I have certainly chammak challo'ed by way to an earworm. Mostly I'm not that interested in listening to "filmi" music without the movie; it's usually the combination that grabs me. (Oddly enough, it's the absolute opposite of the way I feel about American music -- I rarely watch music videos.) But Chammak Challo stands on its own wonderfully, although the video is fantastic.
Someone on YouTube informed me that George Baker's "Little Green Bag" is a bag of marijuana. Duh on me.
My "Amazon Associates" widget is now not working at all, here or home. (I suppose I need to uninstall or reinstall it, but I have a lot of trouble doing anything with Blogger except writing.) But I wanted to mention a truly amazing book Ive been reading: Secret Historian: The life and times of Samuel Steward, professor, tattoo artist, and sexual renegade by Justin Spring. I was initially intrigued by the title, since I'd never heard of Samuel Steward. But it wasn't that I was somehow out of the loop -- Steward is something of a forgotten character, painstakingly researched and brought to life by the author. He was a fascinating personality: a closeted gay man who taught English literature and wrote poetry and scholarly books, met and became friendly with some of the great literary personalities of the 30s and 40s, kept meticulous records of his sexual contacts (many of which ended up in the Kinsey archives), and had quite a talent for drawing and painting. After age 40, he took an abrupt turn, became a tattoo artist (this grew out of his taste for rough trade, particularly sailors), and eventually gave up university teaching to tattoo full-time. He became the house tattoo artist for the Hell's Angels in the late 60s and early 70s. After 15 years, he gave up tattooing, and became one of the early writers of openly published gay porn. I've almost finished the book, and it's absolutely fascinating. The author's quite a hero for discovering and putting together this amazing story.
This song and video come from a brand-new Bollywood movie called Ra.One, which opened at something like $34 million world-wide on October 26. As well it should: it's about videogames and has a lot of special effects and action sequences, flying the star around on a wire...plus, the star is Shah Rukh Khan. Bingo. I thought the movie was a little stupid, and the blue contact lenses on SRK absolutely criminal, but this song is totally awesome:
"Chammak challo" translates into something in the neighborhood of "sexy babe," as far as I can tell.
Today's lesson in Bollywood films: Bollywood actors rarely do their own singing. This is not a secret in any way. The actual singers, called "playback singers," get prominent billing in the film, and are stars in their own right. Needless to say, most playback singers are Indian. But I'm proud to say that "Chammak Challo" is sung by an American:
I have a feeling that Akon's had this song out for a while, but I only first heard it in the movie. Mad respect for Akon. He's great on this.
Needless to say, I seem to be getting more and more hooked on Indian films, and I am particularly fascinated by Amitabh Bachchan. I found out a few days ago that he writes a really amazing blog. And I believe I can finally pronounce his name properly, after a week or so of feeling like an ugly Westerner: it's Ah-MEE-tahb Ba-SHAN. But most Indians just refer to him as Amitabh, or Amitji, and call it a day.
I rewatched Slumdog Millionaire tonight. I'd seen it a couple of days ago, but hadn't remembered until a friend reminded me yesterday that Amitabh had been the movie star whose autograph Jamal sought as a small boy.
Don't you just love YouTube? I just went there, right in the middle of writing this, and found a trailer that had the entire Amitabh scene.
Life imitates film: recently, on KBC (the actual Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), a guy who earns around $120 a month won the top prize of 5 crore ("crore" is ten million rupees, if I've got that right, and I suppose 5 crore is somewhere around a million dollars). And the current host of KBC is -- you guessed it, Amitji. So I hunted it down on YouTube. Call me crazy, but I watched the whole thing, almost 15 minutes (this was the time of the last question), which was about 85% in Hindi (or do we say Punjab?), and was riveted. You can basically follow what's going on. And if you're with me on this, Amitji's charisma just pops off the screen, as does a really warm personality. I have no doubt that he really is that nice. If you wanna be a hardcore Amitabh Bachchan fan, here's that clip:
I took a peek at my blog traffic before, and apparently one person from India came to visit. Hi!
