Love From the Shadows

By Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphic Books, $19.99).

Gilbert Hernandez has done more to articulate the social dilemmas of large-breasted Hispanic women and nerdy space aliens that any other writer I can think of. One half of the legendary brother combo who created the indie-pioneering Love and Rocket comic book, Gilbert is much more prolific than his brother Jaime, having ventured solo in mainstream comics series, graphic novels, even a wacky public access sci-fi TV series.

Much more than Jaime’s more grounded, more realistically drawn social dramas, Gilbert uncovers galactic conspiracies, massive frauds against family members, wild flights of imagination which alter the universes of key ongoing characters, then alter them again, then bring them back to earth as if nothing had really happened.

But the more he exaggerates the real world, the more mystical his stuff becomes. In his erotic series Birdland, characters had flashes of cosmic understanding in the midst of orgasms, only to completely forget the revelations immediately afterwards. In his Love and Rockets stories, characters hold lifelong obsessions that result in massive physical changes and major psychic obstacles. The narratives are propelled more by the forces of the universe than by any plot points.

Love From the Shadows is the third in a series of hardcover graphic novels Hernandez has published since 2007 through Fantagraphics (the longtime publisher of Love and Rockets, the acclaimed indie comic Gilbert does with his brother Jaime). There’s a related volume, Speak of the Devil, which came out via Dark Horse Comics in 2009. The main trilogy stars Rosaldo Martinez, nicknamed Fritz for her resemblance to the knock-out aunt of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Fritz has had a long history in the Hernandez canon. She was in a devastating codependent S&M relationship with a self-help guru. She has been visited by space aliens on numerous occasions. She has been a B-movie goddess and a psychiatrist. Hernandez has described these latest adventures as adaptations of the movies in which Fritz has appeared, then clarified that these are not style parodies or meant to show any specific cinematic influence. In fact, they’re elaborate, complex, open-ended psychodramas which, thanks to the comics medium which Hernandez has long since mastered, add a dreamlike and ever-mutating quality which refreshingly distorts and expands any attempt at a conventional narrative. Some panels of Love from the Shadows are hazy and twilit and ruled by nature, others are uncomfortably confining. There are casual sidewalk dialogues and suspenseful journeys into caves. There are intimately familiar characters and maddeningly distant ones. There’s magic.

You can gobble up a Hernandez story in no time, leaving you wanting more. Luckily, he’s one of the most prolific artist/writers in the indie comics realm, so there’s always more to scarf down. Fritz, last seen shuddering tensely on street corners, then vanishing naked into a yawning chasm, may have been betrayed once again by those she’d come to trust, but she will live to love another day.

Latest band top be denied a gig at Hamilton’s due top a perceived drug- related band name: Hypostylus.

“They hear hypo and think hypodermic needle,” says self-described “science geek” bandleader Marsh, who insists he wasn’t trying to cause any trouble. “First of all, a hypodermic needle doesn’t necessarily have illegal drugs in it. Second, I got Hypostylus from the Latin name for a prehistoric horse.

Indeed, hypostylus the bands sounds remarkably like a prehistoric horse. Do the field work and discover for yourself Sunday night. It’s a grunting, trotting, branch-swinging kind of thing, not the pristine electronica you might expect from a science whiz. “Anthropology’s messy,” Marsh postulates. “So is my band. But,” he winks, “we’ve calculated it all out cleverly in advance.” Also on the bill: The Othnielia Wrecks and Archie & the Op Tricks.

Hustling at Hamilton’s, same night: The Bone Urges and The Ray Darts, whose new song “Middle Awash” is taking them in a whole new direction. Write more originals, guys!… D’ollaire’s gets all sensitive and dark with the supposed cutting-edge capers of The Anceps and The Robert Brooms, but it all still sounds like fossilized hard rock to us…

I made 702 bagels today.

The Dodos, “Companions” (video here)

“Companions” is to the San Francisco-based duo The Dodos’ album No Closer what “Day in the Life” was to Sergeant Pepper—a wandering experimental piece where other bands might insist on slotting something more conventionally climactic. The song is gentle, moody and fraught with the danger of open spaces or open minds.

This new video accompaniment to the expansive five-minute “Companions” sells the song without detracting from it, telling its own harsh cinematic film noir story without literalizing the lyrics. Most of it is about driving on a long winding road, that ever-popular method of visualizing ambient or repetitive soundscapes. Ulimately it turns the very song title “Companions” on its head, eroding a sense of friendship and trust just as the song challenges its own gentleness.

