Radiohead | 3 Aug 2008 | Indianapolis (or thereabouts) Another faceless amphitheater plunked down in the middle of a far-from-anywhere cornfield/flood plain/cheap land of nonetheless pricey "convenience" charges and engorged monopolist gluttony
[Older posts on the St. Louis show here: One | Two | Three | Quasi-Four ]
Setlist, best I can tell: 01. 15 Step [In Rainbows] clap-clap 02. Bodysnatchers [IR] 'Has the light gone out for you?' 03. There There [Hail to the Thief] BUM-BUM 04. All I Need [IR] 'middle of your picture, lyin' in the reeds' 05. Pyramid Song [Amnesiac] 'nothing to fear' 06. Nude [IR] no 'big ideas - not going to happen' 07. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi [IR] stage lights drown you 08. The Gloaming [HttT] heart-modulating bass 09. Climbing Up The Walls [OK Computer] 'I'll be there' 10. Faust Arp [IR] 'thought you had it in you but no' 11. Videotape [IR] 'saying goodbye' 12. Morning Bell [Kid A] 'where'd you park the car?' 13. Idioteque [Kid A] 'women and children first' 14. Reckoner [IR] love that bell on the ride cymbal 15. Everything in its Right Place [Kid A] 'woke up sucking a lemon' 16. Just [the bends] Rawk! \m/ 17. How to Disappear Completely [KidA] and habits of successful people
Encore 1 18. You and Whose Army? [Amnesiac] Thom hamming it up 19. Bangers + Mash [IR b-side] a jam 20. Exit Music (For a Film) [OK Computer] 'today we escape' 21. Jigsaw Falling into Place [IR] 'as your bad day disappears' 22. Karma Police [OK Computer] surreal to hear live
Encore 2 23. House of Cards [IR] crystal clear with lights to match 24. The National Anthem [Kid A] bwoom-bum-bum, ba-dwoom-dwoom 25. Street Spirit (Fade Out) [the bends] as good as you dreamed
Thom Yorke: It's kind of good with the old stuff that you can get three or four days with it and then say, "Okay, next," and not waste your time. For example, on the first couple shows on this tour, we haven't played "Paranoid Android." It's nice to ditch the ones that you don't want to play. We're still trying to get our heads around a lot of it. "Reckoner," for example, that's a bit tricky.
[snip] AVC: Was "Reckoner" intended to usher in a different feel for Radiohead?
Thom Yorke: It's definitely a first-thing-in-the-morning song. You don't write many of those until you have kids. It was something that happened despite us, really. It just happened.
Well, this is fast turning into a drug -- each high affirms why I'm doing this, only to get me thinking about how I can get the next fix.
I went with two friends to Indianapolis to see Radiohead again, with no expectations that it could equal the May show from this tour in St. Louis. But there it went. I'm blown away. Each song of the eight-track (double) encore gave me a feeling of being spoiled that I haven't had since the Christmas I received a table hockey game *and* a table soccer game. I was about 7 then.
But on this night I hit 30, a great way to enter another fake plastic decade. I was thinking about these (artificial) age transitions -- which aren't so much transitions, really, as they are markers to mind your mortality and check your 401k allocation. Kind of how holidays seem to be reminders to mind the family (or THE TROOPS), lest the pursuit of funds get in the way of why, exactly, you need funds. Or troops.
I guess for those who aren't religious, this process of exploration and reflection replaces religion -- except it is a helluva a lot more fun and makes a helluva lot more sense.
Anyway, I was remembering how the members of Radiohead are all parents now, and how they've mentioned in interviews that this new role and perspective inevitably changes the nature and process of what they do.
Fortunately for all involved, that process has landed them in the golden age of what they do: They have become masters of their craft -- the Kid A and Amnesiac years brought their mastery of sound experiment to a higher plane, while touring those taught them how those seemingly laboratory-only experiments could be pulled off in a live setting, to ridiculously funky effect. Touring the explosive Hail to the Thief taught them to mix this experimental sound with the politics-fueled fury of that album into a packaged whole. And now, they have 60-some songs to choose from for their live sets, including the straight-forward, timeless beauty of the new album.
