Tag: 200716

Music that matters

Alternate Routes performs at Tupelo Drive-In

Crisis is often a catalyst for great art. That’s been true twice for Alternate Routes — a few years back the band, fronted by the songwriting duo of Tim Warren and Eric Donnelly, addressed the epidemic of gun violence with “Somewhere in America.” Featuring lyrics by Donnelly, it crystallized the issue by melding the personal and political, without judgment.

Now, as the country endures a pandemic, the pair have delivered a song that fit the moment perfectly. “If I Ever” is a meditation about standing at the brink and vowing to come back with purpose — loving more, worrying less, and facing life’s demons. “I’m gonna be better,” Warren sings in a high lonesome voice. “Because I’m gonna be grateful … if I ever get out of this.”

“If I Ever” wasn’t exactly new. Warren said in a recent phone interview that “bits and pieces of it have been around” for a while. He sent an old demo to producer Chris Ruggiero to buff up, then had Donnelly lay down subtle but essential guitar to build on the rough home recording.

“That’s when it definitely was an Alternate Routes song,” Warren said. “After that, we didn’t do much to it. We just were like, ‘OK, this is cool, here we go’ — then we just put it out.”

It’s the video made to accompany “If I Ever” that lifts the song to a higher plane. Shot at dawn in New York City in its early days as Covid-19’s epicenter, it’s both beautiful and harrowing. The frame fills with socially distanced joggers, a delightful 8-year-old girl named Daisy, encountered during filming, dancing fluidly, and shots of vast empty streets. It ends with frontline workers sharing encouraging words hand-lettered on signs: “If I can feel hope so can you” and “I’ve learned the power of communicating with my eyes.”

Creating the video was a very moving experience for Warren.

“It was such a desolate scene there in Brooklyn,” he said. “Moments on the bridge where there was nobody but us, the police officers sitting there, and a few other people jogging by, I’ll never forget it.”

It came together quickly and was released in early May.

“That’s why I wanted to do it,” Warren said. “We finished the song in the pandemic, and we put it out during the pandemic, and that’s really what it sounds and feels like to me.”

An upcoming duo show at Tupelo Drive-In is their first since before lockdown, and may be their final performance of the year.

“I’m glad we’re going to be able to get to do one,” Warren said. “I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but I’m not sure how many of them we’ll be getting to do before we ring out 2020; I just don’t know.”

Other projects will suffice for the well-traveled band. Warren is hungry to make a new album after releasing a series of singles — “It seemed like a good fit for the way people were putting music out over the last couple of years, but for me that pendulum is swinging the other way.”

Both are focused on family. Donnelly and his wife welcomed their first child, a daughter, in March, while Warren and his wife are expecting their third in September.

Such activity makes another project nearing completion even more exciting: their call to community, Nothing More will be published as a children’s book, with drawings by Mae Besom. She’s best known for illustrating Kobi Yamada’s What You Do Matters trilogy.

“This woman is really brilliant, and I can’t wait,” Warren said.

With its anthemic chorus “we are how we treat each other and nothing more,” the song became a phenomenon. It played during the 2014 Olympics closing ceremonies, and the band has performed it at hundreds of schools, while receiving requests to use it at hundreds more.

Warren and Donnelly hope to take it even further.

“We’re going to try to put together a choral music package … together with ‘Somewhere in America’ and a few other songs that can create a dialogue in schools amongst kids learning music, about some of the social stuff that’s spinning around the world right now,” Warren said. “That feels like important work, you know?”

Alternate Routes
When: Thursday, July 23, 6 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Drive-In, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $20 per person (restaurant), $75 per vehicle at tupelohall.com

The Old Guard (R)

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Charlize Theron is an immortal warrior in Netflix’s The Old Guard.

Andy (Theron) leads a small team — Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) — of sorta-immortal fighters. Andy has been around for millennia, Booker “died” the first time fighting in the Napoleonic wars, and Joe and Nicky fell in love after killing each other during the Crusades. Fighting in battles big and small throughout history, these immortals heal and come back to life every time they’re “killed” — though, we’re told, eventually their time will be up.

