Movie Nights

Movie Nights
Some movies you watch for the story, some for the acting, some for the music. Then there are those that are great just because they were shot well. Thanks to the director and the cinematographer. These past few weeks, I have been able to watch a few of the most visually arresting films.

The first was Zhang Yimou's The House of the Flying Daggers. An action flick with an absolutely banal story with really idiotic twists. The martial art stuff is good, but then after a while the highly overdone CGI daggers and the supernatural nature of the martial arts gets to you. The leads Zhang Ziyi, the Aishwarya Rai of China and Takeshi Kaneshiro are great. It's a movie you have to see for the stunning fall scenes in China and you cannot help but noticing the great colour-work (if there is such a term).
Watch for color and camera only.



A librarian at Cleveland had highly recommended the Korean Film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring and refused to give more details, but said that I should watch it because, 'It's beautiful'. And it was. A floating house in the middle of lake and the change of seasons. The Master and his apprentice and the slow painful process of learning or rather self-realization. It is more a Zen koan than a movie. At the end you feel strangely at peace with the world.

A film directly on the opposite side of spectrum in terms of feeling at peaceful and being optimistic about the world is the Brazilian City of God. Felt it was closer in style and feel to Satya and other gansta-movies of late than the Hollywood Mafia movies- Godfather and Goodfellas. They seem to be quite refined in comparison to this visceral and bloody depiction of life in Rio de Janeiro's worst slum. Liked the mix of fast cuts and music for the action. eg: The first shot is a masterpiece with the fast cuts of a chicken, people chasing it with guns and then the chicken running, all with samba music in the background. Finally, it ends with the gang on one side and the police on the other and the hero with his camera in the middle trying to catch the chicken and the camera pans around. It is and is not a linear movie, it flashes back then forwards. It's like someone narrating a story from memory. You sometimes go back and then forwards and then back again. I read later that different kinds of colours for the film were used for the shots of the 60s (more brownish) and more vivid for the shots of the 70s. Very subtle.

Every two weeks the State Theater shows a classic movie at 12am on Saturday. I got there about 10 mins before the show, and was shocked to see that the whole hall was packed. In the States it is really rare to see anything packed more than 25% its capacity. Seems like all the hard-core movie nuts(there are a lot of them in Ann Arbor) had converged to watch Trainspotting. Classic features of a cult movie - a cast of really whacked out characters, especially Spud and Begbie, colorful use of slang and a counter-culture theme. All the close-ups were shot with a wide-angle lens distoring the features of the people and the angles were totally non-conventional, especially the trip scenes. They better be ...

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?

At 2am, after the movie got over, I wondered. What the hell am I doing?. Not a surprising moment of epiphany?

50 Invites!

Everybody is doing it now!

Now everybody can have Gmail. Google has decided to award another 50 invites to regular Gmail users. Leave your email or drop me a line if you want an Gmail ID or anybody you know who wants one. Can't even imagine the amount of mail that is going to be stored forever and ever. Come to think of it, I can now have 50 Gig of webmail space. Should I suggest that instead of that 1 G of E-mail space, people would love to have that much webspace for private pages?

Lebensraum

Lebensraum

Hitler justified his invasion of European countries on the pretext of wanting more Lebensraum or 'living space' for the German people. I look around my little home acre of 15 by 8 and see a mess of books, CDs, clothes lost in the blanket and wonder if more Lebensraum would simplify things. A whole extra room perhaps? Like Hitler, I don't really need more space. Mom's constant refrain, 'How about arranging your room?', sounds like voice from faraway and seems to get fainter and fainter as the days go by. There are SOME if NO perks of staying away from home. Since she is not here, I can justify and get away with it by saying,
'I can find anything anyways, ... well sort of. Besides, I like it this way.'

I am one of those people Freud would have called 'anal'. I don't delete old email. There is a LOT of space on my UMich account which I have managed to exceed a couple of times. Then we have people like Google providing Gmail with 1 Gig of space. How do you expect me to get out of this bad habit when they indulge me so. I have bills from years ago. The other day my awesome stopwatch ran out of space for the lap times. Something that I did not consider as a possibility (see old post), but I often surprise myself. Using that as a valid excuse (ie. not being able to record time), I ran a mile less than I decided. My laptop has just a 1 Gig left. My I-Pod is already running at max capacity. Should I get rid of the Vladimir Horowitz stuff or ... not?. Brochures from trips. And boy does it all pile up!

