Category: Pop

Album Reviews 22/03/31

Various Artists, Black Lives: From Generation to Generation (Jammin’colorS Records)

The Belgium-based Jammin’colorS label is run by its chef/cook/bottle-washer, Stefany Calambert, whose husband, bassist Reggie Washington, helped out on the writing end in this collection of songs, which aims to present “Black music as a source of moral truth and potent weaponry against the scourge of racism.” The Belgian government directly contributed to the creation of this hefty double album, so Calambert was able to gather an amazingly diverse herd of artists that includes Oliver Lake, Marvin Sewell and a chorus line of others. It’s strikingly produced and deeply urban, all of it: Stephanie McKay’s playful, electric-piano-and-la-la-la driven “Phenomenon” checking off the ’80s-jazz-pop tick; Andy Milne & Unison’s dreamy, soprano-scatted “Togged To The Bricks”; Cheick Tidiane Seck’s tribal-rhythmic “Sanga Bo” adding some Fela Kuti texture; even some opera-diva high-wire stuff from Alicia Hall Moran, getting plenty of help from Washington and DJ Grazzhoppa (“Walk”). An honest, depthlessly immersive experience throughout; it may not solve anything but it sure does try. A

Graeme James, Seasons (Nettwerk Records)

In the busking space, you’ve got your golden-throated guys like Peter Bradley Adams, and you’ve got your po-faced Art Garfunkel types. This New Zealander would fall into the latter category, a serious balladeer who plays a million instruments in these smooth, sometimes mildly rocky tunes. Let’s see, here you’ll hear him play mandolin, double bass, fiddle, guitar, banjo and bass ukulele, among other things, a cornucopia of sound that’s equal to the task of supporting his voice, which is similarly all over the place, ranging from floaty Bon Iver to vanilla Sufjan Stevens to clear-throated sea shanty slinger to the aforementioned Garfunkel (“Death Defying Acts”). The song that’s so far received the most attention (including some love from Rolling Stone) from this album is a song about a terrifying adventure aboard an old ship (let’s all agree that humanity will never have enough of those), that being “The Voyage of the James Caird.” A-

PLAYLIST

• The next batch of new albums scheduled for release will get here on April 1, i.e. April Fools’ Day, which is, of course, most apropos, because this week we start with badly tattooed Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose new album, Unlimited Love, is first to be put into the Snark-O-Scope™ for a thorough and proper evaluation! But before we do that, let’s go over it again: I don’t like this band, and, um, well, I never really did. If the ’90s were the ’60s, RHCP would have been the Rolling Stones to Pearl Jam’s Beatles, if you’re down for some rather trite juxtaposition, and I have no idea how that happened, how RHCP got so popular. But people of all ages love ’em, they just love ’em. A couple years ago I was given a single pass for the RHCP show at TD Garden, and since it was snowing and it was only one pass and I don’t like RHCP to begin with, I gave it to a friend, who drove down from New Hampshire, through the snow, to see the show. He loved it, which I wouldn’t have, because I don’t like a single one of their songs, literally none. The only thing that pumps me up about the old ’Chili Peppers is being given this new opportunity to trash their funk-ska nonsense in public, and since I’m salivating at that prospect, I’ll toddle off to YouTube right now, to listen to the new song “Black Summer.” OK, the video starts with Anthony Howeveryouspellit dressed like the Karate Kid, and the song is mellow, with their usual drippy guitar sound (it would be so cool if they’d learn that their Peavey amplifiers actually have things like distortion knobs and stuff and thus don’t necessarily have to sound like the sort of 1-foot-tall amp that’s normally played at kids’ birthday parties, so lame!). Anyway, on the tune drags, with Anthony making rapper hand movements even though he doesn’t rap, and then there’s some psychedelic ’70s vibe that’s just annoying and then some Austin Powers 1960s-pop vibe that also just made me depressed. What does this all mean? Well, it means that a lot of people will like it, just to tick me off.

• In spite of their German-sounding name, Warmduscher is a British garage/post-punk band. Wikipedia says that a “Warmduscher” basically refers to someone who’s a wimp, like, at English “pubs,” the beer-gargling “punters” tease their “mates” with that term, in the hope that someone will start a huge bar fight that will need to be broken up by the “bobbies.” Any-whatever, the new album, At The Hot Spot, is on the way, in the “lorries” right now, headed to the “record shoppes,” where you can buy it with your shillings and tuppence, and it will feature a song called “Wild Flowers,” a stream-of-consciousness rant spoken by one of the “lads,” who “prattles” on and on about all the stuff he hates in everyday life. There’s a wah-wah pedal on the guitar, not that that sound will be coming back from the grave for widespread use anytime soon, or at least I hope.

• You have to admire a band whose cover art is inspired by those old Garbage Pail Kids stickers, so props are due for Toronto four-man power-pop band PUP, whose new LP The Unraveling Of Puptheband is on the way! The push track, “Robot Writes A Love Song,” is a pretty well-rounded amalgam of Weezer and Violent Femmes, if that sounds like something anyone out there would be the slightest bit interested in.

• Finally, let’s check in with Canadian singer Lights, and her new album PEP, with its single “Salt and Vinegar.” This is basically next-gen Taylor Swift bubble-pop, made tolerable by some nifty samples; it’s brainless but not hateful.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, by Bob Odenkirk

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, by Bob Odenkirk (Random House, 285 pages)

It’s hard to imagine now, but in its first season, the AMC drama Breaking Bad didn’t make much of a splash. In fact, when his agent first brought up a potential short-term gig playing a sleazy lawyer named Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk had not seen the show.

“I vaguely recalled the image on the billboards — a guy in his underwear in the desert?” He figured, “I would phone a friend, see if anyone had actually seen it,” Odenkirk writes in his new memoir.

Breaking Bad, of course, would go on to be a monster hit and make household names out of Odenkirk and several of his costars. And the show’s success eclipsed the work he’d been doing since he was in middle school. (“By age twenty, I’d been steadily pumping out the blithering idiocy for over a decade,” he writes.) What he wanted to do, what he’d always done, was make people laugh, and he had been (mostly) paying his bills by writing jokes and sketches, going from the famed comedy stages in Chicago to the set of Saturday Night Live.

