From the Wake of a Former Lover

You escaped the funeral,
fleeing from the man who can no longer walk,
who at one time borrowed your shoes,
Tonight he wore your black jacket

with those buttons that glared on his chest
like a row of stowaways. You
face the bathroom mirror—your skin
the same trap for stale light

as his. You take off your grieving
clothes, watch yourself naked against the wall—
your shadow dimming and dividing
like that upraised coffin's lid. All curves,

all upturned cups, your shadow draws an outline
of diluted color about to fade. The film
of black thinned out clings to its edge, stubborn
as a peeled-off secret come back

to claim its kiss. How you tease it,
stepped out of it the way you abandoned
that funereal suit whose tailored fit
says you belong back inside.

The corpse in the coffin: a man
who slept with you, whose lips
you cannot split apart again. His mouth
invited you in to confirm

that there is no final tongue touch
blistering within. You are no longer one.
The stitch that bound you came loose
ahead of the needle swallowing the thread.

Your lover and you
were never meant to be intact
completely, only temporarily connected
until that night you lean away, two

pieces of split wood. The black knot
from which you both take root
forces each of you to opposite ends.
Then what happens? In closing the book

of intimate glances, you learn
who leaves whom behind.
You looked at him and
the dead man rose to say goodbye,

not looking up or down
the way the preachers always say,
not looking in or out—
not even looking back.

Rigoberto Gonzalez

Editing Knowned Works

(Well...they're not reknowned works, first there is the painful knowning process)

"The Day Flies Off Without Me"
The planes bound for all points everywhere
etch lines on my office window. From the top floor
London recedes in all directions, and beyond:
the world with its teeming hearts.

I am still, you move, I am a point of reference on a map;
I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes.

John Stammers

(there is some pointless reference to pacts to read letters simultaneously, which is very telling, not showing and hence must be dumped. The rest reads like a good melancholic movie scene, probably a Hollywood movie trying really hard (like Closer) but wtf)

Enough arbitrary narcissism...lets stare vacantly at some Bored Couples, and avoid thinking - Could that be me.?? Strange, no one says that when they flip through the Kamasutra..too few of us use mirrors during sex, and there are too many mirrors in restaurants.

But what will it look like.. in the future?

Go EEEAAAASSST
Years ago the Pet Shop Boys captured the spirit of my parent's generation, that the West was where the future is. Times have tumbled through countless clocks and has landed on its back, like a struggling cockroach. If the sins of the Eastern fathers were visited on their Western sons about ten years ago, then today the streets of the future will be visited in the East.

In Code 46, Shanghai is made to look like the future (and is that already true?) made up of surreal locations and exquisitely coloured moments. Unlike Lost in Translation whose entire premise is that the non-West world is alienating to the lost Caucasian until they find another like themselves, Code 46 is in some strange way like London. It is already a multicultural world where difference is now part of life, several races crowded together in a tube rocking occasionally against each other in casual, but rarely intimate contact. A multiracial world where the free newspaper screams in all the faces about a murder of a white boy by a Muslim, who is going to jail that day. We are shocked, appalled by the reality of racism, and then again .. look at those 2 Asian girls (about 18) sitting opposite me. One with an acute pimple problem with her head resting on the other girl’s shoulder, who is transfixed by her own flawless brown gorgeousness, her gaze rarely shifting to the stations and walls visible behind her faint reflection in the tube windows.

Code 46 takes that world ahead... intimate relations remain intact within races, but some boundaries are shattered. Language is exchanged to the point where accents travel with words. Maria Gonzales' Ni Hao is as perfect as William's Khuda Hafiz. Strange words exit from lips that shouldn't know these words. If this movie is anything to go by, the future solves terrorism by embracing Urdu and maybe Islam. The entire movie revolves around 'papal' and it is a lesson in how easily we communicate.. what do we know about 'papal' - not what it means, what language the word is borrowed from. We just know you need a papal to travel from one place to another. In that way the future reflects an older slightly familiar past, where travel was restricted by economics.

There are rules but very few explanations of the future in the city in which this movie lives ..
We cannot travel easily, borders are difficult
There is an ordered world (it is definitely Chinese and Japanese), and Europe is in houses but there is nothing else that you need to see of it
There is an anarchic world to occupy (it is an Indian landscape, with camels, purdahs and sahab ko padmini de do - so the padmini fiat still exists)
We cannot go out in the sun
We cannot live where we choose
And ofcourse.. what the movie is based on.. we cannot fuck whom we choose. From which obviously it becomes we cannot love whom we choose.

