When Sig Flenck of Horse’s Nerves realized he was the only one in the band who didn’t wear glasses, he went out and bought a pair at a vintage shop. His bandmates could have taken this a number of different ways, but they chose to take it in the spirit of unity which Sig intended.

At Thursday’s Bullfinch show, Sig’s fell off and got stepped on. Whereupon bassist Phil Jasmina doffed his own (tinted) lenses and made an elaborate show of smashing them underfoot.

Singer Jilly gasped “Ay!”, as in “Caramba!” Somebody in the band caught the pun and started chanting “Eye! Eye! Eye!,” pointing and shouting. It was a like a cover version of one of Sonny Blitt’s pronoun songs from a few weeks back. Horse’s Nerves can really play—Sig and Jilly were in a Mexican restaurant jazz houseband together–so the whole thing sounded rehearsed. But as far as we can see, it wasn’t. And as far as we can see, Phil can’t see without his glasses.

Myrt & Marge and The Court of Human Relations at the Bullfinch, singing backup on each other’s sweeter tunes… Those Websters and Pete Kelly’s Blues Band at Hamilton’s, rehashing every song you never wanted to hear again after college… An Evening With Do You Miss Brooks at D’ollaire’s, with hastily booked local opener Novak for Hire. Somebody in the headlining band had a falling out with their girlfriend and she lost the gig…

Cleaned the whole house.

This is a massive selection of unreleased tracks by a band you might be surprised to learn is a decade old. Has indie rock changed so little in all that time? The gentle strums, the tentative and endearing vocals, the light-fingered production…

There’s a gorgeous demo version of “What’ll We Do,” and so many songs that seem casual and unobtrusive that you realize this can’t be a pose—they know exactly what they’re doing, found their ideal sound early on and have somehow continued on without gaining arrogance or annoying studio-technique tendencies.

I’ve seen too many legendary bookstores die in my lifetime. Had to shutter one myself, Book World on Chapel St. in New Haven. So the news that St. Marks Books’ days are, uh, marked fills us with inkstained remorse.

There was a time when St. Mark’s Place Books had things you simply couldn’t find elsewhere. All the hip young novelists of the ‘80s were well represented on its shelves. If it was Man Booker Prize season in England (as it is now—the prize was just awarded on Tuesday to Julian Barnes), you’d be able to browse not just the winning novel but every one on the short list.

But marveling at a well-stocked bookstore is of course a thing of the past. Expecting such a place to survive and not succumb to the online piranhas and sink into the Amazon is futile. The Village community is going about this rescue attempt in exactly the right way: Show that the love is there through petitions and demonstrations. Argue for the store as a valued cultural landmark and aesthetic delight. Try to negotiate a more manageable rent. (The store has apparently been paying $20,000 a month to the Cooper Union school, which may be the going rate, but is three or four or ten times what failing bookstores I know about in New Haven were paying.) At the same time, St. Marks wouldn’t be much of a landmark if it didn’t actually sell books. So the owner’s appeal, in the Associated Press coverage, to all the demonstrators and supporters to simply “buy a book or magazine” should be heeded. Then readed.

Chats I’ve had on the street this week about the city’s jettisoning of Police Chief Limon and bringing Dean Esserman into the post have been dispiriting.

The opinions I’ve encountered all strike me as superficial and cliché-ridden.

That can be understandable, since Limon didn’t have the job long and was under fire by dissembling naysayers for much of it. Esserman’s rep is shorthanded by his association with former chief Nick Pastore. But the sort of lightweight comparisons and improper references I’ve been hearing: “We’re back to giving free pizza to murderers” (a reference to a Pastore strategy for getting a confession one time) and various race- or class-based assumptions about Yale, downtown neighborhoods.

