Monthly Archives: January 2016

Movies, Myself

A Very Bloody Christmas

“So, Satya”, she said. “Which M was your Christmas this time?”

I was confused. Which M? Like James Bond M? Was my friend making some arcane pop culture reference that I did not get? Was I doomed to begin the year on a note of failure, unable to respond to a simple query? I must have blinked more than a few times, because she laughed. “I meant, was it Merry, Melancholy or Meh?”

“Oh”, I said. “Sorry, you lost me for a second there.” And then when I was about to answer her, I realized that my life is such a blur sometimes that it took me a couple of minutes to retrace my steps and answer her question. Merry, I said. But not the way you would think. And very very special. In fact, I told her, if I did not write this shit down, I would forget all about how special Christmas 2015 was.
“Goddammit are you going to not answer me right now and write one of those roundabout, self-aware blog posts of yours?”, she said, and seeing the twinkle and the grin, added, “You know nobody reads blogs nowadays, right? I mean, this is 2016. If you were writing this down, I would have lost interest right about now.”

Too late, for my eyes had already glazed over, as my mind flashed back to a few weeks ago. A time when events of major import were unfolding in another part of Los Angeles as I sat at my work-desk whispering arcane spells over cauldrons overflowing with bubbling ichor. Or debugging code, if you want a narrative that fits in more with your frame of reference.

You see, the New Beverly – which is a heritage theater that Quentin Tarantino used to frequent as a struggling screenplay-writer, and later on bought when the owner died and building was due to be broken down in 2007  – announced that they were going to play Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair on Christmas Eve. KB:TWBA, in case you didn’t know, is the NC-17 cut of the movie, both volumes played in one single screening with an intermission, with a combined runtime of 257 minutes. It has additional material, the whole House of Blue Leaves sequence is in color, as opposed to the b/w version that was aired for audiences because the excessive bloodletting did not make for happy Film Certification boards. Only one print of this cut exists, and QT owns it. It has French subtitles because it was cut for the Cannes screening.

Now here’s the important thing – the only public screening was in Cannes, for the premiere of Kill Bill. The only other time it had been screened until this happy announcement was also at the New Beverly in April 2011, for Tarantino’s birthday. I know the month because I bought tickets off Craigslist for the event; I had to sell them because of an unexpected trip back to India. The tickets yielded a profit, but the cruelest blow was the Tyler Stout Mondo poster that was released during the screening. I did buy the poster a few years later, but had to pay a huge premium; I complained to the moirai, out of frustration and resentment. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, for the sake of his living room wall.

Anyway, the point of all this nerdtastic regurgitation of facts is: The Whole Bloody Affair is kinda special. Especially more so because out of Tarantino’s oeuvre, Kill Bill was the movie that mapped the movie-viewing landscape for me in the second half of my twenties. You know how when you are young and you like certain things, but you don’t really know how to classify them, or find more things like them? Before Kill Bill happened, I never really knew how to go around and figure out what I should watch next, but suddenly there was this explosion of taste; this whole spectrum of genres that QT’s homages and references opened up for me – Italian giallo, Shaw Brothers films, Spaghetti Westerns, *good* anime, the Yakuza movies of Kinji Fukasaku, the soundtracks of Morricone and Bacalov, Japanese noise rock; and surprisingly, a renewed interest in the likes of Hitchcock, Truffaut, and Godard. Films and film-makers that I had considered too pretentious or stuffy for my tastes suddenly felt warmer, cast in a new light; swathes of genre film that I had dismissed as not worth my time revealed deeper veins of style and substance. So it made the wait to see Tarantino’s original cut for the film even more special, a 12-year tunnel at the end of which a light flickered, finally.

But of course, all 200 tickets for the December 25 show sold out in 2 minutes. I was ready at the appointed hour, refreshing the tickets page. By the time I added tickets to my cart, the number came down to 92,  and by the time I got to the payments page, they were all gone. Somewhere, the moirai laughed. But I pulled myself up, brushed off the dirt of disappointment while muttering “So that we may pick ourself up” to imaginary Alfred in my head, and went on with my life, because there is not much else one can do.

That Christmas morning, I went to watch Hateful Eight in the morning; it was one of the few movies of 2015 that I was looking forward to, and to say I loved it would be an understatement. By the time I was done with lunch and came back home, it was nearly 4 PM. I am not sure why I checked Twitter, but I did, and in my feed there were tweets from the New Beverly Theater talking about the show due in a few hours. But huzzah, they mentioned a standby line. A moment or two of indecisive laziness, and then I found myself saying – fuck this, I can either stay at home and cry, or go stand in line and at least try. Moments like these – when one’s brain speaks in rhyme – defines one’s very existence. I walked out, paused, and ran back in, because it was really really cold outside – shut up, non-Los Angeles people – and put on another jacket, picked up a scarf, and drove like crazy to the theater. Hoping that there weren’t already 30 people in the standby line.