Mostly they’ve stayed hidden but a man named Copely (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an ex-CIA agent, has figured out their abilities and sets them up for capture. His intentions aren’t so terrible, maybe, if you don’t think about it too hard: he wants to bring them to petulant hoodie-wearing biotech bazillionaire Merrick (Harry Melling) for study so that their regenerative abilities can be used to heal disease and injury. But Merrick is clearly evil so what are the odds this experiment will just be a peaceful gift to humanity, as Copley intends?

As the group is on the run from Merrick, they get a psychic alert that there is a new immortal: Nile (KiKi Layne), a U.S. Marine recently killed in Afghanistan. Or she appeared “killed” but then healed — freaking out her squad mates. Andy sets off to find her and explain her weird new powers to her before the U.S. government or anybody else can ship her off to a lab.

In addition to the problem of Copley and his motivations (he is presented as a basically good, smart guy, though his initial actions undermine this), The Old Guard has, for me, a structural problem: the “Episode 1” trap. This movie feels so intent on setting up a series of movies that it piles up exposition and slows down the action. The Old Guard does a lot of filling us in — about characters or plot points that are clearly meant to pay off in the future — that doesn’t necessarily add to a fuller understanding of this story and that is a drag on the progress of this movie.

Near the movie’s end, when we get well-choreographed action and characters making decisions, I could see what this movie was and I enjoyed the world this had all built. But all the “TV pilot” business weighed the movie down.

These problems aren’t, however, fatal. I like the characters set up here. Much like in ABC’s Stumptown, another property based, as this is, on a Greg Rucka comic, The Old Guard has a good handle on how to create well-rounded female characters who feel like real people, not just one-dimensional Strong Ladies. The romance between Nicky and Joe adds much needed joy and humanity to the story. (They are a romantic-as-heck couple and it’s a treat to have something so swoony tucked inside an action movie.) Their scenes and scenes of Nile figuring out her new “eternal” status are good examples of the movie folding in heart and lightness without resorting to quippiness. (KiKi Layne, who I liked in If Beale Street Could Talk, holds her own next to Theron here.)

Did I immediately add The Old Guard graphic novel to my library request list? Of course. And the movie’s final moments set up a next chapter that I am eagerly awaiting. I just wish this movie could have been a little tighter and able to stand on its own. B

Rated R for sequences of graphic violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood with a screenplay by Greg Rucka (who created the comic book with Leandro Fernandez), The Old Guard is two hours and five minutes long and is available on Netflix.

Book Review 20/07/16

The Great Indoors, by Emily Anthes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 220 pages)

In any other year, a book about “the great indoors” arriving at the start of summer would seem strange, a publishing mistake.

In 2020, however, it’s perfect.

We’ve all been under house arrest, and whether you’ve enjoyed it or are one empty-toilet-paper-roll away from strangling your housemates, the quality of the experience may have much to do with the design of your house. Science writer Emily Anthes explains why, in what she promises is “the surprising science of how buildings shape our behavior, health and happiness.”

The average American, Anthes writes, spends 90 percent of his or her time inside a building, to include offices, stores, restaurants, gyms, theaters and everything else we’ve been missing during the pandemic.

Our love of the outdoors, it seems, is fantasy, or myth. Outdoors is rain and mosquitoes. Indoors, a fridge and sofa. If you’re like Anthes, “anxiety-prone and risk-averse,” you prefer to enjoy the outdoors from your window. But until recently scientists mostly concerned themselves with the environment outside the home rather than in it. But that, Anthes says, is changing, and new research is emerging on how the design of buildings affects our brains, our moods, our productivity and our choices; and how features of buildings, such as windows, affect our mental health.

