Year: 2024

The Bikeriders (R)

A buffet of character studies and Chicago-y “da Bears” accents is laid out for your perusal in The Bikeriders, which is based on a real life “living amongst the outlaw bikers” book by Danny Lyon, as the movie and Wikipedia tell us.

The movie is structured around a series of interviews between author/photographer Danny (Mike Faist) and Kathy (Jodie Comer), wife of Benny (Austin Butler), who is one of the core members of the Vandals motorcycle club. The Vandals are led by Johnny (Tom Hardy), who formed the club in Chicago, supposedly after seeing The Wild One. When Kathy met the club members, who she describes as mostly unsavory types, in the mid 1960s, Johnny made a point of telling her he’d make sure nobody bothered her. Kathy was sort of lust-at-first-sight with Benny and fell for Benny and to some degree the “outlaw” life during her first motorcycle ride with the whole club. But she always seems a bit torn between her attraction to Benny’s whole “what are you rebelling against, whaddaya got” devil-may-care thing and her desire to separate herself and her husband from what she sees as an increasingly dirtbag-y group of dudes. As the 1960s wear on, new members with more violent dispositions join up and Johnny — who also has a wife and children — seems eager to find some kind of way out, possibly by giving Benny the leadership position.

These new guys don’t listen, Johnny says to Benny at one point, which feels like the generational lament that all older-guard people in all situations and occupations have toward newbies. Johnny created the thing, but now the meaning of the thing has shifted while he has more or less stayed the same. You stay too long at the party and your cutting edge thing becomes cute nostalgia at best — Johnny trying to deal with that is probably the most interesting element of his character.

The most interesting part of Kathy is Jodie Comer’s whole full-bodied creation of her, all cigarettes and mannerisms and conversation style. It occasionally feels like more of an acting exercise than a character in a story, but Comer is a compelling actress and she creates a highly watchable character even when she’s just, like, drinking coffee from a very 1970s green mug.

For me The Bikeriders actually feels at its strongest when it’s just characters talking — Kathy talking about her opinions of the group, a guy named Zipco (Michael Shannon) talking about his attempts to join the army. You get a sense of real people with backstories and inner lives. When there was plot happening, I often felt like the movie was just giving us goobers making bad decisions without really showing us what held these people together. It’s a movie worth a watch for the acting even if I didn’t feel like it was worth rushing out for. B-

Rated R for language throughout, violence, some drug use and brief sexuality, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols (from the book by the same name by Danny Lyons), The Bikeriders is an hour and 56 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Focus Features. It is also available for rent or purchase.

Featured photo: The Bikeriders.

This Ordinary Stardust, by Alan Townsend

This Ordinary Stardust, by Alan Townsend (Grand Central Publishing, 261 pages)

The most nourishing soil in the world, Alan Townsend writes, starts with disaster:

“Pyroclastic explosions of ash and lava slam into hillsides and streams, obliterating trees and boiling fish alive in their water. Or massive glaciers suddenly pulverize everything in their path … then unleash a catastrophic flood for good measure. The aftermath is a horror — a moonscape of ruin. It is also a beginning.”

That’s all well and good when talking about geological processes, but what of more personal kinds of disasters, the kind that explode your life, as when both your wife and your 4-year-old daughter get diagnosed with brain cancer within the same year?

Townsend, a tattooed scientist and dean of the college of forestry and conservation at the University of Montana, is much too intelligent to offer platitudes in such a situation. This Ordinary Stardust is no ordinary memoir of a health crisis, as Townsend and his wife, Diana, are no ordinary people.

They are both brilliant scientists who have traveled extensively doing interesting work — when we meet Townsend he’s doing research in the Amazon on how to prevent deforestation, Diana is planning an excursion to collect bacterial samples in Antarctica when she gets sick.

But with the twin diagnoses, the couple is thrust into the strangest world yet, going from the world of the healthy to the world of the sick with frightening speed.

Little Neva’s diagnosis came first, and Townsend writes movingly of how hard it is to watch your child endure MRIs and IVs and CT scans at Colorado Children’s Hospital. At one point, her parents take Neva to a hospital cafe for ice cream, and the child asks if she can have more. “Hell yes, I thought,” Townsend writes. The child, like her parents, is stoic and tough, and a scene where Diana takes a team of residents and medical students to task for their callous treatment of Neva is a Tiger Mother master class in assertiveness.

