Sometimes it’s fun to just peek into the minds of cool people and see what the hell is going on in there. If there were a King of Cool election, I might just cast my vote for former Talking Heads frontman, musician, artist, designer, filmmaker, writer, general creative-type and genius, David Byrne. And if that election got down and dirty—a contest, say, of who could write the best conceptual song around the word “chair”—and the public was still having difficulty picking a favorite, and if I were David Byrne’s campaign manager, I might suggest he direct the public to his blog for the last word in coolness. That’s a lot of “ifs,” but I am confident that, should this strategy be employed, David Byrne would indeed win his rightful crown.
Reading through Byrne’s journal, you see his thoughts move from an appreciation of standard Disney tunes a la Snow White and Cinderella to his interest in the work of David Hanson, a Dallas, Texas-based maker of humanistic robots, with whom Byrne is collaborating to create a singing robot for an upcoming exhibition in Madrid, and whom he recently visited in Texas. The blog recounts the visit in detail, complete with creepy photographs of the face of one robot, half removed and the internal wiring—literally—revealed. Click away from the blog and you’ll find links to Byrne’s various art projects, books, films and purchasable paraphernalia.
For me, the definition of “cool” is a mind that is constantly thinking up new things and exploring where those things take it, and I can’t say that I have ever come across a more active mind than Byrne’s.