Ultrabrown http://www.ultrabrown.com Arts and politics of the South Asian diaspora Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:27:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 en hourly 1 Jo pehchaana woh sikandar http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/jo-pehchaana-woh-sikandar http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/jo-pehchaana-woh-sikandar#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:07:21 +0000 manish vij http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/jo-pehchaana-woh-sikandar

iTunes isn’t so great at matching Bollywood tracks with their album covers. Corporate Whore is an aptly-named American b-school band, not a bad Bipasha Basu movie, a redundancy if ever there was one.

I wonder what it might come up with for songs from Don — Don Henley, ‘Dirty Laundry‘?

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/jo-pehchaana-woh-sikandar/feed Death Row http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/death-row http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/death-row#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:02:18 +0000 anonandon http://anonandon.wordpress.com/?p=861 Picture 2

Michael Jackson, Pina Bausch, Tyeb Mehta all died this week. A couple of weeks ago Ali Akbar Khan passed away in his Los Angeles home. A little more than a month ago, Kamala Das died alone in a hospital at Pune. Barring Bausch, the others were well past their glory days. Michael Jackson was living Kabuki mask; Tyeb Mehta was virtually blind and deaf; Kamala Das was bedridden; Ali Akbar Khan was, well, old. But they were all still legendary and for those who have grown up with them, these past few months have been chilling reminders that Mr. Reaper is out and about. As a friend gasped in a moment of grief-struck epiphany, "To misquote Tennyson, an old order is passing and New Order has already hung up its boots." Whether the young guns can fire or not isn't the concern of the hour. It's the fact that in the age of the Heckler & Koch MP7, our trusted favourites are still A-Bolt rifles (and you thought I couldn't follow a metaphor through to its logical end. Read on).

For some, the anxiety is about whether the current crop can match up to their predecessors. Is Judd Apatow the Woody Allen of the noughties? Will Radiohead overtake the Beatles? Is Jeff Koons's kitsch the contemporary equivalent of Pablo Picasso's cubism? Is the melancholy wonderland of Haruki Murakami (somebody please, please, please translate "IQ84″ soon) the next stop after the magica-realist world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez? National boundaries are, fortunately, becoming increasingly irrelevant. It's sometimes difficult to tell the writhing girl in a club like China House from the backup dancer in Akon's latest video. More importantly, thanks to the internet most of us can reach across and access whatever we want to. Where you live and what is available in the stores aren't crucial factors anymore. You don't have to be defined by what your country produces, which is a relief for me personally since currently Mumbai seems to be defined by "New York" and "Kambakht Ishq". This blurring of boundaries has been a brilliant thing for many of us but it's also made us lazy. It's made it easier for us to be incompetent and illiterate. We don't need to make the movies or write the criticism; someone else, possibly with an Ivy League degree or its European equivalent, will do it for us.

Since we've been popping out babies like tennis ball machines, we're a young country, unlike the aging populations of Europe and America. We're constantly reminded of this. The fact that the youth is also frequently idiotic and irritatingly banal worries many. India's shining alright, but it's the glitter of sequins and disco balls. What I wonder is whether this generation, this new order, cares about understanding and evaluating the old folk. Do they even care and are they capable of it? Would our young culture vultures take on the task of defining Tyeb Mehta and his compatriots' artistic oeuvre, without taking recourse to the syrupy polysyallables that the obituaries will drip with? Would I trust them to put Tyeb Mehta into perspective? (Ans: I might.)

Especially in the case of modern Indian art, being young has been an excuse we've clung on to desperately. Does Indian art have a distinct visual language? It's too soon to gauge this. Has Indian art developed its own set of aesthetics? It's only just coming into its own. Will the auction-house hotties have a place in the history of Indian art? It's not possible to say for certain because the past is so close to the present. Is the idea of "Indian art" simply a category developed on the basis of the birth certificates of certain artists? It's too early to tell. But Tyeb Mehta's death is an indicator that it is no longer too soon or too early. In fact, it's now time. It's time to get into that sticky, treacherous quicksand of being critical; of deciding how important the artists of the past were to the development of contemporary Indian art; of taking some sort of stand on who was good, who was better, who was overrated and who should have got the champagne and canapés at their opening instead of chai and cheese sandwich (if that). This means studying, making mistakes, figuring out those mistakes and, if Jonathan Jones is to be be believed, trusting your instincts (provided you have good ones, of course. If you have bad ones, well, then you're probably already a critic). If we don't do this, not only will the ones of the past who deserve recognition not get their due but the contemporary artists will suffer as well. Because until we've figured out the past, the present will only be as good, as respectable and as credible as the press releases that gallerists circulate.

