Gross Magic, “Sweetest Touch.” From a 5-song EP currently on iTunes and about to be released in tactile CD form now that Gross Magic himself, Sam McGarrigle of England, is embarking on a U.S. tour.
Where a lot of tributes to androgynous ‘70s glam rock fall down is in the guitars. Gross Magic has the voice which could be gritty female and could be whiny male. It’s also got that rough fringe-noise guitar sound. It’s a style that drifted right from ‘70s Britrock into ‘90s Seattle grunge, so there’s a lot to appreciate here. The DNA of T Rex has been successfully scraped.

Rubber Balls and Liquor
By Gilbert Gottfried (2011)

I gave up waiting for the library to stock this, and bought it on Kindle with a gift certificate I’d gotten from my mother-in-law. I did buy it, but I didn’t pay much. I think that’s the way Gilbert Gottfried would like it. This is the most self-deprecating, self-pitying, purposefully clueless and relentlessly cheap celebrity autobiography ever penned.

Turns out I already knew all the major turning points in Gilbert Gottfried’s career: Saturday Night Live during the show’s early ‘80s nadir (though he describes the present-day SNL as having transcended the need for quality comedy and is now simply “a restaurant in a good location”); Hollywood Squares (where he was the required square in what became the longest round in the show’s history, an experience he savors most for the opportunity to continually scream “You fool!” at the hapless contestants); playing a parrot in the Aladdin film and its spin-offs; doing a routine about masturbation at the Emmy Awards (where, if memory serves, he also impersonated the event’s host, Jerry Seinfeld, though Gottfried doesn’t mention that); doing a Sept. 11 joke at a Friar’s Month, in the same month as Sept. 11, and—when confronted with pained silence and cries of “Too soon!”—he launched into a telling of the classic joke “The Aristocrats” which became the centerpiece of the movie of the same name.
There’s a photo in the book of Gottfried from when he worked on the 90-minute late-night talk show hosted by Alan Thicke in 1983. I remember this show vividly. It was so hard up for material that occasionally Thicke would bring out his writers, supporting players and sidekick Richard Belzer and ask them what was on their minds. I remember Gilbert Gottfried absolutely killing in this fraught, halfbaked arena. He had his co-stars on the floor, the audience gasping. Other than that photo caption, Gottfried doesn’t mention Thicke of the Night, but I remember it as the period when the squinting, yelling persona we now associate him with first asserted itself on the small screen. (His SNL sketches

Rubber Balls and Liquor is sly, selfless and crude. It’s padded with “clip-out jokes,” one-page faux-perforated retellings of surefire classic comic stories, delivered in a literary style unlike that which Gottfried would ever use live. The main narrative, happily, is very firmly in his accustomed raspy, impatient and impassioned voice. You can hear his intonation in the text without having to pop for the audiobook. (Or hire him to read it to you; considering his opinion of his career prospects, he’d probably take the gig.) The only time it diverges from his signature yowling is when he indulges in parenthetical remarks about all the literary clichés he’s accessing in his writing. It’s the

Nearly all Gottfried’s anecdotes about his life and work have to do with him being humiliated or embarrassed. Considering that he’s been in show business for over 30 years, it’s amazing (or intentionally understated) that some of the biggest names he quotes in relation to himself come from hearsay. He tells of someone telling him that Woody Allen viewed his audition tape and asked if Gottfried was a Navajo Indian. He’s patted down at customs and is told that Julie Andrews got the same airport treatment a day earlier.

These are the anecdotes, folks! As for details about his life, all you really learn of his childhood is that he masturbated a lot and watched lots of old movies on television, usually at the same time. You don’t even know until the closing thank-yous section of the book that Gottfried is married.

Does this make Rubber Balls and Liquor a bad book? No, its very slothfulness and silliness and insipid second-classness makes it sensational. It’s celebrity pulp fiction. It’s zany and unpredictable as Gottfried wrestles with the prospect of putting into perspective a career that he’s never quite mastered.

The funniest part? This book was released just before Gottfried got fired from his gig voicing the duck in Aflac commercials, for texting jokes about the tsunami in Japan. That’s a whole chapter he didn’t get to write right there.