Doubt I'll ever actually learn the language, but I'm starting to learn some things about the culture and the history of India. Watching Slumdog Millionaire again, I picked up on some things that I hadn't noticed before I started watching Indian films; for instance, I was very much aware of which characters were Hindi, which were Muslim, and noticed some Sikhs on a train. Another thing about Bollywood films: there are a lot of trains in them. A lot of train station scenes. Even in Kabhi Alveda Naa Kehna, which is set in New York, there are no subways or busses, but plenty of railroad scenes. (They kind of vaguely indicate that the characters work or spend time in Manhattan, but live in Connecticut, so folks keep turning up in Grand Central Station.) And I like it -- there's something romantic about trains.
I'm going to pretend I'm going to sleep now, but I may actually watch a couple more videos.
It's true that I have been persistently depressed and anxious of late. It's partly due to the realities of life in the 1%, and probably partly due to inadequate medication. My long-time primary care doctor is not in my new insurance plan, so I have to pick a new doctor, see him or her ($30 copay) and get a referral to a psychiatrist ($50 copay). I couldn't figure out how to make that work financially except to wait until mid-December to see the psychiatrist (and had no idea how I'd get any psychiatric meds until then), but I actually got offered a babysitting gig: five hours at $20 per hour. Yes, thank you. It's probably 40 years since I've babysat, but that's actually a higher hourly rate than I make at work. Yes, thank you very much. The mom is someone I know casually, but well enough that she knows things are tight for me, and it was a real kindness and offered in a very sensitive way.
Work does keep me busy and that keeps away the worst of the moods for the most part, although I have some days where I feel very sad and cry easily. But the weekends are terrible. Way too much unstructured time on my hands. I rarely make jewelry because I'm so conscious of how expensive the materials are, and how impossible it would be to replace anything I use up. (Truthfully, I have an insanely huge amount of beads, but the silver findings -- clasps, wire, earring hooks -- do get used up and silver is now wildly expensive.)
So mostly what I end up doing on the weekends is distracting myself. Occasionally I just do something useless like sleep all day, but mostly it's Media Time. Barry and I do love our TV and music and movies, but he gravitates to the TV set and I gravitate toward the computer. The TV set is old and not HD and our DVD player died; even with all the on-demand stuff we get with FIOS, there's way more content and variety online. Barry doesn't really like watching much online except for relatively short videos, but I love it: HD screen, headphones with nice sound. And I like to let him have the TV on weekends because he lets me hog it during the week because I work and he doesn't. We like a lot of the same things but we do have different preferences. So on the weekends I'll leave him to martial arts and vampires and the things he likes best. And I can jump around, stop and start, and be as obsessed as I like.
I watched, I think, five Bollywood movies this past weekend. And another great thing about the computer is that I can pause a movie and look something up: how are Sikhs different from Hindus? do the actors do their own singing? are all Indian movies like this?
I was not only thoroughly distracted, but very entertained and very educated. Bollywood movies totally rule.
I watched: Ra.One. This movie just opened, around $34 million internationally on its first weekend. Kind of an Indian Tron. I watched: Swades. Incredibly beautiful. I watched: Veer-Zaara. Also very beautiful; this was the one where Sikhs and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis were all involved. I watched: Deewar. Wow. That one was from the 70s, with a very young, brooding Amitabh Bachchan. Old-school plot about two brothers, one a gangster, one a cop. Shashi Kapoor was the "good" brother, and incredibly wussy next to Amitabh. Kind of like Leslie Howard next to Clark Gable: no contest. Love the bad boys.
These are some long movies, too, generally around three hours, and I started to realize that it wasn't just comedy and drama and music, but also family issues, justice, prejudice, women's rights, government corruption, class, caste...these movies are just plain loaded. And then everyone sings and dances. This is definitely my new favorite thing. I'm also thinking I like Amitabh Bachchan better than I like Shah Rukh Khan, although SRK is certainly handsome and talented. But Amitabh is like Cary Grant, Clint Eastwood, Fred Astaire, George Clooney...great at drama, great at comedy, great at dancing, handsome young and handsome old. Visual aids:
I rest my case. There are a lot of Bollywood actors and actresses I haven't seen yet, and I have yet to say anything about the female stars, but I do love those men.
