Woke at 2 a.m. to a horrible conflagration at the PCPC.

Cut Off Your Hands
The new breed of old New Romantics from New Zealand. A couple of tracks from the imminent new album are already circulation, plus a free EP from the band’s Facebook page. The thrill of the new is balanced by the “Heard this all back in high school” factor. But honestly, such a mix of earnest heartstring-pulling and synthesizer-nostalgicizing is hard to pull off, and Cut Off Your Hands don’t waste a single echoing “Wooooo.”

The Ebony Hillbillies played a free concert on New Haven Green June 19 for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Here they were Thursday, July 14, rousing ambient villagers of a whole different culture and pace, at the Grand Central subway stop in the band’s accustomed NYC stomping grounds.

The beanbag chairs thought they’d found a hip band name. Them they played out three times and each time were asked “where are the beanbag chairs.” if you choose a certain sort of name, it appears that you are obliged to furnish props.
So for their fourth gig, an opening set for The Sluks at the Bullfinch six weeks ago, they bought and brought beanbag chairs. And tried to sit in them while playing. When that didn’t work, they tried to stand in them while playing. When bassist Dorie nearly took her head off pitching suddenly out of a bag when her feet got tangled in the… beans?, the set came to an abrupt end.
The beanbag chairs are nice people and have lot of friends. They also have parents who told them never to give up. So they booked themselves another Bullfinch show. Again it was an opening set (for the fotomatics this time). Only a gleeful sadist would’ve expected till see the (non-musician) beanbag chairs this time, but there those fat lumpy fabric menaces were, filling the stage when the crowd started arriving around 9 pm.
The beanbag music started playing around 9:30– but we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Some recorded tracks seemed to be involved, but definitely some live vocals (you could tell because of the giggling), kind of muffled.
Then, like the miracle of a butterfly breaking out of its chrysalis pod, zippers were heard to zip and the beanbag chairs broke free of their beanbag chairs. Then they kicked the empty vessels of the stage and rocked out.
(And no, they didn’t need rocking chairs).

First concert spectacle at the Paper/Clay performance center. Har provided a paper clip audience.

We the Kings, Sunshine State of Mind
We the Kings rule benevolently, in the manner of monarchs of AM radio in the mid-1970s. Their pop, refined as it is, is simple and direct to resonate right out of an old car stereo. The song titles assess every aspect of young love: “Somebody to Call My Own,” “Say You Like Me,” “Sleep With Me,” “ “You and Only You,” “Over You.” The lyrics are somewhat more complex than that.
No political entanglements, just crisp regal-rock pronouncements, with ooh-ooh-oohs and frisky guitars. Even the hardest rockers on the record, like “Kiss Me Last,” are civilized and genteel: “Kiss me last; I don’t care who kissed you first.”

Carte Blanche—The New James Bond Novel
By Jeffery Deaver (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

I’m not sure how many there are like me out there, but I find I get at least as excited when a new James Bond book comes out as when a new James Bond movie does.

There’s the same urge to experience the sensation immediately. (I was out of town, nowhere near a book store when Carte Blanche came out mid-June, so I forwent a hardcover first edition. But I was reading the Kindle edition at 12:01 a.m. on the release date.)

The same fear that this time whoever’d been entrusted with the franchise had gone too far.

The same relief at the end when you realize all is well and they’ve really got this thing down to a science.

There’ve been around two dozen James Bond movies, give or take the first couple of Casino Royales, but close to 40 official Bond novels:

12 novels and two short story collections by Bond’s creator Ian Fleming. (The short stories were reissued as a single volume in 2008 to tie in with the film Quantum of Solace.)
14 novels and two movie novelizations by John McDonald.
Six novels, three movie novelizations and three short stories by Raymond Benson.
Colonel Sun by Robert Markham (Kingsley Amis).

Some might also include the five Young Bond novels by Charlie Higson, the three installments in the Moneypenny Diaries series by Samantha Weinburg (Kate Westbrook), and maybe even the four “Israel Bond (Oy Oy 7) parody novels by Sol Weinstein.

