Category: Pop

At the Sofaplex 21/08/26

The Ice Road (PG-13)

Liam Neeson, Laurence Fishburne.

This movie is so exactly-as-advertised that sometimes it almost feels too simple: Mike (Neeson) is part of a group of people driving three trucks with heavy equipment across an ice road in Manitoba. At least one of the trucks needs to make it to a collapsed mine within some 30 hours to save the lives of 26 miners stuck inside. The roads have technically been closed because it is now early spring, so the first challenge the truckers face is the potential for the ice to crack and send them and their trucks very quickly into the freezing waters. As you’d expect, more challenges develop along the way.

The team includes Mike’s brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), a veteran who requires Mike’s constant care due to PTSD and aphasia that jumbles his words; Goldenrod (Fishburne), the man who put together the team; Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), a young trucker who has worked with Goldenrod in the past, and Varnay (Benjamin Walker), the insurance guy connected to the mine.

Trucks drive on ice, complications arise — that’s pretty much the movie. And that’s fine! For all that not every performance or line of dialogue feels particularly Oscar-winning, it’s a movie that holds your attention and provides a solid mix of action, suspense and “huh, ice roads, cool.” This isn’t Neeson’s best “late-career action Neeson” performance but he knows this territory well and turns in a perfectly workable performance. B- Available on Netflix.

The Last Letter from Your Lover (TV-MA)

Shailene Woodley, Felicity Jones.

Also Nabhaan Rizwan and Callum Turner (who I couldn’t place until I looked him up on IMDb; you may know him as Frank Churchill from 2020’s Emma.).

Present-day newspaper writer Ellie (Jones) finds letters from the 1960s between J, whom we learn is Jennifer Stirling (Woodley), and Boot, her pet name for Anthony O’Hare (Turner), a then-newspaper reporter. They meeton the Riviera, where Jennifer and her wet-blanket husband Lawrence (Joe Alwyn) are sort of vacationing. Mostly, he runs off to deal with work things and she’s left alone, which is how Anthony finds things when he shows up at their house to interview Lawrence for a profile. J and Boot, as they start to call each other, end up spending time together, forming a friendship that, when they return to London, turns into an affair.

We see this story play out in flashback as Ellie, who thinks maybe there’s a good feature in this story, finds letters in the newspaper’s archives with the help of archivist Rory (Rizwan). Naturally, reading all these love letters together causes these modern people to start to feel some feelings.

If you generally like romances (particularly with this kind of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society events in the past/events in the present structure) and enjoy period wardrobe (I could fill up an online shopping cart with Woodley’s dresses and accessories) and need something on in the background while you fold a bunch of towels or pay bills, The Last Letter from Your Lover is fine. I feel like some very good naps could be generated by the scenes of well-dressed people drinking cocktails and listening to period music. If you need something more, like heat generated between any of the couples or really compelling characters or interesting dialogue, you probably need to look elsewhere. C+ Available on Netflix.

We Want What We Want, by Alix Ohlin

We Want What We Want, by Alix Ohlin (Knopf, 256 pages)

The short-story collection We Want What We Want by Alix Ohlin is billed as women’s fiction, so it’s strange to see it named one of the best books of the summer by Esquire, a magazine aimed at men.

That’s a testament to the Vancouver writer and college professor who has been published in The New Yorker and anthologized in Best American Short Stories. Or maybe it was just wrong to call this women’s lit in the first place.

Regardless, it’s a taut and memorable collection that brings to mind the quote “I would have written a shorter letter if I’d had more time.” (That’s often attributed to Mark Twain, although the sentiment was also expressed by Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther and Cicero.) Ohlin’s stories are polished; her characters, succinct; and her narration, both comfortable and provocative. You will know the people who populate this book even if they do things that surprise and sometimes shock you.

Consider the story “Risk Management,” crafted around two women who work in a dental office. At first, it seems to be about a character named Little, who comes across as someone kind of like Angela on the TV show The Office, a woman who works with “blistering efficiency” despite her perfectly sculpted gel nails. “The filing, the phones, the calming of patients made hostile by tooth pain; there was nothing she couldn’t handle.”

When the narrator, Valerie, almost by accident, gets invited to Little’s apartment for dinner, however, she sees a different side of her coworker, and the evening conjures secrets and an unexpected intimacy. The story is not flashy or explosive but in Ohlin’s hands utterly engrossing.

