I am very proud of my spelt sourdough. I nursed it along for weeks of daily feedings and have kept it thriving for something like five years now. Our farm friend Laura shares the spelt berries she buys in bulk. Spelt flours is a nutty wonder, underappreciated yet one of the healthiest and heartiest flours you can find.

I stumbled into spelt as the base for a sourdough. Turns out it’s the best choice you can make. If you have a white-flour sourdough, adding heavier flours could kill it. But spelt sucks up everything you throw at it, at the primordial ooze in Joseph Payne’s short story “Slime.” I’ve also gone on weeks-long vacations and found my spelt sourdough easy to revive upon my return (though it did say it had gotten lonely in that dark refrigerator).

This is not to say that I have not had some difficult periods with the sourdough. Let it “rise” too long (especially on a second “rise”) and it gets gray and clammy. Sometimes it looks just right, yet won’t bake up. I put this down to seasonal climate, and in winter I’ve been adding a little yeast just to be sure.

This past month, however, I guilted myself into forgoing yeast and making careful tests of what worked and what didn’t, prep-wise.

And I think I’ve nailed it:

1. Before bedtime, mix one cup of sourdough starter in a ceramic bowl (no metal!) with one cup of water (no chlorine! Use one of those water filters, or better yet just leave it out for a day before using) and enough white (unbleached!) flour to make a very soft dough, so sticky that some will remain on your fingers. Add nothing else. Don’t butter a pan. Beware salt and metal. Cover with a heavy dishtowel.
2. In the morning, mix in another half-cup of the water and enough flour to make it a slightly stiffer dough than before. Put in a loaf pan—I use covered clay ones. No metal! Let sit for 45 minutes to an hour, no longer.
3. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Put the pan in the hot oven and bake for at least 45 minutes. You’ll smell the baked sourdough smell well before you need to remove the bread from the oven. If you don’t let it cook that long, it will have soft gummy spots.
4. The sourdough loaf will come out golden and crusty. Excellent with cheese, but also with butter and jam.

Egg of Night was named for a 2-6 a.m. truckers’ breakfast special at the Ellie’s Place. The band would poke its fans with plastic forks. Out of this melee grew O.H.I.O & M.E.T., sometimes cited as among the area’s earliest rap acts, but really just aggressive white guys in baseball hats who shouted rather than sang.

These days, you play five times as much for an egg sandwich, can’t get one except between 7 a.m. and noon, you can’t snag a free newspaper to read while eating. And the idea of an original band bouncing off the walls of a truckstop? So unlikely you can’t believe it EVER happened. These are the myths, folks. These are the Rock Gods.

Doomrock quadruple bill at D’ollaire’s: Skull Mountain, Skeleton Rock, Clue in the Embers and Witchmaster’s Key. What does one drink at such an affair, and is it served in a cauldron?… Jungle Pyramid at the Bullfinch… Flickering Torch and Mysterious Caravan, world rock, at Hamilton’s…

Maybe I just have malaise.

Mark Lanegan, Blues Funeral. This is a nice blend of slick late ‘90s radio rock and an undeniable blues sentimentality. Lanegan has an artist-for-hire reputation, but here he seems genuine. There are guest stars and old bandmates galore, but it’s not as showy an ensemble as on Lanegan’s last solo album, Bubblegum.

This is a guy whose scattershot career is hard to follow with consistent idolatry—some of his associations seem lightweight, and it’s hard to gauge the level of participation on some of the projects he’s the ostensible frontman for. This, however, is a set of thumps, wails, and sobbing basslines you really can get behind. It’s well-composed, well-paced, well-intentioned. Best of all, considering the stadium-grunge pedigree of some of its contributors, it’s understated. Northwestern modern malcontents need their own blues: here they are. “If tears were liquor, I’d’ve drunk myself sick.”

The Someday Funnies

Edited by Michael Choquette (Abrams ComicArts, 2011)

I was still in junior high school when I started reading National Lampoon, so of course the comics appealed most. This spectacular volume serves as a long-lost issue of that magazine, for those of us who felt that some of the key contributors never did better work elsewhere. It’s also (and this was its intention) a careful distillation of the central events of the 1960s, written and drawn by those who were clearly changed and liberated by that era. This is not a distanced view of the decade, edited by hindsight. This is not one of those jokey books such as Jon Stewart’s show or The Onion does, or indeed the National Lampoon used to do, satirizing the excesses of the period. This is of its time, with the added sparkle of having been stored in boxes for several decades due to the logistics of getting it published.