Art and Madness—A Memoir of Lust Without Reason

By Anne Roiphe. Foreword by Katie Roiphe. (Nan A. Talese, Doubleday)

Art and Madness is maddening, all right. It’s the kind of memoir which is so self-absorbed that it ignores some very basic needs of the form, like times and places and surnames and, you know, a point.

Granted, Anne Roiphe doesn’t particularly care to recall this part of her life. She ends the book thus:

I meet Carol Southern, long divorced from Terry, at a party on Fifth Avenue, the home of a musician and his painter wife. Carol and I looked at each other. We shared memories that need not be spoken. “Do you regret it?” I say. “No,” she says, “I loved every moment of it. I would do it again.” She smiles her radiant and gentle smile. She is telling me the truth. I, on the other hand, would never do it again. Never.”

Not a rousing recommendation for a good read about the New York art and lit scene in the ‘60s. No wonder the dust-jacket blurb, which describes Roiphe as “one of the girls draped across sofas at parties with George Plimpton, Terry Southern, Doc Humes, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen and William Styron,” is drawn not from Anne Roiphe’s prose but paraphrased from her daughter Katie’s considerably jauntier introduction to this morose book. Roiphe fille notes that Roiphe mere has previously written at great length about virtually every aspect of her life except this era, and the reluctance is palapable on every page. Instead of, say, trying to figure out how some of these admittedly uncomfortable experiences as the devoted wife of Obie-winning playwright Jack Richardson might have shaped her later feminist philosophies, Roiphe just relates indignity upon indignity without useful elaboration.

Frankly, I’m not her target audience. I was looking for insights into Terry Southern (whom part of me idolizes despite his some monumental flaws in his own character) and Richardson, and Jack Gelber and E.L. Doctorow. (Other names judiciously dropped in the book include Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer and William Buckley—or at least Buckley’s sisters, who led a campaign to fire two art teachers at Smith College for being Communists). The memoir is so unencumbered by dates, locations or other crucial context that they add nothing to the scholarship of this time. Terry Southern, for instance is mentioned late in the book as “in California with some lady, I am sure, or perhaps his only lady is the dope he has begun to sell along the coast or so I am told.”

Honestly—“Or so I am told”?!  If that satisfies any potential libel lawyers, it certainly doesn’t satisfy readers uninterested in bitter recriminations and scurrilous hearsay. And this from a person who carries herself as being above this rabble.

Art and Madness fails as a footnote to history, but it also fails a personal reflection, too disjointed and defensive to add up to a fluid account of Anne Roiphe’s youth, the turbulent ‘60s, the New York literary crowd, art, madness or anything else.

We were reminiscing with friends at the Finch the other day about scene legend Ban Ray of the Memo-Rays. He could fix his forehead so that not only could he drop eyeglasses poised up on his hairline neatly onto his nose, he could casually perform the disturbing trick of flipping the glasses up off his nose to his forehead. (Wiggling ears were involved.)

The Memo-Rays started as a high school doo-wop act but ended a decade later as a practically punk affair, with Ban Ray creating a goofy yet dangerous stage persona that few frontmen anywhere have equaled. In the middle of a song, he’d take a comb out of his pocket and amuse fans in the front row by making phony-mustache faces. His harmony partners Billy Bausch and “Lombo” Lewis would tolerate the hi-jinks even while playing ultra-cool themselves.

The fantastic Ban, who for a time also went by the moniker B-15, eventually spent some time in a sanitarium, claiming to see perpetual sunspots. A lot of people assume his stage madness was borne in his other problems, but his bandmates and friends seem to have all dismissed this.

Ban Ray hasn’t set foot on a stage in eons, but Billy and Lombo and some of the back-up band from the old days are headlining a local “Yesteryear” pageant this weekend at Hamilton’s. We’ve seen the set list, and it’s mostly standards, but there are two or three Memo-Rays classics tucked in there as well.

Is it worth passing up The Oakley Women at the Bullfinch that night? (Not to mention the Bolly Kids at D’ollaire’s?) We suspect so. The past is so bright we’ve got to wear shades.

There’s a job for me at the bagel place. Later shift than Mar’ s. We’ll never see each other.

