Happily endured the iPhone 5.0 download last week, but having to reenter all the apps from their backup storehouse on my home computer made me reconsider the value of many of the apps I’d placed on there in the year and a half since I got my iPhone 3G.
I realized how much I still read on the phone, even now that I’m so accustomed to a Kindle and have a massive library there. I ended up keeping a lot of my one- book apps even though I’d duplicated many of the purchases on Kindle.
Without going into the many periodicals, comic strips, news blogs, cookbooks and other texty apps which clog my screen, here is my telephonic l literary line- up:
Collected Works of Voltaire
Collected Works of Mark Twain
Gulliver’s Travels
P. G. Wodehouse’s The Intrusions of Jimmy
Burrough’s A Princess of Mars
Vanity Fair
Peter Pan
Dostoevsky’s The Idiot
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Myths of Ancient Greece and Rome
Works of Samuel Johnson
A collection of U.S. historical documents
eReader, for downloaded maintained from elsewhere
The iBooks reader
The Google Books reader
Overdrive, with which you can borrow ebooks from libraries
WattPad, for fan fiction and out of mainstream writings
a poetry app
And last but foremost, the Kindle app. What would I do without the ability to read Baum’ s Oz books to my daughters at the school bus stop every morning?

Last weekend, it felt like Fair Haven was the center of the cultural universe in New Haven. This weekend? Westville.

There are two exceptional small theatre shows in the neighborhood—A Broken Umbrella Theatre’s locally rooted ghost story Play With Matches ( my review is here) and Tony Juliano’s fifth annual Forgot to Laugh sidewalks and animation festival (my preview feature is here, with a review slated for tomorrow).

It’s also the middle weekend of City Wide Open Studios, an event at which Westville has always excelled. The area houses a number of notable artists willing to let folks tramp through their workplaces for the annual affair (the Erector Square section of CWOS was last week, with the Alternate Space, for those artists without studios to open, coming next weekend).

Windowshopping along Whalley Avenue last night en route to Play With Matches, I noticed what an active bar scene there is on Westville weekends as well.

1. It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown leaf globe. I’d had an Amazon alert about this thing, and am glad to have now seen one for real. It’s small. It’s round and flat rather than spherical. The Peanuts figures aren’t in the purest Schulz style. And the “leaves” are really glitter. Not so great.

2. Crafts books: Zombigami, Gothic Jewelry and Super Scary Crochet. What grandmothers do after they die.

3. The Cracked.com compendium You Might Be a Zombie. Misfiled. It’s not really a zombie book.

4. The Weir, by Connor McPherson, astutely included. This Irish barroom discussion one of the great ghost-story plays of the last 20 years.

5. John Landis, Monsters of the Movies. It’s a pity when great film directors are doing memoirs and coffee table books instead of being given movies to direct. I felt the same way when Nicholas Meyer’s fine autobiography came out a couple of years ago.

6. Much fewer vampire books than there were last year.

7. Still way too many zombie titles. There’s one about zombies fighting Nazis, but nobody’s really improved on World War Z in all these zombie years.

When Sig Flenck of Horse’s Nerves realized he was the only one in the band who didn’t wear glasses, he went out and bought a pair at a vintage shop. His bandmates could have taken this a number of different ways, but they chose to take it in the spirit of unity which Sig intended.

At Thursday’s Bullfinch show, Sig’s fell off and got stepped on. Whereupon bassist Phil Jasmina doffed his own (tinted) lenses and made an elaborate show of smashing them underfoot.

Singer Jilly gasped “Ay!”, as in “Caramba!” Somebody in the band caught the pun and started chanting “Eye! Eye! Eye!,” pointing and shouting. It was a like a cover version of one of Sonny Blitt’s pronoun songs from a few weeks back. Horse’s Nerves can really play—Sig and Jilly were in a Mexican restaurant jazz houseband together–so the whole thing sounded rehearsed. But as far as we can see, it wasn’t. And as far as we can see, Phil can’t see without his glasses.

Myrt & Marge and The Court of Human Relations at the Bullfinch, singing backup on each other’s sweeter tunes… Those Websters and Pete Kelly’s Blues Band at Hamilton’s, rehashing every song you never wanted to hear again after college… An Evening With Do You Miss Brooks at D’ollaire’s, with hastily booked local opener Novak for Hire. Somebody in the headlining band had a falling out with their girlfriend and she lost the gig…

Cleaned the whole house.

This is a massive selection of unreleased tracks by a band you might be surprised to learn is a decade old. Has indie rock changed so little in all that time? The gentle strums, the tentative and endearing vocals, the light-fingered production…

There’s a gorgeous demo version of “What’ll We Do,” and so many songs that seem casual and unobtrusive that you realize this can’t be a pose—they know exactly what they’re doing, found their ideal sound early on and have somehow continued on without gaining arrogance or annoying studio-technique tendencies.

