Archives for category: Myself

Marina Memories

February 27, 2012 //

So we arrived at the apartment at about 8 PM, after a long drive back from Vegas and through bad traffic. “Tired?”, I asked. “A little”, she said. “Hungry too, but let’s explore.” It was a little chilly outside, so we put on our jackets and I led the way.

(Not before the book tour, and the cat tour. The cats were a little bemused by this new visitor who crooned at them enthusiastically, but they coped. Except Elvis, whose default reaction is set to Distrust With Extreme Prejudice, and who scampered into his True Mistress’s room and locked himself in. Um, no, he did not lock himself in, that was just a figure of speech. Elvis The Scaredy Cat just refused to greet the new arrival until he was sure she did not intend bodily harm.

The book tour made an impact, the right kind, except for the unopened boxes. “You have too many books.” Don’t I know it.)

So we headed out, and I gave her a tour of the Marina behind my apartment, brightly-lit and welcoming as always. We passed the boats lapping gently in the water, and I pointed out the amusing names some of them had. One was called Mon Cherie. ”That’s not right”, she said. “It’s bad grammar.” “Sure”, I chuckled. “Maybe you should go correct it.” I showed her my favorite boat, one named Tooth Ferry. “Sometimes, in the evening, you can hear a pig squealing in the distance”, I said. “Or at least I thought it was a pig, but then I realized that it was probably a seal.” She had begun to laugh, but the mention of seals piqued her interest, and more so when I mentioned that we could probably go kayaking one day of the week.

We did not go kayaking, but we got to see seals. That is a different story.

By the time we reached the other end, it was clear that we were losing the hunger game. “I know just the place for dinner”, I said. “It’s a fifteen minute walk.” We doubled back, and there were joggers running by, and people with pets. “So people in LA do walk”, she exclaimed. “I thought it was only cars and more cars.” “Not necessarily”, I said. “I don’t have a car yet. And this is Marina del Rey, not Los Angeles.” “Same difference.” She had the happy grin I recognized, the kind of grin I usually have when I am walking through the Marina by myself. The only difference was the lack of a soundtrack in my ears, but the company more than made up for that.

When the lady at the front desk of the Cheesecake Factory asked us if we wanted to sit outside, facing the water, we looked at each other, a little hesitant about sitting in the cold. “We have the heater turned up, don’t worry”, the girl smiled. Outside it was, then, facing the beach and the distant lights. By the time the drinks arrived, both of us were grinning at each other, happily munching on the bread that in our hunger tasted like the Greatest Bread Ever Baked. When we waited, I told her about the cute waitress who once served me there last year. “Hi, my name is Penny”, she had said. And I looked up at her, looked down at my menu, and hoped she did not realize I was trying to conceal my grin. “Oh, it’s fine”, Penny from the Cheesecake Factory grinned. “I get that all the time. Just don’t knock on your table three times when calling my name, and I won’t throw a plate at you.” It was probably rehearsed, but I collapsed with laughter. Penny wasn’t there this time, but Micah made us feel comfortable. The food, when it arrived, was delicious. She could not finish her’s, as I knew she wouldn’t – dang American portions. I bulldozed through mine with the rugged pace of a Terminator model T-1000. I ate every slice, sipped every drop, and I knew I would be back.

“Are you ready to walk some more?”, I asked. She was, or so she said.

By the time we got to Venice pier, we had decided that ice-cream for dessert was out of the question, tantalizing as the Creamery looked. Thankfully, last-minute moral dilemmas were avoided by the closed sign on the door. Besides, it was too cold for ice-cream – the wind whistled in our ears and tickled our necks. As we got nearer, the sound of the waves drowned out the music from the bars nearby. “We could drop in at the Whaler later”, I said. “Uh huh”, she said, with a huge grin on her face, all her attention focused on the ocean. I had a feeling the Whaler wasn’t going to be part of the night.

The pier glowed bright and welcoming, with a row of lamps leading inward. I hadn’t been there in a while – I preferred to walk there in the afternoon, where the warm sunshine tamed some of the sea breeze, and when it was teeming with the strange variety of visitors that Venice Beach was known for.

“How much further does this go?”, she asked. All we could hear was the rushing of the waves below us, and the lights on the beach turned smaller and smaller. The lamp posts that marked our way just showed us the path, but a few meters beyond lay the darkness of the ocean. For a second, I thought of what would happen if there was a power-cut just then, if we would see anything but black, and keep walking until we plopped into the ocean. I stifled a mental giggle, and thoughtfully did not say anything aloud.

When we got to the end of the pier, we found out we were gatecrashing a quaint little soiree. A couple slow-danced in the middle of the circle, oblivious to our presence. The guy sang softly and the girl hummed along to a few phrases. ”Is that… German?” I whispered. “Spanish”, she whispered back. Somehow it felt necessary to whisper, and disrespectful to interfere with their mood by declaring our presence. From time to time, they laughed together, full-throated laughter that merged with the whooshing of the waves and made us smile to ourselves.

