I got to discuss the book on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth.
SAFETY DANCE
How the safety pin became a revolutionary fashion accessory.
Text by Ted Kulczycky
In the spring of 1849, inventor and mechanic Walter Hunt nervously fidgeted with a small piece of wire while trying to figure out a way to pay off his debts. Among this New Yorker’s inventions had been a streetcar bell, street-sweeping machines, an ice plough, a semi-automatic rifle, and an early sewing machine (which his seamstress sister wouldn’t let him patent because she believed it would put too many people out of work). Despite his immense productivity, Hunt was frequently cash-poor, due to his equally immense gambling habit. But his anxiety managed to convert a small wire into a prototype safety pin, which won him $400 when he sold the patent.
Hunt probably should have held out for more. The recent invention of the microscope had revealed microorganisms as the cause of much disease, and hygiene was beginning to be seen as more of a health concern than a social problem. The washable cloth diaper rapidly replaced the hide-skins that had previously been the norm, and Hunt’s safety pin replaced the clumsy ties that held them. Cloth diapers were being mass-produced by the 1880s. By the ’40s, diaper-washing services were used in middle-class cities across North America, and Hunt’s invention was attached to each and every “present” Junior gave Mommy.
But the introduction of the feminine sanitary napkin gave parents ideas, and by the early ’60s, a number of disposable diapers were on the market. By the mid-’70s, Pampers basically eradicated their cloth counterparts, and the safety pin was replaced by sticky tape. At around the same time, however, a young poet-musician-addict accidentally discovered same new uses for Hunt’s safety pin: political statement and fashion object.
Richard Meyers moved to New York City in the late ’60s with his prep-school chum, Tom Miller. After several years of working in bookstores and operating a small press, Meyers and Miller changed their names to Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine and formed the band Television. Unlike most bands of the era, Television wore their everyday clothes when they performed. Hell’s filthy unkempt hair and generally dishevelled appearance had already made an impression before he arrived at punk mecca CBGB, his shredded t-shirt held together by safety pins.
Hell has long maintained that this wasn’t meant to be any kind of statement, but was simply a way of holding his clothes together. This explanation has never really made much sense: why not just wear another shirt? Photographer and friend Bob Gruen filled in the missing details. What Hell neglected to mention was that, after a very recent fight with his live-in girlfriend, she took a razor blade to all his clothes.
As it happened, Malcolm McLaren (husband of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and aspiring music impresario) was spending a good deal of time in New York, looking to find musicians to steal and to steal from. His plan was to package his Dadaist politics with his wife’s confrontational fashion sense and graft them on to a prepackaged ’70s boy band (think of The Osmonds or the Bay City Rollers). Although he was unable to mold any New York musicians to exactly his ideal, he returned to his native England full of fashion notes and musical concepts from the New York scene, including Richard Hell’s unique garb.
By mid-1975, McLaren had formed the Sex Pistols, drawing from the disenfranchised youth who hung out at his wife’s boutique. Sex (later called Seditionaries). Littered among the S/M garb, spray-painted t-shirts, and dog collars that the band wore were clothes held together by safety pins.
One of the employees at the McLaren-Westwood shop was Jordan (born Pamela Crooke). By common consent, Jordan was not only the first “punk” in the United Kingdom, she was also its most consistent media image. Virtually every British television report and newspaper story that appeared on punk in the late ’70s featured an image of Jordan in her suggestive outfits with cropped and sculpted dayglo hair.
Much credit is due her for defining punk’s image, but she often claims to have also invented the safety pin as fashion statement. “Johnny (Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols) always tells the story of how he went into Sex one day – I had on this T-shirt with a big rip right across the front, so I’d put in a safety pin to cover it up. Johnny thought it was great, and the safety pin thing started there and then.”
Since both McLaren and Rotten dispute this account (and give proper credit to
Richard Hell), Jordan’s memory seems faulty. However, she may have been the first to use a safety pin as jewelry. There are pictures of her in the early punk era with safety pins piercing various parts of her body, whereas the other punks from that era seem relatively unscathed. By the late ’70s, this was standard practice among aspiring punks. There were (unsubstantiated) rumours that certain clubs had “dress codes” requiring piercings. If
you showed up without the appropriate gear, the doorman conveniently had a safely pin and pencil eraser (but no antiseptic ointment) ready to improve your image.
By the early ’90s, punk had morphed into grunge and “alternative,” and the days of mohawks and safety pins seemed as quaint as ducktails and zoot suits. The late-night drunken bathroom piercings of yesteryear gave way to midday drunken visits to “body artist” boutiques. The stainless steel barbell became the standard starter piece.
Of course, the safety pin continues to be used as an ad hoc clothing mender and fastener for badges and buttons. But as a symbol, the safety pin is no longer dangerous. It is worn like a support ribbon to promote patient safety measures in the medical industry, and every September 10, many American schools celebrate Safety Pin Day.
But in the spring of 2005, Vivienne Westwood launched her “Hardcore Diamonds” jewelry line. For the low starting price of $400, any street punk could use a gold safety pin (with a .05-karat diamond setting) to hold their ratty t-shirt together, Perhaps, if he were alive today, Walter Hunt would use the $400 he received for inventing the safety pin to purchase one of these must-have fashion items.
Here is a pretty scholarly piece I wrote about Do the Right Thing. It’s title is, and always has been, BY ANY MEANINGS NECESSARY. The play on words (whether or not it was as clever as I thought) was intended as a comment on academic postmodernism and the difference between the nature of political activism in the 1960s vs the 1980s. Much to my frustration, this article is often mistitled online as BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, which is a simple unnuanced reference to a famous Malcom X quote.
It has become a cliche to assert that “conflict is the basis of all drama.” In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) conflict is more than a structural necessity: conflict is the explicit subject matter and ultimately saturates every element of this film. Appropriately enough, conflict has also proved to be the only constant in discussions of Lee’s work. Like many of the characters in Do the Right Thing, the vast majority of critics have been quick to choose sides, either condemning or praising Lee’s film. Much of this debate has centred on a single scene. Mookie, portrayed by Lee himself, throws a trash can through the window of his place of employment, Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. While the moral implications of this scene have been discussed ad nauseam, a number of important considerations about the film have been completely overlooked:
1. While some theorists take great care to catalogue the “internal contradictions” and “shifting antimonies” in certain films, no one has yet taken on the task of a comprehensive indexing of the conflicts within and surrounding Do the Right Thing. Surely, a film expressly about conflict deserves this type of analysis.
2. Whether or not we agree or disagree with what we perceive as Do the Right Thing‘s political stance, we must acknowledge that films and filmmakers are not born from vacuums. Regardless of Lee’s artistic and political intentions, the film (like all an) is also a product of the society in which it was created. Hence, the film is not merely a projection of Lee’s political views but also a reflection of our culture as a whole. Our extreme reactions to the film might suggest more about the way we as individuals and as a society understand racial conflict, and conflict in general, than they do about Spike Lee’s political agenda.
