I love it when things go hunky-dory.

I love it when I can read what I want when I want, and get exactly what I expected out of it, if not more.

Has anybody ever thought of designing an eBook reader application which maps “mood music” to a book? Kind of like having your own soundtrack to a book.

On second thought, that would be somewhat stupid. Because, (a) Most people don’t like reading eBooks and (b) most people can’t listen to music and read a book at the same time.

Last Friday, I read Stardust by Neil Gaiman. I had postponed it a long time. Postponed it because there are only two Gaiman books that I have not read left, those being Coraline and Stardust ( I am not counting the Sandman books, or his other graphic novels. ) It moved me. It reminded me of when I was twelve years old and just dying to go out into the world and have adventures, never mind what adventures, just something other than dreary old studies. It gave me the distinct feeling of basking in the sun on winter days and eating oranges. Times it reminded me of that old TV show called Fairy Tale Theatre. This book is now neck-and-neck with Tom Sawyer and Little Women in my List of Books to Read Aloud to My Children at Bedtime.

My questions are done, sort of. Contrary to what I expected, the volume of visual questions has risen from five in the past week, to about 105 as of now. Lots of interesting ( I think! ) connect-questions, a number of rare photographs that I never knew would be available on the Net, and none of them Quiznet repeats. Wahoo! But of course, I haven’t been to Quiznet in quite sometime.

I had thought that the Google Image Search sucks, but the last couple of days, I stumbled across quite a few walkarounds that are exceptions to the rule.

And now, four days before the quiz, I am afraid I have a shortage of interesting audio questions. Oh, the inhumanity….

Vice City Update: Tommy Vercetti now owns The Cherry Popper IceCream Factory, Kaufman Taxis (the rest of the Taxi drivers have been terrorised without mercy, their fares occasionally taken away by you-know-who. ), the Shipyard, Sunshine Autos, and the Pole Position Strip Club. Mark my words, the Real Estate business kicks ass in Vice City. Rampages Passed: 18 out of 35. 35% of the game completed.

http://www.boycott-riaa.com
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

There are very few things I react strongly to. One of them being the whole issue of music piracy. I dislike the word “piracy” being used in conjunction with music – “dislike” being too mild a word.

Makes me wonder – How did the whole concept of piracy come about? Was there any such idea in the pre-recording age? The only example I came about was that of a particular composition Miserere Mei, Deus written for a nine-part choir by composer Gregorio Allegri in around 1640. The work was considered to be so spiritually powerful that the Pope insisted that only his personal choir at the Sistine chapel should be able to sing it, and they would preform it once every year, during Holy Week. Things got so bad that all but two copies of the work were destroyed, of which one was gifted to Emperor Leopold I and the other to the king of Portugal. No, there were no illicit copies made, until 1770, when….ah, no, we’ll come to that later.

This might have been the first instance of some form of legislation against music. At least so far as I know. But at least the intent was noble…I mean, modern-day composers and music enthusiasts second the fact that the particular composition was as powerful as the Pope claimed.

Let me get into a little philosophy. Why would a musician compose music? The answer, of course, would vary from a historical perspective. Folk music, the origin of most music styles, and the most localized of genres were mostly about stories retold as ballads. ( I am thinking of Cacofonix strumming his lute and saying “Let me compose a song for this historic occasi..” – *Baammmff! * as I write this.) Which was mostly passed on from mouth to mouth, with bards and wandering minstrels (isn’t it funny the way we associate “wandering” with “minstrels”? Are musicians always travellers? ) singing before assemblies, villages, councils, or even Kings. It’s very strange to think of music that one cannot listen to at will, or of people having to wait months, or even years, to listen to a repeat rendition of some tune. But it was that way, once upon a time.

The concept of music as a spiritual activity has its origins in the Old Testament, and the spread of Christianity throughout Europe only helped make that aspect more pronounced. Classical music involved a degree of spiritual satisfaction, and also some amount of research. A musician of that age might be asked – Why do you make music? To be closer to God. What do you want to do with your music? I want people to listen to it, and to be affected the same way I was. I want people to see God through my music.

I am not making any assumptions about a penniless idealist who starved in order to be more spiritual. The lure of wealth and fame was a major lure for musicians even in such times. The better you were, the more famous you would be. The more famous you were, the better your standing in society, and someday, you might even be a Court musician. There. Settled for life.

