Sunday, September 7, 2014

the last book I ever read (Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler, excerpt ten)

from Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker:

We started the DVD. It was a concert movies and David Byrne looked completely insane. He had no stage patter. He began singing “Psycho Killer” on a bare stage, with his guitar and a drum loop. I didn’t like it much. I glanced at Roz. She looked doubtful

“Hm,” I said,” shall we skip ahead?”

“Maybe.”

We skipped through several songs. “Slippery People” was a bit of a disappointment—more of the musicians were on the stage, including two backup singers who helped a lot, but it didn’t sound as good as the recorded version, with Tina Weymouth playing her clean thumpity-funk bass. There wasn’t much humanity in what David Byrne was doing. It was all too arty, too knowingly ironic. Maybe at a different time I would have liked it, but it definitely wasn’t the sort of thing to watch if you were with a person who was having a hysterectomy the next morning.



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