Thanks to Moacir, I watched the documentary Kabul Transit. Eschewing the usual talking heads approach – or even much of a linear narrative at all – it allows us to follow some people in Kabul for short periods of time. An entrepreneur, some government officials, some Canadian force members of NATO-ISAF, a yunani physician, some Kabul University students, either tell us directly what they think, what they remember and what they see in Kabul or we learn it from their conversation with others. 

It is a powerful work, though it takes a while before you sink into that world and I am undecided on whether the lack of narration and the lack of some explicit structure hurts or help. As someone who knows a little bit more about the history and languages of Afghanistan, I was soon immersed but the people I was viewing with had a harder time contextualizing what was on the screen. 

In the Director’s Statement, David Edwards concludes: “Kabul is an ancient city in which one is continually made aware of how the past shapes the present and intimates the future. History in the film had to seem to emerge out of psyche and experience, as it does when one lives in a place. We vowed not to impose a history upon the place as is done so often in many documentaries…Our goal was to allow insight to emerge out of experience, to reveal rather than describe, and to listen rather than speak.”

Well, sure. I agree. But, there are happy mediums. Since the documentary is indeed geared towards US audience, I don’t see any good reason not to, at least, locate their audience. Tell them what year it is, or why we only see Canadians giving out shovels and building sewage, or how much history lies buried in the rubbles of Kabul. As it is, the people remain nameless even – we only learn their names in the credits – and their personal histories unknown, except for those that share them. The camera obscures far more than it ever reveals.

In any event, it is something that you should try and catch. You can buy the DVD at their site. There are some clips that didn’t make the cut, and best of all, here is Alexandr Rozenbaum’s amazing Monolog Pilota – set to the best sequence in the whole documentary.

I highly recommend that you go out and watch Tarsem Singh Dhabdwar’s The Fall. Think of it as a companion piece to del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth – obsessed with stories, story-tellers and the corrosive realities that surround them both. I was hesitant to go see it, until I read Ebert’s interview with Tarsem (worth reading every line) and the details of the amazing on-location filming and the commitment to his vision. Also worth reading is another interview with ion-cinema (as well as these tid-bits about the framing device). It is not a film upon which you can hang too heavy an analytic curtain – the story and the sub-text is simple enough but it does contains some traces of a quixotic endeavor that is endearing. So, yeah. Oh, the visuals are amazing (especially of Jodhpur and the Jaipur observatory). Go Tarsem and the power of a broken heart.

“Gowarikar came before the media with half a dozen history books and said that he researched the subject thoroughly before making the film.” You will just have to imagine my cheshire cat grin upon reading that sentence in an otherwise eye-rolling reportage on the “controversy” surrounding Ashutosh Gowariker’s bollywood spectacular Jodhaa Akbar. I want every director of every historical movie to come with such arsenal to press conferences.

The movie, which I had the pleasure of seeing, along with two dear friends, at a run-down, mob-front, theater on the north side of Chicago, is underwhelming. Purportedly, it is the story of the Mughal emperor, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar (1556-1605) and his “romance” with the Rajput princess Jodhaa. The controversy seems to be in the realm of that pesky popular memory and history. Apparently, the offending parties claim that Jodha Bai is the Rajput wife of Jahangir – Akbar’s successor – rather than Akbar’s wife. And that brings some dishonor to some one. I really stopped reading after a while.

The movie doesn’t deserve any controversy. Irfan Habib and Muhammad Amin have the right attitude as historians: “… nothing to get worked up about”. Because if historians are indeed to huff and puff, the one-on-one combat sequences for all of Hindoostan are far more an egregious crime against history than whether Jodha Bai was Akbar’s wife or daughter in law. Man Singh, Pleez. Akbar did have (a number of) Rajput wives, and other wives, and not every one’s name is recorded. The one from the movie is named only by her given title, Maryam-e Zaman (Mary of the Times), in the medieval sources. A title that gave 19th century popular colonial narrators all kinds of wrong ideas about Christian influences on Akbar.

What I did find more troublesome than Jodha Bai, was the particular brand of Hindu-secularism at display in the movie. Wherein the open-ness of Akbar is needed only to give triumphal space for the Hindu dieties. And while Outlook India notes that this movie is the most noted example of an intercommunal romance where the man is muslim, I simply noted that every villain in the movie is a devout Muslim. Jodhaa Akbar, is a story about contemporary India and the world we live in, not about Akbar the Mughal King.

As teaching tool, I appreciated the bits of social and court historical display available in some scenes – the Diwan-i Aam, the Parcheesi, the night camps – but the rest would have to be avoided outside of a class on popular history and memory. My favorite scene was the “throw him over head first”. I dug.

For those who care, I have put the account made famous by British Orientalist about Jodhaa and Akbar, below the fold.

Here, then, is the account given by Vincent Smith – “the hegemonic historian of ancient India”, as Inden pegged him – in his biography of Akbar written in 1909. It informs some bits of “history” of the movie:

One night, Akbar, when on a hunting excursion, was Pilgrim-passing through a village near Agra when he happened to hear a party of Indian minstrels singing the praises of first Khwaja Muin uddin, the renowned saint buried at Ajmer, and was thus inspired to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of the holy man. Accordingly, in the middle of January 1562, he started for Ajmer with a small retinue, hunting on his way. At Deosa, midway between Agra and Ajmer, he received Raja Bihar Mall, the chief of Amber or Jaipur in Rajputana, who offered his eldest daughter to Akbar in marriage. The court made only a brief stay at Ajmir and returned by forced marches to Agra, leaving the heavy
camp equipage to follow. The marriage was celebrated at Sambhar. Man Singh, nephew and adopted son of Raja Bhagwan Das, the heir of Raja Bihar Mall, was taken into the imperial service, and rose ultimately to high office.

The bride subsequently became the mother of Jahangir. Her posthumous official title, Maryam zamani (or -uz zamani), ‘ the Mary of the age’, has caused her to be confounded sometimes with Akbar’s mother, whose title was Maryam-makani,’ dwelling with Mary’. The dust of Akbar’s first Hindu consort lies in a fine mausoleum situated near Akbar’s tomb at Sikandara. The building has been restored
by judicious measures of conservation.

Although it has been asserted that Humayun had one Hindu consort, that lady, if she really existed, does not appear to have exercised any influence. Akbar’s marriages with Hindu princesses, on the contrary, produced important effects both on his personal rule of life and on his public policy. His leanings towards Hinduism will be more conveniently discussed at a subsequent stage, and the effects
of the Rajput matrimonial alliances on public affairs also will become more apparent as the story proceeds. But at this point of the narrative so much may be said, that the marriage with the Amber princess secured the powerful support of her family throughout the reign, and offered a proof manifest to all the world that Akbar had decided to be the Badshah of his whole people—Hindus as well as Muhammadans. While the court was on its way back to Agra one of the keepers of the hunting leopards was convicted of stealing a pair of shoes. Akbar ordered the thief’s feet to be cut off.

Later in life he would hardly have inflicted such a savage punishment for a petty theft.

- Akbar, the Great Mogul.

I recommend that you stick with the epic Mughal-e Azam (1960), one of the greatest movies ever, for your Mughliana romances for a while.

Ashvin Kumar’s Little Terrorist is a wonderful short that I accidently caught on the Sundance channel. The title is a bit misleading – I would have called it “The Wicket” – but it is heartfelt and a nice introduction to some issues of difference and sameness around the partitioned homistan.

