Sometimes we all feel that reviewers need a reviewer. (That is supposed to be the editor's job) One reviewer to my paper sent in this comment:
- TABLE 1 : (minor corretion): title and description ...
Since none of you ever illegally downloaded an .mp3 or a video, or read a pirated book, this one is for you. I would like to warn you chaps that even bathroom singing could become an illegal activity, along with whistling, if things continue in this fashion as Slashdot reports: In a rather bizarre move, the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America have decided to take on guitar tabs. They have served notices to a number of tab websites for infringment of copyright and IP. As a result many guitar tab websites are twiddling their thumbs and have restricted access till they figure out what to do.
Guitar tabs as opposed to sheet music are diagrams of notes and chords for people too lazy to read music and are usually transcribed by ear by some 'talented' musician. They aren't direct copies, but interpretations of the melody, chords, etc. which the publishers claim are an infringement of the artists's creative copyright over the melody. I have tried to write tabs and it does take a few hours of effort to get all the notes and chords right. It's not a simple case of running a copier, or dragging and dropping songs from one folder to another.
The publishers' claim that these 'illegal' sites make money off banner ads without permission. The publishers now want to make money from their own 'official' sites. This seems fair enough. Often Tom is making money off Dick's unpaid labour of love of creating tabs from Harry's song?
What seems fuzzy is the definition of the song IP. A large number of these tabs are often wrong, is that a copyright violation? That gives our first workaround - a silly one, one that the lawyers will have for breakfast. Assume I make a change in the key of the song, or I make a tiny, obvious error in the tab; is it still a copy? Then can I then sue anyone who uses that tab for copying? If a song sounds like Stairway to Heaven then it is obviously stolen even if it an annoying MIDI file or cell phone tone. Fine.
But where do you draw the line? At the melody? The song arrangement? Section of music? Individual riffs? Combinations of notes? Chord changes? Aren't all songs mutated copies of other songs? What is really original? Who is that guy who wrote the first I-IV-V change? He should make billions.
A simpler definition is: as long as you don't profit from it, anything goes. The next time you are in the bathroom and whistling or humming away be aware that you are infringing on song IP. While that currently qualifies as fair, personal use it is still use of IP without permission. Who's to say that in the future you might need the artist's/publisher's explicit permission everytime you play that song at house party? On a brighter note, if you do happen to be a musical genius and your neighbour is whistling a tune you composed. Sue his ass off!
A good idea would be to write a program to write a song that has every musical note, in every major and minor key, with all possible combinations of rhythm and chord changes. Yeah! Heck it will be ten miles long, but then I will have created every song in the universe.
Zachary Kanin takes Sunita 'Suni' Williams's Boston Marathon in space a few steps further in this hilarious piece.
From One Small Step:
April 16—Suni Williams competed in the Boston Marathon on our treadmill. Although she did not win, she said that she enjoyed the “fresh air” and “being outside.” NASA is very pleased with us for finally doing something that people on Earth aren’t horrified by.
April 19—Today, Suni used the StairMaster to begin climbing Mt. Everest. She predicts that it will take several months to complete her ascent, but she is refusing food and water. Our colleague Oleg Kotov tried to explain that mountain climbers on Earth do not deprive themselves of sustenance, but she insisted that she would “hunt for food, like a human."
There is something odd about rusticating in the Georgia countryside under a hammock and to be reading a book written by a Brit on an Indian city. William Dalrymple is one the finest scholars of the late Mughal era and one can understand his fascination and love affair with Delhi, which he calls The City of Djinns. The book, an account of a year in Delhi, is a fascinating portrait of India's capital city. He writes, "Delhi is a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic, a city of djinns".
