Serendipity

What You See Is What You Get

2007-12-06T12:12:00.001-08:00

She catches glimpses of an oval moon that's only partially uncovered by silvery clouds. Her face reflects a bluish tinge. The apparent serenity is misleading. At the surface, the roles have been reversed. She ponders long and hard at possible consequences. This time I’m sure, she tells herself. She audits the situation with much prudence and concludes assured security. She's traded fear for desire. She’s scared and therefore in control. ‘Have you imagined us together?’ – his words reverberate in her mind. If she is to assume a certain amount of sincerity on the part of her ally, it follows logically that he is in love with her and is willing to project this onto an eternity. To love is not a primary requirement, to be loved is, not to be hurt is - she tells herself. She’s especially careful after a poignant heartbreak.

The riffs fill his emptiness. A wicked soul wonders about ways and means of riddance. He lays supine with the half-open door ushering in gushes of cold air that leave him shivering. He doesn’t bother protecting himself. The carapace is doing its job. There is attachment, he concludes without quandary, but to play it safe, he’s exaggerated and on occasion, over-said. How much longer? His eyes fixate on the couch by the wall. He remembers those passionate kisses. An inexplicable uneasiness shudders up his entire being as he realizes that he may be losing interest. Does she not turn me on anymore? Is it reducible to sex? – the questions haunt him. His self-esteem is long over and done with. He thinks of the prerogatives.

2007-06-20T22:02:00.000-07:00

Turtles with sweaters...

2006-08-13T00:45:00.000-07:00

This, in part, is due to mystery.

Let's start with a flickering lamp. But a flickering lamp is no good unless we're in the very late hours of the day. Preferably a couple of hours after midnight. Since a certain stillness is essential for this portrait, we will avoid the weekends. Monday, the first day of the week, works well. What we're seeing here is a quiet suburban tree lined street, spacious houses with lavish lawns arrayed with impeccable uniformity. Let's make these houses somewhat opulent with fancy facades; makes for greater visual appeal. In fact the house that we're looking at even has a tiny swimming pool in the back. To give our shot here some more verity, let's add some crickets chirping in the background. As we focus in on our lavish two-storey house with a derelict lagoon, we catch a glimpse of a cat whisking across the front lawn. Let's avoid being excessive and not throw in any thundering clouds or lightning. That'd be an overkill. Let's make this cat black and give her red glowing eyes. We move towards the large bedroom on the first floor with a quiet nervousness that this moment evokes, almost scared to wake anyone up by merely reading this prose. On the couch in the living room downstairs, we observe a half empty bottle of beer; Stella Artois. There might be an empty pizza delivery box with some crumbs littered around the black leather couch, but I'm not really sure. Have it in the picture if you like. There is white noise on the TV that has inadvertently been left switched on.

She appears to be sleeping unfettered, but on closer inspection we observe a tiny wrinkle on her forehead. Is something amiss? The lamp by her bed is flickering. Turtles put on their sweaters to save themselves from alien transmissions via the circumspect bulb. Her alarm clock starts to beep. She yawns, scratches her head and rubs her eyes open in stupor. Her arms reach out to snooze the alarm as she squints and eventually registers that it is 05:05AM. Time to shirk off dreams, wake up and get out of bed, she thinks.

Sitting on the fence...

2006-06-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

There's something to be said about being able to sit quietly by the window, a window that is hopefully looking out to a tranquil yet potent ocean. If you're a poet, or an artist, you might consider throwing in the sun around the horizon. Maybe the sunset. Sunsets always get a lot more poetic attention that do sunrises. Why is that? Are artists not morning people? Probably not. There's something about licentious behavior that fosters creativity. Or maybe the sunsets are more poetic in the first place, darker. Something negative about them, unlike sunrises, which happen to bring forth hope and joy and all those good things. Why do we associate light with brightness of spirit and optimism. It's fairly natural I guess. We correlate visual discernability with self-awareness. Light facilitates physical sight and hence the metaphor. So much for sitting quietly by the window.

I have an idea. So often with art, what we see is a finished piece. A completed painting, a finished book, a film, shot, edited and refined until it is released. But we're not privy to what is going on inside the artist's head, as his ideas evolve from inchoateness to coherence. Well, there maybe exceptions, but in my experience, in general this is true. And I admit that this may not be feasible or and even desirable in many cases, but it is still an interesting idea. After all, isn't there life in evolution? A kind of recursive book (much harder to define/understand this concept for a painting). A book that starts out only with a sketch, a very rough structure. Like this post. I started it with the image of a lass (now don't you get any nasty ideas!) looking out the window. Then I threw in the ocean and the sunset. Maybe I would have propped some solitude, some unexpressed sorrow in her yearning eyes next. I think it would be cool to have the reader be a part of this creative process! What do you think?

Somewhat disconnectedly, I'll close this post with a quote (actually one of the first few opening lines) from Woody Allen's '79 film, "Manhattan" (recommended!)

