Tag: 201210

The Music (Gift) Roundup 20/12/10

Local music news & events

• Scene support: Among those hit hardest by this no good, awful, horrible, please-let-it-end year are working musicians and the venues they play in. For the latter, a great present for your favorite fan is a gift certificate, or even a ticket for a future show. Tupelo Music Hall (tupelohall.com), Capitol Center for the Arts and Bank of NH Stage (ccanh.com) and The Palace and Rex (palacetheatre.org) are among the places that could use a boost, and music lovers will appreciate something to anticipate.

• Teacher, teacher: Since March, it’s gone from total lockdown to sort of quarantined and back again; in short, a lot of time spent indoors, and more in the forecast. So why not gift an experience that can be enjoyed in spite of the current malaise? Plenty of musicians are offering one-on-one lessons via Zoom or Facetime, among them Danielle Miraglia, an ace blues guitarist and stop box champion. Children or adults will love them. Half-hour slots are $37 each at daniellem.com.

• Get equipped: Learning to play requires an instrument, and a great resource is Manchester Music Mill. From a beginner’s Epiphone Les Paul Express six-string electric ($127) to a vintage 1976 Gibson Johnny Smith Hollowbody approaching seven grand, they’ve got the aspiring musician covered. On the acoustic side there’s everything from an entry-level Cort Earth ($99) to top-of-the-line Martins. Keyboards too — get in the game with a used Yamaha PSR portable or go all in with something grander.

• Direct connect: There are a lot of ways to give local musicians some love. Buy a track or more on sites like SoundCloud or Bandcamp — among the artists with new offerings this year are Hunter, Conniption Fits, Dead Harrison, Town Meeting and a joyful holiday album Dan Blakeslee. Grab a vinyl copy or some swag on a band website, and then put it under the tree. Nobody makes much from streaming, but ordering direct is a guaranteed way to maximize an artist’s profit.

• Be conventional: For those deserving of a sweeping gesture, big-ticket items are there to be found. Duetto is a $599-and-up tabletop radio/turntable combo that plays internet radio stations from around the world along with Spotify or Amazon Music while offering an outlet for when the retro mood strikes. Box sets this year include Tom Petty’s complete Wildflowers sessions and Bob Dylan’s work with George Harrison from 1970. Find that last one and be a true hero — it’s very limited.

Mank (R)

Mank (R)

Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz writes Citizen Kane while recuperating from injury and Citizen Kane-ily reflecting on his career in Hollywood in Mank, the most made-for-Oscar-nominations movie I have ever seen.

It is a movie about the movies featuring a character whose name is on one of the Academy Awards’ prizes (that being the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award; the Irving Thalberg played by Ferdinand Kingsley here is worth his own biopic). Many of the towering figures of 1930s Hollywood appear in this movie set in southern California that somehow captures, despite being in black and white, the sunny California-ness. And you get the intersection of California politics and Hollywood (and the conservative politics of corporate Hollywood clashing with the liberal politics of creative Hollywood) and a testament/cautionary tale about the power of movie magic storytelling in a real political world. There’s a “fake newsreel”! This movie has everything!

When we meet Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) in 1940, he has recently been in a car accident and has been given a place out toward the southern California desert to recuperate, a nurse (Monika Gossman) to care for him and an assistant, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), for him to dictate his screenplay to. All of this comes courtesy Orson Welles (Tom Burke), who has hired him to write a screenplay (or begin the writing that the two would complete; look, the authorship of Citizen Kane is a whole thing — what I’m talking about here is what this movie tells us about a screenplay that would ultimately have both Mankiewicz’s and Welles’ names). John Houseman (Sam Troughton) is to work as editor on the project and it seems understood by everybody, immediately, that what Mank is doing is a potentially dangerous undertaking.Even Alexander, a British lady who is more concerned about her RAF pilot husband’s survival than Mank’s career woes, immediately knows that the great man in decline that Mank is writing about is a thinly veiled riff on media magnate William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), which would make his ditzy showgirl wife a take on Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), even though Mank insists he doesn’t mean it to be her.

In flashbacks we see how Mank used to be a writer at MGM for Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and used to be a friend of Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies, having met her through her nephew, the writer Charles Lederer (Joseph Cross). The witty Mank was, for a while, a regular at gatherings at Hearst’s house in San Simeon, where he hung out with the likes of Mayer and Thalberg and saw their influence beyond media and into the world of state and national politics. Mank seems to want to appear above politics, playing the sarcastic wiseguy role, but the 1934 governor’s race and Mayer’s and Hearst’s opposition to the Democratic candidate Upton Sinclair seems to make it increasingly hard for Mank to follow his wife Sara’s (Tuppence Middleton) “if you don’t have anything nice to say” advice. And then there’s his own self-destructive behavior — drinking and gambling and a fair amount of what seems like self-loathing.

