My second Coachella trip involved a lot of new – and old music – being played on repeat for a few weeks, to get into the groove. Among the new music I liked, this song by Kill The Noise and Feed Me infected me with its smooth, slap-bass-happy head-bopping groove.
[youtube]5QTBrVPeJ1w[/youtube]And yesterday I stumbled across this, which made me love the song even more.
[youtube]eaIvk1cSyG8[/youtube]We live in a beautiful world. But you already know that.
(Possibly more on Coachella later)
While I acknowledge that I am a Lapsed Quizzer, there comes a time in a man’s life when he is forced to shake that queasy (yeah, fine, pun intended) feeling out of himself by going all Powerpointy. I have been listening to some Rahman every now and then. Though I tend to stay away from his earlier catalog as much as I can, ever since that year-long sabbatical from his music. A friend and I were talking about “Aha” moments in his songs – where random back-up singers go “aha”, like in ‘Kilimanjaro’ and the title track of Parthaley Paravasam. We tried to think of other songs of a similar nature, and suddenly I found odd bits of trivia popping up in my head. So here, out, damned spot. A bunch of 20 questions that are somewhat sensible, and sometimes not. Please make sure to read the fine print (second slide), and come back here for answers in a few days.
(For those who cannot see what’s below, it’s supposed to be an embedded Slideshare iFrame. Here’s a direct link to the page.
Sonny Chiba is Hattori Hanzo
One of my All Time Top Five movies, Kill Bill, has this monologue by Sonny Chiba, playing retired swordsmith Hattori Hanzo.
Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest. And like a forest it’s easy to lose your way…to get lost… to forget where you came in.
This leads me to make two specific observations about myself and my life.
One: I find it very hard to respond to the question “what kind of books/movies/music do you like?” It is hard because I have never been able to figure out why I choose that particular book to read next, or this movie playing in theaters gets my pulse racing while I am cold towards another, possibly equally-good film. Or steadfastly refuse to listen to some albums until … I don’t know … I feel like it.
Warning: this may sound pretentious and somewhat obvious. It’s like I am in this forest full of trees blooming with psychedelic flowers and populated by mysterious creatures, and I am trying to find my own way through. I forget why I came in, what I am doing in that forest, and where I am going, but it just works out that way. I like it. I guess that’s all that matters. I am reading two books now – Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes, a title that sounds too frivolous than what it is, a bunch of scientific observations about sex, human nature, relationships and biology. Questions like “how do your parents’ age determine what kind of partner you will be attracted to?” and “Why are blue-eyed men attracted to women of the same eye-color?” are answered seriously, with a dash of statistics and an odd tongue-in-cheek comment every now and then. It does get repetitive sometimes, but it’s fun. Why am I reading this book? Because I went inside Piccolo – the second-hand bookstore opposite my office – last week and paid attention to my favorite shelf (yes, I have a favorite shelf there, it displays the weirdest books, especially hidden behind others, most of a dubious nature. I found David Carradine’s Kill Bill memoir there too, which led me to watch the movie again, and ergo, the quote above – a nice game of connect-the-dots, don’t you think? Oh, and all books at Piccolo are a dollar each.) This book was hidden behind one on steamboats, and it took me a few seconds to flip through it and realize that it was going to be read next, even though I was pretty darn sure that morning about beginning to read David Byrne’s How Music Works, on my e-reader.
Then yesterday, I attended a Suzanne Vega concert, my first concert of the year, and I reached one song too late. Which in my book was okay-late, not omg-late, I took a minute or two to park the car and walked inside the venue a little faster than I usually would have, because there was nobody standing outside. I still do not know what the first song was, but ‘Pale Blue Thing’ was playing when I got in, and ‘Caramel’ began next, which turned my knees into jelly and made me forget that I had driven 600+ miles in the last 36 hours. When we were nursing our teas in the foyer of the building during the break, I not-so-unpredictably found myself next to the merchandise table, and my wallet not-so-unpredictably unloaded its contents in the general direction of the cheerful volunteers there, especially when the magic words “signing” was mentioned. Among what I got was The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writings of Suzanne Vega, and today, when waiting for code to compile and run, I opened it up. Boom, next book on the reading-immediately pile. Did I know about this book’s existence a day ago? No. Is poetry/essay/interview collections my thing? Not unless it’s – y’know – Suzanne Vega.
