Review of Sorts: Radiohead (In Rainbows)

You must be in a very strange place when you listen to a new Radiohead new album. I mean a very strange place in the physical sense, a locality which is not common to you, not a foreign emotional space (that comes included in the album's retail price). I bought Thom Yorke's solo album in Los Angeles before I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to Berkeley. Indelibly linked are the surreal moments where I was curving on a road built into cliffs, meters from the end of my life while listening to the apocalyptic and painfully sweet keens of Radiohead's lead singer which I absorbed while I was giving Ansel Adams the finger from every roadside pull-off on the Pacific.

This time (In Rainbows), it was Halloween. I was on a basketball court in an empty school gymnasium in-between classes. More artfully, I should say that I was in-between poetry and nonfiction. The court was matchlessly clean, practically shining, the nets were the full quality, like 1200 thread count sheets, immaculately unfrayed, there was also not the slightest trace of another other person there. In Manhattan, the amount of space that I ever have entirely to myself is little. My neighbors sometimes say bless you through the wall when I sneeeze, so an entire recreation center loomed like Elysian Fields. I wasn't planning to play basketball, but I peered in on the court and some metaphorical (possibly Estroginian) dimrushed yearbook photographer (conjured with the song House of Cards playing) beckoned me to step in.

I slashed through the lane and cut the baseline for reverse lay-ups as the song Jigsaw Falling Into Place promised fulfillment. During the fierce 15 Step, I crashed the board, fending off imaginary opponents for rebounds amid a bass tempo furtively shaking the court. With great focus, I meditatively pondered cornball mortality and took free throws during the idyllic Videotape; from the exact same spot on the line each time, in a routine of solitude I would never otherwise have patience for. My shot was off, the motions were clumsy to start, but I was all alone and did not feel discouraged by it.

I used to play basketball the most of all sports when I young, but I had only played maybe ten times since I left for college; I had no driveway with a hoop at school, the courts were always packed, everyone in New York lives entirely too far away to round up for a game.

Weird Fishes/Arpeggi turned up next. I chased down the rebound of an errant shot to the court perimeter, recovered it, and found myself at the three-point line. When I was much younger, ten through fourteen, I played shooting guard because I was not especially tall and had a good (read: decent) jump shot. Later into middle school and high school, I was broad-shouldered, bulky, so I was placed down low near the hoop, ordered to shoot less and box out others for rebounds. I developed a (decent) hook shot with my left in an intense childhood admiration of Hakeem Olajuwon. But I always missed the spread of the court from the perimeter, I was never going to be a forward, there is no such thing as a 5'9" forward, the death of my game was in the lane.

As the song was hitting its first crescendo after a spur of hypnotic arpeggios, themed in ars poetica, I took the outside shot, the guard shot, and watched it arc and drain through the center of the net. The shot produced the most beautiful sound an athlete can hear (short of "not guilty"), the net folding in one-handed applause, arousing the saccharine joy of a low-percentage shot defying itself. It was also me, eleven years old, draining a three, waiting for approval from a less empty gym. The tempo gathering, I line up again and I drain the same shot from the top of the court, the same sound, the same sensation. I hit the next one and then the next as the maze of the song pulled away like a flipbook full of stick-figured cartoons. I had rediscovered my shooting touch, twelve years in hiding like lost faith.

This is an album that Radiohead wants you to own. They even let you download the album and name your own price; symbiotically, it would be worth whatever you paid.

I lined up for the last shot, as the song was to gasp loudly in finality, I waited for just a second more to align the shot with the penultimate cymbal crash and let it go. The ball sailed away from me. I believed I was a guard again. The moment hung where the net would welcome the ball and the symmetry of the game would twist into a strident disorder as the shot arrived. But it never came. The ball bounced high off of the side of the rim, missing with shuttering clang, and escaping to the sideline, where I went to follow.

Nude, the album's best track followed and I caught the ball on the side of the court and stayed, breathing heavy in the nostalgia as Thom Yorke chillingly and softly crooned his clarion warning in the song's protracted and haunting first line "Don't get...any big ideas." Like the band, I had returned to a familiar form, something that had changed and been lost, something old that I loved.