The worst part of going shopping or eating out, at least for me, is the soulless music that plays as background music in most of these hangouts. I always used to wonder who on earth buys those Brian Silas piano renditions of popular Hindi songs or eighties “classics”, tripe like Lionel Ritchie and George Michael. But the more I go to malls and eat-spots and any commercial outlets that play piped music, the more convinced I am that the “bad instrumental covers” section of the music store flourishes entirely because of these places. The same way that all these “College Classics”-type compilations seem to be bought by lazy pub DJs who can just play one of these albums from beginning to end and go smoke with his pals. So I make it a point to mention, in one of those rare occasions when feedback forms are available, to explicitly point out that the music was terrible.

“How bad can it be?”, you ask.”After all, nobody is really too concerned about what music is playing when one is at shopping, or eating out, yes?” Hmm, maybe you’re right, but I, in my delusionary state of mind ( “I-am-right-and-you-are-not-so-I-shall-be-excessively-verbose”) shall put forward the theory that good music always helps individuals do things well, definitely better than when they are listening to terrible music. Now hold on, before you call this a nonsensical theory, let me point out that workers becoming more productive when they listen to proper music was a patented observation made in 1922 by Major General George Squier, and that gentleman went on to create a company called The Muzak Corporation. Later on, of course, “muzak” became a much-vilified term, a synonym for bland, soulless music, but Major Squier’s intentions were noble, I must say.

So I am thinking about an alternative career for myself – a sonic texture designer. Someone who decides what music an establishment can, and should, play. A playlist, probably a mix-CD at regular intervals of time with well-researched, good music. Something that ensures that people associate the experience of being at that place with the song that was playing when they were there. It’s definitely not as live as deejaying gets, where there is the constant crowd feedback, but at least it’s better than listening to tepid crap on public speaker systems. If people can hire interior designers to jazz up the physical surroundings, they can sure hire a sonic architect to enliven one’s aural environment.

I frighten myself with my rational thinking these days.

Guwahati had its share of second-hand bookshops. There were four of them located near a cinema theatre called Anuradha, and I learnt of them sometime when I was in my last school year. Which also happened to be the Slog Year, the time when you are supposed to forget everything else and stick your nose so far up your textbooks that the smell of the pages never quite leaves you during your waking and non-waking moments. As you can easily figure out, it was not an auspicious time to learn about the availability of second-hand books. My first visit to those shops yielded a huge collection of Mad magazines from the seventies, Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja ( of which I had read a couple of rather….interesting pages from a friend’s father’s collection), and a couple of Sidney Sheldons. ( Oh, I loved Sidney Sheldon back then, especially the hot bits he managed to fit into his stories) All of them for a grand total of forty rupees and therefore cause for much rejoicing.

So from then on, I would latch onto any excuse to hang around near Anuradha cinema, which was about seven minutes by bus from our house. Mother wants a loaf of bread from the bakery? Birthday gift for cousin? Trip to a relative’s place? Off I would whiz to sniff around the four bookshops, looking for the new stuff they had, after which I would tend to the job I came there for in the first place.

And one fine day, I found a magazine.

Nothing so special about it, let me tell you. Just one more in a pile of other tattered and semi-tattered books and magazines, most of which were doomed to lie there, dusty and unbought till the end of time. Why did I even look at the magazine then, you ask? Because it had the letter ‘X’ in its name. For a 15-year old, any word with ‘x’ in it is the visual equivalent of a Siren’s song; you don’t let go until you have actually figured out the source, in the hope that there would be a nekkid chick or two singing it. The name of the magazine, in case you are wondering, was “Reflex”. It seemed like a music magazine, but when I opened it, at a random page, there were a couple of music listings – a couple of music reviews, an article on Dub music, whatever that was – and, strangely enough, a couple of articles on comics. Comics I hadn’t heard about till then. A brief writeup on some character called Madman, whom the reviewers called The Best New Character of the Year. Some interview with a fellow named Gaiman about some guy who committed suicide after reading some issue of some comic of his. Interesting, I thought. And promptly left the magazine back in the pile and ran home, because it was already late and I had spent about half an hour more than I was supposed to.

