[Music: Idlewild - Warnings/Promises]

*points up* This entry marks the return of the infamous background music tag. I thought I could do without it but sometimes I go back to my older posts and just reading what I’d been listening to at that time brings back memories. So it’s mainly here for my own reference…

In Paul Auster’s City of Glass (the first part of The New York Trilogy), one of the events described takes place on my birthday. Not just the same day and month, but exactly my birthday.

I found this quite intriguing just because it never happened to me before with a novel. I believe there must be various reasons for that. Firstly, most of the books I read were written a long time before I was born. Secondly, as far as contemporary books are concernced, they either don’t mention exact dates or the stories simply don’t take place during my birthday.

From the moment on I realized one of the days mentioned was my birthday, the story seemed quite real just because something so personal was mentioned, a day of such importance for my life :)

In retrospect, it sounds totally strange and silly so never mind what I just wrote.

We have a new layout! It features seagulls. Oh and Idlewild. Editing WordPress wasn’t even half as difficult as I’d expected mainly because besides the graphics and colours, the changes were minimal.

God, I couldn’t repress a small chuckle when I reread my last post a few minutes ago. I can’t believe I wrote of myself as “working as a journalist” because I’m not. One thing I learnt at Uni was that journalism is so not my kind of thing and two months into my first semester of Media Studies I had decided for myself that I was right to think that I don’t ever want to become a journalist. It was both the work itself and the people (most of them) that confirmed my opinion. So no, I’m not a journalist, I just write for a local newspaper from time to time and that’s about it really.

I saw the video for the new Hot Hot Heat single, Goodnight Goodnight, a few days ago. While the videoclip itself was semi-decent – not too graphic design influenced which is what most bands go for these days, think Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand and every second video by your average The band – the song was pretty much lacking in the catchiness department :( Very unlike HHH. It’s definitely not a second Bandages but that won’t stop me from buying the new album when it comes out.
(On the topic of Bandages: My father regularly “borrows” my copy of Make up the breakdown just to listen to that one song over and over again. He never returns my CD and it’s always me who has to search around the house and in the car for it. Needless to say, it’s always in the place I look last. I offered him to burn him a CD with all tracks being Bandages only, 17 x Bandages or how many times it fits on a CD. But he declined. This is one of the reasons why I’d prefer parents with a slightly different taste in music that mine ^^;)

A change of scenery (i.e. a layout change) would be very nice… I’m dreading making a new layout for this place because of the monstrosity that is editing templates in WordPress. O Blogger, Where Art Thou?

I don’t know if it’s the flu that still hasn’t left my body completely but I’ve been rather doubtful about things I just didn’t question before and easily annoyed by things that normally don’t get to me. Things that usually make me happy now seem dull and useless. Even the smallest and mundane things like my manga magazines that posed a monthly joy, something to look forward to now seem obsolete because they prove that Japan isn’t exactly the land of gender equality and I just can’t stand the sheer thought of it at the moment. Stupid, incapable heroines in girls manga really get on my nerves :(

It’s just a short phase of general peeved-ness and I’m sure it’ll soon be over. I’m not a negative person and always frown upon constant complaining and whining from people who should know better. (What a waste of intelligence!)
This small low might simply be caused by utter boredom. I’m not allowed to work at the moment because I might spread The Virus (from the flu I had) to innocent people who come to our shop to buy CDs. And geez, I won’t kill serious music lovers (at least not consciously) so I’ll be a good girl and obey the doctor’s orders.

So here are the advantages of working as a journalist and manga trend scout: I don’t infect people with evil influenza virii because for the time being, I can just sit at my computer and email my reviews and reports in. How to protect oneself from my written fits of madness is entirely left to my bosses.

Apart from all that, I consider myself a completely changed, deeply moved and enlightened human being. And it’s all due to Idlewild’s new album, of course. I should write something which resembles a review one of these days. I could have written one already but how do you put something so otherworldly beautiful into simple and comprehensible words?

