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Excerpt from Not Funny, biopic on the Joking Clown by Lar Basa and Jasi Markese, two rich kids who fancy themselves hypercool film makers. They are not JC fans.
On the Budapest leg of his last world tour, 2067-68, the Joking Clown stopped in the middle of his set and began to harangue the crowd. He called them ignorant fools, people without memory and history, amnesiac slaves without roots. ‘You don’t know what music is!’ he yelled, strapping on an ancient design of guitar. In an unprecedented lapse into classical music, he then proceeded to play a succession of crumbling numbers from the vaults.
The lineup, assembled later from close watching of the live set, was as follows: the Beatles, ‘I Am the Walrus’, Led Zeppelin, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, Pink Floyd, ‘Wish You Were Here’, Guns’n’Roses, ‘Sweet Child o’Mine’ (which the Joking Clown claimed was ‘a song for mothers’), Marilyn Manson, ‘Man That You Fear’, Nirvana, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Queen, ‘I Want To Break Free’, the Grateful Dead, ‘Uncle John’s Band’, the Velvet Underground, ‘Venus in Furs’, Bob Dylan ‘All Along the Watchtower’, Jimi Hendrix, ‘Voodoo Chile’, Joni Mitchell, ‘Woodstock’, the Doors ‘When the Music’s Over’.
He then screamed, ‘This is my history!’, threw his guitar into the audience and disappeared before he could be arrested. Warrants were taken out against him under the Nocopy Protocol, since all these songs with the exception of ‘Man That You Fear’ are owned by MusicDhun, his old label. Fans outside the venue later complained, ‘We couldn’t dance to any of that stuff. It was all dead white males, anyway.’ DJ Lips, a fixture of the corporate circuit, commented, ‘It’s so sad that the Clown is finally running out of material. There’s a point where swearwords and simulated sex just stop being funny. I think he should pull that needle out of his arm and do a few youth-product endorsements. He should use his power for good.’ Homeland Security repeatedly tried to apprehend him, but he slipped through their fingers till his epic final gig in Tokyo in April 2068, shortly before that city was nuked for the final time.
Yes, we have been laughing at Mamata Banerjee, and yes, she has deserved it. Even her most rabid supporters have to admit she hasn’t handled recent controversies very well, and that she’s done a few unforgivable things, like sark rape victims and get in the way of the police doing their job. But let us not forget that she probably does love Bengal and wants to see it do well, for what it’s worth. This is no mean thing: the feeling of neglect and indifference we got from the last bunch still leaves a lingering taste in our mouths. We only wish, because it’s important, that Mamata Banerjee’s deeds live up to her words. We can probably forgive her behaving like a spoilt child provided she does it on her own time: even politicoes are allowed to have quirks. But there are clouds from the past that suggest the road is going to be very long: she has thrown away solid support on a whim before, she has let her people down before, and she’s blustered about it before. We remember this. We don’t want to see it happen again. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, she really is our only hope. Can she keep the Sith at bay? Read on to find out.
[Go on, do one of Mamata as the great Jedi. You know you want to.]
This is the Joking Clown’s first hit. He posts it on a music sharing site in 2058 and within hours it’s in Xoogle’s top ten trending hits. In the video he appears in a full red body suit and a black and white devil mask. Clearly he had not yet worked out the look that was to be his trademark. The song’s point of view and subject matter rapidly became controversial, fuelling later speculation about his orientation and politics. He’s pictured under a bridge scribbled with filthy graffiti, his only instrument a steel municipal garbage bin played with his bare hands with three inch iron nails taped to each finger. You can see the emptied-out trash by his feet; it includes a flyer for boy band TestoMenT, a broken Tenorion, a headband of the Stiffs streetgang notorious for its ‘bitch cruises’, the text of the Commercial Protocols, a coke bottle, a pornstar platform-sole, a baby’s bonnet and a Jack Rawlings poster. This trash ‘still life’ later became a popular t-shirt icon. He beats out a furious rhythm in a long complex time signature, then he throws his head back and adds his voice:
Hey you wanna bleed you wanna need you wanna MAKE. ME.
Hey you wanna take you wanna fake you wanna HURT. ME.
Scrape my bones dry on the floor, pin my skinny arms
Didn’t think I’d take you so far (too far).
Didn’t think I’d scrape you so far.
