Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Electrohop therapy

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My friend Milind Parate’s band Atomati is playing a show at legendary NYC nightspot CBGB this Saturday. Milind has a day job so square, he had to be a rock drummer for street cred His old band Ladyjane had some great tunes which reminded me of the Sundays. And a great logo. Milind says, ‘p.s. please bring lighters and friends.’

So last night I saw two emo bands play and they got super pissed at each other. They were getting ready to fight and they all busted out razors and started cutting each other’s wrists. [Link]

Umar and Mohan

After Atomati, you can walk over and check out the beatsmithfools behind DD Pesh. Mohan Arora and Umar Rashid spin electrohop in LES the same night. These guys are my neighbors with the odd but endearing habit of buying me beer on their own birthdays. And they put Kishore Kumar next to Quincy Jones. Listen to ‘Morning Raaga Pt. II.’



Related posts: Zerobridge, Hipsterville, W’burg: The dungeonmasters of Galapagos Bar

Atomati, Sat. Feb. 25, 9:30pm, CBGB Lounge basement, 313 Bowery at Bleecker, Manhattan
DD Pesh, Sat. Feb. 25, 10pm, Crudo, 54 Clinton St., Manhattan

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Incredible advert!sing

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As I tried to catch some shut-eye at Chicago O’Hare yesterday, I kept hearing Indian music playing in the background and finally tracked down the source. This very slick ad for Indian tourism is running endlessly on CNN’s airport network. It’s part of the Incredible !ndia campaign, which used to be Incredibly L^me.

I agree with this critique:

Not bad but they need to do a few more urban-themed things… they all seem to focus on rural women spinning around with pots on their heads… There’s nothing wrong with pushing our history (indeed it is a big tourist draw), but by dropping in some stuff from modern India we can really change people’s perceptions. Remember, this is a bit like what Japan did with its Shinkanshens… India must be marketed as a nation where futurism runs alongside tradition. [Link]

The Turkey Welcomes You campaign shows off a modern subway system (watch clip), though it uses a lot of cheesy, Daler Mehndi-esque, gratuitous greenscreen.

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Enter Sandman

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Sudarshan Patnaik, an Indian artist who notably recreated the Taj as an “ultimate sand castle”, is cocky about his next endeavor (via the BBC):

(Patnaik) has built a huge sand sculpture of a rooster on a beach in Puri city, a resort in Orissa state, to create awareness of bird flu…
It took him five hours and eight tons of sand to create the sand rooster.

As Abhi already posted, the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus was discovered in Maharashtra a few days ago. I’m curious as to how well this sandy approach will actually work:

“This sand sculpture is basically to create awareness about bird flu because a lot of people don’t even know about this disease. And a beach is a place where a lot of domestic and international tourists come,” Mr Patnaik told the Reuters news agency.

Patnaik, who made a similar artistic statement after the tsunami, isn’t stopping with just a rooster– hens and eggs are planned, as well. Continue reading →

That’s some damn good acting

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The following would be hilarious if it weren’t actually true (thanks for the tip Suhail). The BBC reports:

The actors who star in movie The Road to Guantanamo were questioned by police at Luton airport under anti-terrorism legislation, it has emerged.

The men, who play British inmates at the detention camp, were returning from the Berlin Film Festival where the movie won a Silver Bear award.

One of the actors, Rizwan Ahmed, said a police officer asked him if he intended to make any more “political” films.

The men were released quickly and not arrested, said Bedfordshire police.

The film is a docu-drama based on the experiences of the “Tipton Three.”

After the British government secured their release following a two-year ordeal at the notorious American Guantanamo prison camp for suspected terrorists, one of the first things Britain’s so-called “Tipton Three” did was to file a lawsuit against United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The men denied any links to terrorism and claimed they had been tortured at the camp.

In their compensation claim, which is still pending, they alleged they had been “repeatedly struck with rifle butts, punished, kicked and slapped. They were short-shackled in painful stress positions for many hours, causing deep flesh wounds and permanent scarring.” They also claim they were “threatened with unmuzzled dogs, forced to strip naked, subjected to repeated forced body-cavity searches and intentionally subjected to extremes of heat and cold for the purpose of causing suffering…” [Link]

With regards to the airport detention, the details are still being sorted out:

They have called for an urgent inquiry into what happened while one of the film’s producers, Melissa Parmenter, said the detention was outrageous.