Umm yeah, so my reading habits are sort of a forest too. A Totoro forest, not a Baba Yaga forest. Ok, maybe a Baba Yaga forest where Hellboy and Price Ivan team up.
Two: I really really like revenge as a sub-genre. This probably dates back to my appreciation and love for The Count of Monte Cristo, which I have talked about in the past. But it is amazing how many of the films I run to watch at the theater without a second thought, or rewatch any day have this as the theme. Think about your favorite revenge flicks. Chances are very high I will have watched them, and liked them, and that I will like you for having liked them.
(For the record, Taken 2 is a terrible movie.)
My days of throwing money at shiny things are in the past. I rarely frequent bookshops, once upon a time a source of wallet-loosening. Now I find them mostly a waste of time, or an excuse to go look at new items that have escaped my attention. I stay away from eBay, and my ComicArtFans gallery gathers dust even as I find new excuses not to buy new art.
So yesterday was terrible.
It began in the morning, when I woke up debating with myself about whether I should really try to get one of the Mondo Looper posters that were due to go for sale in a few hours. Unable to decide, I reached office early anyway, where I spent a few minutes with my boss in the kitchen, as he made fun of me for getting in at that (by my standards) ungodly hour. At 8:55, my alarm rang, and I hurried to the Mondo website. Made it in time for Dredd and Looper posters to show up, added them to my cart, and was about to pay for them when….
…I closed my browser. Took a deep breath. Waited a minute, and then went back to work. I mean, seriously, I was going to drop $50 on the poster of a movie that I hadn’t even seen. Would it be one of my top 5 movies? Hell no! Would it be my favorite movie of the year? Uh huh. So there, I saved myself $50, and I felt proud of myself.
But then I began thinking about what were my top 5 movies, and wondered how many of them did have Mondo posters. There was Tyler Stout’s Kill Bill poster, which always struck me as a little too busy, too cluttered for my eyes. But it still had the nice grindhouse vibe to it. Too bad it was selling for upwards for 450$. Not my cup of tea at the moment. Then I remembered the Totoro poster, the one that got away. I was in Romania when the Mondo guys made the drop, sipping on a cup of rooibos and diligently clicking refresh on the page every few minutes. I was determined to own that print at the cost price. But a colleague Skyped me about something important, and I headed out to respond to her without having to type a lot. I come back a minute later, and it was all over. My rooibos was not even cold, it was over that quick.
So I looked around a bit at the forums I hang out, and saw a bunch of Totoro prints for sale, at prices that lay somewhere between astronomical and batshit-insane. There was however a panic sale going on, and being the kind of ruthless low-baller that totally takes advantage of panicky merchants, I shot off a PM, asking him if he would accept my low-ball offer (which, come to think of it, was not that low-ball. It was the six-month average selling price for the piece. Thereabouts. Give or take a few tenners. Mostly take.) As it turns out, he did accept my offer, and I realized, with a silly grin on my face, that I had actually gotten one of my top 5 movies up on the wall of my future apartment. A definite improvement over Looper, I would say.
Then I sipped my coffee and flipped through my Facebook feeds, where an update about GTO: The Early Years made me pause. Apparently it was getting over with volume 15, out very soon indeed. Which made no sense, because I had always thought it was a 31-volume series. Hasty realization: the US reprints were oversized, covering two volumes’ worth of material in one. No wonder. This meant that I needed to get up to speed with the adventures of Onizuka before he became Onegai Sensei Onizuka as soon as I could. Not an easy task considering that the series had two publishers, one of whom went bankrupt and all its catalogue went out of print – that was Tokyopop, for those who came in late, who had brought 10 volumes of the series out last decade. Volume 8, in particular, was selling for 50$ and above in the secondary market. The others could be obtained second-hand, off Amazon sellers or eBay. Vertical publishing was coming out with the last 5 volumes of the series.
On an impulse, I looked up eBay, and hit a 20$ best-offer on a set of the first 4 volumes. The seller accepted within 5 minutes, and as soon as I completed payment, he changed status to “shipped”. That was…quick. The package got here 3 hours ago. Probably the fastest eBay shipping EVER.
