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A link-encrusted post

I love Charles Addams. He’s one of the few cartoonists with a truly macabre sense of humour – there’s Gary Larson, there’s the mindbogglingly brilliant Bunny Suicides, there’s Jhonen Vasquez with Johnny The Homicidal Maniac – but Addams came much before all of them, and his cartoons can still make you laugh and cringe at the same time.

Now I had seen Charles Addams’ primarily through Dell paperbacks picked up at various second-hand bookshops. While these books were printed on fairly high quality paper, I was always bothered about why the reproduction of those little pen and ink masterpieces was so blurry. At times, you had to squint really hard to figure out what the picture was all about. The tones would bleed into each other – the general appearance was that Addams liked his work very dark and hard-to-figure-out-unless-you-looked-carefully types.

But today, I realised why the Dell paperbacks of Addams’s work was that way. It was because they were reprints of oversized hardcover books, which were abso-freakin-lutely gorgeous. The artwork on these books was crisp and required no squinting.

Now how do I know this, you wonder? Because I picked up a first edition hardcover copy of Charles Addams’s Black Maria today, for only a hundred rupees.

And I also re-found the soundtrack to Ocean’s Twelve. And I bought the complete run of Preacher (1-66, and some specials) for $82.10, which includes shipping ( the seller refunded part of the shipping charges to me because he could ship it cheaper), and the remaining run of Swamp Thing Vol 2 ( issues 45-171), also for 83$. There was a sale on at secondspin.com and I ordered a 3-disc collector’s edition of Dario Argento‘s Suspiria and a ten-volume collection of Sonny Chiba movies for the grand price of 23$. My credit card is moaning rather loudly right now, so I will let it sleep for a while. Six months. No, three. Erm, let’s see.

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A Happy Bihu for me

So yesterday was Rongali Bihu, the Axomiya New Year, and a holiday in the office. The upside – an unexpected break. The downside – everybody else I know were still at work. It’s a rare day when such a thing happens, so I ended up doing some…oddball things.

I cleaned up the kitchen in the morning. The place was being shared by the three of us with the denizens of the night – quite a few of them, I found out, because as I lifted a plate that hadn’t been washed since the Dwápar Yuga, a family of cockroaches scurried away. I let them go. I didn’t want to start the New Year with any genocidal activity. Scrubbed the dishes, cleaned up the garbage ( genocide was out of the question, but emigration was still possible), wiped the grime out of the stove and the cupboards – all to the tune of Trickbaby.

Quick decision-making time – do I stay at home and swig packets of Appy and watch Futurama until my brain explodes, or do I go out and get undone things done? Spent five minutes laughing at myself for even considering the first option, and headed out. Quick stop at National Market, just for kicks. And found…stuff. War-dance-inducing, Sinful stuff. Tra la la. Hopped into the office ( you’ll notice my unnatural mental perseverance at this point, because instead of heading home straight, I was taking a roundabout way. Prolonging the pleasure, they call it ), did hasty monetary calculations – and..

Oh wait, did I tell you about the hard disk crash that happened on Sunday? Graaah. Music most painstakingly downloaded was gone, GONE! And what was that they said about unheard sounds being sweeter? Ever since I lost those albums, there is this urge, more than ever, to listen to Ornella Vanoni singing L’Appuntamento ( That’s from the Ocean’s Twelve OST, one of the best albums I’ve heard this year, though the movie tried so hard to be over-smart it collapsed under the weight of its own setup, and the combined coolness of the (ahem) actors ). GRAAH! I can’t find the album anywhere now, suprnova.org having collapsed a long time ago, and the rest of the sites are all underground, and with seedless torrents. I swear, if I see this in any of the stores, I am buying it. No second thoughts there.

So that’s what happened, about 10 GB of stuff vanished – because I didn’t have them backed up. I generally do that by writing CDs and passing them on to Sasi or Vasu, who are smart enough to make copies for themselves. So anytime we lose anything, the other guy’s copy comes to the rescue. That’s foolproof, let me tell you. But what happened was – my CD-writer crashed sometime in October, so no backups since then.

