Fanzine, “Roman Holiday”
This early single from the forthcoming album My Stupid Brain begins like some bargain-bin discovery from the great age of faceless ‘70s riff-rock, then swells with woo-oo-oos and decidedly non-stadium vocals. The rawk turns human before your very ears.

Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, Volume Two
Adapted by Chuck Dixon. Illustrated by Scott Cohn and Tim Seeley. Colors by Ale Starlin. Lettering and Collection Design by Bill Tortolini. Collection Cover by Brett Booth.

Koontz gets top billing in the comics adaptation, both as part of the title and just below it.

This version was originally issued in multiple-issue comics form, Volume 2 being the second collection of those individual comics. So the adaptation is already kind of stop/start and repetitive. But it also just has a different temperament and tempo from the novel version which begat it. To complicate matters, that novel grew from a 1994 TV miniseries project which Koontz left over creative differences with the USA network but which contains some of the same characters.

Koontz’s Prodigal Son novel (which originally bore a shared credit with Kevin J. Anderson) is easily the strongest of the three versions, though there’s no reason why the TV or comics series couldn’t have surpassed it. In all three, the story of a modern Prometheus is mapped out for maximum impact, intersecting with a slew of serial killings and the profound personal problems of the principal characters. The story is a police procedural, an insane-killer caper, a science fiction speculation, a noir thriller and an unhinged horror squeamfest all in one.

The illustrations in the graphic novel match the snappy sensationalism of its own comics-concise text, but neither captures the mood of Koontz’s sprawling and novel. Instead of the darkness that fills the book, there’s a constant glare.

Koontz’s books have lots of downtime built into them, where you begin to relate to his characters as humans because of the way they chat amiably with each other and go home to bed occasionally. There’s a few pages of car chat in the comic version, but it’s expositional rather than emotional. Having the structure streamlined shows you how much Dean Koontz has on the ball.

It’s kind of like an old ham radio signal beamed into space and returning years later, out of context but welcome and revealing.
It appears that Radio Shack is coming back to the Chapel Street, across from the Green.
The place is being readied for opening. It’s one of the few filled storefronts on a block that was once a bustling urban shopping mall.
Strangely, it was one of the last shops in the mall. One of the last thriving ones, anyhow. Radio Shack stands alone.
In the years it’s been away, the Radio Shack chain has changed its tune, and its tuners. It used to be a place you could wander into as you would into a hardware store, in search of a transistor or an audio splitter or an A-B switch, and they’d know what you were talking about. In recent years, the stores have become less about do-it-yourselfing and more about ready-made electronic appliances.
Isn’t it funny that the same month that an Apple Store sprouts up downtown, Radio Shack reappears? In this age of staycations and home offices, are computers and viewing screens the only surefire business opportunity?
Why ask why (or wire)? Just enjoy the charge.

Latest sweet of noteworthy weeks from the titles of Archie stories gag pages. This time, they all emanate from Jughead Jones Digest Magazine #67 (February 1991).
Rare pair
Rebel Robot
Code Three
Wide Birth “D-uh… I was in born in South America!” “What part, Moose?” “D-uh! All of me!”)
Help Un-Wanted
Rest in Peace
Winning Wand
Snow Snicker
Every Which Way But Jughead
Snow Woe
Snow Job
Big Fight Tonight
The Latest Report
Some Kind of Emergency
Line Design
Nice Advice
Kitchen Kapers

…and a four-part epic with these chapter titles:
Winter Wishes
The Great Crashers
Love It or Lump It
Ah, Sweet Mystery

We don’t write enough about the fights. We justify it thus: we’re there for the bands. We don’t write about drink specials, or wall fixtures, or the paper the schedules are printed on either.
Except, sometimes we do. (200 gram #74 medium cardstock! A draft and a half on Wednesdays between 4 & 7 p.m.!) So here’s what we say about the fights:
Too many of ‘em right at the front door of the Bullfinch. At Hamilton’s, where folks still bother to go inside and get drunk first, the side room might as well have a ring of rope around it and a bell in the corner. D’ollaire’s is the only place with a surefire, if draconian, mechanism for quelling the violence—a phalanx of well-paid bouncers. Your high ticket fees at work.
The problem is not the alcohol, we suggest.
The problem is not even those wretched metal bands which exhort everyone to “go wild,” or the well-intentioned indie bands which advise us to “rise up.”
The problem is the perception of our culture as a place to cut loose. Which it always has been, in the artistic sense. But now the finer distinction have been moshed and pulped and windmilled away.