I was among those who read Bob Levin’s long Comics Journal article about the project a couple of years ago in amazement. The story had readers salivating for a glimpse of these graphic treasures, but it also had the despairing air of Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” to it—this stuff was probably out of reach, or perhaps really didn’t exist in publishable form. Grails are all too easy to believe in, but they usually remain out of reach.

Yet now here The Someday Funnies is, with only one main element substantially different from what the project’s overseer Michael Choquette intended back in the ‘70s. Each one- or two-page “chapter” of Someday Funnies has a hole deliberately placed in it—the only unifying visual concept of a work whose 129 artists range from C.C. Beck to Neal Adams, from Sergio Aragones to Gahan Wilson, from Red Grooms to Federico Fellini. Those holes were at one point held in hopes that R. Crumb would fill them in with Mr. Natural adventures, but instead they’ve become a post-modern documentation of Choquette’s own adventures in putting the book together. That these drawings are not the most successful artistic statement in the book goes without saying—they are in service to a much grander scheme, of encompassing the whole of the 1960s. The main attraction is the splashy original artwork, but the idea that this book is also a historical artifact of the 1970s is inescapable, with multiple prologues, reams of annotations and translations, and bios of every contributor (some of whom were just starting their careers when asked to lend a page to this project, and the majority of whom continued on as artists and writers of renown). Making Choquette a constant seems only right. The book as it stands is as much about itself as it is about the ‘60s.

If Someday Funnies had come out as planned in the 1970s, it would have smoothed the transitions of countless young comics fanatics into counterculture college students, even faster than did National Lampoon’s own Funny Pages section. For here are the creators of Uderzo & Goscinny of Asterix fame, and top-rung Archie comics artist Stan Goldberg, and Mad magazine icons Aragones and Don Martin using their famous styles and characters in service of satire and subversion. There’s a wondrous psychedelic skepticism running through this book. It challenges, it explores, it goes to extremes.

Above all, it lives up to its hype, which is more than the 1960s did.

Fantastic 250^th episode of the Marc Maron What the Fuck podcast, recorded live in Boston. I grew up near that city and witnessed a few fireworks worth of the Bostoncomedy boom of the ‘70s and ’80s. So hearing Maron (who began his career in Boston, during his college days) reminiscing with such local legends as Tony V,  Jimmy Tingle, Frank Santorelli, Mike Donovan and Kenny Rogerson is… well, it’s like sitting down the bar from guys like that, eavesdropping on them, at places like the Ding Ho or Nick’s Comedy Stop, back in the day.

Oh, the stories! Boston has some of the best tales of killing, dying, corpsing and coming-of-age from any comedy scene anywhere.

Funnily enough, many of those storied adventures happened in Connecticut. Our fair state was literally a rite of passage for Boston comics whose careers had developed to the point where they drive to nearby states and play at remote clubs for total strangers. Connecticut is continually derided and misunderstood in the memories of these comics—how happy are your memories of your first job?—but we can take solace in that Maine fares far worse in the recollections of commuting comics.

Tuning in the 250^th WTF show, we can listen knowingly to Maron’s own memory of a tedious car trip with a fellow comic who complained non-stop for the whole hours-long ride about how a performer of his stature deserved better gigs than this. (Later in the Maron show, it’s revealed that this comedian’s surname became shorthand among other comics when describing that manner of kvetching.) The club in question? One which Maron describes as having “the front end of an old car as a DJ booth.” That image transports Connecticut clubgoers instantly back to the Bopper’s clubs which rode a ‘50s/’60s nostalgia wave back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And to a kindler, simpler era of messed-up stand-up comics blathering on about the hazards of car trips.

When the Grammy Awards are nigh, the preview articles invariably deal with the conflict of “Who Will Win” versus “Who Should Win.” “New” acts can be years old. Categories like “Metal” and “Rap,” though they’ve existed for long enough to evince some level of credibility, are still being too loosely defined, or the province of long-established commercial acts who couldn’t get a shake in the main categories.

