truefiction.org

I write a lot. I barely finish anything. In an effort to finally clear out my hard drive of those huge, space-filling Word 97 files, it’s time to spread the unfinished gospel to the world. I present to you: Decent But Unmotivated Week! Because I’ve got nothing better.

David Cross - Shut Up You Fucking Baby

For all those still angry that I’ve seen Radiohead and the Beta Band live when all you’ve seen is a giant puddle of water, I give you this: two years ago I drove up to Manhattan for what promised to be one of the greatest comedy concerts of all time. It was called Eating It, and it was a special edition of a weekly showcase that took place at the Luna Lounge. Where normally it was a few, under-the-radar comics that hadn’t yet earned their Comedy Central Presents episode, the show I was supposed to see was topped up with big names. Janeane Garofalo. Marc Maron. The Upright Citizens Brigade. God help me, even members of the State were supposedly reuniting. And headlining the show was the irrepressible David Cross.

If you don’t think you’ve heard of David Cross, you’re wrong. He may not be a big name celebrity, but he’s appeared in so many things that once you figure out who he is, you’ll be slapping your forehead like a Matt Groening character. Or something. But anyway: he’s one of the original “meta-comics” (and yes, even I’m getting tired of “meta” now), half the creative force behind HBO’s seminal Mr. Show, and he’s had cameos in more movies than you’d care to imagine. I was going to see him, live, and was willing to pay for tolls, gas, and parking for the drive to Manhattan to do so.

I think you see where this is going.

Mr. Cross never showed up, for reasons I don’t remember. The show as a whole was still pretty damn good, but I always felt like I had missed something special. With the release of his first solo comedy album, I’ve learned that I did.

Radiohead - Amnesiac

I have a riddle for all you loyal Dec readers that may sound like apostasy from the guy who drove 750 miles to Toronto to see Radiohead play live last fall. I want you to keep an open mind about it, even though, by now, your eyes have been drawn to the paragraph below and you are, as you come back to finish this sentence, seething in anger and rage and wanting to meet me so you can punch me in the face. I promise I will explain everything.

Here is the riddle:

Q. What do Radiohead and the Dave Matthews Band have in common?

A. They’re both better live than on albums.

Some of you may be wondering, what the hell is wrong with this kid? How the fuck does he compare Radiohead with Dave Matthews? How dare he say Radiohead is better live than on record? Didn’t he “get” the masterpiece that was Kid A? How it worked only as an album rather than a collection of individual songs?

Well, yeah. And don’t get me wrong, I liked Kid A. (Just ask my roommate, who was a second-hand listener to little else during September and October.) Also, with Dave Matthews, “better” remains a relative term. Finally, I am definitely pushing this comparison as a way to trick you, loyal Dec reader, into reading the rest of this article. But I digress.

Amnesiac, as most Radiohead fans know, consists mostly of songs that were recorded at the same time as Kid A. It has been described as a more commercial work than Kid A. It has been described as a warmer work than Kid A. It has been described as a return to their earlier, more accessible albums. It is none of these things. Yes, there are songs that are commercial and songs that are as warm as Radiohead gets.

True story: a few months ago this girl gets on the bus and sits down in the back. She’s been talking on her cell phone since she was at the stop, and she continues to chat with her little sorority friend all the while she’s riding. She covered most of the standard “riding on the bus” talking points: the unnecessary declaration that she’s “on the bus right now,” that she’ll “be there in, like, four minutes”–but she also carried on a fascinating conversation about her friend, her friend’s boyfriend, and her ruthless attempts to sleep with said boyfriend any way she possibly could. Despite the fact that there was another passenger on the bus, despite the fact that the bus driver does in fact have ears, this girl went on and on about something that normally wouldn’t even be discussed in private.

It’s stories like these that illustrate my biggest argument against the New Mobile Order: it’s impossible to go anywhere without hearing about where people want to meet up with their friends, or where they are right now, or whether or not the test came back negative. For some reason, talking on a cell can convince a person that they are less than alone. There are no crowds, no one listening in, not even the caller on the other end of the line. The interior monologue has become exterior, with predictable results.

