Right now, the only things to do is to wait for the days to pass by until I get to Guwahati. I think I deserve a long rest. I also need 5.5 GB of DC comics to whet my appetite.

Anne Rice is this writer whom I have been unable to make up my mind about. Some of her books ( Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Servant of the Bones ) are so low-paced they can give Rip Van Winkle a complex. While others ( The Queen of the Damned, Vittorio the Vampire, The Tale of the Body Thief ) are white-heat. She also happens to write the darkest, most erotic bondage-themed fairy-tales ever ( The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, Beauty’s Release ) In Bombay, I had been to this shop, Lotus Books, that had an amazing collection, with amazingly high prices. Jeez! They actually increase the book prices every day with the changing exchange-rates. I found the Vampire Companion, a complete guide to Ms Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and the nearly tattered copy had a price tag of six hundred and thirty rupees. Bloody grave-robbers, living off the dead!!!!!

I got Blood and Gold for sixty rupees yesterday, which is a very low price for a book released last year. And last night, I watched the first cd of Interview With the Vampire. Anne Rice had written the screenplay herself, so there were no surprises, except that I didn’t know Brad Pitt plays Louis. I thought it was Banderas in that role. The story moves at a leisurely pace, much like the book, with the philosophical discussions ( which were so integral to all of Rice’s books – existential angst of the vampire community ) chopped down. Tom Cruise plays LeStat in a flamboyant manner, the character’s cruelty, his vainness, his moments of unrestrained joy at being a vampire being enacted quite well by Cruise. Neat scene: a “dance of death” with a corpse of a plague-ridden woman. In my imagination, ( and Rice’s, i think) Lestat was much more taller, much more handsome.

Again, the disadvantage of VCDs – the annoying hiss of badly encoded audio cuts down much of Elliot Goldenthal’s background score.

The highpoint of the movie so far was Kirsten Dunst’s role of Claudia, a cherubic vampire child. I found her very different ( as in looks and demeanour) from the chirpy role of Mary-Jane in Spiderman; pretty impressive acting, I must say. I wonder if the film didn’t run into censorship problems with the Lolita-aspect of the whole thing – Claudia was supposed to fall in love with Louis, about fifteen years her senior.

I am trying to get my nocturnal bearings straight before i go back home, in order not to disturb my parents’ idea of “daily habits”. So my go-to-bed time gets earlier, and so does my rise-time, and as Mr James Thurber once put it, it’s enough to make a man healthy, wealthy and dead, all at the same time.

In tune with the above theme, I dutifully switched off the movie after the clock struck 12 ( or rather, after the digital watch beeped once), and went to sleep.

OK, so the first installment of the Indore quiz questions. Your answers may be appended with a screened comment, that will be unscreened once I give the answers out. Yes, this was supposed to be a team quiz, so google is allowed. The condition is that, (a) you will click the google “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, and (b) you will click it only once.

I read Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer the night before I left for Indore, and on the trip, I finished SF Fantasy Masterworks: Elric by Michael Moorcock. Both books were awesome, and part of my short-term goals happen to be finishing the two other Fowl books, whose e-Text versions are stored in my HDD. I am slightly hesitant about starting Gloriana by Moorcock, since that’s a lot divorced from his Eternal Champion storyline.

Current Read: Gump and Co by Winston Groom, in which Gump has managed to semi-bankrupt the Coca Cola company and drown a village in pigshit. From a Buick Eight by Stephen King. Stuck at page 113.

This made my day. I met Gaurav at the fest, and as he told me his name, I thought it sounded familiar – “most likely Quiznet”- was what I thought. It was only when someone asked me who the person on table 5 in the Lone Wolf quiz was, there was this blinding flash of light, and I remembered who he was. Thanks, Gaurav.

Prelims Questions

or rather, Daredevil:Yellow. It was worth the wait.

Gotham has loads of new titles. I think they have the continuity problems worked out now, so instead of printing random stories now and then, they are starting afresh with titles that have a single continuity point. Point in case: Batman:Hush, Daredevil:Marvel Knights, Spiderman by Paul Jenkins ( Sasi, this is the guy who wrote Origin ), Mark Waid’s soap operatic take on Fantastic Four ( I believe he was fired from the title this year, just as he was getting warmed up), also a manga standalone Marvel Comic ( serioussam, you hear? )

Pros: Everything.
Cons: I will think of something soon enough.

Some chap in IIM Kolkata has 5.5 GB of scanned DC/Marvel comics on his hard disk and is sharing it over the network. Me and Sasi will be stopping over in Kolkata when we are coming back from Guwahati. *insert maniacal laughter here*

The first time in recorded human history, I have finished preparations for a quiz three days in advance. Not only that, I have also used Power PointTM for the audios. Saves me the bother of trying to hide the player or the ID3 tags. I tried hard not to be smart-alecky with the questions. Let’s see.

What if the RIAA( or it’s Indian equivalent, the one that’s charging money from college Music Events ) tries to charge money from me and IIMB for playing audio clips? After all, it’s a commercial enterprise, both me and the team-members will be making money out of playing and listening to music. Can the RIAA charge me if I use lyrics from songs? I mean, can I quote lyrics from songs in public, or will that be copyright infringement?

Me walk down the road. Me stumbles. “Ow! F***! F***! F***!”
Tap on shoulder. “Hello, young man, you have been issued a subpoena by the RIAA in association with the John Lennon Estate. For using words copyrighted by the Estate. See you in court, and have a nice day. ”

Don’t laugh. The way things are going, this is what it’s all leading to.

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.