Because I had promised to be there, and because no unforeseen change in scheduling happened, I was in Bangalore for the weekend. ‘Twas Madhav’s quiz, folks, and it was superb. Too bad I didn’t couldn’t make it to the finals. Maybe I should have taken a peek at his laptop when I had the chance. But the Onam lunch made up for everything. *Inserted satisfied sigh here*

kvk, al_lude and Mitesh, otherwise known as the Metaquizziks, swept the finals ( with a point-lead twice of that the next team).

My self-control amazes me. I managed to come back from Bangalore without buying any books this time. Inspite of seeing the biographies of Orson Welles and Francis Ford Coppola and a neat-o Harlan Ellison short story collection at Blossom. (Which incidentally has shifted to a new, much spacier place on the same road) I bought a couple of cds, though. Passion: The Original Soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ – a pending wishlist item, Mike Oldfield’s The Killing Fields: Soundtrack, and Salim Sulaiman’s Ab Tak Chhappan.

Note: I am not losing my touch. I would have definitely bought those books from Blossom if I had cash with me. Alas, I didn’t.

Other soundtrack updates:

Inspite of buying Kyon! Ho Gaya Na two weeks ago, I listened to it properly just a couple of days ago, and wow, regardless of what the movie is or pretends to be, the music is fantastic! Shankar, Ehsaan and Loy stick to their formula of generating catchy songs with dollops of techno and an advertising hangover, what impresses me most is the way they stay away from getting caught in a groove, melodic or otherwise. These guys hit the bulls-eye with the selection of voices for each of their songs, the brilliant use of instruments, just the right mix that distinguishes a cacophonic hack-job from something that genuinely brings a spring in the step when you listen to it.

My current favourite happens to be “No No”, the second song. The credits say it’s sung by Shankar Mahadevan himself, Kunal Ganjawala, Chetan Shashital ( who’s the official voice for Amitabh Bachhan on the album), and oddly enough, Loy Mendonsa himself ( spelt wrongly as “Mendonca” on the album cover) The highpoint of the song however is the female voice, Dominique Cerejo.

slight digression: Dominique has this ethereal church-choiry voice, much like Anupama, she of Koncham Nilavu fame, very good for background tracks, and ARR used her to sing in the background tracks of both Fire and Iruvar, and also Kaadhal Desam ( from what I remember right now!) I did not know her surname was Cerejo, which means she is related to Clinton Cerejo, the guy who is responsible for vocal arrangements in ARR’s compositions and S-E-L’s. Husband/wife? Brother/Sister?

Dominique and Kunal’s voices complement each other very well on “No No”, her’s soft and silky and his husky-gruff-nasal-anglicised. Loy is probably the guy who’s chanting the English lyrics , and Chetan Shashital’s there for the Bachhan laugh.Trust me, the vocal arrangements are superb on this one.

“Aao Na” by Sadhna Sargam, Udit Narayan and Shankar Mahadevan ( his vocals uncreditted on the cover) is next. Slow melody, with brilliant strings, elevated to God-stature by Sadhna Sargam’s vocals. Parts of “Main Hoon” remind me of Remo’s “Shinga Linga” from Khamoshi:The Musical. Chetan Shashital gets Amitabh Bachchan’s voice just right in “Baat Samjha Karo”,, a song with much folksy overtones and bedroom-dance potential.

Ouch. I just thumped my head against the keyboard.

This is about all I can afford to type tonight, thanks.

I got myself an Internet Connection at home two weeks ago. Sify Broadband – which was too slow, so on Friday I switched to Beam Cable. 850 Rs per month for unlimited access, fairly decent. Speeds are much much faster than those I got with Sify, which was 600 Rs per month.

However, immediately after the cable guy came over and changed the IP settings and created the new login, the computer crashed. I am running Win2k SP4, and everytime I booted up, a blue screen would come up, showing some .sys file that failed during boot, and the computer would restart. Things would work perfectly if I removed the network cable. Tried messing around with the network card, moving it to a different PCI slot and reinstalling drivers, none of which worked. Went to sleep pretty puzzled, and mighty sozzled.

Yesterday morning, I woke up, and remembered I had a personal firewall running, with its settings tuned to allow certain start-up events and disallowing others. Started computer with network cable detached, uninstalled firewall, restarted, reconnected cable. Voila, works perfectly now.

So there you have it. My First Post from home. Hoo-ah!

The first DVD set of Rurouni Kenshin arrived on Friday, too, so no more cursing Customs and the Postal Service. Watched the first episode that night. Very cool, in fact better than what I had expected it to be. Just the right mixture of humour and action. And I saw a volume of Ken Akamatsu’s Nagima at Walden yesterday, for 426 Rs.  Also a graphic novel version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, by Peter Kuper, an irregular Mad artist. Prices are pretty high for both, so still undecided about whether or not I should buy them.

