Thursday, June 30, 2005
the people are nice there but the ants are vicious
casablanca was riveting. almosttenthousand people shuffled, shifted, blinked and otherwise tilted their heads for a very well-written, intense and surprisingly funny two hours. the newly-short-haired ak beside me loudly whispered how it reminded him of an indian movie repeatedly. and that line about paris didn't quite seem as romantic on film as it did hyped up.
the ac inside smelt like rain, but outside it was still an anticipation. humid hushed nights remind me of unwantedunhappiness, last june.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lomokev/5419409/ps. ahmEd and mina - the lahore metroblog has shown some signs of life...check your (junk?)mail.
pps. k, yaay for the turn-down..i hope lahore's gonna be so worth it :D
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
apocalypsetonight. no really.
because, you know, she couldn't be just another voice.
"you need more cuts, your shots are too long, they're getting boring"
her first edit.
hours later, he found her in a pool of twisted cuts and frames, dripping spontaneous fade-ins and fade-outs.
"i didn't like being called boring".it's always easier to pronounce the we in every brave proclamation. one of the first things i said to h after he left was, 'we miss you'. it felt weird saying i.
a few weeks later, i used the i. he replied 'i miss you guys too'.
photo-op missed, number 23.
a little past 3 pm. canal. my car one car among a dozen, painfully writhing in the sun and a red signal. about six skinnydarkskinned boys stand in shorts, still on the stone ledge. they seemed to be contemplating the suspiciously dark waters, the blackness of which seemed to be holding up against the rather gleefully brutal june sun. below, a friend waved cheerfully, big long waves, not drowns. one by one they jumped, each following the other in a blink, striding through water away. in the seconds it took for the light to turn from red to green, they left behind images on tired eyes and screeching accelerator-feet.
apocalypse now, showing at the movie marathon at lums. tonight.
dont you remember we built this city on rock and roll
i chew on obsessions
Monday, June 27, 2005
fit right in
Saturday, June 25, 2005
me, you and a broken machine
the
only nice thing about the sun (had to squint to find) is how it lights up whitelacy curtains.
"Isn't r still in town?"
"Yes, she is."
"So why haven't you met her or anyone else lately?"
"Because they're all at lums and i'm at NCA!"
A little surreal.
I'm not at NCA, can never be. I go to a building to take a summer workshop. The building which has been the site of other people's wonders, someone else's heaven and hell. You can see their handprints on the walls,
their breath still smouldering around empty lemon barley bottles and twenty-rupee shakes. Mango, falsa and a third i forget. It's after all a menu i have not come to be on intimate terms with yet.
They never resent us our intrusions, the ghosts that yelled eureka politely nod and give way.
Somewhere back at lums, i'm still faintly sitting in an auditoriumlecture fooling myself like humans do into the comfortable feeling of ibelong, and trying very hard to not fall asleep.
the class of
Yeah, it wasn't just that we really, really liked the new millenium.
(comingofage picture of sorts - taken by noideawho, somewhere around march/april/may 2k. class of 2k, sjc)
All 34 of us landed in this picture. the 34 most
disorienting women i've ever known. mostly because they got such a lot of you to disorient, what with seven or more years of constant-sometimestorturous-contact. Most of the time it didn't involve being as physically close as depicted in this picture though.
what's irritating and sad is when people refer to 'the convent' and implicitly mean cjm. not that i have anything against cjm, wonderful school it be i'm sure. But that fact's just irritating and sad. We're convent enough to be 'the convent' too man.
In other news,
http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/PKXX0011_c.html?force_units=1. It's gonna be 46 degrees tomorrow. yaay. now i can have that little look around hell like i always wanted.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
of things
at a random foray into a car workshop, i saw a roof full of falsa vines, complete with dustydarkred tiny falsay swaying mysteriously out of reach. and a bird who bore an uncanny resemblance to a skinny turkey.
a man across the street emerged at his first-floor balcony carrying a waterpipe and proceeded to inexplicably albeit generously spray the mound of cement, the one emaciated plant, and what seemed to be several feet of sidewalk right underneath his window.
the bird jerkily picked its way through oily car radiators and old tyres in a rather royal manner while the men lazily hammered away at my poor machine, underneath vines of fruit they never ate.
i am fairly certain that if i find my way back there someday, dharampura will be a whiff of someone's breath and the workshop would never have existed in the world of men.
