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News & Notes 25/04/17

Senate race update

Former Governor Chris Sununu told WMUR that he will not run for the U.S. Senate seat in 2026. The race will have no incumbent for the seat as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen has said she will not run for reelection. U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas, a Democrat, announced his campaign for the seat in early April. Sununu, a Republican, said the commitment to serve in the Senate was “not right for my family at this time,” according to a report by Adam Sexton on WMUR on April 8. See wmur.com.

Family meal

The Mast Road Community Market is offering a nonperishable meal kit for Pinardville families who need a meal as part of their “Meal Kit Program,” according to mrcm-nh.com/meal-kit-program. Upcoming distribution days are Thursdays, April 17, April 24 and May 1, from 5 to 6 p.m. at Jacques Flower Shop, 712 Mast Road in Manchester. No preregistration is required, participants are asked to fill out a registration form at the site, according to the website, where you can find more information about receiving or donating to a meal kit.

Center center

The Center for the Arts, a New London-based organization with arts programming in for the Lake Sunapee Region, celebrated the grand opening of its Gallery & Studio and Creative Classroom at 428 Main St. in New London, according to a press release. The Center for the Arts officially opened its new center on April 10 and the gallery currently exhibits art from more than 30 local artists on the theme of spring, the release said. See centerfortheartsnh.org.

Cats prez leaves

Rick Brenner, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats president, is leaving the organization to focus on teaching at Plymouth State University, according to a Fisher Cats press release. His final day with the Fisher Cats will be May 1, the release said. Brenner “is the Assistant Professor of Practice, as well as the Director of the Sales Institute, in the School of Business at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire. He began in his roles at Plymouth State in August 2024,” the release said.

TB testing

The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services and the Manchester Health Department held additional testing clinics for people who might have been exposed to a person with tuberculosis who visited the Families in Transition Adult Shelter and 1269 Cafe in Manchester in January, according to a press release. People without a primary care provider can call 211 for information on testing and treatment, the release said. Call 271-4496 or go to the DHHS TB webpage, at dhhs.nh.gov/programs-services/disease-prevention/infectious-disease-control/tuberculosis-tb, for more information.

Concord’s Giant Indoor Yard Sale is slated for Saturday, April 19, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Everett Arena (15 Loudon Road in Concord). Admission is $5 per adult. Find the event’s page on Facebook.

The University of New Hampshire Durham will hold the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival on Saturday, April 19, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. The free festival features readings, workshops, a small press fair, performances, a celebration of the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize and the Granite State Poetry prize and more. See unhpoetry.com.

Milford Drive-In (531 Elm St., Milford, milforddrivein.com) is slated to open for the season this weekend, with shows Friday, April 18, and Saturday, April 19. The scheduled double-feature screenings are A Minecraft Movie and Paddington in Peru on Screen 1 and Sinners and One of Them Days on Screen 2.

Poet Liane St. Laurent will read her poems followed by an open mic on Saturday, April 19, at 2 p.m. at Balin Books, 375 Amherst St. in Nashua, balinbooks.com. St. Laurent did a Touchstone Talk for the Poetry Society of New Hampshire in February; listen to it at psnh.org/touchstone-talk-liane-st-laurent-interview.

New Hampshire Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello will speak at the Monadnock Writers’ Group meeting on Saturday, April 19, at 9:45 a.m. at the Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St. in Peterborough. The event is free and open to the public. See modnadnockwriters.org.

Best of 2025 — 04/10/2025

on the cover

10 The results are in for Hippo’s Best of 2025 readers’ poll! Where can you find the best pizza, the best happy hour hangout or the best bike trail? We asked you to name the “bests” and you picked your favorites!

Also on the cover Zachary Lewis gets the details for this weekend’s NH Indoor Scottish Festival (page 27). John Fladd finds out about Thai desserts (page 30). Michael Witthaus talks to organizers for this weekend’s Brooks Young memorial concert (page 38).

