Miracles of Modern Science. OUT DEC. 6. Inverts the Beach Boys ’67 formula by putting the strings foremost (this is an ensemble of fast-paced poppy classical players) and the harmonies further back. It gives the melodies an effect that’s somewhat Eastern, somewhat Philip Glass. Many of the tunes open with quick two-note repetitions, and most swiftly insert experimental classical techniques and counterpoints. Keeps you guessing, that’s for sure—it took me several listens before I was able to pay attention to the lyrics.

Shindig—the slick, moderately more mainstream British cousin of American ‘60s garage/psychedelic publications such as Ugly Things— is usually devoted to profiles and puffery. But the current issue has a delightfully snarky essay by Austin Matthews titled Snare Traps in the Forest of Delights. It excoriates rock drummers for indulging in endless solos, asking this pertinent question: “When [Eric] Clapton solos he’s accompanied by the entire band—why does Ginger [Baker] get to solo on his own?
Matthews’ take on Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida”:

A great rock song that they probably could have got an incredible five minutes out of is alarmingly extended by another 12, largely to incorporate the meandering solo shit-burps of all the members.

Matthews tries to see both sides of the issue, but ends with a “maybe… maybe not.” Essays in rock mags certainly can seem indulgent. This one reminds you that they have nothing on drum solos.

I made the New Haven Independent this week, described in a photo caption as a “Dwight dad,” and quoted in a story (by Allan Appel) about how Amistad Academy is acclimating itself to our neighborhood.
No kicks with the reporting, except that it overstates my desire to send my daughters to Amistad. Mabel and Sally didn’t even know we’d applied for them to go. They love the school they’re in more. We applied to Amistad in order to pursue all available options to us, because the school is just a block from our home, and largely because some of the politically active neighborhoods were strongly encouraging residents to apply, to demonstrate the number of children which a strong alliance between Amistad and the Dwight/Edgewood could serve.
Judging from the meeting of the Dwight Management Team where this came up, that particular tactic was unsuccessful (or at least unnoticed). The Amistad representative behaved as if this was an outreach attempt by the school, not a reaction to one from the neighborhood.
How I got in the story: I was one of the few at the meeting to speak up. My initial question was whether “neighborhood preference” was in effect for the current school year. It was a loaded question. Technically there was neighborhood preference at Amistad, yet if you’d gone to the usual listings where such things are mentioned, it wasn’t mentioned anywhere. If you didn’t talk directly to someone who worked there, it’s not information you’d know or could easily find. (It’s also not information you can take for granted. Many New Haven magnet and charter schools do not have neighborhood preference, or sibling preference for that matter.)
I was calling for clarification, and got it. Does this make me more likely to get into the lottery system and find a place for Mabel and Sally next school year? We’ve talked more about the possibility now, and for now they’re against it. They really do love the school they’re at now. They dislike schools with uniforms and overmuch discipline and longer days. They’re both getting good grades and already have college aspirations.
Amistad is a school we pass every day on the way to the schoolbus stop which brings the girls to their own school. We love its presence in the neighborhood, making the block safer and with a youthful energy. Having the school has gotten the community a nice new meeting room. As with so many institutions around here that we love and respect—Fellowship House, Rudy’s Bar, the Laundromat next to Stop & Shop, any number of churches and barber shops—we don’t have to join it to appreciate what its done for the area where we live.

