I noticed this DVD at my brother-in-law’s place, and I just had to borrow it. I’ve always liked the _Talking Heads_ … granted, I grew up on their music, but I was didn’t catch this movie, Stop Making Sense when it first came around.

So watching the movie was both nostalgic and just wonderfully fun.

But the group was more than just entertainment. It is as much art. The message or meaning hidden within the art, however, is any one’s guess. David Byrne’s enormous suit, for instance, was both entertaining to look at as well as some thing that was mentally jarring… like a piece of sand in a oyster’s shell. As Byrne said about it:

My hope was that it would look both funny and elegant at the same time. When you look at me from a distance, you see this little head, little hands and little feet… I don’t want to read too much into it, it was a pretty simple idea, but after some time I asked myself why did people remember this peculiar outfit? I think it was the transformation of something ordinary, a man’s suit, into something strange and surreal.

One thing that is very clear (especially when you adjust the audio settings on the DVD) is the clarity and distinction of the bass lines. I know that this is typical Heads, but it really hit me more which with this go-around. As Byrne says in a recent interview, “I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.”

The entire movie, like Byrne’s himself, has a sort of entertaining tension that mirrored the music. In one song the entire band is jogging in place and near the end of Life During Wartime, Byrne starts running in a circle around the band members.

Byrne’s bizarre dance movements are as disturbing as they are mesmerizing. If you can, I grabbed a small sequence of the video so that you can get an idea of his… er, I hate to call it dancing.

There is a section before one of the songs where certain words are displayed in the background. One the “Commentary” audio track, Byrne says:

These are slides I did of words that I thought sounded really funny when you just looked at them by themselves.

He attributes the idea to Californian artist, Ed Roche. Some of the words that were floating behind the band were:

ONIONS
FACELIFT
PIG
SANDWICH
UNDER THE BED
PUBLIC LIBRARY
GRITS
DOG
DIGITAL
BABIES
DUSTBALLS

I’ve been interested in “words” as both a medium and a message for many years. I mean, I’ve hated words as well as enjoyed them. But taking words to an abstraction is a somewhat recent meme for me (see my thoughts from Roger-Pol Droit’s book). It actually started when my brother, after spending a couple years in Germany, thought an acquaintance’s last name was funny…. Gubler. Hearing the name from an early age, I had grown accustom to the sound.

Now with a two year old learning to talk, words have a life of their own. She often says that she wants to eat pop’porn and refers to chicken satay as hicken un a dick.

When I was two, my mother had words on “flash cards” and taught me to read a few hundred words at that age. Obviously, I wasn’t sounding out words or seeing them as a series of letters, but merely memorizing the words as an image. To this day, words like “cry” look to me like it is indeed, crying.

Some words, to me anyway, are not only funny but self-descriptive. Some can even be onomatopoetic … like poo, warts and … er, congenital herpes.

Rabbit hole? What rabbit hole?