Read the e-edition

News & Notes 25/04/10

250410 Featured Content News

Pappas runs Chris Pappas, four-term Democratic congressman for New Hampshire’s 1st District, will run for Senate in 2026. The seat ...

Was it Houston or Florida?

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250410 News Sports

The Big Story: By the time you read this we’ll know if Houston won its first ever basketball title or ...

Quality of Life 25/04/10

250410 News Quality Of Life

Share your two cents about sidewalks The Manchester public is invited to share ideas and feedback on the Downtown Sidewalk ...

This Week 25/04/10

A covered table filled with a wide variety of assorted items.

250410 Featured Content News This Week

Saturday, April 12 Today is Record Store Day! You can score special releases including some that will only be sold ...

Best of 2025

250410 Best Of Cover Stories Featured Content

Meet the big winners! This year’s picks for Best Ice Cream, Best Happy Hour Hangout, Best Ski Hill and Best ...

A gallery’s Growth

A collection of works from the Glimpse Gallery in New Hampshire.

250410 Art & Theater Featured Content

Glimpse in Concord readies new show By Michael [email protected] For its inaugural show in February 2024, Glimpse Gallery featured four ...

22 years of Highland dance

A line of dancers perform in colorful plaid skirts at an indoor Scottish festival.

250410 Art & Theater

Music, craft & more at the Indoor Scottish Festival By Zachary [email protected] Claire MacPherson is the President of Scottish Arts ...

Treasure Hunt 25/04/10

A photo of a cute pastel baby rug, adorned with daintily dressed animals.

250410 Family Fun Treasure Hunt

Hello, Donna. I saw someone had some dishes and asked you their worth. That prompted me to reach out and ...

The Weekly Dish 25/04/10

250410 Food

News from the local food scene • Cheers and farewell: WineNot Boutique in Nashua has announced on its website that ...

Kiddie Pool 25/04/10

250410 Family Fun Outdoors

Family fun for whenever Bunnies and eggs • The Easter Bunny will arrive in a student-built airplane when he visits ...

Thai food like Grandma used to make

Brown Suger Boba Strawberry Roti and Coconut Cake.

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New Dessert House satisfies a sweet tooth By John Fladd [email protected] Some of Vasita Saktanaset’s favorite memories of growing up ...

In the kitchen with Jackie O’Dowd

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Owner and baker of The Sweet Spot, 353 Riverdale Road, Weare, 529-6667, thesweetspotnh.com “My grandfather was a Japanese chef in ...

Tangelo Madness

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The Sample Lady at the grocery store and I have an understanding. As long as I don’t block traffic and ...

Album Reviews 25/04/10

250410 Albums Pop

Ingrid Laubrock, Purposing the Air (Pyroclastic Records) Her fully caffeinated handlers describe Laubrock as an “experimental saxophonist and composer interested ...

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp

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Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown and Co., 341 pages) When you toss a plastic water bottle in a ...

The Music Roundup 25/04/10

250410 Music This Week

• Join the band: On a tour that includes stops at five New England high schools, Dallas Brass performs music ...

Remembering Brooks Young

250410 Featured Content Nightlife

Friends and bandmates to perform tribute show By Michael Witthaus [email protected] The New England music scene suffered a huge loss ...

Remembering Brooks Young

Friends and bandmates to perform tribute show

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

The New England music scene suffered a huge loss last October, when Brooks Young was killed in a car accident. The guitarist, singer and songwriter was celebrating a wave of success that included tours with George Thorogood, Sammy Hagar and Three Dog Night, and shows sharing the stage with stars like Bryan Adams and B.B. King.

Young’s career was fueled equally by talent and tenacity.

“If someone called and wanted him for a good gig, he was saying yes,” Mike Liane, a bandmate of Young’s organizing a memorial show in Concord, recalled recently. “He didn’t care, and I say this in a loving way, if the group of people around him were going to be able to do it. He knew he was going to do that gig.”

