Now the windows are clean and open, we are investing in a communication network of baskets and tin cans.

Samiam, Trips. Wow, “80 West” sounds strikingly like Dramarama’s “Work for Food” from 15 or so years ago.  But it’s really a very different, faster, louder work. I have always appreciated Samiam’s melodic sense, marrying catchy chord progressions to a thunder all their own. It goes beyond familiar to downright comforting.

I’m well aware of the vastness of the Star Wars galaxy and my tiny place in it. The films hold a special place in my heart, since I really got to know the guy who became my lifelong best friend when we hopped a train to Boston together to see the first Star Wars the week it came out, and had to wait in a blocks-long line. I didn’t see the more recent trilogy until a couple of years ago, when my daughters expressed interest and we got them out of the library. But I always knew I’d get around to them when I had six free hours.

Star Wars books are a more daunting task. There are hundreds of them, starting with the novelizations and evolving into whole independent series. Some fill in gaps in the movie narratives, some elevate minor characters to their own adventures, some move into future generations.

I’ve read dozens of these over the years, from the series about the twin offspring of Princess Leia and Han Solo to the offerings from big-name science fiction authors Timothy Zahn and Alan Dean Foster.

Currently, I’m down to two series—one of them steady, the other slight and culty. Aaron Allston’s Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi books are breezy, true to the romantic adventurous of the original films, and don’t get bogged down in all the mechanics, dialects and geographics reserved for readers much more fanatical than I am. Allston uses the most famous Star Wars faces—Luke, Leia, Han—but treats them as wise elders who must look after younger, more impetuous force-wielders, including their own children:

Luke killed the repulsors, allowing the shuttle to settle don on the stony surface of the slope. The shuttle began to rock, pushed by the winds.

“Fun flight, dad.”

“Quiet, you.”

(from Star Wars Fate of the Jedi: Conviction by Aaron Allston, Ballantine Books 2011)

Straightforward space tales neatly told, they also adapt beautifully to audiobook, with the series’ regular reader Marc Thompson doing as good as job differentiating the many voices in the narrative as Jim Dale famously does with the Harry Potter audiobooks.

Allston is the mainstream Star Wars writer I can get a handle on. The Star Wars books of Joe Schreiber are the cult ones I connect to. Schreiber is a horror writer foremost, and he brings a darkness, bloodthirstiness and unruliness to a genre that tends to be clinical and neatly uniformed. He reminds us that evil is more than a sleek black mask. Schreiber’s Star Wars output is slight, but his Red Harvest has stayed with me longer than any other Star Wars book I’ve read. He uses few well-known characters, plumbing the war-is-hell-and-hell-is-good consciousness of the Sith Lords and the often horror-struck, up-for-anything opponents:

Drawing on the Force, gathering it inside, as he’d been taught duringh hundreds of hours of training, he jerked the vent fixture from its housing. It came loose with a hollow metallic pop, bolts rattling free, opening a rectangle of cold space that fed into an open air shaft above. Still dangling from the open shaft, Scopique turned the vent fixture over in his free hand, evaluation its immediate utility as a weapon. It was thin and aerodynamic, with sharp edges—it would serve the purpose well enough.

He looked down at the thing that had been Jura.

“Whatever you are,” Scopique muttered, “say goodbye to your head.”

(from Star Wars Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber, Ballantine Books 2010)

Both Allston and Schreiber revel in the campy fun of B-movies, as the very first Star Wars did; they just prefer different genres. Between them, they provide all the Star Wars I need just now.

People get fiercely loyal, and wax extremely eloquent about their passions for specific New Haven pizza places. Much less quietly, the city developed a coffee shop culture of similar intensity.

This is significant, since in many regions of the country the coffeehouse boom is long over. In New Haven, it sometimes seems like it’s still developing, in energetic spurts not unlike the properties of the beverage it espouses

New Haven is a city which didn’t have a Starbuck’s until the late ‘90s—years after other cities had been settled and conquered by that monolithic caffeinated corporation. Sure, there’d always been plenty of Dunkin’ Donuts—the wonderful breakfast nook Gag Jr., when it closed in the late ‘80s, gave way to a DD. But independence and distinction have always been valued in New Haven. But there was always a strong, full-bodied presence, a robust perk.

