David Byrne is easily the most fascinating artist working across genres. His latest book is called Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up (Penguin Random House). It is a fascinating read, and was made all the more interesting when he recently held a lecture as part of Live Talks Los Angeles at the Robert Frost Auditorium in Culver City, California.
Byrne delighted the crowd by elucidating several examples from his book and added two more, which he called bonus material. He started with the seemingly mundane (concrete) and ended with the titillating (the clitoris).
In between he touched on Botticelli and the symbiotic origin of cellular life.
Byrne started by pointing out that his thesis was not about the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, in which everyone went to sleep. Byrne was more interested in pointing out the variety of examples where everyone knew about something and then they didn’t. The most concise example is the Roman Coliseum: it was built 2000 years ago using concrete and remains in relatively great shape. But concrete in use these days is marketed with a life span of 50 years. That is why it was easy for the audience to recognize the images Byrne showed of collapsing new buildings and sidewalks needing rebar for support.
“Folks forgot the original recipe for concrete,” said Byrne. Apparently someone recently woke up and the original recipe will soon re-enter the market.
Byrne stood at the podium like the nerdy professor he always wanted to be, gesturing at his slides to emphasize certain points.
Early in his book, he asks “Why isn’t something I think is a wonderful inventive idea automatically broadly popular? My personal taste can’t be that different from everyone else’s.” That of course is an interesting topic in itself; Byrne has made some of the most inventive music of the last few decades and is still going strong in his stunning live performances.
In his book Byrne ranges from Vermeer to thermodynamics, from water management in South India to Franz Kafka.
Eclectic or just random? That is an enjoyable question about Byrne. At one point he even echoes one of his early lyrics: “Why bother asking annoying questions if you don’t need to?”
Both in the book and in his introductory remarks at the podium, Byrne made clear that he would not digress into works that we know existed, but are gone and lost forever. We know that Shakespeare wrote a sequel called Love’s Labour’s Won and that at least 20 books referred to in the Old Testament have never been found, such as the Gospel of Eve. “Might society ponder women differently if that book didn’t disappear,” Byrne ponders.
Invariably, Byrne writes about painters who died penniless (Vermeer, Van Gogh) whose works were later reawakened and now sell for unattainable amounts.
Byrne naturally touches on music, his principal oeuvre. Bach fell out of favor after his death because his compositions were modal. But being reliant on just one chord can still give you a lot of room; Byrne cites Kind of Blue (Miles Davis) and Remain Light (Talking Heads) as examples.
His writing style remains infectious; his four prior books remain a delight as well.
It was unlikely anyone unfamiliar with Byrne was in the audience, so they were accustomed to his charmingly eccentric demeanor. This is the second Byrne lecture I attended, he did a similar tour when he published Bicycle Diaries. His boyish excitement at the discovery of certain matters that were once popular but then lay sleeping was contagious.
In the end, Byrne asked the most poignant question, which is whether we were willing to look for the now-dormant that should be awakened.