The club guy works for the Parks Service.
Scribblers Music Review
Bonnie “Prince” Billy makes an appearance on the eight-song alt-folk album Where In Our Woods by Elephant Michah. It’s an appealing thump-and-strum sound, laid-back but not calm. “Rare Beliefs”s starts with a quiet rumble and stays still, but not without menace. “Demise of the Bible Birds” may be the quickest and most sprightly of the eight songs, but even it has that drag-leg Tom Waits feel beneath its peppy instrumental sections and higher-register vocals. There’s a sad wail beneath this whole album that’s the very definition of “haunting.”
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Magic number: 85743
Magic word: plinth
Stenciled in green on the sidewalks of Chapel Street a year or so ago
LOCK DOWN
YOUR DOORS
BE SAFE
JUST SAY
WHERE YOU ARE
Rock Gods #322: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
The Stage IIs were formed as the live band for a theater musical, and stayed together originally so they could play other musicals. Then they found clubs liked them too—at least clubs that could handle a nine-piece ensemble with several banks of synthesizers and endless percussive devices. SIIs did showtunes sets for a while, but got bored so they found some off-copyright scripts and started performing those with vibrant ambient musical accompaniment. Classical scripts, mostly, but also some really obscure 19th and early 20th century stuff. These worked best at college basement gigs, but spread anyway down the hilll to the Bullfinch, where on Thursday the Stage IIs presented Messalina’s Muse. It was an odd production, staged deliberately so that you could barely conmprehend the words.
Tonight: Sweet Tart Slush and Quirk Jeep at the Bullfinch, with free slush while it lasts… Greenbash and The Humarocks at Hamilton’s inevitably closing with “Close Your Eyes”… Drolleries’ is jam-crazy, with Blu’s Shower Door and Oakman Wayne…
Riverdale Book Review
Observations from Archie’s Sunday Finest: Classic Newspaper Strips from the 1940s and 1950s by Bob Montana (IDW Books, 2012).
Reggie’s surname was once spelled Mantel, not Mantle.
Archie and Li’l Abner exist in the same universe. There are references to a Sadie Hawkins-type “patch dance” and Lena the Hyena.
Archie nearly coined a musical general three decades early: There’s a dance event called the “Hep-Hop.
Bob Montana apparently created the gesture where Miss Grundy gets so flabbergasted by her students’ behavior that her white bun hair-do flies off her head like a wig.
The Archie Andrews radio series, which ran on various networks for a decade, 1943-1953, has an effect on the Archie comic strip, as when the cartoon Jughead mutters “Boy-o-boy-o-boy” a la Harlan Stone on the radio shows.
For Tomorrow We Shall Die: Diary of a College Chum #272:
Gar went to work and saw the club guy by the side of the road.
Scribblers Music Review
The video for Generationals’ “Reviver” takes an interest in quaint old county-fair motocross races. The band has a vaguely ‘70s vibe itself—upbeat pop that you might play at the school dance. “Reviver” is on the new Generationals album Alix.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Magic number: 31450
Magic word: spinny
Five Books I’ve Read That Feature Appearances By Their Own Authors
Clive Cussler, Crescent Dawn. Cussler loans his adventure hero Dirk Pitt his antique roadster.
Leslie Charteris, Salvage for the Saint. Technically, Charteris didn’t write this Saint book. But it has his characters, and was ghostwritten based on a teleplay for the Return of the Saint series starring Ian Ogilvy. It’s such a well-written story that it’s one of just a few non-Charteris Saint adventures reissued as part of the massive Saint e-book reissue last year.
Martin Amis, Money. Amis, who’s appeared in other of his novels, meets his fictional protagonist in a bar.
Joseph Payne Brennan, the Lucius Leffing stories. Brennan is the Watson to Leffing supernaturally inclined Sherlock in this New Haven-based series.
Oh, and the Kinky Friedman mystery novels.