Spent last week in two different basements. House parties both, but as differently directed as the one-way streets which distinguished them both. Can’t reveal too many details here, for the same reasons that we can’t talk about these shows before they happen. These are private residences, and any intimation that the general public is swarming to events at them would put the proverbial kibosh on this overwhelming underground movement.

First basement was a luxuriously laid-out love pad in the Peacock section of town. Leather, vinyl, plush carpeting, a corner bar area with tall stools, cheesy landscape paintings—all of it purchased from hotel going-out-of-business sales, we were told. In the midst of this tacky splendor stood The First Hipsters, the self-styled lounge band we wrote about a few weeks back, had heard about the place and called a few friends (not to mention two other bands suited to the decor: Lite Source and Oakland Living). This was a genteel cocktail party with casual conversations you could actually hear and take part in. Somebody should bottle this atmosphere. Then either the partygoers could spin it and play a kissing game, or The First Hipsters, who delight in discovering new rhythm devices, could shake it or tap on it.

Bottles played a part in the other basement show we caught, and sent one poor woman to the emergency room. This was the more conventional application of the basement rock bash, the kind where the organizers really don’t have the wherewithal to rent halls, apply for permits and all that malarkey. They just plug in and let word of mouth take care of the rest. Two mobs had formed well before we arrived—the kids clambering to get in and the comparatively elderly neighbors tut-tutting across the street, waiting for the police to arrive.
We got the nod from someone in the house and were allowed special entry. Good thing, because we only saw very short songs by Jet de Sang before the cops came—and “saw” is really the wrong verb; all we really saw was the back of some football player’s right shoulder. We look forward to catching JdS in a more expansive space sometime—an attic, perhaps.
The mass egress was relatively orderly. No arrests, which dismayed the neighbors no end, and that bottle-throwing injury actually happened a block away, after the show. So it hardly even counts, right?

We don’t have a basement ourself, but if we did it’d be a mix of the two above: everyone in colorful stripes, bell-bottoms or short skirts, but hanging from the pipes instead of slithering in the shag. When our dream is realized, we’ll have you over for pretzels little hotdogs and hard liquor served in paint cans, while the Rock Pirates play their eyes out and our mother finishes doing the laundry in the next room or something.

Mar thinks she saw a mouse. The rest of us are pretty sure it was our ghost (now called Warwid, which rhymes with “Horrid.”).

King Arthur’s association with loaf-shaped foodstuffs predates the musical Spamalot by a couple of centuries. Just returned from The Baker’s Store & Café run by the King Arthur Flour Company in Norwich, Vermont.
Here’s the receipt:
A round clay cloche pan, for baking breads and biscuits. My last one cracked last month after years of use. This one’s a different brand, made in Virginia, and looks even sturdier. The pan itself is a round dish over an inch deep. The cover resembles a pith helmet.
Another flat clay baking thing: A rectangular baking stone suggested for cookies, though I’ll be doing bread and pizza on it.
Colored markers that you can write on food with, since the ink is really food coloring.
A batter-stirring implement that’s a circle of thick wire imbedded in a wooden handle. This is only marginally more effective than, say, a spoon for stirring bread. But it is way cooler.
Parchment paper. In case I want to write something on parchment, I guess, like a declaration of independence or something.
Sprinkles. It was raining really hard outside, and sprinkling within. Yellow shiny “sanding sugar.” “Mini-flower”-shaped “edible confetti.” Edible flowers, by any other name, would sprinkle as sweet.
A 2-pound bag of Ancient Grains Flour Blend. “Ancient Grains” has become a natural-foods marketing buzzword. I’ve bought Ancient Grains granola from Costco. I first heard the term from King Arthur, however—being a monarch in the 5th century A.D., he ought to know from ancient. Ancient Grains, somewhat disappointingly, isn’t some stash of long-lost flour dredged up from a mummer’s plot outside Stonehenge. It’s just stuff that we have on good authority was used in baking a long time ago. Like wheat? Well, like amaranth, millet, sorghum and quinoa. It’s gluten-free, but it’s not really meant to be the only flour you use; King Arthur (the company) suggests you replace one fifth of the conventional flour in a recipe with this. So you can feel ancient. Or maybe the dough gets ancient while you don’t—the Pizza of Dorian Gray!
A donut pan. A pan, that is, with circular indentations, like a muffin pan, only not so deep and with holes in the middle. Baked donuts are not technically donuts. These would be better described as donut-shaped mini-cakes. But who’s complaining?
A 10-pound bag of King Arthur White Flour, just like you’d buy in any supermarket. Only I bought it at the King Arthur Company in Norwich, Vermont, so there.
Two slices of cheese pizza, a roasted veggie sandwich, an egg salad sandwich, a chocolate cupcake with white chips imbedded in vanilla frosting, a dome-shaped sticky pink dessert, two cups of organic coffee, a couple of esoteric brands of soda pop and a long baguette pulled and trimmed to look kind of like a palm tree—all from the store café. Lunch, yet so much more than lunch.
On the way out, I took photos of my daughters sitting on an Arthurian throne inside the entrance of the shop. I half expected the Lady of the Lake to arise from some nearby trout pond bearing a sword with which she would slash the baguette in my hand into fine slices (to serve at a round table, naturally).
We’d barely hit home before several of these items had already been put to use. Donut-shaped mini-cake with mini-flower-shaped edible confetti, anyone?

