Various Artists, True Blood soundtrack. The HBO series bears very little relation to my own feelings when reading the Charlaine Harris vampire novels on which the show’s based. I like the books for their surface whimsy, their breeziness and perkiness, all of which are in short supply on the TV adaptation. That’s my problem, probably, for not wanting unexpected depth, because that’s what you get with screenwriter/producer Alan Ball. This album shows that True Blood approaches its soundtrack with the same dark energy which it brings to the dialogue. Light pop tunes chosen, no doubt, simply for their supernaturally themed titles) are stretched and mutated and blackened by artists such as Karen Elson (duetting with Donovan on his “Season of the Witch”), Lavventura,  Paper Pilots and Dick Israel and the Soothsayers (for three, count ‘em three, separate and disparate takes on “She’s Not There”). The smartest gloomy voices are enlisted—P.J. Harvey and Gordon Gano (together!), Nick Cave, Siouxsie Sioux. New Orleans traditions are exalted with Slim Harpo’s “Tee Ni Nee Ni Nu” highly placed at track number three.

I gotta give that show another chance.

Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford (William Morrow, 2010).

Donald Spoto doesn’t dish. He researches and he analyzes and he sympathizes and he places in context. This is good for other scholars. But for my own purposes, as someone who’s never been a Joan Crawford fan and always wondered what others saw in her, this book is no help whatsoever. It takes her talent superstardom as givens.

On the personal side, Possessed downplays the infamous Mommie Dearest accusations of Joan’s daughter Christina and even puts the lightest possible spin on her fraught role as Pepsi-Cola executive. Spoto’s  hagiographic attitude is evident from the first page of the book, where he reprints the text of a letter he received from the star when he was 11 years old in 1952. A couple of pages into the same introductory chapter, Spoto’s making such pronouncements as “Crawford spanned generations, movie styles—in fact, history itself.”

As a casual reader in search of thrills, you know I immediately dug into the index to see if Crawford’s legendary early-career forays into pornography (vaunted in the admittedly mistake-laden Hollywood Babylon) was mentioned. There it is, a helpful entry for “pornographic film, Crawford’s, 26-27.” Yet the section is dismissive. It notes one attempt to blackmail Crawford’s MGM Studios with a purported porno reel featuring Lucille LeSueur (the actress’ real name) roundly discounted as nonsense: “A minatory letter was hurried off to the blackmailer, whose house mysteriouslyu burned to the ground the following month.” Otherwise, it simply says of Crawford that “the assertions of wild promiscuity that accumulated after her death are impossible to corroborate.”

This taste made the rest of the book a laborious slog, not unlike (for me) watching a Joan Crawford performance—everything telegraphed way in advance, no surprises, just overconfident bluster.

We’d planned a picnic at Lighthouse Point Park for after school Friday, but when we got there the beach had been closed due to the pollution from all those storms earlier in the week.

Rather than suffer the indignity of eating potato salad at home, we headed along the coast to Milford, to a state park where, in decades of living in Connecticut, we’d never before been.

Silver Sand Park has no admission fee. It’s beachy in a bunch of different ways, with sandy areas and rocky areas and shell- strewn areas. it’s got this crazy long boardwalk to get you across the swampy bits between the parking lot/ picnic area and the water.

We were there as the tide came in. Mabel scraped her foot and I got nipped by a crab, almost at the same moment, but we recovered and had a fine swim and a fun dinner of grilled tofu dogs.

This is a dream park, with natural personality to spare, a highway-exit get-away that plunges you into.. well, you get the picture.

When Mabel was not even a year old, she once silenced an entire Ben & Jerry’s ice cream place in Hanover, New Hampshire with a non-stop barrage of “Ba! Ba! Ba!” exclamations which registered decibly somewhere between a foghorn and a Who concert.

The customers were nonplussed. Many laughed. One professor type tried to say something profound about the power of an infant to shut down so many conversations. I remember thinking that guy just wanted to hear himself talk, and that Mabel had done that better.

This painter was painting a painting all during the Edgewood Day set at the Bullfinch last week. We thought he must be with the band, they were ski accompanying. We’ve been known to sketch a bit at or table after a few cocktails– shades of Toulouse– but thus man had hits whole easel and palette out. When we tried to talk to him after the set–12 songs of battered bliss, about everything from breakfast cereal to borrowed shoes– the artist got all temperamental on us, accusing us of trying to swipe his brushes and tubes and refusing to answer any questions.

So we approached the EdgeDays’ lead singer, George Wandell, who we hardly know. Before we even said a thing, he shrugged and shouted “Who WAS that guy?”