I remember getting here with two suitcases and a rucksack. What happened?

To rephrase 'Parkinson's Law',
Mess expands to fill the space available for it.

Bus Conversation

The Fine Art of Bus Conversation

No one talks to anybody on the bus anymore. Cellphones killed 'real' conversation long time ago. You climb onto a bus and once the doors shut, everyone is furiously punching the digits. If someone is quietly sitting in a corner, invariably the phone will ring with some annoying ring tone (another bane of technology) and starts yapping on it.
A few months ago, there were the unlucky ones who didn't get place to sit and had to stand and grab the handrails and couldn't grab the phone. Now after Christmas, everyone has got an I-Pod or some portable player or the other and now if they aren't talking they are plugged in.
A girl revealed to me her complete plan of study and what courses she finds hard. A few seats away, I am tempted to suggest to the guy a particular restaurant for his dinner tonight. I hear a voice in Chinese or Korean talking at supersonic speed, can't make out anything. Perhaps WE couldn't talk. My neighbour is listening to Outkast and is bobbing his head and smiling to HIMSELF.
I look at my fellow passengers disdainfully and lament the death of 'Bus Conversation' and plug into Mark Knopfler on my I-Pod.

A Nation Starved of Sporting Heroes

A Nation Starved of Sporting Heroes*



Last week Sania Mirza reached the third round of the Australian Open. In an absolute sense, not very remarkable but relatively speaking, for India it was a HUGE thing. Why? Because no Indian woman had ever done it before. Even the Prime Minister got in the act and personally congratulated her.

We have waited for a decade and more for V. Anand to finally be the crowned the best chess player in the world. Still waiting for Narain Karthikeyan to finally race on the F-1 circuit. A few months ago, when Anju Bobby George was trying to jump to India's first individual athletics medal at the Olympics, I was watching every jump online and praying for one good jump. She remained sixth. I watched the progress of the archers who seemed to be making progress to the final rounds but then failed at the last hurdle. What a familiar story. Waiting for the day when the bronze and silvers turn into an Olympic gold?

Not that I have anything against cricket, but I just think that to excel in a sport that is played by handful of nations is not a big sporting achievement. At least some youngsters have decided that swinging the rubber ball in the colony or sitting in an armchair analyzing deliveries is not what they want to do in life. In sports that count (kill me for saying this!) we are climbing slowly but surely, and not crashing out 'fighting bravely' in the first round. We have had a number of podium finishes and some big tournament wins like Gopichand's victory in the British Open.

India is quite unfairly painted simply as a 'cricket crazy' nation. We like othe sports too. We don't really want to cheer adopted teams and heros like Schumacher, Manchester United, Federer etc. and vicariously enjoy the taste of victory. We want our very own. Sania Mirza was only second to Maria Sharapova in terms of hits on the Australian Open website. Even a small percentage of our billion would be enough to rack up the hits. India a nation of a billion is still starving for a real sporting hero* to emerge. Asking the Indian fan to give up hoping is hopeless. Give us one and see how a nation cheers.

*Please note hero is not gender specific

Can't But Agree

Can't but agree

City of Angels

City of Angels

"It was a dark and stormy night ..."