I still wonder why I didn’t buy it then, the first time. Maybe because at that time, five rupees was a lot of money for me – you could get a PG Wodehouse at the same place for ten to fifteen rupees, and a DC comic at a regular store for the same price, and paying half of that for a magazine, on a whim, was too much for this penniless student. So yeah, that was that.

It’s easy to guess what happened next. Every six or seven minutes, I would pause in the middle of my textbook-reading, and think – “Darn. I should have bought that magazine.” That classic beatzoic state-of-mind – if I would have bought the magazine, I would be pausing every six-seven minutes and think – “Darn, I shouldn’t have bought that magazine. What a waste of five rupees.”

Whatever. I went there the next day and bought it. Paid five whole rupees, too, because the guy there had seen me reading it the last day and knew that if I was there and asking him for it, it sure was good stuff.

Smuggled the magazine home ( parents would kill me if they found I was corrupting my mind with non-textbook matter during the Slog Year), and spent the afternoon reading it. Turned out it was a pretty good thing I bought it. This Gaiman guy seemed really interesting, he wore black t-shirts throughout the year, which seemed really cool to me, and he also wrote this comic called The Sandman which drove people to commit suicide. He also knew Alan Moore, it seemed. ( How did I know Alan Moore at that time? Because I read all the blurbs and advertisements on all the comics I read, dummy – and this Moore fellow was an Eagle Award winner, which meant he was a pretty good writer) Then the magazine also had a five-page write-up on an artist called Dave McKean. I remember spending quite sometime trying to figure out whether the artwork on display were mangled photographs or not, because not a soul I knew could paint comics the way McKean seemed to.

Wait, the good stuff does not end there. The cover story in that issue was about an author named Philip K. Dick, and apart from the intriguing nature of his work, which the writer of the article could not stop raving about, there was also an excerpt from “A Scanner Darkly”, which I could not figure out at all. I really didn’t understand a thing of what Philip K Dick wrote, and I must say I was mighty ashamed. Also quite a bit of stuff on music and bands I had never heard of, and was never interested in the first place.

Then there were the ads. About comics called Zap, drawn by a man named Crumb. And with mighty shocking cover images at that. Of a new Dark Horse comic called The Mask. A single page comic strip by a guy named Matt Howarth. All in all, this was value for money, I was sure. Five rupees well-spent.

The only problem, of course, was that there were no more issues of Reflex to be found anywhere.

I tried. Oh, I tried very hard. Any magazine store that had its share of old or new foreign magazines, I would ask about Reflex. Uncles going abroad, I would ask them to find copies of Reflex. Any new city, with its share of bookstalls, I would keep an eye open for the familiar logo. When I learnt the secrets of the internet the first time in my life, and what a search engine was – the third word I searched for was “Reflex magazine” ( the first was “Batman”, and the second was “Spice Girls naked”, before you ask.) But no, no mention of this magazine anywhere, except for a couple of interview mentions on fansites of different musicians.

But on the way, I also searched for the dope on Neil Gaiman, and Sandman, read some of Gaiman and McKean, quite a bit of Philip K Dick, managing to understand his writing this time; learnt more about Robert Crumb and read some of his stuff too, and about Michael Allred, the guy who created the Madman comics. Also came to know that the two guys who wrote that review were named Evan Dorkin and Kyle Baker, both of whom have created some incredible comic books.

Would any of my (ahem) tastes be different had I not bought that issue of Reflex? Alas, I know not. And who cares anyway? “You do, beatzo”, the masses respond. “Why else would you chew up my friends’ page this way?” Hmm, maybe you’re right. I certainly worry about time-travellers in the future going back and buying that issue of Reflex before I did, thereby contributing to my stunted intellectual growth and much ignorance later on in life. ( You realise I have begun blabbering, don’t you?)

