Pop – Page 52

Album Reviews 22/02/17

Neuro No Neuro, Faces & Fragments (Audiobulb Records)

Meanwhile on Neptune — or in Tucson, Arizona, same thing — electronic music tinkerer Kirk Markarian is still at it, making albums of gently demented noise for people who probably need a few drinks before they crack in half. I have too many big-time connections nowadays to ever have to go back to the days when I was the eclectic-music-blogging world’s central repository for albums made by kooks, but I’ve heard this guy’s name enough times to have grown curious to see what the fuss is about. And, well. These experiments are intended to “blurr the connections between vocabulary, memory, and day-to-day processes,” with tracks that illuminate “fragments of memory and speech, as they wander out of focus in the growing aperture of time.” It’s a littered beach of sound, this thing, gentle waves of synth coming in and out of focus while found sounds, snippets of human speech and random clanks drop out of nowhere. Not a party record, but, you know. B-

Hollan Holmes, Emerald Waters (Spotted Peccary Music)

Well, I’ll be darned, it looks like fate’s decided that both of this week’s album-review slots need to be occupied with similar products; let me explain. Right after I wrote the Neuro No Neuro review for this week, I emphatically deleted a thrash metal album download offer from my email, and literally the next thing that popped up was this record, which is indeed related: Where Neuro No Neuro does have an ocean-like ambiance to its weirdness — whether or not that was Markarian’s intent — this LP from Texas music-scaper Holmes is something far more geared to normies. Holmes, a Berlin School-influenced composer, is big into Tangerine Dream, and that’s what you get here, in a broad sense, but sans any goofy krautrock edge. The ocean-like feel (and if you don’t miss that this time of year there’s something wrong with you) is baked into this stuff, its main ingredient lazily sweeping synths that sometimes form into things that recall the progressive trance of Above & Beyond. Deeply agreeable, soul-soothing stuff here. A+

PLAYLIST

• Like it or not, new rock ’n’ roll albums will magically appear in your stores and streaming services on Feb. 18, right in the middle of the worst month of the worst part of the year, not that you should dislike any of those albums for that reason alone (the music will probably be nauseating enough, just sayin’). Our solar system’s sun is a big tease right now, chuckling and yelling “Neener” as it stays too far away from us to give us New Englanders any relief from our North Pole weather, but like I said, there are albums coming out, like Are You Haunted, the fourth full-length from Australian art-indie band Methyl Ethel! I nearly wrote them off as a weak imitation of Tame Impala the first time I heard their 2017 single “Ubu,” but the tune is possessed of an instrumental break that proves they weren’t put on earth just to annoy me, so I’ll proceed with caution in the hope that new single “Proof” is a slight improvement (I don’t know diddly about their third album, Triage, so they’ve had ample time to improve in my eyes). So, the song features vocals from successful-enough singer Stella Donnelly rambling prettily over a polite staccato laptop beat, and then — yup, there it is, a really cool little melodic tangent. Works for me. You know, I have to confess that I always feel a bit funny giving love to Australian bands even today; a lot of them are really good, but it seems to be really difficult for them to break big in America. I mean, they might as well be on Mars, all things considered, but those bands rarely disappoint.

• Hurray for the Riff Raff is the Americana-indie project owned and operated by New Orleans singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra. Her seventh album, Life On Earth, is here, daring to step forward to face my judgment and wrath, coming on the heels of her sleepy 2017 album The Navigator, which I’m pretty sure I tossed into the yard sale pile for its mostly unplugged Natalie Merchant verisimilitude — yes, that’s the one. Whatever, “Rhododendron” is the single, and it does have more of a pulse than I’ve felt from her earlier stuff, not that that’s a rock-solid recommendation, mind you. It’s Bonnaroo-hipster stuff but does have something of a punk edge (every time she sings the word “boys” she sounds like she’s describing rotten eggs, which is oh so novel and edgy). The video is pretty awful — where did they get all that bubblegum? — but I don’t know, maybe someone will get something out of it. I sure didn’t.

