Fade Out

I was just listening to Radiohead's "Street Spirit." It brought back a lot of memories, good ones actually. It's one of those songs that immediately transports you to the place where you first heard it. Though in this case, it was not where I first heard it but where I first read it. One of the lyrics was on my friend's sig file:

This machine will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under

When I heard the song today I thought how familiar those lyrics were and then I remembered where I first saw it. It brought back a flood of visual memories, of text, screens, and of all archaic things, Compuserve. The song itself is delicate, beautiful and haunting yet it brings back vivid black and white ascii text memories. How odd.

If you're interested in hearing it, it's on their album "The Bends."

I haven't listened to Radiohead in literally years. I stopped listening about six years ago when I realized that RH is probably the best music you can listen to if you want to start feeling really depressed. I remember when I was working in London and it was entirely feasible that on any particular day whilst cruising down the Central Line I'd be listening to Vonda Shepard's Ally McBeal soundtrack bopping to "Walk Away Renee" with an hopelessly optimistic grin, then maybe around lunchtime pop in some Placebo and get really, really mad and then by dinnertime be listening to Radiohead and become extremely sad and hopeless. Who needs a chemical imbalance when you have CD's like that in your briefcase!

Anyway, I can't bear the sickly sweet of Vonda anymore but I reacquainted myself with Placebo about a year ago when my friend Marie started talking about it and now Radiohead has crept back into attention.

Today I had a very surreal experience. I had to go to lunch with my boss Brad and Matt (my consultant). They could not be more different from each other - Brad is 6'8 and Matt is about 5'5. We all went in Matt's Mini Cooper. Brad had to drive because sitting in the back seat of a mini was simply not an option and the steering wheel literally sat between his thighs. We'd have had more room if we had opened the top (tis a convertible) and had their not been a babyseat filled with mail. The funniest part was Matt screaming to get out of the car because it was so hot in the back seat and Brad trying to extract himself from under the steering wheel. The car parked next to us didn't back out cos they had to watch this scene. As we zipped around College Park I couldn't help but wonder if we looked like a circus act - the kind where there's a toy car filled with clowns..