Python’s Kiss, by Louise Erdrich

(Harper, 222 pages)

The titular short story in Python’s Kiss is ostensibly about a dog named Nero whose job is to guard the 8-year-old narrator’s grandparents’ grocery store. The grandfather sleeps beyond locked doors “with my grandmother on one side and a loaded gun on the other. This is not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.” The 8-year-old is staying there because her mother is about to have a baby, and she forms a bond with the dog. Nero, however, is infatuated with a cocker spaniel who belongs to a woman the narrator’s uncle is infatuated with. As events unfold, they intersect with the narrator’s memory of a traveling show of exotic, dangerous animals that went amok at her school.

This story, like the others in this imaginative collection, offers a smorgasbord of memorable characters. They are ordinary people in strange circumstances, often with an animal involved.

In “The Feral Troubadour” we meet a man enamored of poetry and stray cats. He lives alone in an apartment where he is decorating the bathroom with black and white tiles on which he writes excerpts from poems with a permanent marker. One day, like the narrator of “Python’s Kiss,” he receives what he perceives to be a sign from the universe, this one telling him “You must change your life.” The events that transpire are a confluence of absurdities that, against all odds, ends on a positive note. Not every story does, so enjoy it while you can.

In “Wedding Dresses,” four dresses stored in a basement closet are ruined by mold after a water pipe bursts, and their owner is confronted by her visiting niece: Why were there four wedding dresses? Who had she married and why did they divorce?

“This was suddenly like being a real parent. Having to explain her own past to a child, and do it in a way that would have little impact, either negative or perhaps overly positive.” The four-time bride goes through the story of each dress. Along the way we learn what she tells her niece and what she doesn’t. It’s a brilliant bit of storytelling.

In “Domain,” there is an afterlife controlled by corporations, which charge people for the privilege of uploading their consciousness into the one of their choice, or rather, the one they can afford. The narrator has been injured in a free-climbing accident and applied for early admission to an afterlife called Asphodel (also the name and subject of another story in the collection). When she arrives there, she sees what’s left of her carcass, but it’s not upsetting because “I have a new body now and it’s made of thought.” And she now has one overwhelming thought: how to find and eliminate — for good — her father, who she holds responsible for the death of her son.

The final story, “The Stone,” is as strange and riveting as the rest. It involves a woman who found a large, smooth stone as a child and adopted it as a kind of talisman, taking it with her to college, carrying it with her to concerts when she became a famous pianist. Stroking the stone gives her a sense of calm — until the day she has something that resembles a quarrel with the stone, and it breaks in two. As she slips from its emotional grip, we see the highlights of the stone’s existence over a billion years, the other lives it’s been part of.

There are 13 stories here, of which seven were previously published, in The New Yorker and elsewhere, but for anyone unfamiliar with Erdrich’s work this collection is a gateway drug to more. They are a great distraction from the everyday world, if there’s anything going on that you’d like to tune out for a while. A

Featured Photo: Python’s Kiss, by Louise Erdrich

Album Reviews 26/05/07

Ted Lucas, Images of Life [Disc 1: Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)] (Third Man Records)

Forgive me for being overly complicated in this bit: What we have here is disc 1 of a three-LP (vinyl) set covering the life’s work of one Ted Lucas, a fixture in the Detroit music/counterculture scenes of the 1960s and ’70s; disc 2 was released the other week, and the third won’t be released until the whole thing comes available on May 22. Everyone with me? OK, so for some reason — probably something to do with cultural preservation of early Motor City psychedelic-cum-proto-punk music, or possibly owing to the fact he felt Lucas was “unfairly” obscure — Jack White (who owns Third Man Records) wanted to release this compilation, which includes music from three of Lucas’ bands, Spike Drivers, The Misty Wizards and The Horny Toads. As well, White unearthed some rare live appearances and whatnot to complete the package. Like I hinted at earlier, it’s a historical artifact, its target taste most certainly acquired during that particular decade. To be honest — and I don’t say this just to help meet my self-imposed yearly quota of making fun of Jack White — the stuff on this set sounds as dated as first-album-era Jefferson Airplane, like, it’s trying so hard to be trippy it comes off as self-mockery — think the “Bat Dance” from the 1966 episode of Batman when Adam West couldn’t stop dancing with the hippie girl. For all I know this would be manna to 75-year-olds who miss the good old days (and sitars), but past that I have no idea what to tell you. D

