Jeff points to the sad honest truth. The Pixies are sellouts. Big time. Their ticket prices are aprocryphal (anywhere from $35-60 a show). And this concert rider illustrates that the Pixies are no different from any other bloated band making the rounds.

“Veggie platter with hummous and sour cream dip?” Exactly 48 bottles of non-alcoholic beer? Fuck you, Black Francis. Eat me, Kim Deal.

I have, in the face of several opportunities presented to me, resisted the impulse to plop down such a staggering sum of cash for a Pixies show in 2004 and 2005. It hasn’t been easy. But now, after this unexpected hummous news, it’s a slam dunk decision. The Pixies are dead to me.

It would be one thing if the Pixies were honest about their avarice. Perhaps calling this “The Pixies Retirement Fund Tour” would come closer to the truth. That’s essentially the approach the Sex Pistols took a few years ago and I resepcted John Lydon for his unapologetic and forthright commercialism. Which was more than you can say for most reunions that hide behind the shady veneer of “We’re getting together just for old time’s sake!”

But if you were of a certain age about fifteen years ago, the Pixies encompassed a sound and a feeling that was uncompromising, independent, and sui generis. The Pixies demonstrated that goofiness and rage and bitterness and carrying on with a strange optimism could stem from a carefully produced guitar sound that nobody else cutting records back then came close to — a sound that, in fact, Kurt Cobain unapologetically pilfered.

They built up their audience with impressionable listeners like me, who lapped up Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, knowing that what was on these albums was genuine and unadulterated. So in the Pixies’ case, it’s especially a shame that these days, the Pixies are more about replaying the greatest hits and cashing in, rather than how it used to be: giving a good show and evolving their sound.

While some publishers refrain from reading anything in the slush pile (with understandable justification) and it’s safe to say that vanity presses remain for the most part a successful mechanism to gouge unpublishable authors, this Telegraph article imputes a potential “gold mine” within these flashless fens.

Consider the unlikely success of medical professor David Alric. Alric wrote a children’s novel called The Promised One and his tale of a schoolgirl who can talk to animals couldn’t find a publisher for his fiction — despite having authored several books on medicine. Alric paid out £10,000 to a vanity press and has managed to sell 80-100 books every Saturday at his local bookstore. He ordered a second run and he keeps the spare copies in his garage.

Alric’s success had no marketing behind it. There are no reputable reviews that appear to be available online. Nor does Alric have a website. There would seem to be little going for Alric but word of mouth.

But the real question here is whether this is a case of publishers being out of touch with the public or, if Alric’s book is a shaggy dog and if the peanut gallery here is ready to leap atop the elitist parpaet, the public perhaps having a paucity of literary taste. Either way, Alric’s success clearly indicates that the chasm between authors, publishers, and reading audience remains wide and needs to be bridged. And it’s enough for this showtunes-loving heterosexual to start singing “Matchmaker” and perhaps start a new publishing house styled “Chava & Hodel.”

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a delectable Friday, which means, aside from tonight’s unchronicled evening efforts of certain literary types who actually attempt to read a book while swinging back the shots (a multitasking enterprise that I am both incapable of and in awe of), this week’s final morning installment of the patented morning roundup. To wit:

1. That the continued ascent of one Helen Oyeyemi, a mere twenty-one years old, continues unabated.
2. That, despite quibbles from certain rakes, it would be incontrevertible to deny that this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner, with its inestimable contribution of the “carburetor breast” fantasy, is amusing, albeit puerile. (The winner was a Microsoft analyst from Fargo, no less!)
3. That we kept up a moment of silence for actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who we enjoyed most throughly in Wuthering Heights and The Pawnbroker and who lived a long life.
4. That Kem Parton, a railroad worker-turned novelist was given cavil and calamity by his boss when he published a novel about the railroad, including terrorist elements. To the railroad itself: for shame.
5. That Betsy Burton (chronicled in our Books by the Bay report has been chronicled, along with other bookseller-related books, in Newsday.
6. That The Da Vinci Code did not win a recent UK book popularity contest and that literary Britons preferred books set in exotic locales.

The literary news junkie can make of these headlines or bypass this advocate’s occasional editorializing as s/he sees fit. But let it not be said that this advocate did not fulfill his morning constitutional.

Thank you and good morning.

