Concerts, Music

Twenty Fifteen, Post Three: On Stromae

stromae

My favorite 2014 concert happened by accident.

‘Alors On Danse’ exploded into my playlist five years ago with the intensity of an Akira-esque thermonuclear bomb, displacing the current summer dance favorite ‘We No Speak Americano’.[ref]Fun fact: Renato Carosone’s Sicilian original plays in a scene in the George Clooney movie ‘The American’, which I watched recently. The song plays on the TV when the actor is sitting down for dinner at a cafe. That brought back memories of my first week in Romania, when in my third visit to a pizzeria near my apartment, I noticed that everybody in the place had gone quiet and were pretending not to glance at me. A quick look at the TV, and I realized why – Raj Kapoor’s Awaara was playing on national TV, with subtitles. “Vagabondul”, remarked the waiter as everyone, myself included, broke into laughter.[/ref] The song somehow managed to get everything right. The happy marriage of the bass-and-brass phrases, accompanied by what sounded like an over-excited poodle running around yapping in time with the beats – did it matter that I could not understand what the song was saying, other than “let’s dance”?

Stromae was due to perform at Los Angeles in October. I knew that in advance, having kept an eye on the events schedule at the Fonda Theater. I was more interested in La Roux and The Tune-Yards who were playing around the same time. I briefly contemplated buying tickets to go see him, but spending $40 on what I thought was a one-hit wonder – not my cup of tea. Besides, tickets weren’t sold out, and isn’t that a sign that maybe he wasn’t cool enough? Yes, shameful admission: sometimes it feels better to get tickets to sold-out shows. Bam!

A few days before the show, my boss – who is Moroccan – remarked that he was interested in Stromae. He had been listening to his new album obsessively, and mentioned that it was really good. Racine Carrée (which means ‘square root’) was indeed appealing, but did not grab me immediately.That is the thing with music – you need time and patience and maybe a little bit of willingness to get into something new. The one song that sounded super-catchy had the words ‘rendezvous’ in the chorus, and that was the song I kept humming to myself every now and then. It appeared that tickets were indeed sold out, even though they showed up as available on the website. I did some halfhearted Craigslist-scouring, but to no avail. Stub-hub, never one of my go-to sites, showed obscene prices. My Stromae experience was over before it even began.

About 3 days before the show, a friend sent an email to me and a few others about how her friend was traveling to France and would miss the concert; she was traveling at the same time as well, so would anyone be interested in two tickets at the floor price? I was, and another person in the mailing list that I did not know at the time was, too. And that is how I landed up at the Fonda Theater that October night, maybe one of 10 non French-speaking people in the audience.

My ticket was for the balcony. I tried wheedling my way into the floor, but the security guard, normally more than willing to listen, was unrelenting. The floor was packed, the balcony was too. October in LA is not much different from August in LA, and the air-conditioning – even with an expensive beer – were not enough to quell that feeling of impending heat-related collapse. I found out that the Fonda had a terrace with turf carpeting. It was worth missing the opening act to sit under the stars and contemplate cutting and running. Yes, I was this close to just leaving.

I did not leave. I remember dancing like crazy. I remember a French girl in front of me who did not stop screaming, dancing and singing along throughout the show, and her American boyfriend awkwardly looked at her, shaking his head every time she asked him to dance. Douche. I remember being mesmerized by the strobe lights throbbing in time to the tribal drums of the opening song (it was ‘Ta Fete’, the first song in Racine Carrée), the crowd chanting along with the chorus. I remember the trippy animations that accompanied ‘Humain L’eau’, with its nutty, dissonant riff. Stromae taking the piss out of Americans and French people at the same time while talking about french fries (“They are not French and they are not American. They are from Belgium”), neatly seguing into the opening of “Moules Frites”. [ref]Obviously, I did not know the song titles back then, it was only afterwards, when I got into the album with the intent of reliving the sounds I heard in the concert that I was able to figure out which song was what.[/ref]The guy had a bum leg, and still managed to dance around like a maniac. He was a bonafide star, I kid you not. If it sounds like I have a gigantic man-crush, yes, I am not denying it.

