There's a "true crime concert documentary" about David Byrne

I love the work of documentarian John Wilson, the wildly observational filmmaker who specializes in discovering strange, whimsical, and poignant aspects of everyday life through capturing the mundane. His beloved series How to with John Wilson, which ran on HBO for three seasons, emulates instructional videos and probed topics like “small talk” and “building scaffolding” and “plastic seat covers.” He “yes-and”s with his subjects, allowing his initial inquiry to sidetrack him on paths of exploration that bring him to strange places and introduces him to wild people—experiences that help him refine his initial inquiries in unexpected ways. If I might attempt to ascribe a unifying thesis to his approach: his work is about the surreal, and often nonpareil, things that lurk beneath the quotidian, the perennial, and the forgettable aspects of modern human life.

Wilson, whose canvas is usually the city of New York, has just released a delightful documentary called The History of Concrete, which is about how he is trying to make a documentary about the history of concrete. It is his first feature, and it was met with critical acclaim. Personally, I enjoyed it. Following my viewing of the film, I looked into Wilson’s filmography. It was early in the morning (much earlier than I normally wake, but my baby is teething and was screaming all night before settling down at 5:30 am and leaving me feeling like this), which is when I normally can’t think of anything else to do besides go down Wikipedia rabbit holes, which is why I now know everything there is to (reasonably) know about Phineas Gage, Stendhal syndrome, and the Battle of Zutphen. 

Anyway, it turns out, John Wilson made a documentary short in 2015 featuring the filmmaker David Byrne. Wilson was hired by the filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross to help them in their capture of Byrne’s multimedia arena tour, Contemporary Color. But Wilson made his own short about the experience, Temporary Color, which is about how he was hired by the filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross to help them in their capture of Byrne’s multimedia arena tour, Contemporary Color, but ultimately doesn’t have too much work much to do, and gets sidetracked when he realizes that Byrne’s tour destinations correspond with the escape route of two convicts on the lam, and begins to tell their story, turning the concert video into a true-crime doc, instead.

It’s funny, it’s strange, it is both very Byrne-ian and very Wilson-ian.

Watch it here!