David Smith at the Guggenheim

David Smith was one of the leading abstract expressionist sculptors of America and is on display at the Guggenheim. I really liked his work, even though I have spent precious little time looking at sculptures and really have no specific tools to analyse or describe what I saw, but I will try anyways. To start with, the Guggenheim is an astonishing museum. Frank Lloyd Wright really knocked the ball out of the park with this one. It's a very strange feeling to be walking around looking at art only to suddenly realise that you are inside a piece of art yourself, making up the kaleidoscope of colours inside the totally stark white of the museum. The curving ramps interspersed with straightline columns make for some very interesting perspectives. At times one suddenly finds oneself on a balcony looking down at the crowds milling in some gallery or the other and it really makes the head spin. Wonderful. So there I was trying to take in and make sense of this whole David Smith thing when I see something that lightning-rodded the whole experience and turned it into electricity -

Interior (1956)
After that I was quite happy to walk along the curving staircase getting blown away by DS. Works of his that made an impression on me were 'The Letter', 'The Music of the Landscape' and the little one with colours in it. The exhibition was so wonderfully curated that not only did they present his works but also enough background info for one to get a sense of his mind and thought process. For example, they had a full room of his sketches. DS said that sculpting was too slow a process and in order that his ideas have a chance to flow freely, he would sketch incessantly. He had two studios, one for sketching during the day and another for sculpting into the night. Some of his 'sketches' though, are big huge drawings in his trademark sculpting style, hardly possible to call them sketches. They provided a huge insight into the mind of the man.
Study for Tanktotems In another room, they had his actual sketchbooks on display, with his notes and jottings and everything. DS also made a series of 'Medals of Dishonour' to express his anguish at the Spanish Civil War. With titles like 'Bombing of Civilian Populations' or 'The Clergy Cooperates' or 'Death by Gas', these are fiendish works in bronze depicting the ghastly scenes of children impaled on bombs, hospital ships singing, angels of death in gas masks. Hard core. In between this David Smith orgy, lie the Guggenheim's permanent collections, a wonderful way to cleanse the palate between courses at the David Smith buffet. I especially liked Picasso's 'Woman Ironing', Van Gogh's 'Viaduc' (made the other impressionists on display look like rank amateurs) and a huge one by Jackson Pollock - Seas of Grey I think it was called.

Rova Saxophone Quartet live at the Stone - Review

Full-power avant garde jazz. We got there late and the show finished early, so all we got to catch was a forty minute set and I say - thank God for small mercies. It's not that the music was bad, it's just that avant-garde music with it's bizarre tonalities and disdain for resolution can make one feel very uneasy indeed. The band was superb - two horn guys, a bassist, a cellist and a percussionist, playing floor drums and providing sparingly used samples and street sounds from his laptop. The bass player was playing this huge acoustic bass, an old battered and much loved instrument and he was thumping along and singing and smiling this huge smile. The cellist, a mad Eastern European looking man who slouched in his chair and made faces while playing, bounced these mad lines off of the bass line and the two of them seemed to be having the best time ever. The two saxophonists played some lovely atmospheric passages and some blistering solos which made no sense to me but which were, I suppose, avant garde gold. So the Rova saxophone quartet has four albums to its credit, each of the musicians is early middle-aged at the very least and there is no doubt that they have enough chops to send anyone packing, yet they played this tiny venue to twelve people and thanked everyone for coming and sharing the evening with them. This is what I loved most about the show.

Bike rides

This happened in January but I figure it's not too late to write about my bike ride to Goa and back, especially since I count these two rides as the best of my life and real formative experiences in my motorcycling life.

When Anoop and I did this trip last time en-route to Trivandrum, it took us two days to cover the 530 kms to Goa, so when I set off from Pune at about 8 am, I figured I'd reach Goa sometime the next day. The weather was just perfect - mild winter sun, clear blue skies, and the road was flat and smooth. I headed down NH4 at a good clip, stopping once for chai somewhere south of Satara. Further on, I took the Chiplun turn-off, a stunning crossing from NH-4 to NH-17 and reached Chiplun at lunchtime. Quick break for lunch and a reassesment of my itenerary revealed that if I pushed I might just reach Goa before the end of the day. So I pushed it like a maniac all the way down NH-17 until about 1630 hrs, when the fatigue started to kick in.

 I was really starting to fade and needed a break yet the urgency of reaching Goa remained. I decided against a break, instead figuring I'd ride the next hour or so at a comfortable 60kmph. No sooner had I slowed down than I was passed by a red Pulsar, similarly loaded with luggage (he wasn't bogged down by a paraglider though, lucky bastard) and clearly going my way. Perfect. I just follow. It was sweet, with the Pulsar clearing the way for me I could really relax and take some time to enjoy the ride too. About an hour afterwards I figured I'd relaxed for enough time and squeezed the throttle. As I passed my unknown benefactor I figured I'd give him a little wave, but we were on a turn and I couldn't see his face. No matter. A little further on I stopped for fuel. After tanking up I waited by the highway, smoking a cigarette, for the guy to pass, but he never did. Strange I thought. There was nowhere else to go. Anyways, I remembered his license plate number - MH04 CN 7147 - and figured I'd bump into him somewhere in Goa perhaps. I was already thinking of him as some sort of guardian angel who appeared when I needed him and then disappeared immediately afterwards.

I pushed on through the gathering gloom, crossing Sawantwadi in the dark. Getting into Goa in the dark is usually horrible with everyone on full high beam and speed almost impossible, yet on that day, there was almost zero traffic. In the end I reached my destination at 2030 hrs, a straight 12 and a half hour burn from Pune to Goa, with perhaps an hour spent on breaks. I was dog tired, but immensely happy. I'd done 560 kms (double my previous best) and made it to Goa in a single day. It was a rare achievement, and one of which I was inordinately proud. And imagine my surprise when the tripmeter (which I'd reset in Mumbai the previous day) read out my guardian angel's license plate number - 714.7 kms. Shocking coincidence? I think so.

Coming back was actually even better. I remember nothing of the ride. I set off late, 1122 hrs, and was suffering from a runny nose and stomach likewise, so I figured I'd reach Kolhapur by evening, then carry on to Pune the next day. Right after Sawantwadi, I took the Amboli ghat via Gadhinglaz and Sankeshwar. It's probably the shortest route from Goa and it was a happy accident for me to find it. At 1530 hrs, I was blowing past Kolhapur at 120 kph with a big smile on my face. Another four hours of high speed burn, and I was down Katraj ghat and in Pune at 1922 hrs - eight hours from Calangute to Pune. I was flush with endorphins and took about two days to come down from this ride, by far the best of my life. It was 420kms, a full 160 clicks shorter than the ride out. Before these two rides, I was of the take-it-slow and enjoy-the-ride variety, but now I find that these endurance tests, these marathon high-speed biking sessions are far more fulfilling.

XML-RPC Excel client for the NSE

I spent the afternoon writing an XML-RPC server and client in Excel for accessing the National Stock Exchange's order books. This is great if you want to just get the current bid and offer prices for various options or futures contracts in a portfolio. The RPC server scrapes the NSE site for the info and returns it as XML. The simple getquote() function in Excel is responsible for sending the request and returning the answer. The sample Excel sheet is at http://patang.org/projects/nse/XMLRPCOptionViewer.xls You might have to add a reference to the comxmlrpc library in the macro code. The library is available at http://comxmlrpc.sourceforge.net/. Right now the RPC server only returns the bid side quote. I'm working on making it return more comprehensive data. If you download and use the spreadsheet, please let me know.