I should permanently write on my forehead, forwards and backwards, "ignorant".Went to my first concert of the year, was about time you'll tell me, and you'll be right: I'm still amazed at how little I listen to live music. Terebi & live recordings don't count. I almost didn't go there , as usual for meaningless reasons, but a cocktail of hurting feet, television and a high mix of monosaccharide changed my mind somehow. Or maybe I just wanted to piss my flatmate off. Make him understand he cannot talk me, no matter how hard he tries, into laziness. Laziness is usually my own decision, but thanks for the concern.Anyway, off I went to this small converted-to-art malt-house (is my life dictated by and dedicated to beer ? hmm...) to hear a bit of jazz. I liked that place. The malt-house, I mean. It's small. So small that it was difficult for the double-bass to stand without touching the ceiling.About the music, well... I'm not able to make accurate comments about music, I mean, I don't know anything about it, it's mostly personal... Mmm... The first part was a French piano player, from what I have read his music is supposed to be inspired from Scandinavia, well, if he says so, right ? I'm no judge. And I wouldn't know how to judge that in the first place. He was talking about his daughter and an obscure Swedish writer, and I felt like an idiot because I had no idea who it was. I liked it, btw. His music. Sounded round. Made me wish I'll never learn how to play the piano, because it'd kill it all. Like in magic tricks, you know ? If you understand how it works, it isn't funny anymore.The main act was the Japanese piano player Fujii Satoko, along with the three other members of her quartet (good, you can count up to four !). And, well. I didn't understand much. At all. I am not made to understand this kind of jazz. It felt like they were all on different rythms, I'm sorry I don't have four brains to compute four differents tracks ! When they were splitting into solos or duos I could follow (a bit) but mostly I felt like an idiot. Sigh. Someday...For those interested, anyway, here are the MySpaces of Stefan Orins and Fujii Satoko.Read more…
Memories of ballerina dreams, tap shoes, and tightsA child long since grownA woman in waitingForever fused to perfectionIn a broken mindSelf-induced pressure cooks the mindWhat is expected of you,Is not what you expect from yourselfYou think we think you're perfectYou have misjudgedyou have laid blame for your mistakesyou are still lovedHow can you be who you are,When you don't trust that we love whoever you becomeBad influences and fitting in.People are overratedLoved onceLoved alwaysWe are all but humanimperfect by designGive us a chance to understandyou'd be surprised
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Slipping further awayDeeper into the darknessBad choices and wrong turnsWeigh the anchor speeding descentPlastic smiles and crocodile tearsWhich is the mask?Where does the truth lie?Reaching down to offer a reprieveThere is no hand to graspHelpless, watchingTears burning as the light fades to nothingWhere is the fire that lit you from within?If you reach for me,I will always be there
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Today I was struck by an absurd but valid feeling. I realized, through an inner flash of light, that I am no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash of light, what I thought was a city proved to be a barren west Texas plain revealing no sky. I’m no one. No one at all. I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town.I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want.I am a stranger in the world and to the world, and am indifferent to all the lies about a meaningful world. I’m the plot of an unwritten film, wafting in the air, detached without ever having existed.The whirling of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. In this vast vertigo floats everything I’ve ever seen or heard in empty decent. Houses, Faces, kisses, pinches of music and inflections of voices all circling a bottomless void. Spinning corpses of physical space. The end of all worlds churning blackly in the waves. I’m that void at the center of which everything spins, falling from a trap door through infinite space. Existing only so this black whirl can spin, being a center simply because every circle fucking has one.But let’s just sit down here for a moment. From here we can see more of the sky. The vast expanse of these starry heights is soothing. Life hurts less as we gaze at them; a hint of fresh air from an unseen fan refreshes our weary faces. YOU are in this moment the whole universe for me. You’re the full content of my conscious sensation. All I want from life is to feel it being lost in these unexpected evenings we share. On this height by the oldest sky where the stars will always return. We must always live in the present. We and the universe and the mystery of both…eternally standing by the window.We don’t know anything about the future and no longer hold the past.Our arrogance is reduced to cinders in the face of the vast and chaotic absurdity of the universe. There is no clear meaning to life or death and the future is always uncertain.If I could only think. If I could only feel.You died too soon for me to ever know you…
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a friendly schoolmate let me borrow his comic book collection. everything was fine until under extreme mental distress, i began noticing reflections of my life in the comics. it was amusing until my death was foreshadowed and then came true according to book nine, i realized that in fact it was my life that was based on the comics. shortly after my death i was driven to suicide again, anguished by the lack of control i held over my fate. a few days later a girl from school dragged me down to her height by my tie and asked me to kiss her. i realized that this, too, was from the comic and, seeing an opportunity to break away from the book, i refused. when i had escaped to my home, i recieved a text message from her declaring she was making me lunch. i accepted hungrily but then broke into tears remembering book three, when the girl from school made lunch for the boy she likes. after finishing some math problems i began hasty construction of a hangman's noose in the flickering light of a fire on my bed fueled by the comics i had collected. during my work i was tormented by a feeling of forgetting something important. at seven i recieved another text message asking if i preferred rice or pasta. 'rice' i responded, measuring the strength of the noose against my foot. halfway through hanging myself i suddenly remembered that the boy died of choking on rice the day after failing to kill himself for the second time. dissapointed, i cut myself down and went to bed.
