Yeah, I hate all those annoying people that wish you stuff like “Happy New Year” or “Happy Birthday”. Getting all those nice texts is really fucking annoying.

Why do you need a special day or two in the year to party? Everyone does that every week because we’re rich and spoiled and 18.

Yeah, most of these are marketing ploys so people would buy us presents and candy and flowers and shit at least once a year. Damn conspiracy. I don’t need a special day, I get amazing presents from everyone all the time anyway, since I live in a John Hughes movies.

A special day to celebrate the beginning of a new year? Celebrating your birthday? Celebrating love with tacky pink shit? Dressing up and scaring each other? Why would you need anything like that when you can have mundane sad little lives where nobody celebrates anything. Oh and I forgot people that don’t want to have weddings. Or funerals for that matter. Sure, why celebrate anything or anyone ever?

I may sound a little bitter but get over yourselves, honeys. Yeah, sometimes you’ll get a tacky Christmas text that only acknowledges that you are still in that person’s contacts. Is this really a reason to complain? Really? Do I really need to point out how tasteless and immature complaining about something that’s essentially nice and well-intended is?

I’m sorry my last post of the year is me complaining about shit. It’s what being back home does to me! Anyway, my point was: life sucks, we all know that, these are little things that could make it better, nicer. So why make them into more little annoyances?

Because this is the last post of 2011, I feel the need to say that it’s been a tough year and I can’t wait for 2012.  So Happy New Year! Oh, and an optimistic little song here:

• Grandma: Do you want some juice?
• Me: No, thank you.

(2 minutes later)

• Do you want some juice?
• No, thank you.

(in another 2 minutes she brings me fresh squeezed juice)

(5 minutes later)

• Would you like some coffee?
• I already have some, thank you. (and I point at the half-full cup)

(2 minutes later, grandad walks in)

• Why does my head always hurt after I take a nap?

(walks out)

(2 minutes later, grandma walks in)

• What would you like for lunch?
• I don’t know, I like everything you cook.

(2 mins later, granma walks in again)

• Should we have X with Y?
• Neah, Y is enough, thank you.

(1 min later, walks in again)

• Are you sure you don’t want X?
• Yeah, I’m sure)

(2 mins later, grandma walks in with more juice)

(1 min later, grandpa walks in with strong liquer. At this point I have 4 glasses and one cup on the desk)

(2 mins later, grandma walks in)

• Come with me, I want to show you something.

(I go and look at the lovely pidgeons)

This is about the time when I realized being alone in a room was too much to ask for and decided to write this post and then, feeling really guilty about writing it, because my grandparents really are lovely people that love me and spoil me and everything, I also decided to go back to the living room. The only question is which of the glasses do I take back with me, since they’re all pretty much full?  

There are quite a few things that I particularly enjoyed about the music of L.A. Noire, the first of which is the variety: it had 40s film-noir inspired original orchestral pieces composed by Andrew Hale and Simon Hale (with additional music by Woody Jackson), music of the time (diegetic, played on the radio within the game) which included the Andrews Sisters, Tex Williams, Billie Holiday and Louis Jordan, and original vocal recordings composed and recorded by Stephen Coates and his band The Real Tuesday Weld with vocalist Claudia Brucken.

Both the lavish orchestral pieces and the jazzy vocal recordings (it’s worth a mention that it’s a bit original for a video game to feature especially-composed vocal tracks) later released as a soundtrack album (L.A. Noire Official Soundtrack) and are marvelous listen for any retrophile. The sometimes-playful-always-sultry vocal recordings are my personal favourites, the voice of Claudia Brucken being appropriately reminiscent of 40s starlets and Stephen Coates’s lyrics always leaving you with an ironic, maybe a bit bitter, smile.

I feel like I need to mention that there was also a second official soundtrack album released – Verve Records And Rockstar Games Present L.A. Noire Remixed. This one is a bit pointless and seems like a bit of a cash-in. It consists of 6 songs that aren’t even in the original game, remixes of songs from the era, present in the game in their original form. Although I’m generally a fan of the Verve Remixed series, this particular album leaves me thoroughly unimpressed.