Conflict in Bedford-Stuyvesant
Every level of meaning in Do the Right Thing is saturated with conflict. Most apparent are the conflicts between characters. There are at least one hundred and twenty four separate confrontations in the film’s screenplay. Although distinct, these incidents are not isolated. One of Lee’s strongest skills as a writer is his ability to carry emotional overtones across scenes and sequences. After Sal (Danny Aiello) finally gets Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) to turn off his boombox during their initial confrontation, we hear Raheem shout from off-screen, “Yo! Put some more mozzarella on that motherfucker n’ shit.” This line echoes Sal’s earlier encounter with Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), cuing us to the compounded tensions Sal is experiencing. Ultimately, this cumulative tension informs the climax, as do pervasive conflicts from the real world (the Howard Beach incident, among others, is referred to directly). In the complex web of tensions, a number of distinct types of conflict can be distilled. Obviously, issues of race dominate but they do not supersede other concerns.
Our first exposure to the tensions between characters follows D.J. Mister Senor Love Daddy’s (Sam Jackson) radio wake up call. Mookie wakes his sister, Jade (Joie Lee), who informs him angrily that “Saturday is the only day I get to sleep in.” As Mookie persists, Jade demands “Shouldn’t you be at work?”. The next conflict we witness is again between siblings. Sal tells Pino (John Turturro) to sweep the stoop of the pizzeria. Pino prompdy passes the task to Vito (Richard Edson) who objects, “Pop asked YOU.” Their ensuing spat prompts Sal to note “I’m going to kill somebody today.” In these two scenes, Lee introduces familial conflict and hints at the gender conflict that will be explored later. Considering that Lee himself has four siblings, it should come as no surprise that familial tensions form a major theme.Territorial disputes also run rampant in Lee’s Bed-Stuy. A minor but illustrative example is the boombox duel between Radio Raheem and Stevie (Luis Ramos). More interesting is the confrontation between Buggin’ Out and the white yuppie, Clifton (John Savage). Ostensibly about damage to a pair of sneakers, the argument rapidly escalates to Buggin’s rhetorical “Who told you to buy a brownstone in my neighbourhood!?” Issues of race are here inextricably linked to issues of territory.
Related to the territorial disputes is the confrontation between the Mayor and Ahmad. “Who elected you Mayor of this block anyhow?” queries the younger challenger. The Mayor attacks the man’s youth, suggesting that Ahmad “can’t pee straight” and that his parents raised him better than that. This scene’s subtext hints at other types of conflict as well, but clearly part of the problem is a generation gap.
Money is also a source of conflict for the citizens of the block. Buggin’ and Sal’s initial confrontation begins with a dispute over the price of extra cheese. The tension builds as Buggin’ demands that Sal put some photos of African-Americans on the pizzeria’s “Wall of Fame,” which consists entirely of Italian-Americans: “Since we spend much money in here we do have some say.” When Sal refuses, Buggin’ attempts to organize a boycott in the hope that economic pressure will change Sal’s mind.
Sexual tension is also in evidence, although not as explicitly as in some of Lee’s other films. Sal’s painfully obvious flirtations with Jade evoke negative reactions from both Pino and Mookie, as we can tell from a tracking shot of the identical expressions on their faces. Mother Sister’s (Ruby Dee) insults eventually become a form of flirtation as her relationship with the Mayor improves. Mookie’s relationship with Tina (Rosie Perez) is portrayed as passionate but strained, due to Mookie’s difficulty in accepting his responsibilities. Both Tina and Jade repeatedly remind Mookie that he has commitments that he must try to live up to. Although Lee portrays some of his characters within the gendered stereotypes of “women as responsible nags” vs. “men as irresponsible good-for-nothings,” he weaves these questions of responsibility more deeply into the film’s conflictive network.
Most of Sal’s confrontations with Mookie stem from Mookie’s disregard for his responsibilities as an employee. Buggin’s exhortation to “Stay Black” is intended to remind Mookie that he has obligations that may take priority over his commitment to his employer. Both the title of the film and its climax relate to questions of responsibility. Had any of the characters involved in the climax behaved more responsibly, Radio Raheem’s death (and therefore the destruction of Sal’s pizzeria) could have been avoided. Sal could have put African-Americans on the wall, or been slower to reach for his baseball bat. Buggin” Out could have been, as Jade puts it, “down for something positive in the community.” Mookie might have actually become involved in the dispute while there was still a chance of diffusing the tension. Sal could have politely asked Raheem to turn down the music. Instead he bellows, “No service until you turn that shit off.” Indeed, on any day other than the hottest of the year, the fate of these characters may have been quite different. As Lee notes in his pre-production journal, “It’s been my observation that when the temperature rises beyond a certain point, people lose it…the heat makes everything explosive, including the racial climate.” The characters are, in a sense, engaged in a conflict with the environment itself.
The Non-diegetic Conflicts of Do Me Right Thing: Sights
One of the few aspects of Lee’s work that is not the subject of fierce debate is his working familiarity with a wide variety of cinematic techniques, as well as his willingness to experiment with them undogmatically. Lee used to deny stylistic influences beyond Jarmusch, Scorsese and Van Peebles, but has recently confessed a surprising fondness for such films as Help! (1965, Richard Lester) and A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan). Lee’s wide range of influences is perhaps most evidenced in Do the Right Thing.
Expressionist influences are exhibited in the film’s opening dance sequence. The stylized two-dimensional backdrop combines with high contrast (yet colourful) lighting to evoke the horrible worlds of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Of course, many expressionist codes have been adopted by mainstream music videos and because of this their use here seems less anachronistic than some of Lee’s other techniques.
Contrasting the expressionism is Lee’s use of the conventional codes of realism. In most scenes, Lee obeys the dictums of the classic Hollywood continuity editing style. Eyelines always match; the axis of action is usually obeyed (barring a new establishing shot); dialogue is often covered in the “shot/reverse shot” manner. The finer points of the style are also in evidence. Tradition has it that cuts should be “smooth” and not jar the eye of the spectator. Thus, when cutting between two shots of the same subject, image size and/or camera angle should change so the change is not perceived as the mere absence of frames, or a “jump”. Our introduction to “the corner men” begins with an extreme long shot, then cuts to a long shot and finally ends on a medium three-shot. Although he does not change the angle, Lee smooths the cuts by using the passing cars as wipes. Lee does not restrict the film’s realism to the editing. While we are concentrating on the activity inside Sal’s, a passing glance through the window will reveal other recognizable characters going about their business on the street. This passive use of deep-focus photography reinforces the sense of a real world, which exists with or without the direct attention of the camera.
A multitude of hand-held and zoom shots appeal to codes of ultra-realism familiar from documentaries. One might expect this style to clash violently with the classical cutting habits, but Lee somehow manages to get them to hang together. When Sal asks Mookie to remove Buggin’ from the pizzeria, the camera that had provided the establishing medium shot follows the two out the door. After their conversation on the street the camera pulls back into the pizzeria, following Mookie. It comes to rest in a new position, thus providing a new establishing shot. A conversation between Sal, Pino and Mookie ensues and subsequent cuts obey the new axis of action.
