Batman: The Dark Knight!

Watch out Robert Mugabe they are coming after you. You don’t seem to behave cordially with western folks these days! Eh? Are you too big for your shoes? Have you heard about a dark knight? He is coming after you.
Iran, stop enriching uranium! You folks are a real menace to ‘western democracy’. Look at North Korea they are now, with ‘us’. The coalition of the willing! Want to know who else is there? Well our man from ‘Gotham city’- Batman alias Bruce Wayne.

‘With a fantastic collection of stamps
To win friends and influence his uncle..’
I see Donald Trump (in Christian Bale) wear his bat suit amidst the ruins of ground zero. He is busy punching digits on his i-phone; frantically calling his servant Pedro (Michael Cain). He wants to know if the Wall Street came crashing down? Or if his stocks are safe at the aftermath of the tragedy.




Discipline and Punish!
Capitalism has a new task in hand. It is called Disciplining. It is the first step. Punishment will follow in the next step and third is re- structuring. From the streets of Gotham to that of Iraq we have seen the ‘western democracy’ teaching truant street thugs like Jack Napier (Joker) how to behave.

By now all you ‘baddies’ have got a feel of how ‘we’ operate. The latest Bat-flick will tell you. We no longer care for international law. We violate your air space if we have to. We take prisoners right from your own door step. No, you are wrong: CIA is not part of this ‘operation’; in fact we retired those guys long time back. It s Batman we trust in and the rest is strictly in cash!
The City(Bank) and Batman never sleep at night!


‘Police doesn’t know how to make a man guilty or innocent
…against the repression of the police….’

Dear
Joan Baez,
I suggest you take a closer look at the brutal representation of violence in police custody (Batman beating up Joker right under the watchful eyes of police chief in a police station). Guantamo bay style of torture was on the surface!



Vigilante as the last man standing in the west (ern) democracy of nightmarish dystopia.

‘This city is like a sewer….. Some one has to clean it up…’
-Travis to a Senator Charles Palantine.
--Taxi Driver, 1976
Travis is a war –veteran from Vietnam. He wants to clean up the city! He is getting organized. Does he call Batman? No, he takes the onus on himself. Shoots his way out of the whore house after rescuing Iris. Applauds. – ‘Gary Cooper rides with Grace Kelly into the sun…you ********- John McClane, Die Hard, 1988

.
‘There must be a way out of here …said the joker to the thief?’

This is what most of us in the third world are wondering.There must be a way out of this uni- polar world and its obscene representation. Christopher Nolan’s Batman – The Dark Knight is just an entry point into the heart of present day world order. It can be read as an allegory of things that just doesn’t seem right .The end doesn’t justify the means.
This is popular culture at its best. Thrilling experience for kids and right wing adults too.
A dark tale of popular culture degenerating into the political pedagogy of the far right!
The white man has to carry his burden for few more blocks. Passing through Baghdad, Tehran and Kabul…
The march continues…
Someone in his/her blog has called Dark Knight a tragedy of nietchian proportion. I agree. This is the tragedy of western modernity and capitalism.

Sin City

"Mama's in the fact'ry

she ain't got no shoes

Daddy's in the alley

He's lookin' for food

I'm in the kitchen

with the tombstone blues.."

I am getting pushed around in this concrete maze of a city. I am running away from people to suburbs of Sonarpur , Baruipur, Canning and Birati. The city does not belong to me. It never did! I come from the suburbs filling the local train everyday and spill out at Ballygunje rail station, Howrah, Sealdah and Ultodanga. I move around the city in small three legged venom spewing bug of a beast called the 'auto rickshaw'.

I wait endlessly at bus stops, train station and at offices where I make cold calls. You can spot me. I wear trousers that are politely called boot cuts, full sleeve shirt and a funny looking tie in the month of May.
I always address you in as ‘sir’ and I have credit card forms rolled in a plastic carry bag.

Yes sir I will visit you in your home, I will visit you in your office and even wait for you in scorching heat at any time of the afternoon. Occasionally you will find me selling books in front of Music World, Park Street!
From credit cards to over produced encyclopedia I sell every thing.
I work for DSA i.e. direct selling agent.
Apart from that I sell my humble origin. Yes Sir I am polite while answering my mobile phone and while making you fill the credit card form that you desperately need to cover your conspicuous expenses.

You must be wondering what my stake in this line of trade is? My stake is employment. I don’t have a regular salary. All I have is a commission – a cut, say 15 cards a month offers me a salary of Rs.3, 000 plus the travel expenses.
To tell you the truth beneath that façade of my polite conversation, I loath you ‘sofistos’. I envy you and your likes for that utter disregard of my being. For the disdain with which the city treat us. You must be wondering about those red colored strings tied around my wrists? Sir they protect me from the likes of you. From being hunted and devoured by Satan.

