Day Tripper

this is the place
remember me?
i’m the face you always see
you’ve been stuck in a lift
we’ve been trying to reach you
this is the place
it won’t hurt
it won’t hurt
a smell of recognition
a face you barely loved
empty all your pockets
cause it’s time to come home
you’ve been stuck in a lift
in the belly of a whale
at the bottom of the ocean
a smell of recognition
a face you barely loved
empty all your pockets
cause it’s time to come home
this is the first day
of the rest of your days
of your days
so lighten up squirt

-thom yorke

Connection and fragmentation vie. The Internet opens worlds and minds, but also offers opinions to reinforce every prejudice. You’re never alone out there; some idiot will always back you. The online world doesn’t dissolve tribes. It gives them global reach.

Hey, that’s something I’ve been saying.

Looking out from Kenya, where he mediated an end to the tribal violence, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, told me: “I think an Obama presidency would be inspirational, an incredible development in the world.”

Most meaningful endorsement of Obama for me.

Tribalism Here, and Tribalism There

i feel like i live most of my life trying to break through
breathe that one full breath
that you find coasting down a gentle hill
sun setting over the mountains
rice swaying in the paddies
birds flying overhead
you just take your hands off the bars
lay em behind your head
look straight up at the orange sky

or the one you find
underground, in a practice room
clanging at a grand piano
pedal down, sustaining every tone
and your voice flows out free
like a foreign being -
you never knew you had
something that beautiful
inside, you let go and you feel
like all this time you’ve been breathing
sand

or the one you find
when the sun’s out for the first time
all day, in the afternoon
after a heavy storm has lifted
you can see the black clouds
rolling away
the world’s wet, full of water
and color, saturated,
the air’s crystal clear
you can see for miles,
the islands way off the coast.
mist rises off the leaves of plants
drops fall off the branches of trees
onto your forehead.

or the one you find
in a foggy zen temple garden
a carpet of moss on everything
rich, heavy wood odor
maples leaves blown by the brreeze
a tea house
with a round window
a small rowboat in the pond
stillness
a fountain trickling

you feel alive.

leads to hell week. i think i read 500-1000 pages this weekend. and nearly lost my mind. god, i have issues.

it’s people like me that systematically weed themselves out of the population, allowing the species to move along unburdened.
adapt, migrate, or die. survival of the fittest. i don’t fit here. 

Instead of finding the end of these rainbows, as Lynch’s Mulholland Drive reminds us, we find ourselves fatally trapped inside. This is the “Reckoner” of In Rainbows. For a generation conditioned to both crave and doubt trust and authenticity, Radiohead continues, ten years after the band became a talisman, to provide both those things in art.

Their reliability and authenticity has always borne with it the potential for transcendence. For its fans, the band has provided a decade-long emotional field guide, and a ready shield against the turmoil of extended adolescence. For observers on the outside, the band has proven alien, shrouded in mystery and obscurity despite their enormous presence. But slowly and surely it has also risen up as a sturdy cultural touchstone, an icon of an age that even those who failed to worship at its feet will remember.

But it remains an open question whether we can ever really convert the shared escape of spectators and audience members into any sort of permanent redemption. Radiohead has imparted a measure of hope even while chronicling its loss. But, for many, the capacity to hope may still be permanently damaged. To escape from escape, after all, is to reject it.

For everything the Radiohead generation owes their band, one thing it cannot expect from them is the magic spell to undo the faithlessness that seems to define life in the 21st century. In their turn toward the intimate, Radiohead points to the place where the loss of faith does its deepest damage. Part of restoration of the faith that holds the world together is the recovery of a responsibility still best described as ‘adult.’ Until the Radiohead generation manages that feat themselves, any retrospective of the Radiohead decade will remain incomplete — caught up, all too typically, in unresolved contradiction.

sometimes that’s all we need.

the problem of modernity?

going through photos of last year, i remember who i am. am i back? i feel like i’ve been eroding slowly since september. i am ready to come back alive. 

two months
stuck in the same half mile square patch in desolate
wintry minnesota,
my memories fade to the bland smudgy white
of the ice and snow,
lost in the tasteless fried foods
and stuffy library cubicles.
existence flattened, spiceless,
monochromatic
among the homogeneous white students
who blend so nicely with the landscape.
i lose my sense of being,
no longer feel the travels of my feet
the work of my hands
the pictures of my mind -
the craftman’s tools dulled from months of disuse,
dusty on the shelf, buried by the webs.
i’m looking for that spark
the joie de vivre,
morning excitement,
the defiance to those
who seek to contort me
under their stale myopic
definitions.
it is time to hurl forth
from my sunken bed
and take this life
with my fists and teeth
and keen
it back into shape.