Chapter One. He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in ... - no, that's a little bit too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here. -

Chapter One. He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage ...

the ice cream will melt

2006-06-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

So let's see. Is there really such a thing as uninhibited, unfettered writing. Just an honest and transparent transcription of my mind. Untainted and unblemished by the lens of perspective, or the suffocating self-consciousness that comes with the urge to impress. The urge to come across as intellectually stimulating. A cross section of my mental landscape without annotations. If not impossible, it's certainly hard.

The ironic thing is, if it stops raining then the ice cream will melt.

Stella Artois

2006-05-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

Imagine the following (no words, only pictures, so for increased efficacy, please don't imagine any conversation): a hot grueling day in a tiny village in Belgium. A poor peasant and his sweating mother are floundering back home after what has presumably been a very exhausting day. The mother, once a rather dignified woman in all likelihood, now mired to a life of less than modest means has to endure blisters on her feet due to her dilapidated and worn out shoes. As they happen to walk by the only shoe store in the village, this caring and deeply disappointed son notices his mother salivating over the sparkling new pair of pink sandals with quiet temptation. Deeply moved by this poignant moment, he resolves to put his heart and soul into labour over the next couple of weeks and put together the twenty francs he needs to buy his mother those shoes. In the next shot, we see our poor little peasant ploughing the fields in the scorching summer heat, with a river of sweat dripping from his brow. We see him gathering the corn into barns and carrying it through mountainous terrain. We see him cutting and and collecting wood. But at the end of what seems like an eternity of hard work, we see him getting the twenty francs that he needs to make his mother happy. We then see the sweating peasant rushing back to the shoe store. His dedicated labour bears fruit and he buys the new sandals that his mother so desperately needs. Thoroughly tired, we see the poor peasant sitting at a cafe nearby just to catch his breath. At this point, a waitress walks over to the gentleman sitting on the table next to his and serves him a mug full of Stella Artois. In the next shot, we see the peasant gulping down an entire mug of Stella Artois himself and the waitress walking away in a lovely new pair of pink sandals. Later, we see the peasant tearing apart the Stella Artois beer mat in two and placing each part in each one of his mother's shoes to cover the holes. The commercial ends here and we read 'Stella Artois: Perfection has it's price.' If you haven't seen this Stella commercial, you should try and get hold of it. I couldn't find it on the Internet, but here are a couple of others:

The Stable Marriage Problem

2006-04-18T23:24:00.000-07:00

Computer scientists and economists will perhaps disregard this post as pretentious. But I think that the Stable Matching problem is really cool and easily formulated, so I am going to go ahead with it anyway.

Assume, for whatever reason, that you are holding a grand ball-dancing event in which you invite 'n' men and 'n' women. Each man has a strict preference ordering over the women and analogously, every woman has a strict preference ordering over the men. Your objective is to match men with women such that the pairing has a certain 'stability' quality. For the sake of this problem, assume that you have been sent back about twenty years in time and the main pairing mechanism is still heterosexual). A given pairing is said to be unstable if there exist two pairs (Amit, Puja) and (John, Alice) say, such that Amit prefers Alice to Puja and Alice prefers Amit to John (so that both Amit and Alice have incentive to cheat on their partners). Given the fickle and uncompromising nature of men, clearly instability is an undesirable property and you would like to avoid the anguish it ensues at all cost. So your task as a match maker is to pair up men and women, one on one such that the resulting pairing is stable in the sense that there are no unstable pairs. It is interesting to note that it is not sufficient for Amit to prefer Alice to Puja to make the pairing unstable. In other words, Alice must reciprocate this bias for instability.

The first question that you might be interested in is, do stable matchings always exist?
Answer: Yes (was shown by Gale and Shapley in 1962).
Caveat: The proof breaks down for mixed (homosexual + heterosexual) preferences.

The next question that you would like to resolve, given that you are organizing this ball is whether there is some easy (efficient) way in which you can determine this matching. In other words, you are interested in an efficient algorithm that computes a stable matching. The solution (also given by Gale and Shapley in 1962) is a simple and elegant one.

Here is the algorithm. Imagine that the men and women are standing at either end of the room. The algorithm is the Men Propose, Women Reject algorithm (much like the real world).
It proceeds in rounds. In the first round, every man proposes to his most desired woman. Among the proposals that a woman receives in this round (she might receive none), she (temporarily) accepts her most desired man, and rejects everyone else. In subsequent rounds, each unpaired man (and hence one who was rejected in the previous round) proposes to the most desired woman who has not yet rejected him. In case a woman, currently matched with John receives a proposal from a man she prefers to John, she rejects John (after having led him on initially by saying yes to him in an earlier round!) and accepts this other man. The algorithm terminates when all men are paired. And this works and produces a stable matching! How much it resembles real world dynamics in a modern day society - I leave to your imagination!

