An aside in Adam Markovitz’s brief Entertainment Weekly review of the 3D opus Yogi Bearhas eked some umbrage out of me. The offending sentence:

After watching so many cartoon icons turn cynical on screen (yes, you, Chipmunks), it’s a relief to see Yogi Bear land unjaded in this frivolous CG live-action episode.

There’s a point to be made there, but using the hallowed Chipmunks to it shows a shocking cultural ignorance.
Alvin, Simon & Theodore turned cynical? When? As in, when weren’t they?

From his very first recorded Christmas-song utterances, Alvin was questioning the value of everything from the value of pre-arranged lyrics to recording studio decorum in general. He wanted a hula hoop, damn it.

Revolution is incited on many a Chipmunks record. In their subsequent longer-form TV and film incarnations, the boys were inclined to do good deeds for others, but even these acts of kindness were compromised by their impatient guardian David Seville, who, for instance, wouldn’t believe them when they told him that they’d adopted an eagle. That’s from the 1960s TV version; the ‘80s Chuck Jones rendition is notably warmer, fuzzier and more moral, which is probably Markovitz’s blind spot. But those shows still demonstrate a constant disregard for authority, tradition and basic safety.
A certain amount of cynicism—a huge, vast amount—might naturally be afforded rodents with careers in the recording industry. These are not Smurfs or Care Bears, after all, who have communities of like-minded fluffy friends of the same species to fall back on. In every period of their half-century existence the Chipmunks have been essentially on their own, their motives for what they do perversely their own.

Cynicism’s totally the wrong term. Self-preservation’s a whole lot better. And that’s what those recent semi-live action Chipmunk films cover well. Their sensibility comes from screenwriters Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi who brought contemporary TV coming-of-age myths to a high art in their landmark Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete & Pete. The Chipmunks and Pete & Pete share more than the sensation of cute siblings as stars (McRobb and Viscardi also wrote for The Naked Brothers Band series, by the way); there’s the same sense of music having extreme importance, of individuality and non-conformity being paramount characteristics of healthy development.

I have not seen Yogi Bear yet, and have no comment on whether it is important (or credible) for a starving park bear to appear unjaded. But for my entire life I’ve happily embraced the jaded cynical maverick rebellion of The Chipmunks—not to mention their spiritual kin Dennis the Menace, Calvin & Hobbes and Snoopy—and can’t let even a casual clause in a hundred-word Entertainment Weekly review slide.

“ALLLLLLLLVINNNNNNNNNN!”

“Saw Donald play last night.”
“Tux or ducks?”

***

Donald Fowler leads two lives. On Saturday nights, he slicks his hair into a D.A., shines his black-and-white suede shoes (OK, so you can’t really shine suede), and thump-thumps on a stand-up bass to swing and rockabilly covers as a member of The Nephews, house band at the Walter Hotel. There, he rasps and scats and slaps like a sultan.

On Thursdays throughout the indoor concert season—plus the occasional matinee, Pops show or park gig, Fowler is the bassist for an even more retro, even more roaring combo—The Barks Memorial Hall Symphony Orchestra. Here, he’s a more sanguine, more even-tempered, capable of fading into the background, though no less bombastic when needs be.
Sometimes you’ll find both Fowlers in a single night, undoing the bowtie after a classical rave-up to join the Thursday “Gearloose Jam” at Huey’s Diner. Last week he even brought a violinist and a clarinetist with him.

Didn’t know Huey’s even had a jam? It’s largely an after-hours thing, since assistant manager Bruce Spiegel, aka “Beagle” of The Beagle Boys, keeps his keyboards in a kitchen closet there and is always itching to play after the last round of dishwashing. Sometimes, when it’s OK with the customers, they kick in early.

And that’s how a couple dozen patrons last Thursday got treated to a mad mash of rockabilly tinged with Renaissance interludes as a sidedish to their meatloaf:

“The Mummy’s Ring,” interrupted with the second movement of “The Fabulous Philosopher’s Stone.”
A jam which included snippets from the jukebox gem “Christmas for Shacktown” and the song cycle “Christmas on Bear Mountain.”
A “golden” medley of “The Golden Fleecing,” “The Golden Helmet,” “The Golden River” and “Pirate Gold.” (Two are pop tunes, two are symphonic works; you guess which.)

There was barking and wailing and sincere polite appreciation. In other words, a lot of the crowd didn’t know what to think. But a band was born, and a more cohesive concert/gig is planned. Band names already being bandied around: John D. Rockerduck
There’ll be plenty of notice next time, since this is a project that needs a prepared audience to be properly appreciative.
Hey, can we write the illuminating, footnote-laden program notes?

