Music

No Rahman For A Year

I turned 30 last year, and I realized that for the last seventeen years of my life, AR Rahman’s music has been a constant companion to virtually everything I’ve done. It was what converted me from a casual listener to a rabid music enthusiast, and it is to this music that I map most memories of growing up, my college years, a lot of significant events of my life. Every Rahman release would be ( and still is) a mini-event, the only thing beating it would be the anticipation of what would come after this one. While I cannot confess to having listened to *every* song produced by him, the number comes very close to his complete output.

But hey, seventeen years is a long time, man. While there was a time that I listened exclusively to his music alone, it also got me to sample new composers in the Indian film music scene, and even go beyond my comfort zone and try out different genres – Qawwali, world music ( I remember hunting down and buying Peter Gabriel’s Last Temptation of Christ just because it was recommended by Rahman, in a Filmfare interview, then the only way to keep track of what was on the cards for the next few months for the Rahman fix), good ol’ rock and roll, ambient music, EDM – and lots and lots of soundtracks.  And while my tastes in other genres and kinds of music has morphed and evolved in various directions, I find my predilection for Indian music often gauged by the strict barometer of the standard laid down by Rahman. (And not just Indian music, mind you – there is an instant liking to some international artistes based on how Rahman-like their music sounds on the first hearing – Vanessa Carlton’s ‘A Thousand Miles’ comes to mind, as does Owl City’s ‘Fireflies’ ) Which is to say that, every new composer or artiste I listen to has to stand up in a podium while I, with my halo of Rahman-love shining brightly over my head, pass judgement – the result is more often than not a thumbs-down.

Last December, while walking through the streets of LA, the album that played in my ears was Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged. Now this is another of those college-level albums that was internalized to such an extent that I could not only sing along to all the songs, once upon a time, but also murmur the words that Kurt Cobain says in between song. True confession, I would do that, and even laugh along with the studio audience. During boring classes, I could play the album in my head all the way through – ah well, you get the picture. It was an album that I heard so much that after some time, I realized that I need not listen to it again ever again. And I didn’t, for quite some time – I remember hearing it again sometime in 2003 or 2004, and then relegating it again to the “been there, enjoyed that, time to move on” pile. But listening to it this December was a revelation. I frequently found myself being surprised by which song followed another, I could not remember most of the lyrics, and Cobain’s dry banter between songs actually had me smiling not by force of habit, because I found them genuinely funny. Needless to say, I loved that feeling.

So the deal with not listening to Rahman’s music for a year is this – I want to get back that unfamiliar feeling of discovering something new about an oft-heard song. The number of times I’ve heard ARR’s discography borders on the ludicrous ( check out my last.fm profile for the extremely skewed statistics) . I seem to use his music as a stress-busting choice or a mood enhancer, and sometimes plainly as a default playlist filler when I run out of ideas of what I want to listen to. In a way, Rahman has become comfort food, and I don’t think I am too comfortable with that idea. Hence, this experiment.

Sure, there are new releases lined up – I believe Gautam Menon’s latest release is already out ( Vinnaithandi Varuvaiya) and Mani Ratnam’s Raavan is coming soon, but hey, I’ve heard Justice, Leslie Feist and Katie Melua three years too late, and even now, discover artistes whose prime albums were released many years ago. There is no pressing need for me to listen to a new Rahman album other than the fluttery feeling that accompanies the first listen. The fear of that experience being marred by reviews and other people’s opinions is why you need to listen to the songs on the day of release, because you can be sure that every other blog, column and radio station would be talking about it in the weeks to come.  Ah well, one has to live with that.

This does not mean I will run away if you play a Rahman song, or that I will cover my ears and go “la-la-la” if ‘Chiggy Wiggy’ starts playing in the mall when I am shopping. It’s just that I won’t actively add a Rahman song to my playlist if I can help it – I can spend that time listening to something new, something I haven’t heard before. It’s embarrassing to know that I hadn’t heard Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds album until a few weeks ago, or hadn’t succumbed to the pure joy of listening to Lady Gaga’s Fame. Maybe seventeen years later, it’s time to go cold turkey and hey, if things get really bad, I am sure I can just press play in my mind.