It was the first concert where the artiste thanked nearly every member of his crew, from the light-man to the costume designer to the chaffeurs. It was one of the craziest encores I had seen in a while. From collapsing on stage while performing the gut-wrenching “Formidable”, to being carried in like a stiff mannequin for ‘Papaoutai’; from singing an acapella version of the rendezvous song with all the musicians (‘Tous les mêmes’ is the title), sans microphones, and with the entire audience shushing each other, to just being plain fucking awesome, Stromae did it all. He promised to be back in LA in 2015, and that is one show I won’t miss this year.

Racine Carrée has been a constant on my play queue in the second half of the year. It is not just the music. The videos – good lord, the videos are incredible. They also come with sub-titles, an added bonus, and it becomes clearer why this guy is such a phenomenon in Francophone countries. ‘Formidable’ was shot guerilla-style at a Brussels tram station; Stromae appeared drunk, incoherently shouting at passersby, later accosted by policemen who tell him they are big fans and ask if they should drop him home. ‘Ta fete’ shows him at his flamboyant best, overseeing a gladiatorial contest in a get-up that comes with a beret, trenchcoat and a microphone cane, how cool is that? ‘Tous les mêmes’ has him in drag, playing both the male and female adversaries in an eternal war of the sexes, that culminates in a dance-off. It also showcases Stromae’s complete unself-consciousness in front of the camera; one minute, he is a rakish nose-picking boor, grabbing at his girlfriend’s ass while heading out the door; the other, he is a seething woman remonstrating her boyfriend’s lack of interest in her.

The crowd-pleaser of the album is undoubtedly ‘Papaoutai’ (“Where are you, papa?”), which is ironic considering that this has the saddest setting ever. A kid tries to engage with a glassy-eyed mannequin of a father while other kids have their real dads with them. “Everybody knows how to make babies/ but nobody knows how to make papas. Mister know-it-all would have inherited it, that’s it/he probably learnt it while sucking his thumbs”, says the lyrics as the song jumps from sadness to anger to resignation, even as it pulsates with thumping beat and a chorus worthy of hosannas. I find the tone of the song- and Stromae’s delivery of these lyrics – reminiscent of some of Eminem’s best work. Is it worth noting that the artiste’s father – a Rwandan architect who later died in the 1994 genocide in his home country – was absent for most of his childhood?

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Books

Twenty Fifteen, Post Two

I began reading a 11-volume series of books on world history. It’s called ‘The Story of Civilization‘, by Will and Ariel Durant. Much like the most of my book shopping nowadays – ahem, with the exception of signed Subterranean Press books – I picked up 9 out of the 11 volumes in a Long Beach used bookstore, for the grand total of 9 dollars and 90 cents (10% sales tax). I had to get my car from the parking lot, park illegally outside the bookstore and wave at the sales guy to come out with some of the books, because they are heavy, bulky 1000-page volumes.

So why did I begin this year with this apparent ordeal of going through 9000+ pages of history? Therein lies a short tale.

Last year, one of my friends was appearing for the GRE. Her scores in the quantitative section were off the charts. In the verbal section, she scored really well in the vocabulary questions, but her reading comprehension section left much to be desired. Emergency help was sought, and I sat down and tried to help her reason through some of the essays in the test material. And then I realized that the problem was not just about comprehension, it was also about context.

You see, my friend – for no fault of hers – could not get a grasp of the subject matter that appeared in those essays. Most of them were literary criticism or snippets from world history. Words like “Byzantine”, “Renaissance” and “Holocaust” stumped her, and cost her precious minutes as she read and reread those passages, trying to glean whatever meaning she could.

So I ended up giving her a primer in world history, in one hour. It was a fun, challenging exercise – it had been a long time since I had talked about topics like the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the Silk Route, or even World War II. In the middle of that hour-long conversation, I realized that my dates were all over the place – suddenly, I could no longer place Indian history in relation with the birth of Islam (was it Harsha ruling Central India at the time, or was it the Kushans? Or both?), or even that of the Renaissance vis-a-vis the Reformation. Don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about precise years here, I was getting centuries wrong, even. That detracted a bit from my narrative, as I told her to take my timelines with a grain of salt, but it was a fruitful hour for the both of us.