In less rarefied climes this wintry Wednesday, Dollaire’s gets historical with San Diego Inkpots and Hall of Famers Eisner & WR-H (who had a home in our fair state for a time) at Dollaire’s, CBG and Disney Legends at Hamiltons , while the frolicsome Flintheart Glomgold and the Ganders hold down the fort at the fabled Bullfinch…

You Might Be a Zombie—And Other Bad News
From the Editors of Cracked.com. Plume Books (Penguin Group), 2011. 295 pages.

I blew through You Might Be a Zombie’s 41 chapters and umpteen factoids in a single evening, the way I used to ravish the latest edition of The Guiness Book of World Records when I was 12 or 13. This is indeed the hip cynical grown-up’s equivalent of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, an institution for which You Might Be a Zombie—And Other Bad News has nothing but snickering scorn; while debunking the claim that “Einstein Flunked Math” in the section “Five Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught in History Class,” it is noted that:

The idea that Einstein did badly at school is thought to have originated with a 1935 Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! trivia column, which probably should have been called Believe It Or Not! I Get Paid Either Way, Assholes! The famous trivia “expert” never cited his sources, and the various “facts” he presented throughout his career were mostly things he thought he heard, combined with stuff he pulled directly out of his ass.

That sort of cogent analysis (and I’m not being entirely facetious here) represents the dominant attitude of this book: Trust nobody, and roast them unmercifully for their self-inflating sins.

Inventors steal their ideas (especially from women: one whole section’s devoted to “Four Great Women Buried by Their Boobs”). Historians not only lie, they underplay the best parts of the legends they’re burnishing (“The Four Most Badass Presidents of All Time,” “Five Beloved U.S. Presidents the Modern Media Would Never Let Into the White House”). Storytellers varnish the truth (“Five Movies Based on True Stories [That Are Complete Bullshit]”; “Five Fight Moves That Only Work in Movies”; “Five Hollywood Adaptations That Totally Missed the Point”). And speaking of varnish, the red food coloring on the candy and yogurt you ate today (this book exists excitedly in the “Eek! Right in front of you!” present tense) is a shellac make of yucky bugs “Five Horrifying Food Additives You’ve Probably Eaten Today”). To the collective of Cracked.com humor writers who cranked this book out, grossing you out is as crucial a mission as screwing up your sense of the universe. For every “Five Ways Your Brain is Messing With Your Head” or “Five Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed,” there’s “Six Terrifying Things They Don’t Tell You About Childbirth” or “Six Most Terrifying Foods in the World.”

At times, You Might Be a Zombie makes too much of simple ironies, like that Barry Manilow didn’t write the song “I Write the Songs” and other deceits that are formed only in the minds of the ignorant. Plus there’s always that awkwardness of a book openly embracing harsh language and bad taste yet appearing to be shocked and dismayed by examples of harsh language and bad taste elsewhere (“The Gruesome Origins of Five Popular Fairy Tales”). But even these lapses into literary overkill help set a tone where conspiracy theories (including five that “Nearly Brought Down the U.S. Government,” not to mention :”Five Wacky Misunderstandings That Almost Caused a Nuclear Holocaust”) can be told from fresh perspectives

What You Might Be a Zombie fails to acknowledge—because for marketing reasons it chooses to be a humor book and not a scholarly textbook—is that this ain’t such a bad teaching method. There’s such a consistent tone and fluid writing style to this widespread selection of cultural conundrums that one of the book’s biggest shocks is the number of separate writers who apparently contributed to it. This is the biggest tribute to unified-voice humor writing since the early years of Spy Magazine.
You Might Be a Zombie’s superior and snide attitude is compelling and convincing. The jokes are funny and hold your attention regarding disagreeable subject matter. The disrespect for authority, the snippiness about the reliability of recorded history, the complete distrust of common wisdom, the glee of unlocking key truths which unsettle mountains of accumulated “knowledge”…
It all adds up to a comedy compendium profoundly more consciousness-molding than all those humor books which merely satirize history with line-by-line parodies and puns, like (the nonetheless brilliant) Onion’s “Our Dumb Century” and The Daily Show’s “America: The Book.” What You Might Be a Zombie lacks in graphic-art expertise (though some of the illustrations are very funny), it makes up for with an obsessive need to not just make you laugh, but make you laugh at yourself and at the world around you so hard that the “shocking but utterly true FACTS!” advertised on its cover may shock you into shaking things up a bit.
Such activism will either lead to the reclassification of Cracked.com as a university or think tank, or provide fodder for You Might Be a Zombie’s sequel, depending on how badly you screw up or show your worst attributes.
Either way, score. I felt distinctly unZombie-like after plowing through You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News. Oh, I wanted brains. But the book taught me the difference between having them in your head or having them up your ass.