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Perhaps Shakespeare was a prophet after all. Maybe he saw our day and that vision lead him to proclaim:"O wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is!O brave new world!That has such people in't!" -- The Tempest, Act V, Scene I.If so, he was of course being ironic, and if he wasn't, there is no doubt that Aldous Huxley was when using this passage in his prophetic book "Brave New World". What is our problem people? What made this nation the greatest nation to ever grace this planet is the fact that here, in America you were free to succeed and free to fail. You knew if you took a risk it could pay out or it could cost you dearly. With those 2 elements in play you were able to weigh every risk, evaluate every decision and act according to your own ability and will.But not any more. Now, everyone is a winner. Everyone gets a trophy at the end of the soccer season. Everyone wins and there are no losers (well except for those super-rich people, but they can afford it anyway). I've talked about this before, but what has really set me off today was this picture I found:
This is Mary Ann Herrera standing out in front of "her home" in San Antonio. I put "her home" in quotes because it's not her home. It's the bank's home, not hers. It's not hers because she couldn't afford it. Now I don't know what the particular issue is. Maybe she just lost her job on the same day that her husband died or something, but I'm going to use her to represent the millions of people of who bought a home they could not afford and are now belly-aching that it's being taken away from them.Knowing the bank was about to kick her out she had her brother paint the words "Help!!" and "Foreclosure!!" on her home in the hope of getting assistance. This is absolutely ridiculous to me. Who are you asking help from? Who should pay for your problems? Who are you to get help? What makes you so d*mn special?I'm sure I don't know.A recent poll said that over 60% of Americans believe it is the responsibility of the government to provide food and shelter and healthcare for it's citizens. This is crazy. It doesn't say that anywhere in the constitution and more importantly people use to not want help. Where is our pride? What has become of us?Perhaps Rudyard Kipling said it best in his poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings when he said, "And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins /When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins ..."Just to show how screwed up things are, right now I am not eligible for any assistance, even under the new "stimulus plan". But if I were to not pay my house payment for the next 3 months (giving me an extra $3300 to spend on whatever) and got a notice that they were going to foreclose, and if during that 3 month period I racked up $80,000 in credit card debt thus making my debt-to-income ratio just such, then the government would swoop in and save the day, lowering my principle owed on my house, dropping my interest rate, and my monthly payments would be about where they are today, but with $83,000 worth of free stuff. WTF?This is just madness and I'm sick of it. People - stand up and take personal responsibility for your own actions and decisions. , but things have changed and it's now or never. We're losing the "Shining City on the hill", we're losing our freedom, and nobody is taking it from us. We're begging, in big letters painted on the side of our homes, to have them taken away from us. And my greatest fear of all is that if it continues, I'll get caught up in the tidal wave; I'll get eaten up by the beast and will find myself one day begging just like this lady in San Antonio. I really want to be a better person than that. I truly do.
