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Feeling the heat? Go Bollywood!

thebradmiskell — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:20:12 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 44

Not long after this feature was published, Yahoo pulled the plug on Underground. Of course I regretted it, we had barely scratched the surface of American subcultures…

Next time you find yourself with a gun to your head, a suggestion: Slap on an outrageous grin and bust your best moves through undulating bolts of colorful fabric and a phalanx of bhangra-ing backup dancers.

If you know anything at all about Bollywood movies, you’ll know it works every time: A (literally) loaded situation is abruptly forgotten — at least for the duration of a song — in favor of a show-stopping, pop-hop, Hindi song & dance number that invariably celebrates the loveliness of love and the manliness of men.

Turns out it’s not just in Bollywood movies where that ploy works. I met all kinds of college kids employing the maneuver earlier this year at the Hindi film dance competition known as Bollywood Berkeley (as in University of California, Berkeley).

Of course, the coeds there faced no actual threats to life or limb that I was aware of — otherwise, I’d have alerted authorities. Still, the vast majority were first-gen American kids of Indian parents, a group that’s legendary for having high scholastic expectations. So naturally, the young ‘uns needed stress relief.

Now, you may not consider subsisting on cinnamon buns and diet soda, while rehearsing yourself into the ground in order to polish choreography you’re still trying to remember over a weekend you should be studying… to be stress relief.

Then again, odds are you haven’t attended a Hindi film-dance competition.

Competitions pit teams from Indian clubs at rival colleges against one another (Bollywood Berkeley featured 12 teams, each comprised of 10 to 20 dancers, and included entrants from UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley and Stanford). The teams do battle with big dance numbers choreographed to a medley of songs from au courant Bollywood soundtracks.

The dance numbers — which must include at least four costume changes — are equal parts art, camp and fire drill. They’re judged on concept, choreography, execution, sets and costumes.

At Bollywood Berkeley, additional big points appeared to be awarded for the tenacity and volubility of fans, and for how maniacally happy teams could appear throughout their performances.

Regardless of exact judging criteria, Bollywood Berkeley was a knock-down-and-drag-out for the ages.

And that was just for the audience.

For hour-after-grueling-hour that Bollywood night, chants and cheers of team spirit and alma mater madness rose in Oakland’s Scottish Rite Center (the site of this year’s event).

Repeated technical problems bloated the show’s run time, and temperatures inside the auditorium were more Bombay than East Bay. No one gave an inch.

At times, the cheering grew so loud that, if you closed your eyes, you could have been at an arena for a big game rather than in a big theater for a dance-off.

(Note to college sports fanatics, boosters and bookmakers: Get your season tickets now or get them later on eBay at a premium.)

Performances opened with hammy videos made by (and featuring) team members. The clips set up the characters and common Bollywood storylines the teams would then portray in dance and, sort of, pantomime.

Team-after-team took to the stage to put on exuberant displays for an audience of predominantly Indian decent: proud parents, baffled grandparents, supremely patient uncles and aunties, shrilly-cheering kid sisters.

There were African-American and white kids on teams at the event, too; being Indian isn’t a prerequisite for participation. Still, the competitions are an Indian club thing. Most participants are of Indian decent.

“I grew up watching Hindi films with the family,” says Suraj Arora, captain and lead dancer of Univ. of Southern California’s Anjaane team. So did most of his team members.

And most of them will tell you that a positive upshot of their participation in the “sport” has been the connection to their parents, their cultural heritage and mores that full Bollywood immersion fosters.

Arora, like most of the other young dancers, is also into the randomness of the genre. “You see a song — a bunch of people dancing to it — changing clothes randomly,” he says, smiling wryly. “Things popping out of nowhere, nothing really makes sense.”

“It’s a great escape,” says Amrita Mapara. “I’m an accounting major, so coming here and doing this is completely different.”

I suspect getting to hang out and dance (in close proximity) with members of the opposite sex is also a selling point for the young coeds. Though I was told that, at least for members of USC’s Anjaane team, any flirting ended once preparations got serious.

And preparations are serious. Details regarding costumes, dance moves and sets are guarded like state secrets: Teams hope to unleash shock and awe on rival teams at the eleventh hour (dress/tech rehearsal) when it’s far too late to respond.

They analyze videotape of their performances like athletes and coaches. And, as hinted at above, they adhere to strict training table diets, apparently all with pizza and Red Bull at their core (CinniBuns and Fresca, on the side).

Hindi film dance competitions have been going on at colleges in the states for five or six years.

