Uncategorized

To Buy

Pantheon Books is reprinting Craig Thompson’s first graphic novel Goodbye Chunky Rice. The Pantheon website states the release date as May, 2006, and the price is 12.95$. Considering that Pantheon is a proper book publisher ( the earlier graphic novel releases, such as Persepolis 1and 2, David B’s Epileptic and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers have all been available at regular bookstores in India), I think there is a fair chance that I might be able to buy Goodbye Chunky Rice pretty soon. Need to talk to the folks at Bookworm and Blossom, hmmm. Oh, and Jessica Abel’s La Perdida is also being brought out by Pantheon. We wants!

As a friend pointed out to me recently, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, which Moore describes as “literary pornography” ( he refuses to call it erotica) is complete after 16 years of developement. The story is about three classic characters from literature, Dorothy from The Wizardof Oz, Wendy from Peter Pan and Alice from Alice In Wonderland, who, in the year 1914, meet at a chateau and talk about their erotic adventures. Top Shelf Productions is bringing out a 3-volume hardcover edition, on sale from June 2006 for 75$, as well as a signed and numbered edition of 500 copies, available for a mere 150$. *Sigh*. According to the website, “this will be the most expensive book Top Shelf has ever published, with the first printing costing us almost $200K. Why so expensive? Because Lost Girls will be published as three, 112-page, super-deluxe, oversized (9″ x 12″) clothbound hardcover volumes, each wrapped in a beautiful dust jacket, with all three volumes sealed and shrink-wrapped in a gorgeous slipcase. “Much as I would like to buy the lot, I realised that it would be completely impossible to bring it into India – Customs would no doubt be ready with their permanent black markers to protect me from obscenity. Did I ever tell you about my copy of Heavy Metal magazine that had certain pages blackened by our moral guardians?

I am a little hesitant about getting the 2-disc King Kong DVD that’s available right now, because there might be a seperate collectors’ release in the future. With a figurine and all.

Meg Cabot’s seventh Princess Diaries title is out, and is priced at 376 Rs, goddamnit!!! Now I just need to wait until it lands up in the Bargain section of Odyssey at half-price. But, but, what am I saying?? I want to read that book SO BAD, I am pretty sure I am buying it at full price before the month is out. It’s called Seventh Heaven, by the way, keeping in tune with the number-themed earlier books. (Book 3 was Third-time Lucky, Book 4 was Mia Goes Forth, and so on).

Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is one series that is so completely true to the Zombie genre – I have been following it since issue 1, scanned, of course, and when I look to buying it off eBay, the prices make me faint. Apparently the early issues had very low print-runs, so there have been instances of the first two issues selling for 113$, and the first printing of the first issue for 81$ – you get the drift. So what I found is that if I want to buy The Walking Dead, the best thing would be to go, like a true completist, for a slipcased hardcover edition. This collects the first 24 issues of the series, and costs a mere 100$. Another such selling-for-real-high-prices-on-eBay series is Invincible, also by Robert Kirkman, and they have got hardcover collections for this series up on Amazon too.The second collection hasn’t been released yet, though. Heh.

For the record, I would also buy this, but I already have the original comics. Hmm, yeah, that was my oh-look-I-am-so-cool line for the day.

* * *

So this friend of mine reads this post just now, and comes up on GTalk.

Anon Friend: you are not really going to buy chunky Rice right?
Beatzo: :D
I am actually of the opinion that someday, this management guru will come to me and say “dude, i owe my craig thompson love to you, so I bought you a signed copy of Goodbye Chunky Rice as a token of my gratitude.”
Anon Friend: (bitter laughter)
Strong doubts about me becoming a management guru. and secondly i will NEVER ever buy you gifts man.
i mean you are the sort of guy who would totally deflate a potential gifter: “Thanks. but I already have the Ultimate goodbye chunky Rice, signed, numbered, with Craig Thompson’s semen enclosed and packed in Alan moore’s beard shavings. Of course, i can try to sell this on ebay…”

Oh phoo. I need an image makeover, and fast.

Standard
AR Rahman, Comics, Mixtapes, Movies, Music

Of movies, blankets and mixtapes

What really annoyed me after watcing Darna Zaroori Hai is the knowledge that RGV’s scriptwriters are so starved of scary ideas. Between this movie and its precursor, there have been five storylines involving cars on lonely roads. Hey, I know lonely roads are scary, and I understand that you guys drive to Khandala every other weekend and it’s a long frigging lonely drive, but get off it already. My point is, if you want to make a horror movie, you need to understand horror. Are you being scared by what you just wrote and translated to screen? I think you need to go out a little more, read a lot, watch a bit of Argento and Fulci and Hitchcock and Park Chan-Wook. And then maybe you will get out of this loser-level walk-up-behind-me-and-say-boo level of scriptwriting. And someone needs to take a jackhammer to Amar Mohile’s keyboards, there, that’s a horror story for you guys – loony music critic ends up with a jackhammer because the music had subliminal messages in it.

