Dear Evan Hansen (PG-13)

Dear Evan Hansen (PG-13)

An anxiety-filled teenager stumbles into a family’s tragedy in Dear Evan Hansen, a film adaptation of the Broadway musical.

Evan Hansen (Ben Platt, who originated the role in the stage musical) is starting his senior year of high school with an arm cast, prescriptions to help him manage his anxiety and depression and an assignment from his therapist to write himself a daily letter of affirmation. “Dear Evan Hansen,” he writes himself in the high school library. He can’t seem to find the life-affirming words to say to himself and instead pens a letter wondering if he matters at all, throwing in a mention of Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), a girl he’s long liked from a far. When he goes to print it out, though, her brother Connor (Colton Ryan) gets ahold of it first. Connor, an angry kid who briefly has a friendly-ish conversation with Evan before he finds the letter, storms off, thinking the letter is just meant to provoke him.

As Evan explains nervously to Jared (Nik Dodani), his one sort-of friend (we’re just family friends, Jared reminds him), he’s afraid Connor will publish his letter online. But instead, he’s called to the principal’s office, where Evan’s mom, Cynthia (Amy Adams), and stepdad, Larry (Danny Pino), ask him about what they assume is his friendship with Connor. Evan very weakly attempts to explain his whole therapist assignment situation but then Cynthia explains that the “Dear Evan Hansen” note is Connor’s last words because he has died by suicide. Evan ends up accepting a dinner invitation to Connor’s family’s house and, unable to bring himself to tell this grieving family that Connor didn’t write the letter, he makes up memories of a friendship between himself and Connor.

This friendship not only brings him into this family — a wealthy, in his mind idyllic version of a family compared to his absent dad and caring but long-hours-working mother, Heidi (Julianne Moore) — and closer to Zoe but wins him support from the kids at school, including high achiever Alana (Amandla Stenberg), who confides in Evan that she too struggles with mental health issues. As Evan is pulled more into these relationships, he finds himself able to deliver, to others at least, the hopeful message that he and, as he learns, other teens need to hear.

I know that time and Joss Whedon have made this comparison uncool, but during the first half of this movie especially I found myself thinking that the “Earshot” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had delivered the basic message of this movie so much cleaner and more succinctly. The “every single person … is ignoring your pain because they’re too busy with their own” speech from that 1999 episode (which, if it makes it better, was written by Jane Espenson, according to Wikipedia) delivered to one high schooler by another gets to what I feel like this movie wants to convey. That, and that you, the “you” of all of teenagerdom, are not alone, which this movie conveys through at least two or three songs.

Here, these messages are delivered often by or to or around Ben Platt — and, look, it’s a musical, I can suspend disbelief regarding a lot of things, including an actor’s age (which has been a subject of internet chatter since the trailer was released). But Platt isn’t just about a decade older than the character he’s playing, he reads as considerably older, both older than his character and older than the other “kids” in the “high school.” In reality, he isn’t all that much older than most of the other main teen-playing actors, but his whole vibe creates something different in this character, something more predatory and, frankly, creepy than what seems to be intended, which, I think at least based on the songs, is more a kid who is sad and lost and so lacking in confidence that he sort of falls into something he doesn’t understand the harm of and can’t handle. I never felt entirely certain who I was supposed to root for, and if always thinking Evan Hansen was awful is what I’m supposed to feel then he makes for a very unappealing central character.

So there’s all that, creating a real “yeesh” in the middle of the movie that I could never quite get away from. But there are also some nice elements here. Moore and Adams both give real depth to their characters as moms dealing with sons they don’t know how to help. Their difficulties, their grief and frustrations are well-portrayed, even though the movie doesn’t give them a whole lot of independent character development. I also like how Dever (who has pretty much been excellent in everything I’ve seen her in) is able to give us the struggle of Zoe to reconcile the crappy parts of her relationship with her brother with her memories of them as kids.

While I don’t think I’ll be shelling out for the cast album, Dear Evan Hansen has some nice songs, that work in the moment. I didn’t love all of the choreography and camera work here, but it was interesting and it was able to break free from the “stuck on the stage”-iness that can hamper some musicals.

