Madrid

For whatever reason, I have a 16 hour layover in Madrid on the way to Johannessburg in each direction, but who am I to complain? After arriving, I took the subway to the city center, enjoyed the local cuisine including Manchego cheese and Galicia Estrella. I´ve never been to Spain (but I sure do like the music) and I definitely think I´m going to return. the weather here is great, the women are amazing, and the pace of life is pretty chill. There is a great mix of modernity and history, where people will wear current fashions but throw in a toreador hat or use a folding fan.

Across Europe, the formation of the EU has led to much immigration from all parts of the world, but it seems as if English are streaming here at a marathon pace. I asked one of them why and they said "the weather, duh". Closely following them are the Americans, who all apparently use their High School Spanish, much to the dismay of the locals. (I do the same, I have to admit) The fastest growing group is apparently the Chinese, who have established a Chinatown here in Madrid. For some reason, that blows my mind. I only saw one Indian dude and he was at the Indian restaurant, so I don´t think that counts.

I made a friend on the plane who comes every year for the bullfighting season (May-July) as part of his retirement and to remind himself of his youth in Mexico City. Since I had nothing but time on my hands, I took him up on his offer to see a bullfight in the evening. I spent the afternoon walking around, taking pictures, and trying to practice Spanish with whomever would respond. As far as cities go, Madrid is clean and well managed. The transit system here is impeccable and even the street cleaning staff is populated with blonde lithe chicas. Definitely worth a more substantial visit.

The bullfighting was interesting, as a part of the national history, and pretty much everyone in town goes to watch. This version had toreadors on horses, which is a more unusual variation, but its still bullfighting, and without much more judgement, lets say I´m probably not going to go again anytime soon. Its not really a sport so much, since the bull seems to lose every time. There is clearly a lot of skill involved in not getting your ass run over by a half-ton pissed off animal, and I see how it´s impressive.

I think on the return trip I´ll do less sleeping and more museuming. I´m off to hit my 11 hour flight to Johannesburg.

Operation Paster Blaster

Okay, this is a little strange so bear with me. Back in 1993, two friends of mine (Mark/Harry) buried a time capsule in Mark's parent's front lawn. The contents are largely forgotten to them but Lord they have not stopped yapping about it since the put it in the hole. Anyhow, Mark's parents are moving so we had an "Emergency Time Capsule Removal" scheduled for this weekend.

Mark came from S. Carolina and Harry from Boston, so we met up with our friends the night before and had a few beers.



Harry's superpower is that he sweats profusely if he even eats one medium-spicy hot wing. It's amazing.



We took in some bowling, darts, and jokes. It was good to see the guys again - its remarkable that most people largely look the same as they did in high school. We discussed the possible contents of the capsule and talked about planting another one to be opened when we're 50 and what we'd put inside it. Mostly, we were giddy with anticipation.

Saturday morning, I got the call and arrived on the scene of an already growing trench in the front lawn.



We carefully peeled back the grass and began to dig around in the area where we thought the corrugated metal sealed pod was. The problem being that the two geniuses who planted it had largely forgotten where it was, so we dug around the whole area, cheered on by Mark's parents (maybe the only parents to encourage their son to ruin their lawn) some guy with a metal detector (which was the most useless piece of equipment we had) and various neighbors.



We dug and dug. Then we speculated about where it could be, better places to dig, better digging methods, etc. The great thing about digging an enormous hole in the ground is that everyone is curious and has some sort of opinion about the right way to go about looking for a time capsule. The guy with the metal detector was actually just someone from the neighborhood who was walking around, became curious, and then hung around waiting for the result for about 3 hours.