I got a knife in my head and its name is you
I got a pain in my belly and you say it’s nothing new
I gonna scream till your fucking walls come down I gonna [screams]
I gonna [screams]
Break you as you go my brother break you as you go
Break em now! [Solo]
Come out of the workshops baby come out of the holes
Come out of the prisons saving all your pretty souls
Come out of the shadows baby come into the light
Let me do it to you all the motherfucking night!
Let me sing…
Let me sing…
Let me [screams]
The first verse of this song appears in my science fiction novel Antisense, currently writing. By popular demand I’m posting the whole song here. At some point I may even set it to music. The Joking Clown is a rockstar in my world. No one has ever seen his face. He always wears greasepaint and a big rainbow wig. This is his second hit after ‘Knife in My Belly’ written from the point of view of a rape victim. ‘We’re Going to the Garden’ was first performed at the Silver Heights Love Fest, 2058, and is the first track on his debut album The Garden.
‘We’re Going to the Garden’
The Joking Clown, The Garden, (c) MusicDhun Media 2059
Triple Platinum in 2060
A Section
We’re going to the garden, baby
We’re going to get there okay
We’ll buy our tickets for the cable car
And climb the hill by the bay
There’ll be for us a star in the sky
A lantern in the dark
And a door will open in your heart
As you take a walk in the park
As you take a walk in the park
B Section
We’re going to the garden
Join the Love Parade
We’ll see you in the garden, baby
We’ll meet you in the glade.
A
For the leaves are all falling like dollar bills
The billboards look shiny and nice
The man in the moon’s got shares in his room
And the caviar’s nothing but ice
They gave me a gun and a sacrament
They gave me a road and a wound
They left me with physical testament
That I had been thoroughly pwned.
That you have been thoroughly pwned.
B
We’re going to the garden
We haven’t got much time
Come on, meet me in the garden
Bring nothing but your mind
A
Throw down your keys and your jewelry
Tear up your Daddy’s card
Break off the shackles they put on me
Breathe and it won’t be that hard
I’m here at the rendezvous waiting
I’ve got your favourite coat
I think that we’re done with the hating
For you sang to all that I wrote
You sang with me all that I wrote.
PS The song is so awesome I’ve decided to include the full text in the novel.
If all stories are chronicles of events that haven’t happened yet, then all fiction is essentially science fiction. However ‘realistic’ fiction disguises this fact by aping the evidential appeal of documentary and testament. Thus, in a story where a man drives down the road in a car, the story has actually assumed the existence of cars, petrol companies, roads, cities, finance corporations and traffic police, maybe even patriarchy. But the story doesn’t have to: the story is happening in someone’s head, in a made up world where any thing can happen. The fact that all of these things are assumed and let be, except for one or two, is an essentially conservative action.
Therefore, any stories that really want to question the existence of any of these things, any of the rules that our world is based on including rules of inequality, exploitation, war and rapine, have to be science fiction. There is no other way to question them. For authors who want to change the world, this is the only possible medium. literary fiction is a dead end, because it does not lead, it follows, it reproduces the given instead of probing it, or it probes only a small part of it, leaving the rest untouched.
Thus in such a story a battered wife might escape from her husband and build a life for herself, but we only see the forces at work in microcosm. That can tell us a lot about the universe of that particular couple, but what of the millions who are being beaten all over the world, how do you tell their stories? How about a world where they form a secret internet alliance at bluemoms.com and overthrow their husbands? Then their stories would knit together into a big picture, you could have say seven main characters each symbolising a type of victim, they could talk, compare notes, get angry, and they would fight, they could start a global movement, you could show them fighting even though no one’s fighting much around us right now, except a few good souls who fight for themselves and their friends and maybe their local charity shelter NGO.
There is essentially no difference between history and story, because if I want to tell you how I survived cancer, or how I might get from here to Shantiniketan, or how I made breakfast, I have to tell you a story. The format, the style, the mental effort involved is the same, except that I’m drawing on my memory first and imagination second. In fiction memory is the sous chef. If histories are threads of experience spinning through time, then fiction is the respinner of cut threads. That is why when the threads of experience of the victims are cut by murder or war or holocausts, fiction must step in and mend them. That is how fiction changes the world; it rediscovers the histories that have been stolen and buried. It makes graves talk. It levels the playing field between the dictators and the crushers and the crushed. So censorship and suppression is essentially an attempt to change reality. Not to be allowed to tell the story of the truth is not to tell the truth. Is to obliterate the truth entirely. Except that the stones and the skulls will cry out to the storytellers. Mothers will make them into ghost stories and horror stories and tell their children, don’t make Bluebeard mad, he’s got a room you should never open. Your world’s memory of terrible things is in that room. The story is the missing key for the huge padlock on the door. hence fantasy and science fiction are kindred: fantasy respins the past, and science fiction spins the future.
