Angst In My Pangst

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.