Confession: the ocean at night always reminds me of this Buz Sawyer story that I read as a kid. It was just that the colors in the cheap Indrajal reprint were very evocative, and the story itself, about a seagull’s egg and Buz’s down-on-his-luck brother and his family was poignant enough to be the main point of association in my mind for an evening stroll by the sea.

After sometime, the song died away, the lovers bid their adieu, and exited stage right. We stayed. We sat on a solitary bench that faced the darkness, and though our jackets felt paper-thin against the wind, after sometime the cold bothered us no longer, and the bench felt more comfortable than it should have. We looked up at the stars twinkling through the parts of the sky that were free of clouds, and at the city lights shimmering behind us. Every now and then, a plane hummed above, drowning out the constant, reassuring ocean roar with its own banshee scream. That and the distant sirens in the city reminded us that the world existed beyond that well-lit circle, that time and our ears had not really frozen.

We sat there for a long time. Silent. Happy.

Tags happiness, life, marina del rey, venice pier

Categories Myself, Other People

The Ghibli Theater Watch: Princess Mononoke

February 24, 2012 //

This is easily the darkest of Miyazaki’s films, dark not only in the sense of the themes but also in that most of the film seems to happen in a twilight world, with little or no sunlight. Probably because most of the proceedings unfold inside forest canopies. The climax involves the morning sun, but the tension onscreen, with a decapitated being groping around for his head, negates its effect.

While Spirited Away had cute and quirky forest gods with the occasional gross-out creature thrown in, Mononoke’s menagerie of beings fall squarely on the malevolent side of the supernatural spectrum. The worm-infested Tatari-gami that attacks Ashitaka’s village in the opening sequence, San’s guardian wolf-god (goddess?) Moro, the Ape gods that demand to eat human flesh – these are some scary, no-nonsense creatures. Even the benevolent deer god is a death-deity in his night-walker form.

And the kodamas? They are cute, I agree, but the clattering is fucking creepy, man. A lot of things in the film are fucking creepy. Like the part where Jiko’s men follow the wounded boar god as he stumbles blindly towards the Shishigami’s island, slithering alongside him wearing the skins of dead boars. Or the first time we see San, her face smeared in red, a feral creature of the woods. She spits out blood, and stares at the camera. Creepy.

Mononoke is also unique in the sense that it is an action movie from the Ghibli stable, and a period action movie at that. The violence is served without mercy – bullets and arrows whiz towards their targets with precision, blood flows freely, body parts fly sans concern for parental guidelines. The fight sequences are brutal and gravity-defying – San and Ashitaka’s rooftop confrontation, or the wolves leaping across jagged cliffs to strike at Eboshi’s procession. The final onslaught of the boars against the humans is a harrowing scene of destruction that makes you want to look away. Hisaishi’s score reflects the turmoil of the battlefields, one that booms to taiko drums and echoes through deep, rippling cello sweeps. There are brief moments of respite, like during the kodama sequences, but they are few and far between.

As always, it’s the details that get me. How the presence of Yakkul the elk (easily my favorite character in the movie) kind of nudges at the otherworldliness of the setting. The way we learn about Ashitaka’s outsider status (and that of his people) when he tries to buy food from a village market in course of his quest. Lady Eboshi is one fascinating non-villain, and you would be hard-pressed to really dislike her or not see things from her point of view. Mononoke, like most Ghibli films, has things to say about the relationship between mankind and nature, about co-existence and mutualism, and its lovely to see shades of grey abound in the story, instead of broad strokes of good vs evil.

The scene where Kaya, one of the girls in Ashitaka’s village gives him her Gyoku no Kogatana (and the subs say “obsidian knife”) made me smile, because I remembered suddenly the name of the gentleman who had written the dialogues for the English version. He was not as well-known then as he is now, but I remember reading his discussion about why he chose the word “obsidian” instead of something more generic, like “jade”. His name was Neil Gaiman. He wrote the dialogues to make the film, soaked in details and minutiae of Japanese folklore, more accessible to Western audiences. One such changed detail that came to mind was the voice of Moro. Japanese culture has male voices for wolves, regardless of gender – and it comes as a shock to a first-time non-Japanese viewer (umm, me, circa 2004) when you realize that San calls Moro “mother”. To remedy that, Gillian Anderson voiced her in the American dub.