The illusion of reality is partially broken by a string of direct addresses to the camera. A quick zoom forward introduces the slanderous soliloquies. As Mookie, Pino, Stevie, the Policeman, and Sonny deliver in turn their hateful speeches, the camera holds fast, dead on. This direct address seems inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), but is also reminiscent of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1968). Certainly, Radio Raheem’s similarly-shot speech regarding love and hate was inspired by Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955). Whatever the sources, Lee’s break with traditional realism has an atypical effect in this sequence. Due to the build up of tension throughout the course of the narrative, we experience a sense of mounting alienation (parallel to that of the characters) and thus anticipate a cathartic release. These racist rants satisfy our expectations, while their crudity increases the overall tone of alienation. The usual effect of this type of break from realism is simply the subversion of audience expectation as a reminder of film’s constructed nature. Here, Lee’s use of the direct address actually fuels our involvement with the narrative, at the same time as it makes us uncomfortable with our character empathization.
Love and hate figure in the most drastically conflicting of Lee’s styles. Lee uses a number of techniques inspired by 1920’s Soviet filmmakers. Montage sequences are now common currency in virtually every style of filmmaking, and Lee’s use of them merits no special attention. More subtle techniques, such as Eisenstein’s “Rhythmic Montage” have also found their way into many types of film. However, “repeat cuts” have enjoyed but two brief resurgences (in Godard and Music Videos) and have never really been explored enough to better Eisenstien’s delicate use of them in Battleship Potemkin (1925). By 1989, even MTV had deemed them passe and it seems odd that two of them appear in Do the Right Thing. One occurs upon Mookie’s reunion with Tina. We see the same shot of their kiss twice in quick succession. After Mookie yells “HATE!”, we see the projectile trash can break through the pizzeria window twice (although from different shots). These doublings are used (like the repeat cuts in Potemkin regarding revolutionary consciousness) to accentuate decisive action (here regarding love and hate).
Lee’s film also contains a number of “long takes.” Most notable is a six-minute scene that occurs precisely at the film’s midpoint. Sal and Pino discuss the future of their business in the window of the pizzeria.The sixminute scene is covered by a single shot that begins with a brief zoom in. Although often associated with Welles, the long take style is usually considered to have reached its zenith in the work of the Italian neorealists. Their over-arching aesthetic demanded that cinema be ultra-real. Characters had to be human, and plots had to be about common everyday occurrences. Most importantly, the neorealists held that style and artistic embellishments should be shunned as much as possible. If a scene could be covered by a single shot, then it was. Many consider the neorealists to be the polar opposite of the Soviet school. Where the Soviet films focused on mass revolts, the neorealists concerned themselves with individual hardship. Where the Soviets utilized abstract symbolism, the neorealists shunned all metaphor. Where the Soviets might have thirty cuts in twenty seconds of film, the neorealists might have none in eight minutes of screen time.
It is not entirely unheard of for a filmmaker to be influenced by both neorealism and Soviet montage. However, repeat cuts and five minute static takes seem to be at the extremes of each technique. Lee’s solution to this conflict of styles is undramatic. Neither style proves its supremacy, nor do they coalesce into a compromised synthesis. The conflicting styles simply coexist, side by side, in the same motion picture.
The Non-diegetic Conflicts of Do the Right Thing Sounds
To date, the most coherent articles written about Do the Right Thing have examined its relationship to various musical styles. More will be said about this later, but Victoria E. Johnson’s “Polyphony and Cultural Expression” seems the definitive work on Lee’s use of music. A brief survey of Johnson’s model of Lee’s musical system will reveal conflict within the soundtrack of Do the Right Thing.
Johnson posits the presence of two distinct types of music in the film. She labels these the historic-nostalgic, and the contemporary-popular. The very first clash of the film is between these styles. As the studio logo appears on-screen, we hear several quiet bars of a mournful and complacent saxophone. Suddenly as the screen goes red we hear the aggressive rhythmic opening of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”
Within each of these styles are further divisions. The historic-nostalgic cleaves into romantic folkinflected string arrangements and jazz. This division is heard during Pino and Sal’s long discussion. The light string arrangements that begin the scene are overtaken by the struggling jazz riffs that creep in as their conversation intensifies.
The contemporary-popular tradition segments into several fragments but can be characterized as “rap vs. everything else.” The obvious example is Raheem and Stevie’s boombox duel. Johnson suggests that the film’s musical clashes jolt the “classical spectator” (who is passively manipulated by the music) into an active role. This is perhaps putting it too strongly. Many spectators may be completely accustomed to (and, for that matter, enjoy) both hip-hop and jazz. However, it is likely that the different musics have different effects and carry different associations for the polyglot spectator. While the music can be taken at face value, each of these divisions carry cultural connotations which encourage individual interaction with the musical text, regardless of a conscious “jolt”.
Again, Do the Right Thing exhibits no attempt to somehow reconcile conflicting styles. Jazz and hip-hop just co-exist within the film without either becoming “victorious” and without either being compromised into a “synthesis”.
Conflicting Ideologies, the Ideology of Conflict
The power of language is often discussed, but only non-verbal artists ever take note of its essential weaknesses. It is unfortunate that we who live by the word (i.e. academics) do not assess its inadequacies more often because such discussions will ultimately benefit our language and ourselves. Many of our words, like all cultural artifacts, are laden with hidden values, judgements, and perhaps even ideologies.
The words conflict, contest, and contradict are but a few of the words we often use interchangeably to describe a particular phenomenon. When we see this phenomenon occur within something we understand to be an individual unit, we use words like unintelligible, irrational or incoherent. When we see this phenomenon dissipate between individuals, we use words such as resolution, reconcile and solution. It seems, initially, appropriate enough to use any or all of these terms in discussions of Do the Right Thing, However, close examination of critical responses to the film, in light of its treatment of the Martin Luther King/Malcom X dichotomy, suggest that these terms may, one and all, misrepresent the film’s approach to conflict.
The first real critical response to the film occurred following its premiere screening in competition at the 1989 Cannes film festival. Reportedly it failed to win any awards because jury chairman, Wim Wenders, felt that Mookie didn’t behave like a hero.
Wenders was seriously confused about both the film and the conflict in it. He was obviously reading the conflicts in the film as some sort of racial game with heroes and villains. Probably, Wenders is not so simple as to expect a “good guys beat the bad guys” ending. Perhaps he was expecting Mookie to somehow stop the police from murdering Radio Raheem. More likely, he saw the Malcom X point of view as decidedly unheroic. He wanted Mookie not to throw the trash can and instead (in Pino’s words) “talk some brothertalk” to calm the rioters and create racial harmony.
If Wenders was not simple enough to expect a “good guys triumph” ending, some American critics recognized one in the climax of Do the Right Thing. Terrence Rafferty wrote in the New Yorker. “Raheem certainly doesn’t deserve his fate but without the racial epithet Lee would have a hard time convincing any audience that Sal deserves his… if you think, as I do, that not every individual is a racist, that angry words are no more revealing than any other kind, and that trashing a small business is a woefully imprecise image of fighting the power, then you have to conclude that Spike Lee has taken a wild shot and missed the target”. Surprisingly enough, Spike Lee seems to think as Terrence Rafferty does. When asked if destroying the pizzeria was “fighting the power,” Lee replied: “It’s the power at the moment. But when it’s burnt down, he’s back to square one, even worse…(all you end up with is no place to have pizza)… that’s very powerful at the moment but it’s fleeting”. Lee and Rafferty seem to be in full agreement about the destruction of the pizzeria. So, either the film misrepresents Lee’s beliefs or Rafferty’s reading is way off the mark.
