Sweet Sixteen

The clock ticked ahead shyly for eternity

And I feel a new prickle under my arms.

Daddy, I need a mic for my sweet sixteen!

I wanna sing to all my friends about Tony.

Tony is pink and hairy and jumps on troubles

Like they were three mice stealing from me

As if I were a Nazi dairy running very dry,

Forever after Peter and Michael, before him.

Oh, Daddy, Tony is sick and I need a mic

To tell my friends if he'll make it through.

I need them to sing back that it'll be okay,

That he'll pull through like Peter and Michael.

All my friends sing into mics and I can't.

Why don't I have a mic when I have Tony?

You promised me a mic this warm winter

To play with Peter and Michael, and Tony.

Hurry up, Daddy, Tony is almost blue now

All the pink has rubbed onto the three mice

Who are dancing like the poor in December,

Drinking my milk, eating my Camembert.

Oh Daddy, what have you done?

Tony has left - grown wings and flown away

Unlike Peter and Michael, before him

Who continue to run like headless mice.

No I don't want Peter and Michael

They are dirty now, like the Camembert.

I want a mic, damnit; gimme a mic

I wanna sing my troubles to the world.

Screw you, Daddy, I don't want your mic.

I can shout and scream to my good people.

I am sure they can hear me without a mic.

Lemme sing why you won't give me a mic.

Arachnophobia at 2:14 AM

Another sleepless night. Another forced technological intervention. Facebook at 2:14 am, hoping to fall asleep on the banalities of others' lives, when suddenly - a spider - black, but subtly back lit by the spill from the laptop monitor against a dull, yet rough white wall. Jesus! Arachnophobia past mid-night. Surely, there must be a law against this kind of behavior somewhere, but not here, heck no, this is Hollywood, man. We snack on spider tissue because we are cool and need to tell everyone how much. The desk lamp is turned on and renders a little orange warmth to the cold blue light of the laptop.

What are you doing, man? You are not Peter Fuckin' Parker. Run around, make some noise, wake the neighbors, call the super. Sanity versus Exhibitionism. Front row tickets. I fight the urge to let the battle ensue in that brilliant light. Meanwhile, the poor bastard is running towards Lennon and his lyrics of Imagine on the wall. Light doesn't affect his motion I noticed. Maybe the sucker is blind. Maybe it's a blind spider. Or maybe, all spiders are blind. They are supposed to be. Not evolved enough. If this was taking place centuries later and I were just telekinesising the fuck outta this blog post, maybe the spider would stop, do a steamy little number for me, sing in a deep Kathleen Turner voice and take a bow, but not tonight - this is just a post-modern saga, not some futuristic Phillip F. Dick novel.

The ten count is over. Exhibitionism is lying face down in a pool of its own blood somewhere in my subconsciousness. I walk over to the bathroom, trying not to shake for my companion, but once out of sight, my dirty little shaking hands tear a piece of TP off - a clinical move, reeking with mercenary efficiency. I walk back - an epitome of Nihilistic Buddhism, TP in one hand, silence hovering over my lips like a mistress at a funeral and nothing but the creature's reflections in my two eyes. It's almost over now I tell myself. We look at one another. It stops, for what can only be melodramatic effect. "Breathe, muthafucka. Enjoy the last five seconds of your miserable, mountaineering domestic life." Strong words for a monster-slayer. Pulp! It's done. Just like adolescent sex - anticipation far outweighing the act. I crush it between my thumb and forefinger a couple of times, just to be sure.

I bury the fucker in my trashcan, where rest countless other household bugs. If these goddamn animals have afterlives, they are bitching about me right now over some dirty Tecates and mouthfuls of crunchy pork tacos. Ouch! That must have hurt. Sanity is suddenly coughing blood as Exhibitionism punches him under the belt while I type this out for other insomniacs awake at this hour. As they say, it ain't over till the fat lady squeals and we all know Exhibitionism is one large bitch.

