Alien Sex Planet

To the extent that you could make a belief system from the works of David Byrne, and the liner notes of Stop Making Sense are its bible, then I am an adherent. So it is with a bias (that of a fan) that I recommend David Byrne's journal. It is regularly amazing. Another form that the man has absolutely mastered - and mastered not by reflecting or subverting, but by simply embracing. It is surreal how banal David Byrne's journal can be. Just a man writing about his life, on the internet. Nothing to see here, folks. Except, of course, that it's David Byrne.

It's worth a regular visit, say once a month, but certainly check out his recent post about a cross country-trip. My favorite part? That he stays in Holiday Inns. Budget conscious in America. Just like me. An excerpt:

We cross into New Mexico and arrive at Carlsbad Caverns National Park by 2:30pm. We’ve missed the last guided tour and a chance to clamber down the natural entrance, so we take the elevator down and spend almost 2 hours wandering the marked paths underground. The Big Room is vast, bigger than a football field (one quote claims one could lay the Empire State Building down in here — what an image!), and other spaces branch off from it. There are electric lights cleverly hidden behind rocks and formations so one can see pretty well, but some people still bring flashlights and I saw one couple with lights on their heads.

The formations are creatively named, as they often do in these caves: The Chinese Doll Theater (really!), The Temple, The Klansman(!), the Twin Domes, The Giant, The Lion’s Tail. I remember seeing some hilarious B&W pieces that Mike Kelly did where he made up his own names for cave formations.

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. Imagine farmer Jim White seeing a plume of weird black smoke being spewed out of the earth near the top of a ridge – these were the bats. At sunset, thousands gushed from its small orifice, the way in to the sexy underground world. Any artist producing objects like these in such quantity and profusion would be considered a pervert, or at least obsessed. In this case, it is the Earth that is the pervert.