August 2006
Monthly Archive
Tue 29 Aug 2006
Just a very personal and unfinished post. Unless you’re totally into instrumentals, you shouldn’t bother even going further this line.
Ennio Morricone is still making music. More than 400 movies, tv dramas and countless lives touched. This two-disc anthology assembled by Mike Patton is, after the spaghetti Western soundtracks and themes, essential Morricone. Never has his music from the strange films he scored in the 1960s and ’70s been showcased in such an original and powerful way. Patton has looked closely into the experimental nature of the maestro and found plenty here to offer as well as to crow about. Many of the scores he chose from would be known only to cineastes of minor and obscure Italian films. Yet, Patton understood that Morricone loved his own process and treated crime and exploitation flicks like L’Anticristo and Forza G with the same delightful sense of adventure that he approached The Godfather and The Mission with. Here, all manner of strangeness is on offer: from psychedelic guitars and tripped-out wordless vocals to sitars, layers and layers of percussion, acid-drenched strings, an Echoplexed celeste, toy pianos, psychotic operatic voices in chorus, and more. And this is no novelty compilation. It is sequenced with taste and depth. Most of the music here was conducted by the great Bruno Nicolai, and thematically moves from dark to ecstatic to just plain weird in a seamless fashion. In presenting Crime and Dissonance in this manner, Patton has given listeners a much wider view of Morricone not only as a composer, but as a sonic experimentalist. This is one of those must-haves for just about everybody interested in music just off the beaten path enough to conjure strange dreams and perhaps even nightmares
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Sun 27 Aug 2006
This is classic. It’s been quite a while since I have really looked into something related to webdesign on internet even though I have been actively designing different websites during all this time. But this probably would keep me busy in next several days.
Google have formally launched what they call Google Webmaster Central. Here’s what they say:
You’ve worked hard on your sites, and, not surprisingly, you want to make sure they’re listed appropriately in Google, so of course you have lots of questions. You can find many answers simply by creating a Google webmaster tools account (if you have a Google Account, you’re already set), adding your site URL to your account, and verifying that you own the site. A few of the many things you can do with webmaster tools:
Whoa! I can now easily identify which pages Google’s found 404 without going to my stats pages and so on. But for which websites?
Well, for last two months, I have been (once again) seriously thinking to re-start publishing at EOMag - an International ezine I started back in 2001 but haven’t been updating since 2004. There’ve been lots of things happening in my life, in Pakistan and in the world generally. I’d be taking time off of my work next month and hopefully would be able to spend some good time looking for new work and contributors. That’s when I’d hopefully fully utilize the new Google Webmaster Central as well.
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Sun 13 Aug 2006
As the heavy clouds leave the beach of Arabian Ocean up on Karachi, I try to seek answers to years long troubling questions - of happiness, democracy, respect and dignity. I find myself too helpless to find anything out of it. However, one thought keeps racing my mind as has been through this month of August when we, Pakistanis, celebrate the independance of a country which marked decline in British Colonialism post WW2. The thought is simple and I’d like to share with everyone, Pakistani or non-Pakistanis.
Free were you born so let yourself die Free too. And you aren’t dead as yet until you are.
Here’s to Freedom and its endless bounties.
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