Closed till further notice.

There are barely a handful of artists whose music perfectly accentuates whatever state I’m in. The last time I was this moved by an album was when I listened to Jeff Buckley’s Grace for the first time; an underrated (by today’s general public I mean) masterpiece - the kind of music that slowly grows on you and before you know it, consumes you.

Johnny Cash’s (1932 - 2003) American IV: The Man Comes Around is undoubtedly the work of a man relapsing into the cold comfort of religion in his last days but that shouldn’t put you off of it. Some of the tracks do have not-so-subtle religious overtones but then again, the songs are so organic, so heartfelt that you cannot help but go back and take them in all over again. One of the truly brilliant tracks on the disc is his cover of “Hurt” by Trent Reznor (yes, of Nine Inch Nails fame). The song takes a completely different meaning when sung by Cash; lending credence to that Edith Wharton saying, “There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.”

The video, for your viewing pleasure-

Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights is a strange film. Some thirty minutes into it, there’s a scene in which Jude Law’s character kisses the sleeping Norah Jones; and they barely know each other. Whether or not you’ll fall in love with this film depends on how you react to that one scene. You could either think it’s immensely beautiful or incredibly creepy, like I did.

WKW’s films are filled with strife and agony that aggravate the already existing emotional and sexual tension between characters. He makes them go through terrible bouts of loneliness before giving them a reprieve. The emotions are underplayed; what really does the trick in a WKW film is the visual style. He’s probably the only director who can make neon lights, blurs and bright colors look sensual and intimate as opposed to well…sleazy.

My Blueberry Nights follows Elizabeth (Norah Jones) as she takes a road trip of sorts whilst trying to come to terms with a recent heartbreak. Along the way, she meets the proverbial clown car of characters, each of them struggling through life themselves- a troubled couple (played by David Straithairn and Rachel Weisz) and a compulsive gambler (Natalie Portman). You know she’s supposed to learn something along the way, but you can never be sure of what Wai really wants to say. Elizabeth shares an ambiguously defined connection with Jeremy but still goes a long way before she realizes truths that only characters in films do. My Blueberry Nights has a very weak screenplay; one that’s not quite sure of what it wants to tell. The character arcs are ill conceived and you never really get a satisfying resolution. I have to agree with the critics who say WKW’s vision got lost in translation somewhere; it’s pretty obvious he was never comfortable with the language or the nuances involved.

However, the film is perhaps the most beautifully shot film you’ll come across this year and has one of the most amazing kisses ever filmed. If nothing, this film will be remembered for that one (creepy yet beautiful) kiss. At the end of the day, My Blueberry Nights is a disappointment for WKW fans; a beautiful disappointment.

Links:

• My Blueberry Nights is not so tasty: Daily News
• Norah Jones’s Three Day Kiss: Telegraph

PS: See how I didn’t go overboard with Natalie Portman this time?

Why is it that you always want what you can’t have?

Damn you Jagger.

Tarkovsky’s 1971 original was a film I first watched during my school days; needless to say, I brushed it aside as pretentious drivel along with Kubrick’s 2001: ASO. A revisitng of the film during college proved futile too. I could never appreciate Tarkovsky’s long and rather plain visuals.

The recent passing of Arthur C Clarke drove me to revisit the film yet again, that too two weeks after I watched Soderbergh’s 2002 interpretation of Stanislav Lem’s novel featuring George Clooney’s buttocks. This time around, both the films blew me away. The films while being (long) meditations on grief, are also explorations of existentialism and love; themes that feature in the two films to varying extent. For the uninitiated, Solaris was a novel written by Polish sci fi author, Stanislav Lem about a planet (Solaris) being observed by humans aboard a space station. But it soon turn out that it’s merely the humans who are under observation. *cue ominous music*

Tarkovsky’s Solaris is unabashedly more philosophical; it flits across consciousness, guilt, memories and (drumroll) love. The protagonist Kris Kelvin finds that his deceased wife keeps reappearing aboard the spacehip. We are soon privy to the fact that she may be a manifestation of his idea of her; she posseses memories and characteristics only Kelvin is aware of. Kelvin cannot seem to come to terms with her and at one point tries to get rid of the apparition by shooting her/it off into space. Dr. Snaut, another human aboard the ship decides to broadcast Kelvin’s brainwave patterns to Solaris in an attempt to communicate with the planet. The ending is one I consider far superior to Soderbergh’s version. The brainwave patterns (brainwave. heh.) cause islands to appear on the planet surface; the islands are occupied by manifestations of Kelvin’s childhood home.

