Category: Pop

People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, by Sofi Stambo

(Restless Books, 292 pages)

Sofi Stambo was born in Bulgaria and now lives in New York, which is about all anybody seems to know about her, given that her website is down (as of this writing) and the biographical information about her on the internet is scant.

That said, we know from her debut collection of short stories that Stambo is a very good student of the human condition and, from the title of a forthcoming novel, This Train Has Sailed, that she has a fine sense of irony and a very good agent. Which makes her story collection, People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, very low-risk in terms of your time. In fact, some of the stories here — 34 in all — take less than 10 minutes to read but will stick in your memory much longer than that. Others read more like journal entries than fiction.

Take, for example, “”I Stepped on a Cat,” in which the narrator says, “I started learning English when I was six, and here I am in Brooklyn, and I am still faking it.” It’s a short and lyrical account of a child trying to learn English, “a language not a single Bulgarian villager spoke, that no one in the house understood.” As the only English speaker in the house, it fell to her to translate pirated English-language movies shown via videotape on a TV that was always breaking. As for the dialogue, “I made it all up, and as long as I kept talking simultaneously with the actors and in sentences of similar length, no one complained.”

Fast-moving and irritatingly illustrated with sketches by Yana Mihaylova that are serviceable but do nothing to improve the reader’s experience, the collection skips from interactions in diners to offices to parking lots, most set in the boroughs of New York with a rotating cast of immigrants or the children of immigrants.

In “Ponchicki for the Fine Ladies of Queens,” the narrator is envious of her coworker at the travel agency who “is constantly hungry and forever chewing on something” and who talks lovingly to her boyfriend at lunch about what they’re eating, in hearing range of the rest of the staff: “We don’t have boyfriends, we have husbands, and they don’t care what we eat for lunch, only about what they’ll get for dinner.”

The workers book their clients’ trips to exotic places even though they themselves hardly ever leave Queens. One day a vivacious visitor comes through the door, bearing a box of ponchicki, a type of pastry from Poland. “He shared his strong belief that you must never go anywhere empty-handed and should always bring food with you. It breaks language barriers, and people are generally nicer to you when you feed them.” The women are enchanted. The visitor, however, ultimately serves to highlight the dullness of their everyday existence, in the same way that their love-smitten colleague did.

In “Spying in Manhattan Diners,” a couple sit in a classic Greek diner, observing the clientele and the manager, who, as at virtually any New York diner, is the 20-something son of the owner, “a little bit on the short side, has been to the gym three or four times this week already, and is clearly a fan of the protein shake diet, which makes him brave enough to wear a tight red shirt. You can’t say for sure if it is the protein shake and/or the occasional line of coke, but he repeats everything he says. His name of course is George. It’s always George.”

The titular story, “People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much,” again plumbs the mind-numbing routine of office work, this time for three young women who look from their cubicle windows down on the Hudson River, as a cruise ship passes by at the same time every week. The narrator longs for the adventures experienced by the people on the ship while she slogs through her workday with one coworker obsessed with lucky numbers and another who insists that she has unlucky letters of the alphabet. (“Would you believe it if I told you that in the same year, I had problems with my Cat, and my Carpet, and my Ceiling? … Cat completely ruined my Carpet. The doctor said she had Cancer, are you following the trend? Not only did she die, but on Columbus Day.”)

The best short stories startle us or tickle us and often contain one or more threads that lead us back to our own lives. In “Goods,” Stambo reminds us of our own grandmothers, as the narrator follows an elderly Asian woman who looks like her deceased grandmother, in order to temporarily experience the illusion that her beloved Baba Borka is still alive. With a few succinct vignettes we see this grandmother grow older, her eyelids growing heavier “as if she carried too many memories there,” and eventually pass on, leaving to her granddaughter a handmade dress that she wears proudly until she realizes that it will cease to exist, like her grandmother, if she keeps washing it. (Stambo has a soft spot for grandmothers in general; in her acknowledgments, she says “this book is for the grandmothers who took care of us while our parents were working, who taught us the songs and poems we still know by heart. When we were bored, they read us a book.”)

Some of the stories with the best titles don’t rise to their promise: “How to Blow Your Nose in English,” for example. Conversely, the curtly named “Lists” is a delight, particularly for anyone who frequently makes shopping lists but arrives home missing several things that were critically needed but somehow didn’t make the list. (“On the bright side, we are out of bread but we have pasta. We are out of toothpaste but we are really good on toilet paper. We are actually great on toilet paper.”)