The result is that everything works, on every level: professionally, aesthetically, sonically, visually. They are tight. They are happy. They are playing these songs to the hilt. Not a single selection can disappoint, even if you don't hear your favorite one (I didn't, but I don't even know what it is. EDIT: Wait, yes I do. "Let Down." Hearing that would ... not let me down.). Every serious fan is left feeling like Santa Claus came and emptied his entire sack on your living room floor. Two table games AND a Tonka truck.
Everything in its Right Place
I remember when I first heard the opening tones on the confusingly received (and now lauded) Kid A, I was challenged but tickled by the band's new direction as a follow up to what many consider one of the best albums in history. But I never imagined that the song those notes belong to, "Everything in its Right Place," would become a rip-roaring, foot-stomping, clap-clap stormer of a song that fertilizes an entire Indiana pasture's worth of goosebumps in the audience's already exhausted skin.
(BH: by jehovah I hope you get the chance to hear this one when we see the show in L.A. Don't look it up on YouTube, don't try to picture what it will be based on the studio track, just trust me that it will buckle your knees.)
That's what Radiohead is doing: Taking familiar tunes you may already have some affection for (or might skip), and transforming them into a moment of ecstasy that will never let you hear that song the same again.
Between the show I saw in 2004 and the two shows I've seen this year, they've done that for me with half their catalog. The rest, I dare say, needed no live exposition to enrich my understanding. But I'll still take it when offered.
There There Some specifics to last night:
**The driving bass line that holds "The National Anthem" together, why, they could just play it and dance to it for five minutes straight and it wouldn't get old. They certainly extended its intro last night, as the second to last song, turning it into a single-song party celebrating why we were all here.
**The North American tour is broken into two parts, sandwiching European festivals. But during the European break, they've kept up on American political insanity. Excerpts of which were played during jams and intros to songs like "The National Anthem." You know wingnuts on the radio ranting about Democrats causing $4 gas are sadly misguided, but hearing their words in this context strips them to display their naked absurdity on a whole new level. Such bigger issues at stake in the forest, and we're busy battling lies about the identity of one tree.
**Apparently they apologized to the Chicago Lollapalooza audience Friday night for them suffering jet lag. Two nights later here in Indy, Yorke's voice initially sounded scratchy. A couple rough spots in the first few songs for the band. Which made the rest of the night that much more choice. It was as if he just needed a little time to warm up, because this one just took off and got better as the sun, finally, went down and freed the stage lights to do their magic.
**We had the joy of classic slower songs like "Exit Music (for a Film)," but they were dinged slightly by drunkards behind us who hooted and hollared through half the song. Who are you, drunk guy who shouts through soft songs, and why don't you get this simple concept? It's not so much the mood-ruining -- everyone can take their own mood to a song -- it's the fact that during delicate songs like these, your hooting is "talking over the movie" and obscuring the sounds and words.
**I continue to admire drummer Phil Selway for keeping diligent time while the rest of the band creates looped chaos around him. It's one thing to keep strange signatures and off-beats. It's quite another to keep those while your bandmates are adding electronic percussion and dancing with melodic loops and atmospherics in the measureless realms above and below the song's main beat.
At any moment, you feel a given song could come crashing down with no hope of reconstruction, no unheard timing train to hop back on and calibrate to. But it never happens. It's certainly key that bassist Colin Greenwood is loyally by his side to help him navigate through the surreal waters.
**Radiohead, in this age of irony and computer-influenced soulless anonymity, have a way of turning the very nasty and/or mundane aspects of our existence into twisted, soul-soothing delight. It's not that they make those dark moments better, but they address them without bringing me down. Why, amid relationship-collapse song "Morning Bell," do repeated lines like "Where'd you park the car?" and "Cut the kids in half" bring me such joy and maniacal laughter?
**For "You and Whose Army?" Yorke again did the now-honed act of singing into the close-up camera at his piano. Knowing what was coming, it was fun to turn around and see the reactions on fans' faces to this inspired way of performing it. With the lyrics lying in that open-ended area where everyone interprets what they want out of it (and I certainly do), the phrases "Holy Roman Empire" and "You forget so easy" again resonated to wild cheers.
