Life, the Universe and .....

A maid comes to our house every alternate Wednesday, robs my roommate and me of 60$ each, and leaves a spotlessly cleaned house behind.

I love coming home on Wednesdays.

I am caught in a flux of LA's high culture life, involving impromptu trips to nearby places on weekends, watching movies, mostly revivals, with odd ball past-weekend releases in between, if I could manage time, reading New Yorker stories, and Sunday NYTimes (Sitting in LA, I read NY-centric magazines), the recipes on the end section of Sunday Magazine, the food chit-chat that goes with it, other gastronomical delights (sun dried tomatoes - yum yum!), thoughts about next Big Travel (Istanbul? Prague? Buenos Aires - only cities, not countries).. the list goes on.

With Fall, the activities gathered momentum. "Prison Break" Mondays with The Big Bang Theory, studying Music Theory for morning classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, doing loads of homework for Wednesday's Principles of Economics class, scrambling to take good photographs for the Photography assignments, thinking about getting "Chicken Madras" (I kid you not) from Whole Foods (Whole Foods simplifies the naming - any south Indian dish is named "X Madras") on Thursday nights, and beers on Friday nights at Westwood Brewery (Hoegaarden on Tap, the current favourite), and exploring new food places (Reuben sandwich - where do I get the best one? What about French dip sandwich? Philippes - I am itching to go there), and decadent Sundays with typical LA fare - "swearing is cool" Entourage and Showtime's "I too can do that" Californication.

More TV: How I met your mother, House MD (blazing through season one, wink wink beatzo), Dexter (3rd season just premiered), Iconoclasts, Live From Abbey Road, Weeds. So much TV, no wonder people envison dystopic 1984s. I'm slowly turning into a couchpotato, not so very different from the one addicted to saas-bahu serials.

I'm glad I haven't caught on Bill Maher and others.

Elegy and Vicky Cristina Barcelona are companion films, if you are a Penelope fan. Both feature Patricia Clarkson as well, if you want to make a connection from that angle. (That High Art and Station Agent girl, if your Sundance cred is strong.)

[ I just noticed New Yorker, quite fittingly, reviewed these two movies together. ]

Elegy neatly fills in the gaps left in Philip Roth's brutal narrative (Yes, I did say brutal, though Manohla said it before me) that concentrates and tries to explain current American sexual landscape. It's a treat to see Ben Kingsley act out the complexity of the Roth's character's mindset, through silences, facial features, and his voice. Apparently, both aging masters (Roth and Updike) are releasing two new novels this fall. Roth seems to be sitting on a high altar and analyzing his observations on American culture over the last 50 or so years, the years he is most familiar with. Something one can afford to do after 60 years of age.

Woody Allen seems to be doing the same in Vicky Christina Barcelona. His musings on the concept of love, the modern perspectives and the contradictions, all neatly wraped in a cute little travel-porn package, populated with beautiful people in it. This would have turned sour in less capable hands. I wish the voice-over were by Woody Allen himself.

I loved watching it at one of last remaining independent theatres in LA - The lovely Crest.



Speaking of old masters making commentary on sex/love, there is Claude Chabrol, whose new film - A Girl Cut in Two - eluded me. The critics are, as usual, raving about it.

I am starting at the end, at "Mere Anarchy" by Woody Allen, and going backwards, moving on to The Insanity Defence next, Side Efffects, Without Feathers, and Getting Even in the end.



Allan Stewart Konigsberg, 'cause that what his name is, amazes me. (Has to be a "-berg", right?! ) He had been active on TV, writes and directs his movies, selects his soundtrack, writes plays, occasionally writes for The New Yorker, plays clarinet in jazz bands, and screws his adopted stepdaughter. What isn't he capable of?!

I crash at UCLA lawns, a little hilly and beautifully landscaped (like any top US college, the dissenters might add), to spend an evening hour, most pleasant from 6pm to 7pm, when the right shade of sun filters through the trees and lights up the grass to glow faintly, warm enough to sleep on the grass under no shade, but not too warm to burn after the first 10 minutes.

One could use a book or the New Yorker or an iPod stuffed with Radiohead as ambient little touches, but completely unnecessary. Summer time, very few students, no diversions, not even the chirping birds.

Dull cellphone pictures that fail to capture the typical setting.



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I am a tourist in my own city. Lucky Baldwin's in Pasadena on a Friday night, where I met one of the people I know from college with her husband, who graciously let me stay over for the night. And that means I could sample more than one belgian beer on tap. I sampled three over the course of the night. There are 63 beers on tap here - many rare to find belgian beers, a few trappist and abbey beers for the beer discerning crowd.

