David Byrne

I finally got to see David Byrne last night. He's been in the area before, but I was never really interested. I'd been skeptical about his solo stuff, and considered myself a Taking Heads partisan. But, after seeing the Jerry Harrison / Adrian Belew Remain In Light tour, and seeing Byrne kill it on Saturday Night Live a couple of times over the past years, I relaxed my opposition and got with reality.

And it was tremendous.

He started with the Talking Heads' "Heaven", which got a deafening standing ovation. I was shocked. To me, apparently stuck in 1987, The Heads will always be an underground band who miraculously worked their way up to a string of late-career hits. And "Heaven" definitely wasn't one of those. Yes, it's in the Stop Making Sense movie (not the album) but it's still one of those deep album cuts that you'll never hear on the radio (does radio still exist?). But there it was, and the crowd loved it. Or loved him for playing it. Or loved him for being there. Or something. Deafening applause for "Heaven".

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And then he basically alternated solo songs and Talking Heads songs for the next two hours. So, pretty much ideal - he did most of what you'd expect for Heads' songs : "Psycho Killer", "Life During Wartime", "Nothing But Flowers", etc., and also "Air" (??!). And his solo stuff was uniformly good, too: "Everybody Laughs" and "My Apartment is My Friend" and some others from the new album, "Independence Day" from Rei Momo, "Strange Overtones", etc..

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There were a dozen people on stage with him, and they were always standing, walking, dancing, marching, leaping, while playing. Nobody sat - there was nothing to sit on. Percussion was split between four people playing a mix of acoustic and electronic drums, marching-band-style. There were four backup singers / dancers, a horn player, keys, guitar, bass, etc.. Every song was choreographed, and the floor and walls -all LED displays- were frequently part of the choreography too.

There were professional videographers out in the crowd, so I assume they're making some kind of movie of it.

He's doing a second show tonight. My father drove down from upstate NY to see it.

Domestic Terrorist

I'm so old I remember that Osama bin Laden's goal with 9/11 was to get the US to overreact and get itself tied up in a war that would destabilize its, and the world's, economy.

But nearly two months into a shipping supply shock, you’d think that investors would wake up and act accordingly. In fact, their compulsive wishful thinking is making the crisis worse, by not providing the kind of signal that has historically gotten Trump to back off his most destructive impulses. Sadly, this time it may be too late, given the operational control of the Strait of Hormuz that’s firmly in Iran’s hands.

The evidence that investors are overlooking the implications of the current situation is piling up. The war’s end is no longer the point at which things will return to something approaching normal. U.S. inflation was at 3.3 percent last month and is expected to rise further, and the second-order effects on goods that are derived from fossil fuels or rely on energy—in the latter case, all of them—haven’t even hit yet. Diesel and jet fuel, the heavy transportation fuels, are rising faster than gasoline. There are trucking costs and fertilizer costs and plastic and aluminum packaging costs, all of which will spark more core inflation, which hasn’t budged much relative to more volatile benchmarks like energy.

Bin Laden also thought the US's overreach would lead to the west withdrawing from the ME, resulting in a ME unification, etc.. That still seems pretty unlikely.