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Posted by SubSickAlien on February 25, 2009 at 2:45am
Corey duBrowa once wrote a 1,700-word review of Hail To The Thief for the Seattle Weekly, ushering in a wave of fan mail that read like sour times at the Target returns counter. Which evidently hasn’t disqualified him from issuing the following list of the five most overrated and underrated songs in Radiohead’s lengthy, critically drooled-upon catalog.:: The Five Most Overrated Radiohead Songs1. “Creep” (1993)The one Radiohead song everybody knows and a staple of MTV’s early-’90s rotation (so ubiquitous that it prompted Beavis and Butt-head to offer up their own special brand of couchside analysis: “He’d better start rocking soon, or I’ll give him something to cry about!”). Pablo Honey’s wanna-be masterpiece of self-loathing is totally of and for the era from which it came: the same school of angst music that Clueless heroine Cher Horowitz once dismissively labeled “complaint rock.” That said, His Royal Badness, Prince, delivered a killer cover of the song to cap off last year’s Coachella festival, which makes me believe that Radiohead’s version suffers more from affected, sneering put-ons and weak performance than from substandard songwriting.2. “Electioneering” (1997)I’ll be the first to go along with the prevailing critical meme that OK Computer is one of the finest albums in modern rock and easily one of the top 25 ever released. (Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list has it sitting at 162, but what the hell do those fuddy-duds know about music, anyway? Pitchfork rated it the top release of the ‘90s, which is decidedly more like it.) But for as much as I’ve professed undying fealty to this record, I’ve never understood the discordant, descending-chord pigpile that is “Electioneering,” its place in the album’s running order or its inclusion on the record at all considering some of the terrific outtakes that emerged from those sessions. Hitting “skip” to “Climbing Up The Walls” always makes me inexplicably happy, which is weird, considering how creeped-out that song is.3. The entirety of Hail To The Thief, except “I Will,” which is borderline genius-lessons stuff (2003)My favorite bit from the Seattle Weekly review-cum-novella mentioned above is this summary of the album’s various flaws, which apply to pretty much every other song in its 14-track, pretentious alternatively titled running order: “This is a band caught dawdling in the fierce tailwinds of a continental drift. How else to explain a song as lovely as ‘Sail To The Moon,’ a piano ballad that would easily qualify as one of the most stunning things the group has ever recorded, if it hadn’t already done the same damn thing two years ago with Amnesiac’s ‘Pyramid Song’? Even if you tried to build a case that [Thom Yorke’s] stringing along a narrative intended to thread multiple works together—and frankly, you can’t—it just sounds lyrically lazy (if nevertheless beautiful to behold, at first listen).” So it is overstating things, huh? OK. Then let’s instead just pick on Yorke’s solotronic joint The Eraser.4. “Life In A Glasshouse” (2001)Just going on a hunch here, but I’m guessing that Amnesiac producer Nigel Godrich indulged in a bit of Method Acting stage-direction meant to inspire Radiohead during a particularly “down” moment in the studio: “Fellows, listen. On this take, I want you to play ‘Glasshouse’ as if Woody Allen got drunk, fell down a flight of stairs, plucked the clarinet out of his arse, then staggered over to the bandstand and attempted to play a new Radiohead song.” Uh, OK. Maybe the take after that can sound like “Mia Farrow chasing Woody down the street with a chainsaw, seeking revenge.” Or are they saving that one for the “guitar rock” album?5. “High And Dry” (1995)This track from The Bends had a lot to recommend it at first listen: classic chord structures, Yorke’s plaintive high-register vocals, a love-entangled lyric wrapped around the axle of a counting-it-down-to-zero love affair, a spy-themed video with a surprise car-bomb ending. Enigmatic, catchy and, ultimately (after a couple hundred times’ worth of hearing it), kinda slight. Radiohead would go on to do far better work (even on the same album; “Fake Plastic Trees” certainly fits this same mold, yet it clears a much higher quality bar), but for early fans, this song’s lovelorn mystique came to characterize Radiohead’s thinking-man’s-rock reputation. But hearing it today, you realize there isn’t as much to it as you originally thought. And they nicked the song’s title from Def Leppard (which had written about being both high and dry on a Saturday night in Sheffield more than a decade previously) or the Stones (who had done exactly the same thing, via a London filter, back in the mid-’60s).:: The Five Most Underrated Radiohead Songs1. “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong” (1995)You’d be hard-pressed to think of a band that has as much high-quality outtake/b-side material at its disposal as Radiohead. (Case in point: 2001’s Amnesiac is an entire official release of songs recorded during the Kid A sessions that were eventually deemed “good” enough for mass consumption.) This song comes from a 1994 EP (My Iron Lung) that may as well be a “lost” Radiohead album, given that it contains eight tracks (seven of which are unavailable anywhere else) of such consistently high quality that they certainly give those included on The Bends a run for their money. “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong” is anything but: a morose, layered ballad feting Yorke’s existential sadness for what seems like the umpteenth time. “A beautiful girl can turn your world into dust,” he sings, “I stood in front of her face when the first bullet was shot.” It’s perhaps the single finest thing Radiohead has recorded that didn’t merit an “official” release.2. “Blow Out” (1993)From its krautrockin’ beat to its squalling guitars (check Jonny Greenwood’s ectoplasmic