Year: 2024

Deadpool & Wolverine (R)

Wade Wilson rides again as the meta-quipping mercenary who longs to be something greater in Deadpool & Wolverine.

Wade (Ryan Reynolds) as we meet him has been rejected as a possible Avenger and is now selling cars and trying to suppress his superhero Deadpool self. In the process, he has pushed away Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), his now ex-girlfriend. Thus is Wade only semi-happily celebrating his birthday with all of his various friends when helmeted soldiers from the Time Variance Authority (a thing from the TV show Loki, but don’t worry, they explain it well enough here) show up at his door. Boss Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) tells Wade that the TVA wants him to relocate to a new timeline and become a big hero. He gets fully suited up as Deadpool and is ready to take his place next to Cap and Thor — if Paradox could just explain the TVA’s vacation policy so Wade can schedule a visit with his friends. But the death of Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in Logan has caused instability in Deadpool’s timeline and it’s starting to fray. Rather than just watch it slowly disintegrate over thousands of years as is TVA policy, Paradox wants to cut to the chase and use a “time ripper” to just end the timeline now, meaning everybody Deadpool knows and loves will be erased from existence.

Deadpool is not cool with this plan and steals Paradox’s travel-through-timelines-enabling iPad-thing and heads off to find a replacement Logan from another timeline. He finds variations such as one who is particularly short, one who is an old man, one who is played by Henry Cavill. Eventually he finds one sporting the iconic yellow suit that the movies have been avoiding since all the way back in 2000’s X-Men.

From this point, the movie jumps off into an odd direction, leading to some fun moments with some fun characters that you are better not knowing about if you possibly can keep yourself spoiler-free.

Early in Deadpool & Wolverine I had a very “hit in the face with a bucket of water” feeling of too much all at once — too much meta Fox Marvel and Disney MCU, too much Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman and their fake rivalry, too much ostentatious swearing and R-rated patter, just too much coming at me all at once. But also, the movie is having too much fun with everything it’s doing not to bring me around. I don’t think you need to entirely understand all the Earth-616 versus Earth-10005 timeline stuff (I had to look up some of those details later) to get the gist of how this movie is playing with all of the stories and tropes of these two Marvel collections. We’re not just seeing IP Easter Eggs but eventually a story about how to tell stories and what the characters in the stories want from their story arcs. We do also get a sort of antagonistic friendship between Deadpool and Wolverine which highlights just how much fun Reynolds and Jackman are having with these characters that they’ve inhabited for so long. B

Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout and gore and sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Shawn Levy and written by Ryan Reynolds & Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Zeb Wells and Shawn Levy, Deadpool & Wolverine is two hours and seven minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios. Let’s talk credit scenes: Pretty quickly after the credits start to roll we get behind-the-scenes footage from multiple Fox Marvel movies. It’s surprisingly sweet. There is also a sort-of-in-character post-credits scene that is self-consciously foul-mouthed and rather “the aristocrats!” in its mixing of the wholesome and the profane (which is the point). Sweet, then naughty — how very Deadpool.

Featured photo: Deadpool & Wolverine.

Pets and the City, by Dr. Amy Attas

Pets and the City, by Dr. Amy Attas (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 311 pages)

The rich are different from you and me, except when their dog gets diarrhea or starts limping, and then they panic just like the rest of us do and call a vet.

Well, since they’re rich, they summon a vet to their brownstones and summer homes, and a lot of the time, when they do that in Manhattan, it’s Dr. Amy Attas who shows up.

Whether you’re wealthy or just-gettin’-by, Attas is the kind of vet you want: a person who was pretending to give injections to her stuffed animals as a child, who started working as an assistant at an animal clinic and age 13 and considers James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small as holy writ. She was born for this profession. It turns out, she can write, too.

Attas’s first book is a memoir that moonlights as a tell-all gabfest, spilling the tea on her most interesting clients and former bosses, albeit in a way that won’t get her sued. She has a lot of stories to choose from, having worked in New York City for more than three decades. The official tally is 7,000 families and more than 14,000 pets, most of which were house calls and which included celebrity clients like Joan Rivers, Billy Joel, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Steve Martin.

Mattas started her business, City Pets, after getting let go by an Upper East Side practice run by a man who promised to make her a partner but then abruptly fired her, apparently because he was jealous that his VIP clients were asking for Attas instead of him. (Every story needs a villain, and this guy, identified only as Dr. B, certainly qualifies.)

