The Sound of Silence

Talking without speaking, hearing without listening: read these words aloud in your mind silently. I still haven't been able to completely wrap my brain around the fact that this is even possible. Isn't sound, and our perception of it, a purely physical phenomenon? Physical waves have to physically excite certain internal parts of our ears which would then translate to the sensation of hearing. How can we possibly perceive sound without this activity, then? Especially when I can actually even say it softly or loudly with varying pitch and intensity - but all of it internally, without really making any audible noise. (And thus the reverse paradox: when you say things aloud in your mind, do you make a sound?) I mean, what does sound even mean if it's not a result of molecular disturbances in the ear cavity? What makes it more strange is that I am unable to recreate this with the other four senses (six, if one includes motion and balance). I can certainly remember a face, but I cannot actually see it with my eyes closed; I can bring up the memory of a touch or a taste or a smell, but cannot voluntarily recreate the specific feeling in the absence of the actual physical stimulus. So what makes sound different? How is it that I can actually recreate the neural pathways in the brain that produces hearing (if that is really what is going on) when the actual source is absent? Going even further, when we read a word, are we necessarily always making the sound in our brains? Do we ever just read, or are we always reading aloud silently without being conscious of it? What do congenitally deaf people feel when they read? Can we isolate the sound of the letter A from the letter itself and perceive them separately? No, I don't have the answers; all I can do is silently wonder, turn, and toss.

Oh, and for those of you already bored out of minds by this entry (you know who you are), here is a hilarious parody of the Simon & Garfunkel classic that inspired the title.

Cover Story

Satyajit Ray designed every single cover of the Bengali literary magazine Ekshan starting with its very first issue in 1962 until his death about 30 years later, and this little montage above is a small sample of a few of those sublime covers. Among all film makers, Ray is my personal favorite, and the empathy I feel with the body of his work is difficult to quantify or describe. Ray was my own personal film school while I was growing up in a small town with no access to international cinema, and I couldn't have asked for anyone better. In this era of specialization, he was the last true auteur who kept a detailed eye on each and every aspect of his films, from scripting and pre-production to post-production and even designing most of the publicity material. As Andrew Robinson, one of his biographers, explains: "Ray has a strong claim to be the most versatile of film-makers. He was personally immersed in every aspect of production. He wrote the scripts of all his films, which were often original or near-original screenplays. He designed the effortlessly convincing sets and costumes down to the smallest details. He acted out the roles for the actors and actresses with consummate nuance. He operated the camera throughout the shooting (after 1963). He edited each frame of the film. He even composed and recorded the music after scoring it in a mixture of western and Indian notation, for all but his earliest films." However, as if that wasn't enough, he was so much more than the complete film maker; that he was an extraordinary composer and prolific author is now somewhat well known, but many of his admirers outside of Bengal still don't know that he was an amazing graphic designer, and almost single-handedly revolutionized book cover designs in the Bengali publishing industry.

His cover designs for Ekshan never fail to amaze me to this day; working with just three letters of the Bengali alphabet and usually just two colors, he managed to build a repertoire of tremendous diversity and freshness. It almost seems to me that a parallel could be drawn between the range of these covers and his oeuvre as a film maker, in the manner in which he almost effortlessly managed to scale the heights of artistic excellence repeatedly while working under unbelievable technical and financial constraints.

More Ekshan covers here.

The Global Politics of Shit

The Big Necessity (subtitled Adventures in the World of Human Waste, in the UK, and The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, in the US) by Rose George, which has been called 'The most unforgettable book to pass through the publishing pipeline in years' by Mary Roach, is unquestionably one of the best books of recent times; very funny, very scary, and occasionally truly tragic.

If you are like most people, you are probably already disgusted; you have turned up your nose, your body and mind is on high alert, and you are secretly thinking that I have a scatological fetish. (I may or may not be a scat freak, but that is irrelevant.) In fact, Rose herself has, by now, had to spend many months answering the question of why she decided to write this book. In spite of the fact that defecation is as much a fact of life as breathing (everyone does it, after all, and an average human spends three years of their life going to the toilet), it is considered to be very lowly unlike most other body-related functions. Indeed, rules governing defecation exist in every culture at every period in history and may even be the foundation of civilization since potty training is nothing but an attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society. The result of this neglect is clear: 2.6 billion people in the world have no sanitation (four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box) and poor sanitation causes one in ten of the world's illnesses with fecally contaminated water killing a child every 15 seconds.

