Everybody else seems to have gone home for the holidays last week.

Woods, “Christmas Time is Here.” The duo covers the Vince Guaraldi song, roughly yet respectfully, with neither schmaltz nor irony. They’re clearly more the shabby-little-tree type than the blissful-ice-skaters type, but they’ve chosen the right song regardless. Hear it here.

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
By Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson, 2010).
I thought such an extensive subtitle would cover some authors I actually cared about. Not that I don’t like Virginia Woolf, but I was led to believe that I might find anecdotes about some of my faves—Wyndham Lewis, David Garnett… No luck at all there, but my disappointment lifted when I got a sense of what Alexandra Harris’ thesis really is. She acknowledges movements like Futurism, but her interest is in those artists who were using new forms and styles to reframe the past, partly as a protective psychological measure during times of war and international crisis.
I realize the need for a broad, general title that grabs as many potential readers as possible—a properly detailed and qualified title describing what Harris’ book is actually about would make it sound like an impenetrable college thesis—but Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper flummoxed me and nearly turned me away… until I stopped judging it by its cover.

I’m going about my Stop & Shopping last week when a woman pushes her cart past the People’s Bank outlet in a corner of the market, then backs off a few steps and says, in a voice which means to be overheard:
“There is no such thing as a People’s Bank!”

I pass her a few aisles later, and she’s still muttering variations on the same refrain: “What’s a bank doing here anyway?”

Wonder what she’d think of the “It’s Time to Unbank” promotions across town at the Connex Credit Union branch on Whitney Avenue.

In my own humble stab at Nouvelle Cuisine—which, translated into domestic cooking nomenclature, means “What’s in the Refrigerator”—I baked and mashed, then lightly fried, some fresh-baked local organically grown squash and put it into otherwise Asian-styled dumplings.
The dumpling wrappers cost under $2 at a Chinese market downtown.
The squash overwhelmed the other ingredients (fried onions and garlic, some grated carrot and potato, a teaspoon of soy sauce) as I’d expected, but not in a way that anybody minded. After some suspicions, the daughters dug in. Kathleen raved, and raved again when she had the last few dumplings in her lunch the next day. Such delicacies don’t often age well, but these did.
The trick might have been that I didn’t use any oils in the frying—just cooking spray. This led to a crispness that oils could not have accomplished. I think.
Honestly, this was a happy accident which I hope I can duplicate soon. Chinese-sesque Connecticut-grown squash dumplings. Wish I was this clever in the kitchen more often.

“No Dogs Allowed.” The Stinky Aching Dogs, a quirky quintet from 100 miles hence, took comic offense when they pulled up to the Bullfinch Friday night for a rousing, leash-tautening late set.
The sign which apparently suggested they vamoose the premises was brand, heightening the hilarity. One of the club’s oft-unseen owners had just had a run-in with an employee’s cur one afternoon the previous week. Figuring he could at least control his own domain, if not the alleyway just outside, he scrawled “No DoGs Alloud”—just like that—on a napkin and taped it next to the band schedule in the front window.
Just to play it safe, The Stinky Aching Dogs performed under an alias, the Dinky Steak Hogs, a reference to some lousy hamburgers they’d just eaten on the road.

Side Necked and Bony Fishes—no fish allowed!—at the Bullfish, uh, -finch… Holostet and The Trionyx at Hamilton’s, for Rock Science Nite… An Evening With Gavial & Closest Living Relatives at D’ollaire’s. Go see who attends, and blackmail them…

Heading home for the holidays. Need to check the notice board.

Phil and the Osophers, It’s Christmas Time With Phil and the Osophers. Silly, underwritten folk-pop carols about Christmas break, ugly Christmas sweater parties, “Brutus the Backup Reindeer” and other lighthearted larks. Hard to get worked up either way about a Christmas EP. It’s a novelty, but one you’ll only listen to once a year, so fine.

Howard Cosell: The Man, The Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports
By Mark Ribowsky (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)
You don’t have to be sportsminded to have an interest in Howard Cosell. He was a popcult touchstone throughout the 1970s. I never watched Monday Night Football or a boxing match, but I knew Cosell from Woody Allen’s political comedy Bananas and from his attempt to inherit the mantle of Ed Sullivan with the TV variety show Saturday Night Live (unrelated to, well, you know, except that both shows featured Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, Brian Doyle-Murray and Howard Cosell at one time or another). Both Bananas and SNL are covered here, and not casually, so the book satisfied me right there. But Mark Ribowsky’s book prodded my curiosity more than I though it would. He covers the obvious highlights of Cosell’s career, in much the same trajectory that Cosell’s own autobiography did. But that’s just the play-by-play. Ribowsky adds a whole layer of color reporting by constantly reminding us of Cosell’s colossal ego. Cosell didn’t just think he could be the next Ed Sullivan, for instance: he thought he could bring the Beatles back together on his variety show, by dint of his passing acquaintance with a bemused John Lennon. This book is a litany of grand schemes and humiliating comeuppances. Cosell is shown to be an excellent broadcaster with great instincts, who undercuts his talents with his annoying air of superiority and his inability to stop drinking on the job.
Not sure what Howard Cosell means to folks today—his non-sports resume was slight, and while he’s still probably one of the best known (and most impersonated) sportscasters in history, mainstream recognition of sportscasters is fleeting if they’re not still broadcasting, and Cosell left ABC in the mid-1980s and died in 1995. If anything’s able to bring him back, it’s books like this which recognize both the myth and the man.

It took me an entire season to warm up to the new Fountains of Wayne album. I didn’t give up trying, and finally I dig it.

I also didn’t notice until just today that there’s actually a New Haven reference in the thing. I interviewed Chris Collingwood of Fountains of Wayne years ago and he told me that he’d lived in New Haven for a time himself, and had lived the same Daggett Street loft space once inhabited by members of The Gravel Pit.
The lyric, from the song “Acela,” is simply:

And it’s entertaining by New Haven
Once you’ve had yourself a drink or two, ooh ooh
All alone on the Acela
Tell me baby, where the hell are you?
(Acela) Ooh ooh (Acela)

I’ve never ridden the Acela, but I’ve certainly had those train rides when a young guy plomps down next to me, twists open several tiny bottles of liquor in a row, lines them up and downs one every few minutes for the rest of the trip to Boston. It’s kind of a holiday memory, crowded drunken trains. As usual, Fountains of Wayne feels it too.