Some of these findings are intuitive: “Warm, dim lighting makes schoolkids less fidgety and aggressive. Fresh, well-ventilated air boosts office workers’ cognitive function.” Some make sense upon reflection: People who live on the highest floors of a skyscraper are the least likely to survive a cardiac event. But some are simply surprising.

Take, for example, the idea that a more challenging environment might extend life.

One couple in Japan took this to an extreme, building a nine-unit apartment complex that looked “less like a home than an oversized carnival fun house.” The homes were designed to befuddle. They had circular living rooms with kitchens in the center, round studies, ladders that led nowhere and what amounted to speed bumps in the floor. The creators were artists who believed death to be “immoral” and thought it could be cheated and that brain-stimulating architecture was one way to do it. They also created “destabilizing” parks and single-family homes.

Unfortunately, they died, so there were limits to the couple’s genius. Their work could be dismissed as the legacy of passionate fools, but for this: Lab animals housed in stimulating, challenging environments live longer and are healthier than animals confined to boring cages.

And, as Anthes writes, it’s long established that challenges are important for human flourishing. “Start lifting weights, and your muscles will swell. Learn to speak a new language and your brain will sprout new connections.” So who’s to say that a living room with shocking colors and speed bumps on the floor won’t positively affect us like a wheel and maze will stimulate a rat?

But not all changes need to be exhilarating. Anthes writes about a neonatal intensive care unit in Rhode Island that was redesigned from the traditional crowded ward to single rooms equipped with sleeper sofas where the parents could stay instead of just visiting. The infants fared dramatically better in the family rooms.

Having convinced us that the right buildings matter, Anthes embarks on a tour of the great indoors, from her own bathroom, where microbes seethe in the showerhead, to redesigned school lunchrooms in New York City, to a community in Phoenix, Arizona, designed for adults with autism to live their best life. She also takes on the housing of the incarcerated, controversial for those who think prisons shouldn’t be humane. (“We should send fewer people to prison, and we should treat them better while they’re there,” Anthes says.)

And she examines two disparate types of housing: that of the most basic shelter, such as the sustainable huts made out of sandbags fastened together with barbed wire, which an Iranian-American in California invented (locking doors are made out of shipping crates), and the high-tech, Jetson-like homes of the affluent, which could allow more seniors to age in place.

But the Jetson-stuff is passe now. What is really cutting edge in buildings are “buoyant foundations” that literally allow homes in flood-prone areas to float when water rushes in. This is part of a new interest in “amphibious architecture” that will allow humans to stay near the coasts as the oceans creep in. Anthes admits that amphibious homes are “more of a curiosity than a bona fide building trend” and that’s unlikely to change in the U.S., as long as these structures are not eligible for subsidized insurance policies, as is now the case. Still, the possibilities fascinate.

In closing, Anthes takes on buildings in space — what it would take to build a village on the moon or on Mars. “The irony is that our continued existence may hinge on figuring out how to live in environments that are literally lethal,” she writes. You’d think there’d be no research to draw from here, but Anthes sniffed out people who are already designing space cities for a living, such as the CEO of a California company called Mars City Design. (True, it’s in California, and its website says to email the company for its research, so invest carefully.)

“Blueprints for the Red Planet” is the shortest chapter and the least fulfilling, filled as it is with speculation. But the rest of The Great Indoors is a solid and satisfying read, even if its title might induce a nap. B

BOOK NOTES
You cannot predict elections by book sales, but if you could, President Donald Trump’s campaign should be worried.

The No.1 and No. 2 best sellers on Amazon last week were literary grenades thrown at the president: Too Much and Never Enough, a memoir by first niece Mary Trump, and The Room Where It Happened by former national security adviser John Bolton. Both portray the president as immoral and inept.

To find a conservative viewpoint, one that Trump voters would relish, you had to plunge all the way to No. 27, where Ben Shapiro’s How To Destroy America in Three Easy Steps sat three places above Sean Hannity’s Live Free or Die.