PS (thanks to Vivek for pointing this out): It turns out that the Men Propose, Women Reject algorithm is optimal for men in the following sense: the algorithm produces a matching in which every man lands up with the best possible woman he could have been with in any stable matching.

Moral of the story: Always hit onto the best girl even if you don't have the confidence, get ditched a few times, until you settle with the best possible woman you could possibly get.

Awakening from the hiatus....

2006-04-16T15:30:00.001-07:00

Flipping through the pages of the book, I notice the following scribbles:

A delightful dark off-Broadway show "Show People." Layered and not unnecessarily convoluted, Paul Weitz's (of About a Boy, In Good Company fame) 'Show People' is fundamentally about an artist's need to be creative. This self-referential intelligent play employs an unusual and extremely interesting form. In one line, the play is a show within a show which itself exists in another show. Read the New York Times raving review here.
A serious off-Broadway play "Mercy on the Doorstep" that examines religion and blind faith and the connection therein, in the complex, disturbing and deeply strained relationship between a "saved" daughter (Rena) and her alcoholic step-mother (Corinne) and the Rena's devout preacher husband Mark. I wouldn't say that the play has many deep insights to offer (anyone who has been around the block for about twenty years or so realizes that religion is an extremely personal matter), but it does tie together a difficult set of issues with reasonable craft. The poignant moments are well-complemented by occasional wit and humor in this three character play. Here is a review.
A quote that I ran into:
I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth - which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations - that mathematical ideas originate in empirics, although the genealogy is sometime long and obscure. But, once they are so conceived, the subject begins to live a particular life of its own and it is better compared to a creative one, governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations, than to anything else and, in particular, to an empirical science. John von Neumann
Movies:

Kontroll - a Hungarian film shot over a period of three days entirely in the Budapest subway, this beautifully put together film borders on the edge of reality and fiction. Making the obvious, yet provocative connection between the relentless, unending (sometimes annoyingly so) nature of the underground subway and life itself, this movie shows us how the show, sometimes pointlessly so, must and by inertia continues to go on!
Cache (Hidden) - It is bad enough when a movie is absurdist, but one can still scratch one's head and wonder long and hard about connections and clues to arrive at aworkingg understanding of what transpired through the two or so hours of the film, but when someone tells you that a movie is French absurdist, you know you are navigating a dangerously obscure territory. If French normal is absurdist, I leave it to your imagination to go figure what French absurdist might be like. Of course, I understood nothing. The movie goes on and on, with many long, completely unmoving shots where an innocuous looking house is in focus and nothing happens for one long minute. I certainly ran out of patience and was getting really edgy. Discussing the movie later with a friend, I came to understand that it was about guilt. But making a movie about universal emotions such as guilt, jealousy, hatred, greed without supporting it with a tangible plot is like making a movie about love only with red and white roses.
Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room: This is a documentary about the rise and fall of Enron, the epitome of an evil union of brilliant minds and corporate avarice to pull the screws on corporate America and Wall St. The film tells us how Mr Lay and Mr Skilling were really running a 60 billion dollar gambling firm. The fact that they were able to orchestrate their operations with such seamless perfection to be declared Fortune magazine's most innovative company for six consecutive years is both remarkable and frightening. In reality, some of their ideas to continue churning astounding figures quarter after quarter, projecting sky-rocketing profits are absolutely ingenuous. From being worth around 60 billion at one point in time, Enron fell, within a couple of months, like a pack of cards to under a few million, and thousands of employees lost their jobs, retirements funds and medical care money. Courts are still trying to resolve the scandals and the loopholes that led to this catastrophe as Mr Lay and Mr Skilling go through their trial over the next couple of months.

That's it for now. There is more to report but I'm kind of tired.

Santiago Senor, por favor - Day 1

2006-03-27T07:13:00.001-08:00

It is going to take me at least a week to put together all of my scribbles and journalize the unbelievable experience that was Chile. Here is Day 1 - starting off with my usual skepticism.

The first thing that strikes one about Chile as one looks at a map of Latin America is its extremely unusual, narrow shape. This slender, sliver country stretches for about 4000 kilometers along the western coast of the continent. With an average width of about 180 kilometers, you're never too far from either the Pacific ocean or the Andes mountains. Come to think of it, the shape is indeed true to the name, kind of like a chili.

At New York City airport before leaving for Santiago, Chile: "... Airports always bring forth this emotion within me. For as long as I can remember, I have been traveling alone, scourging duty-free shops for perfumes, scouting about airport lounges for my favorite foods (though in the end I invariably end up getting merely coffee or soup), waiting listlessly at boarding lounges, waiting to take off, to leave, to depart...".

