You Can Call it Dark Matter

This Saturday, there will be an international conference in Oxford in memory of Li’l A’s birth-father. The kindhearted organizers are making digital copies of the entire proceedings as a keepsake for Li’l A, per my request.

Sir Roger Penrose and Harvey Brown are two of the plenary speakers--and really, it’s a happy event with seriously impressive paper titles such as, “A New Fermionic Quantum Field for Dark Matter.”

Still, when I read Harvey‘s e-mail with the mock-up of Saturday’s program--for no good reason that I can think of--i cried for hours after.



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Beauty Wars

My colleague Kiesa pointed me to this advertisement for Dove beauty products. Try and watch it--it shows “before” and “after” pictures of a model. And the glam factor of the “after” pic is not just excellent wardrobe and makeup but also extreme Photoshop.

The single-most remarkable feature of the ad was that Photoshop stunt where they elongate the model’s neck and she instantaneously acquires a regal mien. I thought the model attractive both before and after, so it didn’t really have the intended impact on me--but Kiesa and a few other women claimed that the ad gave them the shivers/goosebumps/epiphanies.

So is Dove and its so-called “real beauty campaign” a corporate savior of women’s self-esteem?

I’m not entirely convinced. If we were to, as some would say, “ax around,” we’d discover that Dove’s parent company Unilever also runs those annoying Axe body spray commercials. Browse around at Axe and then tell me how you feel about women’s self-esteem.

On the other hand, someone at Dove is making an extremely earnest attempt to demystify media-produced beauty. Whether it's part of a consistent marketing strategy or not, it's still something to applaud.


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How Fanaa is Like Mylo (Destroy Destroy Destroy Destroy)

I am probably the last desi on the planet to finally see Fanaa; I learnt these three things:

1) I have zero sense of romance. Aamir Khan plays a film-lyric-spouting tour guide with a scary case of Rushdie-eyebrow-itis who brushes up against *beautiful*, *blind* girl Kajol every chance he gets. I suspect that a suitable member of the audience would have had a severe case of the tinglies--I got the creepies, instead.

2) It seems that “Fanaa” means “destruction.” I didn’t know that when I unwrapped the DVD from its Netflix swaddling. Then the word was dropped in about 84 different contexts during the first half hour (almost as obsessively as Mylo) and I thoroughly understand it now. I promise. Please don’t immersion-method it again. /whimper/

3) I could have saved myself the trouble. When a movie has been described thusly, “I felt incredibly cheated immediately after seeing "Fanaa" …. as if Aamir Khan and Kajol had stolen my ATM card and pilfered $11.50 directly from my bank account”--it’s probably a good idea to give it a wide berth.

Although, I did respond appropriately and get a case of the giggles when I realized that they were going to go all Roop-tera-mastana and procreate after they inevitably got drenched in the rain--although I did wonder if rain in Indian movies is coy, semiotic shorthand for physical sexual response or ‘glide.

Ultimately, despite above snark and all the outlandish coincidences in Fanaa’s extreme national narrative, I couldn’t prevent myself from rooting for Aamir K to get innocent and the lovers to get back together--disgraceful, I know. My literature profs are howling, weeping blood and drafting e-mails designed to shame me; I’ll have to go and deal with that now.
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* Beautiful i.e. thoroughly gorgeous in that artless and unaffected Kajol way from ten years ago.
* Blind i.e visually sightless, and not just injudicious, although that applies too.




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PocoBorat

I’m feeling really awful for Borat and his creator who are in every kind of trouble from every possible direction.

Despite Cohen’s seemingly sincere denials and the earnest defense mounted by his passionate fans, BoratLove is losing the battle to logic.

Afterall intention is, sadly, an outdated and ineffective excuse.

(See comments to my earlier post.)

Those gunning for Borat include
The Anti-Defamation League
Official complaints in Kazakhstan
The old Jewish “shape-shifters"
Insulted Roma villagers
Drunk Frat boys
Snarky columnists.

More horrible than any of this are the K-Fed jokes.


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Bird Brain

We have been besieged by birds. Or rather by the same house sparrow who is either taking his appellation too seriously or is too dim to realize that for all the six-foot plants and bird figurines, the inside of the apartment is NOT really a garden.

