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This week Playback:STL turns 6 six years old.  They would like you to come to their birthday party, which is on Friday April 11th (starting at 7pm).  

But unlike you little cousin’s birthday party, this will be taking place in The Pageant instead of Showbiz Pizza. And instead of large anamorphic, animatronic robots crooning you with covers of oldies, Playback has brought glam-rock quartet Semi Precious Weapons into town to serenade us.  That band will be augmented with four-courses of fine local fare, including bands The Feed, Bockman, Tell Tale Heart, and Northside’s Sweet Revenge.  So come out to wish them a happy birthday, or at least to  Light the candles with your lighter in the air. And if you’re hesitant to find a last minute birthday present for this, it is still considered acceptable to buy your favorite writers a round of drinks at the bar .

It is only through Hegelianism that we are to know that between Saint Louis (thesis) and Chicago and its great fire (antithesis) we will find “The future great city of the world”; although a baseball philosopher might also be able to make similar deductions, Yogi Berra has yet to make this observation.  To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Hegelians in St. Louis, Webster University has taken it upon themselves to confer not just local philosophers and historians, but has called a national conference to reexamine the philosophical movements spurred by St. Louis Hegelians.  For those of you less familiar with the movement:

The St. Louis Hegelians are one of the most important movements of American cultural history. Founded in the 19th century by an eclectic set of St. Louis school teachers and amateur philosophers, this group helped bring German philosophy (especially the philosophy of Hegel) to the American continent. By adding their own unique American twist to this philosophy, the group is also responsible for taking the first major steps toward producing America’s wholly distinct philosophical tradition of Pragmatism.

Celebrating might not be pragmatic, especially given other social opportunities that Saturday, but it would be amiable to attend the lectures on Saturday April 12th which will begin at 9 in the morning.  And what location to hold this conference would be more appropriate than the Old Post Office in downtown St. Louis, which was a new fixture in the time of the Saint Louis Philosophical Society and today stands restored as a monument to pragmatic reuse.

Democracy - it is a rather simple proposition, for which considerable participation is necessary.  Alongside legal propositions, 61revised.com would propose you vote this Tuesday April 8th, when many counties and municipalities in Missouri will be voting for candidates and plans.  And since you have the power to determine your own future through this process, we want all of our readers (and students in particular) to put their votes where they count - in the ballot box.

It is your responsibility to vote using your best judgment.  It is also the obligation for which a free press is protected constitutionally - to inform a citizenry so that they may make their choice electorally - for which we are responsible to make sure you know what you’re voting on.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (as usual) has created a valuable Voter Guide, with which we’re sure you can make informed decisions when you are voting.  Please vote responsibly.

April 7th, 2008 marks the 75th anniversary of the repeal of the 18th amendment, which prohibited the importation, distilation, and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States.  We would like to propose a toast on this holiday, led by former Highway 61 contributor Mr. Ben Stegmann, to our constitutionally protected right to consume beverages in which alcohol constitutes over .5% per volume.

As you might imagine the Saint Louis area was particularly impacted during the prohibition, which has already been well documented for anyone interested in learning the history of Saint Louis brewing.  Those interested in celebrating this milestone offline can do so at any local brewpub.  We have been made aware of at least one particular celebration tonight in the Schlafly Tap Room (aka Saint Louis Brewery), which will continue with a Beer Festival next Saturday.  Alongside Schlafly’s local brew, you can look foward to tasting assorted beers from Indiana, but it will cost you $25 for the revelry on Saturday April 12th from noon-5pm.

No matter how you chose to celebrate, we would like to caution those of legal drinking age to drink responsibly, lest we motivate another temperance movement and another prohibition.  Cheers.

Despite the water-soaked and unusualkly muddy earth, kickball enthusiasts of all shoes and stripes came out last Sunday afternoon to play. As they’ll be doing every Sunday at 4pm on the fields of Eden Seminary, students of Webster University will play in temas of 6 to 8 in this league organized by Campus Activites and fraternity Delta Upsilon (Webster’s new, first fraternity).  You can sign up for teams at the University Center front desk, or just for kicks show up any Sunday through May 4th 2008 and cheer on your favorite team.

Word on the street is that other kickball teams are forming around the Saint Louis area this spring and summer.  The St. Louis Kickball Association (www.skarocks.org) has already gone through their fourth week of play, bringing htem halfway through the season already.  Residents of Des Peres are starting their own Tuesday evening co-rec Kickball League starting April 8th, although as much as half your team of diamond runners may indeed come from other townships.  And we’ll keep adding games to our calendar as we find them.

