Following an earlier post about self-publishing, I’d now like to direct your attention to the news that John Edgar Wideman* has opted to release his next book, a collection titled Briefs, via Lulu. Consider me curious as to how it works out. I’m inherently skeptical of retail exclusives, and Lulu is — as far as I can tell — an entirely closed system; your local bookstore can’t get a copy of anything they publish, but neither can Amazon. Wideman cites the benefits of having “more control over whom I reach,” which is understandable, though Lulu’s situation would seem to limit the ways in which people can be reached. (Assumably, it’s more of a choice of limitations than anything else.)

That said, given that Lulu’s page for Mr. Wideman features news of two appearances to promote Briefs, one wonders whether there will actually be, you know, copies of Briefs for sale there. Alternately: will the end result of this find more authors of literary fiction gravitating towards Lulu, or Lulu ultimately behaving more and more like a traditional press, at least for a tier of more established authors?

*-pieces of his earlier Philadelphia Fire are still rattling around inside my head after reading it a dozen years ago, for what it’s worth.

Not long ago, I waxed ecstatic on the subject of Justin Taylor. In that spirit, I’d like to draw your attention to two more interviews with that selfsame author: Edward Champion’s, as the 323rd installment of the Bat Segundo Show, and Justin Taylor’s, for the cultural site Jewcy.

At Dusted, I have a review up of Via Audio’s Animalore, an album about which I had mixed feelings.

…while the band and producer Jim Eno (of Spoon) seem to have savored the opportunity to use the studio, the most straightforwardly played songs on Animalore — the ballad “Wanted” and the breathy folk-pop of “Oh Blah Wee” — are among its best. And the stylistic variation doesn’t always work — consider “Babies,” which at times recalls the subdued funk of Belle & Sebastian’s “Your Cover’s Blown.” That in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but the chorus’s refrain of “I want to make babies with you” leaves it unclear whether this is a sincere statement, or a tongue-in-cheek parody of slow-jam excess.

You can read the whole thing here.

Last week, I reviewed Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever for Vol. 1:

Halfway through “Estrellas y Rascacielos,” the third story in Justin Taylor’s collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, there’s an exchange of dialogue that’s at once unexpected and critically important to what follows, both for that story and the rest of the book. The scene is a anarchists’ party at a punk house, where stolen beer is imbibed and ideologically inconsistent tomes sentenced to burn.

It’s an excellent collection: Taylor manages to write scenes of daily life that ring true while unobtrusively raising larger philosophical questions. His interview for the Times’ Paper Cuts blog expands on this, and makes me even more excited for his novel, expected to see release next year:

I’m interested in the boundaries — if there are any — between religion and politics, faith and fanaticism, and what happens when those boundaries break down. But I also wanted to explore this very specific and fleeting moment in our cultural history, when the cross-pollination of early ’90s slacker ethos with the pre-millennial notion that we were living at or after “the end of history” produced some remarkable bodies of utopian lifestyle-politics.

(Taylor’s conversation with Kyle Minor about Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others is worth citing here as well.)

Recently, I’ve been doing more of my music-buying on vinyl. Most of the music I buy comes from indie labels, and most of the larger (and even not so large) indies have implemented the vinyl-with-download-code format, of which I’m a fan. Some of this comes from how my apartment is laid out: I have a record player and CD changer in my living room, and my computer in my office. Generally, when I buy an album or EP, I’d like to be able to listen to it in both places. This works out well whenever I buy something from, say, Matador or Sub Pop or Jagjaguwar or Dischord. Which is a fine thing.

What I’m curious about are the labels that don’t bundle a download code with records: Drag City is the most prominent (perhaps because their music lends itself particularly well to turntables) but there are others — Type and Woodsist both come to mind. Admittedly, if I wanted an easily-digitized physical format of almost anything on almost any of these labels, I could get it on CD. (Though not everything.) But assumably, the people buying vinyl from these labels also own computers and MP3 players and, presumably, listen to music there as well.  All of which begs the question: is the label expecting that someone wanting to hear an album on vinyl and MP3 will purchase that album twice? Or does it come from a more cynical place, where the assumption exists that since someone can easily find an illicit version of that album online, they’ll just go that route once they’ve spent $15 for the vinyl?

Over at Chain of Knives, Ned Raggett has a good piece up responding to the rise of cassette labels. The comments are worth a read; Lucas Jensen makes the definitely-valid point that, well, cassettes are not the friendliest of formats. Which is something I agree with: I can make a case for the advantages of vinyl, CDs, and digital formats, and own music on all three formats. It’s harder for me to think of a particular style of music that’s ideally suited for the cassette — though I don’t doubt that one exists.

Via Maura: an interview with two of the former members of Life Without Buildings, perhaps one of the most underrated bands of the last ten years. Some context for why this name should matter to you comes via Brian Howe and Douglas Wolk.

