Spot that Kickball Fan / Local Kickstarter Project of the Week: White Flight / We Read Nicholson Baker's House of Holes: A Book of Raunch

We don't attend the Game of the Week very often, but when we do we're always a little taken aback by the passion of normally-apathetic scenesters when they watch their friends play a children's game. On this evening, Pita Pit proved just as dastardly as ever. But, as always, the best action was in the stands, where (at one point) a very stoned girl chased a large frog but squealed when she touched it, leading it to plunge off the stands to an almost certain death. Chip cried a little.

Here's a photo of a fellow standing next to us, shouting something about towels that we didn't understand because we don't know the customs. First person to identify him wins a PBR (click to enlarge).



















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We love to support important local Kickstarter projects and a new one has now appeared that just may be the most important yet, if not ever. That's right: White Flight is making a new album, which will later become a film, and they (or should we say Justin) needs your help:

"All of the donations generated here will first pay for the production of a new album of sounds. This will be the genesis egg from which a film of great beauty will eventually be spawned, a documentary about UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS here in this critical time of major earth transformation and human awakening, as we shift into a new way of perceiving what we have previously been calling our "reality".


Go to the Kickstarter page to read a full explanation of the project's goals. Here's one of them:

"I believe soon we will remember how a simple harmony sung by just a few human voices, energized with a powerfully coherent laser-like intention, could move a giant boulder or even cleanse an entire ocean."

For a donation of $5555, Justin will be "your guide and translator on a 2 week journey through ancient Peru." He's not kidding. But so far no one has donated $5555. But the project does have $40 bucks from backers, and we only assume that our generous readers will soon donate much more. But don't wait: the project needs $12,555 by Oct. 2 to move forward.

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Our most-anticipated book of the summer hits shelves tomorrow: Nicholson Baker's House of Holes: A Book of Raunch. The notoriously sex-obsessed Baker (remember his novel VOX, which consists entirely of a phonesex conversation) is back with a book that's been rumored to push the boundaries of filth to their breaking points (in a literary fashion, of source).

Let's take a look at a few excerpts from an LA-Times review (with cameo comments from some of our former LC writers).

"Indeed, it's a bona fide filth-fest, so unrelentingly graphic that there's not much I can quote from it in this review."

Chip: "Boner fide, eh? I'm sold already."

"For all its lighthearted smuttiness, then, "House of Holes" comes with an inadvertent subtext: Has erotica become a nostalgic art?"

Dr. C: "Sold. This is a question I often pose myself."

"Rhumpa... seduces a sex monster, the manifestation of all the bad pornography in the world."

Dr. X: "Sold. I've waited all my life for a book about a sex monster that symbolizes bad porn."

"...it's a throwback... to an era — Kenneth Patchen's "Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer" (1945) and Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's "Candy" (1958) can be read as antecedents — in which erotic literature was often written to subvert the bounds of the conventional, using humor."

Richard: "Sold. That's exactly the purpose of Chip's erotic persona on this blog."

But does this book have any room for romance or does it simply exist in a "realm of sensuality so over-the-top as to render desire nearly ridiculous, a circus act of body parts and dirty words and flat-out friction, until the universe becomes "a giant collaborative moan?"

As a matter of fact, it DOES have romance?

"In one of the book's most moving passages, a man named Cardell pursues a woman down a beach, walking in her footprints in the sand. "With each step he took," Baker writes, "he learned more about the arch of her foot, the ball of her foot, and her small, strong toes"; when he finally catches up with her, he says, "It was the most intimate experience. Did you feel my feet pressing against your feet?"

Our female readers: "Sold. That shit is more romantic than any six chick-lit novels combined."

Read the full review here .