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Post by EvilRocker on Jan 18, 2004 21:04:02 GMT -5
STUDIO DIARY #23 (October 20 - 26, 2000)
Friday 20th I was listening to Queens of the Stone Age whilst painting my toenails this morning and I felt an overwhelming sense of well-being flush right through me. To add to my new found joy, the swelling in my face has diminished somewhat and I don't look quite as gruesome as I have of late. Less of a munchkin and more like a ROCKSTAR!!!! HA ha ha................ Read an interesting article yesterday on depression in a back copy of The New York Times by David Ives:
"Considering the state of the world, why does science still consider depression an aberration?..........History, it would seem, is telling us that there is something compelling about the dark side of things...........For some of us,optimism is seen for what it is:a form of escapism........Optimism is,in fact,a form of desperation that science would do well to investigate...........Depression,let it be said, is nothing more than realism."
Well, I don't know if it's just because I'm in therapy these days but I certainly do NOT agree with these beliefs of David Ives. Although I certainly DO believe that Optimism is a form of desperation.A form of escapism.(Ooh.......optimistic people creep me out.) But I also happen to believe that my mild depression is a form of escapism too. All too often for instance, if I'm feeling overwhelmed by a negative situation, rather than confront it head on, rather than actually DO SOMETHING to alleviate my own misery, I will instead retreat into the "I'm depressed" mode and do absolutely NOTHING. Do you know what I mean? So there you have it. My new theory. Depression must be tackled HEAD ON MOTHerfUCKER. That said............there are definitely differing degrees of "Depression" and there are certain serious types of depression that I believe can only be controlled through communication and/or medication. I'm certainly not denying the existence or the seriousness of the medical condition of depression. All I'm saying really is that I am a lucky devil who really has nothing much to complain about and I have no right whatsoever to feel sorry for myself. It took me all day yesterday to figure that one out. By tomorrow I may feel very differently but today.............HELL.......I'm banishing depression from my vocabulary.
Saturday 21st Started my period this morning and consequently am feeling absolutely GHASTLY and sick as a dog. Per the above.......IGNORE ALL THAT BULLSHIT! I'm feeling depressed and miserable and everything and everybody STINKS!!!!!!!! Ha ha ha........ Anyway...........................I am positively refusing to be anything but a vibecrusher this weekend. I've got it all planned out! I am going to retreat into my hotel bedroom, order a pizza and a bottle of beer and then I'm going to watch Game 1 of the World Series on TV and enjoy every last minute of it. I LOVE BASEBALL. And I mean LOVE it. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait.
Sunday 22nd Day off and Game 2 of the World Series.
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Post by EvilRocker on Jan 18, 2004 21:05:35 GMT -5
Monday 23rd Listened some more to Kid A (the new Radiohead album) and I just can't get into it. Whilst I admire the determined and certainly understandable effort to throw off their "Saviour of Rock Music" mantle I can't help but miss what makes them great. (Thom's singing. Johnny's guitar playing.) I just don't have the desire to go back and listen to it ever again. They don't sound like they're doing what comes naturally.It sounds too forced. And bands like Grassy Knoll ,Godspeed you Black Emperor, Eno,John Cale etc etc. have all managed to make music in a similar vein except they make it compelling and communal and fun and beautiful without it EVER sounding fake and aloof and it seems unfair that they haven't exactly been declared as GENIUS gods of original thought despite the fact that they too are making music confounding the typical expectations, confines and structures of popular music. HOLY RADIOHEAD. Who DARES to speak out against them?
Tuesday 24th Game 3 tonight.Mets are down 2 games to zero.(I have a crush on Pratt so I'm rooting for the underdogs.) Sick and tired of being in a band. Sick and tired of living in a hotel. Sick and tired of a decaying world full of shitty magazines and TV programs and bad movies and pointless wars and endless violence and moronic actors and vacuous actresses and phony, manufactured pop stars and stupid politicians and bitchy shop assistants and incompetent drivers and cruelty and greed and jealousy and selfish soulless people and materialistic, moralistic, capitalistic never-ending bullshit.
Wednesday 25th He ho hum......I can't believe it! I just read a review of the Radiohead album on Rollingstone.com by Jason Cohen and I laughed my head off.Finally someone had the balls!