Diana brings the same defiance to her own treatment. We already know the kind of woman she is from a story Townsend tells about how she badly injured her ankle while the two of them were running on a trail together in Costa Rica, where they were working. The next evening, though her ankle was still badly swollen, Townsend found her wrapping the ankle with strips of an old T-shirt and duct tape. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Going running,” she replied. He writes, “She had a look that challenged me to say more.”

This is also a woman, as Townsend says, who “couldn’t stop talking about bacteria,” who loved science so much that it was all she wanted to talk about on their runs.

When Diana starts having strange symptoms and is ultimately diagnosed with two tumors in her brain, she grumbles that they’d better not stop her going on her expedition to Antarctica the next year. She continues to run throughout her treatment, and even wins her age division in a road race. But glioblastoma is almost always deadly; just 5 percent of patients survive five years. It is not a spoiler to say that Diana is not among the 5 percent since the book jacket blurb reveals that she dies. By this point, we love her as much as her husband does, and the story of her passing is gut-wrenching, but also oddly beautiful.

Townsend writes the book at his wife’s request — she wanted others to learn from their story — and although he confesses up front that he is not a Christian or a church-goer, the story is wrapped in spiritual themes. Science, he writes, can nurture the soul; it offers hope “that life on earth can make its way through the eye of any needle, that our individual choices matter, and that love can bring us back from the brink of annihilation.”

He does not address any issues related to the possibility of an afterlife except in terms related to the title. It’s said that our physical bodies are composed of primordial atoms, elements formed in stars and possibly dating to the Big Bang. Townsend has been fascinated with this idea since he heard a professor talk about how we exchange this “stardust” with each other continually.

“When viewed in our most elemental form, people are trillions of outer-space atoms, moving around temporarily as one, sensing and seeing and falling in love. Then those atoms scatter, joining one new team for a bit, then another. Far from depressing,” he writes. In other words, we might only exist in this form for a short time, but “No matter what happens, we’re still here. And we will always be.”

That’s a far cry from the eternal life promised by some religions, but is still, as he writes, “profoundly comforting.” Grief can co-exist with wonder, Townsend finds on his family’s journey, and his memoir is both poignant and thought-provoking. B+

Album Reviews 24/07/18

Phish, Evolve (JEMP Records)

If you’ve ever read this column for comprehension, you know that I detest fedora-hat bands in general and jam bands in particular, but I’ve had a change of heart of late. This happened after I discovered that my favorite acid-jazz-fusion wingnuts Weather Report took in a lot of guys from Frank Zappa’s bands, which caused me to reassess my prejudgments about Zappa (most of which were based on listening experiences). No, I’m not saying the Mothers or Weather Report were jam bands, but they incorporated extended stretches of improvisation in their tunes, and since I’m looking to expand my listening sphere I figured I’d see what’s going on right now with this Vermont crew of Grateful Dead lampreys (no, I will never give the Dead another chance, no worries). In brief: This LP is, of course, about white-guy groove, pseudo-funk in desperate need of a jolt from cardiac paddles. “Hey Stranger,” for starters, is a politely bouncing, listenable-enough thing that had me going “OK, OK, I get it” 30 seconds into its uneventful five minutes (the drum sound is good, at least). “Everything’s Right” is 12-count-’em minutes of (I swear) the same tiresome ’70s-blaxploitation beat as “Hey Stranger,” and that’s where I gave up. There’s some decent noodling from guitarist Trey Anastasio, which I’m sure seems highly impressive to people who have no guitar player friends who insist on giving impromptu living room concerts to their unhappily captive audiences. B

IDRIS & Una Rams, “Go Deeper” (Defected Records)