Well, it’s quite obvious I had to take an involuntary break for more than a week. I caught the flu ~_~ Up until 2 days ago, my fever was really high and I felt more dead than alive. I’m sort of better now, the fever is gone, I’m back online and all’s well :)

Last week’s biggest news:
Coin Locker Babies is going to made into a movie!

There was that quote by Oliver Stone (I think) on the back of the English edition of Murakami’s book and I thought ‘Fuck no, take your filthy hands of that book >_< ‘. I was hoping no one from the USA would ever touch it and turn it into a movie.

I always thought Coin Locker Babies could be to Japan what Trainspotting was to Britain. Both are shocking, dirty, bizarre and obscene, violent and grotesque. But of course, they are also powerful mirrors of their respective generations. Both have that fresh feeling because they don’t fit into mainstream categories as they don’t want to appeal to the masses.

That’s why I really hoped the Japanese would make a movie out of, and not the Americans. I don’t want some half-assed Hollywood crap, not with that book! The Japanese can handle bizarreness quite well in film, I’m not sure what a mainly American team is going to make out of it.

Sean Lennon has co-written the script though. Also, the production’s gonna start later this year so there is no definite cast yet but Asano Tadanobu might be in it which means it won’t be your typical Hollywood production and there will be a few (half-) Japanese people involved. (Other actors who might be in the film are Liv Tyler, Val Kilmer, Vincent Gallo and Asia Argento – all good to great actors who have proved their talent in smaller productions; plus they are all rather charismatic. So there is still some hope!

The updating spree continues:
The Coin Locker has new songs. I didn’t zip the files this time and the mp3 file names include blank spaces, I hope this doesn’t cause problems for Mac users…

I have three songs stuck in my head at the moment: Hounds of Love by Futureheads, Why do you love me by Garbage and Hard-fi’s Cash Machine (♥♥♥). It always starts with one song which warps into the second and then into the third and at bad moments, I hear them all kind of simultaneously ^^; But they’re all brilliant songs so I don’t mind all that much :)

I made a new site! For Yuki-sensei’s Fairy Cube! The decision was made quite quickly because I just couldn’t get the story and characters out of my head… I wrote a translation of the first installment for my personal reference and then I though ah well, I might as well make this available to everyone else, hence the idea to dedicate a whole site to Fairy Cube was born.

And here it is:
Fairy Tales.

It’s a bit of a lame name, I know. It was the title of the first blog post I made about the manga here and it kind of stuck so I used it as the site’s name.

Oh and yuukitenshiNET has a new layout (after what? 15 months or something).

And now I’m tired *yawns and crawls off to bed*

One thing I always hated about being a fan of Japanese bands was having to wait so long for their new releases to arrive here. Sending the payment to Third Stage took some time; when it arrived, they weren’t exactly fast at posting the package and then there were the extra days of waiting for the CDs to arrive here. Plus, there was the occasional delay due to Customs.

So I’ve really come to appreciate the advantages of just going into a store and buy whatever CD by whatever European or American artist right on the day of its release, or ordering it online and have it delivered to my door within 2 days.

But of course things don’t always go that smoothly, especially when it concerns REALLY IMPORTANT RECORDS by REALLY IMPORTANT BANDS. (Yes, in bloody capitals.)
On Monday (March 7), Idlewild release their new album, Warnings/Promises. The last few weeks were a bit hectic and demanding work-wise, so it got as late as last night that I was able to go to amazon and try and order the album from them. And what do I see? The album is going to be released here on April 11 o_O Why-oh-fucking-why? What’s the difference beween Britain and mainland Europe? Please don’t tell me all about the different labels, promo dates etc. deal, I’m aware of it all, it’s just: I can’t wait another month!

So after much swearing, tearing out hair and general despairing, I got it off eBay. It won’t be here till mid next week but that’s much much better than April 11, of course. I’m a happy but still slightly upset camper. And I’ll be moving to Britain shortly.