Season of Arrogance plus their own side project, Parade of Pathetic Services, at the Bullfinch… Belated Welcome Back College Nite at Hamilton’s with Communiversity and Student Discount starting the homework with covers of “classic” rock songs… Nothing at D’ollaire’s. Nothing worth mentioning, anyway…

The victor in the birdfight is building a nest on top of his expired enemy.

Fidlar, “Max Can’t Surf.” I keep coming back to this one. Even before The Ramones’ third album, there were lots of attempts to mix punk and surf sounds. Some of the best attempts have been from East Coast non-surfers such as The Queers and The Gremies, but Fidlar comes from L.A. and really nails the impatience and nastiness of watching other people having fun in the water.

Untied.

By Meredith Baxter (Crown Archetype, 2011).

Meredith Baxter did a whole lot of drugs as a teenager, and has the sort of encyclopedic psychopharmaceutical memory which allows her to recall and describe how each of those myriad substances made her feel.

By her early 20s, Baxter was married , then divorced, with two kids, living in a virtual garden shack and trying to hold herself together while working insurance company jobs. She drifts into acting.

Her mother Whitney Blake, whose career had gone in the odd direction of her languishing for years as the housewife employer of Shirley Booth on the hit series Hazel, blows through several marriages.

Baxter’s stepfather becomes her agent, and remains so even after he’s no longer her stepfather. As part of his agent duties, he sets up a seedy rendezvous between her and a casting agent.

Baxter wanders into an acting career which takes off immediately and sustains itself even as she ages from high school roles in movies such as Ben to the short-lived and bizarrely controversial sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie to older sister status on the drama Family for five seasons to the mother role in one of the iconic sitcoms of the 1980s to Lifetime made-for-TV movies.

Baxter marries her Bridget Loves Bernie co-star David Birney, who emotionally abuses her and resents her career doing better than his. Soon there are more splits and more romances, successes to celebrate. Then there’s the defining event of the book, which demands a prologue and a couple of chapters: Baxter’s decision to come out as a lesbian in 2009, having established a lasting and happy relationship with her partner Nancy Locke.

Meredith Baxter’s autobiographical narrative voice is unabashed, unashamed, yet cooingly sweet and with crystal-clear recall. Her strong will comes from her realization of how victimized, or at least  vulnerable and subservient she was in her youth. She expresses so much distaste for the waffling and self-censorship that CBS exhibited during the short run of Bridget Loves Bernie that she clearly avoids such absurd second-guessing in her own life. Yet she’s sensitive: an introductory note explains why she’s chosen not to mention her children a lot in the book, and though she has some nasty anecdotes about her husbands, she’s also full of tales about their better sides.

Best of all, this is a flowing human story, not a disjointed collection of career highlights. Baxter doesn’t put her life aside for her work, and the two intersect fascinatingly. Chapter eight ends with the TV producer Gary David Goldberg and his wife Diana Meehan coming to dinner at the Baxter/Birney house, to discuss a role for Birney in a new series called The Bureau. Birney doesn’t get the gig, but Goldberg later calls Baxter to offer her the role of Elyse on Family Ties.

Chapter Nine begins:

Years later, Gary’s wife, Diana, said that as they drove away from our house that night, Gary told her that he found the way David spoke to me so embarrassing that he didn’t want to work with him. I couldn’t remember anything David had said that stood out; I had no sense of that night being different from any other night.

This is exactly the celebrity bio you want it to be.

Here in Ward 2, the candidate our family was supporting for Alderman, Frank Douglass, won handily with a final tally of 358-172.

The New Haven Independent reports that Frank’s opponent, Doug Bethea, plans to switch his party allegiance to Independent and run against Frank again in the General Election two months from now.

Part of me hopes that doesn’t happen. Elections can be draining affairs, and one hopes that the wheels will not have to be set in motion again so soon. Is two years from now not soon enough?

Journalistically, though, I notice that a number of the candidates (including Bethea) who received support from Mayor DeStefano’s City Hall and who were defeated last night announced that they’d be changing their affiliation and running in November. Is this losers’ bravado, or could it be a grander DeStefano-machine strategy?

Many of the victors in the aldermanic races last night were backed by local unions. The brouhaha over that has barely begun from those who seek to paint these unions as anything other than community-based organizers. City Hall could foment quite an anti-union backlash in eight weeks if they chose to, giving their “Independent” pals a leg up.