I like this number for a lot of different reasons. I'm on my second viewing of this movie, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, but I've watched this number a gazillion times. I don't know much of anything about Bollywood, but I suspect this movie is kind of the golden mean of Bollywood movies. It's really long, has romance and goofy comedy, and awesome musical numbers like this. There are also some things that make me cringe a little, some supposedly-funny-but-really-dreadful parenting bits, some non-PC stuff. Lots of NYC locations (!) and every American person acts weird and wacky.
I've decided that Shah Rukh Khan, who is seen in this video brooding off to the side, is kind of the Bollywood Tom Cruise. He's kind of cocky and pseudo-tough, and he's highly cute. Tom Cruise never got to me, but SRK did. But watching this now, I see that it's Amitabh Bachchan, the older dude in this video, who is the real deal. He was 64 when this was made (2006). It seems as if he was at one time the top guy in Bollywood, period, although he had some setbacks during his career. He is seriously hot in this number. And what I didn't know the first time I saw this is that the young guy in this number, who plays the son of Amitabh's character, is actually Amitabh's son, Abhishek. How cool is that?
The colors in these dance scenes hurt my eyes in a good way. The party at which this number takes place allegedly has a "60s" theme, but those clothes sure doesn't look like the sixties. It doesn't look like 2006, either. I don't know what it looks like. It looks like a parallel universe. And the dancing certainly comes from a parallel universe, one where things crash together in a bizarre and attractive way. I would love to be able to dance like that!
I keep having this vague ugly-American thought that this stuff is so weird and yet so unselfconscious -- but of course they wouldn't feel self-conscious. It's not weird to them, it's their culture. But it's really very foreign to me, and very charming and beautiful and cool, just endlessly rocking in a timeless way.
I know that I do strike people as sad and troubled and anxious of late; I walk around anxious about money every hour of every day, and every small increase in expenses makes me feel gut-punched. And I haven't been posting here too often, and I suspect I've done more posting when I've felt really down than when I've felt really up. There are a lot of good things in my life, for sure. It's just that the roller coaster is killing me. And I'm uncomfortable about people seeing me in pain, and some days it really is pain. It's just grinding. I recently had an e-mail from my sister-in-law, and she's having much the same experience. Neither of them is working, they have a son, and my brother is having some pretty wrenching emotional problems. There is a lot of not-happy going around, and I guess I'm carrying an additional load of disappointment. This is not how I thought my life would go, and I'm not too optimistic about things getting better in a big way in the foreseeable future. I feel like I've been clobbered by my lifetime of underachievement, that I'm paying now for being unfocused and undisciplined and unprofessional. It took me way too long to become a good worker and to be satisfied by working well; I have that satisfaction now, but missed out on a lot of the benefits by not getting here sooner. I should have been building a career instead of rebooting into a new line of work every couple of years.
The weekends mostly depress me since I often don't know what to do with myself. Last weekend, I took four days off -- took two for Rosh Hashonah because I felt I needed the break -- and we went to the Atlantic Antic on Sunday. That's a huge long street fair down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, which is held on the first Sunday in October. I try to set aside a little money because there are generally a lot of nice handmade crafts. I got a beautiful bronze hairclip shaped like a sand dollar ($5) and a tie-dyed swing top ($20). Barry decided to come with me this year, but he does what I try not not to: buy food. To me, an $8 gyro is outrageous, plus, I'm not a fan of eating while on my feet. Thought I confess (please don't kill me, oh sugar- starch and gluten-free friends) that we split half a dozen deep-fried Oreos, as neither of us had ever had one. Worth the splurge.
This past weekend was dreadful because it was The Weekend Before Pay -- that is, broke, broke, broke. This is the kind of weekend where I am trying frantically not to think, because it will plunge me into even deeper depression. I slept a lot, watched TV, watched things on the computer.
