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(My Origin Story, chapter 2)

A few reasons to take this column with a grain of salt: Talking Heads are my favorite band; I have a tattoo of the cover of their 1983 album Speaking in Tongues on my upper right arm; I interviewed David Byrne over the phone once, the subject was his performance on that week’s Sessions at W 54th St, a PBS music show he was also hosting at the time; others as noted below.

One of the common charges leveled against musician David Byrne’s 1986 musical serio-comedy True Stories is that it traffics in cheap shots and sustained condescension towards its subjects: the residents of a (fictional) Texas town as they prepare to celebrate the sesquicentennial, or 150th, anniversary of their beloved Lone Star State.

In many ways, this criticism bears remarkable parallels to the complaints hurled towards Joel & Ethan Coen over the last 25 years for numerous films in their oeuvre, but in particular towards early films such as Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, which boast similar geographic and socioeconomic landscapes. The Coens time and again have been met with accusations of sneering at their characters, mocking the predicaments and situations in which they place their creations, and standing back with an ironic distance that allows for superior smugness among more (supposedly) refined and urbane audiences. I don’t want to wander off into that rhetorical battlefield at this time, but I will note that O Brother, Where Art Thou played to a much different fan base than many other Coen films, particularly striking a chord with those in that nebulous cliché of a region known as “middle America.”

In the process, it became a medium-sized hit (the Coen brothers’ highest-grossing to that point) while never expanding beyond 867 screens at any one time. O Brother is easily one of my least favorite films by the brothers (along with The Ladykillers, it seems as if the Coens settled on shooting a far earlier draft of the script than they normally do) but I have to acknowledge that if I had seen it first in a different time and place than Manhattan in 2000, my reaction might have been considerably different.

I feel safe in this assumption because True Stories operates on a lot of the same principles (if not the same structure) and I adore it in all its meandering, quirky, and gentle lunacy. I first saw it when I was... well, for once my memory does not allow me to pinpoint the exact time and place. I can place the span roughly around the winter of 1987 when it was released on video, and it would be highly probable that my best friend JD was involved. As previously noted in “My Origin Story,” sleepovers at his house marked my first exposure to a wide array of individualized movie genres - ninja/martial arts, breakdancing, skateboarding, sword and sandal - and a surprising number of chapter twos.

I also have him to thank for whatever eclectic musical tastes I have been fortunate enough to indulge in, in the two decades plus that have followed. He turned me on to the Talking Heads, and, as they were the first real band I listened to with any regularity, consistency and depth, they were the template for all that followed. In my 20s as I listened to their albums with a fresh perspective, I began to appreciate how “weird” a lot of their songs were. I wondered if I would have so easily become enamored with their works if those listenings were my first.

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