Year: 2024

Fancy Dance (R)

Lily Gladstone turns in another captivating performance in Fancy Dance, a movie on Apple TV+.

Thirteen-year-old Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) goes nearly everywhere with her Aunt Jax (Gladstone). They live together in the family’s house on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation Reservation in Oklahoma. They fish for crawfish together, they work together to do a little light car boosting. Roki is saving her earnings from those endeavors to pay for entry in the upcoming powwow in Oklahoma City where she and her mother will wear their regalia and dance in the mother-daughter dance. But despite Jax’s semi-encouraging “she’s never missed a powwow before”-type statements about Roki’s mother, the hard set of her face and the stack of “missing” posters she carries everywhere tells a different story.

Tawi (Hauli Gray), Jax’s sister and Roki’s mother, has been missing for a few weeks. Tawi and Jax’s brother JJ (Ryan Begay), a tribal police officer, tells her he’s tried, with minimal success, to get the FBI involved in investigating Tawi’s disappearance. Jax takes it on herself to organize searches, hang posters and even push her way in to unfriendly situations to ask men who may have seen Tawi if they know anything about her whereabouts.

Despite Jax’s hopes that Tawi could still return soon, the state’s child services informs her that criminal charges for drugs in her (Jax’s) past keep her from being a fit guardian for Roki. Frank (Shea Whigham), Tawi and Jax’s white father they haven’t seen much of in the years since their mother died, and his new wife Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski), are given custody of Roki. Though Roki hopes to still attend the powwow, Frank and Nancy say they’ve been told Jax can’t be with Roki unsupervised. Jax at first tells Roki “next year” but then, perhaps sensing that there won’t be a next year for Roki and Tawi at the powwow, borrows Frank’s car and takes Roki on a road trip to the event.

Or, to put it the way the FBI sees it, Jax steals Frank’s car and kidnaps Roki, leading to an Amber Alert and statewide hunt for them by local and federal law enforcement.

Jax doesn’t at first realize the seriousness of the situation but even when she learns that Frank has called the police she continues forward in her twin missions to take Roki to the dance and to find information about Tawi. JJ both tries to bring Jax home and helps her in her quest. Both of them hope that perhaps this FBI attention will shine some light on Tawi.

I went into this movie rooting for Gladstone and I was not disappointed. She elevates everything she’s in, helping to highlight this movie’s solid storytelling despite some indie movie scruffiness. Gladstone makes you believe every moment of Jax’s struggle and makes you feel her exhaustion and desperation as well as her deep love for Tawi and Roki.

Which maybe doesn’t sound like the funnest use of your movie-watching time, but Fancy Dance manages moments of heart and sweetness among the bitter. And at just about 90 minutes it’s a well-crafted story. A-

Rated R for language, some drug content and sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Erica Tremblay and written by Erica Tremblay and Miciana Alise, Fancy Dance is an hour and 30 minutes long and is streaming on Apple TV+.

Featured photo: Fancy Dance.

There Was Nothing You Could Do, by Steven Hyden

There Was Nothing You Could Do, by Steven Hyden (Hatchett, 272 pages)

When Steven Hyden was 6 years old, he found a cassette tape in the glove box of his parents’ car and asked his dad to play it. When the sound came through, after precisely nine seconds of silence, it was “my personal ‘big bang’ moment,” Hyden writes. “All these years later, I am still chasing the rush of hearing that titanic BOOM! in my father’s car.”

The artist was Bruce Springsteen; the album Born in The U.S.A., issued 40 years ago this year.

There Was Nothing You Could Do is Hyden’s exegesis of Springsteen’s impact — in Hyden’s own life and in the country, focusing on Springsteen’s best-selling album, released in 1984. The title is a line from the song “My Hometown,” the last single released from “Born in the U.S.A.” The subtitle references “the end of the heartland.” But don’t be scared off by that. While there is some politically tinged commentary, as has always accompanied Springsteen’s work, it’s mostly a book about music.

First and foremost, Hyden is a fan, although his fandom had an inauspicious beginning, coming as it did in childhood. Kids loved Born in the U.S.A. “for the dumbest possible reason — because we heard the songs constantly. That’s all it takes to appeal to little kids,” he writes. “Kids my age weren’t brainwashed, exactly. We were Boss-washed.”

It wasn’t as if that’s all he listened to, however; Hyden’s examination of the Boss-washing of America detours into other culturally significant pop musicians: Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna (all of whom comprise “the big four” of the 1980s); as well as Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. Springsteen, he writes, was something of a combination of the latter two: “… he could move like Elvis and write like Dylan. The pelvis and the brain had been fused into one.”

