It took about a year to move my books here. I was undecided about whether I should cart them off to my parents’ or my sister’s place. Chandru, over in Chennai, offered to put them in cold storage in a room at the office, but I wasn’t sure how I would get them over. A lot of people had conflicting opinions to offer about moving stuff to the US. Some said books in bulk were not allowed to be imported, others reported packages being returned to India after months of sitting in customs. I spoke with second-hand book sellers – none of them had experience taking books into the US, just exporting them out of the States. Thankfully, pal Ajanta had no problems babysitting the books, but time was running out – even she was to move out by end of the year.

I am not sure how I stumbled onto the R2I forums, but that got things moving. Based on the positive experiences people had with movers in some sticky threads, I emailed a couple of the names mentioned there. 21st Century Relocations, based out of New York was the first to respond, and their responses left me pretty confident that they would do a good job. They went to the apartment one weekend, sent me a reasonable quotation and a week later, packing was complete. I did not even have to mail a check, just sending a scan was enough. Had to printout, sign and scan in a boatload of documents, but they did all the running-around for customs clearance. Things got a little complicated because my departure ticket to LA was not a direct flight – I had to stop at Romania for a month, and my ticket was through Delhi, while the books were in Bangalore.

But it all went well, and by end of November, the books were enroute.

They arrived end of January, in a truck whose size made me very nervous about whether all the books would fit in the apartment. But fit they did, though my room looked like a cardboard hurricane hit it.

I had a Minor Adventure while buying bookshelves from Ikea, where the gentlemen with the pick-up truck decided to hijack my items and go make three other deliveries on the way. With me in the truck too, of course. And then proceeded to give me a ride to a movie theater, with a convoluted 20 mile side-track. It was a weird day.

In the course of the week, shelves were assembled, cartons were unpacked, muffled curses echoed through my chambers. It’s not an easy task, arranging 70-odd packages of books on your own, but I managed. Strangely, I managed not to get distracted by the books I hadn’t seen in a year. Though I confess I felt complete when I arranged the Walter Moers volumes on the top shelf, and smiled at the Tom Sharpe collection, putting them aside to reread Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. Srividya Natarajan’s No Onions Nor Garlic joined the maybe-I-will-read-soon pile, as did the Lee Siegel books. Some left me rolling my eyes – what on earth was I thinking when I bought the Clarke Gable biography (called Long Live the King) or the book on Obie award-winning plays. Or the piles of Star Wars novels. Oh well, at least 2004-version of me must have been a happy camper.

And it was done. Almost. The comics and manga were in my room, and the books went to the living room. The DVDs (the manageable pile of originals that I had the nerve to get into the States, the rest being disposed off quite some time ago) were still packed (2 boxes), and about 4 more boxes of comics remained still – I had run out of shelf-space. There was no way I was going back to Ikea any time soon, and so these boxes remained unpacked for a few weeks, affecting my zen calm every time I entered my room. Last weekend, I figured I had had enough – went to Target, bought a non-Ikea shelf and finally, finally, it was done. My preciouses were home! मेरा पिया घर आया! やった!

And now, presenting a bunch of pictures. Whee!

Download here.

15 songs, tag-stripped, no theme in particular. (Or maybe there is, and I am not telling)

It was on display at Modern Book Depot, Guwahati, for as long as I could remember. Modern Book Depot was a place where popular books went not exactly to die, but to hibernate. The place smelled a little damp, if memory serves me correctly, and there was a sort of moldy feel towards the back of the shop, where the sun never shone, and piles of books lay unsold. This was one of the few bookstores that refused to add on the 10% discount that came as a godsend during the Annual Guwahati Book Fair. Sure, a part of the collection would get the discount, but those would be the dregs of literature, the John Grishams and the Robin Cooks, the Dick Francis and the who-ever-buys-this-shit copies of some random book. The ones you really wanted to buy would get a measly 5 percent, and no self-respecting book buyer would fall for that.

So, this copy of the Dune trilogy was on sale for 300 Rupees, for the longest period of time. I remembered seeing it when I was in school. In 2001, that sum of money went a long fucking way, especially for a guy who never bought first-hand books. 300 rupees was at least ten books, not three. So while I drooled over it, I never bought it. Someone bought that book for me. Two someones, both of them college seniors. Carthik was one of them, he was traveling to Guwahati that year to get acquainted with his future in-laws travel through Assam. Udatta was the other. Both of them figured that I was too much of a cheapskate to buy the book, and both of them wanted to read it too, so it turned up one morning on my table. With personalized inscriptions inside. At that time, I hated inscriptions in my books, but this one was special. Specifically what Udatta wrote. “Dear Evil Guy,” the inscription read. “Please do not sell this book.”

