chicks were born to give you fever, and I'm still running one ..

Showgirls

Allow me to give you an idea of how into women I am suddenly. How hard and stupidly and brazenly I've fallen off the deep side. From isn't it cool to see me dancing with another woman (in some lesbian porn for straight men kind of scenario) to this -- which I'm not even going to describe. It seems to be the theme of the month and honestly even I'm getting sick of it. Either get with it, girl. Cut your hair, get that eyebrow piercing, remove the link to BDSM websites on your bookmark which you haven't visited in months, don't fix up dates with straight men this week, no next week.. or no, its okay, lets do this the week after, stop trying to say to yourself that this is some kind of bizarre rebound trajectory and that you might just be back.

But to give you an idea of how into women I am, lets just say this. I liked Showgirls. The worst, most embarrassingly bad movie ever made. The sex scenes (heterosexual ones, ofcourse) are a hoot. They are somewhere between a really bad Broadway dance production and really bad pornography. If those sex scenes are meant to turn you off straight sex for life, then shit maaaan.. they definitely worked on me. Ofcourse there are reviews of Showgirls that give me hope, one that says that saying Showgirls is sexist or misogynist is to say that Brittany Spears is not a real musician, like you discovered something.

Showgirls turns and twists karma around its thumb like a narrative tool, till you can foretell with a flick of your mouse (yes, I watch movies on my laptop) that the friend of the main female lead (Goddess, no less) is going to suffer badly for Goddess' sins. Goddess keeps saying 'I am not a whore' in the most inappropriate scenes, where you're practically crying and saying - just make out with the other hot woman. Yes, yes, we are all whores. Accept it. Now make out.

But there is a charge in the scenes between the women, the dance scene and the kiss in the end. Or is it because the straight sex in all lesbian films is invariably portrayed just a step better than rape. Even sweet sensitive men in lesbian flicks fuck like grunting robots with a mechanical penis. And then moan suddenly in the middle of their equally spaced jabs and come. Ofcourse the chick looks like -- when and how, and the man looks shamefaced. Another pathetic lesbian flick that I saw recently that has a laughable scene of straight sex is My summer of love. Though the replay of the straight sex between the two women is quite adorable (ugh .. I know, I’ve lost my marbles).

Anyway Showgirls has been attributed the dubious distinction of starting off the trend of liking bad movies. And I enjoyed it.. for the lesbian undercurrent

Yes, I'm in serious need of saving...

every girl needs a pep talk

.. and she needs to be a nutso, cheesy, pathologically obsessed fan of something.. (thats my excuse, whats yours?)

and when i've tuned out my funny bone, and am watching this .. i think of a certain girl and also how she needs to get out of the x-rated part of my brain

damn! heroin chic is over...

I'm surrounded by morons who don't know that frustration and sorrow has to be handled not by screaming out loud and raging. Stylish grief like in the movies, is what looks good ... like self harm (side of hand and thighs preferably), drugs (hard and soft), sex, sex, sex with random people, two night stands with beautiful hips that coil up on your bed after, tangos and fevers...
tears not only recriminations.

Song: Don't tell me, Madonna
Mood: Amused

mona lisa descending a staircase

Joan Gratz, Two dimensional clay animation on glass

sometimes the sheer effort to do something is exhausting
to feel history, to see the linkages

Fever isn't such a new thing, fever start long ago

About three years ago, I and a friend had gone for a Ladies Night at a bar in a five star hotel. There is little I remember of that night, except that it was as banal an outing as a north Indian family going to eat dosa&idli in their neighbourhood market in Delhi. In retrospect we could have gone to the Big Nipple, and met some of the people we know now and probably had a better time. But we were seduced. In the movies, women trapped by circumstances exit them in a dimly light pubs, leaning over a bar counter, being served cosmopolitans by a suave bartender.

Instead we got a ridiculously uninteresting vodka, lime and crushed ice drink (for free) and each other for company. We had reached too early in the evening and saw only one person ever reach the dance floor. It was dark, the lights were dim, there were reasonably good looking people around, but.... we were too naive to know what to do, or maybe it just wasn't yet time.

Jump cut. Here's the recipe for a ladies night that actually does what we wanted that one to do ...

- add a few years
- replace vodka and crushed ice with australian white wine
- don't eat at home, don't eat too much
- women, lovely looking women.. dykes in fact
- a table full of traveling japanese at the next table
- many cover versions of fever
- the willingness to tell your life story with wit
- the willingness to forget your life story
- adept fingers for messaging
- a man to call the next day
- a man to leave behind
- a man to call next month
- and a woman who's going to leave soon who says things like - you know I would have loved to spend the night with you

the post that conceals more than it reveals

Prey and Young man hides from Big Woman, Richard Onyango


I’ve known two people who should not have belonged here, but do. Two whose lives are implicated in this mire of Indians (mallus, punjus, tamils, bengalis, gujus..) with their varied accents and ways of being. Two people who are racially out of the mix entirely. In different and complicated ways both have chosen to belong and un-belong.

One plays up his race, making it an aspect that has to be dealt with again and again, and yet feels, touches, talks like one of us .. and ofcourse thinks like one of us. The other never mentions race, and only does so at the end of a seven year relationship to ask whether it felt strange to be with a Chinese person, a question that finally shatters the sense of normalcy that he had ensured around him. A question that revealed the questions of other newer lovers.

Both know this country and this city, are so rooted in this part of their borrowed world of Indianness. Neither could really handle Delhi though have tried, or probably any other city. One went abroad and navigated England stoutly claiming Indianness not Chineseness.. and avoiding the cringe-worthy category of Indian Chinese food. And the other hasn't set foot yet as an adult into a different world, but something tells me will find out soon enough how different he is from other black people. What marks him, his clothes, his facial expressions, the slight remnants of kajal in his eyes, the way his body would curve into the posture of the south Indian immigrant in London but not that of the black man who belongs there.

In some senses I'm dislocated as well, not racially/culturally as much as these two, but maybe my affinity to them is an indication of a dislocation so huge that I don't acknowledge it myself. I don't really have family. I do, they exist, but technically. we could belong to different planets. My mother said to me, while watching a trailer of - In her shoes (a movie I sincerely don't intend watching, just like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind) that you and your sister are just like that. There's nothing similar about the two of you (the depressing part here is ofcourse that I like Toni Collette far more than I like Cameron Diaz, and considering my family and my sister.. well there is no doubt that I'm Cameron .. none at all..)

We are in some senses an ahistorical family. It is only recently that my brother in law has unearthed photographs of my mother as a young woman, that allow me to see that my sister does look a bit like her. The presence of a proud, lonely grandfather ensured a sense of some kind of history when he was around, but also the extreme humility and almost benign ridiculousness of my father. The man who never liked the taste of alcohol and was often found pouring gin into plants at fancy dinner parties thrown by very rich members of my mother's family.

My father introduced me to the quirky outsider, who survived at the fringes of every party and managed to make fun of everyone just by not participating. But I think he was very embarrassed when I grew up and wanted to be there with him. He wanted to be the only shadowy presence at the margins. Often telling me to get back into the fray.. but somehow I don't think he understood that I thought where he was, was cool and the place to be. That I thought the others were idiots, but mine was an articulated thought about them, and his was an absence. An absence (as I have learnt quite well recently) is not allowed to speak...

in the dark you can see shiny cars