Cesaria Evora, the moody Cape Verdean thrush who died last Saturday, performed in New Haven at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in June, 2000. I’m having trouble believing it was that long ago, since my memory of the concert is so fresh.
This was one of those A&I “Courtyard Concerts,” on an outdoor stage in a walled-in yard outside an impressive Yale building. Artists take to such a staging arrangement in different ways. Some treat it like any other park festival, even though it’s clearly more intimate and reserved. Some treat it like an indoor club gig, ignoring the unique atmosphere.
Cesaria Evora nailed the concept. She didn’t do anything special—or rather, anymore special than what she usually did. She sang divinely, then sat at a little round onstage table and drank and smoke until her backing band required her to sing again. Theatrically, she was the female equivalent of Tom Waits’ 1970s persona, without the grift. Just a weary woman with a great gift.
In that courtyard, Cesaria Evora acknowledged the breeze. She reflected the warmth and the nature. You could smell her cigarette smoke, but as an accent and not as the annoyance it might have been indoors. She seemed freed and refreshed by being able to set up shop on someone’s lawn. Her songs were as downcast and unsettling as ever—her magnificent voice had the power to chill and wound—but she was in her element. Windswept, unflappable, immoveable.

Fan waves. Singer lunges. Amp falls– right off the stage. The Guitarist plugged into said amp, who hasn’t been paying attention, is yanked of his feet as if he were a fish on a reel. He flounders forward and nearly falls off the stage himself.
We know what you’re wondering. Did the rest of the band stop playing? (That’s what we always wonder, anyway). Well, if you Carl laughing music… The drummer was summarily fired later that night.

The Toxochelys and Lax Marginals at the Bullfinch, students stuck on campus over the holidays… High Solid Shells and Trionyx at Hamilton’s… Nostalgia night at D’ollaire’s with Aspiderettes, a retro band now retro itself…

Everybody else seems to have gone home for the holidays last week.

Woods, “Christmas Time is Here.” The duo covers the Vince Guaraldi song, roughly yet respectfully, with neither schmaltz nor irony. They’re clearly more the shabby-little-tree type than the blissful-ice-skaters type, but they’ve chosen the right song regardless. Hear it here.

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
By Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson, 2010).
I thought such an extensive subtitle would cover some authors I actually cared about. Not that I don’t like Virginia Woolf, but I was led to believe that I might find anecdotes about some of my faves—Wyndham Lewis, David Garnett… No luck at all there, but my disappointment lifted when I got a sense of what Alexandra Harris’ thesis really is. She acknowledges movements like Futurism, but her interest is in those artists who were using new forms and styles to reframe the past, partly as a protective psychological measure during times of war and international crisis.
I realize the need for a broad, general title that grabs as many potential readers as possible—a properly detailed and qualified title describing what Harris’ book is actually about would make it sound like an impenetrable college thesis—but Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper flummoxed me and nearly turned me away… until I stopped judging it by its cover.

I’m going about my Stop & Shopping last week when a woman pushes her cart past the People’s Bank outlet in a corner of the market, then backs off a few steps and says, in a voice which means to be overheard:
“There is no such thing as a People’s Bank!”

I pass her a few aisles later, and she’s still muttering variations on the same refrain: “What’s a bank doing here anyway?”

Wonder what she’d think of the “It’s Time to Unbank” promotions across town at the Connex Credit Union branch on Whitney Avenue.

In my own humble stab at Nouvelle Cuisine—which, translated into domestic cooking nomenclature, means “What’s in the Refrigerator”—I baked and mashed, then lightly fried, some fresh-baked local organically grown squash and put it into otherwise Asian-styled dumplings.
The dumpling wrappers cost under $2 at a Chinese market downtown.
The squash overwhelmed the other ingredients (fried onions and garlic, some grated carrot and potato, a teaspoon of soy sauce) as I’d expected, but not in a way that anybody minded. After some suspicions, the daughters dug in. Kathleen raved, and raved again when she had the last few dumplings in her lunch the next day. Such delicacies don’t often age well, but these did.
The trick might have been that I didn’t use any oils in the frying—just cooking spray. This led to a crispness that oils could not have accomplished. I think.
Honestly, this was a happy accident which I hope I can duplicate soon. Chinese-sesque Connecticut-grown squash dumplings. Wish I was this clever in the kitchen more often.

“No Dogs Allowed.” The Stinky Aching Dogs, a quirky quintet from 100 miles hence, took comic offense when they pulled up to the Bullfinch Friday night for a rousing, leash-tautening late set.
The sign which apparently suggested they vamoose the premises was brand, heightening the hilarity. One of the club’s oft-unseen owners had just had a run-in with an employee’s cur one afternoon the previous week. Figuring he could at least control his own domain, if not the alleyway just outside, he scrawled “No DoGs Alloud”—just like that—on a napkin and taped it next to the band schedule in the front window.
Just to play it safe, The Stinky Aching Dogs performed under an alias, the Dinky Steak Hogs, a reference to some lousy hamburgers they’d just eaten on the road.

Side Necked and Bony Fishes—no fish allowed!—at the Bullfish, uh, -finch… Holostet and The Trionyx at Hamilton’s, for Rock Science Nite… An Evening With Gavial & Closest Living Relatives at D’ollaire’s. Go see who attends, and blackmail them…

Heading home for the holidays. Need to check the notice board.

Phil and the Osophers, It’s Christmas Time With Phil and the Osophers. Silly, underwritten folk-pop carols about Christmas break, ugly Christmas sweater parties, “Brutus the Backup Reindeer” and other lighthearted larks. Hard to get worked up either way about a Christmas EP. It’s a novelty, but one you’ll only listen to once a year, so fine.