I'M REALLY SUPER SORRY THAT I'M ACTING SO MEAN

embedding disabled, sorry
If there's a throne, you're looking at a chairman.
The Mundanes: Empty Boulevards

[Tonight's post is transcribed straight from the chicken-scratch scrawl on the first few pages of a just bought, probably never-to-be-completed (like all the others) composition book.]



On the subway. A little drunk, but not that drunk. Left a holiday party because my wife didn't have her keys, and if I don't get home soon she'll have to face a roomful of 7th graders tomorrow on even less sleep than usual. Still left later than I meant to said I would, because my non-music bosses started doing a Christmas Carol skit based on the CEO, and dessert somebody put dessert in front of me. I wanted to see what they were serving if you ordered "not the cheesecake." (See, I like cheesecake, but the other thing had a funny name, like "profiterole" but more Italian, and starting with a "t." Good-sounding.) (What they served was some kind of tiny cup of vanilla like ice cream, very disappointing.) Now I'm on the subway. Thom Yorke's wordless hum. Air-clearing, still slightly on edge acoustic guitar. "Jigsaw Falling Into Place."

[I'm transcribing this, btw, while watching "The Grinch Stole Christmas." Your brain is for spiders, you got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch]

They say nobody talks about the music on In Rainbows. They The same ppl mention Radiohead and the Eagles in the same over-capitalized e-mails. (They're both business stories, right?) But the business-- which started killing itself once the acountants took charge at some always-to-be-unspecified date-- is dead. Never to be reborn until, perchance, it is. In the meantime music is all of ours. Yours and mine. Do it yourself!!! Why not? You can do it a zillion times better than the Eagles. Nobody would listen to you, because the marketing armies that launched those old fucks are defeated vanquished. But as the shittiest band in the world next to U2, those turds Coldplay, has already proven, nobody but nobody can do THIS -- Radiohead. What Radiohead does. It's a biiiiiggg cult, but it might be the last cult worth joining. (Jesus was two millennia ago, maaan.)


[transcribing, Simpsons ad, Homer singing about a "spider pig," YES!!!!!!]

If from here on out we're all nobodys, or at best nobodys pretending to be somebodys, Radiohead are somebodys-- major-label approved! w/ the emotive grunge-era one-hit-wonder one hit (in the U.S.) to prove it!-- who are unafraid to be loved by the nobodys. In the land of the nobodys, the last living somebody is king. There are more nobodys today than somebodys (see previous post). Radiohead is AWSOME.

[You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile. ...Arsenic sauce?]

Didn't think much about In Rainbows when I first downloaded it, I admit. Everybody else was thinking about it-- where's the fun in that?-- plus I'd just dropped $80 on some record I might receive in a couple of months, w/o even hearing it, so both expectation and embarrassment were running impossibly high.

Since I filed my main 2007 year-end list, In Rainbows-- ranked too low on my list-- has been the album I have played most, even more than new Drive-By Truckers or old Saint Etienne. Maybe it's the kind of record that needs to be free of year-end pressure for me, not least because OK Computer is practically the record that introduced me to the post-Beatles variety of the critically acclaimed Album of the Year. I was a kid from a foothill town in Northern California, with too few real friends in next stop Nashville, and not yet any real friends in next stop Arizona. What the fuck?

[It came without ribbons, it came without tags, it came without packages, boxes or bags.]

I'm listening to Videotape now, so I'll write about that. The halting broken piano chords. The electronic beats, spare, in between headphones. The off-kilter drums in the left headphone, the way you don't expect to hear from any band, not that you can expect anything from Radiohead after they had, first, innovated beyond your teenage comprehension (OK Computer, Kid A) and, after an album you never cared about as much as you wanted to, retreated into boring, depressive gloom-rock (that POS (for Radiohead) political album that came after Amnesiac). I don't know what it means but the sound comes before the sign, the sign before the signification.

[Maybe Christmas he thought doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.]

It's just as well that I finally started talking about Disc 1 as Disc 1 ended, because Disc 1 is still something I admire, even adore, even maybe love, w/o ever feeling like I can touch it. The way Brent D. I think once described the diff between Loveless + OK Computer. Disc 2, which I thought I'd hear for the first time when my $80 slabs of vinyl beautiful vinly vinyl arrived in the mail, is what reignited my interest in this album when it finally leaked. From the mournfully percussive dark-side-of-the-moon goo goo goo joob of "Down Is the New Up"-- hit me, string section!-- w/ it's ladies + gentlemen, w/o a safety net , I shall now... -- to the "Karma Police" analogue "Last Flowers" -- regretful, fragile, and terrified where its precursor was accusatory and fuck you and terrified (appliances have gone berserk -- I cannot keep up... "snot-nosed little punk" is maybe a bit nicer than "arrest this man" for a "hitler hairdo" if not-- diff song-- kicking screaming Gucci little piggy) seeking relief like an old man, so like a fan of the Eagles, or the worst band in the world Coldplay, and fucking finding it, goddamn it, in the beats and drones and Climbing up the Walls and dystopian mists of Up on the Ladder climbing

to the deranged --

"Bangers + Mash"

to the perfect 4 Minute
warning

(everyone has a different favorite song on this, WTF?)

I'

I need to go let my wife into the apartment now. She is waiting for me, possibly in the rain. I have a Santa hat in my bag which will make her laugh. [I should've said it was on my head!] And only one more stop to go, so I'd better stop.

MySpace link, scroll down for song
He lay awake at night, tossing and turning underneath his printed quilt protector, tears welling in his eyes.
Dominique Leone: Nellie McKay

Context is everything, but context can be changed.

(What was yours is everyone's from now on.)


As the novel moves toward a purer, more private expression it will cease altogether to be a popular medium, becoming, like poetry, a cloistered avocation.
The Professor Brothers: The TA Interview