The bar tender recommended me a Le Chouffe, and I pooh-poohed saying "I already had that one before", as a beer-snob would do, and settled for a Moinette Blonde, the first name bartender uttered that I didn't recognize, typical of a fake beer-snobs of my kind. And oh, you are allowed to say "you prefer Belgian Blondes".

And thus, I had my first Leffe, as well.

The following night, I made a beeline for Father's Office, curious to explore my own neighborhood's Lucky Baldwin's after getting a one hour HOWTO lecture from my roommate about making a conversation at a bar ("We don't call it a pub, unless it's Irish, so tell them you went to a bar last night, Lucky Baldwins, and people told you to go here as well", "Don't hold your hands like that, that's closed body language, no, don't put your hands in your jeans' pockets either" and so on). Father's Office, rumoured to be serve the best burger in town, turned out to be a hole in the wall, but yes, it did have some rare beers on tap.

My beer education continues.

That begs the question, psychelone: When are we going on the Abbey tour in Belgium?

In other news, the Whole Foods in Westwood carries two more of The Select Seven trappist beers - Rochefort and Westmalle.

First pick up a copy of Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, with a double l and a double t. It's better if you have heard about this classic whodunnit in your college days and you couldn't find a copy. It's even better if you later find it at a second hand books stall in your city. Savour every page of it. Discuss the clever and urbane relationship between the lead pair - Nick and Nora - with your buddy, who happens to read the novel before you and also recognizes that same aspect about the story.

Then having relished the literary subtleties of the book, you keep your watch for the movie series. You wait. Then years later when the series comes on TCM on TV in a foreign land, you record them all. All six movies. You call in sick, stay home, and pop open a bottle of wine at 10am, after the breakfast, of course, but ignoring the hour of the day, and sit down to see the stars - the real stars of the yesteryears - William Powell and Mirna Loy playing the roles of Nick and Nora.



What a delight! Classic romp! Romp? Sounds pornographic.. but who cares about the description. It's not like you have the dictionary with you to look the up the subtleties of meaning.

Then you ignore the series fizzling out towards the end of the fourth movie. You don't care, you just finish the bottle of wine, and have a good time.

Ben Kingsley seems to be everywhere this season. He was there in The Love Guru (Don't ask, I didn't see the movie), he was the f'ed up wacko in The Wackness (Watch it, if you can), and was the Russian in Trassiberian (your little indie thriller this summer, recommended for travel junkies), and now in Elegy, Philip Roth's novella - The Dying Animal - turned into a movie.

If you want a spectrum of character acting, there, you have it.

I am going to see Elegy as soon I as I finish reading the book this weekend.

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If you want to look at it from another angle, Penelope Cruz is going to be there everywhere these two weeks - This week, Elegy; next week, Vicky Christina Barcelona, the new Woody Allen film that's getting released.

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Wayne Wang introduced his new movie - A thousand years of good prayers - at the sneak preview class last week. Wayne Wang? Yes, that "Maid In Manhattan" guy, if you want to be blunt about it, or that "Joy Luck Club/Dim Sum" guy if you want to be snooty arty-farty about it.

"A thousand years of good prayers" forms a diptych with "The pricess of Nebraska," the latter being released online here in US.

I love companion films. Gives me a sense of exploring.

Yiyun Li, another book on to the stack.

After the movie, I went to Canter's as usual, as I was in Fairfax district, to have my weekly pastrami and hoping to read current New Yorker story, and was surprised to find Sarah Silverman in the diagonal booth. Other than seeing noted celebrities at movie events, this is the first time for me seeing some one at a normal restaurant.

Needless to say, I didn't finish reading that story.

Tacking, Luffing, Jibing, Rigging... I speak the language of a sailor now.

Sailing, for me, is like venturing into a foreign country without even learning to say "Hello" in the native tongue. There is so much of sailboat vocabulary that often I give a blank stare and listen intently to understand what the hell the instructor is saying.

Among the many "something-new"s I poked my long nose into so far, sailing is really something "new". I am still amused at how the boat moves upwind. I hear an ice sailboat can go easily upto 60mph in a 20mph upwind.

Another field that I'd think would be really new (from a vocab angle) is ranching, as Anne Proulx's recent story in NewYorker fiction special issue - Tits-up in a ditch - richly illustrated. Take the title, for instance, if you can get past the mental brakes at the word Tit. It's a western slang to mean: to get stuck in a situation from which you can not get out of.

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Oxymoron: In the early days of blogging, immediately after reading a nice story like "The Great Experiment," I would recognize the mentioning of Alex de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" and connect it with the first time I heard about it, and blog about it. But, in the days of anyone-can-google, I wouldn't.