The Yale Barnes & Noble Bookstore got its windows back! I was afraid it would revert to the thik outer walls and darkened check-out area of its illustrious predecessor The Yale Co-op.
Instead, all that construction blockage of the display windows was just temporary. B&N is all sweetness and light again, with a great view of the even bigger windows at the Apple Store next door.
The important part of the Yale Bookstore redesign—the conglomeration of all the merchandise from two stores into one so that Apple could come to Broadway—happened months before the cosmetic windowdressing, of course. It was a swift and sure reshuffling, and I got immediately comfortable with it.
Couple of kvetches, however: I miss having the mystery and science fiction sections near the children’s section, where I could peruse them while keeping an eye on the kids. I’m already tired of browsing the cookbooks.
And whence magazines? When Barnes & Noble first settled in, they set up one of the biggest periodical sections in any store downtown (second only to News Haven’s) with its own designated manager. There used to be a dozen or so wide racks of mags. That’s now the Yale clothing-and-souvenirs section. So now there’s just three or four racks, up a step in the back of the convenience-store area near the coffee shop. Makes you want to not bother buying the LIFE special edition on George Harrison.

Ambridge Extra, the spin-off from the long-running Archers radio soap opera, has been granted a Season Two. Its 70-year-old parent program The Archers broadcasts six times a week without fail, and would cause riots in the street were it to miss a single episode. (Major political speeches and election coverage have had to steer carefully around Archers airtime.) Ambridge Extra has a more leisurely schedule. It did 13 weeks of two episodes per week last spring then, despite its apparent popularity, took the summer off.
The Archers is named for a central family in the ongoing storylines, a multi-generational farm family. Ambridge Extra, in turn, is named for the rural village in which the Archers and the show’s dozens, if not hundreds, of supporting characters live and work. That’s significant, since the new show is more about place than people. It delights in pitting the quaint folk of Ambridge against invaders from the outside world, evildoers who scorn what they see as the townspeople’s naivete, innocence and gullibility.
Ambridge Extra brings minor characters from The Archers to the forefront and thrusts whole new people into the stories without the careful, gradual set-ups which The Archers maintains. It’s a faster, flashier show, clearly meant for a younger audience, since young people tend to star in the adventures. What’s funny about this objective is that, for all its attempted hipness, Ambridge Extra does nothing for those with short attention spans, the presumed youth demographic. The traditional Archers shows skips around wildly with multiple plotlines per episode. How many stories did Ambridge Extra tell in its whole first season? Two.
These differences in styles and emphases took some getting used to, but having done so, I found myself eagerly awaiting the show’s return. The opening episode has a suspenseful tone—sppoky music, hitchhiker at night, who when recognized as an ex-con starts telling stories that sound full of holes. The suspense comes not so much from the hitchhiker but from the guy who picks him up—longtime Archers listeners recognize the voice of the village’s most celebrated felon, Matt Crawford, who spent time in the slammer just last year for tax fraud.
As with season one, one Ambridge Extra adventure is about bad boys while the other is about love. A moony-eyed teen boy is on Facebook learning about a girl he fancies. You just know embarrassment and anguish are in store.

Season two of Ambridge Extra began yesterday (Tuesday Oct. 4) and airs two 15-minute episodes a week on Tuesdays and Thursday via the BBC’s online Radio 4 Extra channel. It’s easy to keep up, since there’s both an “Omnibus” edition which reruns that week’s two parts back-to-back and a podcast you can play anytime.

When we heard there was a new band called Cleavage of Grass playing the Bullfinch, our first thought was that we were reading about the ill-clad waitresses on Hula Nite at Hamilton’s. Then we hoped against hope that at least this was just an ironically named all-male band.
Not that we don’t respect the female physique. But no good can come off naming your band after cleavage. Even if you have some. Too many female bands, especially in overthinking college towns, take names intended to mock conventions, to empower by “taking back” slurs and redefining them (to name just a couple of the common justifications). They get all the conceptual theory worked out, then they show up to play… and the area right in front of the stage is filling with drooling exhorting them to lift their shirts.
Cleavage of Grass plays Thursday. We’re thinking of boycotting.

Gar said it first: Let’s start a band.

TV Girl, “Girls Like Me.” A-side of an impending single from the San Diego duo. The melding of lifeless dance beats and matter-of-fact vocals seems rather old hat to me, but it’s obviously some kind of wide trend these days. This one has a few distinctions, though.
It’s got a drum beat opening that completely drags you in. The plaintive lyric—“a girl like me doesn’t even have to try”—is sung by a guy singing. At 2:36, it doesn’t overstay—which is really the only danger in dancebeats, that they go on too long.

