OK Computer, squashed like a bug

Consider this the stretching exercise for the end of the year lists which will occupy entirely too much of my time. I'm completely stealing an idea from Coke Machine Glow about the top 12 songs on OK Computer. Feel free to revert back to their list and create your own, for mine differs enough to warrant a complete blog entry. But then I think that while yeah, Karma Police and Paranoid Andriod would mount almost everyone's list, where does Lucky end up? Austin swears his undying love for Climbing Up Walls, but you'll find that about the bottom of my list. Does this tell us something about our personalities, that we can figure out the makeup of someone by the songs on a great album they like the most? It's a touchstone for sure, for all of us who care. And it's a lovely exercise with free time at work.

12. Fitter Happier
Almost disqualified. I've probably listened to this song more than half of the other songs on the album because of its relative position to Karma Police, but I can safely say I've never intentionally directed my CD player towards this song except to freak out people in my car. It works.
11. Climbing Up Walls
I admire that this song so completely delves into the pain of existence and all. And the drums are eerie and pounding. But this ranks as my least listened to song on the album. And for that reason alone, it's placed at the bottom of actual songs next to to the talking computer Fred.
10. Electioneering
This song gets loads of crap for rocking out in an album that likes to drift. But those who chastise it as some sort of remanents of their Bend's past probably don't have ears. Though the guitars are loud, they are hardly the distorted monsters of Just, and the angular feel of the song showed Johnny had wrangled the song around his head and spit it out just the way he wanted. I've always been quite partial to "When I go forward, you go backwards" for the way the music mirrored the lyrics. To my 14 year old mind this was genius. But this ranks as the second least listened to song, for it comes after Fitter Happier and before Climbing Up Walls. And if anyone needs to know my least favorite part of the album only connect the dots.
9. Lucky
Lucky is as menacing as Climbing up the walls, but it doesn't hide its terror behind the wall of electronics. I'll forever tie this song to opening of Radiohead's tour video/breakdown Meeting People is Easy, that immediately introduces the haunting atmosphere that would encapsulate the band before and during the making of Kid A.
8. Tourist
In my younger days, feeling like a lonely disaffected teenager and all, I'd put the last three songs and try in some vain attempt to feel genuinely sad. Whether that was shedding a small tear or just feeling quite awful, the last three songs on OK Computer could always pull the world taut. And while Lucky surely helped the feeling, it was always the climax of this song that would end me and send me into a world a little more sublime then my own. It probably doesn't place higher because of the general inactivity of the song until the swelling chorus. And it's probably up a place for the one note ending that left us stranded at the end of the world and gave us nothing to hold on to.
7. Subterranean Homesick Alien
The inevitable comedown after the heights of Airbag and Paranoid Andriod was punted to this one, that if positioned anywhere else might be ranked higher. The lyrics remain the strongest point, and the simple tale of alienation (gee how that rings with the title) gains epic weight because of the saucers that fly over head. I agree with pitchfork, that OK Computer is the last album and should be heard as thus. I also believe that the best albums are those with the best filler, and this is some of the best around.
6. Exit Music for a Film
A part of the harrowing trifecta of Climbing up the Walls and Lucky, is the most dramatic. It's wide-screen lense and deep fuzzed bass make it the most interesting of the three, but in the end the great songwriting is what propels it. It's Romeo and Juliet in a post-modern world, and there is no swelling of music to accompany them. Just crashing of drums and distortion laced in bitterness. Like the moment at the end of the Graduate when Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross stare at each other on the bus like they had been caught in a daze and finally realized that their whole world was over because they don't even have any idea where the bus ends.
5. Airbag
The guitar riff is wonderful, the ending sublime, but I still think this is the best recording of drums ever made. Whether it's the actual part that Selway came up with, or that it was just completely appropriate to the other sounds of the song. This song would crumble without the brittle ticks and bangs of the drums. All the rest of the adornments wouldn't hang as handsomely as they do.
4. No Surprises
One of the most telling parts of Metting People is Easy is the part where a lady on a talk show calls No Surprises "music to cut your wrists to". That No Surprises is preceeded by the most depressing song of all time and followed by two songs that used to make me cry on demand, never seemed to have crossed her mind. To Radiohead devotees No Surprises is the rare light beaming through a world of metal, it provided the last respite before the onslaught truly began. Sure the words are disaffected, but this is the perfect example of what a xylophone and double harmonies can do to your outlook on life.
3. Paranoid Android
To many in the under 24 crowd, this is the first Radiohead song they ever remember hearing, as we were just too young to get the Bends. I remember seeing that video and knowing immediately that I loved this song and that I had to have the album. I bought that album at a little record shop in Louisville as my family was on its way to see my dying great aunt. I bought Sgt. Pepper at the same time. For the first month or so this was the only song I listened to, because it was really four different songs, and I could see then how intelligently the song was constructed, and how it fit so perfectly together. There is no doubt that this remains the quintessential Radiohead song, the one hipsters and jocks can agree on, because it has something for us all. It weeps when it needs to, and rocks in the middle and at the end. It even manages to throw in a perfect riff, which I don't think has been topped since its inception. So how is this magical song not topping the list? It has something to do with being overplayed, though it took a good couple hundred times to do it. But I think that I let go of Paranoid Android the moment I started listening to the rest of the album. The album became more important and I became obsessed by the quirks and the small moments that I found within.
2. Let Down
I could repeat adnausem the merits of this song, how it was once one of my least favorite songs and is now my most listened to track. How it sounds transcendent in a subway. How I believe Thom and company were touched by angels when they made this song, but I think coke machine glow got it best when they called it the most perfect song Radiohead wrote. Not the best. But the most perfect.
1. Karma Police
Paranoid Android was well introduced, but I found Karma Police hidden halfway in the album before its artsy video appeared on MTV. And I've never been able to forget it. When a mammoth album like OK Computer comes and you're able to delve into it and find something like Karma Police, something changes in you. It sounds good on headphones, in cars, at parties with drunken friends. It sounds great on demos, and live records, especially the David Letterman version, or on the last night at college when Austin and I sang it for a group of friends. Let Down maybe perfect, but Karma Police is the best song Radiohead has ever made. And this all might sound rather ridiculous, especially from someone who thinks Kid A is better, but I've never been able to shake this song. It's been eight years since it became apart of my life, and is still here.