A Little X-Rave:
Generally, I stay away from X-Men. With the exception of Ultimate X-Men, I find the X-Universe very convoluted and badly-written, with too many characters that grimace and clench their teeth and do cool things just because they look cool.

In recent times, there has been a buzz about Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men, and how his knockdown approach to the X-Story alienated many hardcore fans because of the changes he brought about, and of course, the general vein of weirdness running through the entire series. Now, Grant Morrison is a guy who falls squarely into the category of fans-turned-writers who create comics as an extension of their own interests. He is a practicising Magician, much like Alan Moore, and claims to have been abducted by aliens during a trip to, of all places, Kathmandu, though I personally think that was just an acid trip or something. He also claimed to increase sales of his Vertigo series Invisibles by organising a mass-masturbatory experiment among its readers.

Yesterday, I sat and read the first fourteen issues of Morrison’s X-Men run, and boy oh boy, was it fun or what! The Cyclops-Jean Grey equation is handled pretty well, Wolverine has, after a long long time, ceased sounding idiotic, the Beast reveals facts about his orientation, th island of Genosha, a mutant sanctuary, is annhilated by the sentinels. And homo sapiens is about to be extinct in four generations. Plus a load of interesting new mutants – a new attitude-throwing Angel, the trying-to-fly-but-can’t Beak, and my personal favourite, the Stepford Cuckoos, five telekinetic proteges of Emma Frost who think dirty and sound angelic.

The cycle was brilliant, with over-the-top cliffhangers and plot resolutions that only Morrison can think of. ( I mean it. Maybe Moore, Gaiman et al would come close, though) One issue involves Jean Grey and Emma Frost’s exploration of a comatose Professor Xavier’s mind. No words, except in one panel, the very last, that comes with a revelation, one that has been hinted at throughout the 22 pages, and you’re kind of expecting it, but it’s still shocking to see Jean actually say it out aloud.

Cool, cool reading.

I am a little worried right now. For the stupidest of reasons, at that. You see, I received 2 DVD packs, each pack containing six DVDs, episodes of an anime series called Rurouni Kenshin. Why I am worried is, there should have been THREE packs. 18 DVDs in all. Damn, I have this mental picture of greedy scumbag Indian customs officers ( apologies to all customs officers and their brethren ) who paw through imported packages that come by mail and see three similar looking packages and decide that two packs out of three won’t be that bad, and so they take pack# 3 home for their kids. I know that shows just how much of a bigotted anti-customs creep I am, but I can’t just help it. I will probably wait for two more days before I begin to weep and wail.

The same kind of paranoid thoughts crossed my mind when I was waiting for mrsgollum‘s 10-kilo package to arrive. It did, after two months, and very safe and sound and neatly packaged at that, but I bet if you took all the bits of fingernails and toenails and finger-skin that i gnawed off ( um, my own fingers and toes, thank you) in breathless anticipation of whether and when it’s going to come, you could stuff a fairly decent sized teddy bear and still have a pile of prickly badly gnawed fingernails left. Needless worry. I bet this kind of thing is what will lead to my premature baldness, not my faithful radioactive-impotency-ray-emiting Nokia that stays permanently wedged inside my pocket.

(Info: mrsgollum‘s package contained a fair amount of graphic novels – V For Vendetta by Alan Moore, Jinx and Goldfish by Brian Michael Bendis, Gaiman’s Stardust, Frank Capra’s autobiography The Name Above The Title, copies of Bill Sienkiewiescz’s Stray Toasters, Peter Milligan and Brett Ewin’s Skreemerand oh, precious, the first forty five issues of Swamp Thing, featuring Alan Moore’s early work on DC Comics, an awesome body of work that helped bring in the Vertigo Age of comics. I got this some two Saturdays ago )

Right. I need to stop worrying about petty details, and forgive customs officers everywhere, and focus on the positive things at hand.

I read 230 pages of Simon Singh’s Code Book last night, armed with pencil, paper, and the rare combination of sleeplessness and complete dedication that a really, really good book brings with it. I was supposed to fall asleep early, because I had just come back from a lightning-fast Chennai trip ( Landmark Quiz. Damp Squib, as always). Spending two consecutive nights on General Compartments of Charminar Express is not advisable, let me assure you. Your spine feels like a seperate entity altogether, and at about two AM, your ass feels like what Atlas (the Greek Mythology guy, not the bicycle) must have felt after all that sky-bearing. Instead of catching up on sleep, I ended up reading about the history of codes and ciphers – and I salute Mr. Singh for the brilliant readability of his work.