I have finally figured out why the Mahabharata is so good. This is because I have developed an irritating social tic: I buttonhole random strangers and tell them my story. No, not MY story, the story of Antisense. I have lost count of how many times I have hijacked dinner parties or disturbed someone’s fevicol by saying, ‘Okay, so it starts in 2684, but actually the back story begins from 2007…’ But the amazing thing is, not only do I remember the whole damn story every time, but bits get clearer every time I tell it. It’s like I’m constantly rewriting the novel without the slightest bashing of plastic. Awesome! Now I know why the great literatures always start out oral. Works are only written down when people figure that they will never get any better. Accordingly, one should ever write down a story until one has told it at least once to one’s friends and gotten a few reactions. Actually the reactions usually disappoint. Questions are way better than comments, because they wipe clean a tiny part of the window, they make me focus on and see some part of the story. Eventually, when it’s got smokin’ good, I will write it down. Now I know why I always insist that people read/tell their stories live in all my workshops, classes and creative writing events. Storytelling is always telling, and the written voice is only a substitute for the spoken one. Writing a piece of fiction is not that different from what you would do if your spouse asked, ‘How was your day?’ or your boss asked, ‘So how are we going to bag the contract?’ But anyway, I just wanted to thank my extended family of story-hearers for their patience (some of them have heard the story many many times), and to share with them my insight into why the Mahabharat or Iliad or Beowulf or Cinderella is so good. It’s because it has been told so many many times: storytellers have added and embellished, unfolded and deepened it, and passed it on. The best stories are the ones that get told again and again. It’s wrong, therefore, that our culture tries to cage stories in copyright; has made this caging a condition for the author to eat and pay bills. Rather than giving me the power to stop people from copying my work, shouldn’t society find a way to pay me for every copy, or even every reading, my work gets? Surely my addition to society’s value happens every time my story is consumed? What if you could pay for poetry like pizza?
Hit counter: 13 this week?
 Joker by Vanbriesen on deviantart For a variety of reasons (thanks LATOA), I have been talking and thinking about Bob Kane’s Joker quite a bit recently. The Joker appeared in Batman issue #1 and remained pretty much the way he appeared; a homicidal laughing maniac who uses joker Venom to kill, leaving his victims with wide staring eyes and a fixed grin. The only significant change in his appearance has been the addition of a Glasgow grin, so called because it is a favourite punishment among Glasgow gangs. It involves cutting the corners of the mouth and then making the person scream (or laugh), causing separation of the wounds.
The Dark Knight wasn’t the first text to introduce this feature: it first appeared in the Batman comics series no 663: The Clown at Midnight, 2007, written by Grant Morrison, who is so often at the root of awesome. But the best revelation of who the Joker is, is to be found, I believe, in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke. In that story, the Joker puts first Jim Gordon, then Batman himself,. through a succession of funhouse installations, during which he talks to them about who he is and what he’s up to. At the end of the story, he actually makes Batman laugh. At the beginning of the story, we see a typical victim of the Joker venom, with wide staring eyes and a fixed grin. That rictus compels me. What do the victims see, and what are they grinning at? I believe what they see is nothing short of the Apocalypse. They see the truth of the world, which is a big joke. Really.
The Joker knows that the world he lives in is corrupt. he also knows that the world is kept alive by all the good people in it who clean up after the bad ones, who get scammed in bank frauds, held up in gas stations, who buy bum shares, who get raped and trafficked into prostitution for the entertainments of the masters. Batman thinks he has to remove the masters to stop the system (he is one himself in the daytime) but the Joker knows what really needs to be done is remove the victims. If necessary by killing them, but letting em see the joke is an acceptable alternative. The many origin stories he tells about himself (always with variations and a new cast of characters) are all stories of victimhood. He is Everyvictim, and the weirdos who congregate around him are also people who have been fucked over by the system. The Joker often betrays them too, because they’re part of the system as well: Gotham deserves a better class of villain. In fact there is NO difference between the masters and the criminals.
