I am soothed by the wordplay in titles of Archie Comics stories. These are all from Archie Comics Digest Magazine #97, August 1989:

Blink Think

Towel Howl

Money Honey

Heave Peeve

Acclaim Aim

Roman Omen

Drag Gag

Game Aim

Locker Lore

Motion Notion

Splash Bash

Snake Break

Game Gambit

Clock Yock

Brain Strain

Test Quest (in which Sabrina the Teenage Witch inadvertently aces a “Meanness Test”)

Wet Set

Handy Hound

Decoy Ploy

… and that old chestnut (beneath accustomed Archie standards) Double Trouble.

The photog’s anxiety at a crowded club show. Best not to get in close; your camera will be moshed. Best not to get on the side of the stage; even bassists emulate windmill-armed stadium rockers when energized by a crowd. Best not to leave.
So you find the calmest pocket of folks who happen to be close to the stage, the gang you know won’t jostle you. Amid this phalanx, you shoot creatively, framing the images around upthrust fists and bobbing heads and skanking knees.
Then, in a fever of inspiration, you convince the kind folks around you to hoist you bodily upon their soldiers, as in a beach game of Chicken, and you snap one of the shots of your career, capturing a split second of a roiling whirlwind of lights, sound, sweat and—yes—blood.
Happy to oblige.

Benevolence & Bandage at the Bullfinch, with Tribulation Periwinkle. Which side are these guys on?… Touched With Fire and the visiting Bostonians for Brown at Hamilton’s, some sort of college cover band exchange program… 5000,000 Strokes for Freedom (a quintet) and The Captive Toiling (a solo act) at D’ollaire’s…

Spent whole night at college radio station sorting records and listening to the strangest ones. Distracting.

Zambri, Glossolalaia EP.
Five tracks of strident soulful female vocals emerging siren-like from an echoey, lightly industrial mix. I get a Wizard of Oz Winkies vibe from the march beats and baritone sounds of “On Call.” Things lighten up, in the ethereal sense, with “Heather.” It’s swirling dark pop built from a very human base, which makes it creepier. The human sounds become forces of nature. Sounds like Black Album Prince then sounds like Bone Machine Tom Waits. If Dante Alighieri holds dance party in Purgatory, Zambri’s the house band.

My sister Catherine has a knack for finding ideal birthday gifts for me in old book stores and flea markets. My tastes are quirky, and I don’t discuss them with her a lot, yet she invariably nails them. It’s as if she wrote on a shopping list “Hunt down obscure volumes of early 20th century pop culture for Chris.”
This year the haul included:
• The Improper Bohemians, Allen Churchill’s 1959 history of the radical art (and just plain radical) movement in Greenwich Village. Admittedly, I’ve read and owned this book a few times in my life, but never with these bizarre markings on the title page:

• Six Curtains for Strogonova, the last book in Brahms & Simon’s series of comic mystery novels about the Stroganova Ballet company. One of those unassuming orange-and-white Penguin Books editions, not one of the cartoony-cover reissues from the 1980s.

• A poster celebrating cartoonists and comics writers who hailed from Oklahoma. Here’s a scan of the upper half of the thing; what the cropping mainly misses is Bill Mauldin in an Army private’s uniform standing in a foxhole at the feet of Chester Gould (in yellow Dick Tracy coat, natch):

• a souvenir newspaper (“The Daily Herald”) published by the Outgamie County Historical Society in Applewood, Wisconsin. Applewood was the birthplace of Harry Houdini. The lead story in the eight-page paper concerns the magician’s death, and the rest of it is devoted to his life and tricks, including an award-winning article on “Harry Houdini and Wisconsin” by Kimberly Louagie.

My daughters recently, and independently, became big Houdini fans, largely due to Sid Fleischman’s biography Escape! The Story of The Great Houdini and Jason Lutes & Nick Bertozzi’s graphic novel Houdini The Handcuff King (though the more grown-up Houdini: Art and Magic by Brooke Kamin Rapaport has also had an impact.). So this was that sort of mystically timely gift that my sister Catherine has become known for.

With so many Occupy encampments around the country being shut down or modified into insignificance by local government entities, it’s worth noting that Occupy New Haven’s presence on New Haven Green hasn’t been altered or diminished—unless you could the members whose arrests in New York City during Tuesday’s anti-Wall Street protests kept them off the Green for a day.

Channel 8’s upbeat story “Occupy New Haven Still Going Strong” is here.

http://www.newhavenindependent.org“>The New Haven Independent continues to provide the best ongoing coverage; NHI reporter Thomas MacMillan even accompanied New Haven protesters to the Wall Street demonstration.

Occupy New Haven’s own website is here, though nothing’s stopping you from talking to these folks directly on the Green, or grasping their message through old-fashioned viewing options such as protest placards.

My favorite, glimpsed during one of Occupy New Haven’s routine streetcorner rallies last Sunday:
“I’m So Angry I Made a Sign.”

Wednesday was my birthday, and I maintained my tradition of baking a personal comfort-food dish for myself, even if my family doesn’t particularly care for it.

It’s a vegetarian variation on s kidney pie. My mother (who’s still alive; I put this in the past tense because she doesn’t cook anymore) would make it fairly often, skimping on the ingredients so that it wasn’t really a STEAK-and-kidney pie, mostly kidneys and mushroom soup.

I do it differently every birthday, and not at all during the rest of the year. Here’s how I did it Wednesday:

Prefer a piecrust (I had a sourdough bread rising Wednesday, so just used that dough; bread dough’s excellent for meat-pie crusts).

Saute a large chopped onion and one minced clove of garlic. Add an 8 oz. container of mushrooms (sliced, if you prefer.) Then add half a block of tofu, diced, a handful of frozen peas and corn. Finally, stir in a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, undiluted. Season with salt, pepper and paprika.

Put the mushroom/tofu/vegetable glop in the prepared pie plate. Add a top crust. Carve something symbolic in the crust. (I did “51” this year.) Bake at 375 degrees for not very long—a half hour should do it.

Eat nostalgically.

By Artie Capshaw

We nearly fainted when everyone yelled “Surprise!” at the “Artie Capshaw Appreciation Party”— our birthday!—Wednesday at the Bullfinch. We’d been told to check out a band at what we thought was the regular Open Mic nite. Turns out everyone was there to check US out. Non-stop fun, fellers. Just don’t do it again, OK? Not sure our gin-soaked heart can take it.

Macabre Propensities and Syllabic Sound at the Bullfinch… Recrudescent and Knocked for a Goal at Hamilton’s… Lindsay in His Congo and Skippy’s Treasure—half man, half machine—at D’ollaire’s…

Need a distraction.

Native Speaker, Braids. Chatty vocals over a swirly techno backdrop. The arrangements have a minimalist Laurie Anderson feel, and tracks like “Glass Deers” and the thumping, slowbuilding and absolutely mesmerizing “Lammicken” are more like sonic experiments than they are songs. Makes me immediately wonder what this would sound like in a concert hall. It would certainly be better to experience this in an acoustically ideal hall than in a club, the better to appreciate the dense, layered approach to music-making. Native Speaker does an awful of texturing in these seven tracks, which run from four and a half to eight and a half minutes in length.