A critic for the entertainment website Uproxx and the author of previous books on music (Twilight of the Gods and Your Favorite Band is Killing Me), Hyden brings encyclopedic knowledge to the topic, and as such, There Was Nothing You Could Do sometimes reads like an encyclopedia, as when he lists the various iterations of songs that were proposed for Born in the U.S.A. when the album was under development. Herein he runs into a problem: For the Springsteen fanatic — and they are legion — much of this material might induce a yawn.

There’s a lot of material that seems better fit for a blog, such as digressions into the author’s fantasies: what would have happened, say, if Springsteen had drifted from the lane of heartland rock to straight-up country music, or had put out another album in 1985 when Springsteen mania was at its peak. (He even proposes a playlist for this.) And Gen Z might raise a collective eyebrow to Hyden pronouncing Springsteen more of a “national monument than a pop star” at the age of 75. For all of their success, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band never had a No. 1 hit.

Still, despite some vaguely silly asides, Hyden does a good job of explaining the Springsteen phenomenon as he delves into stories that relate specifically to Born in the U.S.A., such as how the “Dancing in the Dark” music video was made, and how it was received.

The video, directed by filmmaker Brian De Palma, shows Springstreen awkwardly dancing at a concert with Friends actress Courteney Cox (relatively unknown at the time). It “undeniably made him more famous in the short run, and it unquestionably made him easier to make fun of in the long run,” Hyden writes. The video has become a popular GIF and “personifies everything that is corny about Bruce Springstreen and almost nothing that is cool about him.”

But it could have been worse, Hyden reveals. In another video that was made and ultimately abandoned, Springsteen “looks like a mime attending a Jazzercise class,” he writes.

Hyden is at his best when he strings together snapshots from Springsteen’s life, from his troubled relationship to his father to the existential struggles that inform so many of his lyrics, and connects them to the singer’s appeal. “If you want to see the emotionally repressed man in your life cry — a stoic father, an unflappable granddad, a weird uncle, an immature brother — send him to a Bruce Springsteen concert,” Hyden writes.

Toward the end, he examines the controversy that erupted from the Super Bowl Jeep commercial that angered both conservatives and liberals in 2021. It was indicative of America’s deep political divide that a commercial inviting Americans to “meet here in the middle” irritated so many people. “‘The Middle’ was designed to please exactly no one,” Hyden writes. “In that way, Bruce did manage to unite red and blue America, ironically, their condemnation of him.”

Hyden did not interview the Boss for this book, although he’s been within 50 feet of him, at a concert where he obtained special press seating. His reporting comes from previously published articles, Springsteen’s autobiography and other books. and so much of this information is already out in the world; this is just an artful rearrangement of music history. For the casual fan, the minutiae might be too much. But Hyden is a skilled wordsmith, and There Was Nothing You Could Do is a surprisingly breezy read, despite the ominous title. It’s a sort of love letter we all might write to our favorite pop star if we had the time and skill. B-

Album Reviews 24/07/04

Category 7, Category 7 (Metal Blade Records)

I’ve mostly avoided covering albums released through the Metal Blade imprint owing to their long history of not paying their bands, but in this case I’ll make an exception, as I assume the members of this group have been around the block enough times to avoid the usual contractual traps. Here we have the first album from this all-star band of thrash oldschoolers, featuring John Bush (Anthrax), Mike Orlando (Adrenaline Mob), Phil Demmel (Machine Head), Jack Gibson (Exodus) and Jason Bittner (Overkill), a group that has its act together for sure in the area of production (this is major-label-level stuff). In the area of tuneage, though, it’s assuredly not anything new. If you’ve heard any of the above-cited bands you know what you’ll be hearing, although the intensity level does get pretty high on songs like “Land I Used To Love” and “Exhausted,” which are both pretty, well, enthusiastic. It’s likable enough. B-

Dye, “Dirt” (Metal Blade Records)