Whatever happened to schoolyards and loading docks? Take it outside, fellas.

Folk frolics at the ‘Finch with The Ol’ Dirt Daubers and Korn’s-a-Krackin’, with a short opening story-song set by The Jean Shepherds… A couple of bands which crave audience suggestions at the cover-song coven Hamilton’s: Let George Do It and Pick & Pat… Case Dismissed and Gulf Headliners, trying to be civil at D’ollaire’s, but they must be bummed that there’s not a larger place to play in the area…

Gar told his friend Char about the back windows, and she wants to wire a pirate radio station up in there.

AM & Shawn Lee have done a remarkably respectful cover of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ mid-‘70s hit “Jackie Blue.” Not the first indie-rock cover of the song. No less a band than Smashing Pumpkins did it on the K-Tel covers project 20 Explosive Dynamic Super Smash Hit Explosions! compilation. AM & Shawn Lee’s version takes advantage of the opportunity to jam electronically, then slow the thing down to a crawl. The poppy elements and vocals remain pristine, slavishly aping the Daredevils to the point where they seem ironic or parodic. It’s that middle jam that’s so smart, taking the song apart from the inside and leaving that AM (radio, that is)-friendly shell intact.

The girls and I have been rereading L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz. We read it just over a year ago, then decided to read The Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz, followed by the short Woggle-Bug Book. Then they wanted to hear Ozma of Oz already again, just because they want to do them in order. Between our first and second readings of Ozma, the girls were avidly following Eric Shanower’s comics adaptation of that book, so they really know it well by now.
Shanower’s version shows the characters other than how they’ve imagined them, but it didn’t jar them at all, as he follows the books’ plots very closely his adaptations.
Just as theatergoers these days are as likely to know Oz from the musical Wicked as from the 1939 MGM movie, Mabel & Sally are aware of the famous John R. Neill illustrations of Baum’s original Oz books, but much more familiar with Shanower’s. The Kindle edition of the Oz books which I read to them from—all 15 or so in the series, for just a few bucks—doesn’t have any illustrations at all.
The supporting characters and regional villains are what Oz books are all about, though Baum learned that they couldn’t quite carry the series by themselves. Ozma marks the return of Dorothy Gale as heroine; she was absent from Marvelous Land. Ozma was in that one, but mostly in her enchanted guise as Tip, a young boy unaware that he’s actually a beautiful princess inside. (It is my belief that the gay men who label themselves “Friends of Dorothy” should more accurately be called “Empathizers of Ozma.”) Marvelous Land features a motley crew of supernaturally charged stragglers—a figure made of sticks with a pumpkin for a head; a sawhorse; a winged beast with no limbs and a couch for a body—who would not be alive if not for magic powder. There’s also the Woggle-Bug, a know-it-all irritant whose cultural brethren of later generations would seem to include Jeremy Boob from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and Yoda from Star Wars.
Ozma’s cast includes a talking chicken named Bill, whose name Dorothy changes to Billina because the hen is female. The first villains encountered are The Wheelers, who have wheels instead of hands and feet and could be one of the street gangs in Walter Hill’s The Warriors.
Best of all is Tik-Tok, an all-metal mechanical man, from a time before the word “Robot” had even been invented. Baum presents Tik-Tok’s speech by inserting lots of hyphens between syllables. He’s anticipated not just artificial intelligence but the very invention on which I read Ozma of Oz to my daughters: when I read Tik-Tok’s chatter aloud, it breaks up into monotonous word-bites which sound just like the Kindle’s own text-to-speech function. Perhaps if I tire of reading to them, the Kindle can take over, and all Tik-Tok’s talk will sound just right.

