Urgent message on the tin can: dinner is ready.

Hugh Laurie, Let Them Talk. I really avoided this, despite the blitz of positive features and reviews in my favorite UK music magazines. Then there it was, posted for free listening on AOL Music. Even then I hesitated. But I pushed “Play” and got a headful of determinedly idiosyncratic “Saint James Infirmary.” Challenging and confident, Hugh Laurie spends no time proving himself to the skeptical. You’re the one who has to follow him. Unlike so many actor/musicians who play the spotlight more than they do an instrument, Laurie finds affinities in slowed-down instrumental work-outs. When he duets with Dr. John, both men still their hyperactive sides for a sultry, sweethearted “After You’ve Gone.” Even the pattery “They’re Red Hot” gets a slow, train-conductor-intonation build-up. By the time you’re getting to the final track, the title song, and Hugh Laurie actually invokes comparisons to the great Randy Newman, well… you’re speechless.

It’s one of the biggest publishing company overhauls ever, and a forward-thinking embrace of internet publishing.

But alll these new DC number one issues–52 titles (including the venerable Action and Detective) renumbered as if they’d never existed before, as a way of promoting the new simultaneous releases of the print and online editions– has not overwhelmed me at all. I haven’t bothered with any of ’em. And I’m a diehard longtime DC fan.

After Batman’s death and rebirth, the Flashpoint nexus, Brightest Day, Blackest Night and Grayest noon, I’m completely new-concepted out. The new DC number ones don’t swirl their storylines together as avidly as those other stunts have, but they do reinvent or reinterpret a host of heroes (again), and I’m done with that for a while.

To add insult to ubiquity, in launching all these new books, they’ve canned or stalled a bunch of my favorites. Bryan Miller’s brilliant take on Batgirl? Over, replaced by the return of Barbara Gordon in the role. Superman’s year-long stroll across country, scripted by Michael straczinsky? Out of step; Supes flies again. Batman Incorporated? Its stock has split.

The only new DC title that really interests me its the latest revelation of Swamp Thing, but I’m more curious than especially of true (or new) quality there. Luckily, I’ve been cleaning the basement and have baskets of back issues to dig through. I’ll take rediscovery over reinvention any time.

“Have you been to Chairigami?,” a neighbor asked. I hadn’t even heard of it, but I immediately appreciated the concept. For years I’ve been folding origami animals and other objects to put in with my daughters’ school lunches. (I thought when they learned how to read, they’d be happy to move on to written lunchbox notes, but they still want the origami.) Origami is a language I speak. And here’s a guy who’d adapted the ancient Asian paperfolding artform to furniture and home furnishing.

A sexy small-business story for the local press, to be sure, especially since the proprietor is a Yale student and his York Street storefront has been given him gratis for one month through the munificence of Yale’s University Properties landlords.

The stories have celebrated the cleverness of the concept, the difficulties of starting up a small business, the aesthetic qualities and consumer demand for the chairs and other offerings in the shop. But unless you’ve done it yourself, it’s hard to convey the joy and wonderment of folding paper into sturdy objects of beauty.

I walked by Chairigami a few days after it opened. It was after 9 p.m., closing time for York Street and Broadway businesses. A time of night when the excitement had already shifted to the crowd in line outside Toad’s, or the pizza shops already into the first-wave of late-night snackers.

Chairigami’s door was still open. The place was brightly lit. The furniture looked immaculate and lovely. Pop music was blaring from a boombox. And there, alone in the shop was the chairman of Chairigami, bopping and weaving and dancing to the music, enlivened and entranced by this miraculous little world he had folded himself into.

…this time from Jughead’ s Double Digest #109 (Feb. 2005 issue).

Class Gas

Career Sphere

Split Bit

Tall Fall

Stock Yock

Search Perch

Ever Clever

Paint Complaint

Frank Prank

Growl Howl

Puck Pluck

Hill Spill

Prize Surprize [sic]

Fright Sight

Heat Treat

Hint Stint

Hot spot

Snow Woe

Munch a Bunch

Two Coup

Thumb Fun

Flash Dash

Proof Spoof

Gag Bag

Heart Art

Gripe Snipe

Chin Din

 

…and Snow Snafu.

This will be on your permanent record. A skip on a track sampled for the forthcoming Rank Case of Reason album—a project which also marks the first efforts of DJ Fistula as a producer of music by others—had a natural affliction which caused it to repeat, with a sinuous beat.

When they heard the skip, Fistula says he completely reinvented and “inverted” the song. The band was initially baffled, but has grown to love the track, to the point where they intend to play it live next week at the Bullfinch alongside and antique turntable spinning the original skipping vinyl.

The Baby Snooks and Clara, Lu and Em at the Bullfinch, with shoes on… The Dandunns and Dennis Day in the Life at Hamilton’s, covering the you-know-whos… look for a tattered poetry book in every pocket at the Painted Dreams/Portia Faces Life drear-athon at D’ollaire’s…

Now the windows are clean and open, we are investing in a communication network of baskets and tin cans.