Lyrics Part 3: The Saddest Song

The photo above is more of a joke now than any sort of triumphant pose. Springsteen songs of real-life Americans certainly didn't mean more because he finally embraced real-life politics. All that remains from the election last year are the haunting voices of failure, and none has touched me so profoundly than Springsteen's. Maybe it was because I loved his music so much, or felt like he was a pillar to rest upon. I played "The River" on repeat on election day last year, for no apparent reason other than I could sense the dread and wanted the nightmare to end.

Some people listen to opera and cry away their dramatic fantasies, I listen to Springsteen.

I come from down in the valley

I actually do, but that is where it rightly ends. I'm about as far away from being stuck in my home town, with my high school sweet heart and a deadend job, but the song still shakes me, especially the second verse.

Then I got Mary pregnant
and man that was all she wrote
And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat
We went down to the courthouse
and the judge put it all to rest
No wedding day smiles no walk down the aisle
No flowers no wedding dress

The pain that is evoked in those simple words makes the hurt that much more direct. The last two lines sound haunting, but I am particuarly taken with the line, "and the judge put it all to rest", which instead evoking the celebratory moment of marriage, recalls a death sentence.

But until now the song just seems like a demented person's self infliction, his own stupidity kept him there. Then the bridge comes and filets me alive.

But I remember us riding in my brother's car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I'd lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse

It's surprising how full of loss and disappearing youth this song is, while Springsteen had just turned thirty. It's a theme he brings up numerous times, both heartbreaking (all of Nebraska) and oddly nostalgic (Glory Days). It's the image of the tan body that points to the natural decay of both the human body and spirit that gets me. That tangible girl as fleeting as the time he describes.

I started think of this song around my birthday last week, because it coincided with the election of last year. With that on my mind, I was shocked to see another Springsteen-worthy depression.