In fact, the final set piece of Nolan’s The Dark Knight, where two shiploads of people are set up to blow each other (or themselves) out of the water proves the Joker’s point. All the palaver with the hostages distracts us from a salient point: the good citizens didn’t blow up the other ship, but neither did the condemned criminals. Say what? These are supposed to be killers, right? So if they spare kids and little old ladies, why the hell were they doing time in the first place? But the movie requires closure, so the Joker hangs upside down and tells Batman he loves him instead. Why not? There’s nothing like explaining a joke to kill it.
The Joker tells Batman ad nauseam that Batman is just like the Joker. This is his little joke. Batman’s transformation comes out of a similar victimhood: the ‘bad day’ that Joker blames in The Killing Joke. The difference in Batman’s reaction is that Batman wasn’t meant to be a victim. He came from privilege: he was the rich young heir to a business empire, symbolised by the pearls from his mother’s necklace that always fly around when he remembers that night. His self-chosen mission thenceforth is to restring the pearls of society. He can’t do it, of course. The Joker repeatedly points out to him the inappropriateness of his victim-response. By battling ‘villains’, most of whom start as victims, Batman is just shooting the messenger. His costume, his anonymity, his love of night and caves, suggest shame. The Joker’s clownface is his real face because he is a true victim: Batman is not. Batman is desperately trying to side with the victims but doesn’t have the moral honesty to give up his privileged day job, and his only excuse for keeping it is that Wayne Industries helps him ‘fight evil’. Hilarious! If he became entirely Bat, entirely Mad, the Joker would probably forgive him. But of course that repeatedly attempted ‘seduction’ is the source of Joker’s evil in Batman’s eyes.
The Joker’s relationship with Batman is therefore one of exasperated love. The Joker always collects and protects powerfully angry people around him, and his Joker instincts tell him Batman is the best of the lot. But he is battling Bruce Wayne’s twelve years of conditioning as the future scion of Wayne Incorporated. He tries in every way to break down the wall of silence and repression around the angry young boy who powers Batman, and every time he fails. He ‘enlightens’ everyone around Batman, even going so far as to put on a show for Jim Gordon’s benefit featuring naked pictures of his wounded daughter. What’s the point of that? you ask. Jim Gordon is an upholder of the law which fails to prevent the kind of atrocity that happens to Barbara Gordon, and in fact sanctions it in the case of renters from slum lords who default on their payments, of failed comics in sleazy bars, of no-hope single mothers, of druggies, of hobos, where the police look the other way or yawn around their donuts. His only message is ‘Dekh kemon lage.’*
This is why the Joker rarely wins a physical fight with Batman, in fact he giggles hysterically while Batman slaps him around. It’s like hitting one of those inflatable clown toys. That’s the only power of the victim: to not be a victim. From the Joker’s point of view it is of course extreme masochism, while from Batman’s it’s an aggravating refusal to play the game. Sometimes the Joker will yell and scream and make agonised faces mocking the pain-response of the terminally beaten. The last thing a torture victim is supposed to do is laugh. Nothing scares a torturer more, that and the Joker saying, ‘I’m not a monster; I’m just a bit ahead of the curve.’ If all the system’s victims behaved like that, the whole damn structure would collapse.
Right now I’ve got to go find some Joker venom. Apocalypse beginning in ten, nine…
Further to my observations on the garden.
The process of returning to the garden is a long and complex one. we who return are not the same as we who left, because we leave in early infancy (or at an early stage of social development not much further than the nomadic tribe). Society, in other words the people around us, the ever growing people, they unfold us. We grow and invent cities. Or we discover them. They could be cities of the mind, otherwise known as libraries (not necessarily constructed out of print), or they could be cities of mud and wattle, brick and mortar, steel and glass. We learn to appreciate the pleasures and multipliers of sociableness. Our garden, therefore, transforms into a garden city. The garden city is a powerful idea, combining the virtues of both and hopefully avoiding the disadvantages. Of course, in real life, many things can go wrong, but the idea persists, of a community spread over an area which can come together or find places of solitude as it chooses, where there is productive work to do, things to build, audiences to please. If the gardens could feed us, we would be in Paradise.
It is on this principle of the garden that Zigsa constructs the world of the Florian Age. She is inspired by ancient Buddhist tales of the arama, the park which was frequently converted into a vihara, or a place of sojourn. (By the way, that is what the placename ‘Arambagh’ means. Unlike the Western garden, this is more like a cultivated forest as forests give shade from the tropical sun, give fruits, nuts, leaves and wood and shelter to animals. They are far more sustainable than the modified grassland model of the Western garden, borrowed from the Persian. Unfortunately Indians have bought in to the Western idea, from the sad, bare, shrubby municipal horrors to the neat, sterile,spongy green acres of high class developments, watered every day with a small wasteful lake. The forest, source of all our enlightenments, is no longer loved.