Saul Goodman, of course, is in many ways a comical character, although he exists within a serious and often violent drama. So maybe Odenkirk’s transition from stand-up wasn’t as big a transition as, say, playing the butler in The Remains of The Day, but it’s surprising enough to sustain a 200-plus-page book, at least for Breaking Bad fans. Those who have no interest in the show or its spinoff would have a tougher time paying attention unless they are young people looking to get into comedy.

The book, of course, begins with a joke:

“How does one begin a book? … Dickens, Melville, Odenkirk — all have faced the same query, and only one has failed. Melville. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Talk about giving up.”

He goes on to riff about a childhood in Naperville, Illinois, that was most likely more painful than described. “A tale as old as time. Daddy issues. The end,” he jokes. Odenkirk was one of seven children in a Catholic family headed by a man with anger issues, so to speak. “Generally speaking, my dad was rough and too intense, and those were his good qualities. He was never around, and when he was, there was tension in the air.”

Odenkirk was relieved when his parents split up when he was 15; he says he shrugged when his father died when he was 22. His salvation was his brothers and sisters, encouraging teachers and, most importantly, discovering Monty Python, the British comedy troupe. Their comedy taught him that much of the world and many of its people were pretty awful “and you don’t have to respect these people, you can laugh at them.”

He mowed lawns in order to save enough money to buy a cassette recorder from Kmart (Google both of them, kids), on which he recorded comedy bits and interviews, but he couldn’t really envision doing comedy for a living until he was in college and had a chance encounter with Del Close, a legend in Chicago’s comedy scene. On impulse, Odenkirk asked if he could interview Close, “a gnarled, shaggy Sasquatch of a man,” and got two and a half hours of rambling memories, confessions, inspiration and advice. “All I can say is that it drew me in and shook me by the collar and screamed in my face, ‘YOU CAN DO THIS! THIS IS GONNA BE GREAT! I trembled in the presence of his galloping mind.”

From there, Odenkirk describes the ins and outs of his early career as a comedian and writer, including a trying time as a writer at SNL, which was then in its 13th season, working with people such as Al Franken and Chris Farley. It’s a revelatory in that he describes how what seems to be a dream job can actually wreck even someone with talent. (And it’s clear Odenkirk had talent — I am still laughing over a sketch he pitched about a cheap airline called “Greyhound Air” that doesn’t promise destinations but vague directions: “the plane is headed in a general direction … like towards New York.”)

It’s interesting that Breaking Bad doesn’t show up in the memoir in any real way until the ninth chapter, some 200 pages in. It shows how so many people in Hollywood can define a person by a single series or film, despite a robust body of work that precedes or follows it. And Breaking Bad, of course, gave birth to the prequel that Odenkirk is still immersed in: Better Call Saul, which he calls “the biggest break of my career by a fair margin.”

But here’s one of Odenkirk’s more interesting reveals: He initially said no to the role, because it was going to be shot in Albuquerque. He and his wife/manager had two kids, he was a school volunteer and a soccer coach, and a raft of other reasons, including that he felt he was famous and successful enough. “I am in this to entertain myself. Here’s how much fame I need: ‘just enough’ and no more.”

Maybe that’s the secret to Hollywood success: not really caring about it. Odenkirk concedes that his own success has in some ways been driven by luck. (He tells a young woman seeking advice, “You can’t make your own break.”) But it’s hard to look over Odenkirk’s life and not recall the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” With enough raw talent and a cheap tape recorder, it’s apparently enough to just want to entertain yourself.

B

Book Notes

The literary genre known as autofiction is a blending of fiction and autobiography, and not everyone accepts it as necessary. “It’s either memoir or fiction. There’s no such category as autofiction,” writing coach Brooke Warner argued in Publishers Weekly last year.

The industry begs to differ, as perhaps would authors of centuries past. Let’s just say Charles Dickens’ fiction likely would have been much different had he not grown up in his own bleak house.

The latest buzz in the realm of autofiction is Checkout 19 (Riverhead, 288 pages) by Claire-Louise Bennett, a novel published in the U.K. last year and released this month in the U.S.

It is, as much as I can tell from reading excerpts and reviews, a stream-of-consciousness novel about books and their effects on the narrator’s life. But the opening will draw in anyone who, like the narrator, would go to the public library as a child and emerge with a stack of books they could barely see over.

It’s better, Bennett’s narrator, says, to just pick one book, rather than to be distracted by the siren songs of 10 others all week: “[J]ust because we were allowed to take out six books eight books twelve books four books didn’t mean did it that we had to.”

That could be autofiction for many of us.

Meanwhile, one has to marvel at the timing of Vladimir: A Novel (Avid Reader Press, 256 pages) by Julia May Jonas, which was released a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has nothing to do with Putin, but surely benefits from people searching for books on Russia’s president. It’s about a New York college professor who develops an obsession with the titular Vladimir while her husband is under investigation for having untoward relationships with students.

Finally, Anne Tyler fans are rejoicing at this week’s release of her 24th novel, French Braid (Knopf, 256 pages), a multigenerational family story — set in Baltimore, of course.

Book Events

Author events

• AN EVENING TO REMEMBER: CONVERSATIONS WITH CONCORD-AREA AUTHORS Authors Margaret Porter, Virginia MacGregor (Nina Monroe), Paul Brogan and Mark Okrant, in conversation with NHPR’s Laura Knoy. Presented by The Duprey Companies. Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., April 6, 7:30 p.m. Free to attend. Visit ccanh.com.

• MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD Author presents The Great Circle. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 6 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BRANDON K. GAUTHIER Author presents Before Evil: Young Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Kim. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., April 27, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Album Reviews 22/03/24

Raveena, Asha’s Awakening (Warner Records)

Another Missy Elliott wannabe heard from, more or less, although this diva is more prone to tabling reggaeton and such than Ariana Grande-ish Disney-spazz when she’s in gyration mode. With regard to her reggaeton, her singing on “Rush” has the same fluttery fragility as The Jets’ “Crush on You,” if you remember that one, and “Secret” borders on same, but the beat there is more a general-purpose Shakira thing than anything else. “Mystery” is different, though, a rather straightforward R&B tune with a pretty remarkable amount of bubbly femininity. I wouldn’t want to be trapped in a car driving around with nothing but this album for a few hours, but it’s pleasant enough. And mind you, the LP revolves around a conceptual theme regarding an alien princess “who, through a fantastic journey across the centuries, learns about love and loss, healing and destruction.” So anyhow, that. The closest her tour will bring her to New Hampshire will be on June 15, at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass. A-

