In rainbows

alright, this is going to be overtly stanny and excitable, but let me just get this out.

Radiohead announced, about 3 hours ago over their website, that they are releasing their new album "In Rainbows." Aside from the fact that it's radiohead and they're fucking great, here are several reasons why this album is revolutionary, without even hearing it.

a.) the record is entirely self-distributed. You go to radiohead.com to get the album. No major label is responsible, no one made any demands of radiohead, no corporate branding anywhere. It's, from the ground up, a self-propelled release by a band that can do it. This is, in essence, the music industy's Lexington. It's the shot heard round the world. because:

b.) the download comes from radiohead.com, nowhere else. It's DRM free, it's high quality MP3's, and if you want a hard copy, you order it from them (and get vinyl, cd's, artbooks, and a whole other album's worth of material, essentially making it a double vinyl album (because the other songs aren't b-sides by any stretch of the imagination)). Here's the best part: you decide how much you're going to pay for the digital album. Seriously. If you want to buy the album for 1 cent, it's yours. so:

c.) why bootleg it? it (most likely) won't leak because the hard copy isn't available until december 3rd. And the digital album will be out October 10th (yes, releasing an album 10 days after the announcement... bad-ass). And you can literally download it for free, as long as you tell radiohead.com that you want it for free. If you choose to support radiohead and give them money, great. If not, great. The download is through radiohead.com. And who knows what will be included in the download package as of now?

d.) since they can establish their own design in their own matter of choosing, it looks like the "discbox" is going to be an art student's wet dream. AND YOU GET THE VINYL NO MATTER WHAT! so maybe some music fans will be motivated to go out and buy record players and see how great music sounds when it's physically reproduced. Man. This is literally a home run of a record.

I can't begin to tell you how excited I am. even if the album sucks, this may end up being one of those moments where we all get the treat of seeing an entire industry and economy slightly shift one way or the other. if the album moves a million units (easy for radiohead) in the US, then we'll see Billboard charts have to completely readjust their sales standards (because if it's the most popular record in the country then it's the most popular, regardless of whether they sold it to you for free), we'll start to see "indies" actually become indie, we'll see artist driven labels (like, for real), we'll see tour sales go through the roof (hey! that band that gave me their album for $5 is touring! why not!), and we'll see a paper culture industry actually catch up to the times. I know this is one album, but it's a huge album, from the biggest free-agents in the music world. U2 and REM and the Stones have more money than God but they can't directly sell their album to their fans? yeah. Good job radiohead.

And for luddites like me, I can get the album on vinyl, CD, and my computer without having to buy the same thing 2-3 times. And I can get a massive art book by one of my favorite artists. We all win.

i'm gonna get back to not sleeping until next wednesday

Slightly, so slightly

I confess, this new adventure into literature and literary ideas as the basis for this petite meeting of the minds, is daunting. I'm not frightened by the idea of engaging texts and bitching about them, but I'm concerned that my blog-interests are off-topic, even when they're on topic. I'm sure that makes no sense.


Anyway, something that's been getting my goat recently is the idea of aesthetic. Though I'm aware we all have our own aesthetic (some things get us off and some things don't) I resent the idea that we have to bring this entire hierarchy worth of baggage to the stuff we consume and decide how things fit into those tight schema, or not. I constantly feel, in the poetry community, a need to be tightening my viewpoint, learning to better argue matters of taste until they mystically become matters of value. I feel poetry should be about expanding onto a larger and larger world, opening up to it and consuming what we find - like children wandering through orchids. Instead, a lot of the time, it's about walking through the orchid and saying, 'this tree is diseased', 'this tree is of little use to me' and 'there is neither a thing good nor strange' about some other tree. Though this is a criticism, I think it's also an impossible dream.

I think that most of the poets who want to be poets will continue to specify their viewpoints out of a desire to be taken seriously and produce recognized work. I'm not sure what the alternative is, nor how it can be achieved, but I think questions of aesthetic are running a muck and that reading a poem for the sake of enjoying it and saying, 'huh, that's fucking good' is becoming something of a lost art.

[the first draft of this post was riddled with grammatical errors, I've fixed a few - but to my defense, it was written at the zenith of my weariness.]

Executive Decisions

Dear Kids:

I have some bad news. Chicken Paprika as we know it is dead, buried behind Aunt Betty's barn. But from all bad things like death and and construction sites, come good things, like resurrections and room changes.

This is now a place to rant, rave, and obsess about literature or things that we can loosely, but always fascinatingly, connect back to literature. What do I mean by literature, you ask? Well, I mean nothing, and I mean everything. I don't read Judith Butler or Roland Barthes as much as I should, but if I do, I will post what I think here.

Classrooms are stifling these days. I can't say what I feel, I have to say what I think, and those thoughts have to be very grounded in the text or I lost my license to practice reading. I say bah! to that. It's time to hash it out, to write unfettered. We are all apologies and niceties, and while respect to the author and the text is important, sometimes shit is shit and it sucks to read it.

Will you help me in this next unworthy endeavor?

Sincerely,
Me

letter to a caroselli

Dawnie-

can we change the name? i want recycled chicken names, every week. I tried to do it, but 'taint let me. i mean, if you really like paprika, then let's roll, but i think some header witticism might spice the place up. and I will be posting, come thursday, a minute by minute account of me & Bendi's real time drunk and out of control review of MIA's Kala. Believe it, fam.

I have been a bad, bad blogger.

I haven't read this thing in ages. From what I can glean, Bendi and Jon are engaged in an epic battle and I forgot to buy a ticket.

Here is a little something I'm working on. Right now, I'm trying my bestest to write an accessible poem on the surface, but then again it should also have a little somethingsomething to it.. (maybe paprika), that makes you want to read it again..

Lesson One: Meringue with Sir DOMS

i.

Delayed Sir Doms: I have done it again. I have eccentrically contracted
my muscular meat into that petrified pretzel of pain.

Onset, on the street, You follow me everywhere and now I have
nothing but this motorized scooter and a pocket
full of milky dreams.

Muscle me, Sir Doms, all day long, but the situation grows
lethal. I request a formal
hearing with the ministry of cheese. “I am rejecting this house of glass
bones. The recommended prescription is a good bout
of calcium.”

The Soreness salsa: fin-ger quicks, fin-ger quicks, fin-ger quicks
in the mean
time, this slow-
Moe has got me jiving with you, Sir Doms,
and I am heavy-tired.

ii.

Did you know the cause of your existence is tearing not
buildup? You break me down to build me up better
cup and I could say that I am grate
full, but I’m too lock-jawed for thank-yous.

untitled

man wars perfectly
seperating fat from thighs with sharp
memories of guerilla warfare jumbled
recipe calling for more blood in the soup
eyed general points and 15 boys drop dead
weight! Throw out the freezer burned bits,

or they'll ruin the stew.




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Yo Jon, you wanted a shit fest?