Loves It!, YAY!
It’s hard not to enthuse over an album entitled YAY! This is a folk-pop duo with presence and verve. The female vocalist, Jenny Parrott, is well-remembered from the New Haven scene of a few years ago, though Loves It! now calls Austin, Texas their homebase. Vaughn Walters, who like Parrott both sings and plays guitar, hails from West Virginia. The interplay between Parrott (who handles most of the lead singing) and Walters (who helps with harmonies and gentle guitar details) is honest and refreshing. They’re so fresh and perky, in fact, that YAY! could be mistaken for a chidren’s-music album. (The album cover design doesn’t hurt that impression.) Even the sadder, reflective songs like “Me Alone” have an amiable showiness to them.
But this is grown-up music—luxuriant and articulate, about stuff like Bobby Kennedy (a biographical ditty which ends with a potent wail of “California!”), second-guessing love relationships and the fluidity of musical styles (the complex “Dixieland,” shown in the video above).
The recordings clearly suggest that Loves It! must be an engaging, uplifting live act. Their affection for performing, for adding charming little frills to their arrangements, is abundant. They want to win you over with chipper charm, not pomp or bluster, and they succeed.
Makes you wonder: when did the majority of folk acts today forget the whole “ingratiating” aspect of what they do?

No Regrets: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir
By Ace Frehley, with Joe Layden and John Ostrovsky. (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

No regrets, but that’s to be understood because there’s not a whole lot of self-awareness in the first place. Ace Frehley gets that he overdid the drugs and booze while hiding behind the Spaceman make-up in one of the most popular rock bands of the 20th century. But his constant grumblings about the commercial-minded machinations of Gene Simmons and other insults to his assumed excellence rankle the reader in different ways than they do the writers. (Frehley required two associates to pen this disaffected tome.)

What’s weirdest about this book, and about the world of Kiss in general, is how it seems to exist in a vacuum. He dispenses with personal influences (The Who, Cream, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels) early on, and doesn’t really get into comparing his best-known band with any other. When he mentions famous rockers, it’s as celebrity encounters, not as colleagues or artists.

The book, and Frehley’s views, exist in a void. It’s as if Kiss was a distant planetary entity which Spaceman was destined to plant a flag on, then jump back in a spaceship and orbit as a pissed-off observer for the rest of his career.

Lots of local headlines this past week about the NHPD overtime costs related to the Occupy New Haven settlement on New Haven Green. I think it was one of the local TV stations which first did the math. Struck me as idle trawling for a story—once the luster of any event starts to fade, the first question most folks ask is “What did this cost?!”
To me, the answer to that burning question—$65,000 or so since Occupy first planted itself two months ago—seems not just reasonable but a downright bargain, and I speak as someone who has covered city festivals and events for a couple of decades now, and who helped set up a couple of big outdoor spectacles on the Green as a short-term employee of the city’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs in the late 1980s, not to mention the many downtown local-band festivals the New Haven Advocate was involved with throughout the 1990s.
Expenses for a one-night event on New Haven Green can quickly go into the thousands of dollars, with the need to accommodate the safety and well-being of the citizenry. Even a deliberately low-cost endeavor such as the Ideat Village festival needs a budget in the four digits to kick back for costs of essential city services. A big parade can run into the tens of thousands.
More to the point, on any given weekend in New Haven, there are untold numbers of cops getting overtime for standing by as college student parties on residential streets spring up unexpectedly and suddenly need overseeing. There are bigger-than-usual closing-time needs at dance clubs. There are community festivals where special clean-up services and security procedures come into play.
I loved City Hall’s reaction to the cost of maintaining the Occupy settlement: that this is what the First Amendment sometimes requires, and this is what New Haven Green is for. Due to the abruptness of the settlement at first, expenses were somewhat inflated and have since been modified. I imagine that the expected future expense of regrowing the grass in that area of the upper Green would be about the same whether the tents were there for a week or for two months.
If we look at this another way, the City has helped support a dynamic new movement which is rethinking how we can live in the city (providing shelter at rock-bottom rates, including for some who are otherwise homeless), express our views in a public forum and gain international publicity beyond that which has been achieved by any single cultural event in recent times, for what seems to be a minimal expenditure.
This is the cost of doing business in the new America, and it’s well spent.

Very pleased with how my ciabatta loaves came out today. Credit where due: Paul Hollywood’s lavishly (loave-ishly?) illustrated book 100 Great Breads (Metro Books, 2004) is what first made me believe I could conquer this tricky Italian dough. I’ve since revised the recipe to my own needs, thus:

Start at bedtime.
Put one cup white flour, one cup whole wheat flour, one package yeast (I’m partial to Hodgson Mill Active Dry Yeast for Whole Grains, which is currently on sale at my neighborhood Stop & Shop) and one cup of water in a big mixing bowl.
(I honestly don’t know if the usual don’t-use-metal-equipment rules which govern sourdough recipes apply here. I have a lovely big red ceramic bowl, and I use that, with plastic or wooden spoons.)
Mix until smooth and goopy. Cover with a dishcloth. Let sit overnight.
In the morning, the mix will be an expansive bubbly mass which could win a starring role in a horror movie. Dump two more cups of white flour and one more cup of water into it and whack it back down to a doughy form. The mixture will still be goopy and unkneadable by hand. Add two or three tablespoons of olive oil. Stir it hard for several minutes. Keep scraping the sides of the bowl so it takes on the form of a wet oozy ball.
Let rise for at least two hours. (Today, I left it for something like five.)
The operative verb for what you do next is “tip”–that’s from Hollywood’s 100 Great Breads book, and it’s perfect. The dough is so fluid and sticky that you have to sluice it out of the bowl carefully with a spoon, dividing it in half as you “tip” it onto a floured wooden surface. Stretch each half of the dough (it’s more like batter) to a French-bread shaped lump about a foot long. Dust with a lot of flour on top, then lay a dishcloth over it and let rise for an hour or two.
After the time has passed , push each half of the sloppy mass back into some semblance of dough. Divide each half in two. Take these four pieces and put them on a dusted baking pan (I use a breadstone; they’re really worth the expense), shaped into long eight- to ten-inch loaf-shaped blobs. Cover with the dishcloth again and let rise another hour (or more). When the rise has hit the 45-minute mark, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Bake for just 30 minutes.
The ciabatta comes out airy and soft inside and crusty outside. Excellent with butter and cheese, also sturdy enough for peanut butter and jelly. Distinctive sour taste, and the olive oil also shines through. But it’s that texture which is the true achievement. Too much flour in the dough and it ends up acting like a lot of regular breads. Keep it batter-like and marvel at the difference.