Wow, I’ve been unplugged from the velvet-rope circuit for so long (no thanks to my local Manchvegas music scene — will we ever get a proper dance club in this town or what?) that I wasn’t aware that actor Idris Elba was a DJ of significant note. In fact, his music is, I’m told, dominating the scene, which is just another notch in the belt for the guy, who was voted People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2018 and starred in such movies as Pacific Rim and Prometheus. OK, granted, anyone, even the sexiest guy in the world, could futz with ProTools and make a dance beat, so what’s so special about this, his latest track? Well, it’s the authenticity, really. Maybe you’re already used to the tribal house of DJs like Oscar G and whatnot, a sound that kept me interested in covering the beachside club beat for a couple of years, but this is definitely a step beyond that. Rams, Elba’s accomplice here, is a Grammy-winner from Makwarela, South Africa, and he adds some thick vocalizing to a track that would have been a bit pedestrian without it. As is, it’s otherworldly and completely immersive. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like a relentless tsunami of cultural inertia, a fresh storm of music-albums will bum-rush our cockeyed zeitgeist on July 19, scrabbling and shrieking for attention from a citizenry that’s no longer paying any attention whatsoever to “what’s hot” in the milieu, since the only thing that’s generated any mainstream rock ’n’ roll headline activity for months has been people arguing on social media over whether or not Taylor Swift’s last album, Whatever-its-name-who-cares, is a good thing. The weighing-in continues unabated; the other week, Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters told insinuated during a concert that Taylor lip-synchs during her shows, according to assorted media.

Past all that, like I said, there are new albums to deal with this week, including one from mummified ’70s arena-rock band Deep Purple, which uses an actual church organ in their heavy metal tuneage for some reason, don’t ask me why. The title of this new album is =1, which is funny, because =1 has never been recognized as an official internet emoticon like 🙂 or =^). I can guarantee you it’s not, because I asked Google’s “artificial intelligence” if =1 is an emoticon and it told me to go jump in the lake. But whatever, let’s keep in mind that the fellas in Deep Purple are all in their 80s and thus probably all have Earthlink email addresses; let’s just proceed to listen to “Portable Door,” the band’s hot new single! Wow, drummer Ian Paice, bassist Roger Glover and singer Ian Gillan are still here! Ha ha, Gillan looks like Bill Murray does today, but belay all that, ya swabs, this isn’t a bad song at all if you ever liked Deep Purple, like, the main riff does have a pulse. I give it a =) emoticon reaction and want to remind you that Ritchie Blackmore hasn’t been in the band for decades now because he is literally one of the worst people ever born.

• Rapper Childish Gambino initially earned his fame for his tertiary role on the endlessly irritating TV show 30 Rock, do any of you people even remember when network television was relevant, do I really even have to talk about this dude? Fine, whatever, his new album, Bando Stone & The New World, is the soundtrack to an upcoming same-named film. It is the final Childish Gambino album, because Donald Glover (his real name) is as sick of the joke as everyone else and hence he’s retiring the moniker. I don’t know, the movie trailer seems fine, it’s an apocalyptic comedy that I’d watch, and his joke hip-hop songs aren’t any worse than recent serious ones.

• Los Campesinos! (remember 15 years ago when indie bands used dumb punctuation in their band names?) are back, with a new LP, All Hell. The single, “kms,” sounds like a drunk Aubrey Plaza singing with Pavement. Yes, it’s literally that awful.

• Finally we have Glass Animals, an English indie band whose 2020 boyband-chillout single “Heat Waves” went viral on TikTok. The guys’ new album I Love You So F***ing Much features the wistful “Creatures in Heaven,” which reads like an Imagine Dragons arena-ballad, not that I’m trying to discourage you.

Piña Colada

A shockingly large percentage of 20-year-olds are convinced that they make an extremely good piña colada. They aren’t precisely wrong; a 20-year-old’s piña colada tastes really good — to a 20-year old. Fill a blender with ice, pour it about a third of the way up with pineapple juice, half a can or so of pre-sweetened cream of coconut — the one with the parrot on it — and an unconscionable amount of rum.

Grind, whiz, slurp, and you’ve got something that will be a big hit with other 20-year-olds. It’s perfect for a dorm room, or a secret party in your buddy’s parent’s garage.

Many of us go through our adult life still convinced that we make a really good piña colada, until one day, after years of not having one, we confidently blend up a batch and are confronted with the fact that like many decisions we made in our youth this one has not aged well.

Most blender piña coladas are too sweet, too slushy, and taste a little like chemicals. So what if we gave the blender a break and made one much less sweet, and not so redolent of polysorbate 60?