Monday, June 20, 2005
chemical insides
Swirling voices on a heated day. Music, in lieu of voices, carries far. Like every proud 80s child, I've always thought that music leaking from my room was a way of marking my territory. Lately I've wanted to live inside a song, Chapman or Natalie Merchant. even The turbulent Cranberries. To live and die in one stretch of a thin-voiced whoop, one deliberately misheard verse.
My film teacher is a firm believer in ackshon. He of the Jeff-Goldblum-lookalike fame seems to think that dialogue is every filmmaker's weakness. But I've always been in love with movie scripts and stray quotes forever.
These are the first days that I've actually been up and in a car for a proper commute in the mornings in a while. It's been while enough for me to not have heard 89's morning shows at all. Sohail Hashmi's show is a faint way of being in Karachi while not actually being in Karachi.
[I'm haunted by the fear of not fitting back into place when I get back].
[Almostbasicallymaybehopefulyonly 13 months, 10 days till I get back [home?] for good].
SMHT called completely suddenly yesterday. I almost didn't recognize his voice. I hadn't realised that it had been a year since I had last heard it. And today, half the things that Joey said on myreligiouslyhaunted friends reruns reminded me of him. Another wishyouwerehere, another stupid missing, another how'syouryearbeen.
It's been a month filled with weird long-distance calls. They mostly contribute to the hate part of my love-hate relationship with phones. The cramming words into every possible breathandspaceandtime, the thinking of something exciting and worthwhile to say which neccessiates mindless babbling to cover for processor time. Mostly the brute certainty of being so far away. The phonelines must clog up with sounds of human flesh carried across continents.
(love you much and always man. forgot to say that anywhere)
Saturday, June 18, 2005
stereotyped connotations :/ ...man seen through the nca parking lot.
this building seems like it belongs somewhere else.
Friday, June 17, 2005
there's a clocktower thingie hidden in there somewhere. almost all of these taken on mall.
secret. i post lots of pictures when i know what i have to say isnt worth saying. maybe tomorrow i'll think these are all crappy, but bear with me please. all taken on one notsorandom run to davis road. ak drove again :D
row upon row of square pidgeon holes. i could live in one and never know the way out.
blurry i know. this is what my edge of lahore looks like when the lights go out. quietdarkandskyliney.
i cant decide whether this one's crap or not.
:)
took this the night of one of the storms. its blurry and everything but this house was looking spectacular from my window.
These bottles have been standing around in one of the nca courtyards for a while now. And no one knows why. The labels've been removed and they're all partially or fully filled with water. I personally think they're part of an elaborate and highly secret plan to attract thirsty aliens from the above and beyond. Or an ice sculpture gone terribly wrong.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
we got the beat
My teacher at nca looks like
jeffrey goldblum with a weird french beard. On the first day of classes, he conspicuously glided into the 'multimedia' lab half an hour late, and gathered his herd of rather unconcernedatlateness, starryeyedfromthesummersun students around him. Like the celebrated piper, he led us to the studio a breath away, lit up a smoke with a barely audible apology of sorts, and proceeded to talk for four hours straight. He paused to take every call on his cell phone and merrily talked away with complete unabandon to the voice on the other side, blissfully ignorant of the rather unsettled puddle of students staring at him all the while unblinking.
In the middle of his introduction proper, one of the high, rather forlorn-looking split airconditioners started dribbling water onto the carpet.
I think I was the only one who found that incredibly funny, and couldn't stop eerily grinning away at the glaring stares of a hushing few. He airily muttered something to a man who had till then been sitting in a corner as if on cue to jump up and swish out a sword to defend jg-lookalike till death do them part. The easiest thing to do was to ignore the drippledrippledrip, and after we all tried following that path of action in vain for about an hour or two, the sporadic drippledripple turned into a very unignorable stream. After which a small man came in with an air of much help about him, and proceeded to carefully place a steel tray underneath the offending airconditioner. An air of a task well accomplished surrounded him now as he turned to go. Upon the prompt insistence of the teacher, he then procured two dishcloths, which he lined the tray with for optimal and soundless drippledrippledrops and tiptoed out of the room.