This week on The Rumpus featured a Steve Almond essay laying out his rationale for self-publishing two books that wouldn’t easily be categorized. Almond also discusses his practice of only selling them at readings, and the result of that:

[T]he weirdest part was that I sold out at every reading. I’d love to believe that this was because people were just blown away by my incandescent prose. But I think it had more to do with a kind of communal feeling. Readers liked the fact that the book wasn’t available everywhere.

I haven’t read either of the books that Almond refers to here, though my interest is definitely piqued. I did, however, recently read Warren Ellis’s Shivering Sands, a collection of essays that Ellis made available via Lulu. It’s a similar case to Almond’s, in some ways: most of the pieces here were already written, and time was taken to make the book look distinctive. In this case, Ariana Osborne’s design echoes the look and feel of the work she’s done on Ellis’s recent graphic novellas, which makes sense — even with the author’s name on each blanked out, it would be clear that Shivering Sands and Aetheric Mechanics come from the same pen.

It’s the literary equivalent of a b-sides and rarities collection and, well, I always gravitated towards those. (One of my first exposures to R.E.M. came via Dead Letter Office; the habit stuck.) A few weeks ago, Ellis added an update with the first two months’ sales figures, which make for interesting reading.

Last Friday, I went with some friends to Floyd Bennett Field to watch Brooklyn’s New York Aviators take to the ice against the Long Island Stingrays. I’m going to rely on Wikipedia’s entry on the North East Professional Hockey League — to which the Aviators are/were affiliated — to explain some of the context here:

The NEPHL, wrought with financial problems from the day they dropped their first puck, is down to two teams with the Connecticut C-Dogs ceasing operations with the forfeited playoff game vs. Rhode Island. The New York Aviators will apply to the Federal Hockey League…

There’s something inherently enjoyable about a professional hockey game with a ten dollar ticket, seats close to the ice, and a friendly bartender upstairs. And the “human slingshot” contest between periods — which involved watching a khaki-clad guy riding an inner tube into the boards and, eventually, into five ten-foot-high inflatable pins — was likewise entertaining. The Aviators ended the night as 10-0 winners (to his credit, the Stingrays’ goalie did stop 53 shots). Players were checked into the boards, helmets were lost, “Song 2″ was played after many a goal. Not a bad night of hockey…

For Dusted, I reviewed Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s Kollaps Tradixionales.

Calling this Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s most accessible album should not be taken as an indication that we’re in pop-song territory, or even that most of these songs have a verse/chorus/verse structure. The group’s discography (and, for some of its members, their time spent in Godspeed You! Black Emperor) suggests a fondness for slow builds leading to fissures of noise, strings swirling and whorls of feedback from guitars.

You can read the whole thing here.

One: At io9, an interview with Joh Alan Simon, the writer/director of an upcoming adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth. (With a Robyn Hitchcock soundtrack, no less.)

Two: At Bleeding Cool, Adi Tantimedh discusses the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work on science fiction. While I don’t agree with his take on the Soderbergh adaptation of Solaris, it’s a good and comprehensive piece; definitely worth your time.

Because I am not above cutting and pasting my posts from Twitter in this space, some reactions to Saturday’s Don Giovanni Records showcase at the Bowery Ballroom. First came:

At Bowery Ballroom, drinking Guinness and waiting for the punk rock to begin.

Approximately three hours later:

….I think I’d have liked Jeff the Brotherhood a lot better had one of the guys in it not been sporting the leather pants.

However, fine sets from the Groucho Marxists, Black Wime, and the Measure [sa]. Ah, the Jersey punk rawk.

Ninety-odd minutes after that:

Screaming Females: how you pull off heroic soloing while still being catchy as hell and punk as fuck.

Forgetters: expansive power trio, with a welcome bite to the delivery. Better than I expected, and my expectations were high.

And an hour later, once I’d arrived back at my apartment:

Can’t quite quantify what I like so much about Shellshag’s music, but their use of percussive jumping helps. Plus: full-on gear destruction.

This Saturday Night Live sketch may have made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen from said show in a long, long time. (And this includes the likes of “The Curse” and “Everyone’s a Critic.”)

(Link via Heathalouise.)

Word comes via their website that the excellent San Francisco trio Gowns have disbanded.

They’ve posted their final song there as well, along with information on the members’ ongoing projects.

They will be missed.

At the Chicago Reader, Miles Raymer talks about how his take on file-sharing has shifted the release of Mannequin Men’s Lose Your Illusion, Too last year.

My experience with Lose Your Illusion was a big part of the reason my opinion about free music changed so dramatically over the course of this past year. It was the first album I’d been involved with that had a real label backing it up and covering the bills—all my previous records had been self-funded, self-released DIY projects—and as such it was the first one where the music didn’t “feel” free.

It’s something of a response to Chris Ruen’s recent Tiny Mix Tapes essay on filesharing. Also discussed are DJ Shadow, Amanda Palmer, and Flameshovel Records. It will not leave you with a happy feeling in your heart, I don’t think.

(And if you’re a fan of clamorous punk rock, you really should pony up the cash for one of their records.)