six-string feedback tantrum at about the three-minute mark) to its subterranean-homesick paranoid-android lyrical bent (“Everything I touch/All wrapped up in cotton wool/All wrapped up in sugar-coated pills/Turns to stone”), Pablo Honey’s “Blow Out” neatly prefigures the latter-day alienation and experimentation of OK Computer and beyond.3. The entirety of Kid A, except “The National Anthem,” which is basically a big, lame blurt (2000)For anyone who lived through the trauma and aftermath of September 11 at close range, this is the record that most closely approximates the free-falling terror, fear and isolation of that event in musical terms. “Everything In Its Right Place,” “How To Disappear Completely” and “Optimistic” (along with its ice-cold instrumental prelude, “Treefingers”) are psychologically imbalanced mini-symphonies that may spell out Yorke’s very particular form of antisocial adaptive behavior but ultimately form the backbone of the soundtrack for the new apocalypse. (P.S.: Kid A also makes perfectly appropriate background music for watching CNBC chart the downdraft of the post-modern economy. I’m just sayin’.)4. “Lozenge Of Love” (1995)Another one from the jaw-dropping My Iron Lung EP. (Normally, I would say stop what you’re doing right now and go to eBay or Amazon or wherever and just buy the damn thing, as it’s as essential a part of this band’s catalog as anything you already have on a closet shelf or hard drive. But the EP will be included on the expanded reissue of The Bends next month, so I guess you can pick it up that way.) The fingerpicked, acoustic “Lozenge Of Love” is like finding a long-lost Nick Drake track. Make that a really good long-lost Nick Drake track.5. “Meeting In The Aisle” (1997)This glistening, shining instrumental comes from the Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP (a six-track grabbag of OK Computer outtakes) and serves as one of the band’s earliest attempts at Eno-like ambient-noise sculpture, only with real melodies, beats and identifiable song structures. There are other tracks on this EP that make it well worth the price of admission—spaced-out travelogue “A Reminder” and epic “Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)” both come to mind—but “Meeting In The Aisle” is the one that sold me then, and keeps me hanging on now.Written by Corey duBrowaFebruary 24, 2009Magnetmagazine.comSource Link: click hereRead more…
time flew by, peru didn't get a stop in the south american tour, just like colombia, venezuela and costa rica, despite having thousands of fans asking for it (almost 12,000 took part of the "radiohead en lima" group in facebook, but it was too late!). so we found no other option than traveling the continent to see our favorite band in concert...I'm personally doing brazil (rio and sao paulo), argentina and chile, totaling 5 shows. yikes! at least this is somehow weighing against my US visa rejection from last year (I posted a blog about it). I'm at the office again, but another one... better job, better salary, better workmates (I actually have them, as opposed to only having my boss and an assitant and that was it). anyway... I'm exactly three weeks away from embarking on the largest trip I've done on my own. exciting, scary... bound to be awesome!just read an interview with ed for a brazilian paper and he said the band will mix up the setlist a bit, which is nice... though I really hope it's not packed of "greatest hits" so they can treat us to some non-single material and even some b-sides, seeing how they've never been to this part of the world before.I'll keep posting as soon as the day comes... we have some exciting stuff prepared to make the band notice the presence of their peruvian fans (we're nearly 30 going to argentina and 40 going to chile... yikes!) and I really hope things are, above all, heaps of fun.just need to get my yellow fever vaccine within the next couple of days so I can enter brazil... :)I still don't know what I'll wear to the shows... and there's also some ultra-secret undercover mission I can't say a thing about, but I'll post about it if it becomes successful. nothing to be scared of, obviously.
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This amazing movie is from the Japanese space agency's SELENE mission (Selenological and Engineering Explorer, or Kaguya). It shows the Earth blocking out the Sun during a lunar eclipse - this is the first time such an image has been seen from the Moon.Let's all gawp together.
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Fireballs of realization burn through to the soulSinged memories of liesSmoke filled sighs of reliefThe embers remain...smoldering deep withinBurning cheeks with the ensuing tearsTrust, so fragile is now crackedMolten bile churns to the surfaceShould it eat its way through or be suppressed?Can it be repaired or must it be rebuilt?Is it even worth the trouble?Don't speak the wordsLies speed destructionWhich will win in the fight to remain?The lies of the past and the truth of the present,Or the truth of the past and the lies of the present.All truth or all lies is just too easyPerhaps it is time that this is someone else's fight
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The days continue as if nothing ever happenedNothing has changed and no one has noticedA question of reality and a loose grip on sanityMomentary sadness and lethargic tendenciesOthers see what they want and believe the same wayLack of understanding or inadequate explanationsThey yield the same resultsNo help for the helplessBroken angels cannot fly, yet they are angels just the samePerfection is not sought for us by othersIt is not expected nor can it beChange will find a home everywhereThough it is not always what is wantedGrowth is painful more often than notPerhaps it is that very pain that feeds the growth itselfWhatever the experience, whatever the causeOnce loved truly, loved foreverTrust in those who remain
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