Year-end list '09: Movies

A great year in movies, watched almost 3.5 movies this year!

Richard Jenkins.

Year-end list '09: Cover Art

Favourite cover "art" of 2009:
Pearl Jam's Backspacer

The artwork for the album was handled by editorial cartoonist Dan Perkins, who goes by the pen name Tom Tomorrow. Perkins spent six months working on the artwork. In 2009, Village Voice Media, publishers of 16 alternative weeklies, suspended all syndicated cartoons across their entire chain. Perkins lost twelve client papers in cities including Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City and Seattle, prompting his friend Vedder to post an open letter on the Pearl Jam website in support of the cartoonist. Perkins referred to the artwork as "dreams and memories," while Gossard referred to the artwork as a "bizarro otherworldy dreamscape." (Wiki)

Dave Matthews Band's Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King

"Matthews, who drew the richly detailed artwork for thisr record, knew a different [LeRoi] Moore. On the cover of Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, DMB's seventh studio album, Matthews portrays Moore as a giant laughing head on a Mardi Gras float, leading the delirium on a French Quarter street." (RS)

American Beauty

For many reasons, Bonnie "Prince" Billy's album Lie down in the light reminds me of Grateful Dead's American Beauty.. the sound, the words, the simplicity... and above all, the wonderful Garcia-like vocals...

I like the places where the night does not mean an end

Where smiles break free and surprise is your friend

And dancing goes on in the kitchen until dawn

To my favourite song that has no end..

Get Lucky

Mark Knopfler's new album is out and the pipes are back... and loving it! - something I didnt like much on Golden Heart as a Dire Straits fan.

Read up on the lyrics of Border Reiver while listening to the song, if you are not familiar with what Mark is singing about.. the context would give a whole new dimension to the song!

A hard day's night

Interesting comment by Jay Leno on his work schedule, in a Rolling Stone interview (Aug 09):

Rolling Stone: What made you decide to host your new show every weeknight when you had an opportunity to take a break and just do a show once a week?
Jay Leno: You know, once a week is harder than every day. Because if you write once a week, then you feel guilty that you’re never working hard enough on the show. I contend that a weekly magazine is harder to put out than a newspaper.

Music and Lyrics

Sting writes in the introduction to his book, Lyrics:

The two, lyrics and music, have always been mutually dependent, in much the same way as a mannequin and a set of clothes are dependent on each other; separate them, and what remains is a naked dummy and a pile of cloth.

Though I am a fan of Sting’s songwriting, I might not want to buy this hardbound book in which all his lyrics are published, with a brief intro for some of them, much like liner notes.

I glanced through these notes in a book store - apparently, the beautiful “Mad about you” is based on the story of David and Bathsheba, and what a great love song it is!

And I have never in my life
Felt more alone than I do now
Although I claim dominations over all I see
It means nothing to me
There are no victories
In all our histories, without love.

"...and the punishment comes in Chapter 12".

Zen and the art of Taking it Easy

I had almost stopped reading travel writing two years back, after being bombarded by travel blogs. Perhaps, the travel blogs I used to read were not a great read as travel writing goes. But definitely, they came in handy when you had to find a good home stay or the driving route to a destination.

I think the last travel book I read (almost 5 years ago!) was Under a cloud, Life in Cherrapunjee, which was a highly readable account of life in the wettest place on earth (not really, the wettest place is Mawsynram, just close to Cherra). In the foreword of this book, author Binoo John says that the project was sponsored by Penguin India. This declaration made me wonder whether he was really passionate about the travel to Cherra or he did it just for the “project”.

In contrast, Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk is a more intimate and passionate account of something he really wanted to do - to live in a monastery (a bit clichéd, but the book works), though Iyer says that he was on Time Magazine’s payroll through his stay in Japan.

The book eventually showed me what great travel writing is. Maybe it was due to my short stint in Osaka in the early 2000, or for my fascination for The Razor’s Edge kind of life (which I know, I can never do) or may be for the highly readable prose of Iyer, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. For instance, prose like this I could instantly relate to:

Whenever I wandered the winter streets alone, though, Kyoto still aroused in me a surge of unaccountable elation: even in winter the skies were unreasonably blue, and the days had a bright, invigorating chill that seemed to admit of no despair. In Japan, there was truly a sense of a culture calmly on the rise, in possession of itself and buoyant, and the mild air itself felt cleansed of cynicism and decay.