• OK, I know I’ve heard of Metronomy, let me go look. Ah, yes, they’re an “English electronic music group formed in 1999.” That didn’t help at all, but I know I’ve heard of them, and I’m too lazy to search my archive, so let’s pretend I liked them before, at the very least to have some more positive news in this week’s thingie. Their new album, Small World, is on the way, featuring the single “It’s So Good To Be Back,” comprising a blip-bloopy elevator-music beat and some happy-but-not-aggravating vocals. Jeez, so happy, but I’m not getting angry. What on Earth is happening to me?

• We’ll pull stakes on this week’s column with the new album from boy-girl indie duo Beach House, whose new album Once Twice Melody is probably a bunch of dream-pop songs, because that’s what Wikipedia says, they do dream-pop. My stomach will be able to tolerate that, I’m sure. Yes yes, it’s like My Bloody Valentine but not messy, like your grandmother probably wouldn’t mind this at all. It’s so polite and listenable that I’m starting to get a little mad, so before I start comparing this to 1960s Spanky And Our Gang records and getting jerkish, let’s end it here.

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 22/02/10

Flee (PG-13)

This animated documentary (nominated in for Oscars in the animated feature, documentary and international film categories) tells the tale of Amin Nawabi — not, according to a story in Variety, the man’s real name, even though I believe it is the real “Amin’s” voice that we hear in the movie and he has a co-writing credit along with the director, Jonas Poher Rasmussen (whose voice is also featured). Amin is the identity created to protect the man who is now happily married — to Kaspar, who I think we also hear (I’m not sure if that’s his real name, though I suspect it is his real voice) — and living in Denmark. Amin was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the story of how he and his family tried (occasionally failing) to escape the country when the Soviet occupation ended and the civil war began is the story Amin is telling Jonas, a little at a time, with increasing veracity the more Amin comes to trust Jonas.

Rendered mostly in a spare but beautiful color sketch-style of animation, Amin’s story follows his family as they flee — first to Russia and then attempting to go further west, perhaps to Sweden, where his adult oldest brother already lives. Along the way, the family’s legal situation grows ever more precarious — they only ever have tourist visas in Russia — and the weight of hiding and being at the mercy of unscrupulous traffickers and even more unscrupulous Russian police drags at all of the family members, particularly Amin’s close-in-age older brother Saif.

As Amin ages, he is also coming to a better understanding of himself and his sexuality. His struggles with his fears about how his family might receive this information and struggles with the balance between living the life that might do his family the most good (one largely dedicated to work) and one that makes him feel safe and happy.

Similar to Persepolis, the animation allows you to experience Amin’s story as though you are inside his mind, with images that focus on the emotions of a moment — fear, sorrow, loneliness, excitement. It’s an engrossing way to absorb this story, while occasional archival newsclips help to ground it in a past that feels particularly relevant to this moment in world history. A Available for rent or purchase.

Ice Age: The Adventures of Buck Wild (PG)

Simon Pegg, Justina Machado.

In the grand tradition of TV series adaptations of movies starring none of the original characters and direct-to-video sequels featuring sound-alike (maybe) voices, Ice Age, the previously five-movie animated franchise, gets a sixth movie sidequel thing that is direct to streaming.

Gone are your Ray Romano and Queen Latifah and parade of big name vocal talent (except for Pegg, who voices Buck, the crazy weasel, as he apparently did in previous movies, so Wikipedia explains, which I consulted because this Ice Age saga is basically an All My Children-like web of characters, relationships and story points). Instead, Manny (voice of Sean Kenin) the mammoth, Sid (voice of Jake Green) the sloth and Diego (voice of Skyler Stone) the saber-tooth tiger are voiced by people doing a facsimile of Romano, John Leguizamo and Denis Leary, respectively. Latifah’s Ellie (now voiced by Dominique Jennings), a female mammoth who showed up in the second movie and is now Manny’s wife, and her adopted possum brothers Eddie (Aaron Harris) and Crash (Vincent Tong) are also voiced by new actors. And several characters — Sid’s grandma voiced by Wanda Sykes, Manny and Ellie’s daughter Peaches, and a Jennifer Lopez-voiced love interest for Diego — have been lopped off entirely. Which, whatever; in my review of the last movie “way too many characters” was one of my criticisms.

