What happens when you take a stunner of a rock road movie called "Hemia" ("At Home") by the ethereal Icelandic band Sigur Rós (the song playing in the above video is "Glósóli") and throw in footage from Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Solaris"?

Pure mindfuck.

Go here, and play "A Perfect Rain" from the collaborative album "Breathing Under Water", put out recently by Krash Kale and Anouskha Shankar. In this track Shankar Mahadevan's vocals drift ethereally over the lush orchestration, which in many ways sounds like a gentler version (thanks to those interjecting sitar grooves) of tracks from Kale's previous solo effort, "Broken English".

You can also go here to play other tracks from the album.

So I took myself to a church in Upper West Side last evening to hear a moderately good performance of this most lovely choral work, J.S. Bach's "Magnificat". While I may not acknowledge the presence of a divinity, i.e., a god (however to be a writer is to, in some sense, listen for, and channel the breath of god or gods), this work by Bach always put me in pretty close proximity.

This morning finds me in snowy Chicago, reading, and listening to this Ton Koopman conducted, Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra's performance of Bach's "Magnificat" - as in the background my sister potters around in her kitchen trying to dash off a festive dish of pulihora¹ to satisfy my whim and fancy.

Merry Christmas, dear reader(s)!

[1] The lovely Andhra food blog, Mahanadi, presents this visually very tasty recipe of an interesting pulihora variation