While you're checking out, Rohit, you may as well also go to
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sharmila/
and although it was unclear if she's attached at first, we'll have our
answer by the end of this exercise...
> Welcome to the World of Sharmila
> Poetess, Geneticist, Naturenymph
This is a good start.
> Hi there! Thanks for checking out my page ...
No problem.
> SHARMILA THE POET: Poetry is my first true love. I sometimes think I
> was born writing ... Click here to check out one of my favorite poems.
Not bad at all:
| That ancient rhythm
|
| We fall into that
| ancient rhythm again on my futon.
|
| After, we wrap our spent
| bodies together like a heavy rope,
| a steel ballast. Love words from
| your delicate lips drive me
| to bury my face in your chest
| and speak of nightmares
| and children.
although, children can be nightmares in and of themselves...
> SHARMILA THE GENETICIST: I am also a Ph.D. student in the Department
> of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan, where I do research on
> genetic complexity. My major publication so far has been: Ocular
> retardation mouse caused by Chx10 homeobox null allele, which came out
> in the April 1996 issue of Nature Genetics.
Sounds smarter than anything I'll probably do.
Of course, I do note that the word "publication" is singular.
> SHARMILA THE NATURENYMPH: Devoted Taoist, starry-eyed romantic,
> Earth-loving "giver-goddess fashion-plate saint" (Judy-ism, anyone? :)
> To put it another way, I find it best to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, "I am the
> Lorax, I speak (to) the trees." Need I say more???
Yeah, she needs to say more, because I haven't a clue what she's talking
about. Email her and ask her for me, okay: sharmila@umich.edu
> My adorable little brother, Sumit Basu (click on his picture to find out
> more about him ... he writes poetry too, and he's a PhD candidate at
> MIT's Media Lab).
Geez, this guy is smart, cute, and ramming through MIT faster than the
speed of light:
http://sbasu.www.media.mit.edu/people/sbasu/
Studying "Combining audio and visual cues to enhance machine perception,
speech recognition, facial feature tracking."
Advisor: Alex Pentland
Hey, he worked at Xerox PARC in 93 and 94, too. Cool.
Oh no. His personal Web page
http://web.mit.edu/sbasu/www/mylife.html
reveals
> Sharmila is my big sister. I love her dearly, but I still always
> complain that she inherited most (if not all) of the brains and social
> skills of my parents! She on the verge of getting her PhD in Human
> Genetics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She's been my
> greatest confidant and advisor for as long as I can remember. We've
> always been rivals in some sense - we both write poetry, we both sing,
> etc., but there's a synergy between us that makes us both excel at what
> we do.
>
> She's beautiful, brilliant, and in case your wondering, already has a
> boyfriend!! :)
Nice of her to avoid telling us that on her homepage. I'm beginning to
appreciate the difficulties single people put up with...
Nonetheless Rohit, maybe you want to invite Sumit to join FoRK? We need
more people from MIT...
One more thing. Sharmila has a link to a guy named Chad Childers who
went to WWW6 and wrote up a pretty extensive report on that conference
that's an interesting read. Then again, it's 4am, I'd probably find the
back of the Cheerios box an interesting read at this point...
http://cannibal.mi.org/~chad/www6/chad.notes.html
Chad is www@ford.com in case you want to invite him to FoRK too.
You should also check out his personal ad
http://cannibal.mi.org/~chad/personal.html
Oh heck I'll just include it here.
> What am I looking for?
> Intelligence
> You must read for entertainment, preferably Science Fiction. I don't
> own a television because I'd rather talk about real life, go out and do
> things, or curl up with a good book. You must have a mind of your own,
> and a strong personality.
> Style
> Isn't there a woman out there who drives an E-type Jag roadster?
> Grin... I may never find one, but tell me how you're equally cool.
> Competence
> You must be able to drive a stick (for that Jaguar) and handle
> yourself in any situation.
> Humor
> I'm often known as the Cannibal, so you mustn't mind being eaten. If
> you like Monty Python and the Tick, we're on the right track.
> Sexuality
> I'm comfortable with it, and especially enjoy flirting and
> triple-entendres. You should be interested and enjoy life!
