Sunday, December 24, 2006

This Must be the Place

That's the title of the Talking Heads song bouncing out of the computer speakers right now, with David Byrne's voice that always sounded to me like Silly Putty if it were a chord, but I've come to see more in my own art punk daze as a reckoning with suburbia, and a way of finding the animal and romantic in that, and when he says "love me 'till my heart stops/love me 'till I'm dead," it's like the chirpy keyboards and burbly xylophone--catapulting past irony to a post-ironic innocence, a place where the knowledge and malaise of the culture are not ignored but transformed, like in "Nothing But Flowers" where the restaurants and malls are all covered with flowers. Also, no one else that I know of has worn a gigantically oversized two-piece suit and looked as cool as David Byrne.

It's a bright, warm Christmas Eve, and Forest Park was studded with sleek joggers and feeding geese today, and it was cool to see the same sky inverted and rippling in the ponds that I've been jogging past on and off for about fifteen years now, and to get a homey feeling from it. The Talking Heads song is about home, and carries this sense of having reached a promised land, and I got that feeling in Colorado, where the mountains looked like gigantic spikes of some heart monitor reading, filled in with stone and snow, but neat how it followed me here. Hope it's finding you, too.

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