Trifecta of Perfection: Radiohead's "House of Cards" Video

Khoi IM'd me very matter-of-factly the other day, "Hey have you seen the Google-Radiohead thing?" Being the totally uncool person that I am, I hadn't, and of course, I clicked his embedded link and what I saw resulted in the last 48 hours of deep pause. What I experienced in Radiohead's new "House of Cards" video simply blindsided me on so many levels.

I would call myself a marginal Radiohead fan at best, but this song and this video made me think about them in a whole new light. There has been much buzz around Google's involvement, the impressive technology behind the effects, the unusual pairing of GOOG and Radiohead (but it makes sense though since Radiohead so gets the Internet, thus becoming the Internet's darling rebels), the strength of Radiohead's recent album in general. Initially, I watched the video a few times, gawking; decided I needed more and downloaded the hi-res version, read every word about it (both on Google Code and Radiohead's site) watched the "making of" companion piece, messed around with the interactive Google Code version, bought the .mp4 version of the song on iTunes, even downloaded the fullscreen screensaver. I did everything that was asked of me, following the PR script to a T. I was a good-geek.

Eventually, what it led to, which I am assuming was by design (even if it weren't it doesn't matter), was total immersion into the video itself. By my most conservative estimation, I've watched the video probably 70 or so times this weekend, sometimes actively, sometimes having the video run in the background, listening to the track while I did other stuff on my computer and off. But why on earth would I compulsively loop the video if I weren't actually watching it? Good question. I guess I just wanted to always know it was playing, to know that it was "alive" and always near me. I even took it to bed with me, looping fullscreen on my iPhone (being able to "hold" a video experience in your hand, liberated, decontextualized..is just cool beyond words).

Upon reflection, I realize that my appreciation for it gradually went deeper than the initial coolness of it. I started thinking about it in the way I think about any work of art, and not simply as another notable example of diversionary entertainment. Asking myself questions about the translation of intention to execution, taking a critical look at the meaning behind the words, separating the music from the visuals and experiencing either on it own (try it, watch the video with sound turned off), pondering the nature of the technology used to create all the amazing effects. Then I realized something: I began thinking of this "House of Cards" video as a legitimate work of art. Why is this significant? Can't you call just about any music and music video works of art? Well, no. I have always loved music videos, and even worked for a few years with a video production company producing lots of short-format entertainment experiences (mostly house and hip-hop). It was a blast.

No, this Radiohead video is a perfect storm in a way that I've never seen one in a music video - a trifecta of perfection. One, the music arrangement itself, so soulfully earnest, halting and haunting, elegantly restrained, a departure from typical Radiohead fare. Two, the bold appropriation of one medium (lidar laser scanning, data visualization) and perverse application of it to another. Three, the rich subtext of the lyrics - a literal interpretation of the lyrics is about the experience of unrequited love, the pining for someone trapped in a meaningless relationship, references to Ang Lee's "Ice Storm" and its plodding expose into the experimentation with social mores in laissez faire suburban America. But what about the subtext...?

I went on a few lyrics sites (needed to, I find Thom Yorke's Orbison-esque voice hard to parse) and discovered a wealth of opinions from Radiohead fans around the world about what the lyrics meant. I am admittedly one of those people who likes to read movie reviews after I see something, especially when I can't rightly articulate myself why I liked or disliked something. I would say categorically established fan opinion agreed the song was about love, but a few voices made compelling arguments that the song was about....capitalism. Pretty cool because this is an important theme for me of late. Whether or not you are in a visual or textual medium, metaphor can be powerful especially if used deftly. I honestly think all the song's references are indeed metaphors for the illusory structures that we experience in capitalist society, and the song concerns itself with our own state of being in an environment that is tenuously anchored in symbols and a relativistic moral framework...a framework as solid as a "house of cards". 

The song's refrain, "Denial, denial, denial" repeatedly echoing Radiohead's pretty explicit statement that we as a society just don't have a clue that all that is solid in modernity, really just continually melts into air. And this metaphor is rendered in a not so metaphorical way in the video's many scene cuts to a mundane ranch house suburb, houses quite literally disintegrating into digital dust, blown away by virtual wind.

So, readers, please forgive my naive indulgence into a critical analysis of a pop-culture artifact (as I am hardly an art or music critic), and forgive me for looking deeper into something beyond the myriad "cool-factors" by which it is being peddled to the public. I just want to write this: Radiohead's "House of Cards" video is as close to perfect (the trifecta of form, meaning, and technique pushing conventional boundaries, bonded together into something coherent, incomplete if separated), as anything can get. 

It's just so beautiful on so many levels. 

[Updated: infosthetics likens it to Colder's "To the Music" video - good tune, cool effects, but not the same animal at all, not even close.]