The book flits back and forth between the past and present as Dalrymple explores the city and uncovers its secrets - the mansions, the eunuchs, Unani medicine, Lutyen's Delhi, etc. Starting with the riots following Indira Gandhi's death in 1984, the book spirals backwards going back further and further in time till it ends with a solitary sadhu on Nimbodh Ghat. For a Brit, Dalrymple doesn't have much sympathy for the British era and his portraits of the Anglo-Indians and Brits who chose to be 'left behind' aren't sensitive but comic. They are a people suspended in an age and time that has long passed. For one particular class of Anglo-Indians he does make an exception and those being the 'White Mughals', notably Col. James Skinner and William Fraser (the ancestor of his wife Victoria Fraser). One can see why these Brits who 'went native' are so fascinating and to do justice he had to write a larger piece of work - The White Mughals. For these class of Brits he is overcome with wistful nostalgia and anguish over history's great missed opportunity. For a brief period the English, Hindu, and Muslim world lived side-by-side in an odd, harmonious marriage before the Revolt of 1857 and Victorian mores destroyed that idea forever.
Delhi doesn't boast the glitz or the financial muscle of Mumbai, and isn't anyone's idea of the cultural capital either. Around partition Delhi was a city where even milkmen and prostitutes could quote Dagh, Mir, and Ghalib. The indigenous poets and artists have long departed. What remains of culture is transplanted from elsewhere. Delhi, for most, is a political circus, where the Parliament meets, the location of the annual Republic Day Parade, and incidentally also the home of the Red Fort. Monuments are really empty if the culture around it has vanished. Dalrymple's central thesis is that the Partition all but killed Delhi's cultural richness that resulted from the mixing of the Hindu and Muslim worlds from the Mughal times. The Partition exodus resulted in the city being overrun by the boorish and loud Punjabis who have no love nor understanding of the city's language or culture. Modern Delhi is divided into two halves - the decaying and dying Mughal Old Delhi and vulgar and conspicuously consumptive Punjabi New Delhi. But as he explores Delhi's past, Dalrymple cannot escape the Punjabis who now run the city and grudgingly he gives them their due. He rents an apartment from the iron-fisted Partition-refugee Mrs. Puri and is driven around by the irrepressible Balwinder Singh from the International Backside Taxi (backside denoting its location behind the International Centre).
The world that he writes about is from the late 1980s (the book was published in 1993) where he had many encounter with the famous Indian bureaucracy, but things have not changed much since at least in terms of preserving history, culture, and architecture. He writes about two brothers from a family of nastaliq calligraphers. One brother continues to preserve the dying art and the other, the more pragmatic of the two, has all but shunned it in favour of taking soft-porn photos in the same premises where his ancestors laboured for princes, omrahs, and scholars. The death and decay continue. Monuments are still uncared for, valuable papers are still rotting in basements, and grotesque improvements and changes are being made in places that are of great historical importance.
In middle of this captivating account, the mid-morning Georgia sun made it presence felt and I had to run indoors for cover. I was halfway across the world but this plot of earth is only 10 degrees north of Delhi and in any case the red earth of Georgia does remind me of the Red Fort.
If you want to make money on the stock market all you need to do is to remember to 'buy high and sell low'. Correct advice on what to do, but ultimately useless since it does not tell how. Similar is the concept that 'free market economics and education' is the answer to the problems in developing countries. Pray tell me how?
Muhammad Yunus's book 'Banker to the Poor' is an extraordinary tale of an extraordinary person doing rather ordinary things for the most ordinary of people. It is a story of great courage and determination in the pursuit of an idea that was considered to be doomed from the start.
Muhammad Yunus is a patriot, who gave up a professorship in the U.S. to return to his country in 1971 following independence to help rebuild the new nation of Bangladesh. He got disillusioned with his first job at the Planning Commission and accepted professorship at Chittagong University. All along Yunus was really hunting for a cause. Before he hit upon the idea for Grameen in 1976, Yunus tried a number of things to help the villages around Chittagong university.
If Yunus hadn't been the head of the Department of Economics at Chittagong University, he would have been booted out by the bankers and officials when they first heard his hare-brained scheme to lend money to poorest people, ones who had no credit history or collateral. It was a scheme that was not only against all banking principles, but also against plain logic. The said that the poor would simply use the money for their own needs and not for a business and the project would surely fail.
