Listening to… Body Language

Body Language, Social Studies. The sort of echoey, thunderclappy dance-tracks-with-voiceover stuff that usually leaves me cold, but Body Language adds appealing female backing harmonies and techno-fillips that make it more than a background beat. Tempoture sounds like the start of a sporting event. The title track resembles a tropical track from some exotic lounge vinyl. And “Holiday” opens in such a non-festive, laid-back manner, that it gets your attention more than if it had been named anything else.

Literary Up

I treasure my copy of Shit Haven #1, a two-sided one-page photocopied zine that I found in a bin meant for a more commercial publication last year. It’s the kind of punk attitude publication I used to do myself back in the 1980s. But my shit is old and this is fresh—even a year later, with no #2 in sight. At least I haven’t run across one, and there’s no contact info other than: “Spuds Circle, editor. To contact Spuds: Ask a punk! No submissions from Yalies.”
Here’s an excerpt (deliberately chose one which shows Spuds’ softer side):
Thinking About James Franco
Every single person at Yale dreams about the day they’re gonna be speaking French at Atticus and James Franco will sidle up alongside them and butt in with a funny comment, thus planting the seed that will flower into their lifelong friendship.
Uh:
1. James Franco isn’t funny and doesn’t have real friends.
2. Dude tried to kill Spidey (sup Tizzie)
3. If you see me around, buy me a slice of pizza.

For Our Connecticut Readers: Treats not Tricks

Neighborhood Halloween party Saturday at the new community room in the new Amistad school building. Frank Douglass, who’s likely to be our next alderman, was there. So was Greg Smith, interim alderman for the past summer.
Also present was Mayor DeStefano. I asked him joshingly if he was actually the mayor or in Halloween disguise as the mayor. “I’m incognito,” he cleverly replied. Later that day I was at Tony Juliano’s insane Forgot to Laugh Sideshow and Animation festival at Lyric Hall in Westville, and there was DeStefano again—on screen, in a fun intro video to the wacky shindig.
The neighborhood event was cordial all around, the very opposite of spooky. Geraldine Florist on Chapel Street brought costumes and outfitted kids for free. There were apples and other healthy snacks amongst the candy. Kids could design buttons, the template already emblazoned with “I care about…,” lest Halloween prankiness get the better of them.
I don’t think there was a Mayor’s Halloween Parade this week, but other generous family-friendly city tricks & treats are in store with the return of Magic Week. Local magicians are honoring the 85th anniversary of the death of Harry Houdini (punched in the stomach on Halloween, 1926) with free performances at local libraries. Tonight (Wednesday the 26th) brings Gale Alexander to Stetson branch library on Dixwell Ave. Thursday, Wilson branch library on Washington Ave. welcomes Headmaster Lang of Froghearts School, who is “looking for young wizards and witches to join his school!” Saturday, Cyril the Sorcerer—an enthusiastic advocate of recycling—does two gigs in a row: 1 p.m. at the Main Library on Elm Street and 3 p.m. at Neverending Bookstore, 810 State Street. There’s a talk Sunday, Oct. 30 about the wondrous new Yale Press book Houdini: Art & Magic, at Yale’s Slifka Center on Wall Street.
Magic Week details here.

R.I.P. Whichever Gerbil Was Mabel’s


One of the gerbils died. Mabel was the only one of us who could ever tell them apart. When she announced that it was her gerbil and not Sally’s which had died, she was despondent, though she could easily have convinced us (and herself) otherwise. Sally, for her part, immediately sought to negotiate a replacement pet. One absorbing the loss, the other deflecting it.
I was the one who fed the gerbs and cleaned their cages and shared the study with them in the daytimes. Today, clearly hearing only half the accustomed amount of rodent scrabbling, I am the very model of forlorn.
In the process of removing the corpse and making a rare unscheduled cage cleaning (it’s usually every other trash day, and can take up to two hours to do properly) I scaled down the cage arrangement from a connected duplex to a single apartment with a whole lot of tubes around it.
I don’t know how I’d care to live if a constant companion suddenly expired, but I expect I’d want to nestle snugly in a small soft area for a while. And that’s just what’s happening with the surviving gerb, who’s developed a new bedroom area for herself, and has stuffed the running wheel with tissue paper as well—perhaps in tribute to her deceased athletic sister.

Rock Gods #222: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

That really took the cake!
The cake was a bitthday surprise for Millie of the Model Marvels. We knew about because we baked it ourself. But the delicacy never made it out of the confined grease-spattered corner laughingly known as the Bullfinch kitchen (and more commonly known as the sink room).
Culprit—a rat, chased with the proverbial carving knife by Millie herself when she saw her anniversary desert being desecrated by rodent teeth.
The entire cake was disposed of. A visiting punk band turned the disposal into a new spectator sport, so laughs were had. But the bitter memory remains.
Bullfinch oddsbody Q has vowed a full investigation and extermination.
No rats will be let in without having proven that they’ve already eaten desert elsewhere.

