan's superb creations)

Trained in Kalabhavan, the art school at the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore at  Shantiniketan, Mimi began her artistic career as a print maker. Her "crossover" to the realm of painting is thoroughly joyful and well received as attested to by the following profile.

We normally use two categories of artists- one trained in an art school as opposed to the naïve autodidact. But Mimi insists that even an artist, highly skilled in a specific medium, may step into the territory of the latter exemplified by her own transition from printmaking to painting. At the time of deep crisis while wrestling with the intractability of oil painting, she would draw strength from her memory, of what Ramkinker Baij used to tell his students about how he learnt about the technique of painting: it was from a salesman at the G C Laha paint shop in Calcutta that Kinker discovered the joy of oil painting and paints' changing texture and viscosity when mixed with linseed oil and turpentine!

So how would a printmaker handle paint? It is in this crucial question that I locate a contemporary concern in the disjuncture between her technique and her content. The technique of oil painting taken up by her allows direct contact with the surface of the canvas but the form that builds up under the execution of her brush draws from a repertoire of the always and already seen, known and experienced. In the Swirl Called China is a mis-en-scene of images considered Chinese in tourism brochures. No wonder that in the titles of her works, there is a recurring reference to “memory”. At the level of content, she registers the mediatedness, a necessary technical imperative in printmaking but now applied to a mode of representation. This makes her combine the expressionist potential of oil painting, essentially stroke based with a printmaker's obsession with the procedural, working from one palimpsest to another. Again, her writer's acumen of writing page after page translated well into painting layer after layer, as if a long narrative and strings of characters have been telescoped into a painterly spectacle.

Indeed. In executing her paintings, Mimi wears the additional hats of a print maker and story teller. Many of her paintings are framed by a "border" - like a sari or an embroidered shawl. The backgrounds  are textured with print like motifs - fish scales, floral, water lines. The story-like character of the compositions derives from the repetition of a theme over several canvases and titles like "Holding Dodo's Eggs in Despair" and "Masked Men in Conversation."  Characters appear and reappear through series of paintings. Friends meet at the foot of a mountain in one panel. They begin a journey in the next and reach a magical destination in the third. In one painting the bearded sage Chamatkari Baba lands among expectant devotees. Then they gather to celebrate with abandon. In the final canvas one of them receives the Baba's final blessings. There is a dream like quality to the paintings like the tales of a fabulist. In all of them, Mimi pointed out to me what the figures may be "thinking" and where they are "going."  Notice the three portraits I have posted below the fold. They belong to a series representing Muslim women of India with names like Dr. Jahanara Begum, Professor Nusrat Rizvi and Miss Niloufer, B.Sc. III Yr. The portraits are of imaginary women. Mimi gives them names and educational credentials that evoke real personalities and vocations. The two Istanbul pieces illustrate the artist's knack for mural like compositions, juxtaposing related human figures, artifacts and edifices as parts of a larger commentary.

Mimi's artistic eye and training spill over into her surroundings - in her tastefully designed home and the lush garden she has planted in her backyard, an unexpected and pleasing oasis amidst the overdeveloped urban south Delhi neighborhood. She is also an ardent and unapologetic cat lover. Three cats share her home and garden with Mimi. Her husband claims that during the course of the day she has more conversations with her tabby Baichung than she does with him. The title of her last exhibition (all the paintings posted here are from that show) was Twisted Tales - Between Images and Words. My second meeting with Mimi lasted a little over two hours. During that time she and I discussed our cats for nearly forty five minutes. That might strike some who don't understand cats, as a twisted tale of sorts!      

Please turn the page for the thumbnail images of some of Mimi's paintings - be sure to click for enlargement.
 

Amazing High Speed Photos (Sujatha)

Enjoy!

Science as Art (Sujatha)

The 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge winners.

Nandalal Bose: An Indian Modern Master

An exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art showcases the works of Nandalal Bose, an Indian painter who was at the forefront of the Indian modern art movement. A life long student of art, Bose's education was influenced by the Tagore family of Bengal, artist Abanindranath Tagore in particular. Bose drew the inspiration for his subject matter from Indian history, mythology and the landscape of Bengal. His style was also shaped to a large extent by Japanese paintings and pen & ink drawings, Mughal miniatures and and later the Buddhist paintings of the Ajanta caves. He went on to become the head of Kala Bhavan, the art school, a part of the once famous Vishwa Bharati University at Santiniketan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore. The winner of numerous awards and honors, a significant collection of Bose's works is housed at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. A brief history of his life, work and the history of the Indian modern art movement in the New York Times.