And this is the primary intent of this 9000-page exercise. To  sift through my decade-old knowledge and rekindle some old flames, and learn something new at the same time. Will Durant writes in the kind of semi-formal tone that is brisk and yet dense, highly readable without being the dry academic tone that turns me off. At the same time, he is not a pop historian; his stories are rarely embellished to woo ADD blurb-friendly readers. I began book 3 (‘Age of Faith: Medieval Civilization from Constantinople to Dante’) early this week and I am only on page 162. The Western Roman Empire, having embraced and absorbed Christianity in every walk of life has just declined, fallen to attacks from Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns and Vandals; as has the Persian Empire – after the flurry of great Sasanian warrior-emperors Shapur and Khosru (I and II, for both); the Byzantine emperor Justinian has built the Hagia Sophia with an expenditure of 134 million dollars (and this is by early 20th century exchange rates); and we are now among the Bedouin tribes of Arabia, referred to as “Easterners”, from the Arabic sharqiyun, which was corrupted by the Greeks into the word ‘Sarkenoi’, anglicised to ‘Saracens’. Durant takes his time to set up the mileu, talking about the pre-Islamic Arab’s love for poetry, for example:

Every year, at the Ukaz fair, the greatest of these contests was held; almost daily for a month the clans competed through their poets; there were no judges but the eagerly or scornfully listening multitudes; the winning poems were written down in brilliantly illuminated characters, were therefore called the Golden Songs, and were preserved like heirlooms in the treasuries of princes and kings. The Arabs called them also Muallaqat, or Suspended, because legend said that the prize poems, inscribed upon Egyptian silk in letters of gold, were hung on the walls of the Kaaba in Mecca.

I had no idea that the word Kaaba comes from the same root as “cube”, it means a square structure. Nuggets like this abound throughout, and that makes for slow going, trying to take in this continuous flow of information. It’s fun though, and so far, seems very very worthwhile.

What about my friend, then? She appeared for the GRE, did really well, and is now waiting for responses from the University applications she sent in. Our discussions about medieval history has sparked in her the interest to go visit Venice and Florence this year. I am trying to get her husband to buy me a free ticket, so I can be their tour guide and honorary baby-sitter. I don’t think he is sold on that idea.

Note: apparently Durant’s earlier work The Story of Philosophy is available for 99 cents for the Kindle. Unfortunately, the 11-volume set of Story of Civilization is priced at 99$.

[amazon asin=B00HT53KV0&template=iframe image]  [amazon asin=B00IAZ5YJY&template=iframe image]
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Life

Twenty Fifteen, Post One

The year ended in a flurry, much like other years. I had a brief moment of confusion a week before December 31 when, while talking to a friend, I realized that I had no recollection of what I was doing on New Years’ Eve last year. I remembered 2013 (Rob Delaney at the Improv), and 2012 (insert snort of laughter here, pun intended), but 2014 was a chunk of white noise that refuses to budge from its position of stubborn opacity.

That made me realize the virtues of regular blogging. Even Facebooking, for that matter, but I locked that gate months ago. Don’t get me wrong, I still have the key, but it’s not a garden I want to visit any time soon. The only positive thing that came out of Facebook this year was a message from my English professor in college. We switched to email like civilized people, and hopefully our conversation will continue with minimal distraction from shiny New Yorker links and week-old reddit images. But regular blogging, ah. That feels like the kind of ramshackle garden that Enid Blyton protagonists wander into when they are off visiting their grandmother for their summer vacation. I am bemused about this blog, to be honest. There is a lady that reads it regularly, and then began emailing me with alarming regularity, referring to incidents and books and pop culture shit that I mention. That in itself is not bad – but then the tone of her emails got weird, like crazy-bat-shit weird, and I learnt that she was sending similar emails to friends I know.

