9 days ago..

Published
by
SEV
on May 12, 2008
in staying.aside
. 3 Comments

..i last posted. i shall not apologize, i shall not rant about my lack of posting, those things are passe around here.

i should be forgiven, dear reader, i wait on my parents as they trip around north america just for my sake. i do love being coddled at 25 :)

i shall heretofore proceed to california, and not post for another week. there is a single fly in that soup though, but i cannot remove it :(

meanwhile, tashan and bhoothnath, starring the so called glitterati of the bollywood industry, do far far worse than jimmy, a film heralding the entry of mimoh.

i have to see jimmy. even before i see tashan. now.

words

Published
by
SEV
on May 3, 2008
in staying.in.my.head
. 0 Comments

Monty Brogan: Well, fuck you, too. Fuck me, fuck you, fuck this whole city and everyone in it. Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back. Fuck the squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job! Fuck the Sikhs and the Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs, curry steaming out their pores, stinking up my day. Terrorists in fucking training. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN! Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped up biceps. Going down on each other in my parks and on my piers, jingling their dicks on my Channel 35. Fuck the Korean grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in the country, still no speaky English? Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach. Mobster thugs sitting in cafés, sipping tea in little glasses, sugar cubes between their teeth. Wheelin’ and dealin’ and schemin’. Go back where you fucking came from! Fuck the black-hatted Chassidim, strolling up and down 47th street in their dirty gabardine with their dandruff. Selling South African apartheid diamonds! Fuck the Wall Street brokers. Self-styled masters of the universe. Michael Douglas, Gordon Gekko wannabe mother fuckers, figuring out new ways to rob hard working people blind. Send those Enron assholes to jail for FUCKING LIFE! You think Bush and Cheney didn’t know about that shit? Give me a fucking break! Tyco! Worldcom! Fuck the Puerto Ricans. 20 to a car, swelling up the welfare rolls, worst fuckin’ parade in the city. And don’t even get me started on the Dom-in-i-cans, ’cause they make the Puerto Ricans look good. Fuck the Bensonhurst Italians with their pomaded hair, their nylon warm-up suits, their St. Anthony medallions, swinging their, Jason Giambi, Louisville slugger, baseball bats, trying to audition for the Sopranos. Fuck the Upper East Side wives with their Hermes scarves and their fifty-dollar Balducci artichokes. Overfed faces getting pulled and lifted and stretched, all taut and shiny. You’re not fooling anybody, sweetheart! Fuck the uptown brothers. They never pass the ball, they don’t want to play defense, they take five steps on every lay-up to the hoop. And then they want to turn around and blame everything on the white man. Slavery ended one hundred and thirty seven years ago. Move the fuck on! Fuck the corrupt cops with their anus violating plungers and their 41 shots, standing behind a blue wall of silence. You betray our trust! Fuck the priests who put their hands down some innocent child’s pants. Fuck the church that protects them, delivering us into evil. And while you’re at it, fuck JC! He got off easy! A day on the cross, a weekend in hell, and all the hallelujahs of the legioned angels for eternity! Try seven years in fuckin’ Otisville, J! Fuck Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and backward-ass, cave-dwelling, fundamentalist assholes everywhere. On the names of innocent thousands murdered, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your seventy-two whores roasting in a jet-fuel fire in hell. You towel headed camel jockeys can kiss my royal Irish ass! Fuck Jacob Elinsky, whining malcontent. Fuck Francis Xavier Slaughtery my best friend, judging me while he stares at my girlfriend’s ass. Fuck Naturelle Riviera, I gave her my trust and she stabbed me in the back, sold me up the river, fucking bitch. Fuck my father with his endless grief, standing behind that bar sipping on club sodas, selling whisky to firemen, cheering the Bronx bombers. Fuck this whole city and everyone in it. From the row-houses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue, from the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in Soho. From the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park slope to the split-levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it, let the fires rage, let it burn to fucking ash and then let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place.
[pause]
Monty Brogan: No. No, fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all, and you threw it away, you dumb fuck!

upgrade hell

Published
by
SEV
on April 28, 2008
in staying.general
. 2 Comments

so, on a dreary sunday night, i decided to upgrade my wordpress. given the message on the header that i needed to do this ASAP, and that the fantastico doesn’t put it up for another 20 days, i looked in on WPAU. nice plugin install, nice step-by-step upgrading, upgrade database.. and re-login.. and boom! i cannot login. no matter what. my backups zips are apparently corrupted, and there is no mention of such an error on any page i google.

then starts hell. no login works, no login recovery works, the blog randomly kills itself and throws 401 and 402 errors, i get very very frustrated. the mySQL database decides to show me that there is no ‘users’ field (as per the error log). my provider has no clue. this keeps on until 1pm today, when i post on the wordpress forums. i await a solution. i work.

i try again.

