Still not tired of Radiohead

I only own two of their albums - OK Computer and In Rainbows. But for months now I have been listening to these recordings regularly with only short breaks to listen to something else. What is it about Radiohead that I find so wonderful?

OK Computer was pure magic the first time I heard it - most of the album, that is. There are a few tracks that dont go anywhere, or else they simply dont have the magic. I am luke warm toward Electioneering" because is just jangles to abrasively. "Karma Police"is a good song ruined by whining vocals. But every other song has something, and some are simply amazing.

Most people say they dont like In Rainbows as much as their other stuff. I say, they are crazy. Yes, it took me a long time to realize it, and like all good art, it takes patience to appreciate it. I have seen the truth: like OK Computer, the latest album is magic except for one or two songs. I cannot listen to it enough.

I think the reason is that no other band has the complete freedom to record what they want, and the talent and vision that Radiohead has. They use sounds no one has ever heard before. They are not afraid to mess with alternative beats. They never use cliche chord progressions, in fact, they wallow in dark, minor chords, but mix them just right with colorful major chords to create a beautifully dark tapestry.

Which brings up the last reason I like them - because they are messed up and dark, like me.

Copier dialogue at the school where I work

Scenario 1: Old worn-out copier experiences a paper jam

Grammar (Elem.) Teacher Response: ‘I know what to do! It’s easy! This happens a lot. Think of all the poor children in the world who don’t have a copier. I’ll fix it myself, that way everyone can share!’

Logic (Jr. Hi) Teacher Response: ‘Woe, woe. Here we go again. Administration hates us, the perpetual step-children; all the other divisions get new stuff. We are forced to live with this contraption that wouldn't impress Johannes Gutenberg. Another movie, I guess. On the odd chance, I’ll just check and see if I can fix it myself with these scissors…’

Rhetoric (Sr. Hi) Teacher Response: ‘Pshaw! This is unacceptable! I cannot work in these conditions! I cannot mold the souls of tomorrow’s world leaders if I have to deal with copier malfeasance. What’s that? A “paper jam”, you say? Yes, I’ve heard the term. I wish one of the serfs would fix it. Meanwhile, I will do my copying downstairs.’

Scenario 2: Brand new shiny copier catches fire at the beginning of finals week

Grammar Teacher Response: ‘Praise God for this awesome new copier! It rarely has any problems. And look how fast it is! Shout to the Lord, all the earth, let us sing…!’

Logic Teacher Response: ‘Oh great. A fire. There, you see? I told you this new copier was a lemon. I miss the old copier. Ah, Sweet Gypsy Rose, we called it. I will take it out on students by giving an oral exam and require them to sing their answers to the tune of “Proud Mary” while doing the MC Hammer dance.’

Rhetoric Teacher Response: ‘I have had a headache since September. I think I’ll use this fire to light a cigar and pour myself a drink. I bet this damn copier is a result of injustice, corporate corruption and waterboarding. There will be no more broken copiers in the Obama administration.’

Cruel and Unusual

Being forced to listen to "Brand New Key" (click to listen) is used in one Colorado town as punishment for playing your radio too loud. Convicted offenders must spend 1 hour on a Friday evening (when they would presumably rather be out socializing) with the county judge listening to whatever he wants to play. Other reported instruments of justice: Barry Manilow, Culture Club and Beethoven.

Said one convict, "A little Barry Manilow every now and then is OK. At least we didn't have to listen to ABBA."

The recidivism rate is said to be around 5%.

Head Tattoos

Where to start.

What kind of a world is it when people view their own bodies as a place to tell a sick joke, a playground for absurdity, advertisement space, or a prison house of the soul?

There are some MUCH worse - click the picture to see more.