Likewise, the story “Casino” suggests at the beginning that it’s about a fractured relationship between two sisters, one of whom is oblivious to the other’s resentment of her sister’s perfectly coiffed life, with a Lincoln Navigator and a five-bedroom McMansion. “Even her complaints are part boast,” Sherri thinks about her sister, Tricia. “She has to mention her busy husband and the two hundred thousand he rakes in a year. Her children’s after-school activities for the gifted are just so freaking expensive and time-consuming.” Tricia only deigns to visit Sherri in January “after she’s suffered through another Christmas that failed to live up to her Martha Stewart-generated expectations.”

But there is a deeper conflict in the story, which Ohlin slowly reveals as the sisters go out for a night at a recently opened casino, and by the end, the story is not so much about this fractious relationship but another one that Sherri has, and Tricia turns out to be her ally.

“The Point of No Return” has the feel of a short novella, spanning decades of friendship between two women, Bridget and Angela, who met in their 20s at the restaurant where they were waitresses. “Angela was from Vancouver, and some dewy freshness that Bridget associated with the West Coast seemed to cling to her always, even when she was sleep deprived or drunk.” Bridget was dismayed when Angela announced she was getting married. “She was used to a constant exchange of friends and lovers, and the idea that one of these relationships should be considered permanent struck her as considerate. It went against the way they all were trying to live: skipping lightly on this earth, skirting the folly of human certainty.”

Early in their relationship, Angela is the rescuer of the somewhat immature Bridget, but these roles reverse later in their lives, and Bridget eventually finds herself standing alone, outside the strange circle that Angela’s life has become, and even her own family.

Ohlin’s gift is to present these strange characters in a way that seems cozily familiar to the reader and then to summarize their existential dilemmas in a jewel of a paragraph like this: “Sometimes she saw her life as a tender thing that was separate from herself, a tiny animal she had happened upon by chance one day and decided to raise. It was terrifying to think how small it was, how wild, how easily she could fit it in the palm of her hand.”

There are 13 stories in this collection, which ultimately is more poignant than funny, although Ohlin displays a sharp wit, even in a story knit around a funeral, “FMK,” in which two characters try to lure a rebellious child inside for the service, and one suggests that there would be snacks afterward, possibly brownies, and the other unleashes on her with fury. “‘Jake has food sensitivities,’ she hissed, as if I was supposed to know.”

On a primal level, Ohlin’s stories appeal because she knows what her readers want: characters who need kicking get kicked, characters who need killin’ get killed, characters who need loving get loved. But she also has a Hollywood screenwriter’s knack for crafting sentences that drag you into the next, such as “When I was twelve years old, my father hired a private detective to follow my mother around” and “We’d been to this funeral home twice before — at least, I think we had?” — sentences that dare you to stop reading.

And although Ohlin is an alumna of The New Yorker, this collection doesn’t have the haughty feel of some of the magazine’s short fiction, which sometimes seems calibrated to mock the reader. It is accessible while deeply thoughtful, a nice bridge from the frothy reads of summer to whatever sober titles arrive in the back-to-everything rust of fall. A

Book Notes

We interrupt this summer to bring you foreign policy, as served up in Afghanistan, which is the sort of place that most people pay little attention to unless it’s front and center in the news. As such, much of the commentary on social media regarding America’s withdrawal is informed by Wikipedia, if even that.

So here are some titles that you might want to check out if you would like a more nuanced education on what’s happening in Kabul:

Sarah Chayes examined corruption in multiple nations in Thieves of State (W.W. Norton paperback, 272 pages) but focuses on Afghanistan in a book praised by Sebastian Junger, among others. Chayes, who has worked as a journalist and military adviser, argues that government corruption is responsible for the rise of the Taliban and other insurgent forces.

The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg (Crown paperback, 384 pages) helps to explain why the Taliban’s takeover is so troubling for women’s advocates and why many parents there choose to disguise their daughters as sons until puberty makes that impossible.

Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living (Picador paperback, 320 pages) is about “America, the Taliban and the war through Afghan eyes” and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Prize. The New York Times review when it was published in 2014 called it “essential reading for anyone concerned about how America got Afghanistan so wrong.” Probably time for a sequel, but some people are still saying it’s the best book about Afghanistan in the past two decades.

Blood Washing Blood(Dundurn, 408 pages) is a new book by a former officer in Canada’s Army that is getting good reviews for its history of conflict in Afghanistan over the past century.

And finally, if you’ve never read anything by Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-American novelist best known for The Kite Runner (Riverhead paperback, 400 pages) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead paperback, 432 pages), get thee to an independent bookseller website and order one of his haunting novels. His most recent book, Sea Prayer (Riverhead, 48 pages), isn’t a novel, but a poetic letter from father to son that was inspired by the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a beach in 2015. There are no first-world problems in this author’s body of work.

