Books, Movies

Talking about books I read: ‘How Star Wars Conquered The Universe’

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Pal Seamus was reading this book when I went to meet him one evening in Larchmont Village. Even though there were other books in my queue, hard to resist a book about Star Wars. Not that I have much love for the franchise – people’s reactions to it make me shake my head in bemusement and back away slowly. [ref]while growing up, some people distinguished between Star Wars and Star Trek as the series with the tube-light lights and the series with Mr Spock. Star Trek played on Doordarshan in 1985, a year before we bought our first TV, so I bypassed that too. But there were kids in school who would pinch you really hard on the back of your neck, because Mr Spock. [/ref]I suspect the most invested I was in the series was while reading a bunch of Star Wars novels about 10 years ago, specifically The New Jedi Order series, which begins with the death of Chewbacca in the first book. Don’t worry, this is not really a spoiler, none of the books are canon anymore, especially with The Force Awakens and the planned one-Star-Wars-movie-a-year releases. Just so you know, this book talks about that happening too, with the kind of cold-blooded objectivity that sends shivers down your spine.

When fan grief over the death of Chewbacca surpassed anything Shapiro or Stackpole expected, a rumor surfaced that Randy Stradley of Dark Horse Comics had told the meeting to “kill the family dog,” and compared Chewie to Old Yeller. But Stackpole denies that, insisting they all stuck the knives in at the same time, like Roman conspirators. Shapiro, who would edit the book, was happy to wield a blade. “You’ve got to get people’s attention. Otherwise it’s just ‘Oh, another adventure, another super weapon,’” Shapiro explains.

Why the interest in this book then, you ask? Because the behind-the-scenes affairs with the series has always fascinated me. Stars Wars’ tendrils encompass a lot of sci-fantasy pulp fiction, old-school Hollywood space operas, and world cinema. Alex Raymond and Akira Kurosawa, EE Doc Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs coming together in a cultural bouillabaisse that is timeless and appealing to multiple generations, clunky dialogue be damned. Lucas, an avowed non-writer, worked his way through anxiety and budgetary nightmares to try and bring back to life his childhood fascination with film serials; to deconstruct what made his heart soar in a darkened movie theater. And – pardon my mixed pop-cultural metaphors – he even went boldly where few screenwriters had gone before, tapping into primal myths and stories, specifically the themes and archetypes that writer Joseph Campbell identified in his seminal works. For me, knowing about Star Wars was much more enlightening than watching the movies. [ref] Here’s a confession: I saw the first 20 minutes of Empire Strikes Back when I was 11 or 12, and did not make sense of it, obviously. I have vague memories of watching one of the Ewok movies a year later, and that was a cutesy experience where storytelling did not matter. I saw New Hope in my second year of college, shaking my head over the outdated effects at the end but letting myself be sucked into the world. Then came the prequels, and much as I enjoyed them in the theater, the relentless barrage of wtf-ery in both plot and dialog overpowered the love of the world Lucas created. Yes, I have never seen Return of the Jedi. [/ref] That’s why I jumped on this book immediately.

Also, turns out Campbell had nothing but good things to say about Lucas, who met him later in life and befriended the academic:

“I was really thrilled,” Campbell said of the Star Wars series in a later interview. “The man understands the metaphor. I saw things that had been in my books but rendered in terms of the modern problem, which is man and machine. Is the machine going to be the servant of human life? Or is it going to be master and dictate? That’s what I think George Lucas brought forward. I admire what he’s done immensely. That young man opened a vista and knew how to follow it and it was totally fresh.”