Sasi was here for all of half a day, and just because I was dying to share Blankets with someone, asked him to borrow it off me and read it in the next couple of days. I loved that book. Once upon a time, I totally hated reading autobiographies, but it’s books like Blankets that renew my faith in the fact that people can talk about themselves without laying it on too thick. The book is beautiful, romantic without being cheesy, graceful without being highbrow, poetic without being inaccessible. One of the few books this year ( Yes, I know the year isn’t even half-over yet, but I know that this statement is true, period) that I read in one sitting. And the artwork, oh my goodness, what I wouldn’t do to get ONE PAGE of Craig Thompson’s pencilled art. I had read that he was inspired not by other comic-book artists ( though there were definite Will Eisner influences on the storytelling style), but by post-Impressionist painters like Pissarro, Modigliani and Matisse, and his influences show themselves in flowing panels, full-page thoughtscapes that give me goose-pimples as I read the book.

(So what is Blankets? It’s a graphic novel, by this gentleman named Craig Thompson, an autobiographical retelling of his childhood, his relationship with his brother Phil, and his first love, a girl named Raina who he meets at Christian winter camp. He spends two weeks at Raina’s place, and a greater part of the book deals with these two weeks and their repercussions on Craig’s life. GRAAAH, I am bad at describing things like this, just go and read the Wikipedia entry already, huh?)

This would perhaps be the most beautiful book you won’t read in your lifetime, if you are in India. The steep price-tag (29.95$) ensures that even if it’s imported, the price will be high enough to dissuade people from buying it. Plus, yeah, no scanned versions available yet. It would be tough to scan this without destroying the book, it’s 600 pages. So don’t ask.

I made a mix-mp3 collection, again, part of the weekend project. I call it my Ultimate Though Slightly Biased Feel-Good AR Rahman Mix. Slightly biased because these aren’t songs that have been dubbed (and hence not part of the “national consciousness”, so no Bombay, Roja, Rangeela, Dil Se – you hear?) or are easily associated with ARR Hits package – these are the gems that lie in dormant brain-cells, songs that give me a high everytime I hear them because I have not been saturated by them at any point of time in my life. Each of them has a story, of course, and maybe someday I might get around to wearing off your collective ears with them, but for now, the songs will do. 14 tracks in one zip-file, meant to be listened to in the order in which they are arranged.

You can download the zip right here.

Standard
Music

A look at why Himesh Reshammiya is the saviour of pop culture and the last hope of the catchy tune.

So I was talking to my friend Vasu the other day, the day after I had met him in Bangalore, and the man pasted a link onto the chat window.

The idea of a tune, a melody, a combination of musical sounds that seems to be on everybody’s lips at the same time, that spreads through a society as rapidly as a respiratory infection, and seems to invasively seize and occupy space in peoples minds until they finally succeed in forgetting it.

The reason why he had thought it fit to send me this link was that in our previous meeting, I had driven him off his rocker by humming ‘Jhalak Dikhlaa Jaa’ at every break in the conversation. Now Vasu is the kind of Pop Culture God who can sit through five Los Bros Ramsay productions in a day, but even a man of his stature has his limits. It was his reaction that made me realize at that precise instant that Himesh Reshammiya is a person who deserves not just my respect, but also a standing ovation for managing to affect people with his tune and voice. But the Himeshiyaa has been getting a lot of flak from all quarters, everywhere I see, there are people dissing him. Any lame stand-up comic or some babe-in-the-woods VJ thinks he can get a bellyful of laughs out of the potential audience by talking about The Him-man’s cap and his mike-holding posture. But you are wrong, all of you. Let me point out why.

The voice.

We are a nation who have been adoring Lata Mangeshkar’s glass-shattering screams for about fifty years now, and we cannot take a man with a nasal tone? What are you, aurally retarded or something? I felt the same way after I heard Ozzy Osbourne for the first time, and even Robert Plant, or for that matter, RD Burman on Mehbooba. Offbeat voices that feel like a cat’s claws on glass when you hear them the first time, but which grow on you, and a couple of decades down the line have become pretty distinctive in their own right. You may not like the voice right now, but twenty thousand hearings later, or perhaps after the next Hit Music Director decides to sing his own songs, you are going to beg for apna Himesh-bhai’s renditions. And oh, Indian music already has a nadir as far as voices go, and that happens to be Anu Malik.

The look.

On a flight to Bombay, I read an interview with Himesh Reshammiya. The interviewer asks him about the cap and the stubble, to which our man has a very legit explanation. I am quoting from memory

My friend pointed out that in India we have no rock stars. No Bryan Adams or Michael Jackson who the youth can identify with. I want to change that. My friend made me wear the cap, it has become part of my look. Even if you see a silhouette of Himesh Reshammiya, you ought to recognise it as Himesh Reshammiya.

