In 2003, British Jazz outfit The Cinematic Orchestra reworked this absolutely awesome track from their previous album Everyday as a score to Russian film-maker Dziga Vertov’s groundbreaking silent documentary film of the same name from 1929.

Get the MP3 here.

Also, since we are stealing from the internets and shit (and because Samreth is your friend) go get the entire ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ album here. You can thank me later.

Be well. Eat fruit and stretch.

Happy Valentine’s Day all!

May 15th 2002  -  February 2nd 2010

Extremely loving.

Occasionally misunderstood.

Often mistreated.

Desperately missed.

You had more of a personality than most humans I’ve ever known and for all the times I was mean to you I am so, so sorry baby.

.

So. While the whole tech/blog world is caught up in Apple’s brilliantly orchestrated storm of leaks, guessing games, waaaay-too-elaborate renders/mock-ups and general breathlessness about the heavily rumoured but never officially acknowledged Tablet/Slate computer I’m sitting here cursing this piece-of-crap operating system they pooped out last year. Yeah, I’m talking about Snow Leopard (hereon called Slow Leopard)

Wasn’t this supposed to be The world’s best operating system, finely tuned?

Why has boot time gone from a snappy 25 odd seconds to a minute or more? Why does Slow Leopard need to restart every couple of days when Leopard could easily go for weeks without a reboot?

Why do both my screens get a grey tint and my keyboard and mouse stop working when I try and logout instead of restarting to save time? Which then necessitates a hold-down-the-power-button-and-hear-the-sickening-clunk-of-the-hard-drive as the system shuts off while you get Windows ME flashbacks.

And all this grief for what? No new features besides the ability to play movie clips in the icon itself! Thanks Cupertino. Thats real useful. Slow claps for you. Windows users… eat your heart out.

Is anyone else hating Snow Leopard as much as I am? Is there anyone else who just wants the 10.6.3 update to fix the myriad bugs that make Slow Leopard painful to use? Are there other users who don’t give a flying fuck about a freakin’ tablet computer and just want their expensive aluminium (yes thats the way the English speaking world spells that word) bodied computers to just work, as advertised?

Also, Superdrives. Fuck Superdrives. Mine seem to die on me every couple of months at the exact time I need to burn a few copies of my showreel to send out. This has happened so often that staff at my Apple reseller avert their faces and try not to make eye contact with me every time I walk in with a broken Mac. I feel like it’s my fault sometimes.

Anyhoo…. Rant over. Happy thoughts now.

There is nothing that can cheer you up after spending hours stuck in traffic like looking over into the next car and seeing that a girl you used to date looks like she has spent her life, post-you, stuffing fatty foods into her face with both hands.

Fucking.           Priceless.

Just got this video of a to-scale visualisation of the size of the entire known universe from M. Watch it and then remember the scale every time you think of God, your life, your loves, your troubles, your time on this planet or your quest to leave this world a better place than you found it.

Hat tip to M for sending it to me. This must be so freakin’ awesome to watch after ’smoking the weed’ huh?

Speaking of things that (I imagine) go well with psychotropic substances, here is a great house track I’ve been listening to off Roger Sanchez’s Release Yourself Volume 7 CD.

The track is Do The Night (Ricky Ryan Edit) by Applescal.

Enjoy the new year. Get the MP3 here.

Merry Christmas to all, whether you believe in the baby Jesus or not!

In the new year, may you have (in no particular order):

Belly laughs

Good posture

Healthy food

Interesting conversations

Big pay-cheques

Fulfilling work

Occasional bouts of the-floor-is-moving drunkenness

Lots of sore-the-next-morning sex

Be good, stay calm and eat fruit!

That and the beeping and booping. Can you imagine using a computer that constantly made some sort of sound for every UI interaction?

Geeeez…

(via unplggd.com)

So, the kid bro and I had a random instant messaging session the other day that ended up with us discussing women who we used to think were the hotness back in the dizzayy (a decade ago actually, when he was still a prepubescent little runt that ratted me out regularly and I was a teenager who had a three ring circus in his pants coz he was at his lifetime hormonal high) We traded opinions on what we thought of the fine ladies ten years later. (trout lips, scary ass chick, I’d still do her and the ubiquitous awwwwww yeahhhhh!) Which had two weird results..

1. I tracked down this song, Camino De La Vida from a decade old album by French artiste Sergent Garcia and had it blasting through an empty house (not counting the dogs) all weekend. The album is Un Poquito Quema’o and it is a funky blend of jazz and salsa and Cuban music with a bit of electronica that is hard to describe but listen and it will have you shaking your ass.

