Stop Making Sense (1984) Jonathan Demme assembled the best footage from over three nights of The Talking Heads in live performances at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater during a tour to promote their new album “Speaking in Tongues.” Hits include “Psycho Killer,” “Heaven,” “Burning Down the House.” “Life During Wartime,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Crosseyed and Painless,” among many others. The use of digital audio techniques and wide shots from a distance enliven the audience interaction with the performers. “It’s a live show.” wrote Roger Ebert, “with elements of Metropolis.”
We are always digging up
Other people’s graves —
The color of space is a vacuum
More silent than the voice of God.
From bombed-out housing
Ten million displaced
Miners wash the coal off
But not ash from their children’s lungs.
Applause is the color of a crushed
Angel, the mother of all bombs,
In a Vatican alcove before lit
Votive candles back-projected.
The front man has a front man,
A blood-leach feeding on white
Tics in the constitution
Of psychobabble cancer.
Mottled brown, Spanish Mariachi
March piñatas, drums, and horns
Bleating into Chinatown
And dragon gold.
Color-blindness makes everyone
Black to him, Javanese shadow puppets,
As if ebony had pores
That breathed blood diamonds.
Chocolate or vanilla
Or raspberry razzmatazz
Among the blind who love
To feel everybody up.
Pink more than white,
Pearls pool as eyes ovulating,
Whose rouged, peached lips
Suck up widescreen Technicolor.
Beneath each cuticle, traces
Of somebody else’s skin —
Black when ceremonial sacrifice,
White when beached after drowning.
Color-blind, the Pharaoh
Seizes Athena’s arrows,
Hooks Achilles’ heels,
And hangs him upside down.
Absorbed and hidden
By phoenix feathers,
The color of God
Blinds anyone who listens.
[Disposable Poem April 28, 2017]
Dr. Mike
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