Major His

WTF Amazon!

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 03:29:12 +0530

WTF Amazon!

In 7988 years, I can download this album on Amazon!

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:49:00 +0530

In 7988 years, I can download this album on Amazon!

"When you think about it, why does music have any emotional appeal at all? Why should something so..."

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:54:40 +0530

“

When you think about it, why does music have any emotional appeal at all? Why should something so unlike anything else in our experience — unlike, that is, any sound generated by the normal workings of the world — have an emotional impact? Perfume seems to have a similar directness, in that we are affected by it without really being able to articulate why; as opposed to stories, for example, where we have a clearer sense of what’s going on and why it might matter to us.

A science website asked several scientists to tell them what they thought was the most interesting question you could ask of science at this moment. Most of the replies were of the nature “Is the alpha constant stable over the universe?,” “Will the Riemann hypothesis hold?,” “Does junk DNA have a function in the genome?” — science questions. My friend Danny Hillis asked, “Why do we like music?” — a question that has formed the basis of our conversations over the years. And that is truly a mysterious question, which many learned books have utterly failed to answer. Why do I like one composer’s string quartet rather than another’s, when to a Martian visitor they’d seem indistinguishable? What are the differences we’re hearing? What intrinsic wiring exists for having feelings about music? — and by intrinsic wiring I mean the kind of wiring that leads us to prefer symmetrical faces to asymmetrical ones, or to be frightened of spiders.

”

- Brian Eno (interviewed by David Mitchell)

"The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference..."

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 10:51:09 +0530

“The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Coffee (Honore de Balzac)

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 04:18:00 +0530

… I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

… The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one’s voice rises, one’s gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.

Deconstruction in graphic novels.

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:52:13 +0530

Deconstruction in graphic novels.

Infant Innocence

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:35:21 +0530

The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;
He has devoured the infant child.
The infant child is not aware
It has been eaten by the bear.
A.E. Housman

"I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a..."

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:02:00 +0530

“I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”

- Douglas Adams

"The postindustrial world is not in fact populated … by “bizarre mavericks operating at the..."

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:54:00 +0530

“The postindustrial world is not in fact populated … by “bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe.” The truth about most white-collar office work … is captured better by “Dilbert” and “The Office”: dull routine more alienating than the machine production denounced by Marx. Unlike the electrician who knows his work is good when you flip a switch and the lights go on, the average knowledge worker is caught in a morass of evaluations, budget projections and planning meetings. None of this bears the worker’s personal stamp; none of it can be definitively evaluated; and the kind of mastery or excellence available to the forklift driver or mechanic are elusive.”

- Book Review - ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft - An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,’ by Matthew B. Crawford - Review - NYTimes.com

On Writing

Tue, 19 May 2009 16:55:04 +0530

nickzed:

“I go to the library, and I open my laptop, and I sit there, regardless of whether or not I feel like it. I gave a reading at a high school the other day, and one of the students asked, ‘what do you do when you don’t feel inspired?’, and I said ‘I’ve never in my life felt inspired, it’s not a question of inspiration.’ It’s a question of this mundane, or this seemingly mundane act of will. I just go, and I’ve committed myself to this project of trying to be honest, and it’s not like a glorious revelation, it’s an incredibly difficult, frustrating, self-deprecating act.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer (interviewed by Charlie Rose)

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of..."

Thu, 07 May 2009 19:46:00 +0530

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

- Winston Churchill (via virtualvdworld)

The Anatomy Of A Nightmare

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:01:00 +0530

The old hag-like woman who lives downstairs from me is in my room, curled-up on the floor in a fetal position. She sobs and complains about my television, too terrified to stare at the screen. At first, I am surprised at the sight of her there, but soon the shock gives way to a disturbing fear, almost as if I understand her despair and come to realize the unspeakable horror that she must have conceived on the TV. All this is gravely unsettling and when the terror reaches a climax, I wake up! The eyes are wide open. The body is paralyzed, pinned to the bed in panic from the chimerical visions of the nightmare. The mind, perhaps not fully awakened from deep slumber, hangs in a state of twilight, suspended in a lull, beyond wakefulness or the apparent consciousness of a dream. In the dark, I stare at emptiness, without the use of mind and body, half dead and alive. For a fleeting moment I experience an intense thrill in this state of merely being, like a ghost floating through ether. Dilated eyes, dry mouth and palpitations - an endorphin high!

Soon this blissful, ethereal peregrination fades away. I see the cherubic face of the hag’s daughter. There is a discomforting soreness in my mouth, which has perhaps been wide open for some time. The cherub’s beatific countenance, without the slightest suggestion, transforms into a menacing grimace and the eyes turn black; deep and dark like the eyes of the devil, like that antichristical priest from Carnivàle on TV. I gasp for air and spring upright on the bed. The half-conscious slumber is gone and I am wide awake, although disoriented and confused. As I make a leap for the light switch, I catch the dying sound of the echoes of a scream, reflected in the walls around me.

The Real Badass Ram Joshi in History

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:59:00 +0530

The tamasha (a Persian word meaning “fun,” “play,” or “spectacle”) originated at the beginning of the 18th century in Maharashtra as an entertainment for the camping Mughal armies. This theatrical form was created by singing girls and dancers imported from North India and the local acrobats and tumblers of the lower-caste Dombari and Kolhati communities with their traditional manner of singing. It flourished in the courts of Maratha rulers of the 18th and 19th centuries and attained its artistic apogee during the reign of Baji Rao II (1796–1818). Its uninhibited lavani-style singing and powerful drumming and dancing give it an erotic flavor. The most famous tamasha poet and performer was Ram Joshi (1762–1812) of Sholapur, an upper class Brahmin who married the courtesan Bayabai. Another famous singer-poet was Patthe Bapu Rao (1868–1941), a Brahmin who married a beautiful low-caste dancer, Pawala. They were the biggest tamasha stars during the first quarter of the 20th century. The tamasha actress, commonly called the nautchi (meaning “nautch girl,” or “prostitute”) is the life and soul of the performance. Because of their bawdy elements, women never see tamasha plays, nor do respectable men.

Source: Brittanica Online Encyclopedia