But if the high probability of losing one’s reputation doesn’t faze the American public anymore, the possibility of losing one’s life still has a hold on us. At least in theory. Why else the maelstrom of sniper coverage back in October? Why else do people pay so much attention to whether eggs and butter are currently good for you, or the Washington Post devote space on the front page about how cancer is now more like a chronic disease than a death sentence? Life and death issues grab hold of our consciousness damn near immediately (it’s the reason for those heavily-hyped, under-reported sweeps segments on the local news). Yet there are people, otherwise perfectly sane (minus their willingness to discuss herpes in a coffee shop) who still use a cell phone while they’re driving.

Let’s be fair: any kind of distracted driving can be dangerous. I once ran my car into a Jersey barrier because I was trying to change a CD. People who eat or drink (non-alcoholic beverages) while driving are arguably just as distracted as the person talking on a mobile phone. Even holding conversation with someone else physically in the vehicle can be distracting enough to cause a crash.

In the latter case, that second set of eyes can make up for the distraction. In the first three, even though you must take your hand off the wheel and focus elsewhere for a moment, it’s only for that moment. The CD or radio station gets changed and you’re done; the bite of a burger or sip of coffee is ingested and you’re done. But the cell phone’s distraction is constant; your hand is up at your ear as you try to maneuver into that sinister turn with one hand and an elbow. It’s still there as you crane your neck around to check for oncoming traffic, still there as you slam on the brake to avoid the car that you didn’t see. Every time someone cuts me off, or forces me to swerve at the last second, or decides to play judgement stop with my vehicle as the traffic cone, they are invariably speaking on a cell phone or from North Carolina. Or both.

Naturally politicians have jumped on the issue, passing cell phone bans first in New York City, then expanding outward to the whole state. Several other localities have joined in, though a nationwide effort died in the Senate (which is just as well, because there’s a freakin’ amendment for this type of thing). They typically ban only hand-held cell phone use by the driver, advocating the new hands-free models instead.

Also, naturally, there’s been a backlash against the new laws banning cell phone use by drivers. In an article last December for Wired News, Lauren Weinstein argues that “evidence exists that hands-free cell-phone conversations in vehicles produce about the same level of distraction to drivers as handheld cell phones.” Regardless of whether or not this is true (it’s the about the same level of distraction as any conversation), it’s not the distraction of the driver that is most important–it’s the reaction time. If you’ve got to put down the phone in order to grab the wheel and evade danger, it’s those extra few moments that mean the difference between ramming whatever’s in front of you and stopping just short.

Weinstein goes on to say that the delay of this study in California indicates that “merely talking on a cell phone doesn’t necessarily mean the phone contributed to an accident,” and that the “study’s results were inconvenient for cell-phone ban proponents” because they only included collisions in which the cell phone was the causative factor. Yet the Bay Area Times article states that because of a California Highway Patrol policy, cell-phone use only counted if there was a witness or definitive evidence–evidence easy enough to hide in one’s pocket before the cops showed up. And even if it wasn’t the immediate cause for the accident, cellular usage’s tendency for both distraction and increased reaction time don’t offer much plausability for having prevented it, either.

There’s a tendency in American culture to claim a right to just about everything: the right to speed, the right to a huge car, the right to own the latest gadgets and use them as they please. Cell phone usage in cars is one of these new spontaneous rights, and unfortunately, it does infringe upon the rights of others. And let’s face it: would it kill you to wait until you got home or to your office to use a phone? Do you really need to check your email while merging lanes at eighty miles per hour? Fine. Use mass transit. But stay the hell off the roads.

Occasionally, the government actually has to step in and prevent people from being stupid. Cell phone bans are not a cure-all solution to the me-first attitude of today’s drivers–there isn’t one–but they do contribute to making the roads safer. In an age when we freak out about possible terrorist attacks that are much less likely than being killed in a car crash, a few minutes without conversation for meditation won’t hurt a bit. Oh, and can you not tell me about how your leg was all bloody while I’m sitting at the coffee shop? Thanks, man, I’m just trying to read.