Overall, it’s an uneven collection that is charming in places; the more affection you have for New York and its eccentricities, the more charmed you will be. B

Featured Photo: People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, by Sofi Stambo

Album Reviews 26/07/30

The Durutti Column, Renascent (London Records)

Here’s a band name you’ll want to keep handy in your brain if you often find yourself conversing with fans of artsy post-punk in the vein of this crew’s former Factory Records label-mates Joy Division, et al. Largely regarded as a solo vehicle for the classical-flavored noodlings of brilliant guitarist Vini Reilly (who’s alternately been called the Van Gogh and the Jeff Beck of post-punk, among other appropriately breathless outbursts of praise; he’s collaborated with Morrissey among others), the group is legendary among old-school British New Wavers and such, but, like Wire, they somehow never achieved the household-name status one would have expected. It’s been 14 years since the trio’s last album, 46 since their first, and Reilly’s ability has been affected by three strokes he suffered in 2010 and 2011, but this record is nevertheless a next logical step, a mature-minded collection filled with plenty of lush, bright, sweeping, epic, Orbital-like passages. Shame that the Great Unhelpful Algorithm that rules over us all has made Reilly basically invisible, but now you know, so please get to listening to him. A+

David Occhipinti, Looking Glass (Elastic Recordings)

The recipient of two Chalmers Arts Fellowships and a few Juno nominations, this Canadian composer/guitarist is said to have developed a genre-bending approach to his writing that “gestures toward several styles without comfortably settling into any.” Lots of other fifty-cent words in this one-sheet that sure look smart, and there are indeed some mildly surprising moments here and there, but to my ears this is a form of neo-classical that’s remindful of deservedly acclaimed soundtrackers like Thomas Newman (The Shawshank Redemption, Road To Perdition, etc.). The compositions can get pretty snooty, such as when mezzo soprano Alex Hetherington steps in to lay down some church-y Christa Ludwig epic-ness, but Occhipinti is an unconventional thinker, so it isn’t unusual to hear things (guitars, most prominently) that feel more like curveballs than classical obeisance; “The Frumious Bandersnatch,” his paean to Lewis Carroll, finds him emulating a bloopy synth with (I think) his guitar. A highly advanced classical tinkerer, let’s say. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yep, this Friday is July 31, all that’s left of the summer is August, when the sun starts going down early and everyone starts in with how much they looove pumpkin spice, which is of course a Stockholm syndrome reaction to the fast-approaching ridiculousness of frostbite weather, like, everyone’s like “fall is my favorite season, don’t you love pumpkin spice and apples,” even though apples are hilariously common in New England, like they’re on half the trees and no one eats them because who even wants to, and pumpkin spice just tastes like fresh-squeezed allergy juice from concentrate. Toward all this horror, the unkindest cut of all came in early June, when I happened upon a giant Starbucks pumpkin spice display at Giant Box Store, which totally floored me, what on Earth are you people even doing, and furthermore, I — oh forget it, I need to get back to the business of this literal award-winning column, and oh just great, look what I have to deal with first, a new album from Wicked actress Ariana Grande, titled petal (in lowercase, not that you’ll find it stylized like that in any other publication other than Nylon), I can hardly wait to hear her new rock ’n’ roll song, for the twerking children! Yikes, what a mess, the advance music on YouTube is a shambles, just 20 seconds of the title track, and then a song that’s also claimed to be “petal” but isn’t, it’s actually called “in the moment” (lowercased again because yadda yadda) and it is gentle and Wicked-y and cultural appropriation-y for all the twerking children, who never heard a Mariah Carey or Beyoncé song before, don’t you wonder what passive-aggressive diva fights Ariana had with Elphaba behind the scenes of Wicked, I’ll bet there are stories to be told!
• The subject of my next live-reaction will be Virginia rapper-singer Shaboozey, who won some Billboard Music Awards (I’d assume because someone paid for those “honors” but who knows, right?) and a Grammy for his collaboration with Jelly Roll on “Amen.” His forthcoming new album, The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales, is largely being ignored on Reddit groups like r/Popheads except for a handful of breathlessly enthusiastic, totally obvious bots, but we will take this album seriously, because it is a country-hip-hop concept album, with videos, in which Shaboozey totally rips off the vibe of Sinners shows off his signature move of channeling Johnny Cash and Lil Nas X. Fine with me, the teaser stuff has a DMX flavor to it, I’d never complain about that, it is gritty and mean, it might be a good album, someone let me know!

• Dum-dee-dum-dee doo, heaven help us all, what’s next, ah, it’s trans Latina experimental composer/DJ Arca with her ninth album in 12 years, XXXXX! Her last one, 2021’s Kick IIIII, was Aphex Twin-like, so maybe this one is decent too. OK maybe not, the song samples consist of stuttering robo-noises with nary an actual beat to be found among them, but it’s not my place to question anyone’s taste.

• We’ll wrap up this remarkably forgettable week with Austin, Texas, indie band Shearwater, which came into being when two of the guys from Okkervil River left the band to play even wimpier music. The New World, the band’s 20th album, includes the single “Daydream Unbeliever,” which actually gets kind of heavy after a Bela Fleck-ish opening bit. I hate the guy’s voice, but your mileage may vary.

Featured Photo: The Durutti Column, Renascent and David Occhipinti, Looking Glass.

Never going home?