Post-script: Early this year, tired of searching eBay for non-existent back-issues of ‘Reflex’, I called on divine help. Namely, mikester, who proving my point about great minds that read alike, mentioned that he had a collection of back-issues that he might off-load. As a result, two months later, a package of 10 Reflex magazines arrived at the front desk of the office, beautifully packed in the Mighty Mike Sterling Manner. Life, I swear, never seemed so good. Does the term “full-circle” make any sense to you?

Blossom Book House is now selling first-hand Del Rey editions of manga titles for 250 Rs each, which compared to the Landmark price of 400-450 Rs is really cheap, AND they are stocking series. As in, not scattered volumes of a title, but complete runs. That is why I picked up five volumes of Ken Akamatsu’s Negima on Sunday.

Now let me be frank, my experience with manga has been with the well-known, occidentalised ones. Like Blame, Lone Wolf and Cub, Kamui, Blade of the Immortal and Katsuhiro Otomo’s works like Domu and Akira. These titles were brought out by American companies like Dark Horse, Marvel, First and Eclipse in the late eighties and early nineties, and were read, like other American comics, from left to right. Any manga buff worth his salt will tell you that the correct way to read manga is from right to left, which is the way they are generally created in Japanese. Fans therefore look down on “flopped” manga, the Americanization of the artwork so as to enable readers accustomed to reading comicbooks to carry on reading manga the same way(i.e lazy buggers like myself). So when publishers like Tokyopop, Viz and Del Rey got into the manga reprint business, they tried to stay as close to the source material as possible, and published titles with artwork that run right to left, and have the cover image at the back, and the book description (which is traditionally on the back cover) on the front. If you open one of these manga as you would a book, the first thing you see is a warning saying: “This is the end of the book, please turn to the other side to begin reading.” – or something like that.

Initially I found that reading right to left was really difficult. My eyes were just not conditioned to read that way, and the panel ordering on the first manga of that format that I read, Fumiko Soryo’s Mars was just too much for me. Then I downloaded fan scanlations of manga like GTO and Ichi The Killer, and got even more confused, because trying to figure out which manga has been flipped and which is not is a herculean task because they occasionally make sense both ways. But I kind of accustomed to the right-to-left reading, and so, Negima was a very good read for me. I have finished the first three volumes.

Negima is short for ‘Magister Negi Magi’. Negi Springfield is a 10-year old Welsh kid who happens to be a wizard. Now hold on, before you begin harrying me with the obvious comparisons, Negima is not about prophecies and Dark Ones and magic spells. The premise is that this ten year old prodigy is given a rather unusual career option when he passes out of Wizarding school. The charge that he is entrusted with, the one that will lead him to becoming a Magus is – teaching English. At a girls’ School. At a girls’ High School. Now how cool is that?

Needless to say, the levels of acceptance he gets from his students vary from brotherly affection to major crushes to out-and-out hatred. The first problem Negi encounters is a student named Asuna Kagurazaka, with whom he has to (gulp) share rooms. (Because, very conveniently, the school authorities have run out of beds in the teacher’s quarter, and….you get the drift.) Asuna has an unrequited crush for the previous English teacher, and therefore has a very low tolerance level for the new guy, who is something of a runt in her eyes, and also has some very strange things happening around him. Like the odd way in which everyone’s skirts fly up whenever Negi sneezes. (or in Asuna’s case, how she manages to lose her clothes once when Negi sneezes right in front of her, and everyone discovers she wears bear panties) Or how fast he is, for a small boy. Or why he carries around a long staff with him wherever he goes.

The storyline develops quite well, with Negi getting to know all of his students slowly, and discovers quirky things about all of them. He takes under his wing the Mighty Morphin Baka Rangers, a group of students who score really low on studies, and have to receive tuitions in English from the new teacher. At the same time, he comes to terms with the difference between using magic to solve his problems ( and some of his spells do backfire, like the time he develops a love potion for Asuna to woo the old English teacher, and drinks it himself), as opposed to good ol’ common sense and honesty. Things start getting a bit more magical by the time volume 2 ends, but that was to be expected, I guess.

