A very sad piece of news from Philadelphia. Gretchen Worden, the director of the Mutter Museum, passed away. The Inquirer has an obituary:

Gretchen Worden, 56, director of the Mutter Museum, who transformed a collection of sublime anatomical medical oddities and history into a work of art that spoke for itself, died Monday of respiratory failure at Hahnemann University Hospital.

The museum was a compulsory stop for art and film students in Philadelphia. Gretchen was always very supportive of our projects, and would let us wander around the fragile exhibits in their 19th century cases with our cameras and grubby fingers. I suspect David Lynch wouldn’t have come up with Eraserhead, without the Mutter Museum’s inspiration, something he must have surely encountered during his days as a Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts student. Before I moved from Philadelphia, visiting the Mutter Museum was the only sentimental gesture I allowed myself. A few years ago, the new head honchos of the College of Physicians, in a misguided effort at a face-lift, added a “modern” exhibit on medicine and health that they forced you to go through before you could get to the 19th century. And horror of horrors, they discontinued the Mutter’s wildly popular calendars. I shudder to think what further damage those barbarians will do, without Gretchen fighting the good fight.

Charles Sobhraj plans to appeal his conviction in Nepal. His lawyers say he was convicted because of his lurid reputation. His former jailors in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail shared their memories of him with the media:

Despite being known as a cheat, blackmailer and murderer, jail officials still recall Sobhraj’s sharp memory and uncanny knack of remembering about people around him as the most fascinating feature of his persona.

A court in Nepal has found Charles Sobhraj guilty of murdering an American tourist in 1975, and has sentenced him to 20 years in prison. The BBC has a profile of him. There is a much more colorful account of Sobhraj on Court TV’s website. When I did a search for who else had carried this story, I got hits from the tiniest newspapers all across the country, which I didn’t get when I did a search for “Darfur.” I suppose I am not the only person intrigued by this dangerous individual, having devoted two films (Eunuch Alley and Snake-Byte) to him as a character.

A mob of 14 women stormed a court in Nagpur, Central India with knives, and killed the man who was on trial for rape and molestation. The BBC reports it and The Hindu has a few more details. It seems the court was stormed in a similar manner when a gangster on trial was killed.

I couldn’t find any information about who these women were, what the background was for the trial, or what is going on in Nagpur. Shocking as this news is, angry murderous women are perhaps not such an unknown figure in India. Mahasweta Devi has a wonderful story in Imaginary Maps called “The Hunt” which describes the execution of a potential rapist by a Tribal woman, which is based on a true incident. There are example in popular films like Zakhmi Aurat, a rape-revenge story. And popular figures like Phoolan Devi are the stuff of folklore. The image is alive and present in myths of the Goddess Kali, if you want to get really essentialist.

An image of Phoolan Devi on the back of a rikshaw in Bangladesh.

The Italian government wants to honor Robert de Niro and confer an honorary citizenship on him, but Italian Americans say no:

The Order of the Sons of Italy in America (Osia), which is based in Washington and has 600,000 members and donors, and describes itself as the oldest and largest association of its kind, is indignant that the actor has “made a career of playing gangsters of Italian descent”. The Order of the Sons of Italy in America (Osia), which is based in Washington and has 600,000 members and donors, and describes itself as the oldest and largest association of its kind, is indignant that the actor has “made a career of playing gangsters of Italian descent”.

Infact, Osia doesn’t like Dreamworks’ colorful fish story, Shark Tale, either. Though Dreamworks spokesperson has said that “at no point does any fish say its Italian.” Meanwhile the people in the village where de Niro’s great grandparents are from, are thrilled, according to them all the gangsters come from Sicily or Calabria, so its not a problem for them that de Niro became famous for his roles as a gangster.

Sepia Mutiny has a post on this film. I am ashamed to say that I did not know this marvelous thing even existed. It has Garam Dharam playing Dad and seems to be chockfull of song and dance sequences and footage appropriated from the original Superman movies! Piracy or cultural subversion, it is safe to say that this film will never be discussed in the rarefied discussions around found and appropriated footage films. As the noose of intellectual property rights tightens worldwide, we can say goodbye to films like The Indian Superman.