There were 7. I was the 8th. And after 3 hours of waiting, and talking to the guys standing ahead of and behind me, and hearing stories of how one of them sat next to Quentin T himself at one random movie screening and how the other fist-bumped Edgar Wright just a few days ago, it turns out there were 11 returns. I swear Tomoyasu Hotei played when I walked inside the theater. There was a line at the refreshments stand, which has one of the most wondrous cinema food prices in the world – $1 for a small drink, $4 for a popcorn – and even though I had only just been in line, I stood there again for a few minutes to grab me some nourishment. The pre-movie ad reels are always fun at the Beverly; this time around, we had an animated Max Fleischer Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ‘toon in its entirety; followed by trailers for Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, the Western Navajo Joe, Bronson’s Death Wish, and the Clint Eastwood starrer Hang ‘Em High, which I realized I have never seen.

Thoughts on TWBA:

  • The music that begins Kill Bill, with the somewhat old-timey ‘Our Feature Presentation’ animation is actually QT’s homage to the New Beverly, which plays before every movie. This music therefore played before the movie actually began, and then again within the movie’s credits. We applauded, of course.
  • French subtitles throughout. ‘Buck’, for some reason, is subtitled  ‘Buckaroo’ in French.
  • Boss Matsumoto’s killing is defs more gruesome in this cut. Pun completely intended.
  • The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves sequence is all-color, and has a bunch of unedited blood-and-gore snippets, obviously. It also features the kid that gets his ass whupped with the non-business end of the Bride’s Hanzo sword in yet another sequence, where his mask gets knocked away. That also misses the close-up of the Bride’s eye in the upstairs room – in the normal cut, she blinks, and the color flips back in.  Gordon Liu as Johnny Mo also gets a little more fight-time in this version.
  • Because both movies are linked together, Bill and Sophie’s scene from the end of Vol 1 does not have the line “Does she know that her daughter is still alive?” line. None of the preview snapshots (‘How did you find me?’, ‘That woman deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die’, ‘She must suffer until her last breath’) at the end of Vol 1 appear in the uncut version, for obvious reasons.
  • It also does not have the opening ‘Bill, it’s your baby’ sequence from Vol 2 – which is the same scene from Vol 1 but with the theme music from ‘Navajo Joe’ playing in the background. Also, the Bride looking into the camera saying ‘Thought you were dead, didn’t I?’ is not in this cut.
  • Love the way Gheorge Zamfir’s ‘The Lonely Shepherd’ leads into the intermission. Very very stylish.
  • There is a 7-second blooper at the end of the credits. For those of us who stayed until that point – and there were a lot of us – the staff at the New Beverly handed out custom beanies. Woo hoo!

My Christmas, therefore, was M for Merry. It was B for Bloody and T for Tarantino-esque and F for Fuck yeah, a gargantuan goal overcome.

kill-bill-gargantuan

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Myself

A Moving Post

So I moved.
Marina del Rey was a great place to live in. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment that was right on the water, in a complex that boasted of perks and frills like no other. There was a gym 100 feet from my patio – oh, yes, I had a patio, and a gigantic one at that. A swimming pool with a jacuzzi and a steam room. Open pits outside in the courtyard for barbecue parties.In the summer, there was a $1 water-bus service from the harbor end of the building, and I have gone to get groceries from across the Marina on one, at times. The evenings that I would go out to run or walk around the marina, I would come back home with a shit-eating grin like you can’t imagine. And at night, if I left my patio door open, I would hear the sound of seals and the creaking of boats. And sometimes this neighbor having sex. Umm, really loud sex, and quite long too. My other next-door neighbors were an elderly, jovial English couple who would apologize every now and then about the House music they played, which I never really heard; a sweet old lady who would complain every now and then about the dreadful noise near the swimming pool; a young Jewish couple who invited me to my first Shabbat dinner and would occasionally come over for a drink or catch up when we passed by each other on the harbor. Everybody owned a dog or two; and a lady two doors down even walked dogs for a bunch of people in the building.

My first memory of Marina del Rey was pure relief, with a bit of financial trepidation. Relief because of adventures while house-hunting after my move to California. Case in point, I was visiting an apartment in – I don’t remember, Santa Monica, maybe – and the door was opened by an elderly gentleman wearing a leather jacket. And nothing else. Who then proceeded to show me around the place with a concerned arm on my shoulder, and also mentioned three times that he did not like dirty dishes in the sink, and anything else was acceptable. Before I left, he said he was off to a Playboy party that evening, and that if I moved in, I could join him if I so wished. I could feel Orpheus and Lot’s wife judging me as I walked away. Tough life. Another prospective co-tenant in Santa Monica had olfactory problems, according to her Craigslist ad. That was quite an understatement, because she ended up discussing which brands of laundry detergent and soap I should buy, and what time of the day I should shower, and which spices I am allowed to use – all to avoid triggering her strong sense of smell. I backed away as elegantly as I could.

