Gin pushcarts!?

- Daytrotter has a most excellent live session with Death Cab for Cutie, with several songs off of the much-hyped Narrow Stairs, due via Atlantic on May 13. I like Ben Gibbard’s explanation of Styrofoam Plates:

This song, off of The Photo Album, is a scathing indictment of the things that oftentimes go unsaid in moments that matter the most.

- Paste, always laying on the snark, reluctantly refers you to Coldplay’s new site to download “Violet Hill,” the first single off of the terribly-named Viva La Vida. Check it out, I guess:

Finally, the website reveals the Viva la Vida album cover, which confirms another important Coldplay magical power: the ability to spray-paint French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, in the name of music!

- Matt Nathanson was Paste’s video of the day yesterday. Check it out.

- via kottke: Gin, Television and Social Surplus. Clay Shirky considers how the internet has replaced television - all for the better. Among the highlights include comparing Desperate Houswives to a “cognitive heat sink” that dillutes real thought, and this revelation:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. 

Gin pushcarts!? Please bring them back! 

- Gawker questions the absurdity of an absurdist philosopher’s prank/act of self expression/douchey move.

[The iPhone is coming to Canada. Thanks to Gizmodo for the image.]