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/death-row/feed Sarah Barracuda http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sarah-barracuda http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sarah-barracuda#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 01:58:41 +0000 manish vij http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sarah-barracuda If the real thing don’t do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn it out to the wick
Aren’t you, Barracuda?

– Heart, ‘Barracuda‘

So Sarah Palin dumped her resignation announcement on Friday night before Fourth of July weekend. Palin can see Indictment from her house:

… all of this precedes what are said to be possible federal indictments against Palin, concerning an embezzlement scandal related to the building of Palin’s house and the Wasilla Sports Complex built during her tenure as mayor. Both structures, it is said, feature the “same windows, same wood, same products.” Federal investigators have been looking into this for some time, and indictments could be imminent, according to the Alaska sources. The BRAD BLOG has not been able to receive confirm from any federal sources on this. Our information comes from local Alaskans… [BradBlog]

Palin’s resignation speech was rushed, impromptu, stressed out and larded with bullshit. If Bobby Jindal sounded like Kenneth the Page, Palin was redolent of Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation.

Alaskan senator Ted Stevens too was brought down by a home construction scandal. What is it with Alaskans and free manses?

Will every Republican presidential candidate self-destruct to make way for Bobby Jindal?

Is Palin our Mayawati, or is that unfair to Mayawati?

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sarah-barracuda/feed 11/26 audio intercepts http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/1126-audio-intercepts http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/1126-audio-intercepts#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:15:23 +0000 manish vij http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/1126-audio-intercepts The UK documentary Dispatches: Terror in Mumbai got some horrific leaked audio intercepts of the gunmen. At 4:00, the 11/26 attackers calmly murder a Chabad House hostage in front of a phone so their Pakistani handlers can listen. The whole operation is conducted in relaxed Urdu and Punjabi.

Here’s part 1.

Related posts: Developing a covert capability, ‘Descent into Chaos’, The nuclear umbrella, Exactly., The government is not a suicide pact (updated), Bangalore helter-skelter, Bank shot, Rounding up a posse, Hamid Gul’s war, A modest Indian proposal, ‘Falling Down: Bombay’, The CCTVs speak, India terrorizes fedayeen, Bombay under terrorist attack

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/1126-audio-intercepts/feed On Mridula Koshy’s If It Is Sweet http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/on-mridula-koshys-if-it-is-sweet http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/on-mridula-koshys-if-it-is-sweet#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:47:00 +0000 Chandrahas Choudhury tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-8075915264709247126 In the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, one of the founding stories of modern literature, we see the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wake up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect. “Companion”, one of the stories in Mridula Koshy’s debut collection If It Is Sweet, offers us a similarly strange prospect, although it is not announced as swiftly and dramatically as in Kafka’s story. Instead, we are made to wait. For a while we are led to believe that the efficient and attentive companion to the old widow in the story is like any other domestic servant. But we find out after a while that he is actually an extremely talented talking monkey.

The initial surprise and disbelief of this is quickly overwhelmed by the radiance of Koshy’s imagining. The monkey, we are told, was bought off the street by the widow (“Maji”) and rescued from a life of captivity, cheap stunts, and hunger. In return, he brings all his skills to bear on improving Maji’s stuttering life. The natural alliance of human and simian lives and needs imagined by Koshy (“His tendency to groom found great satisfaction in her tangled morning hair”) is very endearing. By the time the monkey takes Maji, at the close of the story, back to the old house in Bhutan where he used to live, and we see his tail curl “to lovingly lift the latch of the house gate”, we are totally won over. The companion echoes the tender love and fidelity of that most devoted of companions in our literature, Hanuman.

