Quizzing

The FWSE Round answered

It started with just one of those cool things you hear when on the Internet. The Vijay Iyer Trio’s cover version of M.I.A’s ‘Galang’. I hadn’t heard of the band before, and was impressed by Iyer’s piano-playing on the song, great their interpretation of the song. Obviously, this is not a question you can ask in a standard quiz – not many people would have heard ‘Galang’. One should not really ask which song is being covered when the cover is so radically different and the original is hardly that famous.

So I came up with the question ‘The song is a cover from the X’s first album, which is named after X’s father. X’s second album is named after X’s mother, and the third album is named after X. ID X and all three albums.” A nice way to play a song that I like and make a question out of the fact that M.I.A’s albums have this naming convention. And if I guess right, her next album will be named after her baby. To be very honest, I was not too happy about the question because it seemed too self-indulgent, in addition to being badly phrased. When I started thinking of the round where I could ask people to search, I was searching around for a ‘hook’ – some topic that could jump out into multiple strands of trivia. M.I.A seemed a nice way to start this off. And definitely not because I thought Maya was among the awesomest albums of 2010.

So, what did we know about M.I.A? The breakout track for her was ‘Paper Planes’, which featured in the trailer to Pineapple Express before it went stratospheric in Slumdog Millionaire. Not many people know that the backing guitar riff to ‘Paper Planes’ was a sample of The Clash’s ‘Straight To Hell’. (Yeah, even I didn’t, until I checked out the Wikipedia entry sometime early last year.) In quizzing circles, well, at least in those cycles where people occasionally name-drop Hipgnosis as answers to any question involving multiple album covers, the Clash’s London Calling is well-known for the way it copied the fonts of Elvis Presley’s first studio album.

Pineapple Express refers to a weather phenomenon, and the whole Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen/James Franco cartel connection was ripe for the picking for a convoluted connect. Franco obviously tied into Danny Boyle and Slumdog Millionaire, the other M.I.A tangent, because he stars in Boyle’s latest 127 Hours. Rogen and Green Hornet get a nod, as do Franco and Spiderman. And Freaks and Geeks, hell yeah.

Slumdog Millionaire leads us to Vikas Swarup and QnA, and the South African Boeke Prize (the list of awardees makes it clear that there is some kind of Indian bestseller list tie-up with the way the Boeke jury thinks). There was also the case of Danny Boyle thanking Anurag Kashyap in his movie, and Kashyap returning the favor in Dev D because Boyle suggested the use of a still camera for Dev’s drug-trip scenes. Dev D led to Sarat Chandra and Devdas and its multiple adaptations, and Sarat Chandra to Parineeta and its multiple adaptations as well, which also covered the obligatory Lit part of the MELA.

Hmm, yeah, ‘face to face with’ is ‘Roobaroo’, in Urdu. Naresh Iyer and Vijay Iyer have nothing in common except for their family name, but who am I to avoid a gratuitous Rahman reference if I can help it?

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Comic Art

A Good Art Year

2010  has been a good year for art.

I refer to ‘comic art’ by the way, not art as in music or drama or art art, if you know what I mean. To be even more specific, I refer to my small collection of comic art,  something which has taken up quite a bit of my daily life. Hello, I am a Comic Art Addict and proud of it.

At the beginning of last year, I was fairly convinced that there was one great piece that I would buy. It was a page that I saw when I was in LA towards the end of 2009, in a friend’s collection. I was at his place, and he had just finished showing me the pieces on his wall, and then remembered a bunch of stuff that had just been framed but were not up on the wall yet. It was a page from one of my favorite comics, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

A brief word on the art of Sandman – in course of its 75 issues, the series had a tremendous line-up of artists, some extraordinary. most of them good, a few pretty middling. In most cases, the bad printing process on the series – remember that this was the late 80s/early 90s, where comics were just beginning to get used to computer coloring, and the quality of the paper, while not the cheap newsprint quality ‘mondo’ format from the 60s and 70s, was still far from the glossy format you young punks are familiar with today. So some of the printed art came out muddy and ugly, which ruined some of the artwork. Especially the work of Mike Dringenberg. Dringenberg was co-creator of the Gaiman run on Sandman, he inked Sam Kieth’s work in the early issues, and when Kieth moved on by the end of the first arc, Dringenberg took over the pencilling duties, along with inker Malcolm Jones III. Because of the aforementioned quality issues, I never really appreciated Dringenberg’s work all that much – and was glad when Kelley Jones, who was to become one of the all-time great Batman artists by the early 90s, took over the acclaimed Season of Mists arc. Dringenberg pencilled the first and last issues of Season of Mists, and that’s it. He moved on from comics work, apparently, going on to illustrate children’s books and album covers.

