A Burning

 A Burning 

A novel by Megha Majumdar 

This 2020 novel is very current to the moment globally although set entirely in India.

It is a very personal story of a very poor Muslim young woman who gets accused of being a terrorist involved in a horrible torching of a passenger train filled with people; a burning.

This occurs because of a casual Facebook “friendship” she has with someone she doesn’t really know who is said to be a “terrorist recruiter”.
She only has facebook because she was able to finally earn enough money for a smartphone.

  The novel is a very engaging story of Jivan, the accused, PT Sir, the physical education teacher in a school that Jivan has attended, and Lovely, a young hijra outcast taking an acting class and dreaming of Bollywood stardom. Jivan knows Lovely because she has been helping her to learn English.
  We follow these three into the story. The Jivan sections are written in first person and she tells her sad life story. A third person voice tells us about Lovely and PT Sir.
The reader becomes very intimate with Jivan, who is a fine young woman just struggling to make a better life, a marginal life, up from a not really sustainable slum life, for herself, her mother and disabled father.  

Our pathetic hunger and dreams of stardom are a major part of this story that can be transferred to most anywhere in the mass media saturated world. We all seek status. Want to be seen by our peers as doing well, achieving, succeeding. And maybe catching the eye of something bigger, fame and fortune.  This varies widely depending on need, and situational circumstances. This is clearly illustrated in the characters of PT Sir and Lovely. Status seaking, although directly related to economic improvement, really comes from a deeper emotional need to be seen, to matter. The novel shows us how that works on PT Sir and Lovely.

PT Sir comes upon a mass outdoor rally of a right-wing populist Hindi political party. The microphone fails and PT Sir leaps to the stage to quickly remedy the situation. This act brings him to the attention of the leaders. He is thrilled and sucked in by the leaders who begin to use him.

Lovely and PT Sir must learn to compromise their ethics and truths or abandon their dreams of recognition and economic improvement. They are uneasy with that. The thoughtful reader is invited to question themselves. Would we sacrifice justice to secure elevation of status, and to what degree?

This is a very fine novel. It is written in a spare style. That lack of florid prose seems to clarify and heighten the reality of the story. It draws us into the story of these individuals rather than impressing us with writing style.
The result is a stunningly impressive and fully realized story.
The Jivan parts, written in first person, are particularly moving.

I cannot think of a better novel than this. Totally of the moment with an underlying theme of how we can be manipulated through our need of status,
It is great, vital and deals with things that touch all our lives. 

By Steve Carter (Aug 2021)

Unmasked

 Unmasked

Beneath the Veil, A Cirque Experience

Dixon Place, NYC
Aug, 26, 2021 (Closed)
Producer/Director: Fran Sperling

Cast:Gillian Barkins (Aerial silks), Malin Bergman (Aerial silks), Makenzi Cooley (Aerial hoop), Linda Huang (Dance Trapeze), Ellie Klein (Contortion artist), Danie Kohn and Rob Williams (Acrobats/ Cyr Wheel), Eliana Wenick (Aerial hoops), Toby Russell Medlyn (Spinning Pole), Sara Odze (Aerial silks), Olga Puntus (Aerial Silks), Bridget Dahl (Aerial hammock) & Susana Morehouse (Hair hang act)

Suspended Animation.
Noun:
“the temporary cessation of most vital functions without death, as in a dormant seed or a hibernating animal. -Oxford Languages

  For the past year and a half or more, much of the global human population has experienced something akin to suspended animation. We have to varying degrees had to slow, STOP, suspend what had become our routine normal activities. We have had to remain in isolation, in our homes, work and communication carried on remote from one another in an atmosphere of perpetual fear of death, only kept from that by our suspended activities and isolation. There is no need here to go into more detail on this fact. We all know it and all have experienced it while hearing of the death count even if we have, so far, been able to avoid death or the death of someone personally dear to us.
  It’s not over. We may have been teased here in New York City by an “All Clear” a “Homecoming New York” that appears to be truncated into “But wait” the danger not gone, and perhaps evolved into something even more infectious.