By Artie Capshaw

How Hard Can It Be?

Tippy from Tippy and the Tipsies is in a community production of that famous rock musical about the religious hippie, and it’s gotten her converted.

“Who needs bands? It’s theater for me from now on!,” she croons. Asked if she’s bothered to inform the tipsies of this bold new performance direction, she demurs. “Well, I probably oughtta see what else is out there. I like performing.” Spoken like a trooper.

But the ratio of club hoppers to theater geeks remains unchanged, since someone else is switching ranks, over on the other side of the local music/local theater cultural divide:

Robert Lipsyte, he’ll remind you, is “a theater guy.” He founded Work Theater 10 years ago, when he was still at the college on the hill, and has mounted “between 12 and 20 productions, depending how you count.” (A lot of one-act plays were involved.) The most popular of these shows were seen by maybe 25 people, the least popular by two.

Lipsyte would go out with the cast to Bull’s or Hamilton’s after rehearsals. He’d see the generally larger crowds in the club scene. And, he admits, “I got jealous.

“You can’t imagine the amount of work that goes into presenting a play. There’s the memorizing, all the technical stuff, rehearsals. Plus I write my own plays and act in them.” You can hear the “hmph” in his voice.

Well, if you can’t get them to join you, put a beat on it.

So Robert Lipsyte became Bobby Lip, and Work Theater became a band called Work Theater: Opus One. Opening night is Thursday at the Bullfinch. Bobby Lip sings, plays keyboards and wrote all the songs, some of them based on his experimental plays like “Succatash High” and “Ex-Text Next.”

“I’ve worked with interior rhymes and choral refrains in several of my chamber plays, and it’s not that different than songwriting.”

But wait, there’s more. “I want this to be a valid rock band, but the experience will be mostly metatheatrical.” Got that?

The Arps, The Huelsenbecks, and Emmy H. are at the Bullfinch tonight, a pretty lush theatrical spectacle of their own, assuming they bring the theremin and the bondage gear… Everyman His Own Football, Rongwrong and The Blind Man are telling certain people their Hamilton’s gig tonight has been cancelled. But they didn’t tell us, and the Hamilton family’s clueless too. All our queries to anyone who might know have been left unanswered. Stay importuned…

A washboard tie

A tea set

A turntable with USB port, so I can turn my Willie Loco Alexander records into mp3s

An oil-free, hot-airblown popcorn popper

And stuff I choose not to write about here.

Back to school for both girls and wife tomorrow. The stay-at-home vacation is officially over, and the stay-at-home work recommences.

With regular breaks to make popcorn, play records, drink tea and swipe a thimble across an accordion-pleated piece of metal hanging from my chin.

New Year’s resolutions for this website include doubling the number of daily posts, increasing both the fiction and non-fiction elements, making deadlines with the almanack, and start publishing some of it to Kindle. All right with you?

You could hear the faces falling Thursday at the Greek Palace when Ben Button finally got around to singing “The Fiend,” and blew the lyrics.

Button, as you know, has two distinct fan bases. There are our grandparents, who followed him from his big band through his lounge LPs, his radio comedy show and his TV variety show. And there are us young whippersnappers who freeze him in time around 1967, his sharkskin period, when in order to get down with the kids, the balding anachronism recorded not just one but two of the most disturbingly insanely brilliant singles of that magnificently myopic pop era: “The Fiend” and “Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar.”

Both of this misshapen masterpieces appear on Button’s The Freshest Boy album. Ostensibly a love letter to his first grandson, Freshest Boy is anchored by wistful, mature numbers such as “The Bridal Party,” “The Baby Party,” “The Lost Decade” and “A New Leaf.” It’s one of those thematic swing platters so popular at the time, except that “Fiend” and “Dice” stop the whole disc cold—or, more precisely, hot. Illustrating Freshest Boy’s hero’s prior wild ways before he found fatherhood and new grace, they sizzle with cynicism and sozzle with that “atomic martini-mixer sound” that all the young European turks were trying but which few old-school jazz jumpers could get their balding heads around. Not surprisingly, those two errant and evil songs have a different producer than the rest of the album: Jim Powell, later to mold The Camel’s Back, of  “Jumbo’s Got a Bible” fame.

