Television

A Scandal in Belgravia

You start giggling approximately a minute into the opening of ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, when a Bee Gees song begins to play. And the laughs just don’t stop, as writer Stephen Moffat and director Paul McGuigan create a rousing remix of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories that is adventure laced liberally with humor.

Spoilery observations and tee-hee points:

Much of what I like about Sherlock is the innovative modern-day parallels that the series brings to the original stories. An American opera singer is transposed to a British dominatrix, a photograph becomes a bunch of photos and videos on a phone, and a region in Germany becomes a London district. A whole bunch of other Holmes cases are punningly name-dropped. The Speckled Blonde, The Geek Interpreter. The blog counter stuck at 1895. Well-played, guys, well-played.

Irene Adler’s War-Dress is a joy to behold.

“Brainy is the new sexy.”

I liked the way the central focus of the original Holmes story – that of Holmes having to find the picture for his client – is covered in the first 1/3rd of the episode, and the remaining portion is devoted to exploring this delightful – relationship? – between Holmes and The Woman. A relationship that involves her vital statistics, her pulse, her password – and of course, her death.

“It’s a bit rude, that noise, isn’t it?”

Great use of the supporting cast of the show – specially Mrs Hudson. Sherlock and Watson both show a tremendous amount of affection for this lady, played with just the right amount of eccentricity by Una Stubbs. Most of the regulars turning up at a Christmas party at 221B Baker Street (which also features the most uncomfortable deduction scene ever) is a treat, having them all being subjected to Sherlock’s moody quips and yet be around, most amusing.

Did anyone check out @TheWhipHand on Twitter? Or John Watson’s Blog? Also this, which is hilarious beyond belief, but please proceed with caution. The title of the blog gives out one of the most crucial plot points of the episode.

Crackling dialogues abound. One of my favorite scenes involves Mycroft and Sherlock in the corridor of a hospital where, between puffs of a cigarette, the two brothers stare at a grieving family in the distance. “Look at them”, Sherlock says. “They all care so much.” The camera frames the two brothers in profile, through an assymetrical frame on one side of the screen. “Do you ever wonder if there’s something wrong with us?”, he wonders aloud. “All lies end”,  the elder brother responds. “All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage.”  There is a reason why their mutual enemy refers to him as “The Iceman”.

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All in all, Sherlock season 2 is a perfect example of how quality programming speaks for itself. Just today morning, Adi Tantimedh wrote about TV shows burning out, citing two once-popular shows that have jumped the shark in recent times thanks to lazy writing and needless season renewals. This show, on the other hand, proves that if you bring your best to the table, you can win over viewers regardless of production delays and non-adherence to an annual schedule.

“But initially he wanted to be a pirate.”

An excellent start to the New Year. Two more episodes lie in wait for us, and I have high, high hopes for both of them.

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Life, Myself

Meta Post

A good friend recently mentioned that I’ve had a blog for almost ten years now. This was slightly shocking to me, because while the passing of time did register, it still feels more than a little…scary.

The blog actually turns ten end of 2012, and my, my, things have changed in nine years. Livejournal, where it all began, used to be this bunch of people just having fun. The LJ friends’ page was that generation’s Facebook status, young ‘uns, and unlike Facebook, you would find genuinely interesting content to peruse in the mornings. Actual written content, you know, not just a funny link or a professionally-written, well-articulated article. There were threaded comments, there was roaring LJ-Drama every once in a while. LJ also proved conclusively that it is possible to make – and sustain -lasting friendships online, even with strangers whose real names you did not know.

Beatzo, at that time, was this distinct personality. He was a fragment of who I was, a slightly deranged self-conscious pop-culture-humper who was trying to figure out if there were other people willing to play with him in his walled garden. He was trying to figure out how big the garden was. (Yes, I know, super-creepy talking about yourself in the third-person. But I don’t do this often, and I am talking about a persona here, so cut me slack, yeah?) For those who were not around in those Livejournal years, I used the image of Gollum as a user-picture, because that sort of fit.

I am not sure if Beatzo exists anymore, the character that he was back then and the voice he had in my head. If he does, he may be Beatzo v3.0 right now. (v2.0 was a maladjusted, angry little creature because of some people who pissed him off, and when he wrote, he really did not give a fuck.) And he’s also more of me than ever.