  In this atmosphere the one night performance Unmasked was more than a show, it was a catharsis, a pantomime of our suspended animation. Performers in the air grasp tightly to the threads of existence, a slippage, an error could result in serious injury or even death. (“You could break your neck!” Yes, thanks mom.) Survival is entirely dependent on human physical strength and acquired skill as the performers pull themselves up on yards of silk. They are pulling themselves off the floor, the base, to ten or more feet into the air. This becomes a metaphor of our very existence, in essence, emerging from the grounded safety of the womb, the floor, the pandemic isolation, the home, and climbing out into the risky proposition of LIFE. We always know it is temporary, this individual elevation into LIFE. The floor, the ground is always there awaiting our return. It is only our will and our strength that keeps us above, ALIVE.

  The Unmasked performers artfully illustrate what we do once we are off the ground. We dance in the air of our tender lives. The silk performers wrap themselves in the threads of existence and show us the beauty, strength and power of human life. All above the hard unyielding floor, without a net. As we do in life, they pose, they suspend themselves wrapped in the secure, yet unstable, silk of life to take a momentary horizontal relaxed position, then shift, rearrange and, with skillfully controlled slippage, yoyo unraveling, suddenly plummet several feet down, but catch themselves, their strength and will, saving them to climb and dance, show us their beauty and grace once again.

  With all this the viewer is deeply touched, without effort of thought/speech, shown the dance of individual life, not told about it through the step-away medium of spoken language, but seeing, witnessing close-up our fellow strong by fragile humans doing the dance of life.

  This type of performance can only really be felt in a live presentation. We see something here that is as old as human existence. Does the art of this go back to our hunter-gatherer roots where a member of the tribe says, “Hey! Watch THIS!”? Out of this primal background it is best appreciated live and direct. Of course we have all seen it pulled away from us, taken from us transformed and exploited over time into a SHOW, evolving with showbiz into the melodrama of the “death defying” drumroll accompanied spectacle. That type of exhibition takes it from us and then sells it back, turning it into a product, by separating it from us. It becomes something over there, a world elite grandiose and remote that can be witnessed devoid of much personal feeling.

  Unmasked gave it back to us in perhaps the only way we can still have it, in the close-up reality of an intimate theaterial setting. 
Human beauty is experienced directly beyond the capabilities of other media and The Greatest Show on Bigtop TV. We all view TV, cinema, moving images with side-eye suspicion. We know it's not real, but trick and special effect laden.
The live presentation of Unmasked brings it all back home where it is best and most deeply experienced.

Unmasked producer/director Fran Sperling beautifully packaged this evening of performances. Each act was introduced with a brief personal story that references the Covid pandemic and how the individual has coped with it. It’s all rather, matter of fact, just what went on. No need or attempt at hyperbole  This was a brilliant concept that heightened what we witnessed, the pantomime performance that focuses on the beauty of the dance of life without exploiting the Death Defying elements that we don’t need to be told are always there.

Unmasked was a deeply moving performance by skilled, powerful, hardworking performers. Simply a once in a lifetime experience, a moment, climbing out from change and floating away with it.  

- Steve Carter (Aug 2021)
           
   

Control (2007)

 Control (2007)

Directed by Anton Corbijn
Written by Deborah Curtis (from her book) Screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh

“Even the people who love me hate me.”

Let's look at the movie as a stand-alone story and disregard the actual people depicted. Isn’t it better to treat all the music figure biopics that way as an item unto themselves? Getting into comparing any biographical art to the real person is always hazardous. We are all more than, better, deeper, and far more complicated than what can be mediated no matter what form and the skill sweated into it.

This is a story of Ian Curtis, frontman of old time band Joy Division. Old time?!? Well it was 40 plus years ago.
This intimate movie is not at all bad. Who knows what Curtis would have thought of it? From the movie one would have to guess that it would be too much and not enough. But it hardly matters what the dead would think, they don’t have to think any more.The crematorium smoke drifting into the sky of his remains in the final shot is not thinking smoke, it just is and it goes where it goes and becomes what it does.

Biopics are of course, in their nature exploitive. Ok so what? How’s the movie?
Pretty damn good. For one thing the live band performances are handled very well, with the actors actually playing live. If they are not, it is fauless in the illusion that they are.

Presented in B&W the movie is anti-glamour, gritty, with realfeel.
Sam Riley as Ian is convincing as a young man who felt things got too big, too overwhelming. The band, the success of the band, the marriage to Deborah (Samantha Morton) and their baby daughter, the additional new love Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), the horror of dealing with epilepsy and the crude pharmaceuticals prescribed to treat it: it's just all too much and he didn’t know how to change or stop things.