The book opens in a wonderful manner, a screening of Star Wars dubbed into Navajo, where the writer tries to find Star Virgins, people who hadn’t seen any of the movies before. He spirals out into how pervasive the movie’s references have become, and how it is very hard for anyone at all to come into Star Wars with a blank slate. (If I remember right, someone did a Star Wars virgin watch on Twitter recently.) Alternate chapters of the book talk about fandom and the weird ways in which everyday lives of people have been affected by the movie. I had no idea, for example, that light-saber classes existed:

The easiest way to describe light-saber class is that it’s one part fencing, one part yoga. The goal is to learn a numbered system of fight choreography worked out by Bloch and his co-founder Matthew Carauddo, who runs the same class in a studio in Silicon Valley. You and I could meet for the first time with our light-sabers at a Comic-Con, say, and I could utter a string of numbers and you would know that I was going to slice around your body in a star formation and parry appropriately. We could even throw in flourishes such as the figure eight, or something more elaborate Bloch calls the “Obi-Annie” (but which is actually a move called “plum blossom” from the martial art Wushu). We would for one moment shed our nerd shells; we would look cool.

Or that the imperial storm-troopers you see at conventions are part of an officially-endorsed Stormtrooper legion created and managed by loyal fans, called the Fightin’ 501st. They later went on to be name-checked and referenced both in novels (Timothy Zahn’s Survivor’s Quest) and in the prequels, though in an ill-fated turn of events, they will forever be known as the baby-jedi killing storm-troopers.

It was, friends agreed, a pretty neat idea. They helped him hand out leaf-lets at conventions: “Are you loyal? Hardworking? Fully expendable? Join the Imperial 501st!” In 2002, Johnson mustered roughly 150 Stormtrooper costumers in Indianapolis at Celebration II, the second official Star Wars convention, and offered their services to a skeptical Lucasfilm to let the 501st help out as crowd-control when the event’s security proved woefully inadequate for the thirty thousand attendees. Lucasfilm was won over by the tireless, hyper-organized troopers, and started to use the 501st as volunteers for all its events. Lucasfilm licensees followed suit. If you’ve ever been to one of the Star Wars Days held at dozens of baseball stadiums across the United States, if you’ve seen multiple Stormtroopers, or Darth Vader or Boba Fett at a store, a movie theater, or a mall, you’ve almost certainly been staring at the forces of the 501st.

The 501st Legion is now recognized as one of the largest costuming organizations in the world. It has active members in forty-seven countries on five continents, divided into sixty-seven local garrisons and twenty-nine outposts (those units that comprise fewer than twenty-five members). More than 20 percent of the troops are female. The 501st absorbed a once-independent UK garrison and established a garrison near Paris, though some French Stormtroopers have gone their own way with the 59eme legion. The Germans, meanwhile, have a garrison consisting of five squads that are all large enough to be garrisons on their own—but are loath to undergo any kind of de-unification.

Swooping into a quick history of Lucas’s childhood and influences, the book talks about his early avant-garde career – one of his acclaimed student films, for example, was comprised entirely of panning shots of photographic images with music playing in the background. The takeaway is that Lucas always had ideas, but they were unconstrained by any Hollywood pretensions – the three-act screenplay was not for him, until American Graffiti came about. The nugget there is that the name did not quite appeal to the studio bosses, because the word “graffiti” was not in popular usage then.

It sounded odd to contemporary ears. The Italian word had not yet gained common currency. New York subway trains were about a year away from being covered in spray-painted signatures. Lucas hadn’t intended that debased usage of the word in any case; he meant the word invented at Pompeii in 1851 that means nostalgic etchings. He wanted to record the legacy of a lost decade: an American Pompeii, frozen in time forever.

Lucas tried to follow up this success with options of Dune and Flash Gordon. Producer Dino DeLaurentiis happened to get Flash, and Alejandro Jodorowsky got hold of Dune. Flash Gordon ultimately got made as a campy pastiche in the early 80s, while a different version of Dune made it to the screen. The book talks about trippy possibilities that the latter presented, and this reminds me that I need to check out the documentary soon:

Jodo, appropriately enough for Dune, was something of a cult leader himself. He persuaded the great Orson Welles to act as the villain of the piece in exchange for hiring his favorite Parisian chef, and even managed to hector Salvador Dali into agreeing to a cameo as the Emperor of the Universe (for $100,000 a minute, Dali insisted). He got the Swiss artist H. R. Giger, possibly the only person in Europe weirder than Jodo and Dali, to do a bunch of nightmarish concept paintings, and recruited French comic book artist Moebius to storyboard the entire film at lightning speed.

