Nyon and the Talking Heads

Dwight Peck's personal website

Nyon, Switzerland

and The Talking Heads, 2007

Normally we dine at lunchtime with our little sandwichs on the lakeside, but having been alerted by Josette that the Talking Heads are appearing in the Place du Château in Nyon, naturally we cut lunch a little short and ran the 25 vertical metres up to the upper town to see what's what. It's 17 January 2007 and raining.

Up the alley from Ammy's old apartment in the Rive (lakeside) district we jog ponderously, thinking David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, and especially Tina Weymouth.

Tina Weymouth?!? These are different Talking Heads.

In fact, these are the Souls of the Heads -- also called the Soulstates, each one of them wired for sound and blurting out soulful expostulations in many languages, at random intervals, all perfectly unintelligible. Impressive ceramic heads, these are!

We're a month late, evidently, but perhaps Ms Hedi.-K. Ernst-Schmid was busy and forgot to come back to pick them up, so we're still in luck. Google tells us that Hedi.-K. Ernst-Schmid is an obviously imaginative ceramicist and painter from Lucerne, Switzerland, who taught for many years at arts and crafts colleges near San Francisco in California, USA, but has recently come home again, now based in her arthke workshops center, in Jona in the canton of St Gallen (http://www.arthke.com).

The Nyon Castle front door, guarded by ceramic Soul Heads, and the interior. The famous wine museum is down those stairs on the left.

The château from up the alley, in a drizzly sort of mid-January rain

Talking Heads from the back. Couldn't understand a WORD they were saying.

Castle front deck, and more Heads. Not wired for audio, this lot.

The front of the Château of Nyon overlooking Lake Geneva, a rainy-ish 17 January 2007 (still waiting for the snow to come)

Talking Heads performing silently at the Château de Nyon in a light rain

Civic administration officials peering down from their offices

A sombre loveliness in Nyon

Through the archway, the castle entrance -- municipal employees slipping out for their lunchtime salad and fizzy water.

The Promenade des Veilles-Murailles (Promenade of the Old Walls) on the right and the Parc du Bourg-de-Rive in the centre. Only it's not a park anymore, it's a parking lot. That's the bad news. The good news is that the parking lot is underground, and that a parking lot was badly wanted.

The other bad news is that awful elevator conveying carparkers up to the castle level with no expense of calories.

Lunchtime's over, time to go back to work -- back down to the waterline.

The Rive neighborhood, in a drizzle.