The source, in my opinion, of this whole copyright issue, stems from a Benedictine monk named Guido d’Arezzo. This chap observed the confusion that generally prevailed in musicmanship of that time, which was mostly to do with the inability of a group of individuals to sing a tune from start to finish with the semblance of coordination. Alright, you could do it, but it required back-breaking…er….throat-aching practice, and, as all individuals living in the Middle Ages seemed to know, there had to be a better way. His ideas led him to develop and perfect the system of musical notation, yes, that same four-lined form filled with strange black and white symbols that’s so puzzling to us Orientals, and that is still in use. For the first time, music became something that could be owned, stored and of course, copyrighted. I doubt if the humble monk, with his noble intentions, would have liked seeing what his invention has led to.

Back to the same question. Could anybody have understood the concept of music piracy before the advent of recording? Who do you call a pirate? Someone who hasn’t paid for a concert ticket? Someone who has copied some other composer’s tunes and making money out of performing it? ( Did anybody do this, by the way? I know of Handel indulging in such plagiarisation, and no doubt, there are composers who would take the credit for others’ compositions themselves…..) In the former case, it would be a financial loss for the composer, and the organisers and the musicians, all of whom, no doubt, partake of the credit and the monetary gain. To an extent, that shouldn’t matter, unless all of the audience got in without paying for the tickets. In the latter case, it’s not only money, but also a privilege that’s denied to the deserving person. Which, to the best of my knowledge, is a bummer.

In today’s context, they use the term “pirate” to somebody who has not paid for the music, but is listening to it for free. What about somebody who has downloaded millions of music files, but hasn’t listened to a single one. Is he a pirate because of the act of downloading something available for free? It’s people who are sharing, letting a major chunk of their music files available with them open to others, that the RIAA is issuing subpoenas to. Isn’t that crazy, kind of like the police arresting you because you leave the door to your house open when you leave for vacation?

It’s not about music, boss. It is the medium – and the distribution channel for the medium. All this hullabaloo – it’s about recording piracy, isn’t it? Not music piracy. It’s about the ability to create infinite copies, infinite free copies of something on a medium which happens to be a steady source of income for a cartel of dinosaurs. And it’s the people eating that cake who don’t want any of the slices missing.

Stop saying music piracy all the time. We aren’t pirates. We aren’t tampering with any of the music to earn more money and we aren’t using others’ intellectual propery to make money for ourselves. We don’t make war on 12-year old girls, and even if we did, if we believed in what we were doing, we would not let them get away if they “confessed”, or “apologised” or paid us settlements. If it’s thievery the RIAA is talking about, I can see what they mean. The self-righteous indignation – it does not fool anyone. Your time, Middle-Man of Music, is over and done with. So begone.

A happy ending. Remember the Pope’s directive about Miserere Mei, Deus, and all that secrecy and grandstanding about ownership of that piece of music? In 1770, a fourteen year old boy heard the 13-minute piece. He heard it just once, and then he proceeded to write it down, step-by-step, from memory, and started performing it throughout Europe, putting a rather nasty hole in the Pope’s plans.

The boy’s name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. To my knowledge, he was never called a pirate in his life.

OK, so now it’s official.

IIM Indore has its quiz-fest (named ‘Nihilanth’) on 4th and 5th October. I am supposed to conduct the Music, Movies and Entertainment quiz. Well, the press releases and online promos don’t mention my name, and I wasn’t taking things ( like preparing questions, or deciding on the format of the quiz) too seriously. Yesterday, I got the two-way air tickets delivered to my office, so now things are serious.

Frankly speaking, I am scared. I have too few questions, and people like Siddharth Basu (yes, him.) and Arul Mani and Gautam Ghosh are doing the other quizzes. The usual nightmares, of stammering on stage, or somebody pouncing up and saying ( worst-case scenario: some other QM doing this) – “No man, your funda is all wrong.”, or the deadliest of them all, me forgetting the answer to my own question. Yes, that has happened to me once, I was on stage goggling like a water-deficient fish for about 7 seconds, trying to figure out whether the answer given by the team is the correct answer or not. Trust me, when you are onstage, everyone can hear you think. (this one occasion had a happy ending, though. I just pretended, like all “good” quizmasters do, that Team C’s answer was a wrong one, and sauntered over to Team D, my mind working wildly all the time. By then, inspiration struck, I realised that the previous team had answered right, so I whirled around, and said “TEN POINTS for Team C!!!” real loud, and also managed to ask “Was that a guess, or did you know the answer?” Team C was, of course, too relieved to answer. ) This generally happens because the paranoid me does not write down the anwers along with the questions, just to ensure that there isn’t a chance of anyone coming upon the Q&A and…..

