David Byrne: Your Action World

I picked this up at the Ormeau Baths Gallery during the Belfast Festival in 1998 — David Byrne was exhibiting some of his photography there at the time. It's not really a CD, it's an art book, one section of which has a soundtrack to accompany the text, which is laid out like a corporate clip-art comic.

DB has done a whole series of works that seem to be inspired by the fellow travellers he's spotted in hotels around the world — but not the fellow rock bohemians, the corporate business footsoldiers.


One of the parts of the book I like most is the photos of the airless hotel meeting rooms, devoid of animated powerpoint-jockeys, their stackable chairs looking slightly askew and askance.

It's like DB wants to suggest there's something sublime going on in these humdrum theatrical spaces — but he doesn't commit to whether or not he believes his own suggestion. The subtitle of the CD is "An inspirational message from Mr David Byrne", but in more than one respect he's not (t)here. Unlike his songs, unlike his feature film, his voice, presence, even his many alter egos, are absent from image and soundtrack. And unlike Bongwater, DB is not denying ironic, parodic or postmodern intent. He's just presenting other people's intent like it was a found object. "Live your life around your dreams and you live life like the movie it was meant to be," could be a straight quote from a self-help book. But before long the way these elements have been collaged together, mashed up as they'd say now, reveals itself. So you get the photo of the silver-haired woman, looking like she's just been plucked from a pension scheme ad, and in the cartoon, as well as on the soundtrack, she's saying "Fuck the world. I'm ready to die." Texts from pretend relaxation tapes are read with throbbing Carmina-Burana-style strings undercutting them. A voice identified as a 'stoner' talks of taking an island paradise and turning it into golf courses "just a few hours non-stop flight from most major US cities."

It's all just one fifteen-minute track, performed by ten voices and library music.

Here's something I wrote five or six years ago about DB's later book Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (EEEI), which kind of develops along the same perspective.

In this light, you can see EEEI as a continuation of the pop-culture post-modernist pre-occupations that Byrne helped to define. These include a concern with surfaces and depth, cliché and profundity. Thus as Byrne says in the NPR interview EEEI "uses clichéd phrases… as free-floating poetic elements that I can rearrange as if they're blocks, and make them mean something completely different or reveal them to be as absurd as they actually are." Your Action World in particular includes many glib exhortations (in a kind of Anthony Robbins parody) combined in 'slide' form with collaged visuals. Mass-production images recur in Byrne's work and PowerPoint clip art is another extension of this. PowerPoint also allows Byrne to indulge an ambivalent and playful approach to lists and classifications (fellow travellers in this regard being artists like Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway).

EEEI continues David Byrne's dialogue with his faux-naif alter-ego. He played this part himself as Narrator of his film True Stories, described by one reviewer as "a thin, quiet, withdrawn figure with a voice so flat that you have to listen to the pauses to figure out when the sentences end." Later Byrne rehabilitated Bob Dylan's Mr Jones ("something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?") in a song that proposes that maybe the straight business types who don't know what's happening are the ones who can most easily find happiness ("Mr Jones, put a wiggle in your stride…I believe you'll be all right").

David Byrne seems obsessed by anonymous business-people; or more particularly by the anxiety that they might be happier than him, the highly-wrought [mops brow] artist. At the start of the EEEI book, Byrne writes, "using PowerPoint is fun and relatively easy. The pleasurable rewards come quickly and often. Your amateur presentation looks at least as good as any professional's. Unfortunately, you have become a pod person, and smug pseudo-bohemians like myself look down their noses at you. This does not matter, because being a pod person has its own rewards. Happiness, for starters." So Byrne feigns a desire to transform himself into a happy office worker: "rather than give in to my smarmy boho tendencies, I decided that I must surrender and learn to use this software myself, for, like everyone, I long to belong. I have a long way to go. I'm resistant. My presentations are sometimes unclear and confusing." Let's all sob boo-hoo for the boho who's slumming it with dumb software from the evil empire, safe in the knowledge he can return to arty towers any time it suits.

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Comments

[Medwyn Jones]

I never knew there was a CD with this - my copy (discounted to £4.99 at Book Warehouse) didn't come with one - and there doesn't seem to be anywhere to hold it either - is yours separate or housed within the book?

[David]

Hi Medwyn, The CD was/is in a separate jewel case, shown half way down this page. If the case was attached to the book at all, it must have been stuck to the outside of the plastic slipcase, since that slipcase is -- as I'm sure you've found -- a very tight fit.