The Wonder That Is Emacs

This post is for all you people in Linuxland who stare enviously (and furtively) at Mac users with their TextMate. I know you've seen all the screencasts with some geek with a MacBook and TextMate doing their nifty snippet things and going clickety clack on their white keyboards. Well, I know I have and I said, yeah emacs is cool and all but why can't I have some TextMate coolness? Then I remembered, what the fuck? this is emacs we're talking about. A quick search reveals that emacs has had html-helper-mode (i.e. snippets) from 19-fucking-95 when html was a baby. Even cooler? It was written by Marc Andreesen. A whole load of history to go with your editing too. Here are some good blogs to setup your emacs properly with python code-completion, etc. Python Programming in Emacs Emacs as a powerful Python IDE Don't forget the screencast. That one is from 2006. Does TextMate do subversion? No, I mean properly....

Aamir - Movie Review

As you may have noticed, Aamir is getting a lot of buzz in the press. For example, Taran Adarsh writes

Films like Aamir are more for the discerning audience, for the thinking viewer. It's a film that attacks your mind, rather than your heart. It's a film that pricks your conscience.

Not one of the reviewers will tell you about all the pitfalls of this movie - its meaninglessness and the utterly retrograde politics it represents. About the politics first - the whole movie is pure Muslim bashing. It's entire objective is to get you to see Muslims as dirty, filthy, uneducated, meat-eating paedophiles and druggies. Portraying Aamir as the "educated, moderate" Muslim only makes the contrast that much starker. It is true that Muslims are poor and uneducated. But so are Hindus. But oh, just you try making a film like this about the Hindus. The moral police will be out in force talking about hurt sentiments and what not. Yet, if Muslims protest it will all be oh, look at them, they're so touchy.

Anyone with even the first glimmer of Marxist ideology will see the situation of the unwashed masses as a deliberate result of the policies of the establishment. It is class warfare and religion is just a tool of oppression. Looking for the reasons for terrorism in shady underworld dons is like looking for the reasons for cholera in a puddle of watery shit. It is purely symptomatic of repression, poverty and exploitation. Had the film carried such a radical message, it would then have been possible for the absurd plot to recede to the background as a purely narrative device to bring the bourgeois protagonist in touch with the proletariat, for the terrorist to then make the point that the real enemy is neither Hindu nor Muslim but lies in the corruption of the State and the greed of the elites. There was a point in the film where it almost went that way. I thought the director had set up a nice dialectic with the whole "aadmi apni kismat khud likhta hai" setup, but oh the waste...now, that would have been a film. As it is, Aaamir has a meaningless plot full of holes and an absurd ending and it has absolutely no sympathy for human beings that are victims of the great political games. It almost seems like someone else (cough...Anurag...cough..cough...Kashyap..) directed the film from about halfway through the first half (enough with the running behind the taxi already!!)

Is Nikhat Kazmi a Muslim? Can even she not see this film for what it is? What's that paper she writes for again? And boy oh boy did she go out on a limb for RGV with this one...some excerpts for your reading pleasure

But like his father, he has the welfare of Maharashtra at his heart and is hell bent on giving his state the multi-national power project which the NRI business executive (Aishwarya Bachchan) would like to set up in India

His camera follows the angles it excels in, plastering the screen with extreme close-ups of his protagonists. Of course, it does help when the faces in full view are extremely emotive and reflect the myriad emotions of anger, pain, passion and revenge with a mere muscle flick.

It is too boring to review the whole movie. Pathetic depiction of the goons that pass for politicians around here. Can you imagine a film about a power project (we all know which one Ramu) without a single rupee note exchanging hands? The asslicking machine is already at warp5 captain....I cannae hold her no more....

Update: A discerning viewer pointed out the very insiduous assumption at work in the film i.e. that an educated Muslim will immediately seek to distance himself from the terrorists, which is to say that their anger is not justified. Is it not possible that an educated person will look back and say that yes, after decades of marginalisation, of persecution and of being terrorised their anger is indeed justified. That is not a possibility that is admitted. Like in a one-sided argument, the film never delves into the marginalisation and terrorisation of Muslims in India, even if only to reject this as a justification. The film seems to say that only lack of education is the reason behind their squalor and the terrorism in India, and in the same breath says that the onus to educate oneself lies with the individual, as though systems of control and subjugation of whoever, Muslims, dalits, etc. just do not exist, that there will never be the equality of opportunity without some semblance of equality in circumstances.

Mike Miller - possibly the tastiest guitar player ever!!

In 1993, Chick Corea put together the second version of his Elektric Band and recorded what has turned out to be one of my favourite jazz-fusion discs of all time - the seminal Paint The World (those who have been following this blog might remember this post). The lineup replaced uber-shredmeister Frank Gambale with the little known Mike Miller, a studio musician from the Los Angeles scene. I can still remember my jaw hitting the floor when Mike's music came pouring out of my speakers for the first time.

The first thing that strikes you about Mike is his tone - it is sharp and biting, and Mike really digs into your ears with his bluesy, ballsy playing throughout the album. The second thing you notice about him is his total control and very strong melodic sense. Of all the solos on the album, his are the most singable. Mike is the polar opposite of his predecessor in the band - he doesn't go in for very fast playing, choosing instead to let his phenomenal phrasing and evolved musical sense create their own mood. Mike's gutsy playing can be heard throughout the album as he solos or comps with some bizarre chords in that crunchy tone of his. In Tone Poem, he rips an absolutely phenomenal nylon-string solo, just for fun I guess. Some of his other standout solos are on CTA and The Ritual, while the sparring with Chick on the initial bars of Ished leave you in no doubt that this is a guitar player who has learnt the theory, mastered it and then chucked it out the window as he goes with his highly evolved musical gut. I won't waste any more time here, but what I will do instead is to leave you with a few samples of the masterful artist doing his thing.

Ritual solo.mp3 Space_solo.mp3 Tone Poem solo.mp3

Mike has a solo album out called Save The Moon. While the music on this album is a lot more laid back than Paint the World (Chick can get very complicated at times), it is still a whole album's worth of immersion in some wonderful guitar playing and you should totally buy it off emusic (or wherever) if you can.