Soderbergh’s Solaris is exponentially more artistic with exquisite set design and photography, heavily inspired by Kubrick’s 2001 and like 2001 is a film that is slightly ahead of it’s times; a film that will be fully appreciated only 10-15 years from now by 20 something art aficionados and intellectually impotent folk like yours truly. The science is updated too; Higgs Bosons replace Neutrinos as explanations for the spooky occurences.

I would reccomend both films but then again, what do I know? Stanislav Lem hated both.

Links:

• Philosophy in the stars: CSM
• Solaris and the philosophy of consciousness: Mind Hacks

Over the last few years, churches have become something of a curiosity to me: places where you go to see other people wallow in their guilt and delusions. It’s especially weird considering I used to be an altar boy. Not the abused kind.

Realizing that the last time I visited a church was over a year back, I dragged myself to the Good Friday service at an Anglican cathedral here in the city and was amazed at how low the attendance was. Back home, Good Friday was the time of the year when the church burst at the seams, when people gathered to make that obligatory once-in-a-year appearance. Far from repentance, I suspect the masses did it more out of an odd sense of social responsibility.

Being a Syrian Orthodox Christian from Kerala and growing up in the middle east is a cliché of sorts, perhaps akin to being a Catholic from Boston or a Buddhist from Tibet. In hindsight, it does bring back a lot of memories. The Good Friday service for example stretched on for hours; the hymns and prayers accompanied by cymbals and frequent bells, the church covered in a thick pall of incense smoke and throngs of people pressed against each other reciting verses at the top of their lungs, more for the benefit of their friends than the invisible man upstairs. And the two years I spent in Kerala, the service was followed by the serving of choruka (a concoction made from bitter gourd and vinegar), kanji (rice gruel), payar thoran (green gram) and a pickle. Secretly, having the kanji in earthen pots was something I looked forward to, the one thing that kept me from feigning a head ache.

Here, the service turned out to be far less eventful. The choir sang a rousing piece followed by tediously monotonous recitals of a few prayers and then, nothing. Despite having no religious convictions whatsoever, I find myself longing for that controlled chaos of a small church packed with people excited about actually being able to belong to a group that would have them, in spite of themselves.

Despite being mathematically challenged, I’ve always been quite the (amateur) astronomy/astrophysics enthusiast. So imagine my curiosity with all the hype surrounding Microsoft’s upcoming initiative, the WorldWide Telescope. But having recently moved to Linux, I had to find open source alternatives.

And, I’ve found (ok, so finding in this day and age is a tad bit overrated) a couple of really good open source sky mapping programs:

1. Stellarium: This is a planetarium software which means you’ll have a pretty much earth bound perspective of the night sky. Excluding additional plugins or data files, there’s a massive catalogue of over 600,000 stars and a pretty huge number of nebulae as well. The visualization is extremely cool with near realistic depictions of atmospheric conditions and light. For a given point on earth, you can choose how fast time passes, thereby being able to view the night sky in time lapse. I spent close to 4 hours last night trying to figure out the stuff I could do with this brilliant piece of software.

2. Celestia: While Stellarium is the equivalent of gazing at the night sky, Celestia is akin to travelling through space; delivering images of what stars, planets and galaxies would look like up close. The basic program consists of a catalogue of 120,000 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue. Using key board or mouse controls you can basically travel through the universe (limited by available data) at speeds ranging from 0.001m/s to light years/s. Celestia is a very power and bandwidth hungry software, so I would suggest Stellarium to get a hang of things initially.

Frankly, there’s nothing that puts things into perspective like marveling at the sheer magnitude of the universe and nothing…nothing comes close to the realization that we’re a generation lucky enough to be alive during a time like this; a time when everything seems possible.

Links:

• Stellarium User Guide
• What Made Me Cry: Microsoft’s WWT [From Scoble's Blog]
• Stellarium screenshot from here

Carefully unkempt twenty somethings with guitars standing next to bright red and blue boxes; another new indie band promoting cheerful nihilism. Methodically flipping through the pages once every two minutes, I thought to myself about what a creep I was being.

From the corner of my eye I watched her purse her lips to hum a tune; Damien Rice. What is it about a girl humming Damien Rice that never fails to arouse? Standing at the counter, she seemed oblivious to the evening commotion, a disposition that I was drawn to. The pretense of seeming interested in the stacks of music and pop culture journals was wearing thin. It was only a matter of time before someone at the counter realized I was not actually going to buy anything.

