I don't really like watching TV shows on TV. Frequent ad-breaks take away my concentration from the proceedings onscreen and the fact that I have to adjust my schedules according to a fixed time interval on a weekly, or daily basis does not appeal to my lifestyle. Which is why I would rather watch TV shows by buying the DVDs of a complete season, or by downloading them. Not only do I get to watch them according to my own timings, its pretty obvious that DVDs give me a more lasting product, added extras like commentary tracks. No ads, hallelujah!

However, if I apply the same principle to comicbooks, I have always preferred owning - and reading - the original single-issue comics as opposed to trades. Based on the analogy used, I would be more inclined to purchase trade paperbacks - collected versions of the individual comics. One of the primary reasons why I would prefer individual comics to trades is that when I was a kid, single issues were easily available and priced very cheap. The trades that would be available would sell at dollar price ( anything from 200 Rs upwards to around 900 for the ones that were priced at 35$), while the individual issue would come for anything between 10 Rs to 25 Rs. Collectibility was a MAJOR reason why I preferred single issues - it would be a mental triumph to own something that has had a limited print run and won't be reprinted AND might be worth a lot of money in the future. Plus, I loved letter columns. The kind of knowledge you get from letter columns used to be amazing, especially in the pre-Internet days. Not only would it clear away doubts about plot points, it would also give one a new insight into a particular aspect of the story, or something about the art. Probably my favourite letters EVER would be the ones in Sandman and Swamp Thing. Miller's replies to the letter column in his Dark Horse books, Sin City, 300 etc was enough to give put a whole new spin to the term "diatribe".

Even when I started buying stuff off eBay, I would concentrate on single-issue runs rather than the TPB collections, though the former cost a little, in some cases, a lot more. There were exceptions, like when I bought the collected From Hell ( one of my earliest eBay purchases) instead of paying close to 60$ for the individual issues. Painstakingly brought together runs of Sin City, Lone Wolf and Cub ( the 45-issue run from First Comics), , Swamp Thing, Transmetropolitan and Preacher. Now let me make it clear that I am not one of these fanatical people who insist on examining every corner and crease in a comicbook and talk about CGC grade and shit like that. Not at all. I took good care of the comics I owned, bagging most of them. I still refuse to lend them out to people and take a bit of care while reading them ( if you want to read my comics after you've just had your dinner, I will go ask you to wash your hands. With Dettol soap, and then you must dry them to room temperature). I would just insist that the comics I buy had their covers intact, didn't have any kind of obvious defacement ( no writing names or stamping or stapling my comics, thank you) and weren't yellowing. Because I was interested primarily in modern-age comics, all these criteria were met by sellers. I was a happy man. In fact I remember arguing with both oooky and gotjanx about the merits of the single issue, when the former was buying trades of Fables and Y The Last Man and the latter, well, everything he bought was trades. I was a purist, and even managed to brainwash convince tandavdancer how cool it was to own the ORIGINALS, not reprinted stuff. There were the occasional mild bouts of weakness when I would lust after a hardcover first print of Sandman: Season of Mists, for instance, but in all, I was pretty much a single-comic guy.

Another vote for single-issue comics comes from the fact that they are "historical" in some way. Printed only once, and not available in the market once they are sold out, and only accessible through back-issue bins in Comic Book Shops in the US. The fact is, most collectors keep all their comics bagged and boarded and pretty well-preserved. Will they become rare someday? I doubt it, because of the fact I just mentioned. More important about why I ought to buy single issues is that without adequate sales of the monthly comics in question, the trade versions wouldn't even be released. And there is a good chance that a decent series itself might get cancelled if there are not enough people buying it monthly. Case in point: American Virgin by Steven T Seagle and Becky Cloonan, that just got cancelled recently. It was supposed to be a long-running series but had to face cancellation because of poor sales.

This urge to own the original comics persisted until the middle of last year, when I was buying out a large collection from a friend of an LJ-acquaintance, someone who had advertised on one of those comic communities. The prices were rather good, and I started out by buying whatever single issues the guy was selling. But then, he lowered the prices of the trades he was selling, and all of a sudden, I decided to lower my buying-conditions and plonked down cash for all the stuff he was selling. Yes, everything. He had good taste in his books and I was pretty sure whatever titles I didn't know about I would not be worse than the Image shit I used to read as a kid. Thanks to that decision, I got to read some excellent stuff, like the crime series Hawaiian Dick and Paul Grist's Kane and Jack Staff. Lots of Marvel Essential Editions and collections. And like a crack-user who discovers the merits of heroin, I found out just how brilliant it was to read a trade paperback.

For one, when you read aTPB, you are reading a self-contained story. It's of course sturdier - there isn't that itch at the back of your mind, that battle between the collector who insists that you should not recline backwards and risk the chance of creasing the cover and the reader, who just wants to READ the goddamned thing and probably also have icecream at the same time. You have additional material, forewords, afterwords, design sketches, unpublished material - of course, not all trades have them, but most of the good ones do. And they're easier to handle. Retrieval time is cut down by a huge degree because I do not have to search through piles of material, the spine tells me what I am looking at. Looking at my trades of Blade of the Immortal, just to give an example, or Invincible, I am happier about the fact that I am able to read these comics and give them to friends without worrying too much about cover damage and spine bending.