A week or so ago, I was really feeling the absence of scent (cologne, perfume). My big bottle of Bellodgia has a clogged sprayer and although it's about 2/3 full, I can't get any out. This happened about two months after I got it; at some point, just from pumping and pumping, I got it to work for a few days, then it quit again. There's no way to open it. I even wrote to Caron, and never heard from them. I had bought some Gucci rush about a year ago, but the sprayer dropped off, so it will only stream; plus, it's not holding well on me at all. My Sublime and Escape were down to dregs. It's the season where I like to wear something a bit heavier, like Coco, but what was really on my mind was Shalimar. Mind you, I've never worn Shalimar. But one of my grandmothers did, or else she simply had a bottle on her vanity, and I remembered the smellvividly. It was wonderful and almost overwhelming. I recognize it on women who walk by. So I got myself a fairly small portion (1/4 oz. EDT) on eBay, and it's unbelievably wonderful. I can't believe how happy it makes me. I'm also waiting for a bottle of Mitsouko and one of Samsara, both also made by Guerlain. It seems like time to wear classics.
I may have mentioned The Perfumed Court, a website where you can buy smaller sizes of almost any kind of scent you can imagine -- plus it really has a lot of information about the history and composition of pretty much every scent on the site. It's tons of information, but it does help you to find other scents of the type you enjoy -- plus you can get small samples (not free) to check them out. It's not cheap, but fragrance samples are not as easy to come by as they used to be.
My brother is having more and more and more problems. Not much to be done for him. He's having more and more flashbacks about some bad things that were done to him as a kid, and although he sees a therapist, this stuff has totally paralyzed him. Neither he nor my sister-in-law has worked for a very long time, and I'm not sure how they get along, except that I guess public assistance goes a longer way in Providence, RI than it does in New York.
I do have a new insurance plan through my job, which is about as good as it can be. Unlike Medicaid, there are co-pays, but there are none for generic meds and none for lab tests, which is a life-saver.
Work is basically good. The beginning of the term was pretty hectic, but now things seem to be rolling nicely. I hired a nice new intern who seems to be working out well; I've had good luck so far with interns.
Barry is now without insurance (we lost Medicaid September 30), which is terrible, but there's not much we can do. I don't have a spare cent to add him to my coverage (which would totally about $6,000 per year). I'm really pushing him hard about looking for work...rather, I am strongly encouraging him. But we are just not making ends meet. We've already sold CDs and books and Barry's drum kit. Something has to change.
I never need to think "Jeffrey who?" because there was always and ever will be only one Jeffrey. I sometimes use the shorthand "childhood sweetheart," but that's not really accurate. We weren't in kid-love. It was a little more complicated. We were eight or nine when we met (he's a month older) and saw each other every day between Memorial Day and Labor Day for five or six summers, and even now and then in-between. Our families spent the summer in a small bungalow colony, 30 families, and pretty much all of the kids interacted with all the other kids. There were certain age groupings, and some loose, gentle cliques; for instance, I hung around most with the kids of the five or six couples closest to my parents. (My parents' clique was far and away the smartest and funniest, and they actually referred to themselves as "the In Group." It was the mid-late sixties, but, you know: )
So Jeffrey was part of all of this; his parents were one of several couples who spent time with "the In Group" but weren't really of it...or maybe you'd say they were secondary members. And so Jeffrey and his brothers were pretty mainstream kidgroup players. He and I had one of those hate-you things, classic boy-girl kid stuff, and always made fun of each other and teased and said mean things. Boys and girls did play together, especially games that required a lot of players. And these were really bonafide running-around-outdoors games like tag, kick the can, and hitting tennis balls off the handball court wall. But that boy-against-girl thing was always there -- not that we played games in same-sex teams, but there were always squabbles that came down to "boys are SO stupid!"
Jeffrey and I were a particular pair in the boy-hate-girl-hate-boy facet of the kid social scene, and it was like that for years. And then, of course, it dawned on both of us. Things changed. We used to do a little off-to-see-the-Wizard routine that was a thinly veiled excuse to hold hands. We wrote a few letters in-between summers one year. (He lived in Manhattan and I lived in Brooklyn, but at that age, unless our parents were having some kind of kids-included get-together, we simply didn't see each other between summers.) We were sometimes shy with each other but it was clear to us that we shared a secret. That transition was a tremendously awkward thing, maybe because the connection between us was so powerful and so weighty. I've heard adults say, "I fell in love with my best friend." I supposed it was something like that, except we didn't really know that kind of love when we were friends, it was an early friendship, and it was first love.