We’ll stop before we get even more obscure. Point is, all our lives we’ve been wanting to ring out the old and ring in the new at the exact same time. We just don’t know how to explain it, but we’ve been thwarted again. Happy next year.

I am no longer the connoisseur of cloisonné pins I once was, but I do still occasionally buy souvenirs of Broadway-style shows. While kid-theater spectacles such as The Wiggles or the Backyardigans will always have the best range of cool stuff for sale in the lobby, but for years now, the bigger and longer-running shows have made an effort to transcend T-shirts, “special edition” program books and refrigerator magnets with the occasional stuffed animal (Annie’s Sandy, for instance) or other unexpected item.

Top theater tat (British expression I find so much more appealing than “gewgaw” or “tchotchkes”) that tickled my wallet in 2010:

1. A plastic drinking flask from the tour of the Hair revival. The logo’s tricked up to make it look like an old-fashioned bottle of hair tonic. It’s sturdy, made in the U.S., and according to the Hair shop website the show’s co-creator James Rado had a hand in its design.

2. A coffee mug from the Goodspeed Opera House production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Coffee mugs are commonplace at theater concession booths, of course, but the Goodspeed doesn’t always offer them—unless, as in the case of this Loesser/Burrows organization-man opus, it’s intrinsic to the plot. The show’s Act One ensemble showstopper is “Coffee Break,” during which the employees of the World Wide Wicket Company unanimously lament that if they can’t take their coffee break, “something inside me dies.” That’s the legend on this mug, which also bears the classic logo from the show’s original 1961 Broadway run. The Goodspeed usually develops new poster art for its shows, but I’m glad they went with this sexist ‘60s standard-bearer, which shows the back of corporate desk chair with a man’s arm holding a phone jutting out one side, long women’s legs akimbo on the other side.

3. Didn’t actually buy this, but this show’s still in town as I write this, and I’m tempted to wander into the lobby just for the quick purchase:

Spamalot coconut halves (which, I think, might be made of plastic) with which you can mimic the horse-riding noises from the show. An instruction booklet explains that they are “imported exclusicvely by African Swallows.” The brief demonstration I got from the chipper proprietor of the Spamalot souvenir booth at the Shubert Theater in New Haven Thursday night was worth a portion of the show’s admission price by itself.

Now It Can Be Tolled!

That bell-ringing climax to Namby’s set on New Worth common last weekend? Completely and complicatedly planned, from the fade-out of the local diva’s song “(I’m Your) Belle” to the brief pause and look skyward to the sudden and overwhelming clanging from the Union Street Church bell tower.

The Bonita Dimension Festival has a history of surprises–the Terrake Milk reunion, the debut of the Waterfords in a slot originally meant for the band’s earlier incarnation Gorham—but Namby’s singlehambiedly raised the standard sky-high…

Sissy Spangler has sent a lengthy letter describing a night of passion with a noteworthy modern metal band, an attempt to prove that she is indeed one of the alleged “skankiest groupies” which put our town on the map. We regret we can not publish her exciting tale (or is that tail?) here, but we will be presenting slurred performances of the text for anyone within earshot, nightly at the Bullfinch until we have wreaked maximum enjoyment from it. The Conway Scenics play there next Tuesday, by the way…

And what better ways to ring in a year?

Fifty percent off virtually everything in the West Haven Goodwill Store on New Year’s Day. Think they said the sale applies to everything except new stuff (this is one of the Goodwills that also sells dollar-store type things like gloves and socks) and mattresses. (And who wants half off a mattress? Wouldn’t that make sleeping difficult?)

I draw your attention particularly to the two big boxes of comic books near the check-out registers. They were going for a dime apiece on a non-sale day, which means a mere nickel on Saturday. They clearly all spring from the same ‘80s/’90s collection, since there are multiple issues from just a handful of key titles: Fantastic Four, Conan the Barbarian, Doctor Strange and a few other second-tier Marvels; the only real contender from another publisher is Mike Grell’s magnum opus for DC Comics, Warlord, well-represented here with several years worth of loinclothed Skartarisian swashbuckling. (Warlord ran from 1976 to 1989 and has recently been revived by DC with a new warlord.)