Dave Douglas, Secular Psalms (Greenleaf Music)

Quite the Da Vinci Code-tinged curveball here from jazz trumpeter Douglas, who was commissioned by the city of Gent, Belgium, to score music for the city’s 600th anniversary celebration of the creation of a 24-part polyptych (multi-paneled painting) titled “The Adoration Of The Mystic Lamb.” There’s an interesting backstory of course, revolving around the 2012 discovery that the altarpiece had been overpainted around AD 1550, and a couple of pieces are apparently missing, and such and so, all of which served to inspire Douglas and his sextet to work with such components as Latin Mass chanting, medieval folk songs and the work of composers of the period. As well, the band plays unconventional instruments such as a lute and a serpent (a huge, meandering ancestor of the tuba), which takes us to the first track, “Arrival,” a bizarre piece that evokes a William Peter Blatty fever dream. There’s relatively normal stuff as well, some readily accessible modern jazz and such, but chanting and such things do appear from time to time. Like its subject, a unique, rare artwork. A

PLAYLIST

• Onward we slog, my stouthearted ones, to March 25, when the new albums will magically appear in your Spotify, begging for just a little space in your non-existent attention span. Pitchfork will have to talk about these albums, as will YouTube’s resident clue-mosquito “musicologist” Anthony Fantano, a.k.a. “Needle Drop.” As always, in between making up nonsense words in an effort to overanalyze simple rock ’n’ roll songs, Fantana will make super-funny comments and perform two-second skits dressed up as a butler or Haystacks Calhoun or whomever he assumes will entertain his audience of 11-year-olds that day. And once he’s done confusing the young’ns, he’ll either toddle off to say something completely idiotic on some political podcast run by college freshmen who’ve never actually read any political books, or he’ll go shopping for more funny costumes in order to better entertain his fans, who apparently don’t have ears attached to their own heads, so there’s no way they can judge all that awful music for themselves. Needle Drop will definitely ignore the new Cowboy Junkies album, Songs Of The Recollection, because he is fake-edgy and only likes songs he could play his stupid bass to, but you know this album will be OK, because the ole Junkies have always made it a point to make a stop in New Hampshire when they tour, which is pretty cool of them. This year they’ll be at Portsmouth Music Hall on April 12, and the alternative country-folk veterans will surely play a few numbers from this new LP, a collection of cover tunes. There’s a boozy/pretty version of David Bowie’s “Five Years” on board; singer Margo Timmins sounds particularly Melissa Etheridge-ish on it.

• Speaking of Bowie, there’s a new album coming from British pop-punkers Placebo, who benefited greatly when Bowie took them on tour with him in 1996. It’s all well and good by me that they’ve had success; I suppose the world could always use a band that sounds like a weak version of Killers, but such analyses are beyond the scope of this newspaper article, as I’m supposed to discuss this new album, Never Let Me Go, and move on to the next thing. Fine, then, one of the tunes, “Surrounded By Spies,” has the same rhythm as “Cry Little Sister” from the soundtrack to The Lost Boys, like it’s music for dancing slowly and weirdly around a roaring campfire and making googly eyes at people, except the vocals sound like Pet Shop Boys. I have no idea what these guys think they’re even doing these days, but anyway, that.

• What else, what else, what else, oh look, it’s Toronto hardcore punk band F–ed Up, with a new album, called Do All Words Can Do. The title track really is old-school, which is cool, like, it’s really fast and crazed, and it sounds like it was recorded on a boombox and whatnot, but the only reason I even brought this up was that you bands out there really need to stop having swears in your names, because 99 times out of 100 you’ll be ignored by respectable newspapers like this one, because young children would accidentally read it and have questions. It just isn’t done, you see. If you’re looking for a way to make me listen to your music, I’d much rather that you brag about how awesome your band is instead of behaving like a 10-year-old, that’d be great. This has been a public service message; the more you know.

• Let’s wrap up the week with Australian all-girl indie-rock trio Camp Cope, whose new full-length, Running With The Hurricane, is heading your way in trucks right this minute! The title track is really good, evoking Florence & The Machine in a Woodstock frame of mind, you’ll like it, I promise.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

At the Sofaplex 22/03/17

The Adam Project (PG-13)

Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Garner.

This Netflix action-comedy also stars Zoe Saldaña, Catherine Keener and Mark Ruffalo.

Ryan Reynolds plays that one Ryan Reynolds character again in this movie about time travel, fathers and sons and digital de-aging. Adam Reed (Reynolds) is a pilot from 2050; Adam Reed (Walker Scobell) is also a present-day tween getting in fights at school and sparring with his mom, Ellie (Garner), due in part to his anger and grief over the death of his scientist dad (Ruffalo). When his mom goes out one night for a date, Adam ventures into the backyard to investigate strange sounds only to find a man bleeding in his late father’s workshed. The man knows where to find the first aid supplies, knows the special trick to closing the refrigerator and has the same scar on his chin as young Adam. The man also has the same “Deadpool but PG-13” speaking style as the kid so even if we didn’t know going in it was grown-up Adam, we’d know young Adam had just met his older self.

Neither Adam seems particularly delighted to be in their own company — younger Adam is excited that he gets ripped in the future but is annoyed older Adam won’t give him any information; older Adam meanwhile is embarrassed at having to re-experience his tween self and is annoyed that he’s landed in 2022 as he had meant to go to 2018. In this future where time travel is possible, Adam has ventured back in search of his wife, Laura (Saldana), who was lost (or was she?) during a time traveling mission.

How exactly time travel has affected the world is one of many things that’s sort of yada yada-ed here (generally, it’s not good, is what the movie tells us) along with pretty much everything about what 2050 is like and why Maya Sorian (Keener), Adam’s boss, is such a big noise in the future. Basically, she becomes another evil tech villain whose big accomplishment is becoming rich with destructive technology and follows the Adams into the past to protect her own personal future.

