VJG Niche Notes

The dhol is a drum that dates back to the 15th century. It was probably introduced to the Indian subcontinent via the Persian drum type dohol. The evidence for this is found in Ain-i-Akbari, which describes the use of duhul in the orchestra of the Mogul emperor Akbar. The Indo-Aryan word "dhol" appears in print around 1800 in the treatise Sangitasara.

The dhol is most commonly associated with Punjabi music and dance. It was used in war by the Sikhs and later to celebrate successful harvests by Jatt landowners. This drum became the ground roots of modern Bhangra music.

From North India, the Dhol spread to other parts of the Indian subcontinent as well.

The dhol is a double-sided barrel drum (straight barrels also exist) played mostly as an accompanying instrument in regional music forms. In Qawwali music, the term dhol is used to describe a similar, but smaller drum used with the smaller tabla, as a replacement for the left hand tabla drum. The typical sizes of the drum vary slightly from region to region. In Punjab, the dhol remains large and bulky to produce the preferred loud bass. In other regions, dhols can be found in varying shapes and sizes and made with different woods and materials (fiberglass, Steel, Plastic). The drum consists of a wooden barrel with animal hide or synthetic skin stretched over its open ends, covering them completely. These skins can be stretched or loosened with a tightening mechanism made up of either interwoven ropes, or nuts and bolts. Tightening or loosening the skins subtly alters the pitch of the drum sound. The stretched skin on one of the ends is thicker and produces a deep, low frequency (higher bass) sound and the other thinner one produces a higher frequency sound. Dhols with synthetic, or plastic, treble skins are very common.

The drum is played using two wooden sticks, usually made out of bamboo and cane wood. The most common rhythm played on the dhol is the Chaal, which consists of 8 beats per measure. The stick used to play the bass side of the drum is a bit thicker (roughly about 10 mm in diameter) and is bent in a quarter-circular arc on the end that strikes the drum, the dagga. The other stick is much thinner and flexible and used to play the higher note end of the drum, the thili. The drum is slung over the neck of the player with a strap usually made up of ropes or woven cloth. The surface of the wooden barrel is in some cases decorated with engraved or painted patterns.

Former Miss World turned actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is pregnant, her father-in-law and veteran Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan has revealed.

"NEWS NEWS NEWS !! I AM GOING TO BECOME A GRANDFATHER .. AISHWARYA EXPECTING .. SO HAPPY AND THRILLED !!!," Bachchan wrote on his Twitter page late Tuesday.

Aishwarya Rai, 37, married Bachchan's actor son Abhishek, 35, in April 2007. The child will be their first and comes after weeks of speculation in Indian gossip columns about the actress' fluctuating weight. Bachchan senior later said on the micro-blogging site that he was "overwhelmed" with the response to the news from followers and had received 2,843 tweets of congratulation in just half an hour.

There was no immediate indication when the baby was due.

The Bachchans -- Amitabh, his actress wife Jaya, Aishwarya and Abhishek -- are Bollywood's "first family" and have a fanatical following in India and around the world. His daughter, Shweta Nanda, has two children. The family patriarch said he was particularly pleased with the news because "now cometh the progeny of my son that shall bear the surname Bachchan - the first in this generation...".

The family boycotted the annual Filmfare magazine awards in 2010 after a tabloid newspaper in Mumbai wrote that Rai could not have children, prompting a legal notice to be sent demanding a retraction and an apology. Rai, who took the Miss World crown in 1994, made her debut in Hindi-language Bollywood in the late 1990s and has gone on to star in more than 40 Indian films.

Most recently she was in the blockbuster South Indian film "Endhiran" (Robot) alongside Tamil-language superstar Rajinikanth, which broke box office records in India. She appeared as a jewel thief in Steve Martin's "The Pink Panther 2". Her other English-language films include "Bend It Like Beckham" director Gurinder Chadha's "Bride and Prejudice" in 2004 and "The Last Legion" in 2007. She was recently seen at the Cannes film festival promoting her upcoming film "Heroine", which was due to begin shooting this year.

The chief executive of UTV Motion Pictures, Ronnie Screwvala, said at the time that Rai had star power. "She is the brand ambassador for India and for Indian cinema when it comes to the French Riviera." Rai also has a number of lucrative modelling contracts, including for French cosmetics firm L'Oreal

Lady Gaga has once again found herself the center of controversy, but this time it has nothing to do with a meat-based outfit or accusations of Madonna worship. Instead, Gaga has been hit with a class action lawsuit claiming that the singer improperly profited from the "We Pray For Japan" bracelets that she sold through her official website to raise funds for Japanese earthquake victims, NBCDFW.com reports. All proceeds from the sale of the $5 bracelets were supposed to go directly to Japan relief efforts; however, a law firm accuses Gaga and her team of adding unnecessary tax and overcharging for shipping to profit from the charity items.

