Merry Christmas, everyone! Well, almost Christmas, which means there’s time left for just a little more hopeless wishing for miscellaneous stuff too cool to find under the tree tomorrow!
This instrument from Futurama doesn’t just play music, it projects holographic images to match, allowing one person to create whole music videos and even operas. As an opera/musical lover and, let’s face it, a writer with plenty of the hermitish, non-team-player neuroses that word conjures up, I want one. I can’t promise I could write and play a whole opera; holophoners are supposed to take a lot of practice and concentration to play, and I don’t have the clearest visual imagination, but I’ll bet I could pick out “The Happy Snail” by ear (and eye).
Not the one pictured above, not the worldwide bestseller by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, although that’s nice too. I want the book-within-the-book of the same name by Julian Carax. I don’t know what it’s about. No one does. There are almost no details in the real life book about it except that it’s a can’t-put-it-down, finish-in-one-night, have-to-read-it-again-rather-than-say-goodbye-to-the-characters, must-find-everything-else-this-author-ever-wrote-right-now sort of read. It’s a book that will make you leap to its defense when you find out someone pretending to be its villain has been trying to erase its existence, while being secretly thrilled to find it leaking into your real life in such a way. What more do you need to know?
This is another piece of art that doesn’t exist, but unlike The Shadow of the Wind, we do get to sample a little piece of this one through the fictional world it exists in. In the episode of Dharma and Greg, “Papa Was Almost a Rolling Stone,” Dharma finds some old recordings from her father’s days as a ’70s folk rock singer/songwriter and tries to find out why he gave it up so she can convince him to give it another shot. It turns out that he stopped when Dharma was born because the excuse of being a father spared him admitting to people that he hadn’t been able to break through professionally, but he finally pulls out his guitar again and plays this last song he wrote, about Dharma’s birth, and it’s beautiful. I think so, anyway, and I want to hear the rest of the album.
Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!