Sunday, February 13, 2011

The LC's Guide to the Grammy Awards / New in Downtown Dining: Pickleman's

Tonight is Grammy night, and the boys are ready. The "Song of the Year" category is especially strong this year, featuring one of the greatest "booty call" songs to be found in the American songbook (Lady Antellebellum's "Need You Now": "It's a quarter after one / I'm a little drunk / And I need you now") as well as the infectious (and likely to be victorious) "Fuck You" by Cee Lo Green (Chip: "I thought it was called "Forget You").

But the most literary of the bunch is Miranda Lambert's "The House That Built Me." Let's unlock the mysteries of this "House":

I know they say you can’t go home again
I just had to come back one last time
Ma’am I know you don’t know me from Adam
But these handprints on the front steps are mine


Richard: "It's a wise move to invoke Thomas Wolfe in the opening line before pulling a clever reversal on Wolfe's sentiment that transitions smoothly into the cliched Biblical allusion likely to be more familiar to Lambert's demographic. The move suggests the tension between our narrator's adult (educated) perspective and the childlike understanding associated with the house. The final line shows that the house is as marked by her (the embedded handprints) as much as her memories are marked by it."

Chip: "In the linking of memory and physical sites, I can't help but think Lambert is drawing on the work of the French historian Pierre Nora and his conception of lieux de memoires, or sites of memory. In the chorus, the speaker promises she "won’t take nothing but a memory /From the house that built me.' The residue of collective family memory remains attached to the house, and the speaker can only exercise the song's unspecified family trauma through physical contact: "I thought if I could touch this place or feel it /This brokenness inside me might start healing." It's a powerful work, but ultimately there's nothing in it that compares to the raw power of Antebellum's 'booty call' song. I've got a boner just thinking about it."

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The Columbia, Missouri based chain Pickleman's Gourmet Cafe, known for its toasted sandwiches, is now open along Mass. Street. Are the boys excited?

Chip: "Look, I'm sure they make a fine toasted sandwich, but I just can't support a Missouri-based business. How do I know the sandwiches aren't made by slave labor?"

For the rest of you, who are slightly less rabid in your anti-Missouri hatred, check out the menu and such here:

http://www.picklemans.com/

8 comments:

Capt Questionable Idea said...

I, for one, will never eat at Pickleman's.
in fact, I pledge to lead a group of local Jayhawker seditionaries that will destroy the storefront after the final whistle in the KU-MU game that on March 5. We will throw bricks through the windows, storm the store emptying the registers and destroying the food coolers after stomping on all the bags of chips--individually, like a child stepping on giant bubble wrap for the ecstatic thrill of the POP. Finally, one and all of us will defecate and micturate throughout the store, leaving a trail of scatological detritus in our wake. After that, we'll be headed down to the Replay for an Abolition Party where my new band, Scatological Detritus, will be born, putting on its first show ever in glorious insurrection while the money from the register will be used to open the bar to all freedom fighting Larryvillains. Come one, come all! We will have freedom!

Local Lardbutt said...

I pledge to lead a group of Jayhawker sedentaries to have some Picklemen's delicacies delivered to an undisclosed E. Lawrence location in order to process it for the next day's defecation.

After consuming them, we'll sit around farting and coming up with reasons why we can't get up off our fat asses to go see the same ole sad hipsters down at the Replay.

townies demand burgers said...

But does Pickleman's serve gourmet burgers? And are their pickles even local? We're bored and will remain across the street at Burger Stand.

Hey is that a pickle said...

or are you just glad to see me?

Capt Picklepoop said...

Lardbutt, great idea.

There would be no better turd left behind in the wake of our destruction than a processed Pickleman toasted sandwich turd. I think I'll take the Italian for a ride. And, since we are recycling Pickleman products, we should probably dedicate a little time during our all out assault on the establishment to drinking all the pickle juice and refilling the pickle jars--pickles and all--with vinegary, salty-sweet micturate. The genius in today's comments is unlike anything found in humble Columbia, Missouri.

pickleback said...

We hear the new boozing trend is a shot of Jamesons followed by a pickle juice chaser. This better be offered at Pickleman's.

If I were a poet, I'd know it said...

My rhyming dictionary has no rhyme for "micturate."

So I just stick with "piss," in all my future compositions.

Laughing Piss-terically said...

It's not my pickels fault: these comments are hilarious!