The rust bult just got more bad news this week asGM plans to cut 30,000 jobs. The reasons are many, and Rick Wagoner, the companies Cheif Executive, has cause for alarm. They are losing ground to other companies and are saddled with the high costs of labor benefits, mainly health care.

The future of health care in this country is approaching a level where major companies are increasingly trying to shake off full responsibility. For their credit, a successful business that doesn't pay 100% of it's employees benefits is better than a bankrupted one that can't pay anything.

Being liberal and having watched "Roger and Me" more than once, I find it hard to empathize with GM. Europeans have a much more comprehensive health care system, and have better unions. But there was an interesting article in the New Yorker today about vacation time of Europeans to Americans. We already know the facts: Europeans make less, have higher unemployment, but work much less. We make more, have lower unemployment, but work more than we have time to spend. Thus Americans have to pay more money for child care (to take care of the children), restaurants (because people don't cook as much as they used to). This has spawned a whole service industry which employees millions of immigrants and people without much education. Where in Europe the service industry is much smaller, these people have less chance for a pay check. This is then tied to the riots in France, and how unrest has grown, all because the French want to work less.

I'm not sure if I quite believe that. But it sure doesn't make understanding any easier. And that's what makes "The River" such a heartbreaking song, because there is no deliverance from these questions. The haunting ghosts of the past reside in those lines, and they only get more harrowing as life progresses.

Overhearing the Overheard

I carried on the proud tradition of appearing in Overheard in New York that was passed on to me by Blake Royer from about a week ago.

It's still rather funny, if I do say so, but now I can't get over the language I used. I say "say little black boy", because I needed to differentiate the colors of the two little children because the joke hinges on it. In retrospect, probably should have been "little African American boy", though even that sounds ridiculous. You never hear people referred to that in the overheard files. To rectify it, I called the little Caucasian girl a "little white girl", hoping that that would some how neutralize by poking fun at the other side, or at least carrying out a standard system. It is kind of fascinating that I still struggle with the proper way to describe people in this culture. I think other people do as well. But it's so hard to act polite when humor is involved.

Essentially what I learned is that you should never put your full name on the Overheard in New York submission sheet.

And yes it did happen on the 6 train.

Destruction of the Apple Part Two: "Tekserve, the land of promise and the disciple that led me there"

Jesus

After the debacle at the Apple store (how on earth was I going to get $700), I told my sodden story to just about everyone who crossed my path. 90% of the time I was met with the kind of empathizing that usually comes with the passing of a grandmother.

"I am so sorry."
"I can't imagine how I'd deal with it."
"How are you?"

They all could feel my pain. The death of my beloved apple had reached their hearts. That was because it affected people on so many levels. First was the loss of a beautiful machine, a crucial part of eveyone's daily life (you think I'm kidding, but I am not). Second was the money involved with restiveness the whole fiasco. My birthday money went bye-bye, and I was thinking seriously about a loan. I applied for a credit card. I volunteered to go to work on a Saturday. I was going to borrow money from Abby, because I still couldn't face the thought of telling my parents. Everyone can understand that, right?

That was, except for Max, who without even blinking said, "Just take it to tekserve. It's going to be cheaper."

Product Placement: http://www.tekserve.com/

So I did. And it was. But never in my wildest dreams, did it ever occur to me that it would be $500 dollars cheaper. In fact, I had to make a $280 down payment for them to look at it, and they said they were going to refund $40.

This could all be a joke, and I could go to pick up my computer and it has fried wires coming out of the sides, but as of right now, I'd like to thank Tekserve and my very own Jesus, or John the Baptist, or whatever religious allusion that fits.

Subway Love

Things got weird quick. I thought I'd just invite some people down to the Subway Inn for my birthday, a proper local dive, but something happened and I don't know how to accurately explain it to you except with some pictures.



I guess the festivities started nicely, Blake and I just hanging out. Friends would come, we'd all drink a few, and perhaps I could sing some Oasis. That was my plan.

Then Lindsey arrived.



And bam the night became an explosion of happiness. Blake and I, two completely straight gentlemen with girlfriends, started, well, looking like this...



And then Jake and Gina came. I thought they'd cool things down, but then Jake started sniffing something and all hell broke loose.