**The place in time-, in society-, on the planet-, in the universe-, existential-high I had for "Idioteque" back in St. Louis? Yeah, they brought me there again. To hear 10,000 people shout, "We're not scaremongering, this is really happening, happening" just as the organ drops out of the song is, well ... I have no more words for it.
So we returned to town around 3 a.m., sleepy but still high on music and dreading stumbling into work in the morning. The trip instantly paid for itself in joy, despite a minor snafu: We actually ventured out earlier to pick up craft beers we can't grab in A-B/InBev Acme Beer country, only to learn that Indiana still has hard-core blue laws: not only are liquor stores closed on Sundays, but you can't buy a lick of packaged alcohol in any form on the Day of Some People's Lord. The brewpubs, at least, were open beforehand. Ah well. The concert wasn't too bad.
Trust me, the Tom Waits thought download/review will come, albeit so inexcusably late. It's too bad I've now had another seminal concert experience since Waits, but I pledged myself a sector of my brain as a storehouse of Waits concert thoughts, to be untouched by other interfering reflections.
It's kinda worked. The neural sector is taped off. If pressed, I could write up the Waits experience now. But -- as always happens with me -- once I delay, then I fiddle, figuring: "It's already untimely, might as well make it just right" once I finally put key to screen. Then another freelance task comes up.
The procrastination stems from my scatter-shot interests and a series of interesting events: a shooter on my street (who burned down his home, wounding the neighborhood in the process, after taking himself out). I have the story of that day almost ready to post. Then there have been two great vacations, one (again) to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, plus another great boat trip during which I got sick but still lived it up with family, while watching our little next generation get there first true taste of summer cousin fun.
Several interesting writing-for-hire projects going on, too. But the best is the shows. Oh, the shows. This is the Year of Concerts for me. I'm blowing my vacation days and budget on seeing concerts that all fall in the "may be your only chance ever" category.
Living up Radiohead (two down, one to go, with a hookup with male soulmate BH). Then Tom Waits, who last visited St. Louis as the opener for Frank Zappa at Kiel Opera House -- what a show that must have been! And of course this fall's Killing Joke mortality tour -- New York and Chicago for me -- featuring the original rhythm section after the death of their longtime bass player. Throw in three November weddings for longtime friends, too.
Add it all together, and Year 30 is shaping up like a fully achieved "bucket list." I can't fathom how it could be topped. I will thus keep my eye out for buses and freak accidents accordingly. Unexpected diseases will be handled like the market: play the odds and hope it works out.
So concludes this jumbled personal update. Now excuse me, I have some airfare to line up. But put it this way: If something were to cut my life's ride short in '08, I'll have gone out doing what I love. "So I got dat goin' for me. Which is nice."
I have certain interests that, if left unchecked, would easily become obsessions that leave me unemployed and incapable of speaking with the outside world.
One such restrained obsession is maps. I can't really pass a map without looking at it. I can't look at it without finding a reason to look just a little longer. On road trips, I'll start in earnest, just looking at the atlas to locate the next interchange. But my wandering eye will send me following the Appalachian Trail five states up, or wondering if a particular state highway curves because of geology or Not In My Back Yard reasons. Three hours later, I've forgotten why I opened the atlas in the first place, but I can tell you I want to go see a lake in Idaho.
So a site like Strange Maps, which posts maps from all over time and purpose, could easily suck me in for a year. From language politics in Belgium, to galosh-themed early Soviet-era posters, to a New Yorker-like French view of the world, to airline maps that put Buffalo in Quebec and New Orleans on the dry side of Lake Pontchartrain, to plans for foreign occupation of the U.S., it's all there and smartly presented.
I have a coffeetable "Great Map Book" that I received as a gift, but it focuses its giant full-color pages on the history, function and evolution of maps. So there's a lot of Latin and a lot of maps of pastures watched over by gods and guarded by angels. It's enjoyable in that aspect but still a little too far back and too pre-Scientific Revolution for me. In some ways, this site is what I wished that book would be. In other ways, I wish I'd never found the damned site.