Events generally take place in winter and spring at select universities (including UCLA and Penn State). They’ve yet to become a college sports staple, but they do offer high drama.

Bollywood Berkeley did. Even if — as is often the case with Bollywood films — audiences weren’t always sure what the drama was about. It was nothing a good song & dance number (actually, 12) couldn’t fix.

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It’s a Bollywood World After All

thebradmiskell — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:21:27 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 43

For Iram Parveen Bilal, a USC grad student and self-professed Bollywood nut, this was the last chance to join the school’s Anjaane Hindi film dance team before receiving her degree. The lone Islamic member of the team — she’s from Islamabad, Pakistan — Iram took full advantage…with a couple of costume alterations.

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My Father’s Pictures

John OBrien — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:24:14 +0000

As enamored of the arts as I was when I was a teenager, like most of same, I sought the things I was interested in outside the home. It’s too bad, because I missed out on what should have been more of a source of inspiration to me. Ken O’Brien, my dad.

My dad first tried to make a living as a photographer when he was a young man in Gainesville Tx., during the late thirties. The war put and end to that, and when he got back and married my mom, he got suckered into a G.I bill financed “Academy of Cinema” in Paris. That turned out to be a hoax, and by the time the (by now) three of us made it back to the sates, he’d had enough of the starving artist routine for a while.

So for the next 30 years, he taught school, and made photographs on the side. When he finally retired in the late seventies, he started exhibiting those photos, and has done pretty well. He’s shown at Ray Hawkins Gallery, been collected by Graham Nash, is listed as a historical photographer on Corbis. At 94, he’ s still selling pictures, although he can’t work in his darkroom any more.

He chronicled the years we spent in Venice with a truly sharp and faithful eye, and I always get swept back into time when I look at his recording of our world and our lives. These images provide a conduit into the past. The eye is not really the surest way back, of course.

Thinking about his work, I was reminded of the romance the darkroom held for me when I was little. The muffled, dark-red light, the sharp and bitter odors of chemicals, the hushed whispered voices, for no obvious reason – pure magic. They say that memories associated with smells are the ones that we can recall with the greatest immediacy and vividness – and I believe it. Thinking back, trying to recapture some of these memories, I’ve had a lot of those flashes – the perfume of turpentine linseed oil in a studio, the breath of the sea, the odors of a hundred foods and smokes and people. Maybe that’s what they mean when they say “the nose knows”

That said – never throw photographs away, they are windows and doorways into places you’ll never really be able to get to again. Cherish them.

Smile Hard: How to win a Bollywood dance-off

thebradmiskell — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:27:05 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 42

Participants in Bollywood film dance troupe competitions are nothing if not serious about winning… Didrik and I studied the oeuvre extensively and came up with this plan for world domination. Watch and learn.

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Bollywood Berkeley

thebradmiskell — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:34:31 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 41

Bollywood film dance troupe competitions have been popular at certain American universities since the turn of the century (the current one). Campus Indian-American clubs are the instigators and their members, the primary participants. For most of these very American kids, Bollywood films are their main connection to their parents’ heritage: Buy-in from notoriously no-nonsense folks is therefore easier. Meanwhile, what college kid doesn’t want to dress in provocative costumes and undulate with beaming members of the opposite sex? Arranged marriages can wait. Check this vid if you think I’m fooling.

My friend and accomplished songwriter Dan MacKenzie had produced some tracks for an upcoming Bollywood-inspired indie film. He gave me one, which I dismantled and reformed to serve as the bed for this little paean to Puna and the gang.

BOLLYWOOD BERKELEY
© 2007 Miskell/MacKenzie

Straight outta Punjab
A new tradition
Bollywood film
Dance troupe competition
I saw my first
Up in the East Bay
A fierce competition
Bollywood Berkeley

Shalins and Priyas
Had their hands full
With mudras and costumes
Pizza and Red Bull
Last minute changes
To scenery
Rehearsing in parking lots
Bollywood Berkeley

They brought the bhangra
They brought the funk
The “bullet time” moves
The bona fide hunks
The pretty girls
Each one a gem
How can the boys think
It’s all about them?

They did their
Movie musical dances
Right down to the
Sappy romances
The Bruins tap-danced
To victory
They heart New York but they luv
Bollywood Berkeley

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Win Friends and Influence People, Drive an Art Car

thebradmiskell — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:19:52 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 40

I only wrote one piece on Art Cars. Underground’s publishing schedule was catching up with us and most of my time was taken creating videos, which were what my superiors at Yahoo were most focused on for commercial reasons.