While I really did not remember much of the film from my eight-year-old viewing, the memory of one particular scene lingered, and I looked forward to see how my perception of it would be altered when I saw it now. That scene – in which the deer god appears for the first time, and makes his way towards the wounded Ashitaka on the island, flowers blooming and withering in his wake – occurs in perfect silence. When it played on my PC, I was half-tempted to check if the sound system had conked off. If I remember right, the Weinsteins tried to introduce a musical score in this sequence for the US release just because audiences weren’t used to absolute silence – Miyazaki refused, obviously. I am not sure how Americans watching it in theaters in the early 2000s took it. But in the Egyptian that night, when the deer god made his appearance, I realized two things – one, I was holding my breath. And two, so was everyone else in the theater. The guy two seats away from me, who had been wheezing until then, had fallen silent. The gang of students giggling behind me, ditto. No popcorn being chewed, or shoes shuffling in the dark, or creaking seats. Have you ever been in a packed theater that has fallen silent at the right cinematic moment?

That was something to remember.

Tags miyazaki, princess mononoke, studio ghibli

Categories Movies, Myself

A Winter’s Chat with Alan Moore

February 22, 2012 //

Kickstarter is a site that been one of the most interesting things on the web. What is Kickstarter? A way to solicit funding for projects. Any kind of project at all, just as long as it’s original. All you need is a goal amount and people can pledge a sum to help you meet it. The project gets funded if enough people pledge and the goal is reached – or surpassed. Most projects usually have different funding options, with corresponding rewards based on the amount you contribute.

And the kind of projects that you see on the site range from the humdrum to eye-poppingly awesome. From producing independent cinema and music albums to developing quirky products like Twine, from producing custom-made espresso machines to starting mobile libraries, Kickstarter is becoming a hub for amateur musicians, artists, technologists and – well, anyone at all – to connect directly with their intended audience.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the comics projects. There has been a lot of them. There was a project on an all-female comics anthology, catchily named Womanthology that gained quite a bit of buzz, and a 109,000$ backing. Writer Neil Gaiman and his wife Amanda Palmer kickstarted their American tour last year, raising 133,000$ (out of a $20,000 goal). Digital Manga Press broke new ground in manga publishing by first proposing reprints of an out-of-print volume of Osamu Tezuka’s Swallowing the Earth – a 3950$ goal yielded 8800$ in crowdfunding. Emboldened thus, they recently launched another Kickstarter, one to publish another adult graphic novel by Tezuka, called Barbara. This one still has 5 days to go, and is at 14,600$ for a proposed 6500$ goal.

One particular project that caught my eye was Joyce Brabner’s Kickstarter to install a desk and statue in honor of noted comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, in Cleveland, his hometown. For those not in the know, Pekar is one of the pioneers of American autobiographical comics. His long-running series American Splendor, based on his own day-to-day adventures, began in 1976 and went on till his demise in 2010. Since he could not draw comics himself, the illustrations were provided by a variety of artists, ranging from alternative gurus Robert Crumb and Joe Sacco to modern-day cartoonists like Gilbert Hernandez and Richard Corben.

Among the rewards that the Pekar Kickstarter had, the most surprising was something that cost 99$. A Video conference with Alan Moore. THE Alan Moore. You know, the guy I keep obsessing about and keep mentioning at every single opportunity. Would I pay 99$ for a video conference with Alan Moore? Seriously? I would have happily paid twice that amount, and that’s as honest a statement as I can express without melting into maudlin sentimentalism and fan-wankery. I paid the money last year, felt flushed with happiness and altruism and nervousness at the thought of actually being able to watch the Mage of Northhampton speak.

And then I forgot all about it.

News of the actual conference came in early February – it was to be held on Saturday. I was a little disheartened to learn of the date because I had other plans that day, but as it turned out, I was able to attend part of the conference, knowing that Brabner would undoubtedly put up the video sooner or later online. There was some level of an honor system involved, where we were not supposed to share our passwords to the conference with any non-backers. Some payment issues involved with the hosting company.

Regardless of how he comes off in interviews (more than a little disgruntled with the state of affairs around him, that is), Moore is a genuinely funny person. He’s also capable of carrying on a conversation without losing his train of thought or the erudite charm that marks his writing. The conference obviously did not have us all talking to him at once, it was more of a broadcast where he would answer questions that the backers had sent to him prior to the event. But the air of quiet theatricality he brought to the proceedings – hunching his shoulders and rolling his eyes at times, sipping on his cup of tea, and even showing off his shoes – this was something that paid for itself within the first few minutes. And continued for much longer.

In the course of two hours and thirty minutes, Moore talked about fans and celebrities, his thoughts on the comics industry, and the possibilities of the comics medium. He went into detail about his thoughts on digital comics, where he distinguished between gimmickry in online comics and actual utilization of this new medium. (“comic companies are taking the same regrettable formulae from the last few decades and plopping them online”). About process, and how he finds all the little details that make his works so much richer. (“You research the place until connections start to emerge.”) He spoke briefly of his beef with Grant Morrison (“I was someone famous that he could slag on”) and about Jerusalem, his upcoming novel, which he calls the biggest work of his life and has about five more chapters to go. There are moments where he astounds – like his aversion to video games because he does not want his audience to control the narrative (“I am a fascist with narrative”). Or when he compares Pro wrestling to Greek theater.

