A miles- long traffic jam between our town and a certain big club in a certain major city. Two bands from this area en route, both on the bill, both hoping that if they can’t get there, least the other band might so “out of town nite” at the historic venue wouldn’t be a total loss.
” forty five minutes without moving, and we get out and wander around the highway,” recalls Paul straw of the sedents. “Just a few rows up, there’s the peripatetics’ van.”
The bands joined forces and honed a strategy. The peripats had a bike in their van, so Paul, a messenger by trade, took it and rode it to the nearest transit line, a guitar strapped to his back. A Paul revere of pop, he rides into town (back on the bike, having begged a transit guy to let him bring it on the train even though it wasn’t off peak), bellowing “The C-dents and The Peripatetics are coming! The C-dents and The Peripatetics are coming! At least that’s how they tell it.
Paul did a solo set, the bandmates arrived and traded of spins for the rest of the night. There was even a decent sized audience in the room, and a couple pod people who claimed to be agents.
Ride home? Don’t ask.

The Twenty-Second Letters and Star & Story at the Bullfinch. Why don’t these bands just write poetry?… Those Brewster Boys and Shadows of Fu at Hamilton’s. Scan your parent’s record collection before arriving… You Can’t Do Business With Hitler at Dollaire’s. Except on Mondays…

The tin cans are covered with pigeon poop.

Lucy Hale, A Cinderella Story: Once Upon a Song. Soundtrack to a new tween-friendly sequel to the fairy tale series, out on video this week. I can’t figure out how these songs are supposed to further a plot—they’re the usual Disney Radio-type rock about self-empowerment and awesomeness—but I needed a fresh dose of polished, perky pop today, and this is it. “Bless Myself” is crammed with nanosecond-long sonic references to everyone from The Kinks to Divinyls to Madonna. Even with the modern studio gadgets now available, it’s an extraordinary workout for young vocalist Lucy Hale. Elsewhere, there’s a marauding metallic “Twisted Serenade” that kicks off like Gary Glitter before lurching into ‘80s-style pyrotechnics. And the whole album ends in a Toni Basil-esque clapping song called “Crazy Girl.” I’m going to have to talk my daughters into checking out this movie.

Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini
By Sid Fleischman.
I’m a lifelong Sid Fleischman fan. I put him right up there on the tallest taleteller’s platform as a spinner of great American adventure yarns. For my daughters, though, he’s been a hard sell. His books tend to feature young male protagonists. They found the audiobook of Bandit’s Moon too creepy for bedtime.
But Escape! , one of Fleischman’s recent forays into non-fiction (a field he did not enter, other than a series of magic instruction books early in his career and a 1996 autobiography, until just five years ago; score this against his dozens of novels and half a dozen screenplays), grabbed them.
Fleischman writes in the manner of the eras of which he writes. He likes sensational adjectives and blowhard rhapsodizing. Yet he’s also a skeptic, keen to unravel yarns that get out of hand. He’s the perfect biographer for Houdini. A magician himself, he cares about the master’s craft, and notes that Houdini’s innovations were mostly about new methods of presentation rather than new concepts for tricks. He questions the established lore about Houdini’s birth, his relationships with his parents, his ego and his legacy. He does this in a way that makes Houdini’s whole life seem spectacular, even when Fleischer’s reminding you it could be mundane.
I hope to get my daughters interested in Fleischer’s new bio of Chaplin next, then spring novels like Chancy and the Grand Rascal and By the Great Horn Spoon on them. And for my next trick…

The New Journal, a Yale undergrad mag which publishes five times a year, has a grasp of the off-campus New Haven community which allowed most other student publications. The September issue has short article covering the Long Wharf Theatre gala held in honor of the 90th birthday of ubiquitous local foundation board member Louise Endel. The story, by Cindy Ok, takes the proper, realistic and trenchant approach, and actually reaches conclusions—something the local press rarely thinks to do in these advertising-grubbing days of bare-facts reporting. “Though it is highly unlikely that Endel connects more people than Facebook,” Ok writes, referencing a description of Endel by effusive New Haven Register columnist Randy Beach earlier in the piece,” she can be compared to Long Wharf Theatre as a gracefully aging city fixture.”
The current New Journal also a six-page article, with lots of original photos, on the resurgence of the Institute Library on Chapel Street under its new executive director Will Baker. It’s the most extensive and revealing reporting I’ve seen done on this deserving and underappreciated private lending library, a place so rich in history that most reporters (including myself) kind of wander away from its precarious present tense.
The New Journal seems to want to genuinely understand non-Yale institutions. They don’t treat New Haven like some mysterious outside world.