I’ve seen too many legendary bookstores die in my lifetime. Had to shutter one myself, Book World on Chapel St. in New Haven. So the news that St. Marks Books’ days are, uh, marked fills us with inkstained remorse.

There was a time when St. Mark’s Place Books had things you simply couldn’t find elsewhere. All the hip young novelists of the ‘80s were well represented on its shelves. If it was Man Booker Prize season in England (as it is now—the prize was just awarded on Tuesday to Julian Barnes), you’d be able to browse not just the winning novel but every one on the short list.

But marveling at a well-stocked bookstore is of course a thing of the past. Expecting such a place to survive and not succumb to the online piranhas and sink into the Amazon is futile. The Village community is going about this rescue attempt in exactly the right way: Show that the love is there through petitions and demonstrations. Argue for the store as a valued cultural landmark and aesthetic delight. Try to negotiate a more manageable rent. (The store has apparently been paying $20,000 a month to the Cooper Union school, which may be the going rate, but is three or four or ten times what failing bookstores I know about in New Haven were paying.) At the same time, St. Marks wouldn’t be much of a landmark if it didn’t actually sell books. So the owner’s appeal, in the Associated Press coverage, to all the demonstrators and supporters to simply “buy a book or magazine” should be heeded. Then readed.

Chats I’ve had on the street this week about the city’s jettisoning of Police Chief Limon and bringing Dean Esserman into the post have been dispiriting.

The opinions I’ve encountered all strike me as superficial and cliché-ridden.

That can be understandable, since Limon didn’t have the job long and was under fire by dissembling naysayers for much of it. Esserman’s rep is shorthanded by his association with former chief Nick Pastore. But the sort of lightweight comparisons and improper references I’ve been hearing: “We’re back to giving free pizza to murderers” (a reference to a Pastore strategy for getting a confession one time) and various race- or class-based assumptions about Yale, downtown neighborhoods.

Police ain’t politics. There are things in common, and sometimes pols and cops do play the same games in how they get their messages out. There may indeed be questionable motives behind the leaving of Limon (who was doomed anyway because of the constant parroting of a spurious statistic—that New Haven is “the fourth most dangerous city in the United States”) and enlisting of Esserman, who I guess is supposed to represent a familiar and friendlier (though it wasn’t necessarily more peaceful) era of policing in the city.

But I blanch at attempts to stereotype, minimize or otherwise second-guess a job that is frightfully complex by any standard. The showiness of selecting and announcing a new guy, and gracefully getting rid of the old one, is a needless distraction. Let’s get back to this conversation when there’s something real to talk about—lower crime stats or more productive union relations or whatever.

Latest in a continuing serenade of songs about animals

1. “Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear,” Randy Newman. It’s a Randy Newman song, so you know its doom-laden. There isn’t really a bear, or they don’t really get fed, or life isn’t so amazing. Most versions of the song lay on the absurdity and irony. Probably the biggest hit versions—the ones by Alan Price and Jim Henson’s Muppets—don’t.
2. “Hold That Tiger!” And then what are you supposed to do with it?
3. Knock knock. Who’s There? Gorilla. Gorilla who? Gorilla My Dreams. That gag dogged my whole childhood, appearing in very jokebook in the public library. But even in the ‘60s, nobody I knew could hum me the melody of “Girl of My Dreams,” a 1946 hit by Perry Como, though the song had been written two decades earlier by the illustrious tunesmith Sunny Clapp.
4. The Woody Woodpecker Song. Actually, it’s the Woody Woodpecker laugh with a song constructed around it. The lyrics are impossible: “Yeah, he’s peckin’ it all day long,” it says, but it’s talking about singing; “He gives all his rivals the bird,” yet he is one. Kay Kyser has a lot to answer for—he must have had a few holes pecked in his head.
5. “I Am the Walrus.” Now what stopped the Muppets from doing this one?

Last week I mentioned that the real name of Q, the Bullfinch barback, is unknown. Well, his mother should know, and she called me proudly when the column came out. All hail Quentin Duke, cool as a cuke. (Am I trying to get this guy mad at me?)

The reference got another response. Seems that Jilly Tight—sometime singer for Mounted Edna and a longtime student of behind-the-bar culture—thinks it unfair that we awarded Q the title of best local bar oddsbody without checking out more of the competition. She sent a list with no less than seven other contenders.

Yes, but do they book the bands? We hoist our bias high.

The Communists for the FBI and Joe & Miranda at the Bullfinch… Bachelor’s Children and The Club Eskimos at Hamilton’s… Dreft Stars back at D’Ollaire’s, confirming that they are truly on the way down, with the up-and-coming Red Foleys…