Ladies and Gentleman, please fasten your seatbelts - tonight's meal - BBQ-ed medulla oblongata

I am a blind pilot, passing over some ice-topped mountains in Greenland. I can't see anything of course, but if I could, it would be like a dessert cooked in a household of Irish-English heritage, if such a thing is at all discernible. But there lies the quandary, because the smell at the time would just be stale, metallic, reproduced oxygen - your staple fare at 3000 feet above air. And what good can descriptions by unimaginative over-traveled heavily mustached colleagues paint.

It's not like I'll loosen my thin tie and wipe my broad forehead between adjustments of the sexy, sleek pilot's hat when we cruise over the vast chromeness of the Sahara, dotted with occasional black olives of royal guards. Sounds like Colin Firth in A Serious, no sorry, Single Man, innit? Fidgeting around the autopilot controls and seeing the black sheen of a .38 caliber flashing the finality of death. For that one tenth of a second, the urge to be engulfed in the dull chromeness, ostensibly in an effort to pick out and eat the olives, french-kisses the hell out of me.

As the mustaches demand an urban detour, the blindness whisks away like a particularly persistent cloud cover, leaving me in the realm of the .38 caliber's ugliness, to sculpt the patron's unpleasant wife or the neighbor's leprous maid. I choose Khartoum with its beautifully carved chess pieces for us to tamper with. The mustaches are happy. They can cover themselves in white rags of comforting cotton while their bosses slug it out over games of chess between puffs of mint flavored hookah.

And so to Awadh, which would be modern day... , wait lemme Google, aah Lucknow, my initial hunch was right - the land of kababs and shayari, though right now, it's probably festered with terribly accented call centers and smoggy dark gray traffic. Fuck, I would kill for a kabab right now, which is ironic, because, if you don't kill, you can't produce a kabab. Why do some people spell kabab with an e? It might be a Turkish conspiracy to recapture the world in the name of commoditizing world peace. I have a hunch - personal interaction with modern-day Ottomans I tell you, not the kind you put your feet on, well I suppose you could, but they tend to be bony and fuck with your ankles. If only I had a pig like the Queen of Hearts, but the stink, oh the stink. Haha... irony alert again - pigs taking over Ottoman jobs!

Maybe I'm just hungry. BBQ pork chops would never taste better, I promise. But something tells me the magic is in the BBQ sauce and not the meet. Can you imagine tasteless crap like veggies, that your mama gets you to eat every living hour, with BBQ sauce? This is bigger than world peace, man. This is the Food Network on acid. Just dab the damn thing in BBQ sauce and voila, you have solved world hunger. Why are we dropping food concentrates in African wastelands? Let's shower them with BBQ sauce. Take that UN!

Aren't some African societies cannibalistic? Would they try to eat each other then - dabbed in BBQ sauce? If only Hannibal Lector were more white-trash than such a cultured prick, we would know what BBQ sauce on human meat tasted like. None of that 'I fried his liver with some flava beans and had it with a nice cianti' crap, I'm talkin' about downright BBQ-ed medulla oblongata here. Is 'cannibalistic society' an oxymoron? Is 'oxymoron' an oxymoron?

Short Film 'Six Women'

Please check out the website for my thesis short 'Six Women'.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1631757069/funding-for-production-of-short-dramedy-six-women

Thanks

Stolen Moments

A mouthful of overheard gibberish water cooler Arabic, those indecipherable yet beautiful conversations in the barbershop, the imperfect tip of a McDonald's $1 vanilla ice-cream cone, drive-through desserts on three full stomachs, liquid body soap, revolting against this to maternal authority, the magnificence of Cirque Du Soleil's "Love" in Vegas, clandestine "Please Please Me" on the black double deck stereo system during Geography homework, watching The Graduate in Directing Class, Simon and Garfunkel listening for the sounds of silence on that very first CD, speeding tickets, the impotent little electronic screams of the new Cressida when driven over 120 kmph, two whole CD's of Kishor's sadness, the orphan gray cassette that turned up in WNJ 6666, advanced cinematography, the Alipore Zoo pictures of a 1988 early morning on that first Kodak, girlfriends, ICQ, Godfather II on the Xbox 360 on a black futon, Xcite Bike on Super Ninetendo on a grayish pink sofa set, momentary bursts of singing in the shower when the mind suddenly soars for no apparent reason, a year of tabla classes to get the basics down, ugly storyboards, a pair of comical ears on a bird flying by, Hulu, the Crystal Maze, Pandora in IMAX 3D, Indy's last few hops and skips on an invisible bridge, the overworked community treadmill, the first Oedipal chess victory, this impulsiveness, the dull chrome of Sunshine.

