At 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, there was a line that started outside the 16th Street BART and stretched down the block. In that line: fans of Radiohead, waiting to get a copy of a 12-page newspaper the band released to hype their new album, “The King of Limbs.”
The newspaper was passed out, for free, at 61 locations around the world. The other location in San Francisco? Haight Street, in front of Amoeba Records. The ink may have smudged off on our fingers, but the carbon-conscious band has promised to purchase enough carbon credits to completely offset the environmental destruction wreaked by printing a newspaper.
The news itself? A little perplexing. From the first section:
The days passed like they do and I just got colder. The cold spread until I was like a sculpture of ice. I didn’t sneeze any more, and if I tried to come it was like a tendril of porcelain. I was a solid man. You could throw rocks at me, and it didn’t hurt at all. I just splintered a little.
Perhaps fortunately, no one noticed and everything carried on being normal and as it should be, all around me. But I was frozen.
So there you have it. The fans were thrilled, and as of press time copies were selling for a lot more than free on eBay.
Also: A few PDFs have been taken down, but last time we checked you could see the whole thing here.