Photoblog: Photo #28 — A perfect day
Imagine a Matrix-like future where we are kept captive by machines. To keep us compliant, the machines project an elaborate simulation onto our minds, making us believe that we are going about our lives like humans have for hundreds of years. Now occasionally, your mind senses that something is amiss and tries to wake up from the illusion. The machines are programmed to detect even slightest of such perturbation and address it immediately by rifling through your memories, picking out the most perfect day of your life and playing it back to you. In my case, the said machines will settle on this past Friday. It was a strangely calm day. In Amsterdam, where strong winds buffet you continuously, it felt out of place. It was as if the air had been replaced with another viscous, transparent fluid and bodies reprogrammed to breathe in it. The temperature felt perfect too. If I had a knob that regulated the city’s temperature, I myself wouldn’t have been able to dial it to such a perfect setting. The light at this time of the year is very pleasing and the absence of clouds for most part, meant a glorious sunrise and sunset. I don’t remember any remarkable achievements - personal or professional - that I can attribute to this day. In fact, for all this talk of the light being beautiful, I didn’t have time to take pictures, and the swimming class (that resumed after a break of 6 weeks), thanks to all the chlorine or whatever disinfectant they put in public swimming pools these days, left my eyes painfully irritated. And yet, there was something about the Friday (there better be right? something atavistic about the perfect last day of summer?) that makes me want to live it again (Groundhog Day style).
Clearly I’ve been reading too much science fiction.
p.s. I was thinking of music that I would set this day to, and I instinctively reached for Netru Aval Irunthal from Maryan (pardon ze cheezy grafix okthanx).
Barry Lyndon
I read about Barry Lyndon in an article on dpreview.com about the f/0.7 lens that Kubric used for shooting low light scenes (illuminated entirely by candles) in the movie. Visually, the movie was a feast for the eyes. Each frame looked like a Pastoral painting that I could’ve printed and hung on the wall.
However, at 3 hours long, the movie’s pacing was a little flaccid - except towards the end, when it felt a little rushed. The movie actually had an intermission around the 90-minute mark (announced with opening bars of Schubert’s Impromptu No. 1 — great choice). The biggest letdown however, was the acting. Ryan O’Neal maintained more or less the same unmoving expression of a deer in headlights throughout his scenes and with the story centred on him, there isn’t much the others could do to salvage the situation.
Musically, the movie was a treat. It didn’t have an original score, but the western classical and Irish folk pieces Kubric selected, fit nicely with the overall theme of the film. This Spotify playlist sums it up nicely, but if you have time for just one track, listen to the second movement of Schubert’s piano trio #2.
p.s. Even the formula one driver Mark Webber could’ve done a better job, and he doesn’t even get paid for acting. (Exhibit #1: Webber’s Canberra Milk Ads — he can even sing).
p.p.s. iTunes wouldn’t let me take screenshots of rented movies. Fortunately there is the phone’s camera.
p.p.p.s. This is the 300th post on this blog. Can’t believe I’ve been able to keep it up for 11 years (earlier on blogspot, before settling on the vanity domain).
p.p.p.p.s. The article. Barry Lyndon trailer.
Photoblog: Photo #27 - Books
I had been looking for a copy of Fahrenheit 451 at the library here for a while, but, it’s either very popular and hence always in circulation, or the library doesn’t carry it, which would be quite ironical. I finally found it at a bookstore on a recent trip to the US and managed to finish it last week.
It’s a book set in a dystopian world in future where firemen go around burning books. But saying just that about the book would be like saying that 1984 is a book about advances in surveillance technology. Fahrenheit 451 talks of a world where we are so inundated by trivial information that we haven’t any mental space left for critical thought. Books are a proxy for room to think. With a 100 cable TV channels and constant access to flood of trivial information on Facebook, Twitter and other places on the Internet, it’s a world that felt a lot real to me than the dystopian worlds that Orwell imagined. Though, from the recent leaks concerning the various government-funded surveillance programs, it seems that our democratically elected representatives are working hard on fixing that.
