Weekend Scenester Guide / Sonic Bike Lane

The cornerstone of this weekend is The Hips' Replay debut on Saturday evening (in case you don't recall, this is the "supergroup" composed of members of Drakkar Sauna and Fourth of July). Of course, the true scenesters witnessed The Hips' TapRoom debut a few weeks back (see Chewyfally's L.com piece) and have likely moved on to something newer by this point, so you'll be mingling with Larryville's second string of scenesters for the Replay gig. We predict a packed house.

Tonight, Thee Oh Sees take the stage at the Granada. Perhaps you missed them during GarageFest because you were watching something hipper (or, in our case, less hip: we were at the Greenhornes gig).

And the weekend brings two opportunities to see Larryville's newest sketch-comedy show, Loaded for Bear, featuring some of Victor Continental's writers. The shows take place in the Lawrence Arts Center's renovated downstairs theater, and the press material assures us that plenty of booze WILL be available (one could hardly be expected to watch sketch-comedy without it). Will the show feature Victor's patented drinking games, and will it be possible for us to get as quickly hammered and obnoxious as we do at Victor's Liberty Hall shows? We aim to find out.

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And speaking of sketch-comedy, we've become rather enamored with IFC's Portlandia of late, a satiric take on all aspects of Portland hipster/foodie/townie culture (Chip: "And that Carrie Brownstein gives me a bit of a boner, if I'm being honest, although I was always vaguely threatened by her during the Sleater/Kinney days."). But perhaps the greatest and goofiest bit of Portland-news we've discovered recently is not made up by Armisen and Brownstein but is, in fact, a real possibility: the city is proposing a "sonic bike lane" across one of the city's bridges: "The bike lane will be built with concrete grooves that when driven over will play a melody, in this case Simon and Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”

http://www.patspapers.com/story_stack/item/proposed_sonic_bike_path_to_make_portland_groovier/

Why can't Larryville do something important like this (perhaps instead of that lighted pedestrian walkway through the student ghetto)? We'd like a stretch of Mass. Street (ideally in front of the Replay) to be rigged up to play Pavement's "Spit on a Stranger" as we walk by.