With its premise that I feel like it doesn’t entirely do justice to and its whole “this could easily be a horror movie” thing, Dear Evan Hansen is pretty solidly not for me. But I could see a world in which fans of the musical (of which there clearly are plenty; it was nominated for multiple Tonys, according to Wikipedia) might enjoy this adaptation. C

Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving suicide (which, for real-world help: the number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255), brief strong language and some suggestive references. Directed by Stephen Chbosky with a screenplay by Steven Levenson (from the stage play with music and lyrics by Justin Paul and Benj Pasek and book by Steven Levenson), Dear Evan Hansen is two hours and 17 minutes long (and oh boy is it ever) and is distributed in theaters only at the moment by Universal Studios.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (PG-13)

The life of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker gets the biopic treatment in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a feature film that shares that title with a 2000 documentary about Bakker (who by then was Tammy Faye Messner).

I forgot, until rewatching the trailer for that doc (available for rent or purchase), how deeply weird it could be, with its puppets reading title cards and its talking head interviews with Tammy herself. Tammy Faye died in 2007 and really by that point did seem like someone whose life and on-screen personality were so much bigger and stranger than the late 1980s collapse of the TV evangelist network she fronted with her then-husband Jim Bakker.

Here we much more specifically stick to Tammy Faye (Jessica Chastain) from roughly the early 1960s, when she first met Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) at bible college, through the end of their religious entertainment and real estate empire. After an initial glimpse at child Tammy Faye, eager to be a part of the church community where her mother, Rachel (Cherry Jones), played piano, we see maybe-20-ish Tammy become instantly attracted to Jim, whom she watches honing his tight five on the prosperity gospel in class. The teacher is not impressed by his “God wants you to be rich” shtick but it fits with Tammy’s “just spreadin’ joy” approach to religion. The two quickly get married and decide to hit the road as traveling preachers, with Tammy finding a crowd-pleasing gimmick in puppetry.

Their show, with its kid-grabbing puppets and parent-captivating humor and messages, is exactly the kind of four-quadrant entertainment that Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) is looking for at his Christian Broadcasting Network. The couple goes to work for him and makes a nice living — but Robertson’s living is nicer, Bakker realizes. Tammy meanwhile is not thrilled with how pregnancy and a new baby has pushed her off the air. They decided to go it on their own, starting their Praise The Lord network and earning big off the contributions of their audience.

But there is no “enough” for Jim, whom the movie shows constantly trying to expand the PTL’s reach with an amusement park and real estate. Along the way, Tammy doesn’t realize (or maybe has decided not to realize) the financial troubles the couple is getting themselves deeper and deeper into but she does realize that there are serious troubles in her marriage.

This movie seems to have one strongly held belief and that is that Jim Bakker is a real jerk. The movie paints him as manipulating and gaslighting Tammy Faye, shows him being cruel to her and shows him leeching off her talent to bolster his house-of-cards empire. Is Tammy an earnest dupe who doesn’t understand her husband’s dodgy business dealings? Is she sort of a willing dupe who doesn’t understand because she doesn’t want to understand? Is she a True Believer who is on a mission from God? Is “True Believer” another bit of stagecraft, like the sparkly clothes and the loud makeup, that she puts on because it gains her affection? I’m not really sure where the movie comes down on all of these issues or what it wants us to come away believing about her. I feel like it presents us sort of an appetizer sampler of Tammy Faye’s life and who she is and lets us pick whether we think the jalapeño poppers of “making up for childhood hurts” or the mozzarella sticks of “a natural-born performer whose skills didn’t have a lot of outlets in the deeply religious mid-century rural South” are the true centerpiece of the dish.

This movie feels like it was constructed by figuring out the makeup and costumes first, with everything else built off that. Everybody looks and sounds the part (or enough of the part) that you can believe who they are. But I didn’t get a sense that the movie went much deeper than that. The Eyes of Tammy Faye absolutely sells us on the idea that Tammy Faye is deserving of a biopic, but doesn’t offer a clear picture of who it thinks she is. B-

Rated PG-13 for sexual content and drug abuse, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Michael Showalter with a screenplay by Abe Slyvia, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is two hours and six minutes long and distributed by 20th Century Studios in theaters.

Copshop (R)

A police officer at a lonely Nevada police station finds herself in the middle of a shootout in Copshop, the dusty, 1970s-vibed Western you want when you want some popcorn and escapism.

