Soundtracking

One of my favorite things to do when directing a play is to put together the soundtrack, and sometimes when writing I will try to manipulate how I write by what music I select for the background (or don't select -- silence has its own effect).

Thus, I was immediately interested in the new "soundtrack to your life" meme that Gwenda Bond and Elizabeth Bear did. For fun, I put iTunes on shuffle and looked at what the songs would correspond to. I didn't intend originally to write about it here, but the songs that came up created a strange sort of narrative, with some spooky syncronicity, and I immediately began trying to think of a story to build from most of them. I'll probably try to write the story, so am recording here the initial impulse...

IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
So, here's how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that's playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool...

Opening Credits:
"Oliver Cromwell" by Monty Python
The most interesting thing about King Charles the first is that he was 5 foot 6 inches tall at the start of his reign, but only 4 foot 8 at the end of it....because of....

Waking Up:
"So Come Back, I Am Waiting" by Okkervil River
And there’s plenty of ways to claim his crimes tonight,
and there’s plenty of things to do on his dime.
And there’s plenty of ways to wear his hide tonight.

You’ve got yours and I’ve got mine.
You’ve got yours and I’ve got mine.
So why
did you flee?
Don’t you know you can’t leave his control
only call all his wild works your own?
So come back and we’ll take them all on.
So come back to your life on the lam.
So come back to your old black sheep man.

First Day at School:
"Evening Song" by Philip Glass, from Satyagraha [no lyrics]

Falling in Love:
"I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" from O Brother Where Art Thou?
I am a man of constant sorrow
I've seen trouble all my day.

Fight Song:
"So Fast, So Numb" by R.E.M.
listen. this is now. this is here.
this is me. this is what I wanted
you to see.
that was then. that was that.
that is gone. that is past.
you cast yourself, cast.
passed by, thrown down fast. you say.

you say that
you hate it.
but you want to recreate it.

Breaking Up:
"Gold Dust" by Tori Amos
How did it go so fast
you'll say
as we are looking
back
and then we'll
understand
we held gold dust
in our
hands

Prom:
"Divertimento for Strings" by Bela Bartok [no lyrics]

Life is Good
"Estate Sale" by Eels
Man: "These are the sounds of the days that are past."

Woman: "A miracle was about to happen."

Mental Breakdown:
"Poor Ditching Boy" by Richard Thompson
Was there ever a winter so cold and so sad
The river too weary to flood
The storming wind cut through to my skin
But she cut through to my blood

Driving
"Hold On, Hold On" by Neko Case
Compared to some I've been around
But I really tried so hard
That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on"

Flashback:
"Play Dead" by Bjork
I play dead,
and the hurting stops.
It's sometimes just like sleeping,
curling up inside my private tortures.

Getting Back Together:
"Crazy Man Michael" by Natalie Merchant
Michael he whistles
The simplest of tunes
As he asks of the wild woods
Their pardon
But his true love has flown
Into every flower grown
And he must be keeper
Of the garden

Wedding
"Don't Explain" by Billie Holiday
Hush now, don't explain
Just say you'll remain
I'm glad you're back, don't explain

Paying the Dues
"Paranoid Android" by Radiohead
Please could you stop the noise, I'm trying to get some rest
From all the unborn chicken voices in my head

The Night Before the War
"Happy" by The Frames
Come help me out I'm sick from the fight
from inserting a laugh where there's none
show me where this joke got tired

Final Battle
"Ruby's Arms" by Tom Waits
I'll feel my way down the darkened hall,
and out into the morning
the hobos at the freightyards
have kept their fires burning
so jesus christ this goddamn rain
will someone put me on a train
I'll never kiss your lips again
or break your heart

Moment of Triumph
"Police on My Back" by The Clash
I'm running down the railway track
Could you help me? Police on my back
They will catch me if I dare drop back
they will kill me for the speed I lack

Death Scene
"Hell Yeah" by Ani DiFranco
Life is a b movie
It's stupid and it's strange
A directionless story
And the dialouge is lame
But in the he-said/she-said
Sometimes there's some poetry
If you turn your back long enough
And let it happen naturally

Funeral Song
"Coin-Operated Boy" by Dresden Dolls
coin-operated boy
sitting on the shelf
he is just a toy
but i turn him on
and he comes to life
automatic joy
that is why i want
a coin-operated boy
made of plastic and elastic
he is rugged and long-lasting
who could ever ever ask for more
love without complications galore
many shapes and weights to choose from
i will never leave my bedroom
i will never cry at night again
wrap my arms around him and pretend

End Credits
"Angels of Deception" by The The
Down by the river, I've been washing out my mouth,
'cuz deep in the heart of me
there's a frightened man breaking out.
Oh I was just looking for paradise
anywhere in this world
While they're gunning for heaven--
from this man made hell!

I doubt I'll stick with the exact circumstances of the sections (prom?!) for the story, but I'll definitely keep the order of songs and see what happens. If it seems to be going well and worth sharing, I'll post fragments here.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b...
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie...
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d...
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...
Read more