Samiam, Trips. Wow, “80 West” sounds strikingly like Dramarama’s “Work for Food” from 15 or so years ago.  But it’s really a very different, faster, louder work. I have always appreciated Samiam’s melodic sense, marrying catchy chord progressions to a thunder all their own. It goes beyond familiar to downright comforting.

I’m well aware of the vastness of the Star Wars galaxy and my tiny place in it. The films hold a special place in my heart, since I really got to know the guy who became my lifelong best friend when we hopped a train to Boston together to see the first Star Wars the week it came out, and had to wait in a blocks-long line. I didn’t see the more recent trilogy until a couple of years ago, when my daughters expressed interest and we got them out of the library. But I always knew I’d get around to them when I had six free hours.

Star Wars books are a more daunting task. There are hundreds of them, starting with the novelizations and evolving into whole independent series. Some fill in gaps in the movie narratives, some elevate minor characters to their own adventures, some move into future generations.

I’ve read dozens of these over the years, from the series about the twin offspring of Princess Leia and Han Solo to the offerings from big-name science fiction authors Timothy Zahn and Alan Dean Foster.

Currently, I’m down to two series—one of them steady, the other slight and culty. Aaron Allston’s Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi books are breezy, true to the romantic adventurous of the original films, and don’t get bogged down in all the mechanics, dialects and geographics reserved for readers much more fanatical than I am. Allston uses the most famous Star Wars faces—Luke, Leia, Han—but treats them as wise elders who must look after younger, more impetuous force-wielders, including their own children:

Luke killed the repulsors, allowing the shuttle to settle don on the stony surface of the slope. The shuttle began to rock, pushed by the winds.

“Fun flight, dad.”

“Quiet, you.”

(from Star Wars Fate of the Jedi: Conviction by Aaron Allston, Ballantine Books 2011)

Straightforward space tales neatly told, they also adapt beautifully to audiobook, with the series’ regular reader Marc Thompson doing as good as job differentiating the many voices in the narrative as Jim Dale famously does with the Harry Potter audiobooks.

Allston is the mainstream Star Wars writer I can get a handle on. The Star Wars books of Joe Schreiber are the cult ones I connect to. Schreiber is a horror writer foremost, and he brings a darkness, bloodthirstiness and unruliness to a genre that tends to be clinical and neatly uniformed. He reminds us that evil is more than a sleek black mask. Schreiber’s Star Wars output is slight, but his Red Harvest has stayed with me longer than any other Star Wars book I’ve read. He uses few well-known characters, plumbing the war-is-hell-and-hell-is-good consciousness of the Sith Lords and the often horror-struck, up-for-anything opponents:

Drawing on the Force, gathering it inside, as he’d been taught duringh hundreds of hours of training, he jerked the vent fixture from its housing. It came loose with a hollow metallic pop, bolts rattling free, opening a rectangle of cold space that fed into an open air shaft above. Still dangling from the open shaft, Scopique turned the vent fixture over in his free hand, evaluation its immediate utility as a weapon. It was thin and aerodynamic, with sharp edges—it would serve the purpose well enough.

He looked down at the thing that had been Jura.

“Whatever you are,” Scopique muttered, “say goodbye to your head.”

(from Star Wars Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber, Ballantine Books 2010)

Both Allston and Schreiber revel in the campy fun of B-movies, as the very first Star Wars did; they just prefer different genres. Between them, they provide all the Star Wars I need just now.

People get fiercely loyal, and wax extremely eloquent about their passions for specific New Haven pizza places. Much less quietly, the city developed a coffee shop culture of similar intensity.

This is significant, since in many regions of the country the coffeehouse boom is long over. In New Haven, it sometimes seems like it’s still developing, in energetic spurts not unlike the properties of the beverage it espouses

New Haven is a city which didn’t have a Starbuck’s until the late ‘90s—years after other cities had been settled and conquered by that monolithic caffeinated corporation. Sure, there’d always been plenty of Dunkin’ Donuts—the wonderful breakfast nook Gag Jr., when it closed in the late ‘80s, gave way to a DD. But independence and distinction have always been valued in New Haven. But there was always a strong, full-bodied presence, a robust perk.

Willoughby’s Coffee, of course, is the stalwart. Its original Chapel Street outpost is long gone, but the Whitney one is a grand institution, and Yale has had its own Willoughby’s on York now for a few years. When the local chain was sold and lost its way, the founders actually regained control.

Then there’s the calm tones of Woodland (two locations), the intellectual camaraderie of Lulu’s, the Orange Street hustle-bustle of Bru Café (not to be confused with the Bru-with-an-umlaut microbrewery restaurant at BAR on Crown). There’s Koffee? on Audubon, beloved of parents waiting to pick their kids up from classes at Neighborhood Music School. There’s the brewing-liberal Blue State Coffee, which first established itself on the students-rushing –to-class thoroughfare of Wall Street and now runs a second concern on York St., where the longlived Koffee 2 once was.

All independent. All aware that a good coffee rush is in the details (multiple kinds of cream, wooden stirrers, etc.) , and the décor.