“Did you recover? Did you recover? Are you recovered? Have you…” Every conversation in the scene today is about surviving yesterday. There is no other dialectic. Scenesters are united in how they are the freaks of their respective families, how going home for an appointed holiday event is a nightmare, how they couldn’t wait to flee out to a club or bar after dinner because they had nothing in common with the fam.
Most of them are lying. The headcount at the Bullfinch last night was place—sparse, we’re sayin’. Hamilton’s was essentially closed. D’ollaire’s had a sort of family nite.
So where was everybody? Unwrapping new guitars, drum heads, and T-shirts that you’ll likely see at sets in the New Year.
How do we know everyone was home and not at the joints? Aw, this is no time for pity.

Slept 20 hours in the bath. Then slept again.

A Canadian punk band posted this on YouTube in 2006. It’s got some funny lyrics (acknowledging YouTube and Google for historical research) and a “Hark! How the Bells” instrumental break.

Here’s the current Dick Tracy comic strip team paying tribute last week to Max Allan Collins. The esteemed mystery writer happens to be a former Dick Tracy writer himself, having penned the detective’s two-way wrist mishaps from the time of its creator Chester Gould’s retirement in 1977 (at the end of December, as it happened, so almost exactly 35 years ago) and continued to script the adventures until 1992.
Collins reined in the science-fiction aspects which Gould had been pushing since the 1960s—moon people, rocket cars etc.—and repopulated its rogues gallery of villains marked by their outrageous physical characteristics or outlandish style choices.

When I was in college in the late early 1980s, I was a founding staff member of a daily newspaper on campus. It was common then (and now) for campus papers to run only two syndicated comic strips—Doonesbury and either Peanuts or Garfield. That seemed to cover all the bases for the shortsighted college press. At the Tufts Daily, we ran Collins’ Dick Tracy.

Days after Christmas can be culturally lacking. So can Mondays. We’re probably hitting the Peabody Museum, which does appear to be open. Then maybe to Judies Bakery for lunch, in hopes that the seasonal Stollen bread is still available. The New Haven Historical Society is closed, as is the Istitute Library. Most galleries and museums are closed Mondays.
At Café Nine tonight, Beatnik 2000 is holding its six-hundredth-and-third weekly revue, with featured performers Age of Reason, George Morgio, Michael Volpicella, poets Alon and CMR and an open mic after midnight.
Mostly we’ve got a visiting mother to entertain, and new books to read. We’ll get by.

The bluesman sang a blues, and after every line, a pickled heckler piped up with this rejoinder: “Like a lightbulb.”
Woke up this mornin’…
“Like a lightbulb!”
Dragged a comb across my head…
“Like a lightbulb!”
This was funny. The bluesman is bald.
And a good sport. He improvised:
“Got lit up…”
“Got turned on…”
“Used up all my energy…”
A daring maneuver, but not at this time of year. All was calm, all was nice. The heckler shut off eventually. There was a warm glow in the room.
Like a light bulb.

The Wee Freakings and Whence Law? at the Bullfinch. Early show…. The Watcher Flocks and No Room at Hamilton’s. Early show… Harrod at D’ollaire’s, no-show…

I miss my bus. I don’t think I’d paid for the ticket anyway.

Cloud Control, Bliss Release
Folky and rustic yet also coolly Eels-ish. There’s an eerie emptiness, even a scariness, to how the sweet backing voices drift in and around the rough lead vocals. Then the guitars come in and everything goes hauntingly haywire. Some of the rhythms are African, in a controlled Paul Simon Graceland manner, which some will enjoy (“Gold Canary” earns a commercially minded two-minute remix on the album’s bonus EP), but personally I’m more taken by tracks like “The Rolling Stones,” which seems to roll all musics of the 1960s—from Velvet Underground to Nilsson to Mamas and Papas and yes, the Stones—into four knock-out minutes of all-natural mind expansion.

The Death-Ray
By Daniel Clowes 2 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011)
Aka Eightball #23, Spring 2004.

You could question the value of reprinting a single issue of a comic book in hardcover form and charging $20 for the privilege. But when it’s a work by Dan Clowes, you shouldn’t. Like the earlier Drawn & Quarterly release Ice Haven, Death-Ray isn’t a collection of stories with the same characters of several installments scattered through several issues of Clowes’ irregularly published Eightball comic. It’s an entire multi-part, multi-styled issue of Eightball (#23, from Spring 2004), every part of which pertains to the same central narrative. That theme is one that Clowes has been successfully exploring since his early Lloyd Llewellyn comics in the 1990s—how average young people would behave if granted superpowers overnight, and how the responsibility might simply make them wish to return to normalcy. The power here is not just a death-ray but super-strength, gifts bestowed on an awkward, withdrawn, horny teenager. The depiction of sullen youth is not clichéd, while the fantasy of using mysterious superpowers to right wrongs and revenge yourself on bullies is. It makes for a great balance, and a smart use of the comic book form. Which more than justifies this elegant oversized reprint. The hardcover version made me reappreciate a comic I loved the first time around but haven’t thought to revisit. Now I’m digging all my older Eightballs out before Drawn & Quarterly has to do it for me.

Very proud of Mabel. Nine years old and activist, she has become very interested in the Occupy New Haven tent community on New Haven Green. We’ve visited it a number of times, donated food and had conversations about the movement, though we have yet to attend a meeting or get more directly involved.
Tonight Mabel finished a project she’s been talking about for weeks. She took it upon herself to dress up 50 candy canes with eyes and pipe-cleaner antlers, then carried them to the Green and selflessly, shyly, presented them to the chilled tenants of Occupy. Kathleen, Sally and I came along with homemade cookies and apple cake. Then our whole family trooped off to the Christmas Eve service just a few feet away at United Church on the Green. That church has been deeply supportive of Occupy New Haven; Rev. John Gage has even slept in a tent in solidarity, and allowed the Occupy members to hold meetings in the church.
Occupy New Haven is one of the few remaining encampments of its kind. Its members, who have maintained excellent relations with local police and government, have stated that to last through the winter on the Green would make a grand statement, and there they remain, while the rest of us sleep tight in our beds, visions of sugarplums etc.