Police ain’t politics. There are things in common, and sometimes pols and cops do play the same games in how they get their messages out. There may indeed be questionable motives behind the leaving of Limon (who was doomed anyway because of the constant parroting of a spurious statistic—that New Haven is “the fourth most dangerous city in the United States”) and enlisting of Esserman, who I guess is supposed to represent a familiar and friendlier (though it wasn’t necessarily more peaceful) era of policing in the city.

But I blanch at attempts to stereotype, minimize or otherwise second-guess a job that is frightfully complex by any standard. The showiness of selecting and announcing a new guy, and gracefully getting rid of the old one, is a needless distraction. Let’s get back to this conversation when there’s something real to talk about—lower crime stats or more productive union relations or whatever.

Latest in a continuing serenade of songs about animals

1. “Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear,” Randy Newman. It’s a Randy Newman song, so you know its doom-laden. There isn’t really a bear, or they don’t really get fed, or life isn’t so amazing. Most versions of the song lay on the absurdity and irony. Probably the biggest hit versions—the ones by Alan Price and Jim Henson’s Muppets—don’t.
2. “Hold That Tiger!” And then what are you supposed to do with it?
3. Knock knock. Who’s There? Gorilla. Gorilla who? Gorilla My Dreams. That gag dogged my whole childhood, appearing in very jokebook in the public library. But even in the ‘60s, nobody I knew could hum me the melody of “Girl of My Dreams,” a 1946 hit by Perry Como, though the song had been written two decades earlier by the illustrious tunesmith Sunny Clapp.
4. The Woody Woodpecker Song. Actually, it’s the Woody Woodpecker laugh with a song constructed around it. The lyrics are impossible: “Yeah, he’s peckin’ it all day long,” it says, but it’s talking about singing; “He gives all his rivals the bird,” yet he is one. Kay Kyser has a lot to answer for—he must have had a few holes pecked in his head.
5. “I Am the Walrus.” Now what stopped the Muppets from doing this one?

Last week I mentioned that the real name of Q, the Bullfinch barback, is unknown. Well, his mother should know, and she called me proudly when the column came out. All hail Quentin Duke, cool as a cuke. (Am I trying to get this guy mad at me?)

The reference got another response. Seems that Jilly Tight—sometime singer for Mounted Edna and a longtime student of behind-the-bar culture—thinks it unfair that we awarded Q the title of best local bar oddsbody without checking out more of the competition. She sent a list with no less than seven other contenders.

Yes, but do they book the bands? We hoist our bias high.

The Communists for the FBI and Joe & Miranda at the Bullfinch… Bachelor’s Children and The Club Eskimos at Hamilton’s… Dreft Stars back at D’Ollaire’s, confirming that they are truly on the way down, with the up-and-coming Red Foleys…

Painted my room. Stripes.

Warm Ghost, Narrows. I was never enough into the Human Leaguey and New Romantic bands to be able to drop specific references, but this sounds like them. It doesn’t matter that this is a philosophically minded duo from Brooklyn. The low vocals and prominent synth beats and swooping background guitars are straight-out Eno-ized England circa 1983. There is a gesture made to modern ears: the stuff is slightly quicker and wilder than expected at first throb, enough to make you  listen further rather than just heading for your vinyl collection.

The final track, “An Absolute Light,” has the coolest effects. It sounds like someone is either rattling chains or eating celery for the first half of it, then it abruptly becomes a sparse single-note piano solo.

If the weird fillips don’t make you curious, song titles such as “Myths on Rotting Ships” and “Splay of Road” should. What’s a splay of road?

Give me a few more days to get a Twitterfeed of scribblers.us going, but the sister site New Haven Theater Jerk has its own account as of today.

There’s also a new project, unique to Twitter. As you know, scribblers.us already features a short-form novel, For Tomorrow We May Die: Diary of a College Chum, that’s over 170 sentences long now but doesn’t actually happen to be on Twitter.

Now I’ve started a new “book”, Cliffhanger Daily @ScribblersCliff, which is actually on Twitter. Follow our hero as he escapes certain doom every 24 hours or so.