Moving By Remote Control

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2007-06-04T22:09:00.000-05:00

THIS BLOG HAS BECOME REDUNDANT!!!

TAKE A LAST GANDER, BECAUSE IT'S ALL OVER!!!!!

RETURN TO THINGNESS AND DRINK THE PUNCH!!!!!!

::::::::::INTERCALATION::::::::::

2007-04-04T09:55:00.000-05:00

This blog has been on hold due to something potentially happening to it that did not, in fact, happen. More soon ...

77: Psycho Killer

2007-01-30T21:30:00.000-05:00

A dream circa Late High School:

I'm dropped in medias res, it's a desert road, vaguely familiar because they all look the same. Probably somewhere in the (at the time) somewhat undeveloped north end of Scottsdale. I'm running down the road, it's dark, and I realize suddenly that I'm chasing a guy in a suit with a briefcase. It looks like the "Karma Police" video, but no dashboard obviously, just me chasing some guy and for some reason he's lit up by headlights. I catch him and, without thinking, stab him multiple times with a butcher knife and drag his body behind some shrubs. I hack him into manageable pieces and stuff the pieces into a couple of black garbage bags. I do not panic. All I can think about is the fact that I've just killed somebody and I am not panicking, but this thought is insulated from the immediacy of the actual dream-murder. I know that there is the me that murdered and the me that watched me murder from behind my eyes. I think that the cognitive split between murderer me and observer me means that I am not responsible for my actions. But does my lack of panic, my lack of revulsion, mean that the interior non-murdering me is, if not a murderer, then at least morally complicit in the murder? I'm thinking these things as I walk back up the road and I see police lights flicker from behind me.

The police handcuff me and put me in the back of the squad car. They take me to a friend's house, take the handcuffs off, and make me stand in the kitchen. There are about a dozen cops milling around, and my friend comes downstairs. She's in her pajamas, and she says, "Don't worry, my parents aren't home." Then she goes back upstairs.

The chief of police enters the kitchen and grins at me. He opens the refrigerator and takes out a jar of mayonnaise, a loaf of white bread, a package of Kraft Singles, and an overcooked hamburger patty and tells me to make a Jack-in-the-Box Jumbo Jack sandwich. The ingredients are insufficient to the task, and it's now that I begin to panic. I tell him that I can't do it, and he says nobody is going anywhere until I do.

77: First Week / Last Week ... Carefree

2007-01-28T12:31:00.000-05:00

Verses are visions of "Thank You For Sending Me An Angel"; it's a version of a song they reimagine more perfectly as the first track on More Songs About Buildings and Food. The elevator horns don't do much for me here, they sound like a 70's-ism.

Certainly this song is an exemplar of the early-Byrne wordless vocalizations. As time goes on, Byrne will progress from relatively primitive nah-nah's and aah's to percussive whoops and stutters.

There's a subtle difference, here, between the performance of "Don't Worry About The Government," where Byrne assumes the voice of optimistic suburban / corporate exile, and the sort-of-trippy-when-you-think-about-it temporal ejection enacted by moving all of your appointments to last week. It's either a self-help, stress-relief banality or the voice of euphoric schizophrenia speaking from the unmoored platform of no-time. Or perhaps both, perhaps it's being without care, the privilege of Beat-ish dropouts and bourgeois monads (more often than not, they're one and the same), that is as delusional as living completely outside of the Greenwich slipstream.

The 70's horns, then, are a bit more eerie than simple 70's schlock (although there is a zombie-quality to much schlock); they echo like a good dream inside of a nightmare.

77: Don't Worry About The Government

2007-01-15T15:09:00.000-05:00

I'm reminded of the Sand in the Vaseline compilation that was my real introduction to the Talking Heads. I used to listen to this song over and over, and laugh as the song pivoted on the "Loved ones, loved ones" line. I don't know how the describe the comedy of that moment - the key change amplifies the narrator's naivete, but leads into the "Don't worry 'bout me" section, where the keyboards hint at the ominous implications of total surrender to drooling bourgeois consumerism.

The references to "highways" seem particularly conspicuous to me. In telling the listener to "take the highway, park, and come up and see me," Byrne taps into postwar ideals of mobility (both physical and economic), of Eisenhower's interstates (with their ties to Cold War security) and the nuclear family moving out to the suburbs. The "laws made in Washington, D.C." strengthen the songs ties to the paternalistic, friendly government.

So, sure, the sense of expansive optimism, the song's grand swelling at the proclamation "My building has every convenience," suggests there's an irony, but I wonder how much of it is dependent on identity, on knowing who the Talking Heads are, the milieu from which they emerged, and their subsequent work. If you heard this song and didn't know who was singing it, would it register as a lump of banalities. This song doesn't have the contrast that, say, "The Big Country" does, where Byrne's attack on American placidity is overt and vicious. Nor is "Don't Worry About The Government" less effective than that song.

It's not entirely clear to me that "Don't Worry About The Government" is an attack either. In a sense it's descriptive, but the way in which it's descriptive of actual people, actual things, the way actual people think is suspect. The critique is aimed at some other identity, one that's obscure, possibly ephemeral.

