But now, beside the curving ships, far away from your parents,
the writhing worms will feed, when the dogs have had enough of you,
on your naked corpse, though in your house there is clothing laid up
that is fine-textured and pleasant, wrought by the hands of women.
But all of these I will burn up in the fire's blazing...
**********
Track listings:
Iliad and in.
1. We Are Not Scaremongering. This Is Really Happening.
2. Football Season Is Over.
3. In The Pines
**********
I was in a Radiohead gang once. We'd hang about in the bar from four PM on, getting fucked up on vodka shots and talking old shit on someone's girlfriend and insulting each other's CD collections. Then about a quarter to midnight, the Oasis boys would barge in and slug someone in the stomach and the fun would resume right where it left off the previous week. We'd trash the place thoroughly while the clock ticked the night away, give each other split lips, concussions, broken noses. Usually someone would piss on the wall or set a trash can on fire. More than once a cat was skinned and eaten alive.
And when the sun came up, we'd survey the damage and feel a shared sense of pride at a job well-done. We'd bid the Oasis gang adieu and go on ripping our real friends a new one.
And all of this really happened – online.
On the Usenet group alt.music.radiohead, which I inhabited full-time during 2002, a peak year for me in terms of dropping out of the human race: 9/11 was fresh in the psyche and I spoke to few humans in the flesh that year, preferring to watch the wildlife I found myself surrounded by in Eugene, Oregon.
Eugene is a Twilight Zoneish blank verse of a place, not a small town, not a city, with the University of Oregon at the east end and fuck-all but bars and strip clubs headed out west. A statue of Ken Kesey adorns the town square. It’s a place where the world will let you be, if that’s what you want. My only companions were the deer outside my window, the forest they retreated into and a motley internet crew of Aussies, New Zealanders, Brits and a few Americans united by one thing and one thing only: our love of the rock group that had raised paranoia to a fine art.
Most of the people reading this will be mildly shocked out of Facebook-complacency to realize that there existed once, and still does to a small degree, a worldwide online forum that was utterly uncensored. There was no “like” button and no brake reflex: communication was not a shiny-penny contest or a Politically Correct drag; you said what you wanted and might take fire from any corner at any time. We exchanged no wacky profile pictures, and absolutely no one was your “friend” if they didn’t want to be. You still had to take what they had to say. Honesty, sometimes in spades, was a given. It was a geek experience nonpareil, and in a peculiar, soothing way, I loved almost everyone I encountered, having no idea what a soul among them looked like.
For a few months that year, off in the corner of the group, a New Zealand kid was building a human figure out of matchsticks. It took him several weeks: it was somewhere between six inches and a foot high and he was very proud of it; it stood up on its own. We all knew about it, and when he finished it in a triumphant blaze of weed and Bjork and OK Computer, it felt like a win that belonged to all of us. We were all raving about that matchstick man for hours upon days.
When I reflect upon that matchstick man, it’s a dark, bitter, sobering thought in the face of the six-hundred-million-plus-subscribed eternal rom-commy auto-passive-aggressive-vibrating, smirking, boring enabler we’re condemned to live with now. Andy Warhol wept, you know?
A common email signature on AMR, also a T-shirt on the Kid A tour, read:
We Are Not Scaremongering. This Is Really Happening.
When I began this piece, in May of this year, I made a decision, a sensible one on the face of it: to not immerse myself in the chosen band's music, as I did while writing a shorter piece about R.E.M. Spending two weeks with R.E.M. was light, pleasurable, and adventurous. Fun. They're nice guys. No one ever said they wanted to throw R.E.M.'s lead singer off a cliff, as Liam Gallagher once said about Thom Yorke, as I wanted to a mere two weeks into the thickets, when I began to wonder if I was hunting an elephant far too big to ever bring down, that could trumpet only in a language I’ve spent so much of my life skirting the greyzoned borders of, blurring through roadblocks, forever mangling and bastardizing the native poetics, a tongue I don’t care to gain greater fluency in: the language of nightmares.
Even in a world where Attention Deficit Disorder has long been little more than a bad joke, we still – most of us, usually – have a sense of lines that could prove hazardous to cross. Maybe it’s only a superstitious layover from the time when most who spoke the language I’m writing in believed it a sin to suffer a witch to live… but at some primal level, humans today still shun the darkness: scorning, mocking and denying, rather than lighting a match to see by. Playing at Fitter, Happier Niceness. And while you can post all the Tweets you like on your Facebook page and drift along at just the layer of awareness you’re content to believe in, you cannot, finally, merely open Pandora's box, touch the parts that look pretty, ignore the rest and traipse merrily away. Not without a chill in the blood.