Word is that contemporary Indian art is the next sensation on the international market. So now’s the time to learn something about where it came from, which the nuanced, storytelling show called “Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (1882-1966)” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art helps us to do.

Along with detailed information about one artist’s life and times, the show delivers a significant piece of news, or what is still probably news to many people: that modernism wasn’t a purely Western product sent out like so many CARE packages to a hungry and waiting world. It was a phenomenon that unfolded everywhere, in different forms, at different speeds, for different reasons, under different pressures, but always under pressure. As cool and above-it-all as modern may sound, it was a response to emergency.

In India the emergency was a bruising colonialism that had become as intolerable to artists as to everyone else. From the official British perspective, India had no living art. Its indigenous traditions were dead, the stuff of museums, and ethnological ones at that. Western classicism was the only classicism; European oil painting was the only worthy medium. Indian artists had to learn it if they wanted careers, but even then their options were limited.

Naturally some people, British and Indian alike, saw things another way. Ernest Binfield Havell, a British teacher and art historian, did. He recognized Indian art as the grand, ancient, still-vibrant phenomenon it was. And as director of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, he encouraged Indian students to bring their own past, transformed, into the present.

This mission really took fire, however, in a social circle gathered around the Tagore family in Calcutta. One of its members, the artist Abanindranath Tagore, taught at the Government School and developed a type of painting based on Indian rather than Western models. His uncle, the writer Rabindranath Tagore, opened an experimental university at Santiniketan in West Bengal. Devoted to the study, preservation and regeneration of native culture, it would be a modernist seedbed.

Into this venturesome environment came a young painter named Nandalal Bose, first as one of Abanindranath’s prize students, later as a teacher and director of art at Rabindranath’s school. From the start Bose understood the concepts behind the school: the idea that an aesthetic was also an ethos, that art’s role was more than life-enhancing, it was world-shaping.

For a slide show of some of Bose's paintings on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, see here.  More about the artist here.

Great Music You May Have Missed (Andrew)

The music of Miles Davis' electric period, which began in roughly 1969 and continued on to his death in 1991, used to be criticized as crude and unfocused in comparison with his earlier masterworks like Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue, and the albums of his two great quintets.  Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way, with their moody, chaotic, sprawling tracks and huge bands of multiple pianists, guitar players, and saxophonists were criticized as indulgent, dull, and uninspired.

This older assessment, by critics like Stanley Crouch and Jack Chambers, has become a minority viewpoint, to say the least.  Among many other musicians, trumpeters like Dave Douglas, Roy Hargrove, and Nicholas Payton clearly show the influence of "electric Miles" in their sound.  Critics have published books that treat this music as seriously as any other part of Davis' career.  And record companies, desperate to sell anything in their vaults, particularly to a jazz audience actually inclined to pay for meticulously-created re-issues, has released lavish, expanded box sets versions of early 70s LPS like Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way, On the Corner, and A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

The one I'd humbly like to bring to your attention is a 5-disc live album called The Cellar Door Sessions, recorded in 1970.  What's wonderful about this music is its embrace of the funk.  Whereas Bitches Brew tends to emphasize texture and a kind of haunted, ambient quality, The Cellar Door Sessions is held together by a 20-year-old Motown bass prodigy named Michael Henderson.  Since each of these tracks is sprawling and free-form, Henderson's endlessly energetic grooves keep the whole affair moving and full of surprises  And the individual soloists are ferocious!  Who knew Keith Jarrett could rock an electric piano so hard?  Saxophonist Gary Bartz repeatedly builds himself into an explosive lather.  And on the last disc, fusion guitar god John McLaughlin joins the group to add yet another voice. 

Unlike some of the other reviewers of this set, I find Davis' trumpet a bit overshadowed by his young-turk superstars.  But as perhaps the greatest talent scout in jazz history, only he could have the wherewithal and audacity to put together a band playing this splendid combination of rock, jazz, and unvarnished funkiness.  Long live the electric Miles revival!

P.S. If you'd like to listen for yourself without investing the $65-100 for the set, check out this Kevin Whitehead review on NPR.  I'm not crazy about the selections Whitehead chose to play, as they don't highlight the great soloing as much I'd like, but it does give you a flavor.