Comicbook companies are getting smarter too - Omnibus editions, Showcase Editions, Complete Collectors' editions, Absolute versions, Masterworks, Essentials. It's paradise for someone who wants to read sequential literature , er, sequentially without the collectibility part of it interfering with one's reading pleasure. All of a sudden, it's more tempting to own a gigantic single volume compendium than a bunch of flimsy 32-page pamphlets. It does not harm my newfound opinion when these 32 page comics have 10 pages of ads and no letter columns and the single volumes have much, much higher production quality. All of a sudden, my steadfast resolution of holding out until I buy the complete Sandman comics in single issues seems to be weakening. Have you seen the colour transfers on the first Absolute Sandman volume? Dang! And all these releases also mean that one can read Silver Age comics without resorting to scans or endangering old collections. Also, with trades of manga titles, like Mai the Psychic Girl or Kamui, for example, it seems the latter-day versions are more uncensored, if you know what I mean.

The Biggest Reason that tilts the argument in favour of my giving up hankering for single issues and opting for trades - White Drongo. I am sorry, but I cannot resist a hardcover edition of Spider-man Loves Mary Jane if it's available at a competitive price ( read: with a major discount). I am NOT willing to forego the chance to buy The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist, especially if it comes with a beautiful Chris Ware cover. I AM going to resist buying all the Starman trades, though, because they don't reprint all the original episodes of the eighty-issue run of the title.

Hmm, so what does this have in store for my collecting habits? I will NOT be porting my single issue comics to TPBs anytime soon, sorry Ganja. In all likelihood, my Sandman collection is going to be Absolute-ized. Stuff that I have in trades ( Invincible, Punisher Max), or a combination of trades and single issues ( 100 Bullets ), I shall continue to buy in whatever format I find them in. I will of course buy all of the Omnibus, Showcase, Masterworks versions that come out. Tripe like Absolute Hush? Never.

Boy o boy, I'm beat.

So?

I leave the US of A on Monday night.

In the last one and a half months, I have -

• been part of a team that's delivered a feature-complete product a day ahead of deadline.


• seen my first Monet, Titian, Manet, El Greco and Gainsborough. And these were names I remembered off the top of my head.


• visited my first comicbook shops.


• bought out full runs of comics and manga and exceeded my weight limit by 20 kilos.


• been to my first Comic book convention. Woo Hoo!


• indulged in Major Comic art acquisitions, 32 in all.


• managed to buy Perfect Gifts.


• visited 5-level used record/CD/DVD outlets, each of which made me want to sit in a corner and whimper to myself.


• held original first printings of the first three Dark Tower books in my hands, caressed them for about twenty minutes, put them back gently in their display cases and cried on the way out.


• eaten The Crappiest Biryani Evah, and priced at 8.99$ to boot.



• had surprise packages mailed to me from Spain.
  
  
• become part-time Web Elf for the coolest Electronic Dance Music site ever.
  
  
• not had the time to write about all these. Mostly because of point (1), but that will soon be remedied.

So I am in Palo Alto, California right now.

Right opposite my hotel, there is an Indian Chaat place, where you get thaalis and panipuris. I am not interested in either. ( "Panipuris? You are not interested in panipuris??" "Well, not when they are $3.95 for six pieces. It's un-Indian that way.") But. But. There's a comicbook store right next to that eatery. Unfortunately for me, the time it closes is much before the time I get back from work, except on weekends.

Luckily enough, yesterday I came back from work just about half an hour before closing time.

And went inside My Very First Comic Book Store.

It was a cool experience. The salesman really knew his stuff, and pointed out the stacks of Asterix and Tintin they had right next to the door, because of the Indian population who inquired about them frequently. Because I did not have too much time, I decided to ask him about the art collection they had advertised outside, and he came back with two huge folders. Yum. Got to looking at the pages. Saw some nice Buscema/Severin Weirdworld pages, a couple of excellent Thor splashes, a Son of Satan splash by Ed Hannigan and Sonny Trinidad that set my heart a-flutter, especially when I saw the low price marked onto the pages. ( The salesman explained that those were the prices the owner had paid for them when he bought the pages himself. Damn.) And then, just at the end of the second folder, I saw...

A Hitman cover.

There was a Hitman cover for sale at the store.

Ok, let me set this straight. There are 60 John McCrea Hitman covers in existence right now, 61 if you count issue 10 Million. I own one of them, I have reserved three more, there's one on sale right now on Comic Art fans, Romitaman.com has the cover to #34 marked at an exorbitant price because it won an Eisner award, and I have accounted for about six or seven more of the covers.

That leaves us with about 40. And I just found one opposite my hotel room.

I would probably preen a little, but let me figure out how much the owner quotes. Fingers crossed.

And did I tell you about the sale that begins May 20th, which involves a 50% discount on all back issues and 25% on statues?

India's first online store devoted solely to graphic novels - White Drongo - is online. A simple price comparison will show you the level of discounts that are being offered, and trust me, the catalog is being updated within the next couple of weeks.

Need I say more?

Kurt Vonnegut died last night.

Questions asked by davenchit.

