Author: joseph

In an interview with Kurt Loder, Thom Yorke referenced Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Yorke: … all along the way, while we’re making the record [Kid A] and recording, all the time we were away, I just kept meeting people that were talking about it. Talking about the fact that maybe human beings are defunct and maybe human beings eventually sow the seeds of the next higher form of life. They’re not quite sure on how to deal with it yet, but they have already started doing it. And I’m reading this really wacko book about stars and pyramids as well.

Loder: What is it called?

Yorke: God, what’s it called? I can’t remember what it’s bloody called. Where’s my bag?

Loder: About stars and the pyramids?

Yorke: Yeah. Where’s my knapsack?

Loder: Just show us everything in your knapsack. That would be good.

Yorke: It’s all right, ’cause you won’t use any of this. You’ll edit it out. OK, it’s got a terrible cover. Just ignore the cover. It’s called “Heaven’s Mirror: Quest For The Lost Civilization,” by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia.

Loder: [Reading cover] It’s now a major television series?

Yorke: Yeah. I saw it while we were working, and it slightly freaked me out. It’s a book that has this theory that there are a lot of ancient sites around the world that pyramids and temples are built on which correlate exactly with stars in the heavens and correlate with things like the Mayan calendar, which is like more accurate than our calendar and takes the wobble in the earth into account. A lot of it is about the idea that in all ancient cultures and myths there is a flood, and before the flood there was a higher form of civilization, a higher form of life on Earth that that was wiped out. And in order to tell us that they were here, they left all this stuff. So, within all this, with the symbolism stuff, they indicate that our period is coming to a close and the next period is about to start.

Loder: It’ll be like an AI period?

Yorke: Well, I don’t know yet. I’m booking my condo on the moon, actually.

Line 12 of “Bones” from The Bends reads:

And I used to fly like Peter Pan

Peter Pan is a fictional character that first appeared in Sir James M. Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird in 1902.

The final line of “Like Spinning Plates” reads:

Our bodies floating down the muddy river.

Line 6 of “How to Disappear Completely” reads:

I float down the Liffey.

Again, a body floating down a river. In James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle, the wife of H. C. Earwicker, the major male character, personifies the River Liffey, which flows from the Wicklow Mountains to the Irish Sea. On old maps, the Liffey was called “Anna Liffey”, from the Irish Gaelic word “amhain” for river. See also message 10.

Read the original New York Times book review for Finnegan’s Wake here.

Two lines of the song “The Bends” read:

They brought in the CIA, the tanks and the whole marines,
To blow me away, to blow me sky high

The CIA is, of course, the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA refers to itself numerous times on its web site as an “independent” and “separate” agency. They maintain a distinct information page for children.

A possible antecedent for the pronoun “they” in the two lines quoted above occurs earlier in the lyrics:

But who are my real friends
Have they all got the bends

Here, “they” refers to the speaker’s friends. Are they, the friends, the CIA? Perhaps the song is, as Greenplastic claims, ridiculous.

Read biographical information about Humphrey Lyttelton, the jazz trumpeter who plays on “Life in a Glass House.” Lyttelton presents BBC Radio 2’s Best Of Jazz and Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. The session with Radiohead, he claimed, was “heavy.”

A video that conflates the songs “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and “Like Spinning Plates” has been directed by Johnny Hardstaff at Black Dog Films. Information here and here. An earlier piece of Hardstaff’s entitled “Future of Gaming” is available for viewing here.

Limited information on the collection of essays I am editing on Radiohead is now available. Strobe-Lights and Blown Speakers: The Music and Art of Radiohead, will include a preface by Kevin J. H. Dettmar, editor of Reading Rock and Roll, an essay by Paul Lansky, the professor at Princeton whose music is sampled on “Idioteque,” and the artwork of Stanley Donwood. Currently, the collection does not yet have a definite publisher. I am in contact with several presses and once I have more details I will post them here.

Green Plastic Radiohead has made available some previously unreleased blips created by My Cat is Broken.

Jeanne Loriod, 1928-2001.

On July 14, 2001 of this year I interviewed Chris Bran briefly over email. Responding to a question regarding the Amnesiac antivideos (see Message 42), Bran wrote “all the videos on the updated radiohead.com are just out takes, left overs, works in progress. they were all created for the current radiohead project I am doing. we just decided to put these online and try to build up a gallery of video ideas.” When asked specifically why a majority of the shorts do not use music, Bran responded with reference to an earlier response, “as i said these are all works in progress, unfinished ideas or out takes.” The last comment Bran added was, “check out radiohead.com in the next few weeks.” What was to come was the release of “I Might Be Wrong,” an internet only video created entirely on a Powerbook.

What, then, happens to our understanding of the antivideos without sound? In retrospect, they become a form of waste.