Outsider

From the Nobel Prize Banquet Speech of Albert Camus,

For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.

Suggested Rhythm: "Yeh mehlon, yeh tadkon", Pyaasa

Now...

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Suggested Rhythm: Her name is, George Jones

16-bit Intel 8088 chip

with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Suggested Read : Charles Bukowski

And whose world is the world?

Peoples of the world, together
Join to serve the common cause!
So it feeds us all for ever
See to it that it's now yours.

Forward, without forgetting
Where our strength can be seen now to be!
When starving or when eating
Forward, not forgetting
Our solidarity!

Black or white or brown or yellow
Leave your old disputes behind.
Once start talking with your fellow
Men, you'll soon be of one mind.

Forward, without forgetting
Where our strength can be seen now to be!
When starving or when eating
Forward, not forgetting
Our solidarity!

If we want to make this certain
We'll need you and your support.
It's yourselves you'll be deserting
if you rat your own sort.

Forward, without forgetting
Where our strength can be seen now to be!
When starving or when eating
Forward, not forgetting
Our solidarity!

All the gang of those who rule us
Hope our quarrels never stop
Helping them to split and fool us
So they can remain on top.

Forward, without forgetting
Where our strength can be seen now to be!
When starving or when eating
Forward, not forgetting
Our solidarity!

Workers of the world, uniting
Thats the way to lose your chains.
Mighty regiments now are fighting
That no tyrrany remains!

Forward, without forgetting
Till the concrete question is hurled
When starving or when eating:
Whose tomorrow is tomorrow?
And whose world is the world?

Suggested Read : Bertolt Brecht, Solidarity Song

Happy Birthday Dylan !

500 Greatest songs of all time - Rolling stones list .Bob Dylan turns 66.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Speak to us of Religion

And an old priest said, "Speak to us of Religion."
And he said:
Have I spoken this day of aught else?
Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,
And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?
Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?"
All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.
He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.
The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.
The freest song comes not through bars and wires.
And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.
Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.
Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute,
The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.
For in revery you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures.
And take with you all men:
For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair.
And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.
And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.

Suggested Read : Khalil Gibran (major works available here )

Witchy woman

Raven hair and ruby lips
sparks fly from her finger tips
Echoed voices in the night
she's a restless spirit on an endless flight



wooo hooo witchy woman, see how
high she flies
woo hoo witchy woman she got
the moon in her eye
She held me spellbound in the night
dancing shadows and firelight
crazy laughter in another
room and she drove herself to madness
with a silver spoon
woo hoo witchy woman see how high she flies
woo hoo witchy woman she got the moon in her eye
Well I know you want a lover,
let me tell your brother, she's been sleeping
in the Devil's bed.
And there's some rumors going round
someone's underground
she can rock you in the nighttime
'til your skin turns red
woo hoo witchy woman
see how high she flies
woo hoo witchy woman
she got the moon in her eye

Suggested Rhythm : The Eagles

A Letter to Tatiana Yakoleva

In the caresses of lips
or hands
in the tremblings of bodies
near and dear to me
the red colour
of my motherland
must also
burning be.

I dislike
the love
that Paris boasts
of females one adorns
with silks and fashions
who stretch out dreamily
saying:
"u es beau!
with a bitch’s
animal passion.

You alone
equal me in height
stand now beside me
brow to brow
and about that
oh so important night
let’s talk
like human beings now.

Five p.m.
and since that time
let people
of the dreaming pines
depopulate
the inhabited city..
I hear only
argumentative whines
of trains
for Barcelona quitting.

On the heaven’s black
lightning acts
thunder
tamed
in the drama of heaven.
That’s not thunder,
simply the fact –
of jealousy
moving mountains even.

Don’t believe the raw stuff
stupid words and idle.
Don’t be frightened
by these reelings.
I’ll tame
I’ll bridle
gentry-offsprung
feelings.
Passion’s measles
scabs only leave
but happiness’s
unwitherable ever.

I’ll be long
I’ll be brief
talking only in poetry’s fever.
Enough
of jealousy
wives
tears
Eyelids swell
fittingly I weave.

I’m not myself
but I’m jealous, dear
of Soviet Russia
even.
I saw on shoulders
rags and tatters,
TB
licked them
with a sighing cough.
We’re not to blame,
so what’s the matter?
A hundred million
were badly off.
We can only rectify
a few
for such a gentle sport.

We’re needed in Moscow,
me and you,
there’re not enough
of our long-legged sort.
But with those legs
you won’t be passing
through snow
and typhoid-typhoons.
Here they give them
for caressing
at banquets
for oil-tycoons.
You furrow your forehead
don’t be afraid
eye-brow arcs straighten to bands.
Come to me so
or in the cradle
of my great
big
clumsy hands.


You don’t want to?
You’ll stay behind and winter there?
Well that insult
to the general account
is gathered.
Just the same
sometime or other
I’ll take you dear
from Paris
single
or together.

Suggested Read : Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

Alice Alice !

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Alice didn't think that proved it at all: however she went on. "And how do you know that you're mad?"

"To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"

"I suppose so," said Alice

"Well, then, " the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."

