I have stopped buying CDs. They clutter up the house and I end up listening to the ripped mp3s anyway while the actual discs gather dust in the living room. To assuage a bit of the illegal-downloading guilt, I got myself an eMusic account. 11.99$ per month for 30 tracks, and they have a huge selection of electronic music AND almost all new Indian bands put up their music there. This month, I downloaded Shaa’ir and Func’s album Light Tribe, S&F being the most hyped Indian band EVER ( except maybe Raghu Dixit, whose album I didn’t enjoy at all ). These guys are mentioned in some way or the other in every Rolling Stone India issue, and one of their tracks featured in a free CD that came with the magazine two months ago. They even ended up making an appearance in ‘Rock On’. Shaa’ir is Randolph Correia, the lead guitarist for Pentagram and Func is Monica Dogra, and together they make for an amazing package, Func’s vocals and Correia’s grooves meshing perfectly in the electronica-fuelled tracks.

Smoke a.k.a Dhruv/Ashutosh’s Smoke Signals was the second legit download album of the month. I loved the few songs I heard for movies like Bombay Boys and Snip!, as well as random RSJ albums, and recently, there was this animated video on one of the music channels that featured a song called ‘Summertime Rocks’ from this new album, with guest vocals by Kailash Kher. The rest of ‘Smoke Signals’, as I found out, was not bad at all! The overall mood of the album is really Indian, but with a very eclectic soundscape. ‘Yaad Tumhari’, a thumri by Shubha Joshi, is a pure classical number at first, but then a subtle rock guitar riff plays in the background, along with a very very soft percussion track that never overpowers the tabla. But that’s followed by ‘On and On’, a funkily mixed rendition of Mahalaxmi Iyer’s vocals chanting a shloka – the vocals are heavily processed, and the carnatic violin sounds like a mad combination of an electric guitar and a phat synthline as the song progresses. The rest of the songs are similarly unpredictable. Rags Khote singing Bangla in a French accent in ‘You’re So Beautiful’. The African-sounding ‘The Final Frontier’. The very unlullabylike ‘Lullaby’.

Both the albums, incidentally, have been released by Blue Frog records based out of Mumbai. The company grew out of a live club, and now has its own sound labs, a music production house, and A&R services. I believe Dhruv & Ashutosh run it, or are at least major stakeholders in it. The site looks well-designed, and so far, in addition to S&F and Smoke, the label has brought out albums by John McLaughlin, Sanjay Divecha and Vivek Rajagopalan. They do sell CDs online, as well as mp3 tracks and also have a licenseable audio library for use by corporates.

Of course, the No-CDs policy does not apply to Rahman albums, hoo-ah!

News of the day: Batman: Arkham Asylum, currently under development for the PC, X-Box 360 and the PS3. The screenshots look nifty, the gameplay details are encouraging, but what increases the chances of this being really good is the fact that Paul Dini is scripting it. Dini, along with Messrs Bruce Timm, Alan Burnett and Eric Radomski, is responsible the single-greatest screen adaptation of the character – the nineties’ show Batman: The Animated Series, and he’s also a fairly competent comicbook writer, having tackled Batman in the ongoing Detective Comics , and also on standalone books like Batman: War on Crime.( But wait, Dini wrote Countdown too, right? Goddamn, the game is going to suck.)

Grant Morrison is the current writer on the ongoing Batman title, and a couple of nights ago, I caught up with the latest issues. So far, Morrison has brought startling developments to the character – his first four-issue arc ‘Batman and Son’ gave us ninja man-bats, a new love interest ( called Jezebel Jett) and a son. Old-timers will remember a graphic novel called ‘Son of the Demon’, which was published in the late 80’s, drawn by Jerry Bingham and written by Mike W Barr. It had Batman teaming up with Ra’s Al Ghul, overcoming his hesitation in courting Ra’s daughter Talia, who always held a candle for him, and well…doing it with her. I read this story in ‘The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told’, a compendium that was one of my life-altering relics, because it introduced me to the Joker, the Monk, Calendar Man, Neal Adams, Dick Sprang, Alan Brennert, Earth-2, Man-Bat and taught me the Spanish word for Batman ( “El Hombre Murcielago”, hooo-ah!). The page where Batman and Talia go for it is indelibly etched in my brain, the way things-you-see-at-age-eleven ought to be. Too bad somebody at the library, where I read this book in the first place, tore off the page after a couple of months. And no, it wasn’t me. ( I just flicked the book, much later)

So anyway, ‘Son of the Demon’ was apparently a more well-written story than ‘The Killing Joke’ – does not really matter now, does it? – but what came out of it, after the fight scene with the bad guy Qayin and Batman’s stony-faced farewell from Ra’s and Talia, is Bat-baby, the child that Talia had claimed she miscarried. At the end, the child is adopted by an anonymous couple, Batman goes on with his life, and Dennis O’Neil, the Bat-editor-in-chief declared the story out of continuity. That is, it never happened, it was a hoax, a grand trick played on thirteen-year-old minds by evil DC writers, an imaginary story, as they all are.

Morrison chose to bring the story back into it-was-all-true-dom, with minor modifications. Damian Wayne is the newest addition to the stable of Bat-children that infest Bruce Wayne and his dual identity, and the boy has not quite a chip as much as a gigantic wooden plank on his shoulder – not so strange as he has been brought up by the League of Assassins. On his first night at Wayne manor, the boy beheads a (albeit minor) Gotham rogue called the Spook, and subjects Alfred and Robin to humiliating bouts of child abuse. The four-issue arc sets into motion a number of sub-plots, including one decidedly odd plot-line about Three Batman Ghosts, which is tackled by Morrisson one by one, in the issues to come.

