Lost and 2BuckChuckAnna

I was feeling really strongly about something before I came here. Now I forgot. So much for strength of thought.

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Confession: I am addicted to Lost. I seriously believe that if modern day fiction has shifted to the visual medium, then Lost is the best fiction I have ever encountered. It’s got a lot of bullshit of course – like radio hookups that won’t happen and will happen when you want them with a piece of red twine and can call London from a frikking freighter which is causing people to time travel to a Royal Scottish Regiment and a mouse dies trying the same —–. What I am REALLY happy about. Netflix has Seasons 1 through 4 for online streaming. For the past two weeks, barring a few exceptions, all my evenings have been spent planning a departure from the living area without being noticed by my roomies and then crawling into bed and watching back to back episodes of Lost. Things came to a head yesterday when I took half of the day off from the indulgence hangover that consisted of sore swollen eyes a headache and a general inability to stop thinking about what would happen next. I was even dreaming about John Locke and Kate Austen and Jack Shepard in a flight and on an island.

What I am really grateful for is that I started watching Lost at a period of time when I have access to 5 full seasons. What I hate about this is that I don’t have access to Season 6 yet. The waiting and anticipation for good fiction is unbearably nail hurting and cuticle peeling.

With that purged out of my system, I strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t had a good time in a LONG time to invest in a few DVDs and give their mental stimulations a healthy boost. I mean c’mon – if you could believe and enjoy and relive Gondor and Elves and Gandalf and appreciate a good story with a twist every second, Lost is totally up your alley. Brilliance I say.

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My roomie Anna – she wakes up at 6 45 am – is at work by 7 45 – works till 4 30 pm – comes back and goes for a bike ride or a speed skating expedition every evening – comes back all sweaty and high from an endorphin orgasm – and then showers, cooks, smokes, up, and drinks between 1 to 2 bottles of wine – and finishes her day with a Haagen Daaz ice cream stick at 1 am. The same time as when I have been falling asleep in the days before Lost. However, on a day I get less than 8 hours of sleep, exercise or a walk for me goes right out the Dee-Oh- Oh- Are.

This morning I look at her looking up at me grumpily in the morning as I left for work and I asked her what did I do to earn the stare. She said she was sore from the 20 odd miles of speed skating she did yesterday.

I asked her how does she do it- that after the 2 bottles of 2buckchuck she sent the previous night.

She said, in truly Annaesque style:
Coffee, carbs, supplements, vitamins, ice cream – whatever it takes!

It’s Friday morning at 9 45 am and I am thinking when was the last time I wanted to do whatever it takes for anything at all. I’m chewing on it.

Deifying the dei

Deifying the dei

Maybe this is what de-i-fying really means.

Removing the ‘I’s in expression and then re-evaluating what will remain expressed to get an non-”self adorned” measure of the value in the expression. If the sentiment and expression doesn’t fall apart, there may be some value in expressing it. It might even make it to aphorism of the day.

It’s so mathematically obvious.

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PS: This is an opinion.

this needs a title?

There is inherent beauty in the art of making choices. A choice is a measure of care. Be it the file format and zip format that supports streaming or miso soup over steak. If we are the product of our environments, the only real influence the environment has on you is what you end up choosing for yourself. Steak? Man from outside your religion? Yoga? I’m stating the obvious but we all know anyone who chooses things that are not the convention exercises more brain muscle than the average joe, stands out, has more to contribute by way of conversation or example, and can stand the test of novelty more often than once.

I think Choice is beautiful. And dangerous. And fun.

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Confessions of an efficient communicator:

Having lived with Americans for 3 weeks, my subconscious communicator self has begun to rotate Rrrs, and “D”fy “T”s. Like later is laderrr. Hahaha and Vodka is being converted to Vaadka – just so the bartenders do not hear it as wodka and interpret it as water. Really.

Sometimes I twirl em RRs even with J. I could choose to speak in Indianese, but then I would never be understood and get way many blank stares as compared to now. There is some amount of ego at play when I think I am giving up my real accent personality. I’m all for the dissolution of the ego when it comes to getting things done.

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Fun facts that one wouldn’t know if they sat inside a cubicle for most of their life:

- Ducks lift one of their legs and stand sometimes. Sometimes they even shit like that. It makes them graceful.
- They also eat grass – for roughage I guess.
- They get cold in cold water and shiver too.
- Their shit is green and white, solid distribution – 70% green 30% white.
- Lake water turns into mercury during dusk hours.
- Watching the sun melt away clouds is like watching the war in Ramayana. Eventually everybody succumbs to the sun’s whims.
- Pine cones can be as small as 1 inch tall.
- Lake Tahoe – restekpah!