The Antisense basha reproduces the model of the forest outside, with an overarching canopy covering several square kilometres, and individual dwellings as offshoots of these, like subsidiary trunks of a vast banyan tree. The solid waste and waste water travels through ‘roots’ to the surrounding true forest, getting digested as it goes and feeding the trees. The area thus fed is also looked after by the denizens of the basha, mostly teenagers and older people who want to get some exercise. They bring in biomass for the crackerboxes. Of course I have cheated a bit, as my civilisation can ‘print’ anything from the molecular level up, so they only need basic sugars, fibres, fats, amino acids and minerals to create all the things they need, including food, and the energy they need to do this is produced by bubble fusion. Cost and sustainability being issues with the garden.
More on this later.
 The line says, 'That's enough, now go give the toy to Mukul.' As Ruchir Joshi says, thirty four weeks was all it took. The arrest of Ambikesh Mohapatra, Professor of Chemistry at Jadavpur University, allegedly for distributing this cartoon, is the latest piece of absurdity by the Trinamool government. Before you think that Mamata showed astute acumen and figured out she was being mocked, see this. As a long time resident in a cooperative housing project, I can vouch for the fact that society politics makes US presidential elections look like teddy bears’ tea parties. I am not surprised that the ‘aggrieved’ parties (read cheaters, embezzlers and petty crooks) decided to ‘take action’ against Mohapatra and his neighbour Subrata Sengupta. Recently an almost identical case happened at my complex and the whistleblowers were victimised in exactly the same way, minus the arrests. The only difference in our case was the absence of Mamata’s involvement.
Clearly the corrupt contractors who tried to remove the ‘thorn’ that Prof. Mohapatra had become, figured that Didi was their trump card, and that she could be appealed to to grant their wishes like her neighbour and role model, Ma Kali of Kalighat. Like a jagroto debota, she obliged. The students and faculty of Jadavpur University were understandably angry, and demonstrated through Friday, with scenes of celebration greeting the news that Prof. Mohapatra was out on bail on Friday afternoon. However, so were his assailants.
If that were not creepy and disturbing enough, the next morning I receive an SMS on both my cell numbers from LM-WBGOVT saying in all caps, ‘SHUBHO NABABARSHE APNADER SAKALKE JANAI AAMAR ANTARIK PRITI-O-SUBHECCHA. SABAI BHALO THAKUN, SUSHTHA THAKUN. ASUN SABAI MILE NATUN BANGLA GORE TULI -MAMATAA’. This translates roughly as ‘On the auspicious occasion of the Bengali New Year I send you my heartfelt love and best wishes. May you all remain happy and healthy. Come, let us build a new Bengal together. Mamata.’
Several questions arise. One, how did Mamata get my number, including the one I never use? Two, does ‘may you all remain happy and healthy’ mean ‘if necessary, the opposite can be arranged.’ I always get nervous when governments sidle up and say, ‘Everything okay? Kids, car, house, job, all fine? No worries? Taxes? Nightmares? Loose talk? Road dividers? Street lighting? Competitors of the wrong colour? Late nights on Park Street? Auditors?’ Why should they care, and what would it cost if they ‘did something’ about it?
So what is this new Bengal Didi wants to build? Does it involve cartoons, or creepy text messages? Transferred police officers or five streetlights per square foot? The other political parties have kept a low profile so far, waiting for Didi to implode under the weight of her own ego. I don’t think they’ll have to wait long.
Isn’t it odd how tyrants always start out being funny? All bullies do, I guess. Then they want to wipe the grins off people’s faces. Thus the pogroms begin. But on a more serious note, perhaps this is indicative of hte fact that DID doesn’t really care about the press, the intelligentsia or the ‘sushil samaj’ (civil society) that helped bring her to power. Like the Left before her, she wants to create exclusive rural pockets of power which she will protect as rotten boroughs. Kolkata is just a showpiece to her. So she will spend money on prettying it up, but not on making Park Street safe for women, because the women who go to Park Street don’t belong in her universe. At the most, they impinge on her consciousness as ‘tools’ in the hands of her enemies to make her look bad. Because that is what Tapashi Mallick was to her: a tool. When the rape cases started pouring out, she seemed unsurprised. Her response was throwaway and rehearsed: got up cases! Of course, why else would a woman be raped in NATUN BANGLA?
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