Indeed, Koshy’s stories are full of large and small acts of caring – of a sense of duty that does not go away even when the object of that duty is no longer present. In one of the best of these stories, “The Good Mother”, we see a woman returning to Delhi from Manchester after the death of her two young sons in a car accident. She carries with her their ashes, to be dispersed in holy waters, but finds herself unable to release them when the occasion arrives. Finally, in a little apartment in Delhi, the claustrophobia of which Koshy evokes with a set of precise details, she brings herself to let the remains go. “Little bits swirl back and stick to her lids and lips,” writes Koshy, leaving us to imagine the horror of swallowing a particle of a life birthed by the very body that now ingests it.

Koshy, who was born in Delhi, lived and worked in America for about two decades, and now lives in Delhi again, has said that she was “a trade unionist before she was a mother and a mother before she was a writer.” These anterior layers of her experience are given expression in the mingled toughness and tenderness of her stories. Many of them are about an underclass of workers – construction labourers, carpenters, garbage collectors, maids – living quietly in the interstices of a thriving South Delhi; one family’s slum home has tin walls “filched long ago from the construction of the Chirag Dilli flyover.” There are excellent close descriptions of the labour of workers, whose condition is sometimes intuited from the smallest details. The protagonist of “The Good Mother” hears the sounds of hammering next door and decides that the tools are either “made light, for smaller hands, or made cheaply, for poorer people.” Walking through a construction site, the boy protagonist of "P.O.P" sees a worker "reach the end of his plank-walk to throw the cement with a motion so precise he is convinced again that this work is easy because each of its parts are minute, and only the whole must hurt."

At the same time, these stories cumulatively offer a rich portrait of mothering: of the fulfilment of being a parent, but at the same time its many annoyances and curtailments. Indeed – and this is true to Indian realities – the task of motherhood in Koshy’s work often falls to people other than parents. Several children in these stories are stand-in mothers to their younger siblings, and devise games and consolations to make a bleak reality appear warmer and more exciting. Here is a description of food as seen from the perspective of extreme hunger in "When the Child Was A Child":
That year, Emma remembers, they ate vindaloo pork patted into flour: soft fat thick on stringy meat, and the rind of each piece that started out tough between her teeth crackling to release oil so rich she wanted nothing more than to live in her mouth. There was a dry preparation of beef, fried dark, to which slivers of coconut clung; and chicken in creamy gravy with bones good for crunching open and sucking the marrow from, till the sharp breaks in the crenulations within grated fine the surface of her greedy tongue.
In Koshy's stories, food and family are often conjoined; the same story has a Dickensian scene in which the long-absent father returns...
...from far away where he had been living in a place called a Correctional Facility, which [Emma] knew from the enemies at school was also the place called Jail. He came home that day with boxes of Twinkies and Dingdongs, and a lap into which he pulled the children's mother. The children, exultant and uncomfortable, ringed the tussling parents, and in the mirror Emma observed the great satisfaction of the whole.

Emma remembers it as the year they ate fish every night.
As these passages show, Koshy’s is a prose that does not surrender its shape or meanings easily. Sometimes her narration can seem as willfully dense and tangled as the forest to which Koshy's characters often retreat for a moment of peace or rest. But this is Koshy's method, her quiddity as a storyteller. If there is a criticism to be made of these stories, it is that they can be too one-paced: they sometimes lack that turn of speed, that change of register, that would balance out their heavy beauty, the careful accretion of details like a bird seen on a tree by a child, perched “not on a branch, but actually on a leaf”, or a character who vomits out "chunks of tomato and marvellously intact lengths of noodle." Even so this is absolutely rigorous and distinctive work, and there is a sound and a sense in these stories that make Indian fiction a bigger place."]]> In the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, one of the founding stories of modern literature, we see the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wake up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect. “Companion”, one of the stories in Mridula Koshy’s debut collection If It Is Sweet, offers us a similarly strange prospect, although it is not announced as swiftly and dramatically as in Kafka’s story. Instead, we are made to wait. For a while we are led to believe that the efficient and attentive companion to the old widow in the story is like any other domestic servant. But we find out after a while that he is actually an extremely talented talking monkey.