(Suggested listening while reading this review: click here; don’t bother to watch the clip, since it’s just a fan slideshow) The film version of Etgar Keret’s novella “Kneller’s Happy Campers” (which is also recreated in the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze) has finally been released in the US (see the earlier review of Keret’s work here). Despite some major and possibly regrettable alterations to the setting and plot, it is still an excellent movie. The biggest disappointment is the location. The story takes place in an afterlife universe where people go after they have committed suicide. In the novella and graphic novel, this place is a city and surrounding countryside that bears a remarkable resemblance to Tel Aviv. The movie was shot in the United States in run-down parts of LA and somewhere near the Nevada-California border, which makes sense, since most cinematic universes are relocated to California. The characters are now mostly American, or recent immigrants to America. Choosing to make the whole movie American and losing the Israeli element of course robs the story of some of its original flavor, although in the novella the place is never named, and is only meant to resemble the lousy places where the suicides lived before they killed themselves. Suicide is not a culturally flat construct and in the context of an ironic Israeli tale it takes on an especially dark and provoking resonance. On the other hand, the Croatian director, Goran Dukic, has done a superb job choosing the grimmest and most derelict locations imaginable, and this does make up for the initial disappointment that our hero is now from New Jersey and his life has probably improved quite a bit now that he is dead and living in California.

Many alterations have been made to the story, but most of them work well and some brilliantly in helping the writing transition to a visual medium. Dukic shows enormous attention to detail in his choices of location and set decoration. In an interview he explains that he directed his crew to find the most run-down and undesirable objects imaginable for every scene. This was a clever and thrifty way of dealing with the task of creating an alternate universe on a shoestring budget. Added to the general dilapidation of everything is an element of whimsy which helps to underscore the absurdity of the dismal universe of suicides. For example, in a couple of scenes that call for some kind of transportation, ridiculously small vehicles appear, such as a tiny train car that seats only two people. As Dukic explains in the same interview, the color was desaturated after shooting, giving the whole movie an aged, slightly dirty look, like a yellowing, battered old photograph.

Many reviews of the movie accuse it of being yet another entry in the roadtrip/romance genre, with the added gimmick of the suicide universe. Some reviewers have even accused Dukic of glamorizing suicide or taking hipster irony to an unpalatable limit. The roadtrip/romance aspects of the film are far stronger than in the original story, no doubt mostly to give it more coherence and direction. The unexpectedly happy romantic ending was also added for the film, making the whole thing a lot more Hollywoody, despite its clear indie roots. Nonetheless, to take Wristcutters as a roadtrip romance is to misunderstand the underlying mood and message of the story. Far from glamorizing suicide, Keret’s story imagines the outcome of suicide as the opposite of desensitized escape or martyrdom, a continuation of the depressing state before the act, only just a bit more depressing and lonely. An exception to the more depressing rule might be the case of the side-kick character, Eugene, an aggressive, punky Russian immigrant rocker, whose entire family has committed suicide and is now happily reunited in suicide land. Though this character exists in the novella, he is not depicted (at least not in English translation) as a Russian immigrant. In the film, the family’s happiness at being reunited, their close bond and deep affection for one another, and their relative lack of interest in the fact that everything is slightly worse, seems a commentary on the trials of migration.

Eugene’s career as a musician when he was alive provides an excuse for an excellent soundtrack full of songs by the “Transglobal Gypsy Punk Rock” band, Gogol Bordello. The character of Eugene is in fact modeled on the lead singer and founder of Gogol Bordello, Eugene Hütz, a friend of the director, Goran Dukic. The opening scene includes a song by Tom Waits, who also plays the role of Kneller, an idiosyncratic charismatic group leader of sorts, in the film. The Tom Waits part of the movie, toward the end, is worth the price of admission alone, and his acting and character go a long way toward heightening the bizarreness of the story, which reaches a climax in a spectacular show put on by ‘the Messiah’, played by Will Arnett (AKA G.O.B. Bluth). The fact that Tom Waits and Will Arnett play roles very similar to other personas they have inhabited outside the film adds to the heightened surreality of these later scenes. Importing the baggage of very particular (indie-ish) pop culture icons makes the characters they play jump out like scenes in a pop-up book. The effect is clearly intended, and serves as a short hand for the elaborate characterizations in the novella that might otherwise require loads more explication in the film version.

And finally, it is worth taking a look at this interview with Goran Dukic and the female lead, Shannyn Sossamon, if only to see how mind-numbingly dull some interviewers are, how exhausting Sundance must be, and how startlingly undereducated Sossamon apparently is.

» Following last week’s military crackdown in Pakistan and the detention of hundreds of lawyers, the Harvard Law School Association has decided to award Pakistani Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry its highest honor: The Harvard Law School Medal of Freedom.

» “Mentally and in my heart, I am not a dictator. In my heart, I have introduced democracy,” appeals The General during a recent sit-down with Sky News. The proof? He was not a dictator when he was commanding the army. The mind boggles at the logical contradiction buried in there. (Try imagining a democratic army). But, I am giving him too much credit if I say he is contradicting himself. He is lying. There is news that he has arrested key members of the leadership of Pakistan People’s Party in Punjab including Abida Hussain, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington. Democratic, no?

» I went to the sneak preview of Persepolis – based on Marjane Satrapi’s comic book (see this for background). It is a poignant film – amazing 2d illustrations, perhaps some of the best music I have heard in a movie recently, and lots of “applicability to our current situations” (as I heard one sage describe it on the way out). The story takes place immediately before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and follows Marjane through the early 90s. Especially notable is the nuanced portrayal of a child growing up and learning what it means to know who she is and how to live with integrity. History and memory weigh heavy on Satrapi, though I am sure she will flick her burning cigarette into my eye for such academic l33t speech. I also know that Satrapi did not write this to “explain” the Islamic Revolution or life under the Mullahs in Iran to the United States at the moment we are actively contemplating “liberating” that nation from its suicidal regime. But that is how the US media will see this movie. I predict lots of reviews about how factual or authentic the description of life under Islamic regime is; how she is an apologist for the mullahs or handmaiden to the Great Satan etc. etc. There is no denying that this movie is grist for the hard news-wallah’s mill.

» Nicholas Schmidle, reporting in TNR compares Musharraf and the Shah in Iran – with the backdrop of US support of a dictator. The comparison is mostly facile and the fear is not a new one. General Zia ul Haq thought as much in the immediate aftermath and went on to inject his Sunnification policies into the Pakistani bloodstream (often mislabeled ‘Islamization’). The Iranian example does provide one crucial point to ponder: the role of the cultural intelligentsia and their ability to know and predict what is going on in their own country. We are focused on the middle class and the youth but we need to guage where the country’s over all mood is tilting towards. Let us not get carried away and forget that two of the biggest states in Pakistan are effectively ungovernable by the Federal regime; that an incredibly ruthless adversary is currently operating in Swat; that the people of Baluchistan have long awaited justice and that the Pakistani people are just as scared and helpless to control the direction of their country as we have been in this country. I am hopeful that Musharraf and his uniform and his throne will part soon enough but we need to know what happens next.

In the meantime, we can take heart from Schmidle. After all, it did take two years of hanging out with nastiest Islamists around before he got spooked from anti-Americanism:

At least, not yet. After living in Pakistan for almost two years and traveling to all parts of the country meeting some of the nastiest Islamists around, I had my first encounter with visceral anti-Americanism on Saturday night, an hour after the State of Emergency was declared. I was walking from one side of a police cordon, back into a crowd of anti-Musharraf protesters, when a tall man with a long beard called out from 15 feet away, berating me and accusing me of being a CIA agent. “America is destroying a nation of one hundred and sixty million people to save one person!” he yelled.

I looked back at the line of riot police and wondered if they were going to come to my rescue. But I didn’t fault the man with the beard; even though the White House has criticized Musharraf in the last few days, they have spent the past six years telling Musharraf that he could do no wrong. I just wondered how many American journalists faced a similar barrage in the months before the Shah fled Iran.

» In some earlier post I mentioned Zakaria and his particular brand of “realism”. He now demands our attention with Pakistan’s Pinstripe Revolution. Pinstripe? The analysis is so off-base that it screams for a proper fisking – for which I have no energy. Can I just say that when so-called “liberal pundits” are proclaiming “Periods of transition are never placid” a la Donald Rumsfeld than we really need to re-assess the meaning of the word “liberal”. The meaning of the word “pundit” thankfully should remain what it is.

» Imran Khan finally came out – went to Punjab University – and was tossed un-ceremoniously into the hands of the police by the members of the IJT (student wing of the Jama’at-i Islami, the hardline mullahs). Imran Khan needs to be released, now. He has justifiable fears for his safety.