The "Sneak Previews" class conducted by UCLA at the Writers Guild Auditorium in Beverly Hills, the class I had been looking forward to since I missed taking it last term, has started with a whimper yesterday. The movie screened was - In search of a midnight kiss. Yeah, I know, where is the Michael Clayton you promised me? Where is the little-indie-on-it's-way-to-monster-hit "Juno" you spoke about?



"In search..." wasn't a bad movie (It's mostly getting positive reviews in the indie/festival film circuits). It wants to be the Manhattan, without Woody Allen and Gershwin; all in black and white, with liberal doses of perverted gags that run contrary to the romanticism it wants to evoke with B&W visuals. But, the setting is LA, mostly the downtown I never go to. The city I live in, the city I love, the city many wanna-be stars pretentiously say it will change you as a person.

I hear Medicine for Melancholy is similar with San Francisco as the city behind.

Manhattan, In search of a midnight kiss.. any other similar black and white movies you could think of with the City as the main character?

Let's try this again.

Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, In search of a midnight kiss, Medicine for Melancholy.. Any other movies with two characters talking and walking through a particular city?

Sub-genres within rom-com genre.

Summer. Hints of sweltering heat. Remove the ubiquitous city lights from Manhattan skyline. The City. Tone down the colours to various shades of gray. Introduce hip-hop. Introduce Ben Kingsley as the psychiatrist who needs help. And oh, mix in the usual coming-of-age tale.

The Result:

An open-air screening of "Planet of the Apes" and a burrito bowl with chicken and shredded beef. Bliss.

LA Film Festival in full swing.

Incidentally, I discovered Westwood area during last year's festival when I visited this place for the first time to catch Johnny To's Exiled. One year later on, I moved in here. Coincidence? I don't think so. :)



This year, the festival started for me today with City Lights. (The fest actually started with a premiere of Wanted last Thursday, but not for me). I have seen Charlie Chaplin movies as a kid, but never in my adult life, and what an experience it is to see this movie on big screen. The balletic boxing scene alone is worthy of many accolades. (Do you know that Chaplin used to compose the music for his movies by himself? Note to self: Seach for the track - A boxer by necessity). Now, I know why the closing fade-out scene is important in movie history and what the fuss about being chaplinesque is.

Followed by Exodus, Edmond Pang's new movie. I loved his earlier movie, Isabella. But, I was a little bit disappointed by Exodus; an amusing idea - women are killing all men (not with their looks, you don't say!) - that didn't hold up well. But, I am glad the new-age Wong Kar Wai doesn't make the same movie again and again, and likes to shift gears and try new ideas with each successive movie. He was present for the screening and for the QA. That was kinda nice.

Yahoo, while frustrating me over the last couple weeks, gave me a little respite as well, with a ditch-day on Wednesday. Blessed with a day off midweek, I decided to put an end to the continuous moping I had been doing lately, and celebrate the day, my style. And that means movies and good food, of course.

First, I caught Baby Mama (Tina Fey, my current celebrity crush), a movie I had been keen on seeing but couldn't, at the Beverly Centre, the only place nearby where it is playing, where apparently the movies go to die. Loved it. Light hearted humour I am in great need of.

Since I was in the Fairfax district, a trip to Canter's is, of course, a requisite. Pastrami, the best in LA, at least among the ones I sampled so far, on rye bread (why Rye, of all things?) and a chilled beer before the start on a sunny and moderately hot LA afternoon. The only thing you could do, the only sensible thing to do afterwards, is come home and take a nap.



Shows it's age, after all, it's been an LA institution for over 80 years.



The mural outside the building, near the parking lot. Man, I love this place!




Wake up to go and sample the Animation Show 4 at Nuart. As many things in LA, you scratch the the surface a bit, and things reek of the ugly smell of The Corporation. While going west on Santa Monica Blvd, you would see the bill board of Nuart, and think, ah an independent theatre, preserving a sense of the by-gone era. You stop at to take a close look, and you would get to know that the place is now run by Landmark, a big corporation that specializes in distributing indie movies and maintaining revival theatres. Not so independent, after all, are you?

Whatever!

Landmark has been running the yearly The Animation Show, which is now in it's fourth year, to showcase some of the cutting edge, edgy animation pieces. Most of them, surprisingly in French, which probably tells who is on the cutting-edge of culture. Curiously, I got to know, Landmark commissioned some of these pieces to put together The Animation Show. Not family-friendly. Who needs the disclaimer anyway. All in all, good experience.

beatzo, my brother, this is your type of show. Sample: "Angry Unpaid Hooker," in a segment where a guy is explaining his wife returning from vacation why there is a naked lady in the bedroom. So, when are you moving to SoCal?