The day after Attas was let go, when she was still mulling what to do, two of her former clients tracked her down and asked for house calls. The day after that, she had four more homes to visit, even though this was before house-call practices were common in veterinary medicine. She kept at it, and placed a few ads, and eventually worked up the nerve to call Joan Rivers, who’d been a client at Dr. B’s business, and to tell the comedian she was available for house calls for Spike, the Yorkie who traveled with Rivers everywhere.

“What happened?” Rivers asked, and Attas answered, “Do you want the long story or the short version.” To which Rivers replied, “I want every single detail, and I promise you every single person on the Upper East Side is going to know every single detail, too.”

And with that, City Pets was off and running; no word on what happened to the notorious Dr. B.

For an Ivy League-educated veterinarian who serves a largely privileged clientele, Attas is surprisingly down-to-Earth and willing to dish on humiliating moments, like the time the urine of a male cat soaked her during an exam just before a date, and her genuine, child-like excitement every time a new client turned out to be a celebrity. When she went to a hotel to treat the pug of a yet-unknown VIP — she was told to ask for John Smith at the front desk — Billy Joel answered the door and said, “Hi, I’m Bill.”

While she replied calmly, Attas writes that “Inside, my thoughts were screaming Holy moly! It’s Billy Joel! BILL-Y JOEL! Looking and sounding like … Billy Joel!!!”

She also confesses that, in her scramble to get to the hotel, she forgot her stethoscope and instead of admitting to it, pretended to check the dog’s heartbeat with blood pressure headphones.

It is this kind of vulnerable disclosure that makes Pets and the City quirky and charming; the book’s subtitle is “true tales of a Manhattan house call veterinarian” and we don’t doubt the true part since, in addition to animal stories, Mattas is also telling us how she pretty much badgered her future husband into dating her after they met when his puppy took ill, how she fainted while watching another veterinarian draw blood, and how she once removed dew claws off a litter of 12 two-day-old puppies after letting them suck on Q-tips soaked in sweet wine.

Many of these tales are not so much stories as they are confessions.

The celebrities’ pets are interesting enough, as are the friendships that Mattas forms with some of their famous owners. But the stories I found most interesting were just ordinary cases — the Siamese cat named Itchy undergoing chemotherapy for intestinal lymphoma, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Chowder with heart disease — the lengths to which people will go to keep a pet alive for a few more months or a few more years.

And the owners themselves, of course, are a large part of the story, like the woman who, after her terminally ill cat was euthanized, threw herself on the floor and started screaming that she didn’t want to live anymore. (Mattas searched the house until she found prescriptions, and then called the woman’s psychiatrist for help.) A much more touching story of euthanasia comes when Mattas unexpectedly goes to the house of the late Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author of Night, among other books, while the family is agonizing over whether to put a beloved cat to sleep.

The Wiesel encounter is poignant, but for the most part, Pets and the City, like its author, doesn’t take itself too seriously. Mattas did not try to build a lofty narrative arc in which she and the people in her life undergo great and meaningful changes. She just tells entertaining stories, as if sitting around the dinner table with her readers, sharing what happened that day at work.

As such, there are no real lessons to learn here, other than that there are people who are even crazier about their pets than we are. And if you ever have a pet emergency while visiting Manhattan, don’t call Dr. B. B

Album Reviews 24/08/01

Vaux Flores, Dawn Chorales (Audiobulb Records)

My 2024 Word Salad Of The Year award goes to this person for their unintelligible PR one-sheet, and I quote: “Travis Johns is a sound artist residing in Ithaca, N.Y., whose work includes performance, interactivity, installation, and printmaking, often incorporating eco/bio-based themes and electronic instruments of his own design.” That’s just the first paragraph, but what this all tells me is that this “Vaux Flores,” aka Johns, is a musical experimentalist with a serious case of OCD, not that one could tell by the compositions themselves, which are Tales From Topographic Oceans-style exercises in self-indulgence. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course, particularly if your jam is movie soundtracking, for which this stuff would work (think Arrival), and the synth work is indeed pretty deep, which is of course half the battle. And besides, he does go off on some EDM-ish tangents, producing beats that are almost danceable. It’s interesting, let’s leave it at that. A-