Occasionally, he’d book a show and learn some members of his band had prior commitments, Liane continued. That didn’t matter; Young would put together a quick pickup group or, failing that, do the show solo. “Brooks wasn’t going to lose an opportunity for anyone … he just had this confidence and bravery. ”

Young was a genre-bending rocker who began in the blues. He met B.B. King in his late teens, after the legendary guitarist performed in Manchester on September 11, 2001. Eight years later Young’s band opened for King in Concord. Over his career Young would range into rock and pop, without losing his early inspiration, Liane recalled.

“The thing that paints an accurate picture in my mind of what he really liked to do is when we’d play ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ The reason I say that is because it has very true, deep blues roots, but we’d do it in a way that was muscular and a little rock … he would take all his influences and combine them into every performance.”

The April 13 event at BNH Stage is a fundraiser to benefit Young’s three children. House band performers span the Brooks Young Band’s history, including drummer Blake Wyman, a member of the group’s first incarnation. Three other drummers will be on hand as well: Adam Soucy, Rob McCarthy and Dave Lombard, who was behind the kit longest.

“Usually the hardest band member to find is a good drummer, but in this instance we’ve got four that raised their hand,” Liane said. “But outside of the drummers, the lineup’s pretty consistent. Charles Mitchell’s on bass … there’s myself and Mike Gallant on guitars, and Jeff LeRoy, who played keys with Brooks basically his entire career … a great band.”

Also performing is Charlie Farren, who contributed to Young’s second album. “They had a relationship since then, and we’re delighted that he’s going to play,” Liane said. “He’s going to do a few songs, and hopefully I can get him on stage to sing some harmony with us or something like that during the set with the Brooks Young Band.”

Also appearing are Hank Osborne, Dakota Smart and Valerie Baretto, and there will likely be additional guests.

Liane was a band member late in the game, accompanying him on Three Dog Night and George Thorogood tours from 2016 to 2020, but he’d known Young since high school. He recalls when the two enrolled in an introductory guitar class, even though both were pretty good players at that point.

“We just wanted to play guitar, but we also knew we could get a really good grade,” he recalled. “While everyone else was learning ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ he would show me a Clapton lick, and then I would show him an Angus Young lick. We did that during class.”

His old friend never lost the joy of being a musician, Liane continued, recalling another memory that happened a lot.

“Every night standing side stage, he’d put his hands on my shoulders right before we walked out and he’d look me right in the eye and he’d say, Mike, we’re going to have a good time tonight,” he said. “Every single time that he did this, and it was hundreds of times, but every single time he did this, he was excited, he had a huge smile on his face, and it’s the only place on Earth he wanted to be in that moment.”

Memorial Concert for Brooks Young

When: Sunday, April 13, 4 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $20 and up at ccanh.com
Appearing are Brooks Young Band, with Charlie Farren, Hank Osborne, Dakota Smart, Mikey G and Valerie Baretto

Featured photo. Brooks Young. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/04/10

• Join the band: On a tour that includes stops at five New England high schools, Dallas Brass performs music ranging from classical to Broadway, swing and American standards. The ensemble has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and other vaunted venues. For a show in Derry, they’ll welcome Pinkerton Academy students to play, along with local middle schoolers. Thursday, April 10, 7 p.m., Stockbridge Theatre, 5 Pinkerton St., Derry, $15 and up, 437-5210.

• Crowd work pro: Few comedians incorporate an audience into their act quite like Paula Poundstone. She has a knack for finding something to talk about with just about anyone, anywhere; her act has a handful of jokes and a lot of back and forth. She moves easily from topic to topic like a Beetle at a car rally, keeping her sets as fresh as the fans that regularly return to see her perform. Friday, April 11, 7:30 p.m., Chubb Theatre, 44 S. Main St., Concord, $25 and up at ccanh.com.