If you are disturbed by my cynicism, that too before taking off for Latin America, a bohemian port for many backpackers, adventurous travelers, looking to get away from the humdrum of their daily lives, let me say in my own defense that my disposition right before the trip was one of apprehensive enthusiasm (a strange emotion, I know :]). And this was the case not because I am growing old and averse to change (I'm still as eager for fresh experiences as ever!), but because I was after all setting foot in the southern hemisphere for the very first time, skeptical of being able to make the most of this trip with my limited, five word Spanish vocabulary (si, no, adios, hola and beunos dias, tardes, noches). Having exchanged my fresh and new hundred dollar bill for fifty thousand Chilean pesos at the airport, I sipped my coffee quietly at the airport cafeteria, wondering why the Chilean peso symbol was also '$', musing at the sound of 'A mug of beer will cost you $1500 senor!' (I later found out that the dollar symbol in fact comes from the Spanish peso, abbreviating pesos as ps, a lowercase p inscribed inside an uppercase S.)

I arrived in Santiago, the capital of Chile on the morning of the sixteenth. For anyone traveling from New York in the month of March, even a mild encounter with sunlight is enough to elevate spirits. The fact that the sun was beating down unabashedly, with all its brilliance (I've always been accused, and admittedly guilty of verbosity :]) felt almost hedonistic. I had just about half a day in Santiago, for my connecting flight to Valdivia was scheduled to depart later the same evening. My very brief impression of Santiago was that it is a regular busy, bustling, big city (fact: a third of the country's population lives in Santiago, around 5 million people.)

Mad World

2006-03-27T06:58:00.000-08:00

There is plenty that has happened in this long writing hiatus, but this post is about a song that has inexorably pervaded my mind over the last week or so. Its from the sound track of Donnie Darko (which by the way is an extremely interesting film).

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, Worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, Going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, No expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrows
No tomorrow, No tomorrow

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
And they feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, Sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, No one knew me
Hello teacher tell me whats my lesson
Look right through me, Look right through me

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which i'm dying, Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it's a very very
Mad World, Mad World

Enlargen your world

Tape

2006-03-04T15:33:00.000-08:00

In my opinion, Richard Linklater is one of the most gifted movie-makers of the 21st century. His films derive their beauty neither from the complexity of gut-wrenching plot (Memento, 21 Grams, Munich...), nor from breathtaking views of a mesmerizing landscape (Gladiator, The New World...), but through the use of riveting dialogue. It is how his characters think of themselves, their lives, and the meaning (or the lack thereof) of their very existence that makes this semi-independent film-makers productions brilliant. Most of his films (which, in most cases have been written by him as well) are slices of life over a very short period of time (in the case of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, this period being a day, whereas in Tape, just a couple of hours on a torpid summer evening in a motel in Michigan).

In Tape (a film that I recently saw, hence this post), the plot is of marginal importance. In fact, one could very well imagine Linklater making an equally brilliant film with three young, juvenile, rebellious and confused high school kids sitting at a soccer field on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted from their early morning practice, looking back at a seemingly quotidian event in their lives - and I'm quite sure that he would have managed to keep his viewer equally enthralled. Tape is a minimalistic film, the entire 82 minutes of which are shot in a motel room in Lansig, Michigan. There are only three characters in the film. The coarse, laid-back and arguably lost Vince (Ethan Hawke) is a drug-dealer and a voluntary fire-fighter in his home town (Oakland), and is in Lansig for the screening of his long time high school friend's (Jon Salter) independent film that's playing at the film festival. Finally, Amy (Uma Thurman) who went to school with Jon and Vince over ten years ago, is an Assistant District Attorney in the Lansig Justice department.

Here is an exchange between Jon and Vince in the film that I liked a fair bit:

V: You're making movies about guys who rob Popeye's Fried Chicken.
J: Hey! Hey, I am telling a story... which aims to resonate the notion of where our society's headed if we're not careful. (pause) If it sounds a little pompous, it's only because I haven't fully honed my skills yet.
V:It doesn't sound pompous. It sounds... like you're talking... out of your ass.
J:Why?
V:Because you have no idea where society is headed, okay? You are just like everybody else, all right? You're just following the latest trend which you hope will get you laid until that trend switches to something else, at which point you'll drop the old one and start making movies about, you know, whatever-- turtles getting caught in fishing nets.
J:You don't like my work?
V:I like it, like I like a shot of whiskey, first thing in the morning. It's good for about 5 minutes and then I want my coffee.

Caring Is Creepy

2006-02-21T21:13:00.000-08:00

This is an amazing song.

Title: Caring Is Creepy
Band: The Shins
Album: Oh, Inverted World.

I think I'll go home and mull this over
Before I cram it down my throat
At long last it's crashed, the colossal mass
Has broken up into bits in my moat.

Lift the mattress off the floor
Walk the cramps off
Go meander in the cold
Hail to your dark skin
Hiding the fact you're dead again
Underneath the power lines seeking shade
Far above our heads are the icy heights that contain all reason

It's a luscious mix of words and tricks
That let us bet when you know we should fold
On rocks I dreamt of where we'd stepped
And the whole mess of roads we're now on.