Discoveries of the Week

1. The Annals of Improbable Research
Where Apples can be compared to Oranges and hence the analogy is proved invalid. Where the scientists come together with flowing manes of luxuriant hair. Where navel lint matters. Where IgNobel prizes are given out to experiments that “first make you laugh, and then think.”

2. Segway
Go green! Go gas-less!
But first, overcome your vertigo of course!

Time to opine: Enlighten Up

Last weekend I saw this film called Enlighten Up!

So what’s exciting:
- It’s on Yoga. A subject close to my heart.
- It explores the pop yoga culture that offers many variations that may work, may not work. But variations do exist. As do spas and beauty parlors and heated rooms and what not. In the US alone, billions of dollars are spent on Yoga every year, some spend cos its a fad, and many spend coz it works. But it may not work for everybody.
- I like the premise. The documentarian takes a non-believing journalist and exposes him to 6 months of regular yoga to see whether he transforms. The fact that he is a journalist is good coz it makes him objective about the experience.

What got to me:
- I didn’t like the premise so much after I saw the film:
The whole idea of shoving yoga down someone’s throat and hounding him about it is a bad idea. I would rather the director had sponsored his yoga, given him a camcorder, and let him shoot his experience. Self-introspection would have been best. Trying to give someone’s yoga experience a direction in itself is a bad idea. But then this is my opinion.
- The film made the subject do a full day of yoga – 3-4 hours a day, adjust his entire lifestyle around it, and then reflect periodically about changes it introduced.

Here’s what I say:
When I started yoga, I didn’t like it. I’m talking about school. It was boring. It involved being in the same position and breathing for ages. Or what seemed like ages to the young nubile restless mind. However, when I opted for it in times of stress and strife, a lot of that went away. The instructor made it interesting and fast paced. Power yoga did work for me. But I knew it was working for me not because I found it easy to do asanas with every successive class. My benchmarks were based on the activities I perform in everyday life: my job, my routine, my focus, my cooking, my eating even. Everything suddenly became better.

Now, take the routine out of the subject’s life, and he has nothing but his unsettling new atmosphere to contend with. How on earth will he be able to experience the transformation?

Even if a transformation does happen, there is a 50-50 percent chance of yoga getting associated with discomfort for no fault of the subject.

The experiment was set up to fail. But wait, it didn’t entirely fail. I happen to be understanding the meaning of Mu properly at this point in time. So put it simply, it was a Mu experiment. The wrong context of evaluating an idea and expecting results that hinge on a wider broader context of pillars.

So should you watch it. But of course.
The film has an interesting cross section of opinions by people who are affected by it:
- Instructors: BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, all the neo-converts in the US.
Here is a special Iyengar treat.
- Lots of yogis who speak of Yoga being a means to attain god and spirituality. This opens up an entirely different Pandora’s box.
- Norman Allen, the first American to learn yoga. He now lives in Hawaii and is into farming. I love the scene where he asks Nick (the subject of the experiment) to go fuck himself. Metaphorically!

So Englighten Up! – yahweh or no way (quoting Stephen Colbert here)?
I say – yahweh.

Enjoyable, and definitely emotion+ thought provoking.

tid-bits

Have consumed the following and enjoyed muchly:

1. South Park Season 13 – Margaritaville

2. South Park Season 13 – Fatbeard (Somalian Pirate We!)

3. Weeds – Seasons 1 and 2

4. Currently reattempting reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. I will get thru it this time. Slow and steady.

5. Also on the bed side – South Park and Philosophy Why Flatulence is philosophical? and Can a saint really laugh at south park? are the questions being explored here. Morality – the south park way. The book is authored by a professor who teaches philosophy and had recommended SP as the basis of his students’ thesis.

6. Watchmen – Saw it, liked it.

7. Ma Vie En Rose It’s amazingly made. Softly. How a little boy comes to terms with his distaste for his Y chromosome and wishes suddenly he will get his period and turn into a girl. Until then he wears satin frocks, red shoes, and lipstick. And plans to marry the boy next door. Like I said, softly.

8. Super High Me – Must watch stoned. Absolutely must. A regular stoner stand up comedian gives up smoking pot for 30 days and stays high for 30 days.

9. Super Size Me – A man goes on a 30-day McDonald’s ONLY diet.

10. King Corn – How everyone in America is made of Corn. And everything. 2 guys from Idaho go back to their home town to plant 1 acre of corn and then follow it into their foods and bodies. Corn is everywhere here.

We’re all made out of ticky tacky

I have to thank Weeds for introducing me to ticky tacky.

ticky tacky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticky-tacky

Expression, learning, and limitations thereof

All expression seems to come from a void. Even as I type this sentence, I think I am only reiterating and fully understanding a statement from Waking Life*. One of my friends here is studying film making here, and she invited me for a film screening in a class for International Cinema appreciation. I went along for the experience. We saw The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, but that is not the point, of course.