Given Lee’s skills as a filmmaker, it seems more likely that Rafferty’s contempt stems direcdy from his own ideology about drama, the King/X dichotomy and conflict in general. He automatically interprets Mookie’s actions as “the right thing” and therefore assumes that the climax is meant to represent the triumph of good heroes over evil villains. He goes on to suggest that the King/X quotes which end the film are merely token gestures of ambivalence, masking Lee’s allegiance to the X school. The above quote from Lee, which portrays the riot as ultimately unproductive, is an obvious representation of King’s “eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” If Lee’s ambivalence is tokenistic, he is remarkably convincing. Rafferty is assuming that everyone (filmmaker and spectator) has a preformed opinion (i.e. ideology) that is either to be projected (for the filmmaker) or reinforced (for the spectator). In Rafferty’s vision, no one is allowed the privilege of confusion, doubt, or open-mindedness.
Lee’s supporters can be equally simplistic. Although none has suggested that Lee fells into the King camp, a number of critics believe the film portrays a compromising “synthesis” of the King and X views. James Hurst suggests that Mookie’s toss of the trash can both saves Sal’s life, and sparks the riot that destroys the “endorsed establishment of the hegemony.” While not an inaccurate reading of the film, Mookie’s action, thus interpreted, does not have the makings of a coherent synthesis of X and King. Lee noted the futility of the destruction, and Hurst notes that the act is based in hate. Neither Lee nor Hurst seems to be portraying X as an advocate of hateful futile violence. The violence condoned by Malcom X was explicitly “self defense”.
Perhaps Hurst is invoking panAfricanist Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon suggests that the psychological damage rendered by institutionalized racism can be reversed through violent catharsis. This point of view is much more difficult to “synthesize” with King’s as it explicitly feeds “the downward spiral.”
Lee has claimed that the film is, indeed, a synthesis. But, as noted at the outset, filmmakers and films are subject to cultural forces that are not necessarily conscious or intentional. In Do the Right Thing, no particular ideology is valorized and no contradictions are synthesized.
Postmodernity and the Right Thing?
James Hurst suggests that Do the Right Thing represents the cinematic component of hip-hop culture. When his article was published (1990) very little had been written about hip-hop. Since that time, much work has been done and a number of illuminating theories have come to light. One of the explanations bandied about most is ‘postmodernism.’
Postmodernism continues to be the subject of much theoretical and political debate. Part of the problem is the free use of the term to designate phenomena as disparate as socio-historic-economic conditions and a species of critical inquiry. Moreover, as Jonathan Arac notes, the line between the theoretical and the political debates is unclear and thus, “to ‘have a position’ on postmodernism means not just to give an analysis of its genesis and contours, but to let the world know whether you are for or against it, and in fairly bold terms.” Many hold that postmodernism, in its resistance to metanarratives, signals the end of history and the death of politics. Luckily for the doomsayers, postmodernism still seems to lack any comprehensive theoretical paradigm. The best that we can do, according to Jim Collins, is address a series of recurring themes.
The key precondition for postmodernism is the bombardment of signs. Known as a semiotics of excess, postmodernism presupposes the proliferation of symbols and texts that we encounter in our mass-mediated urban world. Following from this condition are intertextuality and hyperconsciousness. Hyperconsciousness is the psychological response to/symptom of the proliferation. Intertextuality is simply the perceived presence of pre-existing or co-existing texts within an individual work. Both Do the Right Thing and hip-hop exhibit evidence of all of these themes. In any one hip-hop song, an almost infinite number of previously recorded songs may be digitally sampled. As we have seen, Do the Right Thing references a remarkable range of cinematic and musical styles while engaging in a political dialogue that precedes and surrounds the film. Advocates of postmodernism call this political/aesthetic system “bricolage”, while opponents call it “cannibalism.”
The most distinguishing, and most contentious, characteristic of postmodernism is its accommodation of multiple and contradictory “subject positions”. Advocates hold that postmodernism is the only critical theory capable of recognizing a spectrum of spectatorship. Assuming a relativist stance, postmodernism rejects both the hypodermic model of the subject (values directly injected into the spectator) and the “free will” notion (texts having no significant effect). Postmodern subjects position themselves within a text, based on any combination of social, cultural, aesthetic, moral or political factors. This supposedly accounts not only for multiple and contradictory readings of texts, but also for a text’s inherent contradictions.
Do the Right Thing is a film rife with contradictions. As a postmodern text, it displays no internal compulsion to somehow resolve them. Throughout the film, Mookie wrestles with relative subject positions (employee of Sal’s, big brother of Jade, father, and irresponsible child). Following the murder of Raheem, Mookie is forced by the crowd to “take a position.” Any course of action he follows will be “right” for only some of his multiple positions. When he throws the trash can, Mookie does what he feels is the most responsible thing possible, based on a negotiation between his feelings and his chosen subject position. It is no coincidence that his moment of decision coincides with a point of view shot that surveys the various proponents of his possible choices. It is at one and the same time the right thing and the wrong thing. Mookie is no hero and he enacts no brilliant synthesis of conflicting political stances. Rather, he is forced into an expression of conflicting identities.
Conflict, Generation X and Me
With all this talk about responsibility and subjectivity, I feel some compulsion to address my own “position”. 1989 was a year of major upheaval for me. As a white, middle-class male I had long considered myself a “liberal”, and subscribed to most of the beliefs that go along with that title. A nasty case of philosophical frustration combined with a number of congruent events to catalyze a major re-examination of my values along a less simple path. Do the Right Thing was part of that process. Long having professed a “zero tolerance” for violence, Do the Right Thing forced me to reexamine my position. I still don’t know where I stand on this issue, especially regarding experiences that I couldn’t begin to relate to. While I find the charges of anti-semitism, sexism, and homophobia levelled at Lee’s films irrefutable, I still must acknowledge Do the Right Thing as one of the reasons I am even able to comprehend these criticisms. Perhaps one of my own internal contradictions…
One of the first things that struck me about the film is how much it resembles the children’s television show Sesame Street. Lee’s visual construction of BedStuy virtually quotes the structure of Sesame Street. In fact the film’s whole aesthetic principle is reminiscent of the show, with musical interludes, speeches to the camera and so on. The general idea for this essay was sparked during a lecture on hip-hop, in which the speaker suggested that Sesame Street was a major aesthetic structural influence on hip-hop culture. Noting that Sesame Street was conceived as a positive response for children to the bombardment of signs, it struck me that any North American under the age of eight in 1968, including Lee, grew up watching the show. Ironically it’s probably the only common experience most of us have.
We are also of the generation labelled “X”, and although I have campaigned vigorously to try to shrug off this designation, several generalizations bear some relevance to this discussion. The “bombardment of signs” is almost a given for most of us. We have also borne witness to the failure/co-optation of the sixties’ counter-cultural movements. The conservative retrenchment seems to run deeper with each passing moment. Frequently, hopes for a more egalitarian society are superseded by questions of mere survival.
