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.

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