As I tried forming sentences from a random array of words in my head, he walked in. Quite an entrance, even turned a few heads in the process. I grinned not giving the slightest hint of displeasure and proceeded to return his rather enthusiastic wave. It was hard pretending to listen to him go on and on about coming to pick someone up. Or something. I managed to shrug, sigh and nod wherever necessary. Tilting my head ever so slightly towards the counter, I watched her tip over a can of coffee beans. Our eyes met and she gave one of those embarrassed smiles; I smiled back. I think. She exclaimed, ‘Best day ever’ to someone else at the counter.

I touched his shoulder politely stopping him mid sentence and managed a hurried goodbye. Too much pressure; I had to leave. Maybe another day. Nevertheless, I surprised myself by making a detour to the counter. She looked up and for about two seconds, I had nothing to say. Then, ‘I’ll have a orange juice.’ Fuck. An orange juice. An orange juice.

She smiled, one I’m assuming they taught her when she signed up for work. ‘That’ll be two fifty’. A false sense of confidence rushed over me by the time I reached into my purse, ‘You spilled a can of coffee beans, didn’t you?’ Way to go. That was as smooth as any opening line.

‘Yeah…I tried forcing the lid open and the entire thing just came off’, she was still smiling.

‘You come in on weekends huh?’

‘Mondays and Tuesdays, mornings and then weekends…wait…how do you know when I come in?’

‘No I just see you on…relax I’m not stalking or anything’. Exit false sense of confidence.

She grinned like a school girl. We had nothing to say to each other. She handed me the orange juice, ‘Thank you! You have a good night.’

‘Sure…you too.’

Making my way out, I couldn’t help but smile. Five weeks and so much progress. Glancing back for the last time, I watched him give her a peck on the cheek. She smiled. Not the one she gave me. Happier.

Television shows are a lot like relationships; you can usually figure out if it’s going anywhere from the first two days/episodes after which it’s all about commitment. Terrible metaphors aside, I find it hard to believe how much Battlestar Galactica has grown on me over the last couple of months. Science Fiction is a genre that has been done to death on TV and then some, but rarely has a show attempted what Battlestar Galactica has. While finding it’s bearings in a kind of pseudo present day society, it still manages to enthrall as a space opera with dogfights and exploding spaceships aplenty minus kitschy overdressed aliens.

BSG is set in a time line nobody is quite sure of (though there are chances this ambiguity may be intentional) and in a universe that may or may not be our own. Cylons are a breed of intelligent cyborgs created by humans who turn on their masters due to… well, religious differences. The Cylons are steadfast believers in a monotheistic God with scary resemblances to the Judeo-Christian version of a loving and benevolent creator. One thing leads to another and the human colonies are destroyed by the Cylons leaving 50,000 odd survivors adrift in space on a fleet of ships led by a single military ship, the Battlestar Galactica. Also, the Cylons can apparently take the shape of humans with the obligatory blonde bombshell thrown in solely for the purpose of satisfying legions of male fans with no social lives to speak of, yours truly included.

What’s different about BSG is that it takes shots at topics straight from today’s headlines; terrorism, suicide bombings, fundamentalism, religion and politics and is far superior to the mindless drivel that crowds the screens these days. The character arcs and plot twists rival those of most other contemporary series although it does seem at times that the writers are working on the story as they go; which I sincerely hope isn’t true. This is the kind of show that needs a grand finale and a much bigger audience.

Links:

• Battlestar Galactica on SciFi
• Wikipedia Article
• Ron Moore’s Deep Space Journey [NY Times]
  
• In Galactica, It’s Politics as Usual, Or Is It? [NY Times]
  

Epiphanies are dime a dozen; even while packing stuff into boxes. Nomadic exasperation perhaps. I’ve realized I have just a single pair of jeans; that too, one that hasn’t been washed in a couple of months and has been worn more times than it was designed for. All my t-shirts have insignias of marginally obscure cartoons a la Thundercats, comic book characters and band logos. I live in my own little delusional biosphere; oxygenated by seemingly intellectual literature, obligatory rock and indie music, cinema and distorted nostalgia. I pretend to care about things I don’t and am apathetic to the things that may matter. I lift lines from films hoping people won’t notice. I have nothing original to say; And now I learn that I am a cliche. Not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Organic decaying matter.

I’ve been told I act far too old for my age as many times as I’ve been chided for not growing up. In all likelihood, I’ll be that guy who hits 40 and still thinks he’ll make it in a band. Will mediocrity be the result of my struggle for a non conformist higher ground?

And today, she calls me a hipster. There is nothing that soothes the soul like being reduced to a stereotype. Nothing.