Royal Baths, Better Luck Next Life. I usually find the after-plucking squeaks of guitars (a ubiquitous studio-production technique of the last ten years) to be akin to fingernails on a blackboard. But Royal Baths opens the first song on this album, “Darling Divine,” with a whole passel of ‘em, and it’s great. The frisky fingering leads you to continually expect the unexpected. There’s some straight-ahead rock stuff like “Nightmare Voodoo,” but most songs have rhythmic and vocal variations that go well beyond the wild, sitar-satiric guitar solos. Swoops of sound interrupt the vocals, echo chambers turn plinks into yowls. The soft and reflective becomes the ominous and overwhelming. There’s a song called “Faster and Harder,” but the music for it is strangely and wonderfully neither.

As the final song, “Someone New,” says,

Tell my girl she’s now alone.

This time I’m not coming home.

Keep my records and sell the rest.

Tell my girl I loved her best.

Drown in Royal Baths: Creepily cool from top to bottom.

DC Universe Legacies by Len Wein (DC Comics hardcover)

DC Comics decided to revise its entire 80-year superhero mythology. They needed this reprioiritizing and revisioning to be be anything but a boring history text.

Any number of young whippersnappers would’ve loved this assignment. But it would have turned out very differently than it did under this old whippersnapper, the legendary Len Wein, original writer of The Swamp Thing and expert resuscitator of The X-Men.

Wein frames the new DC scriptures as an exercise in nostalgia, as witnessed by a cop who’s spent his whole life scrapbooking superhero articles. The sheer mass of information that needs to be divulged is daunting—Brad Meltzer’s entire world-changing Identity Crisis series is shortened to about two panels here. There’s little about heroes’ personal struggles. It’s the DC story as written in public—the relationships, the feuds, the organizations, the sidekicks, the supervillains. Wein adds a human subplot about the cop’s gangster brother-in-law.

The artwork, by a slew of artists working in the classic muscled-hero style, adds buoyancy and color to a narrative that can’t help but bog down occasionally. Stories with their own arcs and climaxes and folded into the middle ground of a much larger tale, so naturally it’s jumpy and disorienting.

Yet for such an outrageous exercise in condensation—millions of comic stories boiled down to their essence—Wein actually builds a momentum, a plot and even a moral—people can change. Even superpeople.

Wonderful Register profile by Randy Beach about local magician and recycling activist C.J. May.

I’ve seen May’s socially conscious magic act, benefited from his environmental expertise, and enjoyed his Celtic folk howlings in parades. One of those New Haven characters whom  you hope will land on his feet. Yale’s letting May go as the beaming face of its diverse recycling efforts, diffusing his duties to a variety of departments. Don’t let the guy be thrown out. Find him a new gig worthy of his transformative powers.

One of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes involves corn syrup, and other than some gloppy Halloween make-up, it’s the only thing I’ve ever used corn syrup for.

When I decided to make cookies this morning, the Karo bottle had run dry, having given up its last drop for a batch of cookies just three days ago.

The sweet sticky syrupy stuff which I do keep around all the time is molasses. Don’t use it much, but it makes the kitchen feel Colonial.

So I substituted. Strong flavor, molasses. A doubly sweet cookie—trebly sweet when you count the brown sugar.

Here’s what I did:

Beat one cup brown sugar with about three quarters of a cup of margarine. (I use Smart Balance brand.)

Add two small eggs (or one large—I like buying those two-and-a-half dozen packs of small eggs) and beat some more.

Vanilla would be optional here. A teaspoon of two.

Mix all that up thoroughly.

Add a half cup whole wheat flour, one and half cups white flour, one-quarter teaspoon baking soda, three-quarters teaspoon baking powder and half a teaspoon salt.

Mix like crazy. Then add a cup to a cup and a half of chocolate chips.

Put tablespoon-sized blogs on a lightly buttered baking pan. (For cookies, I like to use my cast-iron pizza pans.) The dough can fill two large pans, and should make just over three dozen cookies.

Bake for eight minutes at 375 degrees, then check how they’re doing. (You might want to switch upper and lower pans.) Cook another two to four minutes—you shouldn’t go over 15 minutes total. Take the cookies out when they’re puffy but formed—they’ll dry a little harder than they look, and it’s real easy to overcook them.

…but not to overlook them. The aroma is exquisite.

An entire band fell asleep and missed a gig. All of five of them. With, they swear, no pharmaceuticals involved. “Except caffeine,” the singer says, “and that obviously didn’t work.”

