This is a clever little promo from A24 for the rerelease of Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, a concert film from 1984 featuring The Talking Heads — it, the promo, features David Byrne dropping into his dry cleaners to pick up an old, big suit. As for the film, it's getting a 4K restoration and will be out sometime later this year.
"Stop Making Sense" stars core band members David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison along with Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steve Scales, Lynn Mabry and Edna Holt. The live performance was shot roughly 40 years ago over the course of three nights at Hollywood's Pantages Theater in December of 1983. It features Talking Heads' most memorable songs, including "Burning Down the House," "Once in a Lifetime" and "This Must Be the Place."
"There was a band. There was a concert," the Talking Heads said in a statement. "This must be the movie!"
The legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael loved the film, calling it "close to perfection" in this contemporary review:
The director, Jonathan Demme, offers us a continuous rock experience that keeps building, becoming ever more intense and euphoric. This has not been a year when American movies overflowed with happiness; there was some in Splash, and there's quite a lot in All of Me — especially in its last, dancing minutes. Stop Making Sense is the only current movie that's a dose of happiness from beginning to end. The lead singer, David Byrne, designed the stage lighting and the elegantly plain performance-art environments (three screens used for back-lit slide projections); there's no glitter, no sleaze. The musicians aren't trying to show us how hot they are; the women in the group aren't there to show us some skin. Seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy — which turns out to be just what you wanted.
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A group called Choir! Choir! Choir! recently put on a show in NYC where they taught the audience to accompany them on a song, in this case, David Bowie's Heroes sung by David Byrne. Byrne wrote up the experience in his online journal:
What happens when one sings together with a lot of other people?
A couple of things I immediately noticed. There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing... and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up.
The second thing that happens involves the physical act of singing. I suspect the regulated breathing involved in singing, the act of producing sound and opening one's mouth wide calls many many neural areas into play. The physical act, I suspect, releases endorphins as well. In singing, we get rewarded by both mind and body.
No one has to think about any of the above-we "know" these things instinctively. Anyone who has attended a gospel church service, for example, does not need to be told what this feels like.
So, the reward experience is part of the show.
That's really thrilling and cool to watch. You can check out some of Choir! Choir! Choir!'s other performances on their YouTube channel, including Zombie by The Cranberries, Free Fallin' by Tom Petty, Karma Police by Radiohead, and Passionfruit by Drake. (via ted gioia)
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Based on his world travels and city biking, David Byrne imagines his ideal city.
If a city doesn't have sufficient density, as in L.A., then strange things happen. It's human nature for us to look at one another — we're social animals after all. But when the urban situation causes the distance between us to increase and our interactions to be less frequent we have to use novel means to attract attention: big hair, skimpy clothes and plastic surgery. We become walking billboards.
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