Aliens in America premiers tonight on the CW. Can someone tell me what that poor kid is wearing?

P.S. Considering it was filmed in Pasadena and Vancouver, let’s not forget to keep a tally of inaccuracies about Wisconsinites as well as Pakistanis.

P.P.S. Alessandra Stanley places Aliens in the genre of imaginary friend comedies. As she wisely observes: “Wish fulfillment gone awry is the essence of many a comedy, and there is no wish as potent and deep-seated as the yearning for an imaginary friend.” Thankfully she clarifies this assertion later on in the review with this clarification:

“Aliens in America,” which begins tonight on CW, follows in the same tradition except that the wished-for best friend is a Muslim exchange student from Pakistan, not a supernatural creature.

P.P.P.S.
It seems that the Pakistani character is named Raja Musharaff.

Just what we’ve all been waiting for: the animated version of Persepolis is being screened at Cannes this week, and that means it should get a general release later this year. There are some great trailers on Satrapi’s MySpace page that include some pretty sweet air guitar and “Eye of the Tiger” renderings by the protagonist. As we mentioned in our Chicken with Plums review, there was a great article on Satrapi in the Independent last year, and more recently, a really good article about Satrapi in the NYT in January (behind the great wall, unfortunately), that has a lot of details about the production, including this bit:

The voices were recorded before the animators began work, with Ms. Satrapi coaching the actors one on one. (Aghast at the prospect of bossing Ms. Deneuve around, she said, she downed three cognacs before directing the actress, who turned out to be ”funny and intelligent and a big smoker.”) Ms. Satrapi allowed herself to be recorded while acting out the physical gestures for each scene, to give the animation team a physical reference.

”We could do any number of movements to coordinate with the words,” said Christian Desmares, the chief animator, ”but Marjane wanted to really personalize each character, to use precise Iranian gestures. And we don’t know how to do that.”

Ms. Satrapi interjected: ”I play all the roles. Even the dog.”

The stills from the movie posted to the official website suggest an interesting mix of styles, with the characters drawn faithfully in the mold of the original comics, and the settings and backgrounds done in a more ‘realistic’ mode, perhaps to give the action some dimensionality to move around in. The look it produces seems almost like a visual joke about bringing cartoons into live action films (à la Spiderman, etc.).

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories (Toby Press, 2004), $12.95.
Jetlag (Toby Press, 2006), $12.95.
The Nimrod Flipout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), $12.00.
Pizzeria Kamikaze (Alternative Comics, 2006), $14.95.

It’s one of those days when you find yourself in a new part of town with an hour to kill, and you decide you to sit in a cafe with a book, but you don’t have a book with you, so you walk around browsing in a few bookstores, looking for something you could actually sit and read in public, and to your surprise, you actually find something stunning that you have never heard of, and, frankly never even fantasized about. You notice the book because its cover is well-designed and when you flip through it, there is a lot of shiny silver. Since it’s a graphic novel, you can tell whether it’s good from its cover, because if you don’t like the layout, design and artwork, what’s the point of reading it, really? And this is an Israeli graphic novel, and that’s the part of the whole thing that you had never even fantasized about, besides, of course, all the shiny silver parts. You purchase the book and walk to a cafe, more quickly than you ought to when you are killing time, and sitting on a stool at a shiny silver bar, you order a solitary piece of raw fish, a glass of something cold and proceed to delve into Pizzeria Kamikaze, hoping you will not be terribly disappointed.

A few pages in, you find your expectations vindicated by an unbeatable premise:

Two days after I killed myself, I found a job at some pizza joint called ‘Kamikaze.’

The following sentences seal the deal:

…whenever they used to talk about life after death and go through the is-there-isn’t-there routine. I’d always imagine these beeping sounds, and people floating around in space and stuff. But now that I’m here, it reminds me of Tel Aviv. My German roommate says this place could just as well be Frankfurt. I guess Frankfurt’s a dump too.

Thus begins a story about an afterlife reserved for suicides, where everyone is just as banal as before, and the town is a real dump kind of like Tel Aviv or Frankfurt, and everything is just about the same except that everyone has a tell-tale scar that betrays their method of suicide, except, of course for the people who died from poison. These people are called the Juliets and they are usually smokin’ hot.

I won’t give away the rest of the story, which does become rather surreal (as any story about the after-life ought to), without ever losing its purchase on mundanity, as described by the desultory tone of the first person narrator and the abundance of hip slang that is thrown about by the depressive and bored characters. I was sufficiently intrigued by Pizzeria Kamikaze that I looked up the author, Etgar Keret, and discovered that he was not, in fact, a graphic novelist or cartoonist, but a short story writer with quite a few publications. Pizzeria Kamikaze is based on a novella called “Kneller’s Happy Campers” that is published in English in Keret’s collection The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, and is not the only collaboration he has done in the graphic novel line. The volume Jetlag was published in 2006 and represents a collaboration between Keret and five different Israeli artists in which five of his short stories from various collections have been illustrated to varying degrees of success. The artist for Pizzeria Kamikaze seems to actually be a cartoonist, whereas the others appear to actually be artists or illustrators and many of the drawings resemble woodcuts, although it is not clear what media were used. Some of them are quite interesting but I’m not entirely sure what the point is.

Keret’s short stories are hilariously funny but the graphic novels seem to take some of the fun out of them and distract from the style. I am not convinced that everything needs to be turned into a comic book, and am more inclined to believe that cartoons and graphic novels tend to start with imagery as the basis for their story-telling strategies and use words as supplements. Obviously there is no rule for this, but my point is that the visual images in cartoons tend not to be used as illustrations of ideas constructed through words; instead the words are generally used as supplements to the ideas put forth by the images. Illustrations on the other hand, are servants to the verbal text, and faithfully portray the ideas that originate in the words. This little theory is all in the way of saying that while the drawings are quite well done in the second volume, there is a bit of a parallel text feeling at work, where one feels like the writer and the artists are most definitely not the same people and they are not collaborators in the classic sense of comic book production. The drawings are like illustrations, but much of the text has been cut out, leaving the stories bereft of their style, and slightly inconvenienced by the strong colorful images. Pizzeria Kamikaze, on the other hand, has been worked over in a much smoother, comic book style, perhaps because the artist (Asaf Hanuka) is a cartoonist, and thus the adaptation goes down easier, or maybe it’s all the silver.

[As an aside, Amazon customer review fans should not miss out on this gem-like set of observations by Kevin Killian of San Francisco on the topic of Jetlag (if you are not a fan of customer reviews, feel free to just skip ahead):

Etgar Keret, you're the most promising fortyish writer in Israel and you just love working in comics too. Your skills at farce and a Charles Schultz wistful sadsackness give your stories a lovesick, hovering, numinous quality like dark clouds over a child's tea party. In JETLAG FIVE GRAPHIC NOVELLAS you really take the word "novellas" and give it a new meaning, that is, you make it mean something brief and haiku like, when in ordinary English I expect it to mean something long. Comics have their own Orwellian newspeak but to dignify these sketches with the name of novellas would have Henry James, not to mention Isaac Balshevis Singer, rolling in their graves.

Etgar Keret, youe (sic) collaborators on JETLAG all belong to a collective called ACTUS, but their drawing styles could not be any different. Rutu Modan, who illustrates the final "novella," has a classic European clarity and the last panel, of your hero alone with his pet monkey on a seaside amusement pier, is like a panel from some lost Tintin adventure by Herge. Itzik Rennert, on the other hand, dazzles things up with a George Grosz meets Basquiat (or John Bankston) satiric crudeness of gesture and line: big thick sharpie strokes and a pornographic river of debauchery. As an Anerican boy growing up in France I used to try to imitate the line drawings in the books of erotica I found on the top shelves of my elderly professor's directoire, and if I had had three hands I might have been able to come up with something like this. Mira Friedmann is working the ominous shadows overmuch (granted when the story if called "Passage to Hell" that's a mighty big temptation) and one of your other Actus people can't really draw at all, might it be one of your relations trying to break into the big time on your dime?

