Receding back into the Dark Ages

America now has a "Creation Museum", which showcases Genesis. And blames the loss of faith for all modern "evil". What a warped idea! Why do people have to get so militant about religion?

Who I wanna be today

"Budd, I'd like to introduce my friend, the black mamba. Black mamba, this is Budd!"
(Elle Driver a.k.a California Mountain Snake)

Question

Why do we do the things that we do? And then beat ourselves up for it? Why do we feel the things we feel? And then feel stupid? Ow, my knee hurts!

Horses

A snowball, a cooing bird
Green grass and the smell of dew
Blue skies with puffy white clouds
Laughter in the rain
Quiet in my head

Sing to me, Jimbo...

Its been a long time since I heard this

Btw, had a lovely weekend!

Some eye candy for a busy day

Name

You're breaking my heart, you guys...

I miss Pandora! Boo to all those restrictive copyrights!!

If

"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less".
(The Gift of the Magi - O. Henry)

Black Balloon

Take a walk

Lets take a walk outside, shall we? Step out of our shoes and not be ourselves for a while. Just stand by and watch us act out the everyday life. See what makes us happy, what makes us sad, what captivates our imagination, what reduces us to tears of exasperation. Watch emotions flit across our faces, thoughts travel across the synapses. Realize what we are doing right and what we are messing up. Amuse ourselves with the childish games we play, the masks we put on - father, mother, daughter, son, boss, employee, co-worker, husband, wife, lover, child. Count the number of times we bite our tongues, or grin away to glory. Hear the laughter rumbling deep inside, waiting to be set free and go Ha Ha Ha till our sides split and there is nothing left but the residue of deep joy and deeper angst.

Light breaks where no sun shines

By Dylan Thomas

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

I miss Mulder (sigh)!

They say when you talk to God it's prayer. But when God talks to you, it's schizophrenia.
(Fox Mulder, The X- Files)

It's crazy what you could have had...

Old favourite. Lyrics here.

Man, some people sure can think!

Novelty plus dread equals overreaction.

We can see the effects of this all the time. We fear being murdered, kidnapped, raped and assaulted by strangers, when it's far more likely that the perpetrator of such offenses is a relative or a friend. We worry about airplane crashes and rampaging shooters instead of automobile crashes and domestic violence -- both far more common.

Whoever said humans were rational! Nice article.

Start the day with some oomph!

Love the way Banderas hits that guy with his guitar!

The Pumpkins are coming back!

Supposedly a sampler of the song Tarantula from the upcoming album Zeitgeist.

My Own Private Idaho

This came up in a conversation this morning. Watched it when I was at school and was blown away. I think I had a crush on both Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. More so on River Phoenix since I was fascinated by how damaged that character was in that movie. And that name! It broke my heart when he died at 23 (I still feel sad about it). This movie is where I got that fantasy of driving down in a open roofed car down long open roads. Must watch it again.

Christ, I need to get out of here, anywhere!

(sigh!)

And now, some Alanis to round it up

Well...

At the end of the day, its all the same and everybody is the fricking same as well.

Life in a Metro

Remember Shallow Hal, how the trailer promised a rather funny movie? Till you actually saw the movie and realized that the trailer was all you needed to see? Life in a Metro was just like that!

Spoiler warning: Plenty ahead. If you're planning to watch this movie, kindly refrain from reading further.

For a movie that supposedly captures the life of people living in a metropolis (in this case Mumbai), there is barely any mention of the place. Except maybe when the director wants to apologize for something mindless and selfish that any character is about to do, and conveniently blame it on the poor city.

Shilpa Shetty is the long suffering housewife who resists an affair with a lonely, washed up actor (Shiney Ahuja). There's Nafisa Ali, Shilpa's bharatnatyam (??) teacher who meets a long lost love (Dharmendra - man, he's gotten old!). Sharman Joshi is a BPO executive who lends his apartment and his bed to the sexual escapades of just about anyone senior in the office. Kangna Ranaut, apparently a brainless bimbette, is having an affair with her boss KK Menon. And then there is Konkana Sen Sharma, who finally falls for the guy who keeps staring at her chest (Irfan Khan). Needless to say, all the characters have to be linked somehow since its the latest fashion in the movies these days.

The subject material is not bad as such, but suffers under the graceless direction of Anurag Basu (the same guy who made Murder, I should have guessed). Each and everyone of the characters in the movie is such a cliche, it makes me want to hurl. I admit, every place has its share of infidelities, rat races, heartbreaks and such. But the people who live in this fake metro are so pathetic that you only feel a sense of outrage when they start blaming the city for their shortcomings. Basu tries to portray them as innocent victims, people driven to be what they are because of circumstance. But the one-line-of-voiceover-per-character to justify all that they do only ends up as an irritant.

The actors have a bad time of it, of course. Sharman Joshi, who was well directed in Rang De Basanti, is wasted here. He wanders about clueless, mooning over a lady love and mulling over a dilapidated building where his father dreamt of building a restaurant. Shiney Ahuja is unimpressive - my first movie starring this guy - and I kept wondering why people rave about him (sorry Ajaita!). Konkana is also wasted here, I mean what kind of a character is she? And why does anybody imagine that a woman who is single at 30 would necessarily be depressed about it? I liked her in Page 3 and Mixed Doubles, but she is completed misused here. Irfan Khan brings comic relief, this is an actor who can probably transcend the most disastrous of scripts.

