There was a time when you said the above word when you doubted the veracity of the statement or question you were confronted with. That was before the Modern Family cast entered your living room and your pizza and beer laden brain. Nowadays, it could mean anything from, 'you are kidding me!', to 'No, you don't mean that', to 'Why is this happening to me?' to 'Oh, come on now' and a wide range of other emotions and expressions. I am not knocking a sitcom lingo wriggling its way into the everyday vocabulary of its audience, Seinfeld did it with 'yada, yada'. But that was a new word, wasn't it? Somehow, "seriously" doesn't have the same appeal. You just take an existing word and cram it with all kinds of meanings till dies a violent death, groaning under the weight of all the meanings it was not supposed to carry, probably blurting out weakly before breathing its last:' I couldn't take it. Seriously.' It's force-feeding, that's what it is, a foie gras (wtd?) of words. Interestingly, I've only observed the fairer sex displaying the symptoms of this, shall we say, 'seriousitis'? Hope it's a passing fad, in all seriousness.

I purchased a kindle book the other day titled 'Dancing beyond thought'. It's a collection of verses from the Gita and the author's sincere belief is that one can take any of these verses and make chanting that a daily ritual. It's transliterated with English pronunciations along with the verses. Speaking of a verse that resonates, I always felt drawn to the instruction to 'do your duty without expecting results' (karmanye vadikharaste ...').

It allows you to focus your mind on what's at hand, not a distant victory whether it's the money that's going to be in your account or an award that you may or may not get someday. Since it un-clutters your mind, you can concentrate on the task at hand. It absolves you of the result, good or bad bestowing upon you a sense of peace and calm settle in you as you go about doing your duty, whatever that maybe.

There's a similar story in a Zen koan. An impatient student keen on learning kendo, a Japanese martial art(way of the Sword), approaches the sensei and asks him to teach the art of kendo. The master says it will take ten years. The student, appalled, says, 'But master, I have to learn it in five years'. 'Oh?' says the master, 'in that case, it will take twenty years'.

The lesson is: focus on what you have to do and the rest will take care of itself. In the case of the student, effort and single-minded attention would have ensured that he became adept at the art in ten years or less, but with his mind on the result, it was obviously going  be delayed. The more impatient you are, the longer it will take.

Which somehow ties back to Stephen King's 'writers write' piece of advice. It doesn't matter if your book is published or not; whether you have a million readers or five. All that matters is that you sit at the computer and write. Because, like he says: “Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.” 

It doesn't have to be stories all the time. You can take a break between your novels and story writing schedule by writing blogs. Even if you write a bestseller, what next? Are you going to stop? Is that the best you got, to quote Ali (apparently that was how he taunted his opponents in the ring)? Not all bestsellers are great. Again, going back to King, he hates Snowfall in the cedar type stories; Tom Robbins loathes 'Fifty shades of grey'. So to write a decent book, you have to keep writing, and if you make it to the bestseller list, great, but that's just the beginning. As they said when I was learning Aikido very briefly, 'a black belt is not the end, it's the beginning'.

I almost always get drawn in by the first line of a book before buying it, and Marquez’ masterpiece was one such book I was lured into by the opening lines. There is something melancholic, beautiful, engaging, mysterious and irresistible about those first few lines. I had attempted reading him earlier, about ten years ago, but I landed on the wrong book, the Autumn of the Patriarch, which, if I remember right, did not have full stops for pages on end. All authors have their entry point books I think, (for instance, if you want to start off with Murakami don’t let Kafka on the Shore be your first as it was with me before I rediscovered him through Norwegian Woods)and luckily I revisited Marquez at Borders and got off to a wonderful journey that started with ten dollars. From then on I bought almost all his books and fell in love with his writing, even though he wrote in Spanish. That’s another inexplicable quality about his stories, you don’t feel like you are reading a translated piece of work, and the credit for that goes largely to Gregory Rabassa who erected a transparent (or diaphanous, as Marquez would have said) veil between the two languages to make sure you didn’t lose much in the process. And I learnt today that magical realism dies at age 87. RIP GGM. There will be one hundred years of platitude for your works, I'm sure.

Saw this in Japan Times last week, right after the Bridge defeat. And it is getting worse, fittingly. Ho hum.