Officer Val Young (Alexis Louder — ladies and gentlemen, meet action movies’ newest badass) gets punched breaking up a rowdy wedding party fight at a local casino and arrests the puncher, Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo), a man who wasn’t actually part of the wedding. And, as Young figures out pretty quickly, he wanted to get arrested. Perhaps he figured even the bored, shifty and generally annoyed officers at this small station were safer company than the likes of Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler), a man also arrested that night. Bob appears to be falling down drunk — but of course that’s just his way of getting into the same small cell block as Teddy. Though locked up, Bob proves pretty quickly that he can still get to Teddy. But they both learn that Bob wasn’t the only person hired to take Teddy out. But, whatever the workplace politics of Teddy, Bob and their criminal bosses, no-nonsense Val isn’t having any of it.

Everything in this movie feels very intentional. The movie appears to be set in roughly the now but it plays with what feels like a throwback sensibility — a little bit 1970s stylized police and Western tales, a little bit 1990s indie crime tales with a violent sense of humor. And it manages to do this — and play with some very stylized camera shots — without tipping into Quentin Tarantino territory.

This movie is also very intentionally (maybe even impeccably?) cast. Everyone brings a kind of griminess to their characters — none more so, of course, than Butler, whom I have seen deservedly praised in other reviews for his work here. His Bob Viddick is both a precise and professional assassin and kind of a sweaty, hairy mess and it all works great. And then there is Louder, who just leaps off the screen as the confident but capable enough to justify the confidence young officer. Get this woman a John Wick-style franchise!

Copshop feels like real effortless fun, like exactly the kind of movie you’re hoping for when you go to a midday matinee, as I did in the reopened and newly named Apple Cinemas in Hooksett (which is the new owner of the old Cinemagic; both the Hooksett and Merrimack locations are now back in operation). Improbable shootouts and the nuttiness of a not-the-good-guy Gerard Butler performance — now this is why you go to the movies. B

Rated R for strong/bloody violence and pervasive language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Joe Carnahan with a screenplay by Kurt McLeod and Joe Carnahan, Copshop is an hour and 47 minutes long and distributed by Open Road Films. It is screening in theaters.

FILM

Venues

AMC Londonderry
16 Orchard View Dr., Londonderry
amctheatres.com

Bank of NH Stage in Concord
16 S. Main St., Concord
225-1111, banknhstage.com

Cinemark Rockingham Park 12
15 Mall Road, Salem

Chunky’s Cinema Pub
707 Huse Road, Manchester; 151 Coliseum Ave., Nashua; 150 Bridge St., Pelham, chunkys.com

O’neil Cinemas at Brickyard Square
24 Calef Hwy., Epping
679-3529, oneilcinemas.com

Red River Theatres
11 S. Main St., Concord
224-4600, redrivertheatres.org

Regal Fox Run Stadium 15
45 Gosling Road, Newington
regmovies.com

The Strand
20 Third St., Dover
343-1899, thestranddover.com

Shows

• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (PG-13, 1986) part of the Film Frenzy $5 Classics series at O’neil Cinemas in Epping with multiple daily screenings on Thursday, Sept. 30.

• Composer Amy Beach, a documentary about the NH composer, screened at Bank of NH Stage in Concord on Thursday, Sept. 30, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $12.

• 21+ Trivia Night for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at Chunky’s in Manchester on Thursday, Sept. 30, at 7:30 p.m. Reserve a seat with the purchase of a $5 food voucher.

• The Lost Leonardo (PG-13, 2021) screening Friday, Oct. 1, and Sunday, Oct. 3, at 4 & 7 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 2, at 5:30 & 8:30 p.m. at Red River Theatres in Concord.

• The Eyes Of Tammy Faye (PG-13. 2021) Friday, Oct. 1, and Sunday, Oct. 3, at 12:30, 3:30 & 6:30 p.m. at Red River Theatres in Concord.

• Blue Bayou (R, 2021) Friday, Oct. 1, and Sunday, Oct. 3, at 1 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 2, at 2:30 p.m. at Red River Theatres in Concord.

• Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) double-featuring on Saturday, Oct. 2, at 1 p.m. at AMC Londonderry, Cinemark Rockingham Park 12 and Regal Fox Run Stadium 15 via Fathom Events.

• National Theatre Live Follies, a broadcast of a play from London’s National Theatre, screening at the Bank of NH Stage in Concord on Sunday, Oct. 3, at 12:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15 ($12 for students).

• Week of Witches see films daily at The Strand in Dover Sunday, Oct. 3, through Sunday, Oct. 10. One ticket to all 8 films costs $25.