I don’t see our society’s deepest conflicts ever being resolved through compromise or victory for any side. I just hope we can survive the confrontations, and perhaps derive something positive from the differences. I’ve always understood Do the Right Thing to share this position. As DJ Mister Senor Love Daddy puts it:
My people, my people. Are we gonna live together? Together are we gonna live?
The Conceit of Postmodernity
I suggested above that postmodernist rhetoric often proclaims “the death of history,” thereby positing itself as “cutting edge” and historically unique. It is perhaps too easy to fall into this kind of egoism and proclaim that hip-hop, extreme alienation, and strange ways of coping with stylistic and ideological conflict are brand new and virtually unique unto people my age.
Consider hip-hop. Trisha Rose holds that the frequent digital sampling of older funk, soul and jazz records serves to situate the performer “within an Afro-American musical tradition, and a self-constructed resistive history”. This seems remarkably heritage-conscious for a postmodern form that supposedly resists “metanarratives”.
For that matter, the manner of coping with conflict discussed above existed prior to the postmodern age. Musicologist Peter Guralnick has suggested that:
the principals of (sixties soul music) brought to it such divergent outlooks and experiences that even if they had grown up in the same little town, they were as widely separated as if there had been an ocean between them. And when they came together, it may well have been their strangeness to each other, as well as their familiarity, that caused the cultural explosion.
Guralnick is positing soul music as a product of the interaction of individuals who are somehow conflicting and coalescing at the same time. This very “postmodern” aesthetic principle can be traced even further back. John Chernoff has found that African music uses “the multiple and fragmented aspects of everyday events to build a richer and more diversified personal experience”. It seems that postmodernism may not be so new after all.
Paradoxes
The fragmented identities and multiple subjectivities are considered by many to be a “negative” effect of postmodernism. But some Western cultural critics of African heritage have offered a very different assessment of the fractured postmodern identity. Stuart Hall writes:
Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centred. What I’ve thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience!…welcome.
Hall, a British-Jamaican, believes that his experience of dislocation is representative of many “migrants” to white-dominated, Western societies. As white society feels more and more fractured, Hall’s own fragmentation somehow becomes centred. Hall labels this a “paradox”.
I suggested above that our understandings of conflict, contradiction and resolution are frequently too narrow to accommodate the facts of our experience. We tend to attach the label, “paradox” when we encounter truths that we believe to be contradictory. Frequently, it is this type of encounter which forces us to re-evaluate our contexts of understanding. This situation has occurred many times in history. I have tried to show that African-derived musical traditions have tended to be structured such that they can accommodate contradictory truths. If, as suggested above, Do the Right Thing is the cinematic equivalent of hip-hop it should come as no surprise that it deals with its contradictory styles and ideologies by a “richer more diversified experience”.
Of course, European-derived intellectual systems have confronted paradoxes as well. However, we frequently put up some resistance. Many European biologists denied the existence of Australian animals because they believed that no creature can be both bird and mammal.
In the twentieth century we have confronted sciences that say light is both a particle and a wave (but not a compromise of particle and wave), multi-cultural cultures, and global villages. To point a finger at these phenomena and shout “incoherent” is to expose a limitation in our way of thinking. When examining the violence/non-violence debate and Do the Right Thing, the trick is not judgement, but rather, understanding.
I would like to thank Rob Bowman, Evan William Cameron, Sarah Demb, Jesse Hawken, Susan Lord, Lilian Radovac, and Robin Wood for their knowing and unknowing assistance with this paper.
References
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bordwell, David and Kirsten Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1990.
Crouch, Stanley. “Do the Race Thing.” Notes of a Hanging Judge. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1990. pp. 237-244.
Davis, Thulani. “We Gotta Have It.” Village Voice. 20 June 1989. pp.67-72.
Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form. New York: Harcourt, 1949.
hooks, bell. “Counter-Hegemonic Art.” Yearning: Race, Culture and Politics. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990. pp. 173-184.
King, Martin Luther. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
Lightning, Robert K. “The Homophobia of Spike Lee.” Cineaction 29 (1992). pp. 35-39.
Sklar, Robert ed. “Critical Symposium on Do the Right Thing.” Cineaste. Vol. 17 No. 4 (1990).
Stam, Roben et. al. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics. London: Roudedge, 1992.
X, Malcom. The Final Speeches. New York: Pathfinder, 1992.
Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” Film: A Montage of Theories ed. R.D. MacCann. New York: Dutton, 1966. pp. 216-227.
Author Affiliation
Ted Kulczycky is completing a Bachelor’s degree in Film Studies at York University and writes a regular column for Freewheelin ‘magazine. He continues to ponder the relationships of cinema, music and values.
Copyright Cineaction! 1996
Place of publication: Toronto Country of publication: Canada Publication subject: Motion Pictures ISSN: 08269866 e-ISSN: 25622528 Source type: Magazine Language of publication: English Document type: General Information ProQuest document ID: 216878568
Stop Making Sense has long been an obsession, but I haven’t really published about it. I’m going to be uploading a few pieces I’ve published that are only tangentially related to Stop Making Sense.
Director Jim Jarmusch, by most accounts, virtually invented contemporary independent American film (Stranger than Paradise, Dead Man, Broken Flowers) and ranks among the finest living directors. This has no relevance to the musings at hand.
FIVE REASONS JIM JARMUSCH IS THE COOLEST PERSON ON EARTH (OTHER THAN THE FACT THAT HE MAKES GREAT MOVIES)
Text by Ted Kulczycky
1. “NEVER TRUST ANYBODY WITHOUT HOLES IN THEIR CLOTHES.” He’s well off but still proudly wears thrift shop. The sharp lines and dapper trims on most of his outfits scream “style,” but despite this attention to his appearance, he never seems especially handsome or pretty. His clothes look old, but they don’t convey the preciousness of vintage. Even with the odd hole, they don’t have that ratty feel you sometimes get with thrift. His stuff looks sharp but still — for lack of a better word — worn. One further note on fashion: he’s a film director. He likes baseball. He’s almost never seen in a baseball cap. Thank you.
2. THE HAIR. The straight-up shock of salt and pepper has progressed, through the years, to a straight-up shock of salt. During the halcyon days of punk, while everyone on the Lower East Side was using chemicals, food colouring, and bodily fluids to make a “striking new ‘do,” Jim Jarmusch’s hormones styled his hair naturally.
3. HE’S A MEMBER OF THE SONS OF LEE MARVIN. There is, apparently, a secret society with meetings and handshakes and everything) that also includes Tom Waits, Neil Young, Nick Cave, and several other celebrities. Membership requires the individual to bear “more than a passing resemblance” to the hard-living, horse-faced, and gravel-voiced star of The Wild One and The Dirty Dozen. With his stretched features, thick eyebrows, and premature white, Jarmusch was one of the founding members.
