The Boys Consider Today's Local Larryville Protests / Also, The Death of Hipster Culture? / And Pitchfork Takes on Pearl Jam!

Progressives love to rally for the necessity of health-care reform almost as much as conservatives love to show up and yell about "death panels," and today offers two great opportunities for local liberals to showcase some witty signs and show their unwavering support for Obama.

A "Big Insurance: Sick of It" rally is slated outside City Hall at 6:00, while other liberals with a more interesting sense of humor are rallying across the street in an event called "“Billionaires For WealthCare Kansas." Jo Anderson, local head of Moveon.org, describes the satirical aims of this rally as follows: " “We have got a lot of people who are dressing up as billionaires. Of course, they don’t want health care reform because that will not protect their billions. So they want wealth care reform.” (LJ-World).

Chip: "It's going to be funny if some real billionaires show up believing this is a serious rally."

Richard: "I'm going to take this opportunity to dress up as Scrooge McDuck, because I've been wanting to do that anyway."

---

For those of you who are also "friends" with Richard on Facebook, you may have noticed our recent discussion of a piece by Christian Lorentzen in TimeOut New York called "Why the hipster must die: A modest proposal to save New York cool," which uses an interesting "hipster as zombie" metaphor to explore how hipsters have consumed and destroyed the authenticity of various subcultures in their quest for "cool."

Among the article's points is a classification of hipsters into two major types: the Sweet and the Vicious.

"We know that there are Sweet hipsters, who practice the sort of irony you can take home to meet the parents, and there are those Vicious hipsters, who practice the form of not-quite-passive aggression called snark."

Richard: "I believe the LC offers a good mix of these two."

Check out the full piece here:

http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/features/4840/why-the-hipster-must-die#ixzz0RrJLmzQU


---

And speaking of snark, let's take a look at Pitchfork's 4.6 drubbing of Pearl Jam's new album Backspacer just to get our three rabid Pearl Jam fans riled up (pay attention, Beth, Dr. X, and Cl.thier!).

"The opening four songs kick-start and then keep up a certain pleasing level of propulsiveness, with the goofily fast-and-loose "Gonna See My Friend" (hey, is that an actual bassline I hear?) and Thin Lizzy-ish double entendres of "Johnny Guitar" being particularly listenable. Sooner or later, however, you remember these guys wouldn't know a melody if it bit them in the ass."

and this:

"Backspacer, the group's ninth studio album, seems to suggest in its tossed-off 37 minutes that Pearl Jam have no greater concern and regard for what they do than the rest of the world can muster."

and this:

"Once upon a time this was a group that was on top of the world and yet still took all kinds of bizarre chances, recording shit like lengthy tape experiments and songs about bugs-- often ridiculously self-indulgent, sure, yet always surprising."



Richard: "Exactly! I mean, the most important thing I've heard on record this year is Neko Case's half-hour of frog noises at the end of Middle Cyclone. If Pearl Jam would do stuff like that again, I'd totally give them my hipster-money instead of saving up to buy the new Big Star box-set."