Most of the making of the actual Wars movies was not new to me. Too much have already been written about the process, and the different iterations of the first movie’s screenplay that Lucas banged out. One thing however stood out, the short-lived gender reversal of the lead character, a telling choice for a series that has been plagued with gender/race allegations until the recent sequel. Think of what might have been.

In March 1975, Lucas decided to fix that at a stroke: Luke Starkiller became an eighteen-year-old woman. After all, he’d been reading an awful lot of fairy tales as research into the mechanics of storytelling, and it’s rather hard to ignore the convention that the protagonist of fairy tales is almost always female. (Think Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, Red Riding Hood, and Goldilocks—as much as they have to be saved by princes or woodcutters, we at least see the story through their eyes.) This gender reversal lasted for a couple of months, long enough for the female Luke to show up in a McQuarrie painting of the main characters.

The discussion becomes much more entertaining with the movie’s release. Taylor goes into an inspired examination of the first few words on the screen – words that apparently were rewritten at the last minute by Brian Coppola to lessen the original verbosity.

Consider instead that this is exactly what every fantasy epic needs to give you right off the bat: a setting in space and time that says, relax. Don’t bother trying to figure out the relationship between what you’re about to see and your own Earthbound reality, because there isn’t one. This isn’t Planet of the Apes; the Statue of Liberty isn’t going to turn up in a last-reel twist. No other movie had ever announced its divorce from our world so explicitly before; with the exception of Star Wars sequels, none would ever be able to do so again without seeming derivative. The perfect simplicity of those ten words appears to have been hard for a lot of people to understand in the run-up to the movie’s release. The words that open Alan Dean Foster’s novelization (“another galaxy, another time”) aren’t quite the same—that might place us in the future, rather than in a story that is safely in some history book. Fox didn’t get it at all: its trailer for Star Wars opened with the words “somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now.” The ten words remain on the screen for exactly five seconds, long enough for the casual viewer to think, Isn’t this supposed to be a science fiction movie? Aren’t they all set in the future?

It is this modern myth, that of how the Star Wars machine became what it was, in the first weeks and months after the release of the first movie, that the book really captures so very well.

In May 1977, repeat viewers didn’t necessarily add to the ticket gross: they could simply stay in the theater, wait an hour or so, and watch the movie again. This was not something viewers had tended to want to do before. Indeed, it was because of Star Wars that most cinemas instituted a policy of clearing the audience out of the theater between shows. But as soon as they left the theater and came back, the repeat viewers were responsible for an incalculable amount of box office takings. For many—and this is something you see time and again in television and newspaper reports from 1977—the number of times they’d seen Star Wars took on the tone of a competitive sport: “I’ve seen Star Wars twenty times!” But for many more who weren’t quoted by the news media, it was simply a thrill to invest themselves in a story with such eminent repeatability. You could see it twenty, thirty, forty times and not get bored.

***

The manager of the Coronet, a cranky old soul named Al Levine, had never seen anything like it. He offered a now-famous description of the crowds: “Old people, young people, children, Hare Krishna groups. They bring cards to play in line. We have checker players, we have chess players; people with paint and sequins on their faces. Fruit eaters like I’ve never seen before, people loaded on grass and LSD.”

***

In June 1977, the monster crowds at the four theaters in New York showing the film each required police on horseback for crowd control. All walks of life rubbed shoulders in those lines. Johnny Cash, Muhammad Ali, and Senator Ted Kennedy waited at their theaters like everyone else. Elvis Presley tried a different tack; the King was in the process of securing a Star Wars print to screen for himself and Lisa Marie at Graceland the day before he died.

