Rich mélange of Indian spices

Our world too often seems depressingly homogenized. With only a few changes, a street scene in Seattle resembles a scene in London, which resembles one in Paris, which resembles one in Sydney. It's therefore exciting -- in a guilty sort of way -- to watch a movie like Slumdog Millionaire, a film that reminds us that the world contains vast regions where people still live lives that are not safe, clean and well-ordered -- whose lives are, to the contrary, primal, dangerous, vivid, colorful, scary, horrifying, full of pain and hunger -- and exhilarating.

India is a country in transition. We know all about today's high tech world of Bangalore, the world of software and tech support. We also have vague images of an older India -- beggars, mystics, disease, overpopulation, starvation, and callous exploitation of starving and maimed children.

Slumdog shows us both Indias. The movie opens on the glitzy television set of a Mumbai version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." A young Indian chai-wallah (boy who delivers tea to office workers) named Jamal answers question after question correctly, reaching the highest rung of the show -- 20 million rupees. But Mumbai is not New York. Before the final round, the show's cynical and obnoxious host has Jamal arrested and horribly tortured by the police to force him to reveal just how he's been cheating. Because, really -- all middle class India knows that a boy of his status would be far too ignorant to give the answers that he does.

The police interrogation presents the framework for the story, a series of flashbacks to Jamal's boyhood and youth, re-enactments of the traumatic events that, once imprinted on his young mind, fortuitously provided the answers to the questions posed on the show. We see the squalor of the Mumbai slums, the gangs of young slum children who survive day by day by their own wits, the unbelievable cruelty of adults who live off those kids, and the rich and immensely varied background of India herself -- including even some beautiful scenes set before the Taj Mahal.

This film could easily have been presented as a depressing sociological tract, calling out the need for slum clearance and protection of children. But it's not. Instead, it's a joyous affirmation of Mumbai slum life, showing not only its chaos and all too frequent cruelty, but also the richness and small daily pleasures experienced by those who live there. Above all, the movie is a love story, the story of a boy who falls in love as a pre-adolescent and never gives up his dream, despite impossible odds and years of separation from the girl he loves.

This isn't the kind of movie where it would ever be in doubt, so let me tell you: In the end, Jamal gets his girl.

The movie has been compared with a Dickens novel. It does resemble Dickens in its portrayal of the underside of an urban society, in its focus on the goodness of children (and especially, the innocence and kindness of its hero), in its celebration of great diversity and peculiarity among human types, and certainly in its overriding theme of sucess and happiness as the reward for virtue and perseverence in the face of enormous obstacles.

The ending is, as you may have gathered, happy. The police interrogator allows that Jamal's explanations are just barely plausible -- and that Jamal is too absurdly honest to have been cheating. Jamal returns for the final round and, of course, wins.

And in case the audience remains in any doubt as to whether the movie ends happily, Jamal and his girl friend -- after being reunited in freeze-frame with a chaste kiss -- suddenly join together with a cast of thousands, singing and dancing their way through the streets of Mumbai (and the closing credits) in an improbable homage to every Bollywood film you've ever seen.

Only in India. Go see it.

Twilight

No. No review of Twilight. Not in the Northwest Corner.

Even though it takes place in Forks, Washington. (Maybe especially because it takes place in Forks.)

I don't read vampire books. I don't watch vampire movies. I don't review vampire books or movies.

Why not? Because ...

Vampires suck.

Fox finds werewolf

We all know Fox News, of course. The troglodyte channel, the world as seen by angry old white men (and a few even angrier, tight-lipped young white women). The sort who "Lexington," in this week's Economist magazine, says belong to the "party of 'white-trash pride,'" and who "are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders."

But I digress.

Whatever else you may say about Fox, it's a business and a successful business at that. It knows its clientele, and it knows their needs and interests. As a result, a perusal of its website reveals news items that never see the light of day on grayer, more boring media such as CNN and ABC.