*apparently cartophilia isn't an accepted word, but it sure fits, and sounds more professional diagnosis-like than "map lover"
I wonder, has war ever broken out simultaneous to an Olympics opening ceremony before this year? Yeah, knowing humans, probably so.
But it's somehow fitting that it should happen this year, when this international event of intended goodwill is hosted by a regime that is using it to showcase how glorious and not-all-that-abusive-really it is. The state of the commercialized, regime-exhibit Olympics today doesn't exactly instill confidence in the prospects of our little human community as we allow anonymously guided corporations to become evermore influential non-state actors.
I'm not sure if I'll tune into the Georgia-Russia war though. On paper, it looks entertaining, but I'm not sure my psyche has room to digest it at this time.
Um, yeaah, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and work tomorrow...
Meanwhile, in other theaters of conflict, my department has been thrown into another less-than-ideal office move. As usual, the mechanics of this move have been handled in a way that, one might suppose, does not appear in most internal communications textbooks.
The announcement has been met by the lifers with the usual assortment of outrage, heartache, and battered-victim syndrome acceptance. Without going into details, logic indicates that, in the covert planning phase, certain things were not considered while other things were mistakenly assumed. There is a general feeling that The Deciders -- people who measure human life in terms of square-footage occupied -- do not actually know what the affected worker bees do. It is possible that this feeling was intensified by the fact that such Deciders have not, in fact, seen what said worker bees do.
Creating the sensation that one's fate is determined by arbitrary, unseen forces is seldom advised in the employer-employee relationship. Historically speaking, such a sensation tends to lead humans to either religion or revolt (whether through active rebellion or lethargic non-compliance) -- neither of which is desired, me thinks, by the unseen forces pulling the strings.
But the point of my vignette is this: Out of office conflict comes hilariously passive organizational speak. We subjects collected a list of office arrangement "demands" and offered them up for sacrifice to the unseen forces. The point-by-point response -- divinely authored by the unseen gods themselves -- included several repetitions of this doozie:
"No proposed action to be taken at this time."
As in: Item -- Parking lot lacks adequate lighting. Response: No proposed action to be taken at this time.
The first rule of Unseen Forces-speak is the passive voice: It's important to ascribe no person or identifiable actor as the actual "decider" or maker of decisions. Just as the legal shelter of a corporation protects incompetent or fraudulent C-executives from the liability of their actions (instead it falls on the retirement accounts of the shareholders who unwittingly paid their salaries and golden parachutes), so the passive voice of organizational speak protects anyone from actually being identified with the decisions they've made.
e.g., "The department has been moved." These positions have been eliminated. This benefit has been reduced. Headquarters have been relocated to a city that, shock, shock!, is closer to the CEO's home. And so forth.
The second, closely related rule is to speak in the sort of infinite wisdom voice of philosophy or scripture: "Roles will evolve as conditions change." Interruptions in power are to be expected. An agreement has been reached. Her decision to spend more time with family is respected.
The third rule is to add phrases like "at this time," which create an air of uncertainty and help mitigate the sudden finality of The Decision. Like an ambiguous song lyric, this tactic has the added benefit of letting the interpretation vary according to the paranoia of the receiver:
For the hopeful, "at this time" can mean your request may eventually be met, even if there are no plans to meet it, um, at this time. Similarly, I have no plans to inherit a fortune at this time. For the cynic, "at this time" can subtly suggest that you better be happy with what you get, because as you have seen, eventually it will change yet again for the worse. Likewise, I have no plans to rapidly decline in health at this time.
Meanwhile, the Unseen Forces use "at this time" as a stopgap to help achieve the short-term goal: Get the decision implemented first, then see how they like it, how they adapt, and whether any further arrangements are actually necessary. Once they've moved and their status quo has changed, you have the hard part down: Possession, or location in this case, is 9/10 of the law.
In our case, the move is also labeled "temporary," a nice way of inspiring hope and pretending hardship won't last. Nevermind that the temporary term is undefined and floating, and subject to the successful execution of plans by Unseen Forces whose ability to execute a plan is highly questionable. The point is that the relocation is -- like life, regimes, and solar systems -- temporary.