The Odyssey takes you on a journey with its nearly three-hour run time

Step 1 with watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is to forget.

Like a lotus eater, forget stuff that came before — the barfy discourse around casting, what you think you remember from when you read (or skimmed or got someone to tell you the gist of) The Odyssey in school, what you think you remember about Greek myths in general (the movie explains whatever god or famous Greek-mythology human is at the core of a scene well enough for the purposes of watching the movie). And forget about the runtime, because yes, it’s long but the movie mostly uses those two hours and 50-some minutes pretty well and the pacing picks up right when it needs to. Also probably forget whatever your opinion is of Matt Damon, because the persona of Matt Damon is just going to get in the way of the performance the actor Matt Damon is giving. Ditto Anne Hathaway.

Just focus your viewing experience on the movie itself: the story of the nearly 20 years it takes Odysseus (Damon), king of Ithaca, to get back home to his wife, Penelope (Hathaway), and son Telemachus (Tom Holland), after having left for the Trojan War. We see different parts of this tale, from the beginning when Odysseus is explaining to Penelope why he has to participate in this sure-to-be quagmire-y endeavor and how much the war is going to suck, to the “guys in a horse” part to all the coming home stuff.

Though it’s not told linearly, the main action is roughly this: After 10 years, Agamemnon’s (Benny Safdie) dumb war is over and Odysseus decides instead of looting more from Troy and sailing straight back to Ithaca, they’ll pick up snacks along the way and “see a bit of the world,” a real “three-hour tour” plan that turns into a nearly decade-long trip. Along the way, Odysseus’ army and fleet of three ships meet a Cyclops (Bill Irwin); a witch named Circe (Samantha Morton); some sirens; some zombie soldiers; some armored giants and some supernaturally terrible weather. Each adventure takes a big bite out of the surviving number of Odysseus’s men and makes them both more desperate and less likely to ever reach their homes.

Meanwhile, back home, Penelope is trying to queen the country together but finds tensions high and civility fraying due in part to the many many suitors who have shown up at her castle to try to marry her. She has footed the bill for their years of feasting and drinking while they wait for her to decide to get married again. Telemachus suggests that he could be king, but Penelope points out that he can’t just say he’s the king, he needs everyone to buy in to the idea, which they aren’t right now without a definitive declaration of Odysseus’ death or proof that Telemachus is, essentially, grown up enough to hold the job.

That’s basically the action of the movie. The emotional “what it’s all about,” which becomes clearer as Odysseus works to remember, after years of living in a pleasant lotus buzz on an island with Calypso (Charlize Theron), who he is and what he needs to do, made me think of Nolan’s Oppenheimer. In some ways this movie feels like it is an expansion and examination of the philosophical question that ended that movie, with Oppenheimer worried that he had destroyed the world with the creation he spearheaded. When you’re stuck on a beach for 10 years trying to fight your way into a walled city or rushing to build a catastrophic weapon before a genocidal dictator can, you don’t always think about the long-term repercussions, if you are breaking something that can never be fixed, something that doesn’t just fight this fight but that, as Odyssesu puts it, wages war with civilization itself. That is Odysseus’ struggle, what he doesn’t know how to come back from.

This core struggle allows you to stay rooted in the story of this one family even when the movie brings in a massive cast of characters that range from a goddess (Zendaya) to the weaseliest of the suitors (Robert Pattinson). I never felt like I was getting lost in the spectacle of it all, though the spectacle of it all was mostly enjoyable to watch and I warmed to it over the course of the movie. The razzmatazz of angry Poseidon storms and huge armies on the march augments, not overwhelms, the human story.

The performances are all very good, even Hathaway’s, once I got over some “this is too thin for the Oscar nomination I’ll bet it earns” annoyance. And even Damon, once you let go of the fact that this guy just does not have a “king from antiquity” look or vibe about him, though I think that works for what the movie is trying to do. Everybody — every John Leguizamo and Lupita Nyong’o and Jon Bernthal body — adds a little something, pulls the overall narrative in an interesting little side direction. You could let that pull you out of the tale, but it could also put the story in its rightful place as something that is timeless, as in out-of-a-specific-time and more about the nature of humans than the historical events of the Bronze Age. This is not a history class; it’s a story, literal or metaphorical or somewhere in between, about a guy dealing with the world. And if you want to let your mind wander to the elements about our modern world that the movie seems to be commenting on, there are plenty of places where you can do that too.

(Extra credit; Before you see the movie, amp yourself up with The Odyssey: The Making of an Epic, a 22-minute docummercial on Peacock about the movie which delightfully nerds out about elements such as the on-location sets and the score.After, check out Vulture.com’s story “Christopher Nolan Explains the ‘Key’ to The Odyssey’s Ending,” in which they ask him more about the Oppenheimer-y nature of the movie — though when I thought about the Oppenheimer connection as I was leaving the movie, I didn’t particularly see it as a big reveal for either movie.)