For example: today's photo article about Pruthviraj Patil, the 11-year-old wolf boy in India. What? You knew nothing of this phenomenon? Well, I didn't either, but now I do. It seems the lad is covered with fur from head to toe, palms of his hands and feet only excepted. According to the story, he suffers from hypertrichosis, a "rare genetic disorder," more felicitously known as "werewolf syndrome."

The story was newsworthy, apparently, because of an anticipated "cure": Columbia University physicians are experimenting with testosterone injections. Too early for news of any progress, but not too early for a nice head shot of the young werewolf. Thanks, Fox News.

The Northwest Corner is proud to pass on this breaking development.

Tickling the ivories

I took piano lessons when I was a kid, but -- like an idiot -- stopped in 9th grade. I still like fooling around on the keyboard. Maybe I'll take lessons again some day.

When I started this blog, twenty months ago, I wrote those words on my profile. Since then, I've continued, at times, "fooling around on the keyboard." Now I want to do more -- more than just fooling around.

If you want to quit smoking, tell everyone you're quitting. The humiliation of breaking such a public resolution may be just the incentive you need to stick with it. Using that trick as an analogy, I now declare to you, my vast reading public, that I plan to give the old piano another whirl.

During my hours of "fooling around," I've managed to work up a fairly acceptable rendition of the first movement to Beethoven's Moonlight sonata. By that, I mean I've learned to play the notes and I've tried to imitate the phrasing and emphasis that I hear in recordings. I haven't had a teacher to provide feedback. And I still don't feel ready to start lessons.

What I do plan to do is to continue working on the Moonlight sonata, and at the same time learn to play the second movement of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata. I tried to learn the Pathétique once before. While the second movement is one of the easier Beethoven movements, it is more difficult than the Moonlight. I got discouraged, and didn't master even the first page.

This time, however, I will not get discouraged. I will work on it every day. Sooner or later, I will learn to play it.

Once I do, my self-confidence will increase. I'll find a teacher and arrange for lessons.

Wish me luck. No, not luck. Wish me determination and perseverence. And maybe even a little bit of musicality? I'll report back in three or four months. If I don't, ask me how it's going. Shame me, if necessary!

Post-electoral depression

Twelve days now, since the big election: the "defining moment" of our times. Where now is the elation?

I gaze out the window at the gray sky ... nah, I went running yesterday, I can't do it again today. I glance at the pages of the New York Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, spread all over my living room floor ... no, I've read it all. I flip on the TV, but the world has not changed. Stories about gang murders and drug busts and wild fires and earthquakes ... along with still more footage of a perky Sarah Palin. Even the Faux News anchors, their pre-electoral fury momentarily doused by reality, sound too dull to be interesting.

Same old, same old.

Every December, the young Rainier96 would count down the days and hours to the magic moment of Christmas. And every Christmas evening, or the next day at the latest, our young hero would feel the same vague, inevitable sense of disappointment. "Is this all there is? I waited so long!" So also feels the corporate employee, I imagine, after he finally makes vice president, and the author after he finishes celebrating the conclusion of his book. Doctors even give a medical diagnosis to the sadness felt by some mothers after giving birth, ending nine months of waiting for their child: "post-partum depression."

Even "defining moments" in history cause only incremental changes in our daily lives. Yes, political decisions have real consequences. They will effect real long-term improvements in our lives and in our children's lives. But the political victories themselves do not validate our lives in any satisfying manner, any more than do the successes of our favorite sports teams. As always -- whether we live within a democracy, a monarchy, a dictatorship, or a tribe -- contentment comes from a sense of belonging within our universe, and from our community with other people.

And even with the most integrated of personalities, with the best adjusted of lives, enjoying the warmest of friendships, we may feel discontent following long-awaited triumph, a discontent apparently hard-wired into our brains.

Some folks handle it by going shopping. Others find it helps to add a post to their blog.

