Gar spent the entire afternoon in the town historical society researching our ghost. He was told there has never been a murder or an unusual death in the history of the house. We find that hard to believe.

“Flub Bub,” “Hair Flair,” “Nifty Gifty,” “Sprawl Stall,” “Bath Wrath,” “Rare Flair,” “Work Quirk,” “:Less Mess,” “Mark Lark,” “Broke Bloke,” “Shape Jape,” “Fuel Fool,” “Sad Saturnian,” “Classy Lassy,” another “Work Quirk,” “Bird Herd,” “Dough Row” and “Dough Woe” (on adjacent pages), “Goof Spoof,” “Bread Dread,” “Pain Refrain,” “Quack Pack,” “Play Ploy,” “Great Weight,” “Date Bait,” “Fab Gab,” “Ace Place,” “Slick Pic,” “Heap Sleep,” “Tight Plight,” “Sly Buy,” “Muzzle Puzzle,” “Quiet Riot,” “Lid Kid,” “School Rule,” “Jog Jag,” “Dance of Romance,” yet a third “Work Quirk,” “Drag Gag,” “Type Gripe,” “Act Tact,” “Brain Refrain,” “Stick Trick,” “Fear Jeer,” yikes!—”Work Quirk” again!, “Tall Fall,” Trick Kick,” “Chess Mess,” “Swipe Gripe,” “Guinea Pig Gig,””Spy Guy,” “Non-Scene Nonsense,” “Keen Screen,” “Brat Spat,” “Spat Chat,” “Tune Croon,” “No Hope Rope,” “Throw Woe,” “Borrow Sorrow,” “Fright SIght,” “Phone Tone,” “Read Deed,” “News Blues,” “Group Scoop”… and a few dozen that’s aren’t rhymes or plays on words at all.

By Artie Capshaw

Martin Gibson unveiled his wireless guitar at The Tailors reunion show (amusingly dubbed The Retailers) Thursday at the Bullfinch. As prophesied, being untethered made absolutely no difference in Gibson’s performance: he stood, he soloed quietly, he sang back-up, he smiled. The guitar did not have a chance to enjoy its freedom.

Martin had read our column predicting this very situation, but told us after the gig that “it just didn’t feel right” for him to move around the stage. So he’s allowed the peripatetic Eddie Rick to borrow the axe-pensive toy for the next RickNBacks gig, this Friday at Hamilton’s. Just call us Matchmaker Capshaw.

Baffled bear and Poppleton are also on the bill Friday at Hamilton’s; album release for both those acts, but the RickNBacks will be stealing their thunder all right… Same night, R&B masters Dark Dark Room rule Dollaire’s (see, we can be nice to them sometimes), with locals (or rather less-regionals) Henry & Mudge opening…

We think there might be a ghost in the house. Behind the bathroom wall.

What’s with all the superheroes dying lately? Is there something in the water? Besides Aquaman, I mean—we know he’s not killing ‘em.
Water could well have been the substance that did in The Human Torch, who was snuffed out in the flaming prime of his life earlier this month. But no, he was extinguished by a mob of slobbering cretins.

With his given name of Johnny Storm, The Human Torch could easily have taken a job as a TV weatherman and left the derring-do to others. But no, he was a team player with an invisible sister, a rubbery brainiac brother-in-law and a surly sedimentary colleague playfully known as The Thing. They all wore “4”s on their uniforms. Did the Three Musketeers or The Secret Six or the Chicago Ten wear numbers on their shirts? This was some TEAM.

Now what happens? Well, there’s one potential scenario drawn from pop music. When Lawrence Payton passed away, the three remaining Four Tops toured for a while as just The Tops before enlisting a new member (that group’s first new recruit in nearly half a century). Granted, this is unlikely to happen to, um, The Fantastic. They complement each other’s other superpowers, not each other’s ability to harmonize well. Then again, how do you pick a suitable replacement for a man who can turn himself into a ball of flames on a whim? Do the auditions involve matches and gasoline?

I’m going to stretch this Fantastic/Tops comparison one step further. My wife had never listened closely to the lyrics of “Bernadette.” Her mishearing of the title? “Burning Death.”

And not even the elastic Mr. Fantastic could “Reach Out!” this time.

HoodNi, the famed national rapper (we know our readership; many of you who follow the most obscure white indie bands and have a passing familiarity with nearly all Top 40 artists still require a qualifier like “famed national” when it comes to rappers. Work on that, will you?) is, according to the tabloids, engaged to a woman who comes from this very city. He’s been visiting often, and because the occasions are longterm romantic, he’s apparently been traveling sans posse. Since he’s traveling light, and since this is the sort of scene that tends not to fawn over celebrities, HoodNi seems to feel free to step out on the town with relative freedom. He’s been spotted at D’ollaire’s (in the “VIP area,” but still…), at such diverse eateries as the Varsity Diner, Vaud’s Vegetarian and Ville Europa Ristorante. Those who’ve had exchanges with the reportedly clean-living “Metamorphosis” hitmaker describe him as “a regular guy”—in love….