4. HE SMOKES. Smoking is bad. It kills. It stains your teeth. It harms your unborn baby. People who smoke are bad. Bad. But it’s cool! And very few of us look as cool as Jarmusch while smoking. What could possibly frame that hair as well as a cloud of smoke? In Blue in the Face, Jarmusch has a cameo as a man about to quit smoking. He philosophizes about the filthy habit for 15 minutes before taking his last puff: “Why do the Nazis always hold their cigarettes in a funny way in movies? Does it signify their evilness?” Among Jarmusch’s own films, Dead Man comments on the differences between Native American spirituality and Western capitalism via a running gag about tobacco; Coffee and Cigarettes is a two-hour meditation on what my uncle commonly refers to as a “whore’s breakfast.” Jarmusch has been quoted as saying, “I hope I’m not a notorious smoker.” Sorry, Jim.
5. HE’S ACTUALLY BLACK AND WHITE. I recently noted to a friend, in casual conversation, that I’d never seen a colour photo of Jim Jarmusch, My friend was polite enough not to correct me, but I soon realized the absurdity of my statement_ I’d seen the movies Blue in the Face, Tigrero, and Sling Blade. All three are in colour and all three feature Jarmusch. Hell, I’ve seen him in person a couple of times. So why can’t I get a colour image of him in my mind?
Sure, there are other people it’s impossible to visualize in colour — Charlie Chaplin, Ralph Kramden, Hitler. But this seems to be a consequence of familiarity. Most of the images we’ve seen of these people are over 40 years old and in black and white. But I saw two documentaries with a colour Jarmusch in them a month ago. I checked my magazine collection for interviews and articles, and Jarmusch is usually photographed in black and white, even for full-colour magazines. I still don’t think that’s it. I think the fact that he seems made up of shades of grey is what leads photographers to shoot him devoid of pigmentation. I’ve racked my brain trying for an explanation, and it could be 1) An odd geometrical visual phenomenon caused by his hair and the length of his face. 2) A strange psychological condition related to the way people perceive colour in dreams. 3) He’s actually black and white.
2024 STOP MAKING SENSE PROJECT POST-SCRIPT
I was thrilled last year to discover deep in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts the first issue of the Barnard College Upstart from early 1977 which included one of the first ever interviews with Talking Heads side-by-side with photos by one “James Jarmusch.” James has always been cool.
Demme’s genius was to not be seduced by crude ideas about what constitutes “cinematic.” For this reason, the film focuses on the people, and not the special effects included in the concerts he filmed. This was a wise choice, but it does mean that I’ve spent 40 years wondering about the other word slides for the song Making Flippy Floppy.
What slides am I talking about? Act Two of Stop Making Sense (following the “Does anybody have any questions?” bit that ends the build-the-band Act One) begins with the song Making Flippy Floppy. Behind the musicians, on a giant screen, various white words appear on red or blue backgrounds in groups of three. These words may or may not be related to the music we’re hearing. Byrne admits, in the commentary on the original SMS DVD, that these slides were heavily influenced by the fine artist, Ed Ruscha. Talking Heads later used one of Ruscha’s works for the cover of their compilation Sand in the Vaseline. Ruscha has been in the spotlight a bit recently, for his cover design of the new Beatles single, Now and Then.
As I already noted, not all of the slides actually appear in the movie. A few missing slides appear in the photos included in the centrefold of the limited edition booklet that accompanied the original soundtrack release. And a couple of errant words were reported in Steve Morse’s glowing review of the show in the October 6 1983 Boston Globe.
But other than that, the exact details of the remaining slides have been a mystery to most fans. Were they the same words every night? Were they in the same order every show?
Well, I’ve been continuing my project of going through all the available tapes of the 1983 tour, and I was thrilled to discover that on September 1 1983, at the Costa Mesa Pacific Amphitheatre, the legendary taper, BFOQ, VERBALLY CALLED OUT ALL THE SLIDES while recording the show!!! I soon determined that BFOQ repeated this procedure just over one month later at the Rochester War Memorial, confirming the consistency and order of the word slides.
Here is BFOQ’s recording of Making Flippy Floppy with all the slide information.
Here is a chart of all the slides, where they occur in the song, and what the source of the information is. Even more information about the slides coming soon.
BEAUTIFUL
VIEW
EIGHT-THIRTY
PM
RELIGIOUS
UPBRINGING
Recording
COWBOYS
ONIONS
PARTIES
Recording
NOTE: ONIONS appears in the film later, but it is probably an asynchronous edit piece
SNACK
DOCTORS
PLAYBOY
Recording but
SMS booklet shows DOCTORS substituting for ONIONS above
In addition to all the attention from the Globe article, Cory wrote about our adventures on his site, and deftly wove it into his larger point about the trajectory of our cities. He’s a really good writer, and a very innovative thinker and I’m proud to know him.
Of course, the real solution to Teslas – and every other kind of car – is to redesign our cities for public transit, walking and cycling, making cars the exception for deliveries, accessibility and other necessities. Transitioning to EVs will make a big dent in the climate emergency, but it won’t make our streets any safer – and they keep getting deadlier.
Last summer, my dear old pal Ted Kulczycky got in touch with me to tell me that Talking Heads were going to be all present in public for the first time since the band’s breakup, as part of the debut of the newly remastered print of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert movie of all time. Even better, the show would be in Toronto, my hometown, where Ted and I went to high-school together, at TIFF.
Ted is the only person I know who is more obsessed with Talking Heads than I am, and he started working on tickets for the show while I starting pricing plane tickets. And then, the unthinkable happened: Ted’s wife, Serah, got in touch to say that Ted had been run over by a car while getting off of a streetcar, that he was severely injured, and would require multiple surgeries.
But this was Ted, so of course he was still planning to see the show. And he did, getting a day-pass from the hospital and showing up looking like someone from a Kids In The Hall sketch who’d been made up to look like someone who’d been run over by a car:
In his Globe and Mail article about Ted’s experience, Brad Wheeler describes how the whole hospital rallied around Ted to make it possible for him to get to the movie:
He also mentions that Ted is working on a book and podcast about Stop Making Sense. I visited Ted in the hospital the day after the gig and we talked about the book and it sounds amazing. Also? The movie was incredible. See it in Imax.
That heartwarming tale of healing through big suits is a pretty good place to wrap up
I had to work at the library on August 1 2023, and had a lunch with a friend from out of town so I wasn’t able to get much done on the site on that day. Also, recovery time from the trip. New York was exceedingly hot. This reminds me that I really should be checking the weather at the locations of each date. I’m not sure how difficult that will be.
On August 2 1983 Talking Heads performed at the Springfield Civic Center in Springfield MA. After performing the night before some 9 hours away.
To my layperson’s mind, it seems like a lot of travelling to begin a tour. Nine hours south from NYC to the first show, nine hours back north for the second? However, my researcher’s mind tells me that professionals usually have reasons for the choices they make. Unfortunately, the tour manager, David Russell passed away years ago and won’t be able to answer my questions. Hopefully I can convince Matthew Murphy, the road manager to share his insights at some point. In hisRemain in Love book, Chris Frantz asserts that “Tina and I toured by bus with baby Robin and nanny Louise; the rest of the band travelled by plane.”
The Hartford Courant announced this show for the Center’s “Little Arena” on July 22 1983:
The venue is now known as the MassMutual Center there’s an…interesting blog post here describing the atmosphere at concerts back then. One author incorrectly excluded Talking Heads from a 50 most memorable nights list.