The reason behind this deserves a flashback-within-a-flashback, so here goes.

The year I joined college was also the year everybody seemed to figure out that owning a personal computer was the coolest thing to do on campus. Look at statistics – when we joined, our senior year had two students who owned computers on campus (one of them happened to be the illustrious Palaka Sasidhar, who then became tech advisor for everybody on campus, including college professors, and made use of his enhanced accessibility to the 64 Kbps college internet connection to download the complete Calvin and Hobbes from a pirated site, causing everyone’s emails to be backlogged for about a week as 150 MB of gifs downloaded at a glacial rate). By the time our ragging was over and the last remnants of  the fresher parties had been up-chucked around the lawn, there were almost 30 people on campus with their own computers and that number increased every week. (All numbers, obviously, are pulled out of my Memory Hat. But then, it’s the spirit that counts, so bear with me, please) It got to the point where even I contemplated getting one – though the thought of spending 30,000 Rs or so on something made me feel light-headed and weak-boweled. (I hate to think what 1998-version of me will think of the art collecting bug that’s infected me, post-2005) (I did buy mine a year later, with some scholarship money)

One evening, after dinner was over, I was sitting around in my room when Udatta sauntered in, smoking a cigarette. Burugu Bhaskar, my room-mate was also inside. He was this nice, clean-cut local fellow who made sure to study after dinner, while I pored over my Stephen Kings, both of us humming along to whatever was playing on my modest tape-recorder. Probably Dil Se. I glanced at Burugu when Udatta got in, because we had exchanged words about Udatta a few days ago. Specifically, about his smoking in our room. “Hey, Chetri”, he said. “Your senior, man. Tell him to not smoke when he comes in, man.” “He is my senior”, I reparteed. “You tell him.” So when Udatta came in, Burugu and I looked at each other, and then he looked at Udatta and then he walked out of the room. Couldn’t blame him, because you didn’t really mess with the U-man and his considerable bulk even back then.

“Chetri”, Uddu began. Everybody called me Chetri back then. I hated it. “Chetri is my father’s name, goddamn it”, I would grumble. “My name’s Satyajit.” But nobody cared. I was doomed to be Chetri forever. “Chetri, what’s up?” He didn’t really say “what’s up?”, nobody did. What he really asked me was what the eff I was doing, spiced up with some choice words in Axomiya that we employed with each other, involving hair and bananas. Harmless good fun, except you had to remember not to use those words in front of your parents.

I said nothing was really up. At which Uddu asked me if I was interested in deflowering his computer. I was totally up for deflowering his computer.

Allow me to explain. The situation at this point  was that you bought a computer, with the official excuse (to your parents) being that you needed it for your courses. But what really happened was that you used it for other stuff. Like renting VCDs and watching educational films. But mostly porn. And the first time you played a porn movie in your computer was when you “deflowered” it.  Remember, this was the Pre-internet Age, still about a year away from when browsing would get pocket-friendly enough for us to be able to go someplace and surf the internet without blowing up a month’s allowance in one night. Porn VCDs were the only way this particular itch could be scratched. And if we were lucky, the VCD wouldn’t be scratched and we wouldn’t feel like we didn’t get our money’s worth. Obviously, nobody would really have the patience to watch the whole thing from beginning to end, but still. Uddu’s computer had come in about a week ago, and the most he had done with it was to install a bunch of shareware from Chip magazine CDs and pretend like he was having fun. Chip magazine CDs were our default source of fun those days.

We deflowered Uddu’s computer, and it cost a grand total of 23 Rs. This included auto fares of 4 Rs per person, one way, and a 15 Rs charge for the VCD. We split the money. We were happy. I bet the computer was pretty happy too. And then Uddu handed over the VCD to me and said I could go return it the next day. I would have, I totally would have, except -

I went back to my room and asked Burugu, back at his desk and intently going through his Engineering physics homework, if he wanted to watch a porn movie. He blushed, and nodded vigorously. I asked him if he knew of any friends who might want to watch a porn movie. Of course he did. I then went to visit my classmate from Goa, the first guy in our batch to own a computer of his own, bought two days after his fresher’s party. Goa always had the first fresher’s party because there was only one guy from the state, and said junior would bond with his senior the first day and both of them would declare each other cool enough to bestow the honor of being welcomed into the college fraternity without posturing and macho rituals that plagued the rest of us. Of course he was okay with us using his computer, provided he got to see it for free. He was the only one that did not need to pay for it – I charged everyone 4 Rs each, for the viewing. The room was filled with everyone from the block, about 20-odd people. Everyone was happy. With eighty rupees in my pocket, I was pretty darn happy too.