My favourites:

1. Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker

2. A poem called "Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins, set to simple animation.

The full poem (you get without the lj-cut)

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

       -- Billy Collins

My thoughts put to Billy collins' words. :)

Don't you love youtube?!

Alternate cut.

3. Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No.2 set to animation. Dude, where's the full version? Youtube, you fail me!

xkcd moment: Any mention of B.F.A sounds like NFA!

Theory of Computation and VRR, rejoice: I'm scarred for life.

Oh, I barely passed the subject, with 35 or 39, I don't quite remember.

p.s: Before you ask, I don't watch Tyra Banks show, but I watch The Soup, and I get my updates. :P

I am not much of a car person, but I enjoyed the drive, particularly on the "notoriously steep, windy, and difficult to drive" Generals Hwy inside the Sequoia National Park this weekend.

One travel stereotype is the one who talks only in terms of US Highways, with exquisite road vocabulary that is inscrutable for a newbie, you know the kind who says, "Once you hit SLO on 101, switch to CA 1, then you hit the coast line..."

I am afraid I'm going to become that person. After driving from South to North on the Generals Hwy, in stead of driving back, exit the park with a detour via 245, and drive down the mountains, along the rural side.

Mandatory Tunnel log picture: The one grinning inside my car is my friend Vikram.

Mandatory Patel Point Picture: The one grimacing is me.

I want to run. To compliment the emotional run I have been practicing over the last 28 years. I wish I had the physical endurance. I wish I had strong knees that won't snap in my autumnal years. Autumnal years, twilight years. My knees, showing the signs of abuse, are still my strength; they still take me from Here to Anywhere. (Psychelone, why did I capitalize the H? How vain of me to think that you read this?!).

Haruki Murakami, the running novelist, started running when he was 33. Is my desire to run the same as "Pulini choosi nakka vaatalu pettukundanta!" (Seeing the tiger, with a desire to have similar yellow stripes, the fox went and got the burns). Lousy translation. Ah, my mother tongue, how it has better phrases to convey a thought! Indian languages. I wish I had the time to learn a dozen Indian languages and not forget them. The nuances. The idioms. The cultural references.

While English has different words for conveying a burn - burn, char, singe, scorch, scald, sear, cauterize - it doesn't, as far as I know or what my thesaurus says, have a specific word for vaatha - "a burn caused deliberately/accidentally by a hot iron object"

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THE RIGHT WORD
If you're not an experienced cook, you're likely to burn your vegetables, char your meat, and, if you put your face too close to the stove, you might even singe your eyebrows. All of these verbs mean to injure or bring about a change in something by exposing it to fire or intense heat. Burn, which is the most comprehensive term, can mean to change only slightly (: she burned her face by staying out in the sun) or to destroy completely (: the factory was burned to the ground). To char is to reduce a substance to carbon or charcoal (: the beams in the ceiling were charred by the fire). Like char, singe and scorch mean to burn only partially or superficially (: scorched the blouse while ironing it;: singe the chicken before cooking it). Singeing is often done deliberately to remove the hair, bristles, or feathers from the carcass of an animal or bird. Scald refers specifically to burning with, or as if with, a hot liquid or steam (: the cook scalded herself when she spilled the boiling water); it can also mean to parboil or heat to a temperature just below boiling (: scald the milk to make the sauce). Sear is also a term used in cooking, where it means to brown the outside of a piece of meat by subjecting it briefly to intense heat to seal in the juices. When it's human flesh that's being seared in surgery, the correct verb is cauterize, which means to burn for healing purposes (: the doctor cauterized the wound to ward off infection).
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Attention spam.

I want to run. I want a friend who when I say I want to run, listens, doesn't immediately offer his opinions about running, but detects the hint of distress in my tone. I want to run, literally, figuratively.

If you skim through the Time's Summer Arts Preview, you will notice a few interesting personal inclusions.

1. First you will notice that Rivka Galchen has written a novel - Atmospheric Disturbances, and it's come out recently. Since his geeky short story on New Yorker was promising, which is when I took notice, I am looking forward to this, though I can not start a new book now. Now, you could read New Yorker stories online, almost all of them, though unless for some quick reference or re-reading a passage, I am not sure why you would want to read them online. The only right way of reading them is while feeling the words in your hand.

2. You will also notice that a new Rushdie novel has come out - The Enchantress of Florence

3. There is going to be an Anish Kapoor's exhibition in Boston - Why not LA??

4. David Sedaris' new book will be out tomorrow

5. Coldplay is going to release a new album - Via La Vida.

And Thomas Friedman is coming up with a new book.