on the motion pictures rendering of 'on the road'

it is a truism that it is difficult to make a movie based on some books. some books are translated well into movies, some are enhanced, some are destroyed. concerning this particular movie/book combination, i'm not yet sure what has happened. let me write this review/analysis and hope to gain some clarity in the process on what it really means to talk about a book like on the road, jack Kerouac, and a movie based on the book.

“I never thought it’ll come to this, I’m actually buying a ticket for the On The Road movie,” I mention to the ticket issuing lady as she clicks away to print my ticket.

“Have you read the book?” she asked.

“Oh yes, I’m still reading it, I’ve never stopped reading it actually, and have long stopped counting how many times I’ve read it.”

“I did begin the book, but never got past it the first few chapters.”

I frowned.

“Well yes,” I said, “it did take me quite while the first time, but you have to keep at it.”

“I hope it’s a good movie, and you like it.”

“Thanks, but I don’t. I can’t expect anything, let’s just see how it is.”

The last few weeks I’ve been squeezing some minutes where I can, with the book in an attempt to finish it one more time before I went for the movie. I am on 93% with Dean and Sal in Mexico, just finished partying up with the girls. It has been seven years now since I first read the book. And now, after reading and re-reading it several times, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The first few times it had been a travel book with unnecessarily long passages on mad people and jazz parties. Then it had been this exploration of psychedelic drugs and the restlessness of life pushing people out on the roads, flinging themselves across the continent of America. It is about Dean Moriarty, and Carlo Marx, and the others. It is a sad, grave book on life. It is a funny book on life. And in my most recent reading, it occurs to me that the book is entirely on, for, and about Dean Moriarty.

The movie starts in complete silence. Sal begins the narration: Across to Mississippi, across to Tennessee, Across the Niagara, home I'll never be, Home in ol' Medora, home in Ol' Truckee, Apalachicola, home I'll never be. Several shots of him walking across the different terrains of the world follow. Walking on grassy roadsides. Walking on dry earth. Walking in snow. Walking on asphalt. He hitches a ride on a trailer, full of bums and young hitchhikers like him. Montana Slim and the blond boys going for the harvest. You know which part of the book you are witnessing.

“Five months ago” to the death of his father, and a gross, unnecessarily chronic departure from the book, on quite an inconsequential matter: the great event in his life wasn’t the death of his father, it was when he was sick and when his wife left him. But you get the father version with the funeral in the rain and all.

You meet Carlo Marx first, and Chad King for a bit. Carlo is this thin squinty eyes writer with wavy hair and thick glasses, certainly not what I had imagined him to be, but this one was likable. He did say poetic things all the time. In an unassuming scene Sal meets Dean at his apartment in New York. Marylou isn’t “jumping off the couch” as they arrive, but is lazily lying on the bed topless, watching them as they walk in. It was the beginning of the movie and I was watching with extreme scrutiny, as if I was the producer. This was strike one.

Then, when Dean met Carlo nothing tremendous happened, “two piercing eyes” didn’t glance into “two piercing eyes”, but it was shown quite literally as they are walking down an alleyway that Dean and Carlo are digging each other, and paying no attention to Sal, who is left behind to drag himself to their madness. Strike two.

And, Sal says he is always “scrambling behind people who interest him, because the only people who interest him are the mad ones, those who are mad enough to live, who never say a commonplace thing, or yawn, but burn, burn, burn, like roman candles across the sky.” Roman candles across the sky, and not exploding spiders across the sky? This is probably the most quoted line from the book, everyone knows it, why screw with it? I wrote that line off my head right now, in my 22^nd hour without sleep. This was indeed strike three. Okay, need to recalibrate my expectations from the movie. This isn’t going to be Lord-of-the-rings-peter-jackson.

The good things: most of the good scenes from the book are in the movie. Some with great detail. The chronology is completely screwed, but thats okay. The book has five parts without much of a narrative connecting them anyway. For instance, the part when Dean is thrown out of his house by Camille and him and Sal hit the bars of Denver, Dean with his infected thumb and the dirty bandage around it, when he held it near his chest all the time, after they have hit some bars they end up with a black guy and go to his apartment to smoke up and the black guy’s wife is sleeping and doesn’t mind the noise at all and smiles as her husband recounts events in his high. That’s in the movie, and that was good to see. There are many such things in the movie that needn’t be, but are in an attempt to remain faithful to the book.