Hold your glass up, hold it in
Never betray the way you've always known it is.
One day I'll be wondering how
I got so old just wondering how
I never got cold wearing nothing in the snow.

This is way beyond my remote concern
Of being condescending

All these squawking birds won't quit.
Building nothing, laying bricks.

If you're willing to venture out into some new independent music, I strongly recommend The Shins. Both their albums Chutes Too Narrow and Oh, Inverted World kick ass. In my opinion, their sound is fresh, and their lyrics intriguing to say the least.

The Portmanteau Film

2006-02-13T20:21:00.000-08:00

Rather early on, as I experimented with writing, I was fascinated by the potential infinity of a single moment. Obvious, as it may seem, this simple observation has been used rather remarkably in films. In fact, a portmanteau film is a kind of film that knits together several disparate unrelated stories via larger, though not contextual themes. And in fact what is interesting is the fact that the word portmanteau means a coat-rack in French. This connection is arguably a stretch, but just as a coat-rack in public places (restaurants, bars, etc) is a location for different people with different coats that (in a certain artistic sense) binds these different people, a portmanteau film brings together several separate short stories through often subtle connections. Personally, I quite like this genre of films.

Some of my favorite portmanteau films are:

Magnolia
21 Grams
Short Cuts
Nine Lives
Amores Perros

Another cool thing I learnt as I was randomly surfing the web for portmanteau are portmanteau words. These are words that are formed by combining two different words that eventually seep into the language. A few examples I saw were smog, brunch, motel, .... A more comprehensive list is available on wikipedia here.

Over a cup of coffee

2006-02-02T08:47:00.000-08:00

Even Sigmund Freud was unable to resolve the perpetually piquant question: What do women want? I'm no Freud, but my guess is we may never find out. But as a self-proclaimed rational thinker, I'd like to pose the potentially simpler question: Why is it that it is impossible to determine what women want?

And I think one good attempt at answering this profound question was this hilarious, outrageous off-off-Broadway show that I caught yesterday "Angry Women In Low Rise Jeans and High Class Issues" - five fascinating skits in the lives of different women in New York, in different contexts, yet bound by the labyrinthine complexity of their being (or feminity). Here's a summary (from smarttix.com):

Come on down and enjoy a hilarious evening of comedy as the women of New York go head to head with bikini waxes, low rider jeans, crazy oversexed mothers, lingerie wearing teenage nieces, thongs, sexual fantasies, public displays of affection, birth control drugs, their side effects, mean teenage kids on the subway, Electra complexes, traumatic memories of the first sexual experience, traumatic memories of last nights sexual experience, sympathy sex, the double standard of nudity in movies, the artistic integrity of vaginas and penises in independent film, and of course..men. It's part sit-com, part stand-up comedy and part sketch-comedy! You won't find a funnier show!

Calibration

2006-01-29T13:03:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered how meteorologists are evaluated on their jobs? Consider a simplified environment in which we are only interested in the chances of rain. So everyday, the weatherman gives us a number between 0 and 1, the predicted probability that it would rain that day. At the end of the year, the television company is working on performance based bonuses for its employees. Question is, how does one evaluate the weatherman's performance? If it rains on a day on which the predicted probability of rain was 60%, did our weatherman do well, or badly?

Answer: Calibration. And the concept is interesting and rather intuitive. Ideally, what you would like is that if the weatherman predicts a 60 percent chance of rain, then it rains with a probability of 0.60. But precipitation is a binary event on any given day. So what you do is: over the year, you count the number of times it rained when the weatherman forecasted a 60 percent probability of rain. Let this number be R(0.6). Also, let N(0.6) denote the number of times the weatherman forecasted a 60 percent probability. What you would like is for R(0.6) / N(0.6) to be close to 0.6. There's the way to evaluate the weatherman's performance. Plot an X-Y graph, with X and Y both between 0 and 1. For some discrete values of X (0.0, 0.1, ...), plot on the Y axis R(.) /N(.) for the corresponding probability. The closer the plot is to the 45 degree slope line y = x, the better the forecaster is.

When the spinning head loses its pride.

2005-12-22T23:35:00.000-08:00

Just finished dealing with the one qualifying exam I had this semester. Here's a brief report of the twenty-four hours that have transpired since.

I took a long ride from NYU to Penn Station, to catch a screening of Pride and Prejudice. A discounted ticket with free pop corn. Though the movie deserves more merit than that. To be perfectly honest, even against my own propensity to love dark films with glum endings, I liked Pride and Prejudice. In this film, the world is still an unblemished place, and love still a trespassing priority. Good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, and in that sense, the movie does not make any significant departures from the code of conduct, causality and morality we've grown accustomed to via pedagogic injections.

