Last Plane to Jakarta vs. Amnesiac

where can i read this, especially the finnegan's wake bit?

I would also like to second the praise offered by Mark & Brock re: the actual reviews in question. I have to bite my tongue sometimes, since my knee-jerk reaction when I read "we are..." is to think "Well, I'm not...", but that's nothing. The bit in the latest / last entry, where the words turn in on themselves while actually kicking the reader out (that is, "revealing" that we're intruders, not welcome) made me smile.

If there's any feeling I instinctively take away from John's project, it's that I feel twinges of guilt when I listen to Amnesiac and ENJOY it. (I enjoy it very much; now, I wonder if I really should.)

My feelings run parallel to Dave's, if maybe more guiltily so. John's take centered on a very literary reading of the record, constantly clocking how Yorke's narrators place themselves and how they address the listener and what they actually have to say -- which I think was fantastic, especially in the midst of basically all Radiohead press over the past year taking a Studious Rock Band Uses Electronics to Kill Rock angle and just putting the lyrics down to "alienated" or "finds modern world soulless and oppressive." This also surely does a lot to reconnect sonic readings of the songs with the actual literal meanings of them -- it can keep us from, say, seeing "Knives Out" as this shimmering familiar respite mid-record as opposed to reading it for what it actually has to say.

If we're talking an "author is dead, look at text" stance on this, that's a magnificent project, and we don't have to get into all of this genre talk about how much the sonic presentation actually matches up with the actual text. The fact that Yorke is the conceptual center of the band helps as well, in that we can assume he's not writing contrary to his own music. But there is some part of me that interested in how the sonics played into it, and how those decisions fit with the album itself as a closed piece of work. This isn't a complaint about John's project, as I can't see going about that discussion in a song-by-song format ... and I think the results he got were an ideal way of breaking through all of that genre-talk and getting at the record itself, and a good corrective to most everything else that's been written about the record ... but there were spots where I was very interested in what he actually would think, if he happened to step back and talk in those overall-aesthetic terms. I.e., he displayed way more close, hard-won insight into the record than everyone else making the generalizations, so I was curious as to what his generalizations might be.

james joyce didnt he write useless? saw winsor davis talking to ladida gunner graham about him on aint half hot mum on uk gold.

And - like Nitsuh said - these articles render all the Generic Radiohead Reviews obsolete, thankfully.

As a brief aside, the way the piece on "Like Spinning Plates" manages to convey how, uh, grotesque and horrible the song is without just saying "this one is about children being killed in wars" was fantastic. Perhaps more thoughts later.

somnolence by name somnolent by nature.

Anyone know where to find said marathon explication these days?

Is this thread about his Flash review or his long essays? I seem to have confused the matter with my post five years ago, and I apologize for that. I am crazy about that Flash review though and I think of it often.