FOR THE RECORD
It’s late on a Sunday night in late May. So late it’s 12 minutes from being June. I’m listening to some hard and heavy metal, songs from the soundtrack to the Bride of Chucky. I’m hating them. Why listen? My love of films lends me to buy cheap soundtracks where I see them and ones that suit my tastes when I have the resources.
Bride of Chucky was acquired in a ridiculous moment of freedom of choice. My local library was thinning down its’ music catalogue. There was a sale in the Todmorden branch. Almost everything was 50p. I came out of the building with German expressionist opera (2CDs and a booklet, immaculate condition), most of the Ring Cycle and maybe thirty soundtracks for films I’d seen and films I’d never see. Didn’t matter to me. I just like the idea of this music that augments and adds to the images on screen.
I like the idea, and in an era where physical data is less in evidence, I like the way a shelf of CDs looks like a DNA fingerprint. I mean it is. Kind of. Over the last 11 years with occasional peaks of activity I’ve done more collecting than listening. It’s left me feeling like a dump. An end point. The inevitable rather than the evitable. I’ve grown moribund as I’ve made sense of life in an old people’s home, sheltered housing block, excuse me.
Somehow, recently, that’s changed. I’m struggling to pinpoint a reason for the recent change but change there’s been. That’s why I’m listening to the soundtrack for the Bride of Chucky. Because it’s there. Because I’m here. Because it’s me and not me. Most streaming services find you entertainment you might like based on previous choices. I’m just reaching out blindly and pulling out what a me from a different era decided was worth having. Then I have to listen to it for the reason that it’s my decision at the root.
There’s no systematic process that throws up responses for a systematic me. Picking blindly a CD I picked blindly is comfortably random yet humanly comprehensible. I may not want to listen but at least let me live in the world of the person who elected to buy this thing, carry it home, store it and even move house with it. Admittedly I didn’t do the moving. I couldn’t, my back was broken. I can’t blame a streaming service for causing my ears such pain. It would be pointless. The computer would feel no shame. I have to examine my own past motives as I deal with the torment. Anyway, we’re okay. It’s over now.