Kris Davis Trio, Run The Gauntlet (Pyroclastic Records)

On this new LP, Grammy-winning jazz pianist Davis pays tribute to six of her heroes, pianists who’ve inspired her over the years. In specific we’re talking Geri Allen, Marilyn Crispell, Angelica Sanchez, Sylvie Courvoisier, Renee Rosnes and, in no-brainer news, Carla Bley. This new trio features bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Johnathan Blake, both of whom have plenty of room to stretch out. I got quite a jolt out of this one; if you compare jazz albums to scotch, this is no drinkable-enough, off-the-shelf Johnnie Walker special blend; it’s the top-dollar stuff, mathematically and physically ambitious, darkest-possible-roasted art that challenges the senses. Davis bonks, pounds, diddles and stress-tests the keyboard as if she’s trying to get it prepped to start its Ph.D. dissertation. In that, it’s obviously not for jazz-heads who just want to feel good that they’re listening to basic genre stuff; it’s enormously brainy while not indulging in an academic exercise. Yowza. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Aug. 2 is the next Friday on which you will feel pressure from your Spotify to remain plugged into our horrible excuse for an arts zeitgeist! The record companies will unleash terabytes of new-album spam, and it’ll be everywhere you look, and you will feel pressure to listen to many songs that have no redeeming aesthetic whatsoever to them. But you will be assimilated, and before you know it you’ll be part of the problem, like my boomer friends on Facebook, who enjoy arguing with me about how I should be listening to and publicly praising 60-year-old albums from the likes of Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin, artists that I ignore for no other reason than to trigger easily triggered people on the Facebook! Yes, I am a rascal, I was born this way, stop being intolerant of rascals, it’s not nice. In fact, let’s just drop the whole subject of my personal taste in music (regular readers will recall that when last we left the subject of my musical taste it had shifted to 1950s greaser-rock like Sha Na Na and Eddie Cochran, which is still current) and focus on the here and now, starting with the new album from endlessly irritating ’90s band The Smashing Pumpkins, titled Aghori Mhori Mei, a phrase whose actual meaning is being argued over by Pumpkins fans on Reddit as we speak, that is when they’re not complaining about Rick Rubin sticking his big fat nose into one of the album’s singles. It is basically a nonsense phrase, unless we interpret it as a purposely idiotic misspelling of the Latin phrase “agori mori mei,” meaning, as one r/SmashingPumpkins redditor explained, “I am about to die” or “I am working on my death.” OK, and with that, my real friends can tell by now that I already hate this album, but regardless, I will go through the motions and mention that the band hasn’t released any of the new songs to the public at this writing, so there’s nothing for me to report, and they are touring with Green Day this year. The internet has decided that the presence of an orchestra in one promo shot is evidence that there will be a symphonic angle to this rock ’n’ roll music album, while other folks are hoping that the band will go back to the rockin’ roots of their early days, when they inspired such wannabe acts as Live. I ever tell you about the time Petunia and I mooched passes to see Blues Traveler open a show with Live and Collective Soul and we left before Live came on to ruin everything? It’s true, we barely escaped in time. Anyway.

• Yow, L.A. punk legends X have been around for 47 years, guys, Forty. Seven. Years. Smoke & Fiction is their upcoming new LP, and I heard a live version of the title track, which is appropriately awesome in a Loreena McKennit-meets-Hole manner. Thankfully, Exene sings off-key through the mellow parts, who would want it any other way? (Side note to new punk-music listeners: Unlike Smashing Pumpkins, X will not be opening for Green Day, because they are still actually relevant.)

• Activist and two-time Grammy winning singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello releases her zillionth full-length record on Friday! It is called No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin, and the first track, “Love,” is a cool, laid-back, bass-driven soul track with a ton of harmonizing and some 70s steez. Full, thick, wide sound, good stuff here.

• Last but not least (depending on factors, of course) on our list this week is Stampede, the new album from country singer Orville Peck, whose gimmick is that he never shows his face, a stunt no musical artist has ever pulled, save for Kiss, Deadmau5, The Residents, Clinic and millions of others. His new tune is a cover of Ned Sublette’s 1981 Texas waltz joke song, “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,” an ode to, well, gay cowboys, which is always a timely subject.

Caipirinha

The story goes that everyone in Brazil drinks caipirinhas when it’s oppressively hot. And because Brazil is on the equator, it’s oppressively hot pretty much all the time.

