I’m a little late in running across pixlr’s amazing photo editor, surely a godsend if you’re po’.

Tarsem Singh is best known for his directorial debut The Cell starring Jennifer Lopez. Though the movie was at its core, a suspense thriller, it was remembered for its twisted visuals which represented the mind of a serial killer. I was intrigued to hear that Tarsem’s next film The Fall would be released in 2008.

It seemed that nobody knew about this movie and it was incredibly difficult to find, but I knew I had to see it after reading Roger Ebert’s review where he stated:

“Tarsem’s The Fall is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality

Ever since A Perfect Circle broke up, I’ve been on the lookout for a band that that combined elements of hard rock and progressive rock with heavy effects and melody. Tool, while very different from APC, ventures into artistic realms largely unexplored by mainstream hard rock, and it was a major plus that the two bands shared a vocalist, but it still wasn’t enough….

Lightweights such as 10 Years and Evans Blue emerged, but it wasn’t until I stumbled upon the Seattle based Rishloo, that I felt I had found something closer to the mark.

Rishloo has a great amalgamation of styles and techniques:

I first discovered Arthur Machen via H.P. Lovecraft. Machen, a lover of the occult and all things supernatural, was a strong influence on Lovecraft’s brooding, claustraphobic horror style. Lovecraft’s short stories are wonderful in their ability to quickly evoke an atmosphere of dread. However, their ornate wording can be dense and a little over the top at times…

And there was something else that I didn’t realize about the author until coming across it in Stephen King’s excellent On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In a passage on writing dialogue, King noted

It’s a good time for Indian writers who write in English. An exotic location (at least to people who don’t live there) mixed with philosophical/social/historical insights, mixed with some poetic substance and the obligatory magic-realism adds up to ching! ching! in the Western book market.

But Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s debut would be a little more stunning if you didn’t feel it had been done before by Arundhati Roy. Love it or hate it, The God of Small Things’s (TGOST) Booker win brought more attention to the genre and you get a feeling of deja vu.