Udatta came to know about my profit-making venture a few weeks later. He tried to demand a cut, but by then, the money had been disposed of. I did tell him he was my favorite senior, and that I would let him read any of my books any time, which mollified him a bit. But I could no longer talk him into any joint financial venture without him trying to figure out exactly how I will undercut him and make a profit, and therefore, the inscription on the copy of Dune. “Please do not sell this book.”

I didn’t.

The day shouldn’t over yet. Because tonight’s the night Brian K Vaughan arrives at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood for a Q&A, followed by a signing. The event is the midnight release party of Vaughan’s new comic book Saga, the previews of which show a lot of promise. Oh, and the Q&A is being conducted by Damon Lindelof, you know, the co-creator of this little-known TV series about a bunch of people on an island. I had been excited about this event for quite some time now – actually, excitement is too mild a word for what I am feeling right now. I was all set to buy issue 1 of Saga, and I was planning to get my Y The Last Man and Pride of Baghdad hardcovers signed.

But what happened was this – I came home, had my dinner, showered, got ready, and put the hardcovers in my backpack. Walked out of the apartment. And then I realized that I was too tired to consider going across town for a signing. Brian K Vaughan could wait. Saga can wait. My body needs to rest.

I feel all grown-up. I feel old. One of these is not that bad, and the other sucks. I hate being grown-up.

* * *

Despite the meetings, I did find time for some liberal credit-card abuse. Scott Dunbier, Keeper of the Artists’ Editions that I had mentioned a few days ago wrote to the comic-art mailing list about a special Wondercon edition of both the Romita Artists’ Edition, which came signed by Stan Lee and John Romita. And sketched in by John Romita as well. The Wally Wood book also has a special edition, and the ebaywhore in me howled at a metaphorical moon as I hastily pre-ordered both. The rational side (if there is any) probably whimpered for mercy somewhere in the corner of my brain. And I learnt of another pre-order today – Titan Books is coming out with an Artist Edition of its own. Back when the first Ridley Scott Alien was released, writer Archie Goodwin and artist Walt Simonson teamed up to adapt the book into its comic. It was a fairly good adaptation, considering that this was the pre-Watchmen era, Simonson’s art in particular nailing the kinetic moments of the film. I learnt that Amazon UK had it for sale at less than half of cover price, sighed to myself and ordered. Come on, it was just 22 GBP.

IDW is on a roll. Up next, after the Eisner and the Born Again editions, there’s the Groo The Wanderer Artist Edition coming out in June.

* * *

Speaking of Watchmen, you should read this transcript of a 90-minute long interview with Alan Moore. This is basically Moore’s side of the story of the Watchmen prequels that DC announced a few weeks ago. Go on, read it, it’s 8 pages long.

Are you back? You don’t have to be. I am too tired to right anything about the interview at the moment. I should probably go get some sleep.

* * *

I am not disappointed about missing the Meltdown Comics event, not at all. Because Wondercon is this weekend, and I am primed for it. Oh yeah, old age and grown-upness, you don’t scare me. Not at all.

* * *

The saddest news this week has been the news of Moebius’s passing. Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud was one of the finest artists who ever drew a comic-book, and it guts me to think that we lost him this early. His shadow looms large over a lot of memorable films of the eighties – Blade-runner, Dune, Akira, The Fifth Element, mostly for the visual design that they liberally borrowed from his works. Among the tributes and articles about him all week, here’s an archive of photographs of the master with other legendary creators. Pay close attention to the ones with Hayao Miyazaki, Osamu Tezuka, Uderzo and Hugo Pratt.

I should really sleep now.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It was very hard to fall in love with the rest of album that easily. The proprietor of the local music shop asked me not to buy it, much like he asked me not to buy Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Sangam when it came out, because it did not appeal to him, because he did not “get” it. Sunoh was kind of weird. Only one song had a video, for the rest of them, you had to let the tracks and the instruments seep into you you, bit by bit. The title song ‘Sunoh’ was catchy to a point, as was ‘Pyaar Ka Musafir’, but it did not stray from its theme one bit. The songs were constructed without mainstream pandering, the compositions weren’t mollycoddling the listener. A few years later, Silk Route would do something similar with their debut album Boondein, albeit in a more audience-friendly manner. But that time and year, Sunoh was one of its kind, an extraordinary debut.