There has been prolonged periods of silence and of course, unrelenting quantities of self-indulgent blather. But I guess the blog has been a sort of weird daemon/shadow-creature/sounding-board for me all throughout. I still figure out what to say and what to leave unsaid. Much of what I write makes me cringe when I read it the second time, and I continue to write my posts in a frenzy of typing until I figure out it’s time to end or I get bored, and click on publish without that all-important edit pass. I am no longer up to writing wall-of-text posts, because I cannot handle them myself – a case of my writing habits adjusting to my online reading habits. My eyes just glaze over. Or I press Alt-tab. The moment a post crosses 500 words, I start telling myself that The Blather Needs To Be Contained. And I do.

But hey, it’s just a blog. Right?

And the funny thing is, I’ve gone on record telling friends that blogging is dead. It is, at least the version of what we thought of blogging 10 years ago. I miss unselfconscious writing, you know, seeing people I know just be themselves or their online personalities, playing their parts with unrestrained glee. Sure, all the memes, the clip-board videos and excerpts and photographs and the one-trick pony blogs have their place in the sun. But there is this dearth of everyday, non-schticky writing that just is. The kind of writing that reminds me of a quiet evening with a bunch of friends who would sit around talking about all the things under the sun. About the books and comics they read and the movies they saw last week, without having to go into deep critical commentary.  About their ride to the office and why it sucked, without trying to constrain themselves to a 140-character barb.

I am not sure if any of this is a complaint, or about what.

So, anyway, this is not a tenth anniversary post, because hey, this is not even the tenth anniversary. This is just me taking stock of things and trying to gear up for this artificially-induced mental reboot that the New Year brings with it. As if the passing of a calendar day can wash off the daily sediment off our lives and make different people of us. Nope. This blog will, in all likelihood, continue to be the same as it was two days ago. You, all of you who’re reading it and rolling your eyes or smiling along or have alt-tabbed before you read this, I still do not know who you are. Doesn’t matter, we’ll still have fun. Umm – actually, I will still have fun, you can join in. (That was v2.0 popping up to say hi, just so you know. 1.0 made a small appearance and forced me not to post this on January 1, because that would be too cliche. Sheesh.)

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Concerts, Events, Music

Concert Diaries: Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer at the Wilshire Ebell Theater

I had not bought a CD since 2008. In a few months, I get CDs of Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman’s recent tour, which I backed through Kickstarter. Also attended their LA show, which was a blast. It happened on All Hallows Eve. In addition to Amanda covering songs from Rocky Horror Picture Show and Neil reading out horror stories that made all of us in the audience sit lower in our chairs and try not to let tendrils of terror tickle our tummies (fuck yeah, alliteration!), we also had fans wearing Halloween costumes. Who were judged by the Dynamic Duo and then given access to luscious swag. The show also featured guest appearances by The Jane Austen Argument, a lovely Australian band. They’ve just released their first single, which has lyrics by The Gaiman himself, and their album is due for release in February.

Neil and Amanda totally behaved like newlyweds, or at least like teenagers out on a voyeuristic date. There was much public display of affection on stage between the two, and a completely aww-moment when Palmer scribbled down lyrics to the song “I Google You”, which was written by Gaiman once upon a time as a post-modern Sinatra-ish love song, and was supposed to be sung by him onstage, at which point he claimed to have forgotten the words. She then scampered up to him, gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and then slipped him the scrap of paper with a dramatic “let’s-do-this-secretly-so-no-one-notices” gesture. Total heart-melt. And Gaiman singing “I Google You” turned out to be completely adorable too.

But anyway, I got myself a Christmas thank-you card from them, which was technically not a Christmas card because they sent it way back in November, but became a Christmas card just because I got it around Christmas. So yeah, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer sent me a Christmas card. How cool is that, huh?

The other thing I got today in the mail was a download code to a preview of the release. And what a preview! Two hours of music, storytelling and much hilarity. I am half-way through the 25 minute narration of ‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar’, a Lovecraft-meets-the-British-Countryside short story by Gaiman, and it drives away every bit of lugubriousness brought about a long and weary working day. It has the songs ‘Blake Says’ and ‘Runs in the Family’ by Amanda Palmer, and also a bunch of excerpts from question-and-answer sessions that the two had. It features great verbal interplay between the two, Palmer’s American drawl contrasting quaintly with Gaiman’s British accent, as the two speak of mixtapes, hobbies, dating and how the audience should behave in order to come off well in the recordings, for posterity’s sake. (“Scream during the singing bits, like you would in a rock concert. And be quiet and inhale sharply in the right bits when Neil reads.”)