Yet, he persisted and they lent him some money for a pilot scheme.
Only upon reading the book did I realise that in addition there were also social conditions that Yunus had to fight against. Yunus knew that he needed to target women to really make a difference. In Bangladesh most women observed purdah, left all economic decisions to the male in the household, so even getting them take the credit that was being offered was hard. On one hand were the religious right who claimed that women running businesses and taking loans was against Islamic law. On the other hand were the communists who insisted that this was 'capitalist' plot to rob the poor of their despair and rage.
Yunus is a devout Muslim, but not an Islamist. He tries to shy away from 'isms' and and he writes:
I am not a capitalist in the simplistic left/right sense. Bu I do believe in the power of the global free-market economy and in using capitalist tools... The able-bodied poor don't want charity. The dole only increases their misery, robs them incentive and, more important, of self-respect.
Povery is not created by the poor. It is created by the structures of society and the policies pursued by society. Change the structure as we are doing in Bangladesh, and you will see that the poor change their own lives.
Forms have the weirdest questions to which no sane person would ever write 'Yes'. For example, "Have you ever been a member of the Nazi Party?" What??
If you survived T-Day last Tuesday, did you notice this non sequitur?
On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.
- Tom Lehrer
I have to break my current work-imposed silence to write about Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Words on the book-jackets read,
Kurt Vonnegut is among the few grandmasters of American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does.
American letters means a little less today. His books will always mean a lot to me. You can pick up any book and start on any page, you will be amused and entertained, and still have learned something. His books are rambling, often without a real thread. You don't read Vonnegut, it reads you. They will change the way you view the world without bullying you about it. Vonnegut wanted us to be humans and simply do the decent thing. Life is hard, shit happens, people are mean, things don't turn out the way they do. Kurt knew it too, as he battled depression for a number of years. But, he had the grace to understand and tell us not to forget to enjoy drinking lemonade under the shade of a tree. He said, "If this isn't nice, what is?"
It is always interesting to walk in a bookstore and see where they place Kurt Vonnegut's books. I always felt that there should a separate section called "Vonnegut". He gave us a few of the most colorful characters in fiction, famously the best-selling, but unknown sci-fi writer - Kilgore Trout.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet. Perhaps now Vonnegut will know if the following statement, one that he often made, is true:
"Life is no way to treat an animal".
Previous posts on Kurt Vonnegut:
Man Without a Country. Hear Kurt talks about his books and life in a recent interview on NPR.
Slaughter House Five
For a humanist the thought of being in heaven after death is a big joke. When asked about Issac Asimov, a past president of the American Humanist Society, he often joked, "Issac is in heaven now." Wish Kurt a good time with Issac up there!
The blog world is full of pretentious characters. How must one survive? In his characteristic sardonic way, Sinfully Pinstripe offers advice on
How to be a lower-middle brow reader. A reader defined as:
One who technically should not be having any views on Llosa or Woolf because he appreciates Tom Robbins, but one who has sniggering rights at that hot babe who is turning the pages of 'Angels and Demons' at Coffee Day (And why just sniggering rights, who can even walk up to her and suggest her a book ...
Apart from Scorsese's win as Best Director, I was a bit surprised to see The Departed pick up the Best Screenplay and Best Picture awards. Ellen Degeneres was herself; I would have liked to see some of her dancing. Her best gag of the evening was asking Spielberg to take a picture of her with Clint Eastwood for her Facebook profile. It has been Mexico's best year in Hollywood, but the big prizes did not go their way. Apart from the old Three Amigos presenting Scorsese with the award there weren't any other memorable or sensational moments.
It is a fun game trying to guess the winners each year - Oscar 2007 Predictions. Discounting The Departed, I wish I had second guessed some of the other categories. I felt Eddie Murphy should not have lost out to Alan Arkin. The other upset of the evening was Melissa Etheridge winning the Best Song. However, it was good to see that Pan's Labyrinth won most of the awards that it was nominated for.
The Oscars also mark the start of the season of drought. Perhaps it is time to get back to some of the classics.
