Tuesday, August 16, 2011

A New Installment of Our Picks and Pans With Firkin Tapping, Kittycat Narrators, House of Holes, Brownback, and a BARRRextravaganza!

Firkin Tapping of the Week:

We love a good firkin tapping, so we'll see you on Thursday at 8:00 at the Burger Stand, where a keg of Tallgrass's new "Chicks With Hips" will be tapped. The innuendoes practically write themselves.

















"HEAVENPARTY" Event of the Week:

Later on Thursday you can see a "BARRRextravaganza" at the Granada, in which BARRR hosts a HeavenParty (a live music installation and performance to be recorded for an ADD podcast). Rumors are there might be BARRRlesque show element to the evening. The dude IS prone to streaking, after all.


Adorable Indie Film of the Week:

We've been waiting a long time to see a film narrated by a cute little kitty cat, and indie auteur Miranda July has finally delivered. Her acclaimed new film, The Future, arrives at KC's Tivoli on Friday. Entertainment Weekly gives it an A- :

"The movie is framed by narration from Paw Paw...(voiced by the movie's writer-director-star, Miranda July), with only those witty-bitty paw-paws visible... [July} weaves in performance art... and Internet culture...And she creates perfect images of supernatural everydayness. A little girl literally digs herself into a hole. The moon speaks."

If this only had a soundtrack by the Transmittens, it would be the twee-est thing ever created. We'll see you at the Tiv.


Dirty Book of the Week:

Yes, we've already pondered Nicholas Baker's House of Holes: A Book of Raunch, but when a literary novel garners so much press for being spectacularly filthy, it's naturally going to receive a lot of our attention. It's reviewed by one of our favorite writers, Sam Lipsyte (no slouch in the raunch department himself) on the cover of this week's NY Times Review of Books.

"House of Holes," it seems, is an erotic theme park which features “pornsucker ships” (which fly over American cities and suck up the bad porn)...“crotchal transfers"... “mastur­boats” ...“groanrooms” [and a] “squat line” organized for the pleasure of female guests" (NY-Times).

According to Lipsyte, the book's "structure seems most connected to the golden age of porn films. Most chapters include a distinct scene that culminates in ejaculation, and like the best examples of that era, Baker’s absurd comic fantasies are adorned with dialogue that gathers energy both from its stiltedness and from its wacky nomenclature."

Chip: "This reviewer fails to answer an important question: did most chapters culminate with an ejaculation from the reader?"

But is Baker up to something beyond literary titillation? Perhaps. Lipsyte says: "we get disturbing flashes that smartly undercut the exuberant innocence of an apparent utopia where nobody feels exploited and everybody gets off. The real humor, and sadness, emerges from the impossibility of this fantasyland...[but] Baker isn’t haranguing us about the evils of sexual abandon, and his approach is the opposite of smug moralism. In fact, the brief, beautiful chapter that closes the book delivers us to a universal zone of pleasure, sexual initiation and renewal."

Sadly, we have not yet read the book ourselves. There are several holds ahead of us at the library, and we're more than a little concerned about how sticky the pages may be by the time we receive it.

Read Lipsyte's full review here .

Anniversary of the Week:

Pitchfork turns 15 this week. Love it or hate it (and, either way, we KNOW you look at it) has any media outlet been a more influential hipster-tastemaker in the last 15 years? Doubtful.

The site is celebrating with a lot of hip pieces this week, including a treasure trove of stuff from the archives that they have decided deserves a second look, such as "My Favorite 10 Songs by the Rock Group Hall & Oates by Ben Gibbard" (2003) and "Nihon No Hardcore: Japanese Underground Prog by Dominique Leone" (2001).

Pitchfork-Approved Local Show of the Week:

Brooklyn's The Men will hit the stage at the Replay tonight. Look at these excerpts from Pitchfork's recent July review of their new album (it gets an 8.2), which proves that Pitchfork-criticism is still delivering the bombardment of musical references that we love so well!

"Listening to Leave Home feels a lot like living inside of Michael Azerrad's 1980s indie-rock tome Our Band Could Be Your Life, variously bringing to mind Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.'s SST stints, Sub Pop-vintage Mudhoney, and Touch and Go-era Butthole Surfers (who surely would approve of a song title like "Shittin' With the Shah").

and this...

"...the Men's dual affinities for brute punk-rock force and bad-trip psychedelia fuse together to brilliant effect, with a searing series of songs that refuse to relent even as they encroach on the five-minute mark-- in particular, the storming "Bataille" suggests Sonic Youth's "Hey Joni" as recorded by Funhouse-era Stooges, while the closing "Night Landing" effectively blurs the line between krautrock and punk in fine Neu! '75-style."


Local Dick Move of the Week:

After initially supporting it, Governor Brownback ultimately rejected "a $31.5 million grant from the federal government to implement a part of health care reform designed to allow Kansans to get the best insurance coverage possible" (LJ-World).

Brownback's explanation: "Every state should be preparing for fewer federal resources, not more. To deal with that reality, Kansas needs to maintain maximum flexibility. That requires freeing Kansas from the strings attached to the Early Innovator Grant.”

Brownback's office then refused to answer the LJ-World's queries about what strings were actually attached.

Here's Brownback demonstrating how he's slowly crushing the hopes and dreams of Larryville progressives with each passing day.





















1 comment:

The Real Chip said...

He's miming the Kansas cock size here, Nog. Get your signs right