***

In May 1977, the most popular poster in America was an image of Farrah Fawcett, chief Charlie’s Angel, in a bathing suit, with a noticeably aroused nipple. By July, Star Wars posters were outselling Fawcett five to one.

***

Toy sales came to the rescue. Despite the movie no longer being in theaters, despite the disastrous Holiday Special, and against all expectations, Kenner announced that it had its strongest holiday season yet. Sales of Star Wars action figures, spaceships, and play sets had crossed the $200 million mark, funneling more than $20 million into Lucasfilm subsidiary Black Falcon. Without that cash injection, there’s little question Empire would have been sunk. There’s something poetic about it: millions of children joyfully acting out the further adventures of Luke Skywalker literally funded the further adventures of Luke Skywalker. Call it a karmic Kickstarter.

It’s funny how Taylor blazes through the three prequels all in one chapter. Star Wars fans from the New Hope generation are so predictable.

All in all, the book was an excellent read; it did make me want to re-watch (or watch, in case of Jedi) the original movies, and put in pieces of the Star Wars history that were missing from my understanding of the history of the seminal series, especially the debt Lucas and Co owe to concept artist Ralph McQuarrie, whose designs really helped sell the movie to both Lucas’s friends, his team and studio heads. My dismissive tone about the series is at odds with my fascination for its metadata, as you can clearly see. I know the technical details of where the sound of Wookie comes from (‘a bear starved in a zoo and then shown a bowl of milk outside the cage’, for your information) or how Lucas made a note when someone asked for Reel 2, Dialog 2 in the editing room of THX 1138, or the story behind how Han Solo’s sprezzatura in saying “I know” came about. I can also appreciate how it probably is the only bit of mythology that America can truly call its own. The person sitting next to me at the morning screening of the Force Awakens cried a few times as the movie played. My local comic-book shop (and others) had large “Star Wars Spoiler Free Zone” signs up the first two weeks of release. All I wonder is how long this reverence will continue to play out. A major part of Star Wars is to do with how little we know about the Star Wars universe and its details – and it only takes a few years of misbegotten scripts to run a special thing into the ground, to turn a mythic tale into something mundane.

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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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Mixtapes, Music

The Last 2015 Playlist

In these last hours of the year, I figured I might as well publish one last playlist. It’s a little longer than usual, but its heart is in the right place.

It begins with ‘Heartsigh’, a song that will possibly remain the musical high-point of 2015 for me. This song feels like waking up on a morning with the sun streaming into my bedroom and the smell of bacon wafting in, while a puppy comes up on the bed and licks my nose. The video obviously has nothing to do with this mental visual, but  it stands wonderfully on its own, and conveys an idea of what a Purity Ring concert feels like.

Mura Masa is the stage-name of Alex Crossan, a musician and producer from Great Britain, who is all of 19, which makes me mad and happy at the same time. Mad because fucking 19. Happy, because this is the kind of musician who provides a gigantic fuck-you to people who claim there is no good music coming out nowadays, or that the best music happened in the 70s, or whatever bullshit excuse they choose to come up with for their lack of musical taste or awareness. Mura Masa’s ‘Soundtrack to a Death’ is one of the best things I have discovered this year. His signature style – crisp beats, pitch-shifted vocals and instruments that delight and awe – mesh wonderfully with Shura’s vocals on this particular track, aided by the single-shot video.

I heard Duke Dumont’s ‘I Got U’ early this year, and that particular track hooked me quite a bit. But ‘Ocean Drive’ does one better, with its 80s aesthetic and insta-earworminess. A song that makes me want to take off in a convertible along LA streets at night, blasting it at full volume.