Ms. Tangerine Muumuu herself alerts us to this review of the new Rushdie novel by none other than William T. Vollmann himself! (Regrettably, the review is inaccessible from the Publishers Weekly site and must be perused through Amazon.)

It’s a starred review, but Vollmann quibbles over Rushdie’s depiction of Los Angeles, which “relies on references to popular culture that the place becomes a superficial parody of itself.” He notes that Rushdie’s female characters are “less plausible” than the male ones, his “sermonistic parallelism or repetition” (ironically, criticisms leveled at Vollmann’s The Royal Family) and his reliance upon slapstick. But overall, the Vollster digs Shalimar the Clown, calling it a “powerful parable.”

Dear Bloglines: Do you love this RSS feeds or not? You’re updating in spurts and, of course, I love you! Surely, you’ve received my dozen long-stemmed roses by now! So work for me with some regularity. Kiss kiss, Edward Champion.

Local photographer Thomas Hawk was harassed by security goons when taking photographs of One Bush Street:

Yesterday I was shooting some photos of One Bush St. (the building where Bush and Market Streets intersect) when their security guard came out of his little glass jewelbox lobby hut to ask me to stop taking photos of the building. He said it was illegal. I moved to the sidewalk and continued taking photos and he again asked me to stop. When I told him I was on a public street sidewalk he said that actually they owned the sidewalk and that I was going to have to stop taking photographs.

The security guard then followed Hawk as he took various photos of the building on the public sidewalk.

This saga, however, is far from over. It seems that another guy is holding a contest for a variety of One Bush Street photos. Mat Honan will give the winner a $10 iTunes certificate. Word on the street that a litany of photographers will be meeting this Saturday at high noon to take several photographs of the One Bush Street building.

I’m going to try and be there myself. Failing that, I plan to introduce a new weekly feature to Return of the Reluctant: the One Bush Street Photo of the Week. Photos will be appearing on these pages every week until this ridiculous enforcement is waived in its entirety.

Taking a photograph of a building is neither a terrorist act nor a copyright infringement. The time has come to take a stand against this irrational fear and unreasonable (if not outright illegal) prohibition. I urge anyone with a camera in San Francisco to exercise their rights to free expression and snap a photo, if you happen to be in the Financial District.

(via SFist)

For any and all North Bay readers, the Michelle Richmond, Bruce Bauman Jordan E. Rosenfeld, Susan Henderson and David Fromm. It’s happening on August 2 at 6:30 PM. More details can be found here.

We’d go ourselves, but aside from not owning a car, there are pre-planned existential events happening that evening which must be quietly attended to and feted.

Robert “U Can’t Touch Dis” Birnbaum, the hardest work literary interview in show business, is at it again, engaging in a second chat with Sarah Vowell. They talk about commercial viability, American history, reading in the sun, outdoors writers, and whether Ms. Vowell has considered writing fiction.

Model vs. Photographer (NSFW): “[I]t was about the only truly creative idea I had ever had. While I’ve often seen photographers do nude self portraits, I had never seen a male photographer try to adopt the same poses as his female models.” (via MeFi)

Michelle Richmond asks, “Where’s the love for Trance?” Trance is Christopher Sorrentino’s new novel. And from where I’m sitting, there seems to be some love making the rounds. I’ve had a few positive emails about the book this week.

Publishers Weekly editor Michael Scharf has been following Sorrentino on his book tour. So far, Scharf has two reports available online. But Michelle quotes from the latest installment (which isn’t yet available):

The store has done its legwork: ads for series have gone in every major weekly. They’ve even printed up little baseball-card like promos featuring the author photo on front, and a little synopsis of the book on back, with in-store visit date at the bottom. The cards are available weeks before the reading, and are kept on a rack front of store. There are cards for Jonathan Ames, who was here last week reading before an audience of about 50. Francesca Lia Block and Aimee Bender (like in L.A.) are due next month…

The question that I pose in Michelle’s comments thread is this: In the year 2005, do newspaper advertisements translate into book signing attendance? I suspect that one of the reasons that so many people attended the Ames signing is that Ames himself maintains an e-mailing list, reminding people every so often about what he’s doing. I have yet to receive a single email from Mr. Sorrentino and would have been happy to have noted the event (and possibly attended it), had someone bothered to remind me about it. (Even though the Booksmith is my neighborhood bookstore, this doesn’t mean that I commit every known reading to memory. I am, like most souls, all too forgetful.)

