Just done a long overdue upgrade to WordPress 2.1. It was relatively painless but for some reason the theme I was using does not work properly with this new version. I am working on fixing that and till then the site will look pretty vanilla.
Update: Horray! Got the theme fixed. Most importantly the logo (of which I am rather proud). Now we are back in business.
My brother has been insisting for a while that I watch Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou. I am not a big fan of their storytelling or movie-making style but I finally ended up watching this
movie. Actually, I had seen it a long time back and at that time the movie did not quite register, because I have no recollection of either liking or disliking it. My brother alerted me to the fact that it’s loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, something, which again had not registered earlier even though the beginning credits clearly say so. To be fair though you really have to have read Odyssey to draw parallels between the movie and the epic. Some parallels do not appear as characters or incidents but are drawn out as a subtext of some other incident in the movie. It’s not as if the Coen brothers have relocated the Odyssey to a more contemporary setting. Instead they have taken the base fabric of the epic, the travails of Odyssey (making an appearance here as a vain, pomade covered, hair-style obsessed convict on the run called Everett, played with relish by George Clooney) on the road home after exile, and taken characters and incidents in Odyssey and weaved them into a comedy drama of their own story of a man on the run. The conceit works really well here. The Coen brother’s story is funny and quirky. John Goodman turns up as a crooked one-eyed bible salesman, echoing Cyclops, the Sirens also make an appearance, and Everett’s wife Penny has a suitor in his absence much like Penelope in the epic.
Only a day or two after watching the movie I came across the Tim Buckley (Jeff Buckley was his son) song called Song To The Siren. As the name suggests the lyrics are about a guy who’s lured by the song of a Siren. Soon after, I heard a cover of that song by the group This Mortal Coil and I was totally floored. It’s an absolute beauty. Even though the lyrics would suggest that it’s a man singing, This Mortal Coil’s version has Elizabeth Fraser (best known as the lead singer of Cocteau Twins’), a woman, as the lead singer. Her voice has this quality that fits the mood of the lyrics perfectly and expresses capitulation to the Siren’s song beautifully. She just transports the song to a different realm entirely. If you get a chance give it a listen (A version with much below sub-par audio is here). Oh, and maybe brush up your Greek Mythology to get a little context before you listen to it, or read up the parts in Odyssey where Odysseus encounters the Sirens on his journey back home. In O Brother, Where Art Thou, the Sirens do make an appearance. Everett and his two companions-on-the-run, are driving on a tree-lined highway when one of them, spying these girls through the trees, yells at Everett to stop. They all rush out to near where three girls are. They are singing (very ethereally) and washing themselves and their clothes (very delicately) at a river bank. The fellows are enchanted and stare open-mouthed. These ladies walk up to them, not saying a word, still singing and swaying seductively. And boy are they seduced. During the course of their singing, the girls stiff them with some local wine and the next thing you know two of them (Everett and the slightly dense Delmar) find themselves waking from a deep slumber, near the same spot they saw the Sirens, and one of three is missing. It turns out much later that the girls had trussed up one of them (the hot-headed Pete played by John Turturro) and turned him in for a bounty on the heads of these runaway convicts.
Tourfilter is a website that tracks tour dates of bands and singers. I think it’s a fantastic service and a great example of content aggregation by collaboration. This is AJAX powered, script driven WEB 2.0 stuff that really works and is useful.