BTW check out Sepia Mutiny, one of the best Desi blogs out there.

After much anticipation, we finally went to see the film. And we weren’t disappointed. Kal Penn and John Cho were very good, had good chemistry and a nice sense of comic timing. The movie’s surreal journey through New Jersey, with a Krishna like Kumar and a reluctant Arjun like Harold, complete with harpies, sirens, monsters and beasts, was hilarious. I was surprised that the film actually had scenes about the racism of the police, rednecks trashing a convenience store (remember the “Dot Busters”) and Asian kids as party animals, things one never sees in mainstream films.

The South Asian Sisters, however, don’t like this film.

They represented Asian American men as being homophobic, spineless, sex-crazed misogynists. They represented Asian American men as being homophobic, spineless, sex-crazed misogynists. 

This comment is very interesting when one thinks of Y Mama Tambien, another film that has a couple of young men who go on a road trip with sex and drugs on their mind. This film was universally lauded, and was a big art house hit. It is well made and a pleasure to watch.

However, in this film it seems the female character exists to connect the two male characters, especially sexually, first both of them sleep with her (feminist scholars have likened fraternity house rapes to homosocial rituals, that allow young males to connect with each other sexually,via a woman), and finally they sleep with each other. In the end we find out that they are not friends anymore and the woman who precipitated their union is dead. The film had to do “kill” the female character in order to contain the homosocial anxieties engendered by the film. Which is pretty disturbing. Second, the backdrop of the story is peopled by poor peasants, whose picturesque poverty performs the function of giving the characters and the story a little more dimensionality. There are no threatening thugs and no racist cops in this film’s Mexico. Given these omissions, Harold and Kumar starts to look positively subversive.

Alexander Hammid, passed away last week, in New York at the age of 96. Hammid’s life and work spanned avant-garde film movements in Czechoslovakia and the United States. There is an obituary in the New York Times.

The censor board in India has chosen to ban Rakesh Sharma’s “Final Solution.” The logic being that it will provoke social unrest. The film is about the violence in Gujarat that took place in 2002 and claimed the lives of almost 2000 people. The filmmaker says:

People who make hate speeches should be banned and not the film-maker who records it

Which is pretty much what the documentary does. It is a very patient record of several people who have a connection with the violence, either as victims, perpetrators or sympathizers of the perpetrators. Every one is allowed to say their piece, including Narendra Modi, the chief minister under whose watch the violence took place. Sharma doesn’t point fingers as much as allows people to present enough of themselves for the audience to draw its own conclusions. It has Narendra Modi on the campaign trail rallying the crowds by calling those who criticized the state government for its role in the violence as anti-Gujarati and anti-Indian. It has chilling footage of the police clearing the way for a mob before it comes into a neighborhood to kill, burn and rape. There are ordinary people like the husband of a woman who was killed on the Godhra train, which was allegedly set on fire by a Muslim mob. This man is trying to continue his life and bring up his kids, and is afraid to delve too deeply into the Godhra incident, makes one wonder about the authorship of the incident. There are children who witnessed their parents getting killed and raped, others who saw bodies being disposed off in the field where they play cricket. If the state is so keen on protecting its citizens from hearing these stories, maybe they should have played a bigger role in preventing the violence in the first place and punishing the perpetrators. Instead we have the obscene situation, where some Gujarat riots court cases are being tried in a neighboring state, because its not certain that justice will be done otherwise.

Also look at Keywords for links on the riots and the film.

As depressed teenagers my friends and I listened to Pink Floyd with a religious fervor, it somehow made our depression even more enjoyable, granted that we were an unattractive and unpopular bunch, so it didn’t take much to get us depressed.

Marimba Films is helping bring the musical version of The Wall to Broadway. God bless the Weinstein’s chubby souls. The BBC has a nice website about the band. I still think Syd Barrett is a genius, and Roger Waters is amazing, too bad they don’t talk to each other. And the sound mix on their tracks is something else, it still sounds incredible.