• Spirited Away (PG, 2001) at Cinemark Rockingham Park, AMC Methuen 20 and Lowell Cinema Showcase on Sunday, Oct. 3, at 3 p.m. (dubbed); Monday, Oct. 4, at 7 p.m. (subtitled), and Wednesday, Oct. 6, at 7 p.m. (dubbed) via Fathom Events.

Featured photo: Dear Evan Hansen. Courtesy photo.

Harrow, by Joy Williams

Harrow, by Joy Williams (Knopf, 224 pages)

The literary genre of science fiction is so yesterday. What’s hot today is climate fiction, colloquially known as cli-fi. It’s a niche within a niche: dystopian drama specific to climate change — the villain, of course, being us.

Into this mauldin sea falls the latest novel by Joy Williams, best known for The Quick and The Dead and The Changeling. Harrow is her first book in 20 years, and it simultaneously feels as though she labored over it every hour of the past two decades, and also as if it sprang fully formed from her forehead yesterday. It’s that fresh and topical, that beautifully crafted.

It’s also, let’s be clear, a very strange story.

The narrator, Khristen, was raised by a mother with a tenuous grip on reality. The mother was convinced that Khristen had died briefly when she was a baby and was returned to life with an extraordinary purpose. This vague mission was drilled into Khristen throughout a childhood growing up in a climate-cursed world where there is an insatiable demand for houseboats with fireplaces and hot tubs, where zoos have been washed away, where ordinary things like oranges are memories, and where meteor showers contain no actual meteors, but accumulated space junk.

“Life never seemed more unreal than when I was with my mother,” Khristen muses at one point, showing that Williams intends to speak to the human condition at all times, not just in this future hellscape. And a hellscape it truly is: “The land was bright with raging fires ringed by sportsmen shooting the crazed creatures trying to escape the flames.” But at times, there are oases of normalcy: a bowling alley here, a birthday party there, although a birthday party where a child’s cake is frosted with the grotesque image of the 19th-century painting “Saturn Devouring His Son.”

After the boarding school she was attending shuts down unexpectedly, Khristen wanders through this world like a nomad, because that’s what people do when an apocalypse comes. “The people I saw didn’t seem to be traveling. They were milling, like little flies after a rain,” she observes. In this world, insects, rocks, even flowers “were aware of nothing but hope’s absence. Something definitely had gone wrong. Even the dead were dismayed.”

She briefly befriends a professor who once rescued horses used for research; the horses are long gone, perhaps everywhere. Then at his recommendation she travels to a resort where her mother might have gone for a conference, the last time she’d communicated with her. There, however, she finds a group of elderly people, all with terminal illnesses, who had not succumbed to the despair paralyzing the rest of the world but instead were energized by their final quest: to avenge nature. They are carrying out what amounts to random acts of revenge largely unnoticed because, “Certainly no one expected the old to be difficult.”

“The elderly were encouraged to depart life and they obliged with little protests and surprisingly few regrets. It had not been foreseen that some would turn on the very institutions that had made them the last beneficiaries of what was enshrined as progress.”

It’s a wickedly smart turn of events, that a handful of old people, whom the young blame for the dystopia around them, turn into eco-terrorists, given the generational warfare sparking throughout the book. (In one scene, a mother and daughter traveling by train pass the Rio Grande River, or what’s left of it, and the daughter says accusingly, “You haven’t left us anything!” to which the mother replies “I didn’t drain the Rio Grande, my dear.”)

But these terrorists, who all suffer some sort of terminal condition, are not especially effective; they mostly dream of killing herbicide representatives or taking out an expedition of trophy-hunters without actually doing it. They, like the rest, are basically milling like flies, vehicles for Williams’ perverse imagination and mind-bending turns of phrase.

Not much happens in this novel, not in the way that stuff happens, say, in an Avengers film, and it slows even further in the third section, as the characters mature. But Harrow is entertainment at its finest, while also at its worst: Should we really be entertained by climate catastrophes? Making jokes at the expense of polar bears?

“Tell me,” says the mother sparring with her daughter on the train. “When was the last time you read a good book by a polar bear?”

Therein lies the quandary at the heart of the climate debate, rarely engaged: Was it worth all of this — the rising seas, the killer storms, the 6th extinction — so human beings could ascend to their peak? And is it over, that peak, and if so, when was it? Williams has no answers to these or any of the questions that Harrow poses, but it’s a disarming piece of cli-fi, erudite and droll, and only mildly depressing. A

Book Notes

I’d never thought of CNN in terms of anything but breaking news until people started telling me about the show Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.