• Mixed up music: One of the more unique tribute acts on the scene, Pink Talking Fish imagines what a mashup of three bands — Pink Floyd, Talking Heads and Phish — might sound like. For an upcoming show they’re playing it a bit straight. For the 50th anniversary of Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, they’ll recreate the album in the first set, and do their thing to it the next set. Friday, April 11, 8 p.m., Rochester Opera House, 31 Wakefield St., Rochester, $20 at rochesteroperahouse.com.

• Return to base: A Concord favorite and current ex-pat working in Nashville, Senie Hunt returns for a brief regional tour that includes a show with his electric blues rock Project in a downtown showcase. Known for his percussive guitar sound, Hunt’s heavier effort is a blend of originals and covers, drawing inspiration from The Allman Brothers Band, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix. Saturday, April 12, 7:30 p.m., BNH Stage, 60 S. Main St., Concord, $24 at ccanh.com.

• Back and forth: Lean and limber blues rock trio The Record Company would have been right at home in a ’70s milieu that produced Cactus, ZZ Top and Three Man Army. Foundational blues influences like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon are filtered through the lens of no-nonsense rock for a muscular sound. Their latest effort, 2023’s The Fourth Album, is a fierce rendering of this approach. Sunday, April 13, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $45 at tupelohall.com.

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown and Co., 341 pages)

When you toss a plastic water bottle in a recycling bin, you’re saving the Earth — or so we’ve been told for decades. But in recent years a more disturbing story has been emerging, with evidence that much of the stuff in our recycling bins is not being recycled but is being shipped, at significant financial and human cost, to developing nations.

In Waste Wars, journalist Alexander Clapp goes Dumpster diving for the truth, traveling the globe to witness what he calls “the wild afterlife of your trash.”

It’s a sobering story that’s being compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 launched the environmental movement with its examination of the devastating effects of pesticides. But Waste Wars is not so much about how America’s garbage is destroying us, but about how it’s trashing other countries.

Clapp’s introduction includes an astonishing statement: “Since the early 1990s, when your discarded Coke bottle first emerged as a major object of global commerce, China had been the recipient of half the plastic placed into a recycling bin anywhere on Earth.” In another decade, he writes, “America’s biggest export to China was the stuff Americans tossed away.”

But China got fed up and stopped accepting the world’s plastic, creating chaos in the global trash trade. “Within months, Greek garbage started surfacing in Liberia. Italian trash wrecked the beaches of Tunisia. Dutch plastic overwhelmed Thailand.”

The richest nations soon realized that the poorest could be counted on to take their waste — not just plastic and the remains of incinerated garbage (all that ash has to go somewhere) but also things like sewage sludge. The garbage and waste shipped to other countries is sometimes processed and sometimes repurposed, but often buried or dumped anywhere a truck driver thinks he can get away with it. In some areas sewage sludge has been broadly distributed and then paved over with “roads to nowhere.” In one area of Kenya, there are acres of six-story-high trash mountains seeping a poisonous soup that mosquitoes won’t breed in.

These sorts of arrangements have sometimes been brokered by government officials with no say by the citizens affected. In Guatemala in the early 1990s, for example, 200 families were “relocated” from their villages to make way for the processing of sewage coming from Miami, Galveston and other U.S. cities. In Turkey, a Kurdish farmer watched a truck stop outside his citrus groves, dump a load of garbage and light a match, the resulting fire nearly destroying his livelihood in the coming years.

Then there’s the e-waste. Clapp travels to a place in Ghana known as Agbogbloshie, which is a slum in which much of our electronic waste winds up. Perhaps, he says, your first cell phone and Game Boy, your DVD player, your college laptop, perished here. He writes about “enterprising young men in Ghana who have spent their lives rummaging through the piles of keyboards, desktop monitors, and smartphones that waste brokers in rich countries have shipped to Agbogbloshie; they are seasoned at restoring these busted electronics back to life — and, on occasion, using them to conduct epic long-range fraud against residents of the countries that sent them.”

