11/04/08

HEY PAL,

FIST BUMP

My son wants to save all the newspapers.
It feels like JFK not dying.

2. CALVIN

Coolidge dies of depression in the Depression.

3. SLUG LINE

JFK resurrects but it’s too late.

                                                                            
OFF THE TOP OF MY RADIOHEAD

Computer, do your best,
okay, is this a new birth
of freedom? “Talking to
my girlfriend, [Homer
Simpson asks God, you’re
a great guy, so why don’t
you have a girlfriend?]
waiting for something to
happen,” sings
Radiohead in its 1995
title track “The
Bends,” the bends
suggesting divers coming up
for air ‘n being punished for it. “I wish,”
“The Bends” continues, “it
was the 60s, I wish I
could be happy/ I wish, I
wish, I wish that
something would
happen.” Stuart Murdoch of Belle
and Sebastian recalls
mid-90’s Brit youth
“come up for air” only to feel
“impertinent—all the great
music done—to even
try to make another song”
though Stuart still
tries producing “all
instruments equal,” aspiring to
60s funk. Stuart then notes:
“pop music is bad
poetry.” I think this is so
words can meld into
more generative wholes
or unions as Lincoln
deemphasizes states
throwing it all on
something bigger
reverberating off the
freeing of the
infinitesimal, the big
falls back on the small
or that’s the idea—everything everywhere
in something besides the universe—Whitman
organizing armies
stopping and starting
with each biblically
styled line—incessant lines
"the miracle,” says Baudelaire,
“of poetic prose, musical
with neither meter nor rhyme,”
“undulating” like crazy,
fitting one Enlightenment phase
in hopes for another,
and maybe Radiohead—
or leader, singer Thom
Yorke, is a kind of
Lincoln/Whitman/Baudelaire in
how the group passes rhyme,
bridge, and chorus to
new attention on the
reverb John Lennon
pioneers in “I Feel Fine,” feedback
chaos generatively right 
like the most easy solid lyrics
putting the worst ones
in play, un-sticking them.
We overlook how stuck
the 90s seem
in the 60s ‘til World
Wide Web interfacing
with graphic user
interface—GUI—is so
crucial in linking
personal computers to
something bigger during the
political unconscious’s
lead up to Radiohead. A student
directs me to the band
in the early 90s. Mario’s
the only student who in
a downtown poet kind of
way wants to be me
though I teach others
who write well. The
whole notion of models
figures because I don't
know Radiohead names
itself after a Talking
Heads song when I
initially call this piece
“Talking to Radio
Heads,” which isn't that
great a title, especially
knowing now
“Radiohead” is a song in True Stories, the
1986 David Byrne film I never see. I see the
Talking Heads as the
most sixties punk band,
the most sentimental—I
mean powerfully, justifiably so. A
simple thesis is that
punk is the mainstream
thing that can’t be
mainstreamed, a cultural
counter to across-the-
boards 60s intoxication-
influence. But there’s
something so full of
“escape hooks” in
Talking Heads songs,
and really that’s what I
like. I’m 14 for Revolver
and Blonde on Blonde
and I’m too old for
everything else. I lose
myself in Prince,
Talking Heads, Steely
Dan but for me they all
hang on the 60s. I wish I
got more into Radiohead
in the 90s but I lost my
sound system—I don’t know
what happened—but this is my
video for them. Put on
Radiohead while you
read this, in other words.
Radiohead reduplicates
the Beatles by slowing
down instrumentals
to get a feeling of stopped
time and then
singing to the slowed
down instrumental.
(Does Oasis do that
too?—Sadaam Hussein
is Hitler the way Oasis
is the Beatles says Bill
Maher.) Thom Yorke
kids himself about being
Beatle-obsessed but I
don’t know, he seems to
mean it though I think
he passes them in terms
of predominant song
structure though the Beatles give
precedents—I always
think “Revolution
Number Nine” is
underrated—
after I write this my son hears it in his 7th grade
music class to exemplify musique concete,
‘n Noah imitates it with Garbage Band—
I mean I
think it’s important
Radiohead songs
needn’t come full circle
or break neatly into
stanzas and chorus
bridges—they are
shaped, or anti-shaped or something. Hey, it’s odd
True Stories is sorta
about computers. I’m
watching the ’86 film
now and there’s a kinda
integrated circuit factory
where a worker sings
“Radio Head,” the song
that I guess Radiohead
kinda likes. The worker
sings he’s a receiver and
his co-worker’s a
transmitter. Another
