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.
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.
The b-side song “Fog” opens with the following lines:
There’s a little child
Running round this house
And he never leaves
He will never leave
At line 7, the song’s setting changes dramatically: “Baby alligators in the sewers grow up fast.” Urban alligator mythology has a distinguished history. But this mythology, made in 1980 into a movie entitled Alligator, is applicable only indirectly. The speaker begins with talk of a “little child” that remains in the house despite unstated wishes that it would leave (evinced in the repetition: “And he never leaves / He will never leave”). The ensuing evocation of baby alligators, a stand-in for the anxiety inducing little child, should come as no surprise. Parenting a child confirms the parent’s mortality, a theme voiced succinctly in Donald Hall’s poem “My Son, My Executioner.” Thom Yorke has a son named Noah, but it is not at all clear that the protagonist of “Fog” can be equated with Yorke.
Track 10 on Amnesiac is entitled “Like Spinning Plates.” To be in a situation where it feels as if you are spinning plates means to have many things happening at once. To spin plates, however, is a skill of uncertain origin, according to this site. You can purchase plates especially for spinning here.
Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew is a recording that should be heard–an immensely important predecessor to Radiohead’s experimentation. For the album’s liner notes, Ralph J. Gleason wrote in 1970: “this music is new music.” It is still new music.
Who is Krzysztof Penderecki?
A transcript of Jonny Greenwood’s online Yahoo! chat with Radiohead fans is available. A quote: “Apparently 90% of your questions are about hair.”