Christopher Arnott’s still spinning the 45s from his basement

1. Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde, A Summer Song. One of the cheesiest of the ‘60s male pop duos—Jan & Dean could mop the floor with ‘em. But yesterday was the last day of summer. C&J’s autumnal songs can be found on their dry, sarcastic psychedelic anomaly Of Cabbages & Kings.
2. Strawberry Shortcake Meets the Spelling Bee. I know there are cool Strawberry Shortcake collectibles aplenty—pop albums that’ve become the holy grail for fans of Flo & Eddie—but I when I find SS items in Salvation Armies it’s always record jackets with the wrong records in them, or skipped beyond repair, or later lesser eras of the still-ripe character… or trash like this—a read-along “turn the page when you hear the beep” story with no music whatsoever.
3. The 5.6.7.8’s, “I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield.” I’ve never seen Kill Bill, which I understand the 5.6.7.8’s appear in, doing this song. I got the single when it came out in 1994 (nearly a decade before the movie), on Washington state’s Estrus label. The liner notes are all in Japanese. I feel the same way about this that I do about another thing I’d had for years that got unexpectedly Tarantinoized: a Krazy Kat T-shirt exactly like the one Samuel Jackson wears following the car hit in Pulp Fiction. Doesn’t kill my enjoyment of this stuff, but I keep it to myself more.
4. On the Road with The Goops. Not only contains a flat-out brilliant punk cover of “Build Me Up Buttercup” but a 12-page comic book about the foul-minded band, illustrated by indie comix great Pat Moriarty. I saw the band at the Tune Inn in New Haven, but the only T-shirts they had were too small. Years later, at the club’s going-out-of-business sale, there was still a small T-shirt on the rack for sale, and I couldn’t resist even though it’d never fit me. That shirt’s become sleepwear of choice for my daughters, even though the Moriarty drawing of the band in a van, running down squirrels and giving the finger to passersby, is pretty ghoulish for bedtime.
5. The Vagabonds, “Laugh or Cry”/”I’ve Heard It All Before.” There are only about a zillion bands called The Vagabonds. This is a Connecticut one from the 1980s and early ‘90s, pals of the equally fast, sleek and Britpop-primed Chopper. My memory of The Vagabonds live is that the guitars were overwhelming, but on this well-produced single everything’s balanced, the drums as prominent as the riffs and harmonies, all of it bracing and loud.

As unaccustomed as I am to self-promotion, I hope you’ll attend tonight’s all-uke shindig at Café Nine, 250 State St., New Haven. Show begins 9-ish. Besides my bizarre medleys of uke standards and underground rock, there’ll be the somewhat more civilized four-string strumming of Jim & Liz Beloff and Lauren Agnelli. Five bucks cover.

Stay tuned in future days for a new calendar section of upcoming events on this humble scribblers.us page. I’ve gotten requests to do the sort of previews and highlights I used to do a lot of for the New Haven Advocate and elsewhere (and which I still do for theater-type events at this site’s sister blog, New Haven Theater Jerk). Just need a little time to get back up to speed… and to go play ukulele.

The Jink-Los played all entirely different songs Tuesday at Hamilton’s then they did the previous Thursday at the Bullfinch. That’s because they were entirely different groups of musicians.

A band sold their name. In this town. And they say the economy’s in trouble!

It’s really about good fun among old pals. Monty Jewels of the Jink-Los has a way with names. John Jones of Fortune in My Misery doesn’t. The longtime neighbors and friends, who’ve known each other since the week they were both born (four days apart), share a lot of things.
“So why not share our name?,” Monty says. He sold the Jink-Los moniker to Johnny for a pack of smokes. Monty’s bandmates don’t mind; they’re all heading to college, meaning the band might’ve been on its last legs anyhow.

The new Jink-Los is the same cover band Fortune in My Misery was, but without the gloomy old name. See if they sound any different. For one tune at least, they will—Monty Jewels has an open invitation to jump up and sing on songs he likes.

Weiner Minstrels and The Ol’ Dirt Daubers at the Bullfinch. Cover your ears—because of the language, not the volume… Jonny Modero and Pier 23 and Light Up Time at Hamilton’s. Light Up Time apparently doesn’t challenge the club’s ban on band names with drug references… The Corliss Archers, Now Nordine and Uncle Whoa all at D’ollaire’s; after all those “Evening With” affairs, a three-band bill seems almost too much to handle…

Someone stole the basket.

Sun Wizard, Positively 4^th Avenue. There’s a folk-pop side to this, but reminiscent of the way that early T Rex was folk-pop—edgy, supernatural, blissful as if on drugs. When it charges ahead into full-blown rock territory, as with “Sick of Waiting,” it’s clean and frisky like Fastball or Jayhawks, with that wonderfully upholstered pop production style that throws lots of keyboards, harmonies and even horns into the mix.