I enjoyed the book but found it trifling compared to your other current projects. You don't have a really big imagination, do you, Etgar Keret? Sounds like the same thing over and over again. Folktales with an edge.]

After finishing the graphic novels I ended up reading your two volumes of short that have been translated into English, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and The Nimrod Flipout, and was at times truly entranced and nearly convinced that the short story was a worthwhile genre after all. At your best, Etgar Keret, you remind me of Saki, with maybe a touch of Gogol and Manto (but not in a derivative fashion!). Most of your humor is deadpan, and in stories like “Breaking the Pig”, you manage to make me feel absolutely heartbroken in about 2 pages over the relationship of a little boy with his piggy bank, the touchingly named Margolis. Most of the stories are very very short, which is what kept reminding me of the genre of extremely short stories in Urdu and Hindi. Everyone seems so set on producing writing of a standardized length nowadays that is very refreshing and startling to see a contemporary writer embarking on experimentation with length.

[As another aside (make sure to skip this part if you are bored by literary criticism and Subaltern Studies volumes-- I know I am): On the other hand, maybe Hebrew short stories are typically very short, how should I know? Don't want to make the mistake that Aamir Mufti did in the dreadfully under-edited Subaltern Studies Vol. XI, where he based his entire thesis on the notion that the short and very short stories of Manto and those of Urdu writers in general stood for the curtailed status of the Muslim in South Asia, a thesis which neglects the fact that most literatures in Indian languages privilege the short story over the novel. As Mufti states confidently:

Urdu is in fact unique among the major literatures of South Asia in the emphasis it places on the short-story as the primary genre of narrative fiction, even over the decades after Partition. In Urdu, the more common hierarchical relationship of the novel to the short-story is reversed....The absence of a canonical novel form in Urdu is a historico-philosophical fact of great significance and is an inscription, at the level of literary form and institution, of the dialectic of selfhood in Indian modernity.

Whoops...wrong! But definitely an 'A' for jazzy rhetoric and self-confidence.]

On the whole, the stories in The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God are more funny and dry, and the ones in The Nimrod Flipout are a bit more angry, so one should turn one’s attention to the stories that best fit one’s mood. The Nimrod Flipout is also much better translated. Bus Driver, at least in the edition I read, which has been succeeded by a more main-stream American edition, seems at times to make a hash of what, one assumes, is the hippest and nowest of slang used by Keret in many of his stories. This problem seems to have been perpetrated primarily by one translator who thankfully did not translate all the stories. I found myself flipping through the book and reading only the ones she hadn’t translated first, so as to avoid the sometimes exceedingly jarring phrases she came up with, like in this little passage from “Kneller’s Happy Campers”:

I met Uzi Gelfland at Stiff Drinks, almost by accident. He acted real friendly. Bought me a beer and everything, which weirded me out ’cause I figured he might be trying to stick it to me or something. But pretty soon I saw he wasn’t on to me at all, just bored.

Maybe ‘stick it to me’ and ‘on to me’ are slang for ‘hitting on me’ and ‘after me’ in some other English speaking community outside the US of A, but over here the meanings are different, and judging from the rest of the translation, I’m pretty sure they were going for the whole American slang thing.

Finally, a few bits of interesting trivia: “Kneller’s Happy Campers”, AKA Pizzeria Kamikaze, has been made into a film that has won all sorts of awards and is due out on August 31, 2007 in the US, called Wristcutters: A Love Story with a cast that includes Tom Waits (whom we haven’t seen on the big screen outside of Jim Jarmusch movies) and Will Arnett (GOB Bluth from Arrested Development) as the Messiah. How cool is that? Also, a great interview with Keret by The Believer here.

Here‘s the madcap comedy we’ve all been waiting for:

The CW’s only new comedy, “Aliens in America,” is about a high school student trying to adjust to a Pakistani exchange student.

UPDATE:

The plot just gets better. According to this source:

The comedy will focus on a shy nerdy kid living in a small Wisconsin town whose mother invites an exchange student to live with the family. The mother hopes the new friend will help her son become more popular, but the exchange student turns out to be Muslim.

If the punchline is “but he turns out to be Muslim” what’s the logical conclusion to the joke? …so therefore can’t help the shy guy be more popular? …does not help him out of his shell? …makes him even less popular?

Luckily further explanation is provided by Variety:

“Aliens” is set in Altoona, Wis., where Justin Hobgood is an awkward, lanky 16-year-old having trouble fitting in at school. His mom hears about the school’s foreign exchange program and signs up her family, figuring the new arrival will give her son a hipness transplant.

Things don’t go as planned, however, when the exchange student turns out to be a Pakistani Muslim who wears a kufi on his head and a shalwar kameez over his body.

I wonder if that means he just drapes the shalwar kameez over his body like a sari? That would not help with a hipness transplant. Bad move, Mrs. Hobgood!

At a dinner table, recently, I asserted that ‘family’ was largely absent from the routines of desi comedians. Their comedy was largely set in the habermasian realm of the public [yes that is a joke. of course, I would never say anything like 'habermasian realm'. ever]. You get lots of material about interactions with the pre-dominant caucasian society, prejudices, life after 9/11 etc. But no sa’as-bahoo jokes. No Auntie Ji jokes. Nothing even about mothers and grandmothers. And definitely no Sardar Ji jokes. Why is that? I wondered. I don’t really know the answer nor am I sure that my assertion is even correct.

So, I compiled a list of desi comedians that I am somewhat familiar with – along with some links to their youtube etc. routines. Maybe you folks can help sort it all out.

• Tinku Patel & Azhar Usman. I was in a security checkout line at O’Hare with Azhar Usman. Fun.
• Rajiv Satyal. I really don’t know much about him besides that he is from around Cincinnati. Which sucks for him. Trust me, I know.
• Hari K. Kondabolu. The tips for brown people is predictable but funny. Also see his blog entry on being a desi comic.
• Aziz Ansari. Ok. I love Aziz Ansari but, the only thing desi about his comedy is … him. Nothing wrong with that and nothing funnier than Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru.
• Aladdin Ullah. I couldn’t find any links to his stand-up.
• Some more random ones.
• Daniel Nainan. Now he does tackle family. But is that because he is taking his cue from Margaret Cho, Eliot Chang and other Asian-American comedians?

Also, asserted at that dinner table: The only people who can laugh at themselves in homistans are the Sikhs [Punjabis in general - maybe].

Feel free to take up either assertion.

From the writing-directing-acting-webdesignin’ duo, the Suhrwardy Brothers comes a Pakistani actioneer, Kaanch. I am unclear as to what Kaanch [crushed/broken glass] is about from the trailer – something about going back home and then running in a jungle? – but, there you go, the fledgling independent cinema of Pakistan.

While Urdu cinema has been dying [dead?] for a while, it is very heartening to see indies take off in Karachi. Later this month, people can go check out the 6th Karachi Film Festival – I am curious about Majagan – a film about Bulleh Shah – and Honour and Shame, about Mukhtaran Mai.

Recently, we watched Omkara – Vishal Bharadwaj’s adaptation of Othello. A few nights ago, I watched Xiaoxang Feng’s The Banquet – Hamlet set in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms of China. I could seriously geek out over the visual delights offered by both of these productions, but I will restrain myself since I have another reason behind this post.

Course Title: Shakespeare in Asian Cinema

Can we come up with a list of movies that can be labelled as adaptations or re-tellings of Shakespeare set in Asia? Difficulty: The movie must proclaim itself an adaptation. We can begin with K.B. Athavale’s 1928 Khoon-e Nahak [Hamlet] and Sohrab Modi’s 1935 Khoon Ka Khoon [Hamlet]. J. J. Madan’s 1941 Zalim Saudagar [Merchant of Venice]. Also, Gulzar’s 1982 Angoor [Comedy of Errors] or Jaya Raaj’s 1997 Kaliyattam [Othello].

Further fun: Comparing South vs. East Asian adapatations.

The Macbeths of Kurosawa [Throne of Blood] and Bharadwaj [Maqbool] could be compared. Or this Turkish female Hamlet!

Add away.