Bedfordshire police have said they will issue another statement specifically concerning the allegations made by Mr Ahmed and Reprieve. [Link]
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A mass grave of a different feather

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I’m really busy today but I still want to put a topic out there that is worth discussing. This means that I’m going to have to resort to some lazy blogging. Please forgive my complacence. Every blogger knows that a good picture is worth a thousand words and can bail you out from time to time:

A good poster for vegetarianism

A veterinarian doctor puts chickens into a pit for burial at Navapur, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Monday, Feb. 20, 2006. Farmers burned their dead chickens and health officials went door-to-door Monday in western India for signs of people infected with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus as a massive poultry slaughtering operation entered its second day. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)… [Link]

The slaughter seems pretty bad already and may get a lot worse:

The bird flu is taking grip of the world slowly and steadily. Because of massive population density in India and to some extent china/South East Asia, these countries may plunge into a deep deflationery depression cycle. According to some experts, in India, people and poultry live close to each other. In the country side most families keep poultry for eggs. With a serious break out of bird flue, India can lose 18% of its population within the first year. If the outbreak is not controlled, 38% of the population can be affected.

According to media reports, a poultry farmer has died of suspected bird flu in western India, where the country’s first outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu virus has been confirmed. [Link]

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Reincarnation

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‘Try it, you’ll like it!’ my brother once told me before handing me a peanut butter, honey and banana sandwich. My brother was the king of weird food mashups. From my brother I learned that you can make a burrito out of leftover Thai, taco sauce on anything is tasty, and you can get away with Maggi spicy ketchup on fruit. Years later when I regularly dished lucre in the direction of Asia de Cuba and Sushi Samba, I thought back fondly. Bro, you should have patented.

On the advice of several Mutineers, I dragged the entire family to Avatar’s in Sausalito tonight. Sausalito clings to the Marin Headlands like an Italian fishing village, if only pescatores drove Ferraris. Avatar’s serves food which is a mashup of Punjabi, Mexican, Jamaican and California nouvelle. One of the owners charmed my parents into ceding control of the entire experience to the chef, his mother. The game was to try and guess the ingredients of each dish.

The pumpkin enchiladas were delish, the saag paneer enchiladas almost as good. The ravioli makhani reminded me of my favorite Indian food hack. We all swooned over the samosas with apple salsa sitting atop white and brown chutney drawn in patterns like cappuccino foam. The only dish which disappointed: the mixed veggies atop watery basmati with a mint chutney base.

The restaurant is simple and homey, but the menu is much more satisfying than at its chic Indo-fusion compadre, Tabla in NYC. A sister restaurant, Avatar’s Punjabi Burritos, sits just up the road in Mill Valley. This snack shack don’t lack — I’ll be back.

The late Avatar and his family and friends have created Marindian cuisine, which successfully blends Punjabi, Mexican and a bit of Jamaican flavors, ingredients and techniques…

Literally, if we find ourselves within 100 miles of the Bay Area, we are going to Avatar. [Link]

Related post: Indian food hacks

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The Cornershop just re-opened

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Two weeks ago the Brit band Cornershop dropped its latest, “Wop the Groove.” The album accompanies a movie of the same name:

Written for the film of the same name by Mr Cornershop himself, Tjinder Singh, about London’s independent music industry, Wop The Groove had several musical makeovers before the finished composition. Rowetta, ex Happy Mondays and X Factor fame recorded her distinct vocals before her brush with tv fame, and the groove is built around her all powering voice. Cornershop’s first release in four years, it’s structure doesn’t deviate much from being one long chorus but it has enough chirpy funk and drive to keep the limbs twitching for several minutes. [Link]

The album features some notable collaborations and I think it includes a 2004 promo single titled “Topknot” with MIA.

…There’s no beating around the bush with this one, a quality track with a heavy duty riff, featuring Rowetta (ex Happy Mondays) on top form – written & produced by Tjinder Singh, also known as the national debt – recorded at Sassi P. Studio, Vatican City. The Factory Records stable have always given solid support to the Cornershop firmament, and it was this connection that led to this collaboration.

Cornershop were personally invited onto the Rough Trade label by Geoff Travis, on which they have released Topknot featuring Bubbley Kaur (“So good it sounds like Singh has found a fitting heir to Asha Bhosle” 4/5 The Mirror) & the much sought after promo mix featuring M.I.A. In between time they have been turning down TV & Film acting requests including some from Bollywood, and refusing international live gig appearances. They did do a remix for Quincy Jones called Valeurs Personnelles, a political track about value judgements, in the French language.

