Oct 7, 2011:
@ChieftanMews: 1/10: Was/Is this all a w.a.s.t.e. of your/our time? Stay detuned.. .. .. .. .. .␄
This was the last of the #10 series of tweets from Chieftan Mews sent out each Thursday for 10 weeks. On the same day as this tweet Mew’s sent a second message stating that he was ‘free’ (Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.) assuming that the quiz had lead to him escaping from the Ziggurat from where he’d been trapped over the previous months.
w.a.s.t.e stands for We Await Silent Tristenro’s Empire and is the name for Radiohead’s official online store and fanclub since 1992. According to Follow Me Around it is from a 1966 novel written by Thomas Pynchon titled The Crying Of Lot 49.
Wiki gives a brief description of the book as:
The shortest of Pynchon’s novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero (or Tristero). The former actually existed, and was the first firm to distribute postal mail; the latter is Pynchon’s invention. The novel is often classified as a notable example of postmodern fiction.
Time included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005
The novel follows Oedipa Maas, a Californian housewife who becomes entangled in a convoluted historical mystery when her ex-lover dies and designates her the co-executor of his estate. The catalyst of Oedipa’s adventure is a set of stamps that may have been used by a secret underground postal delivery service, the Trystero (or Tristero).
According to the historical narrative that Oedipa pieces together during her travels around the San Francisco Bay Area, the Trystero was defeated by Thurn und Taxis – a real postal system – in the 18th century but went underground and continued to exist into Oedipa’s present day, the 1960s. Their mailboxes are disguised as regular waste-bins, often displaying their slogan W.A.S.T.E., an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire, and their symbol, a muted post horn.
( Source: Wikipedia )
Amusingly according to a interview with Thom and Jonny in 1995 the band started their own church titled ‘The Holy Church of Waste’ while on tour in the US.
Jonny: (cutting Thom off) No, we’re reverends…..
Thom: (Cutting Jonny off) Oh yeah, we’re reverends…we’re all reverends.
Jonny: We started our own church.
Thom: The Holy Church of Waste.
Jonny: Well, we can legally marry people and bury people in 13 American states, including California.
Thom: So if anybody needs, you know, to get married, we can do it for them now. (to Jonny) How much did it cost us? Twenty dollars?
Jonny: Ten dollars or something. So we are going to conduct a mass community-style wedding at our LA show, that’s tomorrow.
You can read the rest of the interview on Follow Me Around here.
While we do not yet know if this was ‘just a waste of our time’ on November 9 Radiohead announced on Dead Air Space that they would be releasing a Bluray/DVD edition of The King of Limbs – From the Basement with Supercollider ‘added as a bonus track’.
We’d love to hear what answers other people sent to Mew’s ‘quiz’!
Let us know in the comments or email muggs@ersmenoo.com.