And there is some justice in this.
I am the key to the lock in your house
That keeps your toys in the basement
And if you get too far inside
You'll only see my reflection.
It's always best when the candle's out
I am the pick in the ice
Do not cry out or hit the alarm
You know we're friends 'till we die.
And either way you turn, I'll be there
Open up your skull
I'll be there
Climbing up the walls...
And so you’ll understand, perhaps, why I became reluctant to work on this piece – and more than any of the other five pieces I've put on Blogger for Facebook consumption, this has been work. The head space necessary to assemble the right sorts of things – info, quotes, illustrations, stories – that will hopefully open for you a window onto a diorama of Radiohead and the corner of the world I once saw things from with them – was terrifying, and that was only the research. I tell you this not for sympathy's sake – I believe that in good writing, the author's presence is best left elusive, unseen or glimpsed only in a moment’s tumble, wraithlike – but as a recognition that with Radiohead, you can't separate subject from object, most of the time. That is: you're either on the dance floor doing something weird (‘Lotus Flower’), or you're at home, trying to ignore the places the voices want you to go. There's no middle ground. The pulse the band keeps time to won't allow any.
You fell into our arms…
You fell into our arms…
We tried but there was nothing we could do...
Nothing we could do…
runs the chorus of 'Backdrifts' on Hail to the Thief, one of the lighter tracks on that album. A good Radiohead song never just sits, contentedly drinking tea and having lovely, inspiring conversation with you about rainbows – unless they're reflections of rainbows in a puddle. A good Radiohead song crawls inside a place you weren't using, or had forgotten about, and festers, and waits for you to notice, and then immediately demands some kind of ecstatic response from your heart, all the while making weird faces and trying not to laugh in your face.
"We named our second album 'The Bends' after this particularly filthy sex act I used to perform on my old girlfriend Sarah back in the early nineties. The cover picture is an approximation of what my face looked like when I was giving her the bends. She left me in ninety-four, that bitch, which was the inspiration for the song 'Lucky' off of OK Computer, as in, she's lucky I haven't been able to find her since. I swore to her if she ever went to the police I'd kill her."
-Thom Yorke, reminiscing about the 1990's.
And here’s the cover picture:
I didn’t look consciously for distractions and reasons not to write, but I didn’t avoid them. I don't play video games much these days, don’t own a console system or know the popular platformers any more, but while I conceived this piece in my head, I downloaded a game – no Massive Multiplayer Online orgies for me, no WoW or Evercrack, I have taste and the endless trash-talking MMO attitudes bore me to tears; just the familiar recipe of the lonely, endlessly hummable quests I grew up with: Phantasy Star III, Sword of Vermillion, Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Shining in the Darkness, played and prayed over for days at a time in a patched-up flannel shirt – a classically designed one-player RPG from a small, independent Washington State company, a beautifully homebrewed game with disciplined, practical druids, voluptuously psycho-blonde sorcerors, satisfyingly grim ninjas and a forty-hour gameplay storyline, and I played that froggy bitch from start to finish, in a week, rather than go on looking for the threads that would tie this piece together. (Spiderweb Software, one of the best-kept secrets out there these days.) It was a good game, but it ended and then I had to look at the page again.
Football Season is Over.
"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt."
So wrote the journalist Hunter S. Thompson in 2005, four days before shooting himself while on the phone to his wife. His final typed word, centered at the head of a blank page, was “counselor”. The literati were intrigued.
Initial reactions to the event were predictably disgusted: a suicide in the making, after all, is supposed to wander out behind the barn so we can mistake the gunshot for a falling tree, leaving their loved ones, a handspan later, to put the pieces together, and for some reason a lot of people seemed to think the Gonzo journalist should have had the decency not to die exactly the same way he lived. (How did he shoot himself? Temple, brain or cheek? How much blood loss? How much disfigurement? I somehow feel that these specs are necessary for impact in the telling, but, strangely, a Google search draws a blank on each one.) When the suicide note was reposted online in 2009, one web poster observed: “not to be disrespectful, but they sound like Radiohead lyrics.”
Were he available for comment, HST might have called the poster a pig fucker. But both parties had a point, and it’s one I’m going to give a lot of space here, because I liked the writer well enough and because it was the one he chose to leave us with:
POINT: Artists are obnoxious.