...when we got to Hollywood. For the rest of the trip the fabled Southern California
Sun would simply disappear. We wondered why on earth there was this crazy rain in the middle of December? We would learn later about the tsunami and its devastating effects. Till I got this news and the paradigm shift occurred, I was upset with the havoc the rain created in MY holiday plans.
I was quite kicked about the idea of staying on Sunset Boulevard, but when I got there it wasn't anything that I imagined to be. It wasn't one bit glamorous or even touristy. It was just unimpressive. The heart of Central Hollywood between Hollywood Avenue and Sunset Blvd. is chock-a-block with motels, signs, ordinary squat buildings with the paint fading on quite a few of them. Here I was, in the centre of the oldest and most famous movie-making club and it seemed like I'd stumbled on to the set of a B-grade movie with bad actors and an anti-climactic finish.
The next day we went to the very touristy Universal Studios, a misnomer because it's simply an amusement park with a movie theme. The real studio where the real work is done is below where they take you on the studio tour. How much money can you possibly squeeze from a movie? It's all upto your imagination. Waterworld, which was a colossal flop, is one of the most popular live shows. The The Mummy Returns has been turned into another ride with you travelling backwards. 'Animals' from Jurassic Park are used in the Jurassic park ride which recreates the movie as a roller-coaster ride with a spine-chilling finale. I loved the special effects stage where they showed you how most of SFX tricks are done.
You know you are in a popular tourist spot if it is a 'photography minefield'. Minefield in the sense that you have to constantly be aware of not inadvertently getting into other people's photos and making sure others don't get into yours!
The next day we had breakfast at a surprisingly cheap joint on Hollywood Avenue called Shelley's Cafe which seemed to be the hangout of the failed-actor types. Then we did the very standard Hollywood routine. On the Walk of Fame we hobnobbed with the stars of the immortals which also included some disgusting recent additions like Britney Spears. Tried to figure out the reason why some stars face one way and some the other. Would be good trivia to know. Anybody? Then I walked over to Sid Graumann's Chinese Theater and measured myself against everybody's hands and feet. Of course the Hollywood ladies were wearing impossibly high heels so their feet seemed to be just a few inches long. The Kodak Theater was really impressive. Took pictures of the pillar that still had empty places for the future 'Best Picture of the Year'. Not the most artistic of shots, but think it will be kind of fun to see what shows up on those pillars in a few years from now.
The next couple of hours we just drove around in the massive Buick (which I was lucky to get at National Car Rental) all over Bel-Air, Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive. West Hollywood was more like it! It really lifted my spirits after the acute disappointment with Hollywood in general. This really felt like the Hollywood I wanted to see. The tall walls, the security, the opulent mansions, ornate gates and lack of any nameplates. We did not buy the Hollywood Star Home Map, but did gawk at the homes we passed. Nice!
Tired and acutely aware of our own poverty we left for the Getty Museum. Wasn't too impressed with the museum apart from old manuscripts and antique French and Italian furniture. Categories that are missing from most museum catalogs. Of course, there was a special exhibit on Cezanne which I skipped in order to go on the architecture tour.
The J. Paul Getty Museum is all about Richard Meier and his vision. Known for using his signature color white, the Getty Museum however is in an off-white colour because Meier did not want the building to look out of place with its surroundings. The vistas are simply breathtaking which Meier not only tried to harmonize with but framed them to lead the viewer to what he might miss. The whole museum is made of squares 30 inches wide. Why? Because it maps to Human Scale. ie. you can have one person on every square and they will be close but not too close. There was geometric and engineering precision without compromising on artistic beauty and importantly serving its principal function as museum, library and research institute.
We had lunch in the upscale restaurant which has one of the most splendid views of Los Angeles.
Thumb Rule: How do you tell whether a restaurant is classy or not?
The prices must be high and portions small.

By late in the afternoon the sun broke through the clouds and thanks to the pouring rain the infamous LA smog had been washed out, creating the perfect scene for shots like these. Stories that begin with dark and stormy nights do have good endings.


Complete Photo Album of the Trip

Like it or Leave it!

There are two types of people:
Those who like root beer and those who don't.

I do.

San Diego: Sunny Side Up

San Diego: Sunny Side Up

Taxi Driver
Every seasoned traveller knows this unwritten golden rule of travel.
Before getting into a taxi or rickshaw, ALWAYS NEGOTIATE the price and there is nothing such as a FIXED FARE!
Just because I was in the land of the free and home of the brave, there was no need to relax my guard. I did and a few minutes into trip I noticed the meter rolling, which resulted in the age-old Passenger vs. Driver exchange,
'Why is the meter rolling? I thought you had a fixed fare of 24$.'
'Sir, that is 24$ a person, not a flat rate!'
'But that's not what the guy told me yesterday.'
'Yes, that was yesterday. Today is Christmas Day, a holiday!'

Moral: In Vegas the house always wins, in a taxi the driver always wins.

