flanerie

• too many words
• too many obscure references to chicago

Are there any rap songs that use the phrase ‘Han shot first’ as a double entendre?

Chairman Larry (that’s me! and three other dudes!) at the Darkhorse, once again. Wednesday night, doors 9:00-ish, we go on 10:15-ish. $3 to get in. We learned a new song or two! Come see the debut of this new Electro 2 what I bought! Stick around for the Surgical Staff, who are saints for letting us open for them all the time! This is definitely worth driving in from out of town for.

From the library, the ride to my house is 4.5 miles and goes mostly through residential neighborhoods, with a big empty park in the middle. Two things about this:

1. Roughly 1% of my brain, on the ride through that park, is pre-occupied with it being the best possible spot for a knife murderer to jump out of the trees and slit my throat. It’s a slight uphill so I’m going slow (can’t escape or react quickly since I’m probably shifting gears or something), plus my light is focused on the path in front of me instead of toward my peripheral vision (and it’s a signal to any knife murderers in the trees). Not that knife murderers are a thing to worry about in State College, but still.

2. There’s a smaller park adjacent to one of the side streets I ride along on the way home. I just discovered Marble Hornets, and the whole Slender Man myth that the Something Awful forums invented, and so now when I ride by that park at night I like to look in the trees and see if he’s back there. He’s not, but how great would it be if he was, signaling some grim portent?

nickd and I had a brief little argument on Twitter just now about what, exactly, Logan Square is, spurred by this article which puts a record store at 3700 W. Fullerton in the neighborhood. I took the side of city hall and said anything on that street up to the railroad crossing at Pulaski counts as Logan since it’s within the community area; he took the side that Logan Square, particularly the Logan Square community in which one would expect to find a new record store, carries with it cultural signifiers that don’t extend that far west.

Here is the question:

I probably don’t know enough about Logan Square’s recent history to comment, but I guess if anything, this marks the point in the evolution of Logan Square as the New Hot Thing where we’re going to find out. I imagine to some extent it will always have a west/east split because the kids will follow the Blue Line rather than delve too far west away from it. That said, there’s no Humboldt Park to prevent a grey area forming where that split is, so whatever the relationships between the transplant 20-29s and the locals are will probably determine whether we’ll be decrying the hipster excess of East Logan Square, and ignoring West Logan Square, in a few years or not.

Even though it’s much smaller and forced to be more of a melting pot for it, Pilsen seems like the best parallel in terms of merging demographics, and they seem to be doing okay. The Mexicans in the neighborhood are organized enough, and the new kids sensitive enough to that, that it seems like they’re at least at an uneasy stalemate. (From 600 miles away, basing my observations off blogs, at any rate.)  It’s maybe telling that I only ever see references to East Pilsen in apartment listings.  We’ll see if the economic recovery does anything to that; new money has a way of ruining all of the good work that makes these conversations even worth having.

Sorry if this makes no sense; I shouldn’t even care since I don’t live there.