I discovered this morning that, when you are alone in your car, driving along, minding nobody's business but your own, you can passably sing Lou Reed's "Satellite Of Love", or at least the verses, to the tune of "The Big Country", by Talking Heads. Not so surprising, I suppose, given the relative temporal and locative [you've just been reading William Gibson's latest novel, haven't you? - ed.] proximity of the two songs. It may have just been a zeitgeist thing. The more surprising thing was that "Satellite Of Love" was lurking around in the deep corners of my mind, given my deep-seated aversion to all things Lou Reed post-Velvets. Hmmm. I wonder what else is living up there.
Anyway, this got me to thinking, have David Byrne and Lou Reed ever actually worked together? They live in the same city, and are roughly the same vintage, and David Byrne strikes me as a Laurie Anderson kind of guy (Reed also being, in a different sense, Laurie Anderson's kind of guy), they must at least have crossed paths. But as I was sitting in my car, minding my business, nothing came to mind. There can only be at the most two degrees of separation between them (Reed > Cale > Eno > Byrne), and I suspect this could be further reduced. (Is Arthur Russell another possibility?)
And this, somewhat abstractedly, got me to thinking, if someone at your work is called Nicolette Carson (fact!), how can you train yourself not to think of her as Nicolette Larson and start singing "Lotta Love" to yourself (internally) when in her presence. And this got me to thinking, I should probably go and get some work done.