Stars came from here once. They glimmered from the Ocean Motion party-cruise boat in the bay. The resplendent Sonny Blitt did time with one of the biggest regional party bands of the era before they raised the drinking age. So did Master Moon. Dawnette went from wild local R&B frontwoman to a steady career as a big-city studio back-up singer. The dance parties at the Jupiter Hotel could draw thousands, in the days before television. Lots of musicians in town had houses with swimming pools in those days. Their private parties were as important as their public concerts. That’s how the gods of yore lived.
Now, the best-known players in the local scene all live above the bars where they play most often. No more Jupiter Hotel. No more hordes of drunk teens in public establishments. No more Weekend Hops. No more Apollo.

Hunting for Hidden Gold and Whale Tattoo at the Bullfinch, with whole new found noises you’ve never heard emanate from a stage… Spiral Bridges and Desert Giant at Hamilton’s, covering guess who… Black metal with Shield of Fear, Shadow Killers and The Serpent Teeth at D’ollaire’s; the “Breakdown in Axeblade” tour…

Walked on the beach in the snow. Studied birds.

Beneath Wind and Waves, Non-Etre. Airy whispers which get satisfyingly substantial, building delicately but surely until they’re practically techno tracks. Except they’re much too human for that.

Carla Bley (American Composers series)
By Amy C. Beal (University of Illinois Press, 2011)
I knew the name, but had no real sense of Carla Bley until a few years ago, when the Yale-based experimental bassist Jack Vees told me about her cult jazz concept album Escalator Over the Hill. I downloaded it from iTunes at once and kept it on my iPhone for months, more curious about it than captivated. This book has a very useful chapter on the creation of that album, Escalator’s relation to live theater and other arts, and how it served as a transition to more avant-garde, and jazzier Bley works.
It’s nice to learn conclusively who some of Bley’s artistic influences were on the project, and how deliberately theatrical some of its elements are. Escalator Over the Hill has non-singers vocalizing, the use of performers such as Warhol superstar Viva, a loose narrative that circles ‘round on itself. It’s openly experimental yet supremely confident. It’s cohesion as a longform piece of “chronotransduction” (Bley and her collaborators’ term for what others label a “jazz opera) is remarkable considering how spread out (both geographically and timewise) its composition was.

“The elaborate instrumentation of Escalator Over the Hill,” Beal writes, “reflects Bley’s eclectic tastes, as well as the serendipity and haphazardness of her casting; having little money to pay performers, Bley notoriously drew in everyone she could, plus their relatives and roommates. The musical casting also expressed her affinity for rock music, low brass, elaborate orchestral color, ecstatic solos and occasional experimentation with electronics and unusual sound effects.”
The book is full of such useful matter-of-fact appraisals of how Bley matter-of-factly made transcendent art.
Now I’m less curious about Escalator and dying to sample Bley’s most recent work.
It’s barely over a hundred pages, but as “first compehensive treatment” of Bley in print,” Amy Beal’s book piques interests aplenty.

Yale Daily News, Jan. 10, 2012:
“Yale may not be close to naming its next head football coach.”

Yale Daily News, Jan. 12, 2012:
Reno Officially Named Football Coach

It’s Friday the 13th. You need something better than that Rebecca Black song everyone loves to hate.
There are already some worthy lists of notable Friday songs here and here.

1. Joe Jackson, “Friday”:
Monday morning
Friday’s far away
Pray you’ll make it
It’s a magic day
Bells will ring and you’ll go out to play
Spend your money
Pass the bottle
Friday rules
Friday rules OK
2. George Jones, “Finally Friday.” Did George Jones really worry about which day of the week he looked forward to drinking and partying on?
3. “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask).” One of Alice Cooper’s occasional “comeback” hits—the theme song from the film Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.
4. “Thank God It’s Friday.” Not the R. Kelly travesty from seven years ago; the Donna Summer movie soundtrack from 1978.
5. Ice Cube, “Friday.” From the first installment of his motion picture franchise. Note how many Friday songs came from Friday movies.
6. Tiki Island, “The Friday Song.” A catchy children’s cartoon thing, found here.
7. Bob Dylan (aka Mike Bauer), “Friday.” A skillful bit of style-parody retrofitting, but the text mythology which has grown up around this purported ‘60s inspiration for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” has been just as clever as the production itself.
8. The Darkness, “Friday Night”:
Monday cycling
Tuesday gymnastics
Dancing on a Friday night
I got Bridge Club on Wednesday
Archery on Thursday
Dancing on a Friday night
9. Mel Waiters, “Friday Night Fish Fry.” Smooth yet snappy soul/R&B. Another “Friday” fish song is one I noted in my fish-song list of the other day: “The Codfish Ball,” which begins “Friday night you’re all invited to dance from 8 to 5…”
10. Abba, “Dancing Queen”: “Friday night and the lights are low…”