Anti-Motivational Art

Came across some funny anti-motivational posters (via Shunya's Notes).  Also discovered that the website lets you create your own parody posters. I designed a few using some photos in my computer archive. Click for enlargement and let me know what your message would be for these photos.

                            

The Purity of Pursuit

Here is one topic on which most people have a strong opinion. My own take on the matter is a bit mixed and the older and more cynical I grow, I seem to be leaning away from what I once fervently believed as a youthful sports fan. I have had some heated debates with others who hold a position on this matter more purist than mine. Now that the 2008 Olympics are in full swing, and we are  dreaming of "Citius, Altius, Fortius" the issue is once again on many minds.

The world of sports may be the last bastion of perceived purity where we expect to see miracles of human ability, unaided by external tools or stimuli.  While we tolerate smoke and mirrors in most other pursuits, we don't like our modern gladiators to "cheat." I mean, we live in a world of widespread  physical and psychological enhancements and tinkering. Ordinary folks as well as beautiful celebrities are often surgically altered for the sake of vanity and show biz; capitalists and so-called worshipers of the free market such as big corporations and hedge funders fix and manipulate markets to line their own pockets and rob ordinary working folks of jobs and pension funds; nations go to war under false pretenses and citizens support the aggression for the sake of patriotism; concert musicians take beta-blockers so their hands won't waver during performances due to irregular heart beats; in-vitro fertilization and rented wombs produce "genetic" descendants for infertile couples.  Medical interventions are available for numerous human appetites and disorders.

We have come a long way from the hypocrisy of "amateur" sports when talented but often poor young men and women were supposed to push the limits of physical achievement in the sporting arena and play by the rules set by aristocratic men of leisure. That silly notion of "purity" robbed many atheletes of a dignified life after they were past their physical prime. For example, all round outstanding sportsman Jim Thorpe was stripped of his Olympic medals and lived in abject poverty for not being "amateur" enough.  Jesse Owens, the winner of four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics spent his later years racing circus horses because he couldn't get paid as a sportsman. Two times Grand Slam winner Rod Laver languished outside the glamorous "amateur" tennis circuit until the advent of the Open Era when  "professionals" were at last permitted to compete in the major championships. We have forever abandoned the obsession with "unpaid" athletes. The world of sports is now one of the most lucrative for those who excel. But we still cling to the fond belief of "naturalness" in athletic endeavor and any suspicion of performance enhancement by artificial means throws a shadow over sporting achievements. So what exactly is "natural" in sports when we constantly seek massive technical and technological advances that mostly favor athletes from wealthier nations ?  While mechanical enhancement through space age equipment and gear is kosher, the one area where we cannot bring ourselves to accept outside tinkering, is the body of the athlete. Use of chemical agents to enhance performance is cause for heavy fines and dismissal in most sports, especially in the Olympics. Is it time to shed this last taboo which is often skirted by athletes who know which drugs to use and how to evade detection? If atheltes are fully informed about the ill effects of performance enhancing drugs and decide to use them despite the risk, should we penalize them? What is wrong with "doping" in sports? In a provocative article in the New York Times, columnist John Tierney says, "Let the games be doped." What do you think?

Once upon a time, the lords of the Olympic Games believed that the only true champion was an amateur, a gentleman hobbyist untainted by commerce. Today they enforce a different ideal. The winners of the gold medals are supposed to be natural athletes, untainted by technology. After enough “scandals,” the amateur myth eventually died of its own absurdity. The natural myth is still alive in Beijing, but it’s becoming so far-fetched — and potentially dangerous — that some scientists and ethicists would like to abandon it, too.

What if we let athletes do whatever they wanted to excel?

Before you dismiss this notion, consider what we’re stuck with today. The system is ostensibly designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes’ health and set an example for children, but it fails on all counts.

The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that “antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear” by relying on unscientifically calibrated tests, like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory. Even if the authorities manage to correct their tests, they can’t possibly keep up with the accelerating advances in biology. Some athletes are already considering new drugs like Aicar and GW1516, which made news recently when researchers at the Salk Institute used them to quickly turn couch-potato mice into treadmill champions with new, strong muscles.