Roughly, the story is linear, not the zigzaggy narrative from the book. Marylou and Sal are dumped by Dean when they reach San Francisco, then there is Camille, then Marylou back again, etc. I won’t go into much details.

Old Bull Lee. I don’t know what to make of him. His children weren’t that adorable, and his wife comes across as this crazy witch. There is absolutely no hints of any deep chemistry between them. Oh yes, they lovingly share a martini, but then, who doesn’t? Remi was totally cut out. Terry was done for the sake of it. Everything was rushed up. And that’s the feeling that sticks with you through most of the movie. There is very little that is out of the book, mind you, characters, dialogues, even the exact words are from the book, but only in different places.

And Dean Moriarty, well, it is a great effort, but it was doomed.

There is very little of the LonelyPlanet travel feeling. Maybe this is my personal problem, as it was my early perspective on the book. There were many parts in the movie where I was lost, and uninterested in the story, where it was going, what was coming after. There was no great buildup to anything. The search for “it” was loosely referenced to.

The written word feels much different from the visual word. The movie was based on the book, but my relationship with the book is hardly affected by the movie, and this, I am very happy and extremely sad to observe. But it was expected.

One of those encounters that introduce you to the side of a city that you always knew existed, but never really met, because partly you avoided, and is totally unexpected, but can happen anytime.

Its been 15 months since I came here for a doctorate. As I have been living with my brother in the suburb, my schedule has been too narrow to allow me to enjoy what the city of Melbourne has to offer for evening/night life. Hence it didn't really matter that I was in Melbourne, for almost a year. Now since there are two cars in the house, I have the flexibility in schedule to pursue some of my interests and get to know the city. Now I can say I live near Melbourne, but not yet in Melbourne.

Today morning I was driving back after dropping my niece Reva at the child care. Stopping at the crossing of Sayers Road and Tarneit Road, I noticed this white van/ute on my right, with an white guy sitting in it and just like that, gave me the finger. He was wearing the same gloves as I was, probably both made in China, yet was in another world.

I gestured "What for?" and he didn't think I would respond, he expected me to ignore him. I rolled down my window, he rolled down his, and I asked again, "What is it about?" He was acting like a typical guy, and started to get more agitated as it went on.

"Fuck off! Fuck off back to your country, you piece of shit," he blared at me.

Oh how amusing.. a real bogan! He was a tradie, or so they are called here: blokes driving utes, wearing the florescent jackets, rugged like a two day old pile of shit, possibly barely finished high school, and watching bogan television and all that, the whole package. Only that would make you pick on strangers to intimidate them.

"Oh yeah? And where are you from? You motherfucker!" I shouted back.

"What?" he asked dumbly.

"Where are you from, you motherfucker?" I asked again.

At which point, like most insecure people do, he rolled up his window and drove off into the green signal. Of course, the incident has left me rattled, to the point that I resorted to writing about it, and unnecessarily risk 'putting it down in extended memory' when I should have just come back, made coffee and done something else.

But meeting two dumb, racist drunks in the lucky country should go down in memory.

Okay so this has happened. What now?

where do we go from here? from this point, which may very well be called the pinnacle of my digital life, and we can understand what that means having digested the concepts of tron and matrix and similar, and even as we do it is worth stating, for what its worth, which is what we are discussing.

imagine an operating system, an entire operating system on a floppy disk. the thought itself feels so old in the head, floppy disk, the title itself seems to have migrated and found peace in the realm of jokes. an operating system on a floppy disk, or my first computer, total capacity 4 GB, and filling that 4 GB is a fact worth bragging about.

the first time i owned a 500 GB hard drive, i didn't think i could ever fill it. and in that helpless realization all i could do was make a wallpaper for my desktop with two equal sized rectangles, the one on the left containing a hard-drive picture, seagate barracuda, and the other containing a question mark, a visual conversion of the idea of the phrase "500 GB: what will you do with it?" or "what does 500 GB mean to you?"

Coming to present moment, you will excuse the fast forward if it seems like one, to the present day, which contained a morning time phase that contained the hour when The Momentary Lapse occurred, the purpose of this blog post is to chart out a path of what to do.

Tonight I could keep the laptop turned on and Stellar Phoenix scanning the 2TB which is the same process the three vendors at Sim Lim offered to do, and i said no to all of them, so i must do it.

If i do it, i will be unable to carry my laptop to the school tomorrow, which is fine actually, i plan to leave for chinatown anyway, and buy some touristy things.

so now i must start the process and go to sleep. its 3:20 am.