In 2007, readers of the British medical Journal chose sanitation to be the biggest medical milestone of the last 200 years. The toilet is probably the single biggest variable in increasing human life span: proper disposal of human excreta can reduce diarrhea by nearly 40% and modern sanitation has added 20 years to the average human life. But even the reality of the rich toileted people can be a myth, and the affluent have a bigger effluent problem than they may care to admit. While most Westerners put the thought of human waste out of their minds once they flush it out of their sight, it makes sense to scratch under the surface of this complacency. Until about three years ago, Milan, Italy's cultural capital, discharged its raw sewage into the river Lambro; Brussels, the EU's administrative seat, only started building a sewage treatment plant in 2003; In the United States, 1.7 million people have no sanitation (and that does not just mean that they have no toilet in their house - even an outhouse that empties into a rickety drain counts as sanitation; it means that they have nothing).

And yet the subject remains unmentionable. Even though defecation, and the rules governing it, easily encompass the whole spectrum of human behavior, it takes a brave academic to address it and discussing it openly is probably the last true taboo. Sex and death may have both become conversational, but not shit; Steven Pinker, in his explanation of taboo words, explains how the acceptability of excreta-related words such as spit, snot, fart, piss, and shit are approximately in the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public.

Sigmund Freud, who thought the study of excretion essential and its neglect a stupidity, wrote that humanity's wiser course would undoubtedly be to admit [shit's] existence and dignify it as much as possible. The Big Necessity fills a very big necessity by attempting to do just that.

Illusions of Grandeur

It's not every day that someone calls me a Ph.D. and a CFA, and mentions Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Noam Chomsky in the same breath as yours truly. If only all spammers knew how effective a little flattery can be!

Incidentally, and almost completely irrelevantly, a trio of psychologists at the University of Waterloo in Canada have found that couples are most satisfied with their relationship when partners see each other through rose-colored glasses; mutual delusion & a certain degree of self-deception result in the happiest relationships. (Don't ask. This fact just came up in a Google search I did with the title of this post.)

I <3 xkcd!

I, completely and totally and irrevocably, heart Randall Munroe. Randall is just this guy who, in his spare time, climbs things, opens strange doors, and goes to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so he can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable (at frat parties he does the same thing, but the other way around). His favorite astronomical entity are the Pleiades, and oh, he also draws this webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language full-time, supporting himself from merchandise sale (so go buy something already). Which is all for the best, if you ask me, because I cannot - and indeed do not - want to imagine a life without a regular dose of xkcd to keep me grounded, happy, and sane. Actually, I don't know that there is anything I could write about it here that could possibly add to its appeal. I mean, its a no-brainer; if you already count yourself among its legions of fiercely dedicated fans then I would just be preaching to a very passionate choir, and, if you are unaware of it (because, come on, if you were aware of it then you would be in the former group, duh) then I actually envy you because now you would have the chance to blow your world by experiencing the awesomeness that xkcd is for the very first time.

So what is it that brought me out of years of blogging hibernation? Well, just when I thought that things couldn't get any better, I find out that the comics (all of them) have mouseover text! How cool is that!! (Alright, you don't have to tell me that all of you knew this already, and, like always, I am once again the last one to find out.) But look at the silver lining though, now I get to go back and enjoy my favorite ones all over again, and finally get answers to some of life's persistent questions that I have always had about a few of the strips. It's almost like finding a previously unknown Easter egg in a dearly beloved DVD. Or the Universe turning from black and white to color while you were asleep. You know, one of those.

Some of my favorite xkcd strips, in no particular order:
Students (I still have this dream all the time.)
TED talk (I stay awake nights thinking about this problem.)
Angular Momentum (This is perfect - It appeals almost equally to the science nerd as well as the romantic in me.)
Useless (I did major in Statistics, after all.)
Dream Girl (This one still makes me cry every time I look at it...)

Update: And now, the xkcd book! Also, on a dissenting note, here is someone who thinks that xkcd sucks.