1. Why collect?
Because I want to pay my kids' school fees and still, you know, be able to live a normal life.

Think about it. The number of children to the number of schools available is a ratio that is bafflingly high right now. ( I should know, I have played Caesar 3 too long ). Schools ask for donations to admit kids, and increase school fees by about 20% every year. By the time my kids start going to school, I should be able to respond to their demand for the month's school fees this way.

"Dad, school fees."

"Hold on, my eBay auction for the Eric Powell Goon pages and the Essential Spider-man series get over in half an hour, and I will pass on the buyer's payment to your Paypal account. You will have to mail off the stuff tomorrow, though...."

"Whatever!"

I get back to my hologaming console, and my kid goes out to score some weed. Everybody's happy.

Belated April Fool's Day.

Actually, collecting for me is the reason why I am earning money. I can see where my money goes. I get a reason every morning to wake up and not think of how I have to spend the next ten hours cooped up in a cubicle. It's the adrenaline rush that comes with possessing something that is not easily accessible. It gives me good memories, ones that can pile up on unhappy ones and make everything seem all right again. It makes a life more complicated than it actually is, when I agonize over the hard choices I have to make everytime I see a Matt Wagner Demon page and a Gene Ha Starman page selling for the same price and wonder which one I should buy.

And yes, it means I am cooler than everyone else out there. Hoo-ah!

2. Deathmatch: High Culture vs. Popular Culture. Who wins and why?
The term "Deathmatch" you've used in the question refers to a word that was brought into everyday usage by Doom, a video game and pro wrestling. Does that answer your question? ;-)

But seriously, I find the terms too blurred to come to a conclusion. My inherent bias says that Popular Culture would gobble up High Culture in a trice, and that HC would not even evolve without dissolving an older iteration of itself into PC, and morphing itself into something that's more H than P. Go figure!


3. How does Augustus du Ponti compare with the monkeys you have known? Is he an ideal, grown out of bitter disappointment in the monkeys you've met in real life?
I do not know too many monkeys in real life, alas. I am trying to get to know Augustus better, and so far the only thing he has made abundantly clear is that I shouldn't grin at him, bared teeth makes him feel threatened.

4. 5 pieces of art you would buy if money and access were not constraints.
Ah. There are just too many, my friend! Ok, here goes. Terms and conditions: I won't talk about the obviously historical pieces like the origin page of Batman or the first issue of Action comics, because nobody knows if the art to those actually exist or not.

- The interiors to a complete Frank Miller Sin City comic. Sin City: To Hell and Back issue 7, to be precise. Why? Because Miller never sells any of his art, and getting a complete Sin City comic would be a feat worthy of Collectorial Hosannahs for many millenia. Because this is the ONLY Sin City comic that is in colour, the honours done by Miller's wife and partner, Lynn Varley. Because this issue is a drug-riddled trip in which the title character hallucinates fictional characters around him - which ensures guest stars like Elektra, Lone Wolf and Cub, Wonder Woman, the characters from 300, basically characters from every Miller comic.

- A Charles Addams' cartoon. My absolutely favouritest black humourist ever.

- The cover to Amazing Spider-man # 122, the issue after the one in which Spider-man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy died. It's by John Romita Sr, the definitive Spidey artist and calling the storyline iconic would be an understatement.

- A Dave McKean cover to one of the Sandman books. Preferably this one.

- A huge-ass painting. Not an Alex Ross, I am not that crazy about Ross nowadays. This painting by Steve Rude gives me this kick in my intestines every time I see it due to its Norman Rockwellishness ( I would love to own a Rockwell, but that's not really comic art. I don't even want to think of illustration art at this point of time in my life...) Maybe a Barry Windsor-Smith fantasy painting, or a Boris Vallejo one. *sigh*

5. I suppose this has to be asked. What was your first graphic novel and how did you like it?
Truth be told, I don't remember. Depends on what you qualify as a graphic novel, I think. The first comicbook I remember reading was Amar Chitra Katha's Krishna. The first superhero comic was a Batman issue from the eighties which I tracked down later - turned out it was a one-shot drawn by Gene Colan. All the superhero comics I read as a kid were stray issues from this series and that, but I guess if I were to think of the first self-contained story that made sense to me as being part of something that was bigger than other comics I've read would be Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing, which I have talked about sometime back. At about the same time, i read stray issues of Miller's Daredevil, Giffen's Ambush Bug and Romero's Axa, all of which were very different from the "normal" comics I had read so far. Do they count?

So, what are your dislikes?



( Read more... )

I am obsessed with comicartfans.com. As if you didn't know. While collection-hopping sometime last week, I landed up on a Spanish collector's gallery, where, to my surprise, I found an Alan Davis page for sale. Not just another Alan Davis page, it was a page from an issue of Batman and the Outsiders, published sometime in 1985. It happened to be the issue where I had seen Alan Davis's work for the very first time. And also, it was cheap, remarkably so. So, in my nostalgia-induced headiness, I sent a message to the collector saying that I wanted the page, and would he be all right with mailing it to India, and all that jazz.

He replied in a couple of hours, and quoted a price that was extremely reasonable, shipping included. Everything fine and hunky-dory. I would pay him on Monday, I told him. Cool.

