Publicola: Movies

May 16, 2007

Movies

Back in the days when I was participating in that exercise in abstract & concrete rejection known as internet dating I saw a phrase used by several dozens of women in their profiles. I'm not talking about "Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians/Gun nuts need not apply" (though I saw many variations on that); I mean another phrase. It usually followed a brief list of artists that they liked. That phrase was "If our CD collections don't get along then we probably wouldn't either". I always thought I was an exception to that for 2 reasons. The first one is that I never had an extensive CD collection. Currently I own a little over 30 CD's & about 1/3 of those are from bands I've played with. Most of my music is either on cassette (a few hundred songs) or on a music engine I subscribe to (around 3,300 pieces of music by a little over 600 artists making for around 235 hours of music, or 9.8 days worth of tunes before it starts repeating). The other reason is that I was a professional musician; there simply isn't a genre that I don't listen to. As long as the song itself is good (not even likable per se, just "good" by my standards) then I'm cool with it. Hell I even have a lot of music that I don't like, but I had to have because I was playing it in a band for one reason or the other.

So it wasn't that I thought I was so irresistible that the CD compatibility test was inapplicable, I just thought because of my lifestyle it wasn't a particularly helpful way of sizing up suitability in a potential partner. Not that my explanation ever held any sway with anyone I approached but it still makes a bit of sense to me.

Now aside from wondering about the desirability of a lady who judges folks negatively based on their CD collection (or lack thereof) I did start reflecting on the idea in general. Does musical taste have any bearing on a person's character or potential compatibility? In my case probably not, but it may give some clues about someone's personality. Not enough to make a definitive assessment but maybe enough to give a very very rough idea of the type of person you're contemplating.

As I said though in my case it's not going to be particularly helpful in finding out who I am to look through my music collection. But would the same theory apply to DVD collections? Or book collections? Again probably not, but for no particular reason I thought I'd list what I have on my DVD shelves at the moment. Maybe later I'll list the books. I used Wikipedia for most of the links, but a few movies I had to turn to the Internet Movie Data Base to find information on. I didn't list the documentaries or How-To vids or TV shows (there are only a handful of those anyway); I just concentrated on the feature films (& there are a few more I'd like to list but let my ex have a few years back when we split so I assume they're no longer mine lol). Without further ado open the extended entry for the films now showing at Casa Publicola.