Just dipped into the world of Indian blogging today. I did expect to find a few blogs, but I was still surprised when I saw them. It began when I tried the link on the Blogger home page to the Guardian Best British Blog contest. I found a special section on the Guardian website on blogging, and found there their selections from visitor’s submissions of interesting weblogs. There were two Indian logs mentioned in the Worldwide Weblogs section: Amma’s Column and Random Thoughts. There are others listed in such sections as ‘Tech’ too.

Most Indian blogs provide links to other Indian blogs they find interesting – nothing new, as bloggers have always been an incestuous community. There is also a blog devoted to a list of Indian bloggers.

A couple more: Surely Surreal and Charvaaka.slrs

As i have told you before, i am painting regularly.not the freetime painter anymore.
I have so much demons inside my head that I have to lay to rest on the canvas, but I am afraid I dont have enough time to do that in this small life I got. Funny thing is that One demon exorcised bringsforth a thousand others.

Where ever i look I see greed and untamed desire growing within people's head and splitting their skulls open. Then these demons take the shape of ram horns and starts to grow out of the split skulls. Devils above the clouds filled the sky with there urine and it is saffocating my lungs and stinging my eyes with boiling ammonia. The devils brine is running through everyones blood and is filling their eyeballs and urging them to desire the sight through the misplaced skirt of a five year old child.slcw

Reviews of recent films seen:

ALI, directed by Michael Mann


Mann is one of the great contemporary American mainstream directors. Mainstream? Maybe not quite. He subverts mainstream film-making with his radical style. At the same time, the energy and sweep of his story-telling, not to mention his use of ‘stars’ for his cast, do not seem to lend themselves to the epithet ‘art’ film, with its connotations of a deliberate pace and brooding themes. His style is muscular and fluid at the same time. And he never appears less than in command of his large, crowded canvases.

Ali is a superb film. After a dazzlingly stylish first ten minutes, Mann gets into telling the story of Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali; and Ali being who he is, the story becomes one of the times. Great attention has been paid to period detail and the fights are re-created with meticulous attention to the original footage.

At the centre of the film is Will Smith, in the lead role. The role calls for a physical performance, and Smith delivers. The publicity for the film said ‘Will Smith is Ali’. Though his performance does not have the resonance of psychological truth to be found in, say, de Niro’s Method oeuvre, it impresses in the way he emulates Ali’s essentially extroverted spirit – the confidence, the swagger, the wit, the cheek. Smith dominates the cast, which has big names in small roles. I spent three-fourths of the film expecting Jon Voight to pop up, since he was mentioned prominently in the cast, only to realize towards the end of the film that it was indeed Voight in the role of the funny-looking sportscaster who had been present all the time. But the stand-out among the impressive supporting players has to be Mario van Peebles, for the gravity he brings to the role of Malcolm X.

The widescreen photography is marvellous, and Mann uses it effectively in giving the film an epic sweep worthy of its hero. But the one major flaw that keeps Ali from reaching the level of success of Mann’s previous opus, the remarkable The Insider, is over-length. At almost three full hours, the energy level wanes perceptibly during the final third.slfr

Hey, Fobbin. Sorry about that, man. I just tried to link to a pic I hosted on Geocities and it did not work. My guess is that Geocities has some way of preventing files on their servers being linked to from outside. That is why your picture did not appear on Salon.

Anyway, since your pic could be seen on the Geocities address, I copied it to a Netfirms site and corrected your link accordingly. So you have your debut as a graphic artist on Salon. Congrats!

We can use this as an expedient. You upload your pics to your Geocities site and link it to Salon just like you did, though it will not work immediately. The next time I visit Salon, I’ll do the necessary, like I did now. It’s not the ideal way to go about it, but it’s the best I can think of for the present.

Want me to create a website for you? Fine. Give me details. What do you want on it? And there is only one work of yours I have now.

Something I did in maya.

I will post my paintings and 3d images like this.
can you create an website for me with them?slg

Swell folks (Source: Entertainment Weekly)

Bob Dylan is a trickster troubadour, a backyard absurdist whose lyrics are as expressive of feeling as they are evasive of understanding. (Even after a zillion spins, ''Rainy Day Women #12 & 35'' remains beautifully inscrutable.) Yet the contours of his lines – of lyrics that are intimately surreal, minutely narrative, and dapper with verbal innovation – suggested possibilities to other artists: most immediately to the Beatles and other '60s counterculturists, and later (to name a handful of heirs) to neo-traditionalists like Williams and Tracy Chapman, confessionalists like Joni Mitchell, and shrapnel surrealists like Beck.

...

In a half century of film, no actor – certainly no American actor – can touch Marlon Brando, although many have tried to eat off his plate.