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Post by EvilRocker on Jan 18, 2004 21:06:53 GMT -5
Well Hung at Dawn This Week: "Kid A" to Zzzzz -- A Radiohead Reaction-ary
Our beloved columnists find a fellow Radiohead hater at Reading
A is for arse, which Kid A is a load of.
B is for B-sides. Yes, we know there aren't going to be any singles -- that's because the whole album sounds like a bunch of half-baked leftovers usually relegated to Track 3 on Disc 2 of the third single.
C is for Capitol Records, who must've crapped themselves when they first heard Kid A. The list price, incidentally, for Kid A is $18.99.
D is for difficult. Those who think Kid A is difficult are really rather dim. If anything, it's deadly dull drivel.
E is for Eno. If people wanted to buy Eno records, they'd buy Eno records. Incidentally, we'd like to copyright our invention of the next hip new genre: Enocore. It's like, ambient punk with really, really sensitive lyrics. Kid A almost -- almost! -- qualifies, but there don't seem to be any words to speak of. Oh right, words are fascist.
F is for fartsy, as in artsy-fartsy. F is also for fans, but since Radiohead don't care about them, why should we?
G is for guitar, as in "Anyone Can Play . . ." Well, somebody had better, because Radiohead sure as fuck don't seem interested in it! Here's an idea for a direct action: Get up front at one of their shows and yell requests for the old tunes -- "Ed! Hey, Ed! Play fuckin' 'Ripcord'!"
H is for humor and the complete lack thereof. Radiohead's total absence of glee is what renders them excruciating. Pretentious is cool. We like pretentious. But pretentious requires a nudge, a wink, a crooked Mona Lisa smile, something!
I is for "Idioteque." That'd be the club where people go to listen to Kid A.
J is, of course, for jazz odyssey. J is also for Jacks, but only when A is for Apple.
K is for kvetching. It seems making Kid A was as hard to make as it is to listen to. Just ask Thom: "I felt like I was going crazy," he told Q, in an exclusive interview. "Every time I picked up a guitar I got the horrors. I would start writing a song, stop after sixteen bars, hide it away in drawer, look at it again, tear it up, destroy it . . . I was sinking down and down." And when it was over, and the sad bastard finally took stock of what he -- erm, sorry, they -- had created? "It made me cry sitting in the back of a car from start to finish," he said to Spin, in an exclusive interview. Good thing he wasn't driving!
L is for lemmings. Man, you've got to love rock critics. Does anyone else get off on listening to "an agitated bass-and-drum funk pattern played on a shotgun downbeat [that] abruptly mellows with the help of a murky, underwater echo effect?" Oh wait, sorry, that's actually the New York Times description of a Trans Am song. Our mistake. Anyway, the only thing worse than the legion of rock critics wringing their ink-stained hands over Kid A's supposed brilliance is the disturbing number of hacks dishing out mixed, murky three-star judgments when they clearly know the record is pants! Kee-rist, even a lunkheaded upscale stroke book like Maxim -- Maxim! -- felt compelled to give this sucker a good review. On the one hand, people are making a fuss over sounds that they wouldn't spare a column inch for if it came out under the name "Autechre," and on the other, because it was decided that Radiohead were Important and Significant last time around, no one can accept the album as the crackpot art project it so obviously is. C'mon, don't be such pussies -- Kid A is either a work of extraordinary genius or a steaming pile of dog turds. There is no middle ground to hide in on this one, and we're sure Thom would want it that way.
M is for Mark Morris, lead singer of the Bluetones. Believe it or not -- even we are still rather shocked -- but the fabulous Science and Nature appears to be closing in on 2000's oh-so-prestigious Well Hung Album of the Year Award (England's Grammy). Great tunes well played, sneaky smart lyrics, and a complete and total disregard for popular trends. Top!
N is for #1. #2 more like!
O is for opera. Having exhausted all prog-rock comparisons on OK Computer, the media has been comparing Kid A to The Wall. Erm, The Wall -- not to mention Radio Kaos -- actually has songs, and a story to boot! That fucking Roger Waters is rolling in his grave -- we wish!
