Word: qu
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...some Creole Chicken. Poo-lay. Covered it over with, qu'est-ce que c'est, piquante sauce? Mon amie, she says it's real good, but she don' finish it. She eats only half, maybe, leaves it on her plate. Poor little chicken, I think. Don' nobody love you? I taste it with my mouth and, I don't know, it ain't so bad. You show me a chicken, you know what, I'll eat it. I'll eat it right...
...Manhattan's CBGB, the proto-punk club on the Bowery, the Heads dressed in strictly Ivy spiff, like floorwalkers from Brooks Brothers. Byrne, eyes bulging, long neck turning like a periscope, sang like a carny geek who could not digest his chicken. Then there were the songs. "Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est/ Run, run, run, run away," Byrne would blurt, contriving to sound simultaneously like the murderer and his victim. Perfect new-wave icons, then: psychotic preppies. The pure products of America in the process of going blissfully crazy...
...very title of this summer's big show at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, which fills a floor of the cavernous Centre Georges Pompidou with 263 works by 95 artists (through Oct. 13), gives one pause: "Qu'est-ce que la Sculpture Moderne?" (What is modern sculpture?). A tendentious question, perhaps, but not without its point. Most museumgoers feel they know what modern painting is. About sculpture they care less and are less sure...
...hucksters and mosquitoes, the revolutions of the stomach are all forgotten or, better yet, transfigured into the unforgettable adventures with which we can impress our friends. Paradise's loss is our gain. Small wonder that Proust, great poet laureate of reminiscence, wrote, "Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus." Nothing is ever what it used...
...music as well. African rhythm stacked up against Motown, and 42nd Street funk against the ozone background musings of Rock Minimalist Brian Eno, all set under lyric passages that seemed like exercises in concretist hysteria. Byrne cooked up a homicidal maniac who talked to himself in French. "Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est" was the refrain of the first big- time song he ever wrote. Funny and frightening, it set the band off on a nicely twisted track...