We referred to a show last week as a “hippie-dippy wingding,” without knowing it was a memorial for beloved member of a local peacemongering movement. Some readers think we play the bad taste card a lot on purpose, but this was inadvertent. We guess it’s foolish to suggest that we meant nothing derogatory by the term “hippie-dippy.” We do in fact like many hippies and applaud their humanitarian values. We just deplore their musical tastes. We thought last week’s show was simply a hoedown of hippie hoopla. Instead, it was a public wake for a fallen comrade. We regret our choice of words. There were only five of them altogether, and we’ve just spent a hundred clearing them up.

The Pickwicks and the Dombeys at the Bullfinch… Cricket and the hearths open for great expectations (note there’s a loaded name for a cover band) at Hamilton’s… Copperfield at Dollaire’s. No opening act has been announced, though we heard they’re looking for a female solo acoustic act to open…

More yard work. Dug a hole.

Brontosaurus, Cold Comes to Claim

Stripped-down indie rock attitude. To ears from around here (New Haven), where Miracle Legion ruled the ‘80s, this mix of laid-back rangy poetic sing/speech and punchy guitars is old hat.

…until the keyboards and percussion come in. That’s fresh. “Beware,” the opening track of this six-song EP sets the ground rules, repeating a riff until it orchestrates up into an ELO area. “Bring in New Blood” opens with a guitar sound out of The Beatles’ “Blackbird,” but it doesn’t stay lonely—there are harmonies and weird throbby background sounds. “Mouths Move” opens with heavy crashing piano then flips to classical guitar and keeps changing up for over eight minutes. Full of surprises then, including some fine lyrics about embracing, accepting, surviving and otherwise getting along.

Today’s the final day of the 2001 International Festival of Arts & Ideas. My review of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Serenade/The Proposition is here; there’s a final performance today (Saturday the 25th) at 5 p.m.

I’m hitting David T. Little’s Soldier Songs at 5 p.m. and then heading to the Green for the fest-closing concert of Freshlyground and Mandingo Ambassadors at 6 p.m.

Might also partake of the various local dance and music acts on the upper Green from noon to 6 pm.

I missed most of A&I because I was in Los Angeles with a gang of other arts journalists covering the Radar Festival, the Hollywood Fringe Festival, the Theatre Communications Group national conference and other events there.

I honestly missed Arts & Ideas, and wished the timing was such that I could hit all of these festivals full-force. Though many of the concert and theater acts at events like A&I and Radar are on a festival circuit and aren’t unique to the festival sponsoring them, the different ways the fests and set up and the audiences they attract really inform each other.

The big distinction of Arts & Ideas is the number of free public concerts it sponsors. Large, involved and diverse audiences add a whole dimension to its reputation as a cultural rallying point.

Sure, there are less free shows than in the fat, well-funded mid-‘90s, but also remember that those event-packed early A&Is lasted days rather than weeks, and that many similar festivals in other parts of the country have disappeared completely, lacking the wherewithal to downsize and endure as Arts & Ideas has.

Can’t imagine June without Arts & Ideas. Glad I can still jump in on the tail end of it.

Otto Maddix is a time traveler. One minute he’s a ‘60s teen, three and half hook-filled minutes later he’s touching down in a post-industrial world of marauding robotic mechanical beats. He’s ambient, he’s Teddy Boy, he’s a synthesized orchestra.
How does he get away with it?
“Same melody,” Otto reveals. “I never mess with the melody.”
Maddix is one of those who spent so much time around music when he was a kid—mom’s a music prof at the college on the hill, dad was a session musician in big cities and now leads a swing band—that it’s like music is Maddix’s older sibling.
“I admit it. I’m more into styles. I crafted this one melody that I run through all these genre filters. Maybe there’s an album in that, maybe not. I’ll move on eventually to another melody.
It’s like Otto Maddix has found the lost chord and then went searching for what to do with it. Among the locals who helped on the safari: Olivia Hare (keyboards), Delia Worth (Violin), “Boss” Logan (bass), The Barajas (vocals & castanets) and Mr. & Mrs. Maddix. Mostly though, it’s multi-instrumentalist Otto in his bedroom late at night.
Listen to some 27 variations on a theme tonight at the Bullfinch. If it sounds exhausting, know that a bunch of them will be prerecorded. “I really need it to be constant,” Otto fills in. “Can’t break for half an hour and have someone else’s music in my head. Therefore the Maddix musical mélange is the only sound scheduled for Sunday evening at the Bullfinch. When does such domination by a single act occur there, except when local all-stars jam for multiple sets on the holidays?

Saturday comes first: American Completed in Canada and Sufficient Hearing Capacity do that mystical at the ‘Finch… Exit Seat and CRJ crank the covers at Hamilton’s… It’s the Elements Tour of fleeting successes Fire Smoke Debris and Water Evacuation at D’ollaire’s…

We borrowed a lawn mower and cut “House of Ar” in the grass.

Ingram Hill, Blue Room Afternoon
Everything that might conceivably have endeareds me to the Southern pop band Ingram Hill has been stripped away from these acoustic renditions of their greatest hits. Not only is there little variety in the strum-and-plink guitar/piano arrangements, vocals which once were democratically mixed into a band-sized whole are now overpowering, overwhelming and grating. There’ve been so many worthwhile projects where rock artists have reworked their songs for acoustic intimacy that you’d think such obvious mistakes as those made here would be easily avoided. Instead, this supposedly stripped down (though embarrassingly slick) exercise is minimization only magnifies Ingram Hill’s glaring deficiencies.

Hit home 3 a.m. Thursday from ten days in Los Angeles. Baking bread (no recipes, just winging it with a whole wheat loaf and a spelt sourdough of my own devising). Walking the dogs (A man just said, “Corgis?! They look a bit shy in the paw!”). Changing the hamster cage. Catching up on The Archers. And when family is home, spending every moment with them. Asked Sally if she wanted to go to the library after school, and she said “You just read my mind.”

The Mazz Hats pulled off a neat trick Tuesday at the Bullfinch, thanks to a devoted fan. Everyone in the house was wearing hats–the same kind of hat. Mazz hats.
What’s a Mazz hat? Well, obviously, a disturbing play on words. But it’s also now a sort of baseball cap with a hole cut out of the top. Plus antlers.

The hats are the creation of Hildie Grey, who’s doing a self- styled degree in “rock costumery” at the college on the hill.

So what on earth got folks to put these on their heads? Well, peer pressure never works at the proud misfit fiesta known as the Finch. But beer pressure does.
The colorful Ms. Grey bought a round for the whole house (and had to make it two or three rounds for a couple of the humorous, but ssssshhhhh, don’t tell the others). How could a starving student afford such a thing? Well, for starters the bartenders announced a drink special (they love these world-record type events). But get this, a student grant for fashion designers was also involved. Money well worn.

The Harleans, Boyer and Heads of Banks at the Bullfinch… Shove Alley Yeah! and More Barry doing the movie star pop strut at Hamilton’s… But, we are surprised to admit, best booking of the night is the neoclassical new wave of Debussy Fields and the Gypsy Roses, playing for the first time anywhere near town– which, considering those bands’ indie/ college pedigree, is downright remarkable…

Broke out what was left of the liquor-flavored taffy from weeks ago. Disgusting. Gar ate most of it.