The series, which debuted in February, follows the actor as he eats his way through Italy, and it’s been renewed for a second season. Of course, then, there had to be a book, which comes out next week. Taste: My Life Through Food (Gallery, 304 pages) is already showing up on bestseller lists in advance of its release. It’s a memoir of Tucci’s life, though, with much reminiscing about meals. If it’s recipes you want, go 2015’s The Tucci Table (Orion, 256 pages), written with Felicity Blunt, or 2012’s The Tucci Cookbook (Gallery, 400 pages).

Also out next week, and mentioned solely for the bright light of its title, is I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead, 304 pages). It’s about a writer with postpartum depression who leaves her husband and newborn and explores her psyche in the Mojave Desert. She’s written one other novel and a short-story collection but has already won a handful of literary prizes to include the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Meanwhile, readers of the sports blog Deadspin may remember a columnist by the name of Drew Magary. His storytelling skills are put to the test in The Night the Lights Went Out (Harmony, 288 pages), which is a chronicle of a traumatic brain injury he suffered when he fell and smashed his head on a cement floor. Apparently, somehow he has managed to make this both poignant and funny (the funny part only possible because he has recovered 95 percent of his brain function). If nothing else, it will remind us to watch where we’re going. It’s out Oct. 12.

And finally, New Hampshire author Howard Mansfield has a new book coming out in October. Chasing Eden, A Book of Seekers (Bauhan Publishing, 216 pages) is a season-appropriate, New England-centric reflection on Americans in pursuit of their happiness. Among them: a group of 19th-century painters looking for inspiration in the White Mountains and a quirky group known as the “Vermont pilgrims” who “never changed their clothes, bathed, or cut their hair.”

Thankfully, another group of pilgrims looms larger in the national memory, and Mansfield covers them, too. Look for Chasing Eden in paperback Oct. 12.

Book Events

Author events

ARCHER MAYOR Author presents Marked Man. Mon., Oct. 4, 6:45 p.m. Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord). Visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• JORDAN MORRIS Comedy writer and podcaster discusses his podcast, Bubble. Virtual event presented by The Bookery in Manchester via Zoom. Fri., Oct. 8, 2 p.m. Visit facebook.com/bookerymht.

• MELANIE MOYER AND CHARLIE J. ESKEW Virtual author conversation presented by Toadstool Bookshops of Nashua, Peterborough and Keene. Sat., Oct. 9, 11 a.m. Visit toadbooks.com.

• DIANNE TOLLIVER Author presents Life Everyone Has a Story. Barnes & Noble (1741 S. Willow St., Manchester, barnesandnoble.com). Sat., Oct. 9, 10 a.m.

• ARCHER MAYOR Author presents Marked Man. Virtual event by Toadstool Bookshops of Nashua, Peterborough and Keene. Tues., Oct. 12, 6 p.m. Visit toadbooks.com.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers. Thurs., Oct. 14, 6:30 p.m. Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord). Visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• R.A. SALVATORE AND ERIKA LEWIS Authors present The Color of Dragons. Tues., Oct. 19, 6:30 p.m. Gibson’s Bookstore (45 S. Main St., Concord). Tickets cost $5. Space is limited, and registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

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 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 slamfreeordie@gmail.com or call 858-3286.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com 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 elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

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

Album Reviews 21/09/30

Ian Jones, The Evergreens (Thin Silver Records)

The other week I took a trip up north, to maraud (I don’t just simply “browse”) an estate sale. Tired of all the CDs in my car, I tried to find a radio station. Something popped up, a really good rock-ish song, on a Christian rock station, WANH 88.3 FM in Meredith. I was awed by the tuneage, because none of it was bad (Brandon Lake’s “Come Out Of That Grave,” an epic mix of Kings of Leon/Killers, was really good). I say all this because mellow rock can be OK even if your taste in rock tends to be bad for you, like mine. So I submit this EP, made by a Seattle songwriter with a gift for evoking mellow-mode Eagles and things like that. It’s quite inviting, especially when Jones trots out his Conor Oberst imitation in the strummy “Liars Criminals Beggars and Thieves.” A

Aakash Mittal, Nocturne (self-released)

