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.

Yeah! By Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics, 2011)
Before there were the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there was Yeah! “The most popular band in the history of the universe”—except, unfortunately, on their own planet Earth—the pop trio of Krazy, Honey and Woo-Woo took the Josie & the Pussycats scenario of underrated, up-against-it girl band and took it to several extremes—more outer space than the TV cartoon Josie & the Pussycats in Outer Space, more distinct and clashing personalities than She’s Josie (the quaint teen comic where the Pussycats first formed), more gritty than Midvale (neighboring town to Riverdale).
Hard not to overdo the Josie comparisons, yet Yeah! is also the product of two great indie-comic minds, Peter Bagge of Hate and Gilbert Hernandez of Love and Rockets. Both men gave cartoon gravitas to confused modern teens and helped build a thriving college-age readership for their black-humored real-life-scaled adventures. This was their attempt to create and maintain a regular mainstream title for a younger audience, for a major publisher, DC. They made their deadlines, raised a few eyebrows, and lasted nine issues.
Yeah! is well worthy of reprinting by Fantagraphics, the usual publisher of Bagge and Hernandez’s best-known indie grungeworks. I collected Yeah! as it came out originally, and miss the splashy colors, but I like the strong blacks and whites of this book too. It’s a heftier volume than nine issues would seem to demand, reminding you that even ten years ago comics were still pretty fully packed

The band’s interplanetary adventures give them license for imaginative, outrageous concert set-ups. With their solo work, usually it’s Hernandez who can’t keep his feet on the ground and sends his Love & Rocket cast into

Here, Hernandez is the artist and not the writer, yet it’s Bagge—whose down-to-earth delineations of the Seattle and New Jersey youth scenes of the ‘90s nailed a generation of slackers and posers—who wastes no time freaking out in the cosmos. It’s a good writing/drawing combo.

Hernandez reads Bagge right. Pop music is a fantasy. Even the downside of the business is a fantasy. Having a band tour in a seedy rocketship, forced to don ugly costumes whenever they play Jupiter so the natives won’t revolt, having to compete with a derivative band called Haey! which is stealing their interplanetary thunder… Yeah, the tone is just right.

I dig Yeah! just as I did when it first came out. At the time he was launching this kid-friendly project, Bagge was also writing essays in defense of the current stream of bubblegum bands such as Spice Girls and Britney Spears. A lot of my admiration was thus mixed up in Bagge’s (and Hernandez’s) willingness to challenge the indie status quo.

A stronger recommendation for Yeah! would come from my daughters, who were aged eight and six when I brought the Fantagraphics Yeah! compendium home from the comics store a few months ago. They each read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, and it’s been brought on several long car trips. It’s right in the mix with their (and my) beloved Archie comics. They have no sense of irony or subtext when devouring Yeah! They just like knowing how the band will escape the Mongrel Mogul’s Halloween party.

The Binks are back. What, you didn’t know theyd been away? Yep, six months, starving frayed and crowded in a two-room apartment in a city that will not be named here because it does not deserve to be.
“We thought that’s what you did when you wanted to make it—leave.,” assesses Charlie Crown, the band’s percussionist/saxophonist. “But we really didn’t have anywhere to go, and no saving.” Which would be the other considerations in “making it.”
Well, welcome back, prodigal band. (Grand return concert Friday at Hamilton’s, with Th’ Wolfe and Der Lust.) If you make it anywhere, why not make it here?

Seasonal pop with Assinippi, The Pembrokes, Tinkertown and The White Island Shores at The Bullfinch… Tropical worldbeat potsmoking pop at Hamilton’s with E. Marion, Independence Gable and Pasque Isle… D’ollaire’s pretends the college kids are still in town by booking Long Plain, The Brocktons and Cuttyhunk. Who’ll go see that?…

We have formulated a plan to knock over a gas station.

Foreigner, Feels Like the First Time box set
For three minutes in the mid-1970s, Foreigner had the patina of hipness. That’s when the coldblooded video for “Cold as Ice” was broadcast as a short film on the coolest show on TV, Saturday Night Live. This two-CD, one-DVD set shows how Foreigner squandered that cachet. Instead of SNL, the live concert here will be broadcast on PBS. The obligatory “unplugged” set is pretentiously titled “Acoustique.” The other disk is, whoops, “brand new digital recordings” of Foreigner’s greatest hits, as interpreted by the band’s current line-up. Has that gambit ever worked, except as some legal runaround? For decades now, Foreigner’s featured only one founding member, Mick Jones. The rest of the current bunch were assembled to tour in 2004 or ’05: vocalist Kelly Hansen, guitarist/wind instrumentalist Thom GImbel and bassist Jeff Pilson , more recent recruit Michael Bluestein on keyboards and drummer Mark Schulman, who’s been with Foreigner on and off since 1992.
I won’t be listening to this ever. But I will note that Mick Jones did do one other cool thing since 1976—he co-wrote an award-winning Brit-rock pastiche “The Flame Still Burns,” performed by Les Wickes and Strange Fruit in the cult rock movie Still Crazy in 1998. That song is done by Foreigner for the first time on the acoustic disk.