Further, I don’t feel it’s a fair criticism to complain about low attendance (and if you think ten people is low, you haven’t been to nearly as many book readings as you should go to) when there is no christophersorrentino.com in existence and when Farrar, Straus and Giroux‘s only apparent page for Sorrentino is a listing of his book tour dates. This page tells me (or any other prospective reader) absolutely nothing about Trance except a JavaScript catalog summary. And it offers neither author information nor an excerpt from Trance that encourages me to read the book or catch the guy in person. If I didn’t know who Sorrentino was, with such sketchy information provided, I’d think he was a performance artist prepared to set his penis on fire who just happens to show up at bookstores.

With such a saturated publishing environment, it is the responsibility of the author and the publisher to provide more than just “Booksmith, 7:00 PM” in their information page. We need details, folks. What will happen at the reading? Will there be a band? Will there be canapes? Will each person who buys the book get a personalized hug from Mr. Sorrentino? (And, hell, maybe a penile conflagration might be in order just to liven things ups.) I’m not suggesting that every author feed into the cult of personality, but I am suggesting that they accommodate the reading public instead of expecting them to feverishly scour the weeklies for the latest tours. Readers may be passionate when it comes to books, but they do have outside lives and they are not wolves.

Authors need to reach out to the literati by directing them with non-intrusive emails like Ames’ updates (which are often framed in a polite and non-intrusive personal story) rather than assuming that people will jump out of their seats to attend. In short, they need to do the legwork. And that means taking their heads out of the sand and understanding that the literary culture is solidifying: online and in other places. They just need to be realistic about where the hot pockets lie. I’ve got a few answers to this query, but if these folks are ten years behind the curve, then they really need to sweat it out a little.

[UPDATE: Sorrentino’s San Francisco stretch can be found here.]

This is a quick test to see if the RSS feed is working.

[UPDATE: Even though the XML feeds have been validated and appear through every other aggregator, they are still not showing up at Bloglines. I’ve emailed WordPress and, if I do not hear back from them, I will keep contacting them until I elicit a response and a fix.]

• Nora Sohnen asks whether anyone reads literary journals besides the contributors’ moms. Why yes! The audience also includes glue sniffers, inveterate magazine clippers, insomniacs, MFAs who went through the mandatory “How to read literary journals for life” seminar, and of course snarky literary bloggers.
• I’m truly hoping that this is a typo, but if it isn’t, it looks like men who are literary and unattractive. The daily five mile runs begin tomorrow.
• Actress Joan Allen took to iambic pentameter like a fish to water. Next up: haiku cadences!
• An artist’s invaluable piece, valued at £42,500, has been stolen by some cultural visigoth. Or perhaps the thief was just thirsty. The piece, after all, was a two-liter bottle filled with ice. No doubt that Wayne Hill will have to tap (no pun intended) into his creative energies quite hard to reproduce this masterpiece. Of course, if you give me half of Hill’s price, I’d be happy to serve up my artistic angst. And I’d even outdo Hill by putting a Post-It on the bottle that reads: “CAUTION: ICE INSIDE.”
• Do people know the real Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
• Leaf Books, a Welsh publishing company, hopes to corner the cafe and train station market by offering short stories in book form. Each story will be 4,000 words long. Unfortunately, genre ghettoization will be in play. Each book will be “color-coded by genre.” No word yet on whether the books will be drinking from separate fountains.
• It looks like the new Harry Potter book isn’t available yet in Spanish, French or German — thereby deflating the hearts of children everywhere. You see? The Harry Potter books do bring people together. Thank you, Ms. Rowling, for all the tears!
• Biographer Bernice Galansky Kert (The Hemingway Women) has passed on. She was 81.
• And James Patterson has become so comfortable that he’s now mining his material from the windows of his $5.2 million Palm Peach home. His next book is Lifeguard and contains such zingers as “It doesn’t rain in Palm Beach, it Perriers.” Product placement and a noun-to-verb transition that didn’t need to happen. Way to go, James!

Okay, everything’s good with Bloglines. Not so good with Sage. If anyone has any problems, please report them here. Name your RSS feeder of choice, the specific message you’re getting and I’ll do my best to fix it.