The main characters are sort of shunted to the side here, with the story focusing on Eddie and Crash, who are chafing under the constant sisterly bossing by Ellie and want to strike out on their own. They end up wandering back to the Lost World, the dinosaur-filled valley beneath the Earth’s surface where the characters spent some time in a previous movie, and meet up once again with Buck Wild (Pegg), the off-kilter one-eyed adventurer who enforces a “land for all animals” peace. The boys decide to hang with Buck and help him on his current adventure: stopping a big-brained dino named Orson (voice of Utkarsh Ambudkar) from upsetting the dino-mammal coexistence in the Lost World.

I don’t fault this movie for not getting back its big money players or for moving the action — set in some vague part of the franchise timeline — to some side characters. I do fault it for not being weird enough about the whole thing. Let Buck, who has a pumpkin he calls his daughter, be weirder; let Crash and Eddie be zanier. At its best, Ice Age was never great, but it had some nice Looney Tunes elements in Scrat, the saber-tooth squirrel always thisclose to getting his acorn, and in the dopey wise-guy nature of Sid. Here, everything feels muffled, like the volume has been turned down on all the wacky and goofy — even Buck feels flatter. This movie, which doesn’t even hit the 90-minute mark and is clearly being delivered as Disney+ filler, doesn’t need a super strong emotional arc but it does need to be constantly appealing to its young audience. It didn’t feel like it consistently had that big energy. One of my younger elementary schoolers proclaimed it “boring” by about 10 minutes in, though later he did decide it was “kinda cool.”

Similar to what I said in my recent review of the fourth Hotel Transylvania installment, I think this movie’s principal selling point is that it is available in your home right now for no extra cost. This movie is probably even more younger-kid-audience-friendly than that one as it has fewer adult-type problems. It is, for a day when your kids just need new content and you just need them to settle down for a bit, fine but doesn’t offer anything more. C Available on Disney+.

Oscar movie season!

Welcome to the new class of Oscar nominees! The nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards were announced on Feb. 8 and this year there are 10 contenders for best picture (the Oscar winners will be announced on March 27). If you’re still looking to catch up on the films of 2021, the list of nominees is an excellent place to start. Here are the best picture nominees and where to find them:

• Belfast (PG-13) Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed this semi-autobiographical tale of a boyhood amid the unrest of Northern Ireland in the 1960s. It is available for rent at home and it is still in theaters, including Red River Theatres in Concord, where it returns starting Friday, Feb. 11.

• CODA (PG-13) This excellent story about a teen who discovers her singing talent and her changing relationship with her parents might be my favorite of this group. It is available on Apple TV+.

• Don’t Look Up (R) Adam McKay directed and wrote the screenplay for this satire, which you can find on Netflix, that stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.

• Drive My Car (NR) This Japanese film also nabbed a Best International Film nomination as well as nominations in other categories and is the one movie of this group I haven’t seen yet. It is currently in theaters in the Boston area.

• Dune (PG-13) Not surprisingly, this beautiful-to-look-at adaptation also nabbed several nominations for the look and sound of the film. It is currently available for rent or purchase and will return to HBO Max on March 10.

• King Richard (PG-13) Will Smith also got a Best Actor in a Lead Role nod for this movie about Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams. The movie is available for purchase.

• Licorice Pizza (R) For me, the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s was this real star of this Paul Thomas Anderson story about a precocious 15-year-old and the twentysomething girl he falls for. The movie is currently in theaters.

• Nightmare Alley (R) This movie from director Guillermo del Toro was another one that wowed me more for its aesthetics. It is currently playing in theaters in the Boston area and available via HBO Max.

• The Power of the Dog (R) This Jane Campion-directed movie nabbed a slew of nominations, including nods in three acting categories and for Campion in the director category (making her the only woman nominated in that category this year). Find it on Netflix.