I read the first three books with a smile on my face throughout. There are times when the stories get sentimental, but the humour shines through every panel. Ken Akamatsu excels at details, and the translation appears to be excellent, as even the minutest of sound effects ( and there are a TON of them throughout!) are given their English equivalents. The books do not fall into the “Hey y’all” trap, you know, making all the characters sound All-American – the Japanese antecedents of the school, and the students, are all left intact. The cuteness factor is really high.

A real fun read, and you know what, I think I’ll go and pick up a couple of titles more today evening, probably Genshiken and The Wallflower.

Early this year, I thought of keeping tabs on which movies I see over the next twelve months, and how many times. In part inspired by adgy, and partly because the DVD buy/watch ratio grew to somewhat alarming levels in December. Eight months later, I get the feeling that certain tasks should not be undertaken. New Year resolutions suck. Yeah, I have been watching too many movies.

I watched 14 movies over the three-day weekend. Some of them were repeats, Jay and Silent Bob, for instance, and Akira, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Oldboy. Finally managed to watch it last week. Park Chan Wook is God. Now to look out for the DVD of Sympathy For Lady Vengeance. And watchJSA sometime this week.

The Rising. Maybe because I spent 200 Rs for a ticket (at Inox, night show, dunno why the bastiches charge 200 for night shows), and maybe because I missed meeting Aamir Khan because I was watching Stealth at five in the evening, the movie did not…I dunno….affect me the way I thought it would. No goosepimply moments, except at a bit towards the end. Aamir Khan rocks, Rani Mukherjee doesn’t. ( her tummy wobbles quite a bit throughout the movie, but that’s a rock of a different kind, I guess) Toby Stephen’s best lines are wasted, courtesy Om Puri’s bland-voiced commentary that pops up during any bit of English dialogue – Stephens also gets quite a bit of Hindi lines, which lose out on intensity and dramatic effect because it’s pretty obvious he is reciting them.

Some very interesting gaffes – an English lady mouths a very twentieth-century “Wow!” when she sees an elephant, one of the Indian villagers in one of the crowd scenes is wearing a pair of trousers and shoes.

Unfortunately, most of the songs do not fit into the narrative – except for the title song, which pops up at three different places, but again, the timeline is screwed up. I mean, the way the lyrics of the three versions are written – they evolve over a period of time. The closest analogy I can give is this. The first version, ‘Mangal’ is Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Wake Up’, beginning with an ear-grabbing refrain, and ending with an acoustic high – an appropriate background music for the birth of a hero. The second version, ‘Agni’, is like RATM’s ‘Killing in the Name’, sound, fury and the right amount of feeling throughout the song, echoing the call to arms. The third version ‘Aatma’ is calm, much like RATM’s ‘Beautiful World’ ( ok, ok, I know ‘Beautiful World’ is a cover, but I really cannot think of anything else that comes close to Quietly RATM), an ode to martyrdom, and tinged with a bit of poignancy. OK, so you see the setup, right? What happens in the movie is – the first version plays on the day Mangal Pandey is about to die ( and doesn’t, because of certain reasons you’ll discover if you watch the film), the second version plays during the flashback, very appropriate; and the last version plays on the next day, the day he actually dies. THEY SCREWED UP THE TIMELINE, GAAAAAAAAH!!!

(You know, it’s surprising how anal I can get about minor things, but that’s just me, I guess….)

And on top of that, I am lonely.

Oh, before I forget, is a Live Journal community for discussing AR Rahman, the man and his music. Join, people, join!

Riddle me this – who has made the best movie version of the Godfather so far?

My answer: your brain. And mine. And anyone else who has read the Godfather novel free of the influence of any of the celluloid attempts. Because the story that Puzo wrote in the Godfather cannot be condensed to two, or three, or six hours of cinema. Feel free to disagree, but hey, are you telling me that the Johnny Fontaine subplot is not relevant to the story? Or that Lucy’s life after Sonny’s death does not figure in the big picture at all? Or that we are not supposed to know about Albert Neri’s past life and how he became Michael’s bodyguard? Like I said, feel free to disagree, and I will feel free to shake my head and do hideous things to you in my mind. So let us not bring up the topic of adapting the Godfather novel to screen, and instead concentrate on the first film that tried, the Coppola version, and how Ram Gopal Verma tries really hard, like his predecessors before him, to make a “crime family” movie.