Let's make tracks

Weird, isn't it? "Elitists" used to be a term for fat cat Republicans -- symbolized by top hats, cigars, yachts, and the kids off in prep school playing lacrosse. Now, the term has somehow transmogrified into one of Republican scorn for any Democrats with advanced degrees -- scorn expressed as latte sipping, arugula eating, Volvo driving, and NY Times reading.

And, the latest pejorative is -- believe it or not -- "light rail riding"! Yeah, I read that devastating slur in some right wing article, cast hard on the heals of "latte (or was it Chardonnay?) sipping." And some irascible gent in, I believe, Texas, was quoted as declaring that light rail was just one more cog in a liberal elitist conspiracy to turn us all into Europeans. Not for him, by golly. The good old U.S.A. would do just fine, thank you. "I've never been on a light rail," he declared self-righteously, "and I never will."

W-H-A-T-E-V-E-R!! Anyway, this is all just my grumpy introduction to the great news that the Seattle metropolitan area voted -- finally -- to tax itself to pay for extension of our fledgling light rail system. Readers will recall my anguished lament last fall, when voters defeated a combined rail/highway funding issue. This year's measure, named Proposition 1, scaled back the 2007 proposal slightly, and stripped it entirely of the highway funding component opposed by the Sierra Club The measure was submitted to voters in the three-county (King, Pierce, Snohomish) Sound Transit region.

Proposition 1 passed with about 58 percent of the vote! The measure, along with virtually all taxation measures in the Puget Sound area, passed easily, despite the tanking of the region's economy. The large turnout of Democratic voters supporting Obama may well have produced the needed votes to push all these tax measures over the top.

As a result, Sound Transit's light rail transit line under construction at present, running from the University, through downtown, and out to the airport, will be extended an additional 34 miles -- extensions to the north and south, and a new line across Lake Washington to the east. Commuter train and bus service also will be expanded. Forty years after Seattle first voted down a heavy rail transit system, we finally will be undertaking construction -- at far more expense than the system originally planned in 1969 -- of a comprehensive light rail network that will serve the needs of the three-county metropolitan area.

In Seattle, patience is a necessary virtue for those of us favoring major municipal improvements to our infrastructure. But sometimes, patience is rewarded.

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Photo: Light rail train on test run through downtown Seattle tunnel.

Bury me on the lone prairie

A glance at the electoral map shows that the Republican party has become increasingly a regional party, finding its home in three rough groupings of states:

1. The Old South, excluding Virginia and Florida, and (barely) North Carolina, with an Appalachian sailent running from Tennessee, through Kentucky and West Virginia, and up into southwest Pennsylvania.

2. The central plains, a tier of states stretching south from North Dakota to Texas.

3. Mormon territory, which includes Idaho in addition to the fatherland of Utah.

Other Western states, such as Montana and Arizona, voted for McCain, but are trending blue.

This division of the country leaves the Republicans in control of a lot of red acreage, as shown on the map, but much of that acreage is depopulating (the northern plains), or dying economically (Appalachia, and parts of the South).

If livestock could vote, the GOP would be in a lot better shape.

Republican moderates are now urging the party to repackage its traditional core principles of financial responsibility, small government, and individual self-reliance in ways that could appeal to a new demographic -- young people, blacks and Hispanics, and educated, suburban middle class voters. Something also needs to be done to reclaim traditional Republican blocs (such as business leaders and conservative intellectuals) that are drifting off toward the Democrats. But most Republican spokesmen reply that the party must swing even further to the right, and thus attract voters by force of its idealogical purity. A continuing hemorrhage from the ranks of corporate executives and conservative intellectuals seems almost to be welcomed by a party whose heart lies with small town and rural white voters.

Parties always pull themselves together after electoral disasters, and come back within a decade or two. But the current spokesmen for the Republican party -- one can hardly still call what's left "leaders" -- seem to show little interest in making such a recovery easy.

President Obama

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.