A Grown-Up Piña Colada

  • 2 ounces dark rum – I like Gosling’s or Pusser’s
  • 3 ounces pineapple juice
  • 3 ounces coconut milk
  • ½ ounce honey syrup (see below)

Honey and pineapple have a natural affinity for each other. The muskiness of the honey tempers the fruitiness of pineapple juice. Unfortunately, if you drizzle honey onto the ice cubes in a cocktail shaker, it will seize up and won’t mix with other ingredients very well. Most bartenders get around this by using honey syrup. It’s like simple syrup, but made with honey, instead of sugar. The water is like a cocktail for the honey, loosening it up and making it more likely to mingle with its new friends.

Combine an equal amount of honey and water in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir the mixture to make sure the honey is completely diluted in the water, then take it off the heat to cool. Honey is antimicrobial, so this syrup should last indefinitely in your refrigerator.

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice (make sure that it is large enough to hold eight and a half ounces of cocktail). Add all the ingredients, and shake thoroughly. This is one of those times when it’s OK to shake until you hear the ice breaking inside the shaker.

Pour the chilled drink into a Collins glass or a mason jar, then top it off with more ice, and stir it. Theoretically, you could use a mason jar to shake it, then just remove the lid and add a straw. I’m old enough that it seems like it might be fun to hand out unmixed piña colada at a party and have everyone shake theirs at the same time, possibly while listening to KC and the Sunshine Band’s unlamented classic “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.” At the very least it would humiliate and drive away any children present, giving the grownups a little breathing room.

We’ve already established that honey and pineapple juice complement each other. Coconut and pineapple are both from the same neighborhood; they go way back. With actual coconut milk, the finished drink is silky and rich, rather than overly sweet. It goes without saying that rum is everyone’s friend.

Twenty-year-old you would not be impressed. Which is sort of the point.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Addie Leader-Zavos

Addie Leader-Zavos, Pastry Chef and co-owner of Eden’s Table Farm and Farm Store (240 Stark Highway North, Dunbarton, 774-1811, facebook.com/EdensTableFarm)

“I grew up in the middle of Washington, D.C. I loved to cook from a really young age. I got this book called Preserving the Seasons for my birthday when I was 9. It was fantastic, and the author was making things like apricots in lavender syrup, or brandied pears, and talking about walking out to the patio and picking fresh herbs. I was like, ‘That’s the life for me!’”

After exploring several different careers, Leader-Zavos went to culinary school at the Cordon Bleu in Boston and worked in fine dining restaurants that focused on seasonal menus. After being sidetracked by a back injury, she moved into pastry and opened a custom pastry and catering business specializing in dessert buffets and bespoke wedding cakes. After the Covid-19 lockdown, she and her husband, co-owner Michael Williams, bought Eden’s Table Farm in Dunbarton to focus on local and seasonal produce, locally produced farm products, and fresh baked goods.

What is your must-have kitchen item?

A digital scale. I love to bake, particularly now … there is no better way to ensure high-quality results than to be precise and consistent with measurements.

What would you have for your last meal?

Definitely my grandmother’s slow-cooked brisket with onions. My grandmother made brisket for every holiday and my mom makes it for holidays and every time she comes to visit. It’s just that instantly comforting meal that’s made even better by all the memories attached to it.

What is your favorite local eatery?

The Nepalese restaurant KS Kitchen in Manchester. The food is super-flavorful, well-crafted and perfectly seasoned, just absolutely delicious. Plus, I cannot turn down any form of dumpling and their momo is out of this world.

Name a celebrity you would like to see shopping at your farm store or eating something you’ve prepared.

Pastry chef and author Claudia Fleming. I really admire her style of baking and pastry-making; it’s very seasonal, uses lots of fresh local ingredients, and incorporates salty/savory notes.

What is your favorite thing you make or sell at the moment?

Our chocolate chunk cookie because it has such a great homey taste and texture, big chunks of dark chocolate and a nice kick of sea salt. We’re using regionally grown, freshly ground flours, chocolate from New Hampshire bean-to-bar chocolate maker Loon Chocolate, and an apple brandy from Flag Hill Distillery for top notes. It’s a classic that’s distinguished by the local ingredients we’re using and I hope we’ll be making it for years to come.

