Thursday, December 29, 2005

 

2005 brief review

Ah...how time flies...new year 2004 seems like yesterday and now 2005 will be gone in a few days time....and another fairly exciting year for me in more ways than one....

if i were to pick a few personal defining moments in 2005 these would be my being almost frozen to death in Moscow in february and the trans-siberian rail journey with train #4 from yarolavsky station to Beijing, visiting mai lai massacre memorial in central vietnam , (staying) just 100 meters away from the raja restaurant in kuta October 1st , the day of the 2nd bali bombing....(but i was all the way up in ubud when the explosion occured) , and the week i spent in emperom Acheh helping building houses for tsunami victims the week before that..

regarding books....this year like any other it's more of books that are read but left unfinished more than anything else....but .... finally finished kurt vonnegut's galapagos after first picking it up almost a complete year ago...and despite having terrible food poisoning thanks to 'nasi gudeg' in jogjakarta last week...managed to plough through his arguably best and certainly most well known novel 'slaughterhouse five'....a very depressing book.....and still very relevant to today's world and ....still not much has changed from the senseless bombing of dresden described in this book and the current crazy bloodlust of america and it's lapdogs in iraq and afghanistan today......

but if anything my most memorable read this year are in fact short stories.... Orhan Pamuk's "Famous people" in GRANTA 68, David Mitchell's "The January man" in GRANTA 81:Best young british novelists 2003 and "Dear Mr President" by Daniel Voll ..a completely unknown writer (to me) in STORY are three that stuck in my mind most....


among non fictions..a story that really got to me was an article that i read in the Sunday Times magazine Feb 6 while on the trans siberian train..."riddle of the lost artist"... about the discovery of paintings and sad life of a painter Josh Woodrow....another depressing read....

Sunday, December 18, 2005

 

loving jews

I never thought I would ever say this….that I love jews…. And I don’t mean good old jesus of Christianity…and personally the way Christians view poor jesus to me is totally repulsive…I’m convinced that jesus ...wherever he is if he’s still alive -as many unbelievablely believe - is deeply unhappy that billions of people are singing and wailing and praising HIM instead of god!!…and also, show me a man who claim he’s god and I’ll show you a son of a bitch and a charlatan…

I always wonder why jews are hated and hounded so much since the beginning of civilization…and I’m totally perplexed by how much Hitler hated jews that he tried to EXTERMINATE one whole race from the face of the earth! If he were to consider exterminating rats and cockroaches that would make a lot more sense, practical and beneficial to human kind…no wonder some people find it difficult to believe that six million jews were cooked in the oven …it’s simply preposterous….beyond imagination….and six million! That’s a lot of dead bodies….

Interesting to note that the new Iranian president ahmadinejad re kindled the controversy about this recently and showing a complete ignorance of jewish raison d’etre by asking the western world to find a new jewsih home somewhere in Europe….that’s just like asking hindus to pray to Allah for a change….

It may be just prejudice and one isolated incidence should not be generalized to indicate a character of a nation but I had one unpleasant experience when I visited Jerusalem a few years back. I was staying in a well known five star hotel chain and for the first time in my life I saw the hotel fridge locked and CHAINED . Do these people think that we are going to steal the measly mars bars? ….is this really the seed of why they were hated so much? Their greed?..and is that such a unique crime of theirs that they are punishable by extermination??

I am personally color blind when it comes to human kind and given the right time and place I can hate or love any body from any race just like anyone else….and I love this couple of jewish brothers for a simple mundane reason….they just make brilliant films!

I’m referring to the coen brothers….I’ve seen all of their films starting from the first one ‘blood simple’ to ‘raising arizona’, ‘barton fink’. ‘Hudsucker’s proxy’, ‘Fargo’, ‘miller’s crossing’, ‘the big liebowski’, ‘o brother where art thou’, ‘the man who wasn’t there’, ‘intolerable cruelty’ and the last one ‘the lady killers’…. I love everyone of them and particularly ‘fargo’, ‘miller’s crossing’, ‘the big liebowski’ (john turturo as ‘jesus’ was hilarious) and ‘the man who wasn’t there’. You can read all about these great film makers in this site as well as anywhere else.

It’s not just that their trademark wit, dark comic genius and demented violence are so brilliant but the dialogue in every one of their films is to me as close as any film can get to a good novel. It’s the closest thing to reading ‘literary’ novels by watching films.I can never get tired of replaying scenes from their films just to hear the dialogues.