Probably should’ve waited a day for the sale, but couldn’t. Here’s the stack of vinyl records I walked out with Friday afternoon for a combined tariff of five bucks, Lps which I’ll convert to mp3s forthwith via a USB turntable:

• The Hudson Brothers, Hollywood Situation, a testament to the shortlived TV variety show by Bill, Mark and Brett Hudson, best known now respectively as Kate Hudson’s dad, Ringo Starr’s producer/sideman in the ‘90s, and the other Hudson brother. Priceless due to one superb Beatlesque track, “So You Are a Star.”

• The Mancini Touch, with composer Henry Mancini on the cover dangling a couple of well-dressed young dancers as if they were marionettes. The album is mostly covers of jazz non-standards including Illinois Jacquet’s “Robbin’s Nest” and Trummy Young & Jimmy Mundy’s present to Billie Holiday, “Trav’lin’ Light.” There are four Mancini originals—“A Cool Shade of Blue,” “Politely,” “Let’s Walk” and “Mostly for Lovers,” all making their debuts, plus the established Mancini track “Free and Easy” from the film Rock Pretty Baby. The Mancini Touch was recorded in late 1959, placing it neatly between his successes with The Peter Gunn Theme in 1958 and The Pink Panther Theme in 1963.

• Music from the Golden Age of Silent Movies played by Gaylord Carter at the Mighty Wurlitzer Theater Organ. Pretty self-explanatory, though it would be hard to match exact scenes from the silent-movie titles emblazoned on the album cover to these shortened themes and melodies from the films’ involved scroes. Happily, only a couple of the selections come from D.W. Griffith films (which usually tend to crowd out other dramas scorewise); there’s some James Cruze and Erich von Stroheim love here too. Unhappily, comedy films are barely represented; the liner notes acknowledge that a motif from the Keystone Kops which is titled “The Big Chase” here was also used for such somber if fast-paced fare as the climactic Klansman ride in Birth of a Nation and the cowboy antics of William S. Hart.

• Dionne Warwick On Stage and In the Movies. A title not to be taken literally. These are striking LP-only ‘60s-fied covers of showtunes. In fact, the “movies” angle is meaningless, since all the songs except The Gershwins’ “The Way You Look Tonight” are from stage shows. The stand-out to me, even among such unorthodox choices as “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” (from Kismet) and “I Believe in You” (from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) is “My Ship,” from Kurt Weill & Ira Gershwin’s Lady in the Dark.

• Gaslight Memories—The Happy Music of the Gay Nineties, one of the multi-LP Readers’ Digest sets so prominent at thrift stores. It’ll help me get a handle on the melodies to songs I’ve heard about all my life but have never really heard. I’m sure that when I actually hear someone singing “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nelly,” which I know only as a cliché from the Pogo comic strip, I’ll probably faint from the shock.

You’ve heard about the big rock dick who wouldn’t sing at hits daughter’s wedding without a contact (though he didn’t seem to hardware about warbling ad lib and ad nauseum on talk shows).

Well, our scene doesn’t grow jerks nearly that large (poor climate– we’re in the shadow of a bigger city), but here’s a lightweight contender for your consideration:

Guess who won’t appear at the benefit show for cancer survivor Crutch (yeah, we know) unless he gets to do a solo set that’s twice as long as any other band on the bill—and even if he’s granted that aggrandising plum, won’t commit to a measly two- song reunion set with his old bandmates?

Plus he tried to pull that old demand about how he might work for free this one time, but he’d need to charge something so he could pay his sideman. (yes, we just said “solo set,” but Lord high-and-mighty here can’t play a lick, even in his rare sober moments, so never travels without real musicians, whom he apparently insists on retaining for benefits even though, in a brief and surly ‘phone conversation with him last week, he couldn’t remember their names.

Turns out those sidemen guys have telephones too, are pretty to track down, and were shocked when we asked them about the payment plan because they’d agreed all along to play the gig for free. (We’ve got all these conversations on tape, and we’re having them notarized.)

Hope we haven’t screwed the whole reunion deal now with these revelations, but we doubt it would have happened anyway.

Here’s another good place to spend your time and money, with passionate musicians of all stripes:

Turns out that big local Europop/punk festival of sorts at Campbell’s Saturday from 4-8 p.m. (clearing out before the dance party) will be passing the hat for starving refugees somewhere in Eastern Europe. So promises The Bishop, an immigrant from those climes himself, who’ll be sharing the bill with The Trial, Cosette, The Grave and The Barricade. It’s a CD release for the The Bishop’s new disc Between Americans, which is getting national distro on the Gulf Screen label …