Many years ago I saw this song when I was back home, surprised to see Dylan and Michael Douglas and the other dudes in it. It isn't often you see a Dylan video, much less a video with him and some Hollywood dudes.
That aside, this song gets under your skin for some reason. It's that way with most of Dylan's numbers. Sometimes it's just a few phrases here and there that make a lot of sense, and sort of defy time, like:
"I used to care but things have changed"
"People are crazy and times have changed"
I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can"
"You can't win with a losing hand"
"All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie"
And how he pauses at 'it' in eternity to rhyme with the other 'it's in the preceding lines.

As I went around the exhibition halls at the Mori Art Museum in the confusingly sprawling Roppongi Hills, Tokyo, featuring the creative output of the 15-minute man, I wondered where Andy Warhol would be without Campbell soup cans and screen-printing? Really. You take away those two from him, and it’s like taking away the cape and the weird-arm flying posture from Superman. They’re just not the same without their trademark symbols.

Most of his work featured Campbell cans and celebrity images souped up (ha!) with screen-printing technology. Apparently, he would copy a picture from a pop art magazine over and over using screen-printing, paste them on a canvas and put them up.

The exhibit had a section with his time capsules containing several of his everyday collections of things like magazines, doctor’s prescriptions, scrap papers and such.

The walls were printed with some of his sayings which were quite interesting. Here are a few:

 “I never wanted to be a painter, I’ve always wanted to be a tap dancer instead.”

“I think everyone should be a machine”

“I had a job looking through fashion magazines in a department store at fifty cents an hour to look for ideas. I don’t ever remember finding one or getting one.”

“I used to work for these magazines, I thought I was being original and they wouldn’t want it, that’s’ when I stopped being imaginative.”

“My instinct says if I don’t think about it, it’s right. As soon as you have to decide and choose, it’s wrong.”

“I don’t think people die, they just go to department stores”.

And there were times when he was literally taking the piss. He used to urinate on canvas with a copper based paint and the resulting p(ee)aintings were sold as oxidation artworks. You should read the critics gushing about it. One compares it to the ancient art of alchemy and says Warhol alchemically was converting his own urine into art. It’s amazing what you can do when you have more than 15 minutes of fame and to what groveling lengths your critics would go to justify and rationalize everything that comes out of you. Literally.

That said, it was half a day well spent, although it left me wondering where he is now. Probably at a department store, you know, the aisle where the soup cans are?

Out out brief Apple battery.
Charging is but a brief interruption
That fills and drains its hour on the iPhone
To be seen no more
A tale bought by an idiot
Full of apps and games
Signifying nothing

Maybe the Bard would have said, ‘forsooth’ to those watered down lines if he had been using a smartphone but you get the drift.

My iPhone battery went 49% last night to dead in the morning. I hadn’t made a call, watched a clip or listened to a song. Just like that. Gone. All 49%. Not 29%. Not 15%. But 49%. If you though fireflies had a short life, you probably don’t have an Apple product, all of which uniformly have this malaise plaguing them. From their iPads to MacBooks to iPods. While you are admiring the sleek new iDon’t Know What, its shape, colour (it’s in yellow now!), size and other features, you almost always gloss over the crucial question: how long does the damned battery last?  

Talking of ‘i’, it seems to me, an Apple fan (at least until Jobs was around), that the ‘i’ stands for iteration. Not innovation or inventiveness. If you notice, all the recent releases have been variations of the same offering. Smaller iPad, longer iPhone, cheaper, wider, slimmer, five dimensional, in outer space but nothing new and groundbreaking and category-changing revolutions like the iPad or iPhone or iTunes when they were launched. Just more iterations.

Good thing I’m not writing this on my iPhone or iPad but a Mac connected to a power source.  Otherwise it would have 

There was a time when illiteracy was synonymous with thumbprints. Back home, people who couldn’t sign their names on the dotted lines were usually labeled ‘thumb print’ cases, meaning illiterates. Fast forward to today, when a guy in the office came round getting everybody’s thumbprints on a little glass topped gadget like the ones you see at sophisticated airport immigration counters. This, I was told, was to do away with the card access system (which can be a pain, especially when your wallet is pregnant like Gorge Costanza’s wallet which actually tilts his posture considerably).

It left me marveling at the way human beings shift their perspective over time. From its rather ignominious association with the unlettered, the humble thumb print has come a long way (and is probably holding a Virginia Slims) to be at the forefront of security technology, going where no thumb has gone before, to the final frontier of highly secured office doors everywhere, as if to say, ‘I maybe illiterate but I can get in, can you, you educated punk?’

Thumbs up has an altogether new meaning, don’t you think?