In short, we got bilked of a cool 70$ for a 30 minute ride to Detroit Metro Airport. The only lame excuse I can offer is that 5:00 am ,five below zero is no time and place to NEGOTIATE a taxi fare. I should have known better, the seasoned traveller that I claim to be!

Shooting away in San Diego
It pays to get up early, especially if you want great photographs. In my opinion it pays even more to do this alone and early while co-travellers are sleeping. Since people are constantly pained by my 'constant adjusting' and then 'darting off somewhere'. How am I to convince them that there are people out there who do wait hours for the right light, that might disappear a minute later. The more I walked in Old Town, San Diego, the more I felt I was in Goa. Seemed like it; 9am and no sign of life on the streets!
One of the disappointing aspects of the trip was the reinforcement of popular stereotypes. Our motel was owned by a Patel and so would our other motel. Siddharth Rege made the observation that almost every Indian couple we saw at Sea World was a South Indian couple. I was impressed by his acute observation and theory on why this was so. Surprised to see a guy so domesticated, who just a few years ago was busy ogling at good looking girls!
Never thought that I would want to go to a zoo. The San Diego Zoo is great. It isn't fair, but somehow I couldn't help comparing it to my hometown's Peshwe Park zoo, which has animal after animal lined up in cages like mailboxes. In all fairness, I must give some credit to the PMC's Katraj Snake Park, constructed in the late 80s, which is more thoughtfully designed. Also, how many would pay an equivalent of 200 Rs. to see animals for a day? Using glass screens and cleverly designed barriers and moats, you get really close to the animals without disturbing them. This also minimizes potential feeding and visitors irritating the animals. I observed an interesting effect. All of us believed that we had seen many of these exotic animals like a lion, giraffe, hippopotamus before, but really we hadn't. All these images in our memories were from TV or pictures in books. So often our memory deceives us to believe otherwise.
Caught a magnificent view of the sunset on the La Jolla(pron: Hoya) beach. A beautiful beach in a slightly tricky to pronounce place. Reminds me of a quote by Mark Twain,
"They spell it 'da Vinci' and pronounce it 'da Vinchy'. Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce."

Blog Roll Update

New additions to the blog roll:
Anirudh
Akshay
Paddy
Priyanka

Time proves Freud Right

Time proves Freud Right

According to Douglas Adams an indispensable tool for travel through the galaxy is the Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy and a towel. The towel is Adam’s idiosyncratic choice (though he does provide some hilarious reasons for the choice). For any other trip you would want a watch, better if it is a digital one. I had the misfortune of losing my Titan watch during an amusement park ride during a recent trip. Getting one soon was of paramount importance, since I am one of those people who feel naked if they are not wearing a watch. Obviously, I wanted a digital watch because it has more possibilities than a simple analog one.

Blame evolution or cultural upbringing. Guys love gadgets. More correctly guys love to fiddle around, tinker with and mess around with equipment, take things apart and then try to put them back again. Anything with lots of buttons and lights does not scare the little boy. He will just go ahead and hit the buttons. Reason - ‘To see what happens’. When he gets old enough to wield a screwdriver he will be unscrewing stuff and extracting the innards of electronic equipment. Quite often this results in breaking things when they were working perfectly FINE. This invites the ire of the opposite sex, which do not have such destructive tendencies and cannot understand why guys should do this, and ALL the TIME. A girl will use things more carefully and ALMOST never mess around with things if they are working FINE.

Quite understandably a fancy digital watch with the INDIGLO light, umpteen buttons and complex functions catches a guy’s fancy instantly. I have seen women wear digital watches, but I have NEVER seen a woman wear a watch that measured heartbeats, told you the altitude above sea level or with a calculator. Then there is a question of size. There seems to be unwritten rule that any dial less than 1.5’ in diameter is a girly watch which any self respecting guy would not even touch let alone wear. What use is a watch if you can’t see the damn time without being within inches of it? Of course smaller watches have fewer displays and hence fewer functions, definitely not a guy-appealing quality.
Curtailing these possibly Freudian impulses I chose the largish TIMEX Ironman instead of the massive CASIO G-Shock (the size of a small laptop). Sumedha thought that this was the most grotesque and ugly gift she ever bought me. According to me it was the most useful gift, a gift that would be by my side ALL the TIME. Guys appreciate a good digital watch more than some silly pink shirt (Thank God she understands that!). There is a really slim chance that I will be going snorkeling 100m deep or that the 100 lap memory will never be used to its capacity. But what if …?