> Beauty
> I'm tall (6'3") and not bad looking. I'm looking for someone "gorgeous
> and sensationally beautiful", as Danny Kaye used to say.
> Money
> W.H. Auden said it may not be the fuel of love, but it makes excellent
> kindling. It's not a really big deal, but I'm Scottish... or Ferengi...
> doesn't that say it all?
It does indeed say it all.
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
prepare for a long .sig...
Here's an excerpt from "Bittersweet Triumph" by David Fricke, the cover
story of the current issue of Rolling Stone. For the complete story,
check out RS 784 (April 16, 1998), currently on newsstands.
If you believe the credits in the CD booklet of Urban Hymns, the Verve
neither wrote nor played on "Bitter Sweet Symphony." The composition is
credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards -- there is a line that
concedes, "Lyrics by Richard Ashcroft" -- and the song is "performed by
the Andrew Oldham Orchestra." ABKCO Music, which controls the copyrights
to the biggest hits in the Rolling Stones' Sixties song catalog, owns
100 percent of the publishing rights to "Bitter Sweet Symphony."
Jagger and Richards did write part of "Bitter Sweet Symphony" -- the
guitar and vocal riffs in "The Last Time" that were rearranged in
marginally recognizable, schlocko form for a mid-Sixties
Stones-on-strings album speciously credited to Oldham, the band's early
manager. Ashcroft admits that when he bought a copy of the original
Oldham record a few years ago, he knew immediately that the orchestrated
"Last Time" lick could be "turned into something outrageous," as he puts
it. Ashcroft looped four bars from the track and went to work.
Ashcroft has paid dearly for his inspiration. Just as "Bitter Sweet
Symphony" was about to be issued as a single in England last June, ABKCO
Music head Allen Klein refused clearance of the sample. Jazz Summers,
the Verve's co- manager, went to top Virgin Records brass in the U.S.
for help. Virgin vice chairman Nancy Berry played "Bitter Sweet
Symphony" for Jagger and Richards, who reportedly liked the track but
declined to get involved in the fracas.
Summers also sent a cassette of "Bitter Sweet Symphony" to Oldham, who
now lives in Bogota, Colombia. "Andrew sent me this fabulous note,"
Summers says. "He said, 'Fair cop! Absolute total pinch! You can see why
[ABKCO are] rolling up their sleeves.'" Klein finally approved clearance
in what Summers drolly describes as "a fifty-fifty deal -- fifty percent
Keith Richards and fifty percent Mick Jagger."
Ashcroft has learned to live with the fact that "Bitter Sweet Symphony"
is no longer his -- legally, anyway. He's called it "the best song
Jagger and Richards have written in twenty years." Asked whether he's
seen the Nike television commercial featuring the track, Ashcroft coolly
replies that he was sent two videocassettes of the spot: "They didn't
work." (The Verve are donating their performance royalties from the ad
to the British Red Cross Landmines Appeal and to Youth 2000, a charity
benefiting the homeless in London.) But he talks, keenly and at great
length, about the genesis of "Bitter Sweet Symphony," about what he
means by outrageous.
"I wanted something that opened up into a prairie-music kind of sound, a
modern-day Ennio Morricone kind of thing," Ashcroft says, sitting
cross-legged on the floor of his living room, a sparsely furnished space
bathed in the gray light of an English late-winter afternoon and the
warm soul of the Staple Singers CD playing in the background. "Then
after a while, the song started morphing into this wall of sound, a
concise piece of incredible pop music. "There are three or four vocals
in there," he continues. "It's like an outro to a Temptations record,
except I'm the four guys in a row: the rhythm one underneath, the sex
and violence voices, like a doo-wop thing. You can hear that a lot on
Urban Hymns -- two, three, four voices.
"We sampled four bars," Ashcroft says of the Oldham-record riff. "That
was on one track. Then we did forty-seven tracks of music beyond that
little piece. We've got our own string players, our own percussion on
it. Guitars. We're talking about a four-bar sample turning into 'Bitter
Sweet Symphony' -- and they're still claiming it's the same song.
"It's beyond hip-hop, what we've done. With hip-hop now, the trend is to
leave the thing they've sampled as the hook, to sell more records. This
was old- school hip-hop -- take something but really twist it and fuck
it up into something else. Take it and use your imagination."