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.