Issues 659-662 were fill-in issues by the team of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, and while I have been a fan of these creators in my younger days ( loved the Shazam miniseries they did, and their Spectre run hit a lot of highs, too), I safely skipped over these issues, which featured a storyline called Grotesk. When one has had a dose of the Morrison Mojo, it’s hard to settle for anything less, meh.

Batman 663 is the famous ( or notorious, depending on which fan you ask) all-prose issue, where Morrison merges hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness writing with John Van Fleet’s experimental panels. The story “The Clown At Midnight” is one of the Joker and his minions, and is narrated in a florid, demented style that rips your brains apart. Van Fleet’s art usually works for me, but here, they look like video-game screenshots.

Issues 664-666 continues the Three Ghosts of Batman subplot that was laid down in the first storyline. Hubba hubba, things seem to be getting better in Morrison’s Bat-verse. Bruce’s dalliance with Jezebel Jett continues, and at the same time, there is trouble in Gotham, with a Bane-like character preying on hookers. And we learn of the Black Casebook, a diary that recounts all the unexplained phenomona Batman has encountered so far in his career. Flying saucers, ghosts, vampires and the like. It was while I took this in that I got an inkling of what Morrison is trying to do with his run. If I am not wrong, he is trying to bring EVERY single non-Elseworlds Batman story ever told under the “It-actually-happened-here’s-the-explanation” umbrella. That means the Black Casebook refers to the silly period in Batman’s career in the 50’s and 60’s when writers were experimenting with making him a sci-fi hero, pitting him against aliens and robots. One of the earliest Batman stories, that of the Monk( this featured in the “Greatest Batman Stories” collection), was about vampires and werewolves. I cannot imagine you would understand the kind of chill I get when I see Joe Chill ( sorry, couldn’t help that) making a reappearance in the pages of Batman, or in seeing Bat-mite pop up in a cameo that’s furthest one can get from camp.

The run concludes in the future. Say what? Morrison does a time-hop with the storyline, jumping an undisclosed number of years in the future. Issue 666 has heavy Biblical undertones, and in the future as laid down in this issue, Damian Wayne is now the Batman, having renounced the assassin’s doctrine and adopting his father’s crusade in a world that seems to be spiralling towards Armageddon. There’s tragedy underwrit throughout this single issue, as we get hints of what really happened to Batman and his legacy, and the end-game is the showdown between Damian and the Third Ghost of Batman, in which we meet the Dark Knight’s greatest ally. Amazing, amazing story!

With Batman 667-669, Morrison teams up with artist extraordinaire JH Williams 3. Minor digression: JHW3 might just be the greatest artist working in comics today. Don’t take my word for it, go check out this series called Promethea. Only this guy could have rendered Alan Moore’s treatise on magic in the nuanced, hypnotic meld of storytelling and eye-popping beauty. He brings a design-sense to his work that borders on maniacal, with panel transitions and page layouts that leave you gasping for breath. In this storyline, ‘The Island of Doctor Mayhew’, Batman and Robin fly to a Carribean island and rub shoulders with a campy bunch of heroes from around the world, who call themselves the “Batmen of All Nations”. This is where my theory gains further ground, because you see, the Batmen of All Nations appeared in a 1950’s story, and Morrison used some of the characters ( the British heroes Knight and Squire) in his JLA and JLA: Classified run. The story becomes a murder mystery involving an organisation called ‘The Black Glove’, as one by one, the characters are murdered, and Batman has to find out the killer before it’s too late. This run is my favourite of Morrison’s chapter so far, and while I thought it was a throwaway arc, subsequent issues reveal it as being far from that.

The next couple of issues veers into editorial-mandate territory, as we find ourselves in the middle of a storyline called ‘The Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul’. Yes, Ra’s had died in a book called ‘Batman: Death and the Maidens’, and apparently, editors found it necessary for him to come back from the dead. The story arc is one of those Bat-title crossovers that piss me off a great deal, and they usually feature a lot of Bat-proteges running around trying to save each other from certain death. ( Ha, ‘certain death!’ is a nice name for a band) This one’s not much different. A lot of things happen, everybody lands up at Nanda Parbat, which is a favourite Bat-hangout, and Zombie Ra’s appears. I was too pissed off to take all of it in, partly because I had read it a couple of months ago and didn’t like it then, and I didn’t think I would like it now. And I was right, I didn’t.

Once Resurrection ends, the main storyline kicks in, called ‘Batman RIP’. It’s still going on, and I imagine it’s going to be really freaking good, from the two issues I read. All of Morrison’s stories so far have set up the Batman RIP storyline and apparently it will have grave ramifications in the hero’s life. I am looking forward to reading this series at one go, so I gave up after those two issues. And believe it or not, the central conceit of RIP is that its events are based around a 60’s single-issue story called ‘Robin Dies At Dawn’, also featured in “The Greatest Batman Stories”. Zur En Arrh! Commisioner Vane! Simon Hurt! Possibly you would enjoy RIP without knowing about all these references, but face it, it’s time to brush up on DC lore, if you want to enjoy Morrison’s Batman in the months to come. I am a happy man, because I had given up on reading a good Batman comic in the last couple of years and now Morrison is imbuing him with a fresh perspective and motivations. Neil Gaiman apparently will write a 2-issue Batman story after RIP, called ‘Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader”. Bring it on, DC! Earn my respect and money, goddamnit.