Radiohead Reinvent an Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace once wrote a story about a video cartridge that was so entertaining people couldn’t stop watching it. It was so good people would rather die than stop watching it. With “A Moon Shaped Pool”, Radiohead have created nearly as great a piece of sinister entertainment. Listener beware, for anyone who plays this album all the way through risks suffering a high degree of permanent neurologic damage. Music critics are already showing evidence of their deteriorating cerebral cortexes. Take the following quote of nonsense from the Rolling Stone review of their latest effort:

His falsetto scat on “Present Tense,” delivered over a bossa nova-style acoustic guitar, recalls the angelic earthiness of Brazil’s Milton Nascimento amidst greenhouse-gas ambience. “Desert Island Disk,” which Yorke premiered solo last December in Paris, is a folk song that conjures Nick Drake but, perhaps, for its ecstatic joy: “the wind rushing around my open heart,” Yorke sings with uncharacteristic bliss, “totally alive!”

The RS critic goes on to welcome us to the world of “artisanal anti-pop” “Welcome to the new artisanal Radiohead: provisionally unplugged, old-worldly, and mass-produced with small-batch aesthetics as an antidote to low-flying panic attacks, if we could only slow the fuck down and savor it.”

Shall I start cutting my wrists now or wait until the zombie apocalypse has gained a little more steam?

After spending five futile years trying to top their techno-rock classic “King of Limbs” Thom Yorke sat his band down and said the following:

“ George Bush is no longer murdering innocent civilians by the hundreds of thousands. There simply isn’t anything to inspire me anymore. I’ll bet you we can put out an album of complete garbage and our fans and critics will still love it. I’ll bet you they will buy it by the Millions. To prove it to you we will release an album containing horrible lyrics about how bored we are. Here’s my favorite giveaway line “This dread still covers us, you gotta be kidding me”. To show that no one is even paying attention, we will release the songs in alphabetical order. We will even throw in “True Love” from 1985 using one of the worst of the original demos. The album itself will have a throwaway title called something like “A Moon Shaped Pool” ha ha. Everything about it will completely suck. We will use drum machines and stilted canned chord sequences. We will tell everyone we’re using the London Symphony Orchestra but in fact they will be 6th graders with annoying tendencies to call attention to themselves in the most subtle parts of the music.
Finally, we will make a deluxe package of the album inspired by the 78rpm shellac records in the library of La Fabrique, France. The artwork will consist of 32 pages of paintings of colored rocks. It will be a steal at only one hundred dollars! Just think we don’t have to try and make any more good music. We just have to release a load of crap and then watch everyone pee all over themselves trying to write the most fawning of critical reviews published in all the great periodicals of the world. I can’t wait to read all of the hundreds of five-star reviews on Amazon that will pour in week after week. We will have so much fun, because soon America will be so great.

Unfortunately for us Radiohead did not realize where the next hundred thousand of innocent civilian casualties would come from. Or rather, they just couldn’t wait.

Greedy Google

So i just want to know why there is no dictation capability in gmail on my PC but there is on my phone. When I went to help, I was sent to the forum section which as always was completely useless. I thought I would love to have a human person help me. But unfortunately there is mass delusion that has been perpetuated expressing the notion that search engines and computers know what the fuck you need. When in fact they almost never do. Hence the forums which are just as worthless. So, imagine my surprise when I actually found a place where feedback can be sent. Microsoft blocks even this basic function because they are an even worse, shamelessly greedy company who don’t want to deal with all the grief, frustration, and anger that they have unleashed upon the world by hiring some people and give up some of their ill gotten booty.

Why can’t you rich ass fucking bastards hire some people to help with all the zillions of issues that people are wasting zillions of hours on. It’s because you greedy bastards would rather send everyone into completely worthless Forum hell. How much fucking time do you really think I have to waste. You could probably keep the world economy from crashing if you weren’t so incredibly greedy and would just train and hire some people to work in the much needed area of support.

