City

I love my city - with its unassuming, languid, dust-layered beauty, smiling at you in gentle sunlight during winter mornings and evenings. Freeskool Street, decked up for Christmas – jazz and carols blasting through the gramophones, the jingle of the tana rickshaws mingling with the smell of telebhajas, kati rolls and old second-hand books from every nook and cranny – tantalizing, mouth watering. Dhormotolaye dhormoshonkot. Shirt kholo. Oborodh koro - half naked bodies fluttering flags against the half-restored LIC building. Ahh, ki dramabaji! Ki entertainment! My pretty, crazy city. New Market jomjomat, with fake Christmas trees and scary Santa Clauses on the sidewalks and bright paper stars and tinsel adorning the skies. Lazy tram ride – maidan’s green beauty, juxtaposed against a smog-lined winter sky, officers on their horses, Shahid Minar, tall, ponderous, poetic, against the evening sun. The crows fly home. The sun sets. The evening chill draws out the mufflers and monkey-tupis, the smell of naphthalene stubbornly hanging on to its wooly fabric. Steaming cha, muri-makha and querulous adda.


For better or for worse, I love this city.

See also : Nearsight's city lights post taken with the Fujifilm Finepix S9500. Heck, see his entire blog.

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (Novermber 24, 1864 - September 9, 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draftsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the decadent and theatrical life of fin de siecle yielded an oeuvre of provocative images of modern life. (see wiki)

At the Moulin Rouge

The Kiss

The Toilette

Van Gogh's portrait

Rosa La Rouge - À Montrouge

The Moulin Rouge series - et autres

Best known for his paintings of the Moulin Rouge and the hedonistic Parisian city life, Lautrec was one of the most exciting painters of his era. His contemporaries were Degas, Van Gogh, Renoir, Cezanne, Gaugin and Seurat. I've selected a motley set of his paintings, not in any order of their creation or phase or anything like that. Just stuff I like. To see more of his paintings and posters, click here and here.

Street Art

Los Angeles, originally uploaded by it is what it is....

For more, check Wooster. The coolest blog I've ever come across.

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other.We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Ted Hughes

This poem was meant to decribe the storminess of Hughes' and Plath's relationship and the growing distance in it. Being a sucker for romance and unrequitted love and what-not - the Hughes-Plath relationship has always fascinated me. And I recently discovered this poem - it's so graphic, so blunt and sad - I love it.

paranoid android

One of my favourite Radiohead tracks - weirdass video. You'll need a good connection though, to view it properly. Happy viewing!

Jazz

"I'm crazy about this City.
Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It's the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I'm strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible--like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything's ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything's ahead at last..."
From Toni Morrison's Jazz

Carnival Fascination

Photographs courtesy : Carf

Welcome

Say hello to Carnival, my new blog. I'll be putting up pictures, poems, stories, songs, videos, art work - whatever I like and hopefully you'll like it too.