Although appropriately beady-eyed, s/he is quite cute and I’d be happy to let it build a nest and fly around, chirping and festooning sundry objects with poop. Only, it panics every time it sees me and then crashes into the window panes in a futile attempt at freedom and then I begin to worry that it’ll have a heart attack and die right in the living room, which as the room-designation confirms, is not meant for dying. So I and whoever else is at home open all the windows we can and herd birdie thence.

The first day this happened the whole exercise felt flattering (really did make that living room look like a garden) and noble (saved a living creature). Then it got to be a boring chore. Even bird poop has lost its allure, lately. Although that has been compensated for by my newfound appreciation for the term “bird brain.”


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Death in the (GASP) Emergency Room

The other day I called Big A to order him home and he said,
“It’s possible that (static) is dying (static).”

So I did the honorable thing and went,
“Oh, Ok, Ok. Bye bye bye.”
Then gasping, I let him get off the phone at superhero speed.

I guess some part of me doesn’t really get that he is around the seriously injured and extremely ill all day.

Also, it turns out that the “dying” referred to his Verizon being out of juice.

That's ok with me.

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Borat (So What?)

Yesterday at lunch with the awesome Pied Piper and an accomplished, pioneering writer whose anonymity we shall preserve, Piper turned to me and said, “You saw Borat and didn‘t blog about it?” And I shrugged sheepishly into my chopped salad and did my best to explain that I’m having a bit of a crisis with my response to comedy. It’s true.

Much to the somewhat indulgent amusement of my family, I laugh at the lamest of jokes. But my thinking side is increasingly uncomfortable at the influx of comics who made it because they trashed on their own ethnicity. Suddenly it's okay--no really, okay--to make ethnic and racist jokes again. As the song goes, "Everyone's a little Racist Sometimes." So Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle, and Jeff Foxworthy make malicious jokes about Black, Jewish, and "Redneck" people; I find that troublesome. I can handle Margaret Cho and Russell Peters who mock ethnic culture rather than ethnic race (Make sense?). As for the rest, I’m fairly sure that the subtext is that comics secretly ethnic stereotype everyone although some bizarre sense of cultural correctness or essentialism allows them to broadcast only mockery of “their own.”. Either cultural correctness or comic selectivity--Jeff Foxworthy for all his proud Southern Redneck-ism cannot make anti African American jokes--because what would be funny about that?

Which is why Sacha Baron Cohen or “AliG” as I have called him for the last five or so years--ever since I watched my first couple of episodes on BBC’s Channel Four, too dim-witted for too long to figure out that Ali, Borat, and Bruno were Sacha meme--is my favorite comic. Because Cohen doesn’t say stupid things, he just asks stupid questions and any resulting humor is the consequence of the interviewee’s own idiocy and bigotry. And also, Cohen muddles both ethnic race and ethnic culture--AliG fancies himself a RudeBoy (you’d call it gangsta this side of the puddle) and seems to believe that he is Black, frequently accusing his uncooperative guests of “racialism;” Borat’s vociferous anti-Semitism is directly contrary to Cohen’s own reportedly orthodox Judaic upbringing.

So what in the name of sweet baby Krishna is my problem now? I have to say somewhat meekly--and at the risk of sounding like a hipster-in-the-manger whose favorite indie label has gone mainstream--that Cohen was okay as a small, inside joke. The huge Twentieth Century Fox spectacle of Borat morphs what was once funny into cruelty because what was once merely a silly prank is now a hugely profitable deception. When Borat is no longer the little guy, it‘s harder to excuse his lapses of decency. When he’s no longer the little guy, the fulcrum of honesty seesawing between power and sympathy shifts from the pompous interviewee who is essentially being true to himself to the fraudulent player-interviewer egging him on. Even the gag about being a Kazakhstani reporter seems maliciously opportunistic, because we know that Cohen wouldn't dare impersonate a bumbling Russian or German with impunity. Borat has to be coded as a token white person to gain the kinds of access he does, but he is simultaneously an inept parody of the voice--and presence--of a people with minimal to none-at-all influence in the Western world. When even NPR begins to josh about Borat being a better representative of Kazakhstan than President Nursultan Nazarbayev--Oy! Cohen, we have a problem.


P.S. Also the movie wasn’t as funny as the show. Cohen’s team imported a (weak) plotline, which, methinks, was unnecessary. Borat is essentially Jackass with ideas. And I don’t remember Jackass pushing plot.



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