We love to hate the Oscars because in theory they are supposed to reward the best performances of the year; in practice, the Oscars are often handed out as 'mercy' trophies for past slights, as part of some Academy agenda, or as part of some rotation or quota. While you can quibble over the categories and the winners, at least give the Academy credit for doing a good job of noticing the best movies of the year. But griping about the Oscars is as much a tradition as is Martin Scorsese being passed over. I am also waiting for the bitching and moaning that follows the next morning - best exemplified by Annie Proulx's (despite her disclaimer) grapes-are-sour gripe last year. If 'the Oscars suck' and they 'didn't really care' why even bother watching or attending? Who would really watch or care about the Golden Globes if they were not presented before the Oscars?
The hosts in the last two years have been somewhat disappointing. Jon Stewart and Chris Rock were nothing to write home about. Rock was out of control and Stewart too restrained. Ellen Degeneres might provide the right balance and might be a worthy pretender to the throne that Billy Crystal vacated.
Thanks to the Michigan Theater, I shall be able to watch all the nominated short films making this year the closest I have ever come to watching every movie that has been nominated. (I will update those categories later today Updated.)
Before getting to the predictions I would like say that it is a bit of a shame that one of the best movies of the year - Robert Altman's Prarie Home Companion - did not get a single mention. The overlapping dialogue between Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as the Johnson sisters is priceless. Another fantastic movie not to make it in some of the technical categories was - Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.
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Best Supporting Actor
What's Mark Wahlberg doing here? Haley doesn't have much of chance too. The serious contenders are: (in order) Hounsou, Arkin, and Murphy. In a presence that is felt up to the last frame, Alan Arkin's performance as the crochety, foul-mouthed, heroin-snorting grandpop was lovable and all his advice is well taken and useful. In a movie where all the roles were stereotypes the challenge and beauty was in doing something original and unique; Arkin, unlike Breslin, just played what he was supposed to play - a wise, but maverick dirty old man. Hounsou has an outside chance, but easily Eddie Murphy as the soulful, can't-keep-me-down Jimmy Early (a thinly disguised James Brown) has stolen the show.
Should Win: Eddie Murphy
Second Guess: Alan Arkin
Best Supporting Actress
If you were really looking for a puzzler then this is the category. So far, the acting awards have never been shared and if there was a year for trophies to be shared - this is the year. For reasons mentioned earlier if not for Abigail Breslin's unbelievably natural performance Little Miss Sunshine would have totally fallen apart; it would just be another cute family movie. Rinko Kikuchi has been a revelation (no pun intended) as the wounded deaf-mute girl in Babel. Adriana Barraza playing the Mexican maid reiterates just how awesome she is playing character roles. Cate Blanchett? What can I say? She is not only beautiful on the bicycle, but also can convince us to sympathize with a teacher who decides to have an affair with a 15-year old boy. In this crowd of talent, I would still pick Jennifer Hudson to edge them all out. Hudson has given it her all. While Deena Jones(Knowles) is the just another pretty singer, Effie White is a real artist. She is loud-mouthed, emotional, independent and knows how to throw a tantrum. Hudson might have been booted out of American Idol but it looks like tomorrow is her night on the stage.
Should Win: Everyone or Jennifer Hudson
Second Guess: Rinko Kikuchi
Best Actor
Forest Whitaker has saved the nominees in this category the trouble of writing speeches. In the Last King of Scotland he has stolen every scene, even scenes in which he is not present. Whitaker plays Idi Amin better than Idi Amin. Not only does he play Amin from the outside - the accent, the booming laughter, movement of the eyes, and the half-crazed look, but he is also Idi Amin from the inside. He conveys Amin's magnetic personality and how charisma can blind an entire nation. In a sense, Whitaker's performance is a disservice to the movie. The movie would have garnered more appreciation for its other merits if the magnificent Forest Whitaker had not overshadowed everything.