Some of the shots are breathtaking, and the makers have clearly been diligent in their selection of landscapes, to make the entire environment convey as much pulchritude, as was perhaps conveyed through magically woven words of Jane Austen. It's a relatively long film, but the charmingly quaint dialogue with a British accent, coupled with the very agreeable nature of the film's course of events, in conjunction with Kiera Knightley's sensational looks make it a thoroughly delightful experience.

Other movies I saw: School of Rock, The Boondock Saints and Syriana.

School of Rock is appealing at a musical level, if you're a rock sorta guy. Also, I think that School of Rock is an incredibly funny film, and is worth a watch for a casual unwinding Saturday evening. I'm a huge Linklater fan, so my opinion may be a little biased.

Syriana, on the other hand is by the makers of Trafficand as you would expect, broaches a much more serious and sensitive issue: global politics and oil. The movie shows how giant American oil corporates exploit , influence and impact the chaos in the middle east to further their personal mercenary interests. An interesting argument is presented for how buried under the rubble of corporate avarice lie the very seeds of fledgling terrorism. Though I found the beginning of the film somewhat scattered, the latter half of the film is much tighter, with things falling into place one after another, and the multiple threads all leading into one coherent and cogent plot. And yeah, finally, we have a film in which Matt Damon is no longer the cute bloke from the neighborhood. In fact, I found his character positively repulsive in the film - so that's a hundred points to him. (footnote: I'm impressed with George Clooney this year. Good night, and Good luck was brilliant too!)

And finally, The Boondocks Saints. Initially, I was tempted to cast and dismiss this movie as just another underground mafia / gangster movie, but giving the movie a little more thought (and having been told later that this movie is considered quite a cult classic), I realized that The Boondock Saints is perhaps more mature than what I had initially given it credit for. The plot is fairly simple. In my opinion, its the execution that has class and merits.

Nothing to be done...

2005-12-17T06:48:00.000-08:00

Rather bored of musicals, I decided to explore off-Broadway for somewhat more serious theater. Last night, I caught a fabulous performance of Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" (yes, I hadn't seen it before. no, I am not a loser, I think.)

Sometimes subtitled "A Tragicomedy in 2 acts", Waiting for Godot is a richly layered absurdist play, examining the existential dilemma in "I think, therefore I am." It is a play that constantly trespasses the limitations afforded by reality. Yet, a deeper, perhaps philosophical, confluence inspires a dark and tragic verisimilitude.

The extremely bare decor works at two levels. At first sight, it seems to be in consonance with the overall inescapable nothingness borne into the very DNA of the play. "Nothing to be done" is one of my favorite quotes from the play. However, the Spartan layout, also helps contrast the complexity of the play: a lot like the disparity between the plainness of the material universe and the labyrinthine intricacy of Raskolnikov's mental interiors in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

But Waiting For Godot is not just a tragic commentary on the emptiness that pervades life, it is also incredibly hilarious. The conversations between Didi and Gogo (the two tramps), as they wait for Godot (who never really shows up), by the tree on a country road are awfully entertaining.

There's no point in describing the plot here, because I could do so in a couple of sentences, and it would hardly capture the essence. So I say, "There's nothing to be done (or said), but to go and watch it!"

Random quote:

Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? (Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him) He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. (Pause) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause) I can't go on! (Pause) What have I said?

A good wiki article for more details, here.

Lightning Strikes the Tiger's Eye

2005-12-11T21:22:00.000-08:00

Once again, my sensibilities decided to betray me and collude with the merry-making that seems to have pervaded the frosty air. For the record, the weather today is one of stale freshness. A description of the immediate physical reality is in order. Just as the elephant vanished with the prophetic diary last week, winter arrived in the City unabated and unabashed. It's been snowing leopards and pandas (okay, this note is definitely inspired by animals). Snowflakes beautifully dancing down from the sky, packing rough Manhattan streets with snow jackets, as if to safeguard its charm. The veneer, while delicate, is pervasive at the same time.

And now on to the two subjects of this post: The Elephant Vanishes and Diary.

First, 'The Elephant Vanishes': a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. This is the second book by Murakami that I picked up (the first one was "Dance, Dance, Dance" - absolutely delightful). I have to say there is a certain, surreal appeal about his prose that kept me hooked to The Elephant Vanishes. My favorite stories are "Lederhosen" and "On Seeing The 100 Percent Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning." (the month of April has its own significance in my life as far as perfect girls go). With a wild and vivid imagination, Murakami's universe is mysterious and secretive. Even though the characters, on the outside, are fairly quotidian, they conceal a remarkable underlying complexity, which is developed and partially deconstructed as the story proceeds.

