Welcome Back.
I’ve been gone long. 3 months, near about. 3 months of slack acknowledgment of life’s suckiness. I am hoping for that to change.
A lot of changes took place, yet somehow I am still as indolent as ever. Rains gave into Fall, which gave into Winter. The music playing changed with seasons – Jazz for the rains, Slowcore for the fall, Johnny Hollow (listen on it) and a whole lotta Gothic ambiance for the winters. The lack of good books to read was apparent in much scarce thoughts on the blog. However, I pulled myself up to read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and I find myself completely blown away. I haven’t read a more complex novel. The writing style, I presume, is part reason for the complexity. I also watched Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and it is an amazing adaptation of Heart of Darkness. If you aren’t much into reading books you much watch this classic of a war movie. I am currently trying Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
A lot of pending DVDs found their way to the screen. Apocalypse Now, Chinatown, Dead Poet’s Society, The Dreamers, El Topo, Everything is Illuminated, Fargo, Silent Hill, and some more. Many old DVDs went into a lot of heavy rotation too – Casablanca, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Godfather I & II, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Good Will Hunting, Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, To Kill A Mockingbird, Vanilla Sky and a lot more.
So, all-in-all, I haven’t done much again. It is high time I do something worthwhile.
There’s lot to write about but words aren’t flowing the way they used to. I feel more and more like Winston Smith starting his diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four, wanting to write, afraid to write, but when he writes it seems more like babble than a meaningful discourse yet the babble makes complete sense.
So I’ll leave you guys here hoping that at least one or two of the old readers would return. While I club my notes and thoughts for a serious introspection of the last 3 months, you keep reading and talkback on this routinely mundane post.
PS. Took quite a part of these three months to redesign this blog. Wait and Watch. Work In Progress.
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
November 03, 2006
June 20, 2006
I'm Black
I fuckin' love these lines:
I know someday you'll have a beautiful life, i know you'll be a starCourtesy: Nouman Mohammed Khan.
in somebody else's sky, but why
why, why can't it be, why can't it be mine?
Random Thoughts Vol.2
Reasons are the same as before. Hence: Random Thoughts Vol.2
- Mission Impossible 3 finally arrived in Hyderabad. Saw it releasing day - Friday.
Awesome action. J.J. Abrams has made it to my list of great action directors. Tom Cruise, always brilliant. Hoffman came out as a great villain. The slight suspense was no surprise, already knew who was behind it before the intermission. Maggie Q - HOT. I was looking forward to see Billy 'Russel Hammond' Crudup after quite a long time in a huge movie. He was great too. A great movie. No bad things to say except the lack of THE THEME in the movie most of the time. But still, the music was good. The Vatican and Shanghai sequences were brilliantly shot. Will watch again this week. - Been reading Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird. A geniune story of innocence and human dignity. Looks like I finally found the life-changing-book after all. Will write all about it in a post quite soon. Started reading it for the second time. This stuff should be in primary education curriculum.
Kal El will return on June 30th in IMAX 3D. Book your tickets, I'm booking mine as soon as advance starts. There will be 20 minutes of 3D Supes. Can't wait. The reviews are good not excellent though. Some say it is more of a Chick movie. Some say Spacey wasn't used much. I say fuck off! I say, "I HEART SUPERMAN".- Listening to James Blunt's Back to Bedlam. Listen. Wallow in the beautiful melancholy. Also playing all live performances by Pearl Jam. Also in the loop are the Verve, Soundgarden, Fort Minor, Lynyrd fuckin' Skynyrd, Helen Stellar, My Morning Jacket.
- Also playing Counter Strike and Condition Zero. Trying to throw a LAN party at Copy Junction, Banjara Hills. Need more friends/players.
June 02, 2006
Random Thoughts
Don't have anything to write about, hence: random thoughts.
That's all folks! Will return with more thoughts in the near future.
- People are always asking me, "what are you doing?" This is what I am doing these days. Go ahead and click, its an improvisation of a blogger template. It is Work-In-Progress and there's more where this came from. So whenever you need a different looking blog, catch me on Yahoo! IM.