The class action suit, filed by Detroit's 1-800-LAW-FIRM, arrives just as Lady Gaga was in Tokyo this Saturday to perform at the MTV Video Music Aid Japan show, which also raised relief funds for the tsunami-ravaged nation. In the suit, Gaga is accused of violating federal racketeering laws and consumer protection laws by not only charging tax on a charity item and inflating shipping costs, but by also including whatever money the pop star's team pocketed from the bracelet sales as part of their donation fee to artificially inflate the figures. The firm has posted the complaint and this video (which, frankly, doesn't do a lot to enhance the credibility of a law firm branded with an 800 number by inviting viewers to follow a #gagascam hashtag on Twitter) attempting to explain the "Shady Gaga" suit on its website: "When we tried to communicate with the defendants in this lawsuit, all we got was, 'well, some of the money is being retained, but we don't really know how much,'" 1-800 -LAW-FIRM's Alyson Oliver told My Fox Detroit. Gaga is within her rights to keep some of the money from the bracelets; all proceeds from their sales went to helping Japan, but the production of the bracelets wasn't going to pay for itself, and it's unfair for Gaga to assume that cost herself. However, if it's found that she did actually profit of the sale of the charity bracelets, then that's a major PR (and potentially legal) problem waiting to happen. When contacted by The Amp, Gaga's reps had no comment on the allegations.

The class action lawsuit potentially casts a shadow on Lady Gaga's Japanese relief efforts, which is a shame since Gaga has gone above and beyond the call of duty in lending support to the country. She's spent the last week in Tokyo and has served as a one-woman tourism bureau by using her Twitter account to encourage fans to visit the country. In addition to the bracelets and the MTV performance, she's also designed a Uniqlo t-shirt to raise money for tsunami relief.

Gaga's not the only concerned musician who's been suspected of personally profiting from charity funds: Last year, Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti Foundation was accused of questionable accounting practices in handling millions of dollars in relief donations for a post-earthquake Haiti, accusations he called "baseless attacks." But unlike the current Gaga situation, no class action lawsuit was filed, nor self-promotional YouTube video filmed.

Many promises have been made about the third and apparently final (yeah, right) entry into the hugely popular Transformers franchise by its love-him-hate-him helmer, Michael Bay; less goofy humour, no pathetic robots crafted in the mould of archaic racial stereotypes, and of course, no Megan Fox. On the strength of his latest effort, Bay absolutely still has a way to go with picking cohesive scripts and self-editorialising, yet it’s safe to say that the third time round, viewers definitely get enough bang for their buck, in what is liable to be the only film to challenge Fast Five’s property damage high-score this year.

The plot is about as important to what’s happening on screen as clothing is to an issue of Playboy, but Transformers: Dark of the Moon has the admirable good sense to follow in the footsteps of one of the year’s best blockbusters, X-Men: First Class, by drawing from real events in human history and injecting them with a pulpy revisionism. The 1960s space race, as it turns out, was in fact a dash to recover a mysterious technological artefact which crash lands on the moon; an Autobot teleportation device called the Ark, which the Americans then salvage before the Decepticons attempt to steal it, kick-starting a monstrously-scaled battle between the bots, leaving the humans very much stuck in the middle.

While Dark of the Moon has its share of problems, Michael Bay does admittedly demonstrate a small modicum of growth as a director here; the pre-titles prologue scenes are constructed with a surprisingly nimble, even clever hand, no matter that they give way to the goofball humour, ropey performances and sketchy writing we’ve come to expect from a Bay production. Indeed, following the exciting and inventive opening – featuring some blistering coverage of a Cybertron battle rendered in stunning 3D – Bay applies the gears, frustratingly choosing to focus on the life and times of his protagonist, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), a pointless exercise simply because nobody wants to watch a bunny-stunned young man fawn over his admittedly gorgeous new girlfriend, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, ousting Megan Fox), when we can watch gigantic robots battling for the fate of the Earth.