• West Side Story (PG-13) Steven Spielberg’s very good adaptation of the musical got Ariana DeBose a much deserved nomination in the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category for Anita, among its many nominations. It is currently in theaters.

This Will Be Funny Later, by Jenny Pentland

This Will Be Funny Later, by Jenny Pentland (Harper, 341 pages)

You may not have heard of Jenny Pentland, but you’ve probably heard of her mother, an actress and comedian by the name of Roseanne Barr. Barr was the star of the eponymous sitcom that aired on ABC for nine years in the ’80s and ’90s, and I have to confess before we start that I’m not sure I ever watched an episode in its entirety.

As such, I’m not much impressed by the fact that Pentland and her siblings — indeed, her entire family — were the models for the messy TV family known to Americans as the Conners. (In addition to Barr, the show made John Goodman, her TV husband, a household name.)

Truth be told, I’m not much impressed by anything that comes out of Hollywood lately.

That said, Pentland has emerged from relative obscurity to write a surprisingly interesting book that doesn’t demand binge-watching Roseanne as a prerequisite.

It is intelligent and scathing, indicting and forgiving, bitter and loving, a large dose of acid with just the right amount of sweet. Pentland’s childhood was, in effect, kind of horrible by all objective standards, meaning the standards of Child Protective Services — and that was before her mom became famous. “Aside from being half-naked and feral, we were also being raised part atheist, part Jewish and part Wiccan, with a touch of paganism and voodoo thrown in.” For years, the family struggled, graduating from trailers to an apartment to a 500-square-foot bungalow. “We may have been climbing the ladder, but we were still on the lower rungs,” she writes. “We could afford name-brand foods now, but we couldn’t afford to spill them. We still had to make our frivolous purchases, like toys, from other people’s lawns.”

Her dad was a trash collector before he became a mail sorter; her mother struggled to assimilate her creative ambitions with the day-to-day drudgery of having three young children in diapers. Meanwhile, Pentland herself showed signs of a comedic streak even as a child: Her growing collection of dolls, some scavenged by her father from other people’s trash, always had something wrong with them, so she took to diagnosing them with various illnesses — polio, sickle cell anemia, debilitating autoimmune diseases. She even made crutches out of pencils for one of the dolls. Yes, a social worker seeing this would have intervened, but in retrospect, since Pentland turned out OK, it’s wicked good black humor.

Humor got scarcer in adolescence. After her mother discovered her talent at making people laugh at open-mic nights, she began spending less time tending to her children and more time tending her career, and Pentland’s weight started to become an issue; like mother, like daughter. (She says her mother once lost a lot of weight with a diet that allowed her one doughnut and one ice cream cone a day, and nothing else.) Barr would be traveling and come home to find out that everyone had gained five pounds from eating fast food. Then they’d all go on a fad diet. Visits to her grandparents’ “house/feedlot” didn’t help. No surprise, Pentland developed an eating disorder that found her at times eating spoonfuls of granulated sugar or plain pats of butter. At one point, to try to keep their children from eating, the parents literally put a padlock on the refrigerator.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Barr and Pentland’s father was catastrophically unraveling, even as Barr’s star was ascending. When they finally got divorced, he lost not only his kids, but his job writing for the TV show. Pentland and her siblings had to deal with all the ordinary fallout from a family disintegrating, while also dealing with reporters and photographers stalking the family. Then Barr got involved with Tom Arnold, a man 10 years younger than she was, and their lives got even messier.

Through her teen years, Pentland was shuttled from weight-loss camps to wilderness survival programs, some of which have now been described as child abuse. At the start of one, participants were given a can of peaches each, but no way to open them. (The staff just watched as the teens tried to smash them.) In the next phase, they were given nothing to eat but raisins, peanuts, raw cornmeal and beans to eat. She writes of being covered with blisters and mosquito bites, and having to spend a night in the woods by herself. She was 15. Later, when she was done with all that, there were the classes at the Scientology Center.