The initial surprise and disbelief of this is quickly overwhelmed by the radiance of Koshy’s imagining. The monkey, we are told, was bought off the street by the widow (“Maji”) and rescued from a life of captivity, cheap stunts, and hunger. In return, he brings all his skills to bear on improving Maji’s stuttering life. The natural alliance of human and simian lives and needs imagined by Koshy (“His tendency to groom found great satisfaction in her tangled morning hair”) is very endearing. By the time the monkey takes Maji, at the close of the story, back to the old house in Bhutan where he used to live, and we see his tail curl “to lovingly lift the latch of the house gate”, we are totally won over. The companion echoes the tender love and fidelity of that most devoted of companions in our literature, Hanuman.

Indeed, Koshy’s stories are full of large and small acts of caring – of a sense of duty that does not go away even when the object of that duty is no longer present. In one of the best of these stories, “The Good Mother”, we see a woman returning to Delhi from Manchester after the death of her two young sons in a car accident. She carries with her their ashes, to be dispersed in holy waters, but finds herself unable to release them when the occasion arrives. Finally, in a little apartment in Delhi, the claustrophobia of which Koshy evokes with a set of precise details, she brings herself to let the remains go. “Little bits swirl back and stick to her lids and lips,” writes Koshy, leaving us to imagine the horror of swallowing a particle of a life birthed by the very body that now ingests it.

Koshy, who was born in Delhi, lived and worked in America for about two decades, and now lives in Delhi again, has said that she was “a trade unionist before she was a mother and a mother before she was a writer.” These anterior layers of her experience are given expression in the mingled toughness and tenderness of her stories. Many of them are about an underclass of workers – construction labourers, carpenters, garbage collectors, maids – living quietly in the interstices of a thriving South Delhi; one family’s slum home has tin walls “filched long ago from the construction of the Chirag Dilli flyover.” There are excellent close descriptions of the labour of workers, whose condition is sometimes intuited from the smallest details. The protagonist of “The Good Mother” hears the sounds of hammering next door and decides that the tools are either “made light, for smaller hands, or made cheaply, for poorer people.” Walking through a construction site, the boy protagonist of "P.O.P" sees a worker "reach the end of his plank-walk to throw the cement with a motion so precise he is convinced again that this work is easy because each of its parts are minute, and only the whole must hurt."

At the same time, these stories cumulatively offer a rich portrait of mothering: of the fulfilment of being a parent, but at the same time its many annoyances and curtailments. Indeed – and this is true to Indian realities – the task of motherhood in Koshy’s work often falls to people other than parents. Several children in these stories are stand-in mothers to their younger siblings, and devise games and consolations to make a bleak reality appear warmer and more exciting. Here is a description of food as seen from the perspective of extreme hunger in "When the Child Was A Child":

That year, Emma remembers, they ate vindaloo pork patted into flour: soft fat thick on stringy meat, and the rind of each piece that started out tough between her teeth crackling to release oil so rich she wanted nothing more than to live in her mouth. There was a dry preparation of beef, fried dark, to which slivers of coconut clung; and chicken in creamy gravy with bones good for crunching open and sucking the marrow from, till the sharp breaks in the crenulations within grated fine the surface of her greedy tongue.


In Koshy's stories, food and family are often conjoined; the same story has a Dickensian scene in which the long-absent father returns...

...from far away where he had been living in a place called a Correctional Facility, which [Emma] knew from the enemies at school was also the place called Jail. He came home that day with boxes of Twinkies and Dingdongs, and a lap into which he pulled the children's mother. The children, exultant and uncomfortable, ringed the tussling parents, and in the mirror Emma observed the great satisfaction of the whole.

Emma remembers it as the year they ate fish every night.


