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Message 293: Twenty-One Hundred and Four CSV Files

As part of the video, Radiohead provides a link to a 3D viewer that allows you to manipulate three different scenes from the video. As the instructions say: “Click and drag to rotate// Mousewheel to zoom.”

Aaron Meyers working with Aaron Koblin, the video’s director of technology, devised the laser technique and the video was directed by James Frost.

You can download the data: 2104 CSV files at a total size of roughly 842 megabytes, not including the application to convert the data. No one has yet to upload their own version of the video to the YouTube group.

A “Behind the Scenes” video is also available: [broken link]

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Message 289: “you take things too SEERIUSLEE”

SEERIUSLEE

Thom Yorke. Laughing?

The b-sides for In Rainbows features two moments where we hear Radiohead laugh. “Bangers & Mash” (at approx. 2:32 in) and “4 Minute Warning” (at approx. 0:58 in). Radiohead, in and since Meeting People Is Easy, has been the band that doesn’t laugh. That’s not so true. As Samuel JP Shaw put it, “Radiohead – good humoured? You’re having a laugh.” Um, yes. Another quote:

I believe that to dismiss the band as merely despondent is to miss a trick. Hail To The Thief as an album clearly doesn’t intend to present its listeners with a positive view of the world. However, the way that Radiohead present their manifesto of woe is not without a sense of fun.

Shaw has it right. Just listen to Yorke’s laugh. In Rainbows is less funny than Radiohead having fun. The songs are sexy, languorous–think of “Nude.” It’s fun, the band is having fun, and the song is funny: “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.”

Now, that’s funny.

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Message 288: Someone Always Does

Near to the close of Hail to the Thief‘s “A Wolf at the Door. (It Girl. Rag Doll.),” the lyrics run:

City boys in first class
Don’t know they’re born, they know
Someone else is gonna come and clean it up
Born and raised for the job
Someone always does
I wish you’d get up get over get up get over
Turn your tape off.

Insofar as these lyrics might remotely relate to this site, it’s necessary to at least acknowledge that Pulk-Pull* needs cleaning. Strange character strings have crept into various areas, replacing smart quotes, apostrophes, etc. Over the next week or so, shaking the rugs out will be a priority.

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Message 287: Radiohead and Philosophy and How They Get You by the Balls

A new book is in the works, for release in 2009: Radiohead and Philosophy. I’ll be writing a chapter, as previewed here.

The band’s relationship to money has been on everyone’s mind, including those who thought the “pay what you want, no really” distribution method “demeans music.” But money as a problem, as something that corrupts, has been on Thom Yorke’s mind since at least 1998’s Meeting People Is Easy:

It’s like a supply and demand thing. It’s like: ‘Well, this is what they want me to do, you know, this is what they want to hear, so I’ll do more of this. Because this is great and they love me’, and that can be the demise of so many recording artists. You know, because you suddenly, suddenly people start giving you cash as well, suddenly you’ve got money and you get used to this lifestyle and you don’t want to take any risks because they’ve got you by the balls. You don’t want to take any risks because like, why, you know you’ve got all this baggage you’re carrying around with you everywhere. And you can’t let go. You know you’ve got all these things you’ve bought or you’re attached to, or, you know, if you start spending all this money.
That’s how they get you.

Just after this interview with a slightly clueless Australian journalist, shots of Radiohead in the studio attempting to record new tracks are revealing but boring, and boring because Radiohead is bored. The last song we see performed live before the credits role is an early version of “Nude,” a song then untitled. Gee shows us Yorke joking with an MTV reporter that he’d like to call the song, “Your Home Is At Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Repayment,” but he’s not sure if the title’s “catchy enough.” Yorke’s deadpan-dark humor doesn’t spark a giggle in the room, but the risk the title alludes to is exactly the sort of risk Yorke fears losing. As he said, once you’re given money for what you do, you need to keep doing what you do or risk losing what you have. But fearing this sort of risk makes one afraid to take risks, and “that’s how they get you,” that’s how the record companies crack your little soul: that’s how they get you by the balls.

yorke_marx

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Message 286: BBC Shipping Forecast for April 19, 2008

And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 1725 on Saturday 19 April 2008.

Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea:
East or northeast 5 to 7, decreasing 4 or 5 later. Moderate or rough, decreasing slight or moderate. Occasional rain. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.

Audio for Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea Shipping Forecast 4/19/08

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Message 285: Now that you feel it, you don’t

Hello.

Pulk-Pull* has reopened. I closed it not long ago after some difficulties that included:

  • changing host setups (from a shared hosting environment to a VPS and back again)
  • an SQL dump that was larger than the new shared environment could upload (global variables set at max of 8mb when I had 25mb)
  • someone hacked into the site’s new WordPress installation before I could finish setting it up (sometime within a 24hr period)
  • I moved
  • I got a new job
  • the new album from Radiohead seemed to defy description or interpretation
  • updates had become intermittent and uninteresting
  • my ideas of interpretation were changing (stuck between Eco’s notion of over-interpretation and Rilke’s description of criticism as “happy misunderstandings”)
  • Bush was still in office
  • et cetera, et cetera / fads for whatever

During all this hubbub, I lost several posts. Several meaning 3-5 or more or less, I wasn’t counting. One, I think, is still in electronic format elsewhere.

Why “happy misunderstandings” since 2000? What does the phrase even mean?

With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.

-Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet.

Rilke here gets at what I felt after hearing In Rainbows for the first time. Listening to “15 Step” just after midnight Pacific time. No words I wrote down could capture that moment–and I realized I was trying to capture a moment in words, not explain how the song fit into a larger critique of capitalism and so on and so forth. And if anyone has read the site over the last eight years, you’ll know that side-stepping this “critique of capitalism” was a departure, one I barely knew I was making until it was made. The way Radiohead released this album was on everyone’s mind; how “pay what you want, no really” was going to reshape the dying music industry. But all I could think about was how fucking cool it was of them to start a song with glitchy, electronic, staticy-rhythm that mimicked The Eraser that segued with a shear drop into Phil Selway’s powerful drumming and a Smiths-like guitar layered over a bass-line backed by clapping … a song whose parts would never be greater than its whole, a whole that was both very much a Radiohead song, but also so different that I was laughing outloud while listening to children scream and trying to follow the beat on my friend’s desk and fumbling around for a volume knob. And and and. And Radiohead has … funk? Funk so wide you can’t get around it. This, ladies and gentlemen, was and is: a rock album. And as Alex Ross wrote, how rock-and-roll is it to write about rock-and-roll?

And that’s where I am, where I think some other people are too. I don’t think, anymore, you stop moving in the face of movement. So, I’ve decided, instead of thinking I need to stop, realizing it was the skin I’d put me in and I don’t need to wait for someone’s hand up my ass to move my mouth.

Blink: 1 for yes, 2 for no.

It's Gone