Holy Wars, Shadow Work / Light Work (Pale Chord Records)

Time once again for another lady-fronted epic-metal album recommended by friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, one that’s been in the queue since he first flipped over this Los Angeles band’s first one, after which his Substack-column co-writing daughter “Little Bean” made email-friends with Kat Leon, the band’s singer. Usually when a bandwagon-jumping L.A. outfit clambers onto my desk I can expect two things: great musicianship (bad musicians find out just how bad they are after, like, two days in that city and give up quickly) and a lack of originality (anyone remember when L.A. band Gliss tried to be relevant in the shoegaze space? Anyone at all?). The first part gets a checkmark (if anything it sounds overly tight, typical for the genre); however, I wouldn’t write off these guys as Cassyette/Evanescence clones; Leon does have a distinctive flourish to her vocal lines that matches her ’tude, which is less untouchable Amy Lee dom-princess vibe and more bemused Natasha Lyonne “where even am I” puzzlement. Stronger songs than I’d anticipated, too. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Come sail away with me, my legion of drunken scamps who still believe in rock ’n’ roll for some inexplicable, intricately convoluted reason, come have a gander at the new albums of Friday, May 8, through our mud-colored Jagermeister goggles! First up in our list of abject disappointments new records is Look For Your Mind, the latest from Long Island, N.Y., jangle-poppers The Lemon Twigs, a band semi-famous for collaborating with Bread-worshipping mope-popper Weyes Blood and perpetually unexciting veteran dude Todd Rundgren! Knowing those facts, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from these guys’s new single “My Golden Years,” but I’ll admit that they did make a valiant effort to resurrect the ’70s-radio-bubblegum sound of The Raspberries, down to the Beatles guitars and creamy, sugar-frosted vocal lines. Much of the song is spent trying to re-create Eric Carmen’s way with a hook, which of course doesn’t happen, but like I said, they did try, which counts for — well, nothing really, but I’ll pretend it does if someone out there feels it’s necessary. Now, if you happen to be in a neo-jangle-pop band and want to sound like The Raspberries, the fastest way to create those tunes is by (A) being a decent songwriter, and (B) not even bothering to try doing it at all, since our current timeline in rock ’n’ roll has an unquenchable thirst for mediocrity, which these guys possess in big bucket-loads. I predict that they will do more songwriting with Todd Rundgren, which will deplete even more from their oeuvre, and they will eventually give up and become part of the problem, working in the music business as “talent scouts” and signing random bands to contracts they don’t deserve, but that’s enough inside baseball for today.

• Now, like I just kind-of said, being in a band that would like to try to sound like Raspberries is evidence of having good intentions at least, which I’ve never accused Canadian milquetoast-hipster clowns Broken Social Scene of harboring, but here they are, with a new album, Remember the Humans. Aside from giving us a couple of debatably decent songs from charter member Leslie Feist, Broken Social Scene has mastered the art of bland, un-catchy music, and we music critics have had to pretend to like them forever now, mostly because catchy music is bad for people’s ears because — well, it just is, never even mind why (it’s like the Aughts have never ended as far as overrated indie bands like Broken Social Scene are concerned). But fine, cut to now, and the new single “Not Around Anymore,” which sounds like a Strokes (of course) filler track that’s been put through a Jamie Lidell modulator and just aspires to be, you know, a really bad song. Let’s continue.

• Lykke Li is a Swedish dream-pop/dance-pop singer, songwriter, model and actress, because hot-looking people should never have to settle on just one attention-seeking specialty, amirite folks? Her forthcoming sixth LP, The Afterparty, is claimed to be her final one; there’s no explanation for that as far as I could find on my ’puter, but she recently had her second child and wanted to explore darker “themes of the lower self, including revenge, shame and despair,” and that’s fine with me. “Knife In The Heart” sounds like ABBA trying to be Sigur Ros, which isn’t as bad as it might look.