The above portion was written yesterday, but I forgot to post it.

Vineeth (not him ) sent me a parcel that had TWO Far Side Galleries ( Volumes 1 and 2). And also some Conan novels, with exquisite pen-and-ink sketches by Esteban Maroto, whose work I knew only from Atlantis Chronicles ( DC Comics, 1990), a Dashiell Hammett, and Pratchett’s Equal Rites. Finished The Far Side Gallery Volume One last night, and then read the complete first volume of Lone Wolf and Cub. All this when the four-cd Collector’s Edition of The Cowboy Bebop Original Soundtrack was being downloaded to my hard-drive.

One of these days, the circuits in my brain will overload, and they will find me in the morning with my brains splattered all over the bean-bag, my face frozen in an ecstatic grin. “Too Many Good Things”, they will converse in hushed tones, “you shouldn’t have too many of those damned Good Things. Just look at what happened to poor old Beatzo”.

If there is any justice in the world, there will be a draft of wind just then, something that will chill the bones of those nay-sayers, and make the curtains in my room flap loudly, and make a sound that will vaguely sound like “Shhhhhhhhhhhite”.

P.S The download ( 303 MB in all) completed today morning. With apologies to Extremely Jealous Girlfriend, I need to say this. Yoko Kanno, I love you.

WHOA!

May I?

Brian Lumley is the man.

The Necroscope series, apart from being one of the few series that I have read in reverse order is also one of the non-Stephen King horror books that have been white-heat reads. The good thing was that, inspite of knowing nothing at all about what happened in books one and two, I was able to enjoy Book three ( Necroscope: The Source, found in the streets of Chennai in January 2000) and likewise, I read Book two ( Necroscope: Wamphyri, Best Book Centre, circa 2002) and loved all of it, though I knew how it would end. Book 1 ( Necroscope, MR Book Stall, May 2004) was like reading a prequel, and I love prequels. Well-written ones, especially.

The Cold War. The Russian E-Branch, a highly classified section devoted to ESPionage, spying through people who possess paranormal powers, possess a necromancer named Boris Dragosani, a man who sucks brains and pulls organs out from corpses to demand the secrets of the Dead. But Dragosani has learnt of the art of necromancy from a Vampire who languishes deep in a grave in the mountains of Romania, a vampire who claims to be his father, and, predictably enough, he wants more.

The only man who can save the day is a young man ( yes, there is always a young man around to save the day, and more often than not, he wears specs ) named Harry Keogh. Harry Keogh lost his mother at a very early age. He was bullied in school. His studies suffered. Very often, he would daydream in class. Only thing is, they were not dreams.

If you see Haley Joel Osment right now, whispering – “I can see dead people.”, do tell him to go get a life. Because Brian Lumley wrote it first!!!! A boy who can talk to the dead. In fact, he not only talks to them, he also learns from them. He learns self-defence from a dead Sergeant who was his ex-gym instructor, he gives his Mathematics teacher a chilling stare when asked why he’s not using the prescribed formulae – “Formulae? I can show you formulae you have never dreamed of.”, he says, in a voice that reminds Mr Hannant of his late father, ex-Principal of the school, and a brilliant teacher of his generation. From the tales told to him by a seventeenth century nobleman, Harry writes a novel called “The Diary of a Seventeenth Century Rake”.

And from August Ferdinand Möbius, the nineteenth century German mathematician and astronomer, Harry Keogh learns the secret of the Mobius Strip, by which he can literally open doors and teleport himself through space and time. What better a man to save the world than Harry Keogh?

But as is wont, Bad Things happen. Things get slightly better at the end of the second book, but the shit hits the air conditioner in Book Three. Everything is not as it seems. Which is effectively me telling everyone to please go and find the books and read them.

As much as I loathe Hollywood butchering popular literature, I strongly feel that the first three Necroscope books have very high Box Office potential. A proper horror story, with much scope for SFX-oriented sequences – Lumley’s off-beat depiction of vampires; the cinematic potential of watching a necromancer ripping out a heart and absorbing a corpse’s essence; sex, revenge, melodrama ( dead mother talking to still-alive son) – man, someone pass this book to Peter Jackson.

Me? I am on the lookout for Books Four to Ten in the saga. I have Book five with me, but am not reading it out of sequence this time. I know, very vaguely, that the next arc involves Harry’s son, and an unholy pact between the Wamphyri and the kid, and I am dying ( pun! pun! ) to go read it.

Meanwhile, there is a sale on at YMCA Secunderabad, organised by Best Book Centre. I am doomed.