If Damien did not die on the fake papal, then William's Khudha Hafiz to Maria would have been final, and he would have gone back to his chiko. Instead they went to Jabul Ali.

But more than anything else (including the strange language), the cleverness of the movie lies in how it makes the future look. If the success of movies like City of God and the Constant Gardener, are indicative of the shift in the pleasures of gazing from the West to the East, then this movie in a completely different way explores the Third-World metropolis as a symbol of the “new”.

This is all the more thrilling for its utter improbability: surely those suffocating piles of slums and desperation are too exhausted, too moribund, to bring forth futures? But it seems to me this is exactly what is happening. If, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient city plan has long since lost its futuristic appeal.... desires flee the West’s surveillance cameras and bureaucratised consumption to find in the Third World metropolis a scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology. .... Rana Dasgupta

The locations in Code 46 are now.. nothing made in any CGI lab. It takes charming Indian men, sexy Japanese women lisping Urdu words, white people eating Chinese food, and instead of standing in Times Square, their desolation is reflected in the larger than life red Chinese neon signs behind them. Somewhere between Bladerunner and now, perfect homogenized robots and human beings…

There are many things wrong with this movie, the lead couple have barely any chemistry, which is where the love story fails. And yet it never fails to be a treat to watch and rewatch, and to listen for the different languages (Hindi, Chinese, Spanish), quirky moments of humour like a conversation about freckles and Anne of Green Gables as an erotic classic… a conversation with Nabib selling sherbet fountains at the check points.. and ending with Warning Sign by Coldplay slipping into the movie’s background soundtrack that has to be the best I’ve ever heard.

Portentous meanings - this is our last embrace

I'm doing something really stupid .. something only maybe a certain kind of music aficionado will understand. Which is to visit lands of unheard music from a certain time ... its a rush of what is simultaneously familiar and usually feels so distant and historically chapterised in your life as Last Year.
I'm particularly vulnerable to this when a year has gone by, and you're standing on the same dates again .. leap years and other minute calculations in the shift of the earth's axis aside, it feels like standing in a concentric circle, further away but there are points in the circle of last year that are closer than the previous month or the next month.

Not that this would make sense... but here's the music

Kiss me, please kiss me,
But kiss me out of desire, babe, and not consolation.
Oh, you know it makes me so angry 'cause I know that in time
I'll only make you cry, this is our last goodbye.

Did you say, "No, this can't happen to me"?
And did you rush to the phone to call?
Was there a voice unkind in the back of your mind saying,
"Maybe, you didn't know him at all,
you didn't know him at all,
oh, you didn't know"?

Last Goodbye, Jeff Buckley or the Natalie Merchant version

Graceless lady you know who I am
You know I cant let you slide through my hands

Wild horses couldnt drag me away
Wild, wild horses, couldnt drag me away

I watched you suffer a dull aching pain
Now you decided to show me the same
No sweeping exits or offstage lines
Could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind

Wild Horses
(Rolling Stones) version by Alicia Keys and Adam Smith

Don't give hate a chance, Jamiroquai

My skin, Natalie Merchant (I can't bear to hear this song now sometimes)

Caramel, Suzzane Vega & The Blower's Daughter, Damien rice (ugh ugh ugh)

Shadows of ourselves (in French) so thankfully the lyrics are not potent, by Thievery Corporation -- a glimmer of what was to hold my hand and pull me out

Dead can Dance and Liz Fraser remix of Massive Attack's Teardrop

Lots of bizarre Spanish music that thankfully I wasn't nuts enough to translate.. including Shakira and a lot of stuff from the Y tu mama tambien soundtrack especially the one by Cafe Tacuba.

Okay... I'm laughing now... this is an ordinary enough blog post to allow me to retrospectively celebrate my narrow escape from bad taste and so many other things that can't be named ... paranoid loneliness and unequal affections ..

*grin*

A few days ago I was with a group of people who aren't that friendly yet to feel much for each other (and these are the only groups I can handle these days), and the conversation was about everyone's first trips. They ranged from the most paranoid to the mellow, but I suddenly now remember mine. I was 20, stoned and alone, unbothered by the boy I was making out with then talking to his all-time crush, and had left to go into my hostel room. And there after being stoned for what seemed like hours, I found a photograph of myself taken a year before that in Goa. With long hair, a strange slanted baseball cap on my head, paddy fields behind me that had seemed so neon but on the photo were just pale ordinary green, a crooked smile only four years away from having been restrained by retainers. While stoned, I looked at that photograph not realizing its me and said to myself.. I feel so much for this person, love her maybe...

I wish looking back was that sublime now... though if I look that far back, I think I would still agree .. it would be hard not to .. :-b