[seems like so far at least he hasn't seen fit to write about our experience in red bank, so i guess i'll have to.]

i realized that my slight, occasional disaffection towards david byrne in the past nine months has probably nothing to do with him but instead with my own disappointment at not being able to make more, somehow, of our circumstancial acquaintance.

which i don't think is even my fault, though obviously whatever it would have been would have been up to me. it was not, actually, a situation conducive to meaningful outcomes, although from some external perspectives it seems like it should have been. he was around [my place of work] a lot, sure, but almost always in a rush or narrowly focused on some piece of business and often in a sourish mood - it was a rough time for him, what with his divorce and the label weirdness (this interview talks about those things some.) i wasn't working with him directly; he wasn't even working on anything related to what i was working on.

anyway, i don't necessarily think of it as something to regret. i'm not that interested in the having of famous friends for its own sake. supposedly i should have seized on his presence as an opportunity for advancing my hardly-even-fledgling career, though i'm not really sure how such a thing could have manifested. i don't think i'm shy or starstruck particularly, but i do have a hard time initiating opportunities for conversations unless there's something in particular to be discussed. the calculation and deep-focus opportunism networking implies really aren't my style, although i'm game to try my hand at them in the coming months, as jen barrington tells me i must. i feel like trying that shtick with david might have been foolhardy and shortsightedly inappropriate - he's just so far removed from my league in any kind of professional sense, and besides he is already swamped with that from all sides, from people with much stronger senses of intention. in any event, the connections i made with yale and even the various todo mundos may prove more germane to me at my current juncture.

what would have been nice, sublime even, would be to have had more of the exchanges (of which i had so many with yale - mostly consisting of me explaining my theories about music to him) like those at the few lunches we shared with the assorted office staff, talking about art, movies, bands, the scene, and such. like when i lent him my copy of the new blur album and talked to him about it a little, but didn't really get to hear a lot of what he thought about it. a handful more of those might have been more solidly a basis for a continuing friendship. which, who knows, maybe we'll still have.

in the mean time, he's still just a guy. or rather, he has become just a guy [worse, just a guy i know], albeit a guy with a truly fascinating mental life (just read his blog a bit) or at least one that accords nicely with my idea of fascinating. but he's also a guy whose music (and also movies and dances, and to a lesser extent writings and artworks) i find immensely compelling and personally affecting.

maybe i thought that knowing david would affect my experience of his art. (did i really think that? i don't know.) even if i had managed to engage him in dialogue about his own work [i never even worked up the context, or i guess you could say the courage, to so much as tell him how deeply his work means to me; i was a few pages into a letter to him in the fall when i on some level recognized how much such a thing would really have been for my own sake, not his] i doubt it would have changed things too fundamentally.

what does change, gradually, through the accretion of experience and sense-data, is my specific perspective on music and musicians broadly, phenomenologically, and that must affect how i listen to and experience music, if not perhaps how it affects me. but my encounter with david, in particular, had little to do with his music, in particular.

so this vague coolness i've felt towards his music recently - though probably linkable to my luaka bop summer along the lines of overexposure, burnout, and the unwieldy proliferation of associations - is not comparable for instance to the pointed resentment i began to develop toward beck hansen in the summer and fall of 2002, which is too complex an issue to fully get into here but essentially stemmed from the sense of his character and, more pertinently, his attitude toward [his and others'] music i gleaned from interviews, his portrayal in media, and a pair of live performances. (the upshot is that sea change really pisses me off even though i admit it's gorgeous, and that though i still hold odelay and vultures to be unparalleled masterworks they're now somewhat laced with wist.)

this thing with david is neither personal, nor it doesn't really have anything to do with music. i think i was just confused or something.

anyway. in case i had forgotten how much sheer pleasure the man brings me - i remembered the other night. on the drive to red bank we listened to the first one and a half discs of the once in a lifetime box set, which means we heard the first four talking heads records less three songs from each. not a bad ride. and then i saw david give a performance that easily equalled his may 2001 (?) TLA set and possibly rivalled the 1997 water st. show which ranks high on my shortlist of favorite concert memories.