I used Nolan’s The Odyssey as an excuse to check out The Return (streaming on Paramount+ and available for rent or purchase), a 2024 movie more tightly focused, as the title suggests, on Odysseus’ return to Ithaca. Here, broken down old man Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) is fished out of the water near Ithaca only to be tossed back by some of Penelope’s (Juliette Binoche) suitors, who say there’s already enough of them and they hope he’ll just drown. Instead, he washes up naked on the shore and is tended to by Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria), who explains how lousy things are on the island with remaining inhabitants at the mercy of the terrible suitors. They steal the livestock, they prey on the women and just generally they’re leading the island to ruin. Up at the castle, Odysseus’ son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) is trying to keep from getting killed by the suitors and is almost convinced that his mom should just marry Antinous (Marwan Kenzari), the maybe least-awful of the bunch. As with Tom Holland’s Telemachus, Plummer’s Telemachus, as the movie begins, does not quite have the gravitas to take the throne for himself.

The Return is all scorched earth, all people trying to figure out if they can claw their way back from despair and violence. But quietly, without the spectacle of The Odyssey, The Return does its grief and frustration slower and at a lower volume. Which isn’t always to the movie’s benefit in terms of keeping this from being a downbeat slog. But Fiennes gives a solid performance and highlights the emotional struggles of Odysseus.

And speaking of stuff we read (or were at least assigned) in school, I also gave a watch to the 2026 Hamlet, which had a theatrical release in spring and is now available for rent or purchase. This adaptation stars Riz Ahmed as Hamlet, Morfydd Clark as Ophelia, Timothy Spall as Polonius, Sheeba Chaddha (maybe the MVP for me here?) as Gertrude, Joe Alwyn as Laertes and Art Malik as Claudius. Here, Elsinore is the big company that has made Hamlet’s family rich in present-day London. This is a fun adaptation, if “fun adaptation” is a thing you can say about a play soaked in grief and that notoriously features the deaths of pretty much every major character. This isn’t the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet approach; it’s just a really solid retelling done in a way that, as with The Odyssey, highlights the timelessness of the story.

Riz Ahmed is fully believable as someone who is in the “still figuring it out” phase of his life and doesn’t quite have the maturity at first to know what to do with the information that his uncle was the one who killed his father before nearly immediately marrying his mother. Ahmed also does a good job of making the “whether tis nobler in the mind” of it all feel like natural dialogue and thought, especially for someone addled with grief and anger. Chaddha is equally skilled at delivering Gertrude’s lines in a way that suggests layers of meaning. Gertrude gives Hamlet a look when Claudius is explaining that they are getting married that seems to convey a whole backstory about what is happening and about what she hopes Hamlet understands.

Featured photo: The Odyssey.

Cleanup on Aisle Five, by Ann Larson

(Atria, 230 pages)

In 2021, Ann Larson published a first-person article in The New Republic, describing what it was like to work as a supermarket cashier — a challenging and low-paying job under usual circumstances, but even more so in the surreal early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Larson had gone to college in Utah and graduate school in New York, planning to work in academia before discovering how few opportunities were there. She’d helped found a group called the Debt Collective that lobbied for the abolishment of student loans. But as the pandemic hit, needing money and wanting to get out the house, Larson applied to work at a local supermarket she liked, thinking it might even be a kind of public service, under the circumstances.

It may well have been — we all needed groceries in 2020 — but the experience was grueling and dehumanizing, as Larson writes in Cleanup on Aisle Five, the nonfiction book that grew out of her essay in The New Republic.

Working long days and unpredictable schedules (sometimes she’d get home at 11 p.m. and have to be back at work at 7 the next morning), Larson writes that she turned into a “walking peanut butter sandwich” because “Being perpetually too tired to cook was one of the ironies of working at the supermarket.” Despite her struggles to complete the most complicated transactions, she was soon promoted to a supervisory role, which came with even more absurdly difficult tasks to master, and frequent opportunities for customers to take out their frustrations on Larson and her coworkers.

Their frustrations surely stemmed in part from the ubiquitousness of self-checkout stands, which have turned all of us into cashiers and made it seem like being a cashier is the easiest of jobs: scan, swipe and go.

But besides the human jobs lost to this convenience, self-checkouts come with a plethora of problems that all have to be solved by a human being (machines that refuse to print the receipt, for example) along with the myriad other unseen jobs that supermarket employees must perform. Larson describes her struggles to learn things such as resetting a broken sensor at a check-stand while angry customers verbally abuse her. (“Can someone come and help this idiot?” one man yelled as she worked to repair a machine.)

Frequently, the problems had been caused by the customers, as when they put cash into the slot marked for coupons.

Staffing is another headache that goes unseen by impatient customers; the supermarket employees call in sick for a variety of reasons (once, a worker confessed to Larson that she wasn’t sick but was too broken up by the loss of her dog to work for a few days), disrupting operations storewide, as others have to fill in. At one point, bathroom breaks have to be limited, and one worker vows to wear an adult diaper.

