Halloween Fun! — The Hippo — 10/19/23

Time to get in the Halloween spirit! In this week’s supersized information-packed cover story, we’ve gathered all the spooky season events we can find for all ages and interests. Want to get scared at a local haunted house? Or would you prefer relaxing with a screening of a black and white horror classic? Find haunted attractions, trick-or-treat times, trunk-or-treat times, kids’ events, events for Halloween fans of any age and fun for the grown-up crowd.

Also on the cover: Get your tickets now for the Distiller’s Showcase in Manchester on Nov. 2 (page 28). Amy Diaz presents a new batch of scary movies for your spooky season viewing (page 34). Find live music this weekend and beyond in our Music This Week listing, which starts on page 38.

View entire selection throughout the years here

Comforting sounds

Concert benefits mental health center

If Shakespeare were to write Twelfth Night today, he might open it with, “If music be the food of self-love, play on.” That’s certainly true for Sarah Blacker, an award-winning singer and songwriter who’s been a music therapist for more than two decades. This makes her an ideal choice to headline a concert in support of Lakes Region Mental Health Center, which serves residents of Belknap County and southern Grafton County.

Fittingly, she’ll perform a set of her ebullient folk music, which one fan memorably dubbed “sundress rock,” and then participate in a post-show panel discussion of mental health.

“It’s kind of a two in one; I’m pretty excited about it,” Blacker said in a recent phone interview. “I’m going to discuss the ways we can use music therapy to improve our mental health, and how it was a big part of my own mental health journey.”

Joining her on the panel will be other “experts in the field, as well as individuals whose lives have been positively affected by music and art therapy,” she wrote in a follow-up email. “Attendees are encouraged to stay and gain valuable insights into the licensure and accreditation processes within music therapy, as well as appreciate the advantages of an integrated approach to mental health care, and recognize the profound impact that music and arts wield on the healing journey.”

Growing up a fan of Paul Simon and The Beatles, along with Lilith Fair favorites like Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos, Blacker picked up the guitar in her late teens, mainly because she was constantly writing song lyrics and wanted accompaniment.

“Music really provided me a lot of solace and a place to process what I was feeling,” she said. “When I started writing songs and sharing them … it was really powerful to be able to have that way to connect with other people.”

After high school Blacker enrolled at Berklee College of Music. She was a bit aimless until she discovered music therapy and found her calling; she has mentored Berklee students in that program for several years. During the pandemic she completed her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling, and she now spends her days coordinating an intensive outpatient program for a small mental health company in Massachusetts, while working toward full certification as a psychotherapist.

She also wrote a lot during lockdown and recently completed an EP that includes a pair of songs about the experience. Blacker describes the first as “a survival mode song,” and the other as “asking the question of how did we get here? Why are we such a complicated and mystifying, dark and light species?” She hopes to release the record sometime next year.

Blacker likes to mix up her musical styles. To feed her funkier side, she’s led the New England Groove Collective. She currently sings with The Ammonium Maze, a group devoted to Percy Hill, a beloved Seacoast alt rock band that included her husband and frequent collaborator Aaron Katz. Two other original Percy Hill members, Tom Powley and Jon Hawes, are in the group, which is rounded out by guitarist Dave Brunyak, singer Danielle Lovasco and Chris Sink, a fellow music therapist, on keyboards.

“That’s been a lot of fun to just sing, and I’ve started playing some acoustic guitar and percussion in the band too,” Blacker said. “Aaron’s been on guitar and singing and everybody kind of takes turns singing leads. We started off doing kind of like a party vibe, but we’re all older now, so we’ve moved into a little bit of a listening room vibe since the project began.”

One of the highlights of finishing her degree was being invited to perform the national anthem at Salem State University’s graduation ceremony. She wanted to emulate Whitney Houston’s iconic Super Bowl performance, which was a daunting task. So she asked her old voice teacher for a few pointers. “We survived,” she said with a laugh.

For her own therapeutic needs, Blacker has a chocolate Lab who’s famous on Instagram as @brucefromsalem. “If I feel horrible about myself and everything’s going to hell, I go to Bruce’s page,” she said. “Everyone’s so nice; they say, ‘We love you’ and people send him free stuff in the mail. It’s really been the happiest place I’ve found during all of this.”