The ingredients for a caipirinha couldn’t be simpler: a lime, sugar, and a couple ounces of a Brazilian alcohol called cachaça, a sort of cousin to white rum. Most rum is made from fermenting molasses, a byproduct of sugar production. Cachaça is made by fermenting unprocessed sugarcane juice. It tastes like a slightly sour, faintly musky rum. That sourness plays extremely well off crushed limes.

Because the caipirinha — which is apparently pronounced “kai·pr·ee·nyuh“ — is so entrenched in Brazilian culture, it has inspired strongly held beliefs and heated disagreements. One of the most strongly argued caipirinha disputes is whether it needs to be made with granulated sugar, as caipirinha purists insist, or if it can be made with sugar syrup, like 95 percent of the sweetened cocktails in the world.

Because of my deep commitment to world peace, I decided to try the two versions side by side.

Here is the classic recipe for a caipirinha:

  • 1 lime, sliced into wedges
  • 2 teaspoons table sugar
  • 2 ounces cachaça – which is apparently pronounced “kuh-shah-sah,” which sounds like an obscure type of martial arts weapon. “This is no ordinary murder, Higgins; this man was killed by a cachaça.”

Muddle the lime wedges and sugar in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. There will be a lot of juice, so don’t smash the limes like you might normally with a muddler. Grind it down hard, for longer than you might normally, but make sure you don’t splash.

Add cachaça and ice, then stir thoroughly with a bar spoon and pour into a rocks glass. Some bartenders suggest garnishing it with a lime wheel, but there is so much lime in this drink already, that seems a bit like overkill.

The theory is that the sugar acts like an abrasive and helps strip citrus oil out of the lime peel. That seems unlikely; logic would suggest that the crushed lime produces so much acidic juice that the sugar is dissolved almost instantly and doesn’t have time to abrade anything. But let’s withhold judgment; sometimes Reality ignores Logic mercilessly.

OK, let’s set this aside and make a second caipirinha, with sugar syrup. Do everything the same, but add two teaspoons of simple syrup at the same time as the cachaça.

Crush, crush, crush, pour, pour, clink, clink, clink. Stir, stir. Pour/clink/gurgle. Let’s take a look at the two caipirinhas side by side.

They both look and smell delicious.

Taking a sip of the caipirinha made with syrup: **Raised eyebrows** This is a very solid cocktail. It’s a little sour and musky from the cachaça, just sweet enough, and a love letter to lime.

That’s going to be tough to beat. Let’s try the classic caipirinha: **Pupils dilate, ceiling opens up, the sound of angels singing fills the kitchen**

I realize that I’m still standing in my kitchen, but for just an instant I was sitting on a patio surrounded by tropical flowers while samba music played in the background.

The caipirinha made with sugar is better by several orders of magnitude. This is the real love letter to lime, written with a fountain pen, using sophisticated metaphors and a complex rhyme scheme. In comparison, the other one was a late-night text, asking, “U up?”

(I drank both versions, by the way; I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.)

I think I’ll open a summer-only pop-up bar called Cai-Piranha.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Joe Savitch

In April 2024 Joe Savitch left his job of 10-plus years to start doing mobile street vending.

“We originally were looking at various franchise concepts and ultimately decided that that was still working for somebody else. So using my background in marketing and branding and web development and all the things that I had done for the last decade or so, we came up with this concept kind of through a series of just organic conversations,” Savitch said. “We ultimately decided to center our food around all kinds of things in cones — from snow cones to waffle cones. We put fun things like chicken and waffles and taco cones, which we premiered this year at the Taco Tour. We also make a handheld Japanese-style crepe cone. Our plan is to be creative and leverage our creativity as much as we’ll leverage the cones, and have some fun with our food.”

What is your must-have kitchen item?

A sharp paring knife. It is a simple yet versatile tool that can do many jobs and often goes overlooked.

What would you have for your last meal?

Probably chicken broccoli with ziti. My mom would make this for me as a kid and I haven’t had it in a long time. … And since carbs wouldn’t be of concern any longer, I’d probably have some cheesy garlic bread and a glass of red wine.

What is your favorite local eatery?

Tucker’s. … I always enjoy going to Tucker’s for their incredible creations.