Sifar, released in 1998, was Ali beating the sophomore blues by outdoing himself. I still do not understand why ‘Teri Yaadein’, the first song on the album, or ‘Mausam’, the most accessible one were not pushed out to video, instead of ‘Dekha Hai Aise Bhi’. Trust me, I love that song, but I always thought Sifar never became as popular as his first album because the video did not have the all-ages Bollywood-story appeal that ‘O Sanam’ had. I began listening to the first two albums again yesterday, and there’s no doubt that the songs on them albums were truly unlike anything Indian popular music had to offer.

If you listen closely, there’s a definite sound that binds all the songs in Sifar, a choice of arrangements that thematically links all the songs together. Notably, the unconventional use of percussion, creative guitaring and multiple wind instruments that I cannot quite put my finger on – the sound reminds me of bagpipes mixed with the oboe. Consider ‘Dil Aise Na Samjhna’, for example. Nearly no percussion, and the carnatic violin appears along with the guitar as the primary instrument; even a cello, at times. The tabla peeks in for a few seconds around 2:30, and then disappears. ‘Mil Jaan Se Kabhi’ is like Mike Oldfield-lite, the arrangements hopping from a muted tubular-bellish sound to string pads to Chinese flutes, recorders and other assorted wind instruments. The acoustic guitar and mandolin layer the main chorus, quickly seguing into by an electric guitar flourish atop a drum-roll that in turns makes way for a short piano melody (Is that really a piano? There’s an actual sliding note there). It drives me nuts trying to break down the song like this, but all these disparate sounds somehow work together without drawing too much attention to themselves. And it ends with an anguished howl backed by synth strings. Fucking awesome. Every song in Sifar has a distinct personality, a riff or a line that you can take away with you with every listening. Not many albums do that.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

However, one wonders if Lucky Ali is soleley responsible for his unique sound. Part of the credit should definitely go to arranger and co-composer, his brother-in-law Mike McCleary. McCleary is based out of Australia, and he’s credited as arranger and guitarist on Sunoh, and as part of ‘The Lucky Ali Team’ on Sifar, the second album, along with lyricist Syed Aslam. His name appears on credits of songs here and there – additional arrangements on ‘Himalaya’ from AR Rahman’s Connections, a beautiful piano-only mood piece, and as producer on Rahman’s charity single ‘Pray For Me Brother’. But it’s last year’s release, an album called Classic Bollywood – Shaken Not Stirred, produced by McCleary and featuring five alternative Indian female singers on vocals that brought him some kind of formal recognition. Primarily because of the track ‘Khoya Khoya Chand’ was used in spectacular fashion in Bijoy Nambiar’s 2011 film Shaitan.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Coming back to Lucky Ali’s output post-Sifar, his output seems to have been largely Bollywoodised pap. He has taken to singing for films nearly full-time, beginning with Kaho Na Pyaar Hai in 2001. He went on to appear as the lead in Pooja Bhatt’s Sur (and singing all the songs himself) and Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante. He sang for Rahman too, both in Tamil and Hindi. He has released pop albums (presumably with McCleary in tow) almost every other year, and while you can find ear-friendly ditties and eye-candy videos accompanying said ditties, his singing has been confined to the pattern that he established in his first two albums, echoey nasal crooning that is supposed to exude sincerity and heartbreak. Barring the occasional flash of musical chutzpah, it has been 15 years of predictability. Not really a bad thing, but still feels like he did not go further than Sifar in terms of challenging audiences.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The last time I really liked Lucky Ali, the time when he managed to surprise me was in the track ‘Tu Kaun Hai’ , used in the film Bhopal Express, starring Kay Kay Menon and Nethra Raghuraman. He sings the song very unlike his usual style, employing a lower pitch in the main verse. This coupled with the breathy sound that punctuates the song produces a somewhat unsettling – and striking – effect.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Ten hours ago, I was fairly sure I would skip lunch that day. I had a late breakfast, and there seemed to be no point in going out to grab something. Maybe I would have ordered something if any of the others went out. By one o’clock, I had not only finished a large bowl of rice with some extremely spicy Thai chicken green curry, but had space (and enthusiasm) remaining to get some cookies for myself and the two gentlemen I had lunch with. One of whom happened to be my boss and the other a colleague from Germany visiting Los Angeles for a day. And that’s when the idea of going to the Baked Potato came about. As it turned out, D was a Jazz fan, and the ‘tato was a dream-destination for him ever since the eighties, when he heard his favorite band talk about performing there. Believe me, I get dream destinations. I said I would come along with him, despite the doom-and-gloom the rest of the day promised.