Larson describes a workplace where people are constantly interrupted from the work that they are doing to do other work: As one person said on an online forum, “Today, no fewer than ten shoppers asked for help while I was on the sales floor. I happily assisted them.” But when the worker returned to his regular job restocking products, he was criticized by a manager for taking too long for that primary work.

Customers can be problematic in other ways that make the lives of supermarket workers harder, as when they wait until they get to the front of the store to decide if they’re buying something, and then leave what they’ve decided not to buy — in supermarket parlance, “gobacks” — for someone else to put back. “Gobacks regenerated like bacterial spores. A worker could spend hours in the aisles and never get to the bottom of the cart,” Larson writes.

Larson weaves her day-to-day experiences, and those of her coworkers, with interesting stories of how the modern American supermarket came into being. Most people consider grocery shopping a chore, and yet the first store where shoppers “got to” pick out their groceries themselves — a store called Piggly Wiggly, in Memphis, in 1916 — was hailed as a boon for busy people, since they no longer had to wait for a store employee to gather their goods. “Every customer will be her own clerk,” one advertisement for the store said.

The Piggly Wiggly model became a trend, as we’re now seeing with self-checkout stands. These vignettes also include the story of a Massachusetts factory worker who designed the machine that gave us flat-bottomed paper bags, and the first robotic grocery store, an “endlessly glitchy” debacle called the Keedoozle, which started — and ended — in the 1940s.

Larson’s account is most sympathetic when she is talking about her coworkers, who labor in the same circumstances as she does without the hope of getting out of them by writing a book.

There is, for example, Whitney, who was making ends meet by selling plasma to supplement her income; George, the security guard who worked full-time but had never been able to save up enough money to take a vacation; a 52-year-old cashier who had been planning to celebrate her 20th wedding anniversary by driving to another state to buy lottery tickets, but then couldn’t afford the gas and so stayed home and worked in the garden instead.

Almost all seem one unexpected expense away from bankruptcy. One 25-year-old cashier needed a root canal and was in pain so bad she could only eat soft food, but she didn’t have dental insurance or the means to pay for the procedure herself, so she was on a waiting list at a local dental school where you could get treatment from students learning how to do procedures.

Some of the employees had come to the supermarket after burning out at Amazon; one person had worked in a warehouse and was required to box 90 items every minute. Not that this grocery store didn’t have quotas — at one point, cashiers were told they needed to scan at least 21 items per minute so that customers didn’t get impatient. They held a contest to encourage the cashiers to scan even faster: The winner would receive a $5 gift card to the deli.

Cleanup on Aisle Five challenges the assumption that checking out groceries is so easy that anyone can do it, and adds to a growing body of work about the indignities borne by unseen workers who make the lives of everyone else more liveable, for little pay. Simon Paré-Poupart’s new release Trash! A Garbageman’s Story does much the same.

These books may not belong on the same shelf as the working-class portraits offered by Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Harrington and George Orwell, as a blurb on the cover of Cleanup on Aisle Five says, but they offer voices often dismissed or ignored in the conversations about wealth and poverty, and I, for one, will never leave an unwanted item with a supermarket cashier again.

B

Featured Photo: Cleanup on Aisle Five, by Ann Larson

Album Reviews 26/07/23

New England Jazz Collaborative, Tributaries (Amherst College Press)

Well, that’s a scary little jumble of words, isn’t it, the “New England Jazz Collaborative?” It portends a listen that’s rendered somnambulistic and amateurish through the intervention of academic purists, but don’t let that fool you; far from being an uninteresting exercise for wonks, this set of six new works for jazz orchestra by four modern composers explores several different subgenres that make the record crackle with excitement and innovation. The lead single, “Ol’ Liminal,” combines Benny Goodman full-orchestra swing with noir-detective raunch — think the Peter Gunn theme — and then heads straight for Alpha Centauri, launching a fireworks display of hilariously cool melody. “Another Brighter Day” switches gears to bright, midnight-at-the-urban-mecca joy, with classical elements blending with straight Yellowjackets-style progressive steez. This is a composer-driven collective and it shows; in interviews the sound designers indicate that they can hardly believe their luck in being involved with such an overabundance of talented players. This is one you absolutely do not want to miss. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Sharon Katz & The Peace Train, Desert Air (self-released)

