Food Blob: $15 All-U-Can-Eat Crab Balls And How Craig LaBan Is Racist Against Hipsters
· Hot tip: More than 40 restuarants are participating in this Thursday’s “Taste Of Philadelphia” event, and tickets are only 15 bucks — if you pick ‘em up before the day of the event. Then, they go to $30, and suddenly, eating 28 different kinds of crab balls and things wrapped in bacon doesn’t really seem like it’s worth it. [PW]
· The Village Voice‘s “Last Meals”-themed Food Issue was a mid-concept blunder straight outta the books of our local alt-weeklies, sure. (Note to every editor in town: Nobody cares about the clever themes you can squeeze into the inherent advertorial nature of your special issues. Just do them. We’re not dogs here, we take pills willingly. Just do the damn “Food Issue” or “Summer Guide” or “Holiday Guide” or whatever.) But we had to laugh when they awarded Manhattan cheesesteakery 99 Miles To Philly “Betsy Ross’ Last Meal” and then gave a shout-out to Pat’s and Geno’s. [VV]
· This settles it: Craig Laban is racist against hipsters. See if he can get through a review of Ida Mae’s without a “funky” here and a “funky” there (actually, we counted 4 “funky”‘s). Yes, Craig, we are soooo funky with our “hipster hats” (wha?) and our, um, brunch; we’re a little curio or something you can collect, like lawn jockeys. But if you can roll with that, you gotta also roll with the bad news: By your definition, a hipster in Philadelphia is pretty much anyone who knows how to read and isn’t beating their kid. [Inky]
· And finally, some bona fide, non-hipster or non-non-hipster related good news: 14 medals were handed out to various Philadelphia beers at the Great American Beer Festival last weekend. Too bad none of them were PBR, right, guys? I mean, we’re all such vapid hipsters that we thought… oh, never mind, we’re bored with it already. [DN]
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:52 am
Hipsters are a race? I always thought they were a leisure class. Really, I wouldn’t take offense at being called “funky” here and there by the guy who thought “Cheeseburger I Hold” musical genius.
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm
A silly rebuttal to that equally silly rockist hankiesucker Sasha Frere-Jones’ article in the New Yorker:
http://www.slate.com/id/2176187/
“Ultimately, though, the “trouble with indie rock” may have far more to do with another post-Reagan social shift, one with even less upside than the black-white story, and that’s the widening gap between rich and poor. There is no question on which side most indie rock falls. It’s a cliche to picture indie musicians and fans as well-off “hipsters” busily gentrifying neighborhoods, but compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it.
“With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded “creative” college towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young “knowledge workers” in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire. (Many rap MCs juggle symbologies just as deftly, but it’s seldom their main point.) This doesn’t make coffeehouse-indie shallow, but it can result in something more akin to the 1960s folk revival, with fretful collegiate intellectuals in a Cuban Missile Crisis mood, seeking purity and depth in antiquarian music and escapist spirituality. Not exactly a recipe for a booty-shaking party. While this scene can embrace some fascinating hermetic weirdos such as Joanna Newsom or Panda Bear, it’s also prone to producing fine-arts-grad poseurs such as the Decemberists and poor-little-rich-boy-or-girl singer songwriters who might as well be James Taylor. This year even saw several indie bands playing in “Pops” concerts at summer symphony programs; that’s no sin (and good for the symphonies), but it’s about as class-demarcated as it gets.
“Among at least a subset of (the younger) musicians and fans, this class separation has made indie more openly snobbish and narrow-minded. In the darkest interpretation, one could look at the split between a harmony-and-lyrics-oriented indie field and a rhythm-and-dance-specialized rap/R&B scene as mirroring the developing global split between an internationalist, educated comprador class (in which musically, one week Berlin is hot, the next Sweden, the next Canada, the next Brazil) and a far less mobile, menial-labor market (consider the more confining, though often musically exciting, regionalism that Frere-Jones outlines in hip-hop). The elite status and media sway that indie rock enjoys, disproportionate to its popularity, is one reason the cultural politics of indie musicians and fans require discussion in the first place, a point I wish Frere-Jones had clarified in The New Yorker; perhaps in that context it goes without saying.”