Human Blockhead at Hamilton’s for the midweek crapfest… Open mic at the Bullfinch will feature Beautiful Assistant and Sword Through Boy… D’ollaire’s has some kind of accountancy convention. Seriously…

Took the bartending guide to the grad-student bar and challenged the bartender to fill our orders. After a few attempts, we stopped bothering to check the accuracy of her work and just drank.

The appalling thing about someone saying “Fuck” on television is not the word itself, which has been around for centuries and is exactly the sort of thing people say when they’re excited. No, it’s the lame responses which get unnerving.
At least four Saturday Night Live cast members, for instance, have uttered “Fuck” in the show’s 35-year history: Paul Shaffer, Charles Rocket, Norm MacDonald, Jenny Slate. Sometimes it was acknowledged broadly, other times the show just moved on. Cheri Oteri said “Shit” once and there was a show-closing gag about her having to put money in the Swear Jar.
The funny thing is that the possibility that someone will swear—or giggle, or cry, or fall down—during a prepared routine is exactly the danger element that the “live” label on a TV show is pushing.
Scripted sauciness and double entendres are encouraged. The Oscars had a scripted bit about how suggestive the titles for some of the nominated films were: Like Winter’s Bone—object of the same ridicule several weeks ago on Saturday Night Live. There were continual comments by the hosts about how this year’s edition of the show was meant to be younger, hipper and edgier.
Yet when Melissa Leo happened to use “Fuck” among the thousands of other words in her very long acceptance speech, decorum trumped edginess. The hosts were duty-bound to acknowledge that a standard had been breached.
No one’s accusing Leo of deliberately downscaling the event to give it an amiable earthiness. But it’s kind of appropriate that she did, since this years Oscars show was really pushing the “casual conversations in evening wear” envelope. What ruined the moment was not her language but the lame attempt to apologize for it while still pretending to appear cutting edge.

Another high-concept academic concert treat last week, just before vacation begins at the college on the hill. Frieda Bettany, a Feminist Studies major with a minor in Bullfinch band-watching, presented “The Other Foot: Dance Dance Epistemology,” in which the scholar strove to provide “the underlying tenets and belief systems of synthesized dance music.”
Half of the show consisted of Bettany reading a thesis paper while a boombox blared behind her. But then she turned off the classroom lights, switched on one of those spinning mirrored balls your parents danced to, then played and sang a whole set of self-penned ironic dance tunes to illustrate her thesis—that dance music is based on a iron-clad pre-set system of tribal beliefs which exaggerate gender stereotypes and impair more refined social relations.
One of the songs simply switched all the gender references. Others were purposefully vague and still others indiscriminate. Bettany knew her field of study, and said straight out that there was a whole other culture of gay and bi songs out there, but that those “semiotic signposts” were not erected at the overwhelmingly hetero-sexually minded dance halls where she did her fieldwork. Indeed, Bettany knew her studies were geographically specific to this area, and that her conclusions would be different even if she had studied clubs in other counties in the same state. She even did a musical riff on that—her entirely credible, intellectually underscored disco love ballad “A Night Like No Other.”

We know what you’re thinking now while shaking your booty beneath a textbook-filled backpack: You don’t need a Masters candidate at a lecture hall to tell you that club dance nights reduce us to embarrassingly base impulses. You can get that knowledge, plus a free drink pass, for $5 at D’ollaire’s any Wednesday or Saturday.
Well, we’ve simplified the thesis, obviously. And we can’t properly convey our surprise and delight at Frieda Bettany’s performance skills, which she’s kept under the proverbial bushel until now. That’s why we’ve petitioned to have her repeat the “lecture” after school break ends. If we can’t get D’ollaires itself, Hamilton’s or the Bullfinch will do.
Bottom line on this booty treatise: Personally, we enjoyed it more than we’ve ever enjoyed hanging around a dance club. We don’t exactly see ourselves in that mirror ball, but we’ve always liked a little self-reflection with our social intercourse, and Frieda Bettany gave it to us.

In conventional clubs: The Germanes, The Naomis and the Glorious Steins at the Bullfinch, Scum Man at Hamilton’s (two sets, more shouting) and nobody worth mentioning at D’ollaire’s… Sign up for a non-militaristic musical competition—that is to say a “Battle of the Bands” without the word “Battle” in the title, and only “peaceful” themes, scheduled for late March at the Community Center….

Cocktail hour lasted six hours, because Gar found an ancient bartending guide at the used paper place, with drinks nobody’d ever heard of in it. Oh, Nurse!