Apropos nothing but a stray comment, here’s my ten favorite Talking Heads songs:
Road to Nowhere: Great road music, compulsively listenable, with dark, disturbing lyrical overtones. “There’s a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/And it’s all right/Baby it’s all right”
Dream Operator: Perhaps their most simple, beautiful, wistful song. “Let go of your life/Grab on to my hand/Here in the clouds/Where we’ll understand.” (The glass harmonica version off the Sounds From True Stories soundtrack is pretty wonderful as well.)
Burning Down the House (live version): I prefer the hard-charging, straight ahead version off Stop Making Sense, but it’s very close, as the spooky, echoey album version has much to recommend it as well. “People on their way to work said, ‘Baby what did you expect?’/Gonna burst into flame, go ahead.”
Heaven (live version): By contrast, the live version of this song is far better than the studio version. Their other wistful, beautiful song (though with far more ironic lyrics). “Heaven/Heaven is a place/A place where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”
The Overload: Dark, heavy and foreboding, with a slow, inescapable baseline and lyrics that bring to mind W. B. Yates’ “The Second Coming.” A song (to my mind) about the end of all things. Compare and contrast with Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel.” “A terrible signal…”
Life During Wartime (live version): Another burner. I wonder if combatants in any of the various conflicts going on around the world play this between firefights. “This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no foolin around…”
City of Dreams: Talking Heads at their most twangy. I wonder if disc jockeys at country stations ever slip this into the rotation. “We live in the city of dreams/We ride on this highway of fire/If we wake, and find it gone/Please remember this our favorite song.” (“City of Steel,” off the the Sounds From True Stories soundtrack, is even twangier.)
Memories Can’t Wait: A long, deep drink of neurotic paranoia from inside a damaged mind unable to control its thoughts or direction. “Don’t look so disappointed/It isn’t what you hoped for, is it?”
Hey Now: A pure dose of Zydeco-tinged, childlike goofiness. “Buy me a/rubber ball.”
Nothing But Flowers: Byrne’s paean to modern American society, while tweaking radical environmentalists. “I dream of cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate chip cookies!”
Honorable mention: Once in a Lifetime, Nothing But Flowers, Electric Guitar, Psycho Killer (live version), Walk It Down
And this is just the Talking Heads; favorite David Byrne songs would be a separate list.
UK’s Engineer’s deftly tread the boarders of Shoegaze, Dream Pop, and Psychedelia on “Clean Colored Wire.”
Ulrich Schnauss (who seems to be to shoegaze keyboard what Tony Levin is to progressive rock bass) is also part of the current incarnation of the band.
General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait
Directed by Barbet Schroeder
At this remove, few people remember how big Idi Amin Dada was in the 1970s. He wasn’t just an African dictator, he was the African dictator. Richard Pryor spoofed him on TV (“My name is Idi Amin Dada. That’s 3 A’s, 2 D’s, and one gun.”) He made the cover of Time magazine, back when it actually mattered. Never mind that Uganda is only the ninth most populous nation in Africa, or that Amin was arguably less murderous than (to name but a handful of African dictators) Haile Mengistu of Ethiopia, Francisco Macías Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, and possibly half a dozen others. Amin was well known in the 1970s, while the others remained obscure to all but foreign policy wonks.
I suspect that Barbet Schroeder’s documentary, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, had a lot to do with that. It’s a fascinating film about a man who was a ruthless dictator, giving access to a film crew in expectation that it would make a fine piece of propaganda, unaware of how nakedly it would reveal the vast gulf between his own self-image and reality. Amin was a man of limited intelligence and limitless ego, who would eventually adopt “”His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular” as his preferred title.
I knew that Idi Amin was crazy, but until I watched Schroeder’s documentary, I didn’t realize he was nine different types of crazy.
The film follows Amin around to several official and unofficial functions: reviewing troops in parade formation and field maneuvers, giving speeches, watching (and occasionally participating) in musical and dance performances, conducting a waterway nature tour, and conducting a cabinet meeting. All more-or-less normal for a modern head of state, except all these scenes play out differently than they would in a First World country. Amin watches paratroopers descend playground slides. He leads a mock assault on the Golan Heights with a force so small and ill-equipped it would have trouble capturing a 7-11. His cabinet meeting is filled with meaningless platitudes (“You should not be weak, like a woman”), and a voiceover tells us that the Minister of State Amin criticized ended up dead in the Nile two weeks later. He sends inexplicable letters to other heads of state (“If you were a woman, I would marry you,” he says to the President of Tanzania). He says he has prophetic dreams, including one telling him the time and place of his own death. He tells us he’s obtained a secret Israeli policy manual: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
And yet, despite all that, and despite knowing what a monster he was, the film also displays a playful, charismatic side to Amin. Like Dwight said while we were viewing it, “he’s like a big kid with the world’s biggest toybox.” He loved firing guns and riding boats and having jets fly overhead. He was a competent accordionist and an enthusiastic dancer.
It’s amazing that Amin let Schroeder film this. There was an hour version of this broadcast on Ugandan TV, and a 90 minute version released in the west. When Amin’s agents transcribed the longer film, the dictator only asked for about two and a half minutes of cuts. When Schroeder refused, Amin rounded up some 500 French citizens in Uganda, put them in a hotel surrounded by his troops, and gave them telephones and Schroeder’s phone number. The director caved to this censorship by hostage, but restored the footage once Amin was deposed.
I never cared about the America’s Cup, which has always been a race for rich guys to compete against each other. But this article on the crash of Oracle’s radical 13-story, rigid-sail driven ship is fascinating from both engineering and failure analysis perspectives.
Post crash footage:
And here’s Mark 2 of the boat, back on the water and hydroplaning:
Like most Oracle products, the ship seems to need a large number of consultants to keep it operating…
Stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen has died at age 92.
I’m pretty sure your average SF movie blogger can offer a more heartfelt and insightful obituary than I can, so instead, here’s a short documentary about how Harryhausen helped created the special effects in the underrated Valley of the Gwangi.
