Watching Laurel & Hardy
So I took my lonesome self to Brooklyn last evening to hear live jazz music composed/set to three silent short-films of Laurel1 & Hardy. In retrospect, I now think I made the island hopping trip, also to go back to the Sunday mornings of middle childhood, in which I first watched those black & white, and mostly silent, comic buffoons on Doordarshan (aka TV) right before those garish but wildly popular mythological sitcoms, Ramayan and Mahabharat, hit the air.
I am happy to report that re-watching these old familiar films after years was as much fun as it was on those Indian summer mornings. Better still, for me the most gratifying thing about last night's communal experience was to hear the high pitched laughter of children mixed with those of the adults. Perhaps, this is what the imprimatur of timelessness is. And also what signs of growing old are - memory of your childhood laughter flashing when you hear children laughing.
Go watch "Double Whoopee" here, one of the films that was screened last evening. And tonight, I going to go and get me some Jesus!
[1] Is it only me who thinks the cool hipster pointy hair seen in these parts is but a variation of Laurel's cool hairstyle?
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Self-Is-Psycho Therapy
I return to the scene of crime, a hound dog nose fixed to the contours of half-awake thought for something did happen in those years, a decade ago, even if there is no knife on the cobble stones, and no huge shadows on the walls painted by dawn-blush, to solve the puzzle of waking sweats, which unlocks as soon as the eye opens but taints the days with the dread of failure: there I am forgetting all the answers to tests I am supposed to take; there I am clothed in the cloak of shame; there I am as this swollen monster with a whale-tongue; there I am in a room smelling of sperm blurring the lines between pleasure and pain; there I am, the aspiring nice person turning pathological, a butcher dealing exclusively in pounds of heart-flesh; there I am under a red sheet of fire but as cold as Lenin mummified in his Red Square glass-box; there I am in a landscape - a suspension bridge in fog, to be precise - where I don't really know who I am or who he is, he who dreams those spectral dreams for me.
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Passing Through San Francisco
by the Bay Bridge, and on the right seeing the Golden Gate Bridge, wreathed in fog, hanging over the bay like strange red-white dragon tongue, while on the left tug boats ferry a massive container ship - perhaps from China bearing junk I am in the business of making folks buy more and more of - I am reminded how beautiful this city by the sea is, and how I must live here for a span of seasons, and write my version of the California novel. My models would be Seth and Steinbeck.
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