Working on this project has alerted me to the works of hardcore fans of other acts. In my last post, I linked to a Jerry Garcia fansite documenting all of his appearances. While researching this venue I discovered the Brucebase Wiki which is exactly what you think it is. Candidly, I only really mildly enjoy Springsteen’s 1994-2002 work and find the Grateful Dead dreadfully boring but I REALLY love overly dedicated fans compiling data (obviously). Brucebase reports that the pre-renovation Civic Center seated 8000. Talking Heads Concert History says that the show was a “half-house arena setup” so I’m guessing about 4000 attended this show. Given the proximity to various colleges, it seems possible that it came close to selling out.
There will be a post at some point about backstage passes, but it looks as though this show/promoter had its own passes, the Consolidated Entertainment Group.
Tickets had seating printed on them, so probably not a general admission show. Ticket shows $11.50 price, but even in 1983 there could be some variance in price between sections.
I’ve been able to find an audio recording of this show. The setlist, as for most of the tour is:
Psycho Killer
Heaven
Thank You for Sending Me an Angel
Love -> Building on Fire
The Book I Read
Slippery People
Cities
Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open)
Burning Down the House
Life During Wartime
BREAK
Making Flippy Floppy
Swamp
What a Day that Was
Naive Melody (This Must Be the Place)
Once in a Lifetime
Big Business/I Zimbra
Houses in Motion
TOM TOM CLUB: Genius of Love
Girlfriend is Better
Take Me to the River
ENCORE: Crosseyed and Painless
I’m hoping to develop my musical and auditory description skills here. I’d really love to share these tapes, but I don’t want to violate Talking Heads copyrights. I’m going to add a song or two occasionally.
The tape begins just after the start of Psycho Killer, so we don’t know how Byrne introduces the show. It’s kind of stunning to hear how fully formed the band is at this point. Five months before Stop Making Sense would be filmed, most of the songs sound very similar to the final versions. That said, Byrne’s acoustic strumming patterns on Psycho Killer are considerably less…intense…that the performance that eventually began Stop Making Sense.
After Life During Wartime, Byrne announces “we’ll be back in about twenty minutes.” The “does anybody have any questions” does not appear, which affirms the assertions that that line of dialogue was added in postproduction to the film.
In Making Flippy Floppy, Worrell’s solos are somewhat different, it seems like he improvised here to a greater extent than in other songs.
The intro to What a Day that Was is quite extended. It sounds like Byrne missed his cue to begin singing, so the band cycled through a few more bars before he jumped in.
On Naive Melody (This Must Be the Place) the band seems to have some trouble finding the groove, it may be because the audience clapping along is throwing them off. It’s really interesting because there’s a freshness to the song that later live versions don’t have. The song itself has a coziness that later performances complement. This performance has an uncertain kind of electric charge to it.
This is only the second time the song had ever been performed in front of an audience EVER. It wasn’t yet the familiar classic, as covered by the Lumineers,Arcade Fire, Shawn Colvin and MGMT. It wasn’t yet the title (and premise) of a Sean Penn movie. David Byrne hadn’t performed it over 200 times on Broadway or some 250 other times on solo tours (Researcher-Ted really wants to verify these numbers, casually pulled from setlist.fm, but this blog is designed to help Writer-Ted improve so I’m uncomfortably forcing myself to not spend a couple of hours verifying specifics).
The album had been out for a while and Naive Melody might’ve even been your favorite song, but you hadn’t seen the music video (it hadn’t even been filmed yet), you didn’t have a single (it wouldn’t be released until late autumn). At this point the famous “lamp dance” had been seen by maybe 5000 people the night before. This song is new and obviously great and band is really trying to put it across. The audience clearly responds.
On August 1 2023 I returned from New York City to Toronto. I dislike flying, this was the smallest plane I’ve ever been on, and my ears popped and cracked the whole time. I did a fair amount of Stop Making Sense research in NY which I’ll communicate here in due time.
At some point the tour entourage travelled between New York and Virginia.
On August 1 1983 Talking Heads played the first official concert of the Speaking in Tongues tour in Hampton, Virginia at the Hampton Roads Coliseum. I have been so far unable to locate a recording, review, photograph or ticket stub from this date.
This article appeared on page 31 of the Daily Press Newport News Virginia on July 29 1983. The event was general admission. $9.50 advance/$10.50 day of performance. As with most of the dates on the tour, no opening act.
Now named the “Hampton Coliseum” the venue is quite distinctive looking.
I’m not sure how much information I should include about each venue on this site. At the very least I want to mention that the amazing Talking Heads Concert History website says that this event was a “Half-house arena set-up.” I’ve been unable to find reports of ticket sales, or capacity at this time. Most current sources list capacity at around 9000-12,000 but some of the “book your conventions in Virginia”-type sites say things like “scalable seating capacities from 3,000-12,800.” So it’s difficult to gauge how many actually attended the concert. Did it sell out? In Virginia? I’m guessing 5000 is a safe estimate,
I’m somewhat stressed about documentation and this blog. I’m feeling regrets about research decisions I made years ago based on available resources at the time. I didn’t purchase copies or make notes about the technicalities for each venue when I had access to the tour manager’s documents. And I used the two above images of the venue without proper documentation and I’m sure Google doesn’t feel screencaps of their directions are public domain. However, I’m trying to be less perfect and more productive. It feels very uncomfortable. Especially as an aspiring archivist.
I’m a researcher trying to do some “projects” about the greatest concert film of all time, Stop Making Sense.
Every event is in some ways connected to all the events that came before, and all the events that will come after. So what are the boundaries of Stop Making Sense? Where does Stop Making Sense begin?
I look to the researchers that inspire me for guidance.
Mark Lewisohn, author of the most comprehensive reference books and biographies of the Beatles, begins his research a couple of generations before the birth of the individuals that formed the Beatles, tracing their immigrant ancestors’ paths to Liverpool.
In his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro gets into some environmental/geological shifts that took place over millennia, but for the most part confines his study to seventy or so years of Johnson’s maternal and paternal ancestors.
Mark Malkoff hosts the Carson Podcast and has tried to speak to every person ever connected to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.
My research process has not yet delved this far back, but I am taking three cues from these inspirational researchers.
Mark Malkoff emphasizes “the power of asking.” In his view, polite perseverance is the key to discovering knowledge. He asks everyone he can if they’ll talk to him.
Robert Caro’s research philosophy is “turn every page.” Coming out of his journalism background, Caro insists on inspecting every available document, looking to discover any nugget of insight.
Mark Lewisohn, on the fiftieth anniversary anniversary of the Beatles recording their Get Back project, set out to “re-experience” the project. Throughout the month of January 2019 he listened to each day’s recordings from 50 years before.
This summer marks the 40th anniversary of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues Tour. The final shows of which were filmed and became Stop Making Sense. The planning of this tour is as good an origin-point of the Stop Making Sense story as any. I have managed to acquire 40 of the 57 concerts Talking Heads performed on that tour, totalling almost 80 hours.
My plan is to re-experience that tour inasmuch as possible, and share my findings and thoughts, and maybe learn how to build a website in the process.