That evening was full of fun, laughter, singing, reading, gasping, kissing, premature birthday wishes (Gaiman’s) and a whole lot of ukelele jamming. And, as AFP put it in one of her blog posts, it was a perfect post-wedding reception for two fan-families.

Another memory: On the way back from the concert, I met someone at the bus stop who happened to play the bassoon for Frank Sinatra. He had pictures of himself with Muhammad Ali and Fidel Castro. I talked with him until the bus came, and then I took his card and waved goodbye.

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Comics, Reviews

Pop Culture Update: Locke and Key

One of the genuinely distressing news of 2011 was the failure of the pilot episode of Locke and Key to be picked up for regular programming. This is bad for three reasons – because Locke and Key is one of the finest comic-books being published right now, and the success of the TV show would have no doubt brought in more readers to the series (consider how many people have read Game of Thrones this year, to get an idea of what I mean). Because from what I gather off internet reviews, the pilot episode is really well-made, with superb casting and a great script. But most of all, it sucks because a lot of shitty TV series got green-lighted at the cost of this. Seriously, makes no sense.

But still, the comic stands on its own. It is written by Joe Hill,  a man who, under normal circumstances, be known as Stephen King’s son; but right now, he’s known as the guy behind ground-breaking  genre novels such as Horns and Heart-Shaped Box. It is drawn by Chilean artist Gabriel Rodriguez. Together, the two are magical. This book happens to be one of the most perfect collaborations I’ve seen, where the art enhances the story and vice versa.

Among the things that I love about Locke and Key is that it’s among the most structured comics I’ve read. Not a wasted, throw-away chapter, page or panel on this one. It helps that the story was already planned out into three acts, each act made up of 2 miniseries. This ensures that Hill knows exactly how his story is being framed, giving us just the right amount of information, teasing us with flashbacks and tertiary characters that flicker into the overall plot at the right time. Currently, we are on miniseries #5, entitled Clockworks, where the mythology of the world is being explained by a series of flashbacks. Which brings me to –

The fact that Locke and Key is one of those rare horror comics that gets horror. Which is not surprising, considering Hill’s literary antecedents. But really, do you have any idea how hard it is to do horror in comics without falling back into icky-gore-territory or ho-hum-shock-ending cliches? This book manages to creep into your head in strange ways – through childhood fears, unexpected plot twists, and by a genuinely frightening Big Bad Villain, one that manages to stay one step ahead of the protagonists at nearly every turn.

The first miniseries, Welcome to Lovecraft, introduces us to the principal cast of characters, the Locke family and the three siblings – eldest brother brother Ty, the sister Kinsey and the youngest, six-year old Bode. The death of their father brings them and their mother to their ancestral family home in Lovecraft, Massachusetts, where strange things begin to happen. Bode, for example, finds a strange lady calling for his help from beneath a well. This is also where we start understanding that the tragedy that has befallen the family is not a random incident, but is connected to keys. Keys that do stuff, like turning Bode into a ghost. Or letting people go anywhere they want, or doing distressing things to their psyches.

Finally, Locke and Key is one smart comic that brings unexpected things to the fore on repeated reads. Small example: the second volume is entitled Head Games, and all the covers have a common theme.

In case the image on the right looks a little familiar, here’s why – it’s a riff on an iconic cover from the 1950s that was used by the US Senate to ban horror and crime comics. This particular cover was printed by EC Comics, run by publisher William Gaines, who founded Mad magazine later on. There is this legendary story of Gaines trying to defend this cover as tasteful in court. He did not do a good job of it – in his defense, he was completely doped up on cough medicine when invited to testify.

Oh, and the college the Locke kids go to in San Francisco, before they move to Lovecraft? William Gaines Academy. Ha!