The only actor who manages to shine through this mess is KK Menon - he is downright nasty as the cheating slime ball who doesn't hesitate to use his authority to bend his subordinates to his will. After a 2-year affair with a girl who 'makes him feel 20 again', he walks out on his wife when he learns that she's been with another man for 5 weeks (well, not technically). Why his wife feels so guilty about the little indiscretion when confronted with 2 years of a lying, abusive husband is beyond my understanding. But yes, its easy to believe that men like KK exist, running back shamelessly to the wife when the girlfriend bails out. I can't imagine real people like any of the others, but I can imagine KK living and walking the streets of Mumbai. Terrific actor, but its time he did something different.

Verdict - Give it a miss.

One more thing, the next time I see those 3 ugly guys breaking out into song anywhere, I am gonna shoot them!

A sexy number

Love it! Happy weekend folks!

Its the car ma'am, the chicks love the car! (Batman, Batman Forever)

Waitress

I hope this movie hits the screens here. Nathan Fillion is such a treat to watch. He's so cute as the bumbling doctor in this trailer, way different from Mal in Serenity. Why doesn't he get more roles? Because he isn't pretty enough?

Nice one

Here it goes again!

10 months ago:

Monday, July 10, 2006
Wishes

I want two days of work with 5 days off. I want bands to make good music. I want to sing out loud. I want my private moment in the crowd. I want love and sunshine. I want ice cream soda and snazzy movies. I want to sit on my porch and watch the world crumble around me. I want a house with a porch. I want madness. I want joy. I want all of life.

I still want all of that.

Some random thoughts

I suppose everyone goes through some sort of an existential crisis, most of us are lucky to have left it behind at college and adapt to everyday life. But then I keep wondering about what would happen if humanity went back to a pure state of existence. By that I don't mean that we should go back to the caves. How would it be if we drop all pretensions and remain true to what we are? What if we dispense with all sense of propriety and just be ourselves for a change? Would we then make this world a better place, or would we just beat each other to death? On that note, here's Cobain with Oh Me.

Oriental Hotness

Takeshi Kaneshiro, last seen as Jin in The House of Flying Daggers. Whats it with pretty boys with prettier names anyway?

I love this song

Lyrics here. Original by Joni Mitchell.

Found a documentary on gender transformation at feministing. I wonder how much guts it takes for someone to do what Mookey did. And tell people about it through a documentary.

New place

After over a month of serious house hunting, my roommate and I have moved into a new place. Phew, the stuff we've collected over the years! And I only have 2 cartons of books!! Unpacking is a nightmare that's not over yet, but my fish tank is up and running. Happy days begin again!

Hmmm

Have you ever unzipped your stomach and let your guts hang out for everyone to see? Anyway, someone told me that I need to get a life. Which set off this song in my head:

Lyrics here. Only if Liam had sung it instead.

Who I wanna be today

Also, found out that a distant relative was on board the Kenyan plane that crashed recently. Didn't Supes say that flying was statistically the safest way to travel? How do the statistics work here? And what about probability?

Say hello to Starbuck...

... the cigar smoking ace fighter pilot in the Sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica, and probably the most fascinating female character in a TV series!

Battlestar Galactica hits the Indian small screen tonight at 9 p.m. on AXN. Those of you who lucky enough to be at home then would do well to watch it!

Monday!

An old favourite!

Next on the list!

Milk and Opium

Why don't movies like this get any publicity?

Tolkien at his gloomiest best

At one point in The Children of Húrin, Túrin is furious with someone for having revealed his true name and therefore exposing him to the curse of Morgoth. To which he is told that his doom does not lie in his name, but in himself. And that just about sums up the story of the tormented life of Túrin, son of Húrin. When Húrin defies Morgoth after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Morgoth curses Húrin and his family to eternal doom (or something like that). But even without Morgoth's help, Túrin would have done just fine by himself.

Unlike the sharply polarized characters in The Lord of The Rings, the latest from the Tolkien stable offers us a hero who is more flawed than most. He is proud, headstrong, hot headed and ungrateful. Upon his exile from Doriath, he takes up with a band of outlaws and hardly protests when they go about looting the villages of men. He brings trouble wherever he goes, thanks to his rashness. He also routinely steals the lady loves of his supporters and usurps their authority without so much as a by-your-leave. And to top it all, he marries the one woman that he most certainly shouldn't. His primary redeeming feature seems to be his valour that usually gets him promoted to functional head of the place, which he promptly brings to destruction through his own confusion. And his mother and his sister are equally pig headed. When they finally meet their doom, one feels not pity, but relief that they cannot cause any more misery to themselves or to others.

The Elves, who are such goody-two-shoes in LOTR, are well, more human. The High Elves in The Children of Húrin would rather hide than act against the enemy. They do have more powers since we are early on in the history of Middle Earth, but fail to exercise most of it. In a way, their inaction causes more harm to the doomed Túrin than anything else.

A great read, providing more insight into the genius that was Tolkien. This is the guy who created a whole fictional universe, so vast that most of it is still unfinished. I've read LOTR some 6 times now, and my only problem is that things are too black and white in it. (Though I still love Aragorn, noble and valiant and all that!) In Children of Húrin, Tolkien satisfies my appetite for gray. Amazing book.