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.

By Artie Capshaw
We’ve all heard feedback verses, window-behind-the-stage percussion, deafening bursts of silence and the other ambient or environmental augmentations of small club rock.
But have you ever seen a band PERFORM them?
That’s the new trick of the salty dogs in The Acrobats of Etiquette. They used to crash parties, but now they’re prepared.

Last Wednesday’s set at the Bullfinch saw the Acs of Et approach a long vaccuumy point in their song “Foom!” A void opens up in the midst of pulverizing noise, setting ears on fire with the sudden onrush of calm.
We’ve seen AoE do this song half a dozen times. This time, when the silence hit, they played right through it, expertly miming their intruments so they weren’t actually hitting a drum or strumming a guitar, though it certainly looked as if they were.
The crowd whoop that ensued—there’ve always been whoops in the silence of that song, but this was different—added a whole new audio element of “Foom!”
Later in the set, the Acs pulled another acting stunt. The band has a song-concluding open-tuned feedback thing they do for “Coming Down.” When it came, they didn’t pretend to play it, as with the silence on “Foom!” They acted as if they affected by it.
They acted zapped. They acted electrocuted.
They acted.

Next at the Bullfinch: The Widder Browns and Point Sublime… At Hamilton’s: The Weird Circle and Twenty-Second Letter… At D’ollaire’s: Shadows of Fu (rescheduled)…

We all sit in our rooms listening to our own albums. It’s not right.

Prince Rama: Trust Now.
Exotic without becoming camp or self-parodic, this blend of Arabic, dance and psychedelic music makes you want to go try and take Yma Sumac seriously. It’s mystical and metaphysical and somebody really ought to lead a strenuous yoga workout to it.

Hit that Book Fair at the Institute Library yesterday. The place is officially titled the Young Men’s Institute Library, though the current membership conclusively demonstrates that you needn’t be a man, or at all young, to join. Yesterday, though, the Institute’s 20something-old executive director Will Baker joshed that “If you leave, Chris, I’ll be the oldest one here.
It was a change of scenery in other ways as well. All the bookcases and tables at the front end of the library had been cleared so they could become the sale area. The rarely open third floor had tables full of books as well. The main stacks were closed off for the day, another rarity.
Some genuine effort had gone into what I hope will be a new tradition at the YMIL. Serious bookpersons were involved, so the sale books had been individually (and fairly) priced, rather than the sort of general pricing ($3 per hardcover, $1 paperback) that so many similar events go for these days. (I always felt that such generalizing could hurt the feelings of the books, which deserved to be appreciated singly.)
Here’s what I came away with, for seven dollars total:
• Word of Mouth, a novel by Jerome Weidman. (Stay tuned for an item on this over at the sister blog, New Haven Theater Jerk.)
• Watcher in the Shadows by Geoffrey Household. A 1960 novel which has some of the same themes of loving, hunting and avenging as Household’s classics Rogue Male and A Rough Shoot. I already have Watcher in the Shadows in paperback, but this is the gorgeous hardcover with Milton Glaser’s grassy cover design.
• The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 by V.C. Clinton-Baddeley.
• Mountain Meadow by John Buchan. You’d suspect I was working a countryside suspense theme, with Household and Buchan in the same batch of books. This isn’t one of Buchan’s Richard Hannay books, but it is one of his Greenmantle and Huntingtower thrillers.
• A Magic School Bus book for Sally (but don’t tell her; it’ll come from the Tooth Fairy).
• plus this:

Not the flashiest book haul ever, granted, but I came late to the party, a couple of hours before the sale ended. Plus I’m in a frugal phase.
I was pleased to see that the sale organizers hadn’t raided the hallowed stacks of the YMIL itself for the event. There were some library items, Taxi among them, but mostly these donated volumes—recent bestsellers, art and poetry tomes, even textbooks and (something this library’s not known for) children’s books.
What I’ll remember, though, is the library not looking like it always does. Here’s to more transformations.

Really want to know what was going the mind of whoever set up this display of skeletons sitting around a campfire wearing Yale T-shirts at the Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue.

I threw out my favorite desk chair yesterday. It was upholstered with garish red fabric I never liked. The wooden strips on the wheelbase kept flying off. You could feel a popped spring near the middle of the seat, which was lumpy for plenty of other reasons as well. The armrests gave me splinters in my elbows. If you leaned back too far, the chair could toss you like a bronco.
What a fine chair that was! It was like a stray pet that you take in but can never tame.
I met that chair in the fall of 1991 when I began at the New Haven Advocate. I’d only owned it a few months before I’d absentmindedly carved my name on an armrest—an involuntary habit I’d acquired from hanging out in certain wooden-tabled bars and pizza joints in our oaken college town.
Then the office décor changed, with new carpeting and color schemes, and the old chairs had to go. I saw my chair outside the office, waiting for the trashman. I took it home, where it served me another 15 years.
What made me finally send the chair to its eternal (arm)resting place is a broken wheel. I felt like I was shooting a horse for breaking its leg. But you can’t turn a swivel chair into anything else, can you—not an ottoman or artwork or Lazy Susan. It was a thing on which I sat, and that is that.
Recline in peace, chair.

I have no idea what it will be like. I have been an Institute member for over a decade, and while there has been much talk over the years of extending this historic private lending library’s services and comforts and devising ways to attract new members, it didn’t really start happening until Will Baker was hired as Executive Director last year.

2011 Fall Book Sale

October 1st, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

The Institute Library
847 Chapel Street
New Haven, Connecticut

Don’t Think Just Play is part post-modern rock theory, part jam session and part party game. Shaggy Fur Face, frontman of Today’s Revolution in Weather, came up with the gimmick, which was that anyone who took themselves too seriously during the jam would get slapped by a judge and have to leave the stage immediately. The criteria was thus:
• No closing your eyes and “feeling the vibe.”
• No looking away, turning your back to the audience or otherwise “zoning out.”
• No making faces while you solo.
• No calling out changes to other bands like you know what you’re doing better than they do.
• No turtlenecks, black slacks (unless they’re denim) or neckties.
• No doing anything that takes you away from the band or the fans.

There were a few more rules than that, but you get the idea. With all these signposts in place, this was a thoroughly enjoyable show. The crowd felt involved: they wanted to call out the conceited players as much as the judges (Q, X-Max from Olympus, and—naturally—us) did.

The slap-unhappiest player of the lot was our fair-weather friend Sonny Blitt, who—when slapped down for looking askance—didn’t go gently, but grabbed the mic and ad-libbed a petulant rap. He later claimed that he was just trying to “liven up” a show that was getting “bogged down by rules.” But nobody could have sensed sameness in the stream of players attempting to become the people’s favorite player.
In the end, no one winner emerged. The judges realized that anyone who played too long was guilty of something that hadn’t been codified in the manifesto. So we disqualified everyone. Good thing we weren’t part of the Don’t Think Just Play pack; with our attitude, we wouldn’t have lasted a note.
Shaggy F.F. is rewriting the rules and hopes to have a second round within a few weeks—as soon as he finds three new judges.

The Dead Game Sportsmen and Water on Brain at the Bullfinch… Bottle Fatigue and Hanging Way Over at Hamilton’s… Relations in Strange Locations and VIP Mistakes at D’ollaires, though you can catch the Relations for free at Capitol Park upstate earlier in the day…

Live theater verite broadcast, of an act of violence in progress, gets us found out and closed down.