One of the students in the class was deaf-mute. I don’t know her name yet, but she was of striking beauty and carriage. She was also noticeably dressed in clothes that she must have spent some effort designing. Interesting patchwork on her jeans, a cap with a big yellow feather sticking out of it, rather like Robin Hood. And she had turned the volume up on her make up. It was loud, but it was tasteful and fitted into the persona of a filmmaker. Bright blue eye shadow that extended way down below her eyes to her cheeks in a well designed manner. Loud rouge highlights on her cheeks. And not to mention dark outlined eyes. My first reaction was to say, wow, that’s something! My second reaction was, she must have spent a lot of time this morning getting dressed like that for class. She was colorful, and was definitely on talking terms with rainbows. And then I noticed the patchwork on her jeans. Definitely not something you would pick up in a chain store. Possibly something she designed herself or got it from someone who designed it to be special. Every cell of her being was screaming I am special, and this without a word or look exchanged between us. In a 30 second awareness of her presence, I already knew the kind of person she would be, and that I would love to hang out with her sometime.

My final thought: You turn down the volume on your trap, and the rest of your body becomes expressive. We are walking languages. Who says we need words to communicate? I believe it might not be an exercise in futility to deny oneself of talking privileges for extended periods.

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“Do I really need to know this? This isn’t going to help me!” My biggest learning barrier throughout my life, especially at my first job. What was missing was an informed and weighted cataloging system in my head. It took 5.5 years of technical writing to change that permanently. And it took the first few pages of Lila to help me identify and articulate the problem.

I think I know where it came from though. From the grade-oriented educational system we have back home. This is what it made out of me. If there was nothing to be gained from learning XYZ, I wouldn’t study XYZ. If studying AB over CD gave me more marks, I would study AB over CD. Hence, if reading 60 pages of information made me comprehensively informed, and 20 pages just enough informed to bullshit, I would do 25. I always got to second place. I never made it to first place in class. It would have taken 35 pages of studying some more. Now, given an infinite timeline, one can deliver infinite quality. Given a limited timeline, the successful person is the one who delivers satisfactory amounts of quality, faster and meets the deadline. I was great at that.

Now, taking stock, professionally, it makes me an ace. I have my bullet list of key points ready to attack a subject. Personally, it makes me shallow. I never felt strongly for anything that I didn’t read the latter 35 pages of. I don’t feel strongly about a lot of things.

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*Quote from Waking Life that I was referring to:

Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from. I mean, it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like, you know, “water.” We came up with a sound for that. Or “Saber-toothed tiger right behind you.” We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, I think, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we’re experiencing. What is, like, frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say “love,” the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person’s ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, you know, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I’m saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They’re just symbols. They’re dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It’s unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we’ve connected, and we think that we’re understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it’s what we live for.

Top 10 “Everyone must do this” – Films/Documentary/Visual Media

There are some things that I think are SO exemplary that I must shove it down the throat of anyone I like. Which I have done, no less, or plan to do, no less. It’s like watching a film and going “Wow! I have to show this to everyone.” It’s the kind of film that makes you grind your teeth, and clench your fist, and react. Period. Any reaction is good.

This evangelistic instinct does not come from all the films that you completely digg. For example, I like Reality Bites. A lot. But it’s  a personal joy to watch the dialogs, and I’d rather savor them by myself. Also, A love song for Bobby Long. That’s all for personal pleasure.

Then there are the duet kinda films. I’d rather watch them with a co-enthusiast. Like watching a chick flick with a chick or a guy playing the role of a chick companion, watching a Rasta film with Chivas, or watching a doomsday conspiracy movie with Tinda, or watching evolutionary movies with J.

And then there are the group movies. That must be seen as a group. As a community, as a nation, as a people, as a race and species, as any being entitled to a brain on this planet that is in the act of cognition, feeling, and subscriberism. Even if we don’t watch them in the same room. We must all watch them.  I am talking about those kinda movies.

So why did I bring this up now. Because I am reaching a critical mass of information that I agree with, feel strongly about, identify with, cannot do anything about most of the time, but would want to amplify the message. Because everyone must know about these. Because everyone will understand this irrespective of their background, race, color, religion or language (assuming sub titles). Because I simply must.

#1 1 Giant Leap

It started with the music. Then the quest for why these guys made this brilliant music and how. And then a study of their journey and their idea. In short, they wanted to combine “video, sound, and the written word to highlight the unity that underlies all of us, despite our heavily accentuated diversity”. Brilliant music, and a goose-bump-giving documentary.