News arrives about the long-awaited [at least by me] adaptation of Charlie Wilson’s War. Who is going to play General Zia ul-Haq? Om Puri!

Last night, I happened to catch the beginning of a Law & Order episode [don't ask me which variety but it starred Pvt. Pyle] which was set in the ‘tech’ world. The story, though, quickly moved beyond the use of a pringles can for wireless into torture at Gitmo and an army psychologist who decided to use the interrogation techniques on a psychotic kid in NYC. Here it was, on primetime tv, a discussion of reasons and after-effects of using torture with a doctor trying to reconcile some good out of what she practiced at Gitmo; a turbulent personality pushed over the edge by those same into murder; and a police department trying to figure out who to blame for all this.

Fast forward that same night, battling insomnia, I put in the recent movie release, The War Within. Torture again was the lynchpin that turned an ordinary Pakistani Hassan, depicted by Ayad Akhtar, into a suicide bomber. The movie opens with Hassan kidnapped off the streets of Paris by the Americans and renditioned over to the Pakistanis for years(?) of abuse and torture. His brother was killed in a riot against the Afghanistan war and the Pakistanis seem to think he had terror plans. They intend to burn those plans out of Hassan. It is in the cell that he discovers Islam … which is about all the exposition we have to this war within. Hassan becomes a suicide bomber because he is tortured. And off he goes to NYC and the Grand Central to take his revenge on the Americans. Why Hassan is not out to blow himself up inside Islamabad’s secretariat building is not addressed. It is the Pakistanis who kill his brother and Pakistanis who torture him. Why the USA? Hassan doesn’t say – neither does the film.

Perhaps the writers thought that the USA is a given as a target. Ok, fine. But, what about Islam? Is Islam just as given as a faith of vengeance? In the only direct instance of justification, Hassan lays out a verse from Surah alBaqarah [2:216]:

I am not really out to make any bigger points about jihad, just saying that the Islam in the movie is as simplistic as the devout kamikazee, Hassan, who appears to be alone in his convictions and his scars. There is no complimentary to Hassan’s faith among his friends, his local mosque preacher or even his fellow jihadists. Hassan prays. Hassan frowns on wine. Hassan frowns on his fellow jihadist’s quick decline into the corrupt morals of the American back-alleys. Where is the source of his righteousness? What motivates him.

Since Islam failed to be a sufficient motivator for the other jihadist, as far as I read the movie, Torture becomes the primary designated engine of hatred. Vengeance for what was done to him. Whatever else drives the jihadists, I think vengeance for personal affliction is the least of it. Read the profile of Shehzad Tanweer and tell me what you see. The War Within misreads what L&O makes abundantly clear: Torture does change … but it is the torturer that is made into a monster.

related: That Torture Thing.

also see:Reflections on War, Detention and Rights

Go see An Inconvenient Truth. Pirate it. Distribute it. Watch it. I saw it yesterday and while Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change had already scared the living daylights out of me [well, her NYer version], I was still taken aback. It made me wonder, watching Al Gore, what world would be living in, had he been in office in 2000. Man. Oh well. If Al decides to run in ’08 – count me in.

Along with the planet, Venice needs saving, too – it is sinking. “I love Venice and certainly do not want to see it lost. However, if we do not curb the rise in carbon dioxide emissions then there is no point in trying to save Venice. We should be worrying if we can save London or Paris.”

sepoy notes: It is beyond doubt that the Glorious Lord will send farangi to hell for punning Gloria Dei. It is also beyond doubt that I have been giggling like a, um, girl about it ever since.

III. A 500 Year Old Argument Over Money

The controversy between Catholics and the Enlightenment is a deep one, and is primarily due to the Enlightenment’s humanist, secular, and sometimes libertine ideals, which are overtly, and often explicitly, hostile to Catholicism. Yet the Church itself has weathered greater threats to its authority, and this leaves one to wonder why the Church considers the Enlightenment, the Occult—and Freemasonry in particular—worthy enough opponents to issue pronouncements, some ex cathedra, against it.

Though many believe a connection between the Templars and Freemasons is dubious, it cannot be denied that the Masons themselves believe they are carrying DeMolay’s Great Work, and this adoptive connection must be given credence. What does it matter, after all, if the Templars actually handed a baton to the earliest Masons, if the Masons themselves believe it, and act on that presumption?

What’s more, the narrative gaps in the story of the Templars’ demise suggest tantalizing conclusions that lend credence to the historicity of a Masonic-Templar connection. Much of this evidence is located in Scotland, which would have been a logical and very un-Papish place for the Templar navy to port. Indeed, Scotland’s early-modern always-war of self-defense against England, then a loyal Catholic country, might have made easy bedfellows between a covertly pagan Scottish elite, and a newly excommunicated group of commandos.

Braveheart-era Scotland, under Robert the Bruce, was a tumultuous place, but its course seemed to have been steadied by the effects of a Templar influx. Contemporary accounts record a Templar presence in the Scottish ranks during the Battle of Balantrodoch—they kept their “red cross” mantles hidden by cloak, and ripped off their cloaks at the last second, which reportedly scared the crap out of the English troops—imagine, you’re a loyal but lowly paid English soldier, thinking you’re about to face off against some barefoot Celts, when suddenly you realize the big, bearded guys on the other side are actually the 14th Century’s Delta Force. This may have been a particularly effective bit of costuming, but we cannot know for sure.

Rosslyn Chapel, built in 1445, is a queer artifact on the noble Sinclair family’s estate—in addition to being actual human beings, and Scots aristocrats, the Sinclairs figure prominently in the Merovingian mythos, and, indeed, The DaVinci Code—is the proof-point many rely upon when making a Templar-Masonry connection. Along with the Abbey at Rennes-Le-Chateau, Rosslyn Chapel is to architecture what the Templars are to history. Curious, crazy, attractive, wholly mad, and considered by most historians better left alone; however, its decor contains references to the important symbols of Freemasonry, many of the trappings of Templarism, as well as cheeky nods to Continental fellow travelers like the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, whomever they were.

By the 17th century, Masonry came from the closet, and England‚Äôs Grand Lodge opened for business. It was not an order of stonecutters, nor a beneficial society. It was clearly an Occult organization. Consider that this 17th century poem published in Edinburgh, called Muses’ Threnodie, by H. Adamson, gives us the lines: “For what we do presage is riot in grosse, for we are brethren of the Rosie Crosse; we have the Mason Word and second sight, Things for to come we can foretell aright.” Scottish ‚ÄúRosicrucians‚Äù, using the Masonic ‚ÄúWord,‚Äù which is one of the most highly guarded secrets in Masonry (never spoken above a whisper, and only given in proxy before the latest degrees) were bragging about their clairvoyant abilities.

IV. Sionist Plots

The United States was founded in large part by Enlightenment thinkers, many of whom had received the highest degrees in Masonry, and who traveled, as Franklin and Jefferson did, among the Continent’s Occult circles. Burgo’s History of Orgies describes Franklin, a devoted Mason who developed his own American Masonic organizations, as an 18th century porn-star who frequented the dark rites of England’s Hellfire Clubs—often shocking his hosts with degenerate colonial excess. Washington never missed an opportunity to wear his Masonic regalia, and no American Lodge is complete without his portrait, just so, on the wall. The Scottish Rite’s palatial Washington Temple occupies some of the best real estate in the city, and appears to have been the inspiration for the Temple of Zuul from Ghostbusters.

Whereas America’s dominant form of Masonry is ostensibly Christian-friendly, Europe’s Occult subculture, made the stuff of carnival in the 19th and 20th centuries by the delightful and depraved Aliester Crowley, is more overtly pagan. It has more Voltaire than Santayana. The UK is rife with pre-Christian retro-faith, like Druidism, and new-age Egyptophiliacs who enjoy suspect recreations of ancient ritual. France’s Grand Orient Lodge is adamantly agnostic. Because of the Lodges’ rules of decorum and secrecy, radicals have been known to join Lodges in order to discuss sedition without fear of discovery.

