Books Read:

Groo The Wanderer: The Pacific Issues: Sergio Aragones = Genius.

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser – The Epic comics: Ooooh!

William Sutcliffe: Are You Experienced: The Inscrutable Americans redux, with roles reversed, and cross-Atlanticised.

Robert Rodi: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse : Nice storyline, predictable ending.

Currently Reading:

His Dark Materials Book 1: Northern Lights: madhav, you do not have to give me a refund after all.

Movies watched:

Seabiscuit: “Look, ma! It’s Spiderman on a horse!” Lots of Crusty American Goodness.

Some Like It Hot: 3/4ths of it. Brilliant!

Current Music

Cake – Fashion Nugget
AR Rahman – Lagaan
AR Rahman – Meenaxi:A Tale of Three Cities
BB King – Best of the King vol 2

Other Things On The Plate:

Aliens vs Predator 2
Groo – The Epic Issues
Batman/Dracula: Red Rain
Some Like It Hot 1/4th.

Have a nice week, beatzo.

Useless Fact of the day: Larry Wachowski, of the Wachowski brothers, was one of the writers on Epic Comics’ anthology series Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.

Hellraiser was originally a movie, and I had heard of it, and of Barker, for the first time in the letter pages of Swamp Thing. ( This is one reason why I prefer the original comics to the collected editions. The kind of information and references the Letter-column provides is stupendous. I also liked the goofy responses of some of the editors, especially in The Hell You Say, which was the letters-page for DC’s Demon and the earlier Blue Devil ) Karen Berger was the editor of Swamp Thing then, and she was saying something about herself and Steve Bissette ( the artist ) going to see a show of Hellraiser, and herself being horrified by the goriness of the enterprise, and Bissette cackling merrily beside her.

Interesting, I thought back then. I was in that stage of life when the mind demands to be scared, and is not numbed by everyday realities to the extent that fictional horror fails to affect it. So I was on the lookout for names like Stephen King, Anne Rice and now Clive Barker. Guwahati (as I keep reiterating in my posts) was a good place to find Hardy Boys books and second-hand Tarzan novels and tonnes of Sidney Sheldon. But Clive Barker was tough to come by. Anything remotely horrorific was tough to come by, for that matter. I tried looking for The Exorcist at a local video store at about that time, and the store-guy gave me something that read Exorcerer, and the very first scene was an orgy in a church. It wasn’t just shit that hit the fan…..

Then one day I was reading an Epic comic, something pretty obscure, and I saw this ad towards the back, of this Hellraiser comic which had a scary-looking man on the cover, his face covered with protruding needles everywhere, his eyes staring at the reader. I was fascinated, and that night, I had a very bad dream about being pursued by a needle-faced man who wanted to poke his needles into my eyes.

I never found that comic anywhere. Though I found horror comics aplenty, and saw numerous horror movies , and read almost all of Stephen King and Anne Rice and Clive Barker. ( and tried out a host of others, including Peter Straub and James Herbert and Robert McCammon and William Peter Blatty ) To me, the pinnacle of being scared was shivering on a train while reading The Shining. The urge to make sure that the windows were shut in the middle of watching Evil Dead. Looking back, I think I over-reacted. I desperately wanted to be scared, to make sure that I was frightened hard enough to squeeze my eyes shut and scream “Mommy!”. Nothing came that close ( No, really! ) Most of the movies were gross-out stuff, which helped me get a strong stomach, or just wave-a-tit-at-a-ghost-pray-it-will-go-away types. Most books weren’t descriptive enough ( I wanted to read a book that has very graphic violence, something like that book-within-a-book in Stephen King’s Dark Half ), and as for the comics….

*sigh*

To tell you the truth, I never thought anyone could produce a horror comic. For one thing, you have drawings of terrifying situations, and the characters that are drawn take away part of the terror you expect. ( “Oh, the girl is Not Real. It’s just a pen-and-ink drawing” ) Maybe because what you imagine is far scarier than what you see on the page. Tough to produce a horror comic, really.

And yesterday I got these high-quality scans of ALL the Hellraiser comics that were printed, 20 issues and loads of Special issues. I spent three hours reading whatever I could before I could read no more (I was seeing colours everywhere I turned). Man oh man oh man! High quality painted artwork. A Plethora of guaranteed-to-scare-you-shitless plots. A very detailed attention to buildup. Dark. A little more attention to the sexual aspect than is necessary, but very Dark.

Like I said, the books are collections of short-stories. The “Clive Barker’s” tag is used because the Epic people wanted to tie in to the concept of Cenobites that was laid down in Barker’s work, and movies. So a lot of storylines are about hell and damnation and cheery things like that.

AND IT HAS JOHN BOLTON ART!!!! So there.

When I slept last night, I dreamt of the man again. The man with the needles in his face. I know now his name is Pinhead. And he is still trying to poke his needles into my face.