To be fair, Hannity’s book was No. 1 in the “elections” category, and it doesn’t release until Aug. 4. But that’s also the release date of Stephenie Meyer’s Midnight Sun, which is Twilight from Edward’s point of view and everyone knows how it ends. It’s still selling like toilet paper (the new hotcakes), at No. 8.

There’s no good recent data that easily explains why there are more liberal/progressive titles than conservative in Amazon’s top 30. Occasionally, a study asserts that Democrats read more than Republicans, but a 2012 survey of GoodReads readers found that supporters of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney read the same median number of books a year: 26.

If none of these appeal (and for the record, Hannity’s book appears to be nothing about New Hampshire), there’s a rollicking good time to be had in Scott Conroy’s Vote First or Die, which is actually about New Hampshire and its outsized role in the election of presidents. Published in 2017, it’s a whimsical look at the path to the 2016 election and a timely reminder of how we got where we are.

Also, new and notable this week isLet Them Eat Tweets, How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.

Album Reviews 20/07/16

Jeff Cosgrove, History Gets Ahead of the Story (Grizzley Music)
This album is pretty niche indeed, combining a few things I tend to avoid (improvisational jazz, old-school classic organ, like, I mean right out of Lawrence Welk) with something I do appreciate regardless of setting, namely top-drawer musicianship. The story behind this (I assume) one-off is a bit convoluted; Cosgrove is a Washington, D.C.-based drummer leading a bass-free trio (himself along with organist John Medeski and sax player Jeff Lederer) in a tribute to bassist William Parker, who’s still alive. Got that? No bass playing in an album of tunes written by a jazz bassist (who, incidentally, played in a trio with Cosgrove until 2015). So, an odd duck indeed, but it gets odder; both Cosgrove and Parker love them some ad-libbing, so on the whole the record could be categorized as “skronk-coffeehouse,” if you will, a roller coaster ride of precision and spazzing. Some stellar organ-noodling on “Gospel Flowers”; adept modal sax things on “Moon”; even some noise on “Little Bird” (I had to double-check to see if a guitarist wasn’t messing around with pick-scraping in there or something; I still can’t guess what the sound is). Anyway, that; it is what it is. B — Eric W. Saeger

Skeleton, Skeleton (20 Buck Skin Records)
Debut LP from a crew of Austin, Texas-based guys who stalk a middle ground between old-time black metal and neo-street metal a la High On Fire. I have no idea why this isn’t more of a thing in the metal scene, but then again, any bunch of Air Max-wearing suburban dudes whose sole mission in life is impressing the barista girls at Starbucks knows that the quickest route to being able to brag that “we got a record contract” is to play some boring, pedestrian emo through a Mesa Boogie amplifier that’s been made wimpy and useless through too much processing. No, these guys have better riffing than any ’70s-revivalist band that I’ve heard lately (The Sword can sit down now), and it’s cut with Venom-style spazz-outs that keep listeners on their toes, or at least listening. I like everything about this one, but wait, there’s more, folks: the singer sounds like he ran out of enthusiasm for doing a scary-devil-guy Quorthon imitation the minute he got in the studio. A giant leap for mankind, in short. A+ — Eric W. Saeger

Retro Playlist

Erik W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

With a new renaissance of thought and cultural realism dawning, I’m surprised that heavy metal hasn’t made a massive comeback. (Note that by “heavy metal,” I mean crazily angry music of a type that should, by all rights, be soundtracking the cultural transformations that are in the air everywhere, at least in an in vitro sense on social media.)

One of the things that may annoy you about me is the fact that I tend to ignore what’s happening in the area of “middle-of-the-road metal.” To clarify, that’s a pretty loose catchall I use to describe a wide range of bands, from mildly dangerous-sounding metalcore bands (Bullet For My Valentine, et al.) to nu-metal nonsense like Avenged Sevenfold. In contrast, my tastes gravitate to things that make Everymen feel their true power levels.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Like, for some, death metal peaked with Slayer (along with the 127,287,558 bands that sound like them) and it does the trick for them. Older folks just want some Black Sabbath. But for me it’s Ministry or bust. Their 1996 LP Filth Pig is an F5 tornado of rebellion; if you haven’t ever cranked that album’s “Dead Guy” to the point of permanent hearing loss, please do so now.