This is one of the reasons despots persecute Freemasonry quickly, along with the other usual suspects. And lest you think this is the stuff of history, we should mention The DaVinci Code’s ominous outing of Francois Mitterrand, as well as a European Commission’s 1999 corruption scandal which—ultimately revealed to be a family spat between the Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Orient, played out in the press, and in EU bureaucracies, by proxy.

Dan Brown’s pedantic sock-puppet, Leigh Teabing, suggests Masonic, and other Occult organizations, exist subordinate to one Occult super-organization called the Priory of Sion, which is the real heir to the Knights Templar, and act as bodyguards to the Merovingian Christ family until they can be installed as the world’s rulers.

Most commentators believe the “Priory” is likely the work of a Dadaist hanger-on named Pierre Plantard, who crafted the Christ family tree, and, wonderfully, inserted himself in it. Chutzpah? I guess. Brown also suggests that the Church’s historical persecution of the Magdalene led the early followers of the tradition to merge the adoration of the sacred feminine—essentially a Western form of left-hand Tantra—into the memorial rites of Occult traditions.

I’m not sure I buy this, even as a fictional premise. One of the few consolations of eternal damnation is that you can spend your evenings engaging in acrobatic monkey-sex. One needn’t blame that on a grudge with Rome.

Brown’s premises, and large swaths of The DaVinci Code’s text, were outlined in 1983’s pseudohistory—really a bunch of tantalizing loose ends paired with leading questions—titled Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln. In this bestseller, the authors compiled amateur art criticism (The Last Supper, Et In Arcadia Ego), the elemental Templar legends, and Pierre Plantard’s masterpiece family-tree to argue that the “Holy Grail” of European legend was actually Mary Magdalene. They portray the Church’s antipathy to this notion as one of history’s greatest crimes, and one of history’s greatest conspiracies. Moreover, the purported Priory’s counter-conspiracy is equally complex and imperative: there is an Ultimate Royal Family, and a group of hooded mystical Ultimate Courtiers, waiting in the wings to assume the leadership of mankind.

Whether or not this is true, and I am very doubtful that it is, is completely irrelevant to the ultimate point. All of these organizations I have discussed to now exist, even Plantard’s shadowy Priory. If not legitimate, it exists because he made it up. The organizations are composed of actual people who have to get up out of beds, get dressed, and do things in the organizations’ names. This absolutely amazes me.

I am concerned, as far as small-c conspiracies go, with why Plantard and his Dada buddies would go to all the trouble to insinuate themselves into a long buried Templar legend about Jesus’ love life, if that’s what they did. Other than obvious profit motives, I am concerned with why Baigent and Leigh and Lincoln looked up Plantard and spun their beautiful bloody blasphemous yarn around his tale. Why, twenty years on, did America’s arguably shittiest writer essentially wrap a characterological frame around Holy Blood, Holy Grail? Why, five years from that, are we now talking about Plantard’s thesis by way of Howard and Granger? And why, at the end of it, are people so horny for this thing?

To be Continued.

sepoy notes: At long last, I have cajoled our friend farangi back to CM. Be thankful. This is his first post on Da DaVinci Code. If you haven’t read his Religion in America series, do yourself a favor.

When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears. — A. O. Scott, NYT, 05.18.2006.

I. All the world’s Dr. Strangelove’s situation room, and we are merely

Chapati Mystery’s readers fall into various categories. Among our audience we count a goodly number of professional academics and scholars, who really should be getting back to work on that article, right now…I’m not kidding…you’ve wasted enough time, haven’t y0u? We have a few homeboy-haters in the crowd, who come to harrumph at Sepoy’s progressive values and consider his unruly coif a betrayal of Islam. We cannot forget the spooks and troops and NSA folk who haunt these pages (hi there!), and comprise a third of our unique IP address hits.

And finally, to my extreme pleasure, are the reality-challenged malcontents who mistake possibility for probability and ruin the party for grown-ups trying to engage in serious conversation. And I say that out of love, because, to a lesser degree, I’m one of them.

Sepoy and I have a long history of disagreement over the concept that drives such people—that of the capital-C conspiracy. I am not a proper historian, so my days are not filled with crackpots trying to explain, earnestly, that Venusians built Mohenjo Daro using Orgone energy. I feel Sepoy’s pain—were I him, I would be inclined to dismiss speculation about concerted malfeasance in high places as well. It rings of darkness, of the Elders of Zion, of poisoned wells, of witches in woods.

I am more tolerant of the conspiracy theorists’ basic cynical viewpoint. I encourage it, because though conspiracy theorizing is to critical thinking as cancer is to a normal, happy cell, CT’s at least show some inclination to ask basic questions about why things are the way they are. They tend to lack the ability to wield Occam’s Norelco. They illogically assume, at once, evil omnicompetence and bumbled overreaching on the part of the powerful and rich. They believe humans can keep secrets, or at least tamp juicy information. They look to fantastic, romantic causes for horrible effects.

But in the end, at least, they’re asking. Modern laypeople do that too little.

How can I say such things about CT’s, and still call myself—albeit facetiously—one of them? I count myself among CT’s, technically, because I tend think the causes of horrible effects actually are conspiracies, small-C, and are right out in the fucking open, but the vast majority of folks are too busy, too numb, too stoned, too drunk, too tired, too uninformed, too careless, or too fatigued by the overwhelmingness of corruption, unfairness, and compressed angst of modern living, to say anything about it.

I’m a white-trash hillbilly who swings with coteries with which I have little original context, and certainly no real business. This outsider’s perspective leaves me keenly aware of memes spurring elite behavior, which are not always present, undistilled, among the common folks. I think these memes are forensically analyzable, and their consequences are predictable, and, in some cases, analysis of the memes will show they have been deposited in the cultural slipstream in a conscious way, by interested parties.

Think of the Project for a New American Century publishing screeds ten years ago about the righteousness of buggering brown-folk. Now look at the state of the planet—is it coincidence that PNAC’s heavy-hitters convinced America to elect a figurehead for them to govern beneath, and then went about their stated goals, once installed? To me, the Strauss→ power-salon/think tank→ policy→ legislation→ reality paradigm is as obvious as the grimace on Rumsfeld’s face.

Sometime in the eighties the coastal print media adopted the phrase “woman’s right to choose,” instead of the simpler, more accurate, more grisly “abortion.” Television and heartland print followed; the change in verbiage, thus broadcast, pushed the abortion rights polls ten points in toward “choice.” It is not chance that most major media chose to change the way they spoke about a contentious issue all at once. I have not researched it, so forgive me for speculating. But, I’m willing to bet Sepoy’s doctoral hood that “woman’s right to choose” grew in the fecund soil of an Ivy League philosophy department, or someplace like NARAL’s boardroom.

In a legal sense, conspiracy requires only agreement to commit a crime—curiously, one person can commit conspiracy if he’s serious, and his partner is not, or is a cop. In the broader sense, conspiracy requires only agreement between two people to act. My Miami philosophy professor Peter Schuller—an unabashed LaRouchian—fun classes, let me tell you—used to remind us, “A pot of coffee doesn’t get made without a conspiracy.” I think he meant anytime two people want to impose their will on an environment, and agree to act in concert to do it, you have a conspiracy.

This summer, the infosphere will be atwitter over the DaVinci Code, which, at its kernel, is a not a big-C, but a small-c, conspiracy theory. I have read the book. I admit that. I’m not ashamed, damn you. And no amount of clucking will make me feel that way. Sure, aside from the beautiful epilogue, it’s beach-reading effluent written by the same software that mad-libs John Grisham novels, only this time run on an TRS-80; but I do not intend here to indulge in literary criticism.

I am concerned that polls show that a third of people reading the DaVinci Code adopt its major premises. I am moreover concerned that our inclination to dismiss summarily any talk of low key concerted action in the world of politics and ideas. This could deny us a ring-side seat in round 12 of the fight between the Church and “the Enlightenment,” which is one of Western history’s most delightful, important, and academically toxic, arguments.

It could also cause us to miss the point altogether. There exist small factions, shy for history’s sake, that speak with soft but firm voices, urging promotion and maintenance of a world-wide humanist outlook, demanding the overdue correction of culture-wide sexual dysfunction, begging tolerance of reasoned points of view, religious and otherwise; urging humanity to get its collective head out of its collective arse and get about the business of improving itself.

