Jump and dance with David Byrne

David Byrne has released a new album titled "Who is the Sky?" with the Ghost Train Orchestra, a group I'd never heard of before but which I'm really enjoying. They blend pop, psychedelia, and contemporary, classical, and popular music. In an interview I read, Byrne says three formidable things. The first is that movement is a constitutive part of his music, that when he performs, he needs to move from here to there and feel at the center of a circular current of energy. I understand him perfectly, because the exact same thing happens to me. When I write, I get up, take four steps forward, three steps back, go to the bathroom, return to my chair, scratch my head, burst out laughing, read the first paragraph aloud to the person next to me, get up again, drink some water, sit down at the computer, and raise my arms in a sign of triumph. These days, as I've been writing on the terrace of the Felip bar in Llançà, people must think I'm crazy.

The second is that he's stopped using cream on his face. Bravo, Byrne! His girlfriend wouldn't leave him alone, with that whole cream thing: "Put on cream, put on cream." And, apparently, he did for a while. Which reminds me of a mythomaniac writer who, to explain why Luis Cernuda was so modern and wrote so wonderfully, recalled that he was one of the first men, back in the 1930s, to start using moisturizer on his face. I thought: what nonsense. Read what he writes, which he does very well, and stop being so drunk on potions. Byrne wrote a song in which, by applying cream, he gradually rejuvenates himself until he becomes a three-year-old boy. His girlfriend, who insisted so much, is forced to have sex with a little boy. Byrne is seventy-three years old, but he looks sixty-three, it must be said.

His girlfriend wouldn't leave him alone, with that cream thing: "Put on some cream, put on some cream."

The third big idea concerns avant-garde art. Since the Talking Heads era, Byrne has been an innovator and has often collaborated on theater projects. He worked alongside Bob Wilson—one of the great names in contemporary theater, who died this summer. In the interview, he says he enjoyed seeing avant-garde artists up close and would have liked to be one of them. But taking the avant-garde in a pedantic way doesn't automatically make you a remarkable artist.

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Please: yes! How many times have we suffered this situation you allude to in the interview? A man or woman, often hyperbatonically and unintelligibly, coming to tell you that they're the great artist because they're avant-garde, as if the rest of us were just sucking our thumbs. How many good works the avant-garde has produced. And how many duds. As many as pedantically classical literature or art, which seems to have already been done for them by the mere fact of being classic—and resisting I don't know what evil forces. You look very well, Mr. Byrne, even though you've stopped smearing your face with grease.