So on Monday, just before I am about to pay, I notice that he's online in GTalk. Just engage in casual conversation for a while, talking about comic conventions and collecting addictions and how tough it is to pay for Uderzo pages. While we are talking, I tell him that I am ready to pay and go over to Paypal, type in my information and click on "send money". Just then, he asks me, "have you checked out the site that represents Alan Davis and sells his art for him?" "No", I said. I hadn't come across any site that sold Alan Davis artwork. He passed on a URL to me, and the moment I clicked on it, I knew I should have been more careful. There were Alan Davis pages GALORE, and truth be told, much better than the ones this guy had put up. It even had a page from The Nail, with all the JLA characters in it, and some pages from the X-23 debut in X-Men, including a kick-ass fight scene between X-23 and Wolverine.

And this guy, he takes my Paypal payment and returns it to me. I don't know if he got charged for it or not, but this is what he said after returning the money:

"Maybe this way I lost a sale but won a friend. :D"

You sure did, Pablo.

I lke Stephen King a lot, ever since I read The Shining on a train journey from Delhi to Guwahati and shivered to myself on the upper berth halfway through the book. True to the way I behave, I began to scrounge out Stephen King books right after that. I think I bought close to 7 books in a month, the same month I was coming down to Warangal to join the college. My father and I stayed in Calcutta for a day, and I spent the better part of that afternoon at Gol Park, haggling with the booksellers there for a bulk discount on the Kings I bought from them. Then I bought a couple more at Vijaywada station, where I got them for 95 Rs each, by some strange coincidence.

One of those books I bought and read in that initial white-heat period was Insomnia. Probably not one of King's finest, the book was engaging enough because it seemed to be linked to King's other works in odd ways. There were nods to The Dark Tower, and to Pet Semetary, and because most of the characters of all these books were fresh in my mind, I could enjoy the book a lot. You know what the most important thing about Insomnia was? The way it talked about sleep-deprivation. The main character - Ralph, I think his name was - slowly begins to sleep less and less. It's not like he doesn't want to sleep, it's just that he could not go to sleep. He used to twist and turn in his bed and manage to sleep for an hour or so, and even that got chipped down to a couple of minutes per night. And it was then that Ralph starts seeing colours. Auras around living things. And small people in white coats with scissors in their hands.

Needless to say, this completely freaked me out.

Oh yes, I do know how to seperate fact from fiction, thank you. Especially fiction of the Stephen-King-kind. But what happened was - the book made me promise myself that I would never ever forsake sleep or change my sleep-cycle, that every night I would get a minimum of six hours of sleep, regardless of whatever else is going on in my life.

That resolution held good for all of four years in RECian life, except for a night when I had to sit and design a poster on my computer. Photoshop 5, 32 MB RAM. By the time morning came, I was a completely frustrated wannabe designer - woke up the guys who were sleeping on my bed ( they had come on over to offer moral support through the night, and had dozed off at around midnight). Technically, what I am saying is, I have never done a "night out" before, be it before an exam, or after, or because of college fests or whatever. Well, sure, I would stay awake late, but I could not do things like - I had to grab some sleep when it was dark, or else Stephen King's Insomnia would come to haunt me, and force me to close my eyes and shut down my nervous system. On the positive side, this meant I could fall asleep under any circumstances, with loud music playing in the background, on a bare floor, on a chair, inside a train toilet...

Over the last two weeks, things have changed a bit.

I begin working in the evening, at about five or six PM if things are really tight, and continue until about seven AM in the morning. I see the sun rise every day, and shiver in the cold morning breeze every time I head home. I sleep until about noon, and then I listen to music and read Doom Patrol until it's time to come to the office again. (Must. Resist. Doom Patrol. Rave. Must. Resist.) Four hours of sleep every day, food at slightly odd hours ( I have been having a very heavy breakfast, courtesy this really swanky restaurant near my place that offers a buffet from seven AM onwards. 45 Rupees only. And they serve pancakes and honey among other things, yummy!) Lunch gets postponed until the evening, and dinner gets done sometime at midnight.

But the fact is, I've never really felt better. It's actually quite fun to work at this time, I have found that more work gets done because of lesser distractions, and also because I am working in synch with the overseas team. I can play Juno Reactor really loud if I want to. I can play anything loud if I want to, hee-ah. I have a secret stash of chocolate bars right here in my office drawer, and the pantry has an ample amount of coffee to soothe my tastebuds at times. It's not like I stay tired during the daytime, or that I am over-working, none of it at all.

You know what? I think sleep, and the concept of sleep-cycles are a tad overrated.

Social life, you ask? Not too bad, really. My "window" for a social life is between three and six PM, which means that most of normal human society stays away from me, muwhahahaha. But yesterday was good. Managed to catch a surprisingly good Jazz concert at this cafe yesterday evening. Got drenched too, while coming to the office later in the night. I did what a self-respecting software engineer ought to do against natural born dilemmas - I used my credit card. Saw a sale going on at an Arrow outlet and bought myself a couple of shirts. (Had to pinch myself later to see if I was still sane.) But yesterday was a good day, in fact. I found my USB drive again. Yes, the same one that had gotten itself dunked into the washing machine the last time ( that's called transference of guilt, for the uninitiated). I could not find it for about a week, and just as I had given up all hope of finding it altogether ( I thought it had fallen out of my pocket), there it was, inside the pocket of a shirt that I was about to put into the washing machine. I have a feeling this little bugger likes refreshing its memory every now and then in the washing machine.