Somehow, between lunch and 6 PM, non-existent Babylonian locust gods were banished – as best as non-existent entities could – and happy work-endings were reached. Things fell into place, like Near from Death Note was standing behind my shoulder nudging the right jigsaw pieces. I even fired up some Bonobo to help tide me over the last hour, and surfed gracefully into something akin to feature-completeness. Headed out, with narry a worrisome sigh nor a fretful brow.

And there we were, an Indian and a German sitting among a strange mix of Chinese college kids, Japanese tourists, other suspiciously hipster-looking Jazzheads, who talked about favorite gigs and tried to identify the bands playing over the PR system as they waited for the concert to begin. D and I spoke of work, of doing things other than work, of Scandinavian pop and contemporary jazz, and music software and attending live shows. He ooh-ed and aah-ed over the posters on the wall, the collage of artistes that had played at the venue before and who he had missed. It was a genuine treat to talk to someone so obviously enthused about being at a place, get what I mean? I cradled my beer and wondered about the day, about unexpected beginnings and endings. The waitress brought a tray of steaming baked potatoes and laid them in front of the Japanese couple sitting next to us. “Sugoiiiiiiiii”, the lady exclaimed, fumbling to switch on her little camera. Sugoi indeed, I thought, and chugging the rest of my beer, I ordered another one.

And how was your day?

Before I talk about an Artist’s edition, allow me to explain for the sake of those who came in late, a little behind the process of a comic’s creation. Traditionally, a comic is drawn by hand, with India ink on pencils, ink that is thick, black and lends itself gloriously to the printing processes of the early twentieth century. Pages are drawn on giant boards that are bigger than the final printed size. Then comes the lettering, the word-balloons and sound effects, that would be done either directly on the page, by hand or pasted-on from photocopies done separately. There is a colorist involved as well, yes, but again, due to the limitations of the printing process, the most that colorists could do before the advent of computers was to create color “guides”, done on photocopies of the line art shrunk to publishable size. Printers would use these guides to create the final plates, but it was not necessary that every nuance of the coloring would translate to the final product.

This has substantially changed in recent times, where Photoshop and Illustrator and a variety of other lettering software have transferred a bulk of the coloring and lettering parts of the process online. Some artists even bypass the inking process by allowing their pencils to be directly scanned and enhanced on the computer. And there are artists who stick to the computer for every step of the process – the only physical artifact in that case becomes the printout.

But we talk here about the actual physical art, these boards which, once the printing is done and the comic-book is published and read, used to be treated as disposable trash. While the assembly-line nature of monthly comics has shelved creators into discrete boxes – penciller, inker, colorist, letterer – it is still safe to say that the best kind of artist is the one that does it all. One who is able to not only plan and break down a script into fluid panels on the page, bring them to life by his or her pencils, but also ink, and ink well. Because the inking process is severely underrated and much vilified. Inks not only necessary to show off the contents of the page when they are scaled down to size, but the very thickness of an inked line – its weight – can be used by an experienced inker to convey the import of the artist’s intent with minimum strokes. Less equals more. A good inker can not only ensure that the comic you hold in your hands is as true to the penciller’s vision, but he can sock you in the guts when (- if – ) you hold the board of original art in your hands and see his work up close. This is part of the reason why there is a market for original art. Strip away the nostalgia, and the money-making and the thrill of holding something that is one-of-a-kind, and what remains is the sheer joy and awe of seeing and holding something masterful.

Now fast forward to 2009, when San Diego-based company IDW began a somewhat-bold venture. They took the Rocketeer stories of creator Dave Stevens, and published a giant-sized edition of the work using Stevens’ original black and white art pages. Rather than being a generic facsimile version, this edition was stunning because it was shot in color – what it means is that you can make out textures of the page, the parts that have yellowed, pencils underneath the inks, eraser and whiteout, even coffee stains. It is not an easy task to complete this sort of project because most artists’ pages are spread out among anonymous collectors, making it difficult to track down originals. In Stevens’s case, a bulk of his pages remain with his estate, and the people involved in the project – editor Scott Dunbier, Seinfeld writer David Mandel and collector Kelvin Mao were uber-collectors of Stevens’ work themselves. The successful sell-out of The Rocketeer Artist’s Edition prompted more volumes to come out – a 10-issue selection of Walt Simonson’s run on Thor in the eighties, and a selection of John Romita’s work on Spider-man, among the superhero comic runs most celebrated for their precise, heady combo of art and story.

