man oh man, you put into words what my thoughts couldn’t form. i love the “diorama-like” description – perfect! I’ve felt the same way about and even half-agree with Weiner’s racist White man theory. I also consider myself a big fan of Wes Anderson’s movies, but I’ve noticed his movies do tend to be very “white” and his characters of non-whiteness tend to be amusing little plot points or characters. And yeah because I love his color palettes, his selfish actors, and stylish direction, I always try to justify watching his movies with my love for filmmaking.

I loved the colors, the meandering story of “Darjeeling”, but you’re right, he might get a little stale. One of my thoughts was that he doesn’t ever venture into too much self-parody or self-reference with his style, but at the same time, he might be doing worse with his similar plot and character elements or “auras”. Okay I think I’m losing my train of thought.

Anyway, cool thoughts and cool site! I’m glad I stumbled on to it

:: efrain

Bigotry is a force precisely because its messengers see “very clearly,” in my experience. Extreme and exceptional racism? Compared to whom, to what saintly nation? You were married to a Swede. There are plenty of places where such a union would not have even been possible. I can’t do much with your Blix or Cooper reference, for instance, but I know a little of Iraq or at least the peninsula just south, as I have one ancestral foot dangling therein, and I can tell you that as a Desi, or as any foreigner really, you might find that extreme and exceptional racism is alive and kicking the world over. Or at least in Sweden and the Gulf. It might just be that snide remarks about ones gloves can happen just about anywhere.

Torpedo, are you saying it was my fault for being at the dark end of the Swedish spectrum? Empathy aside (thanks all the same), perhaps it’s not so much to the point for you and me to babble about the travails of being a foreign wife, so much for me as to say, the racially based disdain that Swedes engage in is completely unselfconscious and utterly unbridled, and is apparent in many matters, not just my own experience– after all, Hans Rosling is responding to something.

Anderson is a Danish name, and while I don’t know how Danish Wes Anderson is, I can say that Danes are a bit more accepting of other peoples than Swedes, being on the mainland, but only just a bit. I can see why the movie would remind cicatrix of that long ago relationahip with a Midwestern boy.

I do have to say that the unpalatable toilet sex scene between Jason Schwartzman and Amara Karan. . .

by Satya in #32 resurrected the shudder that went through me during that scene. Has any of you seen the inside of a lavatory on an Indian train (this includes the lav of the 1st-class AC compartment) ? Even if I had spent the last couple of years not screwing, and the “encounter” happened to be a houri who looked like Veruschka von Lehndorff; I would not do it if it had to be in a lavatory of an Indian train!

I’m a fellow Wes Anderson junkie right down from the colour schemes to the soundtracks to the socially stunted narcissistic male protagonists…

But I guess we should have seen this coming with characters like Pagoda et al…

I might still be in the chicken-shit-people-pleaser phase you were in (I am in the land of college) but I still think the film sounds cool and wanna see it when it comes to NZ.

Honestly, I’d rather see India exoticised in a Wes Anderson film where aesthetics are deliberately absurd, surrealist and artificial than in the upcoming ‘Shantaram’ which has a really bad ‘naughty white boy makes good in the wild, untamed exotic edge of civilisation’ whiff about it.

Or, who could forget the crap contributions to exoticism that have already passed our way from desi directors, the unbearable Bride and Prejudice and the so-bad-it-was-like-watching-a-train-wreck ‘Bollywood/Hollywood’ by Deepa Mehta?

I’d rather listen to the Kinks than ‘My name is Chin Chin Choo’ any day. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

I’ve actually seen a lot of hot white girls with not so hot guys of color.

YES! Glad I’m not the only one…ugh I know a certain person called ‘Raj’ who this entire group of blonde private school Barbies think is the hottest brown guy ever and he has somehow deluded them into thinking so…and he just shares himself around with all of them.

I sort of wanted to tell one of them that he as far as brown guys go is so unhot but then it’s kinda funny watching him have his Wilmer Valderamma-wannabe moment in the sun.

dinesh d’souza’s wife is hot. i’ve met her (many, many years ago so not sure how she aged). her name’s dixie. really

Ugh. You would think that wouldn’t you Manju.

it gives me hope in the human race that we can find common ground in our mutual contempt, nay, hatred of each other. bigotry, not music, might be the true universal language.

As for them not being rude to her directly, true, but I suspect it would have different if she were foreign but nonwhite. I recall a cousin saying (talking about how the other relatives felt), “Ah, everyone was happy it wasn’t a kallu.” A different cousin had once expressed revulsion at the fact that I had “fucked a nigger”.

This is not to say that Bengalis/Indians are any more evil than Swedes in this respect. every culture has racism to varying extents just they don’t. I would be careful about overgeneralizing.