PeTS, otherwise known as the Post-eBay-Traumatic-Syndrome, affects me from time to time. Times when I realise that this website is just too unapologetically vast for my liking. Everybody I know tells me that I am spending too much time on eBay - ah, but if only you knew how much time I really spend on the site, heh - and I half-heartedly agree, and promise myself that I shan't even think of typing in "collectibles.ebay.com" for the next three months. (Now there's a tip for you, if you're in India and want to buy comics off eBay, don't type "www.ebay.com" on the browser, it redirects you to ebay.in. ) Don't know why, but three months seems to me like a perfect rest-time from eBaying. Not four months, not six months, not even three and a half months, but three months. So I promise myself, and threaten myself with dire consequences, and then of course, I have to go and check out the new listings two days later.

It makes me sit and weep, I tell you. Especially when it's the end of the month and there is a COMPLETE Groo The Wanderer run up for sale - and by complete, I mean complete, all 120 Epic issues and 8 pacific issues, and even a couple of signed copies and two CGC Graded ones, and a couple of graphic novels to boot - and another original art page at a very decent buy-it-now price. (No, don't ask me which artist it was, I am pretty sure I would be lynched if I say anything.) (Oh, very well, it was Frank Quitely. I am getting obsessed with the guy, and that's that.) And then there is a complete Starman run which I need, Starman being very high on my priority list. Then there is the friend of this LJ user from whom I am buying a pile of comics. How do I prioritize? How do I prioritize? Do I buy the Groo run or do I go for the Quitely page or the Starman series or the Wonderful Ashley Wood pages that are being sold for SO CHEAP or that Darick Robertson Transmet page or do I *whimper* forget all about them and go watch Samurai Jack at home?

Ah, well, after that embarrassing display of inner turbulence, here's something better.



This is Jeon Ji Hyun, the lead actress of My Sassy Girl. *sigh* I think I'll stare at this picture and let eBay run its own course. For the next three months. Yes.


P.S I wouldn't mind Jeon Ji Hyun getting me out of my PeTS-mood in her own inimitable way.



(Pic swiped from adgy)

I am a big fan of soundtracks. Not just Indian soundtracks, all kinds. I am just awed by the fact that music can be used, in the hands of a skilled composer, to augment the impact of a scene in a film. I love the way music can be used as subtext in a barebones storyline. In fact, half the reason I end up hating a movie is when the accompanying soundtrack is crock. ( Perfect examples: the recent assembly-line productions of Ram Gopal Verma's The Factory, which rely on over-the-top moodscapes to ruin half-baked storylines) Right now, there are three composers who are my personal Gods, people whose music make my day ( or night) anytime I listen to them.

On top is AR Rahman. Part of the reason why I like him, truth be told, is that I've grown up with his music. He was the nineties, for me, every year indelibly marked in my memory by a couple of Rahman albums. There really have not been too many Rahman soundtracks I cannot listen to at any given point of time, and there are few Rahman tunes I cannot recognise in the first seven seconds of the song playing within earshot. But yeah, his background scores are no great shakes - they are essentially reworked versions of his songs in that particular movie, played on a different instrument or in a different style, or a slower/faster tempo than the song itself. Very few Rahman-scored films of recent times had memorable scores, to be honest - the songs might be awesome, but that's all you remember after you finish the film, the songs, and not the music. And I don't think I was hallucinating when I heard the same snatch of music at the end of Swades and at a point in Mangal Pandey: The Rising. Of course I am a Rahman fan, you idjit, but faith that refuses to face the facts is not faith at all, as Albert Schweitzer once said and all that.

Second in the list, not because of quality - let me assure you that I am not comparing any of these three composers in any way, other than the fact that they make my earth move - is Ennio Morricone. I have been introduced really late to his music. Believe me, chances are - you haven't heard Ennio Morricone's music yet, true Morricone music, that is. Because, in the sixties and the seventies, when Morricone was composing kick-ass stuff, certain unscrupulous hacks in America, like Henry Mancini or Mantovani (that's right, I know I should not call them such derisive terms, but it's just their covers stunted my musical education. They have also done some good stuff in their days) did some lame-ass cover versions of his soundtracks, and just to show that people have lousy musical taste, these cover versions sold really well, and I suspect made their way up the Billboard Charts too. The cover versions didn't sound bad, just watered-down. Insipid music that did not have a tenth of the energy that the original Morricone versions did. What was so unique about Ennio Morricone's original compositions? I could rave about his quirky use of instruments, or the completely loony themes he came up with. A solitary twanging guitar, a wailing harmonica, the sound of a jew's harp, shrieking human voices - Morricone did not need the grandeur of a string orchestra to come up with the soundscapes needed for a brutal desert shoot-out or a blood-splattered night. Or for that matter, a tenderly-shot love scene.It's not like he never used string orchestras either,;he did, and very beautifully too, in later day classics ( Wolf, Once Upon a Time In America, Cinema Paradiso). This man made the most memorable oboe piece in cinematic history - 'Gabriel's Oboe', from The Mission. He's composed nearly six hundred soundtracks so far, and has managed to repeat himself in only two of them. Pure genius, I say.