At this point, I was done with my shopping for the month. I should not have opened the email from bargaingraphicnovels that said “IDW Sale”. I should have deleted it without even opening the dang thing. But I did, and seeing the 70% discount on books that I had always wanted weakened my soul. The final pass, after much culling of the shopping cart, involved the complete Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse hardcovers by Ben Templesmith (I mean, at $7 each? Why not?) and The Cape hardcover by Joe Hill, Jason Ciaramella and Zach Howard. That will get signed at the next Wondercon, for sure. It felt a little better when pal Pablo agreed with me at the sinful nature of the discounts, and joined in the revelry.
You thought that was it? That was not it. In the evening, I was reading Oishinbo, and was thinking about how much fun it would be to read something like Eden, which was out of print too. Impulse check on eBay, seller with a full run at a deep-discount price, and also selling Sho Fumimura and Ryoichi Ikegami’s Sanctuary, another must-have. I stopped thinking. At that point, I felt unclean already. I closed my eyes, thought about lust and self-control and the need to avoid eBay for a couple of months. And then I opened my eyes and bought both the lots. Because sometimes, the retail-gods win. They win hard.
Update: 24 volumes of Gantz for 175$. At 7.1$ per volume, with free shipping? Going for it.
The fifth of September is celebrated as Teacher’s Day in India. When I was in school, students from the ninth standard were in charge of organizing the annual fest, which followed a standard template. A month or so before the event, the students would go from class to class, collecting donations from everyone. Using the money collected, a stage would be arranged. Every class would present something – a song, maybe a dance or two. There would be a speech by someone from the head class. Some years we would hear awkwardly-worded flowery prose, delivered with frustrating pauses by someone ill at ease in front of the crowd. Other times, the speeches were deliberate, precise and goose-pimply, kind without being overly-fawning, and the applause that followed would be heart-felt. Then there would be a fancy dress contest, where a parade of policemen, beggars, disco dancers, disco-dancing beggars(I kid you not) boys-dressed-as-girls and girls-dressed-as-boys. I tried my hand once at that, and dressed as a tramp, which meant eagerly ripping apart a shirt that I did not like, smearing grease all over my face and hands, and trying to woo the school stray dog to follow me up the stairs of the stage. Despite the lure of a packet of biscuits, the mutt refused to oblige, and I did not manage to cross the stage – the wave of faces looking up at me proved too much for me. I took two steps forward, a halting third and then ran back.
(The day did not get better. I misplaced my good shirt. Turned out later that some wise guy had stowed it at the back of the class almirah, and had left school early. As a result, I had to go back home in the torn tramp shirt, one size too small for me, and to top it all, the bus conductor was rude to me.)
But the fancy dress contest was the final hurdle before the climax of the Teacher’s Day celebrations – the food. As soon as prizes were distributed, and the polite clapping had subsided, the teachers would crowd inside the ‘nursery room’ – which was not a horticultural entity, as the name might suggest. It referred to a biggish classroom in the center of the school, meant for kindergarteners in the morning, and which doubled as a multi-purpose hall in the afternoons, everything from extra classes to antakshari competitions to mini-exhibitions. On Teacher’s Day, the nursery hall would be decked up with flowers and paper streamers, and the caterers would prop open their steaming pots. And we students would politely watch the teachers eat. Some of us would get out and celebrate our own way, in other classrooms – jumping up and down benches and desks, whooping and shouting and dancing.
I like the concept of Teacher’s Day. I like the fact that students go the extra mile to appreciate the authority figures at a crucial stage of their lives. The ones that inspire, prod, poke and belabor the willing and the unwilling to face real life from within a flawed education system. Good or bad, capable or not, they deserve respect every single day of our lives. They make us, in more ways than one.
What I do not like is the reason why we celebrate Teacher’s Day in India. The birthday of an ex-president. Why his birthday? I have no idea. The same way Children’s Day is really about the birthday of an ex-Prime Minister who “liked children a lot”. I am not sure why this bothers me so much, probably because it reeks of sycophancy. Hmm.
