What's THIS For...?!

MON 4 AUG 2008

Genie let out of the bottle By Dominik

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.

--A.V. Club


The Beat Goes Round and Round

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.

MON 4 AUG 2008

Year of the Show By Dominik

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."

TUE 5 AUG 2008

Cartophilia By Dominik

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"

FRI 8 AUG 2008

No proposed action to be taken at this time By Dominik

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."