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Comics

Thoughts on From Hell

If you know me, you know that I have a soft spot for Alan Moore – which is an understatement equivalent to saying that Salma Hayek is just another pretty face, or that GTA is a mildly deviant video game. So you would understand that normally it’s tough for me to sit and write objectively about Moore’s books. The first review I wrote for Rolling Stone was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, and it was devilishly tough to write, as I sought to bring objectiveness to a wannabe rave bubbling with latent fan-frenzy. After that, I’ve played it safe, and have avoided talking about Moore and his writings. But just this morning I finished rereading From Hell, and the physical need to talk about this work is just too much right now.

From Hell is a 572 page graphic novel that presents a version – Moore’s version – of the Jack the Ripper murders. Again an understatement, the book is not so much about Jack the Ripper as it is a deconstruction of Victorian society, as Moore spirals into the murders as the center of a vortex of personalities, (both real and imaginary), coincidences and actual events that spun into and out of Whitechapel in the summer of 1888. The writer is well-known for moulding his scripts to suit the strengths of his collaborator, and Eddie Campbell’s scratchy, black-and-white style is perfect for the book, filtering the image of a sooty, grimy London through jagged lines and blobs of dark ink.

But before I talk about the work, it is necessary to put it in context, both from the perspective of American comics as well as from a personal standpoint. Indulge me here, will you?

Somehow, post-Swamp Thing, The Killing Joke and Watchmen, Alan Moore seemed to have vanished from mainstream comics. Of course, the facts behind what had happened to make Moore disillusioned with the comics industry are public knowledge now, and I needn’t go into them in detail ( if you’re interested, you should check out interview here. The Wikipedia page should also give a fairly detailed picture of what transpired ). He took a much-deserved sabbatical from the genre that he single-handedly deconstructed in the early part of the 80s, and the later part of the decade saw him being involved with a number of independent, idiosyncratic projects – a mathematics-inspired series called Big Numbers, and a treatise on covert CIA operations named Brought To Light – both illustrated by painter Bill Sienkiewicz, whose own experiments with storytelling were stretching the boundaries of what people perceived as “normal” artwork; there was Lost Girls, a sexually-explicit look at familiar characters from Victorian literature ( a theme that Moore would return to, time and again, in his later work) in collaboration with artist Melinda Gebbie. A Small Killing with Argentine illustrator Oscar Zarate was about a white-collar worker in a typical advertising agency, the work serving as a commentary of corporate culture in the 80s. And there was From Hell.

How did From Hell come about? It started in a small independent magazine called Taboo, the brainchild of artist Steven Bissette, the penciller from Moore’s Swamp Thing days. Bissette’s idea was to create a horror anthology comic that was “radical and unfettered” (in his own words). Horror comics in the eighties were still laboring under the legacy of the 1950s – mainstream comics stuck to “safe” subjects that were okayed by the comics code authority, and the indies could not venture beyond a template referred to as “the EC hangover”, stories featuring giggling horror hosts, an old witch or a graveyard keeper, who would serve as the narrators, the tales themselves building up to a twist in the end that one could see coming from a mile away. Taboo was intended to be the complete antithesis of the average horror comic, it was invite-only for a bunch of contemporary artists and writers who could really deliver something out of the ordinary. As Bissette made it amply clear in his “Taboo manifesto”, the intention was “to show the unshowable, to speak the unspeakable” (a phrase borrowed from David Cronenberg), and the invitees were given three guidelines – “it shouldn’t be easy, it should be uneasy, it should make us uneasy”. Taboo was not a spectacular success –it closed shop after ten issues and an annual – self-publishing comics at that time was a hit-and-miss affair, and the adult nature of Taboo’s content did not make its existence too easy. The line-up in those ten issues was stellar – Charles Burns’ Black Hole was first published in Taboo, as was Neil Gaiman’s Sweeney Todd. And Alan Moore, responding to his former colleague’s call to arms, submitted a draft of his holistic approach to the Jack the Ripper murders, due to be illustrated by an Australian artist named Eddie Campbell. Thus was From Hell born (You could do well to read the complete account of the formation of Taboo, in Bissette’s own words here).

Obviously, even with Taboo’s failure, Moore and Campbell’s collaboration was taken to its logical conclusion of fourteen chapters, at first published as single issues by Kitchen Sink/Tundra, and then collected and published by Campbell himself as a gigantic paperback in 1999, with a prologue and an epilogue added in the collected edition. After a brief period when it went out of print, it was then taken up by Top Shelf Comix (Moore’s publisher of choice currently for all his ongoing projects), and is available still. ( To the left, you see the original cover of the first trade paperback collection, which I like a lot for its iconography. The current cover, which shows William Gull in the middle of his…uh…work is another beautiful Campbell painting, but somewhat lacks the subtlety of the original.)