Zoomers, if you ever want to be as unstoppable as Greta Thunberg as a group, you need angry, uncompromising instrument-driven anthems, that is to say, riffs. Black Veil Brides is a cool band, but they’re literally too good in a politely melodic sense. Know what you really need, Gen Z? Sweaty fat guys with awesome, awesome guitar riffs, like Bachman Turner Overdrive. On their 1974 album Not Fragile, the title track may not have been the cleverest or most innovative use of a Marshall amp in history, but it’s perfectly conceived. The riff is exquisitely played; way past fed-up; boiling over with stubborn, overconfident resolve; and only really effective with the volume knob set to 11.

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. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• The next traditional date for new album releases is Friday, July 17, and, as seems to be common these days, I must eat a few stupid words I said before. The Chicks’ new album Gaslighter is out on that day; it wasn’t released on March 4 as I previously reported. That was just the title-track single. It is a great song; otherwise there’s no way on Earth I’d have ever copped to this oversight, like, as if, and I blame Metacritic.com anyway, so feel free to send hate mail to them, because it’s all their fault.

• I reviewed Gang of Four’s EP This Heaven Gives Me Migraine back in February, but guess what, there is another Gang of Four EP coming out, called Anti Hero, on the 17th. If you recall, and you probably don’t, I did like Heaven, even though it was just a bunch of reruns of past GoF tunes that Andy Gill wanted to get off his chest while he was dying of pneumonia. There’s a similar downer history to this EP, a short collection of the last songs Gill was working on from his hospice bed; the story is that he was working on new tuneage until the very last. The kickoff single, “Forever Starts Now,” is an above average post-punk song, with art-wave elements borrowed from Talking Heads. By now you’ve either made up your mind about the band or avoided them like the plague, so in honor of Gill’s memory I’ll just keep my wise mouth shut about this one.

• Like everyone else on Earth, The Pretenders have something to say about the unspeakable train wreck that is the current American sociopolitical environment, but since it’s Chrissie Hynde putting in her two cents, I’ll actually pay attention, because Chrissie is my rock ’n’ roll waifu, accept no substitutes. But wait, the band’s new LP, Hate For Sale, isn’t some sort of political statement, it’s actually a tribute to The Damned, because Chrissie thinks they’re awesome, which only means that Chrissie is even more awesome than ever before. HFS is their first release since 2016’s Alone, and guess what, the original release date was May 1, but then there was the coronavirus, and here we are, it’ll finally be out at Strawberries or Tower Records or whatever store’s open. Hey, wanna know something hilarious, of course you do, they were supposed to do a five-month tour this summer with — you’ll die, I swear — Journey, of all the bands in the world. To me, that’s the ’80s-rock equivalent of Imagine Dragons touring with Black Lips, but anyway the new single, “You Can’t Hurt a Fool,” isn’t a tribute to The Damned, it’s a ’60s-Motown-influenced chill song about being in a stupid relationship, or maybe a diss of J-Lo (listen to the words), I don’t know for sure.

• To close out the week, we have Florida band Surfer Blood, with a new album, Carefree Theatre! Like so many milquetoast-indie bands, despite their scary name, these guys specialize in, you know, milquetoast-indie, but the single “Karen” is kind of loud, a little bit, and would almost be art-rock if it didn’t sound like Death Cab For Cutie with their volume accidentally cranked. It would make a great closing song for a trite hipster movie about a bunch of hipsters who are on an endless quest for an unused pair of 1971 PF Flyer sneakers, and one of the hipsters smokes weed all the time, which hurts his chances for ever finding true love, except for maybe with the crazily shy girl who works at Whole Foods and likes Perry Como records, and then it thankfully ends. — Eric W. Saeger