YouTube and Copyright

I post videos with limited artistic merit that borrow heavily from copyrighted music. So sometimes I am forced to pull down videos and this is understandable. But the videos I post have limited infringement because the sound quality is poor and nobody is about to copy them. Also, I get a few hundred hits at most. So anyway, this same copyrighted music can be found when I look. I am able to find other people who have posted the same entire song in a high quality recording in its entirety with absolutely no original artistic content added in. And what’s worse, their entire site seems to be devoted to these kinds of “videos”. Videos that often get hundreds of thousands or even millions of hits. Now when I have questioned all this I get answers saying that it is all up to the copyright holder. This strikes me as bizarre, arbitrary, and questionable. Little artists have no protection and YouTube rakes in zillions without doing anything to encourage fairness and the sharing of original artistic creativity, however limited it may be. It feels very much like they are purposely, or else through negligence, allowing the lowest common denominator to dominate through corporate policy and search engine. Here is a site with over 9,000 subscribers who has posted hundreds of albums in there entirety. He is stole the art work for his banner from a Peter Gabriel album. https://www.youtube.com/user/SolsburyHill22

The following is a video that I was not allowed to post on YouTube. 

Now you can find this same song posted in its entirety on YouTube in high quality audio with nothing more than a picture of Michael Jackson. This here isn’t a video at all.  It is just a high quality audio copy of one of Michael Jackson’s  songs with a picture. How does this qualify as a YouTube video but my video of a line dance to the same song does not? His “video can be easily copied and downloaded and kept in your personal library for the rest of your life. The audio on my video you would not want especially so many other high quality version available on YouTube. will And this guy is hundreds of thousands of hits undoubtedly because Google is putting him a the top of its search end while my work ends up on the bottom.

Here is another video that is posted on YouTube but has highly restricted traffic. It is blocked in this country but not others. Here it is on Vimeo where it can be viewed by U.S. internet accounts:

 

Why Republic Wireless may not be right For You

I have the best phone available with Republic the Moto-X with 16GB memory for $399. The lack of available memory on this phone is the deal breaker. There simply is way to little. It is advertised as 16GB but I have practically nothing on this phone. I have almost no pics, a couple gigs of music and an average to pretty low number of apps. I struggle all the time just to keep a couple gigs free for video. When it comes time to get a new phone, I would consider staying with Republic but they don’t even have a 32GB option for the Moto-X. There is no way I am going to pay 400 bucks for a phone that is basically the same as what I have and has way too little memory. The issue is has become important enough to me that I may leave Republic sooner than I would otherwise have liked to. I am simply unsatisfied with the memory issue to the point that I have to get a phone and now also a new service provider all because of lack of available memory. If you become a Republic wireless costumer you will find that you pretty much get just the very minimum in every category. Minimum choices, minimum speed, minimum data, minimum customer service, etc. I can’t give the company more than two stars. You get what you pay for and you will save money and you will own your own phone but I don’t recommend it.

Against All Odds: Cleveland Will Win the Championship

Mercury was in retrograde and turned direct on June 10. What does that mean?

Cleveland is a backwards fucked up city tucked right into the asshole of the world and so the so-called “Warriors” were shitting their pants within the first 5 minutes of game one as the Cavaliers blew them up straight outta Oakland. They say that every dog has their day. Well, I am here to tell you that the stars have lined up and after 51 long years, now is our time.

With several of their best players sidelined, the Cavs played their assess off giving the Warriors a run for their money in game one. Going into overtime, they never allowed the Warriors a lead until the final minutes when, in Cleveland style, the Cavs lost. In game two, what did Lebron, I mean the Cavs do? They made history by rockin’ the San Andreas Fault in overtime and winning their first  championship playoff game ever. Then back in Cleveland in game three, after Kyrie disappeared for the rest of 2015 history, what did Cleveland do? They won their second championship game ever 96 to 91, as Mercury went to station.

Now that Mercury is direct, will that give the Warriors a chance? Hell no! Why, you might ask? Because the series was begun during the retrograde phase and that gives Cleveland the momentum, the passion, the fashion of the day, and the win.

