Author: joseph

My essay, Radiohead’s Antivideos: Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, has been published in the academic journal Postmodern Culture.

The title of the b-side “Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)” takes its name from the commercial polymer polyethylene. The most popular plastic in the world, the polymer is used to make grocery bags, shampoo bottles, children’s toys, and bullet proof vests.

“High and Dry” is the third song on The Bends, the band’s second studio album. According to the OED, the phrase of the song’s title and chorus is something often said of a vessel cast or drawn up on the shore out of the water. Hence the figurative sense to mean out of the stream current of events or progress, to be stranded. Often, the phrase can also be used to mean ‘safe.’

The song’s seventh line reads “You broke another mirror.” Breaking a mirror has numerous consequences in superstition. That breaking a mirror causes seven years of bad luck is a common superstition, at least in the West. In context, the addressee’s breaking of another mirror (not just one mirror, but more than one) is a sign of the same reckless courage that prompts him to jump a motorcycle twice in one week. Along the same lines, to build employee confidence one web site suggests that you do the following: “Collect some old mirrors or buy some inexpensive ones at a discount store. At a pot luck lunch, courageous people can take a hammer and gently break a mirror into a large, tub. Be sure to have the person wear gloves and eye shields just in case a splinter of glass flies out of the tub. Their prize – another Courage Certificate.” Read more about building employee confidence by breaking superstitions here.

The third song on OK Computer is entitled “Subterranean Homesick Alien.” The title dervies from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

The first song on Kid A, “Everything In Its Right Place,” may be related to a story by Hans Christian Andersen entitled “Everything in the Right Place.”

You can now purchase Pulk-Pull* T-Shirts.

One of Thom Yorke’s pseudonyms is Tchock. While the name seems relatively nonsensical, it may be related to the musician Tchok who produced an album titled Kinetik (a name that recalls the Radiohead b-side “Kinetic”).

Less likely alternatives: Tchok is the Russian word for old copper or zinc coins of Manchuria and Indochina. Tchok also means indigo plant in Korean.

In an early scene of the documentary Meeting People is Easy, we see Thom Yorke frontally from an audience member’s perspectiveóthe band is onstage also, but out of camera range. Pointing his microphone to the audience, he forgoes singing the final lyrics to “Creep,” letting the audience do so instead. The mournful closing line, “I don’t belong here,” takes on special meaning given that the speaker, with the audience singing in his place, does not need to be present. “I don’t belong here,” is an observation on the surface, but also a statement of desire, a desire to not be wherever “here” designates.

Later in the movie, we see Thom Yorke from behind, singing alone with an acoustic guitar to an empty auditorium. The song he performs here would later become “How to Disappear Completely.” This scene and the one described above form negative images of one another. I’m not here, this isn’t happening. The lyrics we hear Yorke singing, unlike “Creep”, assert that the speaker is not hereóthe speaker is a spectral entity, rising above the moment, escaping it. Whereas in “Creep” the speaker can only pine for an escape that, by song’s end, never comes.

Late capitalism, Slavoj Zizek writes in The Fragile Absolute, has introduced us to “a breathtaking dynamics of obsolescence.” As you will find on this site, many links to older materials on previous incarnations of Radiohead web sites (older=one to three years) are out of date. The links, un-updated, witness this breathtaking dynamics of obsolescence. To update the links would be a vain effort to efface the inevitable: mutability.

Nevertheless, the previous incarnations are fortunately archived here at Beryl Tomay’s followmearound.

Two lines of the refrain for “Life in a Glass House” reads:

Well of course I’d like to sit around and chat
Well of course I’d like to stay and chew the fat

According to the OED to “chew the fat” means to discuss a matter, especially complainingly, or to reiterate an old grievance; to grumble; to argue; to talk or chat; to spin a yarn. The phrase is of uncertain origin. One possiblity: as a child growing up in 40s and 50s America, my father was occasionally given pieces of pork fatback rind to chew on his way to school. The phrase of the song’s title has an interesting history dating at least as far back as Chaucer.