The Elm City Market in the big new building at 360 State Street has received more fanfare even than Stop & Shop’s recent takeover of the vacated Shaw’s supermarket in Dwight Plaza on Whalley. Since well before it was a sure thing, ECM had style and attitude and confidence. Now that you can look through the windows and see what’s in store when the store finally opens. Organizational and financial issues have delayed the project, but it clearly hasn’t lost its focus. As planned, it will be a “community owned food co-op” with paid memberships and an involved, aware clientele who are invited to serve on the market’s various committees.
The store is living up to its hype as a mecca for progressive, earth- and health-conscious yuppies. Signs in the aisles point out where you can find soy milks, energy bars and bottled teas. Another sign, touting “Beer and Wine,” has been a point of consternation for some. But one suspects that the Night Train guzzlers won’t be comfortable in these environs and will continue to imbibe elsewhere.
The new Stop & Shop on Whalley will likely be unaffected by Elm City Market, all the way on the other side of downtown, just as Whalley’s own health-foods supermarket, Edge of the Woods seemed unchanged when they was a Shaw’s just down the street, and equally unchanged when there wasn’t a Shaw’s down the street. Some markets are simply good identifying their market base. Elm City Market’s base is the ground floor of 360 State.

1. “My Dogs.” I only just discovered this one, on one of the Broadway internet channels the girls and I listen to. It’s from the William Finn song cycle “Elegies.” On the soundtrack album, it’s sung by Christian Borle, a wonderful actor whom I first raved about when he played Riff at the New Haven’s Shubert in a non-Equity national tour of West Side Story. A lot of performers never make it out of that circuit, but Borle moved up to Equity tours, returning to the Shubert in Footloose and joining that show’s Broadway cast in the final weeks of its
years-long run. Adept, from the very outset of his career, at shows that blend death and comedy, Borle totally nails Finn’s fetching numbers about deceased best friends and short-lived relationships.
2. “Pup Tune.” My favorite Willie Alexander song, and that’s saying a lot. Improvised during the recording of the Live at the Rat sets in 1976. Between namedropping (Is that Celia Cruz he’s wailing about? And how nice to mention “Rodney Rush, just like Third Rail”) and his patented goo-goo-ya-yas, Willie “Loco” spins a yarn about how “the dog just swallowed another pair of panties. He puked them up in the hall; they’re in a ball now.” Punk rock in Boston started right here.
3. “Teddy Bear’s Picnic.” Are they pets? Well, they eat like pets. One of the thing I love about this classic kid’s song, which I love playing on ukulele, is how it introduces the concept that a picnic for teddy bears might be terrifying. “You’d better go in disguise.” “It’s better to stay at home.” Seriously, you’d think this was the dismemberment of Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae, not a play date with stuffed bruins.
4. “Theme from Ruff and Reddy.” This early Hanna-Barbera foray into low budget, limited-animation series for television is notable because, unlike in Tom & Jerry where Tom is indeed a tomcat, here Ruff is a red-haired cat and Reddy is a white dog. Perhaps due to these counterintuitive monikers, “They sometimes have their little spats/Even fight like dogs and cats … But when they need each other/That’s when, they’re rough and ready.”
5. Pet Soul. The band Splitsville developed their deft blend of Rubber Soul Beatles and Pet Sounds Beach Boys, in the late 1990s, returning to the highly harmonized, studio-precious pop of two of the founding members’ days in the band Greenberry Woods. I remember Splitsville bestowing an advance cassette version on me at a show at Yale GPSCY Café. I treasured it, and still have it. It was years before The Complete Pet Soul came out on CD, with Splitsville’s history-of-rock cover of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” as a bonus track. No songs directly about pets, but the whole EP is recalled and loved as fondly as one.