Idiot Glee, “Trouble at the Dancehall” (mp3 single)

This appeals to me the same way that Danger Mouse’s extraordinary new Rome disk appeals. There’s a sense of genre recreation—in this sense, ‘80s New Romantic pop—in the service of a whole new expression that has nothing to do with what this sort of music might have originally meant. In short, this is dance music that doesn’t oblige you to dance, that instead seems to be relating a short that happens to be taking place on a dancefloor. People who can dance to anything will of course dance to it, but that’s not the point. For the rest of us, this engaging atmospheric indie introspection.

“Trouble at the Dancehall” is from the forthcoming full-length Idiot Glee album Paddywhack. This song premiered on the You Ain’t No Picasso site.

My “Appreciation of the late New Haven Register society columnist Betty Curren ran in this week’s New Haven Advocate, here.

One memory I left out due to space limitations: I am a member of the special club of local folks who were photographed for Curren’s “Here ‘n’ There” column. I am probably the least well-dressed person ever to be pictured in that prissy space.

My “Here ‘n’ There” immortality was clinched due to the happenstance of standing next to the comic actor Howard Hesseman in the buffet line of the opening night party for the first national tour of Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23^rd Floor when it played New Haven’s Shubert theater in 1994. I’d gained Hesseman’s attention by remarking “You were in my favorite episode of Dragnet.”

Ms. Curren dutifully  identified me in the photo’s caption, spelling my name right and even acknowledging the New Haven Advocate as my employer. Some Register staff were, and still are, weirdly reluctant to acknowledge the existence of any other media organizations in New Haven, but not Elizabeth Curren.

She carried herself like no reporter I ever knew. She observed manners and decorum I’d never ever heard of. When she happened to show up at a theater by herself, a theater staffer would know to sit next to her, because that’s how it was in her world—women did not sit alone in the theater.

I once asked her what it was like for her growing up in New Haven, and she went into raptures describing carriage races in Edgewood Park. Her stories seemed fantastical to me, and so did the rumors about her. I’m happy to pass on one of these unattributed stories, in hopes that it will further expand her legend: That Betty Curren was at Chappaquiddick when Teddy Kennedy drove off that bridge, but was denied the opportunity to cover the story due to the sexist and hierarchical journalistic practices of the time.

The University of New Haven was so proud to have Elizabeth Curren as an alumna that they had a plaque with her name on it in the lobby of their Dodds Hall auditorium. I once directed a show there, and would pay homage to Ms. Curren’s name on the wall.

It’s customary when someone dies to note that “they will be missed.” But Betty Curren’s entire world was one many of us miss—in the “overlook” or “are never granted entry into” sense—for our whole lives. Her old-fashioned sense of style, society and propriety was utterly at odds with the New Haven arts scene the way I was covering it at the time. When Ms. Curren retired from her post at the Register (where she’d been for 40 years) she was literally irreplaceable.

Big local band softball last week at the Colour Field. The meet was the brainchild of white rapper C-Meant and his Creosote Crew.

Members of something like 17 bands were hitting and running and scratching their crotches as if they knew baselines better than bass lines.

Which they don’t. None of the players admitted to have been a part of any school sports team, let alone a sandlot league. Every one of them was in their basement learning C chords (and smoking pot) when they could have been out in the daylight fielding fungoes.

Such appealing, alternativist amateurism made for a fun, self-mocking match, if frustrating for the few team members who knew a little more than the others and were vainly trying to play by the rules.

MVP, by a long shot, was Sooner Be A Flea, the solo singer-songwriter who’s also a member of the Cholly Chapmans. Why so valuable? He brought an oaken hitchhiker-size guitar along—and used it as a bat!

It was one for the rulebooks when SBAF refused to drop the bat when he gingerly bunted a ball and ran to first base. It was agreed that if he serenaded the outfield, he’d be deemed safe. In the dugout at that time, the Model Marvels kept taking time outs so they could remove jewelry, so It was four full songs before Sooner Be had to move on.

That impromptu set comprised a much more important “score” than the points tallied by either team. Arguments about who, if anybody, could be considered the winner lasted for several rounds at the Bullfinch, after which the post-game show (Horn of the Hunter, I Didn’t Know It was Loaded and The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older) came on and sports suddenly no longer mattered…

Due in two days at the Finch: Wheelhouse and Yakker, with a short opening set by Whiff, who says he’s trying out new material…Baltimore Chop and Backdoor Sliders dutifully do the covers at Hamilton’s… or you can see actual hitmakers from the old AM days like Heater and PutOut at D’ollaire’s, for “Nostalgia dollar beer nite.” Gosh, how can we tell the students have left town?