Wally Wood’s work was picked for the next Artist’s edition, a departure from the superhero genre of the previous volumes. (Since it’s stupid to talk about biographies when you can easily read about it on Wikipedia, here’s a handy link. )Wood was one of the old guard, in a class of his own, who cut his teeth on the legendary EC comics of the fifties. He’s not too well-known outside fandom, mostly because he worked on non-mainstream horror, science fiction and war comics, did a lot of underground stuff in the seventies, and then proceeded to kill himself in 1982. Most of his original art is still together as full stories, partly because of EC publisher Bill Gaines’ foresight and in part because original art collectors were rabid enough to want to own complete stories by him. The Wally Wood Artists’ Edition collects some of the best of Wood’s stories from the 1950s. It is even more ambitious than the other releases because it seeks to reprint pages that were drawn on “twice-up” sizes, about 14 by 20 inches. That makes it humongous, maybe the biggest book I’ve seen barring the Little Nemo and Gasoline Alley books brought out by Sunday Press.

The cover itself is gorgeous, the kind of science fiction tableau where every brush stroke, every blotch of black feels economical and yet loaded with intent. Opening it the first time gave me the sock-in-the-guts that I was talking about before. As I flip through the pages, it seems impossible not to linger, to peer at a splash of correction fluid here, at a pasted-on correction that has aged less than the panel surrounding it, making it seem whiter than the yellowing art board. You want to caress the zip-a-tone paste-ups that Wood uses to convey three-dimensionality in his backgrounds and the effects, like reflection in the water, or a pattern on a carpet. The women he draws remind me of stars of silent black-and-white cinema, a Harlow here, a Garbo there, voluptuousness of a Mae West in another. The men likewise bear the stamp of square-jawed matinee idols. But at the same time, Wood does not hesitate to coat them in grime, sweat and mud, to add a seven o’clock shadow to the craggy face of a handsome protagonist, or wrinkles and crow’s feet to a face to convey age.

The EC stories are typical science and shock-fantasy fiction of the time, eight-ten page tales book-ended between a gorgeous splash page that lay down the story’s milieu and a twist ending that is the payoff. The verbosity of the writing sometimes gets to me, the art groaning under the narrative captions and thought balloons and a profusion of dialog boxes. What is surprising is the lack of sound effects – the only obvious ones are screams. “Yaaaaaah”, goes a man in a panel from a 1948, grimacing with pain, and then ‘Eeeeyaaahhh”, as if the single scream was not enough to convey the horror of the scene. The story, by the way, is adapted from Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, EC being among the first to adapt sci-fi stories written by contemporary writers into comic-book form. You see the obvious influences of the Pulp illustrators, and the newspaper greats – Hogarth, Caniff, Foster and Raymond – in Wood’s work (to be fair, these giants cast a long shadow – take anyone from Frazetta to Williamson to Will Eisner, and you will see veins of inspiration that lurk beneath the creativity). But what stuns is the dynamic imagination that oozes from his designs of prehistoric and futuristic monsters. From the bold storytelling choices that he makes to convey something as momentous as an atomic bomb explosion or a medieval joust. The tingle of erotic excitement from a woman’s body wrapped in a sheet. The frantic urgency of a rain-soaked battlefield.

I will probably never own a definitive Wally Wood page of my own, but owning this volume kind of soothes the longing, and tells my pleasure centers to have patience. Good art is calming in its own way, and especially art of this caliber. IDW is coming up with two more volumes in the next few months, one of them being a Will Eisner collection, of the same size as the Wood book. The other is Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Daredevil: Born Again. It’s hard to get them unless you pre-order, but these are books that ought to take pride of place on your shelves. Highly, highly recommend that you buy them.

Things that were supposed to happen did not. Things that weren’t supposed to did. File under “real life”, I guess.

Travel and work were the major themes of the last 29 days. I went to Vegas for a weekend, meeting five Romanian friends. We did a one-day trip to the Grand Canyon on a Friday, and the grandeur of the place blew our collective socks off. Hung around Vegas on a Saturday, taking in the sights and sounds, and one of them came back with me to LA. She stayed with me for a week, and we ended up going to San Diego for a day, getting drenched in the rain, walking around Downtown San Diego shopping for a change of clothes. I love the city, and apparently I am going there again next weekend, with another bunch of friends.

End of that week, we headed to Sequoia National Park, to see The General, and to Yosemite, where we saw The Captain, and I DJed in the car, and we had loads and loads of fun, and it was all fucking awesome. I am definitely going back to Yosemite in the summer, from what everyone says, the change of seasons really brings a different feel to the place. Back to Las Vegas, where I put my friend on her flight back to Romania, and took a flight back to LA, and spent the next two weeks punching Java code in the nuts.