This is not a new concept. Artists have always been obnoxious, exemplifying as we do the traits of boredom, hauteur, clannishness, arrogance and insecurity. Artists are simply people predisposed to wonder why things are what they are, the way they are, and when the answers aren’t satisfactory we start making noise. Why is the sky blue? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Why can’t I kidnap my favorite celebrity? Since first attempting a blog, in April, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what draws me to the act of writing, and concluding that it’s the act of writing. I like putting sentences together. I like the neuronal spark that joins a thought, the word or phrase that heralds victory from within the mist: I thrill to it. I’m the kind of writer who’ll take hours putting one sentence together. And yet I have always been aware that writing, like the matchstick man that sarcastic New Zealand kid once made, is in some sense illusory. It gives you a chimera of life in motion; believably breathing, aware, pliable, responsive, even sexy. But writing (unlike reading) is a will-o-the-wisp. Will-o-the-wisps in folklore were poisonous influences, leading wanderers to the edge of cliffs, or they were embers from hell or the spirits of stillborn children, almost sentient, with the same horrifying trace of substratal intelligence that makes clams alive. They were the souls of dead kings which were eternally writhing in pain; they changed the Ancient Mariner’s water into witch’s oils, and even Gollum counseled Frodo to avoid them.
Good writing is a good poker face: there's nothing there. It's just set ink long-dried on a page or streams of data infinitely stored away in the spaceless, coded netherscape. Good writing is Scotch Mist. The saying dates from the middle ages; Radiohead stole it for a film title in 2007. Meaning (from Scottish or Scots): you thought that you saw something; you didn’t; it was a trick of the light, a phantasm, a spectre. 1535 Coverdale Bible: As for thyne offences, I dryue them awaye like the cloudes, and thy synnes as the myst. 1589 letter: We care not for a Scottish mist, though it wet us to the skin. 1842 Tennyson: Rain out the heavy mist of tears.
Writing is the luxury of Polonius, the ancient panderer, the manipulator, stroking his beard – or his other parts – and muttering “oh, that’s good, mobled queen is good…” and writing, of all the art forms, is the quickest to pale before the latest intoxicated sellable bitch in heat and common denominator. Oh, Lady Gaga got a makeover with mannakinface and pigtails… oh, she quotes crap Rocky films as mantra… oh, she’s PART OF the motorcycle, I get it. Cute. That anorexic chick’s never done a thing I’ve seen that makes me want to pay attention, that doesn’t look like Madonna with Britney’s head photoshopped on and in her endless wash of bathetic, sanitized blessings and uppers, she’s never said a thing that Radiohead didn’t spell out for her in three lines of ‘Optimistic’, eleven years ago:
This one’s optimistic…
This one went to market…
This one just crawled out of the swamp…
The social-status food chain marches on forever, twisting through arcs that would leave Warhol breathless… and yet, with each turn of the screw there’s an evolution to witness: with each sun-spotted twirl of the carousel, with each act, we see new patterns. We have to, as human beings: we seek patterns because they’re all we’ve got, and in this we’re no different at all in the second decade of the twenty-first century from the Victorians anxiously awaiting the latest installment from Charles Dickens or Conan Doyle, from Oscar Wilde straddling the gutter, stargazing, from Coleridge’s Mariner beating it into the Wedding Guest’s thick skull (“THE ICE WAS ALL BETWEEN, COMPRENDE”?), from Shakespeare fucking about with Chaucerian rhythm to find iambic pentameter, from the first specimens of Homo Erectus, reading tracks in the mud and the sand to obtain food and identify predators who might be over the next hill, our physiological ancestors learning their very first skill; learning – long before we learned to build worlds, to have egos, to play at sanity and the loss of it and to recline in boredom and routine – what is, quite probably, “the oldest profession.”
The art that I make lives in my mind until you read it, and when you eventually read it I’ve moved on to something else. No blog link, no instantaneous connection speed, no Like button can bridge this last great gap, this uncrossable fugue-space. Consider, if you will, Thom Yorke and his bandmates, wondering Where You End And I Begin: serious enough blokes to get these things. Though the song I’ve just named was an unpolished rush-job, it’s a deep theme for Radiohead: the disconnect, uncompromised, and they will shove you bodily into it. I’m not going to tell you it’s the peak of what they have to say or that ‘Like Spinning Plates’, to select what many would call their masterpiece, is about nothing more than what cookie-cuttered pricks some people are, but I am suggesting that it’s integral to their art, and that there’s too little real art around that sees this.
