The Density of Souls & Soundtrack to a Movie
Last night, I went to see my friend's band play at a bar in Ramsey. Their opener, a guy I met at a Barbecue last weekend, plays these slow, melancholy songs on acoustic guitar. It wouldn't have been so bad if there had been some tonal variety, but even the songs that were meant to be up-tempo sounded more like funeral dirges than wedding marches. Due to that, the atmosphere in the bar in the beginning of the night was very subdued. To pass the time, my friend Innocent invented a game in which you had to pair whatever song was playing with a scene in a movie.
My best and favorite of the night, was a scene in which an aging stripper is walking down the Boulevard, carrying her high heels in one hand. It's just begun to rain and she's going home to her apartment where she has two kids waiting and will have to tell them they will soon be evicted. (Yes, the music was that depressing.) So tell me the name of a song or two and I'll write you a short description of the accompanying scene. Or, if you'd rather, describe a scene and I'll pick and upload a song for you that fits that scene. (I always thought it would fun to be a Music Supervisor but it would be decidedly hard to break into without connections.)
There's also a great article in the New Yorker in which Paul Giamatti waxes poetic about his upcoming film "Cold Souls" and describes what he envisions certain celebrities'/world figures' souls to be like (in terms of physical objects). For example, Paul came up with the following:
Willie Nelson - "an ear of roasted corn"
Dolly Parton - "light and airy, like a hummingbird"
Merle Haggard - "an engine block. Powerful, but kind of rusty, with lots of buildup"
Freud - "a piece of Babylonian statuary, with the curly beard, the half-a-lion, the wings"
Donald Trump - "a nice set of whitewall tires"
Slash - "a blood orange left on a windowsill, all dried out and leathery"
Kim Jong Il - "a crazy box of crabs"
Henry Kissinger - "a doorknob"
Shapely Prose used the article as a discussion-starter on their blog and it really got me thinking. I'm not really sure what my soul would look like. I've come up with and discarded a million things that seem too obvious or cliche, so instead I'll ask you. What do you think your soul would look like? What would the following peoples souls look like: Taylor Hanson, Michael Jackson, Michelle Obama, Diane Sawyer? What do your significant others or family members souls look like?
My best and favorite of the night, was a scene in which an aging stripper is walking down the Boulevard, carrying her high heels in one hand. It's just begun to rain and she's going home to her apartment where she has two kids waiting and will have to tell them they will soon be evicted. (Yes, the music was that depressing.) So tell me the name of a song or two and I'll write you a short description of the accompanying scene. Or, if you'd rather, describe a scene and I'll pick and upload a song for you that fits that scene. (I always thought it would fun to be a Music Supervisor but it would be decidedly hard to break into without connections.)
There's also a great article in the New Yorker in which Paul Giamatti waxes poetic about his upcoming film "Cold Souls" and describes what he envisions certain celebrities'/world figures' souls to be like (in terms of physical objects). For example, Paul came up with the following:
Willie Nelson - "an ear of roasted corn"
Dolly Parton - "light and airy, like a hummingbird"
Merle Haggard - "an engine block. Powerful, but kind of rusty, with lots of buildup"
Freud - "a piece of Babylonian statuary, with the curly beard, the half-a-lion, the wings"
Donald Trump - "a nice set of whitewall tires"
Slash - "a blood orange left on a windowsill, all dried out and leathery"
Kim Jong Il - "a crazy box of crabs"
Henry Kissinger - "a doorknob"
Shapely Prose used the article as a discussion-starter on their blog and it really got me thinking. I'm not really sure what my soul would look like. I've come up with and discarded a million things that seem too obvious or cliche, so instead I'll ask you. What do you think your soul would look like? What would the following peoples souls look like: Taylor Hanson, Michael Jackson, Michelle Obama, Diane Sawyer? What do your significant others or family members souls look like?