Summertime Blues

I'm gonna raise a fuss, I'm gonna raise a holler
About a workin' all summer just to try to earn a dollar
Every time I call my baby, and try to get a date
My boss says, "No dice son, you gotta work late"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues

- Eddie Cochran

I see that my last posting was well over a month ago, and that is a drag. Life has been arduous: a big house move, Willow hospitalized (see sidebar), general life transition-sickness, work at its lowest point since I started, a motorcycle crash with a month of aches and pains and a bruise on my hip the size of Alaska, observations around me that an economic recession is taking hold. What's been good? Well, plenty, of course. During this evening's put-to-sleep regimen, Willow asked me for two things: "Dok!" and "Nook!". She wanted Waylon, our 9-year old pointer-lab mix to join us in her room, and she wanted some cold milk before drifting off to sleep. I remember that it was only 5 months ago that she wouldn't even make eye contact with me, and now I am the one she goes to sleep most relaxed and confident with. And to see her treat our Waylon like a brother makes all of life's travails seem trivial. I offer here not knowing when I'll have a moment to write again, some of the past few weeks' notables:

Face(lift)book
As some of you know, I've had a Facebook account for over a year but only started to actively use it only a month ago. I like Facebook a lot, and I like the redesign a lot, but have to admit I was looking forward to some kind of big momentous step forward. It is, as is the new MySpace (by Adaptive Path), a mere cleaning of the proverbial closet, a smart reordering of things accumulated and accreted by all manner of personal curiosities and shared trivialities.

Aggregation Nation: Flock
I have been almost exclusively using the new Flock browser for all my surfing and social networking needs. It works great. And is the great flag planted on the big mountain of a pile of social networking sites that are out there today. Once again, like the great portalization of everything in the early 2000's, we consolidate and aggregate. I use all the standard fare, but notably absent are MySpace (too much advertising noise and the redesign only makes the advertising to personal content ratio that much clearer, OY) and Twitter (i am just not that interesting and my own Twitter-block proves this). Other aggregators of note: pageonce.com, alltop.com. Found pageonce through one of the new free iPhone webapps. Handy (but risky).

iPhone 3G Love
I lost my 1st gen iPhone during the move, so I finally got a replacement one, a 16GB WHITE one. Happy to be different. 2.0 of the software fixed most of the things that bugged me before. I do like some of the new (free) web apps, and I disagree with Khoi Vinh, who is the last remaining design purist on this planet, that the web apps diminish the core purpose of the iPhone. So what if they are half-baked? That's like saying the web should only have, like, 10 websites. The battery life is, indeed, abysmal.

The Ultimate Media Jukebox: AppleTV
Love it. What else can I say? I love this thing. It has changed my (daddyness) life. I can access so much media for Willow (Wiggles, Teletubbies, Sesame Street, TMBG, and many more) at the touch of a button, it really makes those 30 minutes a few times a day, when Bonnie and I really need to get critical things done, a real joy. My podcasts, my music library, HD versions of films that I will never tire of watching when I need a post-midnight fix of something classicly great - all from that little remote, streaming from my MacPro over my Apple Extreme Network. It all just works. I cannot remember the last time I actually used the Comcast cable box.

Best New Search Technology that I really want to like: Viewzi
It all makes sense, and for the most part, all the different visual search paradigms are usable, but you know what Viewzi will fail. I want to be able to articulate why, but I can't. I think it has to do with how hardwired we are with scanning text for searches, and although we all certainly learned to understand the visual before the textual, there is something about "Internet Information" that a picture "telling a thousand (more) words" about something is actually a step backwards. All the infoviz fanboys out there are gonna slap me for that for sure.

New Search Technology that I spent all of 2 seconds test driving and then wrote off: Cuil
It's way, way, way better than Google in all the ways that don't matter.

Ethical quandaries: Architects building in politically troublesome spots
Talk about a paradox. The world's best architecture is all being built in Dubai and Beijing (among other places). Do architects deserve the crap they get for "turning the other cheek"? I say they aren't, but I'd sure would like to hear a different party line other than "Architecture is ABOVE politics." Nothing is above politics. Politics determines everything.

Art posing as something else: Tesselion
Look at the pictures. Marvel at the chutzpah and engineering mastery. Then read the words and rationalization. Then i defy you to tell me that you don't find some disconnected BS here.

McCain vs. a rash
Siva Vaidhyanathan writes about the growing (mis)use of Google Trends in law and politics.

So..what does the collapse of the United States really look like?
Dmitri Orlov compares the collapse of the Soviet Union to the the mounting evidence of a US collapse.

Dashboards for Life

Good little blog postlet from John Thackara - makes me wonder why no one has really taken this dashboard idea into the social networking space - like really really pushed it?