in the interest of doing this properly: juana molina's opening set was certainly pleasant, and might i suppose turn out to have been my introduction to another artist who - like jim white (db's '97 opener) and joe henry ('01) - i'll come to cherish. it suffered through both the interference of a man sitting next to us who was chattering incesssantly, largely incoherently, and quite offputtingly, so much so that the couple on the other side of us complained and moved [it's possible he had some form of tourette's, which would be an interesting coincidence because david just wrote about ts the other day], and her distance from us.

our seats (the count basie theater is a reserve-seated venue, no question) turned out to be in the very last row of the balcony, although happily they were dead center. i can't complain too much - they were complimentary tickets after all. that particular perspective was somehow fitting for some of the ways i was thinking about the experience, though i supposed it also partly directed them. besides, the back row gave us a lot of open room to dance, and not to worry (as if we would) about disturbing the view of anyone who might have been sitting behind us.

it was, predictedly, not a very dancy (or upright) crowd. they were enthusiastic, applauding heartily and at great length, especially for the talking heads numbers, but they lacked a collective disposition of rock-and-roll, and only a few scattered balconeers and a few diehard dancers on the floor stood for more than a song or two - until, a little ironically, the band left the stage at the end of the set proper.

to be fair, the show did start rather sedately, with a straight "glass, concrete and stone" (loved watching the 'foosball' marimba), a mournful cesaria evora cover ("ausencio"), the jaunty but hardly impassioned "other side of this life", and the lithe and lovely "finite=alright" (the only feelings tune all night, maybe because the string arrangement pre-existed, but it was great to hear it) among the first handful of songs. (although a popping "i zimbra" was up second, a kinetic taste of things to come, with a particularly fierce pseudo-cacaphonous string breakdown.)

especially toward the beginning of the show, david introduced each number with a brief explanation on his most genial show-host manner, detailing, for instance, that number's roots in zürich dada (as i had only just been telling laura,) confessing that "finite" contained a fib about his height, and revealing that "the great intoxication" was an unwritten letter to the girlfriend of "a guy at [his] office" (someone i know? conceivable, but not particularly probable; but yo - "he's drunk and he's insistent/shy but he's persistent" - no wonder he kept it secret.)

the talking heads songs got a way disproportionate amount of applause, i naively posit, not solely for their familiarity and fame but also because they tended to be the more lively, danceable-anyway numbers. "naive melody" (the first song he didn't introduce - it started anonymously with an extended string section that only gradually revealed the bassline, and cued the rest of the band in after interpolating worrell's original keyboard solo; meanwhile david, who had left the stage, gradually danced his way back on, nice and cool and honed, so that he arrived at his mic just as the vocals came in) of course made me jump up and down in giddiness as soon as i recognised it, and generally ushered in the part of the show where i was insanely happy. (after debating the idea for a second, i was singing along full out in harmony - i think maybe the bassist was doing some harmony too but i couldn't really hear it - anyway, the kind of amusingly blond lesbian couple in front of us turned around and nodded approvingly.) "once in a lifetime" was the one that finally got everybody else out of their seats, though they sat right back down again when he followed with the verdi aria ("un de felice eterea") and stayed there for the rest of the set.

that's not entirely true - although set-closer "blind" was unbelievably high-energy, with an awesome fake-out coda extension, "like humans do" and (its somewhat pale cousin) "dialog box" brought the funk almost as handily. meanwhile, a slightly retinkered "u.b. jesus" was as oddball-groovily entrancing as ever, nothing short of inspired, and "intoxication" featured probably the biggest percussion detonation of the evening, blasting away the placid, hinting string introlude, and that's certainly an all-out dance number.

and, actually, the mid-show string of mostly later t-heads tunes ("nothing but flowers" > "road to nowhere" > "once in a lifetime") seemed a tiny bit flat to me, mostly because the stringers left and the remaining core of four was a notably sparser. though it is pretty incredible how full a sound they were able to create with only two pitched instruments (bass and guitar.) and the forró "flowers" was way badass.