2. I finally got around to watching the Gul Panag starrer from a few years back, Manorama: Six Feet Under. As the first hindi film I’ve watched in probably a year, I’ve gotta say…… meh! Of course, Gul Panag’s dimpled smile makes me slack jawed and weak in the knees but she disappeared about a third of the way through the film and then there was nothing to distract me from the weak acting and contrived plot except for maybe Vinay Pathak (who directed a brilliant little short film that I saw at a film festival a while back but can’t remember the name off now for the life of me, but I digress..)

Anyways. There you go, a disturbing story, a film recommendation and a single repeat song for the week. Be well, eat fruit.

As always, get the MP3 Here.

This video assaulted my mind waaay too early in the morning today. No, I did not see this at Onion.com and this is NOT satire. This is an actual Christian Rap Group (And if you have never heard Christian Rap or Christian Rock you haven’t lived) singing about the dangers of hugging people head-on where your crotches are actually (GASP!) touching. They call it (andIkidyounot) “Satan’s lustful arm wrap”

Play the video, listen carefully to the lyrics and hurt your brain at your own risk.

Once again. THIS IS NOT SATIRE. These fuckers are dead serious.

A slight fuck up on my part as this domain name expired left visitors to this site looking at ads for penis enlargement etc (“Yaay! Improvement!” you say) Anyway, trying to fix the problem ended up with me having to pay both my hosting provider and my domain registrar for the domain coz one of them was being a difficult douchebag. I’m not bitter or anything but lets just say Santa is gonna be taking a dump this Christmas in the stockings of a certain person from a company “India Internets” (I know, what an original name, right?)

Moral of the story: Always buy your domain and your hosting from the same company. It shall save you money and yelling into the phone while you pull out your hair.

Anyway, normal programming resumes now. If you were one of the people who would rather look at penis enlargement ads click here. If you are reading this and thinking “Wait. What? You were gone for a while?” Eff you too.

I’ve been listening to a whole lot of music from Norwegian duo, Kings  of Convenience and off their second album Riot on an Empty Street, this is my favourite single repeat song, The Build Up, featuring Canadian singer Feist.

(Alright, I’m giving up on trying to fix the grammar and punctuation in  the previous sentence. It can’t be done. Besides, in a world where the dictionary now has the word unfriend in it  and people who write for a living don’t know the difference between the words your and you’re I think I spend waaay too much time obsessing about grammar and punctuation, so much that spelling mistakes throw me off when I’m reading ahem… erotica (I know, I know, waaaaaaaay too much information and for the nerds among us… a parentheses inside a parentheses but what can I say…. proper grammar is sexy!))

I almost forgot… Get the MP3 Here.

Ola! The first post in a longish time. I’ve been caught up with life (turning down the third employee position I’ve ever been offered, looking for freelance work, traveling to the sea, the hills, the desert) partly busy off my ass with work (which is a new phenomenon this year) and partly A.D.D. (which is par for the course for me) as evidenced by the fact that sometimes I forget that I’m reading a book in my bedroom and launch into another one in the loo.(But I digress) So here goes..

A few weeks back an extremely kind soul (who shall henceforth be referred to as ‘M’) lent me a Nikon D200 and I’ve been going nuts with it. Last month I took some photos on a shoot at a huge cotton mill in Himachal Pradesh for a film I directed for the Ministry of Textiles and more recently I went to the Pushkar fair for the first time ever and shot a ton more pictures. The sights and the people were (and I can’t say this forcefully enough) stunningly beautiful and I would have taken even more photographs but I made the huge eff up of not taking the charger for the camera. (sorry M!)

So, for your consideration, here are the links to ‘teh Flickr’. Pushkar Fair and Cotton Mills at Baddi, Himachal Pradesh. My Flickr account is soon going to go over 200 pictures so nowadays I’m greeted by a not-so-subtle UPGRADE TO FLICKR PRO banner upon login. So, gift me a Flickr Pro account please (and while I’m panhandling how about an EOS 5D Mark II and a few fast primes?)

Some people have said the pictures were ahem, ‘brilliant’ but I’m undecided about whether they were being extremely polite or just wanted to get into my pants. (I mean, like who wouldn’t?)

So. Since I don’t want this to become yet another boring blog that only has posts about promising to post more often, (Stop saying “TOO LATE!” aloud) I shall leave  you with this cute video of an adorable little French Bulldog puppy trying to right itself while I go think of something interesting to write about.