Coppola’s Godfather gave us – among other things – natural lighting, a hoarse-voiced Man of Honour (Marlon Brando, for the clinically brain-dead), and the Successor Guy Who Does Not Want To Do It But Does It Anyway, forgettable bad guys, and Nino Rota’s score, a musical composition that weakens the knees of fifteen-year old Indian boys and make them want to learn to play wind instruments.

Ram Gopal Verma’s Sarkar gives us, in that order, natural lighting, a hoarse voiced Man of Honour, the Successor Guy etc , forgettable bad guys, and the most cacophonous sonic arrangements ever heard onscreen, courtesy Amar Mohile, last remembered as the man who screwed up Vaastu Shastra. An act that required much prowess, if I may say so, because to screw up something that was already screwed-up is a herculean task.

Verma’s bad guys in Sarkar are wannabe cool-dudes, all in their own way. There is the obligatory Middle-eastern Drug Peddler who wears sunglasses and acts so bad he makes Keanu Reeves look animated. Though in his defence, Hemant Birje still maintains the top ranking in the WAH! category. ( That’s Woody And Ham, for the uninitiated. The exclamation point is for effect.) The rest of the crew – which includes a sleazeball politician, a fat South Indian thug with an atrocious accent, a nefarious unHoly Man (played by Jeeva, who did the smashing role of the new Commissioner in Ab Tak Chhappan) and an ex-crony – who plot to bring the Man of Honour down are all greasy, distasteful bunch of crooks whose badness hits you with the subtlety of a jackhammer. These are people you cannot sympathize with, whose motivation can be summed up in three words – Do Bad Shit. People who look like they do Bad Shit and nothing but. And talk like they’ve had fifteen cups of black coffee in a row. (except for cool-dudish Middle Eastern Drug Guy)

Which kind of puts paid to the fact that this is supposed to be a “realistic” crime movie.

The music. The most atonal mess my mind has ever had to deal with. If you get rid of all the dialogues, all the expressions, everything in the film except for the background score, you would probably still figure out what’s going on. A south Indian guy comes into the scene? A mridangam begins to play. A holy man? A whiny tanpura. Even the “Govinda” leitmotif is taken too far – I mean, I can understand the semi-religious undertones of the Sarkar character, but having twenty people scream the same word at various bpm and decibel levels at EVERY moment of import in the film does make the word “overkill” sound like an understatement. The music is just there, every single moment in the film, like an uninvited, opinionated (not to mention loud) relative who plonks himself at your house and decides to stay on for a month without telling you in advance.

The assumption with which Verma directs the movie is that the moviegoer is familiar with Coppola’s Godfather. Which saves him the trouble of explaining who Sarkar is, how he came to power, what he really does, or why the teeming masses wave at him every morning from beyond the walls of his “fortress”. Which is a bad thing for someone who has *not* seen the original, because everything irrelevant to the succession-story is brushed off on the basis of that assumption. At the same time, for someone who has seen Coppola’s version, there is the more-than-occasional jarring note – the storyline deviates. A lot. Again, what’s so bad about it, you might ask. Just that most of the changes are pointless. Why not just have three sons and a daughter and kill the eldest son off etc etc? Why have Katrina Kaif and waste precious minutes that could have been spent on developing the main characters?

Why am I blabbering so much about this? Because I was honestly expecting something that would blow away Verma’s previous crime ventures, and establish this movie as The remake. Because RGV was the only filmmaker in India who understood what subtlety was ( and I assure you, I am talking about subtlety in a commercial context, and not about bare, stripped-down filmmaking) Because I was looking forward to seeing Kay Kay as Sonny Corleone, a character very close to my heart, and was kind of crushed when Sonny and Freddy overlapped.

But then, the movie did make me want to go and re-read Puzo’s novel. Which is never, ever a bad thing.