1. “Here’s That Rainy Day,’ Stan Kenton (or Sinatra if you’d rather)

2. “Girl, You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain Anymore,” The Turtles

3, 4. “I Wish It Would Rain” (both wreckless Eric and The Temptations)

5. “Don’t Go Out Into the Rain You’re Gonna Melt,” Herman’s Hermits

6. “Rain,” The Beatles (now the name of a Broadway-based Beatles tribute act)

7. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” Bob Dylan

8. “Here Comes that Rainy Day Feeling Again,” The Fortunes

9. “Pennies from Heaven,” Bing Crosby

10. “It’s Raining in My Heart,” Buddy Holly

11. “Waters of March,” Antonio Carlos Jobim

12. “Drip Drop,” Hoagy Carmichael

13. “Bus Stop,” The Hollies

14. Here Comes the Rain Again,” Eurythmics.

15. “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” (from the musical Funny Girl)

16. “Rainy Days and Mondays,” The Carpenters

17. The Rainbow Connection, Muppets.

18. Laughter in the Rain, Neil Sedaka.

19. “Purple Rain,” Prince

20. “MacArthur Park,” Richard Harris. Sommmwun leffft thuh cake out in the rain…

By Artie Capshaw

Despair ye who missed Record Store Day. Despair ye more, bands who wished to make a commercial comeback by appealing to the greed of collectors with exclusive vinyl releases. The path to obscurity (or bargain-bin notoriety, a whole different circle of Hell) is littered with those who miscalculated their own value—whether as keepsake, unusual offer, as nostalgia.

We didn’t make it to the Suddenly Teeming with Asshole Record-Collectors shop until mid-day. All the good stuff was long gone, though some of those treasures hadn’t even made it out of the parking lot, where wheeler-dealers were beckoning disappointed latecomers over to their cars for the opportunity to still purchase some of the high-profile items at a mere 500 percent markup.

Well, we’d come for the live music, not for the old-fashioned audio placemats. Bradford X. and Franklin M. (of The Etsys and The Diecasts, respectively) were doing a Record Day duet. We wish we could have collected their sweat in a bag.

Collect these upcoming shows: The Freehills, Jim Shore and the Harriet Rosebuds at The Bullfinch for a folk benefit in honor of “Twenty Days of Peace” (who’s counting?)… Our Name is Mud and Northwood Bear rocking the mainstream at Hamilton’s… Cloudworks and My Little Kitchen Fairies for an unaccustomed night of pensive, precious pop at D’ollaire’s. Didn’t notice these bands getting nationally popular, didya?…

I learned to make macaroni and cheese tonight. The real thing, not out of a box. Except the macaroni part.

On Palm Sunday, made a sourdough loaf and rolls which rose together to form a flower shape.

Created my sourdough starter several years ago now, using organic spelt flour which I happened to have a lot of at the time. Turns out that spelt is the primo flour for sourdough. Whereas adding other flours to a flimsy starter could destroy it, spelt sourdough eats everything thrown at it. Rises great, too. I take it out of the refrigerator once a week to feed it and bake from it. I don’t add sugar, salt, oil or anything besides a cup or so of water and a couple of cups of flour to the starter; nothing else is needed. One short rise and one long one and it bakes all round and bronzey.

There’s a songwriter in town.

Now, in most small scenes, songwriters perform, whether they like to or not. The idea of walking up to somebody else’s band and handing them some lyrics and a melody seems ludicrous. I’d you’re too shy to play out, approaching someone else to play your stuff seems even more daunting.

This songwriter—we won’t reveal the name—had a quiet strategy. Left notebooks and slips of paper, with poetry and chords scribbled on them, all around the Bullfinch every few nights for weeks on end. It didn’t take long to have some of the regulars buzzing. Then it was just a matter of finding out who this butterfingers was, who couldn’t hold onto a pack of such precious papers.

The final step was a little less obvious, but someone finally asked if these songs were ever going to be played out—this was The Bullfinch after all, where some musician’s every idle thought can get an airing, if only on a Wednesday. When it turned out that the songs were veritable orphans, they were adopted at once by a beer-fueled table of fans.

The generous communal impulse grew and grew until it was decreed that members of half a dozen or so different bands would play two entire sets of the mystery composer’s songs this coming Tuesday. Moreover, the bands themselves would be a mystery—new conglomerations of musicians who used to play together, or share a studio place, or have time to rehearse. Somebody had the bright idea to name the bands after the songs they were playing.

