Who Moved My Glycerine Bottles?

The Blog Has Moved.
Looks like it is time for a goodbye and a new beginning. After months of trial and error (mostly error, owing to my expertise in webhosting related matters) this blog has found a new home at http://blog.keyaar.in. Not too far from here, but a lot more reader-friendly and pretty-looking (I hope). I have written an introductory post, listing all the technical mumbo-jumbo for the inquisitive minded-s.
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The Feed Has Changed.

All Google friend-connect subscribers (yes, the whole 34 of you) and the RSS feeders and the Googlers, you might want to subscribe to the shiny new feed, and while you are at it, check out the new neighbourhood.
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All In Good Spirit.
If you don’t want to get into Google Reader or a RSS feed reader and if you can tolerate my occassional narcissistic bouts and such trivia, head over to the Twitter feed @abhijithkeyaar, where I am most likely to post links to blog entries. The revolution might not be webcasted in a better form, so, you know, hay, sun shines…

Singning Off,
Yourstruly.

Interim Goals and CBM Measures. Stuff of Minor Legend.

With no iSight in sight, I decided to put the pen to the much less proverbial paper. The animated gif puts together few pages from a sketchbook. The file might make the page load a little slower, India being renowned for its 3G (most of the Gs for that matter, the newspaper assures me from the work-side table) ‘capabilities’.
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Then, on a three year old impulse, bought these. Multiple shop-owners were positive that an Illustrator-perfect round frame is stuff Quixotic blockbusters are made of. Patience.
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On Placebos, Pop-ups And The Occassional Bursts Of Narcissismo.

I am back with the cheap tricks to hold you — my imagined audience — at bay while the people at AppleCare reenact their little game of ‘It’ all over again, shifting the blame to the superiors, inferiors, courier people, telephones, the colour of the doormat, the consistency of Coco Cola, the length and breadth of a standard pixel and so on for delaying the delivery of my laptop from far-far-away Bangalore. Sticking rather brutally to the adage of not counting the appam-holes when the owen has ‘sponsored’ written all over the thing, I haven’t gone mad and called them names. The last post  proclaimed that one as the last before the unibody arrives in Gurgaon. I am known for being a sucker for fulfilled promises.

Talking of cheap, I have been accused of being — occassionally, probably because my affinity to brands in clothing conforms more to the Unified Thela Consortium norms far too often than it does to the stripes, swooshes, rings and the glittery monograms variety (which, on hindsight, it never does). I am feigning being at a loss to explain this to myself, in the hope that nobody starts putting my shirts’ seam-count through the magnifier like Kathy Torrance. It has been quite a while since I started calling my checkered shirts ‘modular grids’. That also brings to mind, (how convenient a coincidence) the last time I had to think consciously about my (absence of) dress code was in a bus-shelter near Connaught Place, at something past eleven, looking at the patrol-jeeps and hoping that it rained, making it look like I had a reason for being in there. Moral of the story was reportedly seen to be scrawling/spray-painting furiously, hymns about souls and shoes in the vicinity of the said bus-stop.

This, I had kept for after the unibody to write down and upload, but the hell says ‘what’. The closest thing to a being I have been in love — head over heals variety — was my laptop. Was. Promiscuity is a word that fails to explain what goes on at work when I have to put the strokes down on a different machine. The machine had somehow come to understand me, quitting it when the shit I was so carefully drawing up on the vector program started to resemble the proverbial shit it was not supposed to look like. It was quite like having a personalised, ruthless and eventually, slow editor. You will be missed, old Mac.

The outrage felt at being unable to tread on familiar territory comes with its advantages. I was able to finish more books in days than what I could have in weeks. Though this doesn’t play so well with the bank balance, happiness is being ensued/enjoyed. I came across, late by centuries, William Gibson and Laurence Sterne while on this semi-self-imposed technology exile. They have so far been good. I started on the wrong foot with Gibson, Virtual Light having found its way through the numerous bikeporn sites of the interwebs into my not-so-hard-disc. Also, Tim Krabbé.

For the sake of placebos and associated pop-ups. The accopanying pictures are a depth-of-field experiment on the Nokia 5233, with ample help from a glass dome and some histrionics with image editing. Histrionics being this month’s theme.

Dreams of aluminium and mush-rooms,
Yours truly.

(That about covers this month’s quota of keywords. Too.)

Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

This comes after a two-week-too-long wait for a Macbook Pro. I am on a wow not to write unless the track-pad is made of glass. This image also waited for two-weeks-too-long as a basic compostion wanting to be edited on a Quad-core machine. Tomorrow.

Sine Wave Through Space.

When you do not have an inkling of what it means to be a sine wave, watch this on loop.

Camera mounted on bike wheel. 5 minutes long. Manifestation of a sine (or cosine, depending upon your political leanings) wave in Gurgaon at 6 in the morning.

There Is No Chammach.