#2 The Zeitgeist Movie and the Addendum

The most compelling documentaries of our time that put together, in an extremely coherent and logical fashion, the message that we all have been aware of, but never sat down and thought too much of it. Because no one told it like that.  No one viewed it like that. No one could afford the long-range vision and broad-range speculation to coherently arrive at so many conclusions at the same time. And it talks about the biggest delusions in prevalent times, freedom.

#3 Baraka

If imagery didn’t work more than words did, I would put this a rank lower. In fact a couple ranks lower. But it does. For serious imagery, for lost treasures, for rhythm, groove, beauty, and a decidedly wide screen HDTV experience, Baraka takes the crown.

“Baraka is an ancient Sufi word, which can be translated as “a blessing, or as the breath, or essence of life from which the evolutionary process unfolds.”  For many people Baraka is the definitive film in this style. Breathtaking shots from around the world show the beauty and destruction of nature and humans. Coupled with an incredible soundtrack…“

# 4 Koyanisqaatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqqatsi

Darker version exploring man’s existence. Hardhitting imagery that will drain you and music that will churn your psyche.

“The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning “life out of balance.” Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds — urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass.

KOYAANISQATSI attempts to reveal the beauty of the beast! We usually perceive our world, our way of living, as beautiful because there is nothing else to perceive. If one lives in this world, the globalized world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another.“

# 5 Network

We saw this film today. After looking at the credits in the Zeitgeist Movie. It blew our minds. Everyone who watches television, must watch this. Amazing, that the same thoughts are true and repeated in 2009.

# 6 George Carlin

Again inspired after watching The Zeitgeist Movie, I went looking for this guy on YouTube. J has been a fan for ages and guided me through the best. Standing ovation material.

Two of my favorite videos include:

The Modern Man

Religion is bullshit

Kind of makes me appreciate form over function. Why the way you say something is sometimes more important in driving in the point than what is being said.

# 7  South Park

It’s not for kids. It’s as Douglas Adamsian toilet humor as American television can deal with. It’s deep-rooted satire and it comes with a laugh. Not too many people can look at their lives or those of others’ this way. All hail, Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflowski, Stan, and Kenny. You guys rule!

# 8 Waking Life

If you can deal with passionate 4 paragraph dialogs. If an anthology of truth, opinion, speculation, and philosophy, beautifully intertwined in a gripping anime entices you, then Richard Linklater’s animated film is a pot of gold.

I still always have a copy of the script with me at all times. Still. It’s been 6 years and counting.

# 9 Story of Stuff

# 10 Les Carabiniers

Godard’s take on war. And I could have sworn, my best war film before this one was Life is Beautiful. The optimistic war film. The happy war film. Or Platoon. The raw war film. But the dark humor won me over here.

If you have any such experiences (and not necessarily films) that you absolutely must share with the rest of the world (read shove it down my throat, mine at the least), and not to share would be tantamount to blasphemy, please put up a post like this one and leave me a link.

It’s always fun to be angry about and at the same thing.

In a new land …

…things about yourself confront you from new mirrors. It’s like going to one store and finding that widening mirror when all along your home mirror has been telling you of a narrowing waistlines.

I am brand conscious to a degree. To be precise, I don’t want to be caught wearing the same jacket as 3 others at a vacation spot in another state. Obviously a popular choice, but then obviously a very en masse availability. I didn’t know I had these airs till I saw those jackets. I am ashamed of myself, but that jacket is going back unworn. I will buy myself a cheaper or different one from a beat store in hippie land. But I feel this strong need to assert my individuality here.

Whining aside. I have come to realize other selfish things about myself. My life revolves around my job, which I do really well. Take that away and I am like a lost puppy on crack sniffing glue. Nope the yoga doesn’t help. Neither does the walking. The only thing that does seem to help some is reading, watching sitcoms, or doing mundane routine work like cleaning the house.

Further whining aside, on a brighter note.

Dub. The music is so chill, I wonder why it took me 3 years to realize that. Bob Dylan has finally made a place for himself in my heart. 1 Giant Leap is a definitely recommended watch for anyone with a soul and ear for good music. I swear by the music and have made all true friends listen to it if they haven’t already. Now my quest is to show other people this documentary that I procured with great effort and cost.  It’s wonderful and you deserve to see it.

Saw Amadeus. It’s definitely worth one watch. But everything about the movie pales in comparison to the last one hour. Watch it at least once.

J introduced me to  the Zeitgeist movie that comes from the Zeitgeist movement. It’s a free Divx download. Do watch it. Yet another thing has broken down my belief mechanism. So I thought I will take it a step further, by reading not just The Autobiography of  a Yogi, but also The Selfish Gene at the same time. So far the experiment is having no effect on the lost puppy on crack sniffing glue. But I am not believing anything anymore.

Beauty continues to rock. Be it in America or in India. Take a peek … 

Lake Powell, Page, Arizona