(or just don't sleep)
Last night, I was planning to go to Pasadena to hack out some WWW7 matters
with Adam, but the megapost on my week delayed me by an hour and derailed the
whole enterprise.
Instead, I went to Sid's in Newport for blackened salmon at 12:30AM -- with a
kitchen 'til 1, this carnivorivm is sure to be a regular rohit hangout. I've
learned not to go before 10pm, because it's *packed*. Not bad for a place with
no signs or directions. [Note: must rectify grave oversight in never having
eaten at No-name's in Boston!]
Then, off to Higher Grounds for the regular 2AM tall-skinny-cocoa thing.
Studied Tower Record's Pulse, OC Weekly's annual sex issue, and Sweater, a
free bimonthly club-life and electronica zine.
Went to the gym around three, and chatted with the senior who runs the
graveyard shift. I'm her one customer most nights :-) May be making some
actual headway here; it certainly can't hurt to have kicked off Valentines'
Day by offering her a belgian chocolate heart and good luck on her teaching
certificate exam...
And as for the rest of my dear friends whom I won't have a chance to deliver
my bon-bons of bon mots, please accept a virtual valentine hug, Sally and
Clover and Wendy and Kate and Kristen!!
wired,
Rohit
----%->clippings here
Sweater is an interesting beast ( http://www.sweatermag.com/ ). It's actually
fairly literate, with lots of 2-4 page interviews with DJs, electronica
artists, and fashion mavens. I have a feeling Joseph Reagle might be the one
other person in the target market intersection of Sweater and The Economist
:-) [or perhaps Todd Kaloudis?]. Herewith some random notes:
An ad for a really cool new remix album:
Star Rise
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook: remixed
Joi, Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal, Aki Nawaz, Nitin
Sawnhey, Earthtribe, The Dhol Foundation ...
"A collection of remixes by contemporary British musicians of
Asian descent..these treatments are both reverent and inspired,
with the emotional intensity of the originals amplified by the
rhythmic urgency of the remixes. All nine of these versions -
drawing from jungle, bhangra, breakbeat and Burundi
drumming - are nothing short of remarkable"
-- Scott Becker, Option magazine
Sweater gave it a 4* review. I have really high hopes because it has several
asian dance artists from London I've really liked on Anokha and Eastern
Uprising. I'm going to have to start developing my collection in this
department. Heck, might even end up with a KUCI show... this is really new
music in the fusion of tabla and techno. More later.
Realworld is Peter Gabriel's world music arm. he's developed a lot of artists
this way in the Western market.
which got 7/10. "king of the bhangra beat, taking traditional indian vocal
music and then funking it up with hip-hop bass and dub mixology... 32-year old
anglo-indian DJ... aiming to trash the boundaries of indian pop. Bally Sagoo
is famous for remixing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, as well as reworking old Inidian
fim music in to his wold, winderfule 1994 album, Bollywood Flashback. This,
his eight album, is a strange and beautioful fusion fo American ears." Need to
buy this, too. He's doing a concert tour that touches down in San Francisco
this Sunday; sigh.
Randomly useful resource: http://freeindia.org facts about India and freedom
stories. Another tape I'm listening to a lot is a.r. rahman's Vande Mataram, a
huge seller in India that's a contemporary pop resetting of largely patriotic
tunes. The title track, in Hindi and Tamil, is a remix of the 'alternate
national anthem'. More at: http://www.india-today.com/itoday/01091997/vande.htm
l (lyrics by Mehboob, the indian Pet Shop Boy)
Sweater and soundscan have also sponsored the first Electronic Album Chart.
Week ending 1/18:
1. DJ Shadow - Preemptive Strike
2. Prodigy - Fat of the Land
3. Portishead
4. Daft Punk
5. Bjork
6. Roni Size Reprazent - new forms
7. The Crystal Method - Vegas
8. Spawn soundtrack
9. Fatboy Slim
10. Chemical Brothers
20. Mody - I like to score
30. Jackal soundtrack
34. Atari Teenage Riot
39. Orblivion
50. Saint soundtrack
Sweater also recommends Metropolis, here on the UCI campus, as the hottest
nightclub in OC, and Coconut Teaszer, 8117 Sunset 213-957-4787, for its
saturday night 3:30-9am afterhours party.
"A good composer does not initiate, he steals" -- Igor Stravinsky
A movie I saw on late-night TV I really want to recommend to FoRKers searching
for the mockery-of-traveling-with-Rohit experience: "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad,
Mad, World". The 1963 comedy's soundtrack just came out on CD for the first
time. It stars practically every last major comedian of the era. Here's the
iMDb summary:
After a long prison sentence Smiler Grogan is heading at high speed to a
California park where he hid $350,000 from a job 15 years previously. He
accidentally careers over a cliff in view of four cars whose occupants go down
to help. The dying Grogan gives details of where the money is buried and when
the witnesses fail to agree on sharing the cash, a crazy chase develops across
the state.
