The Department of Truth #1

[From The Language Log]

Radiohead at the Beeb

Um, yes another post about Radiohead. It's OK, I'm in control, I can kick this thing whenever I want, etc.

I phoned up for gig tix on the off-chance, so colossally bummed was I that I'd failed to hear about their gig at 93 Feet East; lo and behold, the BBC phone me up to tell me that I've won a pair of tickets to see Radiohead play at the BBC radio theatre in front of 400 people. Sure, I think. Why not?

This was the 7th time I've seen them, and while it was the shortest set I've seen them play (about an hour), it was the best, for a bunch of reasons.

A) We were sitting down, which is perfect for wannabe oldsters like us. B) We were so close - some 12 rows back. C) It was classy from the off - this being the BBC, they'd laid on the full rig of smoke, lights, strobe etc. D) As you might expect for a live national broadcast, they'd got the sound just so (listening back the day after, it was amazing how much sound degradation occurs over the Radio. In the flesh, the sound was pristine, loud, and crystalline). E) The band were just on fire - dancing along to Iggy's Lust for Life, Thom mouthing the words as they wait for the live broadcast to begin, then giggling at Mark Radcliffe's intro (something to the effect of "welcome to our way of filling an hour's air-time until Gardener's World. We've got with us a young beat combo who'll be playing a selection of party hits" etc) and THEN launching into a suped-up and super-snarling Bodysnatchers, a song made for live performance, its frantically crashing symbols a backdrop to the super-condensed riffage of all three guitarists.

Highlights? How about Airbag, if you please. That song's never sounded so good, all those crazy cross-riffs and counter-chords, your ears losing the battle to follow all the harmonic ideas being sketched and then elaborated and then a dancing Colin all excited about the bassline he's about to detonate ooooh there it is… Or what about Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, my current favourite RH song, and therefore my single favourite piece of music in the world as of now; the cresting guitar lines of the opening ascent make us grin stupidly, and we get the scalp tingle like a breaking wave as the dark churn of the final coda crashes over us. Or Lucky? So fresh and majestic. As always, it was entrancing to watch Jonny wring ghostly or serpentine or plain weird sounds from his guitar, not to mention his massive bank of gear.

And a special mention for Nude. It took them ten years to get this song right. That's ten years well spent. Live it's just so beautiful, Thom's voice intertwining with the off-beat bass pulse and spectral synths to beguiling effect.

If they're half as good at Victoria Park, it’s going to be something else.

Radiohead at the BBC

Saddleback - Night Maps

Saddleback - Night Maps (Inertia)

Not so long ago, I heard slow-motion instrumental playing on FBi which blew me away. It remains the only time I've had to phone up the station and get them to identify the track. It turned out to be from Night Maps, the new album by Saddleback, an Australian musician responsible for the haunting Everything's A Love Letter (which had been recommended by TG). As for which track it was: I forget.

Not that it matters, because every song is of part of the same marvellously expressive atlas of creaking strings, airy woodwind and rusting beats. It's like a forgotten piece of sepia Postgate cranking itself into life, a clockwork orchestra playing by memory. Gorgeous.

Fugitive Pieces

Perhaps the single most luminously beautiful book I've ever read, indeed the first book I can remember that made me cry, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (a poet by trade) has been made into a movie starring Stephen Dillane.

Whether they can do justice to such a haunting, powerful novel remains to be seen. But the fact they made a damn good fist of Atonement gives me hope.

The Rest is Noise

I've been waiting for The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, music critic for the The New Yorker, for at least a year. I finally got my hands on a copy a week ago, and it's magisterial, a wonderful, heady sweep of a century's music and how it effected, and was effected by, political events.

His site has an extensive range of samples which accompany the text, which makes the whole experience vastly richer.

But I have to say, I couldn't resist the temptation to trigger them all at once and turn up the speakers.

You try...

Forensic Entomology

from the LRB:

"There is something reassuringly democratic about the maggot nurseries our bodies become if they are left in the open, or in a shallow grave. The insects make no distinctions of race, rank, sex, age or wealth. We're just a place for them to grow up and feed. It's more than humbling: it's heartening - we're organic, too, and in the end nature recovers the meals we've taken from it, by eating us back. Strictly speaking, of course, we're not entirely organic, and some of the hidden chemicals we contain can have the strangest effects on creatures which consume us. A forensic entomologist was baffled by the unusual size of some of the maggots on the corpse of a 20-year-old woman found stabbed to death by a logging road. It turned out that the big maggots, which had grown more than twice as fast as they should have done, had been feeding from the victim's nose, which was suffused with cocaine from years of drug abuse.

"The maggots thrive on Ecstasy, too".

Amazon reviews

From the hilarious world of Amazon.com reviews. Read this review of Carol J. Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory. and remember to feel bad, WIFE-BEATER!

I was so moved by this extraordinary text. Interrogating the assumptions of white male Women beaters/meat eaters, this important work examines how the white dominating and oppressive culture dictates that the eating of meat is 'good' and even 'necessary', subject Peoples of Color to dietary regimes alien to their own subjectivities. As the writer notes, there is considerable resistance among patriarchal-dominated discourses to vegetarianism. This resistance is a form of textual rape, to be combatted by a 'taste of their own medicine': "A vegetarian writer may express feelings about textual violation by referring to images of butchered animals and raising the issue of dismemberment." A wonderful book, highly recommended.

Christ

Jeff Goldblum

I love Jeff Goldblum, and face it: so do you.

Here a quote from an interview with The Guardian:

"I meditate and I read and I just think... well... what are you going to get if you win? You know? Whoever's back you're planning on sticking a knife into, whatever mountain you're desperate to get to the top of, you won't win. There is no winning. And there is no winning because winning is a lie."

A god amongst men.

Cloud-Busting

Enormous Yes yields to no man or woman in its love for Kate Bush. When the Yes was but a callow nipper making its way in a big bad world, her song Cloudbusting nestled and shone amid the drek like a tiara in a toilet.

"I still dream of Orgonon," she sang, and we wondered what on earth Orgonon might be, before being distracted by the mmmmmmm knowing something good is gonna happen bit.

So: what was it? And why were the Government interested?

Listen.....

Mindhacks

Tricks and tips for exploiting your brain

I need this. My brain has been exploiting me for too long.