Video: The Books: "Take Time"
One of the pleasant surprises of seeing the Books live is their video accompaniment, which provides a perfect visual analogue to their music collage. This video for "Take Time" is what they project when they play the song live (it's one of many that they're self-releasing on DVD), and it closely tracks the song's prickly sense of curiosity and wonder. It's like an animated collection of Family of Man photographs tightly edited to music, with people from all over the world shown doing things both strange and banal but always utterly human. Some clips are certainly funny, but as always with the Books it's an inclusive humor and never feels like mocking. In a recent interview in the Wire, Jan St. Werner of Mouse on Mars theorizes that the human mind is incapable of both "experiencing" and "judging" at the same time; this video, like the best of the Books music, reminds us of what pure experience feels like.
[from the Playall DVD; available now at Books' shows and at their website]