Books

Author events

• R.W.W. GREENE Sci-fi author presents new novel Twenty-Five to Life. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., Aug. 26, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• SHARON RASK HUNTINGTON Author presents Mirabelle’s Metamorphosis. Joint event with MainStreet BookEnds of Warner and the Pillsbury Free Library. Thurs., Aug. 26, 10:30 a.m. Jim Mitchell Community Park, East Main Street, Warner. Visit mainstreetbookends.com.

• L.R. BERGER New Hampshire poet to hold release party of latest book Indebted to Wind. Sat., Aug. 28, 4 p.m. MainStreet BookEnds of Warner, 16 E. Main St., Warner. Visit mainstreetbookends.com.

• MONA AWAD Author presents All’s Well. The Music Hall Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Thurs., Sept. 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $13.75. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• KERRI ARSENAULT Author and journalist presents her investigative memoir Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Thurs., Sept. 9, 6 p.m. The Music Hall, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Tickets start at $60 for a small table with two copies of the book included Visit themusichall.org.

Poetry

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

• SLAM FREE OR DIE Series of open mic nights for poets and spoken-word artists. Stark Tavern, 500 N. Commercial St., Manchester. Weekly. Thursday, doors open and sign-ups begin at 7 p.m., open mic at 8 p.m. The series also features several poetry slams every month. Events open to all ages. Cover charge of $3 to $5 at the door, which can be paid with cash or by Venmo. See Facebook or call 858-3286.

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

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

Featured photo: We Want What We Want.

Album Reviews 21/08/26

Sophie Du Palais, Endurance Of Pain Is The Power Of Being (Abstrakce Records)

There’s always room at this desk for techno, especially if it’s coming from someone who’s involved in a rising European niche. In this case it’s a German woman who’s part of the “contemporary Dutch electronic underground,” who also goes by the name Vrouwe Fataal, which means “femme fatale” if I’m getting this right. She’s billed as a Miss Kittin type, which makes sense upon first listen to “Glazed Disco Ball”; she sounds as drugged-up as Kittin did on any of her old stuff, although the epithets Du Palais babbles are of course in Dutch, and there’s more solidity to this blooping beat. But that’s skipping over a tune, specifically the album’s first tune, which is more on a Mario Brothers tip, cheesy but OK overall. It isn’t until “Boys Tears” that we hear her really get sleazy and industrial, though not to the extent you may have heard from Die Form, who are completely crazy (in a very good way). A

Briars of North America, Supermoon (Brassland)

This world/hipster trio, comprised of two long-lost cousins and one of their friends, was formed when the cousins, who never saw each other aside from two family gatherings for funerals, were forced to hang out together at the behest of one of their dads, simply because they both lived in Brooklyn. Odd as it looks, I think my “world/hipster” lumping makes sense; there’s Bon Iver-style moonbat ambience going on, but it’s pleasingly different, because one of the guys is a student of traditional and ancient forms of singing from places such as the Caucasus, the Mediterranean and the rural U.S., so the lyrics are often unintelligible but captivating. Their biography stressed my ADD to the max, but my takeaway was that they’ve done some world traveling to provide a sort of New Age service, soaking TED talks and other gatherings in their peaceful, well-heeled tuneage. Some really nice Americana on “Chirping Birds,” and witch-haunted chanting on “Ambient Condor.” Very creative stuff. A

PLAYLIST

• Tomorrow (or whenever, depending on which day you picked up this newspaper) is the 27th, a Friday, when the latest albums come out in a disorganized spill, all of them praying that some smarty pants snark-volcano like me won’t notice them trying to sneak into the record stores without getting a thorough, richly deserved paddle on the bottom for being horrible. We’ll kick off this week’s nightmare journey with New Jersey-bred Auto-Tune bling princess and RuPaul’s Drag Race judge Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power, her fourth. She is of course a product of Instagram, YouTube and all that gunk, and if you’re unfortunate enough to have a preteen living in your house, chances are you’ve been subjected to such dross as “Without Me,” her first sexytime-pop hit, or maybe her mindless “Closer” collaboration with monstrously overrated boyband Chainsmokers. Either way, you have my sincere condolences, and hey, chin up, maybe this stuff will be palatable, even though she left my beloved Astralwerks record label to go to Capitol Records, meaning she’s nowadays just another tool of Lucifer. The first single I ran into was “Can’t Have Love,” a typical hip-hop-tinged madrigal that —‌ wait, no, that’s a G-Eazy song that came out in June, never mind. So the title track is —‌ wait, it’s apparently a music-film double-whammy, and there are only snippets. If there’s anything that brings out the monster in me, it’s when there’s nothing but snippets. But wait, it’s not empty-brained pop, she’s taken this ridiculousness to a whole new level, a dramatic, epic movie thingamajig that’s like a cross between Game Of Thrones and the even more awful Outlander, like Halsey’s a very pregnant queen of someplace or other, and the film bit is headed up by Trent Reznor. Some people will find this all really great, and I will simply deal with that in my own way, like always.

