Because he downloaded an album called Where is Neil When You Need Him last night and it’s now on my computer in the office and Thea Gilmore rocks and Neil Gaiman is God and I think I am about to go insane. chandru, I don’t really have to say it, do I? Thanks a million for this.
Please don’t kill me, Mr Gaiman. I promise to buy the CD whenever I can.
…Shwetha Shetty and AR Rahman at 5:35 AM in the morning, after a long night’s work.
….accompanied by raisin and apricot flavoured Temptations.
…staring at the AR Rahman poster in my cubicle.
…solving a pesky problem with a software upgrade.
…solving all problems in a single night.
…listening to the same song simultaneously with a friend at the other end of the country.
…ordering stuff off SecondSpin during a 20% discount sale.
…being proved right in an argument, without any effort.
…chicken biryani for dinner.
…countdowns to the weekend.
…countdowns to vacations, however short.
…countdowns.
It’s a thereupatic thing, spending money on wish-fulfilment. But there are times when I realise that it’s more prudent to sit back and pant wistfully, to let the salivary glands do their thing and restrain self from howling at the moon with agony.
The Ultimate Ennio Morricone Box set. 24 CDs, each the soundtrack to an Italian movie, 362 tracks in all. Comes in a Retro-style box, and (it gets interesting here) limited to FIVE HUNDRED COPIES WORLDWIDE. Which effectively means the price is a measly 250-340$, depending on where you buy it from. Gnnnnnng! Released by the Italian label Dagored. Someday, baby, someday….
Ah, well, I do have mp3s of some of these soundtracks, and in case you want to know, you can buy a 2-CD collection of 28 Ennio Morricone soundtracks in 160 kbps mp3 at www.rarecds.us. Whoa, whoa, hold on, I just went to the site and found that they have effectively slashed prices by half, the set used to be sold for 50$, it’s now 24$. There is also a Nino Rota 2-CD mp3 set, for the same price. I have closed the site window for now, so I am safe.
A tip of the hat to Nick Haysom over at the Morricone mailing list, for the pictures.
all these accidents that happen
follow the dot
coincidence makes sense
only with you
you don’t have to speak
i feel
emotional landscapes
they puzzle me
then the riddle gets solved
and you push me up to this
state of emergency
how beautiful to be
state of emergency
is where i want to be
all that no one sees
you see
what’s inside of me
every nerve that hurts you heal
deep inside of me
you don’t have to speak – i feel
emotional landscapes
they puzzle me
confuse
then the riddle gets solved
and you push me up to this:
state of emergency
how beautiful to be
state of emergency
is where i want to be
I want to be listening to this song when I die. No really, I mean it. This song has it all – the Greatest Singing Voice Mankind Will Ever Know whispering words that seep into your ears like a….oh, fuck similes and metaphors. This song has made me weep on dark highways, it has made me howl in my room. Yes, when I die, I want to be listening to this. No, actually, I want to die watching the Live At Royal Albert Hall show, where she says “nerrrve that hurrts you heal”, and gives that twisted, creepy smile at the last “state of emergency”. The kind of smile that breaks the last bit of restraint you try to hold in yourself. She’s the Alpha and the Omega, she’s Death and she’s Life and she is peeling your emotions apart and oh my god she is smiling there on the stage and she knows exactly how she’s making you feel.
Morbid? Oh, no no no no NO. When you have an Icelandic princess whispering in your ears, you get deliriously happy, and you tend to babble a bit.
Life is good.
Did I mention that my discman died two weeks ago? My faithful companion since 2001 ( or possibly 2000, considering that it was originally absolut_69‘s baby that I stole away and paid him six months later), my ecape valve during final year examinations, Sunny Deol-infested bus journeys, my PRECIOUS little precious finally gave up. Was bound to happen, but I am not giving up easily. It’s off for repairs now, and the guy at the service center ( unauthorized, the Philips guys said they don’t repair discmans, especially not the Expanium, and DEFINITELY not this model.), the guy said the lens needs to be changed. I don’t have too much hope of it working for more than a year, new lens or not, and I am pretty sure it won’t be able to read any of my older Frontech mp3 CDs. But no matter. I am not giving up on you easily, precious.
It’s one of those unacknowledged laws that whenever you lack the means to listen to music, your urge to listen to music increases dramatically. I have been spending my free time ( Ha ha ha) revisiting some CDs that I hadn’t heard in quite sometime. Travis, Moby’s Play, Dixie Chicks, Bad Company, Jethro Tull, Van Morrison, Cowboy Junkies. Loads of Suzanne Vega too.
Has it ever happened to you that you hear a song, and then don’t hear it for a long time, and when you hear it again, it sounds completely different from what you had thought it sounded, in terms of the orchestration and the arrangement? That happened to me with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, a song which I keep remembering because of the opening lyrics, that go – If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream, where immobile steel rims crack, and the ditch in the back roads stop – Could you find me? Would you kiss my eyes? – the imagery just kills me, man. I heard it after a long time, and was really, really taken aback to find that it was not really as guitar-driven as I remembered it was.
And now for some venom.
I think it was V For Vendetta that did it, finally, but I realised that the ratio of returns to investment has been mindblogglingly low for all the movies I’ve seen in theatres this and the last year. Movies that I’ve loved and enjoyed, like Sin City, Hostel, The Devil’s Rejects, even The Corpse Bride have no chance of attaining theatrical releases in India. What do we get? Pap. Bile-inducing insults to my brain. Pixellated eye-candy with six tracks of digitized nonsense. So I say, enough. No more movies in theatres. No more paying inflated prices to be mentally assaulted for 90 to 180 minutes, and with cellphone ringtone interruptions too, to boot. Especially comicbook movies. I have been completely uninterested in Superman Returns ever since yada yada yada and I am not really interested in talking about it, thank you. If you see it and you like it, well, I am happy for you. Obviously you haven’t been reading Doom Patrol or All Star Superman, so I can’t really say I am too happy for you, but yeah, you should know that I have absolutely no problems with you watching Superman Returns. Nope, none at all. Not a teensy weensy bit. Honest.
The trailer for Spiderman 3? Not interested. Ghost Rider? Pah! 300? Ditto. Nacho Libre? Well, yeah, interested, but I don’t think it’s coming to theaters here, so there!
I was also more than a little pissed off because the last copy of Hanzo The Razor available at secondspin.com got sold off this week, as did the two copies of Varttina’s Miero. GRRRAH! My credit card’s maxed out, so I couldn’t pick it up. CD-WOW still has it, but it’s almost twice the price.
I am a man of taste. I shall now go home and listen to Himesh Reshammiya until I fall asleep. I have a presentation to make tomorrow morning. Er, today morning. I am in such an ebullient mood (Part of the reason: Roger Ebert gave Superman Returns two stars. I don’t really like the guy, but that didn’t stop me from grinning a lot on reading his review) that my technical presentation has taken on shades of a standup comedy routine. Wish me luck.