“There’s a possibility that athletes in this Olympics will be using these drugs,” said Ronald Evans, the leader of the team at Salk, who has been fending off inquiries from athletes about these drugs. He has advised the antidoping authorities on how to detect these drugs, but whether they’ll be able do it competently this Olympics is far from clear.

If athletes didn’t have to cheat to win, they and society would be better off, says Bengt Kayser, the director of a sports medicine institute at the University of Geneva. In a 2005 article in The Lancet, he and two bioethicists argued that legalizing doping would “encourage more sensible, informed use of drugs in amateur sport, leading to an overall decline in the rate of health problems associated with doping.”

A Gold Medal in Fakery (Sujatha)

Viewers were outraged enough to register some annoyance at the revelation that the fantastic fireworks for the Olympics Opening ceremony were pre-recorded and added in. But Chinese officials have taken the fakery to new levels, with their using a lip-synching 'pretty model'  Lin Miaoke aged 9 (in the red dress)  to move her lips to the pre-recorded voice of 7 year old Yang Peiyi. According to the show's musical designer Chen Qigang:

"We have a responsibility to face the audience of the whole country, and   to be open with this explanation," he said. "We should all   understand it like this: it is a question of the national interest. It is a   question of the image of our national music, our national culture.

"Especially at the entrance of our national flag, this is an extremely   important, an extremely serious matter.

"So we made the choice. I think it is fair to both Lin Miaoke and Yang   Peiyi - after all, we have a perfect voice, a perfect image and a perfect   show, in our team's view, all together."

Never mind that the real singer was as cute a little kid as any. Her just-growing-in milk teeth were enough to disqualify her from being on stage singing the anthem. Is this a cultural issue that shows Chinese to be obsessed with image over substance, or is there something else to Chen 'feeling forced' to set the record straight?  I wonder if there was political pressure to use the lip-synching kid and the only way in which he could assuage his guilty conscience at having to do so was to give praise where it was due for the singing performance.

Contagious Art

Before there was television or the Internet, in the days of pamphleteering, public health announcements were often made available through posters. Dangers of malaria, dog bite, bad dental hygiene, poor sanitation and STDs were advertised through eye catching imagery and pithy messages. Some of these posters are now on display at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C.  The title of the exhibit is "An Iconography of Contagion."

More about the exhibition in Newsweek here. Also check out the photo gallery.

It is art. It is medicine. It is politics and history, too. Born in the world of commercial advertising, health posters like this one emerged in the 20th century as a powerful new way to educate the public about infectious disease. Dramatic images incited fear; headlines alerted the public that coughing, mosquitoes and sex could spread tuberculosis, malaria and VD. Now 22 of these posters from the United States and abroad appear in "An Iconography of Contagion," a new exhibit at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Curator Michael Sappol, who culled the finalists from hundreds of posters housed at the National Library of Medicine, says the exhibit reflects a time when people believed that the creation of visually compelling images was going to be "the scientific and modern way to conquer disease and build a better society."

Even the liveliest posters contain symbols of danger and death. Dark shadows appear routinely. In a 1951 British poster, "Tomorrow's Citizen," a small boy casts an adult-size shadow against a blue backdrop. "He must not be handicapped by venereal disease passed on by parents," the text reads. Skulls appear in other designs. And the anonymous crowd—representing both urbanization and the impact of disease on mass populations—is a familiar sight. A poster produced by the National Tuberculosis Association, a pioneer in health propaganda, shows a father reading the newspaper, surrounded by his family. The backdrop: a mob of "unknown spreaders."

Public-health art exploded during World War II, when the government started pouring money into awareness campaigns, lambasting the enemy and the dreaded contagion at once. STD posters exonerated the soldiers they targeted, blaming the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea on loose women, like the lady with the red beret. The tagline of one poster, produced by the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1940s, reads: "You can't beat the Axis if you get VD."

Tagore in Timbuktu

The video itself is quite amazing. But what really got my attention was not so much the charming dance moves which would make any seventh grader proud, the heart warming locales or the article in the New York Times about Matt Harding, the man who has danced across some seventy or so locations across the globe from Mumbai to Madrid, with a stop in Madagascar in between. No, what spurred me to take a second look or rather strain my ears, is the background music Matt is dancing to. It is  first described in the NYT article merely as New Agey but later revealed to be a poem by Tagore in original Bengali!

However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus.