But we sat in that strange wide blue room all morning, With blue blinds and painted-over-blue-switches, and a blue carpet in the reverance of which we tucked away our shoes in an odd sprawling pile near the door. There were no chairs. Instead, three-fourths of the room was covered with carpeted steps, not unlike the kind you find in stadiums. About forty heads bobbed along the odd stairs, forty sets of limbs in various stages of self-consciousness.
That's where you'll find me this summer, every sleepy morning, wrapped around a random blue carpeted stair. Staring wide-eyed, half-admiringly-half-scared at a teacher who looks like jeffrey goldblum.
to osip mandelstam
All the poems below (c) Osip (Emilevich) Mandelstam (1891-1938)
You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars round it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
(no. 307)
Whoever you were, vanished Lutheran
don't worry, it went off well.
The proper tears dimmed the proper eyes,
the right bells rang through the autumn.
And I thought plain thoughts, as was fitting.
We're not prophets nor apostles.
Hell has no fear for us, we repent for no Heaven.
Our candles make a twilight at noon.
(no. 37)
- I was born in '94,
I was born in '92...
And, clutching the worn-out year of my birth
And herded wholesale with the herd,
I whisper through anaemic lips:
I was born in the night of January the second & third
In the unreliable year
Of eighteen-ninety something or other, and
The centuries surround me with fire.
(no. 362)
...
And maybe this very minute
some Japanese is translating
me into Turkish
and has reached the depths of my soul.
(no. 273)
//Mandelstam's poetry has been excessively translated from Russian.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
afterwards
finding empty glasses in unimagined places, almost underneath a bed but not quite, on top of an abandoned speaker. the only times when you count your cutlery and glasses and thank God for inventing mugs so that they can be drunk from. and realising that no amount of cocacola in the house can
ever be too much.
something very popculture about empty pizza boxes on the floor.
.
luxury is leaving shoes in the middle of the bathroom floor. it's setting down your glass on a stone floor, it's sleeveless shirts.
.
waiting rooms are all alike. a perpetual standby. the tv's never blank, muted sounds of old cricket matches and obscure news channels. breaking news quietly crashing against empty chairs speckled with tired limbs.
for no reason at all, my hands smell of melons.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
under control
.the strokes
I don't want to waste your time,
I don't want to
waste your time.
I just want to say -
I've got to say,
We worked hard, darling
We don't have no control
We're under control
I don't want to do it your way,
I don't want to do it your way.
I don't want to give it to you, your way.
I don't want to know...
I don't want to change your mind,
I don't want to change the world.
I just want to watch it go by.
I just want to watch you go by.
We were yound, darling
We don't have no control
We're out of control
I don't want to do it your way,
I don't want to do it your way.
I don't want to give it to you, your way.
I don't want to know...
I don't want to change your mind,
I don't want to waste your time.
I just want to know you're alright.
I've got to know you're alright;
You are young, darling
For now, but not for long
Under control.
Friday, June 10, 2005
people
blueroses and ammar really like this picture for some reason. some people were sitting on this little...railingthing, with their backs to us mostly. i tried to take a picture, but i don't like using the flash, it was really dark and i didn't have a tripod.
so smudgedandweird.
store signs - Defence Market
mmmmm.
memories of walking up and down this road in search for birthday gifts for people time and again. and textbooks from book plaza :D (the only shop on this road that won't rip you off)
billboards - Liberty
this one looked really chaotic in colour. so switch switch.