This feels like such a movie-nerd’s movie I’m not even sure how to judge it. I mean, do I love it? Sure, it checks all the boxes for a movie geek, with movie nostalgia (or not nostalgia, really, because I’m not 110 years old but, like, reveling in the fantasy, mostly built by movies, of the early days of Hollywood) that packs an extra punch both because I haven’t been seeing big Hollywood movies in theaters and because the industry and its future are suddenly, here in 2020, so much in flux. I like all the technical elements of this movie, how in look and sound and scene transitions it looks like a 1940s film. Specifically, it uses a lot of Citizen Kane visual and storytelling elements and, sure, it does so very self-consciously, but it doesn’t make me like it any less.

Oldman’s performance feels, well, Oscar-bait-y in the extreme but captivating nonetheless. He’s not just Herman Mankiewicz; he’s a Herman Mankiewicz-y version of the Herman Mankiewicz character in highly stylized movie. It is not a natural performance, I guess is what I’m saying, nor is anybody else’s, but I bought it.

Look, this is 2020 and for those of us out in the movie fan universe (i.e. not going to virtual film festivals or working for film studios) this glossy Netflix bit of concession stand candy is probably as Hollywood as it’s going to get for us. This was probably always going to be an enjoyable movie to me, but under these circumstances it felt like an extra special bit of movie magic. A-

Rated R for some language. Directed by David Fincher with a screenplay by Jack Fincher, Mank is two hours and 11 minutes long and distributed by Netflix.

Hillbilly Elegy
Ron Howard directed this adaptation of J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir and it’s streaming on Netflix now. It stars Glenn Close and Amy Adams — both of whom seem to be trying hard for their elusive Oscar wins. Find Amy Diaz’s thoughts on Hillbilly Elegy at hippopress.com, available for free thanks to our members and contributors.

Featured Photo: Mank

No Time Like the Future, by Michael J. Fox

No Time Like the Future, by Michael J. Fox (Flatiron, 238 pages)

If Michael J. Fox hasn’t been on your radar screen since the 1980s, you’ve missed a lot. You probably know that he has Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he announced in 1998, and started a foundation to fund research, and that he continued to work, acting and writing.

But because he appears eternally youthful, it’s still jarring to learn that Marty McFly, that Alex P. Keaton, is the father of four adult children and sits around mourning his empty nest. Children are time machines, he writes in his latest memoir No Time Like the Future, describing the “cruel velocity” with which our offspring catapult us into a future where, he says, “I wish away my time while I wait for my children to come and visit.”

Well. Didn’t see that coming when Fox was zipping around in Doc Brown’s DeLorean.

But Fox is now 59 and while that is young as Boomers go, he has been suffering the effects of a progressive neurological disease for 30 years, so the subtitle of this memoir is “an optimist considers mortality.” Optimism has been part of his brand since the diagnosis — his previous books were titled Lucky Man and Always Looking Up, the latter of which became a documentary called “Adventures of an Incurable Optimist.”

Lately, however, Fox says, there are days in which he wonders if he is out of the lemonade business, if it’s time to succumb to the lemons. He writes of possessing a body that has been weaponized — even with medication and regular physical therapy, his mobility and balance is so unpredictable that he is nervous about getting too close to his 90-year-old mother, for fear of knocking her over. “I love my mother too much to give her a hug,” he writes.

It’s not just Parkinson’s that’s the problem, but the chaos caused by the disease. He frequently suffers from injuries caused by falling, a finger swollen so badly that doctors feared they might have to amputate; a pinched sciatic nerve that renders him unable to go on the beach during a family vacation to the Caribbean; a broken arm that required a stainless-steel plate and 19 screws to fix. And he also suffered a tumor on his spinal cord that required a dangerous surgery two years ago.

The recounting of all these woes may seem like a proposal for the world’s worst book. Who, save the schadenfreudeans among us, wants to read 238 pages of a likeable person’s suffering? But Fox pulls it off, because the book is well-crafted, beginning and ending with a catastrophic fall, and the existential crisis that it represents, and it reveals an admirable mind, one that can fire off smart comic lines (“If Mike fell in the kitchen and no one was there to see him, would he still break his arm?”) while admitting despair.

It is the broken arm, not the disease, that pushes Fox to question whether his half-full philosophy of life is useful, to question whether being a “hopeaholic” (a term coined by artist Anna Deavere Smith) is actually harmful, both to him and to his fans.

“Have I oversold optimism as a panacea, commodified hope? Have I been an honest broker with the Parkinson’s community?” he wonders in anguish. “The understanding I’ve reached with Parkinson’s is sincere, but the expression of it risks being glib. … In telling other patients, ‘Chin up! It will be okay!’ did I look to them to validate my optimism? Is it because I needed to believe it myself?”