What I did was what social media allows all of us to do: I put all her emails up on a different (public) blog without her identifying details, sent her the link, and said that any new emails she sends will go up on that blog with her personal details intact. That stopped her – for a time. She is now sending me mails to my alternate account, from a different mail ID. What am I doing about it? Nothing, because I am lazy. But I will soon.

What I am trying to get at is – there has always been a filter on my blog-writing, where I am consciously avoiding personal details – what I do, the things that really matter –  in the favor of a more generic Rave/Rant/Boast template with occasional bits of eyeroll-worthy talk of the 80s and 90s thrown in. This particular person’s deranged attempts to insinuate herself into my life through scattered bits of information on this blog makes it even harder for me to project any form of myself online. It is not like there is much meaning or substance in these digital detritus that we leave behind, but it is hard even to take a dump when you are making my skin crawl. Do you get it, S?

Coming back to my lack of any recollection of New Year’s Eve 2014. It was probably no mere coincidence that my favorite episode of the six-episode Brit series Black Mirror was ‘The Entire History of You’, which like the rest of the series, talks about a future that feels disconcertingly close, like it may happen next year, or in the next five years.  In this particular episode, everybody has an implant that allows them to record every second of their lives, and replay it anytime they feel like it. What sells the sci-fi is not just the attention to detail – like the peculiar terminology that seems to be ingrained (pun sort of intended) into the culture, or the way users interface with the product. What really sells it is the story that the writers of the show weave around this device – a night and a morning in the life of a couple who are visiting old friends. It would be a pity to give anything more away, but ‘The Entire History Of You’ got me into thinking more about memories and nostalgia and what we really remember. Then I saw the trailer to Still Alice, and that made me wonder morbidly about Alzheimer’s and early onset.

For the record, I could not remember the name Still Alice, and it took me a few seconds to remember that it was not Susan Sarandon in it, but Julianne Moore.

But New Years’ Eve 2015 should be easy to remember. I stayed home, and ran a few miles in the evening, and the air felt crisp and New Yearsy, and the lights shimmered around the Marina in time with the dance beats that were echoing from the boats. I went further than I ever had, and found a new route back home. Then I made myself some popcorn and watched Love Actually, and nearly stopped watching it when I realized that Hugh Grant was the British Prime Minister and the guy from the Walking Dead (Andrew Lincoln, which I remembered) had a British accent. But I did not, partly because the movie was going away from Netflix today and I had already passed my good-movie quota of the day by watching Populaire that afternoon to celebrate the New Year on Greenwich Mean Time.

And then I fell asleep.

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Comic Art

A Comic Art Interview

These were a series of questions asked of me by the great site ComicArtFans, who do these weekly interviews with premium members. It was published in their newsletter on Jul 17th 2014.

1. Please tell us a little about yourself.

I am a 34-year old Indian guy living in Los Angeles for the last four years. My move to the US may or may not be because of this hobby. I work in linguistics/machine translation and other than comics and comic art, I am also into music, reading, cooking, technology, film and travel.

2. Which piece in your gallery is your favorite and why?

Some of the favorite pieces have great stories attached to them (like being on an overnight bus with near-nonexistent internet when the soon-to-be-mine Tezuka painting was about to end on eBay), and some have the hard-fought sweat of a Deal That Almost Went Away But Didn’t (yes, that Swamp Thing 29 page will probably be buried with me). I think I will say that my Milo Manara commission is probably the one I will pick. My then-girlfriend commissioned it from Mr Manara. To this day, when people ask me how she did it, trust me, you will not believe how unorthodox her modus operandi was, and I am honor-bound not to spill the beans. I believe about 9-10 people from 5 countries were involved in this operation (this includes payment, transport and delivery) and it was kept a secret from me for more than 6 months.