While you make pretty speeches…
I’m being cut to shreds…
You feed me to the lions…
A delicate balance…
And this just feels like… spinning plates…
Our bodies floating down the muddy river…
Personally, although there’s no real evidence for this, I believe that somewhere around 1997 – recording OK Computer, their first world tour, Meeting People is Easy, attendant vids – they began to feel that they had two options, and only two: to try to measure up to something, to someone’s image of alt-rock superstars, or to draw a line in the sand and dare you to step across it. And the latter probably sounded more like a good time. When Lennon declared the Beatles bigger than Jesus, scandal and controversy ensued; the world of 1966 was an astonishingly innocent place, and we were creatures just beginning to come out of our shells. Anything can be bigger than Jesus, now – the name alone pushes no envelopes, and our social circuitry for short-term entertainment value just keeps growing. One decade ago, at Amnesiac’s release, just before 9/11, the word “awesome” was not yet ingrained in the mass consciousness as a reaction to A) a resonant life change, B) a vague acquaintance’s Facebook post, C) The day of the week. (The catch-phrase of the day in 2001 was “it’s all good”, still in occasional use – there were probably others, but I wasn’t old enough to know them. I was amused to note that around 2007, concurrent with the advent of Facebook, every social signal from everyone suddenly became “horrible” and it was all horrible all the time.) Ten years ago, the awesomely awesomeness of awesome was reserved for events that left an impact that could be sounded later on, events that eclipsed previous circumstances or endeavors, for which the phrase “more than a nine days’ wonder” might feel apt. Jesus Christ’s return would have been considered awesome, but John Lennon’s return would have been bigger.
But to be bigger than the Beatles? Louder, uglier and more intrusive? Pissing in your champagne supernova and calling it wine? To be the shadow, the photo-negative flip side to the only pop musicians in living memory who passed for religious icons? Giving no quarter, taking no catharsis but for the instamatic whoosh of an airbag exploding from the steering wheel?
Well, now, that sounds like a plan for world domination worth having.
In The Pines
You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?
I don't know.
Believe that.
-Blood Meridian
I’m on a packed New York City subway headed downtown, early afternoon, at the start of summer 2011, when from somewhere behind me I hear a guitar’s strum and a few lines I haven’t heard in a long, long time:
My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me.
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t never shine
I would shiver the whole night through…
It’s a folk song that dates from the 1870s. It got new life from a Nirvana cover in 1993; it’s had a long, tumultuous history and is as popular now as ever, played live or on albums by at least eight different artists since last year. There are variants of the song with different verses, but the most common verse is the one I’m hearing here on the subway. The singer is a clean-shaven kid in glasses and a grungy sweater, who looks about 22. He plays the verse several times over, working his way up from a strong if obviously untrained alto at the start into a full-bodied scream, the way Cobain always did it.
After the fifth or sixth rep of the single verse, a pudgy man in glasses and a turtleneck, early forties, maybe, steps up to the kid. “That was horrible”, he says, clearly trying to be matter-of-fact about it.
The kid stares at him for a minute.
“You need to pay some attention to the tone and the chords”, the fat intellectual goes on to say. This either seems to him to be too much or not enough, so he concludes the impromptu critique with, “you just need to get better.”
The kid rests his guitar on his knees and nods a few times, taking this in. “Get better,” he repeats.
“Yeah,” says fatso, in the same plump, self-satisfied voice.
The kid goes on nodding, and starts drumming his hands on the guitar. “Get better… get better… just got to get so very much better…” starting to make a lyric of it. I laugh volubly, cracking up: both antagonists are aware of me, but neither looks my way. The car is packed, yes, like sardines, but true to the New York way of life, only five people are acknowledging the existence of this situation: the fatso, the kid, a good-looking, expensively dressed ethnic couple on the seat opposite the kid… and me, merely observing.
There’s something very Radioheadish about this whole encounter.
Since no other critiques are forthcoming, the kid takes the guitar back up and plays a few more lines without vocal, like a balladeer now rather than a grunge-punk guitarist.
“That was great,” says fatso. He seems a little relieved to not need to further escalate the conflict. But he can’t help himself; he does need it. A beat later, he qualifies his praise with, “but when you were screaming it sucked.”
To Be Continued... maybe...