Joblo gave it 9/10 and Arrow would butcher his family to see this again. And they saw it at the Cannes. It's my most awaited movie this year. Much awaited than Superman Returns. And I know it won't be released in India/Hyderabad. It's mucho-gloomy and uber-creepy. It's Guillermo del Toro's "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth). Download the creepy trailer, already.- Next in line is Richard Linklater's live-action, rotoscopic-animated sci-fi, A Scanner Darkly. Three Words: PHILIP K. DICK (shame on you, ignoramus). It stars some of my favorite actors, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., and Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson. I believe I don't have to repeat the trailer line from above.
- Year's biggest disappointment, Southland Tales, courtesy, Richard Kelly. I had hopes. Damn you, Richard. Please give me a Darko, again.
- I am back on to music real hard, courtesy: iPod Nano. It's:
- The Who's Baba O'Riley
- Elton John's Tiny Dancer and My Father's Gun
- Helen Stellar's Io (This time around)
- Fleetwood Mac's Big Love (Acoustic)
- Pearl Jam doing the Who's Baba O'Riley (live)
- Wheat's Don't I Hold You
- Lindsey Buckingham's Shut Us Down
- Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird
- D-Mode's remix of Starsailor's Four to the Floor
- Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker
- Beck's Guero
- Got nothing to read. Going for book-shopping tomorrow. Looking for Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird, David Vise and Mark Malseed's Google Story and anything minimal (spanbauer, hempel, palahniuk, coupland, camus, lee). Meanwhile, enjoying The Lord of the Rings for the don't-rememberth time.
I am also going back to my web devlopment basics. Learning CSS again. Learning Modularization in XHTML 1.1. Trying to learn JavaScript for the nth time. I even have a CSS Reference on my iPod. Thanks, Westciv.
That's all folks! Will return with more thoughts in the near future.
May 29, 2006
Apple Sweeeeetness!
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Spankin' new Apple iPod Nano.
This happens to be my first ever Apple product and I am hooked for more. The finesse, the eye for details, and Steve Jobs is evident in the iPod Nano. And the interface is sooooo smooth.
My brand new iPod, in all its sleek-black goodness, holds upto 240 songs. That's near-about 1 gig. I also get a USB cable for downloading music from my PC. A soft leather-like case. A CD with iTunes 6 + Quicktime 7. And it is a gift from a great friend. Thanks man. You are making my day, every day.
My brand new iPod, in all its sleek-black goodness, holds upto 240 songs. That's near-about 1 gig. I also get a USB cable for downloading music from my PC. A soft leather-like case. A CD with iTunes 6 + Quicktime 7. And it is a gift from a great friend. Thanks man. You are making my day, every day.
iPod Flickr Set
May 28, 2006
A Different Beat
Music is books for the ears. Just like any book I read, my music takes me places. Places I have been, places I want to be, places I haven’t been, places I never want to be in. It acts as the same portal that books are.
And as with books, my music choices are a bit slicker than your average. Not just slicker, they are everything from rustic to fresh to all-out industrial. I am Rock. I am Pop. I am Jazz. I am Electronic. Heck, I am even Country. If there’s one genre that I am not all into, it should be hip-hop. I listen hip-hop, but it sticks to Eminem and Shaggy. People are always asking me, why don’t you listen to hip-hop? I can only say, it’s not my kinda music. They ask have I listened to 50 cent, D12, Jamelia, Kevin Lyttle. I say, no. And they consider this to be so uncool.
Well, being uncool is no-problems with me. That’s part nature for a geek. What’s bad is that people presume stuff about you. They presume you want to act as if you don’t listen to what everyone listens to. You act like you are different. And what have I to say? For starters, Yea, I am fuckin’ different.
HELEN STELLaR is a great Chicago band doing some great music in L.A. I love their music. And when you go over to their official website and read their bio. This is what they have to say.
A Car comes the singer gets out singing. He hits a party. Hot Chicks. Ok-looking singer. Huge shirts. Huger Pants. Black-Culture-Gone-Wrong. Gasgsta Rap. Discotheques. Dancing.
