On the off chance you take your read­ing cues from rock stars, here’s some­thing from an inter­view with Radio­head at the Observer Music Monthly:

Thom’s read­ing Q by mys­te­ri­ous Ital­ian anar­chist group Luther Blis­set. I tried to read that once, I tell him.

‘Oh it’s fuck­ing ace! But my missus, that’s her spe­cial­ist field, so she’s been explain­ing it to me all the way through. Medieval church car­nage. It’s mental. I want to get it made into a film. That’s my next mission.’

Using the In Rain­bows profits?

‘Mmm-mm,’ says Thom Yorke, shak­ing his head. ‘I doubt it. That would cover basi­cally the catering.’

Not to spoil the mys­tery, but “the mys­te­ri­ous Ital­ian anar­chist group” who wrote Q com­prised four of the five mem­bers of the group cur­rently known as Wu Ming, the authors of 54, Man­i­tu­ana, and the two sto­ries I trans­lated for Chicago Review 52:2/3/4.

The Radiohead/Wu Ming con­nec­tion is actu­ally apt, since Wu Ming makes all their work avail­able as free downloads.

For the record, here’s what the rest of Radio­head is reading:

Colin is cur­rently read­ing Piers Brendon’s new The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Jonny’s re-​reading Gibbon’s The His­tory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed’s just fin­ished Man’s Search For Mean­ing by Victor Frankel (’Brilliant. He’s an Auschwitz survivor’), Phil’s read­ing Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother.

In an arti­cle on the dollar’s depre­ci­a­tion in today’s NYT, Katie Hammer and Julia Wedigier write:

The dollar’s fall has been so dras­tic, it has seeped into the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness. In his last video, rapper Jay-Z cruised the streets of New York flash­ing not a stack of Ben­jamins, but a fist­ful of euros.

The impli­ca­tion seems pretty clear*; as James Cramer put it last month: “When things have gotten to the point that even people like Gisele [Bund­chen] and Jay-Z real­ize the dollar is too weak, things have gotten out of control” (my emphasis).

Yes, we get it: the point of the anec­dote is to add color (no com­ment) to the story, to break up more mun­dane sen­tences like the one that fol­lows. (”The dollar had been at rel­a­tively low levels against the pound and euro for most of this year, but in April it broke the $2 for £1 barrier…”)

But stop for a moment and ask your­self: by what stan­dards does Jay-Z count as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness? Con­sider what it means to be a person “like” Jay-Z:

+ Accord­ing to Rolling Stone, Jay-Z earned $17.5 mil­lion in income during 2005

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Buried deep behind the full-​color Beowulf spreads in the Arts and Enter­tain­ment sec­tion of yesterday’s New York Times was an arti­cle on Cross Cana­dian Rag­weed, the red-​dirt alt-​country country-​rock (etc.-etc.) band orig­i­nally out of Still­wa­ter, Okla­homa. Lines that describe “a con­cert that was begin­ning to feel like Porky’s with a root­sier soundtrack” won’t do much to con­vert the uncon­vinced, but the arti­cle it does get one thing right: Rag­weed is a band best appre­ci­ated live. (Though their newest album made a more-than-respectable debut at #6 on the Bill­board coun­try charts.)

Check here for details on Mis­sion Cal­i­for­nia, their latest album, and here for photos of their show at Joe’s in Chicago last winter.

Mis­sion Cal­i­for­nia, the new album from Cross Cana­dian Rag­weed, debuted at #6 on last week’s Bill­board Top Coun­try chart and #30 on the Top 200 chart. Buy the album at Amazon or check out the first single off the album, “I Believe You” (writ­ten by Todd Snider), on iTunes.

My photos from the band’s show in Chicago last Jan­u­ary are avail­able here.