Some definite gender and vanity issues among the (as always) cleverly punned or rhymed story titles in Betty & Veronica Double Digest #106, the July 2002 issue:
Touch and Go (Veronica’s not good at touch football)
Tear on the Dotted Line (when Betty & Veronica wear the same style of dress to school, Veronica rips Betty’s)
One of the Crowd (Veronica feels ignored because the gang won’t tease her)
Dr. Cooper’s Miracle Cure (Betty cures Veronica;s malaise by reminding her that she’s missing shopping and cheerleading opportunities)
Fit Bit (Veronica spends a lot, angering her father)
Bad Hair (A puzzle page where the solution answers the question “What’s up with Veronica’s hair dryer?”)
Veronica Takes the Cake (and gets inside it).
The Mall, Part One (a nightclub burns down; “I guess we have no gig this week,” The Archies lament”)
The Mall, Part Two (The Archies play in a deserted storefront at the Riverdale mall and save it from bankruptcy)
Muddy Waters (Veronica convinces her father that mud wrestling is the wrong sort of entertainment to invest in, by becoming its featured attraction)
Foolish Fashion (Betty suggests Veronica can get out of an unwanted date with Archie by wearing “something so silly he’ll be ashamed to be seen with you… like a lampshade and baggy clown clothes”)
Friendly Competition (Betty is better than Veronica at most things, except getting dates on Friday with Archie)
Dial Tone (Veronica spends a lot on ‘phone calls, angering her father)
The Flower of Youth (a Little Betty and Veronica story in which Little Sabrina makes flowers magically “change big people into small ones”)
Muscle Tussle (Little Betty and Little Veronica convince Little Jughead he should become a school athlete, against his wishes)
Fashion Time (a Little B&V pin-up page staged in front of clockfaces)
Uniform Solution (the Little Archie gang are obliged to wear school uniforms)
Weight and See (Veronica: “Eek!” Veronica’s Mother: “What’s wrong, did you break a nail?” Veronica: “Worse! I’ve gained three pounds!”)
The Believer (Jughead won’t stoop to pick up the grocery item he dropped because “it’s self-rising cake flour”)
Team Esteem (the girls are not allowed on the school sports field, so they develop their own winning baseball team)
Turnabout (Betty and Veronica, as Candy Stripers, nurse an anonymous, heavily bandaged patient who turns out to be major pop star “Keith Roberts”)
Weights and Measures (Veronica’s father is dieting)
Wishful Thinking (Betty is granted three wishes by a leprechaun; her first is to
“have Archie near me”)
Dress Dilemma (Reggie: “All set for the Soph Scuffle at the club tonight, Betty?” Betty: “Not quite, Reggie; I’ve still got to buy a new dress.” Reggie: “Chee! You women and your clothes! Why, if…”)
Net Regret (Betty & Veronica both improve their tennis playing abilities specifically so they can play against Archie)
Stop the Presses (Veronica is jealous of Betty and Archie spending a night together proofreading the school newspaper)
Getting the Message (The teenagers have acquired ecological awareness, and despair that their parents have not)
She’s a Good Ol’ Boy (Archie sees Betty as “one of the guys”)
The Wild Ones (Mr. Lodge fears Archie’s alleged clumsy manner will break his “priceless Tiffany” and “Aztec hatchet”)
Golf Gaff (too many female rivals for Betty at the miniature golf course)
Yankee Doodle Darling (Riverdale High School’s Dress-Up Day has “a patriotic flavor”; Veronica as Lady Liberty is “carrying a torch for Archie”)
We’re in the Money (Betty & Veronica visit Poshly Academy)
Keep on Truckin’ (Veronica must drive to the Fashion Expo in a beat-up old pick-up truck)
Never Trust a Man (Jughead: “Er, Arch! Why do you suppose Betty is following us like that?” Archie: “I can guess! She’d the latest in a series of watchdogs of my trusting girlfriend Ronnie!”
The Quitter (Smithers the butler leaves Mr. Lodge’s employ: “I’d gladly work for less money, Sir, if I could also have less Archie!.” Not a Betty & Veronica story at all.)

When Olympus studios was really cooking, back when a slab of vinyl was a crucial calling card for any band to build a following and land a management deal (remember those?), the producers there were gods. They could, and would, change a band’s whole style and identity on a whim, based on what was hot on the charts that week.
If an act had raised enough scratch, through constant gigging, hyping and humiliation, to gain entrance to the blue and white greenroom nicknamed the Gate of Clouds, they thought they’d made it into the heavens. But their hellish journey was just beginning.
The Oddsies, whose mature members had all cracked Olympus as teens in different bands, wrote a song about it:
So calm, so clean, so clinical,
A technological wonderland
A garden of experimental delight
The sweet dew of creativity, the calm rain of inspiration
How could it ever storm in there?

The Bullfinch is closed tonight for a private party. Not one you need to know about… Blues Nite at Hamilton’s with Sinister Signpost and Wildcat Swamp… More metal madness at D’ollaire’s (don’t they know school’s back in session; bring on the indies!) with Flickering Torch, Mark on the Door and A Figure in Hiding…

Helped a guy collect scrap paper for charity, tons of it, all day.

Loves It!, YAY!
It’s hard not to enthuse over an album entitled YAY! This is a folk-pop duo with presence and verve. The female vocalist, Jenny Parrott, is well-remembered from the New Haven scene of a few years ago, though Loves It! now calls Austin, Texas their homebase. Vaughn Walters, who like Parrott both sings and plays guitar, hails from West Virginia. The interplay between Parrott (who handles most of the lead singing) and Walters (who helps with harmonies and gentle guitar details) is honest and refreshing. They’re so fresh and perky, in fact, that YAY! could be mistaken for a chidren’s-music album. (The album cover design doesn’t hurt that impression.) Even the sadder, reflective songs like “Me Alone” have an amiable showiness to them.
But this is grown-up music—luxuriant and articulate, about stuff like Bobby Kennedy (a biographical ditty which ends with a potent wail of “California!”), second-guessing love relationships and the fluidity of musical styles (the complex “Dixieland,” shown in the video above).
The recordings clearly suggest that Loves It! must be an engaging, uplifting live act. Their affection for performing, for adding charming little frills to their arrangements, is abundant. They want to win you over with chipper charm, not pomp or bluster, and they succeed.
Makes you wonder: when did the majority of folk acts today forget the whole “ingratiating” aspect of what they do?

No Regrets: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir
By Ace Frehley, with Joe Layden and John Ostrovsky. (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

No regrets, but that’s to be understood because there’s not a whole lot of self-awareness in the first place. Ace Frehley gets that he overdid the drugs and booze while hiding behind the Spaceman make-up in one of the most popular rock bands of the 20th century. But his constant grumblings about the commercial-minded machinations of Gene Simmons and other insults to his assumed excellence rankle the reader in different ways than they do the writers. (Frehley required two associates to pen this disaffected tome.)