• Turnstile is a pretty cool arena-punk band from Baltimore, and no, they’re not some sort of annoying Dashboard Confessional emo trip. “Alien Love Call,” the single from their forthcoming new album Glo On, finds them indulging in less punk and more arena-rock. Gone are the vocal tracks that sounded like they were recorded in someone’s bathroom; there’s almost a Jane’s Addiction thing going on in this mildly fascinating slow-tempo tune. I don’t like the guitar sound, but again, it’s OK overall. And it’s not emo at all, which is all I ask in life.

• There’s also a fourth album from Scottish synthpop band Chvrches, Screen Violence. I’m absolutely sure I liked what I heard from them before, whatever it was, but either way, the words “Scottish synthpop” should make any ears over the age of 40 prick up a little, let’s admit it. Whoa, these guys are playing to win this time, because guess who’s the feat in the new single “How Not To Drown?” Yes, you’ll die: It’s Cure singer and verified crazy person Robert Smith! This is all goth-y and epic, with a big chorus bit, and in the video Robert looks like he hasn’t combed his hair in two months. You’ll love it. I sure do.

• Finally, we have indie-folk/folktronica due Big Red Machine, with How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last. Guests include Taylor Swift, Fleet Foxes and Anaïs Mitchell, whose turn on the sleepy, rather draggy single “Latter Days” is Norah Jones-ish. Nothing folktronica on this tune, but who knows, you might totally love it.

Retro Playlist

Today we’ll go back exactly 13 years ago, to 2008, apparently the year my little column first came into being. I’m not wildly proud of those early days, par for my course. But it was a beginning, and there were plenty of targets. Metallica, a band that was, at the time, busily engaged in making people forget they were pretty cool, was releasing Death Magnetic, and it was necessary for me to find out how much I could insult the single “The Day That Never Comes” (it “sounds like that dumb Bob Seger wedding-reception tune they barfed out a few years ago”) without incurring the wrath of our editors. But I’m still here, and you can plainly see how much worse I’ve gotten since then. Salud.

Anway, there were two focus albums in play, like always. One of them, Tito Puente and His Orchestra’sLive at the 1977 Monterey Jazz Festival, was, of course, essential listening for jazz nerds who think jazz festivals are a fun time (I can’t imagine anything more boring than a jazz festival, except for maybe a librarians-only mud-wrestling match). And I said so: “It’s amazing, finding the King of Latin Music going nuclear at the Super Bowl of jazz, his hands and sticks moving up through the gears of his timbales in the run-up to an animated rendition of ‘Para Los Rumberos’ (Punte’s universally familiar salsa tune, the one that invokes Vegas-bound jetliners the way bread bespeaks butter).”

The other one wasn’t nearly as good, a two-CD mix from then-constant Pacha Ibiza house-DJ fixture Behrouz, titled Nervous Nitelife: Pure Behrouz NYC. The first CD “[starts] off with King Street Crew’s old-school ‘Things U Do 2 Me,’ a tiresome warmup that’s only missing a voiceover describing a Florida timeshare and sleepy videotape of golfing.” The big spazz-drop is OK, Roberto Rodriguez’ “Camera Obscura,” with “its finger-snap rhythm slowly turning feral under a funky but agile soft-shoe stutter-step layer.” Really the only reason I wrote about that rather trite record was because I had ignored Oscar G’s amazing Nervous Nitelife: Miami past the point of its still being “hot and new,” an error I still regret to this day.

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).

Tender is the Bite by Spencer Quinn

Tender is the Bite, by Spencer Quinn (Forge, 263 pages)

I would say that I am late to the Chet & Bernie series, only I am late in the way you are late to a dentist’s appointment or a barely tolerated neighbor’s cocktail party. That is to say, I’m late primarily because I didn’t want to go.

Sure, the titles are great — Dog on It, The Sound and the Furry, Scents and Sensibility, Heart of Barkness, to name a few — and Stephen King couldn’t be more ebullient, calling Chet & Bernie “the most original mystery series currently available” and saying that author Spencer Quinn “speaks two languages — dog and suspense — fluently.”