It is much like driving past a car wreck, only in this book we are invited to look at the horror. What is most amazing about this story is that somehow, inexplicably, it seems to end well. Despite a train-wreck of a childhood and adolescence, Pentland turned out amazingly well. She is now the mother of five (none of whom have polio) and she lives a seemingly idyllic life on a farm in Hawaii. Moreover, her relationship with her mother is confoundingly good. She recently told People magazine, “We communicate at all costs. Even if it’s uncomfortable, annoying or the timing is bad, that’s the priority.”

It is unclear how such a good relationship could have emerged out of what came before, and I still have zero desire to watch Roseanne, but This Will Be Funny Later succeeds as a thoughtful and provocative memoir, even it’s title isn’t always true. A

Book Notes

In February, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of strangling the infernal groundhog.

Winter will be with us for a few more weeks, although there are those who say it won’t be with us in a few more centuries. Porter Fox, for example, asks us to consider The Last Winter (Little Brown & Co., 320 pages), his examination of “the scientists, adventurers, journeymen and mavericks trying to save the world” from climate change.

A former fellow at MacDowell, the artists’ colony in Peterborough, Fox grew up on the coast of Maine and has previously written about skiing and the future of snow, so he’s not new to the topic. Depending on how cold you are right now, this might be a dystopian book, or one of hope.

Continuing the theme, poetry fans will want to check out Winter Recipes from the Collective (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 64 pages) from Louise Glück, an underachiever who has won both a Nobel Prize for literature and a National Book Award and has also been the U.S. poet laureate.

If you prefer short stories, there’s Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter (Grove Press, 240 pages), of which Ann Patchett said, “It filled up every chamber of my heart.”

Skiers will like Winter’s Children, A Celebration of Nordic Skiing (University of Minnesota Press, 448 pages), by Ryan Rodgers, even though it’s mostly about skiing in the Midwest.

And worth dipping back to the past is Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (Ecco, 368 pages), which was published in 2003 but is an evergreen discourse on how animals survive through New England winters. It’s by biologist Bernd Heinrich, a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont.

Book Events

Author events

• ERIK LARSON Author presents The Splendid and the Vile. The Music Hall Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Wed., Feb. 16, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $13.75. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• 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.

• 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.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration 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 [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

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

Album Reviews 22/02/10

We Are The World, Clay Stones [2022 Reissue] (Give/Take Records)

Today I learned that Madonna wasn’t the only artist Lady Gaga stole song ideas from, and that’s about it. An alleged selling point of this “seminal” album from the Los Angeles electro-pop quartet (which, for clarity’s sake, had nothing whatsoever to do with the 1985 famine-relief charity single) is that it was Gaga’s “favorite album” in 2010, thus its 2022 reissue marks a milestone of something or other. I suppose I’ll buy that, given that I just can’t call Gaga right now to vet all this rubbish for myself, so I’ll play along. It’s mainly a ringtone-centric rehashing of the eclectic cultural appropriation Moby hawked with his 1999 Play album; in that vein, the Pitchfork guy basically wrote this off as a ripoff of Knife, which is fine with me, as maybe the Moby reference is a bit dated (you should see my face right now, panicking at the thought of committing such a colossal foul-up). But, yeah, there are unintelligible Baptist preacher-ish chants and creepy voodoo-priestess `ocal lines going on here, all marinating in thick rhythmic samples, and sure, it all sounds like it could have inspired Gaga circa 2010. It’s OK I guess, and if you’ve read this far you have my sympathies. B-

Charming Disaster, Our Lady of Radium (self-released)

Most recent LP from the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based goth-folk duo comprising Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris. She plays ukulele, he guitar, so like anything else they’ve done, it’s a novelty record intended for convention nerds who covet overdone eye makeup, fishnet stockings and vintage weirdness, and for those things I do thank them. The two are really great at welding their voices into fascinating harmonies in the service of songs dedicated to steampunk-ish themes, in this case, Marie Curie. They’re a mishmash of black-clad-but-innocent tropes, paying obeisance to the likes of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, but given that they’re from the Boroughs, this ain’t no foolin’ around. They strum and busk, busk and strum, warbling on about the subject and going into the deeper ends, like a Curie séance they attended. They’re nothing like Dresden Dolls, so don’t think that; more like an opening act for The Cure at an Addams Family festival. She sounds like Siousxie Sioux when she wants to, if that helps sell you. B-