The first chapter of Season of Mists, issue 21, was the first in which six of the seven Endless make their appearance. So far, readers had seen Dream and his sister Death, and there were hints dropped by the writer about the fact that those two might have other siblings. The introductory sequence in that chapter had an interlude of sorts, where Gaiman wrote brief essays about the six Endless, choosing to omit the Prodigal (we are to find out later that it’s Destruction, who abdicates his position). Desire and Despair on one page, then Destiny and Delirium, and finally Dream and Death.

This last ‘interlude’ page was the one my friend owned.

I had to sit down. Because the art was so brilliant, so delicate and otherworldly that it made my knees weak. The expression on Death’s face, the bubbly water-color shadow that Dream cast behind him (later, when I held the page in my hands, free from the framing glass, I saw that Dringenberg had used glossier paper pasted on the bristol board – probably to enhance the watercolor effect), and the overall  My friend had asked me a few weeks ago about which page from his collection I liked the most, and I had, without hesitation, mentioned one that had struck my fancy. At the moment I saw the Sandman #21 page, I changed my mind, and I told him so. He smiled, and said that if he was ever going to sell this page, I could buy it from him at the price he had originally bought it for. Which was a lot, obviously. But yup, if there was ever a gotta-get-this-or-I-shall-regret-this-forever moment for me, it was when I saw this page. So I agreed.

A lot of collectors do not like artwork that has been personalized to other people. This page has both Gaiman and Dringenberg addressing someone named ‘Jordan’. Gaiman has the words ‘First you dream, then you die’ scrawled before his signature, while the artist just let his art do the talking, and says ‘For Jordan’. I do not mind. Jordan, whoever you are, thank you for keeping this page in  your collection and selling it to the right person who sold it to another right person.

Because 12 months later, I am the owner of the page.

It took some careful budget management, and much brain-ache. In the meantime, I prepared myself mentally – I know it sounds pompous saying it aloud ( hah! Like the rest of the post doesn’t) but really, wrapping my head around the idea of owning it needed a bit of …self-conditioning. Reread Sandman again, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. Read Hy Bender’s Sandman Companion, which gave me much deeper insight into the series, as I discovered things about it that I had not realized, or aspects of the story that I had overlooked. (I heartily recommend that you read The Sandman Companion, if you are a fan) And yes, I felt really bad for Mike Dringenberg, because his artwork, even in the Sandman Absolute Edition had taken a beating thanks to the limitations of printing technology. Or probably because the printer was high – the printed page made the blacks of the original pink – PINK! – because the text had to be given prominence.

Obviously that was not the only page I got this year. I mean, I do have self-control and all, but  the best-laid plans of mice and men….

But that, as they say, is another story altogether.

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Quizzing

The FWSE Round

I recently conducted the Entertainment quiz at Nihilanth 2011, the somewhat-but-not-quite Annual Inter IIT-IIM quiz festival. This makes it the nth consecutive time I’ve conducted a quiz at Nihilanth since it began in 2003. (‘n’ referring to a number less than 10, can also be interpreted as a number I am too half-arsed to calculate precisely, at the moment. Readers? Anyone with deep research skills and the ability to wade through scores of Google results from Half-Life forums?) For those who came in late, MELA refers to Music (or Movies, I never really remember) Entertainment Literature (and) Arts, which essentially gives me carte blanche to do any quiz at all – after all, even sports is entertainment, isn’t it? So’s business, as I’ve heard. Yeah, I am just being evil, so ignore the last two lines.While there has been the occasional glitch in the Matrix –  I did the Lit and Arts quiz in IIM Calcutta in 2005,and slightly tongue-in-cheek, called it the ‘MELA without ME’ quiz, and the India quiz last year at IIM Ahmedabad – the MELA, has always been “my” quiz, even through my two-year sabbatical from quizzing.

Well, until this year. Nihilanth 2011 might probably be the last quiz I do in the foreseeable future, because of some life-altering stuff going on. Well, if there’s a fair amount of time coordination possible i.e if I get enough advance notice, I would definitely try to make it if I am invited again, but not holding my breath. So anyway, because this was the Last MELA (which, I noticed just now, disturbingly abbreviates to LaME, if you are the sort of person to find abbreviated patterns in Any Random Phrase That You Read, ARPTYR for short) – I figured I should make it a little more interesting than your average written-round-clockwise-round-special-round-anticlockwise-round-theme-the end! quiz.