Your Inheritance

You like to wear your hair short

And your mother is in full cohort,

Having forgotten our matted days

Of picketing for Rosa through the haze.

Your little girl wears tight jeans today

As blue as the free misty ocean spray

Which wet the hems of our bell bottoms

Before the man jailed us and got 'em.

You shout against animals and ozone

And while I may not have an iPhone

Count me in when you sign your petition

To bring my voice - that invisibly loud gun.

Sapphire

Originally published at PFC: http://passionforcinema.com/sapphire/

Claudia

It was a usual hungry chilly morning

When you waltzed in through the window

Wading through the specks of sunlit dirt

With pure lyrical Felliniesque fluidity.

Then you changed into something rich

Red like the torn petal of a discarded rose

And we made love in one another's sweat

Scared to close our eyes lest we woke up.

And then the moon appeared in a starless sky

And pulled you away from my tight embrace

To take you through a different open window

Into another pair of welcoming arms.

Rain

I love it when it rains. And no, it's not just the smell of the wet earth, because I live in a concrete jungle. Like most recent things, it is aesthetic in nature. And not just any damn drizzle, but I am talking about mother pouring rains like the kind Maharashtrian farmers pray for. The roads are wet, throwing back at us our very own luminance - the red, amber, green of the traffic signals, mixed on this black shiny canvas, with the different neon signs of the curbside shops.

It's better late at night when you don't have to share the canvas with the other voyeurs, creeping on the veins of the highway to death with their little signals of red paint, to stop and stare. You creep on, like a newly transmitted virus into the veins of a busy lawyer's body, taking in more and infecting more with your illuminating gaze. The wipers disturb you with their loud whirring with the sustained punctuality of a Chinese factory worker.

But if you happen to step out earlier, as the pink and transparent umbrellas vie for the uniform grayness of the rainy sky, you catch that smile that escapes the creased zipper of a pair of tight thin painted lips, as her beau steps into a puddle and gets his boring white socks wet, while she shows off her new furry boots to him. But he ignores her fur and only curses at his wetness, knowing little that he would revisit this scene later all by himself and wonder why he hadn't clung to her instead of his shoes.

Then there is the whole menagerie of shiny colors composed with the pink and the transparent through your windshield, through the whirring Chinese wipers. And when you turn the wipers off and let the cascade of the pureness of the rainwater wash your vessel down, your pupils open up welcomingly at the brilliant fluidity of the oil painting that looks like it's still in progress and is the product of the creativity of some artist's under-worked hand using some musty water colors.

Classic Ménage á Trois – Jules et Jim

Originally published at PFC here: http://passionforcinema.com/classic-menage-a-trois-jules-et-jim/

Thank You Dear Amnesia

"too many locations", "too little money", "not enough time", "too many characters", "too many scenes"! Self doubt raised its ugly head in the midst of all the nay sayers, and hung around for a couple of days. Consecutive winter afternoons of searching for that elusive self-confidence in vain, resulting self-loathing and that sinking, helpless feeling that you aren't good enough to swim with the baby sharks. The commitment was shaken off my rocker.

A child was born to combat the depression. A little girl in a red dress craving some ice-cream on a park bench from her miserly grandfather. An accordion playing street musician offered himself to me, but refused to jam with a fellow street guitarist. The red and yellow and blue of the park sky helped me weed out the gray musicians, but deep down it still hurt. Friendly advice, like good alcohol taken on a full stomach, took its time being potent.