But in some respect we are like you.
We follow cricket and cheer for Sourav Ganguly. We fill Eden gardens to the brim, we watch out for the next Sharukh Khan flick. We too have girl friends. However we don’t sip scotch whiskey. We smoke cannabis. That doesn’t make us hippies though! It helps us to beat the summer heat! You will find us in and around Dhakuria Lake, Nandan cine complex and in numerous parks scattered around the city rolling ‘joints' in shade.
Every day when I board the train to go back to where I come from I spit humiliation on those shanties by the side of the rail track. I pity them like you pity us.
I go home and wash my disgrace. You know sir that my back hurts from politeness?! When I finally rest I try to stop thinking about the city. Then sleep comes seducing me away... into the fold of night. Faint stenches of body deodorant collide with the mosquito repellent caressing my emaciated body!
I am covered with a sense of joy-at being employed.
I feel part of this great machine that is the city – the one that employs us .The one that sucks us dry.
The city doesn’t stop at its margin. It follows me through bad regional reality shows on TV. I see my neighbor’s eight year old daughter dancing to popular Hindi film songs on reality TV.

Beedi jalie le ….
The city is coming right after me …the political parties , the land-mafias, the big honchos of industrialization ,apartment living , Marie Stopes , Raymond’s , departmental stores, shiny glass and steel all are coming after me. Small time financing firms shadow my existence. Their loan sharks are eying our small savings.

The metropolis has let its dogs lose on us! They are trailing me in government health centers and in our crowded moffusil buses .I can hear their cellular phones ring amidst the cosmic chaos of monsoon rain.
They are lining behind our manasa mandir and tea stall.
I am looking out for them..
In case they make a sudden move..
I am on my toes …

Why Brilo Box?
---Towards a general theory of avant garde.


Let us begin this discussion with a simple question: what have we learnt from DADA? Is it just that DADA is the formal enterprise of the art critics who have robed the ‘work of art’ of its context, the traditional domain of aesthetics and turned it into semantics of nothingness? So, let us put forward a certain hypothesis. It is that, the coming of the modern in art (renaissance) is marked by the omnipresence of an aesthetic of philosophy. The renaissance painting (‘modern’) is the break where an aesthetic of philosophy (capitalism: Francastel), broadly generalized as ‘occularcentrism’ (Martin Jay) took hold of the formal processes. The quarto cento perspective framed man as a subject within the walls of the cosmos. The universe metamorphosed into an inverted pyramid.

Vermeer is the highpoint of such a modern who had used science (camera obscura) to facilitate the rise of the bourgeois world view-which when grossly generalized would take up the nomenclature of philosophy. Self reflexivity in art (modernist), Velasquez ‘s Las Meninas, Holbien’s Ambassador and Goddard’s Passion, as offhand examples , are moments of an oblique intrusion of a radical philosophy (modernism)within the frame of the aesthetic. Holbien’s Ambassador with its anthropomorphic skull is the moment when the ‘subject’ is led from the domain of aesthetics to that of philosophy.

The myriad history of modern art movement can be read as the gradual process where by philosophy tightens its grip on the aesthetics. Lines turn jagged. Colours splurge on the canvas. Eyes become expressive. The painting starts to scream at the horror of its aesthetic poverty. Grosz.!

A striking parallel of such a trajectory of change can be traced in ‘writings’ from Rousseau to Barthes.

The line that we have drawn is not continuous; there are moments of disjuncture, rupture and fissures. This transition is not unidirectional nor is it teleological in nature. Rather, there are moments in time when an art form of a distant epoch arises out of the placid depth of mundane avant gardism. The avant garde that had become the norm of the day loses its futuristic quotient, turns sterile(MTV). Where as the art from yesteryears in all its nostalgic hue is avant garde(The Good German:Steven Soderbergh,2006). What I have in mind is the reception of classical Hollywood Cinema (films like: Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon and other cult classics – Umberto Eco) in the age of home theaters, DVDs and pay channels. Why does such commercial enterprise find favour even among the intellectuals? As Jameson has indicated: because it can offer an illusory sense of time travel to retrieve our lost selves.

Why Casablanca a cult classic ? Back to the Future.

Therefore we can reconsider the commonplace definition of avant garde – tomorrow’s art today (Peter Burger) to ‘alifi’ (Borges) an illusory point where art from all epochs, past /future and beyond traverse each other and some (art form like ‘’bell bottoms and boot cut trouser) return owing to its ‘datedness’.

The word modern (root: modernus) dates back to the second century A.D. The classic (Hellenic) in art is always modern. Likewise avant garde is just a disjuncture in the continuous flow of narrative (occurrence of serialized events)- a disruption of the linear continuity in the domain of ideas, both in past participle and future continuous.








Notes: A collage.



Philosophy of aesthetics (DADA, Surrealism, cubism, pop art, neo dada and etc)




“ He (Rene Magritte) disliked being called an artist, preferring to be considered a thinker who communicated by means of paint. While many painters whose work holds philosophical implications are not self consciously involved with ‘ideas’ “. James Harkness ,

This Is Not A Pipe: Michel Foucault. University of California Press, 1983.





2. “ A day will come when , by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series ,the image itself ,along with the name it bears , will lose its identity .Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell .” --- Michel Foucault , This Is Not A Pipe.

and now!

and now!