Of late, I have stumbled upon ( not by chance, to be honest) Morricone's scores for Italian Giallo movies - Dario Argento's Cat O'Nine Tails, for example, and Mario Bava's Danger Diabolik. Awesome, goosepimply scores. I have much to thank Kill Bill for, and rediscovering Ennio Morricone is one of the reasons.

Third in the list is a lady whose music I heard people raving about so freaking much that I nearly went berserk trying to get hold of her stuff. Yoko Kanno is her name, and she's a Japanese composer who has done music for anime titles like Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus, Earth Girl Arjuna, and Ghost in the Shell; Standalone Complex. There's one thing I need to make clear about Ms Kanno - you can never, EVER slot her into a genre, or even in two, or ten, or fifty seven. Absolutely no-no-No. Fine, so you listen to 'Tank', the theme music for Cowboy Bebop, and go "Ah, a Jazz-oriented composer, reminds me of brass bands of the forties.", and then you hear 'Live in Baghdad' off the same album, a song that can give Judas Priest a complex, it sounds so eighties hair metal.Right, so the next song happens to be 'Fantasie Sign', a song that begins like an Edith Piafish French ballad, leading to a 180 bpm Jungle beat that kicks your teeth out of shape if you have your speakers loud enough. Of course, there is 'Bindy', a faux-middle-eastern piece where an alto saxophone tries to sound really hard like a shehnai, and very nearly succeeds; followed by 'Forever Broke', which is a slide-guitar piece you might hear Johnny Winter playing on a really, really bluesy day.

Right. So maybe I went overboard trying to describe how hard Yoko Kanno's music cannnot really be described to anyone, you have to listen to it to figure out how much it rocks. And this is just one album, from out of a possible 7 albums accompanying Cowboy Bebop, with all its music as diverse as the genres from which this anime borrows its themes from. And then you have to listen to the rest of her work, each more audacious than the other. "Audacious without being pretentious" is the term I've heard someone use with regards to Yoko Kanno's body of work, and it strikes me as the perfect term to describe her.

To buy or not to buy?

I am seriously waiting for the music of Rang De Basanti to be released. Music by AR Rahman, of course. It's due sometime this week, and I really need to hear something more than the single line ( and that infectious banjo loop that plays along with it) on TV. The music of Water ( also by Rahman, and one that he called "the best work he has done so far" in an interview sometime back) has released on all the online radio stations, but I am not listening to it until the CD comes out.

Also tempted to buy Bluffmaster, even though I already have Trickbaby's album. Two Ranjit Barot albums have also come out - Pooja Bhatt's Holiday, the songs sound pretty decent, and another one called Brides Wanted that I saw last night in Planet M. But the 145-150 Rs tag on each of these CDs puts me off, I don't want to buy Hindi movie soundtracks just for a good track or two, and then two months later, find prices slashed to half.

Heard Susheela Raman's Music For Crocodiles playing at Habitat, and nearly ended up buying it. Saw the 445 Rs price tag and took the easy way out - ran home and listened to Love Trap(her previous album) for three days. That lady has a sexy voice, and she does some awesome music.

Also saw Trilok Gurtu's latest album Broken Rhythms, it has Huun Huur Tu and Gary Moore guest-starring on some tracks. Temptations, temptations....

First Law, or the law of pricing: A book will always be priced higher than what one is willing to pay for it.
Corollary I : The feeling of euphoria induced on seeing a book is inversely proportional to amount on the price tag.

Second Law, or the Scouring Law: You always find a book when you least expect it.
OR
The less the effort you put into finding a book, the greater the chances are that you will find it.
Corollary to the Second Law: If you decide to stop buying books for a limited period of time, the quantity of book sales around you will increase dramatically.

Third Law, or the Law of Boundless Optimism: A book will always be available at a cheaper price at some other place some other time.
Corollary to the Third Law: You will always meet a guy who has bought a book at a rate cheaper than what you paid for it.

Fourth Law, or the Serious Law: If you wait to buy a book you think is slightly overpriced, you will always find it on the shelf, but not on the day you give up and go to buy it.

Woo hoo, I bought 13 volumes of Blade of the Immortal off eBay for less than half the price. The total came to 99.88$, including shipping. Which makes me extremely happy, because Hiroaki Samura's manga was one of the items on my wishlist - the pencilwork alone elevates it to Godlike status. Dear Hallowed People at Landmark, you can now come kiss my ass.

An article on the Finnish band Varttina, about whom I posted quite a few weeks ago:

“We were scouring the world looking for just the right sound, and then one day we came across the album Ilmatar by Värttinä,” reminisced Nightingale at last week’s press conference in Toronto. “One listen to track six, a brilliant dark, piece, and we knew we had our sound.” ( for the Lord of the Rings musical)

I empathise, Mr. Nightingale, I really do.



Parents arrived last night. Spent quite sometime the last couple of days cleaning up the room; gave up trying to hide the DVDs at oddball places. And I hadn't got me a haircut too, bah!

But what the hey, they were quite accomodating about the Far Side collection, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special collection, and the Mecha-Hulk statuette, and the Ultimate Matrix set, and the rest of the darn DVDs and books and comics and CDs. "At least we know where your money went." Ma got me the Bolton sketch (which looks awesome!) and the Englehart postcard, both of which had been delivered to my Guwahati address. They liked the house a lot, especially the fact that we have kept it quite clean and human-habitable. Now isn't that surprising?