I had heard about From Hell in about 2002, just after watching the movie. I had just gotten a job, and a new credit card, and the wonders of eBay were just making themselves known to me. Add to it the presence of an enthusiastic senior in the US, who agreed to help accept shipped items and send them later to India, and I was a happy camper. If I remember correctly, I paid exact cover price for the book because I had no idea of the concept of sniping and just ended up systematically overbidding. (Apparently the version I own is the movie cover edition, which is no longer in print, and has a slightly higher value in the secondary market. Just saying) It took six months for the book to arrive, along with other assorted comics (Sin City runs, Sandman story arcs, and the first 23 issues of a series called Hitman). It came in through someone who was travelling to Hyderabad for winter vacations, and I remember the fluttery feeling in my tummy as I walked to the address my friend had given me, a little nervousness at whether everything had made it through airport customs safely, and whether the courier himself had any idea of how important this package was to me. Hasty greetings were exchanged, and I fled, taking the books with me. Home had never seemed so far away.

I did not read From Hell immediately, though. A lack of comics (if I were to write an autobiography of my life, it would probably be called “a lack of comics”) ensured that I would ration my reading habits, circling around my reading pile by going through the least-important ones first. But there came a day when I could not wait any longer, I just had to read the book, lack of reading material be damned. I read it at white-heat, until I came to chapter 4, where Sir William Gull, physician to the queen, already having been introduced to us as the future Ripper, goes for a ride through London with Netley the coachman. The chapter is dedicated entirely to Gull’s (or rather, Moore’s) commentary on the city – and that’s all I am saying without giving anything away – and reading it made me feel terrible. I remember that I had bad dreams that night, and let me tell you, it’s very very rare that a work of fiction edges into my subconscious. I did finish it, and by the time chapter 10 came along – a chapter devoted to the systematic degradation of Marie Kelly’s body – I had inured myself enough to just take in the panels clinically, marveling at Moore and Campbell’s masterful use of the three-by-three panel structure. When the book was done, I closed it and carefully put it away on my bookshelf.

It would be 6 years before I would attempt to reread the book. I had bought a copy as a gift for a friend recently, and while she and I discussed it, I realized I did not remember too much of it, other than major plot points and some key events. Somehow, I dreaded having to flip through the Comic That Gave Me Nightmares. Yes, it was also fear of a different kind– sometimes the second read throws up flaws that one glazes over during the first read. The other was that of experience garnered from reading more and more comics over the years – what if I enjoyed the book more, I wondered, because of my naiveté in 2003? What if it could not yield the same kind of emotional response in 2009? Young Master Crowley has something to say about that, though.

Needless to say, I shouldn’t have worried. While I didn’t get nightmares this time ( so far! ), the book still gave me that queasy feeling as I trudged through the streets of London, peeking into the imaginary lives of the four women and the people around them. Chapter 4 and chapter 10 still evoked that potent combination of awe and revulsion that I had nearly forgotten – Gull’s soliloquoy in the middle of the Marie Kelly incident, in particular, took more of my attention this time around. The burn-down chapters – 11 to 14 feel more satisfying because I recognize more of the references this time, and because I have been paying more attention to the story – one of the perks of rereading a book the second time – I found myself able to analyze and correlate the overall characters and events much more carefully. In a way, the second read has helped me appreciate the book even more.

Some things of note:

For a long time after reading From Hell, I found myself unable to watch movies set in London during that time period. I had to switch off My Fair Lady after about 10 minutes into the movie, because my brain just could not process the antiseptic sets and the overall bonhomie in the most dangerous area of the city.

The excitement when Gull uses the phrase “Salutation to Ganesa” the second time, when I finally realize the reason why Moore introduced a real-world character into the story. Incidentally, the book, which is dedicated to the four women (“You and your demise: of these things alone are we certain”), also begins with the same phrase.

The first time Queen Victoria appears in the narrative is drawn in a way that takes you completely by surprise. Not just because Campbell’s style changes drastically on that page, but because the entire chapter is written in a way that enhances the overall effect of that scene. It rattles you, the moment when you turn the page and Victoria looms on the page. “Will no one help the widow’s son?” Phew.