The whole affair reeks of injustice.

Which is why the Brit Awards

http://www.brits.co.uk/

which come just weeks after the Grammys are so appealing. They demonstrate how it’s possible to actually balance the new and the old, the popular and the cultish, the anthemic and the clever. Whereas the Grammy’s “new artists” are folks you’ve heard to death on mainstream radio, the Brits’ “British Breakthrough Act” nominees this year are Anna Calvi, Ed Sheeran, Emeli Sande, Jessie J and The Vaccines.

Yes, there are duplications in the Grammy list of Best New Artists and the Brits’ International Breakthrough Act—namely Nicki Minaj and Bon Iver—but while the Grammys were stuck on J. Cole, The Band Perry and Skrillex, The Brits have already moved on to Lana Del Rey, Foster the People and Aloe Blacc. Now, you could argue that both lists contain acts which have been around a little while, but I would argue right back that “Breakthrough” is a much better word for the award than “New.”

The candidates for “British Album of the Year” include the obvious Adele, Coldplay and Florence & The Machine, but P.J. Harvey and the aforementioned Sheeran. Kate Bush, having come out of long hibernation with two albums this past year, is on the British Female Solo Artist roster. Blur is getting an “Outstanding Contribution to Music” prize while “Critics Choice” honors got to Emili Sande, Maverick Sabre and Michael Kiwanuka.

These are lists that make me want to find out more, rather than lists that make me think I’m browsing a year-old issue of Entertainment Weekly in a dentist’s office.

The Brit Awards are given out tonight. As far as I know, the ceremony won’t be televised in the U.S. But we’ll be listening.

Sponsored by a local bike shop that can’t give the things away, Mark Curie and the Pedal Extremities passed out dozens of bright green elbow pads at their Hamilton’s show last Thursday. Then the band debuted its rousing new rave-up “Elbow Room.”

The crowd embraced this arms-akimbo skanking novelty with gusto. Two guys in particular—hey, you could put an eye out with that funnybone!

MC & The PE are set to reprise the angular tune, with new dancing groundrules, at their next big gig, opening for The Sumerians at D’ollaire’s in March.

The Infinity Clue and Spark of Suspician, keyboard spacerock, at The Bullfinch… Apeman’s Secret and Billion Dollar Ransom at Hamilton’s… Latest “mystery” band of slumming big-timers looking for a comeback at D’ollaire’s: Mystery of the Samurai Sword, with well-liked and stable locals Breakdown in Axeblade guaranteeing some liveliness even if the elders can’t cut it…

Went to Health Services. They just rolled their eyes.

P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake.

Compared another artist to P.J. Harvey the other day, so I figured I better tackle this one next, year-old as it is. I often wait a few months to finally purchase a P.J. Harvey album. I want the intellectual hype to wear off, and be able to appreciate it fresh. But fair is fair—it was the Year’s Best lists that reminded me that I shouldn’t forget to check this out. (Plus its selection as a $5 Amazon special last month.)

This is the most well-rounded and diverse PJ Harvey album in years, yet it still has an overarching single sensibility, as we’ve come to expect from her in recent years. It’s just that this time, the atmosphere isn’t sonic. Not a whisper, a la White Chalk. Not a scream, a la Dry or Rid of Me. Not a contrasting travelogue, a la Stories from the City/Sea. The sensibility is social here. It’s political. It’s philosophical rather than punky or poetic.

After ten or so albums, there’s no longer the old shock inherent in PJ Harvey’s vocal style, despite her changing it up unexpectedly and abruptly. Here, it’s the ideas that assault. And the production: A couple of songs, such as “England,” sound like a bruised Kate Bush. The opening of “The Glorious Land” has an army bugle mixed into it, in a manner that deliberately blindsides and upsets.

My favorite bit, “The Words That Maketh Murder”: PJ Harvey wailing, over a barely musicalized backbeat, “What if I take my problems to the United Nations?,” turning the comical Eddie Cochran line from “Summertime Blues” into a plaintive wail of vulnerability, victimization and just plain perplexity.