IELTS - 22

The Story of IELTS

Prelude Not necessary in the first place
29th April, 2006, a warm summer saturday morning, I woke up at my uncle's place where I had come the night before, for the english test the next day. I was a little nervous about the test, and for having not prepared.

I go to the test center, which is a posh hotel and stand in the line for registration, when my turn comes i am informed that i should be carrying with me a print of the email confirmation of the test date, which i dont have. There is still time, so i rush out, hop in an autorickshaw and dash into the nearest cyber-cafe which has a printer, get the printout, and rush back.

The rest of the test is very uneventful and in a few days i get the test report.

IELTS stands for International English Language Testing System, which is an exam for english language, a requirement for applying to universities for a course and a visa in english-speaking countries. The test has 4 modules: listening, reading, writing and speaking, and you get a score which is called a 'band' for no particular reason, which indicates that how good you are in the english language.

My score was 7.5, 8.5, 9 and 8 respectively with the overall score 8.5, which is out of 9, so it was damn good. Its been confirmed that having studied in the english language through out school, high school and engineering college has made me fluent in all uses of the language. My application was good to go.


Chapter 1 Again?!
Four years pass. I havent used the score I got at that time, because i didnt go to any english-speaking country for a course. Now i am considering for going for a higher research degree and IELTS is on the horizon again.

Why again? I cant figure out, but the reason they give is ('research has shown that') the english score can change over a period of time, so it is necessary to give the test again after 2 years, and they have made it official because the score 'expires' after 2 years.

Why i cant figure it out is because 1. everything changes, IQ changes, life principles change, and test results also change, obviously. But by how much? I dont see any reason for them to change unless 1. i live in a jungle where i have no use of the english language, 2. i study or work in a different language, 3. i study or work in a non-english country, 4. despite of the internet and blogging and twitter, i am not interested in using english for accessing technological services and gadgets.

2. my giving the test should be a pain for the examination system, i have to be given a test date, seat number, the question paper, my answer sheets need to be sent to the competent authorities for processing, etc etc. It is in their best interest for me to be given a short-reassessment test preferably online or on the phone, to check for the score deviation. (which if the 4 points in point 1 are negative, shouldn't change considerably.

3. i have applied for a higher research degree. which means i can very well converse with researchers who have written research papers, and they think i might be able to make an original contribution in my research area, write a thesis to get a doctorate degree and might also be presenting papers at conferences with awesome researchers in the audience. The test-taking authorities may want to consider cases like mine which are outliers in the horde of applications by students going 'abroad' for a 'better life.'

So I register for the test, pay a pot of money and wait for the test date. Dear reader, kindly notice my unwillingness at the whole affair at this moment.


Chapter 2 Reluctance Redux
I mark my mobile-phone calendar with alarms to fire off two days before to not forget about the test. And sure enough, i was happy to have done that and tried to 'study' for the test the day before, just to familiarize myself with the process of the test.

I start with the practice listening tests, and after 80 correct answers i toss it away. The reading tests are similarly completed. Writing and speaking need to practice, and i was good to go for the test the next day, thinking any score below 9 in any criteria would scar me good.

It occurs to me then, although not very crystallized in terms of words and feelings, that the testing system is a bit of a fart. I mean, the listening tests are like wiping your arse with silk. Which means, that it a waste of good silk. The actors are so careful with speaking, the rules are so carefully and precisely mentioned, the tone and tempo is so perfect, its the language testing system at a dead end.

20th November, 2010, another fine saturday morning, i wake with a mild hangover and kill time till midday. After another uneventful test and a few hours i walk out and catch the latest harry potter movie, which is more or less the same as any other harry potter movie.

It occurs to me then, and again not very crystallized in terms of words and feelings, that the testing system is really a smelly fart. The exam is conducted with military discipline. People are seated, confirmed with their identities, the test begins and modules begin and end, the examining authorities walk like German soldiers among Jews. It is indeed the system at its perfection, and the dead end.

The next day, i have the speaking test. As i walk in, i find chairs nicely laid out in a small hall, with a registration table and three little rooms beyond the hall where the interview/test takes place. I am early for the test and the guy before me isnt there so i am asked if i would like to immediately sit for the test (about fifteen minutes before my said time), i say ya sure, happy to get it done with early. The registration authority confirms if i am 'really ready' for it before my time.