77: The Book I Read

2007-01-03T00:27:00.000-05:00

The melodrama of the opening chords! There's a kind of ominousness that's undercut by the (by now typical, even paradigmatic, but always reflexive) banality of Byrne's "I'm writing about the book I read / I have to sing about the book I read," and maybe it's that ominousness and its undercutting that signals the weird division between the book and the book's eyes. The metaphor of a person as a book is nothing new, but the the figuration is complex. The book is alternately a person, and a person's eyes - if they're the eyes, the synecdoche of the eyes and the whole person is complicated by the metaphorization of the the synecdoche, so that the "book" becomes a second order metaphor.

And the Na Na's are so feel-good in this song, a completely unapologetic idiot-rapture that's actually the pay-off for the subtle harmonic tension that comes before. This tension plays into the sickness Byrne's describing; strange that he qualifies "I'm spinning around" - the dizziness of love - with, "but I feel alright," as if that dizziness were literal rather than metaphorical. Against that line, the music sounds like an impending heart attack, or nausea, a bad kind of love-sick, a literal love-sickness, like the body actually trying to purge itself of love.

Now I'm tempted to say that the Book is actually really ominous - it floats and flits through the song. It's "in your eyes," like a look or a suggestion, and here Byrne sounds accusatory. The Book is inescapable.

77: No Compassion

2006-12-13T00:34:00.000-05:00

"Be a little more selfish, it could do you some good": it sound like a homespun Andy Warhol aphorism, a little chunk of anti-moralism in a poison broth.

((MORE VERBOSITY AFTER PAPER WRITING SEASON))

77: Who Is It?

2006-12-06T01:18:00.000-05:00

Traipsing from brilliant to banal and back again, from the elusive non-space of identity's pre-dawn and back to you, "Who Is It?" is slight, but a sea-change. Ok, maybe not slight, but brief. It's a game of peek-a-boo where Byrne is the baby and we find out a) it's your face behind the hands, and b) his love is dangerous.

Who is it? You. What is it? An owl.

You're an owl.

77: Happy Day

2006-11-30T22:35:00.000-05:00

There's that word again: "nice." "I feel nice inside / And now it's summer again."

I find songs like this stranger even that the back end of Remain in Light or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, if only because it's notably not compelling. Airy, solid, simple and simplistic. The familiar oscillations between identity and performance are hear, but batted around indifferently. Although I'll go out on a limb and say that the lines "I believe that I was / Born with the things that I know" are hyper-problematic, especially given the virtual fixation on performance and construction. Unfortunately, I can't push through the layers of boredom.

77: Tentative Decisions

2006-11-29T00:09:00.000-05:00

Chris Frantz, drummer, dreamer, was born into a military family. The march and shuffle only backs up the thematic concerns of the rest of the music - austerity and discipline, confusion and tentativeness blend here and bliss out in the final piano breakdown - this is before they're able to call a naive melody by its name.

Via the magic of nachtraglichkeit, you can hear the "Confused, confused" as confessional rather than descriptive - the piano breakdown is the sound of a band giving into the unabashed pleasure of consonance, a move they would rarely make again until Little Creatures. Consonance places identity in question. The confusion is the identity crisis that comes along with the liminal space of sexual possibility, and you can hear a bare striving in Byrne's voice, tense against the military drums. The problem is viral - the problem is given over, it's infectious or a disease. Think about the dis-ease, think about the nervousness of Byrne's "confused."

This song, like any other, is about fucking.

77: New Feeling

2006-11-26T21:10:00.000-05:00

The opening clarity blurs as it moves forward, smears itself across the time it occupies. Tina Weymouth's bass is the great mirror - the guitar lines double and Weymouth's bass doubles back and surges. (If there is such a thing as a great rock bass player, surely it is she.) This double-figuration swings back at the lyrics and their striving towards the wholeness of irreducible simplicity: "It's not yesterday anymore" is ultra-literal, but depends on the shared illusion of objective time. This is, I think, another concern that resonates all the way through the TH catalog - the lie that makes absolute certainty and irreducible simplicity possible. The exposure of this lie can only happen through its statement in the barest possible terms.

"Why have we kept out own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking." - Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

D & G make me think as well: there is, of course, pleasure in giving yourself over to the lie, to the illusion, to the manner of speaking. The manner of speaking becomes a mannerism, a way of affecting humanness, or a way of exploiting the humanness of others in order to get what you want - "I wish I could meet everyone / Bring them up to my room / Meet them all over again." The pleasure of a first meeting reflected upon from the future is "nice," it is comforting, in a sad way - this is what I imagine it would be like to commit suicide with an overdose of painkillers - because this is what speaking ultimately is.

77: Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town

2006-11-25T16:42:00.000-05:00

Talking Heads always pose a threat, even at their most innocuous. Especially at their most innocuous. Love is always the destroyer, everyday duties and routines are what get destroyed. I like how David Byrne spits out "believe" because it sounds like a little bird squeaking, "Beat me" - this, I opine, is no coincidence. Listen to the Talking Heads: you experience a convergence of the adorable and the threatening - Byrne's adorableness is always a vehicle for danger, and it's only when he sounds most threatening that he also sounds sincere. Belief is a beating, or rather, to believe is to ask to be beaten - the two are one and the same.

What is it to love the Talking Heads, then? Does it welcome danger, destruction? Will I miss work tomorrow? Will the stock market crash?

William James teaches us that there is no escaping belief. Talking Heads write false manuals for living, instruction booklets designed to sabotage anyone dumb enough to take their advice. You cannot believe them - you must believe that you don't. You believe that you don't, yet you don't win. You just get beaten another way.