And I did, I totally did. I came up with a Google round. Actually no, I came up with a FWSE round – for trivia buffs, yes, I am talking to you, the guy that’s still reading this and has not closed the window already – the name change is because of a question asked by Vijay Menon in his Biz/Tech quiz, the only one I could attend part of. Shamanth’s Lone Wolf Quiz was already done the previous evening, and the man was just packing his bags to leave for a relaxing tour of the countryside near some resort in Bengal, some place called Naxalbari (that serves excellent Naxalia berries, from which the place gets its name. Yes, I should probably stop now.) I had an early-morning flight from Guwahati because of which I fell asleep just when the India quiz was due to begin, and later on, people raved about it and I felt stupid for missing it. Left early Sunday, so could not attend Ramanand’s General quiz on Sunday either.

So, the FWSE Round. The rules are fairly simple – you have 15 minutes to crack the round. Feel free to use a FWSE of your choice. The only handicap I will add  is that you do not get to hear the audio that starts the theme and the fact that the last clue refers to a question asked previously in the quiz. No anagrams or word puzzles of any sort to muddle up the facts. And yes, if you read carefully, you will get most of them. I will probably give out the answers tomorrow, so you don’t really have to comment and say how many you got, no really, it’s all good. Ok? Ok.

(If you are on Google reader and you cannot see the slideshare embedded here, you should probably just come to the blog)

The FWSE Round

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Music

How it all comes together

Most of the music that I listen to come together in a complex algorithm of recommendations, accidental mentions that usually have no connection at all to what I am doing or feeling at the moment, and a dedicated time devoted to web-trawling every day. This usually does not have much bearing on the quality of the stuff I listen to – the basic demand I have, from any new album that I hear – is that it must stop me at least once from whatever it is I am doing, and make me listen to it. If it does not, it will probably earn itself a second listen if the buzz is pretty good, but not more. Life’s too short.

Robyn’s Body Talk came into my consciousness because of two reasons. One was the fact that I was making a dedicated effort to track down artistes who feature as – um – ‘feat.’ artistes on stuff I’ve heard. Example: Esthero and Keri Hilson, both of whom have been featured on Timbaland tracks, and whose solo albums are delicious slices of pop. Listen to Esthero’s ‘Wikked Li’l Grrrls’ from her album of the same name – the retro brass line itself is worth the price of entry. Wait, I digressed again. So, Robyn. She was on Röyksopp’s Junior, on a track called ‘The Girl and The Robot’ – lovely voice, a very unconventional melody that really grabs you. Yes, I know Junior released in 2009, but I heard Senior last year and it pretty much kicked my expectations into the ground so I went back to the former to regain some of the Röyksopp-love. Then again, I heard I Blame Coco’s The Constant just after it released. (I Blame Coco, FYI, is the stage name of Coco Sumner, she who’s the offspring of the Honorable Gordon Sumner Esq. You would recognize the vocal resemblance if you listen to any of her songs – my recommendation would be ‘In Spirit Golden’) The Constant featured Robyn on a track called ‘Caesar’ – and that was it. Eager to see what exactly was it about this Swedish lady that made her pop up in all these albums, I checked for her discography. Wait a minute, this could not be right – she has been around since 1991. And she was coming up with – believe it or not – THREE albums in 2010.

That  was Body Talk. Because she did not want to wait for all the songs to be recorded, she broke down the album’s release into three parts – yeah, some of the songs from Body Talk vol 1 did carry over into Body Talk vol 2. The first song from Vol 1, ‘Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do’ was whimsical enough, but it was ‘Fembot’ that made my heart stop. ‘I’ve got /some news for you/ Fembots/have feelings too’. She pronounces ‘noos’ instead of ‘news’, and these opening words are buoyed by thumping beats, a reedy synth line that accompanies the rest of the song as well, and a crunchy, snazzy bassline that forces you to pump up the volume. Everything works for it – the auto-tuned robot voice that punctuates her lines, the sudden jumps in the melody, the rap portions. I saw a live version of the song on Youtube and that made me love it even more, and for about 3 days, ‘Fembot’ was on repeat on the playlist.

Then my attention turned to ‘Dancehall Queen’ – a bouncy Jamaica-tinged song that has its share of quirks – in particular, the main chorus line where Robyn hammers the line ‘Now what | Your jaw has dropped | Until the music stops | You know I run this thing | like a Dancehall Queen | I really don’t want no hassle’ in a single breathless refrain. That was my next earworm, until I listened to ‘Dancing On My Own’ closely again, and it….well, you must have figured it out already, but Body Talk vol 1 became a playlist staple for a few weeks. Not many albums that do that.