Which brings us back to, boo hoo hoo, my plans for the day, and I decided to find my way to SP Road and buy myself a device that will allow my Hard disk to be backed up periodically, in short, a DVD-writer. Boy oh boy, SP Road was a mess, both in terms of the locality and prices. Didn’t really have much to bargain, because every freaking dealer was quoting the same, and once or twice, they even said “VAT” and made me sneer impudently.One of these impudent sneers of mine seemed to work, got a Samsung drive at a price I could call decent, but still 300 Rs more than what the dealers in Hyderabad are charging for it, as I found out. But what the heck, I OWN A DVD-WRITER!!!

Right. Now the problem was, the dealers now tried to overcharge me on blank DVDs. No deal, because I had already asked for prices at National Market, so I went back. The guy at Amith went a little pale when he saw me there – there must have been a lot of faulty discs among the ones I bought, for me to be back there so soon, or so he thought. Picked up some blanks, and found a couple more movies, making the man a lot happier. Nice!

The evening was spent in Commercial Street, where a nice time was had by one and all – partly because of a Book Fair in the wilderness, and a Singin’ In The Rain moment. *snicker*

And at night, when the world slept around me, I watched Sin City, mouthing Marv’s lines and Dwight’s and Hartigan’s and grinning every second. With two packets of butter-pepper flavoured popcorn, Appy and Soan Papdi. I have a feeling it’s going to be a Great New Year for this Axomiya guy. Woo Hoo!

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Shiny Happy Happy Shiny

As it turns out, I have been mispelling a writer’s name. Inspite of having read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it took me a google search to figure out that Susanna Clarke’s first name is *not* spelt “Susannah”. Damn. Which means that the teeny little disclaimer about perfect spelling on my user-info does not hold good any longer. I swear – if I had a knife nearby, and if I wasn’t so chicken-hearted, I would be slicing off my little finger in disgrace.

Couple of happy things:

  • I bought myself a complete set of the six Akira graphic novels on eBay. And a set of Daredevil, issues 26-69, the delectable Brian Bendis/Alex Maleev run from the same seller.
  • Discovered the joys of Berke Breathed’s lovely comic series Bloom County. Got some of the collected volumes off a sale for 50 rupees each. It was the sight of the dog pushing the wheelchair of a Vietnam vet, both quoting Star Trek, that brought me to this conclusion. Highly recommended.
  • My Andrew Vachss collection is now technically complete. I have all the books until Pain Management (2001), which is fifteen books in all. I haven’t seen the newer novels in stores anywhere in India.
  • Picked up a first-edition copy of Gods, Demons and Others by RK Narayan (with the dust jacket intact) for 100 Rs. This was one of the first books I bought with my own money, sometime in December 1988, and I don’t really remember where the copy is, right now. But getting this version made me real happy. I loved the delightful tone of voice in which RK Narayan narrated these stories, when I read this book the first time – inspite of knowing most of them by heart ( courtesy Amar Chitra Katha.

The more Takeshi Kitano movies I watch, the more convinced I am that the guy is the Japanese equivalent of Shah Rukh Khan, playing different facets of himself in all his movies. But then, the joy of watching a Kitano movie lies in observing the cliches that he has mastered – the silent, brooding protagonist, the in-your-face violence that launches itself in extremely creative ways, Joe Hisaishi’s scores, the wisecracking foil played by Susumu Terajima, and the self-destructive ending. It’s not a problem being repetitive ( after all, most classic rockers made a fortune out of repetitiveness), it’s a problem when the repetitiveness becomes in-your-face, loud, and crass. None of these are attributes I would associate with a Kitano movie. Fireworks was a picture-perfect film. Every other minute of the movie, I would want to pause the player and just observe the frame, each moment a cinematographic masterpiece. After a very, very long time, I have this urge to paint (which is not necessarily a good thing, I know), because of this movie.