Sarah Blacker
When: Tuesday, Oct. 24, 7 p.m.
Where: Colonial Theatre, 609 Main St., Laconia
Tickets: $35 at etix.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 23/10/19

Local music news & events

  • Grunge alike: Start the weekend early with Chicago-based tribute act Smells Like Nirvana. Hit their website with advance requests for the 21+ show, which promises selections from Nevermind, In Utero and Bleach, along with a few B-sides and rarities. Dead Original opens. Thursday, Oct. 19, 8 p.m., Angel City Music Hall, 179 Elm St., Manchester, $15 at ticketweb.com.
  • Change up: A foremost singer-songwriter is joined by a premier guitarist as Lyle Lovett & Leo Kottke perform. The show was forced to be reconfigured when Lovett’s original tour mate, John Hiatt, injured himself in a fall while hiking (“He’s recovering nicely,” Lovett reassured a Troy, New York, crowd on Oct. 8). The fall tour dates are now divided between Kottke and Chris Isaak. Friday, Oct. 20, 8 p.m., Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord, $58.25 and up at ccanh.com.
  • Helping out: In support of Concord Coalition to End Homelessness, Delta Generators provide the music for the annual Blues, Brews & BBQ cookout. Pre-order a selection of smoked goodies, or go whole hog with the pit master’s special, with brisket, sausage and pulled pork. Come to enjoy a band led by singer, harp player and guitarist Brian Templeton. Saturday, Oct. 21, 1 p.m., Faraday Function Center, 48 Airport Road, Concord, more at concordhomeless.org/blues-brews-bbq.
  • Big night: A weekly hip-hop event goes big as the Rap Night Supershow welcomes six performers from three tours: Esh & The Isolations, Shubzilla, Ardamus, Bill Beats, Taste of Vomit and Tim Jones. There’s a cypher, the genre’s equivalent of a song circle, happening early in the evening, which is hosted by eyenine and Shawn Caliber, with DJ Myth spinning. Sunday, Oct. 22, 9 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $7/door, 21+. See facebook.com/RapNightManchester.
  • Tune swap: The latest in an ongoing singer-songwriter series has Katie Dobbins, a New England Music Awards Best Female Performer of the Year nominee, playing and hosting. She’s joined by indie rock tunesmith Ian Galipeau, and George Barber, a folk singer who draws his inspiration from John Prine, Steve Earle, Jason Isbell and other Americana artists and who also cooks for the hosting winery and restaurant. Wednesday, Oct. 25, 6 pm., Loft at Hermit Woods, 72 Main St., Meredith, $10 to $15 at eventbrite.com.


Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, by Maria Bamford

Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, by Maria Bamford (Gallery, 272 pages)

Are comedians prone to mental health problems? Two new books add to this image of the troubled funny man (or woman) — Misfit by Gary Gulman (Flatiron, 283 pages) talks about the comedian’s struggle with anxiety and depression; he also had an HBO special in 2019 called “The Great Depresh” that’s about mental illness.
Then there’s Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford, which is subtitled “A memoir of mental illness and the quest to belong anywhere.”
I haven’t gotten deep into Gulman’s memoir, but here’s what I can tell you about Bamford’s: It’s kind of a hot mess, a rambling, often cringey discourse that only occasionally does justice to its underlying and interesting premise: how secular “cults” — from family to 12-step groups — entice us because of our pathological need to belong.

To be fair, the need to belong is a feature, not a bug in our species, one that helped protect our ancestors from predators and starvation — safety in numbers, and all that. Groups provide human beings cover and, often, meaning. And Bamford has joined plenty, including Debtors Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Her experiences in these groups provide a loose scaffolding for Bamford’s stories and jokes.
She wound up at Debtors Anonymous, for example, after an STD led to an infection which led to $5,000 in medical bills she couldn’t pay because she was working for a bakery, loading trucks. The work, she said, wasn’t enough to cover rent and groceries, let alone medical debt, and collectors started calling, and then she got robbed. Her parents were well off but announced they would support her emotionally but not financially, and apparently the emotional support wasn’t so great either.

So at Debtors Anonymous, Bamford got solid advice on how to deal with creditors and put her financial house in order, and got support from fellow sufferers. “This is the great thing about twelve-step support groups. You can share the grossest elements of your personal failings and all you will hear is peals of joyous recognition to the rafters of whatever Zoom breakout room you’re in,” she writes.

After a year of sundry humiliations, including living in someone’s spare bedroom and taking every temp job she was offered, Bamford was hired full-time at an animation studio in L.A. There she could afford an efficiency apartment with a pool (“Filled with leaves and a dead baby possum, but a POOL!”) It took eight years to fully pay off her medical debt, while she was cobbling together a career in which she was successful on some fronts and still struggling on others. For example, she was fired from a job at Nickelodeon shortly before she got work doing voice-overs for the series CatDog. She was still working reception jobs by day when she was appearing on the Tonight show.