This is surely not my kinda music. But then you would say, Ok, you are a fuckin’ Racist. Racist, I am not. If you really want to listen to Black music, listen to Jazz – the original and classy black cultural contribution to Music. I listen to Jazz. To Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Dianne Reeves.
To know what’s behind all this shit-talk, you need to know that International music isn’t easy to find in Hyderabad city. You could get the newer stuff, all those boy bands and hip-hop rappers. What you don’t get is the older music. You get Bryan Adams, you get Michael Jackson, and you get Nirvana, but not everything from them. So when I talk about Duran Duran’s Ordinary Life or the oh-so-lovely Moon River, I get a “huh!" People do not listen to this stuff. People don’t want to. And when they don’t listen that, they reflexive-ly do not listen to great music like Tom Petty, Elton John, Sting, John Mayer, Coldplay, James Blunt and many more great musicians and bands who are available in every record store in the city. Instead, they listen to what’s playing on Top 10. They listen to whateva-lyric-ed hip-hop. They hear what they see.
It’s like they are acting sheep. One jumps the stick, all the others follow.
This, however, is not a critical analysis of music choices. This little write-up is not in anyway offending the hip-hop genre or the true hip-hop lover, the one who’d listen to both Kanye West and MC Hammer. It’s not about people who jump on the latest bandwagon hitting the block. This is about people who jump on the bandwagon and get off. People who listen to hip-hop because it’s cool and would not listen to it when its off-trend.
People don’t want to experiment. They want what is served, meaning, they don’t have a choice in the first place. I’ll talk about myself, I am no hypocrite. Most of my choices are borrowed, acquired taste it’s called. But I guess, everyone’s choices are acquired one way or the other.
I’d never heard the Dark Side of the Moon or Heathen Chemistry or Led Zeppelin I or II or III. I’d never known Mark Knopfler, Sting, Duran Duran or Jim Morrison. I’d never heard tiny dancer or Free Falling or Free Bird. It was other people who made me listen to these records, these bands, these artists.
Other people who might be my friends, people who put these great music into their collection, into their movies, into their car stereo and at the back of their notebooks. People I knew as friends - Rahil, Shakeel and Moid. People I know online but haven’t talked to - Nouman Mohammed Khan, Paul Ranix, and Joe Hesketh. People who are famous like the film makers - Quentin Tarantino, Cameron Crowe, Sofia Coppola, and Robert Rodriguez. Like authors whose books I read with music playing – Tom Spanbauer, Stephen Graham Jones, Christopher Baer, Alex Garland and Douglas Coupland. I don’t know what they listen to but their work inspire me some music.
Yes! I jump on these bandwagons, each and every one of them. But I never get off. I am a geek. And geeks by nature are fanboys. We are loyal to stuff we like, fiercely loyal. Books, Movies, Technology, Theories, Music, whatever it is we remain with them. We remain because whatever our choice is, we know, it is US.
Music isn’t about choices it’s about feelings, emotions, ideology, perspective. Music is about you. Just like the books you read, music defines/instigates/improves your emotions. And just like books it means different to every person. It’s never the same, the music. It’s complex yet simple. It’s just like us.
P.S. Check out Helen Stellar’s io (This time around) on the Soundtrack of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown. Also check out some other music on the official website of Helen Stellar.
And as with books, my music choices are a bit slicker than your average. Not just slicker, they are everything from rustic to fresh to all-out industrial. I am Rock. I am Pop. I am Jazz. I am Electronic. Heck, I am even Country. If there’s one genre that I am not all into, it should be hip-hop. I listen hip-hop, but it sticks to Eminem and Shaggy. People are always asking me, why don’t you listen to hip-hop? I can only say, it’s not my kinda music. They ask have I listened to 50 cent, D12, Jamelia, Kevin Lyttle. I say, no. And they consider this to be so uncool.
Well, being uncool is no-problems with me. That’s part nature for a geek. What’s bad is that people presume stuff about you. They presume you want to act as if you don’t listen to what everyone listens to. You act like you are different. And what have I to say? For starters, Yea, I am fuckin’ different.
