"You may ask yourself: how did I get here?"
The main question that Talking Heads launched in Once in a Lifetime already has an answer.
It is answered by the same guy who raised it four decades ago, the one who was the leader of the most intellectual of the New York New Wave gangs, a Scotsman with a privileged head.
"It turns out that nothing was inevitable," David Byrne finally reveals.
The musician, but also a filmmaker, photographer and writer, had an epiphany seeing life go by isolated from all contact during the days of confinement.
Looking at his body.
Reconsidering his priorities and values.
Questioning his daily routine.
Like everyone.
"History is not what has happened, but what we agree has happened according to our biased interests," he says.
This is his (graphic) version of the facts.
Phaidon
It is called
A History of the World (in Dingbats)
and it reads like the account of a shared experience.
An "Once upon a time", from the atomic model of Democritus to the nasal society of the PCR, narrated in a hundred long illustrations, emotional testimonies of a quarantined thinker.
Byrne (Dumbarton, 1952; naturalized American at the age of eight) channeled his fears, concerns and longings through drawing —one more passion/talent— in the hope of concluding that, indeed, another world is possible.
Or that it is possible to imagine it, at least.
That the resource used for this is that of the dingbat, the curlicue, the ornamental stick figure that helps to separate more or less intimidating blocks of text and fluff up reading spaces, says a lot about the author's intentions.
Curious: dingbats is also what they say in English to those who are dim-witted.
good irony,
Phaidon
With exquisite design and impeccable editing by his friend, journalist, artist and curator Alex Kalam (director of the Mmuseumm, New York's museum of the human condition), the volume also includes Byrne's thoughts on what was and what could be. , if we have learned anything from these pandemic years.
They are aphorisms, epigrams, verses that, like the lyrics of the drawings, are immediately identified with the stream of consciousness of the author of Psycho Killer, Born under Punches, Road to Nowhere, Lazy or Here.
“My hope is that others will recognize themselves in some of these images,” he says.
"I guess like the songs, they're not just about me."