I am shown to the small room, i sit down and the test starts. The examiner is new to this, very nervous, particularly after finding out that i have given this test before, and soon enough, i am driving the test itself, completing his questions and talking like Steve Jobs on stage unveiling the revolutionary breakthrough iSomething product.

I made a note of my thoughts after the test: (verbatim from my daily notebook)

1. well.. that was a waste of time
2. did well, not so bad, intimidated the examiner a little bit, one or two eye-to-eye lockdowns where i sadly note now: he buckled.
3. was taken in early and finished at the time the test was supposed to start
4. topics discussed: 1. shopping, 2. academics (changes and inflation), 3. My friend and batchmate Divesh and his multitouch table, 4. nothing else i can remember right now
I am here at the cafe coffee day, CG Road now, kids around, annoying little kids, Kenny G playing is saxophone very passionately out of the speakers, all around everything is so sad, but we are doing the best we can. And there are no rules, as such, or let me rephrase, 'the rules you thought govern life are no longer true as you grow up, but there are different rules', well what not? Go home, play grand theft auto or crysis (for the nth time) [reason simply being] its a nice game.

It occurs to me then, and again not very crystallized in terms of words and feelings, that the testing system is a very smelly fart indeed. The examiner wasnt really interested in my answers, he was switching topics so often, breaking the flow, which is annoying, and speaking rehearsed phrases. I've learnt as a researcher how to keep the accessing points muted and let the other guy really talk, maybe the examining authorities should look into that.

Chapter 3 The Test Results
I get an emotionless SMS on my mobile phone, test results: 8.5, 7, 7, 7.5 (listening, reading, writing, speaking); overall score 7.5

I am in the IBM research lab in Delhi, the walls shatter and a black hole opens up in the sky and sucks me in. I read the sms again, and it says this is indicative and the scores in the TRF (test report form) will be final. I assure myself there has been some mistake and the scores will surely change. Sure enough, they dont, and my father confirms it over the phone when i am in the train, back to ahmedabad. An earthquake derails the train and falls into a crack into the earth.

Chapter 4 The Dude Abides
I need to get it reassessed. Fight a war, take a stand, shake the testing system by its foundations not for me, but for the generations of fucks that will give the test long after i've forgotten about it. Sure, why not, and after that maybe i can give Obama some tips on financial deficits, China and what to do with nuclear weapons.

Yeah, fuck it, the mantra the old bum Dude Lebowski, I submit my score to RMIT so that my application is considered complete.

Chapter 5 This Blog Post
Writing this, till here. Maybe in the afternoon i will go to the local IDP center to discuss this.

[The views expressed in this blog post are pure and absolute and to be considered world-changing like other words to similar effect. This post has been unedited. Suck on that, anyone who wants check my english]

Bits of Rapture

There was a game we used to play we would hit the town on fridy night stay in bed on until sunday

lyrics copy-pasted from a lyrics site:

There was a game we used to play
We would hit the town on friday night
And stay in bed until sunday
We used to be so free
We were living for the love we had and
Living not for reality

It was just my imagination x3
There was a time I used to pray
I have always kept my faith in love
It’s the greatest thing from the man above
The game I used to play
I’ve always put my cards upon the table
Let it never be said that I’d be unstable

It was just my imagination x3

There is a game I like to play
I like to hit the town on friday night
And stay in bed until sunday
We’ll always be this free
We will be living for the love we have
Living not for reality

It’s not my imagination x3
Not my x18

this is of course an investigation into the different modalities that affect our experiences, starting from this song that plays in your head that you want to experience as it was made, for which you consider the options, realizing that its not on the computer, you download a torrent from a torrent site and its still not it and you download from beemp3.com and a different song downloads, and then you remember youtube.

youtube deserves this paragraph break because it is a site on which you can easily find videos of songs and generally videos of songs are made by the same people who made the song, so its an as-good representation of the idea which led to the song as-it-gets, so there i go on you tube, and in the meanwhile, the Great Meanwhile, download an image and update my status on gtalk and make a new post on this blog.

"thoughts, actions, experiences, bits of rapture.. in short, the greatest stories ever told!"

Thoughts on meeting Dr. Who

If you really were to one day, walk down the street and happen to notice a old wooden blue police call box dusting away in the corner somewhere, you would do well to wait for a while. If a man appears to be running towards it, most certainly follow him.

Most people who meet this person, The Doctor, seem to have life-changing experiences. This is really easy for the doctor, because he is a time traveler and time travel most certainly leads to life-changing thoughts.