That said, the narrator is a dog. And I have an irrational hatred of pen names. (Mr. Quinn, if your books are really that good, wouldn’t you want the world to know that it was Peter Abrahams who wrote them?) And have I mentioned the narrator is a dog?

That said, people lap this stuff up. Since the first book in the series was published in 2008, the author has turned out 10 more and they’re all highly rated on Amazon. So, maybe I was … wrong? You can’t like something if you’ve never tried it.

On to Tender is the Bite, the 11th book in the series that is about the adventures of Bernie Little, a divorced dad who runs a not-especially-profitable detective agency (but still drives a Porsche) and is accompanied everywhere by the lovable Chet, who narrates the story.

Chet admits that he’s not the smartest human in the room, “in fact, not human. I bring other things to the table.” Those would include his senses of smell and hearing, which are much sharper than those of his human, which he is constantly pointing out. For example, when Chet and Bernie are waiting outside someone’s door, Bernie starts to knock for the second time even though his dog has already discerned that a small and possibly barefoot woman was already on the way to open it. “I glanced at Bernie’s ears: not tiny for a human, not at all — and very nice looking in my opinion — but was that all they were for? Just stuck on his head for beauty?”

And with that, they’re off, Bernie trying to solve a case, a modern-day Sherlock with a furry John Watson taking notes, making wry observations, showing his teeth when required, not getting human jokes. Yes, Chet/Quinn/Abrahams is genuinely funny, and yes, it is, as King observed, a fresh way of delivering an old genre. Or was, 13 years ago. Now, however, it seems sort of formulaic, the sort of book that the author can write while he’s cutting the grass and talking on the phone. Open document; insert plot; rewrite the jokes.

In this particular document, Bernie is determined to track down a young woman who had been following his Porsche until he turned the tables and followed her. He learns only that her name is Mavis, before she suddenly turns fearful and bolts, but not before Bernie writes down her license plate number, allowing him to use his network of confidantes (probably illegally) to obtain information to track her down.

From there Chet and Bernie are sucked into a vortex of intrigue that involves two frightened women, a ferret named Griffie, potentially evil Ukrainians and American politicians battling it out for an election that is still a year away. (Quinn shows a deft touch by setting up the political battle with Bernie’s neighbors each putting up opposing yard signs and then offering him one. The nastiness seems vaguely familiar.)

When the humor is good, it is very good indeed, and Chet sometimes seems like a canine David Sedaris, as when he’s musing about a heaven “of the dogs, by the dogs, for the dogs” or making a smart reference to Schrödinger’s cat. But as the mystery unravels it feels more like a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys book with expletives than Sherlock Holmes, and Chet’s fawning about how beautiful and smart and wonderful Bernie is — while completely in line with what probably goes on in a dog’s brain — grows wearisome, as does his frequent use of the word “perp.”

The appeal of the series is not a mystery. As the saying goes, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’re going to like. There’s zero chance you will like this series if you’re not as obsessed with dogs as Chet is with Bernie. But the fact that you like dogs, or mysteries, or dogs and mysteries, doesn’t mean you will like Bernie and Chet.

For those who do, however, it’s a glorious year. There’s another book coming in October, one for the holidays. It’s a Wonderful Woof, of course. C

Book Notes

It’s something of a shock to come across books that are purportedly bestsellers a week or two before they’ve been released, but that’s because of advance sales, which aren’t hard to rack up if you’re Barack Obama or Sean Hannity.

So how are Rodney Habib and Karen Shaw Becker on Amazon’s bestseller list two months before The Forever Dog(Harper Wave, 464 pages) is released? It’s not just because of a compelling cover, which features a dog wearing a Superman-like cape, or even the subject matter, which is how to get the longest possible lifespan for your dog.

Habib is a telegenic “pet influencer” which is to say he has a vast social media following on the subject of pet health, with 3 million followers alone on Facebook, where this week he warns of the dangers of rawhide while recommending dogs have strawberries for snacks. His website gives no academic credentials, but his co-author is a veterinarian. Both are heavily pushing presales on their respective websites; hence, a bestseller is born from two people most people have never heard of, two months in advance.

Only vaguely related to dogs is a new memoir in paperback that’s getting buzz: I Named My Dog Pushkin (And Other Immigrant Tales) by Margarita Gokun Silver (Thread, 266 pages). It’s a comic memoir, “notes from a Soviet girl on becoming an American woman,” and you gotta love any author who dedicates her book to her thesaurus, as Silver did.

