Thursday, November 11, 2010

"This ain't no party/This ain't no disco/This ain't no fooling around."

The Song: "Life During Wartime," Talking Heads. Words & music by David Byrne. Track 7 of Stop Making Sense, 1984.
How/when acquired: Gift LP, c. 1984.
Listen/watch here.

No holiday for me today; I am scrambling on a number of fronts, and will be through the weekend. But it is Veterans Day, so I wanted to take a moment to thank my dad and all the men and women who have served in this country's armed forces — including one of its newest members, my nephew, Airman Patrick Miller. Patrick graduated from basic training last week, and we're all very proud of him.

It's too easy for most Americans to forget that we're still at war, and will be for the foreseeable future. But almost every man or woman serving abroad leaves family behind, and they're all serving, too. If you know a wife or husband whose spouse is serving overseas, offer them some help: a meal, some babysitting time, a night out with friends. It will mean more than you can imagine.

This song originally appeared on 1979's Fear of Music. I never owned that, though I think my friend Adrienne did. A group of about a dozen of us went to see this movie the night it opened, sometime in the fall of 1984. Something went wrong with the projector or the sound system, and the movie ran without sound, which made the whole thing kind of pointless. We booed and hissed and might — I say might — have thrown things at the screen. They gave us our money back, and while I know that I did eventually see the movie in the theater, I have no memory of the event. The night we didn't see it was more fun, and is etched in my memory. There's a moral in there somewhere.

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