This Los Angeles-based nonbinary singer has accumulated international love from BBC Radio1’s Rock Show w/ Daniel Carter, Australian radio station Triple j, and loads of editorial love at Spotify and Apple. This is their latest goth-pop/shoegaze single, intended for fans of (naturally) Cocteau Twins (their voice is reminiscent of Elizabeth Fraser, point of order); by melding both genres, it’s both full of yearning and sonically epic. But wait, there’s more; the tune is also informed by Nirvana grunge, Nine Inch nails goth and dark orchestral flourishes reminiscent of My Chemical Romance, Smashing Pumpkins and such. The sounds sit atop a familiar but innovative New Wave drum beat you’ve heard on hits from artists ranging from Flock Of Seagulls to The Kid Laroi, tabling lyrics “about accepting that not everything broken needs repairing, sometimes it’s best to throw it away.” Cool stuff. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yikes, wait a second, it’s totally, irrevocably summer already, how did this even happen, I’d been anticipating some sort of normal segue, like one last snow-blizzard in May just to remind us all who’s really in charge of all this “New England weather” nonsense! It is summer, definitely, so my drive-time music-listening habits have gone into summer mode with a vengeance: If I have to drive somewhere fast and dangerously, I’ll crank old Kiss albums or Foghat Live, but if I’m just being an old semi-retired dude who’s constantly getting honked at by younglings waiting for me to get the hell out of their way so they can get to their fifth work-shift of the day at Burger King, I’m listening to big-band albums from the 1920s. Those always put me in a good mood, and quite frankly I think our country would be in a lot better shape if those younglings would just get off my lawn and go listen to Ray Noble singing about freckle-faced girls who grew into smokin’ hot babes all the boys wanted to (very respectfully) smooch. But alas, that is not to be, because the only music today’s younglings want to hear is songs about twerking and beefs and being awkward. Sigh, so let’s go look at the list of albums coming out on Friday, July 5, and just try to forget that music was once a good and wholesome thing, with nothing but songs about freckle-faced girls and not about [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and [TOTALLY 100% DITTO]. Wow fam, not a lot of new albums, because it’s the Fourth of July vacation week, and the record companies know that everyone will be spending all their discretionary funds on fireworks and alcohol instead of albums, which is wise, I’d say. We’ll start this week with Fink, a 51-year-old songwriter/DJ/something-something from England, whose real name is Fin Greenall! Among other career highlights, he co-wrote the song “Half Time” with Amy Winehouse, which is on her posthumous 2011 album Lioness: Hidden Treasures. His new album, Beauty In Your Wake, opens with “So We Find Ourselves,” a slow, pensive tune whose vibe evokes floating around aimlessly on a raft with a freckle-faced girl while her grandpa lazily croons about awkwardness or something. I think it’s relevant to the zeitgeist but I’m not 100 percent sure.

• Hm, look at that, it’s another album by a British act, because the Fourth of July means nothing to those transgressive colonizers, as we ’muricans all know. Yes, it’s none other than former interesting band Kasabian, with their new one, Happenings. The first time I heard them was years ago and I liked them very much, as you may recall from past columns, in this space, but now, I don’t know, maybe not so much. This “slab” opens with “Coming Back To Me Good,” a sunny, peppy, happy-ish mid-tempo jaunt that tells me they’ve been listening to a lot of M83, nothing like the stuff they used to do when they were trying to do hard rock or whatever it was.

• Also on Friday, Kiasmos, a Faroese-Icelandic minimal/experimental techno duo, will release their second LP, mysteriously titled II. This is very listenable stuff, bloopy techno reminiscent of Orbital and that sort of thing

• Finally it’s Kokoko!, an experimental electronic music collective based in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their trip is playing homemade instruments, so of course it’s cool and interesting. Their new album, BUTU, includes a single titled “Mokili,” a ’90s-sounding tune that’s like an Afrobeat-infused Technotronic. It’s pretty fun.

Not Quite Frozen Blueberry Daiquiri

The first few sips of a blender drink are virtually perfect. The problem is that a few minutes later you’ve drunk all the flavor and you’re left with a weak, sad pile of slush.

Which is why, when I want a really cold drink, I rely on crushed ice. It chills the cocktail effectively, but stays apart from it, like a, I don’t know, a lifeguard or something. This metaphor has gotten away from me.