Douglas Adams may not be completely right, but his choice of a towel is less controversial and sexist one.

Cleveland Cleavage

Cleveland Cleavage

Been There

Eights months in the City of Rock and Roll have come to an end. Living and working has been largely fun, thanks to all the time it left me to pursue my interests. Cleveland has earned the notorious distinction of being the 'most impoverished city' in the US and I lived in a largely working class black neighborhood. Coming from Ann Arbor, a university town, big city Cleveland had its share of culture shocks. I was initially quite wary of wandering late! It made my evening run much faster! Nothing happened, though. At the end I was sort of disappointed not to have witnessed a drug dealer, a mugging or hear gun shots.

Saw some of the sights last Sunday in the worst snow blizzard. Here I was in the freezing cold taking pictures as the car slipped and slid on the ice. Paid another visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and this time managed to sneak in with a camera. Was lucky to get away without getting arrested (Pics available on request). A great museum which would take more than a day to see. The stuff on display is simply amazing. A few sample exhibits: Joplin's psychedelic Porsche, Duane Allman's guitar with 'D-U-A-N-E' spelled out with old frets, Jimi Hendrix's stage costumes, Lennon's costume from the Sgt. Pepper cover, the original Sun studio equipment and piano, original sheet on which lyrics to Dream On were written.

Done That

The first few months, with my trusty AAA maps, I travelled every weekend. East, West & South till I got tired of being on the road.

I cooked extensively and finally figured out the ideal batter proportions for the perfectly crisp dosa. Sampled the restaurants, including an Indian-Chinese restaurant ( I know this is a rare treat!) The Italian and Greek festivals during the year were fun. The Italian one was much louder and crazier. Thanks to the umpteen farewell dinners, I managed to over drink and over eat so much that I have not even finished burping for all of them yet.

Went through the movie catalog of the excellent Cleveland Heights Public library like a locust. Saw most of their foreign and classic movies, got introduced to the magic of Kurosawa and caught the ones that I managed to miss. Never thought I would see the Apu Trilogy in Cleveland. It was amusing to explain to my roomates why I had read the subtitles to an 'Indian' movie.

Saw Eric 'God' Clapton in concert at the Gund Arena. Almost saw the Cavs play at the Gund had it been at a more convenient time.

It was great to catch up with the books, real books! As a grad student you are sometimes lucky to even get some decent hours of sleep! Read or rather heard quite a few books on audio. I think I have gotten over my initial aversion to reading (sic) books this way. It's a great way to make use of dead time while doing something boring and repetitive, like commuting. I am totally sold on the idea. It doesn't work too great with serious fiction but it works.

Picked up disc golf and Scrabble. The former will have to wait till Spring.

I also did 'some useful' work at Philips where I was employed. At least manged to impress the boss and others who thought I did a splendid job. Gave everything a nice ring to it.

All in all eight months well spent.

(Apologies to those who were seduced by the title of the post and did not find what they were looking for. In fact, I am surprised you got upto here!)

Blog Feed

Feed for Thought

There was a time (in blog prehistory) when there were not more than a dozen blogs that I read. Now almost every week I stumble to an interesting new blog or every other week some friend or the other decides to take the plunge. With the patronizing arrogance of an early adopter to them I say, 'Better late than never. Welcome aboard!'
It has however generated a new problem. The problem of 'Keeping Up'. Just to see if there were any new posts on my blog roll it takes a good thirty minutes. Barring a few most do not have updates. It seemed that I could no longer avoid getting a newsreader to check the stuff for me. Which one? I took a whirl with Feed Demon, News Gator and News Crawler. I found that Feed Demon had the best interface and functionality, though it has a price tag of about $29.99 to use it beyond 20 days. Bloglines seems to be a better idea even if it does match the others in terms of the interface or functionality. The major advantages are:
1. It's free and
2. It's web-based (so you can use it anywhere in the world)
So it wins on price and flexibility.
3. Supports atom and RSS feeds

I don't think that I am a part the problem. The problem being that not every one has RSS or atom feeds turned on.(Turn it on you Luddites!). Yet in the hope that it make things easier, in addition to the atom feed I turned on (for no other reason than being lured by the blogger's help)Feedburner as an alternative feed.
For the past one week 'Keeping Up' has been a breeze.. Though if you want to read a comment or leave one you have to navigate to that page. Won't be long before this becomes seamless.

