The Apple store on Broadway opened just last month, with long lines outside. Then things at the new computer temple, which shines like a beacon and has changed the whole complexion of nighttime downtown, slowed down to simple non-stop busyness.

The lines returned on the weekend, not because of the brand new store but because the shop  had its first new device to roll out: iPhone 4,  the phone with its head in the Cloud.

The lines returned. I noticed that unlike lot of long lines outside busy places these days, none of the people in the apple store line were yakking on the  phone. I was tempted to start a game of “telephone,” whispering something like “Steve Jobs has risen from the grave” at one end of the line and seeing what it ended up as.”

Two nights ago I joined the millions who are downloading the 5.0 iPhone update on older phones. There were a few fraught moments during the long process, then I was up all night reinstalling and rearranging apps, but I’ve never been prone to grouse at Apple, or at any company that makes it easy for me to read and write while waiting for the school bus on the corner. They make it possible for millions of writers to phone it in.

Of all the bands that shouldn’t feel compelled to reissue every album in their catalogue as if it were one seamless canon, Pink Floyd shines on the craziest.

The band’s eras couldn’t get Amy more distinct: the period when Syd Barrett dominated, the period when Roger Waters dictated, and the brief period (one album, the moony one) when they could actually be said to be working together as a band.

For the record, all my favorite Pink Floyd songs are from the pre-Dark Side, Barrett period: “Arnold Layne”, See Emily Play and “Lucifer Sam.” This may be sacrilege, but my favorite Roger Waters project is his post-Floyd media-age musing Amused to Death. Maybe I’ve just never done the right drugs.

Ian of Meek Head bought a volume of 17th century love poems at a yard sale and wants to turn every one of them into songs. He’s done 14 so far. That maketh 247 yet to go.
He’s going order, working in harpsichord for inspiration but ready to adapt to any style or instrumentation that strikes him.

Here’s his best so far, by hugged own reckoning:
Aggrieved, begone
Thou starts are met
With fies and fiddles
Might and mane

His arrangement involves an anvil.

The Chudleighs and Kingsmill Finch at the Bullfinch… Bradstreet and Suckling at Hamilton’s. Really bad move to be a cover band with “suck” or something which rhymes with “bad” in your name… Kat Phill, The God Dolphins and Crash Awe all at D’ollaire’s. Three bands! What will the beancounters do?…

Cleaned my room. Really, really cleaned my room.

Johnny Cash, Bootleg Vol. 3: Live Around the World
My daughters have been gaining an appreciation for Shel Silverstein’s work outside the poetry volumes ubiquitous in their grade school classrooms. They dug Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone” even without fully understanding its 1970s rock stature implications. (Is that the greatest parody rock solo on that or what?)
This collection of live Johnny Cash bootlegs contains a version of Silverstein’s “A Boy Named Sue” performed at the White House during the Nixon administration. The live audience sounds less canned, and there’s some self-censorship masking the phrase “son of a gun.” But most significantly, Cash also swaps the concluding “Anything but Sue!!” punchline for this touch of realism: “When I have a son, I’ll name him… “John Carter Cash.”

Everybody Loves Our Town—An Oral History of Grunge
By Mark Yarm (Crown Archetype, 2011)
This book is over 500 pages long, but somehow it’s not fit to hold the plaid shirttails of Peter Blecha’s Sonic Boom: The History of Nortwest Rock from “Louie Louie” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—which is under 300 pages and only devotes two or three chapters to that scene known as grunge.
Context is everything. Everybody Loves Our Town is great on perspective and detail–all that interband bickering, all that chafing under the labels and media glare. But ultimately it’s not the story of a local scene that it wants to be. It’s driven by the rise and fall of a few key bands, at which point the book veers well away from Seattle and into a storybook vision of what it was like to be a rock star (or for a whole tier of Northwest bands, nearly to be one). At which point it all becomes clichés and entrenched attitudes about what makes rock & roll important. Sonic Boom is about where things come from, but Everybody Loves Our Town, despite its title, loses its place.

Last week the city police raided a few clubs and found a few youngsters who were drinking illegally.
Underage drinking is the evil temptress. It would be a pity for a new restaurant such as Box 63 to fall so quickly because it couldn’t hacker there near impossible task of screening underage student drinkers.
I was once am underage drinker. But I was never an arrogant one. Stealing from your family’ s liquor cabinet, or asking an older friend to buy for you is one thing. Endangering a business’ liquor license by lying to its staff is another. Even when I doctored my IDs so I could get into club shows (couldn’t have seen Cheap Trick and Pezband at the Paradise in Boston in 1978 otherwise), I’d be too scared to drink once I was in the club.
It’s sweet talking vs, subterfuge, and I prefer the former.

Caught the rebroadcast of the Oct. 17, 1946 episode of the Burns & Allen show last night on the Antioch OTR station (1710 AM in Ohio, http://radio.macinmind.com/ online). In the midst of the adventure, titled “Gracie Wants George to Replace Clark Gable,” the show’s announcer rushes in when he hears the name “Louella Parsons.”
“Louella’s going to be here? I have a story for her column.”
I just found out that Ronald Reagan beats his wife Jane Wyman every morning.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, he beats her into the kitchen and helps himself to the first cup of refreshing Maxwell House Coffee.”

Simper Guy’s new song about smelly feet is a hoot, but has got a sensitive backstory.
Simper Guy is an army vet, his shift shortlived because, as he puts it, “I’m a wimp—not that I deserted or anything.” He has fraught recollections of the scene in the barracks, especially of a bunkmate with “feet that stunk so bad he was being studied as a new form of gas-based weaponry.” The song “Stinkfoot Stomp” is dedicated to this unnamed soldier, whose legacy is to have challenged no less than the smell of napalm in the morning.

Geography of a Horse Dreamer and Curse of the Starving Class at the Bullfinch. Both bands’ songs are nearly as wordy as their band names… Operation Sidewinder and The Holy Ghostly covering the zeitgeist at Hamilton’s… Fractious metal nite with The God of Hell and Back Bog Beast Bait at D’ollaire’s…

We broke up the band before we threatened to play again.