[i was continually struck by how plain smart many aspects of the show were, and the orchestration especially: the very versatile and very gainfully employed tosca string sextet augmenting the "rock group" of mauro on percussions (occasionally marimba, paul on bass, kenney on kit, and usually dave's guitar. they shifted easily from sounding extremely dense to extremely sparse, even when the same number of them were playing.]

on the whole the tune selection made me very happy, with "naive melody" being the obvious highlight. i probably would have felt better about "life during wartime" if i hadn't just listened to them in the car, and about "what a day that was" if i didn't have an unexplained tendency to conflate those two songs. i definitely appreciated all the inclusions from eyeball, and i remembered why it was my second-favorite record of '01. it would have been nice to hear more from the new album, even though i do think it's uneven - there were only six, including show-closing "lazy" (amazing - also the constant feel-shifting was a handy demonstration of why that song is so easy to remix, because the melodic rhythm is really basic) and the so-so "tiny apocalyse". i knew that anything from uh-oh would have been extremely unlikely, but it's kind of strange that rei momo was completely overlooked, since there were such nice string arrangements made from it for the '01 tour.

as for the talking heads songs - it was a little surprising (though i guess it shouldn't be?) how much he stuck to the recognizable hits. wouldn't you figure people that are still byrne fans would know the heads catalog well enough to relish some choice album tracks more than the obvious smashes? apparently they don't know it all that well - they were consistently fooled by the first "oh-oh-oh" in the choruses of would-be-sing-along "psycho killer" into pre-emptive "ohhhh!"s which sort of nicely harmonized david's as-recorded repeats.

it was hard not to feel a big affection (if at times such as this a slighly patronizing one) for the crowd - they are my fellow-followers, after all. as if to emphasize that, my vantage point allowed me to watch them just as i was watching david. it felt like i was experiencing the event as a whole, as an objective outsider, rather than just experiencing the performance as a subjective audience-member.

it was what it's like, what it's already becoming like for me and what i'm beginning to imagine it is at times overwhelmingly like for biz lifers, to be a consumer of pop - a record-listener, concert-goer, band-fan, music-lover - when the industrial mechanisms that underlie and enable these activities are part of ones habitual workaday experience.

when the auratic mystique of rock and roll is stripped away; when endemically overpriced concert tickets can be had for the cost of a simple phone call; when jewel-encased compact discs are revealed as no more than cheap pieces of plastic that can be mass-distributed free of charge to anyone like me enterprising enough to ask for them; when artistic geniuses and personal heroes are revealed to be just guys who eat sandwiches and badger their daughters about homework (and it's not like david byrne has ever made any pretense about being just an ordinary guy - au contraire), well, faith in music can take something of a hit.

i found myself (as, the song says, "you may find yourself..." looking around at the crowd of mostly thirty- and forty-somethings shouting along in heartfelt unison, flailing their arms and torsos in a shared nostalgic reverie, to the unflagging pulse of "once in a lifetime," and it occurred to me for a moment that they might think of me with a similarly patronizing affection, as a wet-eared young turk (though rapidly becoming less so) - isn't it nice that a new generation is enjoying the music they used to listen to, back when they were my age.

and then i thought: this is the music of my generation. i grew up dancing to this song - in fact i first heard it not all that long after it was released (although my parents never owned a copy of remain in light, i have memories of stop making sense - which came out in 1984, when i was two - that predate my memories of almost any other album) - and i have been a talking heads fan all my life, and i don't know of anything that is more meaningful to me than the music they made, and the music david has made since.

and i can't psych that out of myself, and they can't disillusion that away from me.