Cut to the last critical studies class this afternoon. "We'll watch something weird today". I had watched Eternal Sunshine before and let myself sprawl on the black, wooden yet cold desk. Sometimes amnesia can be a wonderful thing. It had been a while and the sheer brilliance of the film had evaporated from the cauldron of my conscious memory. As I sat there in the uncomfortable black plastic chair, causing what I am pretty sure is long term damage to my spinal cord, the resolve returned gradually as the film progressed, culminating in the nontarnishable white clarity I find myself in at the moment, the same white that Jim Carrey and Kate Winslett playing together like little children on a misty beach in the last shot of the film dissolve to. The girl in the red dress died and the story with the "too many locations, characters and scenes" and with "too little time and money" to make, about forgetting the past returned, for good, I think. Thank you Dear Sweet Amnesia.

A Social Experiment

A fun little social experiment conducted in LA's busy Hollywood Boulevard.

A Vignette

As he inhaled, the quiet of the corn field let him hear the little searing of his joint, introducing a little dash of vermillion into his otherwise hibernating subconscious. The sound brought back nostalgia-dripped memories to his otherwise arid existence. He remembered the first time he was here, back when hair had first sprouted on his upper lip, led by the obese, experienced hand of the Russian maid. It must have not lasted more than a couple of minutes but on that lazy afternoon, as the sun bore down harshly on the maid's bare back, coloring it with its inimitable red, he had finally become what he had dreamed of – a content and peaceful but sweating warrior.

Anna Karina in B&W

The search was unsuccessful. Even something as vast as the world wide web was unable to throw me the face I was seeking for my desktop. I wasn't asking for too much, was I? - just the right sized image of Anna Karina's sad mascaraed eyes in her expressionless face encased by her short hair in B&W in the just watched Godard film 'Vivre Sa Vie'. Sometimes I wonder if I can ever write a single post about a single thing without flying off on intangible tangents (for an answer, read the last paragraph), but what if that thing is absolutely the most beautiful imperfect thing in the world. Of course there is no such thing, since beauty, much like love, is too subjective to discuss anywhere other than in personal blogs.

If you look into those delicate dark honey colored eyes, you will realize, She isn't a traditional beauty by any means. There is a certain melancholy in those eyes, or even, a harshness that can unleash terrible genocide on the world, that She hides as she rocks back her head and laughs with apparent abandon and reduces my lifespan by just a petite bit. Watch Her use Her eyes seductively while rolling them to American rock 'n roll. Or when she wears her longer hair up in other films - that cruel invention by French women, to reveal that slender, sensuous nape of her neck.

A friend of mine recently told me that one of his ex-girlfriend's once told him that life is best in slow motion and black and white. And now I am telling you, or maybe just rambling silently, but the latter isn't the point. And I remember an uncle putting in words that I had felt for a while but couldn't express, probably a terrible thing for a writer - B&W is so soothing on the eyes. He couldn't have been more right. Visualize it - no extra hue and cry over over-saturated reds and blues projected on the gentle unsuspecting white of your retinas, a binary concept for the most part - the presence of light and the lack of it. The eyes even forgive the nondescript grays from time to time as long as there is a fair amount of black and white that they regard. And the poetry, oh the silent poetry, of high contrast B&W.

Graffiti

Her slender artistic fingers clutching that last cigarette,

His unlined palms.

Her bouncing love handles as she laughs her infectious laugh,

His skinny jeaned legs.

The enviable straightness of her long blond flowing hair,

His receding hairline.

The slender nape of her neck when she wears her hair up,

His jutting Adam's apple.

Her color changing eyes depending on where you stand,

His Lennon glasses.

Her parentheses as she smiles her faint smile in recognition,

His luscious lower lip.

Her bunny rabbit-like slightly chipped happy buck teeth,

His ying yang molars.

Her uncleft chin protruding just enough to be bitten twice,

His bony collar bones.

The loose yet unobtrusive almost cutish fat on her triceps,

His apex cheek bones.

The virginal innocent curiosity of her pointy pink nipples,

His curly black chest.

The secret little hidden mole high on her inner left thigh,

The lint in his navel.

Her red toe nails synchronized like small Russian dancers,

His turtle shell elbows.

Her broad Viking shoulders that can carry all his weight,

His Frank Zappa that makes her smile.

