(no subject)

I haven't heard Radiohead's new record, and, for reasons I haven't explored, have no immediate intent to hear it. But I mostly enjoyed reading Sasha Frere-Jones and Gerald Marzorati's back-and-forth in Slate about it. Here's the weirdest thing: I really enjoyed Frere-Jones's opener, thought he was more or less right about Radiohead's career so far and the critical reaction to it, and man, it really made me want to buy the new album. It wasn't until his second letter that I realized that he doesn't like it.

(As for the last day: A best-of without "Idioteque"? Crazy.)

nature walk

Last night before sleep I read "A Billion Conscious Acts," a six-page story by the comics artist Paul Chadwick. In it, his strange, lonely hero Concrete "walks across a grassy area," and then Chadwick examines the space of a single footprint: an acorn cracked open (dropped there by a mouse when an owl attacked), exposing weevil larvae, and so on and on. Cycle of life stuff you've heard before, but what's spellbinding is the meticulous way Chadwick describes and draws all of this activity in a square foot of grassy space.

Today, not really thinking about this, I decided to go for a ( nature walk. )