ONE

Wake up. Take a shower. Perhaps make eggs or a bowl of cereal, but more likely grab a bagel and coffee from the store you pass on your way to the bus stop. Wave your credentials briefly at the security guy on your way up to your office. Sit down at your desk. Write interoffice memo. Go downstairs for a smoke. Buy fast food for lunch. Return to your desk. Fiddle with your hands, forward joke emails to your friends and write one more memo. Go home fulfilled.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

TWO

Wake up. Skip the shower, you’re in a hurry. Breakfast is a Nutri-grain bar found stuffed in your jacket pocket. Go to the coffee shop. Indulge in lattes for a few hours, jotting down ideas for your brilliant screenplay. Walk next door to your job. Smile at people as they walk in. Ask if they need help finding something. Demonstrate your knowledge of the products at hand. You are on commission. Stand around aimlessly for a few minutes during the slow hours, then take a short break. Ask your boss for a raise. Clock out, then return to coffee shop. Think about applying for a job there. You enjoy the coffee shop. They aren’t hiring. Catch the bus home.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

THREE

Wake up. Smoke your last cigarette. It’s 3 p.m. Walk down to the store beneath your apartment. Buy a pack of cigarettes and a case of cheap beer. Sit down on your couch. Call your friends and ask them to come over. Call your parents and ask them to send money. Watch TV. Buzz your friends up. Roll a joint. Pass it around as you and your friends argue over whether to watch Fraiser or Seinfeld. Order a pizza. Call more people and ask if they know anything that’s going on. Decide on a plan. Put on your jacket. Hit up some bars on your way to the club. Buy some tickets to the show. Go inside. Bounce around in an uncoordinated fashion for an hour and a half. Convince someone to give you a ride home.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

FOUR

Wake up. Step outside the trailer cab and stretch. Sit down in the driver’s seat. Put the truck in gear. Pull onto the highway. Search the local radio stations to see if anything good is on the air. Turn on your CD player. Hum along. Try to stay in the rightmost lane unless there’s a slow car in front. Honk your airhorn for students on a school trip. Change the CD. Pull into a service station. Fill the gas tank with diesel. Buy a sandwich and a bag of potato chips. Get back on the highway. Drive for a few more hours, being vigilant in not letting your attention wander. Answer some queries sent over the CB. Stop at a weigh station and scan a day-old newspaper while you wait. Keep driving. Ignore the New Yorker honking angrily as he passes. Pull into a rest stop. Step outside and stretch. Go back into the cab and set up your bed. Watch TV for half an hour before sleep.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

FIVE

Wake up. Lean over and gently wake up your significant other. Balance yourself against the slow rocking of the boat. Wake up your two friends. Cook a small breakfast in the galley–sausage, eggs, coffee. Take the boat of auto-pilot. Turn off the motor. Raise the jib only, because the wind is rather strong. Trade off on steering the boat. Smile, laugh amongst the four of you. Mix up some Bloody Marys. Raise the main sail. Stay on the rudder while others make lunch. Tack. Duck underneath the boom. Talk about the progress you’ve already made in crossing the ocean. Discuss plans for after your arrival in Europe. Make martinis. Put on some trendy music. Go inside for a coat. Check the weather around you through a laptop and your satellite phone. Step back out to the deck. Say you’re going to start cooking dinner. Make something fancy, because, well, why not? Admire the sunset. Note that pink sky at night is a sailor’s delight. Crack a bad joke about pink-eye being good for no one. Bring down the sails. Turn on the motor and put the ship back on auto-pilot. Go down into the cabin and sit around, just talking, for another few hours. Fall asleep with your arm wrapped tightly around your spouse.

Rinse, repeat until Sunday.

SIX

Wake up. Turn on your computer. While it is booting up, go downstairs for a can of Jolt. Come back up to your room. Sit down in front of the monitor. Begin typing. Break into another computer on the network. From that computer, break into another one. Continue until the lag as you type things is somewhere around a minute. Hack into the secret Microsoft database you heard about from one of your Counter-Strike buddies. Download plans for time machine. Get mother to drive you to Radioshack. Buy the following in large quantities: capacitors, resistors, inductors, circuit boards, hex-inverted Schmidt triggers. Go home. Have another Jolt. Warm up your soldering iron and begin laying out the pieces. Start attaching them to the circuit board. Work quickly, but adeptly, on a software interface. Jump a few small things–a pencil, a toaster, your cat–five minutes into the future to make sure everything is working properly. Go downstairs to dinner because your mother is yelling again. Come back upstairs. Clear out the middle of your room. Attach a note to the door that says, “Not missing. Will return on Sunday. Please keep floor clear.” Start charging the capacitors. Drink one last Jolt. Set the software interface to jump you to the start of next week. Have it wait thirty seconds before activating the machine. Stand in the middle of your room and wait for the blinding flash.

Rinse.