character tells David
Byrne computers are
like music—mysterious
connections of feeling
and rhythm. Apple and
Steve Jobs are then
tacitly praised, and
someone sings “Radio
Head” again near the film’s
ending. Yeah, the song’s
sorta about people as
computers linking, a
“radio head! The sound
of a brand-new world,”
remember this is the mid-80s.
But the computer is an enlightenment totem
for centuries, before its invention and
throughout post-
World War II culture. At
a party I ask a phd
student working in
anthropology how to use
totems. He looks at my
name tag and realizes
my last critical book’s
on his doctoral
qualifying exam’s
reading list but I ruin it
by letting him figure out
that book is as crazy as
this poem and me and he directs
me to an essay that’ll
clarify totems so
I can keep writing this.
Speak of the Beatles—
my new doctoral student friend
directs me to
anthropologist Sherry
Ortner’s essay citing
Stephen Pepper’s
“root metaphor”
concept informing
Ortner’s schema for
totems as different kinds of
culture’s key symbols—
on the one hand
“summing symbols” such as
flags that tend to order
and perhaps command
you around though they
can still explain things
and elaborate—sort of
how hit singles, which
Jerry Leiber told
me—hey, I actually
had a long talk with him
once and he liked me!—hit singles
are “commercials for
themselves,” so I think
that’s part of the Beatle
allure—that their
crossover to albums
from singles is seamless
cuz even though hits and
summing symbols can
explain things—this
distinction’s after all a
continuum and summing
symbols are in fact
necessary for
explanation BUT there
are also “elaborating
symbols” that explain
and draw things out
in long playing fashion.
Indeed, THIS is a poem-essay
because the poem part
at least tries to live it up
but never really does because the
discourse, the back and
forth, the essay, the poetry plus,
the elaborative symbols,
how Dinkas compare
everything to cattle, or, I think Eskimos
to snow, so as to know
one thing through a
more prevalent thing, or like
cultural scenarios or festivals, or
forms such as get-rich-
quick-schemes, the rise
of fall, etc. I think rock
is great when packed
with key summation
hooks that move
forward through micro-
and mega-elaborative
symbols for surface and
depth. That’s when rock
happens as cultural
phenomena. The early
Talking Heads anticipate
widespread graphic user
interface, heralding a
new cold war meltdown
micro-period and the
early Radioheads
prefigure the world wide
web. Right? That’s why
computers are okay.
Right? Let’s walk
through that 1997
album. It begins all
floaty, an airbag in
“Airbag” “back to save
the universe” because,
we’re all corny poetry born
again “born again” but
no really “In the neon
sign, / scrolling up and
down, / I am born
again.” Hard not to think
of the scrolling neon
sign as gui-graphic user
interface about to be
hooked together by the
internet. Death’s second self
saves public space again. Nature becomes
a suburb then a more virtual square.
You walk away from a car crash in “Airbag,”
Reagan described as the one walking from car crashes,
anticipating Naomi Klein’s
shock therapy theory doctrine,
how the right invites disaster
to impose its plans without you noticing,
the right regretting not having its
answers in place before the Depression.
The joke is the right is the car crash,
progressive left the airbag
we bounce off, but I love “Airbag,” the
first song on Okay,
Computer, Spin’s choice
for best album of the
last 25 years, okay, I’m
taken in by the hype.
“Airbag” makes me feel saved, I mean from
Nirvana, which I think is
a kind of summing band
to the explanatory
Radioheads—Ladies
and Gentlemen—the
explanatory
Radiohead!!! It’s
nice to rejoin this mortal “jackknifed juggernaut”
after one of our cyclical car crashes. In
“Paranoid, Android,”
you’re paranoid cuz you
are an android, you
know like how we
are touchy because we
are not real. Hey, don’t
be so touchy!
We all come from the
Beatles—Yorke credits
the Beatles’s “Happiness
Is a Warm Gun” with
giving them permission
to meld three songs into
“Paranoid, Android” but
they might meld better
than the Beatles. There
might be something
portable-computer iPod
about Arcade Fire but
I’m not sure they in any
way surpass the Beatles.
Maybe. But then, I
forgot “Day in the
Life”—the black hole
song at the center of the
Beatle galaxy—is a
meld—still there’s
something strangely
texturally, harmonically,