Today is June 1st 2023. It is 40 years since the Speaking in Tongues album was released. It originally came out on a deluxe edition and regular edition vinyl and an extended cassette. More on all of these versions later.
Today is also my 53rd birthday. More on this later.
Of course, I was 13 years old when Speaking in Tongues came out. I was not cool enough to rush out and get it the day of release. Instead I spent my 13th birthday here.
Talking Heads appeared in the episode of Late Night with David Letterman on July 8 1983. The 8th fell on a Friday, and this was a 90-minute long episode. Monday-Thursday episodes were 60 minutes long. Letterman had only recently started airing occasionally on Friday nights, after NBC’s cancellation of SCTV, the legendary sketch comedy show.July 7-8 1983
Talking Heads performed Burning Down the House and I Zimbra, and Letterman interviewed Byrne for one segment of the show. The band consists of the same lineup that were touring as Talking Heads in 1982 plus one additional member. David Byrne, Chris Frantz,Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth, Dolette McDonald, Steve Scales, Alex Weir and Bernie Worrell. Lynn Mabry, Sly Stone’s cousin who had worked with Bernie Worrell in the Parliament-Funkadelic mob, as a Bride of Funkenstein, joins McDonald on backup vocals.
At some point either before or during the Speaking in Tongues tour, Ednah Holt (late of Larry Levan’s garage house scene and the Ritchie Family) took over vocal duties from Dolette McDonald. McDonald would join the Police on their Synchronicity tour for the rest of the year.
The choreography for I Zimbra lies somewhere between their 1982 and 1983 performances. Although Burning Down the House exhibits some of the choreo that would appear on the upcoming tour (i.e. vocalists gesticulating to themselves on the “my house” lyric), many of the signature moves (Weir and Byrne running on the spot) are not yet present. Given that this is the end of the first week of July, and that the first official tour date would be August 1st, I’m guessing that their rehearsal space was booked only for the whole month of July, and that they had been working for less than a week prior to the Letterman performance. It’s also worth mentioning that Byrne does not wear “the suit” for this performance. Given how useful in promotion the Letterman appearance was at this time, it would’ve made sense to wear this memorable costume if it was available. It seems safe to assume that either it wasn’t yet finished or hadn’t even been commissioned yet. Although Byrne has been consistent in saying that he conceived the costume in Japan during the previous 1982 tour, no one has detailed the specifics of when this concept was applied to the Speaking in Tongues tour.
Letterman’s show was a breakout hit and he became a media darling, with Emmy nominations and a cover story in Rolling Stone magazine soon after the Late Night debut. Although the Talking Heads segments are available on YouTube, the entire episode is sadly not. The other guests were Grace Jones and Brother Theodore. The Toronto TV guide listed John Candy, but I don’t think he actually appeared. July 8th’s Brother Theodore segment is in the middle of this video. I’ve been unable to obtain the rest of the episode. Although I loved the show in the early eighties, I never really enjoyed Brother Theodore.
If you’ve never seen an entire early-period Late Night with David Letterman, I recommend watching at least one (preferably starting at 12:30 am) to get a flavor for how odd and unpredictable the show could be. Here’s a fairly representative episode from just a couple of months before.
So did 13-year old Ted stay up and watch Talking Heads on Letterman? I don’t remember doing so. I certainly recall staying up many a Friday night to watch SCTV in the same time slot. And I think that I was already watching Letterman when I could. But if I had noticed John Candy as a guest I would’ve tried to tune in. But I wasn’t yet a huge Talking Heads fan. I had heard Once in a Lifetime, and seen its music video (on SCTV and elsewhere). I liked them, I knew they were cool. But so was Thomas Dolby, Split Enz, Kate Bush, etc…
So why does this post cover July 7 and 8, when the Late Night appearance was shown Friday July 8 8th? Because the show was recorded the evening of July 7! Through much of his career, Letterman liked his long weekends so would frequently tape the Thursday and Friday episode on Thursday night. Letterman archivist extraordinaire Don Giller confirmed that this episode was taped on the 7th for me. You can read about Don’s amazing activities here and here.
I asked Don about this possibility, because while researching 1983 I came across this advertisement.
This was in the July 6-12 Village Voice (an alternative free weekly paper that used to be the source of information for many New Yorkers). Apparently Talking Heads would be otherwise engaged on July 8th.
So what is this ad all about? Meet Talking Heads? Celebrate the videotape? Why is there only an address (254 East 2nd St) and no name for the place?
Well it turns out that this address was once a legendary nightclub called “The World.” There’s a great article about it here. In the article, David Byrne recalls “We shot the video for Burning Down the Houseat what became the World. I believe it wasn’t open yet.” Chris Frantz says, in his memoir, that the video was made at the World nightclub (p. 311). Interestingly, the audience shots in the final video look more like stock footage from some sort of stadium show, than a bunch of cool East Village club kids. So why was the public invited? Still a mystery…
The “plot” of the nightclub sequences seems to be some sort of battle between dark universe Talking Heads and our-universe Talking Heads. Most of the alternative Talking Heads have few other credits. However, Rockets Redglare (1949-2001) played the dark universe Jerry Harrison.
Redglare was a famous (infamous?) denizen of the East Village with a really impressive filmography. He’s got small but incredibly memorable roles in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law. He’s the cabdriver in Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, the hotel clerk in Penny Marshall’s BIG, and also appeared in films by Oliver Stone and Martin Scorcese. A lifelong heroin addict (his bio is intense), Redglare was well-known as a heroin dealer when he lived at the storied Chelsea Hotel. He was the last person to visit Sid Vicious’ and Nancy Spungen’s room, before her death, so this has led some to speculate that he was the actual murderer, but there is apparently no evidence to corroborate this. When Redglare was ill in the late nineties a powerful, if difficult, documentary was made about him that is unfortunately difficult to find nowadays. Try your local library or ebay for the DVD.
Of course, there’s more to the Burning Down the House video than the nightclub footage. A number of Facebook sleuths have located and documented the actual house featured in the music video. Historic Film Locations has the best post and documentation. Brian Pelican, a commenter, says that his old house was the neighboring property and that’s where cameras, projector and electrical were set up. It’s on Myrtle St. in Union New Jersey. It’s a very short street, just off of the I-78. It’s worth having a look at the street view on Google maps.
I haven’t tracked down the dates that footage was shot, but I guess that it was around July 9 or 10. I will deal with the street projections footage in another post later on, specifically dealing with projections.
…getting back to 13-year-old Ted. If he wasn’t watching Talking Heads on Late Night with David Letterman, what was he doing on July 7-8 1983? He was basking in the glow of his first brush with fame!
Facts:
The Late Night with David Letterman was taped on July 7 but aired on July 8 1983.
The band performance segments of the Burning Down the House video were recorded on July 8 1983 at 254 East 2nd St. NYC. More to follow.
The burning house in the video was in Union New Jersey.
Suspicions:
The rehearsal space was probably booked for the month of July. More to follow.
The big suit did not yet exist.
Ednah Holt had not joined the band before July 7. More to follow.
Dolette McDonald had not left the band yet. More to follow.
Choreography for the tour was not yet fully developed by July 7. More to follow
