you know, radiohead's videos are really good. my absolute favorite is Street Spirit, but the others are all really good too. even some like No Alarms, No Surprises, which at first glance i thought of as an interesting idea but not worth watching for a whole song's worth, now that i pay more attention and think about it, i really like some aspects of it that i hadn't noticed before, and not necessarily entirely intentional either. for example, after he has been underwater for that really long period of time (which at first i just thought was like "hey look, we're weird, we'll put thom yorke underwater for a long time"), when he can finally breathe again, he takes some gasping, deep breaths, and then he quickly starts mouthing the lyrics to the words again, but you can see a smile on his face, because it feels so good to be able to breathe again. that's something that doesn't seem scripted to me, just some of what thom himself is feeling showing through. and i really liked seeing that. and it made me wonder if there's meaning behind the water thing, like more than just "look, he was singing, and now he has to hold his breath for a long time, we're so kooky". seems like it's some kind of ordeal that he has to pass through. and i hate to sound like a literature scholar, reading too much into stuff. i don't think radiohead necessarily sat down and said "let's put him underwater to symbolize the challenge we all face of interacting with society" or something like that. but things like how you can see the reflections in the glass of the fluorescent lights coming on one by one behind the camera at the beginning, and then one by one they go off at the end. brings to mind a scenario like he is in a tank and this is some kind of experiment they are doing to him, or just a bit of torture with no particular goal. and i don't think that's overanalyzing. i think that's the point - it is meant to just be weird and vague so that you can think up a whole story behind it if you want, and if you come up with something intriguing or cool, you can enjoy that, and it's not the band just taking the easy way out by writing something vauge and leaving it up to interpretation. it's entertainment, it doesn't have to communicate exactly what the band is thinking or trying to get across. that has always been my criticism of this stuff - when you write something like song lyrics or whatever and they don't really mean anything in particular, just sound cool, and then when questioned about the meaning of the lyrics you say "it can mean different things to different people, it's whatever you make of it", i always hated that. i felt that the band was cheating. it's easy to write weird meaningless stuff that doesn't express something you feel. but i realize now that there's nothing wrong with that, if you like it, and if the audience enjoys it, then what is there to criticize? it actually ties together two previously conflicting viewpoints of mine - the anti-meaningless standpoint about lyrics and writing, and my skepticism that people who write music are always expressing themselves with it. i don't deny that i can feel a certain way and it causes me to play a certain way, but i've always felt like most of the music i write, i do so just because it's pleasing to me. i'm not trying to convey my thoughts or feelings through it, and i don't feel that it's not "good" music because of that. this realization ties those two mindsets together neatly.

this was not intended to become a dissertation, merely an introductory sentence. oops.

so all i was gonna talk about now seems boring (was just gonna mention the lack of water/AC etc at home these days, but who cares).

i'm in the process of selling all my cars. most of them are gone, now i'm just down to the mk3, mk2, and the civic, and the mk3 has a buyer. feels weird.

hung out with meg for a bit last night, she brought me a little pink bracelet from mexico, it's the best thing ever.

Originally posted on LiveJournal. Original post