To those who proudly roll in flashy or expensive cars, a suggestion: Glue polyurethaned breakfast burritos, blowup dolls and slinky toys all over those precious rides; action-paint them as homages to Jackson Pollock; modify their bodies to resemble giant slabs of sashimi and then shadow Kikkoman delivery trucks around town.

In other words, turn them into art cars. People will not only notice you more in an art car than in any midlife-crisis ride you’ve tried, they might just respect you.

You may wind up feeling like Brangelina exiting an African orphanage, though.

Never have I seen more cameras spontaneously appear than while tailing Rebecca Caldwell’s Carthedral east out of Tucson on I-10. It was like a Busby Berkeley, showgirl-laden musical: The Carthedral passed and a cascading wave of photo-taking gadgets shot from every car window in its wake.

We were rolling with an art car caravan on the last leg of its run from California’s Bay Area to the Arizona/Mexico border town of Douglas. One reason for the road trip was the fun of catching up with fellow art car artists like Rick McKinney and strange roadside attractions like the Integratron.

Mainly, though, we were escorting the venerable Carthedral and Emily Duffy’s Mondrianmobile to their new home, the future Art Car World.

Art car impresario Harrod Blank‘s labor of love, Art Car World is under construction in an old glass shop in Douglas. It will one day house a museum featuring art cars in quasi-diorama settings made by the artists.

At this point you may be saying to yourself, “Back up, dude. What’s an art car?”

Well, an art car is vehicle for self-expression — literally.

Art car artists turn their rides into street-legal, rolling canvases… or collages… or sculpture. The Mondrianmobile is predominantly painted. Ernie Steingold’s California Fantasy Van (part of Art Car World’s collection) is essentially a collage. And the Carthedral is a sculpture.

Art cars turn up almost everywhere, though there are art car hotbeds. Houston recently hosted its 20th annual art car parade. Blank and Northrup are behind the Bay Area’s yearly ArtCar Fest.

And then there’s Burning Man, where the only non-emergency gas-guzzlers allowed on the playa are mutant vehicles (a slightly larger designation than art cars in that they needn’t be street legal). Over-the-top mutants (like Tom Kennedy‘s Super Silky Mobile) are a constant source of amusement at Burning Man.

Wherever they are, and whatever the medium, art cars have maximum effect. Time and again, as our caravan rolled south, people in passing cars would forget themselves — forget that they were driving, even — as they hung out windows and whooped at the rolling art exhibition. Many simply stared in awe (Carthedral is pretty darkly awesome).

Art cars “storm the reality studio,” in William Burroughs’ words. In the early ’90s, Rick Macnamara regularly stormed commuters’ reality with his Rocket Bike, a motorcycle done up as a ballistic missile (plus western saddle and steer horns), as a protest against the Gulf war.

Art cars get you thinking differently: Why would someone drive a car covered in horse figurines? Or painted like a Mondrian? Why do you drive what you drive? Why were you born? (Thinking differently is a slippery slope.)

Art cars get you acting differently, too. Unlike sound-proof, climate-controlled vehicles straight off the assembly line, art cars encourage interaction. People roll down their windows and talk to art car drivers. And they use words other than “#$%@ you!”

“People get so excited,” says Philo Northrup, an art car community stalwart. Northrup made the trip south in his latest creation, a zinc and horn festooned Honda Element named Daisy Singer. “They weave out of traffic to honk their horns and wave at me — and this happens every day!”

In Tucson, the driver of a red pick-up was so amused by our art car caravan that he joined it and for a good five minutes made the sign of the devil at us.

Art cars simply attract attention. It’s up to you to figure out what to do with it.

Photo and footage credits:

Photos of Tom Kennedy courtesy of Tom Kennedy. Photo of Topsy Turvey bus beneath San Francisco City Hall courtesy of Gary Wilson. Dinosaur Demolition Derby footage courtesy of Joe Mangrum.

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Topsy-turvy Bus (Ben & Jerry’s latest flavor?)

thebradmiskell — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:20:07 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 39

Tom Kennedy makes art car mash-ups the way Ben Cohen remixes ice cream: deliriously. Here, they combine their mix-and-mash-up magic to create their very own political machine–the Topsy-turvy Bus. Didrik and I caught up with them in Oakland a couple times during the course of the bus’ building.

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Inside the Art Car Mind (hide the Krazy Glue)

thebradmiskell — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:43:54 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 38

The pure spectacle of art cars generally overshadows consideration of what’s behind them: Who turned the Olds into a giant piece of sushi? And why? This vid explores the art car maker’s mind, while providing insight to Didrik’s (he was largely responsible for the clip).