While it’s still summer and you’re in the mood to sway in the beach breeze to musical trifles, this outfit will be performing July 27 through July 31 at The Power of Music Conference at Star Island (one of the Isles of Shoals, 7 miles off the coast of Rye, N.H.). A white guitarist, singer and musical therapist, Katz is from South Africa’s now-renamed Nelson Mandela Bay and has always been something of a missionary; as a teenager during the apartheid era she’d sneak out to the “Blacks only” townships by hiding under blankets in the back seat of her friend’s car, which eventually led to her forming the country’s seminal 500-voice multiracial/multicultural band and youth choir in 1992, performing at all of Mandela’s special events after his election. The music on this record is carefree, absolutely no-contact and no-stress, reminiscent of Sade in some ways and Maryanne Faithfull in others, but altogether twice as gentle, so if you’re attending that event, leave the glow sticks at home. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Look out below and whatnot, new albums are getting airdropped onto our heads this Friday, July 24, I give up, waitwhat, the summer’s already half over, I may as well try to find my Ren & Stimpy chullo hat and noisy swishy snow pants in my nonsense-filled closet, unless Petunia threw them out because smelly, why am I living in the insane Siberian wilderness of New Hampshire again? But whatever, as long as it’s still summer, it’s actually warm in the permafrosted nation of Canada, which we can thank for all their wildfires, which turned our lovely New Hampshire skies the same color of sickly yellow as the planet Venus, remember when the Russians sent a probe there and it melted within 10 minutes, accomplishing nothing more than sending back photos of molten rocks and a barf-yellow sky? But I digress because whatever, one of Canada’s greatest exports is of course Shania Twain, the criminally gorgeous woman with the singularly mediocre voice who was the ’90s girl-AOR version of Adele, when Western civilization was almost palatable and single 30-something women hadn’t yet abandoned all hope that men would ever understand anything that wasn’t cryptocurrency, sports or Roblox. Come on, you remember, she gave us such hits as “You’re Still The One” and “Man I Feel Like a Woman” and people had normal jobs instead of driving an Uber 96 hours a week for Jeff Bezos or whatever’s even going on now? Well, she’s back again, with an album titled Little Miss Twain, ready to lip-sync something from it on the Today show for the entertainment of the five remaining nursing homes in Idaho that still have it on the teevee, let’s go find something from this album and talk about it and drink heavily, not necessarily in that order! How do you like that, she’s gone in an even more country music direction this album, despite the fact that she grew up in the blue-collar high-unemployment-cursed city of Windsor, Ontario, but whatever, the first single from this album is the title track, which features country legend Tanya Tucker, a much better singer than Shania, but then again who isn’t, wait, I get it, there’s a line in this sleepy country ballad where the ladies sing “according to my mother I’m the next Tanya Tucker,” I see what they did there. I don’t know, you might like this song if you have ducks and chickens living on your property, let’s move on.

• Yay, if you can’t deal with Shania’s classy je nes sais quoi, you can always just settle for London rave queen Charli xcx’s occasional twerking, which at least she doesn’t overdo, because come on already, it’s 2026. Her new LP Music Fashion Film features the single “Rock Music,” which is actually neat if you like four-chord electro-punk (who doesn’t?) and can stomach a little AutoTune (it’s acceptable in this case).

• It’s never been cool to slag off New York City indie-rockers The Strokes as a sucky band, but only because they usually aren’t. Their forthcoming seventh album is called Reality Awaits; it starts with the tune “Psycho Sh-t,” which consists of equal parts New Order and Yo La Tengo, it works nicely enough, same as always.

• We’ll wrap things up with now-73-year-old Robyn Hitchcock, whom you might remember from his biggest tune, 1988’s “Balloon Man,” you remember, the video was a stop-motion thing with a can of baked beans and some fruit and it sounded like The Monkees, OK, just forget it, no one knows that song, his new album The Confuser has a single, “My Dead Astronaut,” that’s kind of a joke song, it’s stupid, but he’ll be speaking and signing books in Boston at Porter Square Books on July 27.

Featured Photo: New England Jazz Collaborative, Tributaries and Sharon Katz & The Peace Train, Desert Air

Catching up with Kara

Checking in on Supergirl and other sisterly stories

Superman is compelled to protect Earth and do good. Supergirl would like to stay out of it and get her buzz on.

Supergirl(PG-13, in theaters) builds on Milly Alcock’s cameo at the end of last year’s Superman (streaming on Prime Video and HBO Max and available for purchase or rent). After partying on planets whose red sun doesn’t prevent her from getting a little tipsy the way Earth’s yellow sun does, Alcock’s Kara Zor-El came back to her cousin Superman/Clark/Kal-El’s (David Corenswet) Fortress of Solitude to pick up her energetic good boy dog Krypto.

While Clark lives in Metropolis, fighting bad guys and, as Kara says, seeing the best in everyone, Kara just sort of dirtbags around in her RV-esque spaceship, partying on dirtbag-y planets and keeping company primarily with Krypto. She is not looking to save the day — but she can’t quite just live with bullying either. When 13-ish-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley) shows up at the bar where Kara is slumming it, Kara seems compelled to fight the patron who tries to steal Ruthye’s sword. Impressed with Kara’s fighting skills even in her low-power red-sun state, Ruthye tries to get Kara to join her on her quest to find and kill Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), the girl-trafficking villain who killed Ruthye’s family. Kara is all “no thanks, kid” but then Krem and his ruffians steal Kara’s ship, in the process poisoning Krypto. A healer tells Kara that she has three days to get the antidote from Krem or Krypto will die. She still isn’t interested in helping a little girl do revenge but now Kara has no choice but to search for Krem, and Ruthye tags along.