I had missed out the German dialogue in the beginning of chapter 5. Well, not any more. Thanks, E. :)

Campbell’s art changes style substantially in some parts, almost as if there were portions where he was trying out different approaches. Things get a little jarring with the ink wash effect used in chapter 5, when Gull’s everyday life is presented in parallel with that of the prostitutes in the East End.

There’s a level of ambiguity in the ending – part of it because of the scratchy artwork, which conveys a more impressionistic version of events, rather than spoon-feeding the story. Which fits in with the theme of the story itself being a filter of the events that we know of, but cannot really verify.

The way the last chapter wraps up every theme, every throwaway ( or so one thinks) line from the beginning of the book is very very satisfying.

On the negative side, Moore sometimes forces real-world characters too ham-handedly. He also goes to great lengths to identify every historical person being mentioned, and some of the dialog comes out clunky and a little forced.

It’s a brand New Year, and a brand new collecting goal is called for. I think I desperately need a page from the book, preferably Chapter 4 or Chapter 10.

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Life, Travel

The Last Time I Updated My Blog

…was a few days after landing in an unknown city in a European country most associated with sanguinary surprises. When I wrote it, I had this distinct LA buzz in my head, as my brain tried to formulate coherent time-based chunks of my experiences in Los Angeles so that I could write it all down and recapture the awesomeness as much as I could. Now, as I make my way back to LA for another three weeks, after spending 47 days in Cluj-Napoca, it seems to me that I should have been more pro-active about the writing bit. I am afraid Cluj has totally pwned you, Los Angeles.

47 days in Cluj. Most of it a flurry of cross-continental late-night calls, meetings, 14-hour workdays, deployment issues, the works. No, I won’t be talking about any of that. That bit was just me junked up on adrenaline, enthusiasm and the occasional shot of Ţuică, a potent variety of plum brandy that drove out my initial India-trained aversion to cold and fog in a move reminiscent of the best of Obelix against the Roman legions. What I need to share is the awesome fun I had. The way these days in Cluj made me forget about comics and comic art for the first time in 3-odd years. The joys of horse-riding in the mountains at near-freezing temperatures. How karaoke can soothe the soul and mend the heart, provided there is plenty of rum and hot tea available. Road-trippin’/ with a Finn/ through vampire nation/ on a Volkswagen. ( I suck at rhymin’/so you can stop with the slimin’)  The bonding nature of movie nights. Oh, and the soul-crushing depression associated with turning thirty.

Yes, I really need to update the blog. I will, I promise.

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Comics, Weirdness

Savoring Junji Ito’s Uzumaki ( a.k.a A Brief Interlude)

While at LA, I found out that my old, old friend and ex-flatmate Vineet was in Pasadena. Vineet found out, to his peril, that the most acceptable way of arranging a meetup with my cantankerous eBay-scouring self was to offer himself as a mule to transport a bunch of manga that I won the same day. ( I know, isn’t that a coincidence? ) So he landed up at Beverly Glen, hauling thirty four manga volumes on his backpack, after having to change three buses to get to the apartment.

To make up for his trouble, I introduced him to Junji Ito’s Uzumaki (‘Spiral’). The cover boasts ‘Terror in the Tradition of The Ring’, and I say to that – “Pish-tosh!” Because while Ring was a nice slow burn of a read as a book, and was terrifying as a film adaptation in Japanese, the manga version was not even something you could call horror – I would probably slot it into RL Stine-level, kid-friendly fare. Uzumaki – sigh – I tried reading volume 1 in my hotel room at around midnight, and about fifteen minutes later, I had to keep it aside and go reread the first few issues of Tomorrow Stories. That’s because the demented Mr. Ito and his finely inked panels wrought holy havoc on my dinner, and a little more of Uzumaki would have either (a) caused me to run to the bathroom and throw up every bit of undigested food in my tummy or (b) led me to toss and turn in bed with nightmarish visions floating in through the hotel balcony.

It is an undeniable page-turner, but there are times when you just know you gotta give up.

As embellishment to Mr Ito’s skills, here are three pictures of Vineet reading Uzumaki (in the daytime, of course) – observe the three stages, and note that the last picture was taken in a car, when we were off to drop him to the bus-stop and there was still a part of volume 3   remaining even as we made our way.