Writers too hung up on being published

The ironic thing about my comments yesterday is that until recently I never entertained thoughts of publishing anything. Who am I to consider such things, I thought. I wrote for my own pleasure, for therapeutic reasons, to exorcise my demons, whatever. I had some notion; I've had lots of notions, but for once I had some time on my hands, and so I just wrote my notion down, fearfully, because I knew I was not a writer and my story would stink. Yet like a passerby who finds a lump of red clay lying on the ground, and contrary to good sense, normal behavior and the desire to keep one's clothes clean, picks up the clay and plunges into it thinking he will make a replica of Michaelangelo's David, but instead makes Mr. Bill, I wrote down my notion.

Perhaps this shows in my entry on the 18th which reveals how childish I can be. And, of course, I was somewhat putting on a character for the sake of writing, so dont think I am succumbing to the overweening dreams so many writers, who simply HAVE to make it big.

American Idol contestants often seem the same way. I have been forced to watch a couple of episodes - the backstage interviews of contestants awaiting their turn...appalling. They just drove in from Toledo in their '89 Sierra, they've just barley wiped the Arby's off their face, wearing clothes that other high school juniors in their town of 15,000 are wearing - undersized 90's sexy fashion a la Mariah Carey, or gangsta baggy heavy wool with hoods, primadonna waif dressed like Stevie Nicks, or guy-liner metrosexual jeans and a stylish shirt. These people talk as if their only desire in life, nay, the very hinge upon which their fate turns is getting picked to be the Next American Idol. They have dropped out of school to go to New York and stand in the contestant line. They have sold the farm, cashed in all their chips, borrowed money from Grandma, who will be watching. They are convinced that they've got what it takes, their potbelly notwithstanding. They are crying, jumping, hugging, praying like Mother Theresa to be picked. 98% of them parade forth in a veritable carnivale of mediocrity at best.

Anyway, that's not what kind of writer I want to be. So if I never get published, I'll just continue to polish doorknobs and admire good novelists.

Im writing a book

It seems like everyone I know is writing a book. I'm writing a book too, which nowadays is like saying, Hey everybody, I got a cell phone! So, why do I get jealous when I hear that someone else is writing a book? There is some little creature inside snarling and saying, "No! Mine! I write book!" Even if its something like a field guide for photo-lithography, I have this itch, like a tick, a fear that my novel will somehow be affected by the competition. I can visualize a man in a book store standing in the aisle, one book in each hand. "Now, let me see. A gloomy novel or the photo-lithography field guide - which will it be?" And he gladly pays the $150 for the field guide rather than that $9.99 for my self-published rag.

Anyway, my book is about a man named Silas who looses his family in a car accident. Counting up right now, I have 176 pages double-spaced - more than I realized. That may be roughly half of the book.

More later...

Story blog

Im starting a separate space in which to write my latest fiction. Its called The Former Hero. Thanks for reading the daily postings which are like a serial novel, and giving me feedback.

I read the news today, oh boy

Today in the news:

• Washington State appeals court says sex between teacher and 18 year old student is not illegal
• Obama will use Lincoln's Bible for inauguration
• CEO's and financiers increasingly committing suicide, faking deaths, in wake of financial crisis
• Toddlers named Adolf Hitler Campbell and Joyceln Aryan Nation removed from home in New Jersey
• This just in: attractive girls in bikinis tend to attract male attention. Discovery made when biniki-clad girl auditioned on American Idol last night and was sent to Hollywood

Teach your children well

Cadillac Escalade

I just saw a big cardboard box for this toy in the hallway where I work. Must have been somebody's Christmas gift. The Fisher-Price website says it retails for about $350.

Now, I can't complain too much, because my children all went to Disneyworld for their Christmas present (thanks to grandparents). But this abomination makes me want to move to the moon.

Review of "We Own The Night"

If the title of the movie We Own The Night makes your nostrils arch a little, it may be because lame movie titles are as obvious to everyone except the writer as a fart smell is except to the person who did it. This move, written and directed by someone you've never heard of (James Gray) is not only poorly named, but is mournfully transparently predictable from 10 minutes in.