Somewhere along the way, they run into and then keep running into Lobo (Jason Momoa), a bounty hunter with some super strength and costuming that suggests off-brand KISS.

Jason Momoa here is a bit like the cinematic equivalent of what happens when you get a bottle of hot honey — it’s such a fun flavor pick-me-up that you just start randomly putting it on things. It’s not unpleasant, per se, but it doesn’t always feel necessary. Jason Momoa knows how to be in this kind of movie and has good enough chemistry with Alcock but, like, I’m not sure why we’re drizzling him on everything.

Kara’s relationship with Ruthye is nice — big sister-y at times with Kara genuinely interested in keeping young Ruthye from sliding into the same grief and loneliness pit that she has been living in since she left behind the people of Krypton. The flashbacks explain how Kara has a working memory of Krypton culture and her father Zor-El (David Krumholtz), brother of Superman’s dad Jor-El, and yet is younger than Superman. It’s all basically fine, as exposition goes. More than we get from the brief glimpse at Krypton via the Superman parents’ video message in Superman, not quite the dazzling world building that you might want for someone so tied to that part of her life.

I think this movie wants — while still being in the 2025 Superman universe, with cartoony bad guys and Superman’s grounded earnestness — to be about the same sense of hope but from shadows. Kara hasn’t had Clark’s Kansas upbringing, she doesn’t have a found family. She feels alone and adrift in a universe that is mostly crappy, full of pirates and ruined worlds and individuals picking on the weak. Caring, for her, is a road to more grief. But, as her mother told her, she may be tough and not always nice but she is inherently good. So how do you be good in a crappy world? It’s not the shock of “this is different” that I think gave Superman its sparkle but Supergirl is full of interesting ideas, with more smart or funny or thoughtful moments than weak ones. I liked it more than I didn’t and — especially with its under-two-hour run time — had fun without too much checking my watch.

Another movie with a female duo at its otherwise tonally wildly different center is Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (R, streaming on Hulu and available for purchase). Picking up pretty much exactly where 2019’s Ready or Not ended, this gooshy dark-comedy horror starts with bride Grace (Samara Weaving) smoking on the steps of her in-laws’ in-flames mansion, having survived/killed her way out of a Satan-mandated game of hide and seek on her wedding night. She is taken to the hospital, where she wakes up to find herself handcuffed to a gurney — a lot of people died, after all — and trying to explain the situation she’s in to her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), who is still her emergency contact. Before Grace can do much recuperating or explaining, someone shows up to try to kill her and she learns what we already know, which is that the previous night’s game has leveled up. The death of her in-laws has left a hole in Mr. Le Bail’s, aka the Devil, High Council. As Satan’s lawyer (Elijah Wood) explains, now the remaining High Council families will hunt Grace until sunrise with the family that dispatches her getting to sit at the head of the High Council and basically rule the world. The local family hosting the hunt is the Danforth family, represented by twins Titus (Shawn Hatosy) and Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar, who wonderfully understands the assignment). Thus a new group of rich wieners attempt to kill Grace and, because she’s there, Faith, while Grace, outfitted once again in her blood-soaked wedding dress, attempts to fight them off. Fight them off and not get too much goo on herself when the council members explode for having broken a rule, which seems to happen a lot.

This movie, like its predecessor (which is also on Hulu, if you’re looking for a double feature), is giddy and goofy and a real good time. The addition of a sister, and thus a team member, for Grace adds a nice element. The sisters have spikey chemistry but Grace still feels responsible for Faith even if Faith is still nursing her hurt at Grace’s long ago disappearance. Weaving and Newton are also both just well suited for these kinds of characters. They are being chased and threatened and they are scared but they’re not victims.

The sister relationship is the most interesting part of Voicemails for Isabelle, a June-release Netflix rom-com movie. Jill (Zoey Deutch) is trying to figure out who she is and what to do with the rest of her life since the death of her sister Isabelle (Ciara Bravo) from cystic fibrosis. Because of Isabelle’s long history of being in hospitals and, as Jill describes it, stuck at home, their sisterhood was particularly central to their lives. Even when Jill moved out to San Francisco from their hometown of Austin to pursue her career dreams of being a baker, Jill and Isabelle constantly checked in with each other, something Jill continues even after Isabelle has died, listening to Izzy’s old voicemails and leaving new messages at Izzy’s phone number. What Jill doesn’t know is that Wes (Nick Robinson), a real estate broker or something in Austin, has inherited Izzy’s number and is getting Jill’s messages. He’s charmed by Jill and starts to follow aspects of her life like it’s his new soap opera. He hears about her difficulties with her pretentious “yes chef” boss Chef Bastien (Nick Offerman, having great fun) and her attempts at dating. And when he gets a chance, he heads to San Francisco to meet her.