Recently posted photographs of my own (not so cute and frankly quite smelly) dogs are on ‘the Flickr’ here. Kindly amuse yourself. Those of you that aren’t dog people kindly fuck off already.

Please stand by. Normal programming shall resume shortly.

So, (I have to stop starting posting posts with that word) on a recent vacation in Goa that lasted nearly a month, I cycled around pretty little villages in North Goa like crazy (I also decided I would “Go For A Run” but that just ended with my thighs screaming “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO US?!“ at me and having to heave myself off the toilet the next morning by pulling my body up using the door handle because I was pretty much paralyzed from the waist down, but I digress…)

One of the  many joys of cycling around was being able to listen to music with earphones in and be reasonably confident that I wouldn’t get run over by a bus or an SUV tearing around a blind corner in the opposite direction. Other joys included blasting down a hillside, free-wheeling at 45 or so, silently whooshing past little old ladies on Honda Activas, while resisting the urge to yell “Outta my way Jesus Lover! Comin’ through!”

Ahhh Goa!

I also managed to borrow a reasonably decent camera from the same charitable people who lent me their house and took a few photographs which are on ‘the flickr’ here. Mostly old houses, abandoned and gone to seed, being slowly reclaimed by the undergrowth and some churches.

So, the song. Besides a ton of Goldfrapp and Tosca, this song by Groove Armada was playing in my ears a lot of the time and boy did it fit the setting. Its called At the River and is from the album Vertigo. If you want to hear Groove Armada’s best album though, SoundBoy Rock would be a better bet. Please ignore the video, which is a mash up of some footage including an Nvidia graphics demo from a few years back, when we would actually go out and buy a new graphics card and slot it into a desktop PC and then run the demo and ooh and ahhh (at the rendering not the chick, okay maybe a little bit at the chick)

Anyways, vacation over. Back to the mines. Same shit, different day. Repeat. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum .

A free concert for the 5% of us that can’t stand bhangra, indi-pop and hindi film music. A very nice change from the usual.

Shame it took a three hour flight full of wailing kids (that should have been checked in with the rest of the luggage) and a four hour drive down treacherously wet, hill roads in a car with weedy tires, no ABS and a driver blissfully ignorant of the concept of aqua-planing. But since I didn’t go skidding off the edge of the hill into the crisp, cool Meghalayan air, I’d say totally worth it.

‘Take Off The Blues’ by hip-hop duo, The Foreign Exchange from their 2008 album, ‘Leave It All Behind’.

Get the MP3 Here.

One of the upshots of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ programs put into place by many countries (U.S.A, Germany, U.K., to name a few) to stimulate the economy and ’save or create’ jobs is that thousands of perfectly decent cars (the ‘clunkers’ traded in) must be destroyed. This is one of the many videos of these clunkers being put to death that is floating around on ‘teh internets’, it looks like a late model Volvo S60 on death row. As part of the deal the car dealers accepting these cars as trade-ins must destroy them. They do this by putting either sulphuric acid or some sort of liquid glass compound into the cars’ engines which are first drained off of oil and then run them till they tear themselves apart.

But can anyone spot what is wrong with this video?

THIS CAR ISN’T A GODDAMN CLUNKER!

It looks like a perfectly good, well maintained luxury sedan that  has many, many years of faultless service to give. What is wrong with these people? I mean look at it! It is a beautiful, spotless car! And the difficulty they have in killing it and the amount of time that it soldiers on bravely, plaintively whining is just painful to watch for anyone who loves cars. (I know, I know, I shouldn’t anthropomorphise cars, they hate that.) Also, the idiots laughing in the end as the Volvo bites the bullet just gets my goat.

How many perfectly good cars like this one are being destroyed and exactly why is it so essential to destroy these cars? Once it has been traded in can’t a perfectly road worthy car like this Volvo be given to a family that would never, ever be able to afford to buy a new car anyway? Why is all the energy and thought that went into the making off this beautiful piece of machinery such a short while ago, so worthless now? Anyone ?

P.S. Text updated and bad grammar fixed. Wordpress was being a bitch when I was writing this post for the first, second and third time.

So, for the first time in almost a decade there is a new Ferrari that is truly drop dead gorgeous. Beautifully balanced proportions, a big, rakish windscreen that plunges into the hood, flared haunches pulled taut over massive five spoke wheels with rubber-band thin tyres on them and that glorious, sinfully wet looking red paint.

If I were a cat I’d be purring right now…