PLAYLIST

• O, what artistic marvels shall we experience on Feb. 11, when the usual Friday delivery of new albums drops into our music stores and Pandoras and illegal torrent streams? Uh-oh, gang, looky there, it’s Pearl Jam’s singer/surfer Eddie Vedder, gone solo, with a new album called Earthling! LOL, remember when he put out that album Ukulele Songs in 2011, and the only problem with it was that it was a bunch of songs literally played on the ukulele? Boy I do, and I remember that all the annoying hipster bands were playing ukulele around that time too, like I couldn’t just sit and watch a stupid car commercial without some twirp playing a ukulele in the background. But that’s finally over with, so we can cut to now, and this new album, his fourth, which features a single titled “Long Way,” I can’t wait! But wait, ack, ack, what’s this, is he trying to be Tom Petty? This sounds like some strummy nonsense song for bored Uber drivers to play on the radio when they’re driving grandmothers to casinos. Come on, Eddie Vedder, what happened to those stupid lumberjack shirts and an entire generation getting nothing accomplished other than oh, I dunno, making people afraid of Courtney Love? I mean, what happened?

• Ha ha, look, guys, it’s super-old Canadian thrash metal weenies Voivod, with a new album called Synchro Anarchy, that you can buy on Friday when the clock strikes midnight! What’s that? No, I know you won’t, I’m saying you could buy it. If you’re in your 40s, maybe you remember when Voivod was an actual force to be reckoned with in the heavy metal scene, because they had good drawings of monsters on their album covers or whatever the attraction was aside from their (really stupid) band logo, I forget. But whatever, outta my way man, I have to go to YouTube and listen to this new song, “Planet Eaters,” and give you my expert review! Ha ha, look at this video, there’s like an evil Pikachu ball and some other poorly drawn monster-whatever things in a swirling hypnotic mush, and they’re trying to sound like Primus. Hm, now it’s trying to be like Guns N’ Roses, and it’s boring, let’s bag this and just continue.

• Oh, here we go. In its continuing, moronically conceived mission to confuse its readers as much as it can, Pitchfork Media described “Cisgender,” the new single from Shamir, as “Prince masquerading as Camille,” failing to remember that most people who have actual busy lives were never aware that the very existence of Prince’s (unreleased, mind you!) Camille album is nothing more than a weird little footnote to His Purpleness’s career. It annoys me that I had to look that up; the writer could have simply spent a handful of words to explain to their bewildered readers that the Camille concept was to present Prince as a female version of himself, but whatever, I suppose the comparison is more or less apt, given that Shamir’s voice is, as you probably know unless you’re older, very feminine. His new album, Heterosexuality, is on the way and will feature the aforementioned tune, a bizarre noise ballad reminiscent of M83 trying to be epic a la “Skin of the Night”; it’s cool, more or less.

• To close out the week, let’s look at indie-folk band Big Thief’s new one, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You before I fall asleep from all this nonsense. Hm, they wear farmer overalls; I knew someone was still buying those things. The single “Time Escaping” has some weird organic-sounding percussion driving a decent hayloft-pop idea, this is OK I suppose.

At the Sofaplex 22/02/03

C’mon C’mon (R)

Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffmann.

Phoenix plays Johnny, a man suddenly thrown into the deep end of parenting, in the sweet and lovely C’mon C’mon, a film written and directed by Mike Mills (of 20th Century Women and Beginners fame).

Johnny finds himself suddenly charged with looking after 9-year-old nephew Jesse (an excellently natural Woody Norman, capturing kid oddballness without turning into a writer’s caricature of a child) when Jesse’s mom, Johnny’s sister Viv (Hoffmann), has to go from L.A. to Oakland to take care of Jesse’s dad, Paul (Scoot McNairy), who is suffering from mental illness.