In the end, what I want to say is that as unusual as it may seem for some music fans to buy a game soundtrack, this album (L.A. Noire Official Soundtrack) truly deserves a listen. And maybe buying game soundtracks should become a habit. Why not? This is better than any film soundtrack I’ve heard in ages. I mean look at the disrespectfully uncreative music choices in director Zack Snyder’s stuff: in films like Watchmen and Sucker Punch he uses ridiculously well-known music that almost offends me with its obviousness! Sometimes it seems like the art of movie soundtracks is slipping away while the art of game soundtracks is blossoming into something quite unexpected. Maybe it’s not entirely new, maybe it’s not entirely original, but it’s certainly more refined that most things that are out there.

Now, what can I say about “The Night Circus”? It’s a delightful book and definitely an “easy-read” (a must for some and an unconfessed deterrent for others). Well, I’m a sucker for a good story, especially when it’s well told. Erin Morgenstern definitely made me care about the cast of extraordinary characters in extravagant Victorian outfits. Yes, I do appreciate good outfits even in literature. Gosh, I don’t know how to tell you the story without spoiling the thing, especially since many of the initial chapters are all messed up in that lovely way, so that you can’t tell when things happen and how things are related.

The story is nice and simple and mysterious enough to give you that “need to know what happens next” feeling. Basically, at the beginning, two magicians or, more accurately, wizards, or whatever you wanna call them, begin a challenge (another one, since you’re led to believe they’ve done this before) between two of their students. You don’t know what the challenge really is or what the purpose is or when it ends. The only thing that gradually becomes more and more obvious is that the circus is the “venue”. The story is filled with wonderfully strange and mysterious people that can do wonderfully strange and mysterious things. Oh and of course there’s a love story. Well a big one and a couple of little ones, I guess. And a lot of unknowns. It’s light and pleasant and cute but has its dark moments. There are interesting little debates over style and ethics and things and there are lots of questions that remain unanswered. It may sound like I’m a bit masochistic, but I do like having unanswered questions at the end of a book.

What else can I say about this story? Well ever since my aforementioned lovely boyfriend said he was certain they’re going to make it into a film, I keep thinking of a proper way of adapting it for the screen. I’m not sure a film would do it justice and I see a nice clear format for a tv series in it. With a tent being described at the beginning of each episode and rich colours like in Pushing Daisies. Anyway, Colleen Atwood (Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd and other things)  should definitely do the costumes.

P.S.: They launched this cute little website/game before launching the book. I think it’s really cute.

To be fair, I like it more now than I did when I was reading it. I felt misled because I expected it to be a book about music, which it is not (I also thought it would be a highly subjective semi-historical account, which it is also not). It is a book about something greater, some fundamentally American archetypes which uses musical examples to prove a not-very-musical point, and a very vague and slightly controversial one at that.

However, there are things you have to admire and respect about it and you always need to remember when it was written and judge it in its context (that of 1975). It is important and it certainly is well written. The balance between detailed album reviews and a much larger picture is maintained perfectly and one can easily say that the book is as much literature as it is music criticism and I truly love it for that.

However, there are some things about this and about Lipstick Traces, the other Greil Marcus book I’ve read (two of the many). The biggest is this passion for stating matter of opinion as matter of fact. Very effective journalistically but highly un-academic, in my opinion. And not to my taste. I’ve had too much of a world full of people who feel that the music they listen to is far superior to the music preferred by the plebs. I can’t stand it when it comes to classical music, can’t stand it when it comes to jazz, certainly can’t stand it when it comes to rock.

Even after that mini-rant I still feel apologetic. (It’s Greil Marcus, for God’s sake!) The book is good, probably brilliant, still “probably the best book ever written about rock”. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. So I don’t. Like it, that is.But I do have to admit there are sometimes ideas of his (aggressive, they’re all aggressive) or maybe opinions, that I agree with. And I’m going to end with one of those, out of the chapter on Randy Newman:

“Rock’n'roll is suffering from that old progressive school fallacy that says if what you write is about your own feelings, no one can criticize it. Truth telling is beginning to settle into a slough where it is nothing more than a pedestrian autobiography set to placid music framed by a sad smile on the album cover.” This only seems to have gotten worse in 35 years…

I’m never bored. I always have something to do. I always have a list of things to do that so big that it can never really be finished. Always have another book to read, another article to write, another film to see. Whenever I hear someone say he or she is bored (or, more likely, read it as a Facebook status), the first reply that comes to mind is “Then read a fucking book”. I know that’s annoying. Probably why I try not to say it that often, although sometimes I can’t help myself. But it’s become harder and harder to understand people who find themselves with nothing to do. I have shelves and shelves of books I need to read, lists of movies, blogs to write in, lists of articles that I haven’t read and reviews and blogs and a million little things to keep me occupied. Always.