In India, Calcutta is now known as Kolkata. It’s not a place I’d picture as being particularly still, especially at night, and that exact vibe — or at least its musical sounds — is what saxophonist Mittal attempts to capture on this album. His accomplices in the trio are guitarist Miles Okazaki and percussionist Rajna Swaminathan, who plays the instruments that bring the greatest degree of realism, the mridangam and kanjira. The setting may be an Indian city of 4.5 million residents, but the volume raises and lowers itself to incoherent buzzings like any other hyperactive metropolis. My impression is that it’s mostly improvisational (“Nocturne III” being an obvious exception; there was definitely quite a bit of planning there), aiming for feel more than melody, but the latter can indeed be found here and there. Matter of fact, if your workday involves some subway time, you could be listening to a lot less interesting things. A

PLAYLIST

• It’s a new week of music releases, all coming out on Oct. 1, for your musical pleasure and/or disappointment! Looking at the formidable list of new albums, my attention — such as it is these days — was immediately drawn to True Love, the fourth album from Texas-based pop duo Hovvdy! I’ve never heard of these people, and in fact the only reason I even got into the weeds with them was that they use two v’s in their name, like Pitchfork-beloved rock band Wavves. No, I know Hovvdy is stylizing the two-v thing in a different way, but I like how they’re doing it more than the way Wavves does it. See how music-critiquing works, folks? Whatever, I shall endeavor to see if this is at all interesting henceforth, as the title track is available for advance order (you wish, Hovvdy) or pirate-listening right now, on my computer! Huh, this sounds like Ben Kweller except listenable, sort of an Americana vibe, Simon & Garfunkel-ish, like a non-annoying Radiohead doing a chill-down. I can deal with this more or less.

• Any band that was once drunk enough to name their band Illuminati Hotties has my unwavering support, which will totally remain unwavering until I hear some bad music from them, which I’m fully prepared for, as I have a handy barf-bag right next to my badass-looking gamer chair, right here! Wikipedia, which is always on the cutting edge of super-hip words, tells me the band is “a vehicle for the songwriting of producer, mixer, and audio engineer Sarah Tudzin.” Well, that’s certainly less obfuscatory than saying “get ready for some cool grooves from a super-weird chick,” which is what you actually get here, on the band’s new album, Let Me Do One More! There is a single, called “Mmmoooaaaaayaya,” and it starts out with a Primus riff reminiscent of the guitar theme from South Park, and in the video Sarah comes out wearing nothing but a black sports bra. It’s pretty cool, and then she starts making fun of stupid men who try to pick up girls by using stupid pickup lines or whatnot, and then it gets louder, and pea soup starts falling from somewhere up above, and soon enough Sarah’s making fun of the Democratic National Committee while getting pea soup all over her. Is it edgy? Yes, but it does not solve world peace, so in my expert opinion it is simply a rock ’n’ roll song, not the answer to mankind’s prayers.

• Hoo boy, what could possibly be next. Whoa, wait, look, it’s industrial-metal band Ministry, one of the few bands on this planet I can actually stand, and they have a new album, Moral Hygiene, coming to your music store, if those even exist anymore! Ha ha, remember when Ministry released the song “Antifa” a couple of years ago, and it made people angry? What’s that? No, not the time people got angry over all those millions of other things, this was a different thing. Let’s just drop it and go watch the video for their new song, “Good Trouble,” shall we? Ha ha, it’s so badass, look, there’s their singer, Papa Al Satan, with American flag sunglasses, and random video clips of riots and burning stuff. The tune is a mega-heavy grinding cacophony of metallic mayhem, it’s awesome, haven’t these guys broken up like five times now?

• Finally we have million-year-old prog-rock band Yes, with their newest LP, The Quest! Given that bass player and bandleader Chris Squire died a few years ago, I don’t think any band should call itself Yes, but whatever, sort-of-original guitarist Steve Howe is here, as is Geoff Downes and Alan White, but, spoiler, Jon Anderson still hates everybody and isn’t here. Starter single “The Ice Bridge” is pretty much like Rush gone New Age. Pretty silly, probably some leftover nonsense from their Close To The Edge album, but you might like it.

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).

Lady in Blue

When I was extremely young, my father was a big fan of easy listening music. His favorite song was called “I Want Some Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” I remember this song as being awful.

Yesterday I thought of it for some reason and looked it up. It turns out that Wayne Newton recorded it in 1965. As I called it up on YouTube, I knew that I would listen to it and realize that now, as I hobble into late middle age, it would actually be pretty good. I would find myself enjoying it and that a week from now it would be on the driving playlist I use to torture my teenager.