I drove block three today. (Worst introduction ever.–Ed.) During the 1100h. class change, a number of idiotic dumbshits decided that they would try to jump on the back doors of the bus. This, for those of you who don’t know, is a big no-no. It’s dangerous, and it will get you a sizable fine if you do it on a bus you have to actually pay for.

The standard solution to this problem is for the bus driver to yell out, “Don’t get on the back doors!” Usually a few people will snicker, and everyone else will get on the front like they’re supposed to.

Not today. Not only do I have to deal with three separate people who do this at the same stop, one of them gets on the front of the bus even though I said there was no more room. He pushed himself back behind the line and I stopped caring.

When he gets off, though, he tells me that, “Just because you wear that blue jacket doesn’t mean you have the right to yell at people.” So I said,

“You’re right. But my Irish walking hat does.”

“And just because you’re wearing an ugly grey sweatsuit doesn’t give you the right to ignore the rules.”

“I’m sorry that your head is a such a desolate, fucked-up place.”

“And you just cost me eight-thousand dollars. What are you going to do about it . . . asshole?”

“Frat-tastic!”

“No, it gives me the right to enforce the rules and Federal law on this bus. If you disobey the rules, like getting on the back doors or not staying behind the line, I can kick you off. I wanted to kick your dumb, ‘I’m above everyone’ ass off my bus, but instead I decided to let you ride. You don’t like it? Don’t ride the bus again. I’m sure we’ll miss your superior intellectualism, impeccable logic and dry wit, but somehow, eventually, we’ll get by. . . asshole.”

“Are you on the crack? Of course I can yell!”

“I WASN’T YELLING. I JUST HAVE TROUBLE MODULATING THE VOLUME AND TONE OF MY VOICE.”

“I fucking! unfortunately have donkey-raping shit eater tourettes.”

“Always fucking naysaying! Why don’t you invent something like inward singing? Fuck you! Fucking…cockass!”

“Can I see your CDL? No? Well, then here, take these two transfer tickets. The next bus to Shut-the-hell-up street will be by in three minutes.”

“I didn’t watch my buddies die face down in the muck so that you can–sorry, I thought I was John Goodman for a minute there.”

“[Obligatory Big Lebowski quote goes here]. . . . Asshole.”

“Does she dress like a tart?” (Dude, no one’s going to get that. We shouldn’t use it. By the way, this whole idea is terrible.–Ed.)

“You ever get the feeling that Ari Fleischer is a total douche?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see what my Glock has to say about that, shall we? What’s that, Glock, you say shoot ‘im? Okay. Wahoowa, mothuhfucker!”

“No, but I do have the right to make sure that I get my ungrateful, full-of-themselves passengers to class and back on time, safely, and without incident. The only reason I yell is because otherwise people won’t hear me. Imagine if everyone was like you: trying to get on the back doors, talking smack to the drivers, ignoring safety rules that are there for a fucking reason, let me tell you, this isn’t the sort of shit that Congress just passes for shits and giggles, there were a lot of accidents back in the day. But I’ll tell you what: next time you ride, I won’t enforce the rules, and when we crash, I hope the last thing you see is your hands holding your own steaming entrails. Good day.”

“Have a good day, sir. Thanks for riding UTS.”

Billy Logan woke up. In a cold sweat. He knew that something was wrong right away, because he looked out his window and he couldn’t see the lighthouse anymore, and it wasn’t just because of the fact that it was night, since a lighthouse is usually lit up at night to keep boats away from the shore.

Like had happened on that day so many years ago.

But no, he could see a few bright spots through his window, so he just assumed that something else was wrong. Out of the bed he leapt and ran for the door, making sure to first put on his slippers and robe.

He crashed into the door. Then he fell onto the floor, and passed out.

* * *

He was surrounded by a bright white light. Back in bed. A bed with metal rails on the side. Mother leaning over him. Other people leaning over him. With clipboards. And white coats. More white. Everything white. He couldn’t take it anymore.

“Where am I?” Billy Logan asked.

A sigh. “You’re in the hospital, Billy,” his mother told him.

“Why am I in the hospital, mommy?”

“Well, we found you on the floor of your bedroom.” Billy Logan realized that he couldn’t see her face.

“Where’s daddy?”

“Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore, remember?”

“Daddy doesn’t love me anymore?”

“I didn’t say that at all.”

“Then why isn’t he here? And why can’t I see you?”

“Uh, perhaps I could butt in here.” The doctor. Billy Logan didn’t like doctors. They were evil men who kept you in bed and made you take disgusting medicine. And gave you shots. They were like clowns, Billy Logan thought. Evil clowns.