But painting this as Unions vs. City Hall would be grossly misrepresentative of what really happened on the streets this past summer, as least as I saw it in Ward 2. Let’s leave aside the fact that the unions and Mayor DeStefano have lots in common philosophically and just consider the concept of one managerial monolith against another.

While the union was unquestionably a major presence in the campaign in terms of organization, management and volunteer help, the Ward 2 choice came down to individuals, not to work cultures or political theorizing.

I was not interested in Frank Douglass for his union affiliations; nor were many of the neighbors I spoke to. Ultimately, an alderman will be answerable to his neighborhood, not to any grander entity. For my vote, Frank was the better candidate to do the immediate job of representing our neighborhood at regular City Hall meetings, and of listening to his neighbors daily. This ward has a history of voting out alderpersons who skirt their duties, and it doesn’t matter whether City Hall, unions or God is stumping for them.

What happened Tuesday won’t matter if the newly anointed candidates don’t do the specific jobs they were elected to do. Which is why I hope that some of the losers don’t go skulking away with their tails between their legs. Living to fight another day is something that New Haven politicians don’t do particularly well. Folks lose one race and they never run again. Frank Douglass is one of a few you can point to who came back—he lost by a smattering of votes to Gina Calder in Ward 2 four years ago, was elected Ward Co-Chair two years ago, and (beyond the considerable union support) knew how to build a strong, community-based campaign this time around.

In the mayoral race, Jeffrey Kerekes has been prepared all along to switch to Independent and run further in November if he didn’t win yesterday’s primary. I have a months-old door-knob flier of his, and it has both the primary and general election dates printed on it. He’s been looking at the big picture all along.

And he did well yesterday—not “surprisingly well” or “alarmingly well”; genuinely, credibly well in the sense that there were no sensational stunts on his part, or egregious stumbles on the part of the incumbent, and an impressive number of voters seem to be grasping Kerekes’ decidedly unsexy numbers-conscous, no-nonsense message.

Though I do have trepidations about too many of these alderman squabbles entering a new phase, I do fervently hope that everyone who ran and lost yesterday runs again, especially on the mayoral level. We had three strong contenders this year, who will only get stronger if they see this as a long-range, multi-year concern and not as a one-time thing. DeStefano’s had serious challengers before, including some deep-pocketed Republicans, but none serious enough to run against him more than once.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m totally anti-DeStefano. I’m not. He’s implemented a number of progressive, creative programs that many mayors would never conceive of doing. He did a fine job managing the city through the natural disasters of wintertime blizzards and summertime hurricans. Verbally, he eschews bluster.

But democracy is good for the soul, and leaders should be tested. Let’s be in this for the long haul.

I’d seen Mr T experience a couple of times in the early ’90s, and really enjoyed them. But I didn’t become a major fan until the group’s leader, Dr. Frank (now known as the novelist Frank Porter) released his solo album Show Business is My Life in 1999.  I listened to it nonstop during an all night work session at the New Haven Advocate, then left it in my colleague Kathleen Cei’s definition with a Post-it recommendation (“REALLY good”) stuck on it. So she became a fan.

We picked up the several old Mr T albums they had in the racks at Exile on Main Street in Hamden, and it wasn’t long before newer ones stayed coming out—Alcatraz, the EP Miracle of Shame… When another Kathleen, the one who is now my wife, came into my life, she became a Mr. T fan too, especially of the 1992 album Milk Milk Lemonade.

I wrote of Dr. Frank as “the Cole Porter of punk.” Kathleen, Kathleen and I would troop off to Mr. T or Dr. Frank shows in new York or Boston, where we’d gradually buy up the CDs we hasn’t yet gotten. It’s just timing, but it took a while before we got hold of a copy of the Mr T album which we barely knew but which I’d wager most of their other fans knew best. Released in 1996, Love is Dead had gotten a big publicity push, with videos and everything, in the wake of the extraordinary success of a fellow band from the Gilman Street San Francisco club scene, Green Day.

So the first time I remember hearing the song “Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba” was when a fan shouted out a request for it at a Mr. T show at the Middle East in Cambridge, Mass.

It was a memorable show in a lot of ways. Joe Queer of the Queers joined in for a song and some body surfing. I won an mp3 player in a raffle. We picked up some unique Mr. T merch, like a gas station attendant’s stripey shirt with a name embroidered on it next to a cloth Mr. T patch.

But my main memory of that show, which repeats in my head every time I hear that song, is that lone guy bleating out his request, over and over. Without melody or clarity, it’s a bewildering, disorienting thing to hear someone wail:

“Play Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba!

Play Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba!”