Another new paperback worth a look, especially in light of the new United Nations climate report, is Warmth, Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin, 272 pages) by Daniel Sherrell.

Sherrell, recipient of a Fulbright grant in creative nonfiction, gives thoughtful voice to a generation convinced that their future is that of climate refugees because of what he simply calls “the Problem.” Whether you consider Sherrell a kindred soul or an overwrought Cassandra, Warmth appears to be an elegant meditation on living with climate-fueled sense of doom.

Books

Author events

• JEFF SHARLET Author and journalist will present his books, as part of the Tory Hill Author Series, including his newest, This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers. Sat., Aug. 21, 7 p.m., to be held virtually via Zoom. Tickets are $5. Visit toryhillauthorseries.com/jeff-sharlet.

• AMY MAKECHNIE Author presents her second middle-grade novel Ten Thousand Tries. Sat., Aug. 21, 2 p.m. MainStreet BookEnds of Warner, 16 E. Main St., Warner. Visit mainstreetbookends.com.

• R.W.W. GREENE Sci-fi author presents new novel Twenty-Five to Life. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Thurs., Aug. 26, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MONA AWAD Author presents All’s Well. The Music Hall Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Thurs., Sept. 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $13.75. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• SHARON RASK HUNTINGTON Author presents Mirabelle’s Metamorphosis. Joint event with MainStreet BookEnds of Warner and the Pillsbury Free Library. Thurs., Aug. 26, 10:30 a.m. Jim Mitchell Community Park, East Main Street, Warner. Visit mainstreetbookends.com.

• L.R. BERGER New Hampshire poet to hold release party of latest book Indebted to Wind. Sat., Aug. 28, 4 p.m. MainStreet BookEnds of Warner, 16 E. Main St., Warner. Visit mainstreetbookends.com.

• KERRI ARSENAULT Author and journalist presents her investigative memoir Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Thurs., Sept. 9, 6 p.m. The Music Hall, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Tickets start at $60 for a small table with two copies of the book included Visit themusichall.org.

Poetry

• POETRY IN THE MEADOW Featuring readings with poets Chad deNiord, Kylie Gellatly and Samantha DeFlitch. Sun., Aug. 22, 4:30 p.m. The Word Barn Meadow, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter. $5 suggested donation. Visit thewordbarn.com.

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

• SLAM FREE OR DIE Series of open mic nights for poets and spoken-word artists. Stark Tavern, 500 N. Commercial St., Manchester. Weekly. Thursday, doors open and sign-ups beginning at 7 p.m., open mic at 8 p.m. The series also features several poetry slams every month. Events are open to all ages. Cover charge of $3 to $5 at the door, which can be paid with cash or by Venmo. Visit facebook.com/slamfreeordie, e-mail [email protected] or call 858-3286.

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.

Featured photo: Tender is the Bite.

Album Reviews 21/08/19

Anika, Change (Sacred Bones Records)
Collection of self-indulgent, googly-eyed runway-model-pop confections from a pan-European girl who apparently believes there’s a huge audience for the random superficial thinkies of a privileged former political journalist who — get this, you’ll never believe it — thinks the world is a little messed up at the moment. Behold what the Warhol/Bowie aesthetic has led us to in the ringtone era: a retro take on the overhead-speaker ambiance heard at overpriced clothing stores at the mall, which, I suppose, really did need a break from the usual soft-pedaled, blippy house-techno; I mean, if you want someone to pay $250 for a blouse that cost 30 cents to produce, your average customer would probably be more hypnotized if one of the songs from this absolutely unnecessary album were playing in the background. Take “Finger Pies,” for instance, in which Random Mononym croons her flatline-brained Nico imitation over a Velvet Underground loop that’s trying so hard to sound ’60s-artpop-authentic you almost feel obligated to dance to it for a second so it’ll shut up. Right, just what we need in a time of insane debt, plague and climate catastrophe: vacuous, tuneless retro garbage delivered by a fashion-victimized chick in gold lamé thigh-high boots. Utterly detestable. F

Cinema Cinema, CCXMDII (Nefarious Industries)
I know for a fact I’ve covered these guys before, but my crack team of unpaid pizza-gobbling interns can’t seem to find it, and I keep getting too distracted by internet nonsense to ever find it myself, so we’ll start from scratch with this sixth album from the experimental art-punk act, comprised of two cousin bros (one on guitar/voice, the other on drums) from Brooklyn. I know I liked what I heard from them before; these guys are hard-edgy and, of course, weird, as we hear on opening track “A Life Of Its Own,” an 18-minute thingie that’s totally Throbbing Lobster-esque, like Swans but with a New-Age slant — there’s a flute (or sample thereof) throughout, you see, not played very well but nevertheless redolent of a tranquil (if claustrophobia-triggering) forest. Elsewhere we have things like “Cloud 2,” a discombobulated noise jaunt that might make you think of an all-analog Battles; and “Crack Of Dawn,” which is pure crackpot-improv. It’s all very “meh” really. C+

