Chronicler of the Weird has Finger on the Button
The Globe and Mail, October 9, 1995
By Elizabeth Renzetti

Talking Heads founder David Byrne is short on words, but his photographs speak volumes of his obsession with things both odd and mundane.

DAVID Byrne, erstwhile Talking Head and continuing chronicler of the weird, stops at an unused conference room in his hotel, drawn to the cryptic scribbling on a chalk board.

" 'Light transmission in shoulder porcelain,' " he reads in his famously deadpan voice. " 'Pulpal sensitivities from various cements.' Definitely sounds dental."

Exchange "mental" for "dental" and you'd have some sense of Byrne's affinity for the world's obsessives and mundanely freakish events. His fascination is apparent in his new book of photographs, Strange Ritual, which documents everything from Turkish religious relics to hotel-room
interiors with a dispassionate but affectionate eye.

The thread that binds them, implicit in the title, is that each of the images details something that, at least in the remote corners of David Byrne's mind, is sacred. That means a meticulously laid out store window is as worthy of contemplation as a pristine sand cone at a Shinto shrine in Japan. It means that chairs, featured prominently among his photographs, deserve a certain respect.

"There's something about a chair that's like a person," says Byrne, sitting pale and somewhat wary on a couch in his hotel room. "It's easy to imagine a chair with a personality. If you knock a chair over, it looks like a person who's fallen over."

He's so quiet, so still, that it's unclear whether leg-pulling is involved. Yet anyone who's followed Byrne's career, from his band's first album, Talking Heads '77, to the feature film True Stories, knows that he takes the mundane very seriously. This is a man whose band once recorded an album called More Songs About Buildings and Food.

In his new book, he's equally drawn to obsession: He devotes pages to the public rantings of lunatics (or prophets), and one to the crucifix-laden wall of a Portuguese man who's carved them all his life.

"Whether it's the nutty window displays in shops, religous displays, or this kind of obsessive behaviour, to me it seems a pure, unschooled, untainted kind of expression." At the same time, he says, he fights a tendency to romanticize this unbalanced act of creation, to regard it as more honest than what a straight mind would produce.

A trip through Strange Ritual reveals a strange absence: while compulsive behaviour and everyday items are on display, their creators are not. It's as though a neutron bomb has landed, wiping out all human life while leaving intact furniture and relics.

"There's a lot of people photos around," says Byrne, who took a series of photos that featured nothing but fellow humans after leaving the Rhode Island School of Design more than two decades ago. "In a funny way, the evidence people leave and things they make and worlds they create for
themselves reveal more about their inner workings and passions and thoughts than their own physical appearance."

Byrne, 43, travels the world taking photographs - while touring, while vacationing, while finding interesting new music for his worldbeat label, Luaka Bop. He photographs what he stumbles upon, rarely manipulating the images. He's surprised only when he doesn't find what he's not sure he's
looking for. He returned from Peru and Russia, for example, disappointed that he didn't see much he wanted to put on film.

America doesn't interest Byrne as a subject any more; it's been "picked over." (Not least by himself, in True Stories, a National Enquirer-ish, good-natured sendup of heartland weirdos, all set to Talking Heads music.) Yet, even on a promotional tour in Canada, he can't escape the absurdities streaming from his home country.

On Tuesday, Byrne had been at the CBC building to tape Morningside just before the verdict was read in the O. J. Simpson trial. CBC employees gathered around televisions to watch the verdict, with Byrne in their midst. A collective gasp went up when the "not guilty" was read, prompting one CBCer to yell, "Americans are so stupid!" There were murmurs of assent until everyone froze in guilt, realizing they had Mr. New York in their midst.

Perhaps they didn't know that Byrne was born in Scotland, and moved to Ontario with his parents when he was an infant. His memories, he says dryly, consist of "walks from upper Hamilton to lower Hamilton, it being more or less a dirty industrial city. I understand it's changed since then."

As an artist, he's strongly identified with places: first New York City, where he still lives with his wife and daughter, and later South America, from which his solo music draws inspiration. Talking Heads,
formed 20 years ago, was the quintessential New York band, performing cool, sophisticated songs about paranoia, altered states and, at the end, redemption through love and family.

Although Byrne is the same as he ever was (except with longer hair), Talking Heads is no more. The group broke up in 1991 after recording 10 albums. Three remaining members have recently recorded under the name The Heads, but Byrne is not keen to discuss them. He says that he still keeps in touch with keyboardist Jerry Harrison, but that Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz won't talk to him. Why not? "I don't know," he says with finality. "You'd have to ask them." There will not be, he insists, a Talking Heads reunion.

Instead, he takes pictures, records his solo albums, and hunts obscure international acts for his label (the latest is a British band he describes as "punk rock with sitars").

During the interview, music is the subject that finally animates the notoriously reticent Byrne, from whom words flow with the ease of toothpaste from an empty tube. When asked what he's listening to, he generously presents his portable CD cases for examination. They reveal a man still in love with popular music: Randy Newman and Jimi Hendrix, TLC and Blur, Emmylou Harris and the songs of Cole Porter, and several discs by the Brazilian lyricist, Vinicius de Moraes.

Music on disc alone doesn't satisfy Byrne's creative itch. After winning an Oscar for the score of The Last Emperor, he's continued to direct documentaries and produce soundtracks, including the forthcoming "aural painting of Brooklyn" accompanying Wayne Wang's Blue in the Face. It was a film, Don Juan de Marco, that brought Byrne and the slain tejano star Selena together for a duet that appears on her successful, posthumous English-language debut, Dreaming of You. The wonders of
technology meant they didn't record in the studio together, but Byrne says he's "thrilled" with the result.

"She seemed to be uniting a lot of people through what she was doing, by the fact that she was so popular, which I thought was a great thing," he says. Even though "she was more of a symbol than a musical innovator. "I haven't seen them, but apparently people make shrines to her all over Texas." That sounds as though it contains all the right elements for the chronicler and his camera.

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