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It appears I departed from this blog many years ago. But today I have been listening to Radiohead's new album, "Moon Shaped Pool," and I felt like I needed to write something down, even if just to mark the occasion for myself.

It's weird: any work of art is a kind of broken conversation in which the artist flings something -- a bit of meaning? -- into the void, trusting that it will be retrieved and that it will signify. When you look at a painting, no pure meaning transfers directly from the painter into your conscious understanding. Instead, you employ your own imagination, intellect, discernment to create your meaning.

Ditto a book, in spite of the illusion that language has intrinsic meaning. The author can pack in all the description, exposition, explanation she wants, but without a reader there are only dead words. This necessarily collaborative feature of art can feel upside down if you think about it enough: In spite of everything an artist brings to his work, it's still the viewer, reader, listener who has the last word. You could say creating and experiencing art involves a kind of power exchange: It is widely understood that "the submissive holds all the power." The artist is Dominant in relationship with the audience, initiating and establishing the terms of engagement. But ultimately inception must submit to perception; the artist is utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of the audience.

Why is listening to Radiohead causing me to think through an obscure theory about audience and perception? I'm not sure, but maybe if I keep writing we can figure it out.

If the artist's vulnerability is key to a power exchange with the audience, this implies a further irony: The better the work is -- the more emotionally exposed, the more honest, the closer to the bone -- the greater the risk, the greater the vulnerability, and thus the greater the audience's power. Shitty, shallow work does not, after all, reveal or expose or risk much of anything, so the audience is just a consumer rather than a collaborator. Listening to "Moon Shaped Pool" I feel a sense of exquisite vulnerability. These songs offer themselves up anxiously in a "low-flying panic attack": Overwhelmingly powerful yet infinitely fragile, they drip quivering into the air around me, their perfection held only by the surface tension.