PLAYLIST

• Friday the 20th is barreling down on us, tumbling head over heels, clutching fresh new rock ’n’ roll albums in its hands while it tries not to smash into a telephone pole and laughs at us for being bummed about the summer ending in like 20 seconds. Yep, before you know it, there’ll be plenty of things to hate: spiced pumpkin decorations at Hobby Lobby, co-workers lying about how much they love autumn, and everyone’s favorite: 4-foot Santas at Target, standing in piles of fake snow even while most people are still in their flip-flops and Rick & Morty T-shirts. There is nothing I can do about any of that, other than hold your hand and gently remind you that you’d promised yourself for the last 10 years that you’d move to Tallahassee, so it’s all your fault, but, along the way, cheer up and eat your watermelon-flavored Airheads while I tell you about the awesome new albums you can buy or pirate or whatever! I know you could use a laugh right now, what with lockdown talk making the rounds even as you prepare to make that dreaded trip to your closet to dig out your North Face jacket and snowshoes, so let’s discuss hipster-black-metal idiots Deafheaven and their new album, Infinite Granite! Wow, the new single “Great Mass Of Color” is a mixture of cut-rate Killers and government-issue shoegaze — hahahaha, I knew they’d drop the black-metal pretense sooner or later! The YouTube comments on this song are priceless: “Deafheaven but make it whirr but make it Morrissey”; “When your friend goes to college for a year and comes back home with a Flock Of Seagulls haircut and a tattoo of the infinity symbol,” stuff like that. So the results are in, folks: Ho ho ho, merrrry pumpkin spice, the people hate you, Deafheaven! They really, really hate you!

• What other unspeakable tortures lie in wait for me today — oh no, this is too funny, it’s Gestureland, another new album from former X-Files actor David Duchovny! My sides are splitting, guys, I’m telling you. What, did people actually buy his last few albums? Ahem, shall we investigate the new single, “Layin’ on the Tracks”? Hey, I don’t want to either, but duty calls. Ack, ack, the music is trite, absolutely dreadful, kind of like Neil Young but without the stupid screechy guitars. His voice is what you’d expect from him and his adenoids. Even if you’ve never played guitar before, I could teach you to play this song in 10 minutes and you’d break into a boss-level guitar solo out of sheer boredom. Why is this man doing this to himself, seriously?

• I don’t even wanna look, gang, what could possibly be next? No way, it’s semi-retired child star Debbie Gibson, with a new slab o’ vinyl, The Body Remembers! Ha ha, remember when she got into a slap-fight with other-former-child-star Tiffany in the Sy-Fy classic cinematic treasure Mega Python vs. Gatoroid? The only possible direction from there, of course, was down, so she’s been doing Hallmark movies, like 2018’s Wedding Of Dreams, which was about, oh, who cares, just bask in all the rich and delicious schadenfreude while I inflict the new single “One Step Closer” on my poor head-bone. Whoa, wait, she’s pretty hot in this video, and the song is sort of afterparty-techno, like Miss Kitty meets Janet Jackson. It’s OK!

• We’ll end this week’s musical water-boarding with Love Will Be Reborn, from Canada-pop lady Martha Wainwright! The title track isn’t bad, sort of Christine McVie/Fleetwood Mac-ish, if I’m being honest, not that I’m feeling so inclined.

Retro Playlist

Way back we go, once again to 2007, a year whose biggest events included Microsoft releasing Windows Vista and Office 2007. I’ll bet half of you readers are still using Office 2007, given that it didn’t require a subscription you had to buy and download from “the cloud” (I’m really, really sick of hearing about “the cloud,” aren’t you?). But let’s not wander too far; there were a few albums up for dissection that week, exactly 14 years ago, in these pages. The most notable one, an album I actually kept in my car’s cubby for a long time, was Bluefinger, from Black Francis of the Pixies, a band I dubbed “the ultimate anti-Fleetwood Mac, a jumbled train wreck of notes, pretty/unpretty voices and bar-band guitars that sucked in every unwary soul who got too close.” The best part of this rather good LP, I said, is “when he gives himself a do-over of the boys-choir chorus that Surfer Rosa’s ‘Where Is My Mind’ mismanaged, this on the new album’s ‘Angels Come to Comfort,’ whose out-of-nowhere fadeout is one of the most stirring things you’ll hear all year.” It really is a terrific song.