Along the way she was struggling to have sustained relationships, which is one way of saying she was having a lot of one-night stands. “What to do? I joined another twelve-step group! Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.”
There, she met “buzzy, intense people in tight clothes” who supported each other in coming up with a “dating plan” and she eventually improved so much that she was able to have a relationship for 11 months with someone who was in a group called Marijuana Anonymous.

At this point, Bamford starts running out of 12-step groups to write about, so she ascribes culthood to other random things, such as success. One success she found was as an actor in Target Christmas commercials (you can see them by Googling “Target Christmas Lady”) starting in 2008. But the success of those commercials constrained her in other ways, and she had a personal tragedy involving a dog she loved, and then because Bamford had started feeling ethically compromised by working for Target, she wrote a letter to “The Ethicist” column at the New York Times, setting off a chain of events that got her fired.

I am literally exhausted by this point, just reading about her life.
She foresaw this, writing “Maria, where was your psychiatrist in all this?” and explaining that she’s been on Prozac for an eating disorder since 1990, and now she was thinking she could be bipolar, and then she had a terrible relationship with a bad man, and suddenly she’s checking herself in a psychiatric ward — at which point she is entering a new cult, “the cult of mental health care.”

The book ends with what is officially called “Obligatory suicide disclaimer” and a genuinely heartbreaking sketch that Bamford did in fifth grade. It’s titled “I feel down in the dumps” and shows a child kneeling with their head hung down. It makes evident that Bamford’s difficulties with mental health aren’t simply the result of bad decisions in adulthood, and a difficult mother, but mental demons have stalked her since childhood. She writes, “Like most people, I’ve thought of suicide between eight and ninety times per day since around the age of nine,” even though she says, “Even regarding suicide, I’m not a can-do person.”

Finally Bamford goes into a couple of pages of jovial advice for people who are suicidal. Call a helpline — dial 988, for starters. “BUT IF THAT FAILS: Call AT&T! Call Domino’s. Call an anti-abortion ‘clinic’! See if they’re pro-life for your life.”

OK, this is comedy, I get it. (I think. Does she really think that “most people” think of suicide all day every day?) And there will no doubt be people struggling with mental health for whom this approach is genuinely helpful. “Please don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. Do something else instead. Even if it’s harmful! Suicide is a one-off. You can do meth at least twice without consequences! … Knock yourself out with a forty-ounce keg of Baileys Irish Cream and a Dairy Queen Blizzard. You do not want to miss any additions to the Dairy Queen product line!

Bamford is genuinely funny, and there are moments of light and love in this book, however fleeting. There’s a lot of family angst between Bamfords that remains unresolved, let’s just say.

But there is still something unsettling about turning mental health struggles into a punch line as Bamford and other comedians are doing, apparently successfully. If this book helps even one person, then it’s an unqualified success. But for someone who doesn’t think about suicide at all, let alone regularly, it was an uneven and heart-rending read. C

— Jennifer Graham

Featured photo: Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, by Maria Bamford. Courtesy photo.

Album Reviews 23/10/19

Charlene Darling, La Porte (Disciples Records)

It’s been a while since the last time I was presented with an album from a quirk-pop Kate Bush wannabe, and here it is, and thankfully not drowning in desperado-romantic angst. But at least this Parisian-born, Brussels-based underground fixture sings off-key a lot, I’ll give it that! No, seriously, folks, if you like Air, Figurine and all that stuff, you’ll probably find a lot to like here, even if I can barely stand it. The key to making music like this is to spend a lot of time in your apartment playing at being existentially lost, as the video for “Tour s’efface” demonstrates; I saw something in the press release about a guy running tape loops for this lady’s group but didn’t hear anything notable in that regard, which is par for the course here. Despite all my disdain for this thing, Iggy Pop, of all people, liked it enough to play it on his BBC radio show. Urban sluggery and first world problems ahoy! C- —Eric W. Saeger

Iogi, We Can Be Friends (Raw Tapes Records)

It’s been a while since the last time I was presented with an album from a quirk-pop Kate Bush wannabe, and here it is, and thankfully not drowning in desperado-romantic angst. But at least this Parisian-born, Brussels-based underground fixture sings off-key a lot, I’ll give it that! No, seriously, folks, if you like Air, Figurine and all that stuff, you’ll probably find a lot to like here, even if I can barely stand it. The key to making music like this is to spend a lot of time in your apartment playing at being existentially lost, as the video for “Tour s’efface” demonstrates; I saw something in the press release about a guy running tape loops for this lady’s group but didn’t hear anything notable in that regard, which is par for the course here. Despite all my disdain for this thing, Iggy Pop, of all people, liked it enough to play it on his BBC radio show. Urban sluggery and first world problems ahoy! C- —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