The boy-meets-girl of this movie is very Amazon Essentials Rom Com. It hits all the beats but nothing about the Jill-Wes relationship is particularly exciting or memorable. Jill’s relationship with her sister on the other hand is a nice look at close sisterly bonds (a relationship somewhat mirrored in relationships Wes has with found-family-type people he calls cousins) and how the loss of someone so close is not only the cause of great grief but can change how the remaining person thinks about her whole self. Jill finding her way back to her life, and deciding if the chef-y nonsense of Bastian’s kitchen is as important to her as it once would have been, is watchable, made more-so by Deutch, who is pretty good at adding a little something extra to light lifts like this.

The sisters at the core of Netflix’s recently released Little House on the Prairie series also have a compelling relationship, though one that seems to be more built on struggling with their forced proximity than embracing it. (The eight-episode first season of the show, released in early July, has already won a second season.) Laura Ingalls (Alice Halsey) and her older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) have been dragged to the Kansas prairie by their father, Charles (Luke Bracey), in search of new opportunities and open land. That the land is open to settlement is news to the Osage, still hoping to prevent the settlers (and the federal government that would enforce those settlers’ claims) from taking their land. The tension between the newcomers and the land’s inhabitants is one of the interesting points of friction in this new adaptation of the classic novels. Unlike the saintly parents of the 1970s TV show, Charles and his wife Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) here start the show at a mom-and-dad-are-fighting simmer. Caroline seems to be all in on Charles’ plan for the family — or at least 70 percent in — but this big move to the new place with no extended family or community amenities (no church, no school, no post office for the first episode) is terrifying to her, as are the wolves that roam the area, the assorted drifter types and, at first, her Osage neighbors, whose claim on the land Caroline doesn’t know about. We see the Osage side of the tensions from neighbors White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk) and William Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother), whose daughter Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts) becomes fast besties with Laura.

Around the edges, the show also touches on the Civil War and its effects on the men who fought in it and, ever so lightly, on issues of race. We also get more of the frustrations of the female characters about the special restrictions and hardships of places like this for women. Caroline has to put up with a snotty neighbor, Jemma James (Mary Holland, a first-rank “hey it’s that guy” who needs to be in more things), if she wants any female friendship at all. Or at least, she does until she makes better friends with the significantly cooler Emily Henderson (Barrett Doss), the Black owner of the town’s general store, and Lacey Aubert (Rebecca Amzallag), the pants-wearing French lady whose relationship with Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie) is always discussed with raised eyebrows.

I like how show tells the story of Laura and her family with a sympathetic eye to them, particularly to the curious, open-hearted, school-averse Laura, while still being realistic about the injustice-filled situation they’ve rather naively wedged themselves into.

In tone, the show reminded me of the bits I’ve seen of Anne with an E, the Anne of Green Gables adaption from the late 2010s whose three seasons are still available on Netflix. (Little House inspired me to watch or possibly rewatch a few episodes.) There, like here, we get the familiar story but more rooted in the history of the time and reality of the characters. Amybeth McNulty’s Anne is a plucky story-teller with a big imagination but she’s also suffering from the effects of abuse she suffered as the ill-used, unpaid servant to several large families. That show, like the new Little House, isn’t quite a gritty update, it’s more a reconsideration that has you thinking about what the familiar story beats (tweenage orphan or family on the prairie) would actually mean and feel like. The Little House adaptation does have a bit more heft (both in its story and in the strength of its performances) and it seems to be working with a bigger budget, with that money well spent when it comes to setting and overall production.

If you’re looking for more sister-ish relationships on TV, check out the recently canceled Ponies(on Peacock) while it’s still accessible. Even though news came out in June that it would not get a second season, the one-season, eight-episode show, which came out back in January, tells a good, relatively complete story and is worth watching. Mother of Dragons Emilia Clarke plays Bea and Haley Lu Richardson is Twila, both women living with their husbands at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late 1970s. They both learn that their CIA husbands have died on assignment and are offered the choice to work in Moscow as embassy secretaries while secretly working for the CIA in hopes of learning more about their husbands’ deaths. Bea has the advantage of being a somewhat native Russian speaker, having learned the language from her Jewish grandmother (Harriet Walter) who lived in the USSR before and during World War II. Twila is a wonderfully plucky, seemingly bumbling American whose mix of street smarts and smart smarts (and curly hair) gives her a somewhat Natasha Lyonne-in-Poker Face vibe. (Poker Face is also a delightful watch, also on Peacock and also, sadly, canceled. But even if the second season doesn’t quite reach the heights of the first season, I also recommend watching all 22 episodes while you can.)

I’m a sucker for some high-quality late 1970s production design and costuming, and this definitely has that as well as some Cold War trade craft and fun character beats, particularly in the growing friendship between Twila and Bea as they work together and separately on increasingly dangerous assignments.

Featured photo: Supergirl.

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