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Art Cars, Highway Stars

thebradmiskell — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:19:34 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 37

Didrik and I saw off this art caravan in San Francisco’s East Bay then caught up again with them in Arizona for the last leg of their drive to the border town of Douglas, AZ and the future site of Harrod Blank’s Art Car World. The art cars all attracted all kinds of attention on the road, none more so than Rebecca Caldwell’s Carthedral, which nearly sent several passing motorists motoring off the road.

THEY WERE IN ART CARS
© 2007 Miskell/Ward

Automobiles got up in memorabilia
Rollin’ with the gothest Carthedral on four wheels, yeah
Ran into The Duke of the road
A whole lotta Hunter, a touch of Tom Joad

Art cars…

Takin’ the art Carthedral to Art Car World
Rebecca was a highway star
So were all of her friends
‘Cause they were in art cars

Art cars…
They were in art cars…

Back in the East Bay Tom’s buildin’ a magic bus
To carry Ben’s topsy-turvy tales to all of us
Emily still drives her Vain Van
But I think she left a piece of her heart with her Mondrian

Art cars…

Takin’ the art Carthedral to Art Car World
Rebecca was a highway star
So were all of her friends
‘Cause they were in art cars

Art cars
They were in art cars…

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Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships! (and other exceptionally named confabs)

thebradmiskell — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:12:58 +0000

Underground Diaries, Part 36

Some of the rocketry guys–the brass in the organizations and venders–expressed concern about being represented as too extreme. This had everything to do with a pending court decision on whether a key ingredient of the powerful rocket motors they prefer was going to continue to be clumped in with dangerous (as in useful for terrorists) explosives on a federal list. That’s why I love the ballsy name of one of the most popular annual rocketry confab: LDRS (Large Dangerous Rocket Ships). Of course, BALLS is a close contender as ballsy names go.

Who doesn’t find the idea of an event named Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships (LDRS) intoxicating? The moment I heard it, I was sold. I wouldn’t have cared if the next thing I heard was that LDRS were held on a barren wasteland in the middle of nowhere. Which is a good thing, because that’s the next thing I heard.

Turns out most big rocket events happen far from civilization (and when you think about it…). Imaginative event names are therefore essential for wooing attendees. Fortunately, rocketeers have exceptional imaginations. Should you want your next event to really take off, consider having a rocketeer name it.

ROCstock. If organizers don’t open these bi-annual rocketry blasts with Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, they ought to have their heads examined (which might not be a bad idea, regardless). The Mojave Desert’s lifeless Lucerne Dry Lake, with its punishing temperature swings, is a rather hostile environment for a festival advertised as family-friendly. Yet, hundreds of rocketry nuts and the people who love them show up to ROCstocks each June and November. Appearances notwithstanding, organizers must not be completely crazy.

Dairy Aire. I thought people were speaking French when referring to this springtime, Central Valley, big rocket event. It wasn’t ’till I attended a launch put on by Dairy Aire’s sponsors at Maddox Dairy near Riverdale, Calif., that I realized their penchant for cornball puns. It’s right up there with their predilection for big ass rockets. I was treated to the launch of a 12-foot-tall rocket equipped with the most powerful engine allowed in the state. It was glorious, as was the dairy air that day. Though I’m afraid my journey to the event scarred me for life: passing downwind of stockyards for mile after harrowing mile, I was nearly sent into a fugue state by the smell of, well, derriere.

BALLS. What more, really, is there to say? Except that, your event better damn well deliver if you’re going to invoke testicular fortitude with its name. You will not be forgiven such cocksureness. By all accounts, this annual experimental launch does live up to its name: last September, rocketeer Wedge Oldham launched a DIY (that’s Do-It-Yourself) rocket the size of the Oscar Meyer Weiner Wagon. BALLS goes off each fall in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, familiar to many as the site of Burning Man festivals. Burning Man may claim to be about radical self-expression, but sending untested projectiles 100,000 feet straight up sounds pretty frickin’ radical to me.

And then there’s LDRS — Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships. How are you going to argue with a name like that? The fact that it’s a “non-professional” event only makes it that much more delirious. Though, the name does seem a tad provocative for organizers skittish about raising red flags with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Maybe honesty is the best policy. Things can be dangerous without being threats to homeland security. These rockets don’t carry warheads. And guidance systems are verboten, which is probably why LDRS generally goes off in the middle of nowhere.

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