While f*ing with real heads is not allowed, doing the same to printer-heads is legal, and is written somewhere in the (civil society approved) constitution. Use of protection (polyethene cover) recommended for economic reasons beyond your understanding. Originally, I wanted to title this “To Err is Human” (based on the bottom-most image as well as a direct dialogue to soothe the scanner’s soul). I decided against “The Scanner Darkly” thinking that will end up being too corny. This one seemed better than “Good Bye, Mr. Anderson”, so there.
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The human condition is one with which I have no direct connections. After three years of highs, lows and in-betweens, the laptop quit its final application on a tuesday this month. While I had somehow managed to develop a metaphysical (yes) connection to the almost new (except for the motherboard and the hard disk, it was brand new-ish) laptop. Thanks to Dahiya, the Big Apple deemed it worth a replacement. As I wait for my shine-y (have ‘casually’ browsed through pictures on the website) new computer, the iMac presents a problem of excessive screenspace — which was never anticipated to become an issue for me — coupled with a kernel panic and eventual shut-down every twenty minutes or so.

The images were created by moving post-its, colour pencils and a Heinz Beanz can over the scanner head. The hard-rock keyboard from the G3 era helped.

Peas and Monsoons.
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Inkdrinker. Punk.

Look what the cat dog brought in!

The Tale of Three Cities.

It isn’t so much the colour as the texture that changes from small towns to cities. Based on a few places I have been fortunate (or not) to call home from time to time. Tomorrow is the Malayalam ‘Reading Day’ (Vayana dinam), commemorating P.N. Panicker, regarded as the Father of Library Movement in the state of Kerala. (My subscription to Matrubhumi needs to arrive sooner.) Since the day is a sunday, expect a little script-love here.
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In Disguise: a Book Review of Sorts.

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Peter Mendelsund, like his colleague at Knopf – Chip Kidd – is one of the few designer+human beings I happen to look up to, and aspire of becoming, someday. It would be nothing short of disastrous to even attempt redesign of one of their covers, let alone publish it for the world at large to look at. I do have my reservations when it comes to picking up books from a store, the price-tag being one of them (sadly).

Many sleepless nights were spent looking at unforgivable crimes to jacket design in my bookshelf — which often gets the irritating shove to the corner and never back to where it was — hoping I will be able to buy the copy with a cover I swooned over online or at a shop-window.

Yesterday bore the unmistakable hues of one of them nights. Spending a good eight hours after work reading the last book from the Millenium Series, I was reminded of how much I hated myself for not being able to buy the box-set with Mendelsund’s gorgeous covers, choosing the ten-times-cheaper paperbacks instead. Now, there are points at which the translation peeps out from the text, laying bare the ugly repetition of words that ought to be a punishable crime in editorial/design. Yet it would be preposterous, pseudo-intellectual double-talk to say the novel — while playing the ethos and pathos cards too often — wasn’t gripping or worth my time. That is, if Zaratushtra were to ask if I regret reading it.

Looping gifs, moshed-up candy and such needs to be posted often, shuffling carefully and not-taking-to-heart-anything in the pages of the nation’s only newspaper worth reading.

Here is an article on the Millenium Series cover design.
Link / Millenium Series covers at the WSJ.

Here is a link to a few of Mendelsund’s covers.
Link / Peter Mendelsund at the BCA.

If you happen to be into graphic design and have not a clue about Chip Kidd, to quote a teacher at NID, go jump into the Sabarmati.

Tomatoes or Helvetica?

~ Is egg or chicken for philistines.

It.

Countless years were sandwiched between my reading On the Road and the first edition off the press in 1957. Strangely, and rather fitting while being so, more than half the text was read in metro compartments to and from Gurgaon. The book, camouflaged in a page off The Hindu’s MetroPlus, rode along in the shoulder-bag quite a few kilometers, air-conditioned and otherwise. Post Lynne Truss, my Obedient Cumbersome Deviations are focussed better on sentence-lengths, commas, dashes, colons and semicolons, in the inverse order of hierarchy. Kerouac’s sentences put me on reading loops more often than what would be considered legal in book-porn.

Cycling at ten in the morning, you learn, over time, inquiring — often bordering on yuppie-contempt and a general sense of disapproval — eyes, screeching tyres all over in the scorching Gurgao-ni heat and a sweat-drenched shirt is a rather sweet way to start a fresh day at work. Since the later half of April 2011, this BSA Mach single speed has become my mark of attendance at the office-door, sniffed and occasionally given a friendly pat-of-honour by the office-dogs. It came with a straight handlebar and plastic mud-guard accouterments, which a trip to Jhandewalan Cycle Market prompted me to replace with a repainted rusty drop bar. The amount of bikeporn on my RSS feed makes my head swim in endless circles, accentuated by the fact that a decent custom bike can cost more than a Maruti Alto.

There isn’t much work done on pixels since the laptop went for its fifth screen replacement, fourth optical drive replacement, second fan replacement, first logic board replacement — all at once and for a long week, a curious departure from its one-at-a-time approach all these years. The sketchbook is half-full/half-empty, ink spilt, teas drunk, etc.

Also, shout out to Marching Ants, who keep blowing minds with Bollywood film posters, this time with a heavily Rorschached Shaitan. The way they manage to catch eyes, while maintaining a signature aesthetics, which is a fine balance between over-selling and understated artistry commands respect.

Peace and Monsoons (mutually inclusive).