Lindsey and Gina started getting closer...



I freaked out...



Then Blake and Lindsey started doing strange sexual things...



I joined in.



And we all left with smiles thanks to a wonderful evening.



(actual events were not quite so amorous, but we did truthfully have a good time.)

Destruction of the Apple Part One: "The Fall"

I was rocking. I had just bought $70 worth of cables and adapters to help plug my electric guitar into my lovely ibook. I was tired of playing my acoustic, it's reverberations were not shaking the insides of my brain like a well cranked amp. But since I had no where to fit an amp, considering it is a tangible object with mass and I have no room for any of that in my very small room. With the headphones on I could hear the distortion hum in my ear. I wanted it louder. I turned it all the way up. I stood up. I wanted to pull out the Pete Townshend guitar hero stance, arms cocked full back and ready for flight. But to do this I need to move my computer to the table because my headphones weren't long enough. The table was crowded, but I didn't care. All the papers and things stacked high could get trampled for all I cared. I was rocking. So I just pushed whatever I could to the floor. No problem. I strummed powerfully on my guitar, the headphones loved it. My head loved it. I look down at my computer to see if the computer recorded it and loved it, too. That's when I saw the glass and the water which eventually dripped into all of the major components of my computer rendering the hole machine worthless.

When accidents are broken down afterwards, thought over and analyzed, holes pop up. Lapses in judgement become easier to scrutunize. If I hadn't been so zealously rocking, I would have saved my computer. If I had cleaned my table, I wouldn't have lost my computer. If I would have bought headphones instead of a guitar table, I wouldn't have needed to raise the computer to the table and then spilled the water. In fact, we'll take it back even further. If I hadn't broken my large, ear-encassing headphones, on an airplane, I would have been able to stand with the laptop not on the table.

All of this doesn't hide the fact that I have no computer.

I took it to the nice, clean, white apple store in SOHO. I was served promptly by a rather large "genius" who informed me that the cost of fixing it was going to be either $750 plus $160 for an external hard drive or $1000 for a new computer. Those were good options I thought. Homicidal inducing ones, considering I didn't have the money for either, but choices. I asked him about payment plans. He said no. So what am I suppossed to do, I asked, considering I don't have the money for either. "I guess you don't have any."

"So can I just come back later on in the week when I have the money?"

"Well," he said, "I'm not sure your computer will ever turn on again. Water continuously corrodes the system, eventually destroying everything."

So I'm facing complete anhilation of my computer, I'm out roughly $900 no matter what happens, and I have to make a decision fast. Of course, my mind thinks of all the stupid things I've done with electronics.

Very quickly, here is a list of things I have lost, had stolen, or broken in the past two years:

1. 3 Cellphones
One was stolen in Paris, one was lost by me on the bus in London, and the other was dropped in a bowl of soup in New York. I'm currently on a pace to lose a cellphone in every major city on earth. My parents paid for all of them.
Estimated cost: $400
2. 1 set of headphones
I wanted the Bose Noise Reduction ones, that were over three hundred dollars. My parents thought that I wasn't ready for them, and decided to buy the $50 Sony ones. I broke them on the way back from London on a plane.
Estimated cost including my attempts at fixing it: $70
3. 1 iPod
This was stolen in the gym at DePauw. It was never found. This was a christmas present for my parents. They eventually bought me the much another ipod, though the much cheaper Ipod Shuffle, but I love it very much.
Estimated cost: $500
4. iBook
Story is told above. It was a graduation present.
Estimated cost: $1000

I'm starring at the big Apple guy, and I know that if I call my parents they will help. They will figure out a way to get money, to loan money, to do something. My dad will give me the perfect piece of advice, think responsibly, and then we'd figure out some way to make it work. My mom would give me the money. She'd say that I needed it, and that was that. But I can't do it. I can't keep asking them for money for things that I break, things that are completely my fault.

I buy an external hard drive, get my shit off, and leave. Of course, what money do I use. My birthday money.

And now, a moment of silence for the death of my computer...

