The Reckoner

The new Radiohead is surprisingly good. The album has a very different quality to it than previous releases by the fugly-turned-popular dwarf that is Thom Yorke. In all honesty, I am both a Radiohead fan but its just too easy to make fun of them… It is, shockingly consumable, and possibly a stroke marketing genius, both of which may alienate your average Radiohead fan, but you have to take chances in the music industry! The bittersweet pop confection (and I mean that as the highest praise) is just ten songs but all of them are at least decent. Highlights include the heart-wrenching “All I Need Is You,” an evolved live favorite, “Nude” and “The Reckoner” a masterpiece in my mind and sublime in its simplicity. God its like you can’t fucking avoid using hyperbole like that when you talk about these guys. I didn’t even mean for this to come off as a pro-Radioead paragraph. I guess I like what the New York Times said about the album (though it might have been Pitchfork); “While In Rainbows like Radiohead coming back to earth, it isn’t anything to be afraid of.” And if that doesn’t convince you: its free!

Exams start up this week (yes, the title does have a double meaning and you’re right, I’m not really that clever). I’ve got my first one in about six hours. Its in Cinema and Colonialism. The things I’ve learned about in Cinema and Colonialism are as follows:

1.) Apocalypse Now! isn’t about the Vietnam war. It’s actually about suicide.
2.) The Searchers isn’t about miscegenation so much as it is about the Other and why we must become the Other to be American.
3.) King Kong is not about a big monkey, its about how lame the Smithsonian is and why Vaudeville is responsible for the Animal Planet
4.) Beau Geste isn’t about honor but rather domestic spaces and why they often don’t work when presided over by crazy Russians in search of jewels.
5.) Gunga Din is what you think its about, only in a bad way.

Thanks for letting me review with you!

After that is my Medieval History final. She is giving us the essay topic today in class (the exam is next Wednesday) and we are allowed to bring in a piece of paper with notes on it… They didn’t even make it this easy in high school.

Lastly: I had something stuck in my head yesterday. I’ve recently finished Killing Yourself To Live by Chuck Klosterman and he uses the Who lyric “the kids are alright” a few times in the course of the work. I tend to disagree with that sentiment but never the less I liked the way he used it in the book. Well, while sitting in the library yesterday a young girl asked if she could borrow a pen. I told her sure. Why a young girl was in a college library I am not sure but there were others there also. I suspect it was some sort of class trip or something. Anywho… when she returned it to me she must have seen what I was writing in a notebook and told me very nicely that I had spelled Manichean wrong. I got two things out of this: the first is that nine-year-old girls can kick my ass in spelling and that “the kids are alright.”