As these passages show, Koshy’s is a prose that does not surrender its shape or meanings easily. Sometimes her narration can seem as willfully dense and tangled as the forest to which Koshy's characters often retreat for a moment of peace or rest. But this is Koshy's method, her quiddity as a storyteller. If there is a criticism to be made of these stories, it is that they can be too one-paced: they sometimes lack that turn of speed, that change of register, that would balance out their heavy beauty, the careful accretion of details like a bird seen on a tree by a child, perched “not on a branch, but actually on a leaf”, or a character who vomits out "chunks of tomato and marvellously intact lengths of noodle." Even so this is absolutely rigorous and distinctive work, and there is a sound and a sense in these stories that make Indian fiction a bigger place.]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/on-mridula-koshys-if-it-is-sweet/feed Rain mix http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/rain-mix http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/rain-mix#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:55:05 +0000 anonandon http://anonandon.wordpress.com/?p=854

It's not every day that I have the time to take a walk along the sea in the mornings. Today was one of those rare days when the weather was perfect and I had the time so I thought, "Carpe diem et coffee. Let's go for a walk." As I got into the lift, I saw myself sauntering on Carter Road Bandstand. Naturally, I saw myself like a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph: a blurry, perfect moment;  wind-swept hair arranged artfully yet carelessly to show only my kohl-lined eyes, preserving the camera and other things with sight from having to survive seeing my face.

So I go to Gloria Jean's to get my daily dose of chocolate soup (officially known as the Mocha Caramelatte). It is raining by now. No matter. I'm carrying my navy blue umbrella, which is perfectly colour-coordinated with the grey sky and murky sea.

I'm feeling very good about this walk in the drizzle. Discovery's "Swing Tree" is tinkling in my ear (fun, fluorescent album with some dark, gender-bender interludes that still manage to sound Ritalin-happy. Once you get past the sinking feeling that the eighties are indeed back, it's an absolute delight. It is, however, very possible that Michael Jackson's heart attack came from hearing their version of "I Want You Back", which is weirdly hypnotic after you've survived hearing it a couple of times).  So far, I haven't slipped on anything and I've managed to avoid excreta, garbage etc. Basically, all is as sweet as a Jaffa cake with the world.

Until my head gets tangled in my umbrella. Don't ask me how, because my hair was tightly and securely tied up. However, suddenly, there I am on Turner Road, with my head cocked at a ridiculous angle, looking like someone has yanked my invisible leash. And I am unable to untangle self from umbrella, which is sticking out as though I'm a cocktail glass instead of a person. I do the only thing a girl can under the circumstances: physically and literally go around in circles in an effort to "see" what's happening at the back of my head. Until I realise that I am physically and literally going around in circles in the middle of Bandra. Then in an effort to end the problem quickly, I proceed to yank my head in the direction opposite to umbrella.  I also jump up and down with the hope that this excessive motion will somehow extricate head from umbrella. Traffic on Turner Road slows down as passing cars are riveted by the sight of bouncing brown egg on pavement.

Am happy to report have dislodged umbrella from self.

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/rain-mix/feed Sita tees are out http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sita-tees-are-out http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sita-tees-are-out#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:35:22 +0000 manish vij http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sita-tees-are-out

My Sita Sings the Blues tee just arrived, and it’s gorgeous. The gold is a bit blingy. No doubt some desi auntie swapped out the original color at the factory. Subtlety is like kryptonite for that old biddie. There’s a light sprinkle of tiny gold rub-off, which is common with metallics. But otherwise it looks good.

One reader mentioned the gold’s flaking off hers, which is hopefully only a problem with her individual shirt. But if you’re concerned, maybe stick with the non-metallic colors. Me, I’ll be rockin’ the shadow puppet at the next premiere.

Get your schwag here.

Related posts: Sita, the adornment, Turbanotorious in da house, ‘Sita’ sneaks a preview, Ars mechanica, Nina’s heavenly delights, ‘Sita Sings the Blues’

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/sita-tees-are-out/feed Voice control http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/voice-control http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/voice-control#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:04:32 +0000 manish vij http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/voice-control

Ever since shiny little Apple products started including voice commands, I’ve wondered how they’d handle song names in unsupported languages. Would it be as bad as Moviefone’s text to speech bot?

Yes it is. Here’s how the current iPhone reads out the title track to ‘Kaho Na Pyaar Hai (Please Say You’re in Love)’: ‘Now playing kah-ho en-ay-ay pyre hay.’

Kailash Kher is ‘kay-lahsh cur, terry dee-wuh-nee.’ Sukhwinder gets ‘thay-eye-uh thay-eye-uh by suck-wine-dur sing.’ Nusrat largely escapes the phonemic massacre.

But the machine out-pronounces some 2nd gen actors I’ve had the pleasure of listening to.