II. Some History; Mine & Earth’s

When I heard rumors in college that the Ancient & Accepted Order of Freemasons killed babies, poisoned wells, ran the world from behind the scenes, worshipped Satan, and had orgies with pregnant alpacas, I decided that any group with a reputation for Jaggeresque excess would probably want me join, and I sought them. I simply had to know if they were planning to unite the world and hand it over, bundled, to the Anti-Christ, and if so, where and when. I like to keep to a schedule.

What I found was an grand, rich, and sad semi-fraternity in a state of slow, maudlin decline. Most members have had nothing to do with babies, other than grandchildren, in fifty years. Rank and file Masons are largely lower-middle class, and, as I joined a rural Lodge, poisoning anyone’s well would be tantamount to murder. Running the world? No. Running a plumbing business? Yes. Worshipping Satan? Hardly.

Though it rankles Masonry’s ecumenical spirit—we had a Muslim and a member of the Native American Church among us—our Chaplain always closed his prayers with, “…in Jesus’ name we pray.” Of course, when we inducted the Muslim brother, he swore on the Quran, of which we had three transliterations in our library. There were no alpacas, no goats, nothing. This was the Kiwanis, with funny hats. Old men: I liked them and stayed.

Aside from doing good works in the community, and, as Shriners, doing an Arab minstrel show and driving absurdly little cars, Masons are the primary keepers of the Western Occult tradition. Most are unaware, and are conditioned to deny it if asked, but Freemasonry’s ritual observances come imbued with the opulent trappings of ceremonial white magick.

Its 32 earnable degrees operate on a symbolic system containing gradations of meaning and nuance that unfold, quite deliberately, like rose-petals, as a candidate moves through the initiatory process. Its references and ancestral echoes are multi-cultural and ecumenical; Masonry’s pageants pay homage to rituals spanning from the resurrection of Osiris to the Sermon on the Mount to Druzish cliquery to Ismaili messianism to some very English prancings cribbed from Yeats’ Golden Dawn.

At first, candidates learn common vocabulary and take set of principles to learn, all cited drawn from the classical world. Candidates must also learn a complicated memory system. A hundred-fifty ago, this ad-hoc education would‚Äôve allowed gentlemen and workmen to converse as equals, exhibiting the egalitarian impulse of modern Masons to flatten, at least in the Lodge, socioeconomic class. ‚ÄúOn the level,‚Äù all brothers were ostensibly equal¹. I have personally seen an auto mechanic recite Plato‚Äôs Symposium from heart, flawlessly. I got chills.

As the candidate becomes more sophisticated, and only if he is interested enough to dig, he finds that there are further layers of meaning to each of the ordeals he endures on his path to the penultimate degrees—Knight Templar in the York Rite (proper fish & chips flava), or Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret in the Scottish Rite (haggis served with French-accented chanting and no-drip candles).

Among the two most important “secrets” present in this body of knowledge we find a record of the Catholic Church’s persecution of free thought, and exactly what kind of free thoughts got Freemasonry’s forbearers in eleemosynary trouble to begin with.

Freemasonry‚Äôs central allegory² comprises a murder, the investigation uncovering it, and a commitment not to let the murdered person‚Äôs life‚Äôs work go to waste. Likely, the murdered person whose doom comes presented under veil was the last Grandmaster of the Knights Templar, Jacques DeMolay, who was executed on Oct. 13, 1307.

DeMolay cursed the Church from the stake in such an eloquent string of epithets and invective that we remember the day of his death, Friday the 13th, as an ‚Äúaccursed,‚Äù day. His tirade, five minutes long, given through smoke and flame, alleged violent, nonconsensual, sexual congress with everyone‚Äôs mother, including yours, the Pope, all the nobles in France, my sister, pygmies, and a fat Algerian boy, while employing the unintended use, as marital aids, of stale baguettes, the concept of something called, fairly accurately, ‚Äúfisting,‚Äù³ an incontinent elephant, and twelve pieces of shattered travertine floor tile. Purportedly, he did not repeat a word, and therefore deserves his own day.

DeMolay’s fluent cursing belies his lofty station. His organization was an ultra-powerful early-modern order of banker-monks who, quite in contradiction of the Church’s edicts, lent money at interest, and with impunity, to noble, friar and peasant, alike.

The Templars also created a safe system of international funds transfer. Ostensibly, these fellows financed both crusade and pilgrimage; taking deposits in say, a London Templar Bank, they provided warriors and pilgrims with cheques permitting withdrawals at Templar Banks Jerusalem, scalping a wee fee for their trouble at withdrawal.

Bankers first, soldiers second, monks last: as soldiers, the Templars soon regarded Muslims as worthy opponents. They engaged their Muslim subjects, and occasionally, their Muslim combatants, in formal discussions of theology, science and art. Finally, they came to respect Islamic civilization and Islam itself.

I do not mean to say that they were somehow sympathetic; they were likely as self-righteous as any Christian of the era. What I mean to suggest is that occupying Templars went native in the most boring, predictable, Orientalist, white-guys-on-holiday sense of the term. They appreciated Muslim culture; they saw, as any reasonable person would, common religious and cultural ground; ultimately, they shrugged and said in a cockney brogue, “this iddin all bad then, is it?”

Ardent amateur archeologists Jerusalem Templars, undertook extensive, likely unfruitful, excavations of the Temple Mount Complex. Their findings, according to most sane people, were, if not ethereal, negligible. Others believe the Templars recovered and secreted away relics from the 2nd Temple’s sanctum sanctorum—relics of the type which occasionally turn up on the antiquities market, even today . Still others believe the Templars found evidence of an unsuccessful Orthodox plot to mute and absorb Gnosticism, which, again, though unlikely to have been part of probable Templar findings, is not an inconceivable small-c conspiracy in its own right.

Fewer, but not a few, maintain the Templars found evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was merely a devout 1st Century rabbi, with a family, and a legacy, not a Davidic Christ-King. Supposedly, the Templars blackmailed the Holy Shit out of the Vatican to sit on the information, and, when paid off by a Church they had found illegitimate, went about developing an alternative syncretism merging aspects of Abbasid Islam, Christianity and ancient paganism.

These theories, taken together, in the alternative, form the first of three elements which irresistibly lend this historical tale to use by CT’s, and some others—others with whom we shall become more concerned, below.

As purported probabilities, none of the basic premises above, save the first, can be uttered in the same general paragraph with the word Templar in polite intellectual company. I blame Hollywood, foam-at-the-mouth CT’s, Pat Robertson, the Vatican, and the sheer mysterious Indiana Jones sexiness of the possibilities following them. And it’s just as well most of those whose work abuts Templar legends have usually preferred to whistle past the smoldering fag-pile, avoiding mention of the Templars altogether.

In 1306-7, the Templars’ fortunes, as they were, went sideways. As primary creditor to the heavily indebted Philip, King of France, and suffering various jealousies from a Holy See that resented their power, and the goodwill they held among the laity and parish-level clergy, and, lately and worse, finding themselves in a wetter-than-expected Jets/Sharks pissing contest with the burgeoning, Papally-sanctioned, startlingly competitive Order of Knights Hospitaller of Cyprus, the Templars had, it would appear, garnered enough powerful enemies that their very existence was threatened.

And it was: in concert with the Knights Hospitaller, who provided muscle, and the Church, which provided The Inquisition, Philip arrested the Continent’s Templar monks and impounded all Templar property he could lay his well-manicured hands on. It should be noted that Philip pulled the same stunt with France’s Jews, and that Philip, having installed a pet Pope at Avignon, was the asshole behind the Schism of the 14th century.

Some Templars escaped or fled with help from priests, monks from other orders, and the fellow persecuted—Jews, Muslims, pagans, heretics, all; curious, that those used to enjoying the comforts and approvals of orthodoxy found themselves relying suddenly on the most unorthodox for help.

