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Because…

….what goes around comes around.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer:

35 GB. Because my hard drive crashed two days ago, and one partition had to be formatted. Bye-bye, my complete Aphex Twin/Sigur Ros collection. *sniff* Some of you will be back again soon enough, and some will have to be downloaded again. ( already have, in fact)

And oh, some of it is legal, ripped versions of CDs I have back at Hyderabad.

2. The last CD you bought was:

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero OST,
Humko Ishq Ne Maara OST
Hanging Around by Trickbaby.

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero or Bose, for short, was a disaster. Humko Ishq Ne Maara was a pseudo-gift from moccacino – because I was the one that had to pay for it – but quite a worthwhile buy, containing a number of peppy feelgood songs from the nineties. Most likely the movie never got released, but the music has endured. The music is by Aadesh Srivastav and the singers are all winners of Meri Aawaz Suno, the TV show that ran on Doordarshan ( and then on other channels, as if I care which ones…)

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

Juno Reactor – Pistolero
Varrtina – Itkin

Both these songs played as I was answering the questions above, and considering that I have only these two enqueued on Winamp, I mustmention both. The Juno Reactor song is mucho different from the Matrix work these guys have done, it’s off their album Shango, a flurry of acoustic guitar riffs and Spanish vocal samples, with the occasional gunshot.

Varttina is every bit as good as I thought it would be – this is the three-girl band from Finland collaborating with AR Rahman on the Lord Of The Rings: The Musical. Itkin reminded me of the title song of Parthaley Paravasam.

Incidentally, I got both these songs from a Finnish friend in the office.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.
This is going to be tough, I can feel it.
For starters, I am going to exclude all AR Rahman and Björk songs. Among the ones that remain:

1) The 5-6-7-8’s – I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield – The song that the house band of The House of Blue Leaves is playing in Kill Bill Vol 1, when the Bride is spying on O-Ren Ishii and the band. Possibly my first Japanese song. Life has never been the same since then.

2) Indian Ocean – Village Damsel – The first Indian Ocean song I heard, and possibly the one that cemented my love for the band forever. I will always associate this band with my Higher Secondary Board Examinations. And Goa. And sitting in my college room wondering if I will ever see this band live and kiss Susmit Sen’s hands.

3) Vangelis – Chariots of Fire – I was 10 when I heard the Hindi version of this song, and then a couple of years later, someone played this in a quiz. Floored. One of the songs I used to play before exams to pep myself up bigtime, along with Koncham Nilavu ( That’s a Rahman song, hence not in the list) Also the first song I taught myself to play on the keyboard.

4) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Musst Musst – I love all the versions of this song available, the sparse, voice-dominated Qawwali, or the Infinite Guitar-backed fusion piece, even the trip-hoppy Massive Attack version. Not to mention the innumerable other versions mixed by the holy mixmeisters from T-Series. Of course, I first heard of this through Viju Sha’s adaptation in Mohra.

5) Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit – If there is a song that reminds me of my College years, it has to be this (or maybe RATM’s Killing in the Name)

5. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why?
moccacino, because I think I know what she’ll put in, and just want to double-check.
psasidhar, though he is out of town at the moment. He doesn’t do memes, but I have a feeling he’ll like this.
vrikodhara, because I want to find out what the boy’s been downloading. Humph!

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There’s a Ghost…in the Shell.

In my 3rd year of college, psasidhar, then in final year, was The guy in the CSE department. He had the right contacts, an unshakeable reputation, and consequently, unlimited access to the (extremely slow) College Internet Line. He didn’t abuse this power, no sir. Except for the short time when he diverted all outgoing mails to trash while his script to download the complete Calvin and Hobbes strips from a site ran on the server and ate up the complete bandwidth, and I would hardly call that abuse.There were other such scripts, of course, the most notable one being a script that downloaded a CD-load of Windowmaker themes. I hardly used Linux even then, except for finishing weekly assignments, and that was a rare occurrence anyways. But Sasi’s themes forced me to use Window-maker, if only for to check out the cool wallpapers that came bundled with them.

Ghost in the Shell

And one of them was this, a sexy-looking woman with loads of attitude. As a little googing ( Yes, we did have google back then, a new curiousity that was waaay faster than Hotbot and Yahoo and all those trashy search engines that we depended on) showed, the lady’s name was Motoko Kusanagi, a character from a manga called Ghost in the Shell ( which I had vaguely heard about, right after The Matrix was released) by a guy named Masumone Shirow, and made into a movie by Mamoru Oshii.