I am fluent in Bengali and quite familiar with Tagore. But I could not make out a word in this rendition.  Fortunately, Sepia Mutiny, the south Asian blog which is far more resourceful than I am, posted the English translation and a reader obliged with the original Bengali version in the comments section.

Stream of Life
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

It was her outfit!

Maria Sharapova, the winner of three Grand Slam singles titles in tennis and the # 3 seed at this year's Wimbledon, was upset in the second round by a 6-2, 6-4 loss to Alla Kudryavtseva who is ranked # 154 in the world. Among the things that motivated Ms Kudryavtseva to beat the fashionable 2004 Wimbledon champ was the tuxedo style tennis outfit that Sharapova wore. 

Kudryavtseva was asked if she was glad to have beaten Sharapova, and said, "Yes", following it with a long pause, after which she explained smilingly that this was because "I don't like her outfit".

Hmm. I wonder if Kudryavtseva will take similar offense with the Williams sisters in case she faces one or both of them during the course of the tournament. Sisters Venus and Serena are well known for their flashy sartorial style on the court. They are also known for their fierce playing style.

Sunday Selections

The weather is hot, blog traffic is down and I am out of ideas. So it's links time again. The stories here range from extra terrestrial thrills to earthly narrow mindedness, with a bit of not so well known history thrown in the mix. Enjoy!

Phoenix Mars Lander unearths (un-Martiates?) Martian polar ice. 

LOS ANGELES — The apparent discovery of ice near Mars' north pole has scientists asking: Did the frozen water melt at some point in the planet's long history to create an environment friendly for life?

The Phoenix spacecraft exposed bright white crumbs at the bottom of a trench while digging near Mars' north pole earlier this week. The bits disappeared in new photos sent back on Thursday, convincing scientists that the magic act was evidence of ice that vaporized after being exposed to the sun.

"The fact that there's ice there doesn't tell you anything about whether it's habitable," chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona said Friday during a teleconference from Tucson.

To judge whether the Martian polar environment could be hospitable, scientists are using the spacecraft's instruments to study minerals in the soil and ice for hints of carbonates and sulfates, which are formed by the action of liquid water.

Water is a prerequisite for life, but it's just one piece of the equation. Scientists generally agree that organic carbon and an energy source like the sun are also considered necessary ingredients.

Mars today is arid and dusty, constantly bombarded by radiation and with no apparent trace of water on its surface. But carvings of channels and gullies on the Martian surface suggest a wetter past. Some scientists speculate that water may have evaporated into the atmosphere and the rest trapped beneath the surface in the form of ice.

"The holy grail is to find water near the surface of Mars," said astrobiologist Mitch Sogin of the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Mass., who is not part of the mission.

Hurt feelings in Houston: Two groups are expressing umbrage over a couple of public events - one a movie ...

The Love Guru tells the story of Maurice Pitka, played by Myers, an American orphan left at the gates of an Indian ashram. He returns to the United States to try and make it in the world of self-help and spirituality.

The film is "rife with stereotyping," Chronicle film critic Amy Biancolli says in her review. "But the target is less Hinduism (the word never pops up) than the saffron-colored accouterments of the faith and its watered-down transference to the self-help industry."

Girish Naik, president of the Hindus of Greater Houston, found the film's depiction of yoga poses vulgar. Vijay Pallod, a Houston Hindu activist, plans to go and see it this weekend – even though he hasn't liked what he has seen in the movie trailers. He wants to have solid examples of portrayals or scenes he feels are disrespectful to his faith.

Some Hindu members in attendance at Thursday's screening worried that audiences might think the movie is targeted at a particular spiritual leader.

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, popularly known as Hare Krishnas, released a statement Friday rejecting calls to protest the movie. "We find it to be a typical satire that does not intend to hurt religious sentiments," the statement said, encouraging other Hindus "to view the film in its context as a comedy, and to draw on the tolerance and broadmindedness that are hallmarks of our faith."

Deepak Chopra, a friend of Myers and a New Age icon, who has a cameo in the film, thinks the issue has been blown out of proportion. The Hindu community needs a better sense of humor, he said.

But to Pallod and Shukla, it has nothing to do with humor."I have seen many people try to defame Hinduism, and as a Hindu activist, we have to protest and stand up," Pallod said. "In the past we kept quiet about movies, but we believe we have to do it because the media is very powerful."