Still others shed their robes and vows and faded into local populations, took families, lived on. Monks serving in port towns reportedly fled to sea, taking the vast Templar Navy with them. They, and their squirreled fortunes (reportedly $25 Billion in 2006 dollars, though there’s no way to know, really) literally disappear over the horizon.

This is the second element: treasure lost, with no answer as to what location it might have secreted its big, shiny, gorgeous, glittering self.

From a literary perspective, this is ham & gravy (lamb & gravy to you heathen reading), consider it with your mental lens least fogged by cynicism and time: mysterious digging, treasure slipped into the night, sword-fights, tall ships, kings and knights, philosophizing monks with crossbows, wearing armor…c’mon!

Errol bloody Flynn himself would rend his garments, shave his pencil-thin, brown his forehead in pyre ash, trade his velvets for sackcloth, and prostrate himself before a script of such grandeur.

But Philip wasn’t done. He seemed intent to provide the Western mind with enough weird tropes to keep writers, actors, CT’s and shadowy occultists busy for hundreds of years. Philip, the Church, and the Hospitallers tortured the poor Knights of the Temple into confessing to a bevy of nonsense.

The charges, and the confessions, included admissions of engaging in hot man-on-man action, worshipping St. John the Baptist’s severed head, smearing crucifixes with sundry bodily fluids, engaging in hot man-on-man action, running with the Devil, consorting with Mohammedans, lending money at interest (shocked, shocked to learn there is gambling here…) and engaging in hot man-on-man action.

As we have already primed the Swedish vacuum penis pump by invoking omni-sexual proto-Bowie Errol Flynn, we might note, vis a vis hot man-on-man action, that His Majesty, Philip of France, was by all⁴ historical accounts a thin, neat, handsome fellow, a good listener, fine dancer, and a snappy dresser whose chambers were impeccably decorated. Most knew him as ‚ÄúPhilip the Fair,‚Äù though, as mentioned above, he was a real bastard, and was never fair to anyone. This leads a minority of lay commentators⁵ to report contemporary sources also refer to him as ‚ÄúPhilip the Totally Gay.‚Äù⁶ Given this, one might be forgiven for suspecting charges against the Templars involved projections of His Highness‚Äô personal predilections.

At any rate, this is the third prong—what exactly where those hardcore after-party Templars getting up to in their fortresses, at night? Were Templar encampments really big bathhouses? Instead of working for Gloria Dei, were they chiseling glory holes in lavatory walls? Were they worshipping a head, or giving it? Or were they exercising, in some primeval Lovecraftian way, the powers and privileges they’d earned by unearthing some horrible truth about the West’s conceptions of the Divine? Maybe, instead, they were channeling Divine himself, John Waters’ diva, from the future, and putting on Jerusalem’s best drag show since Herod Antipas. Ad nauseum.

Dan Brown managed to write most of The DaVinci Code without explicitly invoking crackpot Templar theories, or engaging in funny gay double entendres⁷, but his novel‚Äôs single major premise stems from the Jesus-as-a-family-man blackmail premise, mentioned above, which he cribbed shamelessly from a popular semi-history called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, published in 1983, which we shall examine below.

Brown asks us to suspend disbelief for a few hours⁸ ‚Äîand not just that prose as insipid as his was published by a reputable house‚Äîso his polemic novel may tell us that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a baby, and that, after Jesus was executed, the surviving Christs moved to Cannes. The Christ kids married into the local gentry, who, for a few hundred years, also happened to be the Visigoth Gaul‚Äôs Merovingian dynasty.

The deposed Merovingian bloodline continues in the mythos of The Matrix, the hearts of French royalists, the yearnings of radical European monarchists, the conjurings of devoted upper-class European Occultists, and the veins of the most noxious characters of all: a European nobility so inbred as to comprise a single mutant, vicious, elitist, warmongering, imperialist, misanthropic, generally deformed, psychotic family, which our species would have been better off to have drawn and quartered.

But I have not been so fortunate with the crackpot Templar theories. With some reason, I happen to believe them all.

To be continued.

1. One of my favorite Simpsons episodes is #612, Homer the Great, or “the Stonecutters” episode. Mr. Burns is repeated flagellated in the Lodge by underlings who have to pay him obeisance at the power plant. This absurd yet comedically accurate send-up of Masonry is revered by most younger Masons.

2. I took oaths. You’ll have to find the particulars elsewhere, cowan.

3. I looked this up for research purposes so you didn’t have to. Sing! Praise be the elasticity of the soft-muscle groups of the thrumming human machine! Sing!—Whitman

4. By “all”, I mean historical accounts agreeing my assertion.

5. By “minority of lay commentators,” I mean me.

6. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

7. Except for character names. Sophie Neveu—new wisdom? Leigh Teabing—Baigent & Leigh (“historians,” Holy Blood, Holy Grail)? What a smirking prick this Dan Brown is.

8. Hell yes. Of course I’m jealous. But my being a hater doesn’t mean the man can write. He can’t write. He stinks.

The title leaves a tad to be desired but Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi really impressed me [no, it is not an underworld movie. wtf is up with the marketing on this one?]. It is sad that I cannot watch any Indian movie without thinking, ‘how would I teach it?’ but, at least, this will go brilliantly into any modern South Asia survey.

The movie is a devastating critique of a particular kind of idealism that emerged in the late 60s/early 70s against the backdrop of the Naxalite rebellions. It portrays, in equal measures, the idealism/cyncism of both the Congress and the Comrades. It is a movie made of little moments – elucidating class, caste, gender and above all, language – without a sermon – and snippets of dialogues. The period capture is immaculate – the posters, the songs on the radio, the books on shelves. If you know a bit about the history/people involved [here], you will recognize the details. No worries, if you don’t [Vikram's wedding procession was my favorite]. The use of the voice-over/letter technique that, at first jarring, leads to a devastating scene in the movie set in a Bihar police station. Incidentally, it occurs to me that the Ghalib ghazal which features prominently in the movie [and gives it the title] also has a letter-writing motif, no? Anyways.

After the curry made from history and masala in Mangal Pandey, I am happy to see a movie that pays attention not just to the period but to the lives. In all, a highly recommended movie and one that I will be incorporating [to compliment Guha-ji's Elementary Aspects, ahem] into the curriculum. Here is a review that is a tad over emotive but worth reading.

Saw King Kong on Friday. I must have been 9 or 10, maybe younger, when my father took me to see King Kong at the Doha Cinema. It is a particularly cherished memory because that was my first outing with my father and I felt…special. I remember little of King Kong since then, just that a giant python was ripped in two. About this version, I liked it a lot. Peter Jackson is the Cecil B. DeMille of the age of digital cinema. The only thing that gave me slight hesitation was the depiction of the natives. They were, um, a bit ‘exotic’ even though the movie itself has been de-racinated. In any case, go see it. The middle hour is jaw-dropping thrill with some brilliant PJ-moments of black humor. On an unrelated note, as I type this, The Chosen One is giving his fifth Iraq speech in three weeks. He is sitting behind his desk. I am getting serious Nixon vibes right now. Serious.

• There is now a parody of the American Jesus, a kind of Republican CEO who disapproves of taxes, and who has widened the needle’s eye so that camels and the wealthy pass readily into the Kingdom of Heaven. We have also an American holy spirit, the comforter of our burgeoning poor, who don’t bother to vote. The American trinity pragmatically is completed by an imperial warrior God, trampling with shock and awe. Harold Bloom in the Guardian on America, Whitman, Ahab, and Religion.
• How simplistic to blame our innate human aggression on religion. Robert Winston, also in the Guardian on America, Roth, and Religion.
• Joe Keohane in the Boston Globe tells us about the re-issued 1935 classic It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. You know, just to rub salt in our wounds.
• Robert Fox’s review essay in the TLS, about Iraq’s occupation 80 plus years ago and now, talks about the thing nearest to my heart: narratives. Must read.
• Chicago’s Bruce Cumings discusses what Orientalism and the Asiatic mode have to do with the academic takes on Kim Jong Il in the LRB.
• Will this get noticed by the cable news? or this?
• Finally, I second this recommendation and will stay away from this.