Did it get a little dim between summers, and did I also "like" boys at school? Of course. But the summers began to mesh with my other life when I went to his bar mitzvah. There was the business of dressing up, of picking the best gift I could think of (even then, I was obsessed with giving the perfect gift), of consciously looking forward to seeing him. I remember how much he loved the gift (double live Judy Collins album, y'all), and what I wore (orange and white dress, orange tights -- early 1970's, y'all). And even though there was still a lot of awkwardness and shyness, and not yet any kissing, we smiled at each other a lot and stole glances and we knew what was what.
About six months later, his family moved to Florida.
There is more to say about Jeffrey, I suppose...I've seen him three times since then and the last time was about 30 years ago. We always had a very special feeling for each other, but never got to, ahem, express it physically. I'm been web-searching him for years, but there are many, many Jeffrey Solomons out there who are not my Jeffrey Solomon.
Why he is particularly on my mind right now is that I dreamed about him a couple of nights ago. I dream about Jeffrey maybe once a year, and he's always so real in the dream, so very much himself, his face precisely as I remember it, and the feeling is always the same, too. I'm always wondering about Jeffrey, wondering how he is.
Work: very hectic. Classes started this past Monday; suddenly everyone's around, and there's always something for me to do. Lots. The fall intern I'd hired during the summer punked out on me at the last minute, so I didn't have one before the start of the term. We weren't getting much yield from internships.com, so I had the idea of e-mailing half-a-dozen psychology departments at good local colleges I got around 50 applications, and I believe it has only been circulated in two schools so far (Hunter and Baruch).
Then I cleared the decks and interviewed four on Thursday and three yesterday and I have one more on Monday morning. I'm looking for two. There's one I'm absolutely going to ask. The problem is that two other really good ones have the exact same times available, and I'm trying to split it up a little because three people in my tiny office is a lot; there are only two computers, and there isn't necessarily non-computer work every day. There's one prospect who does have opposite days available, but I don't want to choose him just for that. There's someone I like a couple of notches better. I just have to decide if the guy with the good schedule is really who I want. The more coverage I have, the more other stuff I can do.
I'm going to a couple of workshops on fundraising topics, which are both half-day affairs, and I'd like to at least have a warm body in the office. I'm sometimes away from my desk to attend a meeting; I take minutes for the Board and the Executive Committee, and Fundraising has been asking me to attend their meetings. I'm not sure why I keep having ideas they love; I've really never been involved with fundraising or development. I think it's a mix of my education administration experience and my publicity experience, with a little writing skill thrown in. I recently made a suggestion that we call our graduates "alumni" instead, which has a connotation of continued connection rather than here-and-gone. Everyone went crazy for it. A few months ago, I mentioned scholarships. Who at a school hasn't thought of scholarships?
Play: not much play, but I have a little time to kick back this weekend. I just got paid on Thursday and I'm already stressed about money, but I'm putting it somewhat aside. There's just not that much that can be done. So I've been doing some of the things I like. I have a lot of things I enjoy online: my blog reader (I subscribe to quite a few blogs), a few games at Pogo.com, watching Netflix. Facebook. Tonight I ended up spending a couple of hours on YouTube; I was looking at something Barry had linked to from Facebook, and before I knew it, I was deep into My Favorites and also finding some new stuff. I've posted quite a few of My Favorites here. Some of them I love to watch over and over. I actually posted three to Facebook, or I tried...Facebook sometimes eats my posts. I know that one got up there: Joe Flood singing "Miss Fabulous." What? you don't remember that one? Well, then here it is again:
I was feeling very acoustic tonight. Kind of mellow, although the Joe Flood song does totally rock, even on fiddle and bass. Found a couple of new videos I liked a lot, although my favorite one wouldn't do anything for anyone who isn't crazy about old-timey/bluegrass music and familiar with the late lamented Wretched Refuse String Band. It had one of their old recordings with a photo montage in tribute to the late lamented Richie Shulberg (aka Citzen Kafka), and some of the old band photos included one of my old sweethearts, who played with the band in the 70s. Big sigh.
I'm not sure I really have that much to say tonight, but I wanted to slap something up here. I hate to go too long without posting. No earworms lately, no earthshattering events, nothing too outrageous.
