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Volkswagen boy walks out of the apple-red phone booth onto the empty noon road. He rests his elbows by the window of his ride and peruses his hair in the side mirror- James Dean stares back. Satisfied, he winks and then stares at his watch- in a half hour he’ll be picking up Miss Daisy Daffodil and they have a date at the picture house. He switches on the radio. The Archies are playing on the box.

‘I only eat Candy”- legend has it these words were said by Andy Warhol in a cocky attempt to cover up his own short-comings when dealing with fancy cutlery in an upscale restaurant.

The picture house is showing- ‘Speed Racer’. Volkswagen Boy and Miss Daisy Daffodil pretend to enjoy it for ten minutes and before they even know it they are curled on each other- polyester against polyester, the gel and the perm come falling down, the caramel popcorn spills to the floor, the movie is forgotten and one song plays in both their heads. Cupid is an RJ and ignorance is bliss. They are absolutely oblivious of whatever plays on screen and of College Kid, tweed cap, sling bag, cheque sweater sitting in the right next seat, shifting uncomfortably. The song they traced with thier lips was by The Monkees-

Commercially manufactured at the turn of the 19th century, the word ‘candy’ was derived from the Arabic word ‘quandi’ which means ‘a lump of cane sugar’. Other essential words Arabic has loaned to English include alcohol, algebra, arsenal, artichoke, coffee, ghoul, harem, magazine, mascarra, mommy, soda, typhoon, zero and hashish.

College Kid has an alter-ego he likes to call ‘neo2000′. For him, ‘The Matrix’ was a revelation, a religion, a blast of the pure digital- He looked into the mirror and for a moment saw ony zeros and ones. When it first came out he flicked a spoon from the kitchen to practice psychokinesis, read a hundred zen koans and once had a dream in which his parents wore sharp Ray Bans, carried sharper cell phones and whisked him away into a strange green maze where he grew old trying to escape, fell into a void of no return and…… woke up. He negotiated with his own value system to get the second film in his good books but didn’t find himself in any mood to give the same concession to the third. But he came to the picture house with hope- if not zen, candy will do. His eyes went ablaze at the bravura opening sequence- a million theories expand and collapse in head like so many universes. Space and Time has been turned into a giant Mobius Sphere that forms the universe of the movie. It unfolds like a hypercube moving or rather falling apart or even sliding into the past, the future, another city, another room, another person. A plastic pop culture world where everything opens into the other. He enjoys the strange two dimensional approach that the directors have employed. He enjoys the way the characters are shifted along the planes like so many digital backgrounds put through a bioscope one behind the other. He enjoys the effect the shadows have on the scenes. He thinks in terms of a graph paper. He would need a graph sphere in constant motion to plot it all down to make sense. But very slowly he gets a nagging feeling that maybe he just plotted a castle-in-the-air on the hypothetical sphere. He begins to wonder what lies outside the sphere. PerhapsNothing. He had listened to The Beatles before coming in. He had an idea that the movie was going to be something like

‘Candy’ is a 1968 novel by Maxwell Kenton, ‘a nuclear physicist who gave up his job after he couldn’t reconcile with the philosophical aspects of his work’, who was nothing but a cheeky pseudonym for fiends Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Southern and Hoffenberg took Voltaire’s Candide and adapted it to the 60s America and free love and drugs. Playboy rated it as among the top 25 sexiest books of all time and described it as “young heroine’s picaresque travels, a kind of sexual pinball machine that lights up academia, gardeners, the medical profession, mystics and bohemians.”

Right in front of the screen with greedy quivering eyeballs and locked and loaded on ‘the trip’ and illegal green substances sits Reefer Cat. He’s the hep cat, drives a green mobile, likes to surf, wears his mojo Ts and mojo denims and more often that not prefers to be turned on and dropped out. ‘The Trailer gives me some good vibes’, he would say before he went for the movie. He had got his friend to score the ‘grooviest’ stuff around town and tanked up on it and then some beer and now, it’s a case of ‘all-marbles-and-nowhere-to-go’. He had cheered at the opening sequences- The retro TV psychadelia and the pop anime soundtrack. Niiiiiiice. NFS 2 was the first video game he had ever mastered and he felt for sure that the directors, if not deliberately but very subconsciously, had paid tribute to the early PC classic. The arcade simulation environment is almost a replica of the NFS 2 gamescape and some of the car-chases were giving him the jive. Niiiiiiiice. And then just when he was ready to jump into the hypnotic purples and voluptuous reds, ‘it’ stopped happening. The movie had stopped dead in its tracks. A cheap pun when you consider a movie named ‘Speed Racer’. ‘It’s the kid and the chimpanzee- jar jar binks league stinkers and I just knew they wouldn’t die, whatever happens the kid and the chimp will always survive,” he would say later,” Too bad, I thought it had potential to be some trip. And what really annoyed me was some idiots sitting somewhere behind laughing their asses off to the purple sky”

“I want Candy” was a major hit for the band ‘Strangeloves’. It was further covered by ‘Good Charlote’, a Backstreet Boy’s brother and Bow Wow Wow. The Bow Wow Wow version made for an inspired moment in Sofia Copolla’s Marie Antoinette.

The Pokemon Kid and friends were having the time of their lives. “Look at Pops Racer pulling the pants of the Ninja. Look at the chimpanzee and the kid. HeHeHeHeHeHe. Look at them fall of the couch. Look they’re doing it again. The chimpanzee looks like you. Like your father. HeHe.” Impressionable young minds all.

Research indicates that Older children are significantly more likely to prefer chocolate than younger children (59 percent of 9-11 year-olds prefer chocolate vs. 46 percent of 6-8 year-olds). Also that candy is the No. 1 choice among children for afternoon snacking and that younger children are more likely than older children to prefer hard candies. Other research has found candy to be one of the chief causes of obesity in children. Such contradictions are the staples of the world of advertising and government bodies and it seems, the Wachowskis.

Quietly watching the Pokemon gang was Nostalgia Dude. He liked that at least they were enjoying it. He was even mildly amused by the film, by some of the scenes replicated straight of the anime. Some dialogues- perfectly stunted like the dubbed ones he had heard in his youth, some of the recurring sequences like when the chimp and the kid crawl behind the sofa in fright and hide themselves in the booty of the car. He likes Christina Ricci. She should have gotten more but he was in love with her and nothing mattered when she came on the screen. He liked the artificial background sometimes giving the impression of an ‘anime style’ freeze frame where the surrounding scenery becomes nothing but colorful slanted stripes. He spotted a reference, maybe he’s wrong, to ‘Dick Tracy’, the hyper-meta-unreal-blockbuster of his own time. He remembered Madonna’s neon lipstick. He remembered Pacino and how he was surprised to discover Dustin Hoffman. He remembered Dick Tracy’s watch. He remembered the little kid who gets embroiled in the adventures and how much he had wanted to be him. He looked over to the Pokemon gang having a ball and he looked back on the screen. He sighed. Surely, There was something to be sad about it. He hadn’t wanted to think about it, he had really wanted to like this film, he had wanted to ‘keep his brain home’ but that fact was- for all its flash and razzmataz, for all its nostalgia, for its entire anti-corporate agenda, it was one helluva hypocrite enterprise. Impressionable young minds should have better. He had hoped the makers of ‘The Matrix’ would know that.

Dear Wachowskis,

She’s addictive but she ain’t chocolate,
She’s candy, Candy as Junk.
You can never have enough, but that does’t change the fact,
that Candy is Junk.

sweet love,
Marsh Mellows and the Moffits

(soundtrack by radioblogclub, info by wikipedia, candy crate,pics by posterati, artlink, allposters)