Stop Day Eve / Local Summer Music Showcase: Hidden Pictures/ And the LC Summer Book Club Returns

It's Stop Day Eve in Larryville, which means that local undergrad scholars will take a rare break from their studies and get drunk and laid. We happened to note some fliers that Quinton's kicked off their festivities a bit early, on Tuesday, with a "Country Club Party" which encouraged attendees to dress as "golf pros and tennis hoes."

Our feminist readers: "They might as well just call it a 'date rape party.'"

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Those of us who are (far) out of that age range will need to look beyond Q's and the Hawk and Brothers for our weekend entertainment.

Friday's Hidden Pictures CD release party at the Replay (with the Dead Girls) looks to be a good bet. We've always found Richard Gintowt and Michelle Sanders adorable (like our own local She and Him!), and their new album Synchronized Sleeping is likely to be our soundtrack of choice for many summer afternoons lounging on our decks in a PBR-stupor.

Listen to (and download!) the new album at their Bandcamp page , which also includes some (adorable) liner notes. A few excerpts:

"Michelle Gaumé Sanders sang, played glockenspiel, and made popcorn... Alan Brandsted wore jellies and played bass on 1, 3, 5, and 7... Pat Tomek played drums on 10, 11, and 12 and engineered vocals and acoustic guitar with the assistance of eight to ten cats... Hannah Jensen played viola on 9 while reeking of Indian food."






















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We're 3/4 of the way through James Hynes' novel Next (which just won the Believer Book Award) and 100% in love with it. The novel covers a day in the life of 50-year old editor Kevin, who flies from Ann Arbor to Austin for an in-and-out job interview and spends the afternoon reflecting on his life and loves in Ann Arbor (Chip: "There's a four page reminiscence of having sex on a porch at an Ann Arbor party which is interspersed and interrupted with contemporary parenthetical references to terrorist attacks: I wasn't sure if my boner was caused by the sex scene or the suspense!").

We submit this passage as one of the best examples we've ever read regarding the decline of a cultural "scene":

"He came to Ann Arbor too late for Tom Hayden at the Daily, for the Black Action Movement strike, for the torching of the ROTC building, for John and Yoko at Crisler Arena, for the first Hash Bash where a state representative fired up a spliff right in front of the A-Squared pig, man. Kevin was half a generation behind the town's heyday, but even so, during his undergraduate days and his years as a waiter and a record store clerk, he caught the scent of it like the last April Fool's whiff of Panama Red. He heard all about it after work from old-timers like McNulty and others, sitting breathless at their every word over pizza in Thanos Lamplighter (gone now too), over a beer at the Del Rio (also gone), or over a plate of fries at the Fleetwood (still there, but not the same), listening to world-weary guys only five years older as if they were veterans of the Ardennes or Guadalcanal" (52-53).

Richard: "This book is really making me reflect on my time in Larryville. What would I do if the Replay closed? Or the Tap?"

Please order your copy of Next at Amazon here