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THIS BLOG HAS BECOME REDUNDANT!!!

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

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

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

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

77: Psycho Killer

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

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

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

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

"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))