Should Win: Forest Whitaker
Second Guess: Forest Whitaker
Best Actress
There was a time when playing characters with some physical, mental defect was a sure-shot at Oscar success. Lately, the trend has been towards playing real characters. Six out of the last ten Oscars for Acting have gone to people playing real characters. Perhaps, since people have a better sense of a real person, it is easier to judge and reward such a role. In order, Streep and Dench have given the other best performances of the year, but the Queen is all set to rule.
Should Win: Helen Mirren
Second Guess: Judi Dench
Foreign Language
I was happy to see Water nominated and it deserves some sort of award for perseverance on the part of the filmmakers in the face of the most idiotic, politicized opposition. The best of Deepa Mehta is yet to come, this ain't it, I'll wait. Guillermo Toro's Pan's Labyrinth does not belong here; it should be in the Best Picture category. It is the finest film of year and the host of nominations in other technical categories vindicate the claim. Sergi Lopez as the vicious captain in Franco's Spain and Ivana Banquero as the innocent, fable-loving step-daughter are simply fantastic in this 'adult fairy tale'. It is hard to describe what the movie is about, because it is simultaneously about a lot of things - good and evil, honour and duty, reality and dreams. A masterpiece.
Cinematography
The Black Dahlia, an otherwise uninspired movie, gets a honorable mention here. Children of Men will win only if it is better than Pan's Labyrinth.
Should Win: Pan's Labyrinth
Second Guess: Children of Men
Costume Design
This is a toss up between Marie Antoinette and Dreamgirls. Looks like soulful Motown has an edge over gay Paris.
Should Win: Dreamgirls
Second Guess: Marie Antoinette
Best Documentary
God may or may not exist, Iraq is a mess, but global warming is a much bigger danger and given the misinformation about it, the truth better get out.
Should Win: The Inconvenient Truth
Second Guess: The Inconvenient Truth
Music
Glass's insistent sound ruined an otherwise fantastic movie - Notes on a Scandal. Santaollala's work for Babel sounds much like his work for Brokeback Mountain. Navarette's score for Pan's Labyrinth struck the right note.
Should Win: Javier Navarette
Second Guess: Gustavo Santoallala
Song
There is talk that three nominations will split the Dreamgirls vote, but they have a winner here.
Should Win: Dreamgirls
Second Guess: The Inconvenient Truth
Writing
The Departed felt apart in the end because of poor writing. Some of the loose ends were rather unsatisfactorily resolved. Notes on a Scandal deserves the award for cleverly adapting Zoe Heller's novel told from Dench's point of view without having too much of a voice-over. Good to know that you have Dench and Blanchett to pull it off.
Should Win: Notes on a Scandal
Second Guess: Children of Men
Original Screenplay
This is a tough one. It was amazing to know that Pan's Labyrinth was not written by someone like Marquez. Babel was a good effort but some of the connections in the story were a little tenuous and Arriaga could have made it a little tighter. A good contender is Letters from Iwo Jima. Here I would have to hand it to Little Miss Sunshine for a fresh look at a cliched theme.
Should Win: Little Miss Sunshine
Second Guess: Letters from Iwo Jima
Animated Film
Should Win: Cars
Animated Short Film
Should Win: Lifted
Live Action Short Film
This category is often overlooked and it was two hours well spent. I sincerely hope the Academy doesn't put the nominees in this category in the cheap balcony seats and imposes it usual 'no-speeches' rule. The most impressive adaption of Romeo and Juliet via West Side Story is Ari Sandel's musical satire - West Bank Story which features two competing falafel stores called Kosher King and Hummus Hut. Helmer & Son features a father who locks himself in a closet at a retirement home and refuses to come out. It has laughs, comic situations, and insights in family relations equivalent to films that take 4 times the amount of time. Éramos Pocos (One Too Many), the Basque-Spanish movie, is easily the best. When Joaquin's wife suddenly leaves him and his adult son, he struggles to manage the household. They both decide to bring Joaquin's mother-in-law back from a retirement home which works out great for the both of them.