Blueberry Daiquiri

Blueberries in Syrup

  • Frozen wild blueberries – regular blueberries are in season and would definitely work for this recipe, but wild ones generally have more flavor and are small enough to get through a large straw; regardless, they should be frozen, to help syrup-ify them
  • An equal amount of sugar, by weight
  • A pinch of salt

The Daiquiri Itself

  • 2 ounces blueberries in syrup
  • 2 ounces golden rum – white rum would be a little too subtle for this application; a dark or black rum would overpower the other ingredients; something golden like Faraday is a good daiquiri rum
  • 2 ounces fresh squeezed lemon juice
  • A splash – perhaps an ounce – of club soda
  • A large amount of crushed ice – this could be from the door in your refrigerator, or run through an old-fashioned, hand-cranked ice crusher; I prefer to wrap regular ice cubes in a bar towel and smash it up with the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, which gives me a nice mixture of ice, from large half-cubes down to fine snow

Cook the blueberries, sugar and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally. At first it will be a gloppy, slightly purple pile of sugar. Suddenly, a few minutes into the cooking process, the berries will realize the futility of their existential stubbornness and collapse into a thin jam. Keep cooking and stirring, until the liquid starts to boil. Make sure that all the sugar sticking to the sides of the pan has dissolved into the hot blueberry sauce.

Remove from heat, and set aside to cool.

Fill a mixing glass with a couple handfuls of crushed ice, then add the other ingredients. Stir gently, but thoroughly, into a more or less homogeneous solution.

Transfer into a tall glass, and top with a splash of club soda and a few syrupy blueberries.

Take your drink to your deck, or front porch, or fire escape, and drink it with an oversized boba straw while listening to “The Girl from Ipanema.” It could be the original Brazilian version, or the hep-cat, Sammy Davis big band version, or even Amy Winehouse’s take on it, but the important thing is that you can lean back and draw large amounts of blueberries, rum and lemon into yourself, until it’s difficult to know where you end and the samba music starts. In fact, you could make up an entire playlist of nothing but covers of “The Girl from Ipanema” and spend an hour or two comparing them.

Normally, one of the pillars of a good daiquiri is fresh lime juice, but blueberries and lemon get along so splendidly, whether in a cheesecake or a cocktail, that the lemon is a good substitution in this particular drink. It provides the same amount of acidity and zing, but dances — we might even say it sambas — with the blueberries. The syrupy blueberries bring sweetness and depth to the daiquiri and might even make it a little too sweet if not for the club soda, which brings additional zing to the proceedings while diluting the syrup. The crushed ice brings the temperature down enough to make drinking this cocktail intensely, almost painfully, refreshing.

Without bringing your blender into it.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Erika Follansbee

Erika Follansbee is a food photographer at Parker Street Food & Travel (parker-street.com) and a wedding photographer at Erika Follansbee Photography (erikafollansbee.com). “I strive to create inviting, ambient photos of real menu items in a restaurant’s own unique environment. At the same time, I am also a wedding photographer with 14 years of experience based in Goffstown, New Hampshire. My work has been featured in over 60 national and local magazines, blogs, and websites for my work in both weddings and food photography,” she said.

What is your must-have kitchen item?

My Dutch oven is one of my favorite kitchen items because I love the one-pot life. I become easily overwhelmed by too many dishes, so anything I can cook in one dish that goes from stovetop to oven is high on my list.

What would you have for your last meal?

My last meal could only be a smorgasbord of favorites from a life of traveling and enjoying some of the world’s great flavors. I’d need some pasta carbonara with guanciale from Rome, suadero tacos con todo from Mexico City, a full Scottish breakfast with haggis, and lastly because I’m from North Carolina I’d finish up with some Southern comfort food of Brunswick stew, hushpuppies and banana pudding.

What is your favorite local eatery?

It would kill me to choose only one. I really enjoy North End Bistro, a tiny little place on Elm Street. Other Manchester favorites include The Crown Tavern, Presto Craft Kitchen and Alas de Frida, and Street in Portsmouth.

What is a food project you would like to shoot?

I have always been interested in not only photographing a restaurant’s core menu but also returning on a regular basis to capture more fluid items like seasonal, monthly and weekly specials. Returning to a place regularly gives me a chance to really explore the ‘sense of place,’ which is an anthropological concept referring to the way a place is experienced and lived in over time, resulting in a strong sense of belonging and familiarity. I’m inspired by the light of different times of day and what a different feeling it evokes. To me, the environment of a beautiful restaurant or café goes hand in hand with the actual food photos.

I’d also like to photograph a cookbook someday.

What is your favorite food-project that you’ve shot?

My favorites have always been shoots for chefs or restaurants who had never had photos done before, especially for a first-time website. It’s very satisfying to see a website come together with beautiful photos that establish an inviting and professional-looking online presence.

What is the biggest trend in food photography right now?