  • Oct. 20 is our next new-CD-release Friday, and, much as I don’t want to, yes, I will be normal today and speak first about the only album that matters to Billboard magazine and the mainstream audience it hypnotizes, The Rolling Stones’ new one, Hackney Diamonds! OK, I mentioned it, may I be excused now? Right, I guess not. Let’s just say that I never cared about the Stones and never will; the only songs I used to like were “The Last Time” and one other, I forget, but it doesn’t matter, if I want to hear Stones songs all I have to do is go to Dollar Tree and wait around a few minutes, basking in the despair of that end-stage-capitalist vibe you can only get at a dollar store. Personally I’d much rather hang around at Discount Madness in Pelham because they play 1950s songs all day, and it’s fun to hear the retirees walking around casually whistling along to tunes about jalopies and sock hops, songs that really marked the end of rock ’n’ roll’s usefulness. I mean, after that, pop rock was just about hair and “trousers” and really nothing else; the Stones were basically Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin’s more pliable Beatles, and both ’60s bands had super-boring drummers. That’s all I have on all this tediousness for the moment, so, as far as the new album, the single, “Angry,” has a video that features this generation’s Marilyn Monroe, Sydney Sweeney belly dancing to the song, which has some good AC/DC energy but is still mindlessly Stones-ish. I don’t hate it, no, now may I please go?
  • The Streets is one of the stage names under which British alternative hip-hop/garage dude Mike Skinner releases records. His forthcoming new LP, The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light, features the single “We All Need An Enemy,” a Cockney-accent-drawled chill-trap number that’s actually quite listenable; in it, Skinner waxes apathetic about people finding love in hate groups and other necessary evils. I was impressed.
  • Bombay Bicycle Club is an English indie-rock trio named after a now-defunct chain of Indian restaurants in North London! In 2009 they released their first album, I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose, a fairly thrashy affair that was all about post-punk, and the hilariously loquacious wonk at Pitchfork Media found stuff in it to complain about, and then they went low-key folk in 2010 with their Flaws LP, which was silly of them to do, then they tried stadium-indie on for size in 2014 with the album So Long See You Tomorrow, which was electronic pop, and that takes us to now, with their newest, My Big Day. I hate to take just one song to talk about when discussing the latest album from a band that’s never really even known what kind of band it’s supposed to be, especially given that it’s my understanding that this album is a genre-mishmash according to my fellow music-journalist hacks, but I’ll go out on a limb and give a listen to the title track, because I am a daredevil, don’t try this at home, folks!
    Right, so it’s a quirky whisper-electro joint powered by a fake electric piano sample that really accomplishes nothing, but that’s the charm of that kind of thing, isn’t it?
  • We’ll wrap things up for the week with Blink-182, which is one of those emo-rock/power-pop bands whose success baffles most people over 45; at the moment their main selling point is that their drummer is Mrs. Kourtney Kardashian, which is sure to change after her next mimosa vacation in the Maldives, but that’s OK! One More Time is the band’s new full-length, the title track from which is a strummy nerd-pop ballad. It sounds like Lit trying to be Simon & Garfunkel, all set with this. —Eric W. Saeger

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).

Chocolate spider

With Halloween around the corner and a host of sports moms and PTA dads waiting to humble-brag about the amazing handcrafted costumes and treats they’ve whipped up in their copious spare time, here is a bonus food-craft-y idea. It has the candy hat-trick of (1) looking very impressive, (2) being actually extremely easy to make, and (3) really showing up those snooty car-pool parents.

Ingredients
Whoppers
chocolate chips
pretzel sticks
chocolate sprinkles (optional)

Equipment
wax paper
small paintbrush (You don’t actually need-need this, but it might make it easier to work on small details)
tweezers (ditto)

Fill a small microwave-safe bowl halfway with chocolate chips.
Heat for 20 seconds, then stir with a spoon or a craft stick.
Heat again for 10 seconds at a time, until the stirred chocolate is melted.

Dip the mini-pretzel sticks in chocolate, and lay them out on wax paper.

Use the melted chocolate to glue the Whoppers together to make a body, then glue the legs together and then to the body with more chocolate. If it still looks too much like pretzels glued to Whoppers, drizzle some more chocolate onto your choco-spider. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you could sprinkle some chocolate sprinkles onto the body to look like hair.

The good news about this project is that the rougher your spider looks, the creepier it looks. If you completely mess up and it looks really bad, pretend one of your children made it and brag like heck about it, which makes you look like a better parent than that dad who always wins the Pinewood Derby. This’ll show him. And Sharon from ballet class will eat. her. heart. out.

John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

Featured photo: Chocolate spider. Photo courtesy of John Fladd.

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