New Strip Club Laws / The Wheel is the 41st Best College Bar in America / More Coverage of Franzen's New Novel

Pitchweekly has an important piece on their website regarding the strict new laws that went into effect at Missouri strip clubs over the weekend:

"As club owners understand it -- and as they'll likely be telling their employees tonight -- dancers will have to be dressed in a manner that covers any area of the breast that dips below the areola. They'll also have to make sure that none of their butts or cracks are showing."

Readers, we're pretty sure this completely ruins the very purpose of strip clubs.

The best part of the article is a series of photographs showing what likely is or isn't acceptable in terms of stripper attire. The following photo is accompanied by this caption: "As far as her posterior goes, if she was dressed this way, again, she'd be in danger of breaking the law. You'll note the butt-cleavage at the top." (Chip: "You don't have to tell me to note the 'butt-cleavage.' I totally noted it.").




















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We were remiss last week in not mentioning that The Wheel also received a ranking on Complex.com's list of America's 50 Best College Bars. It clocks in at #41:

"Two words: Pizza and Drunks. A must-visit if you ever find yourself in Lawerence. Want to know a secret? The pizza isn't even that good, you're just drunk."

The site also forgot to mention that Pizza Pete offers free slices to girls that show him their titties, or so we've heard. Also, the site should probably learn how to spell the name of our town.


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If you're a serious reader of American fiction, you'll be in line tomorrow morning to pick up your copy of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, the long-awaited follow-up to The Corrections. And if you're a pseudo-serious reader of American fiction who buys whatever gets pimped on NPR and have been hearing stories about how Obama received an advance copy of Freedom weeks ago, you'll also be in line (though you'll almost certainly end up using the book as a doorstop, perhaps to replace your current doorstop: DFW's Infinite Jest).

But is Freedom fully worthy of landing Franzen a spot on the cover of Time as THE great American novelist of our era.

Let's see what yesterday's NY-Times review says:

"Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,” like his previous one, “The Corrections,” is a masterpiece of American fiction."

Well, there you go. But what makes Franzen so important? His achivement, according to the Times, is that he has "cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and inserted in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism." There goes your hipster readership, Franzen! If there's one thing we dislike, it's "authentic humanism."

Chip: "I might still give it a chance, IF it has a lot of sex in it?"

As it turns out, it does:

"Assaultive sex reverberates through “Freedom,” and why not? Sex is the most insistent of the “personal liberties,” and for Franzen the most equalizing. One is at a loss to think of another male American writer so at ease with ­— that is, so genuinely curious about — the economy of female desire: the pull and tug of attraction and revulsion, the self-canceling wants."

Our feminist readers: "Male American writers can never understand the economy of our desire, and should not try."

Let's end with an excerpt. Here's a passage regarding "a materialistic tease captured by Franzen in all her narcissism":

“She gave Joey a once-over head to toe, the way a person might confirm that a product she’d ordered had arrived in acceptable condition, and then removed her hand luggage from the seat beside her and­ — a little reluctantly, it seemed — pulled the iPod wires from her ears.”

Chip: "What makes Franzen a genius is that he understands that young people wear Ipods."