“Mrs. Logan–”

“That’s Ms. Logan, asshole.”

“Okay, okay, Ms. Logan, your son has myopia.”

A gasp. “Myopia? Nooooo! Not myopia! Anything but that!” The doctor’s attempt to interrupt. “Myopia? You might as well have given my child a death sentence!” She began to cry.

“Well, actually, Mrs. Logan–”

“That’s Ms. Logan, you big dumb excuse for a biologist!”

“I’m not a biologist, I’m a doctor. There’s a difference.”

“Well, what’s the difference, then?”

“Biologists are–oh, why am I bothering with this?” The doctor (whose name was Sam (I’m sorry I forgot to mention this earlier, sorry–Author)) put down his clipboard and glasses. “As I was saying, Mrs.–Ms. Logan, Billy also has cancer.”

“Cancer. Huh.”

“Doesn’t this bother you in any way, Ms. Logan?”

“Well, uh, it’s not as bad as being nearsighted for the rest of his life.”

“I’m going to die?” Billy Logan asked, wide-eyed. He was suddenly very afraid, more afraid than when he couldn’t see the lighthouse, which seemed like so many hours ago now.

“I’m sure this is awfully hard on you, Ms. Logan. I mean, an hour ago, your boy was fine, and now he’s going to be near blind for the rest of his life, which is only going to be a few weeks. Two months at best.”

Billy Logan lay back and thought about how on the television, on E.R. they never talk about death like this in front of the patient. And then he reminisced about Jessica, dear sweet Jessica, whom he had known all his life and was starting to develop serious feelings for.

“But Doctor Sam, he’s only seven years old! Why is he having romantic flashbacks about girls when he’s only seven years old? And why is he blind?”

Billy Logan reflected on her flaxen hair and fair skin, her beautiful laugh, her clear blue eyes.

“I’m not sure, Mrs. Logan. I’m really not sure.”

Her carefree attitude for life. The way she would run around her backyard for hours, for no reason, just because she believed it was fun. The way she believed nothing bad could ever happen to her.

“It’s too early in the morning for this to happen. It’s still the crepuscule.”

The way both the teachers and the students always liked her.

“What the hell is the crepuscule?”

“It’s like the gloaming, except it’s around dawn, not dusk.”

“Ahh, I see,” said Doctor Sam. “That almost makes sense.”

The way Jessica and her father had crashed into the rocks that one day, so many months ago, and the way that, when you are young, the months seem like years and the hours seem like months.

And then Billy Logan, blind and doomed, fell back to sleep.

He had loved her.

Marie called up and asked why the site hadn’t been updated lately, and I didn’t have an answer. I never have an answer. I don’t think I need an answer. I update the site when I feel like it, and if I don’t that’s okay with me too.

She said something about not being able to follow through on any of my big plans, that everything I ever attempt to do was bound to fail. Not because the ideas weren’t good, of course, but because I didn’t have the work ethic to bring them to fruition. Which is true. My work ethic sucks. I’ve essentially failed out of school; Brilliant Young & Angsty is three weeks delayed and who knows whether it will come out in time for the release party.

“But so what?” I told her. “To finish something is to diminish it.”

God, I wish I could have seen the look on her face after I said that. Goes completely against her work ethic, which apparently now includes riding on other people to make them do shit also. “That’s not true at all. That’s only true because you’re lazy, and on the occasions that you do actually finish something, it never lives up to the vision you had for it in your own mind.”

“Because the vision is always more pure than what I put out.” With a click of the mouse I bring up the Word document I was working on. “Look. I’m looking at a brilliant article right now, about the war on Iraq and why it’s a bad idea. I’ve got over two hundred pages of research–that I’ve read all of–for this article. I have the perfect sense for how I’m going to write this article. And yet it’s stuck on page 2.”

“At some points, Nick, you’ve got to sit down and just push your way through it.” She sighs and I look out my window. There’s no snow, like they said it would this weekend. There’s only the rain and the falling leaves, and the grey squirrels (the black squirrel mutation apparently doesn’t exist this far south) scampering about, trying to store food for the winter. “You wait until the last minute to get something done, and then you go complaing about how it isn’t done and it won’t be any good. Just sit down and do it.”

“Okay,” I said, and I hung up the phone.

