Magic number: 89289
Magic word: hogwash
Bought an Olive Hat
Bought an olive hat
at a hat shop
that’s part of a national chain.
The salesman rolled it
—the very hat I was buying—
to show me it was
“crushable.”
“Uh, don’t do that,”
I murmured.
“Don’t crush my hat.”
Rock Gods #319: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
Flip of the Pencil Holders has discovered a lost chord. It takes four fingers from two different hands to play. He has to strum it with his nose. It’s one of just three chords in his new song “Perambulator,” and it’s by far the best.
“They stole my song,” Flip says of, well, everybody. He claims that just about everybody with a guitar or keyboard has purloined one of his original tunes somehow. The counterargument usually goes like this: “They’re not that original.” So Flip set out to create a number that was all his, contorting his hands into knots as only he could. (He’s double-jointed.)
When Flip debuted “Perambulator” at the Bullfinch on Thursday, someone near the stage had the temerity to mutter “I wish I could do that.”
“Well, you CAN’T!,” Flip flipped out.
Tonight: Beulah & Buford at the Bullfinch. No, guess who really… Fastedge at Hamilton’s; cars & girls, cars & girls… Seven a cappella vocal groups at D’ollaires, some sort of college competition to be filmed for television…
Riverdale Book Review
The new, ninth issue of Jughead and Archie Comics Double Digest (not to be confused with the old Jughead With Archie digest which began in 1974) brings back a classic touch of Archie sexism that the series has missed for far too long. It’s the premise that Jughead hates girls. The lead story in the digest, “Mission Most Improbable,” not only uses this as a jumping-off point, it adds to the gender barriers by having otherworldly male imps firing love-arrows at the misogynist Jug, then declaring “We didn’t even know there was such a thing as a female Cupid.” Technically, of course, Cupid isn’t a thing, it’s the name of a specific god. But never mind. Good old woman-hating Jughead is back.
For Tomorrow We Shall Die: Diary of a College Chum #269:
The club guy won’t stop calling.
Scribblers Music Review
Painted Zero’s “Jaime” is a four-chord garage-rock run through the modern filter of contemporary Brooklyn indie rock. It sounds modern-quirky, with effects and crowd noises and layered guitar noises and the bourgeois-bratty vocals of Katie Lau, but it never loses that diehard ingratiating garage beat. Precious yet provocative. “Jaime” has been out for six months now as part of Painted Zero’s Svalbard EP, on the Black Bell label.
Friday, January 9
Magic number: 29564
Magic word: hat
Pre-Ripped
Chasing the Ripper, by Patricia Cornwell (Kindle Single, 2014)
The Jack the Ripper case was presumed solved in September, with spotty DNA evidence on a garment that may or may not have been connected to one of the crimes and may or may not have been washed since that crime pointing to Aaron Kosminski as the culprit.
Kosminski has been on the list of Ripper suspects for ages. But so have others, and the champions of those various other possible Rippers seem unfazed by the Polish hairdresser’s stepping up in the serial killer sweepstakes.
Patricia Cornwell’s slim “Kindle Single” Chasing the Ripper is a postscript to her massive book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, in which she argued that Walter Sickert, the celebrated English artist, was the Ripper.
I want Cornwell to be right. I like the idea of Sickert as the Ripper. I find her arguments on his behalf to be sensational and entertaining. If one is to be obsessive about any murder case, one should at least be entertaining about it. Cornwell’s case is based on artwork and party anecdotes. She has gone the DNA route just as the Kosminski contingent has, but the beauty of Cornwell’s theories are that they are woven into Victorian culture—art, literature, industrialism, celebrity, media frenzy—and not just a worn piece of fabric.
Cornwell uses this opportunity not to tear down the case for Kosminski, or applaud it for that matter. She acknowledges the Kosminski theory then dismisses it offhandedly, then restates her own case for Sickert. She confronts the critics and naysayers who found fault with her book.
The brevity is appreciated. Her thesis is clearer. I still want to believe it. And I want other people to take a shot at articulating this wondrous theory that a great naturalistic and doom-laden British artist was also the country’s most esteemed murderous fiend.
Rock Gods #318: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
Best band of last year happens to be one we discovered in December. There may be a psychological basis for this. Record labels often release certain albums at the end of the year on the expectation that critics preparing their top ten lists have already forgotten the beginning of the same year.
It’s not like that with local bands.
Tonight: The Wofts and Mihtohseeni Onki at The Bullfinch. They’ve rehearsed a band-merging finale… Evidence As To Man’s Place in Nature, college rock, at Hamilton’s… Baron of Fancamp, seriously, at D’ollaire’s. Not “an evening with,” either—full band, all-electric, endless set…
Riverdale Book Review
One of the stated impetuses (impeti?) for the new Archie #1 reboot, according to a press release, is “showcasing the beginnings of the historic love triangle between Archie, Betty and Veronica.” But, as any longtime Archie reader knows, that origin-story-of-sorts (one in which the heroes and heroines don’t gain superpowers but only smooch) has been told a zillion different ways over the past seven decades. One of them, “Down Memory Lane” by George Gladir and Bob Bolling, is reprinted in the current issue of Archie Comics Double Digest (#257). Another is currently unfurling in the bloodsoaked pages of Afterlife With Archie. Depending on which mythology you follow, the Archie/Betty/Veronica triangle started when the characters were babies, or in grade school, or middle school, or in freshman year of high school—pretty much every era of their young lives excepting the womb.