Sunday, August 30, 2009

the uncool 30's

ive turned over a new leaf. ive quit drinking and smoking. smoking cause it was time and drinking cause i just got bored & it was easier coz i was never a big drinker anyway. all this is good im sure. however i still like to go out to clubs and such. but now i never know what to do there

and now other people's sordid drinkin stories are not amusing anymore. i am hugely bored of hearing "hey the other day i got sooo drunk and then... " thats the point where i shut off. No, i don think its interesting that u got drunk and climbed up a tree or went to bed with someone you didnt know or puked yr guts out in a gutter.

i know at least 5 in-their-20's kids who do this every weekend. brag about more beer. tweet about tequila shots gone wrong. and wear t-shirts that proudly affirm their 'i like to drink' hobby.

i think i'm kinda jealous that i don have any crutches anymore - any reasons to do soemthing stupid like alcohol or cigarettes to feel cool and young and hip. i stand around at clubs full of glamorous looking people while sipping red bull and thinking oh shit i better not have too much of this cause i wont get sleep and i got an early morning. sad. i know.

blame it on the fact that im turning 30 in another 19 days. SUCKS.
dammit. im not cool anymore. :(

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Look what you did

You put light in me
And i drink it in every morning
Cut open my veins
Pour a glass
Drop an icy teardrop
Shake it up
Smile & sip

You put ink in my fingers
And i write with them every morning
Run them on empty walls & beds
Linger a bit to make new dots
Full stop. And start again
Joining pieces of me left on pillows
With the ink you put in my fingers

You put the breeze in my step
Now i fly over snow peaks in my sleep
& float on wet concrete with wide eyed wonder
Skimming the cool below my heels
Then the wet wind crawls under my skin
& life begins in my heart again

Thursday, March 26, 2009

music & me - final part 2

ok due to popular demand by the few nice people who read my blog im back for the final installment of music & me.
The pop phase went on till i think i was 14 /15. Yeah it didnt last too long due to the aforementioned 'search for depth'. Thats when MTV happened. Not the lame ass nonsense that is MTV now, but i like to think of my childhood MTV as a real education.

Course 1: How to rebel without a cause and look really cool while doing it - taught by kurt cobain, Chris cornell & eddie vedder

Course 2: Lateral thinking: the coolest ever channel Id graphics. MTV taught me the basics of how to say one thing in the most number of superbly cool ways

Course 3: how to hallucinate and elevate without being drugged - the one and only TORI AMOS , lifelong friend and secret lover

and so continuing on..

Phase 4: teeteering 'over the edge'



My earliest memory of watching MTV was afternoons once i got back from school and noone was home. Sneakily watching MTV when i was supposed to be doing homework or something and one day catching a video set in a grungy basement filled with teenage kids head banging in slow motion to one man's pain stricken voice. I remember very clearly being struck by the orange yellow dusty feel of the video and the 'anti' cheerleaders in black dresses. it smelled like teen spirit and it was heady. then on began the grunge obsession, accompanied by spells of bad poetry scribbled behind red line notebooks apparently an expression of my 'angst'

i still have those notebooks.

Phase 5: my first brush with hallucinations


in the middle of all those brown & grey boys with voices that sounded like paper tearing, a girl with flaming red hair wearing a red tulle dress stepping in and out of windows making love to a mystical piano entered my life. she's still in it , she's still making my hair stand up and showing me 'peices of things ive never seen'
tori amos , sometimes absurd, mostly kind of pretentious when she isnt singing, but always intense and cripplingly beautiful when she is, walked in and took me over. suddenly it seemed like some secret world existed with a secret language and now i was permanent resident of a dark fairytale wonderland.

suddenly am reminded of raggity and the cloud. i miss that book :(

Phase 6: 'adult alternative & mehfil -e -electronica


ok all grown up by now, the grunge/alternative/tori phase defining most of my teens and early 20's i landed up at my first 'advertising job'. discovered a lost cousin from my mom's side - mihir living in boston. thanks to the web we started chatting and realised we were like music twins or something. the newest, coolest music came to me direct from amrica courtesy mihir , here i was with silly smile on my face zoning out on death cab for cutie, phish and the like. Till of course, i heard psychedelic trance. extremely sceptical but pushed by the urge to at least try it, i did. it started with 'this is great work music' (the earlier commercial shit) to 'hmm there seems to be something here' (morning) to 'this is incredibly visual and strangely moving' (parasense).

Am somewhere still there now except with the brilliant addition of IDM (intelligent dance music) and trip hop fellows like rum pistol , prefuse courtesy the BASAK - art partner and grphic artist. between our secret language (which noone else at work seems to understand) are the scratchy, twisted sounds of IDM making the work seem sort of more than what it is. here's to that and to music. for making my world spin.
:)

Friday, February 13, 2009

music & me - Part 1

i'm a 90's child. but unlike most 90's suburban mumbai kids, i almost never heard any hindi/bollywood music as a child. thanks to musically evolved cousins who stayed across the road, i grew up on a healthy diet of pop, rock, grunge and when MTV hit it was 'alternative' courtesy 'alternative nation' a show with jerky camera movements and a dark almost dingy set, hosted by VJ sophia who brought her very special brand of cool to the entire experience. (or was it danny? , there were two of them alternative nation and over the edge)


phase 1: Sunday Mornings with the Fab four.



This was me at maybe 5? or 6? something like that. My folks had this record player and every sunday morning the Beatles LPs' would rock our house. those days we were in no hurry to switch on tubelights so the perfect sunday morning was spent with the fab four singing 'hard day's night' and all four of us dancing and goofing around in the little bits of sunshine. ( i think thats where i got my fascination for sunrise trance from)


phase 2: Bowing down to 80's royalty



mid 80's. it started with watching madonna's like a virgin video and feeling creeped out, excited, and longing all at once. my first crush i think she was. i was too young to understand the references but i knew it was soemthing dangerously cool. Cut to me watching her performances on pirated VHS tapes goggle eyed , cut to lame mimicking of jackson's thriller moves cut to humming prince's purple rain cut to speech bubble inside my brain going 'this guy looks kinda weird, but damn this music is strangely beautiful'

apparently also somewhere in the middle of all of this was an arrogant 10 year old girl who thought peter gabriel was god and snootily snubbed everyone who didnt know who the hell he was. (god knows when this happened, but one of the snubbed friends confirms this)

Phase 3: Going Radio Ga Ga


Now to say i am a bit embarassed by this part of the music history is an understatement. Radio came into my life at this point. and so did pop music. not the madonna kind. more like the ace of base/amy grant one hit wonders kind.

so here i was in my early teens, when i decided radio and pop music was fun. No more 'borrowed tastes' i'm going to discover my own music without having to go across the road. so i started stealing No 1's from the weekly top 10's off the radio and by the end of it i had a drawer full of - you guessed it - mixed tapes. of course then i took it all too seriously and promptly rejected the entire movement because
'the lyrics dont mean anything' and 'my life is more complicated than silly love songs'. Of course what was complicating my life at 13 , ill never know.


coming up: phase 4: in search of the 'alternative', phase 5: trip hop & indie
phase 6: electronica takes over.
and then the forever top 10