At the same time, he writes, Agbogbloshie has become “a byword for ecological ruin.” Chicken eggs there contain high levels of chemical compounds, making them “probably the most poisonous on Earth.”

And yet the enterprise provides jobs. Clapp describes what he calls a “de-manufacturing line” — young men who sit for eight or nine hours a day dismantling and smashing trash: “old ceiling fans, motorcycle mufflers, speaker systems.” It is ironic, he observes, that some of the discarded objects being destroyed contain the world’s most advanced technology and yet it is backbreaking human labor — “of an almost unimaginably archaic kind” — doing the destroying.

Unfortunately, the problems Clapp uncovers have no easy fix, driven as they are by consumer demand for products that don’t just become waste themselves but produce waste, are literally wrapped in waste, every step on the way to your house, from their production to their packaging to the cash-register receipt you receive.

The book sometimes feels a bit like a lecture in which Clapp is chastising each of us for the contents of our closets and refrigerators. And yet we needed that Game Boy, didn’t we? Yes, water bottles are bad, we get it, but for many of us, so is our tap water. It’s easy to see the problem, not so easy to see the solution. Unfortunately, Waste Wars offers no way out of the mess we are in.

At the beauty store where my youngest daughter works, they recently tried to reduce plastic bag consumption by discontinuing plastic bags and offering a paper bag for 10 cents. They had to return to plastic bags within a few months because customers were so angry, they would storm out of the store.

Other countries are being more hard-nosed. In Indonesia, which is said to be the third largest contributor to plastic in the ocean (behind China and India), stores in Jakarta banned single-use plastic bags five years ago, levying a fine that amounts to $1,800. Dubai is building an enormous incinerator that it says will burn what amounts to a thousand trucks full of trash every day. But Indonesia also has plastic being sent there from other countries, and incineration has environmental costs of its own.

Depressingly, Clapp admits at one point, “As long as plastic keeps getting physically diverted by those who consume it the most, the farther from public concern — and political action — it is likely to remain.” Waste Wars is an eloquent and deeply researched call to action, even as it’s frustratingly unclear about what that action should be. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/04/10

Ingrid Laubrock, Purposing the Air (Pyroclastic Records)

Her fully caffeinated handlers describe Laubrock as an “experimental saxophonist and composer interested in exploring the borders between musical realms and creating multi-layered, dense and often evocative sound worlds.” In this album the composer pairs single instrumentalists with lone vocalists to futz with the poetry of African-American poet/essayist Erica Hunt, whom I’d imagine might be a little taken aback (or totally not) by this LP, which, at 60-odd short compositions, is a Whitman’s sampler of modern alienation, its half-written/half-improvised passages offering seemingly random bite-sized chunks of psychic turmoil. There are sing-song thingies about kites, general observations on everyday items and such (I lost track), fleshed out musically by an acidic, often noisily played cello for the first 16 pieces (undergirding Fay Victor in noise-scat mode) and a much tamer but equally animated piano, played by Matt Mitchell for the next set, over which our old buddy Sara Serpa unleashes her inner songbird (as in actual bird, seemingly). If you want unapologetically urban ambiance, this is one-stop shopping. B+ —Eric W. Saeger