Irene’s Riches and Words at War at the Bullfinch… Camel Caravan and Frontier Gentlemen, middlebrow world and country music collide, at Hamilton’s… Package tour at D’ollaire’s with The Candy Matsons, The Tracers of Lost Persons, The Chetters and The Penners. What’re they gonna do with all those bands?

Listening to… Andrew Jackson Jihad

Andrew Jackson Jihad, Knife Man. I missed this band when it came through town a couple months back. They’re probably wonderful live—scraggly and scruffy and distractable. The songs and playing are a mash of the rambling musings of a Jad Fair and the punk-rock & roll charge of Titus Andronicus. There are some wild titles—Fucc the Devil,
“Zombie by the Cranberries by Andrew Jackson Jihad”—yes, the band name is inserted into the title—opens thus: “If I had a cigarette for every time a perfect stranger asked me for a cigarette, then I’d have enough cigarettes to get me through the day. And if I had some spare change every time a perfect stranger asked me for some spare change, then I’d have enough spare change to take care of these bills I need to pay. Dude, I know that times are tough. But that does not mean you can have my stuff. So how about a ride? I can drive you to the shelter. We can eat dinner at the Andre House and you can even take a shower. Because I think you deserve much more than a smoke and fifty cents. You deserve to be self-sufficient, buy your own cigarettes” It then breaks into a sardonic chorus of “Oh, When the Saints Go Marching In” and yet more conflicted musings on charity, selfishness and social values.
The youth of today, working out their issues. That’s rock & roll. Andrew Jackson Jihad does so with considerably more words and insight than a lot of other bands.

Literary Up: Appy Holidays to All our Readers

Happily endured the iPhone 5.0 download last week, but having to reenter all the apps from their backup storehouse on my home computer made me reconsider the value of many of the apps I’d placed on there in the year and a half since I got my iPhone 3G.
I realized how much I still read on the phone, even now that I’m so accustomed to a Kindle and have a massive library there. I ended up keeping a lot of my one- book apps even though I’d duplicated many of the purchases on Kindle.
Without going into the many periodicals, comic strips, news blogs, cookbooks and other texty apps which clog my screen, here is my telephonic l literary line- up:
Collected Works of Voltaire
Collected Works of Mark Twain
Gulliver’s Travels
P. G. Wodehouse’s The Intrusions of Jimmy
Burrough’s A Princess of Mars
Vanity Fair
Peter Pan
Dostoevsky’s The Idiot
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Myths of Ancient Greece and Rome
Works of Samuel Johnson
A collection of U.S. historical documents
eReader, for downloaded maintained from elsewhere
The iBooks reader
The Google Books reader
Overdrive, with which you can borrow ebooks from libraries
WattPad, for fan fiction and out of mainstream writings
a poetry app
And last but foremost, the Kindle app. What would I do without the ability to read Baum’ s Oz books to my daughters at the school bus stop every morning?

For Our Connecticut Readers: Go Westville!

Last weekend, it felt like Fair Haven was the center of the cultural universe in New Haven. This weekend? Westville.

There are two exceptional small theatre shows in the neighborhood—A Broken Umbrella Theatre’s locally rooted ghost story Play With Matches ( my review is here) and Tony Juliano’s fifth annual Forgot to Laugh sidewalks and animation festival (my preview feature is here, with a review slated for tomorrow).

It’s also the middle weekend of City Wide Open Studios, an event at which Westville has always excelled. The area houses a number of notable artists willing to let folks tramp through their workplaces for the annual affair (the Erector Square section of CWOS was last week, with the Alternate Space, for those artists without studios to open, coming next weekend).

Windowshopping along Whalley Avenue last night en route to Play With Matches, I noticed what an active bar scene there is on Westville weekends as well.

Selected Items on the Halloween display table at Barnes & Noble

1. It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown leaf globe. I’d had an Amazon alert about this thing, and am glad to have now seen one for real. It’s small. It’s round and flat rather than spherical. The Peanuts figures aren’t in the purest Schulz style. And the “leaves” are really glitter. Not so great.

2. Crafts books: Zombigami, Gothic Jewelry and Super Scary Crochet. What grandmothers do after they die.

3. The Cracked.com compendium You Might Be a Zombie. Misfiled. It’s not really a zombie book.

4. The Weir, by Connor McPherson, astutely included. This Irish barroom discussion one of the great ghost-story plays of the last 20 years.

5. John Landis, Monsters of the Movies. It’s a pity when great film directors are doing memoirs and coffee table books instead of being given movies to direct. I felt the same way when Nicholas Meyer’s fine autobiography came out a couple of years ago.

6. Much fewer vampire books than there were last year.

7. Still way too many zombie titles. There’s one about zombies fighting Nazis, but nobody’s really improved on World War Z in all these zombie years.