But the smartness lies not just in homages or sly winks at the audience – the smartness lies in the way Hill seems to know exactly when to let certain characters take center-stage, or to subvert a known trope at just the right time, or to let a throwaway part of the scenery become a crucial cog in the battle between good and bad. The two, writer and artist, seem to have fun when telling their story, and that fun is infectious! One of my favorite single issues deals with epic battles and mundane day-to-day affairs, and there are those single-panel settings that hide worlds and untold stories in them, the kind that would make lesser writers milk them through crossovers and back-stories. Hill and Rodriguez do it in single wordless panels, the magnificent bastards!

All said and done, what is the series all about? It helps that every chapter starts with a one-page cheat-sheet, that tells you the bare bones of what’s going on and where we stand.

Locke and Key, ladies and gentlemen. The best fucking comic being published right now, BAR NONE. It helps if you get all the chapters and read them at one go, because every miniseries ends with cliff-hangers. And these are not your everyday, how-do-they-get-out-of-this-level cliffhangers, these are the holy-shit-this-did-not-just-fucking-happen kinds, the ones that make you grab for the next book in the series at 4 AM in the morning, even though your eyes are puffy and you’ve got to be at work at 9.

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Books

Pop Culture Update: Books

I haven’t really been writing much about things that matter, like books and comics and things that make me want to run around my room shrieking with happiness. This post tries to fill that gaping void in your life.

There are a lot of shitty fantasy trilogies around, but Hunger Games is not one of them. The books were recommended to me by a librarian who sat next to me at a Neil Gaiman show. The movie trailer came out a little while ago, and no doubt I would have dismissed it as another of those post-Twilight teen-angst bubbles. But hey, librarian-recommendation. So I read book 1, and was blown away, and finished books 2 and 3 the same week. It’s hard to read when you’re on vacation, but these were just that good.

What’s the series about? If you’ve read/watched Battle Royale or The Running Man and The Long Walk by Stephen King, you will understand that Suzanne Collins takes familiar tropes, at least in the first book, and then takes those to their logical conclusion in the sequels. The protagonist is a girl that plays with metaphorical fire, and kicks up a political hornet’s nest of epic proportions. The cast of characters features a gruff Mentor-figure, a star-crossed relationship , a Diabolical Villain (who does not even make a proper appearance until the beginning of the second book – well-played there, Ms Collins), a Faithful Confidante, and surprisingly, the most awesome Fictional Fashion Designer you’ve ever seen. The three books work beautifully well together, and I loved the way how the storyline unraveled the world’s back-story slowly, the characters acquiring voices of their own. The books brought me on the brink of tears multiple times, and made me skip a healthy regime of sleep just so that I get my pulse-rate back to normal.

I read Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War on a recent flight. Had heard good things about the book on Joe Hill’s Twitter Geek list, even though I had known of Brooks as a parody guy. Expectations were low – how much more can this whole zombie fad be milked anyway? Turns out it can, and wonderfully at that.

Brooks looks at the zombie outbreak as an actual worldwide event and examines its sociopolitical implications. He presents it like a documentary-style set of interviews with survivors, soldiers, politicians, inventors, people from all over the world – much unlike traditional zombie media, where the focus is on a small band of individuals. The interviews lay out the timeline of the “war”, from the time the zombie outbreak caused society to break down, the slow and eventual return to some form of normalcy, and finally, the climactic showdown. In the process, it covers how every aspect of society is changed as a result – from racism to film-making, military strategy to everyday slang, how certain countries take the lead in containing the social meltdown, and how society mutates to keep up. The interviews lead into one another, jumping across continents, showing just how random events on one side of the globe affect other countries.

The book has tonnes of disturbing moments – a traumatized young girl’s account of a zombie attack, political shenanigans that lead to loss of lives, a zombie vaccine that turns out to be a marketing placebo, the build-up to nuclear war between unlikely enemies. And it has moments of stunning epicness – I refer to them as F!$* Yeah Moments. The Japan arc, for example, blindsides you completely, with two unlikely “protagonists” undergoing their own trials against the zombies. Pay close attention to the real-world nudge in the South Africa arc – where a plan concocted during the apartheid years to contain race mobs is resurrected to contain the zombie attack.

The movie is in production right now, but with stars like Brad Pitt attached to the movie, I have a feeling that the everyday aspect of the book will be abandoned in the favor of focusing on specific individuals. This book offers the refreshing view that human society as a whole can be heroic, somehow I do not see Hollywood subscribing to that utopian ideal. Oh well.

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