Out-of-town affair, of course. Long drive. Wrong directions. Finally arrived, three hours before the show, at a friend’s house—empty, but the band had keys—where they could dress and nap. And nap and nap and nap.

This is why, upon their homecoming engagement at the Bullfinch, Random Hall Sweep played all night in pajamas. They’re shaking a curse.

Preschool Friends with Addi Tude at the Bullfinch… Ideas & Discoveries and Teen Ink, some kind of bright-eyed youth aggregation, at Hamilton’s… Wordy cult heroes Library Journal, with a solo set by leader Dewey, at D’ollaire’s…

Sat in the library. Just sat.

Lay in the snow. Just lay.

Life is Not a Stage by Florence Henderson (Center Street, 2011)

She got crabs from former NYC mayor John Lindsay. As much as she tries to qualify the anecdote and brace you for and apologize for even telling it, it’s what you close this book thinking about: Florence Henderson got crabs from a one-night-stand with John Lindsay. He knew, and sheepishly sent her a gift.

This is a book about a star with a long and varied career. It’s not about a woman who’s trying to convince us that she’s really Carol Brady. Nor is it a book arguing vehemently that she’s completely UNlike her best-known role. The Brady Bunch falls into the narrative logically and chronologically, after a whole bunch of Henderson adventures on the legit stage, in film and in other TV shows.

Oh, and her personal life. Where she got crabs from former New York mayor John Lindsay.

But it’s not the Brady Bunch mom who got crabs, mind you. It’s Florence Henderson.

Well, they certainly do. Project, that is. This is some solid, strident three-piece pop-punk, the kind that bred widely in basement clubs throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s. Not a dime a dozen anymore, but the same standards still apply—how slick are they willing to go? By the sound of this album, about 50 percent. There’s a live/whatever feel, but a sense of propriety in how précises the beats are and when the guitar solos come in. Even the guitar swoops and fills seem overly planned, or just obvious.

Clearly, I overthink this stuff myself. These are songs kids today could use, about living through uncertainty and despair in the times before, as the zeitgeist has it, “it gets better.”

The Projection also title a lot of songs so they seem like show tunes or standards or greeting cards: “Not a Day Goes By” (no relation to the Sondheim tune from Merrily We Roll Along), “Just Be Yourself,” the contrary punch of “Always Remember” and “Trying to Forget,” and the decidedly non-Elton John “Your Song,” It’s about the song’s narrator coming to terms with his own feelings, not some awkward communication between actual communicating lovers. There’s a lonely voice throughout a lot of these songs, a guy dreaming and clarifying at the same time. “I wish that we were rock stars,” is one plaint. “Why can’t we be rock stars?”

I am mentioned in this story:

http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/ward_co-chair_races/

…and in a very kind appraisal of it by Ward 2 Activist, second comment from the top.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I make my own laundry detergent now. One of the sites I linked to sent a lovely note of encouragement, exhorting me to make ALL my cleaning supplies myself.

Which, I now admit, I already pretty much do. I wrote up the laundry-soap recipe as if it was a new step for me. Which it was, because I thought of that one as a great leap. But I’ve actually been scrubbing with baking soda and wiping with vinegar for many years. Before I braved laundry detergent I had already been experimenting for a few weeks with an equally daunting multi-ingredient cleanser: dishwashing detergent.

As with the laundry soap, I checked multiple sources, then devised my own based on trial and error. Here’s where I landed:

One cup Washing Soda. (It’s about three bucks a box at Stop & Shop.)

One cup Borax (like Washing Soda, it’s cheap and basic and found in the detergent aisle of the supermarket.)
Half a cup baking soda.

Several tablespoons of handsoap or other liquid soap.

Blend together. The liquid soap will make the powders clump, so you have to stir or shake vigorously. (I used my mixing wand, which kept it powdery yet thoroughly mixed.)

Put the same amount of detergent in your dishwasher as you would for any store brand—a spoonful in the open compartment and a spoonful in the closed one. For your rinse agent, you can use vinegar.

Some dishwasher detergent recipes call for citric acid, which (like the vinegar) is supposed to help discourage spotting and build-up during the rinse cycle. I haven’t come across citric acid easily, so I haven’t tried it yet. Some dish loads are indeed less shiny than others. But overall, homemade has proven no better or worse than the store brands I’ve used—and a lot cheaper.