Local bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Savory, sips and sweets

Taste of the Region returns to Derry

EVENT UPDATE:
Just after going to press on Tuesday, July 14th, Taste of the Region organizers announced that they have made the event virtual. For updated details, visit http://derry-chamber.chambermaster.com/events/details/taste-of-the-region-gone-virtual-11796

More than two dozen local restaurants, breweries and other businesses will be vying for your vote during the annual Taste of the Region. After its initial cancellation in April, the festival will return to Derry’s Tupelo Music Hall on Tuesday, July 21.
Normally held inside the venue, the Taste of the Region is moving outdoors this year to accommodate social distancing regulations.
“Exhibitors will be set up in the parking lot similar to guests at a show at the Tupelo, so people can pass by in both directions without being too close to each other,” said Ashley Haseltine, president of the Greater Derry Londonderry Chamber of Commerce, which organizes the event.
Whenever possible, all foods will be packaged individually grab-and-go style, while beverages will be offered in single-use sample cups. Each sample falls under one of three categories — “savory,” “sips” or “sweets” — and vendors can opt to participate in one, two or all three. “‘Savory’ is more of an entree-type food option,” Haseltine said. “‘Sips’ can be any beverage, alcoholic or non-alcoholic … and then ‘sweets’ is any type of dessert. It’s always a great variety. … The fun thing with this event is that sometimes restaurants bring something that people didn’t even realize they offered, and then for the breweries it’s usually whatever kind of specialty brew they have at the moment.”
If you’ve attended the event in the past, you’ll see some returning vendors and a few new faces. Kiss the Cook Macaroni & Cheese, a Derry-based business offering homemade macaroni and cheese; The Nutrition Corner, a Derry shop offering protein smoothies and teas that opened late last year; and the Daydreaming Brewing Co. of Derry, which was launched earlier this year by Andy Day and Alana Wentworth of Cask & Vine, are all among this year’s newcomers.
Casa Java Cafe of Derry, which has participated in the event previously, will be returning this year, offering multiple flavors of crepes. They’ll have their warm cinnamon apple crepe, their fruity Nutella crepe with strawberry banana, and their house Casa Java crepe with blackberry and arequipe (Colombian caramel sauce).
The Grind Rail Trail Cafe, also of Derry, will be serving a savory option and an entry into the “sips” category, most likely a cold brew or other coffee offering. Rig A’ Tony’s Italian Takeout, another returning participant, has in the past featured a display of desserts like whoopie pies and coconut macaroons.
All exhibitors and tasters are asked to wear a mask or face-covering while in the event area in the parking lot. Instead of stopping in front of each booth to try their samples, Haseltine said, everyone is asked to use one of two designated tents with tables to sit down and eat at. Members of Servpro of Derry and Londonderry, one of the event’s sponsors, will be regularly sanitizing tables and chairs throughout the evening.
Each taster will be given a paper ballot on which to write their votes for each category. Haseltine said winners will be announced on social media within a week.

Taste of the Region
When: Tuesday, July 21, 5 to 7:30 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall parking lot, 10 A St., Derry
Cost: $35 admittance per person (includes full access to food and drink tastings; purchasing tickets in advance is encouraged, with a portion of the proceeds to benefit the Kyle B. Ross Memorial Scholarship Fund)
Visit: gdlchamber.org