Saw Michael Stern, of the tireless non-fiction team Jane & Michael Stern, Saturday afternoon at the Yale Barnes & Noble Book Store. Didn’t hear a presentation by him or anything—the event was poorly attended, so the few of us there just chatted with the guy until an old friend of his showed up. It was like being at a cocktail party or food-tasting, where you know a few people, then your attention wanders, and… well, Mr. Road Food must live in that world a whole lot of the time.
Might have gotten a scoop (in the non-food sense) there though. I was unable to find much in common with Stern foodwise—he professed not to know much about soda pop, and when I asked about the latest food trends, he kind of changed the subject—but one of the B&N staffers had better luck, talking with him about barbeque recipes.
When the bookwoman mentioned that she’d had a barbeque treatment in which crumbled-up Captain Crunch cereal was a crucial ingredient, Stern was amused: “I’ve never even had Captain Crunch!”
What”?! The author of Real American Food, not to mention The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, has never tried one of the great processed corn/oat taste sensations of modern history? Never had it atop frozen yogurt? Never been tempted by a Jay Ward-wrought TV ad?
This man Michael is made of Stern stuff indeed.

Yale Daily News did its annual passing-of-the-torch issue Monday, which is traditionally an extra chance for the editors to do an April Fools-type news-parody edition. The main headline, “Yale Calls ‘Backsies’ on Peruvian Artifacts,” suckered me, I admit—not because I fully believed it, but because I believe that the university’s dealings with Peru were more complicated or covert than the media knew (or cared to know), and could buy into a sensationalized sense that Yale had reneged.
Other headlines in the issue—“Yale’s Fucked”; “Vagina Painting: Do We Dare?”—aren’t far afield from what the Yale Daily News might run on a non-parodic day. Even some of the real ads—David Halperin’s Wednesday talk is entitled “How to Be Gay”—blurred lines between what might have been considered the height of poor taste just a few years ago and now is accepted attention-getting discourse.
The new YDN staff is already joking about the long sleepless nights and diminished social opportunities in store for them. Truth is, they’re doing good work and should be undeprecatingly proud of it. The Yale Daily News often has fresher street reporting than the local daily, and some of the reporting on the recent Democratic primaries equaled the local-news gold standard around here, The New Haven Independent.
Standards for the parody issue can be loose and sloppy (The heading “Holy Shit This City is Dangerous. Get the Fuck Outtttt” is too cheap and obvious to offend even the most patriotic townies. Even on non-parody days, the guest op-ed columns year-round can frequently disappoint or enrage with their insufferable entitlements. There is the impatience of waiting for novices to master their trade—going too far, or just as often not far enough. But overall, the Yale Daily News has become a strong and reliable community newspaper, in an age when such things are no longer sure.

From the basement.

The Rooftop Singers, Walk Right In. Amazing how slick folk music used to be, and how raw so much pop music is now. My copy of this single on the Vanguard label is literally warped for the first half inch of vinyl. Then it settles down, except it doesn’t. The heavy stand-up bass and the unexpectedly raucous guitar solo upset the smoothed-even vocals. You don’t whether to feel lulled or goosed.

Hedva and David, Next Year/If You Stay for A While Israeli folk pop, with spoken English translation interlude. “There will come a time when peace is not a dream. When peace belongs to all without strife. There will come a time when the prophet’s words come true, when Jerusalem above all guides our life..” Then comes the na-na-na singalong.

Baby Drowsy, B-P/Generate. New Jersey five-piece with quick-action punk players and takes-her-time vocalist which really does make them sound both baby-like and drowsy.

Andy Kim, Rock Me Gently/Rock Me Gently Part 2. Did you know there was a “Rock Me Gently Part 2”? It’s a white soul-funk instrumental, where a synthesizer sounding like one of those plastic keyboards you blow through takes a solo. Back-up singers come in for the crucial “ooo”s, “Baby baby”s and chorus. When “Superstition”-style bass licks come up, the idea of “gently” has moved up to the scale to “creepy.”

Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra, L’Amour Est Bleu/Sunny. As an arranger and unpredictable popsmith, this guy should be up there with Esquivel. The A-side was a deserved hit, but “Sunny” is also full of surprises: pops and clicks and strings and even a harpsichord sound. This is what kept people alive in the ‘60s.