Iyer also writes a lot on literature, both Japanese and Western, and on Zen in this book. The most amusing Zen story he narrates is “Is that so”. He also narrates the classic Zen tale of absent mindedness, the story of the Zen monk and poet Ryokan:

One day when the ever-hospitable Ryokan had a guest, he went out to the village to get some sake, asking the guest to wait for a minute. When the guest didn’t see his host for hours, he stepped out in search of him, only to find Ryokan sitting just outside gazing at the moon.

“Isn’t it beautiful?
“Yes. But what about the sake?”
“Oh yes, the sake. I’d quite forgotten about it.”

As Iyer says, the mind was absent to the world -but only because it was taken up with something higher!

The other day, I was chatting with my friend on Buddhism and he had an idea on blending Christianity with Buddhism – I wish I knew this excellent Zen tale then:

One of master Gasan's monks visited the university in Tokyo. When he returned, he asked the master if he had ever read the Christian Bible. "No," Gasan replied, "Please read some of it to me." The monk opened the Bible to the Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew, and began reading. After reading Christ's words about the lilies in the field, he paused. Master Gasan was silent for a long time. "Yes," he finally said, "Whoever uttered these words is an enlightened being. What you have read to me is the essence of everything I have been trying to teach you here!"

Reminded me of what George Harrison had sung on his final album – “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there!”

PS: Iyer says that westerners flock to Japan for two things: Buddhism and Japanese women. Strange. If only they knew how to take it easy!

Kinsmen, Amit Chaudhuri, Miles from India

I enjoyed listening to Rudresh Mahanthappa on NPR’s Fresh Air last week, though I didn’t quite catch the math-y details discussed in the conversation. I had written to Rudresh, in February, asking him where I can get a copy of Kinsmen, his work with Kadri Gopalnath, in India and I got an email reply from him saying that it’s not available in India yet. I had liked what I had heard on the NPR site, though I am not a great fan of “fusion" as such. Just before that I had listened to a song sample of the high profile east-west-fusion jazz band Miles from India, Miles’ “All blues” (my favorite Kind of Blue track) interpretation, which I didn’t like much. I found it to be, to use a cliché, “more of confusion than fusion”.


In 2007, I learned about Amit Chaudhuri’s “This is not fusion" album from Amitava Kumar’s blog and bought the album from a record store here in Bangalore. It is a fantastic album, the catchiest tracks on the album are surely Chaudhuri’s interpretation of “Layla” in raag Todi and his version of Gershwin’s “Summertime”. Even though I haven’t heard much of Hindustani music, the tracks of improvisations of Hindustani ragas with accompaniment of western instruments were really interesting. Though the title of the album says “This is not fusion”, it is essentially a fusion album! As Ananda Lal, Professor of English at Jadavpur Universtity, Kolkata, writes in the liner notes of the album:

To tell the truth, all music is fusion. No musical form remains untouched by acculturation, though classical pundits still turn up their noses at the perjury committed by colleagues who jam with jazzmen. To pin those purists down on hybridization, just ask them how their ragas Kafi or Miyan ki Malhar got their names, or how violin found such a hallowed place in south India.

The only explanation for the title of Amit’s album is that it is not a fusion album in a traditional sense, where a eastern celebrity musician works with a western celebrity musician to produce a “fusion” album.

I guess, as long as it is not fusion for fusion’s sake, it would sound as good as any other genre in music.

Kapish redonkulous?

Havent enjoyed a movie scene like this in a long time since the bread came in slices and changed the way we lead our lives... . The movie is worth for this one scene.
Bolt, the superdog from a TV show meets some pigeons in Hollywood....

Two Men With The Blues

Two super-heroes of our times, one at 78 and the other at 75:



Roger Ebert writes in his review of Gran Torino:

I would like to grow up to be like Clint Eastwood. Eastwood the director, Eastwood the actor, Eastwood the invincible, Eastwood the old man. What other figure in the history of the cinema has been an actor for 53 years, a director for 37, won two Oscars for direction, two more for best picture, plus the Thalberg Award, and at 78 can direct himself in his own film and look meaner than hell? None, that's how many.

AV Club writes in the review of Willie Nelson's collaboration album with Wynton Marsalis, released in 2008.

Willie Nelson records so frequently (2008 releases included Two Men With The Blues, the solo Moment Of Forever, and the career-spanning box One Hell Of A Ride) that it takes some stamina to keep up. Not bad for a guy who recently turned 75.

Note: I haven't watched Eastwood's movie, but listened to Nelson's Two men with blues, which is a fantastic album.