As it turns out, it’s even worse than I remembered from my childhood. The trauma from hearing this as a kid must have forced the worst of it from my memory. Even I wouldn’t inflict this on The Teen.

On the topic of questionable decisions from the 1960s, I was reading through 1969’s The Esquire Drink Book, looking for a new cocktail recipe. When it comes to Mad Men-era, charming-but-arrogant drink recipes, Esquire had a bit of a corner on the market.

The recipe that grabbed my attention had a name so of its time that even after I read through it, said, “Nah!” and flipped past it, I kept returning to it: The Bosom Caresser. I mean, if you’re looking for a Swinging Sixties, Wayne Newton on the hi-fi, “My wife doesn’t understand me” type of drink, this seemed like a no-brainer.

Long story short: I ended up making it and it was OK. It was not spectacular and I don’t think I’ll make it again. The combination of brandy, marsala wine and raw egg yolk did not fill me with enthusiasm.

(That said, I did find out the hard way that if you do make a cocktail with a raw egg yolk in it, you should dry-shake it with the alcohol first, before adding the ice. Dropping a yolk into a shaker full of ice will make some of it freeze and you will end up with really unappetizing globs of it floating around in your drink that you will need to filter out before serving. We know that now.)

So where does that leave us?

In my case, invigorated from a long hot shower, to wash the sleaze off me and the memory of Wayne Newton out of my memory. As an antidote, here is the classiest drink I know:

Lady in Blue

Ingredients

1½ ounces very cold gin

¼ ounce créme de violette

¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

½ ounce simple syrup

3 drops orange blossom water

A “slip” of blue curaçao

Combine all ingredients, except the blue curaçao, with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Shake until frost forms on the shaker and your hands become uncomfortably cold.

Strain into a martini glass. This is one occasion where you should not frost the glass first; you will want to show this cocktail off. The frosted glass would mess with that.

Pour a small slip of blue curaçao down one side of the glass. It is denser than the rest of the drink and will pool in the bottom of the glass.

While this is a delicious cocktail — crisp, gently sweet, subtly floral and just ginny enough to grab your attention — this is probably the prettiest drink you will ever make. If you find yourself needing to impress somebody, this is the drink to make. It’s gorgeous without making it seem like you’ve tried too hard.

Featured photo: Lady in Blue. Photo by John Fladd.

Red wine from bourbon barrels

Does reusing spirit barrels add something to wines?

Natural and minimalist winemaking methods have been prominent in the news these past several years but there is another trend surfacing: bourbon (and other spirits) barrel-aged wine.

Production has boomed since its modern re-introduction in 2014 by Fetzer Vineyards, which produced a zinfandel that was aged in recycled bourbon barrels. Distillers have aged spirits in bourbon barrels, but a little-known fact is that aging wine in recycled whiskey barrels has a storied past.

The Beringer brothers arrived in Napa in 1869 to work at Charles Krug, one of the first wineries in Napa Valley. In 1876 they had their first pressing of their own grapes, and to age their wines they reused whiskey barrels. Long on ambition but short on cash, they thought it made good financial sense and they discovered it added a certain complexity to the wine. Fast forward, we have a whole generation of millennials intent on exploring and expanding the production of bourbon and other spirits, and the marketplace for mainstream and small-batch distilleries.

In addition to bourbon barrel-aged cabernet sauvignons, we have other red varietals now aged in spirit barrels, and the trend has extended to tequila barrel-aged sauvignon blancs. But how does spirit barrel aging influence the structure and taste of the wine? Does it really impact the wine? Bourbon barrels are slightly taller and skinnier than standard oak barriques, and thus increase the wine-to-wood ratio. Also, bourbon barrels are required to be made from new, heavily toasted American oak. Since they are used just once, there is an abundance of flavor left in the wood. These barrels impart the character of whatever was previously in them, so, with bourbon barrels, you should expect that smooth sweetness and vanilla and caramel essence of the bourbon in your wine.

Our first wine is the Beringer Bros. 2019 Bourbon Barrel Aged Cabernet Sauvignon (available at the New Hampshire Liquor & Wine Outlets at $17.99). The color is intensely purple-red and “thick.” To the nose are scents of ripe black cherries and chocolate. To the tongue, the black cherries remain, albeit reduced, and there are persistent tannins. I don’t know if the “flattened fruit” is the product of the grapes or the fact the wine was aged for six months in bourbon barrels. This is unquestionably a wine to be paired with grilled beef or pasta with a tomato sauce. It will balance but not overpower your entrée, with an alcoholic content of 14.5 percent.