Intuition, Integrity, Character, Light

Christopher Doyle has been called the greatest cinematographer working in the movies today and also the most idiosyncratic, and is known for his perfectionism and eccentricity. I first came under the hypnotic spell of his lens when I realized that my love for Wong Kar-wai's movies had almost as much to do with Doyle's involvement with them than anything else (indeed, some wonder if Doyle hasn't been more integral to the success of Wong's films than Wong himself). Credited with essentially inventing the dominant vernacular of pan-Asian pop with Wong Kar-wai, and responsible for some of the most stunning images in modern cinema - blurry, frenetic street scenes, retro-styled couples in delirious clinches, grand historical vistas set off by swathes of saturated color - Doyle has developed a certain signature that is unique. He has the uncanny and apparently effortless talent to easily bathe his images in lush, almost supernaturally beautiful, colors and lights, but is also equally adept at catching the harsh and jarring fluorescence of a neon-drenched and essentially lonely and isolated urban existence, often in the same frame. Known for using extreme angles and vanguard color grading, his camera can be both an impassive observer of great and scattered urban and natural landscapes, and also a gentle voyeur probing into the deepest privacies of his subjects resulting in iconic portraits of sorrow and solitude.

Doyle's own life is as exciting as any epic blockbuster; brought up in suburban Sydney, he left Australia at the age of 18 to join the merchant navy. After three years traveling the world on a Norwegian ship, he came ashore again, and lived in India (working as an oil driller), Israel (cow herder) and Thailand (doctor of Chinese medicine) before gravitating to Taiwan, where he shot his first 35mm film, Edward Yang's That Day on the Beach, for which he won the Best Cinematography Award in the 1983 Asia-Pacific Film Festival. He now lives in Hong Kong, and considers himself to be an honorary Asian.

Here is the voice of the master himself, culled from various interviews over the years.

"Anybody who works with me knows what shit they're in for. They know he's had a beer for breakfast. They know he doesn't give a shit about certain technical aspects. They know he's a little bit out of synch, and he'll probably throw a spanner in the works. Or why would you bother calling me?"

"That (realizing that he was a professional cinematographer) scared the shit out of me. We were just playing around before. So I ran away to France to try and learn competence, and I realised it was all bullshit. You only need a little bit of technical knowledge. Most people can get it in a couple of months. The training of the eye is the real job, and that takes forever."

"I think if you get one image per film that actually works, it's better than average. Who's going to forget Maggie Cheung walking up those stairs (in In the Mood for Love)? Everything else is working towards that; it is a consolidation of ideas into an image."

"You make more mistakes. That's the point. You engage with your mistakes. You have to learn faster, quicker and more often and you'll never learn enough and you never get self-complacent. You know that learning is a never-ending process and you know that you never know enough. You trust things like intuition, or integrity, or character or light."

"Hollywood reminds me why I want to do Asian cinema. I think love is a cultural event. Language is a cultural experience. The films we make come from the culture we feel comfortable engaging with."

"I started making films in Asia, in Taiwan. I started making Chinese-language films so, yeah, I regard myself as a Chinese filmmaker, but I just happen to be white, or pink, actually. It's kind of like a delayed adolescence. I feel I grew up there. I was in my thirties by the time I was growing up. I still haven't grown up. It's just more familiar."

“I usually say that the three of us — that means the art director, William Chang, Wong Kar-Wai, and myself — are a menage-a-trois. It’s a very comfortable and incestuous relationship. Over the years, there’s developed a great deal of complicity and trust. We’re stuck with each other basically. Our visual taste is so similar now.”

"I’m a great fan of jazz music, and as you can see Wong Kar-Wai is obviously quite interested in different kinds of music. I think, at last, we get into—well, what I’ve always dreamed of doing is making films, like jazz music, just jamming. That’s very much how we work. It’s really like a jam session."

Pure and Simple

An Oscar Wilde action figure - that is just so four-letter-word-ing amazingly awesome supercool kickass! And it even comes with a little bio-line and a list of quotations on the box. What will they think of next, really? Seriously, though, what cracks me up more than anything else is the 'choking hazard' warning, especially given the fact that the doll comes with bendable knees.