Movies

The Ghibli theater watch continued throughout the month. I missed a few because of reasons mentioned above, but that’s okay. I am probably getting myself an American Cinematheque membership, just so I can continue attending the film screenings there. Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Valentine’s day was sublime, as was Once Upon a Time in the West as part of the Leone marathon. I wanted to see Giu La Testa, but missed the screening by a day, gah.

Unpacking

I got my books from India shipped. They arrived end of January, and it wasn’t until the second week of February that I finished unpacking the lot. This involved a trip to Ikea, a six-hour affair as I shuttled on with the movers’ truck, to multiple destinations. Five and a half shelves down (the half was borrowed from ‘Drea’s living room space, and there’s still eight boxes remaining. It’s surprising that I managed to get this done in such a short time, because I have a tendency to stop and ooh/aah at a book that I forgot I owned, or just crack open some interesting relic of the past and get sidetracked for hours.

Reading

After finishing The Count of Monte Cristo, I thought I would move on to more Dumas, The Three Musketeers in particular. On a whim, I began reading Just After Sunset, the only collection of Stephen King’s short stories that I hadn’t read so far. And just like that, I was drawn back into Maine again. Sunset over, I blazed through Eyes of the Dragon, a book I had read back in 1997, in a five hour sprint, and that did it. I am planning a King reread marathon, and am already three-quarters into Four Past Midnight. I feel like I am eighteen again, and it’s crazy how many memories and emotions come flooding back as I reread these.

I also finished the manga Death Note, just because I bought the box set on eBay dirt cheap, and it was too pretty to just rest on the bookshelf without being opened up.

What else?

Not happy about slowing down the Spanish lessons. My phone screen slipped from my pocket and shattered during one particularly agile leap across rocky terrain, and I had to get it replaced. Been to lazy to load the Pimsleur files on them again, especially since Spotify fits my music needs.

Not too happy about the deceleration in blogging. But there was no human way possible to meet my deadlines at work and do this every day at the same time. Also, as a friend said, sometimes it’s better to let life be. Amen to that.

“Hey Stranger”, Natalie began. “A friend of mine told me I can easily find someone in my area.” Blah blah portfolio blah blah call me yadda yadda discreet sexual encounter in hotel room. Five lines to get to the point. I clicked on the accompanying link more out of habit that actual interest, and moved on to Jackie Cassell, and Francesca Valdez, and Brittany Eyman. Tough to pick, all their profiles had an airbrushed, unimaginative similarity that screamed eager-to-please. Boring.

Francesca’s blunt “Let’s fuck like rabbits” helped. I wrote three lines – nothing too flashy, nothing that reeked of formality. A mild compliment, a Seinfeld reference in the second line (Seinfeld always gets them, somehow), and ending with a casual “let’s meet around five, take care”. Hit send. I figured it would take her about an hour to respond. She sounded a one-hour type, just like Kylie from last week, and Vivian and Jessy. There was this one – what was her name again, Corina? Clarissa? Yes, Clarissa – who responded in thirty minutes, the current record. I liked Clarissa, we shared a lot of discreet hotel time that week.

One email from drugsonline_258 and another from Lin Courtney. I checked my Cialis stock just to make sure I have enough to last next week. Wrote a polite “hey-what’s-up” to drugsonline_258. Dougie – that was his name, a college drop-out with a T1 line, a heart of gold and a a steady supply of the good stuff – Doug the Dog made a point of offering great discounts to valued customers. I was one of them and I liked to keep up the personal relationship. You really have to admire a guy who knows how to maintain his customers’ inches-to-height ratio, if you know what I mean.

I didn’t respond to Lin – her last batch of MAX-Gentleman pills arrived two days too late, and she did not include the complimentary stash of Viagra that she promised.

Four mails from Nigerians. Henry and his friends, Christ. I took charge of Henry’s money a year ago. With a twenty percent commission, which was way less than the de facto thirty-five percent others charged. Twenty percent of his Swiss stash of two million dollars still made for a pretty chunk of pocket change, and my goodwill gesture was telegraphed to the rest of his countrymen, just like I hoped. Every other week, some oil prince or junior minister sent in a polite, awkwardly worded missive, full of detailed family histories and apologetic explanations and a seven-figure amount. I kept my replies short and my percent constant. I liked Henry and his pals. And other than a few nervous calls from Chase Manhattan about the frequent wire transfers to and from my checking account, things are fine.