Delicatessen – How to Tell a Story through Sound

Originally published at PFC: http://passionforcinema.com/delicatessen-how-to-tell-a-story-through-sound/

The Cutting of 'The 400 Blows'

Originially published at PFC: http://passionforcinema.com/the-cutting-of-the-400-blows

A Day in the Life of Two Farm Animals

The sky has suddenly gone dark, depriving us one of those Californian sureties - a sunset, as if a housewife in Victorian garb in an anti-Liliputian world has mistaken our sun for a poached egg and served it to her farmer husband for breakfast. Maybe he belches a little, and even farts as an afterthought, resonating the crowing of the hen as it yawns and turns off its alarm clock - one of those retro pieces whose rude unfiltered ringing always gives you a headache the first thing in the morning. Maybe there is a system, and every day of the week a different hen crows at approximately the same time, but in a different note, and during their leisure time, the seven hens make music with their respective notes, and the farmer, or his wife for that matter, can't stop them because they are protected by severe labor laws, like in Italy.

Maybe the wife envies the labor laws and wishes she had something like that to accentuate her nagging as a defense mechanism. After all, who likes to wake up and serve breakfast to an uncouth man lacking Victorian manners. I wonder what she does when all the housework is over and she's had her fourteen hour bath, say at 11 am, when her husband is off in the farm, buttering up the hens. She can't be thinking of sex, can she? I mean she doesn't really have a frame of reference, does she? A few minutes of pain under Victorian layers and navy blue overalls can't be much fun. And that's all she's ever had. Now, she has no poster of blue-eyed Paul Newman on the rickety walls of her bathroom to touch herself in the bath, does she? Maybe she thinks about how the hens do it, but then she falsely realizes that they are asexual beings.

The man gets drunk on milk after he returns home from the farm. Stop being so cynical! It's hen's milk. You can reach an intoxicated existence if you have enough of it. Plus, it works slowly, like arsenic, and builds up an involuntary craving in its users over years, much like an arcane piece of art or music that grows itself on you gradually, like a Parisian parasitic virus. Maybe he starts talking in guttural French after he is completely inebriated. He puts on an invisible tutu and puts on a little dance for his wife, singing in an Edith Piaf voice during the performance. She laughs, throwing her arms around and brushing the tears off the corners of her squinty little hen-like eyes, rocking back dangerously in her wooden chair, that she is anyway spilling out of. She knows he does back flips for the hens on the farm that she will never see, and yet, she is happy for a few minutes, to sample this cultured little departure, before they both fall asleep in their respective perches, not really ready, but still thankful, to be woken up by a different note.

A Cinematic Exploration of the Evolution of Film Noir – Se7en

Originally published at PFC: http://passionforcinema.com/a-cinematic-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-film-noir-se7en/

Insomnia

Insomnia of the worst kind. Staring at the high grainy white ceiling with bags under the sleepless eyes. Sitting up and staring at a bleakly lit profile in the larger than life adjoining mirror. Thinking about the dichotomies of life - both professional and personal, of whether to stay warm and let the beads of sweat trickle down over the tiny black hairs on the legs, like transparent caterpillars in transhumance, or listen to the whirr of the invisible little fan and watch the blinds of the window move themselves in perfect rhythm, as if played by the ghost of some dead Rasta musician's veiny dark hand.

Don't follow your dreams. OK fine. Do it, but make sure you have enough money before you jump onto the back of the unicorn. They'll tell you you are cool, that you are just about the second person they know after that skinny dark kid with those big eyes and floppy hair from Andaman who decided to be a professional snorkeler, to follow their dreams and all that crap, but they aren't here now to sing you lullabies as you listen to the rumbling of your stomach echo off your empty life. I hope the snorkeler at least is still sinking.

Holy shit. Didn't Edward Norton's Jack have insomnia which led him to create Fight Club? I don't like where this is going. Great, now insomnia coupled with paranoia. What would the pacifist in me say? I don't have an anarchist in me. Or do I? Maybe it's been dormant all these years so as to use its most potent weapon - the element of surprise. Maybe atheists don't get the little versions of themselves as the angel and devil having the cute little stand-off with their oh-so-British halos and tridents. All they get is an uber-ugly UFC fight between the pacifist and the anarchist versions. And boy, do I know who to bet on in that fight?