This is some extremely middling fare whose success as entertainment is wholly determined by how much you like that one Ryan Reynolds character. Reynolds is fine and he has a good rapport with the kid who is his younger self (who in turn is doing a pretty good Ryan Reynolds impersonation, really hitting all the beats of the Ryan Reynolds Chatty Insult TM). Sort of like the recent “Channing Tatum + dog” movie, the affability of the lead is fuel that runs this movie. But The Adam Project, while possessing of a more elaborate story than “man and dog road trip,” has less nuance to it. From the very shallow world-building to the third-best dad-rock music choices, The Adam Project feels like it was given about half the effort it needed. While Channing Tatum’s Dog was sort of enjoyably mediocre, The Adam Project feels more like something inoffensive to have on while you drift in and out of a nap. C+ Available on Netflix.

Lucy and Desi (PG)

If Being the Ricardos is too idiosyncratically Aaron Sorkin for you but you like Lucille Ball and/or television history, this documentary, directed by Amy Poehler, is a nice way to examine the working and personal relationship of the couple and their impact on television with all the men-explaining-comedy-to-women stuff stripped away. Here, largely narrated by interviews and tapes of Lucille and ex-husband Desi Arnaz talking about their life, you get a more straightforward look at their professional partnership, which, much like their friendship, outlasted their at times rocky marriage. Also adding commentary is Lucie Arnaz, their oldest child, as well as the children of some of their behind-the-scenes collaborators and women like Carol Burnett and Bette Midler talking about what Ball meant to them professionally. Without getting tabloidy, the movie has some interesting insights about the Ball-Arnaz marriage and the difficulty of building something big in their professional lives while also trying to keep their marriage together and the way work and family clashed. B+ Available on Amazon Prime.

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari (Crown, 345 pages)

The late Harvard professor B.F. Skinner became famous for animal experiments that he believed destroyed the idea of free will. Animals can be manipulated to perform an action by repeatedly offering them a reward until their behaviors become ingrained, similar to Pavlov’s salivating dog. Humans, being animals, are basically the same as pigeons in how we respond to rewards. So when we go to Instagram or Twitter looking for “likes,” we’re the equivalent of a Skinner’s pigeon extending its left wing and expecting a treat.

That’s one of the many unsettling images British writer Johann Hari puts forth in his blistering critique of what the digital world has wrought. Researchers have been watching our attention spans shrink over the past few decades and have theorized that this is occurring not only because of the processing speed of all the digital tools we use, but also because of sheer information overload.

The average worker spends about three minutes on a task before being distracted by something else, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s an incoming text or Slack message, a call from your boss or the siren call of TikTok. After we’re interrupted, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back into a state of deep focus. This isn’t only a problem in terms of our ability to accomplish the things on our to-do list, but has more profound implications than any individual’s stress.

When our ability to pay attention deteriorates, so does our ability to solve problems, Hari says. “Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them,” he writes. (Unrelated to the book, I’ve seen commentators remark lately that America’s involvement in Ukraine will only last as long as Twitter will continue to pay attention to what Russia is doing there.)

For Hari, the societal decline in focus became personal and urgent when he took his godson, a high-school dropout who was obsessed with screens, to visit Elvis Presley’s estate, Graceland. While this was supposed to be a trip of human connection, they were given iPads and earbuds to use while walking around. Hari watched as a couple got obsessed with looking at the images of Presley’s “Jungle Room” on the iPad — while they were standing in the Jungle Room. In a darkly funny moment, he told them, “There’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the Jungle Room.”

But Hari knew that, in different ways, he was as addicted to screens as the couple he chastised, and decided to spend three months in Provincetown without any form of connection to the internet. His experience there, however, is a fraction of Stolen Focus, which is built more on research than anecdote, and as such is a damning indictment of the attention economy, tech and what it’s doing to our brains. We can’t solve it by simply throwing away our phones; Hari identifies 12 forces — which include stress, poor diets, physical and mental exhaustion and a decline in long periods of reading — that are contributing to the problem.

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns,” Hari writes.

Unfortunately, a one-day or three-month digital detox does not solve the problem, even though Hari found that without the tyranny of his smartphone, he found time to write 93,000 words of a novel and to read three volumes of War and Peace. Indeed, former Google strategist James Williams later told him that a break from tech “is not the solution for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution.”

Hari doesn’t just read the work of people like Williams, Google engineer turned tech ethicist Tristan Harris, nutritionist Dale Pinnock and renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who died last year); he interviewed these men and others in person, and weaves their narratives into what ultimately is a manifesto for an “attention rebellion.”

The steps he outlines that can help may seem overly simple and ineffective, given the enormousness of the problem, but maybe that’s the point. If they were too daunting, we wouldn’t even try. Among the changes Hari has made in his own life: taking action (which he calls pre-commitment) to cut down on distractions before they can occur; taking periodic breaks from social media; building in unstructured “flow” time to let his mind wander and thus make creative connections; and being obsessive about getting enough sleep. He estimates that he’s improved his own focus by 15 to 20 percent, not a huge amount, but enough to make a difference in the quality of his life.

Stolen Focus is not a self-help book, not a cultural critique, but something even more important: an education. Read it, and you will be forced to evaluate the role of technology in your life, and that little bird on Twitter may forever look like one of B.F. Skinner’s pigeons; a reminder, in the immortal words of children’s book author Mo Willems: Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus. A

Book Notes

America’s shrinking attention span is a problem of such scale that it requires more than one book to address it. In addition to Johann Hari’s excellent Stolen Focus, reviewed this week, there are two other new books that provide variations on the theme:

In Peak Mind (HarperOne, 368 pages) Amishi Jha promises we can find our focus and “own our attention” in 12 minutes a day. (Seems a lot of pages for a 12-minute strategy, but OK.) And Bob Goff weighs in on the subject with Distracted (Thomas Nelson, 256 pages), in which he makes the case for living like a racehorse wearing blinders to focus on the most important stuff.

Otherwise, here are two new nonfiction books worth your attention:

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni is out with The Beauty of Dusk (Avid Reader Press, 320 pages), a reflection on how his life changed when he woke one morning with changed vision and fuzzy thinking, which he eventually found out was the result of a stroke he’d had during the night. The excerpts I’ve read so far are compelling.

For another look at lives suddenly changed, check out Amy Bloom’s In Love (Random House, 240 pages), which examines the fraught subject of medically assisted suicide — not when a person has a terminal diagnosis and six months or less to live, as allowed in some states in the U.S., but when the person still has a decent quality of life and a longer expected life span.

Bloom’s husband was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and wanted to die on his own terms, not the disease’s, so the couple sought the help of Dignitas, a nonprofit in Zurich that helps people arrange “accompanied suicide.” There is no happy ending here, but Bloom provides a thoughtful examination of a controversial issue.