He went in his room. Didn’t bother to turn on the lights. Put in the disk, put it on repeat, plugged in the headphones, stretched them to the bed. Lay down.
I can live this way, he thought. If this song is on, I never have to leave this room. He fell asleep.

He’d been passed out for hours, headphones around his head like a helmet. He woke up halfway, aware of an extra beat. Then it was a bang. A pounding, like his head had before. He was more up now, and got it—someone was knocking on his door.

He took the headphones off. Instead of dark and quiet, the room was dark and noisy. His favorite song was blasting into the entire room, not just his ears.

“Son,” he heard his father say outside the door. “It’s late. We’re going to sleep now. Could you turn it down?”
He started to answer, explain that the headphone plug was loose and he didn’t know, explain how shocked he was that he’d brought someone else into this world he’d created, and oh no, what they must think of him. He didn’t get a chance to apologize. There’s no way his father was hearing him above the music. And he realized he wasn’t being asked for an apology. He could tell, he just knew, that his father had made his request, turned around and shuffled back to bed.

He shut down the player, just slammed the power off. Even though it had just been a little red light, having it off suddenly made the room that much darker. And quieter. Colder.
He had no idea what time it was. It was very dark.

He tried to think. His father—he’d calmed down. He hadn’t yelled. He hadn’t even come in. He’d heard the same noisy, crazy, angry, excruciatingly sad song playing over and over and over for hours—maybe in the far distance, if he’d been downstairs or in the attic, but there’s no chance he couldn’t have heard it. And he just let it go on, until he needed to sleep.

There was some kind of understanding there, wasn’t there? That people just needed to recover themselves, and other people really ought to try to let them do it. Even if, he knew, they never ever really would understand.

He’d gotten away with something, hadn’t he? He’d lit up the skies, brought the thunder, pummeled others with his private thoughts, transmitted through the song. But he didn’t feel bold. It was a stand he’d planned to take. He didn’t feel pushy or strong. He felt like something had escaped, something he had hoped to keep for himself.

He needn’t have worried. In just about every possible way, he needn’t have worried. He woke early the next morning, still in his clothes but with plenty of time to clean up and get dressed and check over his homework and face the day.
He almost didn’t, but then had to: He plugged in the headphones tightly, then played the song, then played it again.

Gar needed a sandwich in the middle of the night and woke us all up about it. He was drunk and hungry and angry that we’d given all the bread to the birds. We made him instant oatmeal and he passed out in the bowl.
The birds have not eaten the bread.

I’m just glad you’re OK.

If you’re happy, then I’m happy.

A birthday wish… FEWER BIRTHDAYS!
(Well, enjoy this one anyway)

Hot Dog!
You’re not even 6 in dog years!
(Happy 40th)

Next time, can we talk first?
Just so I can remind you that I love you.

You’re too good for this card.

The Capas, the Del Monicos and the Derbys XL (the lineup that uses the much-splintered act’ s original 1940 arrangements and doesn’t delve at all into the later R&B hits) make up a so called “woo wop” (hey, don’t blame us; we only retype ’em) fest this Friday at the Sphinx club. You don’t have to be a member to attend shows at the Sphinx, but nobody its allowed outside the auditorium at this ultra secret society. Even the bathrooms are of limits; the promoters have to install porta-potties on the front lawn…
Everybody has a favorite Capas song. Ours is the one about wearing the same hat on a bus trip from Ohio to Connecticut, then hanging it in a new home with a new relationship. Or at least that’s what we think “Led by the Lid” is about. Mostly it’s about the baritone guy going “led lid led lid lied…”

Har, who suns himself out there even in wintertime, found a birdfeeder half-buried in the backyard. We had no seed, so we filled it with bread.

1. Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems. That’s all it said, along with a brilliantly boring company logo. Yoyodyne is the New Jersey company which is a front for an alien invasion of earth in the film Buckaroo Banzai– Across the Eighth Dimension. I bought the mug at a science fiction bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., years after the movie had been released, when the reference would be grasped by very very few. Nobody ever got it. Broke the mug when I dropped it in the kitchen of the old New Haven Advocate offices on Long Wharf (Long Wharf itself could be a reminder of the film’s villain, Lord Whorfkin).
2. Drabble, the underrated comic strip loser created by Kevin Fagan. Clean, colorful drawing of Drabble, the strip’s logo, and that’s it; no slogan or punchline to get tired of. It broke in a moment of Drabble-like klutziness, when I knocked it off a bookshelf onto a carpet. (Yes, it shattered on a carpet.) It’d be easy enough to get another one–it was one of those Cafe Press print-to-order jobs. But I’d moved on. I like a lot of different comic strips, and it seemed unfair to dwell on one.
3. Twin Peaks. A Double D diner mug touting the virtues of their coffee. Not as subtle a the Yoyodyne mug, but in the same vein. From the Twin Peaks official fan club. When it cracked, I used it as a planter for a while.
4. Archie. I’ve owned and broken many of these– not as many as I’ve owned and broken of Archie-themed Welch jam jar drinking glasses. But a lot. The ones I’d never seen before or since came from a vast comics shop in NYC, where they were covered in dust. We’re a rare breed, we Archie collectors.
5. Biggest One I Ever Owned. Basically a soup bowl with a handle. I don’t mind cold coffee or tea, so having a quart of caffeinated fluid in easy reach was sheer joy, though a calamity if I spilled it. As I did on brand new New Haven Advocate carpeting one day.

By Artie Capshaw

The Shaking Quakers live in an old farmhouse about 20 miles out of town. Their home is a registered haven for runaways, and bandleaders Joe and Lucy Meach both are licensed social workers. When not doing double-shifts at halfway houses, they design and build custom stereo cabinets and inlaid guitar fretboards.

In town, the Meaches have been derided as “The Mooches” for their habit of scrounging trash from the dumpsters behind clubs they’re playing at. When they appear on bills with unlike-minded bands, The SQs come off uncertain, insular, twee. At home, however—as we can loudly attest, having spent three nights there this past month—they rock the heavens. This is their world, and they shake it righteously.

Imagine a ballroom-sized barn with stiff wooden bleachers and a hayloft you can jump from, the walls rattling—shaking, technically—with the sound of a six-guitar attack, as many as a dozen screaming vocalists and frenzied dancers whose workboot work-outs obviate the need for bass drums. All rhythm is banging. Some of the guitars have only two of three strings. The bass is electronic, and can make your bowels move against your will.

The chaos is orchestrated, and actual songs emerge. One recent set list: “The Turk Song,” “Dismission,” “Mother (Safely Landed)” the new wavey “Precept and Line,” “My Carnal Life,” “She Wars,” “Ram Pang,” “All That” (“A wolf can not become a sheep/because they’re here for all that/For all that and all that”) and a culminating “Quick Dance.” You’ll recognize the titles of some of those, but not what’s been done to the tunes—jagged, angular akimbo noise. Play loud, very very loud, and long. The instrumental guitar jam in “Ram Pang” went on for 25 minutes, but so did the verses—16 of ‘em—in “Mother.”

Since these jams are held nightly with ever-changing line-ups, hundreds of songs have been written and several bands have been formed. Members of Limber Zeal, The Shameful Three, Silver Cup and Balls of Simplicity all came out of the SQ scene. Those bands plus out-of-towners Nightengal, The Shoulder Blankets, Mistaken Thought and Square Order are all heading to the farmhouse this weekend for a non-stop marathon of shaking, quaking and cabinet-making. Visitors are welcome; camping is even available. But to comply with local ordinances, guests must register beforehand and agree to follow certain set rules of conduct. The model is of an invitation-only conference. In a kickass barn.

Back in the land of bricks tomorrow evening: the rapidly aging New Century band at Hamilton’s (two sets, each with a different vocalist)… Another “New” band, the trad-alt-prog-crap New Music Tradition at D’ollaire’s, headlines a full-on road show in which a couple of the early acts are actually worth your time: Strange Land and Him Noddy…. Finally, at the beloved Bullfinch, camp cut-ups with Evan Jellicle and the Magniffy Cats. Scenes, and obscenes, for everyone. Us, we’re heading back to that farm.