Is "Lawrence Laundry" the New Style Scout? / Literary Pick of the Winter: Murakami's IQ84 / Scenester Pick of the Day: tUnE-yArDs

Readers, we know how much you all loved snarking about Style Scout each week, so we're hoping the new column called "Lawrence Laundry" (which debuts today in LJ-World's "Go" Magazine!) will fill that void. It's written by Ali Edwards and here's the mission statement:

"In this column, we’ll be keeping it local: local people, local clothes, local style. I’ll be diving headlong into what people in Lawrence wear and why they wear it by featuring local humanitarians who “look good” while they “do good,” combing through local thrift stores to find hidden treasures and chasing down Lawrence fashionistas on the street to find out where they got their clothes (and where you can find similar looks in town).

Lawrence locals are public-spirited and well-dressed with personal beliefs that are tightly kept and loudly spoken. Our little liberal-minded blip in a beautifully barren state teems and boils with a zest unlike that of our conservative counterparts. The style of locals has a certain honesty and charm to it that seems forged on the coasts."

In our experience, humanitarians are rarely stylish, but this column may be worth monitoring and we hope to see some of you thrift store "fashionistas" in there soon. Check it out here .



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Those of you keeping up with the hijinks of the PBR Book Club blog (currently reading: Ready Player One) are no doubt getting excited that we'll be devoting both December and January to Harumi Murakami's new 925 page IQ84. The reviews are in over at the NY-Times:


"...trust me when I say I appreciate a steamy scene between a female cop and a female assassin as much as the next guy (arguably more)."

Chip: "Doubtful."

Ultimately, the reviewer is baffled yet affected by the novel:

"By every standard metric, it is gravely flawed. But, I admit, standard metrics are difficult to apply to Murakami. It’s tempting to write that out of five stars, I’d give this book two moons. In fact, though, I’d give it back what it gave me: an entire universe, all of it far out, some of it dazzling, whole swaths of it just empty space and dark matter... It’s a credit to Murakami’s mammoth talent that “1Q84,” for all its flaws, got to me more than most decent books I’ve read this year, and lingered with me far longer: a paper moon, yes, but by a real star."

Readers, this book is so large that we recommend you push it to our book club meetings in a wheelbarrow full of iced-down PBR.

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Tonight brings the long-awaited, rescheduled tUnE-yArDs show to the Jackpot. If you haven't seen tUnE-yArDs before, rest assured there's plenty of weirdness besides just the strange capitalizations of the band name. Will we be out till 2:00 am on a rainy Monday in Larryville? Definitely not. But if someone wants to write a review for our blog, we'd love it!