Radiohead – “House of Cards”

The five gentlemen from Oxfordshire, England have done it to me again. While In Rainbows continues to climb my all-time favorite albums ladder, I heard “House of Cards” this evening and tapped into the subtext of the lyrics at exactly the prefect time. I felt like Mr. Thom Yorke had penned the lyrics exactly for me. I researched the video and was reminded that in lieu of traditional cameras, the video’s director “shot” with lidar technology which detects the proximity of objects from a sensor and yields a grainy,  grid-like appearance.

Turns out the technology is not proprietary; the data used to make the video was released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license and is available at Google Code.

While the story of the lyrics echoes a scene from the masterful Ang Lee film THE ICE STORM, I keyed into the initial couplet:

I don’t want to be your friend.
I just want to be your lover.

And then I got wrapped up in the next:

No matter how it ends.
No matter how it starts.

Luckily before I got too depressed thinking about lost love, I started thinking about M-theory string theory. I watched a documentary on the Science Channel that explained M-theory in layman’s terms. It worked out to be a much needed distraction for my brain’s solipsistic nature.

Once they broached the eleventh dimension and parallel universes, I was sufficiently safe from entering a manic episode.