There is an emphasis on authenticity in food photography, which can mean a less staged and not over-styled approach that doesn’t hide imperfections…. Dripping sauces and scattered crumbs capture a delicious moment in time. The human element is still going strong as a trend, which includes hands in the shots — holding, sharing, and passing the dishes or beverages.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

In the summer, I grow jalapeños just so I can make bacon-wrapped cream cheese poppers. It’s the ultimate in high effort, low reward. I get my vegetable starts from Devriendt Farm in Goffstown. Like most cooking, the results are gone in seconds, but when you grow the thing yourself for a couple of months beforehand you really appreciate that single victorious ingredient you can hold in your hand. I enjoy gardening more than I do cooking, so the growing part is fun for me.

What can a non-professional do to shoot great pictures of their food?

The most important aspect of any food photo is the quality of the light. Take your dish outside in the shade, or get next to a window. You will notice that the incandescent or LED lights of an average home interior have a very yellow cast (or sometimes greenish) and this is not ideal for a nice food photo.

Featured Photo: Erika Follansbee. Courtesy photo.

Around the world in a waffle cone

Ice cream and cookies and cookie ice cream at Social Club Creamery

Cole Gaude knew his ice cream business in Concord was facing a turning point last fall, when all three soft-serve ice cream machines at his shop broke down simultaneously.

“They’re very sensitive machines and we had three of them because that’s all we used to do — soft-serve,” Gaude said. “We had three machines that we bought pretty much within a week of each other. They were all brand new and they all broke pretty much the same week, a couple of days apart.”

Hard decisions had to be made.

At the same time, Gaude and his team had a different type of ice cream shop up and running in Laconia, the Social Club Creamery, which specializes in small-batch homemade hard ice cream and cookies.

“We said, ‘Why not make the swap [in Concord],’” Gaude said. “We decided we had to move in a different direction.” The Concord store was rebranded as a second branch of the Social Club Creamery, and switched to a very different ice cream philosophy.

“We’re a small-batch ice cream shop,” Gaude said. “We make everything ourselves. We make the ice cream. We make all the things that go in the ice cream — honeycomb candy, butter cake, brownies, things like that. Our first location in Laconia has been sending everything to Concord.”

The two locations complement each other. The Laconia location has very limited seating for customers to eat in it.

“We only have about four seats in that shop,” Gaude said. “We had to make as much room for a kitchen as possible. Of the 970 square feet, roughly 750 feet of that is kitchen.” The Concord location, on the other hand, has very little kitchen space but has 36 seats inside and another 20 outside. “That’s a pretty large seating area, so a lot of events happen there. A lot of sports teams go there after they’re done practice.”

The new setup has allowed Social Club to sell walk-in customers on its particular point of view of ice cream flavors.

“We have 16 flavors overall,” Gaude said. “Twelve of them are always on the menu; they never change. That’s stuff like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, peppermint patty, things like that. And then every month we have four seasonal flavors. Right now we’re doing a Travel Series. It’s based on different foods from around the world — Italy, Greece, Asia and Mexico.”

The Italian-inspired item is a Pistachio Cannoli ice cream with a ricotta base.

“We take cannoli shells,” Gaude said, “we twice-bake them with some butter, sugar, a little salt, and some milk powder, and then we make a homemade pistachio drizzle that we swirl through the ice cream. It’s a good one.”

The Mexican-inspired ice cream uses a dulce de leche base, with homemade, deep-fried churros, and a dark chocolate swirl. A mango sorbet represents Asia, and the Greek-inspired offering is a baklava ice cream.

“We partnered with a local Greek bakery,” Gaude said, “and the owner provides us with trays on trays of her homemade baklava. We cut that up and then we put it into a honey-base ice cream. That one’s been the most popular this month. It’s just incredible.”

The baklava ice cream might be the most popular of the special flavors, but it doesn’t touch the popularity of Social Club’s best-selling ice cream.

“Our most popular flavor is the Cookie-Cookie-Cookie Dough,” Gaude said. “The ice cream itself has a cookie dough taste, then we make our special homemade cookie dough — which doesn’t have eggs and uses heat-treated flour, so it’s safe to eat — and then we chop up the chocolate chip cookies we sell, and throw those in as well. It’s been hugely popular. It counts for like 30 percent of our sales overall. It’s a high-selling flavor; it’s cool. But it’s a lot of cookies.”

Social Club Creamery
138 N. Main St., Concord, 333-2111
Open seven days a week, 1 to 9 p.m.
socialclubcreamery.com
Also at 51 Elm St., Laconia, 619-5098.

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