Elsewhere, there was Benelux-based DJ Sander Kleinenberg, with a two-CD set called This is Sander Kleinenberg. Ah, the good old days, when the house-techno record labels all had me on their lists, and I was up to my ears in sexy-cool beach music intended for velvet-rope clubs where all the fashion-model/scientist kids would drink until they danced and grope each other like lobsters in a supermarket tank. This wasn’t my favorite house album of all time: “By and large,” I said in an Exorcist voice, “fans are into his earlier releases for their funk, of which there’s plenty at the outset of the ‘Left’ half of this collection, but the tracks are all over the joint, sometimes getting bogged down in arrhythmic ambient bloviations that stay a little past their welcome.” I gave it a C+, which is my way of hinting that I probably Frisbeed the album out my car window at some point.

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 21/08/12

Val (R)

It’s the documentary you didn’t know you needed about Val Kilmer, narrated with Val’s words read by Jack Kilmer, Val’s son and an actor himself. Val tells the story of Kilmer from a childhood of making movies and having fun with three brothers in the suburban greater Los Angeles area through his career that often seems like a long, only occasionally successful attempt at finding acting jobs that really speak to him. He played Iceman in Top Gun and was a Batman but his real passion seems to be for a Mark Twain movie that he was attempting to get off the ground by touring with a one-man theatrical production called Citizen Twain (according to Vulture, since Kilmer suffered extensive loss of his voice due to throat cancer and its treatment, that production has turned into Cinema Twain, a filmed version of the play that he was touring with pre-pandemic). It’s an intriguing project and one that helps you to understand Kilmer the artist as opposed to just Val Kilmer, Hollywood celebrity. This movie is itself the project of Kilmer’s long love of shooting video and the fact that he saved boxes of footage from his life over the years. Thus do we get to see him clowning around with babyfaced Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn backstage at a play they all worked on long ago and footage of his family, including a movie-loving younger brother who died as a teenager. The movie feels like a scrapbook, collecting his own video, clips of movies and interviews and other souvenirs from his life. It’s a fascinating approach to a biography and an interesting glimpse at acting as a life’s work. B+ Available on Amazon Prime.

Jolt (R)

Kate Beckinsale, Stanley Tucci.

Also Laverne Cox, Bobby Cannavale, Jai Courtney and Susan Sarandon on occasional narration.

Lindy (Beckinsale) has extreme impulse control issues. It’s not that she drinks too much or dates too many of the wrong men (though, as she explains to her therapist Dr. Muchin, played by Tucci, she’s done these things too). When provoked by the irritations and annoyances of everyday life and everyday jerks, Lindy responds by beating the tar out of the provocateur. She’s tried drugs, extreme sports and military service as ways to dampen or channel-elsewhere these impulses but nothing works until Dr. Muchin outfits her with a vest that gives her an electrical jolt at the press of a button. With this button she’s able to not grievously injure the jerk giving a hard time to the valet outside a restaurant or the rude waitress inside as she nervously attempts a first date with Justin (Courtney). 

After the first date goes unexpectedly wonderfully, Lindy is excited for their next date, but her joy at a possible new relationship turns into rage when she learns that Justin has been murdered. Detectives Vicars (Cannavale) and Nevin (Cox) won’t tell her much about Justin but Lindy knows just enough to start her own violence-filled investigation of his death. 

I feel like this movie, with its aggressive, self-conscious Bad Girl Attitude and overall low-rent feel, would have annoyed me had I seen it in a theater. But at home, drinking my own beverages and eating my own snacks and ignoring whatever chores need doing so I can give enough of my attention to Beckinsale’s performance, which is mostly made up of the rocker girl wig and a bunch of impressively high-heeled boots, I find I don’t need quite as much from a movie. Which is to say Jolt is kind of silly and junkfoody and totally fine. Beckinsale seems like she’s having fun, Cox and Cannavale seem like they’re having fun. Yes, the movie finds Lindy more spunky and charming than I do, but she’s not actively grating. 

In some better version of this movie, more could have been made about the ideas of free will, impulse control and Lindy’s ability to pick and choose how much to put up with and not. But this movie doesn’t dive that deep. It floats along the surface at a fast enough clip to be a solid choice for the thing that’s on when you don’t want to have to pay too much attention to what you’re watching. C+ Available on Amazon Prime.

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