I happened to watch Ghost in the Shell recently, after years of reading about its greatness, and about the influence it has had on mainstream movies like The Matrix, and the influences it has borrowed from cyberpunk traditions ( William Gibson, Bladerunner). I was not disappointed. Stylish without being overtly violent, with genuine “Oh-my-god” moments. As usual, it was the road to the movie that was more memorable. I got the comics from a Bandwidth-rich junior, then the soundtrack album a year later when I got my connection at home. Then the soundtrack to the sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Followed by the soundtrack of the TV series. Then found the DVD of Innocence, a version with terrible subtitles, in The Market. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the movie.

The soundtrack of the movie deserves a seperate post in itself. Kenji Kawai, the composer, uses a striking theme for the opening, called “The Making of Cyborg”, which is a choral piece in Japanese, backed with booming taiko drums and chimes. The chorus is hypnotic – I am left wondering which parts of it is synthetic and which parts sung by real people. “Ghost City” and “Reincarnation” play on variants of the same choral-drum theme. The second track is like just a bass drum playing a single beat, slow, evocative.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, also by Kawai has almost the same soundscape, with minor differences in tone and intensity. Brilliant, is all I have to say. So are the soundtracks to the TV series, which are composed by Yoko Kanno, the lady best known for her Cowboy Bebop compositions. As expected, these are tracks that cannot be slotted into a single genre, a single track might hop from a Big-band orchestral arrangement to spanish guitar music and then, as you are gasping for breath, move into heavy metal mode.

Trivia:

1) The title “Ghost in the Shell” comes from Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, which also lends its name to an album by The Police. Koestler himself borrowed the term from a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle who coined it to refute the Descartian ( or is that Cartesian) principle of seperation of mind and matter.

2) The US dubbed version of the movie had a track called “One Minute Warning”, with music by Brian Eno and U2. While this is nowhere to be seen on the official soundtrack album, I found it on a CD called Passengers, at a sale in Hyderabad. This was even before I got the manga.

Ironic Nostalgia Moment of the Day: This post, dated May 2003, where I mentioned the shock value associated with discovering a DVD of Ghost in the Shell at Music World. I did find it in Music World two years later. (not the genuine Music World, this is the shopping centre at Basheer Bagh that shares the same name) Now is that prophetic or what?

P.S: Some of Sasi’s wallpapers are now part of RECian legend – they were used (without any form of acknowledgement whatsoever) as backgrounds for the brochure of Trivium 2001, our very own Quiz Fest. Not the GITS one, much to my regret.

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Sin City, Studio Ghibli,

Woo Hoo! Everybody loves Sin City.

Can’t wait. Though it’s going to be some time before it releases in India. I am still undecided about whether to go the Kill Bill way and shed picture quality in favour of an early peek ( courtesy The Market ), or wait for the theatrical release in India. Probably it will be the former, because I can’t imagine it being screened uncut. Humph.

For non-comic-book readers who have no clue about what on earth Sin City is, here’s the primer.

Prices of the Sin City comics, the original 32-page floppies that were released between 1991 and ’98, have soared on eBay. I remember seeing complete lots of the Sin City comics going for 80$ a year ago ( I bought the individual issues at below cover-price, my first 2fargon-assisted eBay purchases. Did I tell you about the Frank Miller-autographed issue of Sin City: To Hell And Back #1he got for me? ). Last I looked, complete lots are selling at about 300$. Man.

Oh, and porcorosso, I finally watched Porco Rosso last night. I have a vague feeling that the Great Ghibli Gig has just begun.

Before I go to sleep in the middle of the night, I put on the computer, and enqueue all the music files on the hard disk (the playlist time comes to about 312 days) on Winamp, put it on low volume. It’s an awesome feeling waking up in the middle of the night ( for a glass of water, or to pee, or just like that) and listening to the song that’s playing at the moment and trying to figure out who it is by. I put Winamp in shuffle mode, so when I go back to sleep – it’s fun guessing what the next song would be.

It might sound funny, but I can’t sleep with the sound of running water, or a clock ticking louder than normal – but heavy metal playing loud is no problem at all.

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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.

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