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/voice-control/feed Stuff white people like http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/stuff-white-people-like http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/stuff-white-people-like#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:42:01 +0000 manish vij http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/stuff-white-people-like

A set of curly-toed juttis signify a couple’s overweening liberalism in Away We Go, a film by writer couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and director Sam Mendes. Eggers and Mendes are doyens of dysfunction, but Away is more comic than dark. It’s less a movie than a series of comic setpieces which set up grotesque characters and then puncture them.

Away is about a couple esconced in a battered Volvo, searching for a city in which to settle down with their first baby on the way. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph’s first choice is thwarted when Krasinski’s parents move to Belgium, renting out their home through ‘an elegant gentleman named Fareed.’ Jeff Daniels plays the callous dad, reprising his character from The Squid and the Whale.

The couple drive to Madison, where their friend U Wisconsin prof Maggie Gyllenhaal insists they take their shoes off. That’s how Krasinski ends up with a set of crazy-toes. They don’t last the evening; Gyllenhaal and her Burning Man-attending partner drive them away with bourgeois condescension and moonchild political correctness.

Krasinski is unbelievably good in this flick, whether taking revenge by driving Gyllenhaal’s son around in a forbidden stroller (’it’s the most fun you’ll have until you discover oral pleasure!’) or breaking into Tourette’s curses to drive up his unborn child’s heartbeat. He yells a non sequitur at his girlfriend, dives beneath the dashboard and reappears with a stethoscope, grinning like a be-spectacled, be-arded comic gargoyle.

The movie plays like a set of disjoint character sketches set in smaller cities like Phoenix, Madison and Montreal. The couple played by Krasinski and Rudolph are smug and hermetic, cocooned in co-dependency, uninterested in the world outside and convinced they’re the only couple who love each other. Krasinski’s tall, emo character is a particular kind of NPR listener’s dream, and everything about the flick, from the hand-lettered Juno font to the navel-gazing, is pitched at that demographic.

But Eggers and Vida hit heights of absurdism which make the movie well worth seeing. There’s this gem of a line in a scene of gloaming sadness after a friend’s miscarriage: ‘The babies keep growing and fading away. You don’t know whether to name ‘em or to bury ‘em.’ The final homecoming reminds me of the end of the Love in the Time of Cholera remake. Away We Go isn’t as significant a movie as it wants to be, but it’s consistently hilarious just the same.

The trailer:

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/stuff-white-people-like/feed Junko Mizuno: Red Tresses and Freckles http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/junko-mizuno-red-tresses-and-freckles http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/junko-mizuno-red-tresses-and-freckles#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:37 +0000 *pardon my hindi http://www.pardonmyhindi.com/blog/?p=791 About a month ago, my girly, Kenia, showed me some illustrations by one Junko Mizuno and I was hooooooked. Her work is a mix of macabre and sexy, with and a fat dose of "cho chweet!" Luckily, she was in Tr0nto a few weeks later for her first Canadian solo show at the Narwhal Art Projects. We were there to squeal over her mind-boggling awesomeness:

0002.jpg

If only my pockets ran deep, I would've jumped on this one:

00111.jpg

Sahar and Kenia kept their Asiapose game strong:

0003.jpg

I was about to make a run for it with this wicked piece of magic:

0010.jpg

The ever-so-adorable Junko was there signing autographs:

0008.jpg

She even signed a leg tattooed with one of her drawings:

0009.jpg

Apparently, as soon as the signature was complete, the tattooed chick ran down to the nearest parlour to get that shit made permanent. Dedication, y'all! It's a good thing that Junko's signature is mad complex and completely unique. Check it out on this little toy I bought of a character from her Pure Trance manga:

00121.jpg

We had amassed quite a collection by the end of the show:

0001.jpg

Here's a good interview with Junko where she talks about her inspiration for the pieces in this exhibit (Anne of Green Gables!)

On a tangent...Narwhal had an original of my favourite Gary Taxali print on display in the back room:

0004.jpg

Woah, sailor. I'm in love!

:: Currylingus, out.

]]> http://www.ultrabrown.com/posts/junko-mizuno-red-tresses-and-freckles/feed