Moving

This blog goes on hiatus while I shift focus to http://yogispirit.blogspot.com/ I find the blogger platform more flexible so I hope to see you there and continue the great conversations we have. Thanks!

Mon Khmer EP

Mon Khmer is a Brooklyn based band lead by Hammarsing, a good friend of mine. I’ve got the chance to see them live and really dig their music so be sure to follow their progress.

The brooding vocals and alluring beats reach deep inside you to whisper and pull you into the world of Mon Khmer. So primal is this world that it reminds me of the film Into the Wild, which itself is a haunting journey of self-discovery and a trip from the material world into the raw and boundless expanses of the natural world.

Mon Khmer – Change

Mon Khmer – GTS

Mon Khmer – Populist

Mon Khmer – Waves

A Smile of Wisdom: Poem by Bharat Thakur

When a saint and a worldly man met,
they looked at each other,
silent and mocking.
Both laughed at each other.
Each said the same thing:

What have you done to yourself?

—Bharat Thakur

Things I Need To Do Before I Leave

Subway Sketches, NYC. via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cully/

• go back to Arlo & Esme
• catch up on LOST & BSG
• eat @ jaiya thai, mamouns, shake shack, korea town, and maybe one of the fancier sushi/latin joints
• see a live concert (ideally “cut copy“)
• check out the © MURAKAMI exhibit, the new museum (bowery), and this Cameron Hayes show
• camera lens shopping at B&H
• finish my movie treatment
• meet up with the Michigan crew
• laptop replacement (if the apple release schedule is kind to me)
• load up my threadless collection
• central park run around the reservoir
• broadway show
• dumplings in chinatown

feel free to make recommendations about your favorite NYC spots.

Great Tits Cope Well With Warming

I’m not making it up—a delightful headline from the folks at BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7390109.stm

As Ricky Gervais would say, the copyrighters are certainly havin’ a laugh!

New Weird America

After discovering the music of Devandra Banhart recently, I’ve been avidly exploring the contemporary folk genre. In particular, I’ve been enjoying some music (not all of it, mind you) from the New Weird America movement. Bizarre name, I agree, but my taste was sullied, so to speak, ever since I became interested by the Dada, Expressionist, and Surrealist movements in film school. It’s clear that these older movements are an inspiration to the NWA artists.

In “Little Yellow Spider” (track #2), Banhart has very personal conversations with a number of animals and even the sun and moon:

And hey there mister happy squid, you move so psychedelically
You hypnotize with your magic dance all the animals in the sea
For sure

And oh all of the animals, all the animals

And hey there Mr. Morning Sun, what kind of creature are you
I can’t stare, but I know you’re there
Goddamn, how I wish I knew

And hey there Mrs. Lovely Moon, you’re lonely and you’re blue
It’s kind of strange the way you change
But then again we all do, too.

Check out the compilation I created using mixwit (no downloads necessary); you don’t even need to own the songs. Most artists can be considered as part of the NWA.

Dave Chappelle and Why I Love New York

In an attempt to do something different last night, I looked up some comedy clubs to visit. The Comedy Village set in Greenwich Village caught my eye since the location has been a comedy spot for 25 years—Comedy Village for the last three years, the Great Boston Comedy Club before that, and Paper Moon for the years prior. Our show started at 11pm and was supposed to run for two hours, making way for the late night show.

Just after midnight and four comics down, the host came back on and mused about it being his favorite part of the show because the audience had no idea how many comics were left. It could be two, or it could be fifty eight. And that’s when he surprised us all by saying a special guest had dropped by and DAVE CHAPPELLE walked on stage!! We found out that the Comedy Village is closing on May 10th and Dave popped by to deliver one final performance at the place where he began his career 15 years ago. He reminisced on how he put the bricks in place behind the stage and wondered why the Christmas lights were still up from 1994.

People milled in all night as word spread through the neighborhood that they had the chance to see the virtuoso in action. At one point we asked a guy who squeezed in beside us if he had been to the club before. His drunken response was, “Heck no! I was at the club next door when I heard Dave was here.” He also let us know that they were charging $30 at the door for what we paid $15.

The performance itself was a masterclass! Dave went non-stop for four hours and did a great job of engaging the intimate crowd and even called people on stage. For instance, he called on a couple of girls who entered with huge shopping bags. Turns out they were catching a flight to San Francisco for a bachelorette party but not before Dave had gone through the entire contents of the bags—dildos and weird lingerie included. Later on Dave had a personal moment which reminded him of his sketch work. He asked a guy from the front row to slowly lift a chair up high above his head with a look of astonishment as Dave played the HEROES theme music from his iPod (while sticking the mic to his headphones).

Three of my friends and I sat in the first row and Dave constantly made conversation with us, albeit making fun of us mostly. At one point he did a whole routine on my name. He couldn’t get over the fact that my name was Gaurav but since he pronounced it “Garv”, he deemed it incomplete and went on to compare it to introducing himself as just “Day” or calling a Steve just “Stee”. He was intrigued by the fact that I work in comics and even asked if we had a website so I promptly handed over a business card—what can i say, we work with a lot of celebrities so the synergies do exist.

Guests kept dropping in to say their goodbyes and at one point Dave had two other comedians and friends of his on stage as they went down memory lane, recounting experiences they had together at the club. Before closing (3:30-4:00am), Dave started rambling about politics and race but then very coherently summarized his views on globalization and the shifting “paradigm of international economics”. He stressed that corporate agendas are creating conflict for America globally and hoped that a man named Barack Hussein Obama could fix that come November.

What was supposed to be a laid-back and early night turned out to be a long, surreal experience with a top-notch stand-up comedian and satirist whose work I can’t say I’m intimate with but was certainly blown away by his wit.

Making Sense of the Web 2.0 Revolution

Talk by Clay Shirky: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5885

Iron Man Screening

Going to an Iron Man screening tonight. Stay tuned for the review.

Featured in the Bangalore Mirror: Indian Art is Now

A recent article in the Bangalore Mirror about the rising use of blogs by Indian artists to showcase their work featured “A Day in the Life” and had a small blurb on my thoughts about the subject. Check out the story here. Many thanks to my friend Farah and the writer Vaishalli for making this happen.