The Mister Punches came to an outdoor “Polar Bear” show in a horsedrawn coach, which they said they borrowed from some Amish friends. They stayed in there and played a set to scare the horses.
Speakers blared out the back. The canvas roof billowed. They did 14 songs in 17 minutes. Then, having destroyed a couple of centuries of civilization, they were gone.
How can we remind ourselves this fantastical spectacle really happened? They left behind a scythe.

Larry at the Bullfinch, instrumentalizing… The Ten Eel ensemble, a hipster collegiate a capella group, at Hamilton’s, opening for Pont… The Foogahs at D’ollaire’s, with Eh? Shepherds…

Call home frantically all day, leaving messages. Watch a lot of kung fu movies.

The Essential Danzig came out on Sony’s The Essential… series Oct. 25. Glenn Danzig has had a good year, especially compared to that year when a zillion people viewed that video of him getting decked by the roadie of an opening band he’d pissed off. An all-new album, Deth Red Sabaoth, got positive reviews, his time in The Misfits and Samhain continue to inspire tributes, and… well, I never really could stomach the guy so I’ll stop right there.
I will, however, draw your attention to the 49th issue of Roctober magazine, which features two separate interviews with Danzig (a wide-ranging one from this year conducted by Roctober founder Jake Austen and one from 1999 with the cartoonish Canadian arts connoisseur Nardwuar), plus cartoons about Danzig, and lots of freaky love for the Misfits—all part of a much grander special “Livin’ in the ’80s” concept issue.
Roctober is one of the few remaining old-school fanzines of the sort which have filled my basement to bursting. There’s crucial, unique information to be found here, popcult factoids which aren’t well archived anywhere—including here, where updates on past articles or ongoing additions to such worthy projects as listing every Sammy Davis Jr. appearance of masked rock band or Alvin & the Chipmunks project ever can be crammed into filler space on random pages. Each issue carries hundreds of record reviews, dozens of rock-themed cartoons and interviews with talents so long-lost you probably haven’t heard of them. Where Danzig shares equal billing with The Knots and Boyd Rice.

Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds—North America, Britain, and Northern Europe
By John Bevis (MIT Press, 2010)

There are several introductory essays and notes on methodology, then a closing article on “Other Methods of Collecting Birdsong” and a conventional list of dozens of birdsongs which sound like English phrases (such as the red grouse’s “go back, go back, go back” or the hermit thrush’s “why don’tcha come to me? Here I am right near you”). The main show is a 65-page list of spelled-out birdcalls. These include:
“Kik” (common term)
“Kik-ik-ik”(merlin)
“Kikikikikik-kik-kik-kik” (moorhen)
“Kik kek gep krui tik pit kviu kve tchif tchuf” (water rail)

That this book would be published in 2010, using the print medium where most birdcall enthusiasts would opt for field recordings on their cellphones, I find just charming. There are pained paragraphs about the inefficiency of the English alphabet in capturing the tone and precision of birdcalls. But “Why bother, then?” doesn’t ever enter into the endeavor. That’s because Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds (the first call of the title coming from the black skimmer, the other from the lazuli bunting) makes a strong case for birdsong as music, as art, as poetry, open to special notation and interpretation. The book’s design, which sets the text in soft italics and illustrates it with zen-calm nature photography, clinches the concept.

Doing another of my Play in a Day projects tomorrow, Friday Jan. 6, 2-5 p.m. at Never Ending Books, 810 State St., New Haven. Eleven have been staged so far, and each announcement of the next brings flurries of emails from friends and strangers alike.
My stage pursuits are a topic for another page.
What I want to celebrate here is the ongoing good works of Never Ending and Roger Uihlein, who founded the place over two decades ago. It’s a storefront that operates like Alice’s rabbit hole—you fall in and the most bizarre things happen. I’ve done (and seen) theater there for years. Both I and my daughters have held birthday parties there. Many bands have played. Book sales and clean-ups have occurred. A New Year’s party onetime.
Roger, I and others have been brainstorming new projects for the place, including a kid-only coffeehouse cabaret. But just existing, with the bursting bookcases and stained rugs and tweeting radiators, is Never Ending’s most fantastical achievement. Long may it Never End.

Pixy Stix
Watermelon ring pop
Green-on-green striped candy canes
A caramel-apple lollipop
Blue raspberry rock candy
Three grape-flavored Dum Dum pops
A Goetze’s Bulls-Eye. Classic!
The usual jawbreakers and fireballs.

That was a long party at Millie’s mom’s a few months back. In some minds, it’s still going on.
A lot of legendary things happened at the bash, including a six-hour jam session in which two guitarists featured prominently—“Pop” Bash of The Mental Place, and the industrious Frankenjoe of Danger on Vampire Trail. The axemen dueled for hours, antagonistically at first and then copacetically on a magical riff that seemed to arrive from nowhere.
Now the magic has dispersed. Pop and Frank each claim that the riff sprang out of their own fertile scalps. (Both men are bald.) The riff rift began when their respective bands debuted new songs at the annual holiday punk marathon in Santa’s basement, and a couple of tunes were suspiciously similar. Pop accused Frank of lifting his riff, and Frank accused right back.
No lawsuits yet—given the financial straits and mixed-up priorities of both TMP and DoVT, nobody’s got the cash to record for a while, and such disputes don’t get ugly until royalty payments rear up. But this a real grudge happening. Don’t expect a shared bill maybe ever again.

Shattered Helmet at the Bullfinch, with that guy who calls himself Lost Tunnel doing an acoustic opening set… The Disappearing Floor, apparently some sort of dance-party reference, plus Secret Warning at Hamilton’s… It’s a winter-gloomathon at D’ollaire’s with What Happened at Midnight, The Clue in the Embers and While the Clock Ticked…

I call home to tell them I won’t be there for the holidays. Nobody’s home.

123, “Scared But Not That Scared” single. The A-side begins much differently than what it becomes, from one of those common jangly pop openings into a weird David Essex-esque vocal. Unexpectedly gritty, yet there are still those modern-pop underpinnings. The other two songs, “Gun Master” and “Machine” are similarly unprepossessing pop with surprises. ”Machine” even yodels a bit.

The Lives of Sacco & Vanzetti
By Rick Geary (NBM, 2011)
I’ve been a Rick Geary fan for decades, and that means following him in some odd directions—his National Lampoon pages, his spin-off of Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot… but longform delineations of historic murder trials is what he does best, and it’s a pleasure to see him doing it now with long drawn-out complicated cases, slickly printed between hard covers.
Geary did a compendium of Victorian murder cases some years ago, but I think his style is better suited to post-Industrial America. His people have the roundness of John Held Jr. characters with the pockmarked detail of old black-and-white photography. His new full-length graphic novel series has allowed him to sink his teeth into the Lindbergh kidnapping and now the multi-faceted, heavily politicized travails of Sacco & Vanzetti. Geary really sinks his inky teeth into all the conspiracy theories and contradictory evidence, but lays the initial facts out cleanly and maintains a tricky balance between reality and courthouse conjecture. A lot of what’s he’s illustrating is trials rather than crimes, and you marvel at the variety of tools he’s developed to enrich his storytelling even when there’s little or no action.’
You come away from this slim, packed volume knowing all the basics of the Sacco & Vanzetti case and quite a lot more. You get a sense of how passionate people got about the pair’s guilt or innocence, how differently the men behaved, how constant the biases and tampering with evidence were among those sworn to uphold justice. Above all, Geary’s chosen medium suits the swollen, cartoonish tale he’s telling. He’s at home in the era—no corny ‘20s clichés in his art, just period suits and hairstyles—and in command of his subject: the art of celebrated killings.