That’s when things got interesting. I decided to download Robyn’s self-titled 2007 album, the one that won her a pile of Swedish Grammies. That was also the album with which she showed her record label the finger, started her own company to release the album, called Konichiwa records, and came up with a stunner of a single to kick things off. The problem with ‘Konichiwa Bitches’ is this – it lasts two minutes and forty five seconds. One of the most glorious pop songs in the history of pop music, and it’s less than 3 fucking minutes long. This should go into a textbook definition of ‘injustice’, in my opinion. ‘Konichiwa Bitches’ is alarmingly catchy, the lyrics insane, the video completely cuckoo. In short, totally my kind of music.

‘Cobrastyle’ is the second song from the album, and while I thought the main chorus, which went ‘bom-diddi-bom di-dang di-dang diggi-diggi’  was a riff on Las Ketchup’s ‘Asereje’, it turned out that  the song is a Teddybears cover. The Teddybears being a Swedish band that’s so anti-scene that they came up with their band-name  just to keep themselves apart from the <insert_dark_and_gory_name_here> Scandinavian metal  scene. As it turns out, Klas Åhlund from the band not only produced Robyn, but also co-produced Coco Sumner’s debut album. The Teddybears song itself samples the Bomdigi chorus from a song by rapper Erick Sermon, who in turn was inspired by The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’. Now, what’s the Las Ketchup song all about? It narrates the story of a guy named Diego who walks into a nightclub, and asks the DJ to play his favorite song – which happens to be Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’. The chorus of the Spanish song is a phonetic reinterpretation of the hip-hop classic!

It’s all connected, I tell you. But if I asked a question about this in any quiz, I would get lynched, no?

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Books, Gaming

Extra Lives

The last book I read in 2010 was Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, a personal examination of video games, their limitations, and how they’re on their way to becoming a medium full of possibilities. It’s by no means complete – as the author himself notes, quite a lot of games were not covered even though he had written about them (including Half-Life 2, goddamnit, one of my favorite games), and all of them were X-Box 360 games, because that is what Bissell owned. It’s a fast, breezy read – I was done with all but the last chapter on my flight to Guwahati. The last chapter was called Grand Thefts, and I deferred the pleasure because I thought I would come home, install GTA4 on this laptop and continue my saved game. Alas, I had forgotten to take a backup of the saves, and I did not have the enthusiasm to start over on Niko Belic’s quest.

I did finish the book just before the 31st – and I have to say that Grand Thefts was a great chapter to end the book on, because it adds a different layer to the addictive nature of video games, in particular the open-world kind that GTA4 is an example of, the kind that demands hours and hours of dedication and world-grinding. You see, Bissell hooked up with a coke dealer, got high snorting lines of cocaine, and then played GTA4 continuously. It’s the kind of thing that would make me giggle nervously. When Bissell says “Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude and make me good and bad in equal measure”, I pause and wonder if that’s the same reason I play video games myself, and if I should try and see what it feels like to get high and play GTA. Hmm.

The best thing about the book, I thought, was the objective look at the shortcomings of the medium, despite the semi-memoir approach. For example, Bissell thinks the world of Bioshock, but he devotes quite a bit of page-time to a discussion of Ubisoft designer Clint Hocking’s evisceration of the game in a much-discussed blog post. Even as he professes his love for games like Resident Evil, Fallout 3 and Oblivion, he laments the cringe-worthy dialogue that populates most such games (Mass Effect earns quite a bit of praise, on the other hand). The anecdotes that Bissell scatters around the book are little snapshots of gamer lore – every gaming geek worth his headshot has fond memories of game sequences and the author is no exception.  My favorite is his account of a co-op session of the zombie game Left 4 Dead, a tale of heroism, courage and occasional douchebaggery – even though I personally have never played co-op. All of these makes Extra Lives a wonderful look at the American gaming scene from the point of view of a neutral observer – but one who is sold at the medium’s possibilities, and is optimistic about the future of gaming and game culture.

The downside of the book is what he does not cover. In addition to the seminal contemporary games that were missed out, there could have been chapters on handheld gaming, on the Japanese influence (Resident Evil, Kojima and Metal Gear Solid are brought up in passing, but c’mon, you really do not want to skim over such cornerstones of gamelore), sports games, casual games (including the influence of the Wii). BUT.  Extra Lives introduced me to the awesomeness of Braid, and for that, I’ll be eternally grateful.

Like all successful pop culture artifacts, this book requires a sequel. Possibly a franchise, that tracks the gaming industry as it marches towards world domination.

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