I never met Josie DeCarlo, who died last month, and that’s probably because I don’t live in Scarsdale and don’t attend many comic book conventions. She’s a legend in the Archie comics world. She was the inspiration for the Josie of She’s Josie, the down-to-earth teen-frolic comic book which morphed into the international action-adventure TV cartoon series. Further televised exploits of the Pussycats took place in outer space. (The comic book got weirder, too—the Pussycats’ nemesis Alexandra Cabot, who wants to take over the group and rename it Alexandra and Her Cool Time Cats, gained Sabrina-esque magical powers.)

The obituaries which have been flitting about the web don’t generally mention (here’s one that does) that it was a dispute over the rights to the Josie character which led to a split between Dan DeCarlo and his longtime employers at Archie comics in 2000. The artist sought a stake in the Josie & the Pussycats movie (directed by Harry Elfont & Deborah Kaplan, and featuring Rachael Leigh Cook as Josie) and took the Archie company to court, where it was ruled that DeCarlo had signed away the rights to Josie under the conditions of his freelance contract.

In an interview conducted by Mike Curtis, published in Comics Journal #229, Dan DeCarlo recounts the origins of Josie the comic character, which he first intended as the star of a newspaper comic strip:

It must have been about ’56. And then one day Josie came in with—you’re probably familiar with this story—with that real bouffant hairdo and a little black ribbon in her hair… She was cute as hell. She was beautiful.

Curtis: She’s beautiful now.

DeCarlo: Yeah. Even now. You can imagine how beautiful she was. She looked terrific. So I drew the hairstyle, exaggerated it a bit to make it more readily identifiable. And I thought since I’m taking it from Josie I’m going to call the strip Josie.

Later in the interview, Dan DeCarlo divulges a detail that expands on an anecdote which is in a lot of the Josie DeCarlo obits.

Curtis: Now you told me before you had a photograph to base [the Pussycats] costume on, one with the real Josie wearing it.

DeCarlo: Yeah. Yeah. I designed that outfit for Josie maybe in 1963, at a house party. We were having a costume party. I designed the outfit, and Josie had a friend who was a great dressmaker and made the costume later used in Jose and the Pussycats. Later on we used it—we have photographs of that. And even later we went on a cruise and she used that as a costume then for a costume party they threw on the cruise. And you’d be surprised all of the girls, all the pretty girls all lined up in bunny costumes with the ears and the fluffy tail in the back and Josie in the middle with the Pussycat costume.

Josie and the Pussycats continue to be active members of the Archie universe. The characters were redone in a manga style a few years ago. They’ve recently shared a few storylines with fellow teen pop stars The Archies, engaging in a good-natured Battle of the Bands and sparking a romance between Archie and Pussycats bassist Valerie. They also cameoed as zombies in this year’s Archie Meets Kiss miniseries. The Archie/Valerie relationship will be further explored in the forthcoming Archie Marries Valerie series, an offshoot of the young-adult Archie Marries… and Life With Archie Magazine continuum.

Dan DeCarlo died in 2001. He’d been ostracized from Archie and had found work at other comics companies, notably Bongo (which publishes the Simpsons titles). During the legal squabbles, the lack of DeCarlo-drawn stories in Archie Digests and other reprint titles was noticeable. Whatever indignation remained in the air seemed to cease ages ago, at least in the public sphere.

In any case, whoever made the most money from the idea of modeling Josie on Josie DeCarlo, she was by all accounts a charming woman, loyal friend and good sport. May she rest in peace, and may the Pussycats continue to prosper in her honor.

Fell asleep reading James Joyce.

Rom Yulis, the tech warrior and Turkish refugee whose pseudonymous band ruled the hardcore scene in town until he ran out of basements to trash, has resurfaced in a most unlikely place: the gay dance scene. A friend was in the city the other day and spotted his old grade-school chum Rom in his new guise of Queerinus, host of a hot dance night at one of those clubs with a hell-invoking name. When not lip-synching and party-planning, Rom/Queerinus is keeping his live chops intact with the “underground underwear awareness” quartet Queerinus and the Sabine Spears. (At least we think that’s a band).

Rom, who was virtually run out of town for his bad-boy behavior in high school, has found himself, calmed down, cleaned up and (his word) “ascended” to a new realm of entertainment for him. “I don’t hit guys anymore,” quoth Queerinus. “I hit on ‘em instead.” We’ve alerted local clubdom to the ex-Rom’s, ahem, availability. As for a Rom-the-band reunion, let’s not go overboard, OK? Their last incendiary show nearly forced a change in local zoning regulations.

At the Bullfinch: Lizzy Min and Frankie Sin, pathetic parodies… At Hamilton’s: Step and Take a Bow, pathetic covers… At D’ollaire’s: Pathetic prentense…

Fell asleep reading Henry James.