On 15th March last year, madhav bought Samit Basu's The Simoqin Prophecies at Premiere bookstore, and a week later I borrowed it from him. I returned it to him at the beginning of May 2005, i.e this month, unread.

This Saturday, I found a copy of Simoqin at Blossom, and bought it. I was done reading it last night, took me about six hours.

Moral of the Story: The next time a friend wants to borrow a book, ask him to bugger off and buy his own copy.

Tim Burton's movie Big Fish was based on a novel?? Nobody told me!

My sister, now in London with her husband, has got herself quite a nifty accent. The nice, "pretty good, innit?"-kind of an accent that I always wanted to acquire. No, really. I have a thing for proper Brit/Irish/Scottish accents. Reading Garth Ennis and watching Guy Ritchie movies do that to you.

Re-reading one of the best books from my boyhood ( Ahahaha, the word "boyhood" always cracks me up) - As The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer. The man might be a swindler and a perjuror, or whatever it is they call him, but that doesn't take away the fact that he writes neat plot-driven stuff. Used to, rather. I think I need to reread the best of his epic-family-squabble-thingie (Kane and Abel and The Prodigal Daughter, all his latter-day output degenerated to the same pulpy two-guys-seperated-by-class-and-with-interwined-lives plot that Kane and Co did to perfection) Man, As The Crow Flies is getting me all nostalgic. I read it the first time when my younger uncle was getting married, and pissed off a lot of my Evil Relatives by taking the book to the wedding and punctuating the assembly with occasional sighs and giggles and "yeah, BABY!"s. That was the closest I came to being interested in entrepreneurship, or commerce of any sort. Charlie Trumper, the main character of the book was on my Personal Pantheon for quite sometime after that; matter of fact, I think I need to put him on again.

So a quick trip to Planet M resulted in my finding an album long on the list of personal curiosities - The Essential Tri Atma. What's so special about this band? Just that the third song on the album, O Moena was ripped off in the famous Siyaram ads of the eighties ( Remember that tune? "O Siyaram, coming home to Siyaram" and all that jazz...) Listening to the album right now, and the rest of the songs are pretty good. The band Tri Atma is made up of a Bengali percussionist Ashim Saha( "O Moena" starts off in Bangla, and it seems it's about a Mynah bird) and a German guitarist Jens Fischer, who also sequences the tracks. Considering that it's a band from the seventies, the sound is extremely contemporary, the tabla used to good effect throughout.

So I also moved flats in Hyderabad. I was there for two days this week, and thankfully, didn't break my back lifting crates of books, because we hired a bunch of movers who did everything ( except the packing, which we did ourselves). The move was necessary because vrikodhara is all set to leave for Calcutta, and we were paying too much for the three-bedroom apartment, which was also beginning to resemble something that was a cross between a bombed-out refugee center and a set from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So this new place is a two-bedroom flat, the only disadvantage being that it gets nastily hot in the summer. I was really worried my books would spontaneously combust or something - because I came into the house at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, about to leave for Bangalore, and it felt like I had walked into an oven. It's not the house's fault, though. Hyderabad is a bloomin' oven in May. It rained sometime in the night during the bus journey and I woke up shivering early in the morning, as it entered Bangalore.

I took a picture of my room right after the packing was complete; Sasi, friendly reminder, send me the photograph, will you?

In my 3rd year of college, psasidhar, then in final year, was The guy in the CSE department. He had the right contacts, an unshakeable reputation, and consequently, unlimited access to the (extremely slow) College Internet Line. He didn't abuse this power, no sir. Except for the short time when he diverted all outgoing mails to trash while his script to download the complete Calvin and Hobbes strips from a site ran on the server and ate up the complete bandwidth, and I would hardly call that abuse.There were other such scripts, of course, the most notable one being a script that downloaded a CD-load of Windowmaker themes. I hardly used Linux even then, except for finishing weekly assignments, and that was a rare occurrence anyways. But Sasi's themes forced me to use Window-maker, if only for to check out the cool wallpapers that came bundled with them.




I happened to watch Ghost in the Shell recently, after years of reading about its greatness, and about the influence it has had on mainstream movies like The Matrix, and the influences it has borrowed from cyberpunk traditions ( William Gibson, Bladerunner). I was not disappointed. Stylish without being overtly violent, with genuine "Oh-my-god" moments. As usual, it was the road to the movie that was more memorable. I got the comics from a Bandwidth-rich junior, then the soundtrack album a year later when I got my connection at home. Then the soundtrack to the sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Followed by the soundtrack of the TV series. Then found the DVD of Innocence, a version with terrible subtitles, in The Market. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the movie.