Hmm. So couple of things I am really concerned about –

• The anti-plagiarist in me says, no quiznet repeats. The practical guy says, how on earth do I check if my questions have not appeared in quiznet before?
• I don’t have enough visual questions, as in video clips/pictures. Asked for permission to use the CDG scanner, and that’s done. I just have to coordinate my sources, that’s all.
• I think I won’t have to worry about audio questions. One hour with my mp3s should be enough. Memo: get rid of id3 tags. Should I save as mp3s or write the tracks as an audio cd? Or both?
• Got to keep the questions short, so that I don’t ramble onstage. I think this will be tough. Keeping questions short, I mean, not not rambling. Stop rambling, dumkopf.
• And I have to make sure my questions are based on “reliable” sources. *Cookup* is a word that’s very unsparingly used among quizzers.

Hey, I just realised that cartoons by Charles Addams are very hard to come by on the Web. Not only that, his books, or rather, collected editions of his ‘toons for The New Yorker magazine sell for quite high prices on eBay. Which makes me quite happy, because I have five of his books, in the paperback Dell editions of the 50’s and 60’s. The biggest tragedy happens to be the fact that the Charles Addams Estate donated his entire body of work to the New Yorker magazine after the artist’s death. Tchah! That lowers my chances of ever buying Addams original art.

Vice City Update: Tommy Vercetti now owns a large mansion facing the Ocean. The Vercetti estate, formerly the Diaz Estate generates a daily income of five thousand dollars through various (ahem) sources. Rampages passed: 11 out of 35. Hee hee hee ho ho ho ha ha.

anybody… should get a gun and show me Kaizad Gustad’s brains. Yeah, that way. Boom.

Once upon a time, deep in the drudgery of my RECian life, I remember seeing a shocker of a movie called Lal Badhsah. That film made a new man out of me. It gave me an insight into my masochistic capabilities, and since then, Lal Badshah and the song Dhanno Ki Aankh has been a benchmark by which I measure my paisa-vasooli factor – a bad movie I might have seen now and then, but then, i would always remind myself, it wasn’t as bad as Lal Baadshah, was it?

Today that benchmark has been torn apart. I have gone lower. I have seen Boom and lived to tell the tale.

P.S: I know I am being melodramatic. I can’t help it.

The mental block that was removed when I passed Death Row in GTA:Vice City has done a lot of good things. For one, I am concentrating more at work. There was this code review – and it’s official – someone other than myself has acknowledged that my code rocks. Which does wonders for my confidence, thank you.

Then I was coming back from lunch, and in the lift, a senior colleague looks at me and says – “Where do you get your hair-cut?” Expecting the usual barbs, I say – “Ok, some place near my house.” And hastily add – “It’s weird, right, the haircut? Everybody says that, I know.” And he says – “Well, actually, no. It’s quite different. Very chirpy. Very cheerful.”

Oh, great. A new perspective on my hair. After all the years of self-doubt and mental torture and i-know-my-hair-sucks-don’t-stare-kind of looks, that remark mollified me somewhat. In fact it gave me this milk-curdling grin that refused to go away. I think it went away when I fell asleep. Am not too sure. Most likely I had this rictus on my face in the night – good thing I keep my door closed.

And at night, we went to see Boys. As is my underdog-complex, I liked it a lot. I liked the graphics, though they drown out the music of Boom Boom and make it seem like I am watching that annoying Chito-program on MTV. ( Is that programme still on? ), loads of weird squeals and squeaks and what-not. Shankar may be the master of the Deus ex Machinae, but he sure knows how to entertain. And yes, I seem to understand Telugu better than I thought. I wish I understood the language enough to get all the wink-wink stuff. The Boys ( the girl included) have just the right amount of chutzpah to carry off the whole thing, without making it seem a routine Yo-Pepsi-type movie.

But seriously, where exactly is it so vulgar? I didn’t see anything that bad. Or is it because I am less puritan?

One major irritating part: Ok, so you take a song and shoot it in beautiful locales to enhance it. Good. You dress the hero and heroine in matching-matching colours and let them prance around. Not too good, but ok. You see too many reruns of the Matrix and decide to use Freeze-frame to shoot some part of the song and go around town publicising the above fact. Oh good. But why the heck do you have to ring some freakin Windchimes everytime a freeze-sequence comes onscreen, Mr Shankar? We get the point!

I just realised that listening to Boys on headphones, properly, is a completely different experience from listening to it on 5 speakers. (The center one still doesn’t work, ahem ), which in turn is a different experience from listening to it while working. God apparently works in Mysterious Ways. In the middle of the night, of course.