Warning Sign

I woke up sad this morning. The news is grim. Guns and war and greed and fear. In my own little corner of the world, I'm safe and showered with blessings, but paranoia seeps in.

Warning sign, warning sign,
I hear it but I pay no mind.
Hear my voice, hear my voice,
It's saying something and its not very nice.
Pay attention! Pay attention, I'm talking to you and I hope you're concentrating.
I've got money now, I've got money now,
C'mon baby, c'mon baby.

Warning sign of things to come (take it over, take it over)
It happened before, it will happen again.
Hear my voice, move my hair.
I move it around a lot, but I don't care. (what I remember)

Warning sign, warning sign,
Look at my hair, I like the design.
It's the truth, it's the truth.
Your glassy eyes and your open mouth
Take it easy, take it easy,
It's a natural thing and you have to relax,
I've got money now, I've got money now.
C'mon baby, C'mon baby.

Warning sign, of things to come (turn me over, turn me over)
Love is here but I guess it's gone now (hurry up babe,
hurry up babe),
Hear my voice, move my hair.
I move it around a lot, but I don't care what I remember.

Do you remember
What it is that you remember
Baby remember
Baby remember.

Rob Brezsny has a bit from his book Pronoaia next to my horoscope:

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When the spell is broken, you will be able to tap into resources you've been cut off from. When the spell is broken, you will finally notice the big, beautiful secrets that have been lying in plain sight. What is that spell? Can you break it yourself?

What is that spell? I blame, I blame the patriarchy.

Misheard lyrics: "Faster than my puppy"

The band Foster the People has had a huge hit with the incredibly catchy song "Pumped up Kicks.' We've been listening to it on the car radio and singing along, even though we couldn't really decide what they were singing in the chorus. We got the first part:

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks, they'd better run, better run, faster than....

but then what were they singing? faster than my brother? faster than my puppy? faster than my puppet? What does it sound like to you?




Turns out that the song is really a dark little psychodrama. Ann Powers has a brilliant take on it posted in her NPR blog The Record, where she compares it to The Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer." (but Talking Heads made paranoia a musical style while this is shiny).
I looked up the lyrics, and it's "faster than my bullet."
Note the discussion of the lyrics' meaning in the comments to the lyrics post.

This dubstep remix is great, the dancing is, too.

David Byrne's birthday today

Today is David Byrne's birthday. He is 59.

This is a film set to a recent collaboration between Byrne and Brian Eno "Strange Overtones."
I was an ardent fan of Talking Heads. I saw them in concert first in 1978 at the club The Boarding House in San Francisco, whose name I forget but that was a very famous venue. They were very young, hardly talked to the audience at all, but ripped through their set with complete intensity. I would see them again in their various incarnations: still a foursome on Lower Sproul Plaza the day Moscone and Milk were murdered; as a grooving expanded ensemble (Adrian Belew! Nona Hendryx!) during their "Burning down the House" phase at the Greek Theater; in Jonathan Demme's documentary movie Stop Making Sense when it debuted at the Castro Theater.
Brian Eno and David Byrne's 1981 collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, with its analog sampling, was formative for me, shaping my aural palate. The music he produced and shared through his label Luaka Bop, especially the earlier Cuban and Brazilian compilations are also etched in my cranial music library. His curiosity, sense of exploration and collaboration inspire me still.
Here's an interview with George Stroumboulopolous that highlights many of his accomplishments and captures that combination of complete freedom and social awkwardness that infuses his work.

Here is the band talking about their early days on the road:

I'm know the band broke up and there was bad blood between Byrne and the other members, but I prefer to remember seeing them do this:

Heaven

Heaven, heaven is a place
a place where nothing
nothing ever happens

"I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out"

Today I'm feeling the shadows of my brain chemistry's particular quirks with a heavy heart. Some rhythm helps me lose the fear of those shadows.
David Byrne. I'm so glad I got to see him perform three times with the Talking Heads in their various incarnations.
Lyrics here, but I have to admit that I heard "The TV's in repair" as "the TV's in the bed." I'm fascinated by his descriptions of the process of creating these songs, collaborations with other musicians and arrangers, photographers and artists. He ends with this:

When I first started to make music sketches for what would turn out to be this record, I imagined the result would be something a little different. I imagined longer instrumental pieces, which would evolve into songs. But as I kept writing (although a few of them ended up that way), most of the demos asked to be shorter and more and more concise. At times I felt like I needed to apologize for how accessible the songs were sounding. But then I realized that this is what they wanted to be. Like the song "The Revolution" implies, I somehow imagine that a real revolution is won by seduction, by winning over not just the mind, but the body and the senses as well. And that the sadness of some of these melodies are countered by the vigor and persistence of the groove.

—DB
Jan 22, 2001

Not neurotypical

I just read the memoir of John Robison, Look Me in the Eye. He did not have a diagnosis of his Asperger's Syndrome until he was in his forties, and his account of his suffering, delivered with calm logic and the driest of humor, is riveting. He is the older brother of Augusten Burroughs, whose memoirs of his childhood and recovery are lurid and hysterically funny even as they also horrify. They shared a childhood marked by abuse and the mental illness and alcoholism of their parents. By some miracle, they are now both thriving, happy, and very close, partly as a result of their writing and the connections they have made with readers. Robison has also written about taking part in clinical trials of rTMS (which I wrote about earlier), and it seems to be having a noticeable effect.

While immersed in this book, I head the Talking Heads' song "Cities" on the radio. One of the things I found compelling in my early fan days was David Byrne's persona, a mixture of paranoia, hyper-intelligence, and yearning.
Their album Fear of Music, their darkest, was another collaboration with Brian Eno; it came out in 1979, at a time when I was finishing college and reeling from the impact of my parents' divorce and its revelations about our family. I broke out in painful, maddening eczema, all over my body, and for months I was covered with itching painful scabs. I felt as if I had leprosy. The songs on Fear of Music and David Byrne's way of singing them are entwined with those memories. "What is happening/to my skin? Air can hurt you too, air..."

"Air" and "Cities" (1979 performance)

I have now learned that Byrne now thinks he might fall "on the spectrum" of autism, somewhere between Asperger's and "good at math"; he has said it is not so much a diagnosis as an explanation for his intense shyness, the focus, the need to control. I wonder.

Every story

I'm putting together some things on for a class on narrative, and I was so happy to find this old Sesame Street Classic. I didn't watch Sesame Street growing up; I watched it with my daughter. We taped a lot of episodes and watched them over and over. A couple of my favorite bits were animated by super talented Sally Cruikshank. She has put some of her videos up on YouTube. I think this one--"Every story has a beginning, middle and an end" is a great version of a lot of narrative theory--and you can dance to it! It sounds a lot like what the Talking Heads were doing at the time, which is probably one of the reasons I like it.