What degree of changes we are talking about here? Lets examine in detail. The doctor, who would offer you a ride inside the tardis, has the potential to show you everything from the birth of the earth and the end of time and universe itself. Thats all well and fine, but what about my life and my troubles? Fair question. Where would you like to go? One would pause for a moment and think about the life-changing events in his or her own personal life. From the faded memories of the early childhood and beyond that, and would like to visit a few again. Now what we are as a person today, is a collective of all the things that have happened in our lives, and each moment and action matters, because if it happened differently, you wouldnt be you and you wouldnt be thinking the way you do. Your present (the right-now moment) thought process is an amalgamation of all the experiences you have had over the months and years, some are conscious changes, some are unregistered changes, a complex system with innumerable factors which if represented mathematically would result in a myriad array of equations and nested epi-equations reflecting your cognitive processing. This matching of potentials is necessary because for some reason, I believe that all mental models (which we understand to be an integrated exchange system of the physical brain, the mind, mental and physical memories) have to be 'kept busy' with processing of information.

This leads to an interesting offshoot here. The mind has the capacity to process and store information in neurons and it is generally agreed that there are one billion neurons in the physical brain each making 1000 connections to other neurons, and by some fantastic upscaling and assumptions we have a figure to the physical limit of the brain's capacity: one million gigabytes of information. We dont need all this for our daily life, but regardless of conscious thought (consciousness described as the ability of the mind to describe itself) processing of some quadrillion bits is happening every second anyway. The brain (or the mind) is always upto something. One of my friends Dr. Chirantan Kanani, expressed his happy hopelessness at the fact that we have no idea how the brain works. I said, maybe we will in one hundred years? He said, thats height of optimism! This is where day-dreaming in our waking state and dreams in our sleeping state enter our discussion, but only for a cameo. For the realms of the dream world, visions and whatnot, are beyond the scope scientific inquiry at the moment, though always at the door.

Coming back to the time-travel situation, suppose you wish to go back in time to stop an awful road accident you had which left you in bed for a few weeks with an acute bout of existentialism and hopelessness kicked that in your life then, and the pain and the slow process of regenerating tissues, making you want to avoid that, and you wish to intervene and stop yourself from entering the vehicle on that day at that time at that place.

Now there is a charming assumption that certain points in time are fixed (and this has been often recited by doctor who himself) and no matter what you do some things happen. This would mean that the accident i was so desperately trying to avoid doesnt need to happen in the exact same manner, but needs to happen with a certain flexible conditions. The exact date may not be important, the exact time is not important, its only important that it happen within a range of factors. This argument doesnt appeal to me because it is not backed by a good answer to why things happen. If its so important, who decides that? You? God? Destiny? Destiny is a good concept but free will is better. Also it seems like a poor excuse in our explaining things, and we often resort to the less-wild answer 'to prevent things from falling apart.'

Another view states that once time travel is possible, you are automatically dealing with copies of people and alternative timelines and multiple universes. This is backed by quantum mechanics and is thus a strong argument. The hypothesis is that if there can be two outcomes to anything, the universe splits and both outcomes happen. I chose not to think in this direction unless you can give me an address of this copy-universe so that we may go there to continue our talk.

So we are left with the possibility that you indeed can change things, and you successfully go back in time and change the event, stop it from happening. This would change you, this would change the experience you had with yourself gnawing yourself in the dark while recovering. This change would be instantly reflected in your present self. This is similar to saying, that if you go back in time and not go so far as to kill yourself, but neatly scar yourself, you will instantaneously have the scar appear in your present-self.

The situation here is of getting a feedback to your actions, whatever you may do to yourself while traveling back in time and dealing with yourself and getting an instantaneous effect. We may discard the wonderful Doctor and his tardis at this point as we enter a state of consciousness or existence sans time. This is a state of instant wish-fulfillment or thoughts being realized as soon as they arise, but we are looking at entirely new definitions and consequences to the words 'as thoughts arise' and 'thoughts being realized' in this state of consciousness or existence.

My hunch is that this is not a state we are heading into, or should be aiming at, but we are already in it.

Love, Beauty, Hope

(click on the image for a bigger image)

Credits:
Song - New York, New York
Artist - Polly Scattergood
Engine - CryEngine 3
Game Environment - Crysis 2
Setting - New York, 2023
Delta Force operator - Alcatraz, Nanosuit 2
Story - Rickard Morgan
Game Publisher - Electronic Arts
Platforms: PC, XBOX, PS3
Release Date: March 11, 2011