HELEN STELLaR is a great Chicago band doing some great music in L.A. I love their music. And when you go over to their official website and read their bio. This is what they have to say.
“In an age where style is rewarded over content, cynicism inevitably becomes second nature. Passion and originality have given way to cut-and-paste songwriting and carbon-copy imagery churned out for commercial mass consumption. All is not lost. There is a light that still shines. This is HELEN STELLaR.”This is exactly why I do not like Hip-Hop. There is no originality in hip-hop. Their sound, their style, even their videos are same.
A Car comes the singer gets out singing. He hits a party. Hot Chicks. Ok-looking singer. Huge shirts. Huger Pants. Black-Culture-Gone-Wrong. Gasgsta Rap. Discotheques. Dancing.
This is surely not my kinda music. But then you would say, Ok, you are a fuckin’ Racist. Racist, I am not. If you really want to listen to Black music, listen to Jazz – the original and classy black cultural contribution to Music. I listen to Jazz. To Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Dianne Reeves.
To know what’s behind all this shit-talk, you need to know that International music isn’t easy to find in Hyderabad city. You could get the newer stuff, all those boy bands and hip-hop rappers. What you don’t get is the older music. You get Bryan Adams, you get Michael Jackson, and you get Nirvana, but not everything from them. So when I talk about Duran Duran’s Ordinary Life or the oh-so-lovely Moon River, I get a “huh!" People do not listen to this stuff. People don’t want to. And when they don’t listen that, they reflexive-ly do not listen to great music like Tom Petty, Elton John, Sting, John Mayer, Coldplay, James Blunt and many more great musicians and bands who are available in every record store in the city. Instead, they listen to what’s playing on Top 10. They listen to whateva-lyric-ed hip-hop. They hear what they see.
It’s like they are acting sheep. One jumps the stick, all the others follow.
This, however, is not a critical analysis of music choices. This little write-up is not in anyway offending the hip-hop genre or the true hip-hop lover, the one who’d listen to both Kanye West and MC Hammer. It’s not about people who jump on the latest bandwagon hitting the block. This is about people who jump on the bandwagon and get off. People who listen to hip-hop because it’s cool and would not listen to it when its off-trend.
People don’t want to experiment. They want what is served, meaning, they don’t have a choice in the first place. I’ll talk about myself, I am no hypocrite. Most of my choices are borrowed, acquired taste it’s called. But I guess, everyone’s choices are acquired one way or the other.
I’d never heard the Dark Side of the Moon or Heathen Chemistry or Led Zeppelin I or II or III. I’d never known Mark Knopfler, Sting, Duran Duran or Jim Morrison. I’d never heard tiny dancer or Free Falling or Free Bird. It was other people who made me listen to these records, these bands, these artists.
Other people who might be my friends, people who put these great music into their collection, into their movies, into their car stereo and at the back of their notebooks. People I knew as friends - Rahil, Shakeel and Moid. People I know online but haven’t talked to - Nouman Mohammed Khan, Paul Ranix, and Joe Hesketh. People who are famous like the film makers - Quentin Tarantino, Cameron Crowe, Sofia Coppola, and Robert Rodriguez. Like authors whose books I read with music playing – Tom Spanbauer, Stephen Graham Jones, Christopher Baer, Alex Garland and Douglas Coupland. I don’t know what they listen to but their work inspire me some music.
Yes! I jump on these bandwagons, each and every one of them. But I never get off. I am a geek. And geeks by nature are fanboys. We are loyal to stuff we like, fiercely loyal. Books, Movies, Technology, Theories, Music, whatever it is we remain with them. We remain because whatever our choice is, we know, it is US.
Music isn’t about choices it’s about feelings, emotions, ideology, perspective. Music is about you. Just like the books you read, music defines/instigates/improves your emotions. And just like books it means different to every person. It’s never the same, the music. It’s complex yet simple. It’s just like us.
P.S. Check out Helen Stellar’s io (This time around) on the Soundtrack of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown. Also check out some other music on the official website of Helen Stellar.
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