The great part about night classes are that they allow you to schedule around your work, especially for grad students.  So even if you missed last Tuesday’s senior thesis lecture from Aaron Belz, you can still study under his tutelage this Thursday for a night class of sorts filed under the course name of Observable Readings.  This class session we’ll be taking notes on a more Socratic style, under the title “Eight Kates: Colby, Marvin, Ford, Greenstreet, Peterson, Pringle, Schapira, Lederer”.  According to Prof. Belz:

Kate Colby, Cate Marvin, Katie Ford, Kate Greenstreet, Katie Peterson, Kate Pringle, Kate Schapira, and Katy Lederer will fly to St. Louis and read together on one unprecedented occasion!!
Okay, so it’s not entirely unprecedented. You may remember the Ten Jens, The Five Aarons, and maybe even the Three Stephanies. But who knew there were so many Kate poets?

For those who have missed Observable Readigns in the past, here’s a copy of our notes.  You may not get any academic credit hours, but the course won’t cost you a dime.  As for the classroom, show up at the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood around 8pm if you want to be marked as in attendance this Thursday, April 3rd.

Highway 61 (revised) has received a cease and desist order from MODOT. As of 1:30pm on April 1st, 2008, Highway 61 has only 2 days (or less than 48 hours) left to vacate the title our existing domain and title. According to the court order our intellectual property unduly interferes with the copyrights of the already existing domain of TheNewI64.org , which is MODOT’s website for the construction along that interstate highway. For those who do not know, US Highway 61 continues along part of Interstate 64 in parts of St. Charles and St. Louis Counties. We apologize for the confusion we may have caused.

We had already begun the process of transferring our host, address, and title, but things are moving really fast. You might want to save your favorite posts for yourself, because your bookmarks will no longer work. This couldn’t come at a worse time, since everyone here is crammed working on finals as well.

Anyone interested enough to continue reading from this online magazine can do so by reading 61 Revised at http://www.61revised.com . Thank you for your understanding, we promise to keep writing if you keep reading.

Although we’re all busy working on our thesis papers, even in the midst of APA-style reference building you’re going to want to step outside a bit this final essay season.  One such opportunity for a disertation of a thesis lecture of sorts will come from Aaron Belz, who will be giving a reading of his work on Tuesday.  This super-senior of the St. Louis literary scene, if you consider the Regional Arts Commission a school of sorts, will be giving a reading this upcoming Tuesday April 1st starting around 8pm.  His course, Observable Readings, has become a real fixture of the literati scene around town. Here’s how a much more capable writer, Mr. Belz himself, described why you should attend his lecture:

The show is free, and there will be wine. Free wine. Wine for which you will not have to pay. In little clear plastic cups!!

To those of you who are or might be attending my reading at Regional Arts Commission next Tuesday evening: I’ve accepted a position at a college in L.A. and will be moving out there in July. This might be the last time I get to see some of you in a while, so I hope you’ll come let me shake your hand and raise my eyebrows at you in a slightly creepy way. Remember - the reading is free, and so is the wine.

So besides the free beverages for persons of age to consume such beverges you’ll be served with readings of prose, poetry, and reading from The Bird Hoverer that have brought this writer critical acclaim.  And acceptance into school.  So if you’re looking to increase your graduate promises, you should be there too.  Or just because you’re not a slave to your studies this semester, free as bird.

We all have mixed-emotions about Facebook, which has become as ubiquitous as Myspace in its heyday.  The social network, which began only 4 years ago on a single campus and began to extend to other colleges, today commands 69 million users and countless privacy headaches.  So just like with Myspace many people are openly expressing their aggrevation of an expanding and increasingly open network, enough that Facebook recently modified their privacy options.

Besides all of the invites you’ve been sent to add another data-mining application game, there are further privacy concerns off Facebook.  On a recent episode of Talk of the Nation - Science Friday, the concerns over public data and private access to it, including a lengthy discussion of the Facebook example.  If you or any of your friends have been considering removing content or photos that could be found objectionable by employers, you should probably give this show a listen.

There seems to be a deep generational divide about what is private or public when it is put on the internet.  We’ll leave that discussion to take place in the comments, or on Facebook.

For almost the price of a single gallon of gasoline, you can feed your friends and family with a package of so-called Dollar Rolls. It’s “fresh baked goodness”, filled with nutritional yeast and flour. As photographed at Schnuck’s Supermarket in South Hampton, in Saint Louis.