Finally, for a writer who values communicating actual meaning over communicating, oh I don't know, horse feces maybe, it's a truly exquisite touch to remove the actual verb, passive though it may be, from the sentence. Sure there's "to be" in "No action to be taken at this time." But by leaving out "is," it sends that extra special message of intentional distance. It's a love note, really, that says: "Peasant, we Unseens are so removed from this decision, we don't even know what tense it's in."
Anyway, I'm sure further amusing organization-speak will come out of this process. But this latest gem is so tickling to me, I'm tempted to adopt it as my response next time I receive an assignment:
"Thank you for your request. No proposed action is to be taken at this time."
When I woke this morning, I found my mind occupied by my alarm clock, which told me: "When Czechoslovakians woke on Aug. 21, 1968, they found their country occupied by 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops."
It was 40 years ago today that Soviet tanks invaded, forcibly ending a period of internal reforms known as Prague Spring. The mild reforms that the communists within then-Czechoslovakia had tried -- and the central party in Moscow decided to crush -- were such grave threats to Mother Russia as: allowing people to play Western music; to form sports and women's groups; to be Boy Scouts; to show a pulse of creativity in a dour Orwellian landscape.
Funny to think about this anniversary with Mother Russia rattling its sword in Georgia today. Another year, another round of deaths to protect its sphere of influence. History repeats.
NPR's feature about 1968 today is really good. I hear my dad's voice in the audio clips of the Czech intellectuals they interviewed. NPR also has a good companion piece online about that era, which gets into the between-war period of Czechoslovak democracy and why the Soviet imposition of their bastardized form of pseudo-communism never sat well with the Czechs, who were historically a creative people with a healthy intellectual scene at the crossroads of Central Europe.
My father was one of the ones forced out (well, it was escape or die) way back in 1948, when the Soviets first said, "We're here!" Which is lucky for him, because the imprisoned friends he left behind had to live through hell and then the hope and heartbreak of 1968. That year, he was expecting his third child here in the U.S. Heh, maybe my brother owes his conception to a particularly hopeful 1968 spring.
The NPR story points out that, while the invasion and subsequent "normalization" brutally crushed hopes in Czechoslovakia, it may have had the benefit of permanently undermining the idea of an international communist (Soviet-bastardized style) movement: Other, "true" communists were appalled by the Soviet action, which was hardly an example of how to treat your movement "brothers."
So it would be two more decades before the Soviet era finally ended in 1989, after my father had given up hoping he would ever live to see it. Sometimes I forget how dramatically, incredibly things changed after that. My father went from thinking he'd never see his home again, to visiting it each summer and ultimately moving back.
Reading and listening to the NPR stories, it strikes me how much music is intertwined with those hopes and times, and how its control is representative of the way regimes like that just destroy the human spirit. It was the same way for my dad in the 1940s, when he fell in love with swing music and all these Western jazz musicians (which the Soviets quickly made illegal).
One man who was a foreign correspondent based in Prague [that spring] told me this anecdote illustrating how he understood something important was happening in Czechoslovak society:
While he was sitting at a café on the bank of the Vltava River, a few days after the 1967 Writers' Congress, an elderly man wearing a chef's hat and white uniform emerged from the basement kitchen. The cook confidently strode across the terrace, sat down at a piano and began to play and sing Cikanko ty krasna (Oh, My Beautiful Gypsy), a song from his youth, which at the time was still banned as bourgeois deviationism.
A doctor by training and a member of the social elite, he had been relegated to the margins of society and was forced to take menial jobs when the Communists took over in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Twenty years later, with the new ferment in society, the foreign correspondent told me, the doctor-turned-cook felt he could publicly reclaim his identity.
Life don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing.
No really, I did. Back in June. And if I don't jot my impressions down soon, I'll forget the highlights. KayO probably already gave up on me. ... I've been jotting some down off and on and then running away, so it's time to post at least the first half of them. Part II to come next week. Feel free to add yours.