Finally, in a novel described as a modern allegory in the vein of Animal Farm, Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (Viking, 416 pages) savages social media through the voices of animals living through a revolution in Zimbabwe. It’s getting great reviews, but at over 400 pages, you’ll need a good attention span to get through it. George Orwell needed only about a quarter of those pages to make his points in Animal Farm. Just sayin’.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

Album Reviews 22/03/17

Crowbar, Zero And Below (Mnrk Records)

’Twas only by accident that I ever discovered this New Orleans mud-metal band for myself in the first place, and for that, you’ll have to indulge a little inside baseball, apologies in advance. In 2005, around the second year I’d decided to moonlight as a music reviewer, Candlelight Records was sending me every CD they released. Those albums were never any good, and I was just about to swear off them, but I was trying to fill a column and ended up with Crowbar’s Lifesblood for the Downtrodden in my car. I couldn’t believe how awesome it was, Kirk Windstein’s ragged, uniquely badass voice and sludge riffage blasting into my face like a Frankenstein’s monster that had a personal gripe with me. You have to hear these guys to believe it, and the tradition continues here, in their 12th album, starting with “The Fear That Binds You,” a brand-flaunting exercise that sounds like early Mastodon covering Paranoid-era Black Sabbath. Windstein’s voice isn’t as insane-sounding as his “Slave No More” days, but that really shouldn’t stop you; if you’re a rivet-head who’s never heard these guys, your life is incomplete, trust me. A+

Birthday Massacre, Fascination (Metropolis Records)

This Canadian goth-techno band is still, at least to me, the gold standard for spooky 1980s ghost-pop. Some critic wrote that their 2007 full-length Walking With Strangers is the “Sgt. Pepper’s of Dark Wave,” and I’d have to agree; it’s still an unsurpassed mix of Missing Persons and Depeche Mode, the perfect dance tuneage for an ’80s-themed Halloween party. But notice I said it’s still “unsurpassed,” which is a bit of a run, there, because this crew should have surpassed it a long ago, and, well, they haven’t. The band tried some KMFDM stylings that fell flat; singer Chibi is no raging Lucia Cifarelli and should never have tried it on for size, but anyway, that brings us up to date, and to this album, which does start out on a cool-enough note with a sparkling rawk ballad in the title track. Definitely more of a pop edge than on the last few records, which is where they should be; it’s definitely their best since WWS, but all that means is WWS is still, you know, unsurpassed. A

PLAYLIST

• March 18 is our next all-purpose album release date, when you can wait outside the record store for the guy in the truck to dump out all the albums, where they will find homes in people’s cars, where the delicate CDs will eventually wind up getting Wendy’s mayonnaise spilled on them and thrown away, which is what you should do with most of those albums in the first place, use them as little single-serving plates for fast food. So that brings us to Georgia Gothic, the new album from Mattiel, a band from Atlanta that’s fronted by its namesake, Mattiel Brown, who sounds like a cross between Nico and Siouxsie Sioux, not that that means they’re forgiven for making such boring music. Take for example teaser single “Jeff Goldbum,” a tune that sounds like Garbage but without any hook whatsoever, just a medium-tempo Rolling Stones-ish groove that wanders around aimlessly looking for spare change on the street and then, finding none, ends as uneventfully as it began. Punchline to this bit is that the band played this dumb tune on Stephen Colbert’s late night TV show, which proves once and for all that Colbert needs to find some act-bookers who don’t take the first bribe some indie label (ATO Records in this case) extracts from their trenchcoat and slides over to them at the greasy coffee shop. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this would be awesome stuff if it were the first time I’d ever heard music played on an electric guitar, it’s all good, man.

• Midlake is a funny little indie-folkie-ish band from Denton, Texas, and they seem to be something of a big-hitter, an up-and-coming band on the AOR/yacht-rock scene! The band’s new LP, For The Sake Of Bethel Woods, is coming out in just a few hours and features the single “Bethel Woods,” a tune that’s sort of like if Guster had a baby with some sleepy-time 1980s AOR band like Bruce Hornsby, like there’s a sort-of-driving piano line and a hook meant for driving around in the rain looking for a 7-Eleven. It’s boring, in other words, but like I hinted, there’s money behind these guys, so the video for the tune features none other than Hollywood second banana Michael Pena, who’s just walking around the city looking kind of intense, and — wait a second, is that Trinity from The Matrix? Nope, it’s a younger Trinity, and now they’re in a church and there’s a wedding. No, wait, it’s a baptism. Nope, hold it, it’s a funeral, and now Michael Pena’s running around on the streets having memories of being a young boy or whatever. I’d rather peel potatoes for a month than ever have anything to do with this band again, honestly.

• Babeheaven is a pair of British girls who started their career as youngsters, and now no one seems to know what they are exactly. Run a search for the band’s name and you get “they’re R&B,” “they’re dream pop,” and of course Pitchfork’s “bedroom indie,” which does make sense I suppose. Whatever, blah blah blah, they’re “more mature” now, which means they have their own smartphone bills to deal with or something, I guess. The new LP Sink Into Me is kicked off by “Make Me Wanna,” which would have been a cool Portishead-ish chillout, but the tandem appearance of a crummy cheese-synth and none-too-smooth rapper Navy Blue had me bailing after about two minutes. Hard pass.

• We’ll close this out with Sonic Youth’s In/Out/In, which features unreleased tuneage from 2000 to 2010. Keeping in mind that the band peaked in 1983, I was naturally none too thrilled with “In And Out,” which comes off like a Tangerine Dream throwaway, but all the power to you if you’re a Sonic Youth completist; enjoy.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 216 pages)

In her new novel Pure Colour, Canadian Sheila Heti imagines a new Genesis, one in which God is not yet finished with the work of creation but is just taking a break, stepping back, critically looking at what he has so far produced. “This is the moment we are living in — the moment of God standing back,” Heti writes on the first page.

And that, my friends, is the last time that this novel makes sense.

From there, Heti hurtles into a book-length word salad that is at times poignant and insightful; other times, a baffling stream of consciousness. At its best, it’s an imaginative fable about love and loss, wrapped in a blistering social critique. At its worst, which happens too often, you wonder what (and how much) Heti was drinking when she wrote it. Such is speculative fiction.