Before I trash it further, let me say that the film does not fail because of the main actors, who were pretty good - Robert Duvall is always a pleasure, Joaquin Phoenix has his moments of greatness (like his portayal of Commodus in Gladiator, "Am I not merciful?!"), Mark Wahlberg is well established as a likeable guy (though he frequently cast as the perpetually furrowed, simian brow, close-mouthed, imperiled, accidental unhero). The actors did their best to take a ho-hum movie concept and turn it into drama.No, this lemon has to go to the writer/director.

Aside from good triumphing over evil fairy-tale-style, the only other redeeming aspect of the film is the family portrayals, often cast in a dim, yellowish incandescent homely hue, while people are gathered around a dinner table or talking honor and duty in a creaky old New York church. Family ties were strong in the film, even when the black sheep was wandering.

OK, back to why this movie is DOA. As you are still chewing the first bite of popcorn, as if to get the obligatory sex out of the way early so we can get on with the drivel, you the viewer get to see the girlfriend (I forget her name) horny as all getout, twisting and whimpering on a couch with her hand down the front of her pants, beckoning her man, who replaces her hand with his own. Now the microphone is recording the slapping spit sound and heavy nasal breathing. I'm uncomfortable with this, not because I am made of granite, but because this is as phony as manikin porno. Its salacious, perfunctory, exhibitionistic and false. So, the two are revving up, buttons popping, legs in the air, and then, mercifully, interruptus by someone at the door. Of course, the guy leaves her to attend to business.

The obligatory grinding sex scene in a movie of non-stop obligatory tripe. People die on cue, survive on cue, make unlikely discoveries, experience psychological evolution in seconds. This formulaic narrative path is more well-beaten than the Silk Road to China. The villain might as well be twirling his mustaches, which he has amply.

The one car chase scene was spectacularly dull. Honestly, if you are driving along in a high security convoy, and someone pulls up beside you and stretches a SHOTGUN out the window in your direction, you might have the sense to either speed up or slow down. But no, the police commissioner didn't do that, and so he got shot.

I dont have the strength to go on. See Children of Heaven if you want to feel something.

50 kids get a Wii for Christmas

This is a disturbing video.

If it were addicts getting a crate of smack instead of children getting a Wii, would the reaction be any different?

Caspar (written 1/2/05)

Caspar was unlucky. Or, it could have been something else harder to put a finger on. He was slow when things called for speed. He was quick when it was not important to be fast. He was gifted, sometimes seeing more than he could put into words, feeling that he knew some things that others did not. Sometimes he had longings that he did not fully understand. Evenings he looked up, stuck in traffic, well after dusk, loosening his clenched jaw slightly as his eyes turned to the vastness and texture of the sky far above the street. He wanted to speak. No words came. The son of middle-class, educated parents, he was in the second quarter of his graduating class at Mid-State College, and was now assistant manager at a local company, going nowhere. His talent had failed him. Why was it that he so frequently found himself following far behind others - a slightly above average person thwarted by apparently foreordained obstacles, all perhaps traceable to his own quirkiness and personality?

He remembers the day in kindergarten he tried harder then other kids, but his art came out a mess. He wanted to start over but he could not. It was time to go. He had started out high and confident. His eyes were wide. He visualized his painting and his stomach fluttered. He saw other kids making stick figures of men and square houses. Caspar would make a picture of a pony with a man riding on its back. It would stand out from the other kid’s paintings for its beauty and noble theme. He would do his best and maybe they would hang it up on the wire in the hallway after it dried. Then teachers and parents would walk by, all smiling at the simple stick figures of the other children, and when they came to Caspar’s their eyebrows would arch a little, and they might even say something – “Oh, honey, look at that pony one. Isn’t that good?” “Yes, that one’s really nice.” And on Friday he would take it home and show it to his mother, and he would tell her how it was hung on the wall in the hallway for people to see, and how the teacher told him how special it was and how she had “never seen such a great pony before”, and then he would ask if they could find a special place at home to hang it up on the wall, and she would suggest they put it in the kitchen by the breakfast table so they could see it every morning. His mother would hug him extra tight and say how proud she was of him. And that memory would do its formative work in his fresh, young psyche. He would come to perceive himself as a person who can do things, as confident, clear-eyed and strong. As an adult he would be able to take on difficult tasks and impress his supervisors. He would become project leader, and then coordinator and on into positions reserved for people who can do things.