Name a celebrity you would like to see eating at your food truck?

Alan Ritchson. This also was a tough one. My first thought was Anthony Bourdain or Tyler Florence, but I think Alan would be a lot of fun to see at the truck. I think he would place a big order. To maintain that Reacher physique, he’s got to get a lot of calories.

What is your favorite thing on your menu?

Chicken & Waffles — fried chicken in a waffle cone. This is one of the first items we conceived when working on this project. It is a non-traditional twist on a classic dish that everyone enjoys.

What is the biggest food trend you see in New Hampshire right now?

Authenticity — and freshness. With so many restaurants cutting back staff in favor of digital tablets and ordering, I see many customers just looking for an authentic interaction and ordering experience. On top of that, they are looking for fresh ingredients. Most customers are interested in hearing where we get our various products — the ice cream, maple syrup, soda, etc.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home? Why?

I love to make Thanksgiving dinner. I get to break out fun recipes from the past and look for new things to mix in every year. My kids help me make the snowflake rolls and my oldest has taken over pie duties. We get to work together and have fun. They may only end up eating the rolls and pie, but it isn’t about the eating; it’s about the cooking. —John Fladd

Chicken Broccoli with Ziti
From Joe Savitch

1 pound ziti cooked and drained
1 pound broccoli (can be frozen steamed or fresh steamed)
1 pound chicken breast chopped into bite size (1-2-ounce) pieces
flour
1 pint of half & half
salt and pepper for seasoning
oil

Prepare the noodles and steam the broccoli. Set aside.
Cut the chicken into 1- to 2-ounce pieces. Dredge in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Pan-fry in a little bit of oil. Cook the chicken until it browns on both slides, about 5-8 min.
There should be enough flour/oil to create a roux in the pan. If not, add a little more flour and butter (1:1 ratio) until there is a light roux formed in the pan. Add the half & half and heat until it simmers. If you want it to be saucier add some chicken broth.

Add the chicken, broccoli and noodles to the pan and heat through. Season with salt and pepper as needed.

Pup’s day out

Dog cafe prepares to open in Nashua

Ashyana Hall is in the final stages of launching Nashua’s first dog cafe, Pup In a Cup.

“It’s kind of a passion project that I started around two years ago,” Hall said. “I’ve been a dog trainer for about a decade and the biggest problem that I kept finding with my clients is they have nowhere to bring their dogs in the winter to practice socialization and be out with them. And especially this year, this year’s a great example of we’ve just been in a heat wave. They have nowhere to bring their dogs in the summer either now.”

Hall’s idea was to give dog owners a place to sit down with a snack, a cool drink or a cup of coffee, maybe meet some fellow dog people, and give their dogs a calm, vacuum cleaner-free space to relax.

“We’re going to have a full drink and snack menu for the dogs,” she said. “That’s mirrored to the human menu, so we make our own teas and smoothies and with that we have teas and smoothies that are dog-safe, dog-friendly and that are for them as well. The snacks look the same, or as close as we can get as possible. So you could go and enjoy a macaron or something like that with your dog.” The cafe’s baked goods will come from Lighthouse Local in Bedford. “They do a bunch of really cute doughnuts, they do cupcakes, and scones,” Hunt said. “So they do a bunch of different, just fun sweets and cookies. All the bakery goods for the humans are locally sourced from there.”

Pup In a Cup will also have two Quiet Rooms available for dogs, or even human children, who are still working on their people skills. Hunt sees them as a way to make the café more inclusive.

“As a trainer,” she said, “most — half if not more — of my clients were there for behavior modification, reactivity, things like that. You can rent [a Quiet Room] out for about 50 minutes and be out in public without your dog getting overwhelmed by there being too much going on because your dog’s not ready for it.”

At this point, Pup In a Cup is almost ready to launch. Human restaurants are inspected by the Health Department, but animal food — including food for dogs — has to go through the Department of Agriculture.

“The main thing that’s getting approved right now is the kitchen itself,” Hall said. “We’re essentially creating an airlock system [around the kitchen]. There is absolutely no direct access from the area where the dogs and people are to the kitchen. ” Hall said that she is excited to get started.

“I’m looking forward to the experience of it all,” she said.

Pup in a Cup
Pup In a Cup is expected to open in the second half of August.
295 DW Highway, Nashua, pupinacupcafe.com

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