We begin in a world that is “heating up in advance of its destruction” since God has decided the first draft wasn’t good enough and a new one is needed. Like any good manager, God needs feedback, so “God appears, splits, and manifests as three critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling creation in its arms.”

People are born from the eggs of these creatures (yes, even the bear produces eggs in this world), and take on the characteristics of their breeders. People born from fish eggs care most about the collective; people born of bird eggs care about things like beauty, meaning and order; people born from bear eggs care about a few other people: “They are deeply consumed with their own.”

Our protagonist, Mira, wished she was of bear lineage, but she, born of a bird, had the hollow bones and heart of an artist. We follow Mira around in her strange world, where she works at a store that sells expensive lamps. (This all occurs during an unspecified age before the internet, when people found jobs and housing from “little paper signs.” Mira goes to school at the prestigious American Academy of American Critics (which, in a wry twist, has international branches) where self-important students learn to “hone their insights” and to “develop a style of writing and thinking that could survive down through the ages, and at the same time penetrate their own generation so incisively.”

The school, it seems, could have been worth an entire cynical book, or at least a couple of chapters, but it is quickly dropped to explore a brief love relationship Mira has with an American orphan named — wait for it — Annie. Coincidence or something more? Hard to say. Then her father dies, and this strange little novel gets even stranger.

When Mira’s father dies, his essence seems to take over her body. For a while, the book turns into a meditation on grief, as Mira processes her loss. “She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.” She stopped caring about the business of living (though, frankly, it wasn’t like she was doing that much living before her father’s death). “It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store in all that sunshine. It was the dead who need to be held on to, so they would not slip away. Who would save the dead from oblivion, if not the living?”

Then, Mira has an experience in which she takes the form of a leaf — a leaf in which her father’s spirit also dwelled — and they have the sort of beautiful and cleansing Kafkaesque conversations you might have if you suddenly found yourself inside a leaf. Was she dead? It seems so for a while, then she comes out of the leaf and is back with orphan Annie for a while while musing about gods, plural, specifically gods who tired people out when they wanted to stop them from doing things. “The weariest people are being the most prevented. They are the most dangerous ones, who would change the world if they could.”

Eventually, Mira’s mind-boggling dialogue comes to a close, though we are not sure what, if anything, has been accomplished, either for Mira or for the long-suffering reader.

Still, Heti proves herself a shrewd critic of modern life, as in her observation about social media:

“There were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people. … Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see — a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.”

That said, it seems that the world would be better served if she just wrote columns of cultural criticism. Maybe we are bears, and she’s a bird, building thought nests that others can’t fully see. In Mira’s world, artists who created stories, books and movies were producing their own second drafts, better versions of God’s world, as if hoping to get his (or her) attention. For the sake of the next world, let’s hope God doesn’t option this book. C

Book Notes

One of the silver linings of the pandemic was the virtual author event.

When physical bookstores were shuttered, many took to having author readings and Q&As online, which enabled people in remote locations to participate. You couldn’t get a book signed this way or shake the author’s hand, but it was still a better way to “connect” with an author than reading an interview.

Author events have now returned live in many places, but there are some bookstores that are still enabling people to watch online. Others have posted past events on YouTube, such as Washington, D.C.,’s famous bookstore, Politics and Prose. A quick Google search may find a few videos of your favorite author that will make for a more enjoyable evening than watching NFL reruns.

Here are a couple coming up of note:

Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., will have a virtual event March 14 for How She Did It(Rodale, 336 pages), by Molly Huddle and Sara Slattery, who offer “stories, advice and secrets to success from 50 legendary distance runners.”

Mystery writer Simone St. James has a new novel, The Book of Cold Cases (Berkley, 352 pages), for which she’s doing a virtual event March 17 through the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona.

Novelist Lisa Scottoline doesn’t release What Happened to the Bennetts (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages) until March 29 but is already doing events. One virtual one will be through Friend and Fiction on Facebook Live on March 23.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk has a new book, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama (Random House, 304 pages), for which he’s doing both live and virtual events. He’s got a virtual event March 13 through Live Talks Los Angeles. It’ll cost you $40 to get admitted, but you also get actor Jack Black, for what that’s worth.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Album Reviews 22/03/10

Bye Bye Tsunami, Bye Bye Tsunami (Nefarious Industries Records)

You know, giving this Copenhagen-based noise-rock album any amount of love in this space makes me feel guilty that I haven’t done the same for the couple of weirdo bands who’ve been blowing up my email with demands that I stop “being all corporate and covering national bands,” mostly sent from (I think Boston-based) dada weirdos who’ve been emailing me gigabytes of nonsense that honestly isn’t any more unlistenable than this. And plus, a lot of those “national bands” have no support from their record labels. This one is a messy cacophony, some noise-punk grooves, some sax skronk, a few samples, some absolutely piercing feedback bursts, and so on. Recently been hit in the head with a 90 mph fastball? You might actually love this. C

Away, self:antiself (Boom Records)

Four-track EP from the Los Angeles-based beatmaker, whose biggest inspirations are professed to be Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, and Burial, a compelling trifecta of kickassage if I ever saw one. And kickoff song “Ritual” does possess all those aspects: some heavy electro riffage, a volley of glitch-dubstep and goth-sexytime vocals courtesy of Echos, whose soprano is a cross between Kesha and Evanescence’s Amy Lee. So the formula is inarguably good, but the result? Eh, not so much; it’s vibe more than anything else, something to have blaring in your ear when you’re 99 percent sure your sketchy significant other is cheating on you, that sort of thing. “Help Me” fares a lot worse, outright ripping off NIN’s “Closer” to such an extent that for the first 20 seconds you’ll think it’s a cover of that tune. “Ghostbox” is the winner here, possessed of a mellow-mode Imagine Dragons idea that translates even when the glitch gets a little thick. It’s OK overall. B