Should Win: Éramos Pocos
Best Director
Unless the Academy has finally decided to take mercy on Martin Scorsese, the real contenders are Inarritu and Eastwood. Like Scorsese fans everywhere, I would rather not have him win at all than win for The Departed. It might be worth just giving him the award to watch his expression and hear what he says - that is stuff for legend. Realistically, the strongest contenders this year are Eastwood and Inarritu. They are a study in contrasts. Inarritu has done a great job of handling all the talent in his transnational, butterfly-effect movie and while the movie has been criticized for lacking 'follow-through', it is perfect in its details. If the Mexican Inarritu is bursting with talent, the American Clint Eastwood, at twice his age, is bursting with energy. In contrast to the colorful spread of Babel, we have the dark Letters from Iwo Jima, the story of Japanese soldiers stuck in the tunnels with no hope but of certain death. While Inarritu could leap from one timezone to another to move his story, Eastwood had to make a movie of soldiers in tunnels speaking in a language most of the audience would not understand - interesting and explore war from a fresh angle. He has largely succeeded.
Should Win: Clint Eastwood
Second Guess: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Best Picture
The Queen has the weakest chance and should be happy just to be nominated. The Departed is a good thriller, held together by some great acting by Jack Nicholson, DiCaprio and others, but lacks a deep theme that is so needed to be a winner. Why was there no place for Pan's Labyrinth? Little Miss Sunshine's story of a family in crisis is entertaining, but certainly not worthy of the big prize as it lacks the depth that is shown by the next two contenders. I feel that this year, the best director and best picture prizes are going to be split again. Babel has a much richer palette and while the directorial work is not as challenging as it was for Eastwood, essentially stuck with a dreary tale of soldiers and war, it has the correct soaring multi-ethnic, human theme that is always a favorite. Every element is so Best Picture Oscar-friendly that it might actually go against it. But, if my impression when I first saw months ago, before the horse-races were on, is correct Babel should win.
Should Win: Babel
Second Guess: Letters from Iwo Jima
Ashutosh grumbles about the Air Hostess myth. I almost resigned to the fact of facing or rather combating matronly hostesses on NWA and I considered it a norm after seeing it same on the other carriers. Not after I flew on Easy Jet in Europe and Indigo Air in India. BTW US airlines suck in comparison to the new Indian carriers - SpiceJet, Kingfisher, Indigo, Deccan, etc.
Air Hostess equation:
Unattractiveness of the air-hostesses = k. Age of airline
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
- HG Wells
It is well-known that in Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman never said: "Play it again, Sam"; she said, "Play it, Sam." In this week's anniversary edition of the New Yorker Louis Menand says, "...quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation", and the most famous quotes, as originally uttered, were not quotable quotes; they needed some "editorial attention". Editorialization ensures that the quote survives and consequently the person who said does too. Quotes are memes that have a life of their own.
So what is a quote anyway? Why do we find them magical? The last paragraph of his essay is just as quotable for the reasons he describes:
Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quotations are prostheses... We pick them up off the public street, but we put them to private uses. We hoard quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of time and space. That they may be opaque or banal to everyone else is what makes them precious: they aren’t supposed to work for everybody. They’re there to work for us. Some are little generational badges of identity. Some just seem to pop up on a million occasions. Some are razors. "I see a red door and I want it painted black." "Devenir immortelle, et puis, mourir." "Much smaller piece." "You’re two tents." The quotation I have found most potent in warding off evil spirits is the motto of the Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-69): "Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis." "Where you are worth nothing, you should want nothing." That’s mine. You can’t use it.
If you had time to listen to only one program on Public Radio, then it would be - This American Life. Last week's show was all the more special since it was about quiz shows, or rather people associated in some way with quizzes.
To describe the show in their own words:
One of the problems with our show from the start has been that whenever we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. For instance: Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn't sound like something we'd want to listen to on the radio, and it's our show. In the early days of the program, in frustration, we'd sometimes tell public radio program directors that it's basically just like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars. It's easy to say what we're not. We're not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We're not really formatted like other radio shows at all. Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations where things happen to them.