Design Thinking is Anthropology Appropriated
Which completely blows, says Dori Tunstall. Long comment from yours truly.

Some fries with these nuggets
Am liking Alltop.com, a lot. Not sure if it's a game changer, but the streaming information 'nugget' thing makes a lot of sense to me.

Buh-bye Hummer....?

A few years ago, I attended a GM press conference at the Cooper-Hewitt in NYC where the lead designers of General Motors assembled to drone on about the new exciting lineup they had recently rolled out including their drive-by-wire hydrogen-powered "Autonomy" Concept, and the new Hummer (before they called it the H3). It was certainly a big splashy confusing juxtaposition of priorities, ostensibly pronouncing to the press, "We care about the environment! And also, we don't care about the environment!"  

I raised my hand to ask a question, and rambled on about some Honda Insight fansites I had recently spent some time on that outlined all the various techniques that Insight owners employed to squeeze out the absolute maximum in fuel economy from that sweet little hybrid car (since discontinued, dumb). I also noted that the gauge in the dashboard was a hugely prominent element in the instrumentation design, expressing the Insight's singular purpose...Save As Much Gas As Possible. So I asked the panel if they were aware of this squeeze-blood-from-a-stone subculture, if design cues from the Insight dash could tell us anything about future thinking on the relationship between a car's purpose and its driver information feedback loop, if the Autonomy would ever come with a trunk (its current design was simply sci-fi masturbation), and maybe a few other things I can't remember anymore.

My barrage was met with a pregnant silence, and a "Next question, please."

It was on this day that I decided that GM stood for "General Meatheads" (GM designers included). Their announcement today is, well, predictable. Iconic brand, my ass. Iconic brand for "Insecure, crass, fat, and testosterone-obsessed Americans." The Hummer brand should never, ever have been conceived, and I'm sure they spent a fortune doing market research as to the viability of a take-no-prisoners vehicle in that category. There is a point where you have to admit that "market intelligence" is an oxymoron if not untrustworthy. Now it appears that that very category is very much on the way out. How fickle we are.

[Breaking: Here's a great video on "Hypermiling", the art of squeezing every ounce of fuel efficiency out of a common non-hybrid car. Hypermiling stands as the anti-thesis of Hummerness, which can aptly be described as "Undermiling". Thanks, Bon]

From "GM to close 4 factories, may drop Hummer" :

WILMINGTON, Del. - General Motors is closing four truck and SUV plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico as surging fuel prices hasten a dramatic shift to smaller vehicles.

CEO Rick Wagoner said Tuesday before the automaker's annual meeting in Delaware the plants to be closed are in Oshawa, Ontario; Moraine, Ohio; Janesville, Wis.; and Toluca, Mexico. He also said the iconic Hummer brand may be discontinued. [...]

Wagoner announced the moves in response to slumping sales of pickups and SUVs brought on by high oil prices. He said a market shift to smaller vehicles is permanent.

Lash and Bash

 From "Buyers' Revenge: Trash the House After Foreclosure" in the Wall Street Journal:

These days, bankers and mortgage companies often find that by the time they get the keys back, embittered homeowners have stripped out appliances, punched holes in walls, dumped paint on carpets and, as a parting gift, locked their pets inside to wreak further havoc.  [...]

The most practical way to ensure the houses are returned in decent shape, lenders and their agents say, is to pay homeowners hundreds or even thousands of dollars to put their anger in escrow and leave quietly. A ransom? A bribe? 

Britain v. America: Views on Critical Issues

According to this, I am much more British than American. No surprise.

More from The Economist:   [via Reddit]

 

American Financial Illiteracy

From CNN's "Befuddled by debt? You're not alone":

The survey presented 1,000 people with a hypothetical scenario about credit card debt and asked them to compute how long it would take to pay it off. Only 35.9% of the 1,000 respondents could figure out how many years it would take for the amount they owe on their credit cards to double. A full 18.2% did not know how to respond and 31.9% of those surveyed over-estimated the timeframe. [...]

The survey draws attention to a large problem without an easy solution. "Even those with a college degree don't have an understanding of the basic finance ideas," said Annamaria Lusardi, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. [...]

Three-quarters of Americans surveyed said that they spend less than their income and save the difference, which may provide enough for an emergency unexpected expense, but only a little over 50% have enough savings to provide for a comfortable standard of living in retirement. 

From the Ownership Society to the Members-Only Society

From Naomi Klein's "Disowned By the Ownership Society" in The Nation:

Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down. [...]

Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s--their piece of the stock market--to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society.

The Millionaire Middle Class

This short CBS MarketWatch segment is interesting in that "class" (one of the few remaining cultural taboos, IMHO) gets quantified in terms of income and spending power. The new income requirements of the "new" middle class are astounding.