• And finally we have British emo/noise-rock/soft-grunge band Basement with Wired, their fifth album and first since 2018’s Beside Myself. I expect this to be good, let’s go see. Yup, nope, “Be Here Now” is just Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” in a fake beard and sunglasses, I hope this has edified you.

Featured Photo: Ted Lucas, Images of Life [Disc 1: Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)] and Holy Wars, Shadow Work / Light Work

Orange Muffins with Grape-Nuts

From the 1930 Calumet Baking Book

  • 2 cups (240 g) all purpose flour
  • 1½ teaspoons baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 2 Tablespoons butter
  • 2/3 cup (132 g) sugar
  • Zest of two oranges
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • ¾ cup orange juice — perhaps from the oranges you just zested.
  • 1 cup (114 g) Grape-Nuts cereal — At some point in your youth you probably tried the dry, gravel-like cereal that comes in a very small box and its appeal was lost on you. Interestingly enough, the older you get the better the Grape-Nuts get. You find this listed as an ingredient in a surprising number of recipes starting in the 1930s. Presumably, Grape-Nuts were new, exciting, and a social signifier of some kind?

Mother’s Day is one of the three or four days of the year when non-mothers decide to make a big deal about cooking breakfast for the mom of the house. Muffins are a good choice, because they are easy, hard to mess up, and don’t leave the kitchen looking like a combat zone.

This is a good recipe to make with even young children. It’s super straightforward. The key is to measure all the ingredients out ahead of time. Most of us have the image of the joy of intergenerational cooking with children. In point of fact, even very young kids like the idea of cooking but have the attention spans of coffee-addled squirrels. The act of measuring out ingredients is indescribably tedious to them, whereas turning on a mixer and adding ingredients one at a time will take about 11 minutes — the length of a Bluey cartoon.

Preheat your oven to 375°F, and put muffin liners in 12 muffin tins.

In a small mixing bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together. Set it aside.

In your mixer, cream the butter, sugar and orange zest together. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a silicone spatula, then beat in the eggs, a little at a time.

When everything has mixed together thoroughly, add half the flour mixture (turn your mixer to its slowest speed to avoid poofing yourself with flour), then half the orange juice, then the rest of the flour, then the rest of the orange juice.

Remove the bowl from your mixer, and stir in the Grape-Nuts.

Divide the batter between the 12 lined muffin tins, then bake for 18 to 20 minutes.

Let cool 10 to 15 minutes, then eat with butter or topped with ice cream.

Featured photo: Orange Muffins with Grape-Nuts. Photo by John Fladd.

Strictly fudge, many flavors

Fudge following grows from grandma’s recipe

Dorothy O’Rourke runs a small candy company called Granite Bay Fudge.

“I had a plan,” she sighed. “Originally, I liked the name the New England Fudge Company, but it turns out the New England Fudge Company is actually already a company. In New York. Somebody did not do a good job checking on things. New York is not in New England! I was horrified to discover that the name I really liked was gone. So Granite Bay came out of Granite State and Bay State. I try to hide the fact that I grew up in Massachusetts, but I consider myself a New Hampshireite. That’s how we ended up in Granite Bay.”

O’Rourke strictly sells fudge, but in an impressive variety of flavors.

“At this point, I just hit 19 types,” O’Rourke said. “I get a lot of questions from people. I actually had somebody recently who asked me about dill pickle fudge and I’m going to turn that one down, hard. I’m not a believer in the weird. I’m not making jalapeno fudge and, no, I’m not making bacon fudge. Those are not what I consider fudge flavors. But on the other hand, I’ve had a lot of people asking for fruit-based fudges. Until just recently, chocolate-raspberry was my most recent, but I had a woman reach out to me and told me that she likes orange fudge. I’d never made orange fudge, but I just test drove that one, and so that’s our most recent. We do listen to requests. I added maple-walnut and chocolate-walnut. Maple and maple-walnut became huge sellers. I did not realize — I’ve lived in New Hampshire now since the mid-’80s and I had no idea how big Maple Weekend is in this state. It is huge and apparently I’m going to need to really ramp up and make a lot more maple and maple-walnut fudge this coming year because it sells at an insane rate.”

