I heard an anecdote from my friend the other day about Luis Bunuel, the surrealist filmmaker and contemporary of Salvador Dali. Apparently, somebody once asked Bunuel what he would do if he knew he had only twenty-four hours left to live.
His response?
“I would sleep for twenty-three of them.”
What a perfectly surrealist way to approach such an inquiry. My first question is, which hour would he spare? The first or the last? And so minimizing his waking time, how would he spend it? “Awake” doesn’t quite do it for me.
Sometimes I think Bunuel would get a kick out of WVKR’s new music playlists. So much of the contemporary-indie music out there seems to be taking his approach — escaping the conventions of normalcy by defying expectations, minimally, but in just the right ways. Twisting sense into nonsense into sense. An irrational sprinkling of dissonance here, a tap-dancer percussion section there. Swap the chorus for verse, the verse for a chorus.
Now why wouldn’t Bunuel just sleep away the whole twenty-four?
Because, of course, that wouldn’t be so interesting.
Thanks!