Second, 'Diary' by Chuck Palahniuk. Written in second person, in the cold, cutting and unforgiving voice of Misty Wilmot, this book reminded me very much of Martin Amis' Money: A Suicide Note in terms of style. The subject though, is completely different. If you've read Palahniuk's 'The Fight Club' and dumbfounded by its brilliance, you've got to check 'Diary' out. The setup: Misty Wilmot, once a promising young artist, is now an alcoholic, serving customers at their tables in a restaurant. As if life wasn't miserable enough, her husband is in a coma after a failed suicide attempt. Here's a quote from the book's cover:

"... Suddenly, Misty's artistic talent returns. Inspired but confused by a burst of creativity, she soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens to cost hundreds of lives. What unfolds is a dark, hilarious story from America's most inventive nihilist, ..."

But this book is much more than a sardonic tale. It proposes, in my opinion, the hypothesis that a beautiful work of art often has its inspiration in suffering. That pain facilitates creative fertility .

One of my favorite quotes from the book 'What you don't understand, you can make mean anything.' One random passage (not my favorite, but comes to mind right now):

This was Peter's theory of self-expression. The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a master's in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. According to Peter, nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by acccident.

Death Cab For Cutie

2005-11-18T05:53:00.000-08:00

Discovered some new music in the recent past. "Death Cab For Cutie" has to be one of the best finds in a long time. Strongly recommended to the reader. Their album "Plans" and "Transatlanticism". It's amazing how much good the state of Washington has done to my music palate. A song hook for starters: "Marching Bands Of Manhattan".

Marching Bands of Manhattan

If I Could Open My Arms
And Span The Length Of The Isle Of Manhattan
I'd Bring It To Where You Are
Making A Lake Of The East River And Hudson
If I Could Open My Mouth
Wide Enough For A Marching Band To March Out
They Would Make Your Name Sing
And Bend Through Alley's And Bounce Off all the Buildings

I Wish We Could Open Our Eyes
To See In All Directions At The Same Time
Oh, What A Beautiful View
If You Were Never Aware Of What Was Around You
And It Is True What You Said
I Live Like A Hermit In My Own Head
When The Sun Shines Again
I'll Pull The Curtains And Blinds To Let The Light In

Sorrow Drips Into Your Heart
Through A Pinhole
Just Like Faucet That Leaks
And There Is Comfort In The Sound
But While You Debate
Half Empty Or Half Full
It Slowly Rises Your Love Is Gonna Drown

How Costly is The Truth?

2005-11-16T14:28:00.000-08:00

Nathaniel Hawthorn expressed, rather eloquently in his short story "The Birthmark"

Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practice an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.

So how costly is the truth?

A negative nihilist (do positive nihilists exist?) might say 'It's never worth it'. To an Apollonian moralist, truth may be everything. A scholar pilloried to reason, rationality and reality (and the relations therein) might conceive the 'pursuit of the discovery of truth' and the 'quest for knowledge' as perhaps the very reasons for her existence. To a gloomy artist, it might be, as is remarkably expressed by the gifted twelve year old Avijit (from Born Into Brothels) [when asked for his opinion on a rather ashen photo of a starving woman]

It's sad, but we can't look away, because it's true.

What's fascinating to me is that these musings have profound philosophical underpinnings. Yesterday, I gave a technical talk at our department on "The Price of Truthfulness". The talk was based on a conference paper by a group of researchers in the computer science community (at U Wash) titled 'Beyond VCG: Frugality of Truthful Auctions'. And what these people want to understand and precisely quantify, is how much incentive does one need to offer bidders in a complex auction environment, to ensure that they reveal their true valuations to the auctioneer.

An auction is said to be incentive compatible, or truthful, if it is in every bidders' best interest to reveal (bid) their true valuations to the auctioneer. That is to say that given arbitrary bids from all the other bidders, I will always be better off revealing my true valuations to the auction. Here is an example. It is well known that traditional first price, sealed-bid auctions for a single item are not truthful. Here is why. Suppose Van Gogh's "Starry Nights" was being auctioned at the MoMA in New York. Assume that the auction is one where bidders submit sealed bids to the auctioneer, and that the painting is sold off to the highest bidder at the revealed bid. For this example, suppose that there are only two bidders at this auction: You and me. You value the exquisite masterpiece at a million dollars (feel good: you're a millionaire!), and let us say that I value it at two million dollars. In this auction setup, it is not always in my best interest to reveal my true valuation. In particular, if you bid a million dollars for the painting, I could get away by bidding one more than a million dollars and win over the picture for much cheaper than is actually my true valuation. So the traditional single-item sealed bid first price auction is not incentive compatible.

If you've used ebay, or know of Google's real time AdWords, you would know that the auction framework of these sites is a second-price auction. In a second price auction, the highest bidder is awarded the item, but is asked only to pay an amount equal to the second highest bid. It turns out that one can show, mathematically, that no matter what the other bidders do, my best bet is to reveal my true valuation in a second price auction.

So the point is, enforcing truth is not free (hence the title of this post). In the example that I gave here, there is a loss in revenue to the auctioneer if he wishes to enforce truthfulness. Of course, one might argue that in practice, auction environments are extremely competitive, and it is almost always the case that the second highest bid is almost as high as the highest bid, with the margin being really small, and so the loss in revenue is insignificant in comparison to the value of the item being auctioned.