O’Rourke has found customers can be very particular about fudge.

“What I have discovered is that there are different types of fudge,” she said. “There’s the New England or American version of fudge, which is what I make. It’s the creamy version of fudge. But there’s also Scottish fudge. Scottish fudge is cooked to a higher temperature. It is a brittle, drier fudge; it’s very, very granular. We had a lot of people [at shows] asking us about our fudge and giving us some sort of funny looks. And what we realized as they tried our samples is that they were looking for that other type of fudge.”

And don’t ask O’Rourke about penuche.

“We tell people, ‘If you’re looking for penuche, you’re talking to the wrong person.’ I do not make penuche; it does not fit the family recipe. It needs to be made differently. We tell people to go hunt down other people if they’re looking for penuche fudge. My fudge, the original chocolate recipe, was my grandmother’s recipe. It was handed down by word-of-mouth. It is not written down. I was told I was not allowed to write it down. I worry sometimes that my memory might go, but at this point I make it enough that everything is memorized.”

At this time, Granite Bay Fudge does not have a website or a storefront. O’Rourke depends on her fans hunting her down at events where she is a vendor. They usually find her through social media.

“I have Instagram and Facebook posts,” she said, “but word-of-mouth has been an interesting thing. It turns out I’ve got followers. It’s been an interesting experience having people reach out to me to say, ‘Where is the next show? We really need more of your fudge.’”

“I have fudge groupies.”

Granite Bay Fudge
Fudge groupies can follow Granite Bay Fudge @granitebayfudge on Instagram, or search for it by name on Facebook.

Featured photo: Bonne Richards, owner of Bonne the Baker. Courtesy Bonne Richards.

No gluten, no problem

Bonne The Baker wants to give you better options

Bonne Richards has had some memorably bad gluten-free baked goods.

“I saw a gluten-free pizza yesterday that made me cry,” she said. “It was so clearly awful. I was at a meeting on the other side of the state and someone sent out for pizza and the gluten-free thing looked like it was made of Play-Doh. It was probably better to eat the box it came in.”

After baking professionally for many years, Richards has made the move to open her own gluten-free bakery.

“I’ve been in the business for a long time,” Richards said. “I was Michael Buckley’s original pastry chef at Michael Timothy’s back in the ’90s. And I’ve been working for different people and running farm bakeries, then went out on my own a couple of years ago just doing some wholesale accounts in the area. After listening to customers tell me, ‘Please, please open your own place,’ I decided to jump in and do it finally. It will be a gluten-free, dairy-free, plant-based bakery and retail market in Nashua.”

Richards’ goal for Bonne the Baker is to be a resource for customers who follow a specialized diet and, like her, have been disappointed with the choices available to them.

“It will probably break down to something like 70 percent sweet baked goods,” she said, ”and the other portion will be savory. You know — muffins, some Danishes, pastries. I’ll have some bread. Of course things like whoopie pies and cupcakes, all kinds of stuff. I’m going to do a lot of plant-based items. I have a big vegan and vegetarian following so I’m going to have a grab-and-go section that will have fresh salads, grain salads, greens, a lot of protein balls, vegan cheeses and things like vegan salamis that are hard to get.”

Richards remembers when gluten-free baked goods like that disappointing pizza were the norm. “Back in the day, at the beginning of gluten-free, the flours weren’t right,” she said. “Nobody really had a good formula for making eggs that weren’t eggs, you know what I mean? [Ingredients like that] have come such a long way and the procedures have taken a while to catch up with them. I can’t tell you how much I’ve thrown out perfecting my recipes. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I hear my favorite compliment pretty often: ‘ I cannot tell that this is gluten-free and there’s no eggs in this or dairy.’ So I’m pretty proud of that.”

Richards said the new space is promising.

“It looks so good!” she said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my god, it’s looking even better than I thought it was going to look like. It’s a fabulous space. It is so beautiful. I lucked out finding it. The City of Nashua has been so good, I can’t even tell you. And the comment out of the deputy health inspector was, ‘We want you in business’.