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Life, Music

The Jon Brion Experience ( or how Palaka Sasidhar Rocked My LA Stay Part 1)

As the evening drew to a close, she bent close to me, her red dress sparkling under the lights, and spoke into my ears – “Ah, so you are a virgin?”

Wait, I get ahead of myself, like always.

A couple of weeks ago, I got reassigned to a new project, and the client’s office being in Los Angeles, they needed me there for some time, to meet the team and get acquainted with what it was exactly that I was supposed to do. Los Angeles, a city I had visited for 3 whole days two years ago, jazzing it up with pal Sasi and taking in landmarks that are etched in the minds of anyone remotely acquainted with film. Sunset Boulevard. Westwood Village. Hollywood. Mulholland Drive. Disneyland. Ok, not fucking Disneyland, I think I am too old for that. ( Says the guy who squeals like a baby when he sees a Sleeping Beauty snowglobe) But anyway, three weeks in Los Angeles! And this time, Sasi even had a car, and much more experience about what would float my boat during the stay.

“Jon Brion”, he asked me, a few days before I was to leave. “Do you know of him?”

Know Jon Brion? I heard Jon Brion’s music for the first time in 2005, when the soundtrack of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind melted my heart and my ears, and for a brief period of time in 2005, I went berserk and got a-hold of every Jon Brion soundtrack in existence. ( And this was a herculean task in a time when broadband speeds were still sub-64 kbps and Rapidshare wasn’t the searchable uber-repository that it is today ). Magnolia. Punch-drunk Love. I <3 Huckabees. It was humongously tough trying to find his earlier work, and I finally stopped with the Aimee Mann collaborations, which played in a loop for about a month on my Winamp playlist. It was a rush listening to her Brion-produced version of ‘One (is the Loneliest Number)’, that I had heard as a electronica/heavy-metal-driven cover by Filter on the X-Files soundtrack. It’s tough for anyone to call one single version of an oft-covered song as a definitive one, but I’ve heard multiple versions of ‘One’, and Brion’s organ-backed interpretation makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Of course, when Sasi asked me about Jon Brion, none of this really came up in my short answer. “Yes”, I said. “I love his music, but I haven’t really been following him after 2005.”

“You will probably enjoy watching him live”, Sasi remarked. “Let me see what I can do.” And I gotta say this about Sasi. He has this habit of understating stuff. After the first line, the “let me see” part nearly made me crush the keyboard. “You better do something about it, mate”, I said. And then my Indian-ness kicked in. “How much are the tickets?” And Sasi being the guy he is, he disappeared conveniently from Google talk, leaving me on tenterhooks for about a minute, but then I found out a new link on Twitter and forgot all about watching Jon Brion live. Being an ADD-monkey helps sometimes.

Jon Brion came up again when I landed. “We are going to Brion’s concert on Friday evening”, Sasi reminded me on Wednesday. “Wait, what? There’s a signing by James Jean at a store, do you think I can do both?” “In that case, we can do the concert next Friday.” Hmm, interesting. Turns out that Jon Brion performed every Friday at a club called The Largo, so it was not a one-off concert like I had thought. As things transpired, we landed at the Largo that very Friday, because the Jean signing turned out to be scheduled for the next weekend.

The club turned out to be very unlike what I envisaged it to be. The concert was held in a mini-theatre that could seat about 500 people, deep in the bowels of the location and away from the bar. It was already dark inside when we landed up, and most of the good seats appeared to be taken. ( “There are people who come every week”, said Sasi. “He plays a different set-list every time.” Ha, a far cry from Indian bands then. The one in Java City, Bangalore has been playing the same fifteen songs every Saturday the last seven years, or so I heard) We did manage to get a good view of the stage, and I watched people pour in even as the clock ticked closer to 9:30 PM. Someone named Alex had booked an entire row – and the complete entourage turned up precisely at 9:30, whooping and yelling – a birthday party, perhaps? The stage was lit moderately, and occasionally someone would turn up and tweak a knob on the sound-system, or carry a guitar and place it on a stand in front of the drums. On the left was a piano, and what looked like a Mellotron ( how do I know what a Mellotron looks like, you ask? The merits of Ent-quizzing, love) along with a number of small keyboards piled on the piano. The drums were in the middle, and there was a row of guitars of various shapes and sizes towards the right. Pleasant jazz played on the PA, and at about 9:35 PM, as the track that was playing came to a close (Did they time it according to the length of the song, I wondered), in walked Jon Brion, carrying a cup of coffee in his hand, to much cheering and applause.