Carte Blanche, by bestselling thriller writer Jeffery Deaver, takes a major stylistic turn from the previous Bond novel, Sebastian Faulk’s Devil May Care. (Sometimes you think coming up with an appropriately Bond-sounding title must be half the battle when writing one of these novels.) Both are internationally bestselling authors, but

The sensation is in the sameness. Longtime fans’ satisfaction with both the Bond books and films is how true they’ve generally remained to the original Ian Fleming formula:

A major international criminal plot is revealed, one which threatens civilization as we know it.
James Bond gets involved, either through his work as an agent or by sheer dumb luck.
The supervillain is identified, and plays Bond in a sporting match, at which Bond catches the villain cheating.
An early stage of the plot is foiled, and one of Bond’s associates or paramours is killed or severely injured.
For Bond, the mission gets personal.
Bond is censured or disbelieved by his superiors and must finish the mission essentially by himself.
He does so, and the world is saved.

Familiar and reassuring formula aside, there’s still an exhilaratingly frustrating range of quality in the 58 years of Bond lit and 40 or so of Bond flicks. Sometimes the world crisis, or the supervillain is a little too obviously ripped from recent headlines—a media magnate, say, or (in this book) a recycling entrepreneur—and a little too eager to create popular paranoia about any fast-growing industry.

Carte Blanche’s geographical crisis, however, seems perfectly timed: Bond helps liberate Sudan, among other things.

Deaver includes most of the elements from the plot checklist above, notably excluding the sore-loser sports-cheating scene. (They’re running out of fresh sports anyhow; Faulks had to settle for tennis.)

This is something like the fourth or fifth Bond novel which tries to subtly suggest that Bond is not as sexist, classist, racist, Empiricist, alcoholic or nicotine-addicted as he was in the Cold War days. There’s just no way to suggest that subtly. Mention it at all and you’ve drawn too much attention to it.

Personally, I’d read all the Fleming Bonds by the age of 12 (As good as the Charlie Higson Young Bond pastiches are, I would’ve scoffed at the need for a PG-rated OO7). Instead of buying into the idea that he was some sort of heroic ideal, all that fussing over his martinis and sleeping with women who were clearly looking to kill him made me accept the concept fallible heroes, anti-heroes,. The thought that I’d start smoking, or hitting women, because James did seemed ludicrous.

Deaver shows Bond’s tastes growing out of a desperate need for balance, moments of calm in an endless stream of unpredictable excitements.

Deaver’s all slam-bang suspense, with ticking clocks and deadlines and showdowns. He describes the lead-up to a showdown minute by minute, inch by inch, as if he’s writing High Noon II and not James Bond XXXVI. At least this means he’s good at careful description, which helps when he gives Bond enough breathing time to order a martini or luxuriate in his automobile.

I happily went along for the ride.

Ever seen a musician nod off onstage? Not slump over suddenly, or have a seizure, not one of those rapid knock-outs. A gradual, excruciating nod.

Siggy Laria plays lounge piano. But that’s no excuse.

It’s important to know that he also has a backing band, with a vocalist.

Siggy swears he not a “dope fiend,” in the appealing lingo of this septuagenarian somniac’s era. He says he’d played four weddings in three days and should’ve canceled his regular Sunday restaurant gig at DeLuxio’s. But he didn’t, and took a nap instead, during the second chorus of the torch song standard “Death of Each Day’s Life.”
The band did not appear mollified by Laria’s heroic marital-assistance efforts. This wasn’t the first time their bleary leader has slowed the band’s pace to a crawl, they say.
They left Laria asleep on the stage and broke up the band on the spot.
It’s midweek now, and DeLuxio’s manager Ishie Rose still doesn’t know if the houseband gig will stay with Laria, the pianist’s ex-bandmates (who didn’t even sleep on it before enlisting a new keyboardist, Ginny Gilbert of the First Hipsters), or some other act entirely.
Whoever gets it, it’s a dream gig.

Mar added a clay Greek chorus to my paper theater.

The Parson Redheads, “Burning Up the Sky.”

It feels like 1967 or so, and we’re on a lawn outside a West Coast college somewhere. A scarecrow is playing guitar under a tree. In the branches above him a woman starts cooing harmonies. A badger starts playing ocarina. One by one, all the people and animals in the area slowly joins in. Their voices rise into the heavens until the whole world achieves inner peace.