One of the best payoffs of my Baroda visit was the kids. My cousins, nephews and nieces, ranging from ages 4 to 12, most of whom I hadn’t met for quite sometime. Two of them stay in Goa, the rest scattered through various towns in Assam. All of them are a very spunky lot ( unlike the popular rumour, I do not hate kids. It’s not my primary aim in life to make demented psychotics out of impressionable young minds. ), one plays the tabla very well, one reads a lot, one plays a lot of games, and all of them find a variety of reasons to run around screaming their heads off and annoying the hell out of my Evil Relatives. Which makes all the kids Very Good in my book.

My sister’s in-laws are vegetarians. And I can tell you, Assamese people are a lot of things all rolled in one, but they aren’t vegetarians. We are not as carnivorous as our neighbouring cousins from Manipur or Nagaland, I still have strong olfactory reservations about eating dogs or frog’s legs – but we make do. The tendency to eat meat – er – being non-vegetarian is very strongly instilled in our tastebuds. “chicken chicken today’s chicken day” being a litany often heard in Assamese households on Sundays, and usually it’s the children who do a war-dance and repeat those words. Er, I don’t know about all children, but I often did this when I was young.

Anyways, the kids found it very tough to have veggie stuff day in and night out. As an earning adult, and being of a semi-give-in-to-temptation sort myself, I sympathized with them. So, the day of the wedding, we decided to bunk all the ceremonial stuff, and booked a car to take us to a McDonald’s outlet.

( This is beside the point, but Hyderabad does not have a McDonald’s outlet yet. It’s supposed to be a Metropolitan city, forgoshsakes )

The journey, like most journeys I undertake, was semi-surreal. Imagine a car packed with kids. Three adults to mind the kids. One of the adults with a hidden agenda. ( “Planet M? Oh, you find LOADS of video games there! And you can play all you want.” “Of course Crossword will have chocolates, very nice imported ones, too. ” ) One of the kids wants to tell a joke (she has been reading Tinkle throughout) , one wants to have Fanta, and nothing but Fanta for lunch, one wants burger and chocolate, two of them sing “action nursery rhymes” in the car, jumping up and down on the seats all the while. The driver, in a defensive stance, puts on some Jagjit Singh on the car stereo, and the kids start screaming “booooooooring!” ( mostly because one of the adults whispered “The one with the loudest voice gets an extra chocolate.” )

Have you ever considered the logistical nightmare of ordering for eight undecided ( and hungry ) kids in a burger outlet? I hadn’t, too. We live and learn.

When I am done ordering, I look around. Half the kids have vanished!! A little investigation leads me to a corner of the place, where a Playstation has been set up, and there seems to be a game of Tekken in full swing between two tykes. One from out of my gang, and the other the defending champion, from the looks of it. Anyone who was beaten had to vacate his seat, and the next guy would come play against the winner, and so on. Needless to say, I joined the line, a very smug adult among the children.

The defending dude proceeds to whip everyone who challenges him, and ( highly embarassed to say it, but I don’t like to fudge facts ) whips me too. In fact he Totally Trashes me, and gets a perfect score. Fact is, I have never played on a console before, and like anyone who’s new to anything with buttons, I end up pressing every button at the same time, in the hope of doing something. Well, that something worked out to nothing.

Later, the kid left, and just as he was pushing me, informed me – ” I have finished all the levels in this game.” Yeah, right. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have played against him.

Anyways, a nice time was had by all. We reached the wedding home about 15 minutes late, and a royal dressing-down from the parents of all concerned parties awaited us. Who cared?

But – the trauma of being defeated by a eight-year old. Bwaaah!!!

I am in Bangalore on Sunday, to conduct an Entertainment Quiz. It’s a KQA quiz, and I am very very nervous. Have that awkward Androclesian feeling ( “Sigh! I am about to be eaten up. There is a teeny-weeny chance the lion knows me and I know the lion, and we’ll hug each other and be the heroes of a story that someone two thousand years from now will be reading in a text-book. But no, the unknown-lions to Androcles-familiar lions ratio is just too much. I am doomed!!” etc ) I had just a week to prepare questions for it, cannot repeat any of my previous questions because, like the Raphus Cucullatus i am, I had passed everything, from the prelims to the finals, including visual questions, to bloggolb and the rest of the Motorola Quiz Team. *sigh*

But, the brighter side – I will be seeing Return of the King with Mons tomorrow. Oh yeah! So now I can come back on Monday and sneer at all minor mortals in Hyderabad for their LotR-deprived lives. *insert ominous laughter here* Please god let us get tickets.

I just remembered that today is 13th February. Precisely a year ago, at this time, I was seeing AR Rahman perform live, from about ten feet away from the stage. It was the day of the rehearsals, the concert was on the 14th. Vasu and myself, we had gatecrashed Gachibowli Stadium and…..

Naah! That’s a tale for some other day.^*

*loosely translated: I am lazy and I don’t have time and I need to catch a bus and all of you have a nice weekend.