even melodically
coherent about
“Paranoid Android.”
Like “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and many Beatle numbers,
(I just opened a glossy dentist’s office sound magazine ‘n
A contributor, asked his favorite Beatle song, asks,
“Is ‘You Never Give Me Your Money/Sun King/
Mean Mr. Mustard/Polythene Pan/She Came
in through the Bathroom Window/Golden
Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End’ one song?)
OK Computer’s second song
takes on a persona
worried by the unborn
yet executing its audience,
then the second part of its meld
boggies into killing “[all the little] piggies.”
The “Paranoid Android” triptych concludes with
an ominous interpretation of “God’s love,”
a big, beautifully hokey rain coming down
as in a Who song
but even more staticy.
“Subterranean Homesick Alien” twists to
a cool, melodic, almost Hawaiian
guitar lick we all feel—
an underground set apart from
 the “beautiful ship world” (i.e., Reagan, Palin)
framing the “weird world” and
normalizing Dylan subterranean inscape from
the eye of a ufo, I guess
the satellite transmitting his
radio show.
In the 80s Dylan calls the
60s a ufo.
What’s the matter with
me, I don’t have much
to say, the album is
racing past me, human
racing.
I’m leaving.
“Exit Music (For
a Film)” is sweetly
nasty, ending “we hope
you choke, that you
choke.” Clinton’s modest tax hike on the rich
saves the rich right from itself, that
little social progress just enough for more than a decade,
enough to move past the present,
enough to let us down, and “Let Down” is a
rather alienated anthem.
I hope you’re enjoying
our walk, but if it has let you down, let’s relax
because “Let Down” is so beautiful and full of
slight swaying adjustments, a series of letdowns, or
“what you’ll get,” say the “Karma
Police” in the next
song named for them. What you’ll get
for listening to me, I
guess. I’m looping
through OK, Computer
cuz I’m your Radiohead
tapehead. Feel free to
introduce yourself,
Savreen—I’m on the
other side of radiohead.
See you on the other
side. I’m interested in
the WW2 reference of
Karma Police
concerning a girl with a
Hitler cut whose party we crash. Computers
are of course okay in
Britain cuz their
invention breaks the
German code preventing
U-Boats from choking
off Britain from North
American supplies,
preventing a Nazi
England. If totems need
structural tension then
you can argue
computers weirdly
oppose the end of
the Enlightenment/
Holocaust totems and
post-WW2 nationally
oriented European/white
flight American
suburban totems. The
Holocaust and suburbs
balance on the
computer. Is that a valid
totemic system? I have
to email that grad
student, W.J.T. Mitchell,
Levi-Strauss, and
Derrida. I feel that strong,
teetering balance in
Radiohead. At the song’s end,
the Karma Police “lose
themselves” and the
Drifter does escape.
That’s the kind of art I
like. “Fitter Happier” is
a computerized voice’s
Benjamin-Franklin-
virtue-checklist setting
up the folk rock reverb of
“Electioneering,” a song
one in my mind with
the British Poll Tax
riots: “Riot shields,
voodoo economics,
it's just business, cattle
prods and the I.M.F.—
When I go forwards,
you go backwards—
I trust I can rely on your
vote.” Yes, I’m the
taxman.
“Climbing up the Walls”
does just that
with a CSN and Young
surveillant if reassuring
sound thst seems
to hear
the next song, “No
Surprises,” a lullaby
whose lyrics fill
its sleepy music with
joy wasting away: “A
heart that's full up like a
landfill,
a job that slowly kills
you,
bruises that won't heal.
You look so tired,
happy,
bring down the
government,
they don't, they don't
speak for us.
I'll take a quiet life,
a handshake of carbon
monoxide,” a nice
waste blurs from
charming allusions to
delusions of grandeur in
the subsequent “Lucky”:
“The head of state has
called for me by name
but I don't have time for
him.
It's gonna be a glorious
day!
I feel my luck could change.
Pull me out of the
aircrash,
Pull me out of the lake,
I'm your superhero,
we are standing on the
edge.
We are standing on the
edge,” almost
done. The last song describes a
machine that can’t sustain
what propels it. The
right crashes too,
what doesn’t, and
Mario was right in 1994
or 5 or 6. He couldn’t
have turned me on to
OK, Computer cuz he
died in 1996, but could
have told me, like
in the last song, “Tourist,” “Hey
man, slow down, slow
down,
idiot, slow down, slow
down.” It’s okay,
computer, hey, constant
computer, you’re okay.