But a different CL ad led me to share an apartment with ‘Drea the Awesome and her three cats. It was hard wrapping my head around the rent amount when I first heard it, but a glance at what I was getting for that money and I made my mind up. However, some time down the line, being a secondary room-mate got old soon, especially when my books came in from India, and I found out that a bedroom and a bit of the common area did not quite cut it. So I moved out to my own place. I found my slice of heaven two blocks away from Tahiti Way, where I lived earlier, and it took me all of thirty seconds to decide and not a whit of hesitation to say “yes, I do”, when the leasing agent asked me if I liked the apartment.

Three years of living in this apartment. In those three years, I managed to make a honest-to-goodness home out of it, edging it away from the ‘bachelor pad’ connotation that adheres to the single-guy lifestyle. It was the first place that I had set up entirely on my own, using a combination of Reddit interior design posts, aesthetic choices and thrift-store hopping. The results, I should say, were not overly impressive, but it was home. I organized dinner parties among my friends, and by 2015, these events had become happy, complicated affairs, where I could and did entertain 10-17 guests without breaking a sweat. In these three years, there has been two incidents that disturbed the Force – one being a call from security one night when we were having an office after-party at my place – where the guard was apologetic enough because he knew the person that had called to complain and said they did it all the time; the other time, a lady made passive-aggressive racist comments in the garage when friends were present; that was taken care of.

Why move, then? I guess a big part of it was the rent, which increased steadily over the years. It was possible indeed to take a deep breath every October, when the new lease agreement came in, and look around and feel hashtag blessed at the kind of lifestyle I was leading, and just grit my teeth and sign up for 12 more months. But it got to the point where I began wondering of how life would be a little outside this summery bubble. Because, yes, the Marina was a bubble that makes you feel like you are partying all year long, with beautiful people everywhere, on the way to the beach or walking around being all touristy near their water-facing hotel rooms. It was also apparent, especially when I headed back from a concert late in the night, from Hollywood or Downtown LA, that the Marina was out of the way from everything. LA is a big place, and I wanted to move somewhere closer to where the action was.

But the question was – would I find a place that lived up to my expectations?

I did, of course. Once my mind was made up, it took a week to narrow my options down, and one weekend to go around the areas with open houses, and suddenly there it was, the place I would soon call home. It passed the 30-second test (which is this – if within 30 seconds, I cannot think of a compelling reason why the house is not right, it will probably work out). It helped that my future landlady was a no-nonsense woman, all of 93, answering all my questions while seated in that chair in the center of the living room. I was the first to fill in an application, and two days later, it was done, and all that remained was the actual, physical act of moving.

So I moved, and it was all good.

Somewhere in Marina del Rey

The last box.

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Books, Life

Things I learnt on the first day of 2016

  • A cap of whiskey dunked into a smoothie adds a subtle flavor to it that is hard to pinpoint and makes it super interesting. For reference, the other ingredients in the smoothie were 3 kiwi fruits, 1 banana, a slice of peeled ginger, coconut water as the base, chia seeds and a smidgen of honey.
  • Waking up to a long, heart-warming email on January 1 could be the best thing to wake up to on the first day of the year.
  •  If you are in a shopping mall and see a massage chair, go sit on it for 5 minutes. Er, don’t just sit on it, I mean, insert that money to switch it on. Totes worth it.
  • In a choice between udon and ramen lunch, the place with the lowest waiting line wins. Also, you win, regardless of the line.
  • This is important: there are three books on Shunga, or Japanese erotic art, that I have been aware of. I had always set my eyes on Ofer Shagan’s Japanese Erotic Art as the definitive one, thanks to reviews and also because of the price/value ratio. Rosina Buckland’s book is a hardcover and comes in a lower price point, but 176 pages seems far less definitive. Timothy Clark’s Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art does seem more well-rounded in terms of content, but the 99$ price point is excessive. Today, however, I found out about a fourth book that does not turn up in any of the lists. Poem of the Pillow and Other Stories by Utamaro, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi and Other Artists of the Floating World is a mouthful of a title, and it’s out-of-print, but used copies are available for 20$ or thereabouts. Gian Carlo Calza, the writer knows exactly when to let the pictures do the talking and when to interject with commentary. This one’s probably coming into the bookshelf pretty soon.
  • Little Tokyo in Downtown LA has a gallery called Q2, which features indie artists’ work on the walls for sale and display. I nearly pooped my pants at an original Kagan McLeod watercolor of Gordon Liu, and some wonderful work by Alina Chau and a bunch of other names I don’t remember. Definitely worth going back.
  • People in the UK have already watched Sherlock: The Abominable Bride, which makes me grit my teeth. In my defense, I am holding off to watch it on Tuesday, where it plays in the theater opposite my workplace, single-screening only.

Ah, fuck it, I will just go watch it tonight first.

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