Lyrics Part 2: Flip-flops on Fifth Avenue

Rufus Wainwright's Poses is an album I've always liked more than loved. Love is his first album and most of Want One (an album I'm continuously impressed with, even though most people can't stomach the monster). But Poses, though intermittingly brilliant, always felt sheek and clean, trendy but hollow. Everyone loves the title track, but I always felt it was trying too hard to be the ballad "Foolish Love". That was until I came to New York.

Though a shopping spot for the rich and famous on Upper East Side, in Chelsea, where Rufus lived when he made the album and where I work, fifth avenue is just busy. Constantly busy, constantly loud, poor fifth avenue never gets much of a rest. And cleaning seems more like a futile atempt at a joke than a serious task. It is New York in every sense.


I did go from wanting to be someone
Now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue
Once you've fallen from classical virtue
Won't have a soul for to wake up and hold you

For some reason these lines, no matter how pompous (classical virtue?) they may sound, seem perfectly normal because I've walked the streets and seen the circus that crowds around each day. He may sound very alone in these words but for personal experience that is an impossibility. The sadest part about the song is the crowd the passes by unnoticed, like a ghost that he doesn't want to bring up. There are many drunks out on fifth avenue at any part of the day, and he is upset because he is just another face in the crowd.

Yesterday I walked up fifth avenue to where it intersected broadway, and then followed the trail to Time Square, the ulitmate hell of New Yorkers because it's filled with tourists, lights, and more tourists. During my 4 month stay here I've only gone through it twice and both times were with people wanting to see it, because it's an experience that everone should have. But never have I've been drawn there during my daily routine. No good bars are there. No cheap food.



But my uncle was in town, and he treated me to a dinner atop the Marriot Marquis, a rotating restaurant 47 floors above midtown skyline. The food was quite good, if nothing life changing, but the view as we rotated for two and half hours was like nothing I've ever experienced. The Chrysler building seemed chest high. The tall apartment buildings of the upper west side sunk below us. It felt just like the silent movie "Metropolis", where the world ceases to exists at streetlevel, and an extra deminsion opens up to human possibilities.

The wine was great, very great, perfectly honed to what I was eating and feeling, and after I had left I could still feel its chaotic pulse around me. I immediately called my parents, and related all of the nights stories, my uncles first trips to New York with my dad and other family business. I was having such a wonderful trip that I decided to extenuate it, maybe to flex my tightened stomach that had put away a circular piece of cheescake. 30 blocks up, five avenues over, my sodden mind predicted an hour long commute home in which time I would have talked to my parents and Abby and have gotten a good bit of exercise.

Towards the end of the parental exchange when I foolishly told her I was walking solo along fifth avenue, my mother became very scared for me, and offered to reimburse my home account if I'd just quickly get in a cab and get off the street, to which I scoffed and joked about getting mugged on the brightly lit, crowd infested, fifth avenue.

Right after I made the remark I felt something tap my right elbow and heard a thud on the pavement. A large plastic salad container lay open with the contents sprayed around. I looked up and two large black men stood in front of me, one of them screaming and the other one on his knees scooping the discarded remnants of the salad with his barehands back into the plastic container.

In between his screaming, "fuckhead" "asshole" "bastard", I cooly told my parents that I needed to go, and that I loved them. I pulled out my wallet and gave the frantic guy all the money I had, six dollars.

"It was fucking 12 dollars you bastard."

I said I was sorry and just kept walking.

Now it seems rather strange that I handled the entire encounter with such calm, never freaking out to the possibility that two large men could destroy me over a grilled chiken salad. And looking back I attribute it to the wonderful red wine and the small bit of New York nonchalance that graces everything that goes on in the city. Exactly right after it happend I told myself that it was not soely my fault, having just been an elbow on a street does not mean that I am attempting to knock passerby's salads onto the pavement.

I only looked back once. The man who'd lost the salad still stood upright and gave the one finger goodbye, but the other man was still hunched over trying to retrieve every last bit of the salad. And I suddenly felt shame. I had eaten 47 floors above the street and this man was now eating off of it. The bums of fifth avenue are plenty. Rufus Wainwright felt the shame of the street. To be anyone else is the hard part.