Outside, on my porch, the old green couch that the old residents left is getting soaked by rain falling off the roof. Beer cans and cigarette ashes and three-day-old copies of the Times cover the bus seat (which, incidentally, is on the opposite side of the porch and red). The cold was seeping back into Charlottesville, and for the first time I was truly cold in October here, having been readjusted by the unpleasant heat of a Blue Ridge summer. I lit a cigarette and waited. I know fully well that Marie doesn’t exist, that I made her up for the purposes of a story, or the manifestation of the part of me that still wants to do everything, but none of that matters. I sat down and waited for her to show up anyway.

Finally, after nearly a year of talking about it, not creating, the first issue of Brilliant, Young & Angsty is nearing completion. With an all-star staff of writers, editors and artists, the magazine won’t just change your worldview–it will change you.

The fact that you have not yet heard of BY&A is ludicrous. We’ve been talking about it for over a year. We even showed you that quick Word97-based version we were going to print illegally in computer labs across the nation. But times change, and the purpose and style of BY&A has changed.

No longer is it just Nick Gorski writing about random things he couldn’t get published in McSweeney’s. Now it is many people writing about random things they couldn’t get published in McSweeney’s. Do you see the difference?

Actually, it’s not even much of a literary journal at all. Who needs another one in C-Ville, when we already have:

Seven journals published by students, quarterly

One published by MFA students

One published by the English department

Three published by people in their heads

One column about Dave Matthews, even though he doesn’t live here no more.

Two alt. weeklies, neither as good as the old, pre-Hawes departure C-Ville.

6000 Frat boys

400 “indie” kids (that magical 10%!)

Six members of the Seven society

Twenty-six buses

Your mother

Your wife

Your sister

Your chihuaua

Your favorite cup of coffee

Your favorite cup of tea.

Charlottesville’s already got a lot of things, but it certainly doesn’t have a Journal of Pop Culture. This will soon be remedied.

Television! Music! Film! Society!

It’s all going to be covered, and you will be pleased. Oh, man, will you be pleased. We wish we could be you when you open up the magazine for the first time, amazed by what you see. We wish we could be you, sitting underneath the harsh lighting of the Chemistry Auditorium, having picked this magazine up because it all shiny and new and has an interesting photo on the cover. We wish we could be you, flipping through the pages and marveling at the small text that is coherent and funny and relevant, all at the same time (maybe not relevant). We wish we could be you, wishing you were us.

The future as we know it is about to change.

It will be awesome.

It will kick ass.

It will be Brilliant, Young, and Angsty.

(Issue 9 of BY&A comes out 14 October 2002, available at many fine locations in Charlottesville.)

This was to have appeared in the Dec. But it didn’t.

In terms of flying under the Dec’s radar, the Flaming Lips rank up there with Grandaddy and the Microphones on the semi-infamous list of “Bands who released good albums that somehow failed to make the year-end top five issue.” Like The Sophtware Slump and The Glow, Part II, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin went unnoticed by Dec staffers until a belligerent group of students tied us down and made us listen. It was, to say the least, an enlightening and slightly erotic experience.

Actually, in 1999, I was still in high school, but the fact remains that The Soft Bulletin was one of the best albums to come out that year. Combining complex musical arrangements with off-beat lyrics (i.e., “odd,” not “without rhythm”), the Lips’ crazy musical style had only become more refined in the decade since Transmissions from the Satellite Heart and “She Don’t Use Jelly” brought them to the national spotlight. From the sparse beauty of “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” to the watch beep in “What is the Light?” (not to mention the lunacy of including remixes of some songs as bonus tracks), The Soft Bulletin presented pop rock as seen from the eyes of a sonic madman.

Though it contains no watch beeps, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a more than worthy successor to the Lips’ last album. There’d been talk of the band dramatically changing its sound, and it’s true–to a point. Like so many other bands, from Radiohead to list-brothers Grandaddy, the Flaming Lips have added electronic elements to their songs. Still, let’s face it: this is 2002, and boxed drum beats and starting a song’s hook on the previous track can’t really be called “experimental” any more (sorry, Wilco). This is, for better or for worse, the way the quieter rock is going these days. And it works: the new stuff never distracts from the music, instead feeling like just one more set of tricks that Wayne Coyne has in his already formidable bag.