Richards’ original plan was to open for business on May 1, “but with paperwork, there are always issues,” she said. “I finally got my food licence. Now, we start baking and stocking the shelves and putting up my sign. The new plan is to have a soft opening on Saturday [May 9], and then the grand opening is going to be that Wednesday, May 13, which is my mother’s birthday, and she’s not here anymore, so even though it’s a Wednesday I’m going to call it Mother’s Day all weekend.”

Bonne The Baker
Where: 2 Cellu Drive, Nashua, 669-4200, bonniethebaker.com
When: soft opening Saturday, May 9, and grand opening Wednesday, May 13.
Hours: open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Sundays 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Featured photo: Bonne Richards, owner of Bonne the Baker. Courtesy Bonne Richards.

The Weekly Dish 26/5/07

• French wine, French dining: There will be a wine dinner, “La Belle Saison: A French Wine & Culinary Experience,” Thursday, May 7, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Murphy’s Taproom & Carriage House (393 Route 101, Bedford, 488-5975; 494 Elm St., Manchester, 644-3535, murphystaproom.com). Organized by Wine Not Experiences, this dinner is inspired by the fresh energy of spring in France, featuring elegant French wines thoughtfully paired with a creative seasonal menu. Tickets are $150 through winenotexperiences.com.

• Wine and love stories: Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) will host “Pouring Over Pages: A Romance Book and Wine Pairing Event” on Saturday, May 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. This event brings together books, wine and playful fun for a memorable literary wine tasting experience. Sip delicious local wines while exploring four swoon-worthy novels, play flirty games, win prizes, and connect with fellow book lovers in the scenic vineyard setting. General admission tickets are $49.87 through the Averill House website.

• Mother’s Day tea: The Culinary Playground (16 Manning St., Derry, 339-1664, culinary-playground.com) will host a Mother’s Day Tea on Sunday May 10, from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Students will make a batch of berry tea cakes ​and compose their own tea sandwiches, ​then sit to dine in the kitchen. Tea, coffee and juice will be served. The cost is $65 per person at culinaryplaygroundnh.com/adults.

• A high-end Mother’s Day dinner: The Bedford Village Inn (2 Olde Bedford Way, Bedford, 472-2001, bedfordvillageinn.com) will host a three-course prix fixe Mother’s Day dinner on Sunday, May 10, with seating times from 2 to 7 p.m. The cost is $85 per adult and $45 per child. Visit bedfordvillageinn.com/bvi-holidays/#mothersday.

• A wine-filled Mother’s Day: Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) will host a Mother’s Day high tea brunch and wine pairing Sunday, May 10, with seatings at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Tickets are $59 through the Averill House website.

• An artsy Mother’s Day: Arts Alley (20 S.Main St., Concord, 406-5666, artsalleyconcordnh.com) will host a Mother’s Day brunch buffet called “A Toast to Mom” Sunday, May 10, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. This promises to be a “relaxed and memorable afternoon filled with great food, cocktails, and time together” according to the Arts Alley website. Tickets are $55 per adult and $20 per child.

• A gardeny Mother’s Day: Birch Wood Vineyards (199 Rockingham Road, Derry, 965-4359, birchwoodvineyards.com) will host a garden-inspired brunch Sunday, May 10, with flavors, flowers and seasonal dishes. There will be three seating times. Adult tickets are $70 and children’s tickets are $30 through the Birch Wood website.

• A small-plates Mother’s Day: Fulchino Vineyard (187 Pine Hill Road, Hollis, 438-5984, fulchinovineyard.com) will host a six-course small-plate dinner Sunday, May 10, from noon to 3 p.m. Indulge in a carefully curated selection of gourmet small plates surrounded by vineyard views. Adult tickets are $60 each, children’s meals $25, through the Vineyard’s website.

• Cake and countesses: LaBelle Winery Amherst (345 Route 101, Amherst, 672-9898, labellewinery.com) will host a Bridgerton-inspired cake decorating class Wednesday, May 13, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. An instructor will guide you through adding beautiful icing decorations to your own 5-inch mini cake. You can add on a glass of LaBelle wine and a cheese plate to enjoy during class. You will take your cake home with you. This class starts at $74 through the LaBelle website.

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