Ideas That Fell Asleep, David Byrne Brings Sleeping Beauties to Culver City
The Talking Heads cofounder will discuss his new book about forgotten breakthroughs at Live Talks Los Angeles on October 13.
David Byrne has spent five decades moving between music, theater and art since he co-founded Talking Heads in 1975. His new book is about brilliant ideas that arrived ahead of their time and had to wait. On Tuesday, October 13 at 8 p.m., Byrne will take the stage at the Robert Frost Auditorium in Culver City for Live Talks Los Angeles to discuss Sleeping Beauties, Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up.
Penguin Random House releases the hardcover on October 6. It runs 400 pages, and Byrne reads the audiobook himself. Live Talks calls it “a brilliant and inspiring reckoning with how breakthroughs across the arts and sciences get forgotten, and how they get rediscovered.”
The cast of sleepers is wide. The publisher’s description runs from dark matter, lichen and continental drift to solar panels and the steam engine, and from Bach and Bruegel to Vermeer and Melville. Each, in Byrne’s telling, went quiet before it came roaring back. Again and again, the description says, the wake-up call came from someone in a different discipline who broke into the silo.
Over his career he has released 20 studio albums. His score for The Last Emperor won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Grammy. On stage he made American Utopia, which received a Special Tony Award and became a Spike Lee film, and Here Lies Love, a disco musical with four Tony nominations. He also founded the solutions journalism site Reasons to Be Cheerful and has written Bicycle Diaries, How Music Works and Arboretum.
The Culver City night comes ahead of a run of theater talks in Britain. Far Out Magazine reports that Byrne will open a U.K. book tour at the Hackney Empire in London on November 8, with stops in Brighton, Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh, and will donate his fees to the Rocksteady Foundation.
General admission is $40, and the book is available at checkout. A $20 virtual ticket streams the talk on October 20 at 6 p.m. Pacific, with five days of video on demand. The auditorium is at 4401 Elenda Street. Velvet also covered The Beatles Through George’s Lens, Olivia Harrison and Cameron Crowe Talk The Third Eye in Culver City.
