Richard Looks Ahead to a Historic Hipster Reunion Show / Plus, the Boys Begin a Collaborative Poetry Project!

Richard: "Generally, we hipsters are not a fan of reunion shows. Take the Pixies recent reunion tour, for instance. Sure, the Pixies were a defining band for a lot of us hipsters ("Surfer Rosa changed my life, man"), but that doesn't mean an original fan is going to shell out 40 bucks to see them back onstage, older, fatter, richer, and surrounded by a bunch of younger fans who only recently jumped on the bandwagon. Reunion shows are about nostalgia, and nostalgia is not for hipsters. Hipsters are generally all about the here-and-now, the flavor of the moment. Nostalgia is for aging yuppies shelling out big bucks to see Bruce Springsteen play arenas. Your 'glory days' are over, yuppies! Start listening to 'adult contemporary' and stop trying to be the 'cool dad.' Your kids are never going to understand the importance of the Nebraska album. They're into Avenged Sevenfold and Scary Kids Scaring Kids, and that's understandable, aside from the fact that those bands are awful and your kids will grow up just as boring as you. But, back to the point, there are occasions when reunion shows appeal to hipsters, and that's the reunion of a band (especially a local band) that was never popular to begin with but should have been. And one of those occasions is this week, when PAW hits the Bottleneck on Saturday. For those of you who are uncool, PAW released an album called Dragline on A & M in 93, got some MTV play, and were thought by many to be the next big thing in "grunge" (a movement that revolved as much around flannel shirts and depression as music and which most of today's hipsters now find only slightly less embarrassing than "alt country" but nonetheless okay to celebrate again for one-night only when PAW plays). If you go to this show (and do NOT go to this show if you were not around Lawrence during the heydey of PAW, which rules me out, damn it!), here are some things you might want to say: "It's just sad that Pearl Jam is still around and PAW is all but forgotten" or "Sure, Cobain, wrote some nice tunes, but Mark Hennessey is a better writer, without question."

[Note: There was actually a PAW reunion earlier this summer, at Wakurasa, but it doesn't count, since no self-respecting hipster would have dare attended).


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Inspired by a recent entry, the boys have begun work on some poems centering around Quinton's and their favorite waitresses. All of our readers are poets in one way or another, and we ask you, kind readers, to send us a few verses in the 'comments' section which we can later arrange into a beautiful mosaic celebrating the life, love, and lust that centers around Q's (anything that uses the word "nubile" gets special consideration).