Now hold on, I bet all of you are snarking at the guy’s audacity. Personally, I remembered an interview AR Rahman gave in 1997, when Vande Mataram was about to release. Did anyone complain when Rahman got himself the curly hair and the blue-jeans-white-shirt makeover? Nope, we were cheering him through and through. So why single out Himesh Reshammiya? And on top of it, his plan’s working, isn’t it? You see anyone with a cap and a stubble, and the first thing that comes to mind is HR. The same way a goatie below the lower lip will always, ALWAYS make you say “Aamir Khan”. Image, people, it’s all about image.

The attitude.

People say he comes off like a dick. Doesn’t smile in public. C’mon, just because a guy doesn’t grin like a vacuous moron whenever an interviewer is asking him questions doesn’t mean he’s being a dick. For all you know, he’s scared shit-less of the camera. And then you’ve Rahman who giggles uncontrollably after every question, and ruffles his hair — so when Harris Jayaraj does the same thing in his interviews, everybody’s like “HARRIS COPIES RAHMAN. OMG COPYCAT!”. Well? Himesh-bhai isn’t copying Rahman. Himesh-bhai is blazing new trails for himself. The Unapproachable Musician, the Bad Cop in the panel of reality TV judges who cannot be swayed by your ass-kissing or your heartfelt pranaams. And hey, at least he doesn’t go around saying things like “I am the best music director in the country.” He’s quite open about his respect for other music directors too.

The music.

Back in the days when Himesh Reshammiya was still a nobody, there was this article I read about the making of this film called Pyaar Kiya Toh Darnaa Kiya, which starred Salman Khan and Kajol and had music by Jatin Lalit. The article was about the fact that Jatin-Lalit, then one of the hottest music composers had tried rather hard to write the title song of PKTDK, and they had given up in disgust because, according to them, the tune of the Mughal-e-Azam song from the sixties “Pyaar Kiya Toh Darrna Kiya” was too overpowering for them to think of any other tunes for those words. What a bunch of pussies. It was then that Himesh Reshammiya snuck into history. He composed a tune which was quite decent. At least, unlike most the other songs in PKTDK, Himesh’s “Odhli Chunariya” was not ripped off from other sources. Over the years, his output has been dhinchaak at best – ranging from ear-friendly desi tunes to club-thumping numbers, which really got to you if you heard them a couple of times. And all the time, he didn’t quite have a “style” – sometimes he would sound like Nadeem Sharavan on a really good day, other songs he would be like Anu Malik on a bad acid trip.

Aashiq Banaaya Aapne changed all that. You might argue that Tere Naam was a superhit too, but the Himesh-bhai style, His Voice, the solitary violin, the tabla flourishes, the sexy babes in the title songs, Emraan Hashmi – everything came together in AAB. And of course, the Ear Worm effect. The voice lodged itself in your ear, the tune bounced around like a flubberly creature, and all was right with the world.

Now the problem that everyone seems to have is, all his tunes after Aashiq Banaaya Aapne sound the same. Not true. Jhalak Dikhlaajaa from Aksar is better. It is a superior song. If you thought Aashiq Banaaya Aapne was an earworm, Jhalak Dikhlaa Jaa is like a mega-super-duper ear-worm designed to bring mankind to its knees. Do you know anyone who has used the shehnai properly in Indian Film music after AR Rahman’s ‘Humma’? Himesh Reshammiya has, in Jhalak Dikhlaa Jaa. Can you think of anything who can make Emraan Hashmi look cool? Nope, not humanly possible, but Himesh Reshammiya, or rather, Himesh Reshammiya’s music can distract you from Emraan Hashmi. Which is always a good thing, my friends. How many other music directors use Sunidhi Chauhan and Shreya Ghoshal’s voices in innovative ways? The correct answer would be “Everyone”, but because we are talking about The Him-man, the answer is, you guessed it right, Himesh Reshammiya. And the other tune from Aksar, called ‘Laagi Laagi’ also has him singing, and he sounds different on it. More like Sukhwindar Singh.

We are all in denial. Himesh Reshammiya has given us something like TWENTY EIGHT hits in the last six months, and we refuse to acknowledge his talent. Yeah, every Bappi song sounded the same when it came out. When Bappi Lahiri released Disco Dancer in 1982, and followed it up with a series of disco anthems, there would be these disgruntled janta who, with their ears plugged and their constitutions soured, would mutter curses against the newbie composer and his disco tunes. The more hallowed among them would say things like “Ah, he’s ripping off Modern Talking and Laura Brannigan and The Buggles” and then go listen to bootleg tapes of Thriller to purge their ears of such pedestrian compositions.

Twenty four years down the line, Bappi da’s having the last laugh. How many of you have heard of The Buggles? Yet, when I sing “Auwwa Auwwa”, you will think of Bappi Lahiri, and his magnificent Disco Dancer album. I believe that is precisely what Himesh Reshammiya will become twenty four years from now, a cultural icon and representative of the early 2000s, and I think I will give him his due. Which is better than having to explain to my kids why I thought HR’s music sucked at first.

Standard