There was recently some serious flooding, in the wake of the pseudo-hurricane, in my old stomping ground of Binghamton, NY, which is unlucky enough to be at the conjunction of two rivers (Chenango and Susquehanna). Apparently the nearby town of Owego was particularly hard hit, and I know someone who lived there. I haven't been in touch with him for about eleven years, and I called and left a voice mail about a week ago. Haven't heard from him yet, which is a little worrying, but I imagine it's very hectic all around there. I'd just like to know that he and his family are all right.
I may have mentioned that I'm back in therapy. Actually, I guess you'd call it analysis. Back in the day, when I worked at another analytic clinic, it wasn't considered analysis unless you went three times a week. Now, our students are required to do part of their analysis at twice a week, part at once. So even though I'm going only once, I'm seeing someone analytic and I'm on the couch, so there you go. I guess I'm about a month in now, and it feels good. It's good to be able to spill things out and have someone look at them with me. I guess when it gets hard, it's less pleasant, although I've already done a fair share of crying.
I talked some about V., about the fact that I still do think of him and miss his friendship, or the illusion of friendship. My analyst thought it was not out of line not to be over it yet. Three years, I guess, isn't that long to get over someone who was in your life for over 30 years. Also, there was a time where I was hugely wrapped up and intertwined with his friends, family, fans...I was connected to a lot of people through and around him. I'm only in touch with a few of them anymore. There was something unpleasantly obsessive about the whole thing at times, but sometimes I enjoyed the large "family" that extended out to the west coast and back.
NOW I remember what I wanted to write about: a certain prejudice. I'm one of those violently liberal people who can't stand prejudice, based on race and especially based on religion. I think I disappointed a close friend by refusing to hate all Palestinians and all Muslims. I eye people very closely when I hear anything that smacks of bigotry. But I realized today that I do have a problem with one particular group of people, and that's the Russians who live in the US, particularly here in Brooklyn.
We lived in Brighton Beach for about seven months, and when we moved there, I was really excited to move to the big beautiful apartment, to be so close to the boardwalk and ocean, and to have the opportunity to be around a different culture; I even thought that perhaps I would learn some Russian. Uh-uh. I cannot describe how insular the Russians who live there are, and how extremely rude and unpleasant they are to non-Russians. I did not encounter a single person of whom that was not true. I don't even remember being able to have any conversation at all with any Russian person there, not a chat in a grocery store or subway station, nothing. In fact, in the stores, we could not get waited on until every single Russian person was waited on, even the ones who came in after we did. It was as if we were living in a different country, and were entirely unwelcome. And last summer, I suffered a very bad haircut at the hands of a Russian haircutter who was very brusque and curt and who did not give me what I asked for.
It came to mind today because Barry and I went to an an optometrist today to get po' people glasses (we can each get a free pair of glasses through Medicaid, which we only have until the end of the month), and it was very crowded, we had to wait an hour past our appointment time to be seen, and I believe that every other person there, customer, staff, and medical, were Russian. No one was nasty to us, but just spending over two hours listening to Russian and English with heavy Russian accents really affected me. I got cranky and didn't know why. I guess I have to say, honestly, that I do not like Russians.
Then again, a friend of a friend was saying, a few months ago, how much she hates Canadians. Canadians? It seems her job requires her to deal with a lot of Canadians, a lot of her company's clients are based there, and she found all of them rude and conceited. I guess, as much as you may not want to have that kind of opinion of a large group of people, your experience informs that kind of thing. I actually rather liked Russian people before moving to Brighton; there were quite a few living in the apartment building where we'd lived in Midwood, and some of them were really nice. Even the ones who didn't speak much or any English smiled and were friendly. I guess Brighton just ruined it for me.
There's a new reality show on called Russian Dolls: half a dozen rich tacky Russian girls in Brighton. I laugh my ass off. They're about as stupid and obnoxious as the Jersey Housewives, except they dress and groom in even worse taste. THIS IS WHAT IT'S LIKE. There's also a DirecTV commercial with a nouveau riche Russian guy that I find fairly hilarious -- although I also think it's kind of stereotyped and in bad taste. Go fig:
I'm a fool for that tiny giraffe, too.
Well, I think it's time to watch a movie I downloaded today. It's not, ahem, generally available for home viewing yet (if you get my drift), and I hope it's a good copy.
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