You always knew, watching Brando fill the screen as working-class hero or ruthless Mafia don or walrus-like sexual predator, that he had opened the door to a world beyond mere performance or role-playing. Not that Pacino and Hoffman in their day, and Edward Norton, Johnny Depp, and Sean Penn today, haven't all had at least a glimmer of the understanding Brando had. But it's just that – a glimmer.

Only De Niro approaches a screenplay in a similar way, as nothing but a set of clues, a treasure-hunt map in a search for the truth of a character. Brando's own demons edited whatever script he was handed, and Brando, who understood that character is everything, gave life to doomed, dangerous, fatally flawed men.

...

Robert De Niro's paranoid diatribe from Taxi Driver – ''You talkin' to me? You talkin' to ME?!'' – has turned into a scrap of pop-culture boilerplate by now. It's a slogan; you see it on T-shirts. Frat boys blurt it out after too many beers. Ironically, though, the magnificence of Robert De Niro's acting has very little to do with showy verbal eruptions: His most magnetic scenes suck you in at that savage moment when nobody's talkin' at all.

De Niro communicates with his limbs, his knees, his fingers, his belly, his grin, his pupils, his fists, his neck, that weird mole on his cheek; as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, he speaks volumes with the simple, slow nod of his chin.

He was a skittering bundle of nerves as Johnny Boy, the cherry-bomb hooligan in 1973's Mean Streets; he dropped his muscles into deep freeze as the catatonic Leonard in 1990's Awakenings; he slipped into an armor of sinew and skin art as a skeezy ex-con in 1991's Cape Fear. And most famously, he toned into fighting trim – and then let his body crash and burn into blubbery gluttony – as boxer Jake La Motta in 1980's Raging Bull, the most furious aria in the actor's ongoing opera of duets with director Martin Scorsese.

''Marlon Brando changed acting when he walked across the stage in A Streetcar Named Desire,'' says Chazz Palminteri, who sparred with De Niro in 1993's A Bronx Tale. ''De Niro changed it with Raging Bull. At that time, no actors transformed themselves the way he did. They do it now. But they do it because of him.'' Talking? Hell, when Robert De Niro WALKS, people listen.

‘In the darkness... the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.’
- from ‘Pietà’ (1966) by R S Thomasslq

From Entertainment Weekly:

‘Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door;
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.’

That verse is by England's onetime poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who wrote it about the movies of the first half of this century, and who died before his son Daniel became one of the finest film actors of the second. That the lines still resonate speaks of the enduring power of cinema, and of its allure as the most intimate of art forms – the only one best experienced in the dark.

The last few weeks have seen me doing hectic work on a website/e-zine I created for a friend of mine. I did it using Microsoft FrontPage 2002, and hosted it on a free server on Netfirms.com, similar to Geocities, but it seemed better to me.

It is called SrikrishnaMangal. Check it out at
srikrishnamangal.netfirms.com
and let me know what you think. You can also send feedback to the editor of the e-zine using the online response sheet.slrs

I make sure that I watch a widescreen film on TV only in the letterbox format. Do you? To understand why I think you should, read this explanation of 'letterboxing' and the evil of 'panning-and-scanning' on MGM Studio's website.

More on the topic at HowStuffWorks.com.

Here’s how to use Geocities for linking to your pics:

Let’s suppose that you are using fobbinptom as your Geocities id. First of all go to geocities.com and sign in using your id and password. Then click on the link called ‘Easy Upload’. Click on the 'Browse' button and choose the file(s) on your computer that you’d like to upload. Next, click on the ‘Upload Files’ button. You’re done. The web address of the file you have uploaded (eg, mypicture.jpg), will be
http://www.geocities.com/fobbinptom/mypicture.jpg

You can check if it has worked by typing that address into your browser address bar and seeing if the pic comes up. If it works, you can link to this picture from any webpage including Salon like you did with Dali’s pics.

Your earlier attempt I suppose did not work because you tried to link from your mail account, the files in which can be accessed only on the computer on which you are signed in.

Hope you get it right now.

persistence of memory

The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1958-59) Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali - Quote

"We are entering the era of great painting. Something came to a conclusion in 1954 with the death of that painter of seaweed who was just good enough to encourage the middle class digestion. I mean Henri Matisse, painter of the revolution of 1789."
Dairy of genius. Salvdor Dali.

"I have already remarked, when describing my meeting with Freud, that his skull looked like a burgundy snail. The corollary is obvious: if you want to eat his thoughts you have to pick them out with a needle. Then they come out whole. If not, they break and there is nothing you can do about it, you will never get anywhere."
Dairy of a genius by Salvador Dali

Tell me about the river you crossed and tell me from whose tentacle did you escape?

Quotes

"There's no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery. You can't do any business from there."
- Colonel Sanders

"In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of lack of love. There is no greater sickness in the world today than that one."
- Mother Teresa

"The race is not always won by the fastest runner but sometimes by those who just keep running."
- Unknown

"The greatest thing in the world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving. "
- Oliver Wendell Holmes.slq