But that’s not what happened with Caspar’s painting. As he sat with the paintbrush dipping in the red paint, it seemed so easy, so obvious. He started with the head. It had to have eyes and ears and a long nose. He chose blue for the eyes and dipped his brush in the blue paint. But he mistakenly dipped his paintbrush in black paint, and now there was an ugly black spot where the eye should be. He started and gave a tiny gasp. He blinked for a moment, and then his shoulders sagged. He looked around for the teacher. She was with another child. He wouldn’t interrupt. He would just go on, maybe start over.

He cleaned his paintbrush and started a new horse under and to the left of the first one on his construction paper. This time he would do it in green. A nice head, then the front legs, back legs, body. He carefully cleaned his brush. Now he got some orange and put a man riding the pony. The brush stroked down. Wet green paint mingled with orange and turned into a color that Caspar thought was ugly. It looked like mud, and he made a face that showed combined distaste and the panic of another mess-up on his paper. There were only three minutes left. He would try to salvage it. He got more green to fix the spot on the pony’s back that had turned brown. Then he got more orange for the man. Then more green, each time making the lines fatter and more pronounced as he tried to repair his picture. It was no use. He wanted a new sheet of paper. If he could just start over, he could do it right and avoid that mistake. He saw the other children cleaning up. His soaring, prodigious ambition was deflating rapidly. He went to the teacher in his father’s oversized tee-shirt and asked, but, with deeply sympathetic eyes the teacher said there was no time to start over. She said his pony looked “wonderful” and she would put it up with the other pictures on the wire in the hallway, but he didn’t want that because now he knew that rather than being marked with distinction, it was without question the worst. Nobody else had messed up theirs. His had the added blemish of the first attempt and unfinished pony head in the upper right. The young Icarus had sought to touch the sun and ended up crashed in the water. He was ashamed. He felt rage and helplessness, new and confusing to him. He would have no sweet moment of rapture in his mother’s praise. He wanted to tear it up, then his ugly picture wouldn’t even have to be put up at all, but he feared the displeasure of the teacher if he should show such a tantrum. So he wept softly.

He never had any signs of mental slowness or disability, he was just unlucky - and familiar with that sinking feeling that time is running out, others were way out in front, and he had made a poor start and wanted to start over. But you can never start over.

Now, sitting at the wheel after working a little late at the office, he breathed steadily as he forced his eyes from the waiting car in front of him to the ancient heavens as they drew across their veil of night. He thought about that old kindergarten painting. He thought about the school play, the track meet, the layoffs two years ago – all his moments when ambition turned to a sigh. “Dark outside,” he thought. And dark inside. When would summer come? Then perhaps he would try something new, perhaps he would add on a deck or paint the Opel GT, still on blocks in the garage. He thought about it. That car would be nice to drive around with the top down when the weather warms up. He would paint it red…

Mickey Mouse ate my head

Already I have given too much thought to my feelings about my in-laws Christmas gift of taking my family to Disney world and a week in a condo. Fortunately, they do not know about this blog and so they dont read it.

In short, we were subjected to two days of a Disney advertisement of itself, two days of cultivation of the lowest human impulses, omnivorous consumerism, the delusion that Disney's world is the best world, that magic and dreams all come true, bland food, long lines, dog-and-pony shows, unprecedented hordes of humanity crowding along the streets, 20% of people too lazy to walk and renting electronic wheelchairs although there was nothing visibly wrong with them in fact I even saw some get up and walk from wheelchair to roller coaster...

I was overcome with sadness that so many people want to take photos of strangers dressed in a costume, the children standing next to a plastic Dumbo statue, neon signs of Goofy and fireworks. Yes, people try to take photos of fireworks, which, if you've never tried it, these photos never come out unless you have something much better than a $200 digital camera.

I could go on. I am just thankful and hopeful that I have been to Disney theme parks for the last time in my life.