Six Feet Under

Six Feet Under

Cleveland has been great so far, but the inevitable has to happen. The infamous Lake Effect caused what could be the worst snow day in my life. My car's wheels could have well been on roller skates.

My car got stuck in the snow.
Car slid around in the ice + snow + muck + salt mixture.
I slid into the opposite lane.
Thanks to snow all day, the car got buried in a foot of snow.
Seemed to have lost two digits on the left hand while scraping the ice and brushing the snow off.
The car refused to start. Realised that the AC does not work when the car is not running!
A friend tried to jumpstart the car, it didn't work.
I had actually run out of gas and had to be air-lifted (actually towed) to a gas station.
Almost hit the house wall when I got back, despite shoveling the snow last night.

To add to insult to injury, I got no sympathy for my woes at work, which in Cleveland terms was just a regular day. This is what happened on a 'regular' day.

Two Questions
On which accursed day did I pick to live in the mid-West?
California whither is thou?

Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs

Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs of All Time
Of late, every few months or so the Rolling Stone magazine has been coming out with its Top XYZ of All Time lists - guitarists, top albums, etc. and now The Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs of All Time. The newspapers seemed to full of which were the top 10 songs. Bob Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' was nominated as the Best Song Ever and it immediately got the conspiracy theorists busy saying that this was no coincidence - 'Just like the Rolling Stone to come up with a stunt like this to boost its sales and popularity!'.
At the end of the last century we had a profusion of these lists and there seems to be no end of them even now. I find all lists of this sort quite idiotic if taken beyond a point. Lists are fine as long you use them lists, as things to do or see. To treat them as merit lists is to overemphasize some particular person/groups subjective thoughts. Compare any two lists of the same by two 'authorities' and see the amount of difference of opinion.
Rolling Stone has employed the 'safety in numbers' principle in making this list, by taking not the top 10 but top 500, so that no one is going to feel too bad about songs being left out. The panel they selected was quite distinguished and had an impressive range. Full credit for that. I found reading the personal favourites of people like Ray Manzrek of the Doors or James Hetfield more interesting. I agree with the reasons for choosing 'Like a Rolling Stone', the folk-rock transition and all that. Though personally, I would have chosen Jimi Hendrix's 'Along the Watchtower'. Why? For the sheer musical intensity and the sense of drama as Jimi rambles on crazy and then finally hits the correct key at the very end. Needless to say, that Dylan's lyrics are simply awesome. The best guitarist and the best lyricist ever combined.


After having slammed all lists in general, I must admit that they are fascinating. I have come up with a Rolling Stone Song Quotient or RSQ. I thought it was a fun exercise, even if a pointless one. This is my metric to gauge well you know your music. Since the list is heavily 60s and 70s (only 3 songs from this decade made it), a person who listens to the Top 20 or MTV will have a lower quotient. (Personally - Serves you right!)

Look at the list and check songs that you have heard before, originals only, and list the # of songs in the following blocks and calculate values of a, b, c, d, e, f.
Where,
a = [1-20]; b = [21-100]; c = [101-200]; d = [201-300]; e = [301-400]; f = [401-500];

---

RSQ = (a+b+d+e+f)/500* 0.8 + 0.2 *(a*0.1/20 + b*0.3/80 + c*0.3/100 + d*0.2/100+ e*0.1/100)

---

Why this formula?
I felt that simple average alone is not a good enough. So I grouped songs into blocks, making songs within a block to have equal importance. It modifies the simple average by giving more weight to blocks of higher-ranked songs. If you have heard every song you should have a perfect score of 1. More just weights can be obtained by using an non-linear curve for the modifier instead of the brutal quantization, but that's too much complication for what is an idiosyncractic metric anyway.

Listen to all the 500 songs, improve your RSQ and waste more time at work
@Rolling Stone Top 500 Radio