…and it works. for no apparent reason, everything is functioning. the plugin matter-of-factly informs me that the upgrade did not complete thoroughly last time, do i want to do it again?

i create my all-important xml backup. then the database backup. i have everything, i can recover if it dies on me.

re-try.

…and it works. perfectly. i re-login. i see an updated dashboard. a little slow, but it catches up. k2 breaks, until i upgrade it too. the blog is alive, and i have no idea why it decided to kill itself for 16 hours. abs. no clue at all. somehow everything is working, i see ‘2.5.1′ in the footer in my dashboard, and i realize just how much this space means to me. hell, i pissed myself off majorly trying to make it come back to life.

i do not know the moral of this post, except that blogs should not mean so damn much. but somehow this one does. to me.

and at the end of it, i have no idea what major improvement 2.5.1 has given me over 2.5. no idea at all.

and i still don’t know why i went crazy either. ah, mystery.

yesterday, in the pool

Published
by
SEV
on April 24, 2008
in staying.in.my.head
. 2 Comments

i lay my head back.. further, further.. and all at once, i feel the water soaking the back of my head. lower and lower, now it covers my ears. meanwhile, my legs move to get me afloat in the water; and before i know it i’m on my back floating down the swimming pool.

i stare at the blue ceiling passing overhead, my hands and legs moving lazily, slowly.. keeping me moving, keeping me floating. the world is mute, sounds do not percolate through the water to my ears. i vaguely note a swishing sounds.. some experimentation soon tells me that it is me.

my eyes peer through goggles, i continue to examine a nondescript ceiling, my body remains afloat as it has been trained for the last 18 years. my eyes glaze over as i continue to move down the pool. thoughts unbidden come to me. the first thought is that i should write about this feeling of calm that floating down the pool always gives me. the second is whether i’m gonna bang my head against the wall of the pool. i dare not change position, i don’t want to lose this tranquility. there are days when i crave it, the absolute silence, and the sheer contrast it usually has to the sounds of the swimming pool.

swimming is one of the few activities that i can enjoy physically, knowing that i am halfway decent at it. when i first hit the pool after a long time, i realized just how much i had missed it. and just how out of shape i had managed to get. i’m a long way from that day now, but i’m not regular enough for my own good.

trust me: not you, not me, and definitely not hum

Published
by
SEV
on April 17, 2008
in staying.general
. 2 Comments

‘uuuu, meee aurrr ahhummm’ warbles vishal bharadwaj, as silky white words flash up on the screen.

trying to read them is pointless, there exists a world of wisdom here that requires true genius to initiate; much less understand. as a simple example, ‘doctors bhi toh mobile patient ki stomach mein chod dete hai. lekin uske baad woh kutta unke peeche bhaagta rehta hai.’ (in reference to the iconic hutch ad). and then of course, sequences involving seduction at a time of strife, and naked walks at a time of dance.

a ton-load of reviews exist deriding the cinematic tastes of raja sen and taran adarsh: people who seem to enjoy the raping of perfectly decent hollywood-inspired ideas. granted, the source material here is classic bollywood fare - poor guy, rich girl, war, love, reunion in the rain, and a final twist that can be seen halfway into the movie. the current iteration of this idea somehow manages to take out the semblance of logic maintained in the original, the decent acting, the casting, the focus… and replace it with everything that could possibly grate on you. flashback: check. song in flashback: check. flashback in flashback: check. attempt at non-linearity: check. song nearing finale: check.

i personally believe that the movie was an attempt at a sci-fi movie, which people seem to have mistaken for romance. at some point far, far in future we have a cruise going towards mars. old man and woman meet at table, old man tries to hit on old woman by telling her a poignant story of love lost and found. then of course, we realise that the people they are talking about are real people from earth, but from 50 years previously. in an effort to never lose the love of his life, our hero constructed cyborg clones of himself and the missus who regale in the soppy tale of love everyday… forever and ever. the ship runs on the energy generated by the construct in repeating the story over and over.

indian cinema is going the next step though: we are now buying the rights to the movies we copy. at least we’re learning to be honest about it.

i need to watch one more such movie. the inspiration will overflow.