Echoey lo-fi sped-up pop, like a cassette recording of a live show from a world away. The perfectly imbalanced production adds the right air of mystery, and the vocals are off-key and raw without being deliberately geeky. All the song titles are funny on their own—“I’ve Been Working Out,” “Satan Says,” “If I Get Back on My Horse Again”—and funnier in the context of the chirpy pop context and shambolic execution. There’s honest emotion here, plus hormones. It’s a fine world we live in, that can have The Hairs and Mikal Cronin and any number of edgy popsters living in it all at once.

11/22/63 by Stephen King (Scribner’s, 2011)

 

I almost didn’t even read this one because I don’t usually like the more science-fictional Kings. But I dug The Dome, which sets up a sci-fi conceit (aliens have dropped an invisible bowl over Peyton Place) in order to ramp up the action in what is otherwise a John O’Hara-esque saga of small town politics. 11/22/63 works in a similar vein. It’s got a time travel pretext, but it’s no more about time travel than Carrie is about telekinetics. Carrie of course is really about the horrors of adolescence, and 11/22/63 is really about later-life anxieties—paths not taken, choices that meant decades of commitment but which ultimately didn’t work out. It’s about good intentions and second chances and “If I knew then what I know now,” with “then” happening to happen dozens of years before the book’s hero was even born.

Surely I read any number of reviews and descriptions which dwell on the time-travel theme. But, even more than the dome in The Dome, King uses it as a means to an end and doesn’t make a huge deal of the mechanics of such a trip. A guy is directed down to the basement of a diner and emerges in the early 1960s.

To shorthand this, as many critics have, as the tale of a man bent on stopping the Kennedy assassination, is criminal. Kennedy’s a part of it, and Oswald a much bigger part, but the biggest part is the life-living that gets done of the way to the titular showdown. The point is not that Jake Epping is as driven as he is to change history. It’s that he travels halfway across the country, settles down in Texas, finds a town and a job he likes there, and falls in love. He works his quest to stop Oswald into a much grander existence where, all along, the lives of everyday people he knows and respects matter as much as the folks he knows will be remembered as key figures of world history. This is a coming-of-middle-age novel rooted in respect for one’s neighbors.

I think this is one of Stephen King’s all-time best books. A lot of them lose me when they wrap up the plots without wrapping up the humanity. This one is heartwarming throughout. It has the sort of love scenes (and sex scenes!) which King ordinarily shies away from, and they’re here for the right reasons, showing the innocence and empowerment of the ‘60s.

It might help to be a baby-boomer to appreciate it fully, but 11/22/63 speaks to anyone aware of greater forces—political, social, economic—governing the world in which you’re trying to catch a break.

It was fantastic reading 11/22/63 back-to-back with Michael Choquette’s 1960s counterculture anthology The Someday Funnies, which also mingles real history with heightened personal emotions. Both books are garish and colorful and bold, and much deeper than even their admirers let on. Not noticing stronger powers at work—that’s the ‘60s for you.

Rob DeRosa has released the full music schedule for the Meriden Daffodil Festival, April 28 & 29.

We’ve already announced who’s playing. (There’s been one change in that: The Gonkus Brothers aren’t able to play this year. Guess who is? Grayson Hugh. A Hartford native, Hugh had a major-label career in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, also landing songs on the soundtracks of Fried Green Tomatoes and Thelma & Louise. After a 15-year hiatus, Hugh released his latest album in the spring of 2010.)

Now we know when, and on which of the event’s three stages.

Here’s the chronological rundown:

 

SATURDAY, APRIL 28

10 to 10:30 a.m.: The Foresters (Welcome Stage)

10:30 to 11:30 p.m.: Chico & Friends (Food Tent Stage)

11 to 11:45 a.m.: The Tropical Hotdog Band (Welcome Stage)

Noon to 1 p.m.: Frank Critelli (Food Tent Stage)

12:15 to 1 p.m.: Anne Castellano & The Smoke (Welcome Stage)

12:45 to 1:30 p.m.: The Ivory Bills (Bandshell Stage)

1:30 to 2 p.m.: Christopher Arnott & His Ukulele

1:30 to 2:15 p.m.: Bop Tweedie & The Days (Welcome Stage)

2 to 2:45 p.m.: Jennifer Hill & Co. (Bandshell Stage)

2:30 to 3:30 p.m,.: Mark Mirando (Food Tent Stage)

2:45 to 3:30 p.m.: The Appledaughters (Welcome Stage)

3:15 to 4 p.m.: Crosseyed Cat (Bandshell Stage)

4 to 4:45 p.m.: Farewood (Welcome Stage)