And now that I’m feeling quite warm towards jews (just don’t mention the word ‘palestine’) I may start reading to understand a bit more about this great people….I just bought a couple of old books (from clearance sales) which sounds quite straightforward but fascinating…one is a kind of a primer ‘What is a Jew’ by Morris N Kertzer Rabbi and another is ‘Holy Days:the world of a Hasidic Family’ by Harris Lis.

And now that I’m thinking about jews I can think up a lot more really great jewish people that would be a great loss to the world if Hitler did get his way, and if there ever is one jew from the book world that I would risk my life to save from being cooked in the oven it would be Isaac besheevis singer…but this nobel prize winner is already dead so it’s quite irrelevant…..

Sunday, December 04, 2005

 

peter gabriel

a long long time ago....there was this band called "Genesis"....

and in my university days..there was this set up in the main common room where there were rows of nice seats where you can sit back, pick up a headphone and listen to your favorite music ...just go up front and ask the student manning the counter for your favorite album and sit back and be transported to the magical realm of aural sensation...and purposely missed that hated organic chemistry lecture...

and that's how i discovered genesis...the OLD version... the version with Peter Gabriel as the singer...and how i love their old albums...trespass...nursery cryme...foxtrot (with the mind numbing supper's ready)...genesis live...selling england by the pound ....and lamb lies on the broadway....

and then peter gabriel split!!!...damnation...what a calamity...i stopped listening to genesis POST peter gabriel...i simply hated the new genesis with phil collins at the helm...phil collin's wimpy songs are nothing more than silly pop songs and that was a real pity because he could be very very good if he wanted to.... he had an astonishing album with a jazzy band called Brand X and the first album of this band had a couple of really outstanding songs...but after that he went mad and just produced sappy songs with the new genesis and his solo albums...making tons of money and have millions of teen fans who knows nothing about GOOD music....


but Peter Gabriel as a solo artist went different way....he gets more and more interesting and goes on to produce better and better music... and with his interest in world music and collaboration with some fine african mucisians and the great (late) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan he has produced some of the best english music i ever listen too...and his trademark raspy voice is simply a gift from god...

i don't pretend to be and don't qualify as a serious fan if that means knowing about and owning everything by him... but apart from OVO I've listened to every single solo album of his....i remember driving all over Tasmania listening to his first albulm (untitled) and playing "solsbury hills" and "here comes the flood" over and over again... and i still remember listening to "exposure" from the second (untitled) album and "Biko" and "games without frontier" from the third (untitled) as an angry young man then...still angry but not so young anymore.... and listening to the melancholic "mercy street" a song inspired by the poetry of ann sexton from "So" his 5th solo album on radio thinking about all those unfinished assignments in virology in the wee hours in cold winter nights in Kent UK....and you get gloom and melancholia by the tons in his latest solo album ironically titled "UP"....and i'm still listening to this album now....and keep on replaying this album if i drive anywhere long distance as i did a couple of days back to Perlis...

...and a confession...i did NOT buy this album... I was so impatient to get it that as soon as it was out i spent nights downloading the songs from napster ...yes that was before the bastards from metallica complained which eventually got napster taken off the net as a FREE downloads...but did that stop free exchange of music and everything else ? of course not ...the only thing it did was depriving us of the great napster (bless you shawn fanning wherever you are)....

and oh yes... several months back i bought a DVD of his "growing up" concert (held in Italy of mainly his recent songs from "up" album) in my favorite pirated DVD shop at Lido in Beijing....and it was fantastic...awesome!...he had no hair now and put on a bit of weight but what the hell... his voice and music is as great as ever...& unlike some old buggers (i'm referring to mick jagger & rod stewart particularly) who refused to admit their age Peter Gabriel is mature enough (bless him) to kind of age respectably....

and yes, he has also produced a couple of sountracks to two outstanding and equally sad movies ...martin scorsece's "passion of christ" and the sad phillip noyce's 'rabbit proof fence' which i thinks are very appropriate for Peter Gabriel to do...

if you want to read comments on how some people are touched by mr gabriel's songs here is one good link

i hope mr gabriel will continue to come up with new albums and as Niel Young says in one of his great songs "long may you run"....

but that's for another time....about neil young i mean...

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