Near and far

I ride a new way, aiming for the same destination. It's amazing how little deviation it takes to make the familiar seem like unexplored territory. I whistle a happy tune, with obscene lyrics rewritten as I ride. I reflect on how good it feels to be alone, out of the city, disconnected from the daily grind. At one point I almost look at the time, but think better of it. Why spoil the wonderful freedom from the temporal whip? I think of how strange it is that we strive to isolate ourselves from the wilderness, and then construct an artificial one. Of how fragile our existence is. Of how wonderful it is that this freedom is there for the taking, even in the city, if you take the time to find it.

Then I stop thinking, and look at the world.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

It's that time of year when a pall of hangover seems to envelop the world. The holidays are over, but many people are yet to return to work, and travelling on public transport in London is a relatively painless way to spend your time (the odd closure due to drunken engineers aside). Strange how all those signal failures and the like seem to be absent at the same time as all those people. Maybe there's some kind of collectivist disease that overcomes the system when it's in its usual overcrowded state that sets off a mechanical nervous breakdown. It's certainly an odd realisation, standing on the Central Line platform and being able to board the train without pushing, that this is the level of capacity the tube was actually built to cope with, and it works when it's like this.

I spend my tube journeys reading Will Self's Psychogeography, which chimes with my own feelings about travelling round on my bike: the sense of place that you don't get underground, rushing about at the commuters' pace. The other London, hidden beneath roads and rails, on towpaths and riverbanks.

In Rainbows

So, how much did you fork out for the new Radiohead album? Me, being the nerd I am, I forked out the forty quid for the big exciting box with books and pictures and extra music and lovely vinyl. So I have a posh bit of product to look forward to in 6 weeks or so. In the meantime, there's the download version, which I was emailed the link for this morning.

And hurrah! It's absolutely brilliant! What immediately strikes me at the first listen is that they've managed to combine their experimentalism with their undoubted knack for a good pop song in the killer way they've been threatening to for a while. So you've got twisted dance beats, weird retro-futurist sounds, but also big guitars and tunes. So it sounds more than anything like a band.

I ummed and ah-ed for a while about whether to have the big box, or whether to go for the pay-what-you-want download only option. I wonder what I'd have paid if I'd done the latter? Of course it's tempting to pay nothing, but that just seems wrong to me. I vaguely wondered about getting the download and then if I liked it going the whole hog, but in the end I decided to put my faith in them to deliver, and they've come through for me.

I think the way they've released "In Rainbows" is a fascinating experiment (apparently there'll be a conventional CD release next year), and I hope they give us an idea of how many people downloaded and what most people paid. They're lucky enough to be in a position where they can take a risk like this, and if it works, it'll have huge consequences for the record business and bands' relations with record labels.

Free Burma

Today is Blog about Burma Day. I have my doubts about whether such things make any difference at all, (rather like the Facebook Burma group), or are just an easy way for middle-class westerners to feel better about themselves, but on the principle that it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, and the realisation that there are some things more important than music or the petty gripes I put down here (i.e. almost everything), I shall mention the crackdown that the Burmese government is embarking upon, and add one more voice to the protest.

(And if you're confused by the whole issue of whether it should be called Burma or Myanmar, read this.)