I’ve been on a huge Talking Heads kick lately. I know it’s probably because I just bought the David Byrne book (post on that to come), but who cares? that shit rocks.
Although the band is clearly crazy, they’re clearly very sane, and I like that. (Kierkegaard says “take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor”, I’m no professor.) The idea of portraying ordinary things (including where you’re sitting right now, metaphorically speaking) as extraordinary is revolutionary. But it’s not really that revolutionary, right? I mean, we’re familiar with Cezanne, we’re use to Rodin’s humanism, but it’s different for a band that came out in the late 70′s and stayed popular through the 80′s. Even nowadays, to find a band so willing to write and sing about being normal while being completely insane while performing is almost opposite to what we’re conditioned to. It’s suppose to be bands singing about idealized, overdramatic feelings while acting uber cool onstage. Talking Heads had the opposite.
There’s something hip with singing about cities, which they did often, and I’m starting to see is a major home base of sorts for Byrne. It symbolizes the concrete, the empirical; things you can see and feel as opposed to those idealized emotions. It’s also laden with culture, highly modern ideas, and forward thinking politics. It’s also, also, the greatest symbol of the spirit of man with it’s imbedded notion of community and soaring skyscrapers. For the Heads it was a statement to stay here, and to stay present, and to replay the ordinary until it becomes liberatory. It’s like Philip Glass for me. Or a mantra. But instead of actually repeating a set of tones, The Talking Heads repeat images, ideas, and notions that you are already so familiar with that it starts to reveal a depth you didn’t notice before. Kind of like a Rothko painting. It brings art home, into your living room.
Talking about cities reminds me of a great book by Bruce Chatwin titled The Songlines. It’s about Australian Aboriginals and their Dreaming-tracks that were huge, season long walks that they’d go on describing their lives and the surrounding nature through songs. Halfway through the book Chatwin’s narrative falls into a dream-like rumination on staying and leaving. Traveling or setting up shop where you are. He talks about cultures that were based on travel, like nomads, as opposed to more technologically advanced cultures that showed that advancement through the creation of citites and governments, etc. The argument is that living the nomadic lifestyle is more akin to our primordial nature as humans, and therefore less prone to illness (the spread of disease and plague ran/runs rampant in cities), wars, and all the other shit we deal with in modern times. It’s an interesting view and he never quite says where his heart truly lies (although we know he was an ardent traveler).
Here’s an interesting passage- “Among the military farternities of Ancient Germany, a young man, as part of his training to stifle inhibitions against killing, was required to strip naked; to dress himself in the hot, freshly flayed skin of a bear; to work himself into a ‘bestial’ rage: in other words, to go, quite leterally, beserk.
‘Bearskin’ and ‘beserk’ are the same word. The helmets of the Royal Guards, on duty outside Buckingham Palace, are the descendents of this primitive battle costume.”
OK, so maybe that doesn’t completely drive home my point (it says a lot about culture and ritual, though!). Let’s try this one instead, here he quotes Kierkergaard: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it…but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill…Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
Oddly enough, I feel that the only people who actually do any walking to get places these days are people who live in cities. But, we can’t discredit the modern traveler. I currently have two good friends who travel as much as possible, almost willing to sell anything they own for the funds to do it. And coincidentally they’re two of the people I respect most in my life. Maybe Chatwin would say it’s not so coincidental. He/the book raises a good question though; Are we impaired by our desire to stay and build and to communitize? Are we missing out on a basic human need for change of scenery and travel?
Kiergergaard also said, “To defend is to disparage.”
Maybe David Byrne knew this all along.