P is for promotion. Radiohead -- by which we mean Thom -- hate promotion. In fact, the anti-pop tones of Kid A were directly inspired by the soul-sucking misery of publicizing OK Computer. Note: doing umpteen "exclusive" interviews, appearing on SNL and playing restrictively small gigs in New York and Los Angeles to elite crowds that include Sean Lennon and Winona Ryder is apparently not promotion.
Q is for quotas. We're against 'em.
R is for rock & roll. Remember rock & roll? We do. Kid A ain't it. R is also for Richard James, who, while he wouldn't be caught dead listening to it, is definitely rock & roll.
S is for Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
T is for there, as in "There's no there there."
U is for U2, whose new album All That You Can't Leave Behind is out next Tuesday. We are very, very psyched, because there's a bunch of geezers who have learned the hard way that successful experimentation still requires songs. They also know that if you absolutely must inflict your self-indulgent claptrap upon the world, it's best to do it under another name -- y'know, like Passengers.
V is for vocals. We actually don't hate all of Kid A. Just when Thom is singing. In that exclusive Spin interview -- which was conducted largely by e-mail, presumably because Our Yorkie is very considerate and didn't want the nice journalists to be freaked out by his lazy eye and club foot -- Thom wondered: "Am I simply in the business of creating the wallpaper to emptiness?" Yes. Yes, you are.
W is for wank. Nuff said.
X is for XFL. Go Hitmen Go!
Y is for Yes. The album art on Kid A reminds us of the embryonic Yes logo Roger Dean did before he perfected his craft. Unsurprisingly, there isn't much by way of liner notes here, just page after page of amateurish scribbling, much of it on tracing paper -- kinda like the album itself, actually. Lift out the black CD tray and you'll find a second secret booklet -- that explains the high list price! -- but it doesn't say a whole hell of a lot either.
Z is for Zzzzz, which is what you'll be doing if you try to listen to Kid A all the way through. We did!
On a considerably more upbeat note,The Mets won Game 3 in the World Series last night against all odds! It was a triumph of will that moved me to my core.Oh please let them win.It's not that I dislike the Yankees......far from it.I just relate to the struggle of the underdog.I can't help myself. I'm on a buzz high today.I think it was the combination of weight training this morning followed by a guitar class and rounding things off with sushi for lunch.I was in heaven. I have to say..........my guitar playing is really coming along nicely.I'm pretty shocked at the progress I've made already.Daniel our bass player flew in from LA yesterday and I was amusing him no end with all my newly learned tricks. As from today he's beginning to lay down his bass parts on the record.As I type I can hear him working on "Begging Bone" which makes me feel all safe and secure inside.There's something really satisfying about the bass.It's like the cement of sound.It rounds a song out.Squares things off.Nails it down. And of course Daniel is such an amazing musician that he nails his parts really quickly.One or two takes and he's done. He makes me feel really inadequate.Not deliberately I hasten to add but merely by default.He doesn't know how lucky he is either.Like all truly gifted players,he takes his talent for granted. Hey....one last thing.Has Sheryl Crow had facial surgery?!?!?!??!?!?! She looks completely different.
Thursday 26th Watched CNN last night and caught the piece on The Politics of Abortion.So of course at the risk of some half crazed pro-life supporter blowing my brains out I state for the record that I am PRO CHOICE. No government,no man,no neighbour of mine is going to tell ME what I choose to do with MY BODY or MY LIFE. How dare ANYONE even for a MILLISECOND consider it reasonable to legislate over the insides of another human being. Where will that kind of legislation end? Will it eventually lead to goverment legislation over our organs? NOBODY has the right to legislate over another persons body. We may not always approve of what another person chooses to do with their own body but quite frankly.....IT"S NONE OF OUR DAMNED BUSINESS. For instance....if I had my way.......I would OUTLAW plastic surgery. It's facism.It's INSANE.It's DANGEROUS. But you know what.........millions of people....indeed I would imagine the majority of people would disagree with me............so I have to simply choose not to have surgery MYSELF.And that is the end of it.(Am I preaching existentialism here? I guess I am.) I have to practice TOLERANCE because what one person chooses to do with their body is THEIR business.NOT MINE. I am not suggesting that pro-life supporters change theirs views.I think they should do what they think best in terms of their own circumstances,their OWN lives.I'm merely suggesting that they allow other people to do the same. GGGGGGrrrr
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