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

I’m really impressed with how New Hampshirites are coming together to improve opportunities for small farms and home-based food businesses right now. Last year HB 119 was passed, making it easier for small farms to have certain types of meat processed locally. Just a few days ago HB 1565 was passed, which makes it possible to sell pickles made in a home kitchen. Now the legislature is considering HB 1685, which would open up even more opportunities for small farms and food entrepreneurs. This trend of creating more opportunities for people who want to participate in the local food economy really benefits everyone who loves good food, so I hope we’ll see more of it.

What is your favorite thing to cook for yourself?

When I cook for the enjoyment of cooking, I take a dish and make it over and over again until I get it exactly the way I want it. But when I cook to feed myself I tend to keep it very simple — a fresh-picked cucumber sliced up and served with some homemade dip, a big bowl of roasted zucchini with a little soy sauce, or maybe a cheese omelet with fresh herbs and hot sauce. We have access to so many fresh, flavorful ingredients on the farm and through our farm store that I really don’t have to do much to create something very satisfying and enjoyable.

Featured Photo: Addie Leader-Zavos. Courtesy photo.

Friday’s outdoor lunch plans

Food Truck Friday brings eats to Arms Park in Manchester

Every Friday throughout the summer, there will be food trucks in Arms Park (10 Arms St., Manchester) between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. They set up at the far western end of the parking lot adjacent to Cotton Restaurant and the University of New Hampshire’s Manchester campus, overlooking the Merrimack River. (Arms Park is the riverside park with the brightly painted stairs leading down to the river.)

Food Truck Friday is the brainchild of Stark Brewing Co.’s Peter Telge. Stark Brewing, based in Manchester, recently completed a mobile kitchen in a food truck. Telge said he was inspired by what happened at the Tideline Restaurant in Durham, which allowed a pair of food trucks to use its parking lot on weekends.

“They started with two trucks just on the weekends,” Telge said, “and now it’s up to six trucks, Monday through Friday. It’s become a destination.”

Telge saw the same potential near his restaurant, in Arms Park. It is not as well-known as many of Manchester’s other parks, but customers frequently asked him, “Has this always been here? Why don’t people know about it?” Telge partnered with City of Manchester Parks and Recreation department to bring the project together.

“Because we’re working with the City,” Telge said, “we’ve been able to save money on fees and permits.” It also made it easier to expedite the paperwork.

Tim Cunningham is in charge of social media for Food Truck Friday. Like everyone involved in the project, he is confident that it will become extremely successful, once enough people know about it.

“Pretty much we’re just blasting out [social media posts] every week,” he said. “Every week we’re trying to post about it, get people out there, because Fridays, especially in the summertime down there, are beautiful down by Arms Park. There’s so many people in the millyard that will think Friday would be a great day for them to maybe not bring a lunch that day and go down to the park and support some local food vendors”

John Worthen is one of those vendors. He is the owner and operator of Purple Snack Shack (text: 818-9796, facebook.com/purplesnackshack), a mobile snack shack that is indeed painted purple. He sells mostly pre-packaged food and drinks.

“I have pre-packaged everything,” Worthen said. “… novelty ice cream bars, soda, Gatorade, candy bars, potato chips, things like that.” He’s waiting for more customers to learn about Food Truck Friday. The main problem he sees is the lack of foot traffic.

“There’s not a lot of people walking here right now,” Worthen observed. “There’s a few that come by, you know, but it just doesn’t have the viewing. [The hot dog stand] up on Commercial Street — they set up up there, and they’ve got a whole ton of people. If it was busy here, it’d be great, but we’re not too busy yet.”

Joe Savitch is the owner of the Creative Kones food truck. This summer he is working with his daughter Isla. “I’m the Kid,” she said.

“Of Joe,” she clarified.

Creative Kones specializes in food in cones, but not just ice cream.

“We center around all kinds of things in cones,” Savitch said, “from snow cones to waffle cones where we put fun things like chicken and waffles. We have taco cones, which we did this year at the taco tour, and we also do a handheld Japanese-style crepe cone. We leverage creativity as much as we leverage the cones to have some fun with our food.”

“Hopefully all the businesses here, with the hotel and the mill buildings and stuff, word will get out that there’s something new for lunch.”

Food Truck Friday
Arms Park, Manchester
See the Stark Brewing Co. Facebook page for updates on Fridays about who is attending that week’s events.

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