And in the answer to my question, he name-drops Craig Thompson. Hoo ah!

Well, you can see the video for yourself, it’s online now. There are glitches in the recording from time to time, but ignore them. 2 and a half hours of Alan Moore goodness will make you happy, I guarantee it. Umm, feel free to donate some money to Joyce once you are done at hpekar@aol.com. Not only does she deserve a bit of your money, but she’s also planning to organize a second instalment of An Evening With Alan Moore very soon.

Kickstarter is not the only sponsor-game in town, though. There’s Sponsume, which incidentally has an Alan Moore-involved project going on right now, where you can pay for a V For Vendetta paperback or mask signed by Moore. I am a little cash-unrich at the moment, and I’ll pass.

Tags Alan Moore, awesomesauce, harvey pekar, kickstarter, woo hoo

Categories Comics, Myself

Vegas Memories

February 21, 2012 //

We walked down Las Vegas Boulevard on our last afternoon there, taking in the daytime sights of that crazy, insomnia-riddled city. A man stood in the shade with a live python on a table in front of him. For a minute, I was tempted to test the remains of my ophiophobia. But I looked more closely at the snake, and it looked forlorn, more than a little harmless and very disturbed by the hubbub around it. I felt sorry for it, and the moment passed. We walked on, and it was totally not because I was chicken.

There was a flock of Latino Elvis lookalikes, who made me think of 3000 Miles To Graceland and True Romance and Bubba Ho-tep, and the troops of dwarf Elvises that went around humming “Hunka hunka burnin’ love” in Grand Theft Auto 2. Elvis impersonators are inherently funny, and driving over miniature versions who screamed and scattered and then died with satisfying crunches used to be one of those fulfilling activities of youth.

We found ourselves in front of the Bellagio, where the fountains soar and crackle with cannonball thunder every thirty minutes. We watched, took pictures, laughed and clapped, as did everyone around us. A street-side artist waved at people passing by. He had a somewhat odd-looking caricature of a woman open in front of him, with her hair drawn across her lips, that made her look like she had a moustache. The three of us looked at each other and realized that we wanted to get ourselves drawn. At which Steve (for that was his name), Steve-with-a-smile took his sketchbook and spent the next ten minutes doing what he did best, and boy was it purty. He did not use pencils at all, just markers, and the deftness with which he put our likenesses to paper – standing all the while, smile intact – was amazing. “Markers fade”, the art collector in me whispered. “Shut up and have fun”, I whispered right back. “Everything fades.”

I found Vegas more than a little claustrophobic. Navigating through slot machine farms soaked in cigarette smoke and neon lights gets tiresome after a while. The only time I sat at one of them was when a friend wanted to smoke and there was nowhere else to sit, so we grabbed two beers and occupied two bar-stools next to a machine. This one time we wanted to have coffee, it was difficult to navigate to a Starbucks – Google maps said that the closest counter was somewhere inside a building, but plodding through miles of slot-machine farms was daunting. We found it finally, squeezed behind a lounge and a bar.

But Vegas at night is truly something. It was fun being there with friends who had traveled across continents – two of them refused to fall asleep until morning every day. We hung out, did silly things that you can do in the city without a second thought, picked up every card and flyer for escorts and adult shows that were being distributed on the streets by random strangers. I could talk about my Onizuka moment, sitting in the bar at the Cosmopolitan that night, when the girl sitting next to me pointed out that the glass elevator that went up periodically allowed us to peek up the very short skirts that the ladies seemed to be wearing. I remember falling asleep on my feet at about 4 AM, in a Walgreen’s. Two of us walked outside while the others still shopped, where the cold air and the ice-cream we shared sort of woke us up, and we saw a bunch of couples dancing to a guitar-player who strummed his instrument like someone skinning a chicken.

I nearly made it to an ATB concert on Saturday night, but a series of unfortunate events (that will remain unmentioned on the blog) transpired, and we found ourselves watching Russell Peters videos in our hotel room at 2 in the morning. Which totally rocked, just so you know.

Tags vegas

Categories Myself

Off to the Races

February 16, 2012 //

Looks like the blog will be on hiatus until end of the week, due to somewhat-foreseen life reasons. No, that’s not an excuse. Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, San Diego, the Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks are involved, as are mid-first-quarter work goals.

In the meantime, go check out pal Dhritiman’s shiny new blog. Known in certain circles as Vrikodhara (and shame on you if you’re Indian and did not get the myth-reference) his Livejournal was one of the best-kept secrets in my world. I don’t think you can pronounce the name of his blog correctly unless you’re Axomiya, heh.

Or go write your own. Generate content. Fuck the signal up, make some noise.

Or umm, whatever.

Categories Myself