After immersing themselves in the deep gospel of Savoy Records and the sitar strength of Rai Gupta the band have spent the last six months airing a Sunday morning, cross denominational, religious radio programme, over the WorldWideWeb. A new Cornershop album is shaping up as another corker. In addition work has begun on a full album featuring Bubbley Kaur and also expected to drop this year.[Link]

Here are two more tracks:

Battle of New Orleans (Peel Show)

Hot Rocks (w/Rowetta)

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Schmaltzland

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The new Samuel L. Jackson/Julianne Moore film Freedomland opens with Aasif Mandvi’s perpetually startled face, looking more and more like Orlando Jones. Mandvi plays a doctor in this movie, a cross between a crime drama and Do the Right Thing. He gets five minutes of good screen time before he’s deep-sixed. From pizza guy (in Spiderman) to hospital Hippocrates is from stereotype to stereotype, but positive nonetheless.

The rest of the movie, an Amber Alert child kidnapping drama, is a jumble of Moore as junkie, Jackson as old fart community cop and Crown Heights-style race riot. The racial politics are from a Nickelodeon after-school special, Jackson was better as an elder Jedi, and cornhole-in-chief Ron Eldard, that blue-eyed devil more robotically evil than Robert Patrick, wears the official cornhole chin-beard usually sported by French gendarmes.

The Chariots of Fire-like score, the simplistic life lessons and the low-glam Moore makeup make the movie seem like some kind of Oscar bid, but instead it winds up lost in Schmaltzland.

The NYT sniffs:

This week’s contribution to our national slag heap and an early candidate for worst film of the year is Freedomland, an inept, lethally dull drama… about a white child who may have gone missing in a New Jersey public housing complex, where the residents are all black. [Link]

Related posts: Ga-ching-a-ching-a-ching, Cereal Cyrano, Aasif Mandvi in ‘Spiderman 2’

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Keeping tabs on your clan

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I have often wondered where the rest of my kind spread to once they hit the U.S. shores. My branch of our larger clan (which arrived in the mid-60s) started in Illinois and then spread on to California and elsewhere. I recently came upon the website of the Gens Project [via Dexterous Doings]. Plugging in my last name, I was surprised to see that my kind is also numerous (if you count <100 as numerous) in Texas and New York:

It’s just like an outbreak map

The Gens project is born by the initiative and the experience of a team of graduates in Humanities at the University of Genoa – Italy, who have specialized in history, demography, statistics, archive-keeping and librarianship.

Originally it was a research project about the distribution of surnames across Italy, but after the first realization and the first impact with the public, we decided to make it available to others. [Link]

Just for fun, I entered in some other notable last names… Continue reading →

Jail Time for Salman Khan?

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For those of us in America, high profile hunting continues to be part of the regular news cycle. After all, our Vice President did shoot, by accident of course, his hunting partner Harry Whittington in the face and body just last week (guns don’t kill people right, its people that kill people?).

So it was kind of humorous to see the parallels between bad boy vice president, and our own Bollywood bad boy Salman Khan, who this week (thanks Bong Breaker) was found guilty of killing two blackbucks, a protected species of antelope, in the western state of Rajasthan in 1998, and sentenced to one year imprisonment. (link)

Salman Khan and Fans

Charges against Khan were pressed by the local Bishnoi community in Rajasthan where the killing took place… “The court can hang me. I am tired of such lengthy proceedings,” Khan told the court. The poaching case is not the actor’s first brush with the law. He is also facing trial in Mumbai (Bombay) in a 2002 hit-and-run case. One person was killed and three others injured when Khan allegedly drove into a group of homeless people sleeping on a pavement. Khan faces 10 charges, including causing death by negligent driving which carries two years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

It was unclear if Khan was drinking while he was allegedly poaching blackbuck, but he was I believe, driving under the influence when he allegedly hit and killed the homeless people. As an aside Vice President Cheney when asked if they had been drinking while hunting noted in his interview with Fox News correspondent Brit Hume: “No. You don’t hunt with people who drink. That’s not a good idea.”

In that same interview with Fox News, Cheney did later indicate that he had had a beer with lunch earlier in the day. Maybe I am dumb, but doesn’t that constitute drinking? Hell a few months ago, you could get arrested in Washington DC for drinking and driving after having only one drink.

A BBC correspondent says the actor, who has also been fined 5,000 rupees ($111) has a month’s time to appeal.

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