MCB building by night
one night. ak, amb, thegreenone and me. i don't remember why, but we had to go to y-block ka mcdonald's at 1 am.
thesunscomingdown
driving down that bridge one day...the name of which i still can't remember. jinnah flyover? :/ that's R driving, i'm in the backseat.
the suns another dot
From my window, sometimes the sun looks almostinsignificant.
shiny speedbreaker
the coloured version. this one shouldn't be in in black and white i guess,....but just looks ugly up close in colour.
shiny speedbreaker - Lalak Jan Road
Someone had left this speedbreaker in the middle of a paintjob, and I had to circle around this place one and a half times because I'm usually self-conscious about taking pictures on the road, but this time, i just had to...
LUMS - ivy wall
This wall reminds me of schools read about in children's books, crawling with ivy and bright sunshine. And when you walk down this road and look up, it feels just like being in an alley.
LUMS - the library exit
just wandering around black and white i guess.
Lahore Airport - Allama Iqbal Terminal
another one at the same airport, right opposite the departure lounge.
airportsadness
this picture is smudgy, taken through a dirty windscreen on the way back from dropping off a sick friend to a flight home, at a traffic signal in the middle of nowhere.
and i don't know why, but i love it.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
alex p keaton
And so Family Ties
explored not just the cultural ironies of politically conservative youth, but the equally powerful paradox of liberal conscience. Here that conscience was kept alive within the loving nuclear family so frequently decried as an instrument of patriarchal domination, and so constantly appropriated by conservatives as a manifestation of their own values.http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/familyties/familyties.htm
Yes, that's
exactly what I thought it was about too.
though alex is probably my favouritest sitcom character. the tagline's classic - tough exterior which melts at all the right times.
Alex Keaton emerged as a model of the clean-cut, determined, yet human entrepreneur.i wonder how all the clean faced entrepreneurs who came later went wrong.
michael j fox. :D
/
i am and will always be in love with lahore ka weather. the sudden thunderduststorms at the end of the longest, hottest weeks. sometimes in the rush of the dust, i like to pretend that it's karachi and that the dust in my hair's actually beach sand.
Monday, June 06, 2005
http://chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00005118&channel=gulberg&start=0&end=9&chapter=1&page=1I've been a huge fan, ever since I can remember. She's not the best, she's just beyond brilliant. Might possibly have posted this link up before, so.
I had to burn the house down
just to get through the door
(Rusted Root)
It's a strange city tonight. It's past 3 am, and the water in the taps is scorching hot. I like having popcorn swim around beside me while I type away at night, though it probably keeps him more awake than he cares for. When the sun rises, he sits on what could be called a window-sill on the inside, comfortably squished between the headboard of my bed and the grill. He's probably leaving tomorrow though, e's back.
When the lights flicker at night you can see what this city would have been like had it existed a thousand years ago. Mute blocks of stone, light gives sound. Or at least eyes, wicked and gleaming, jagged teeth with souls who think they're home trapped inside.
While the world's been home or away on organised escapes, I've spent my days wandering around the house in spectacularly mismatched outfits, waking up at the end of days where you just throw on the first scrunched up xs maroon shirt, the kind which lies dormant akin to a large scrunchie when taken off. And pair it up with a very random and bright yellow shalwar, and spend the day avoiding mirrors. Spent days wandering around a house filled with stabs of indian soaps, the puffed-madeup characters of which find it oddly neccessary to sing repititively with complete abandon. My mother was fairly ecstatic at the apparently-at-last-mention-9-hours-long awards show though, with even more splashy jarring stabs of oddly neccessary repititive singing. Somewhere, rayray's frowning with utter and complete disgust at the gaping void where my appreciation should be.
I've always wanted a painting of a barcode. On my walls, at home. I might've seen one in a movie once - they are invaluable repositories of immeasurable wealth. Movies, not barcodes.
Baby turtles have necks like ostriches when they crouch and look up, up and out. And faces like old crinkled toothless men.
ps. k, see i do too write.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
jam pearl
Smile
Don't it make you smile (2x)
When the sun don't shine? (shine at all - stone)
Don't it make you smile?
Don't it make you smile?
Don't it make me smile?
When the sun don't shine, it don't shine at all
Don't it make me smile?
I miss you already... I miss you always
I miss you already... I miss you all day
This is how I feel...
I miss you already... I miss you always
The crooked heart swells around... I miss you all day.