Johnny and Viv haven’t been in each other’s lives much lately — they clashed over the care of their recently deceased mother, over Johnny’s unasked-for opinions about Viv’s relationship with Paul, over basic sibling stuff. But Viv is desperate and Johnny is willing to show up so she leaves Johnny to deal with Jesse — his Saturday morning blasting of opera, his odd tendency to pretend to be an orphan, his extreme (but, like, totally familiar to any parent) reaction to having sugar, his kid tendencies to not stay put. But also, his sudden pointed but thought-provoking questions, his delightful imagination, his charming goofiness, his curiosity at new things (like radio producer Johnny’s sound equipment and kid-interviewing project). So, you know, all the frustrating, wonderful, heartwarming-and-breaking stuff about kids.

The longer Viv has to help Paul, the more Johnny brings Jesse into his life — first to New York City and later to New Orleans, making sure he does basic things like brush teeth and do homework (ha, remotely — you don’t see much of that or this would go from a heartwarming look at parenting to a total nightmare horror story so fast).

Phoenix gives possibly his most relatable, most open and human performance as Johnny, a man who knows how out of his depth he is but doesn’t stop trying for Jesse and is aware that this terrifying and difficult scenario is his sister’s, like, Tuesday. Hoffman also gives a great performance as a woman trying to mom from afar while taking care of her co-parent (and ex, I think), largely to save her son’s dad — and to protect her son from the most difficult aspects of his father’s illness.

This doesn’t sound like the most uplifting subject matter, but it is presented with such grace and care, with such a real-world collision-of-fear-and-awesomeness look at parenting, that C’mon C’mon is just a delight. A Available for rent and in theaters.

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg (Ecco, 263 pages)

It is apparently the fashion to write a memoir about writing after having achieved at least some modest success. Maybe this isn’t new and goes all the way back to Montaigne, but the trend seems to have accelerated after Anne Lamott’s ever popular Bird by Bird, published in 1994.

Into this space enters Jami Attenberg, a novelist of acclaim whose body of work includes The Middlesteins, her 2012 portrait of a family obsessed with eating; 2017’s All Grown Up (given a B+ here), and most recently, 2019’s All This Could Be Yours.

In I Came All This Way to Meet You, subtitled “writing myself home,” Attenberg gets personal in a refreshingly candid manner. It’s not so much a book as it is a conversation, the sort that occurs at a bar after strangers have had a couple of shots.

It’s a conversation that takes place during the pandemic; Attenberg peppers the memoir with mentions of life during Covid-19 and she occasionally touches on ongoing social issues. But it’s mainly the story of an ordinary woman who got tired of all the ordinariness in her life and set out to build something different. As Attenberg writes in the opening, in which she bluntly summarizes the first 20 years of her working life, most of her jobs were essentially bringing other people’s ideas into being.

“Eventually I thought: What about my ideas? When do I own them?” she writes. “And once I realized that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I could not stay where I was any longer.”

In a perfect world, an aspiring writer who comes to this conclusion would then find an oceanside cottage in which to write her first book, ensconced there rent-free except for the task of walking someone’s dog. And for Attenberg, it was in fact a perfect world, at least in this regard.

After she spent decades working invisible, low-paying jobs — to include temping, waitressing, typing, blogging — a supportive friend helped set her up in this space, and Attenberg started bringing her characters to life. But that was the extent of her perfect world. It was a hard slog to get to where she is today, an “Author with a capital A,” and she shares her remembrances of this unglamorous life, much of which involved arduous road trips in an old car, trying to get people to buy her books when people didn’t want them — including, at one point, her publisher, who dumped her after her first few books didn’t sell well.

In many ways it would be hard to find a more unappealing depiction of a novelist’s life, from driving alone in a white-out in Wyoming to being booed at a literary festival when she was introduced as being from Brooklyn.

At one point she says this about a book tour: “I do my event. A Jewish event, a panel of four authors. I sell five books. Thanks, Jews. Another car to the airport, two hours before my flight. And there I sit.”

