Brainstormed the perfect best selling novel.

Dom, Family of Love EP
Lightweight synthpop where the beats are bothersome but the keyboard flourishes and swooping backing vocals evoke welcome ghosts of lost New Wave spirits of 30 years ago.

Hearing that Randy Burns is playing two nights at The Space in Hamden (the weekend of Aug. 26-27) makes me think more than “Huh, Randy Burns is still out there.” It makes me realize that The Space fully deserves to claim the mantle of the old Exit Coffeehouse, the legendary ‘60s and ‘70s folk club/collective where Randy Burns got his start.
I missed the entire existence of the Exit. By the time I moved to New Haven, its spirit had dwindled to the occasional reunion. A few different people presented me with copies of the live anthology album recorded there.
This was a volunteer-run listening room whose top performers, such as Burns, were on par with the big-city folk scene in Greenwich Village. The folks who ran the Exit were uncommonly dedicated: I heard stories of New Haven hippies passing up going to Woodstock because they didn’t want to cancel an Exit show. The place is still spoken of in glowing terms as a community-based cultural landmark of its era. The Exit was so warmly remembered, so well documented, that one imagined it as a phenomenon that could never be repeated.
Yet, consider this: Steve Rodgers founded The Space in 2003, in the classic volunteer-staffed coffeehouse manner. It grew out of well organized weekly open mic nites at the rehearsal studio Steve’s band Mighty Purple. Like the Exit, The Space has paid high homage to folk and other acoustic musics, but also embraced rock, the blues, and whatever else the community was supporting. The Exit brought in countless college students; The Space has captured an even younger high school crowd. The Exit distinguished itself from the more commercial clubs where the main purpose was to sell beer. So has The Space, even when it recently opened a second club, The Outer Space, which has a beer-and-wine permit.

A two-night stand by Exit superstar Randy Burns and his Sky Dog Band should clinch the connection, but a quick scan of any month’s Space and Outer Space schedules will show you how devoted the venues are to a range of listening-room joys: solo singer/songwriters, harmony-trilling duos, three-piece pop acts, contemporary jazz quartets, on up to large ska bands and 150-capacity audiences.

The Exit and The Space. Two venues whose names suggest voids. Both created to fill a needed gap, and doing more than they’re given credit for in terms of ignoring generation gaps.

We don’t follow a lot of the local blues singers, as we’ve never required extra incentive to drink whiskey. But Clarks Falls appeals to us. Not just his plural first name (he was named after two feuding uncles both named Clark, he tells us) but how he seems to be in chronic pain when he sings. His agony adds to the allure of songs like “Oh, the Hurt” and “My Baby Stepped on My Insides Again.”
We asked Mr. Falls if the anguished expressions are real. He reeled off a lot of numbers and dashes which turned out to mean something like “classified” or “trade secret.” Clarks’s a war veteran, which may answer our question right there. But he’s loose and funny in person, flashing gap-toothed grins and trying to swipe our pencil so he can do magic tricks with it.
Whether it’s acting or catharsis, performing is clearly a great outlet for Clarks Falls. If he was as jovial onstage as off, it would kill his whole act—but save his audience a few buckets of tears.

Mysterious Handprints and Secret Pitch, pretty big names for the Bullfinch… Two Spies on the deck and Dead Eagles on the main floor of Hamilton’s… An Evening With Knife in the Watermelon at D’ollaire’s…

We think we can make a killing on the stock market.

Magic Kids, Memphis.
This CD was released a year ago this month, but got lost in my laptop/desktop iTunes shuffle and went unheard until now. Timeless in that neo-bubblegum studio-vacuum way, it’s also seasonally bound to summertime, and sounds just great right now on a windy beach. Lite and airy, it also doesn’t overindulge—of the 11 songs, only only exceeds three minutes, and only three (“Hey Boy,” “Good to Be” and “Cry With Me Baby”) have more than one word in their titles.

DailyInk, which in many respects is the coolest, not to mention the bluest, of the three major websites which collect syndicated comic strips, has undergone a redesign. While my main peeve with the page remains, there are undeniable improvements.

First, the peeve, and it may be my own incompetence. If you’re scrolling down your self-picked “My DailyInk” menu of strips, and you alight on a strip you’ve missed a bunch of days of, it seems that you have to leave the My DailyInk page to land on the strip’s own archives page. Then you have to go back to My DailyInk and scroll all the way down to where you left off. A minor quibble, consideting the joy of having so many comics close at hand. But one of DailyInk’s competitors has solved this dilemma, letting you access previous days’ strips right from your main page.

Like I say, maybe I’m just doing it wrong. DailyInk remains my favorite of the syndicated comics providers, largely due to its mix of classics, new strips and decades-old reprints. It’s given me respect for serials like Rip Kirby which I couldn’t fathom when I was young. It doesn’t have everything—I must go elsewhere (GoComics.com) for personal faves such as The Norm, The Doozies or Drabble—but DailyInk has plenty. And its design, old or new, is immensely appealing—more sober than GoComics or comics.com, less overtly childlike. It takes its comics as seriously as I do.

Beautiful harmonies from whoever that retro-nostalgia-oldie-tribute-cover-bygone band at Hamilton’s Tuesday. Until the singer fell off her tall shoes, into the drum platform. Next thing you knew, a mic stand was down. And this was a ballad! During one of the speedier old-school numbers, a whipping scarf nearly took down three bandmates.

So we took a quick Bullfinch survey of Worst Onstage Fashion Faux Pas:

Marsha of the Tisburys: “I wore my boyfriend’s baggy sweatshirt and got the mic caught in the sleeve.”
Myra and Rick of the Myricks: “Matched lederhosen. We were seven and six, in a church talent show. Does that count?” (Oh, yes.)
Lord Sand of Humarock: “I’m sure somebody’s had a problem with everything I’ve ever worn onstage. But for me the worst was splitting my pants at a College Nite. My friend Bobby tossed me a tablecloth, and I wore it like a skirt for the rest of the set.”
Plym and Hing of the Sippiwissetts: “We did the skinny tie thing for one show, but the other band on the bill was a skinny tie band too. We got in this tie fight, pulling each other’s ties. One kid in the other band turned blue.”
Johnny Hausnecki of the House Neck Band: “It doesn’t get worse than the platform shoes. I’ve been there with the platform shoes. Beware the platform shoes.”

Nan Tasket and the Blue Hulls, who’ve never gone in for that costume stuff, do two sets at Hamilton’s… Camp Ramsbottom, a kind of local band revue with a bunch of singer/songwriters backing each other up buddy-system style, at the Bullfinch… D’ollaire’s closed for two nights for reasons known only to God…

We have changed our tactics and will rob a candy store instead.

Sainthood Reps, Monoculture. It starts out with the sort of plodding shouting I associate with early Beastie Boys, the first rap band where I didn’t understand why the songs wouldn’t be better if they were sung rather than rapped. On later tracks, Sainthood Reps delve into doomy metallic crunch, with the same lumbering laxity. Which made me think of Rick Rubin’s passions for modern metal. So, an album made in an alternate 1986? Yeah, but too sluggish to register.