“I need to finish this, or you folks will be listening to a lot of down-tempo stuff today evening”, he announced, cheerily, sipping on his coffee and sauntering around the stage, looking like he was making sure everything was in place. I waited for the drummers to enter, and the guitarist, when he sat on the piano and started playing this rollicking, honky-tonk-style melody. The auditorium was small enough for us to hear his feet stomping rhythmically on the floor, as he kept time, and the occasional gutteral “pah” that escaped his mouth. He was done, to much applause, and then jumped up and ran towards the drum kit. It was then I realized that Jon Brion would be playing all the instruments himself. I had heard that he was a multi-instrumentalist, but come on, even guys like that have backing musicians who switch instruments and let the star of the show take over for some part of the show. But not Brion, it seemed. He attacked the drums hesitatingly at first, and settled down into a pleasant groove that went a few bars, with rolls, flourishes and all, and then, as he leapt up, the drums, having been recorded, continued playing. He ran towards the piano, played a loop in synch with the drums, and this new piano-drum loop formed a new layer even as he ran towards the bass guitar and picked on a progression that added a new layer to the music. And then he sang, strumming on a guitar, and even that was connected to a processor that enabled him to layer the sounds one over the other. It didn’t sound like pre-recorded music at all ( well, except for the recorded drum sound, which did not hold a candle to what came from the kit when Brion played it) – what we were hearing was an organic, freshly-sculpted melody! This jigsaw-method of making live music continued for quite some time, as Brion raced across the stage, often humming a melody even as he played the drums one minute, raced to pick a guitar up, fiddled around with it for a bit and chucked it away in favour of another.  At times, he would stop everything and play a brilliant solo on the guitar, a hillbilly tune this instant, a blues melody in another.

Then came the audience-participation section of the show, which, according to what Sasi had told me, got mighty interesting. Brion asked for audience requests, and people exploded, yelling song- names at him even as he sat sipping his coffee. The girl sitting in front of me yelled “I am the Walrus!” Brion laughed – a peculiar sound that sounded like a combination of a bark and a sneeze, and began noodling about on the mellotron. “You guys need to sing along”, he said, as he got that precise violin sound out of the instrument. And we did – who doesn’t like singing along to a Beatles song, after all? –   and when we got to goo goo g’joob g’goo goo g’joob, he switched to a tuba sample, making it sound even more whimsical. A large number of audience requests were played, each more fun than the other – including a very very popular Bruce Springsteen song, a Kinks number – sadly, I do not remember most of the other songs. They did not allow photographs inside the Largo, so I do not have any pictures of how it all looked like. What totally got me was the way Brion was so, so relaxed and non-starry about performing in front of such an involved audience, and being able to perform without a rigid set-list at that.

The grand finale of the show came two hours later, a mind-bogglingly awesome mash-up of two videos, that of a pianist playing a tinkling melody, two women singing an acapella tune and a snippet of an orchestra playing. What Brion did was to slow a bit, and speed up others, change pitch, volume and phase to produce an eerie sonic effect that did not sound anything like the originals. He used that as a template for a song of his own, and gradually changed and shifted sound-palettes to create something quite unlike I had ever heard, part dissonance, part celestial harmony. Brion announced that there would be a second set, and this one would be even more intimate, it would be in the bar, and could seat only 50 people. Expecting a rush towards the venue, we hurried inside, but strangely, not many people seemed interested in the second set – what the fuck, LA people? – and we ordered our drinks and got ourselves nice seats. The music played this time was definitely more jammy, less loops and more spontaneous playing, both from Brion and from a session pianist who joined him. I forget his name, goddamnit, but he sang a song towards the end that gave me goosebumps.

As I was sitting there, a lady came in and joined the two people sitting next to me in the same row – and those guys seemed to have very strong impulses to go to the rest-room every now and then. She came and sat next to me then, and we looked at each other and smiled, acknowledging our mutual love of the music. When a song ended, she leaned closer to me and said – “Do you come here often?” “No”, I replied. “It’s my first time. I am not from around here.” The next song started just then, and the woman smiled, her red dress sparkling under the lights, and leaned a little closer. “Ah, so you’re a virgin.”

Not anymore, lady, not anymore.

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