This being real life and not a romantic movie, we eventually split up. She let me keep it. It is not on my wall but I keep dithering over whether I should put it up or not. It has the words “will you marry me?” written below the painting, in Italian. So yes, a lot of bittersweet memories, but that makes it truly the most special piece in my collection, and probably the last piece I will ever consider letting go.
ragazza_indiana_cropped

3. How long have you been collecting comic art and what prompted you to start?

I read a lot of comics growing up, but because of the way comics were sourced in India in pre-Internet/pre-TPB days, I was reading mid-1980s comics in the 90s. Began collecting whatever I could (Alan Moore Swamp Thing, hence my special fondness for that particular title, Knightfall-era Batman, John Byrne-era Superman). Graduated to Vertigo and indie comics. Once I graduated and got a job, began to buy comics on eBay and get them delivered to India once every 6 months through friends. Wrote a column on graphic novels for Rolling Stone magazine, became known as “that comic-book guy” in India, and also as the guy approached for a quote in any comics-related article in the mainstream media

I was 27 when I realized that at the rate at which I was buying comics (I had graduated from getting random runs on eBay to buying people’s collections), I wouldn’t really have much of challenges by the time I reached 30. I believe I was looking to see if I can find a signed print or two on eBay for my walls when I stumbled across the original art section. My first piece of art was bought on Christmas day 2005. It was a Phil Hester Swamp Thing page that I sniped for the princely sum of $25, from the Donnelly Brothers. A shout-out to them, because they were very patient with me. They did not accept Paypal at that time, and I had to get someone in the US to send them a money order two weeks later, because everybody was on vacation. Then I graduated to a $200 Frank Quitely Authority page on eBay, and still kick myself for not buying the other Quitely page the seller offered to me for $250. That guy clued me into Comicartfans, and that was when all hell broke loose. All I remember after that is the money flowing from my bank account every month and the thrill of the hunt, the pounding in my eardrums – sorry, got carried away there.

I would like to add (without being asked) that the answer to what prompts me to stay on in this hobby, despite the craziness of it all – it is the stories and the people I have met. Both of these are integral parts of the hobby to me, and I love listening to the old-timers about what they missed out on and what they got, some of it by sheer blind luck and others by dogged persistence. I have met my closest friends as a result of collecting comic art, and that kind of makes everything worth it.

4. How do you display/store your collection at home?

I sleep with some of my favorite pieces under my pillow so that I can wake up in the middle of the night and caress them. Er, I kid, I kid.

I love pieces on the wall. A lot of my art-buying decisions are based on whether something qualifies as a wall piece or not. My Sandman pieces are on the wall, as is the Prince Valiant, the Tezuka and the Koike, three of my Swamp Thing pieces, a Mignola, an Aragones sketch. They keep getting swapped out every now and then, for whatever strikes my fancy. The rest of the art is in portfolios, and I have to confess that I don’t like that. Art deserves to be seen. Maybe I should just sell everything and keep the pieces that are on the wall, I don’t know.

5. What are your top five most wanted original pages or commissions?

I think I have lasted long in this hobby precisely because I do not have specific nostalgia-based wants. (page X of issue Y, things like that) I also happened to bypass the Marvel mania of the 80s – That has helped my collection and my tastes to develop somewhat differently. I do have broad things that I would love to own, though every year the chances of buying some of them seems slimmer.

1. A Little Nemo page by Winsor McCay. What McCay was doing in the 1900s on the Sunday page, the comic-book industry caught up in the 80s. Truly timeless work.
2. A James Jean Fables cover. I love the first 75 issues of the series and it is a testament to Jean’s work that he won Eisner for best cover artist 5 years in a row.
3. A published piece from Blankets or Habibi by Craig Thompson.
4. There is a section of my wall specifically reserved for a definitive Chris Ware, Charles Burns and Dan Clowes piece. Depending on placement, there could be just enough space left for a small Crumb work.
5. Something by Uderzo (preferably from Asterix) and something by Herge (from Tintin, obviously).

Yes, I feel like I cheated on this list by saying more than 5 names, but it feels cathartic saying these names out loud. I feel good.

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Mixtapes, Music

The Second Fall Mix

Apparently it is easier to come up with a Youtube mix. Less effort, definitely, and pretty much the kind of no-frills accessibility that is missing from a Spotify playlist, for example. So here’s the second Fall Mix. I may just end up doing more of these mixes more frequently. Be warned, and be very, very afraid.

 

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