Soon our morale began to flag. We hadn't found anything but a bunch of rocks, some broken glass, and lots of worms. Also, it was raining the entire time, so we became not only completely covered in dirt, but we were wet and cold as well. The Parents brought us subs, tea, and encouraging words. Later on we got goofy and took some zombie pictures:



Sadly, in the end we gave up and realized that it was not where it had been left. There was some speculation of whether the cable company dug it up while laying line in that area. Additionally, we thought about another time to have a go at digging it up. We replaced all of the dirt and rearranged the sod the best we could. It looked terrible. Luckily, The Parents were great about it and even thanked us for entertaining them for the day. Sometimes, parents rule.



After replacing the dirt, we spread grass seed on the top in what was the most bizarrely cathartic moment of all of the dirty labor. We laughed and were glad we were still friends after all these years. If you decide to bury a time capsule, learn from our mistakes:

1) Do not bury it too deep. Remember, you will be older and out of shape when you dig it up

2) Take pictures of the original dig site with geographical markers in the frame.

3) Make some sort of map.

4) Use rocks to point the future you in the right direction.

5) Get lots of people to help and make sure you have a post-digging tool.

Friends with Money

NY Times article

New York State of Mind

I'm in the NYC looking for apts (I found a cool one in Soho) and as usual all kinds of weird shit is happening all around me. Here are some pics from the last few days:



This is a guy on the subway singing "Jealous Guy" while sharing the bench with a passed out guy with his pants around his ankles.




This is a street in the financial district which takes advantage of the deserted nature after hours and puts tables in the middle of the street where all of the restaurants serve food. Eating in the middle of the street sounds kind of strange but its one of the coolest places I've ever seen - like a street fair but at night and more of a diner.

Why I hate "Water" by Deepa Mehta

So there's a new movie I saw at the Tribeca Film Fest last week which is the third installment of some sort of trilogy (Fire, Earth). The first one (Fire) was famous for exploring loveless marriages and lesbianism, which promptly led to protests, bans, and political discussion in India. As a movie, it was pretty good, not really amazing, but when a movie breaks taboo, you have to claim its great because its bold, not necessarily if its a good movie (see "Last Temptation of Christ"), something I regularly refer to as "more interesting than good".

So I saw "Water" expecting it to be great and profound. It sucked. Again, the reasons are varied (see below) but ultimately it takes an important social commentary and drops the ball. The base story is about widows and what a terrible lot they have in Indian society of the 1930's - isolated in a religious ashram and shunned by society, many of whom were so young when they got married that they don't remember the groom. A real social tragedy.

One problem being that like all Indian movies, there needs to be some implausible love story running through for anyone to pay attention. Why must a socially critical and historically informative movie have to have unrequited love? It really cheapens the message, which incidentally should draw attention toward gender inequality of the present day. Additionally, theres an element of "Monsoon Wedding" to the whole thing - that sickly feeling of Orientalism which makes you feel like your culture is just colorful exotic windowdressing for other people to marvel at. Again, it feels sort of inauthentic and unbelievable - like a Merchant-Ivory movie.

Additionally, it was pretty poorly acted (with the exception of the little girl, Sarala as Chuiya) and the music was pretty saccharine. At one point my friend leaned over and asked if they were using the music from "Titanic". The attempt to tie in political history was very Forrest Gumpian and didn't contribute to the story or make any statements at all.

Ultimately, this is an Eastern story told from a Western point of view, which coupled with being sort of boring, really undoes the whole thing. But being that this is the "important Indian movie" of right now, it deserves to be seen so that at least we can recognize something good when it finally shows up.

The real difficulty I'm having is the lack of narrative in film or literature which speaks to myself and my cohort of Indian-Americans of the second generation. I think it's fair to say no one has tackled that story yet. The attempts started at "American Desi" and only devolved into the cartoonish "Dude Where's the Party Yaar" et al. In a video store in London, I saw a whole shelf of these movies which I could already tell had the same jokes and Kal Penn in all of them. Yes, our parents are quirky and funny and want us to be doctors, but isn't there more to this story? C'mon artists, get a move on.

Edit: I neglected to mention that Lisa Ray is unbelievably hot although not the best actress, but super duper hot.