Hipster Pick of the Day: New Pornographers / The Boys Book Club Reads "Super Sad True Love Story"

Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers contains so many excellent and quirky songwriters (Bejar, Newman, Case!) and offers so many feats of harmony that hipster heads threaten to explode at the very thought of them, much less witnessing the live experience. Plus, every horny music geek has had a longtime raging boner for redheaded chanteuse Neko Case, and many of us will no doubt spend this afternoon milling about Love Garden, hoping that Case might wander in to browse and end up taking us back to her room to make sweet love to us and sing us Spanish techno before tonight's Liberty Hall show.

Chip: "My second choice from the group would be Kathryn Calder."

Pitchfork gives their new album, Together, a respectable 7.3 with a few criticisms:

"Case, despite taking the spotlight on the stand-out tracks "Crash Years" and "My Shepherd" and being present through most of the songs, is mostly under-utilized here."

We would never under-utilize her, if you catch our meaning.

See you at the show.



















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If there's one thing we love, it's a good dystopian satire, so we'll be in line tomorrow to purchase our copy of Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, a novel with a title so precious you'd think Dave Eggers had written it.

Publishers Weekly says:

"Shteyngart (Absurdistan) presents another profane and dizzying satire, a dystopic vision of the future as convincing—and, in its way, as frightening—as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's also a pointedly old-fashioned May-December love story, complete with references to Chekhov and Tolstoy... Narrating in alternate chapters—Lenny through old-fashioned diary entries, Eunice through her online correspondence—the pair reveal a funhouse-mirror version of contemporary America: terminally indebted to China, controlled by the singular Bipartisan Party (Big Brother as played by a cartoon otter in a cowboy hat), and consumed by the superficial. Shteyngart's earnestly struggling characters—along with a flurry of running gags—keep the nightmare tour of tomorrow grounded. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart's best yet."

An epistolary novel with Chekhov references AND cartoon otters? Count us in!

In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt from the NYTimes (we like the part about "twentysomething buttocks"):

"And when the earth expires, as it surely must, I will leave it for a new earth, greener still but with fewer allergens; and in the flowering of my own intelligence some 1032 years hence, when our universe decides to fold in on itself, my personality will jump through a black hole and surf into a dimension of unthinkable wonders, where the things that sustained me on Earth 1.0 — tortelli lucchese, pistachio ice cream, the early works of the Velvet Underground, smooth, tanned skin pulled over the soft Baroque architecture of twentysomething buttocks — will seem as laughable and infantile as building blocks, baby formula, a game of “Simon says do this.”

Chip: "I'm moved, honestly moved. And more than a little aroused."