So my talk yesterday had to deal with precisely this issue, except that the kind of auctions that I had to study were somewhat more complicated [multi-unit, multi-item combinatorial auctions]. Without imposing truthfulness, there is a certain maximum revenue that the auctioneer could hope to make. But the moment you want to enforce an auction mechanism that is truthful, you immediately lose some amount of money in revenue, and this loss is precisely what the paper investigated. So, it really was about 'How Costly is it to Enforce Truth Telling'.

Twenty Six is Not Prime

2005-11-06T08:14:00.000-08:00

Voluptuous Thai food met Bacchanalian revelry at the Red Lion in the West Village around New York City yesterday evening. For an update from Debauchers Inc. in images, consult here.

The End Of The Affair

2005-11-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a fair bit lately. Recently picked up "The End of The Affair" by Greene, a book I had been meaning to read for a long time but had never gotten around to doing it. Absolutely brilliant. Although perhaps a little mawkish, this paragraph right at the beginning of Book Two, struck a chord somewhere deep, uncharted and unprotected within me.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace. The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace. It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I loved what in fact I hate. Sometimes I don't recognize my own thoughts. What do I know of phrases like 'the dark night' or of prayer, who have only one prayer? I have inherited them, that is all, like a husband who is left by death in the useless possession of a woman's clothes, scents, pots of cream...

Cornell, Morello and Audioslave!

2005-10-30T14:54:00.000-08:00

Question: What do you do when Chris Cornell does a mesmerizing acousting rendition of "Black Hole Sun" in front of some twenty thousand people at the Madison Square Garden in New York City on a Saturday evening?
Answer: You go crazy.

Just in case Tom Morello's strange movements and wild guitaring were not enough to whet a fan's appetite, Audioslave turn up at Madison Square Garden (MSG) on an otherwise mellow Saturday evening and set the entire house on fire with a fantastic performance. Soundgarden and Rage fans (such as myself) were treated to one hell of a spectacular show, where their set list also had numbers from the respective bands. They did some of my personal favorites: "Killing In The Name Of", "Sleep Now In The Fire", "Black Hole Sun" and one of the most peppy Soundgarden songs "Spoonman". Mid-way through the concert, Cornell did a mind-blowing acoustic solo of "Black Hole Sun", and the crowd (consisting of maniacs such as myself) went hysterical.

Audioslave played almost all of their songs from the two albums, including "Doesn't Remind Me", "Be Yourself", "Cochise", "Set It Off", "Shadow on the Sun", "Like a Stone", ...

The two opening bands were 30 seconds to Mars and Seether.

The Squid And The Whale

2005-10-29T06:21:00.000-07:00

Dysfunctional, disintegrating American households have been a constant source of inspiration for film-makers. To turn this inspiration into something more meaningful though, requires much more than just the drama involving a crumbling family. "The Squid And The Whale", in my opinion, is right up there with personal favorites like "American Beauty" in the genre.

The 81 minute story is set in the idyllic context of Park Slope, Brooklyn (1986). The first thing that struck me about this film is that it is extremely real. There's nothing artificial about the movie's characters. In fact, for the most part, it doesn't seem as though the characters have been brought together externally. Instead, it appears as though the characters naturally fell in place, and their story evolved.

Each character of this film is interesting in his or her own right, and I loved the way their development is carefully nuanced through the film. It's heartening to see that the plot does not seek any kind of a moral conditioning on it's characters. Neither does it look to tie up loose ends by the film's conclusion. In that sense, there is no final denouement. Instead, the film offers an impartial slice from the life of a family that is falling through the cracks.

The plot in a nutshell is: A well established, self-obsessed writer (Bernard), whose mid-life crisis is manifesting itself as an artistic draught lives with his family in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His wife (Joan), also a Ph.D. in literature is an aspiring writer, who is just beginning to receive recognition for her writing. Walt (an indecisive / unsure about himself teen) and Frank (nine something years old) are their two children. It is the children who are the victims of their parent's decision to separate, and both of them (particularly Frank) fall prey to some sardonic and sinister nihilism as the family starts to fall apart.

The Weather Report

2005-10-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

The rain dogs raced across the Utah desert, and arrived in New York City late last night. Given their long journeys and the prophecy from the lady oracle, one would have expected them to be sort of exhausted. But what do you know about defiance.

For the record, the weather forecast today is that of a sanguine defiance. Strong low-pressure systems that were threatening to cause havoc in the northeast have subsided. However, the weatherman advises traveling salesmen, wandering nomads and car mechanics against unnecessary adventures. Fishermen, who are bound to adventure by their livelihoods, will be delighted with their finds. Caution: that has so often been thrown away into the wind must be retained though. Check your local forecast office for personal weather report.