Eric Prydz’s ‘Opus’ is a ridiculous song, in the best sense of the word. 9 minutes long, with a 3 minute build-up, this is a track that confuses club-goers and kinda reminds me of the trick used during the filming of the motorbike sequence in The Dark Knight, where the sound designer revved the engine sound to a higher and higher pitch throughout. This song, similarly, keeps building and building and building to a maddening crescendo – and keeps going on, contrary to the drop-and-ebb rules of trance music. Has me smiling wide every single time.

Magic happens when you put two talented musicians together – and if they are Chet Faker and Flume, it’s organic, wild magic; a spell that wraps you with eldritch tendrils of delight. Sorry, just went full Arkham Asylum there. But ‘Drop the Game’ is just that good a song, the voice and the music and the dancing mesmerizing beyond belief.

I thought Lil Dicky was a lot of fun, and this video definitely plays it for laughs (pay attention to the motivational posters on the wall of the office). Love his rapping skills too, and that Snoop D guy isn’t a slouch either.

Humeysha is Goldspot crossed with Kula Shaker, and I suspect I would enjoy their music more with substances inside me. It’s by Zain Alam, a Wesleyan alumnus (neat, huh, N?) who spent time in India researching the partition and experimenting with Indian music. The band is the result, and the results are encouraging, to say the least.

Alina Baraz is 21 (sigh!) and from Los Angeles by way of Ohio. She follows the modern-day tradition (er, of my favorite electronic outfits, I mean) of collaborating with an electronic producer named Galimatias she met online, to come up with some tracks that make wonderful use of her voice and give us musical textures that are crunchy and delicious and very very satisfying. Just listen to the piano backing in ‘Fantasy’ to know what I mean.

I heart Jamie XX. I am letting his new album grow on me very very slowly, to savor it better. So far, I have obsessed over three songs, and this one’s the second, a beautiful quiet song about loud places and heartbreak and relationship expectations. The other songs will turn up on future playlists, I can feel it.

I heard Conner Youngblood’s ‘Confidence EP’ and was struck by how similar his voice sounded to that of a young AR Rahman, especially on the title track. This song is low on the ARR-semblance, but is the perfect late-night and dread chill combination. The sound of the trumpet resemble the the baying of wild animals in the distance; the voice creeps under your skin; the drone just is, in the background.

Cashmere Cat came into my life via Treasure Island Music Festival in San Francisco in November, the only music fest I went to this year, and an experience well worth the drive both ways. His set was incredible, and it befuddles me that there are still musicians like him that elude me but for pure luck. Mura Masa considers him a major influence on his music, and I can totally see it. ‘Without Me’ is a great video too.

Disa Jakobs hails from Copenhagen, and the original version of Sculpture is layered like Gregorian chants. The live version strips it all down, leaving behind a cheerier version of the song and her voice in full focus, but then the electric guitar kicks in and gives it another tinge altogether. I will be looking forward to more of her music.

‘Silhouettes’ by Floating Points is a work of art in every way possible. I could stare at the video for hours. I could (and have, actually) listen to them for days. Electro-jazz at it’s finest.

Both the Cashmere Cat video and that for ‘Disclosure’ by You & Me (which is also a Flume remix, btw, that guy keeps popping up everywhere) would probably melt Pahlaj Nihalani’s eyeballs because of the amount of onscreen kissing that happens in the two videos.

Tülpa’s ‘A Lil’ Rain’ is a beautiful instrumental, one that weaves its own dreams for you when you close your eyes and listen to it. But this animated fan video by Project 9 on Youtube takes it to another level altogether. This is like Sylvain Chomet meets Ivan Bilibin and the two enter a bar with George Herriman in tow. C’est incroyable!

Ben Khan’s ‘Eden’ and Bad Kingdom’s ‘Moderat’ are songs linked – at least in my mind – with a piercing brass shriek that turn up in both. You will know what I mean when you listen to them. My thought is that they are both the same sample, used in different ways and to convey different moods, in the two songs. You are free to disagree, but I am probably right.

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