Sunday Scenester Guide: Kickball, Foodies, Shakespeare, Woodsman, and Tape Deck Mountain / Chip's Biography, Vol. III

It's a busy Sunday in Larryville, and there's something for everyone on tap. For the scenesters, there's kickball ("The Chalmersiz’ Captain is very confident, so confident that he claims he will kick his first ever left footed home run against the Satanists From Outer Space."--Coach Billy Gay Cyrus over at the KVKL blog ) For the foodies, there's the 2nd annual River City Cookoff at Abe and Jake's (with chefs from Esquina and 715 participating, we're hoping for funky tacos and fried rabbit legs). And for the literary types, there might even be a Lawrence Shakespeare Festival performing King Lear at Watson Park. We say "might" because it's barely listed anywhere (aside from the Channel 6 site ),and surely a family-friendly event like this would receive at least a modicum of actual publicity from L.com or the LJ-World, right?

As far as music goes, we'll be seeing The Jenny Mules at the Replay matinee, because we like the name, and will let the hipsters hit the Jackpot later on for Woodsman and Tape Deck Mountain.

We'll leave you with these two unintentionally hilarious Pitchfork quotes to whet your appetite.

Regarding Woodsman (we used this quote before when they were here in April): "...their sound is naturalistic and reminiscent of some of the more outré acts from the late, great Jewelled Antler Collective, who would sometimes rely only on field recordings and scraped-pinecone sounds to evoke nature's aura."

Regarding Tape Deck Mountain: "...the band swaps a perfectly tenuous, lumbering 90-second stretch of feedback-slathered post-rock for three and a half minutes of corroded dialogue over an airy woodwind suite. Looped backwards. So it's not to say that Tape Deck Mountain don't have potential..."


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A new Sunday tradition on the LC: another installment of Chip's biography.

"Without the stern value system of the country, Chip's first years in Lawrence were naturally a time of wild sexual experimentation (mostly by himself in a small, dark off-campus apartment). He tried several different lifestyles in college, first joining a frat, where he loved the company of the drunken, nubile sorority girls who hung out there (they found his love of tennis to be "cute" but they preferred fucking the basketball players). However, Chip soon found himself simultaneously frightened and attracted by the latent homosexuality of the frathouse, and decided to move into a loft instead and "do art" for awhile. In this period, he grew his hair long, dressed in black, and spent afternoons at the Bourgeois Pig, smoking clove cigarettes and reading Camus and drinking vermouth.* But after a while, he sensed this bohemian, intellectual lifestyle was not for him either. So he cut his hair, donned a hooded sweatshirt, and began to settle into the role we know today, presenting himself as a sort of poet/athlete, a man of the country endlessly fascinated by a city full of hot ass yet slightly disapproving of its ways (such as the debauchery he occasionally unwillingly witnesses at the Replay, which is exactly the sort of place his preachers used to warn him about). Today's Chip is a far cry from the young man we met in Fort Scott, who wanted only to escape. Now he longs to go back to the farm, drive a tractor, chew tobacco, and settle down with a cornfed country gal with child-bearing hips. In the cool of summer evenings, they will relax in the porch swing with a glass of iced tea, surrounded by their eleven children, and Chip will recite Housman's "When I Was One and Twenty."


*Name that hipster music reference and win a free PBR!