At first glance, the album–which looks like it’s the Japanese import version with Kenji characters liberally scattered throughout the package–appears to be some sort of manga concept album. But it’s not so much a concept album as a concept EP surrounded by other material. Yoshimi opens with “Fight Test,” probably the most active and upbeat track on the album. A bouncy keyboard hook and layered vocals over the chorus draw you in to the record. Sure, I can’t figure out whether the Lips are advocating against pacificism, but it probably doesn’t matter. The Lips’ songs aren’t always about something; they just sound good (see also, “She don’t use butter / She don’t use cheese / She don’t use jelly / Or any of these . . .”). But more likely it’s intended to set up the title track later in the album.

And then sometimes they are: “Sympathy 3000-21 / One More Robot” takes the band very much into Grandaddy’s territory. Over a subdued bass beat, Coyne sings about a robot that tries to emulate emotions. “And a sense of coldness detaches,” he sings, “as it tries to comfort your sadness.” “Robot” captures the somewhat pathetic state of both a robot that tries and fails to emulate sympathy, and a human race that has become dependant on such robots. The titular song, divided into two tracks, is the most specifically manga-influenced song on the album. A young girl takes on giant robots that are attacking the city. Back-up vocalists and a funky drumbeat courtesy Steven Drozd turn what could be a depressing song into a very happy one. And then there’s the scratchy bass noises (to represent the robots, natch) that seem like they came straight from the old Super Nintendo game Earthbound (which also involved children fighting evil attacking robots; go figure). The second track could even have been one of the battle songs: the lyrics are listed simply as, “(screaming).”

As good as the manga/anime concept would have been stretched to album length, after “Yoshimi” the Lips just go back to making cool music. “In the Morning of the Magicians” is a meditation on the nature of love, and “Do You Realize??” on time and death. The entire album is much more subdued than past albums have been, even The Soft Bulletin, but that’s not a bad thing. Not even close to it: The Flaming Lips have made an album that is one of the best after-party albums since The Beta Band’s Hot Shots II, and one that is certainly in the running for at least one Dec staffers’ year end Best Of list.

Why Bush as President was a Bad Idea

Apparently, in a post-apocalyptic world,

It’s going to be the physicists versus the bus drivers

Tribute Haiku to Tenacious D’s “Tribute”

Tenacious D rules

The imperative to rock?

Pure inspiration

Banging on the Doors

Yo, Gorski man!

You okay in there?

Wake up and drink!

Why won’t you come out of your room

And have a beer or three?

Hell, we’ve even got some Remy Martin

How it Goes Down: an Order

First we attack Iraq

Then Iraq attacks Israel

Then Israel nukes Iraq

Then France nukes Israel

And then it’s time for us to steal the buses.

It’s like, it’s like that time that you were sitting alone at home and were just watching the tv, and you saw that nike ad for the first time, the one where the guy is being chased by the chicken. You know the one, “He cannot fool the chicken; no, wait, he has fooled the chicken.” Or when you were at a friends house drinking beer and playing asshole, the tv on in the background, and the new verizon advert with the guy’s tounge bitten by the weasel plays. Everyone just cracks up, like, “What the hell is going on there?” Yeah, it’s just like that.

Or maybe: you were at a party, and a song comes on that you’ve heard a hundred times on the radio starts blaring over the speakers. It’s that Eminem song that isn’t nearly as good as “The Real Slim Shady,” or that Nelly song that isn’t nearly as good as “Ride With Me.” But regardless of that, you start jerking arythymically to the beat, bumping into your fellow revelers, trying your damn best not to spill your beer. You start to think to yourself, “The booty music was so much better when I was a first-year,” but then you realize you were just drunk and impressionable back then.

Is it like that?

Then maybe it’s like lying down in the field outside town, staring up at the stars. The Moby song, “We are all made of stars” or something like that, pops into your head. You used to like Moby, back when Play came out, having no idea of all the stuff he did before then, but then suddenly he was everywhere and he did that version of “South Side” with Gwen Stafani. I mean, come on, Gwen Stafani? WTF, man? WTF? So anyway, you’re lying on your back and staring up at the sky, and you start to feel a little insignificant and all that crazy cliched stuff you don’t want to think but you always fall into it anyway. You get dismayed by this, don’t you?

Still: you can’t help but think, blissed out listening to your walkman walking to the first day of classes, that no matter what your feeling, this is a moment for a movie to document, and this song should be on the soundtrack right now.

Too bad what you’re listening to is the screams of a guy who’s just had his tounge pierced by a weasel.