Extra Classic at Love Garden! / The LC's Book Club Reads Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad!

Larryville's hipster parents were upset last Friday because they couldn't take their troublesome hipster babies to the Extra Classic gig at the TapRoom (which isn't very child-friendly, unlike, say, The Pig). But those same parents were ecstatic last night when Extra Classic played an in-store evening "matinee" at Love Garden. It's fun to imagine the exchanges between parent and child going on in Larryville yesterday: "Honey, would you like to go with mommy and daddy to hear the rockin' dub of Adrianne Verhoeven's new band?" "No, I want ice cream!" "Shut up, sweetheart! You love dub music, and this will be extra loud!" As we all waited (an extra hour) for the gig to begin, the children had a good time chasing the Love Garden kitties around while their parents compared notes on child-rearing. Don't worry, though, readers, because they ARE responsible parents: when the band finally fired up, we witnessed several (mildly) concerned mommies and daddies shoving earplugs and balled-up pieces of tissue into their children's sensitive ears.

But how was the band? Well, very good. Their "reverb-soaked combination of dub and rock" (interweb) provides a nice backing for Dri's sultry, smoky vocals. We almost didn't even miss The Anniversary for a little while.

Verdict: three out of four Hamm's (because that's the official beer of Love Garden).

A chorus of non-hipsters: "But would it really kill them to start within at least 45 minutes of the published showtime? I mean, it's not like another band was playing before them or anything."

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Like every other literary hipster obsessed with all things rock music and post-modern, we're excited to read Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. But does this week's front page New York Times Book Review give away a bit too much:

"The book starts with Sasha, a kleptomaniac, who works for Bennie, a record executive, who is a protégé of Lou who seduced Jocelyn who was loved by Scotty who played guitar for the Flaming Dildos, a San Francisco punk band for which Bennie once played bass guitar (none too well), before marrying Stephanie who is charged with trying to resurrect the career of the bloated rock legend Bosco who grants the sole rights for covering his farewell “suicide tour” to Stephanie’s brother, Jules Jones, a celebrity journalist who attempted to rape the starlet Kitty Jackson, who one day will be forced to take a job from Stephanie’s publicity mentor, La Doll, who is trying to soften the image of a genocidal tyrant because her career collapsed in spectacular fashion around the same time that Sasha in the years before going to work for Bennie was perhaps working as a prostitute in Naples where she was discovered by her Uncle Ted who was on holiday from a bad marriage, and while not much more will be heard from him, Sasha will come to New York and attend N.Y.U. and work for Bennie before disappearing into the desert to sculpture and raise a family with her college boyfriend, Drew, while Bennie, assisted by Alex, a former date of Sasha’s from whom she lifted a wallet, soldiers on in New York, producing musicians (including the rediscovered guitarist Scotty) as the artistic world changes around him with the vertiginous speed of Moore’s Law."

If you still want to read it after that summary (and the point of the reviewer, by the way, is that plot is virtually irrelevant to Egan's "remarkable fiction"), we'll join you, as we could use some new LC book club members. We're especially excited about the book's 78-page reproduction of a Power-Point presentation!