PLAYLIST

• March 11 is our next all-purpose album release date, and to help us celebrate the last few weeks of our yearly collective cracking in half Shining-style here in Antarctica, looky there, it’s three-chord pop-metal dunderhead Bryan Adams, with his new album So Happy It Hurts! No, I’m just joshing, he’s not a dunderhead, I really don’t mind Bryan Adams and his tidy, perfect little rock ’n’ roll songs; he’s actually a very good songwriter in my opinion. Remember when he did that three-chord hard rock ballad with Tina Turner? My favorite was when he did that tune “Bang The Drum” with Nelly Furtado at the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, man was she gorgeous, and he was so funny, dressed like a Blues Brother with that stupid skinny tie and off-the-rack suit, ha ha. Whatever, he had a bunch of catchy songs, and I didn’t hate him, which brings us to the here and now, when I’ll probably hate everything I’m about to listen to from this new album. Right, the title track is a sleepy, strummy bridal-shower-pop ballad that’s probably some old John Cougar song played backward, it’s lame and dumb, but “On The Road” is a lot better, because the guitars are heavier, I don’t really have anything bad to say about — wait, ha ha, you should hear it when he starts singing about “Gettin’ back on the road / is all I’ve ever known.” What a hapless fail, I’m telling you, your uncle who used to play in an AC/DC cover band could think of something cooler than this, honestly. Remember when I made fun of the last David Duchovny album because it was such dad rock? This record would get the same review if I had to review it, the exact same verbiage.

• Now that Marilyn Manson did so much stupid stuff that he got himself kicked off the Loma Vista Records roster, the company sincerely hopes that you’re in the mood to buy the new Ghost album, Impera, which will be out tomorrow! These guys are a veteran hard rock-ish/metal-ish band from Sweden, and they’re kind of weird. In the new single, “Call Me Little Sunshine,” they sound like a cross between ABBA and Whitesnake. Read that again: a cross between ABBA and Whitesnake. The tune wants to be a catchy, epic ballad but it just sort of flops around and looks at you dumbly, hoping that you’ll be interested in it, but then you go off to find a snack and forget you ever heard it; I know I already have.

• The Districts are a stripped-down, minimalist-ish indie band from Pennsylvania, composed of three guys who’ve known each other since high school. They’re up to five albums as of tomorrow, when their latest, Great American Painting, hits the Spotifys and whatever, so I checked out the new single “I Want to Feel It All” to see if there was anything to salvage out of it, and there was, if you like mall-pop with a lot of bloops and whatever. The tune doesn’t really go anywhere but it’s pleasant, as aimless music goes.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s business with an album from Rex Orange County, a disposable English hipster-pop dude whose real name is Alexander James O’Connor; his claim to fame is a “token skinny jeans dude” guest spot on Tyler, the Creator’s Grammy-nominated album Flower Boy. Anyone still paying attention, anyone at all? No? Well that’s fitting, because this fellow’s new album is called Who Cares, featuring the single “Keep It Up,” a tune about unironically puttering around on a little boat or something while pastel ponies dance around, I don’t even know. This dude wants to be Jose Gonzalez really badly but will just end up being forever known as “Whoever, you know, that one dude on that Tyler mixtape.”

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

At the Sofaplex 22/03/03

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (R)

Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher.

And by “rated R” I mean hard R, with people cut in half and Bellagio-in-Oceans 11-style fountains of blood. Very R.

I know I have seen some previous Chainsaws — could not even begin to tell you which ones or what happened in them — but the movie doesn’t seem to be some mid-arc entry into the franchise and feels more like it is going the route of the recent Halloween entries, with some connection to the 1970s original but easy enough to follow for new joiners.

Melody (Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore) are chefs and partners in a plan to colonize with hipsters a small, nearly desolate Texas town where every interaction with the locals seems vaguely hostile but at least the real estate is super cheap. Their plan is to open a restaurant, an art gallery owned by Dante’s fiancée, Ruth (Nell Hudson), and maybe even a comic book store owned by Lila (Fisher), Melody’s sister — you know, zhuzh up this deserted-during-the-Dust-Bowl looking town. Hey, cool, says Lila, but I’m still getting over my trauma from surviving a school shooting and this place is seven hours from my friends so, like, maybe not? But Melody and Dante have a busload of “investors” coming and so they are charging ahead with their plans, even when Melody gets into a spat with Richter (Moe Dunford), a contractor and mechanic who doesn’t enjoy being patronized by hipsters, and Dante is fed up with the woman (Alice Krige) who seems to be squatting in one of the buildings despite having been evicted by the bank weeks earlier. Also, she’s flying a Confederate flag outside her building, which he feels like will not be so great for business with the from-this-century young people he’s got coming to check the town out.

That woman claims she squared everything with the bank and has run that home, the town orphanage, for decades. There is one last person in her care — she calls him baby (Mark Burnham), I think — and he doesn’t do so well out in the world so they need to stay. We never get a good straight-on look at Baby; we mostly see his hulking person in shadow. But we, and Melody, get enough of a look at him to know that something bad will come of their removal, especially when it leads the woman to have some kind of medical emergency.

This movie is mostly a straightforward “run, stab, run, stab” affair (well, actually, it’s more like “run, bludgeon, run, hack, run, chainsaw”). And if you like that sort of thing, with the gore and the screaming, this would seem to deliver the basics. But it doesn’t really do more and, similar to those recent Halloween installments, for me it quickly gets kind of, well, boring seems like the wrong word but — tedious? Repetitive? Fast-forwardable?

The movie does have some funny moments, not laugh out loud but more like a “ha.” And maybe it has some messaging — anti-gentrification? pro-gun? — but I feel like it more has “ideas about ideas” than it has actual ideas. Maybe there is some sense that having more than just slashing and screaming brings in a bigger crowd but it doesn’t really put forth a lot of baked-in-the-story effort in that direction. Genre die-hards might have a different opinion, but for me, for the horror agnostic, it’s a C Available on Netflix.

The Royal Treatment (TV-PG)

Mena Massoud, Laura Marano.

You know Massoud from playing Aladdin in the Guy Ritchie live-action remake and Marano from, like, around (she’s a singer, she was on a Disney Channel show, she was in The War with Grandpa). Here, they are the couple from opposite worlds: he’s Prince Thomas from Lavania, a country with a vague “International Location” aesthetic, and she’s Izzy, a hairstylist and wannabe world traveler from New York. When a Siri mistake has his butler-type guy Walter (Cameron Rhodes) call her (instead of some similarly named chi-chi salon), Izzy is at first delighted to cut hair for about 10 times her normal rate. But when she witnesses Thomas’ handler, Madame Fabre (Sonia Gray), being rude to a hotel staffer, she takes Thomas to task for not intervening on the staffer’s behalf. He apparently likes this check on his privilege because he eventually hires Izzy and two of her fellow stylists to come to Lavania to do hair and makeup for his forthcoming wedding to Lauren (Phoenix Connolly), a woman he barely knows but whom his parents are really keen for him to marry because her parents “own half of Texas.”