The iPad offers are getting tiresome. Sure, they’re a dollar each, but not sure if I should get myself another one of those. Some site tries to scam me into spending $4.99, some spiel about matching 10% of retail price. Good luck finding a sucker, buddy.I send them crisp “Not interested” one-liners, the same that goes to the $800 VIP casino prizes, the holiday deals, the work-from-home offers. Too many of them with too little money, and I don’t have the time.

Francesca’s reply arrived just as I was done with my last email. Two minutes shy of Clarissa’s half-hour record. I texted her on the number she sent me, and got up to make myself some coffee. I glanced at the email from my my brother, and another from Jonathan from my old work-place asking how I was doing. I deleted them right away. I don’t have time for spam today.

Don’t date a man who keeps going on and on about books and poems, essays and reviews. The kind of man who is so excited about the Murakami that he finished last night that he just has to tell you all about it, in detail, even though you are running late for lunch. He will casually ask you about the last thing you have read, and if you fumble, or mention a name that is too pedestrian, he will judge you for it. If you show the slightest spark of interest in his reading, he will proceed to thrust his enthusiasm on you. You may find it amusing at first, maybe even a little sexy, but it soon gets tiresome. Every conversation will become an endless thrust-and-parry of words; any casual comment you make will result in a barbed riposte.

It’s easy to notice – and avoid – someone who reads. He’ll be the one slinking through a bookstore looking for a title someone mentioned on an obscure literary website. He does not need to buy another copy of that Neil Gaiman book just because it is the Author’s Preferred Text and has five thousand extra words, but he will. The kind of man who grins like an idiot when he comes across a first edition of The Dark Tower or a dog-eared, scotch-taped copy of Catcher in the Rye, just because that he can brag about it to his friends later. If you date a man like that (and I really suggest you don’t), be prepared to smile and nod when he tells you (for the twenty-ninth time) about how he met Jonathan Franzen in a Trader Joe’s parking lot. But try talking to him about something remotely to do with life, or your feelings, or the last episode of The Big Bang Theory that you enjoyed, and he will probably not know how to react. Or tell you that he never liked that series anyway.

Don’t date a man who reads. He is the kind of man who says he has a busy social calendar, but chooses to sit in his room and alphabetically index his collection instead. He can’t pass a bookstore without popping in “just to see”, but complains about waiting for you for fifteen minutes outside the changing room of the department store because his precious reading time is ticking away. He spends hundreds of dollars on eBay buying full runs of Louis L’Amour novels, but wears the same pair of sneakers everywhere because he cannot spare the extra money to get himself a good pair of shoes. Don’t date a man who, on your birthday (if he remembers your birthday), buys you another book that you will never read. Who thinks flowers are impractical and environment-unfriendly, but continues to buy paperbacks because e-readers “don’t smell right”.

Don’t date a man who reads fiction. He thinks that life is a fairy tale, and that happy endings exist, and that every story needs a villain. He sees the world in black and white and avoids the grays. He has a smart, ironic comeback every time he messes up, as if his wrong-doing can be washed away with puerile, second-hand wit. He will consider himself more knowledgeable than your friends; he scoffs at their conversation because he thinks they are shallow. He will go to the movies with you, but rolls his eyes at the parts you enjoy, because they are not faithful to the book. He will accompany you to parties, but refuse to wear anything but Threadless t-shirts because he feels dressing up destroys his individuality.

Don’t date a man who reads. He’ll keep the bedside lamp on till 2 in the morning to finish the last chapter of the book he’s reading. Chances are high that he will sigh loudly when he’s done, just to make sure you wake up uneasily and ask him if everything is all right. Don’t date a man who will refuse to go out on a sunny day, choosing instead to loll in bed and reread his Wodehouse. If you lie with him, he will scratch your head distractedly. If you try to cuddle, he will push you away and ask you to make him a coffee. He will say please, but as an afterthought, and only because Mr.Darcy would have. Yes, the sex will be interesting, but only because he is thinking of Henry Miller and Nabokov.

You don’t deserve a man who thinks he is a Victorian hero come to life, who pretends he can take care of everything but cannot fix a leaking tap, whose  has his head in the clouds and up his ass. You don’t deserve a man whose room smells of musty paper and printer’s ink. You definitely do not deserve a man who refuses to get a TV connection because he cannot stand commercials. You don’t want to be with someone who cannot stand on a beach and watch the moon rise without quoting Shakespeare. A man who can recite Tennyson by heart, but does not know the names of his neighbors. A man who always – always – wants to get the last word in.