Waits' strict anti-scalping policy only lets you get two tickets per household, which scuttled my plans to recruit a crew of attendees. But at least, our group of four lucked out by getting two pairs right behind each other. Tragically, one of our friends was MIA and moving furniture on the day of the concert: He had the wrong date for the concert by one day, and we had his ticket. Frantic attempts to contact him failed.
(Now is when we recall that Waits last came to town with the late Frank Zappa, before I was born, in a building that itself was demolished and rebuilt 15 years ago. Ouch.)
But all was not lost: The oversight let Mrs. Fall of Because come along instead. She doesn't know Tom Waits very well, so come ticket-buying time she didn't want me to use one of our two precious household allotments on her. But this last-minute snafu gave her a second chance, and boy was she lucky.
The experience starts with the crowd outside. It was a hot-but-not-miserable St. Louis summer evening, so a great time to soak up some air on our walk before entering climate-controlled comfort inside. Because of the anti-scalping measures that require showing your ID and DNA sequence upon entry, the crowd was lined up around both sides of the long block that holds the Fox.
On one side of the block, we walked by the will call line. It was filled with men who try hard to live and dress the part of Tom Waits emulators: Bowler-type hats, cigarettes a plenty, blazer coats, and general NOTICE ME: I AM QUIRKY attire.
Our line, the non-will call line, snaked around the other half of the block. Generally speaking, the non-will call folk had spent less on their tickets. And it showed: same Waits-imitator aesthetic, same chain-smoking, but peppered with less designer-brand quirky attire, more gregarious tattoos, and more people who knew they were in for a good night but also knew their life did not depend on it. Still, either line would have been a good candidate for a brawl over obscure authors.
I myself was psyched for a great night, but my expectations were refreshingly undefined. Waits has been at it for so long, and his style is so singularly rough that you can't listen to it all the time, so I've probably never even heard half of his material. I just expected a curious, amusing, quasi-theatrical show.
Which is what I got. Waits' style and his protagonists are all over the map, but one word that always comes to my mind is "soul." Not "soul music," exactly. But all of his music, even the older, more by-the-numbers tunes, has soul. Sometimes it's mourning, sometimes it's regret, sometimes it's goofy humor, sometimes it's riddles or bursts of rage. But it always depicts the "soul" of a protagonist, or that protagonist's creator, just dealing with life or conjuring the humor necessary to digest it all. A lot of protagonists you'd probably hate personally, but Waits' package of song and music prompts bemused empathy for them. Or else point-and-mock laughter, which is just as fun.
And all the sounds: There's funky percussion, nightclub upright bass, meandering piano, jazzy horns, folksy harmonica -- and relentlessly irregular time signatures. A lot of his songs you hear trotting down the road before they burst through the swinging doors of the saloon in your head. Others stay far away, like a train you watch wind through winding mountains as its chug comes to you on a one-second delay. Sometimes the whole tunes stops just when you thought it would take off. And sometimes the background sounds make you think it was recorded or performed in a primitive workshop. It all keeps you concentrating and a wee bit disoriented.
Then of course there is the voice. Some musicians' peculiar voices turn me off; others' throw talons around my flesh and rip me into their strange world.
James Hetfield's vocals always kept me from getting fully into Metallica. Bob Dylan's has long been a toss-up for me. But for some reason, Thom Yorke's of Radiohead -- a melodic but harsh instrument in itself -- and Tom Wait's shards of dust-and-smoke voice, those please me juuuust right.
After the show, I imitated this voice for days until receiving a cease-and-desist order from the Mrs.
At the show, I had trouble hearing his vocals for the first few songs -- and I don't know if that was me or the acoustics -- but I was familiar enough with those songs to not worry, and the whole visual/audio experience was enough that it didn't matter.
He came out in front of a backdrop of old megaphone-like speakers of various sizes, which gave the set a claymation feel. He stomped joyously (well, he didn't look joyous, but no one puts on this sort of show without reveling in the fun) on an acoustic wood platform that was raised perhaps a foot above the rest of the stage. He used a foot pedal to clang a bell whenever he damn well wanted the accent.