4 to 5 p.m.: River City Slim & The Zydeco Hogs (Food Tent Stage)

4:30 to 5:15 p.m.: The Manchurians (Bandshell Stage)

5:15 to 6 p.m.: The Guru (Welcome Stage)

5:30 p.m to 6:30 p.m.: The Swingaholics (Food Tent Stage)

5:45 to 6:30 p.m.: The Rivergods (Bandshell Stage)

6:30 to 7:15 p.m.: M.T. Bearington (Welcome Stage)

7 to 8 p.m.: String Theorie (Food Tent Stage)

7:15 to 8:45 p.m.: Barefoot Truth (Bandshell Stage)

7:45 to 9 p.m.: Mates of State (Welcome Stage)

 

SUNDAY, APRIL 29

10 to 10:30 a.m.: Burrito Betty (Welcome Stage)

10:30 to 11 a.m.: Chuck E. Costa (Food Tent Stage)

11 to 11:45 a.m.: Dagwood (Welcome Stage)

11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.: Amalgamated Muck (Food Tent Stage)

Noon to 12:45 p.m.: 691 (Bandshell Stage)

12:15 to 1 p.m.: Sidewalk Dave (Welcome Stage)

1 to 2 p.m.: Grayson Hugh (Food Tent Stage)

1:15 to 2 p.m.: Bird ‘n’ Boys featuring Ellen Sackman (Bandshell Stage)

1:30 to 2:15 p.m.: The Grimm Generation(Welcome Stage)

2:30 to 3:15 p.m.: Boxxcutter (Bandshell Stage)

2:30 to 3:30 p.m.: The Pedro Valentin Orchestra (Food Tent Stage)

2:45 to 3:30 p.m.: Big Fat Combo (Welcome Stage)

3:45 to 4:30 p.m.: Riverstreet & Friends (Bandshell Stage)

4 to 4:45 p.m.: The D. Smith Blues Band (Welcome Stage)

4 to 5 p.m.: Kelley and Sean (Food Tent Stage)

So the Oscar producers’ plan was apparently to stem the declining ratings by presenting exactly the same show Billy Crystal did for much of the 1990s.

 

No kick against reliability and familiarity, but Crystal’s routines this year were distinguished only by their routine nature. “Formulaic” doesn’t begin to describe them—“forced” might.

 

His usual set-up, that cracking gags about ultra-serious dramas is funny in an ironic way, only works if those dramas are well enough known to be mocked, and most of the Best Picture nominees just weren’t. These films didn’t come with Jerry Maguire or Hannibal Lecter catchphrases or universally recognized scenes. Without a Brokeback Mountain or Crying Game set-up, Crystal had to resort to inserting himself into The Descendants’ death scene for his token “men kissing is funny” bit (during a program whose original producer was pilloried for making a homophobic statement). In Crystal’s film frolic, it was clear from the descent into Spielberg’s Tintin that the movies most ripe for parody had not even been nominated. Find another format to good-naturedly salute the nominees then!

 

The Crystal shtick made you that much more conscious of the Hollywood royalty template which is really the crux of this ceremony. There is the opening fashion-show pageantry. There are the classy presenters (Cruise, Hanks, et al.) who are allowed to loosen up but not lose composure, and the clowns (Ferrell, Galifanakis, Stiller) who are not allowed to be serious for a moment. (Except that Adam Sandler, amazingly, got the last weighty word in one of those documentary segments where stars were asked to about their inspirations and career desires.)

 

One of the go-to-commercial teaser comments about upcoming awards mentioned that something like 10 veterans of Saturday Night Live have been nominated for awards (including Kristen Wiig, as co-author of Bridesmaids, this year), but that none had won. Yet Saturday Night Live was the single cultural entity that bound most of the disparate elements of this show together. Most of the “cool” stars had hosted it. Most of the comic relief were former cast members. Considering how merrily SNL roughs up its hosts’ images, and how it’s one of the most assured methods to sell a major movie on television, it should be taken as a model for how the Oscars could court a younger demographic.

 

As for the winners, Martin Scorsese has gone back to being a channel through which others nab awards, rather than winning himself. Conversely, Woody Allen is again picking up trophies and not deferring them his supporting cast members and cinematographers. I’ve seen so far of this year’s nominees that I’m not fit to judge whether or not they were robbed (or overrated). I like Moneyball but thought it tried too hard to be Oscar material, and I’m glad that transparent toniness didn’t fly with Oscar voters. Meanwhile, having seen neither Hugo nor The Artist yet, I’m hopeful I can still find them in theaters now that they’re prizewinners.

Overall, fun as always to watch, but the Oscar glow faded before the Jimmy Kimmel aftershow even started.

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…