The soundtrack of the movie deserves a seperate post in itself. Kenji Kawai, the composer, uses a striking theme for the opening, called "The Making of Cyborg", which is a choral piece in Japanese, backed with booming taiko drums and chimes. The chorus is hypnotic - I am left wondering which parts of it is synthetic and which parts sung by real people. "Ghost City" and "Reincarnation" play on variants of the same choral-drum theme. The second track is like just a bass drum playing a single beat, slow, evocative.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, also by Kawai has almost the same soundscape, with minor differences in tone and intensity. Brilliant, is all I have to say. So are the soundtracks to the TV series, which are composed by Yoko Kanno, the lady best known for her Cowboy Bebop compositions. As expected, these are tracks that cannot be slotted into a single genre, a single track might hop from a Big-band orchestral arrangement to spanish guitar music and then, as you are gasping for breath, move into heavy metal mode.

Trivia:

1) The title "Ghost in the Shell" comes from Arthur Koestler's book The Ghost in the Machine, which also lends its name to an album by The Police. Koestler himself borrowed the term from a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle who coined it to refute the Descartian ( or is that Cartesian) principle of seperation of mind and matter.

2) The US dubbed version of the movie had a track called "One Minute Warning", with music by Brian Eno and U2. While this is nowhere to be seen on the official soundtrack album, I found it on a CD called Passengers, at a sale in Hyderabad. This was even before I got the manga.

Ironic Nostalgia Moment of the Day: This post, dated May 2003, where I mentioned the shock value associated with discovering a DVD of Ghost in the Shell at Music World. I did find it in Music World two years later. (not the genuine Music World, this is the shopping centre at Basheer Bagh that shares the same name) Now is that prophetic or what?

P.S: Some of Sasi's wallpapers are now part of RECian legend - they were used (without any form of acknowledgement whatsoever) as backgrounds for the brochure of Trivium 2001, our very own Quiz Fest. Not the GITS one, much to my regret.

There was this song tune that popped up in my head yesterday morning and kept starting up at very inopportune moments. How irritating it is to have a tune bouncing around in your brain without an anchor! I knew that the voice was a whiny voice and the song sounded like one of those top-20 hits, which meant it could be any band in the whole world.

But I figured out what it was just two minutes ago. It was Greenday's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, that I heard on VH1 a couple of days ago, while sipping on a cappuccino in JavaCity.



I am a member of ebay.co.uk. Why? Because when I passed out from college, and joined the company I work in, I found out that ebay.com was a banned site. Mostly because you get adult stuff through the site and the automatic site blocker ensured I could not access it. The catch was that ebay.co.uk was accessible, and I proceeded to sign up, with nothing in mind other than browsing through the comics-listings. Then a year later, I managed to convince the sysadmin about ebay being safe enough, after which he allowed access to it. So I was an ebay.com member.

Today morning in the mail, I get a mail saying "Welcome to ebay India". Whoa! Baazee is now ebay.in. Heh heh heh. Since I was an ebay.com member, I am, by default, a member of ebay.in too.



Now that I have seen The Last Temptation of Christ, and been suitably pissed off by a blonde and white Jesus Christ with an American accent (Though Willem Dafoe was good, really good), and followed by American-looking Israelites who used modern-day expressions in their speech while the middle-eastern-looking guys looked on and whispered and gestured to each other, I feel like watching The Passion of the Christ once again. I think the best thing about the movie was the use of Aramaic as the language. I didn't like it at all the first time I saw it, and I don't think I will - if only it had a storyline like the Last Temptation, or a soundtrack half as good.

Happiness is - waking up in the morning and listening to the Passion: Soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ really loud. On 5.1 speakers.

The Rahman-Passion connection goes deeper. Apart from the familiar bass track of Of These, Hope being copied in Anbae ( Jeans ), there's also the (unauthorized) use of the main refrain of Baaba Maal's Morning Prayer, which is a track in Passion: Sources, and appears in the movie as is, when Lazarus is being brought back to life, a very creepy moment. Funnily, the Passion album has a track called Lazarus Raised which does not feature in the movie. A bit from Morning Prayer is used in the One Two Ka Four theme music.



I just found a copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus in Blossom Book House. For 250 Rs. I am signing up for membership in al_lude-sir's anti-Blossom campaign. Er, on second thoughts, will sign on after 5 PM. Right after I go and buy that Moebius-illustrated Ray Bradbury collection that's available there for a paltry 100 rupees.

How Not To Be A Jerk When Conducting A Quiz, part 1: When you are doing the prelims on powerpoint, NUMBER the bloomin' slides. Otherwise, when someone asks you in the middle of the round - "Was that question 19 or 20?" and you find yourself fumbling for an answer, much Egg shall drip from your face. Especially when the marauding masses ask the same thing every two minutes (with varying question-numbers).

How Not To Be a Jerk When Conducting a Quiz, part 2: Have a test slide before the powerpoint show with embedded audio and video clips in it, and play them before the quiz begins. That way, you will know, when you click on a slide and find out that the bloomin' audio clip does not play, whether the problem lies with the audio cable, or your moronic miscopying of the folders from the CD. And you will have an idea of the volume levels.

How Not To Be a Jerk After the Quiz is Over, part 1: REMEMBER THE QUESTIONS YOU ASKED, DIMWIT!!!!! Not just the answers, THE QUESTIONS. Because there might be a chance that the quizmaster the next day might ask a semi-mutilated version of the SAME QUESTION YOU ASKED yesterday, and you might be the only person in the auditorium not writing down the correct answer. Faugh!

p.s: Remember my experiences about asking a question onstage and then forgetting the answer? At least that didn't happen this time. Whew.