Okay, I think I’ve killed the old template. It apparently cropped up last night. And the new feed (in the old feed) is working. Please report any and all problems here. This site should look the way it should now. (I hope!)

Even though all of the comment has been imported into WordPress, I am still contending with the old MT reference points. Movable Type would not permit me to utilize a script that would generate the rediects for the 3,000 or so posts that are here. So I have left the old permalinks there and they also exist here.

Please report any and all problems here. And I’ll try to accommodate.

Okay, bear with me as we get things squared away. It appears that I lost my entire blogroll. I have a backup somewhere. So I will restore this as soon as I can. In the meantime, please let me know if you encounter any problems.

Due to forthcoming (and long overdue) events, you may or may not have to resubscribe to the feed (although it’s looking more like the former). I apologize for this. I am trying to figure out how to presere the feed as it stands so there will be no major hiccups. But I wanted to give you the head’s up. The good news is that you will soon have several feed formats to choose from. More to come.

[UPDATE: Yup. Definitely not going to happen. You’re going to have to resubscribe. The (currently nonexistent/should exist by Wednesday or Thursday night) new feeds will probably be this one for RSS and this one for Atom. Apologies for the inconvenience. I don’t know if redirecting will help, but I will try that for the existing subscribers.]

I had hoped to get to the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch this week. But I appear to be, once again, time-challenged. But congratulations to Maud for scoring a review.

Posting will be light over the next day, as I work on a few things on multiple fronts. Including this front.

In fact, it suddenly occurs to me that the notion of “multiple fronts” seems a contradiction in terms. How, for example, would multiple fronts apply when considering a full frontal nudity scene? In this case, there can be only one front. Even if you surgically implanted additional scrotums and nipples onto your body, it would still be only one front. Unless you could somehow be in two bodies at the same time while observing a partner or performer who was full frontal nude. In which case, the performer or the partner would be “multiple full frontal nude,” but completely unaware of the preternatural out-of-body experience that would make this term of art applicable not to the partner or performer, who is going to this remarkably enjoyable trouble of doing a “full frontal nude” and yet unable to enjoy this sensation in plural form.

In any event, it gets me too aroused just thinking about this. So for now, I’ll say tata.

[UPDATE: And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention David Kipen’s most recent column, where he responds to readers who quibbled over his Harry Potter and the Half-Prince review (including one death threat) and identifies the qualities of a critic.]

A rudimentary site for the Bat Segundo Show is now up. More to come.

Sarah has an interesting post about mass market paperback ghettoization. She writes:

But sometimes, it makes sense for a writer to be published in mass market PBO. Especially if they haven’t been heard from in some time. After the jump, I’ll talk of two writers being re-introduced using a marketing strategy that’s worked well in romance and might prove useful for mysteries as well.

She points to Paul Levine and John Ramsey Miller, among many others, as examples. And while Sarah’s dealing specifically with mysteries, I should point out that if it’s an author’s intention of being read, the mass market paperback route might yield better results than a hardcover or even a TPB — assuming, of course, that a regular audience picking up a book at an airport is the audience. Which begs the question: Is it viable for a literary title (say, a midlister) to be released in mass market paperback format? Might today’s publishers be losing a younger audience by not releasing their hot literary titles in MMP?

Beyond this, the most immediate example of an author using the MMP route that comes to mind is Gregory McDonald, whose Fletch books were released solely in paperback and drew an audience this way. (And in an entirely unrelated note, McDonald used the series format to jump around in sequence. The limitations of Fletch, for example, being in Rio with $3 million forced him to think creatively about Fletch’s aftermath.)

International Herald Tribune: “A statement Friday said that Menezes’ ‘clothing and his behavior at the station added to their suspicions,’ apparently referring to reports that he was wearing a bulky jacket on a summer day.”

Wired:”Cell phones know whom you called and which calls you dodged, but they can also record where you went, how much sleep you got and predict what you’re going to do next….People should not be too concerned about the data trails left by their phone, according to Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. ‘The location data and billing records is protected by statute, and carriers are under a duty of confidentiality to protect it,’ Hoofnagle said.”

Shurrrrrrrrrrrrrre, Hoofnagle. And the Patriot Act wasn’t just extended for another ten years. And there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like you to buy.

Slate: “The Kite Runner — Do I really have to read it?”

This article — did you really have to write it?