Such is the trade off; being shuttle-cocked between these scenes of “character development” and the other stuff – the explosions and destruction that Bay does so well – means that for the first two thirds of Dark of the Moon, the action is infrequent and stilted, occurring for mere single minutes at a time before it is interrupted by a gag or pointless scene about Sam looking for a job. Sitting through the excessive job-hunting scenes does at least unveil a few peculiar cameos – chiefly John Malkovich as Sam’s eccentric mentor – though you’ll doubtless wish the film had been chopped down by at least half an hour once the lights come up.

Audiences will likely have so much fun with the final hour of this film, however, that they’ll soon downplay or even forget many of its issues; the closing set-piece – a colossal battle in Chicago which takes place in the air, on the ground, inside collapsing buildings, and everywhere in between – is a jaw-dropping technical achievement, both a testament to the present state of visual effects and Bay’s prowess as an action director of scarcely contained confidence. For all of Bay’s flaws, there’s never a spatially confusing moment in this, or in fact, any of his films; his coverage is consistently exhilarating, that is, when he chooses to focus on action rather than drama. The film’s 3D presentation also lends itself extremely well to Bay’s directorial sensibilities, and given that Bay was egged into adopting the format by James Cameron, it’s little surprise that for the level of detail and sheer heart-pumping factor, this is probably the best use of 3D since Avatar.

It’s difficult to imagine more effort – or money, for that matter – being poured into any set-piece this year, for while it very nearly exhausts with its length and outright intensity, Bay’s slick direction and tendency to keep the action moving fast makes it difficult to become restless. This is absolutely the film at its very best – the most entertaining moment involving a desperate dash to escape a half-destroyed building, causing Sam and his comrades to slide several stories through it as though characters in a platforming video game – yet the chilling focus on a destroyed Chicago also inevitably recalls more serious-minded disaster fare, and of course, the spectre of 9/11. Bay doesn’t reach too far for pathos, but for what it’s worth, this is the least forgiving, most brutal film of the franchise; in the final showdown, innocent civilians die ad infinitum, exploding indiscriminately into piles of ash and bone.

It doesn’t do enough to remedy the previous film’s flaws – Sam’s parents still get their oar in and most subsequent attempts at humour fall flat – and the female lead casting change is hardly inspired (Huntington-Whiteley is every bit as doe-eyed and stolid in her delivery as Megan Fox, perhaps moreso), but what Bay gets right is the essence of the first Transformers film; less of a focus on the dumb, and more on the joy of the spectacle and the thrill of the chase, even if it takes him a while to get there. A few other plusses – particularly a cracking supporting turn from Frances McDormand as the Secretary of Defense – don’t hurt either.

It’s still chock full of embarrassing humour and soap opera drama, but Dark of the Moon is, thanks to a dizzyingly impressive near-hour climax, more a celebration of Bay’s strengths than a laundry list of his many flaws. But only just.

When I was about 5 years old I was living in a house that use to be an old funeral home and they also cremated bodies there as well. The cemetery was our back yard. We use to have huge parties for Halloween because people thought it was creepy. At these parties people would play with the Ouija board and try to contact spirits.

I had always been afraid of the basement because whenever I went down there I would get a really bad sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. But I don’t know if that was just because they still had the walk in body coolers that they stored the bodies and the crematoriums where they cremated dead people down there. But one night some neighbor children and I decided it would be fun to see who could spend the longest time in the cemetery and I had fallen asleep behind mausoleum and my mother had came out and brought me inside to go to bed.

Later that night around 4 in the morning I woke up for no reason in particular. When I looked down at the end of my bed I realized there was someone standing there. My eyes adjusted and I was now staring at a man who was staring at me! My eyes grew wide as I noticed that there was something very wrong with this man. He was grey and transparent. He was very tall and had dark black eyes. He had a straight face and he wore an old type of suit with a tie like the one you see on the KFC guy. He had thin straggly hair and a mustache which were both white. He just stood there with his fists clenched and staring. I was sitting up but I was to afraid to move, too scared to look away, and so frightened that I was choked up and couldn’t scream. But it seemed that he took a slight step forward without moving and that is when I let out a scream and wet my bed.

I was only 5! My mom came down the hall and as soon as she grabbed the door knob he disappeared. My mom dismissed it as a nightmare, but for 2 years every night at the same exact time every night he would be there. After a few weeks I stopped screaming for my mom and just started hiding under my blanket. But he stayed until dawn then. So I wasn’t able to sleep.

At the age of 7 we had moved out and that was the last of him but just the beginning of my journey through the realm of paranormal. I believe the only reason that I remember this story so vividly is because it was so traumatizing and it was a major turning point in my life. – learned so much since then but I stilled get creeped out when I think about it.

Sent in by Raven Rayne,