Aside: I have always been teased by my family for my in-shower body percussion, which I've done for as long as I've heard music and taken showers. The slaps on your chest/sternum (deep notes), side of the bum (snare), hollow of the side of the bum (tom), and any other body part make for great percussion in the resonance of a tile-walled bathroom. Granted, it leaves the flesh a little red after a particularly rocking shower "gig," but it's worth it for the life/music/joy cocktail of it all, and occasionally a fan even throws a bra at you ... Anyway, watching Waits on stage turn everything and every limb into a percussion device, I thought, "This guy HAS to play the body drum in the shower!"
On the subject of percussion, it was cool to see Waits' son handle the drumset, and handle it ably. As the son of a jazz drummer who I only saw play with a Czech band a handful of too-young-too-appreciate times, I can't think of many cooler ways to go on tour that by playing drums for your dad and his expert musician friends.
As usual, Waits peppered the show with random meanderings to the audience that reflect a mix of his humor (as seen in several of the film roles he's taken) and the quasi-character he plays on stage. Just one example (you have to picture-hear it in Waits' "isn't that interesting?" gravel voice:
"Every time a male ejaculates -- I know, I know, that's a tough word -- but every time it happens ... OK let's just say 'it' now ... But each time 'it' happens, he releases 250 million sperm. And only one of those sperm fertilizes the egg. So before we even get here, we're already winners." *wild applause* "That's the way I see it."
It was great concert experience. It obviously bewildered me by striking a mix of humor, musical awe and sincere sentiments in me. In Part II, I'll actually talk about some of the specific songs he played.
"It's coming through a hole in the air; from those nights in Tiananmen Square It's coming from the feel that this ain't exactly real Or it's real, but it ain't exactly there. From the wars against disorder, from the sirens night and day, From the fires of the homeless, From the ashes of the gay: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A."
TV commercials are notorious for licensing songs that sound like they mean one thing, but really mean the opposite. Often, they sample an ironic line or chorus from the song and flip its meaning on its head. A classic is how Chevrolet used CCR/John Fogarty's "Fortunate Son" to patriotically taut its American-made, macho trucks, leaving out the signature line, "It ain't me." Heh.
But I never expected PBS's "Frontline" to co-opt, for a promo of its election coverage, Leonard Cohen's "Democracy."
The promo starts with the song's signature light melody, marching drum beat, and salutory harmonica (harmonica, right?). As I heard the familiar music play, sans lyrics, with stars-and-stripes imagery on the screen, I thought, "No ... no ... they didn't ... is this a satire?" as I fumbled to check what channel I was tuned to.
And sure enough, the lyrics only kicked in with Cohen growling the idealist but ironic chorus, "Democracy is coming / To the U.S.A."
I'd say Cohen's song isn't exactly an indictment of American democracy, but it's certainly an indictment of the way it functions now. It's a hopeful call for what we could be (do I hear Obama-style aspirations?) with frank acknowledgment of all our failings. Implicit in the message is that, despite our self-patting, proper democracy isn't really here yet.
Which, to me anyway, is not cause for flag-waving. (But maybe flag-waving includes an embrace of our flaws? Hmmm ... but flag-wavers don't usually strike me as thoroughly introspective about our country like that; they come off more as purely rah-for-the-home-team types: as if our flaws will magically fix themselves thanks to our innate greatness; or, when our flaws are a consideration, they always take a back seat to good ol' pride.)
Unless Frontline WAS being ironic, too, as it profiles the forces that influence our esteemed candidates. Or as a nod to fault-embracing "but it's the best we've got" patriotism.
If that's the case, if election night results show business as usual, I kindly request they sample Radiohead's "2+2=5" and serenade the polls with its blunt chorus: "Because ... You have not been / Paying attention / Paying attention / Paying attention..."
Radiohead is live Webcasting their last U.S. show on this tour tonight, from Santa Barbara (thanks, Talltim). I've got a friend at that show, so I might have to catch this. That, and maybe twist m'lady's arm into sampling what she missed.
Meanwhile, for anyone fascinated by the shows on this tour (that seems to include everyone who attended one) their tour production blog is pretty enlightening. The production handlers talk about all sorts of things like travel, working with LiveNation and lightening their carbon load with the best technology available. A great post explains the LED lights they're using, which actually draw less -- yet more stable -- power consumption.
