Syd Barrett dead / Thom Yorke alive

I, and the rest of the world, learned of Syd Barrett's death today, coincidentally the release date of Thom Yorke's new solo album "The Eraser". Some parallels can be drawn, if forced at times, between the two very English musicians. I have pondered, and even written here before about the similarities between Pink Floyd and Radiohead, musically and where they fit in their contexts, the music scene current to their eras.

Yorke's new album is full of the electronic side of Radiohead and having listened to it twice in a row, I feel that eventually I'll like it. Right now I don't really hear it but I can tell there's interesting music in there. And my reaction growing up, listening to the early Floyd to which Syd Barrett belonged, was quite similar. I and my friends had thought that we were the only people interested in something so esoteric. We weren't yet familiar with the idea of a cult following, though we did know intuitively that somehow our investment in listening to the music and trying to like it contributed greatly and legitimately to the enjoyment of it. And for me, this wasn't a feigned accomplishment. It could be checked against the fact that I knew some stuff would never work for me.

For the two groups, almost as interesting to me as their being unusal is that in their music I hear and understand the creative process itself. Somehow it's new enough or raw enough that the bare materials show through. And, as in all arts, this is the element I find most moving, much moreso than skill. So, I was surprised to read about Barrett being a skilled musician. Having read that, I now hear the taut clockwork of his music alluded to in his song Bike.

Overall, I also find it surprising to read positive, or at least knowlegeable articles about Barrett. I guess we are talking about the founder one of the most popular rock bands of all time and anyone who comes close to their aura can't help but shine a little. And that doesn't pay respect to his contribution to the early days that at least gave them a name. But this is where any comparison between him and Yorke breaks down. Barrett was just a chapter and his creativity waned quickly.

Yorke is the soul of Radiohead, the Roger Waters by analogy. And, like Waters, Yorke's output is dystopic but full of vision and complete, in contrast to the world of Barrett's disconnected saccharine childlike creations. They have one more thing in common: a sort of antithetical contempt for the industry they're in and even their audience itself. I've often felt the withdrawn personalities of these rock celebrities has to be to some degree posturing. I mean, look at their jobs and how they got there. But Syd Barrett is the exception. From the mythology I grew up understanding, which has been bolstered and enhanced by the obituaries that I'm reading today, it looks like he truly couldn't handle the pressures of stardom.

Radiohead Live

I've never seen Radiohead before and I never expected to see them so soon. But I found myself going to their show at the Madison Square Garden Theater. This isn't really a review per se, but more of a listing of my impressions. It was a very moving show. I stood there alone (well, alone with a couple thousand people) just dancing and smiling and muttering to myself with pleasure. It was not your grandfather's rock show. Affected or not, their interaction with the audience is unusual and perhaps unique. Thom as front man acts at once sexual and shamanistic but also disinterested almost to the point of autistic. My brother always jokes that bassists are necessarily understated but their bassist (Colin) was tucked away in the back and never addressed the audience.

Usually, when I go to a rock concert I have this embarassed feeling about the other people I see there. I feel I don't fit in and wonder how we can all share the same music. But this crowd looked a lot like me: pasty white geeks. Actually the near complete whiteness of the crowd is something that must be mentioned. Another demographic note: there were a number of people in wheelchairs. I don't know if this is an unusual number (I saw at least five) or if the venue is particularly friendly to handicapped people but I can't help wondering if the music somehow resonates with "them". I feel this paragraph is going to get me lynched.

A NY Times review had a couple of interesting things to say that I agree with. The reviewer made the point that "sound has supplanted technique for the musicians in the band." This is true. The two guitarists (Ed and Jonny) spent a lot of time sitting on the floor fiddling with effect pedals creating soundscapes. They also played various instruments, wandering around the stage to different stations where a keyboard or a piano could be found.

I did notice them rushing through older songs as bands seem to do when they're tired of them and they did indulge in some circus antics, i.e. Thom playing a mini drumset on Bangers and Mash.

It was the first concert I'd been to where digital cameras were held aloft throughout the show. I wonder what will supplant this practice and when.

Sound

This weekend I listened to the first CD of the "Welcome Back..." live Emerson Lake and Palmer album. Having overlistened to ELP since, literally, early childhood I had taken several long breaks between listenings over the years, and, a bit self consciously, have not let it work its way back into my regular listening routine. And I don't suppose I'm going to change that either. However, that music is still very powerful and impressive to me. On a related topic, I've wasted much time on variations on the silly endeavor of proving objective quality of music, with bands such as ELP as my focus. I've long outgrown the temptation of such arguments. Or have been socially conditioned to pretend I have. Disclaimers attended to, what impressed me this time, though it's nothing new, is just how great the album sounds. Aquatarkus, Toccata and other sections of Tarkus spring to mind.

exit music (for a film) -- OK Computer

This song feels so pre-Dark-Side-of-the-Moon Pink Floyd. It opens with early Roger Waters strumming akin to "If" on Atom Heart Mother. Organ sounds entering on 3rd verse sound like (mellotron?) choir effects. Backwards recordings enter on the next verse. We even get a Nick Mason entry along with an oh-so-good fat bass line when the song starts rocking out ala the break in Echoes prior to it's final verses. The overall arc is somewhat like that of Careful with that Axe Eugene, excepting that there is a real vocal part. The overall feel is so completely Pink Floyd from the writing to the production, to the bleak lyrics that I wonder whether it's a deliberate homage.