Thankfully there are no big glamorous concert scenes, it's mostly the greenroom of low dive clubs for that stuff. Otherwise most of it is staged in the stark flats and grey industrial cities of England.

But life can grow there, raise it’s head and announce its presence, sometimes enough for the whole world to hear its shouts and weeping. 

It’s funny about movies like this that are sort of an exploitation of a life. It doesn’t even stop there. People then type their thoughts about the movie in an act of exploitation of an exploitation.

Thank you.
It was nice to have your attention for these few moments courtesy of long dead Ian and this movie about him.

Sweet William by Gwen Davis

Published in “The Swinging 60s” 1967 this novel is set in a boarding school in rural Virginia. The paperback cover makes it look quite a bit more like a sex romp novel than is actually is. It has one of the fine cover paintings that employed skilled figurative artists back then. It pictures a nicely built shirtless man, Fistfull-of-Eastwood cheroot in his mouth, guitar sling over his back, with two alluring leggy young women holding him in fond embrace.
OK, nice come on, sold. This could be fun junk.

The novel is a good deal deeper than this cover. It starts with the fall term at the school. Three girl dorm roommates are introduced. Two were roommates before another girl was assigned to room as the third. One of the originals, Cecily, gives the new roomy trouble all through the novel. None of these characters is a main character and none of them are particularly appealing in a way designed to have the reader pulling for them. There is no real hero, main character, in the novel. They are all somewhat flawed. This is a good thing that brings the story more into reality than a hero would.
A couple of school staff authority figures are involved. They meet with minor snotty attitude level rebellion from the girls.

Enter William Sweet, guitar, cheroot, just like the cover. He’s been hired as a shop teacher. The place is really college prep, but the powers that be have been persuaded that it will be helpful to the students to learn to work with their hands some from a handsome man. (Geez! Sorry.). Will comes on strong with a charismatic southern style and a folk song on his lips along with the little cigar. He is looked upon by the reader, and soon positions himself, as a friendly good guy, a breath of natural fresh air to the general student body, particularly the boys and Cecily in the first scene is shown to be waiting for something sensual and untamed to liven up the stiff academic institution. Right away Will is put in the position of faculty resident in the boys dorm and comes on all buddy-buddy. 

  What unfolds is more than an escapist softcore pop romance novel. The entertaining story is really a study of a smooth talking BS narcissist, his needs, and maneuvers to take over by seduction, sexual and emotional, of the student body and the faculty. He has the radar of a narcissist who can see at a distance who of these teens needs a daddy or a mentor. He is not brutal, but has the skill and patience to groom, to gain trust, always with his good cheer, jokes, and ready steady grin.
  The one boy, Bob Duro, does gain the reader's sympathy, he is a city kid from the Bronx there on an athletic scholarship, but he is also an outstanding student. He is in love and attached to one of the girls and wants to bring her along to the big time college next year. His scholarship to the college is being earned by hard study and discipline. Early on Will gives him the key to the school shop with a winking bro suggestion that he can bring his girlfriend there for their private moments. Will betrays the boy. who finally discovers that he has taken the girl to Norfolk for a not yet legally premitted abortion. The aborted fetius is the product of Will’s sex with the girl. Bob confronts Will but loses out totally and completely, his relationship and dreams so destroyed that he gives his future up and joins the Coast Guard.

  Will gently but persistently seduces a teacher whose heart is set in the tradition of virginity until marriage. He is taking advantage of the loneliness he had detected in her.  
  He succeeds in solidifying a position of prominence and smiling good guy domination by the end of the school year. Will becomes more arrogant and pleased with himself and his mastery of the place.

Is there a comeuppance? The finale is swift, engrossing, and beautifully executed. Cecily is involved, finally outraged by Will. What goes on is wrong, yet totally justifiable in the situation.

This is a very enjoyable reading experience dealing with subjects, personalities that are familiar to most of us. Perhaps the reader can find themselves depicted within. These narcissistic personalities are all around us, and unfortunately, regularly in the news. They, like Will, position themselves  to become the leader who knows how to appeal to those with the need to follow. These are that kind of attitudes that are being finally called out in the #metoo movement as the games and power needs of some men of prominence are exposed for the #meaboveallothers ruthless criminals they are behind the mask of the charming big leader/daddy.
Their needs to control make them pathetic vampires at the core.