"... thought Alice, and she went on. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where –" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Fight Club

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off

Suggested Script: Fight Club

1984

It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body.

Suggested Read : George Orwell, 1984

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Elephant and ant were petty ego clashing...
Our same old elephant and ant.
Rex the Tyrannosaurus, charged from behind the bushes
and crushed the two mortals in one Jurassic second
Animal media calls it a natural disaster

*******************************

In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight
When England suffered the pains of state
The Roundheads lay siege to Colchester town
Where the King's men still fought for the crown
There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall
A gunner of deadliest aim of all
From St. Mary's Tower his cannon he fired
Humpty-Dumpty was its name...

*******************************

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Iruvar

In case you don't know tamil, there are subtitles. In case you know, there are subtitles. Even tamilians would need subtitles to make sense of Iruvar. The scene, the script,the background score and the way the camera moves is genuinely admirable. The below scene is considered to be one of the best in Indian cinema *by some*. Scene is explained here. Vairamuthu, Santosh Sivan, A R Rahman, Mohanlal and Mani Ratnam at their best.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Suggested Read : William Butler Yeats

and a great song video to go with, The End by Doors (thanks to Alex)

Nixon

Days after the May4th Ohio college shooting, massive protests broke out across the country's colleges. One hundred thousand students marched on Washington and laid seige to the capital, four hundred and fifty colleges shutdown across the nation. Nixon was moved to Camp David for his own safety. The president spend two sleepless nights there at the very verge of a nervous breakdown. The nation he was presiding over was at war with itself,he decided to reach out to the students. The night he was back in Washington, fourty seven outgoing calls were made by the President. At four o' clock in the morning, the secret service radios hissed "Searchlight is on the lawn", much to surprise of officers on duty that night; 'Searchlight' the code word for Nixon. The Presidential motorcade sped to the Lincoln memorial where the student leaders where keeping vigil. At the Lincoln memorial, Nixon "treated the student leaders to a clumsy and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward attempt to display his benevolence". The student leaders did not relent. Nixon was convinced that the students were under external communist influence and decided to gather incriminating intelligence against the anti-war-student-movement through legal or illegal channels - a habit that would bring down his presidency years later.

Vanity, Thy name is...

He is so simple.
His world is so different from mine.
So separate are his dreams and his preferences.
He says very little.
He writes
this morning I saw some lovely flowers
in the lawn and thought of you.
I know I am at that dishevelled stage of life
when my face is not much like any flower.
But I wish
—whatever he says—
I could believe it a while.

Suggested read : Parveen Shakir

Hot Line

How he used to complain to me!
So many people come between us we cannot talk.
In the season’s first rain, first snow,
full-moon nights, evening’s mild fragrance,
morning’s blue cool, how helpless!
How the heart aches!
Today between him and me there is no third.
There can be contact with a slight movement of the hand.
But how many seasons have passed since hearing that voice.
It is not hard for me to call upon him,
but the truth is the voices and the accents do not have the same tones.
The tune is the same but the hearts are not close enough.

Suggested read : Parveen Shakir Translated from the Urdu by Alamgir Hashmi

the face of God

JENSEN suddenly wheels to his audience of one and roars
out:


JENSEN :
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale,
and I won't have it, is that clear?!

You think you have merely stopped a
business deal—that is not the case!
The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and
now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is
ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations
and peoples. There are no nations!There are no peoples!
There are no Russians. There are no Arabs!
There are no third worlds! There is no West!
There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and
immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national
dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!,
Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels!

It is the international system of currency that determines
the totality of life on this planet!
That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic,
subatomic and galactic structure of things today!
And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature,
and you will atone!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
(pause)
You get up on your little twenty-
one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy.
There is no America. There is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT and A T and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide
and Exxon.
Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think
the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx?
They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical
decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost
probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We
no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.
The world is a college of corporations, inexorably deter- mined by the
immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It
has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr.
Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and
famine, oppression and brutality—
one vast and ecumenical holding
company, for whom all men will work
to serve a common profit, in which
all men will hold a share of stock,
all necessities provided, all
anxieties tranquilized, all boredom
amused. And I have chosen you to
preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.


HOWARD :
(humble whisper)
Why me?


JENSEN :
Because you're on television, dummy.
Sixty million people watch you
every night of the week, Monday
through Friday.


HOWARD slowly rises from the blackness of his seat so
that he is lit only by the ethereal diffusion of light
shooting out from the rear of the room. He stares at
JENSEN spotted on the podium, transfixed.


HOWARD :
I have seen the face of God!

Suggested DVD : NETWORK

Abirami Abirami...Abirami

Suggested DVD : Kamal, Guna

this bird had flown

Reporter: I'd like to direct this question to messrs. Lennon and McCartney. In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. And they referred to "Day Tripper" as being about a prostitute...
Paul: Oh yeah.
Reporter: ...and "Norwegian Wood" as being about a lesbian.
Paul: Oh yeah.
Reporter: I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today.
Paul: We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all.


I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me...
She showed me her room, isn't it good, norwegian wood?

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair.

I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said, "It's time for bed"

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath

And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn't it good, Norwegian wood.

Suggested rhythm : "Norwegian Wood", The Beatles