Nimoy vs. Jackson

David pointed me to this infamous Leonard Nimoy video: http://www.alteringtime.com/features/misc/?p=baggins. Yes, it's hilarious but what I notice upon close listening is that its truth to the plot of the Hobbit far exceeds that of Jackson's films to their originals. To be fair, I should mention there is a lyric that mentions battling the trolls. His encounter with the trolls involves more trickery than battle. Nimoy's is more visually appealing at times as well. Overall, its marks in hokeyness are made up for in exceptional accuracy of the Ringlore when compared to many other popularizations of Tolkien's work.

This just in (only minutes after I posted the above): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4840278.stm I rest my case.

La Isla Bonito

Sitting at the bar in Taisho Yakitori on St. Mark's Pl. and watching the spectacle in the open kitchen is a great pleasure to me. I love the endless and repetitive shouting of the cooks and wait staff. Flamboyant cooks prepare truly flaming stir fries, or more carefully cook egg concoctions in distinctive frying pans with vertically attached handles (to best use Japan's notoriously limited space?) to a seemingly less than salmonella safe half-doneness. Next to them a couple bored looking sous-chef-ish kids tend the yakitori (skewered grilled meats and vegetables), spraying them occasionally with water bottles.

The last visit I paid to Taisho was in the expanded location actually, a few doors down from the original and new enough for the kitchen not to be entirely caked with black and ingrained with the smokiness of homestyle Japanese cooking. Still, no foofy sushi smell here. I suppose it was way un-hip of me not to wait on a long line to sit in the older room, but I was hungry.
But I am not here now to sing the praises of Taisho or even yakitori in general, though they are both most deserving of it. Today, I marvel at a more mysterious item of Japanese cuisine: the bonito flake. These curly flakes are shavings of dried fish. Think prosciutto meets a wood plane. Upon close inspection they even show a grain pattern reminiscent of wood. And they are delicious. Wide ranging in function, they serve as the basis for the most important stock in Japanese cooking and they appear as a topping on many dishes, including takoyaki (octopus balls), glued atop by streams of mayonnaise. (Someone call the cornoner!) But again, the flavor and versatility of bonito flakes is not my topic. I come to the point. It is of the indescribable motion that these take on when heated that I write. Placed on a hot dish, say a rice bowl of sorts, they become animated by the heat from below causing them to twist and dance. It's the trippiest thing to watch. It's like the heat patterns you see on the surface of a hot asphalt road, but condensed a smaller scale. A bonsai sized oasis, a delusion of bonito, kinetic, physical, Brownian almost, right there waiting to be eaten. Sigh, what a thing of beauty, the bonito flake. I decided if I ever go into computer animation, my great work will be to model the motion of a sprinkling of bonito flakes over rice. I will win awards.

Code/coal

At the beginning of the bubble I met a programmer at R/GA, an agency that did various kinds of media for ads and movies and had made their name doing titles for films in the 70's, most notably for Alien. We (brother, friend and I) dubbed this programmer "the Viking" because of his nordic extraction and long hair. The Viking made the keen observation that the programmer was the modern-day coal miner. He is overworked, replaceable, a low ranking member of society, his product unrefined and ubiquitous. To him, what cinched the analogy was the way the words code and coal sounded the same. He used to demonstrate, repeating "code...coal, code...coal,...", blurring the ends of the words increasingly until they did sound the same, though neither sounded like code or coal when he was through with them.

Radiohead

My musical obsession of the past year has been Radiohead. When I was a teenager I would fix the larger part of my attention on one band at a time. In my twenties I thoguht I'd grown out of this but I found recently that I've returned to the same pattern. I need to immerse myself in one sound, one idiom, for a long time in order to understand it. The harder the music the longer it takes. By difficulty I don't mean musical complexity, but more my own personal index of accessability. My last band was King's-X who I learned a lot about when I learned to play about 20% of their output, at least one song from each album. Naturally the first thing I discovered when doing this was the personal writing and playing style of the artist but what remains with me is the disconnect between what sounds interesting or moving and how it is played. This increases my natural awe for music.

Action Park

Yesterday I shared this wikipedia entry on Action Park with my friend David, who's family had a summer home near Vernon Valley when we were growing up. I only visited the park a handful of times but I have very strong, fond, memories of those days. I didn't know it had such a reputation for being dangerous. Or perhaps I'd heard rumors but at that age perhaps it seemed that everything (or nothing) was dangerous so they made little impression on me. That the park should be liable for our safety was a concept unknown to me. Action Park provided a relatively controlled environment for carrying out the stunts we did on our own in our neighborhoods. So what's the big deal? We were used to being responsible for the preservation of our own lives.

I was morbidly pleased to read that one of the fatalities is, if inconclusively, attributed to the Tarzan ride, a favorite of ours. It is a simple rope swing that plunges you into water. Even we understood at the time that this one was dangerous, because it was not automated. The rider was responsible for letting go of the triangular bar at the end of the rope at the right time. We studied the timing carefully, both for safety purposes and for maximizing the pleasure of a ride that required 45 minutes of waiting on line. Now that climbing trees and swinging on ropes is no longer a daily activity of mine (it was then), I marvel at the park's trust that any, forget the majority or the totality, of the riders would get this right. And by right, I don't mean effecting the perfect trajectory, I mean not slamming back into the launch area or making any equally sketchy dismount. As it turns out the alleged cause of death, in the case of this one attraction, was the shocking cold temperature of the natural pool that caught the swinger. I remember it being cold.

My first entry

Today I start this blog, mostly to make comments on my daughter's blog but we'll see.