Your Daily Awesome

David Byrne doesn’t update his blog too frequently, but when he does, he doesn’t mess around. Today he fills us in on a cross country drive he took with his daughter, musing on, among many other things…

Mormon architecture in DC:

“As a spectacle it surely ranks as one of the great works of architecture, but I seriously doubt that architectural scholars and critics will agree with me here — they might prefer the more austere, minimal church of Tadao Ando or Corbusier’s wacky asymmetrical church in France. I’ll take this one, and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, over those austere buildings. If certain architectural works are made to inspire awe and act as three dimensional signs and symbols, then surely this one qualifies.”

Midwest highways:

“Cars are the hot item this decade — NASCAR and other “shows” seem to be in evidence all across the country. We pass massive trucks and trailers covered with images of NASCAR drivers and/or race cars. The highways are now a network for race cars carried by trailers crisscrossing the continent to do their “shows” here and there. These trailers are constantly on the move — they fill the roads and the race car images are everywhere, including fast food outlets and billboards.”

Dollywood:

“Although there are none anywhere else, I glimpse the few posters of Dolly on our way out, with her huge tits and hair, and her fairly extreme makeup. She’s a little worked over now, which makes the look even more extreme, and a little scary. The hourglass figure on the tiny woman, the little girl voice- combined with an astute business sense and dynamite songwriting — well, it’s a confusing combination for a Yankee. The look smacks of insincerity, or someone living in a fantasy world, yet her acts, what she did (like creating Dollywood), and her songs are completely sincere and heartfelt. The look says sex combined with little girl, a combo typical of Japanese schoolgirls and manga comics, but not of a serious singer, and later an actress.”

Texas:

“My steak is delicious, as it should be here. The decor is all red chairs, tables and trim, in honor of the local High School football team, the Mustangs. A large painting of the coach sits right on the wall behind us. I watch a man across from us shoot up his insulin after he and his wife finish their meal. He does it deftly, as casually as one would look at one’s watch.

The restaurant (the only one within walking distance of our hotel) doesn’t serve alcohol. I’m not that surprised — between the early-for-us dinner hours and dry counties, I know we’re not in New York anymore. I wonder at how some of these puritan restrictions — the encouragement to go to bed early and to not enjoy a drink with one’s meal — have lingered. I suspect that drinking, much like drug use, is considered a sign of moral weakness, and a disdained desire for pure, cut-loose pleasure something maybe not to be encouraged either by our puritan ancestors or the skin-of-our-teeth settlers and farmers in this part of the country. You never know what will come out of that bottle once you open it. These indulgences have therefore been relegated to “bad” places — honky tonks and dark, sad bars in the case of drink, secluded sessions in the sole company of other users for druggies.”

Carlsbad Canyons:

“I find the formations disturbingly biomorphic, organic, and mostly sexual. Alien sex planet. The names they give them seem to belie what they actually resemble. It seems the underworld is comprised of vast landscape of penises, vulvas, vaginas, tentacles and fleshy flaps. Freud would have had a field day in here: it’s as if our own forbidden images and imaginings have all been forced not merely into the unconscious, as he would have it, but physically underground, in exaggerated form, with elements of the male and the female sometimes mixed together. Other elements seemed strongly sexual, but not quite human, like the sexual organs of insects, or deep-sea creatures. Only in this case it is the sexual organs of rocks hidden 830 feet beneath the earth’s surface, as they should be.”

His cruise through the desert before finally hitting Los Angeles:

“The road enters the Mojave Desert and we pass over scattered ranges of hills separated by long flat desolate expanses. It’s lovely. We stop briefly at Quartzite, where many RV parks are clustered — people living in RVs with hookups, not holiday campers. I browse through a sort of flea market of rocks that a couple has set up. On tables and in metal barrels there are piles fossils, crystals, jade and other minerals priced mostly by the pound.”