Whoa whoa whoa, what do we have here? Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool is all set to be released in Delhi sometime in March, and Bangalore/Chennai in April. Not bad at all, though this will be the good-bits version, or maybe the good-bits-are-hidden-but-you-can-try-make-sense-out-of-what-we-show-you-version as decreed by our hallowed Censor Board.

I live in a country where you get live albums by Isaac Hayes at book sales for 60 Rupees a CD. I don’t know whether to be glad or pissed. ( Pissed because had I been a little late, someone else would have bought that CD. Damn)

Did anyone notice the market for old comics in India? A fine example – Blossom Book House is selling copies of Indrajal comics from the seventies and eighties for 20-25 Rs each. Issues that have a cover price of 1-2 rs, and which are missing covers are being put up with these kind of prices, and surprisingly, people are buying them at those prices. Everytime I go there, the issues I saw the last time are gone, and more copies have come in, with similar prices. Makes me glad I filched all those old Indrajal comics off assorted cousins and uncles a decade ago.

The more I look at Paris Hilton, the more I am reminded of Kareena Kapoor. Not a good thing.

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BR2, Susannah Clarke, Bone and Cerebus

Battle Royale lovers be warned – Battle Royale 2: Requiem is to the first movie what Kisna is to Lagaan. Overblown acting, choppy cinematography, less-than-a-quarter-baked character developement, and a storyline that makes you want to gouge your eyes out and promise never to overestimate a movie sequel, even though it’s Japanese and claims to be “Asian Extreme Cinema”. To think I almost ordered this movie from cd-WOW a couple of months ago, and stopped myself because of this vague hope of finding it in National Market sometime. I did,on Monday night. Watched it. Yeaagh!

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And come to think of it, I have been watching too many movies lately. 26 movies in January, and 9 so far this month. Part of this is because of the DVDs I’ve been finding at National Market.

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England, London in particular, as visualized by Ms Susannah Clarke in the exquisite Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell haunted me for a week in January. It took me that much time to read the 800-odd page book. This hasn’t really happened before, my reading a paragraph and then rereading it. Generally, it is the story that takes me forward, rather than the prose. Susannah Clarke, however, made me pause and savour the rain-soaked, fog-swept streets and alleys of nineteenth century London, a world which has some shades of our world, and some of its own; the characters – quaint, unfantasylike names ( I absolutely hate fantasy stories have an overdose of z’s and x’s and q’s in the names of the characters) and demeanour. It’s not an action-packed magicfest, nope. Reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is more like a brisk walk on a misty winter morning – you know the chill isn’t going to last, and you know beautiful sights lie in store for you once the sun comes up. You shiver once in a while, wishing you were safely under your blanket in bed, but at the end, there’s nothing really like walking alone on a wintry morning. Call it English Magic, if you will.

Just when I was done with the book, I had the one-volume Bone, by Jeff Smith, delivered to me. Now I have read parts of Bone, mind you. Scattered issues towards the beginning, and a couple of story-arcs in the middle. But the joy of reading the complete story, end to end, is something that really cannot be expressed in words. Bone is funny one moment, touching the next, and the more I progress, the more of an epic heroic fantasy it’s trying to become. How can anyone not fall in love with the Moby-Dick loving Fone Bone, the guy whose hat bursts into flame the first time he sees Thorn bathing in the river? How can you not root for Gran’ma Rose as she races her cows? Yes, you heard that right, she races cows. She runs. I would kill to have a grandmother that can run neck-to-neck with a cow and occasionally pound those stupid, stupid rat creatures to a pulpy quiche.

And now that I am about to finish the Bone volume, I just got five volumes of the Cerebus trade paperbacks delivered to me yesterday. Three of them autographed by Dave Sim and Gerhard. Muhuhahahahaha.

Life is pretty much fun. I reserve the mornings for reading and the nights for movies, and I slog my ass off in the daytime. Suits me fine, I say.

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