mister fundamentals

UCLA - Departments of Information Studies and Design/Media, design school : harvard, mit media lab, stanford university, homestead high

professor at UCLA

deserts, brains and bodies, jungles, scuba, situationists, film, rock, ragas, qawali, minimal rock, meditating, baseball, the ocean, structuralism, new media, murakami, south india, himalayas, capoeira, public health, indigenous cultures and their vitality, exhibition design and museum studies, film and installation, microfinance, peace, aboriginal maps and art, public art and architecture, folklores, mathematics and modelling, oral-literary-visual parallels and disjunctures, latin america, central asia, swahili africa

borges, umberto eco, pamuk, murakami, lolita/nabokov, indigenous myths, levi-strauss, appadurai, dostoevsky, mayakovsky

paris texas, down by law, herzog, kubrick, orson welles (esp touch of evil and citizen kane), amores perros, apu trilogy (ray), dogville, mullholland drive, wong karwai (2046 and chungking xpress especially), walkabout, vertigo, last temptation of christ, adaptation, shadows of our forgotten ancestors (sergey parajanov's films), 2001, rashomon, bad education/volver

DAF (deutsche amerikanische freundschap), nocturnal projections, palais schaumburg, eno, english post-punk, dancehall, minimal house, no wave, roxy music, can, grauzone, liliput/kleenex, the slits, king tubby, dubstep, ornette coleman, mingus, lata mangeskhar and mohammed rafi, studio one, liquid liquid, grauzone, neu, WIRE, ward 21, the fall, alice and john coltrane, the gordons, dow jones and the industrials, old-DEVO, boredoms, congotronics, konono nr. 1, dj rupture, faust, amon duul I, to live and shave in la, fat day former bands involved with: temple of bon matin, coochie riot, marketing schemes of vishnu, the lothars

Leo

sultry, disoriented vivacity, shattered and re-glued invocations of divinity, visual culture, space.

i'm a recent transplant to LA, and a new professor at UCLA - focusing on the study of media and culture - i was living on the east coast and western europe from the last several years. my family is in southern india, and many of my closest friends are spread across africa, europe, central america, and north america. i now live in an old jim morrison house on venice beach. very few doors or people are ever closed to me - the worlds of business, knowledge, art/culture all intersect in my life!