Of course I realize that this sounds arrogant and self-involved. But I don’t get it. I have gotten to the point where I don’t understand boredom anymore. I don’t understand how people can be bored. Unless you’re kidnapped and locked in a room with absolutely nothing to do (no TV, no computer, no books, no newspapers, nothing), I don’t understand how people get bored. Can any of you tell me?

Yeah, that’s the problem! It is like riding a bike. Everyone says you never forget how to ride a bike but that’s all crap. Of course you do. And when you get back on a bike after 10 years of not touching one, it’s awful. Exactly how my piano-playing is now. You have no control over the bike, you’re nervous, you don’t want to do it in public because it’s embarrassing until you remember how to do it properly. You still have some of the reflexes but those do more harm than good. Because you end up finally remembering how fun it was to go fast and then you realize you’ve forgotten how to change gears or use the breaks without falling flat on your face. And you wanna give up all the time. Because your body isn’t used to the effort anymore either and everything hurts. And then you don’t have time for it. It’s only a hobby now, it’s not something you can do every day like when you were a kid. And maybe you want to show someone what you can do but people aren’t really interested. But it doesn’t seem as fun when you do it alone, even though it did when you were a kid.

And the most frustrating thing is that you remember being in shape. And you remember being good. And you wonder if you’ll ever be good again. I know I could be, but is it worth it? Is it worth working so hard for something that isn’t really important? Maybe it is because now I finally realize that it was a huge part of me and I can’t really be myself without it. So I’m going to work at it. For me. So ne tirez pas sur la pianiste!

Some people (mostly the ones in dumb romantic comedies) say that fiction ruins real life because your expectations of everything go through the roof. To an extent they do, sure, but what’s wrong with having high expectations? I don’t wanna settle because I didn’t have the imagination to strive for more.

But that’s not the whole story. For most of us life is petty, and not in a funny, self-deprecating manner like it is on Seinfeld, but in a totally boring way. Hell, I’ve had 10 fights about washing dishes in the past months. Petty. And ridiculous, but not in a slap-stick way. And even these fights could have been interesting if they had been well written and previously rehearsed and re-written until they were perfect. So I prefer fiction.

That’s not the whole story either, because good stories are the stories that are well told. That’s why I don’t enjoy Isaac Asimov as much as I enjoy Phillip K Dick and that’s why I would read anything written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Since I just mentioned Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Phillip K Dick, I have to tell you that the word “story” has a very particular meaning to me, because of my mother. A story has a certain warmth and is, to an extent intricate, some love, some sadness and something left untold, kind of like a fairytale. Storytelling is a gift, a vocation. Writing is a skill, something acquired, something you can work on, sure. But storytelling is something you’re born with. That’s why so few writers and directors are storytellers. And that’s why I kinda buy auteur theory and all that.

But I’m going off topic again. You can argue that I’m reinforcing gender stereotypes when I say that I’m a consumer of fiction. But I am. I can’t live without it, I need it every day and I rarely come back to my favourite books and my favourite movies. Besides, there are so many movies and books that I’ve completely forgotten. I don’t know why there are some movies that I know I absolutely adored but can’t even remember what they were about, or lines, or names of characters (for example, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Marigolds, which I’m planning to watch again real soon). Don’t know why I don’t remember anything from The Neuromancer and yet I remember so much from, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude (incidentally my favourite book ever). But one of the answers is I consume. I can’t even tell you the names of all the books I’ve read this year. There are probably (most likely) hundreds of movies that I’ve completely forgotten, that have been completely erased from my memory.

I don’t really care. I don’t even care if they’re in a place in my head that I can reach at one point or not. Because that’s not why I read and that’s not why I watch movies. I laughed when, in Ian McEwan’s book Solar, he wrote something about art students having a way more developed sense of pleasure. That’s kinda how I feel about fiction. Yes, there are books I read because I have to, there are books I read because I want to learn stuff, there are even more books I read because I feel like I should (classics, mostly). But this isn’t the point. None of those are real reasons. I don’t think anybody that really loves reading and watching movies really does it for any other reason but the sheer love of it. The appetite for fiction. The desire to live as many lives as you can and, while doing it, savour the genuine voluptuousness of a well written phrase or a beautifully imagined scene.