Hence a set list that is identical to the band line-up:

Those Endearing Young Chains

Thunder Below,

Time Without Pity

Try and Get Me

The Trout

Who is Hope Schuyler?

Where the Hot Wind Blows

Valley of Hunted Men

World for Ransom

Oh men! Oh women!

The Notorious Lone Wolf

Edge of Darkness

The Family Next Door

Odds Against Tomorrow,

Sins of the Children

Singin’ in the Corn

Sinners in Paradise

They Won’t Forget

It was further decided that this would be a benefit for something or over, yet to be decided. But a benefit for sure. In any case, the main beneficiary is the one who wrote those songs and titles.

Coming up two days sooner: Ex-Champ, The Limping Men and Kids & a Queen all exchanging spit at the Bullfinch… Three Strangers, Two Headed Spy, Unseen enemy and ska oirchestra The Ten Flags at Hamilton’s… We Go Fast, Young Ideas at D’ollaire’s for an afternoon show. Then they chase everyone outside, bring them back in again, and present Zis Boom Bah, Wise Maids and the worth-the-wait (we’ve waited four years for them to come to town) Youthful Cheaters.

I no longer have to play banjo.

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice (Yale University Press, 2010; 78 pages; $13)

If you’re familiar with Ivan Brunetti’s cartoons, you might at first blush not want to take a course from him. His frequently autobiographical comics are loaded with self-loathing (“Turn Your Eyes Inside and Dig the Vaccumm”) and shocking admissions of his distaste for most other human beings (“Hrrlfk! 1,784 Things That Make Me Vomit”). In his (presumably) non-autobiographical work, he often likes to juxtapose quaint old-fashioned newspaper comics styles with images of sexual depravity (“America’s Sweethearts Smelly Ass & Fisty in ‘Piles o’ Fun’”).

Brunetti’s brilliant, of course. He practices a bracing sort of honesty that tests the boundaries of taste as a natural exercise in “what’s next?”:You find downtrodden, depressive Peanuts types amusing? Well, how about the hopeless and suicidal, then? You find memoir-style indie comics eye-opening? Well, how about an entire page of tiny-print soliloquoy? You find comics about single-minded obsessives or casually violent dopes or the frantically lovelorn hilarious? Well, look out!!

The examples listed above all come from Misery Loves Comedy, a hardbound collection of the first three issues of Brunetti’s Schizo comic book augmented with “Horrifying Early Work,” “Contributions to Various Periodicals” (mainly other indie artists’ publications; he has since done some New Yorker covers and other high-profile work) and some beautifully printed color pieces (including “The Thurber Carnivore,” which is not the only extensive appreciation of James Thurber in the collection).

Brunetti comes off not as anti-intellectual but anti-artifice, which is a bracing way for an artist to behave. It raised a few eyebrows when he served as editor for Yale University Press’ Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, but he proved to be an inspired choice, as you might suspect from the book’s very title. The wide-ranging compendium earned a follow-up volume, and in lieu of a third volume (Brunetti notes in his appendix to Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice that he “will leave that endeavor to the ages, or at least to a much younger, less broken human being”), Yale Press is now publishing his self-described “classroom in a book,” which the author goes on to state gives readers “all the benefits of taking the cartooning course I teach, minus the distractions of the instructor’s monotonous, droning voice, chronic absent-mindedness, soporific slideshows and soul-crushing critiques.”

Imagine how many English and History professors would love a chance to publish their course curricula and reading lists in book form! Those guys in the older disciplines can dream on, but comics is still such a young field in academia that anything published about how to teach and appreciate it has immediate merit. Brunetti is appropriately humble, and typically self-deprecating, about being given the opportunity to publish his classroom preparations. At the same time, those very apprehensions have clearly led to an extra level of effort being put into the lectures and assignments. Brunetti notes that he has had “a wide variety of students, ranging from the deeply perceptive and analytical [who taught me a few things] to one who took the class simply to ‘keep out of trouble on Wednesday nights,’” and seems to expect an equally, if not more, diverse lot for this book version of the course.

I read Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice just for fun—as a fan of the artist and not as a potential pupil—and got a lot out of it.