That paragraph, in all its pith, demonstrates precisely why this memoir is so engrossing. Attenberg is completely uninhibited; you never know what she is going to say next. The writing is as choppy as the sea, and as unpredictable, as is her life story, which she unspools gradually.

As much as the memoir is about Attenberg, it’s also about her friends. Despite being a generally anxious person, she has the enviable talent of finding and cultivating friends, such as the Alaska mom she met in Guatemala when she was doing travel writing — a woman who travels internationally for a month by herself every year — or the younger Italian novelist she spotted at a literary festival wearing a black Victorian gown. (“I immediately thought: Her, I must know.”)

On the subject of friendship, Attenberg waxes philosophical, writing: “The thing about bad friends is you never realize when you’re being one until it’s too late. Forgiveness and understanding? Not in this economy.”

She also brings that candor to writing about her romantic relationships. One, undertaken after a solitary trip to Sicily during which a restaurant refused to seat her because she was alone, was particularly promising: “No children, no desire for them whatsoever. No old marriages rotting in the past. We both owned our own homes. We both had flexible schedules. He even promised to quit smoking for me.”

There may have been no children, but a beautiful essay grew out of this relationship, about their trip to a “bone chapel” in Portugal — Capela dos Ossos, circa the 16th century, built using the remains of more than 5,000 people. Visiting it, Attenberg writes, she was “in a state of thrall to the bones.”

“Everything was dead … and yet it felt so alive to me at the same time. It was designed for thought. Alive and dead, stories everywhere. Thousands of possibilities, thousands of stories. The bones had been brought together in this space, the bones would never be alone. They have each other, I thought. And all of us, visiting them, every day.”

Bones became a metaphor for her life, and ultimately for the relationship as well. She is a work in progress, as we all are, but just is more talented than other people in lassoing the mess into art.

To call Attenberg an original thinker is an understatement. Her words crackle like an overbuilt fire, and whether or not you’ve read her work previously, this thoughtful memoir is worth a look. A

Book Notes

With Valentine’s Day coming up, you’re probably scouring the shelves of your local independent bookseller looking for the perfect book to give to your significant other. If you’re not, you should be. Chocolate is gone in a week. The perfect book may outlast your relationship.

You can buy love poems, of course — a new title is Love by Night (192 pages, Andrews McMeel) by SK Williams. But these are not to be confused with poems about love, such as Please Love Me at My Worst(Andrews McMeel, 144 pages), last year’s collection by Michaela Angemeer.

You can buy books about great relationships other people had — such as Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (Bloomsbury, 432 pages), the story of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s marriage in their own words. Or books that promise to help you have a great relationship of your own, such as Fierce Love, Creating a Love That Lasts — One Conversation at a Time (Thomas Nelson, 240 pages).

Or you can forget the cheesy sentimental stuff and give your significant other a book about love that isn’t really about love, but just has love in the title and is a cool and interesting book. To wit: Love Poems (for Anxious People) by John Kenney, known for his writing in The New Yorker and also for two previous books, Love Poems for Married People and Love Poems for People With Children. It’s from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 112 pages. With poems titled “Here comes someone whose name I should know” and “Am I meditating yet?” these are not really love poems, but that’s kind of the point.

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness (Riverhead, 304 pages) by Claire Vaye Watkins is a novel released last fall that’s probably more of a wry gift for your BFF when you exchange cards about how much you hate Valentine’s Day. But we can’t resist the title. Premise: Woman with postpartum depression leaves her baby and husband and goes all Thelma and Louise without the Louise. It’s widely described as hilarious.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper, 816 pages) by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers was an Oprah’s pick last year and Barack Obama said it was one of his favorite books. It’s a novel that reads like poetry and it is not actually about Du Bois, the late Civil Rights activist, historian and sociologist, but his words are interspersed throughout.

But there are limits to how edgy you can be when selecting a book with love in the title. The ‘I Love My Instapot’ Anti-Inflammatory Diet Recipe Book: Not recommended. If that’s your only choice, go with the candy.