----Summary written by Col Needham {cn@imdb.com}
It reminded me of a movie that *even better* represents the mockery of
traveling with rohit, but no matter how I sliced and diced the iMDb, I
couldn't find it. I saw it on late-night TV just before leaving Boston. It was
an ad exec from nowhere, middleamerica, who's called to a big job interview in
New York. There's a storm brewing, so the plane diverts to Logan, they lose
his bags, they run for the train from South Station, cram on, wait for food,
arrive in NY in the middle of a transit strike -- and a thunderstorm -- and
try to walk to the Waldorf-Astoria, where their rooms have been lost by not
calling ahead, wherein they get mugged, report to the cops, get dragged along
in a police chase, kidnapped, robbed in central park, chased for possible
child molestation, and... for good measure, the return flight is hijacked to
Cuba :-) It also had a long, long list of comedy stars in it, and I recognized
a lot of later faces. But I cannot remember the durn title.
For that matter, I also couldn't find another 50's Cold War film I remember on
TV in high school that was set in a Berlin Coca-cola bottling plant and
involved the local Coke guy falling for an East German girl. This is quite
separate from the Coca-Cola kid, where the cokehead falls for an Australian
chick. It was a real classic cold war howler; I should reread "For God,
Country, and Coca-Cola" to find out what it was.
The Original Pancake House of Laguna Hills
"Serving the tastiest pancakes in America since 1953!
All batters made from scratch daily."
"Home of the famous Apple Pancake"
26591 Moulton Pkwy, at the corner of Oso Pkwy in Aliso Viejo
714.643.8591 7a-2p daily
Roy -- is this the mythical pancake house you've been promising to take me to
after some all nighter? Well, it's after an all nighter, and you're not here
to confirm! Oh, the humanity...
I am REALLY PISSED that thanks to not reading the OC Weekly until today and
because of King's lunchtime what-is-a-phd-anyway seminar, I missed my one best
chance to have a beer with Details sex columnist Anka Radakovich, who spoke at
the Anthill Pub yesterday. Damn! All this junk mail fromt he center for gender
equality, and not a damned notice in the _New University_ on the blessed
presence of our interepid soon-to-be-in-a-major-Hollywood-movie sex
journalist. Sigh.
Another event I won't be partaking of: Saturday's Valentine's Day Sex Tour att
the Santa Ana Zoo. Yes, my friends, for $25, curator and veterinarian Connie
Sweet will "take you and your honey on a taboo trip through animal sexdom."
After champagne and a continental breakfast, naturally. "The hourlong tour
focuses on animal foreplay, courtship, and mating rituals, and it offers a
scientific perspective on animal contraception and the way animals choose
their mates."
Speaking of choosing mates, Dr. King recommended an anthropologist's long-term
study of particle physics labs and social structures therein, _Beam Times and
Life Times_ (although it's not listed at amazon -- prolly a trip to the real
library...)
Finally, there was a recommendation to go visit Irvine Lake, a man-made
resvoir with some nice hikes (Santiago dam, 1931). One of the upsides is a new
tiny concession stand-cum-bait-shop where the catch of the day is literally,
well, caught. You place your order, and the chep goes out an dfetches it from
a pond. Used to work at the Irvine Hyatt and at Sid's.
[yeah, i get a LOT of reading done at the gym. I get amgazines from Adam by
the bagful and churn thorugh them. I think our gym attendant fids this
curiously attractive ;-]
Bharati Mukherjee, an acclaimed American writer had a personal essay on how
she chose to be American first, and stepped out of the psychotically
conflicted indian-american longing for home. I firmly support her stance as an
American -- though it took far more courage as a lone student at the Iowa
Writer's Workshop in 1961.
Unfortunately, I don't think the text is on the web; the motherjones.com site
is not responding. It was orignally contributed to "Race: and Anthology inthe
First Person", edited by Bart Schnieder.
"A Mukherjee couls *only* be a Brahmin from Bengal. Hindu tradion forbade
intercaste, interlanguage, interethnic marriages. Bengali tradition even
discouraged emigration: to remove oneself from Begal was to dilute true
culture."
...
"My rejection of hyphenatiuon has been misrepresented as race treachery by
some India-born academics on US capuses who have appointed themselves
guardians of the "purity" of ethnic cultures. Many of them, though they reside
permanently in the United Statres and participate in its economy, consistenly
denounce American ideas and institutions. They direct their rage at me
because, by becoming a US citizen and exercising my voting rights, I have
invested in the present, and not the past; because IO have committed myslef to
help shape the future of my adopted homeland; and because I celebrate racial
and cultural mongrelization"