On Monday, I received my copy of DNOTS. If you haven't followed the story behind this, it's a book of photography by David Lynch that was supposed to be accompanied by a CD of music by Dangermouse and Sparklehorse with a host of other hip collaborators (Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, Jason Lytle of Grandaddy, etc.) Something happened, though, and it turned out there was some sort of impending legal quagmire involving EMI that prompted the following from Dangermouse:

"All copies will be clearly labeled: ‘For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.’ Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the recorded music for Dark Night Of The Soul without fear of being sued by EMI."

Weird. Anyways, around the time this was all going down, I decided to pull the trigger and order a copy of the book. I figured it would probably be an awesome book of photos plus it's a bit of a fetish thing, collecting objets d'art with these weird connections to pop culture. In other words, I'm a sucker: check this out:

• Cost of book: USD $50 (reasonable)
• Cost of shipping the book via UPS: USD $17.59
• Cost of evil UPS's customs brokerage fee: CAD $33.81
• Total: CAD $112.30

So yeah, fuck. Probably a bad call on my part. Notably, most of that cost was due to the arseholes at UPS and I should have seen that coming, but such is life. However, the book is pretty cool, so I thought I'd share some pictures for anyone who's thinking about spending twice the cost of the book on ordering the book. Not of the pictures inside, or anything, but of the whole kit:

DNOTS in its packaging. Yes, it's sitting on my bed, which I didn't make that day. Um. Sorry?

Warning sticker: Awesome, as advertised. I need to figure out how to get it off the plastic.

Full-sized poster: My room will look like Austin in no time flat.

One-sixty-five: Does this make me an early adopter? Or just a huge sucker. Maybe the book will be worth something some day...

CD-R: Looks pretty slick! So if I somehow stumble across an MP3 (heh) or FLAC (pretty please) version of the album, I'll be able to burn it and it'll be just like the real thing! OH and at least I probably dodged the Canadian blank media levy on this CD-R. Win?