Our second wine, a Robert Montavi 2019 Private Selection Bourbon Barrel Aged Cabernet Sauvignon (available at the New Hampshire Liquor & Wine Outlets at $10.95, reduced from $15.99), is produced a bit differently. The grapes grown in Mondavi’s coastal vineyards are aged in a mix of new and used bourbon barrels. Mondavi reports the new barrels give the wine its undertone of toasted oak, while the used barrels, from a Kentucky distillery, impart vanilla and dried herbs. This blending of barrels sets this wine aside from other cabernets. The color is dark purple-red, fading to a rose-colored ring. To the nose, there are blackberries and chocolate. To the tongue, the berries are joined with vanilla, caramel and some mocha. The tannins are much softer than in the Beringer tasting. With an alcoholic content of 14.5 percent, this is a wine to be paired with grilled meats, including marinated chicken.

Our third wine, the 1924 Limited Edition Bourbon Barrel Aged Cabernet Sauvignon, by Gnarly Head Wines (available at the New Hampshire Liquor & Wine Outlets at $11.99, reduced from $16.99), heralds from Lodi in California’s Central Valley. With an alcoholic content of 15 percent, this is a wine that needs decanting and can be paired with game, venison or lamb. The color is dark, dark purple and the nose is of blackberries and leather. To the tongue there is an abundance of dark berry fruit, coupled with strong tannins. A dryness permeates the finish.

Tim McKirdy, staff writer at VinePair, noted in an article that one critic states that spirits-barrel aging is a “marketing gimmick” and it’s a great way to “mask the flaws of sub-standard fruit.” In McKirdy’s referencing the tweet, the critic further states, “It’s like putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig!”

On the other hand, other critics allude to the “blurring” of lines; this method is attracting beer and spirits drinkers to pair their food with spirits-barrel aged wine. I say, you be the judge!

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Pumpkin pie biscotti

We are working our way through the fall flavors in this column: first a savory sweet potato baked good, then a unique apple side dish. Now, it’s time to add some pumpkin to your menu.

Rather than serving pumpkin in a pie, it’s time to try it in biscotti. Not only does this give you a new way to eat biscotti, but it also makes it an acceptable way to eat cookies for breakfast. While you wouldn’t think about offering chocolate chip cookies for breakfast, biscotti seem to hover on the line as to whether they’re a dessert or breakfast treat.

These biscotti are simple to make and store incredibly well. Although if the people in your house are anything like mine, you won’t have to worry about storing them for long.

Michele Pesula Kuegler has been thinking about food her entire life. Since 2007, the New Hampshire native has been sharing these food thoughts and recipes at her blog, Think Tasty. Visit thinktasty.com to find more of her recipes.

Pumpkin pie biscotti
Makes 24

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 cup pumpkin purée
1 cup white chocolate chips
1 teaspoon coconut oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Beat butter and sugar in a large bowl for 2 to 3 minutes.
Add egg and vanilla extract, beating until smooth.
In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and allspice.
Add flour mixture to wet ingredients and mix well.
Add pumpkin to mixture, stirring well to combine.
Divide dough in half.
Shape each half into a 10″ x 3″ rectangle, using floured hands.
Set loaves 2″ apart on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet.
Bake for 30 minutes or until the dough is set.
Leaving the oven on, remove the baking tray and place on a cooling rack for 15 minutes.
Transfer each loaf to a cutting board, and slice the loaves into diagonal bars, 1/2″ thick.
Return biscotti slices to the cookie sheet with the cut sides down.
Bake for 10 minutes.
Flip slices to other cut side, and bake for 10 minutes more.
Remove biscotti from oven, and allow to cool completely on a cooling rack.
Combine white chocolate and coconut oil in a small microwave-safe bowl.
Microwave for 30 seconds, then stir.
Continue heating chocolate in 15-second increments, stirring in between, until chocolate glaze is smooth.
Using a spoon, spread a layer of glaze on the tops or sides of biscotti.
Refrigerate for 15 minutes to set glaze.

Photo: Pumpkin pie biscotti. Photo by Michele Pesula Kuegler.

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