Though it’s been decades since I’ve seen it, this light and friendly rom-com called to mind The Beautician and the Beast (and also the TV show The Nanny, both Fran Drescher vehicles) with notes of The Princess Diaries (there is a fun mention of Genovia) and your standard Cinderella story. Nobody is all that evil, no comeuppance is all that harsh, nobody is all that compelling, but they are all perfectly pleasant to spend time with if you just need a little cotton candy fairy tale. B- Available on Netflix.

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur (Simon & Schuster, 265 pages)

As television sitcoms go, The Good Place was rather remarkable. The NBC show, which premiered in 2016 and aired for four years, had all the typical goofiness of low-brow comedy but was based on high-brow ideas: What does it mean to be a good person? Why should we care? And, of all the prevailing philosophical schools of thought on the matter, which ones are true and most relevant today?

These are tough themes to take on in 30 minutes minus commercials, but Michael Schur succeeded in creating a star-making show that worked on both levels and managed to elevate relatively obscure philosophy books into the mainstream (most notably, retired Harvard professor T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other). Now Schur has written a book of his own, a summary of the ethical frameworks he studied when developing The Good Place. It is, in many ways, a sitcom of a book, as Schur applies a vaudevillian touch to topics rarely taken that lightly: among them, existentialism.

Parts have a slapstick quality that would quickly grow tiresome but for Schur’s true comic gifts and his willingness to question his own moral judgments, among them his struggle to reconcile his admiration of Woody Allen’s work with revelations of the filmmaker’s personal life.

The punchlines begin on the book’s cover, in which the title is hysterically imperfect; it leaves off the “t” in “perfect.” (The subtitle, “the correct answer to every moral question,” also reveals itself to be a joke, because Schur’s ultimate aim isn’t to answer all the big questions, but rather to give readers the framework for thinking about them, and in fact, to insist that we think about them.) They continue through the acknowledgments, in which Schur peppers his thanks to friends and colleagues with random facts. (Einstein used a $1,500 check as a bookmark, then lost the book; moose in the Western Yukon appear to have parties for each other.)

Along the way, Schur unpacks the thinking of the likes of Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, Maimonides, Aristotle, William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, all names with which any graduate of a U.S. high school should have at least a passing familiarity. He applies their ethical concepts to modern first-world dilemmas — Should I cheer for sports teams that have problematic names? Should I eat at Chick-Fil-A? Should I eat meat at all? — injecting personal anecdotes along the way, such as the angst he felt after spending $800 for a baseball bat autographed by Red Sox players as a Christmas gift for his son.

In another story, he reveals that his interest in ethics pre-dates The Good Place by at least a decade. In 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, Schur’s then fiance (now wife) had a fender bender that resulted in an $836 claim, despite the fact that the claimant’s bumper was barely scratched and the responding police officer said there was no damage. Schur was furious and offered to donate $836 to Katrina relief if the man would drop the claim and continue to live with the indignity of having a scratch on his bumper.

While the man was thinking it over, Schur took his outrage to the internet and raised $20,000 in pledges for Katrina relief if the bumper went unreplaced. “I had dreams of rescuing New Orleans all by myself, armed with nothing but a keyboard and a brilliant masterstroke of moral reasoning,” he wrote. “And then I started to feel sick.”

The “chirpings” of conscience began to nag at Schur and his fiance, and he started consulting ethics books and philosophy professors about why his actions felt wrong and what he should do. While he still believed that the other driver was wrong to insist on replacing a barely scratched bumper, he came to believe that he was also wrong to subject the man to public shaming even if an auxiliary outcome (Katrina relief) was good. This experience led Schur into the rabbit hole of ethics that resulted in The Good Place and ultimately this book.

In 2019, Schur was asked to write the introduction to the re-release of controversial ethicist Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, and he wrote of it, “More important than what you feel when you read this book is what you will not feel: complacency. You will not feel like other people don’t matter.”

The same can be said of Schur’s book, which may seem superficial (2,500 years of complex moral philosophy condensed into 265 pages — with jokes!) but in fact achieves the author’s aim: to get us to think consciously about the mass of decisions that comprise our days, and to consider the ideas that could help us choose more wisely. Not because we think this might get us to a “good place” — this is a secular book, as was the show — but because, as Harvard’s Scanlon said, this is something that we owe each other.

B+

Book Notes

Some people choose books to read because they like the author; others, because they like the premise of the book. But have you ever chosen a book based on something the author said?

That happened to me this week when I read an interview with Brendan Slocumb, the author of the new novel The Violin Conspiracy (Anchor, 352 pages). I’d seen the book mentioned before, but it didn’t catch my attention until I read in Publishers Weekly that Slocumb said, “I wanted to pull back the curtain and let everybody know this is how the sausage is made. Classical music is a very cutthroat profession, though it’s especially tough for people of color.”

Classical music a “very cutthroat profession”? Who knew? Suddenly I was interested. Slocumb, who lives in D.C., is a music educator and professional violinist who also founded a nonprofit and plays in a rock band. Yet he found the time to write a novel. Definitely worth checking out.

Other new releases of interest:

Fans of Charles Dickens will be interested in The Turning Point (Deckle Edge, 368 pages), nonfiction by Robert Douglas Fairhurst that examines how the events of one year — 1851 — changed and shaped the beloved novelist’s career.

Funny Farm (St. Martin’s Press, 256 pages) is Laura Zeleski’s memoir of “my unexpected life with 600 rescue animals” and the story of how she, a graphic designer with government contracts, fulfilled her dying mother’s dream of running a rescue.

Daniel Pink sorted through more than 15,000 self-reported regrets of people around the world and found something resembling redemption, chronicled in The Power of Regret (Riverhead, 256 pages). If nothing else, reading the regrets of others might make you feel better about your own.

And finally, this is not a new release, but worth checking out given recent world events: Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine (Anchor, 466 pages), which examines another heartbreaking part of Ukraine’s history, when Josef Stalin intentionally starved more than 3 million people in the region through sinister agricultural policies.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents new book Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents new book Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents new book The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents new book Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents new book The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

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