"Karma police, arrest this man He talks in math, he buzzes like a fridge He's like a detuned radio"
--Radiohead, "Karma Police"
A nice thing about having an obscure personal site with no particular reliable focus on this big, bad, wild Internet, is that you can generally steer clear of nefarious troll commenters who need constant content and specific subject matter to feed their appetite for disharmony.
I honestly don't know what it is about the human psyche (or its lowest capacities) that drives people to stalk popular sites and fill them with usually anonymous antagonism, or what moves people to get into comment spats, or to provoke people, or to just plain tell people off, or to be contradictory for the sake of conflict, under the umbrella of "Discuss this article"
I almost don't want to know. But whatever that part is within humans, it is unleashed tenfold by the anonymity, informality, and lack of consequences of that "bunch of pipes and tubes." Sometimes I tell myself, "it's just children," but it's not. Maybe not. A lot of adults, too. The NY Times recently profiled a few regular "trolls" a few weeks ago -- I don't even want to link to the article -- and the more they delved into each personality, the more I was struck that, at heart, they're simply unhappy people with a lot of disposable time. Too bad.
A great case in point, though, is the inevitable bashing and fighting that happens in the comment threads of any YouTube video. To that end, someone developed a hilarious Firefox add-on that cleans the YouTube comments for you.
Ha! "YouTube Comment Snob" allows you to filter out "undesirable" comments in YouTube threads that have:
More than X number of spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox's built-in spell checker.
All capital letters
No capital letters
Doesn't start with a capital letter
Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
Excessive capitalization
Profanity
Brilliant! The same criteria you use to evaluate a commenter's (or coworker's) sanity and age can be used to make their drivel completely disappear! It wouldn't take away the pure contrarian, but it's a start.
Truthfully, I never look at the YouTube comments anyway, unless I'm hoping they clarify the age or source of a song. But it would be ideal to have this function on sites where the discourse can actually, perhaps, teach me something. The places where comments actually add something to this wide world but are, inevitably, corrupted by weasels anyway. Maybe someday.
Of course, I'm somewhat hesitant to wish for that. In any walk of life, I like getting all the raw information (crap and all) to formulate an informed perception. So comment effluvia does help remind me, inform me, keep me from getting too naive, about just how ridiculous people can be.
As you may have noticed, the site has changed. Sampa, the free-site host, did a version 2 of some sort.
Despite an FAQ that made it sound like allowing one's site to go through v.2 surgery would be okay, there were several flexibilities that surprisingly disappeared with the click of a button. (e.g. I cannot believe sidebars like this one are even narrower than before.)
And I'm told -- miraculously! -- that the conversion cannot be undone. Truth be told, I'm actually quite pissed. But free is free. Sampa has otherwise been good to me.
So I need to sort through site "features" to see how I can make do. Except that I don't have the time at the moment, in the middle of graduate classes and Lighthousehockey.com. (btw, I've removed that Lighthouse RSS feed so that you're not clogged with random Islanders hockey gibberish).
But I promise to touch up the accessories when I get a chance, and return to irregularly scheduled blogging.
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Thom Yorke: It's kind of good with the old stuff that you can get three or four days with it and then say, "Okay, next," and not waste your time. For example, on the first couple shows on this tour, we haven't played "Paranoid Android." It's nice to ditch the ones that you don't want to play. We're still trying to get our heads around a lot of it. "Reckoner," for example, that's a bit tricky.
I guess for those who aren't religious, this process of exploration and reflection replaces religion -- except it is a helluva a lot more fun and makes a helluva lot more sense.
That's what Radiohead is doing: Taking familiar tunes you may already have some affection for (or might skip), and transforming them into a moment of ecstasy that will never let you hear that song the same again.
At any moment, you feel a given song could come crashing down with no hope of reconstruction, no unheard timing train to hop back on and calibrate to. But it never happens. It's certainly key that bassist Colin Greenwood is loyally by his side to help him navigate through the surreal waters.
February, 2008