Willoughby’s Coffee, of course, is the stalwart. Its original Chapel Street outpost is long gone, but the Whitney one is a grand institution, and Yale has had its own Willoughby’s on York now for a few years. When the local chain was sold and lost its way, the founders actually regained control.

Then there’s the calm tones of Woodland (two locations), the intellectual camaraderie of Lulu’s, the Orange Street hustle-bustle of Bru Café (not to be confused with the Bru-with-an-umlaut microbrewery restaurant at BAR on Crown). There’s Koffee? on Audubon, beloved of parents waiting to pick their kids up from classes at Neighborhood Music School. There’s the brewing-liberal Blue State Coffee, which first established itself on the students-rushing –to-class thoroughfare of Wall Street and now runs a second concern on York St., where the longlived Koffee 2 once was.

All independent. All aware that a good coffee rush is in the details (multiple kinds of cream, wooden stirrers, etc.) , and the décor.

Mabel: Can we hear some Burt Bacharach?

Me: You know, it’s not just Burt Bacharach. Burt Bacharach just wrote the music. A man named Hal David wrote the words to all those songs.

Mabel: Did he write “Wo, wo, wo, wo, wo, wo, wo, wo, wo, wo”?

It’s worked for others, so as a practical method of propaganda, proclaiming a musician to be “god,” then spraying that proclamation on a wall, has some merit.

Sonny Blitt, at sea since his best-known band The Blats ended, was thus honored last week at several downtown locations, including the parking lot outside the Bullfinch.

When it turned out the vandal was Sonny himself, that he was caught in the act by security guards over by the ‘phone company, and that he may even be prosecuted… Well, from here he’s not looking all that godlike.

Calling All Detectives and The Backstage Wives at the Bullfinch. All in the family, and several in the force… Box 13 and The 25th Century at Hamilton’s, playing the numbers game of 400 covers for every “original”… The Quizzical Calloways at D’ollaire’s with “special guests” Cinnamon Bear, who should flatten the ostensible headliners…

Another hole in the backyard. R.I.P. representative pigeon feathers.

PS I Love You, Figure It Out—A Collection of EPs and Singles by PS I Love You

I met up with this as a free full-album stream on the PS I Love You Facebook page (For Facebook, shouldn’t they be PS I “Like” You?). Perhaps it’s still there. If not, a vinyl version is due imminently. The comp contains rarities and early versions of not-so-rarities. It’s a remarkably consistent listen for a seeming scattered set of previously released things. (One of the jauntier tunes is actually called “Scattered.”) Even the rhythms and the harmony  attitudes line up pretty neatly, and the occasional lumbering slow tunes like “Actually (I Am a Monster)” don’t really impede the momentum. By the end, with raucous work-outs such as “Where’s the Party?,” the band has shown a range and flair grander than on any single one of their other recordings.

Nobody’s Perfect—Two Men, One Call, and a Game for Baseball History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011)

This was released at the beginning of this baseball season, but is a finer read for the end of it, since The Detroit Tigers, who figure strongly in the narrative, have had such an extraordinary year, over a dozen games ahead of their nearest division rival with just a smattering of games to go.

This is a 242-page examination of a split-second call in which pitcher Armando Galarraga was denied the honor of pitching a perfect game because first-base umpire Jim Joyce declared runner Jason Donald to be safe after a hit in the ninth inning with one out left to go.

A description of the event and its immediate aftermath—Joyce releasing that he’d called it wrong—is all dealt with in the book’s first six pages. Then we get the interesting stuff of what was going through the pitcher’s and umpire’s minds at the time. The book celebrates Joyce’s honesty and Galarraga’s magnanimity. It gives these overnight sensations a chance to explain the rest of their lives and how they got to this moment. After the famous non-out, Joyce reflects, then bursts into tears. Galrraga just wants to be with his wife.

Say grace tonight for all the beleaguered Connecticut farmers. Not only were many crops flooded or blown apart by the rampacious Irene, the rainy days since then cast a further damper on the crops.

This week came the frost.