Participating food and beverage vendors
• 603 Brewery (Londonderry, 603brewery.com)
• Amphora Restaurant (Derry, amphoranh.com)
• Aroma Joe’s Cafe (Derry, aromajoes.com)
• Casa Java Cafe (Derry, casajavacafe.com)
• Clam Haven (Derry, clamhaven.com)
• Daydreaming Brewing Co. (Derry, daydreaming.beer)
• Doire Distilling (Derry, doiredistilling.com)
• Fody’s Tavern (Derry, fodystavern.com)
• From the Barrel (Derry, drinkftb.com)
• Gabi’s Smoke Shack (Londonderry, gabissmokeshack.com)
• The Grind Rail Trail Cafe (Derry, thegrindnh.com)
• Halligan Tavern (Derry, thehalligantavern.com)
• Kiss the Cook Macaroni & Cheese (Derry, kissthecookllc.com)
• Long Blue Cat Brewing Co. (Londonderry, longbluecat.com)
• Moonlight Meadery (Londonderry, moonlightmeadery.com)
• The Nutrition Corner (Derry, thenutritioncorner.business.site)
• Pasta Loft Restaurant (East Hampstead, pastalofthampstead.com)
• Pipe Dream Brewing (Londonderry, pipedreambrewingnh.com)
• Prime Source Foods (Londonderry, primesourcefoods.biz)
• The Red Arrow Diner (Londonderry, redarrowdiner.com)
• The Residence at Salem Woods (lcbseniorliving.com)
• Rig A’ Tony’s Italian Takeout (Derry, find them on Facebook)
• Rockingham Brewing Co. (Derry, rockinghambrewing.com)
• Talia’s Eatery (Londonderry, taliaseatery.com)
• Troy’s Fresh Kitchen & Juice Bar (Londonderry, troysfreshkitchen.com)
• Zorvino Vineyards (Sandown, zorvino.com)

In the kitchen with Doug Loranger

Doug Loranger of Nashua is the owner of Ranger’s BBQ (rangers-bbq.com, find them on Facebook @rangersbbq17), a food trailer specializing in a variety of styles of barbecue, including North Carolina-style pulled pork and slow cooked Memphis-style ribs. He also offers smoked brisket, pulled chicken and several sides, like homemade macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, cornbread and his smoked baked beans with bacon, which won first place in last year’s New Hampshire Bacon & Beer Festival. A Nashua native, Loranger lived in Texas for more than a decade, working in capital equipment sales, before returning to New Hampshire. After cooking barbecue for a Super Bowl party in 2017, Loranger said the feedback was so positive that it prompted him to begin seeking out potential trailers the following day. Currently you can find Ranger’s BBQ at 324 Daniel Webster Highway in Nashua (near the Tyngsboro, Mass., state line) most Saturdays or Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., unless Loranger is catering for a private event that weekend. Follow him on social media for the most up-to-date information.

What is your must-have kitchen item?
A big spatula to get the brisket out of the smoker easily. I have some custom spatulas from Humphrey’s Smokers out of Maine.

What would you have for your last meal?
Probably a good rib-eye or duck breast.

What is your favorite local restaurant?
Giant of Siam [in Nashua]. I just love how fresh their food is, and their service is excellent.

What celebrity would you like to see ordering from your trailer?
Aaron Franklin, because I’d like his take on my food. He owns Franklin Barbecue down in Austin, Texas. People wait in line for hours to eat at his place. They come from all over the world just to have his barbecue, so it would be neat to get a little bit of feedback from him.

What is your favorite thing on your menu?
My ribs. Both the ribs and the brisket tend to sell out very fast.

What is the biggest food trend in New Hampshire right now?
I don’t know that this is a recent trend, but New England is getting more ethnically diverse in its foods. It’s nice to see more … diverse [options] than when I was growing up.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?
Prime rib, or duck.

Homemade macaroni and cheese
From the kitchen of Doug Loranger of Ranger’s BBQ in Nashua

1 pound macaroni or pasta of choice
½ cup (or one stick) butter
½ cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1½ teaspoons pepper
1 quart milk
1 quart shredded cheese of choice (Loranger likes to use a mix of provolone, cheddar, mozzarella and sometimes Gouda)

Melt the butter and mix in the flour to make a roux. Slowly add the milk so it gets warm as you add it. Mix in the salt and pepper. Add the cheese and stir until the mixture achieves a creamy consistency. Boil the pasta to al dente and add the mix to it.

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