L'Atalante
From an article, An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days by Maria Papova:
"In that strange combinatorial way the creative impulse has of collaging existing inspirations and passions into something entirely new, I awoke one day with the surprising idea of creating my own card deck of divinations from the birds — forty decks of forty cards each, to give away to forty people I love for my fortieth birthday (which is today, July 28)."
This happened to me a few days ago when I was going through the daily Songday routine, and recalling the previous night's dream:
I was on a train winding through a residential area. The homes had no walls. with exposed kitchens and living rooms, one which was on a slope toward a river. Then I was on a boat on that river.
What resulted is a mashup that combines the dream, an old film L'Atalante, and an old song. There are two sets of lyrics running in counterpoint. The old song, Party Girl has the lyric, "Sail on a boat to some distant shore" as well as "birdbath in the backyard" which has an interesting connection with Maria Papova's article about augury and divination. It's an interesting example of bibliomancy, similar to what I'm doing with the Songdays, where I'm choosing a line from a text and then applying the combinatorial process. "On a boat on a river" became the riff. Then I thought about the Vigo film, whose footage I had used for other music videos. The chords were similar to Party Girl, and I then used some of the lyrics as a counterpoint.
It's interesting to fold in elements from different places, in this case, a "cameo" of a character in another song, which results in a different kind of story made with a collage technique.
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