The following are texts which I wrote leading up to the final product, [[The Best I Can]]. Frank Boudreaux had told me already about the concept for the overall show -- 10 pieces by different artists based on the 10 tracks from Kid A -- and I'd picked "Optimistic", which is my favorite Radiohead song, as the one to do.
Anyway, I dug up these old note texts that I'd apparently typed up as part of my creative process. The final product was one of the best pieces of work I'd ever done, and while it's really different from these, you can see the threads emerging and it's interesting (at least to me) to be able to pick apart the creative process.
Optimistic Texts
April 16th 2001:
It's fucking hot in here, man. It's hot and it's humid and it smells like the dirty and exciting parts of humanity. Inside my head there's these two oiled steel ball bearings grinding around each other, a sweating binary star system, a very hot competitive fuck, "I'll let go when you do" staredown to blackout.
I want to explode. I want my back to burst open in a shower of blood and useless flesh as I sprout lizard wings from my spine, creaking sinew, pulsing muscles and veins, vomiting hard against the floor in the pouring rain, my soul to pop open and flour like a sickly over-ripe bud. I'll let go when you do, as we both tumble down the long dark way to ecstasy.
September 26th 2001 (Utopia or Oblivion):
It's fucking hot in there. It's hot and wet and crowded. It's not the heat -- it's the humanity - it's the billions of us, teeming, seething, gyrating in time, rhythm nations playing paper games under the 60 second flicker of a fluorescent day to day.
I want to vomit, not because this makes me sick, but because it will feel good and people will notice me, lying on my stomach in a gritty street in the pouring rain, the heavy individual drops making streaks in the orange light about my head, heaving my guts out in delirium.
I imagine the only thing better than this would be to sprout lizard wings - to have your back burst open in a shower of blood and weaker flesh and you rise to catch the wind on creaking sails on sinew and bone. A wet pop, a moment of horror, and then you're gone.
Inside the armor of a city is a burning binary star system, utopia and oblivion, two sweaty steel ball bearings grinding around each other, fade down to blackout, a hot competitive fuck, "I'll let go when you do." All this thundering along every vein, just under the surface of every cool urban exterior.
Behind every eye rests the flashing potential for madness so deftly under control. No fear, no terror, no fearful terrible passion or desire. Nothing to see but the cold calm calculus of reason: purpose, objective, value, mission, all regulated by the time of the watch. All hail the impregnable fortress of rationality... or was that rationalization?
It doesn't matter - I was just being clever. We can all walk on as the oblivious pace of the anonymous throng, all good people, all faceless and free to play the part of our choosing or failure to choose. Just another freak in the freak kingdom. I didn't make that up, it's Hunter S Thompson, but that's ok: the best of us struggle for relevance. "It's all right it's all right, to be standin' in a line, to be standin' in a line..." Stevie Nicks. Fuck.
I have a friend who always sings that song when she's piss drunk at karaoke. It's a sad song about unfulfilled desire and bitterness but she always plays it off like it's a joke. "I could cry."
Look, we're all part of the same tribe here, wherever we're from, wherever we're going, we're animals in this together, and we're all equal. Some animals are just more equal than others -- Orwell -- and so we evolve to forget: we convince ourselves that the universe does not extend beyond our little ecosystem of class or culture, and when someone stumbles onto the set of our private melodrama, it's almost always an unwelcome intrusion, because it reminds us that there's a whole world out there, a whole universe, and our probable significance is nil.
Like that machine in "The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy". Douglas Adams. It's the ultimate torture device - shows you just how small you really are in relationship to everything.
I'm trying to stitch things together here, get us all good and full of holes for a big moment, all mustered up for a good session of deep concern and empathy. "I love the world" I thought to myself the other day wile I was looking at the moon. "I fucking love the world we've been given and the world we've made and I don't want it to die."
But that's un hip. Time now for me to shoulder the jacket, hit the bar, and be on about tonight's business of getting laid or whatever it is. "I'll let go when you do," as we tumble down the long dark way to ecstasy.
October 11th 2001:
Wherever we are it's cold out, crisp but not fresh, and all is twilight, the air containing an unmistakable scent of empire in retreat. You stand alone looking up at a darkening but starless sky: air traffic, birds, things freed from the grids and strictures that predominate the earth. And all around you the humming, the self-feeding, self-exhausting, creative/destructive cycle of human endeavor.
For a moment looking up you caught it. Looking up at the moon, the pure virginal moon with her silent primeval understanding, the sense of utopia just around the corner, like freshly baked bread or hot herbal tea in the next room, something in the air tickling the back of your mind -- think of what could someday be. What are we going to be like?
We're changing. All of us, all the time, in ways we probably don't even understand, whether we like it or not. And it's not always for the better, but it is always inevitable. We're changing. That's who we are. This country is cool mostly because when we got started we were aware of this and we built it in: changing government, changing laws, changing values. Change - it's who we are.
But dig it, just because change is always happening doesn't mean we can always let it go on. We've got to take an active part, no matter how lonely it is, or else the fresh baked bread and hot herbal tea of utopia turn to fattening and vacuous microwave popcorn and we metamorphosize from citizen intelligencia to couch-potato consumer.
But this is a little too much to handle as one alone - and we are trying the best we can. We should be about our business. All around, people are moving into and out of shops, carrying bags, their faces lit up in the rich warm lights of lavish store window displays. Yes, we are all equal - some are just more equal than others.
We sulk, sipping $1 deli coffee and casing dagger eyes at those around us sporting cups of Starbucks. It's not that they're driving local coffee shops out of business or that they're helping to perpetuate the horrible rape of the natural world that rouses my anger. It's the fact that their coffee is twice as expensive, that these people have more money than I do to blow on caffeine, and I fucking love caffeine. I'm actually quite prejudice against wealth, you see.
So much to be cynical about today. The constant drumbeat of mass consumer capitalism drives me on. But it's so easy to be miserable. It's doesn't reflect intelligence or a deeper level of understanding, it suggests sloth and ignorance. Jump into the river of living, ride the velvet nightlight highway, take the path of action into the next room, walking in off the street into a cafe overlooking a stormy sea, we sit down to order fresh baked bread and hot herbal tea.