Art Nation, The Ascendance (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Seems to me — mostly because I haven’t heard a lot of this kind of stuff — that melodic metal may be starting to move in an emo direction, that is unless this Swedish trio is startlingly original. Here we have the speed of Good Charlotte and the hormone-tugging angst of Trivium without the low end; I suppose the short version is Iron Maiden as its most highly evolved Pokemon character, if that makes any sense. The thing these guys do really well is bring the hooky, operatic melody without making it as indecipherable as those things can get; there’s almost no punk element to this tuneage but it’s quite powerfully done. And boy, the sound is pretty huge, which one wouldn’t expect from a trio, not that that can’t be explained by multi-tracking of course, but yeah, they shoot for the rafters. Past the obligato ballad (“Julia”) you’ll find songs like “Lightbringer,” which is like a cross between King Diamond and Pendulum, i.e. next-gen tech metal. High marks for sure. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Happy weekend, rock fans, it’s your weekly ray of musical sunshine and blind hope for humanity, back with another fresh Dumpster-load of albums from rock stars, nepo babies, comedy bands whose silly monkeyshines amuse unfunny people, and whatever else is in this list of new records coming out on April 11, don’t mind the stench, I hope you guys all brought clothespins for your noses! Jeezum crow, look at all these darned albums, durn burn it, this is gonna make a freakin’ mess! Since I probably should, I’ll launch the festivities by drinking five much-needed fingers of scotch and heading to the YouTube matrix to listen to something from Wisconsin-based soft-rocker Bon Iver’s (pronounced “BONE ee-VAIR” for you readers who couldn’t care less about mispronouncing his name and will continue to do so regardless, sticking to the New England-centric pronunciation “Bawn EYE-vah”) new album, SABLE fABLE, see what he did there, with those modern Latin alphabet letters [shocked face emoji]? No, I kid Bon Iver, his first record was done in total DIY fashion; he played a borrowed old Sears brand Silvertone guitar, which has become sort of a cult instrument among musicians, hilarious as that may seem. I don’t hate those things myself; my first guitar was a 12-string Silvertone, and its sound was pretty neat, so I won’t argue about it, but that doesn’t mean I approve of any Bon Iver music I’ve ever heard, because I don’t, but maybe this new record will change my mind about this crazily overrated dude, let’s go. So the album opens with “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” (in which Mister Ivah continues his capitalization gimmick, which, to the average reader, is pretty rude, like getting yelled at on Facebook by someone who really, really wants you to LEAVE ELON MUSK ALONE). With all that capitalization stuff I assumed I’d be hearing a new Ivah-meister, maybe even packing a little aggro-metal attitude, but nope, it’s yet more sleepytime music for awkward millennials, just like during the Aughts, when Ivah-bro was relevant, when millennials hated music and music hated them back. I suppose the tune is nice if you ever wanted to hear Coldplay doing some unplugged twee-Americana hybridization, so if that interests you, by all means, go buy this album and stay away from me on my socials, that’d be great.

• Speaking of the Aughts, look who it is, guys, it’s OK Go, with a new album, And The Adjacent Possible! You rock fans all remember when this Chicago band filmed the most epic music video of all time for their yelly indie-pop song “This Too Shall Pass,” the one where they built a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine (you know, like the kids’ game Mousetrap, but a million times more elaborate) in a warehouse and it was awesome, right? Well, times change, so the video for the new single “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” is a wickedly elaborate shoot that involved 64 smartphones; the tune is kind of like something you’d hear if Maroon 5 were kinda funky. They’ll be at the Royale in Boston on May 30.

• Ecstasy-gobbling Norwegian soundsystem Röyksopp releases True Electric on Friday; it looks like a bunch of re-rubs of their more explosive techno tunes. Fever Ray guests on a version of “What Else Is There” that’s basically a repeat of the Trentemöller remix you may have heard on the HBO show Entourage back when our planet was still managed by dinosaurs and giant dragonflies.

• Lastly it’s the posthumous album from Flaming Lips fixture Nell Smith, Anxious. The title track is a pretty little twee-ish mid-tempo thing; the only thing wrong with it is the occasional tremolo effect on her voice (probably Wayne Coyne’s dumb idea). —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Ingrid Laubrock, Purposing the Air (Pyroclastic Records) & Art Nation, The Ascendance (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

News & Notes 25/04/17

Best of 2025 — 04/10/2025

Remembering Brooks Young

The Music Roundup 25/04/10

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp

Album Reviews 25/04/10

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