What’s weirdest about this book, and about the world of Kiss in general, is how it seems to exist in a vacuum. He dispenses with personal influences (The Who, Cream, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels) early on, and doesn’t really get into comparing his best-known band with any other. When he mentions famous rockers, it’s as celebrity encounters, not as colleagues or artists.

The book, and Frehley’s views, exist in a void. It’s as if Kiss was a distant planetary entity which Spaceman was destined to plant a flag on, then jump back in a spaceship and orbit as a pissed-off observer for the rest of his career.

Lots of local headlines this past week about the NHPD overtime costs related to the Occupy New Haven settlement on New Haven Green. I think it was one of the local TV stations which first did the math. Struck me as idle trawling for a story—once the luster of any event starts to fade, the first question most folks ask is “What did this cost?!”
To me, the answer to that burning question—$65,000 or so since Occupy first planted itself two months ago—seems not just reasonable but a downright bargain, and I speak as someone who has covered city festivals and events for a couple of decades now, and who helped set up a couple of big outdoor spectacles on the Green as a short-term employee of the city’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs in the late 1980s, not to mention the many downtown local-band festivals the New Haven Advocate was involved with throughout the 1990s.
Expenses for a one-night event on New Haven Green can quickly go into the thousands of dollars, with the need to accommodate the safety and well-being of the citizenry. Even a deliberately low-cost endeavor such as the Ideat Village festival needs a budget in the four digits to kick back for costs of essential city services. A big parade can run into the tens of thousands.
More to the point, on any given weekend in New Haven, there are untold numbers of cops getting overtime for standing by as college student parties on residential streets spring up unexpectedly and suddenly need overseeing. There are bigger-than-usual closing-time needs at dance clubs. There are community festivals where special clean-up services and security procedures come into play.
I loved City Hall’s reaction to the cost of maintaining the Occupy settlement: that this is what the First Amendment sometimes requires, and this is what New Haven Green is for. Due to the abruptness of the settlement at first, expenses were somewhat inflated and have since been modified. I imagine that the expected future expense of regrowing the grass in that area of the upper Green would be about the same whether the tents were there for a week or for two months.
If we look at this another way, the City has helped support a dynamic new movement which is rethinking how we can live in the city (providing shelter at rock-bottom rates, including for some who are otherwise homeless), express our views in a public forum and gain international publicity beyond that which has been achieved by any single cultural event in recent times, for what seems to be a minimal expenditure.
This is the cost of doing business in the new America, and it’s well spent.

Very pleased with how my ciabatta loaves came out today. Credit where due: Paul Hollywood’s lavishly (loave-ishly?) illustrated book 100 Great Breads (Metro Books, 2004) is what first made me believe I could conquer this tricky Italian dough. I’ve since revised the recipe to my own needs, thus:

Start at bedtime.
Put one cup white flour, one cup whole wheat flour, one package yeast (I’m partial to Hodgson Mill Active Dry Yeast for Whole Grains, which is currently on sale at my neighborhood Stop & Shop) and one cup of water in a big mixing bowl.
(I honestly don’t know if the usual don’t-use-metal-equipment rules which govern sourdough recipes apply here. I have a lovely big red ceramic bowl, and I use that, with plastic or wooden spoons.)
Mix until smooth and goopy. Cover with a dishcloth. Let sit overnight.
In the morning, the mix will be an expansive bubbly mass which could win a starring role in a horror movie. Dump two more cups of white flour and one more cup of water into it and whack it back down to a doughy form. The mixture will still be goopy and unkneadable by hand. Add two or three tablespoons of olive oil. Stir it hard for several minutes. Keep scraping the sides of the bowl so it takes on the form of a wet oozy ball.
Let rise for at least two hours. (Today, I left it for something like five.)
The operative verb for what you do next is “tip”–that’s from Hollywood’s 100 Great Breads book, and it’s perfect. The dough is so fluid and sticky that you have to sluice it out of the bowl carefully with a spoon, dividing it in half as you “tip” it onto a floured wooden surface. Stretch each half of the dough (it’s more like batter) to a French-bread shaped lump about a foot long. Dust with a lot of flour on top, then lay a dishcloth over it and let rise for an hour or two.
After the time has passed , push each half of the sloppy mass back into some semblance of dough. Divide each half in two. Take these four pieces and put them on a dusted baking pan (I use a breadstone; they’re really worth the expense), shaped into long eight- to ten-inch loaf-shaped blobs. Cover with the dishcloth again and let rise another hour (or more). When the rise has hit the 45-minute mark, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Bake for just 30 minutes.
The ciabatta comes out airy and soft inside and crusty outside. Excellent with butter and cheese, also sturdy enough for peanut butter and jelly. Distinctive sour taste, and the olive oil also shines through. But it’s that texture which is the true achievement. Too much flour in the dough and it ends up acting like a lot of regular breads. Keep it batter-like and marvel at the difference.