In case you missed it, Mercury in Retrograde is a seemingly difficult time. A time when you should not make big financial commitments. It is a time when you might look in on yourself and check out what is going on and make some personal investments in things that are truly important. It is also a time when you might go out and win a freaking championship for the first time in 50 years! Put your  money in the bank, Cleveland wins!

“Don’t believe me? Just watch!”

See my next post for the other 6 reasons that Lebron, Cleveland, and the Cavs win in game 6 of the play-offs.

Empathy versus Apathy

This is another comment posted in response to a post titled “The Dizziness of Freedom” by Be Like Aslan

Empathy versus Apathy at the workplace, wow! I think you really spelled out your position well. Listening to other people argue and complain, this must be a situation that many people find themselves in these days with the hyper-partisan mood of the country. I live in Ohio a state I would have left long ago had it not been for life-threatening health issues back in the 80s and 90s, but that is another story. Anyway, I also identify with the notion of Empathy being a cardinal trait. I am a die hard liberal working in a state psychiatric facility surrounded by many angry tea-party co-workers! As the nurse in charge, I no longer allow myself to engage in conversations related to politic as these discussions have a tendency to cause high powered emotions to explode. It is my job to maintain civility not unleash conversations that have no possibility of educating or enlightening. Politics, religion and personal problems do not belong in the workplace especially when they trigger high powered emotions. You are not being paid to deal with other people’s baggage at work. You have every right to report this inappropriate behavior during your exit interview and at any other time you have the confidence of your supervisor. The parties involved in this highly charged dispute were both wrong for allowing this altercation to detract from the work of you and the others present.

Millennials are More than People, They are the Next Generation

The following was a comment written in response to a blog post by Be Like Aslan titled A Post I will Probably Regret.

Yes, every generation bemoans the coming generation. Not me! I identify with your generation much more than my own. Born in 1962 I am technically a Baby-Boomer. I prefer the label Wedgie. I am a Wedgie between the Baby-boomers and the X-generation. That is another story. What I see happening with your generation is largely reflected in the world at large. In the world at large, there are increasingly two groups, the haves and the have-nots. You obviously belong to the haves or at least potentially.

Your generation believes in judging individuals by their character and leaving race out of the equation. You believe in marriage equality and recognize the sister threats of capitalism gone wild and global warming. These two threats join our brothers and sisters across the world together in opposition to the increasing madness. No wonder so many corporate journalists bemoan the fate of the millennials. If they do not quickly crush you under the corporate steamroller your generation will be calling upon the power brokers for a reasonable plan to deal with the ever increasing income disparity that now plagues the world. Yes the haves must work ever harder to please the corporate cannibals while the have-nots, with few tools at their disposal, continue to feed at the trough of government hand-outs. To hear our conservative brethren tell it the have-nots have really got it going on these days.

When the corporate journalist invoke the laziness of your generation, they are really invoking the ghost of Reagan’s Welfare Queen and, more recently, Newt Gingrich’s “food-stamp president”. At the same time these journalists play upon the notion that every new generation is somehow unworthy. I look at your generation and I say, Thank God! There is still a chance that the human race may yet still survive and overcome the seemingly insurmountable challenges that face us in the coming years.

Lifting Weights: One More Time!

I recently started lifting weights again! Years ago, I read this good book called Body for Life by Bill Phillips.  Now I am returning to this book to help structure a new work-out routine. Here is a good quote, from the book, that any gym rat can live by. Mr. Phillips is describing what a “high point” is:

It’s very important you become aware of what your high points are. A true high point…a true level 10 experience, is one where you can honestly tell yourself you gave it every single last ounce of energy you had— that you tapped into your inner strength. What you’ll discover is a true high point comes from your mind, not your muscles. 

In my upcoming posts I will be discussing Mr Phillip’s book and the various ways I have adapted his upper body work-outs. Now, you too can take your “Training-for-Life Experience” to the gym, work, and even home.

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