The book presents you with a much less disturbing Brunetti—two steps removed from his hardcore indie comics, one step removed from the tastes he revealed as an anthology editor—but a no less forthright or outspoken one. His opinions shape the text. His own drawings illustrate it—original art through which he delves into his sometimes quirky assignments by attempting them himself. Brunetti breaks down an entire novel, Catcher in the Rye, into a single cartoon panel, showing how he did by stages of text and image removal. He gives his own take on exercises associated with cartoonists Chris Ware (“the eyebrow to eyebrow transition”) and James Kochalka (the daily diary in four-panel strip format). His page illustrating “some common pitfalls” of cartooning (“inconsistent character design,” “awkward compositions, more easily seen if upside down,” etc.) is as entertaining as it is illuminating, and made further endearing by this captioned comment: “Note, however, that all of these can be subverted and used to the artist’s (and narrative’s) advantage.”
Truly a teacher who’s scared of imparting any hard-and-fast rules, Ivan Brunetti becomes a radical in academic attire. Cartooning isn’t an upper-crust university-press caricature of those old mainstream “how to draw” manuals—it’s a subversive and realistic introduction to the still-maligned, often misunderstood yet increasingly scrutinized world of cartooning today. You couldn’t hope for a more self-aware, down-to-earth yet mindfuckingly stimulating handbook.

By Artie Capshaw

“I got good,” says the man whose name was Sin.

“Sin-Gin” Smith got his melodious moniker from singeing his fingers with crack pipes. Or maybe it was that period of his life when he would reliably drink a fifth of gin—or rum, or whatever was handy—a day.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t exactly remember. In some respects, he’d like to forget. Yet he also doesn’t want to let himself forget.

In case you’re worried that you’ve strayed into the “affirmations and beatitudes” column, rest assured that Sin-Gin is an ideal subject for the local band beat. Like so of those we write about (not to mention the readers) music saved his life.

As a kid, Smith had played saxophone in the high school marching band, and even joined an R&B party combo for a time. “But I wasn’t any good,” he recollects. “Everybody told me so. Playing music was just an excuse to party afterwards. When the band got better and I didn’t, they moved on.”

He worked as a mechanic, then didn’t work at all, then nearly died on a cold street corner after blacking out from a near-overdose. He woke up in a small stone archway jutting out from the back of First Church on Main. Had no idea how he’d gotten there. Slept there most of the next day.

When he woke up, he heard the kind of music which made him think he’d died. When he realized he was still mortal and conscious, he found the inner strength not to skedaddle but to investigate where the heavenly chords were coming from.

A church organ, naturally. Being played by the church’s eminent Pastor Will rather than the church’s musical director. But the organ was forgotten when Sin Gin peeked into the sanctuary and saw—on a stand beneath the pulpit, with light streaming upon it—a battered old saxophone.

He stepped loudly down the aisle, grabbed the sax, and spoke to the startled minister in the international language of song. A conversation ensued, and Sin-Gin’s spiritual awakening began on those notes.

The heaven-sent sax turned out to have been a gift for an upcoming tag sale at the church. Now it’s a fixture of a special service on the third Wednesday of every month: Jazz Vespers, led by guess who? “Sin-Gin”

Smith has polished the hallowed instrument lovingly, and has polished his playing too. One example of how well his salvation is going is that when we first heard about him, it wasn’t because he was some potential human-interest story about spiritual reawakening or overcoming drug abuse. We heard that the most sinuous sax in town was being blown at one of the severest (and soberest) jazz jams in town, amazingly at First Church on Main.

We went down with some jazz pals who know their shit, and they were itching to sit in. (Spiritual rebirth is not a prerequisite, but it is a happening scene and there can be a long sign-up sheet.) This is a tight, elegant and democratically run gathering where folks play and sing their guts out. No egos—there’s clearly a higher presence in the room that keeps everyone humble. There’s no solipsistic soloing, just sharing. Lots of smiling too.

Sin-Gin Smith has not only made up with old musician friends from his debauched decades, he’s made up with his instrument of choice—the only thing he inhales or drinks in these days, he jokes.

“What can I say?,” he says again. “I got good.”

The daunting duo The Brave Bulls charge (where else?) The Bullfinch, with opening sets from a bevy of solo singer-songwriters: Boy with Green Hair, Mr. Hex and Crimson Canary… The Crowd Roars (not really), Deadline at Dawn (featuring scribblers for the local rag), Dishonored Lady (wouldn’t that be their groupies, not the band?) and Dragon Seed at Hamilton’s New Band (i.e. “impress us and maybe we’ll pay you next time”) Nite… Another new local band, Puddlestone, got the opening slot for the sold-out Dust Be My Destiny and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers at D’ollaire’s. Hard to believe, and believe us, we’re investigatin’…

My line in the play: “ahunh, ahumh, ahunh.” Plus I play banjo.

From the Yale Daily News, April 6:

The article “Sam’s Trip” should have appeared in English, not Latin. The News regrets the editorial and linguistic error.