This is particularly relevant, because Fox’s reminiscing makes it clear that, despite his harsh trials, he dwells on a plane distant from most suffering mortals. When he drinks pina coladas in the Caribbean, he does so with Keith Richards; he is wealthy, able to afford the best of care and exotic vacations. It’s easier to view the glass as half full when it contains Dom Perignon, not vinegar.

But Fox is markedly self-aware and comes to believe that his attitude has become too cavalier, that he has spent too much time focusing on his body and its assorted travails, and that he needs to spend more time examining his mindset. He notes that while Franklin D. Roosevelt is known for saying, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” in the same speech Roosevelt said, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

I’ll not spoil the ending by revealing Fox’s conclusion, only say that No Time Like the Future is occasionally disjointed but assembles itself nicely by the end and is a surprisingly thoughtful memoir by one of America’s most beloved celebrities. Michael J. Fox is not Alex P. Keaton but for the earnestness; he is not Marty McFly, but for the zeal; but he is the rare enduring celebrity who deserves a platform, and continued applause. (His foundation has funded $1 billion in Parkinson’s research.) Still, this memoir, his fourth, is gritty and maybe not the inspiration that people newly diagnosed with Parkinson’s might want. Gift carefully. B

BOOK NOTES
Books can be the best gift — or the worst.

On the plus side they are easy to wrap and relatively cheap to mail. You have literally millions of choices and are not limited to books published recently. Vintage signed copies of an author someone loves makes a wonderful gift (even if it’s inscribed to someone else), which leads to another plus: Books endure and are a tangible sign of your affection.

And a gift book can easily be made to pop with a few thoughtful additions, such as a book light to attach for night reading. (Note to my mother: I am all about the fingerless gloves imprinted with passages from A Christmas Carol on the literati website Storiarts.)

But a book is only a good gift if chosen with a high degree of sensitivity. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (One World, 320 pages), is popular this year, but it’s difficult to give because of the implication. Same with Joel Osteen’s Empty Out the Negative (Faithwords, 160 pages) or any kind of self-improvement book. Novels, too, tough. For a few years, I tried giving friends a copy of the best book I’d read that year but found they don’t always share my enthusiasm. And J.K. Rowling has a new children’s book out, but we have to tiptoe around her this year.

That said, there are some books that are pretty much guaranteed to please people in certain categories. Below is a roundup of suggestions from a serial book giver.
For Democrats: A Promised Land, by Barack Obama (Crown, 768 pages) or My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages)
For Trumpy Republicans: Liberal Privilege by Donald Trump Jr. (self-published, no word count available) or Live Free or Die by Sean Hannity (Threshold, 352 pages)
For Never-Trump Republicans: It Was All a Lie, How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens (Knopf, 256 pages) or Reaganland: America’s Turn Right, by Rick Perlstein (Simon & Schuster, 1,120 pages, not a typo)
For Health Geeks: Clean, the New Science of Skin by James Hamblin (Riverhead, 288 pages)
For Nature Lovers: What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley (Knopf, 240 pages) or The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, (Greystone, 288 pages)
For Shakespeare Buffs: Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro (Penguin, 320 pages)
For Beatles Buffs: 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, by Craig Brown (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 592 pages)
For Young Children (and Their Parents): No More Naps! by Chris Grabenstein (Random House Books for Young Readers, 40 pages)
For Animal Lovers: Dog Songs by Mary Oliver (Penguin, 144 pages) or Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 128 pages)
For Anyone Who Loves Christmas: Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean (Penguin, 272 pages) or A Literary Holiday Cookbook by Alison Walsh (Skyhorse, 272 pages)

Featured photo:No Time Like the Future, by Michael J. Fox

Album Reviews 20/12/10

The Myrrhderers, The Myrrhderers Sleigh Christmas (self-released)

It was with great sadness that I read last week there’d be no live Trans Siberian Orchestra shows coming to the area, just a streaming thingamajig instead. I looked to the universe, hoping to be cheered up, and lo, hark, behold, a wonderful holiday EP from a bunch of trolling punks declaring themselves to be a “North Pole punk-rock supergroup,” made up of members of “Dead Kringles, Prancid and Sleigher.” I immediately decided that the record would receive an A+ grade, then listened to all five songs, which literally only required 12 minutes out of my life. It’s all actually quite good if you like Good Charlotte demos and junk like that; their rub of “Deck The Halls” could actually be Green Day in Santa beards for all I know. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is straightedge-leaning punk-pop lunacy, and so on. These guys aren’t just pikers with an eight-track recorder from 1991, but I didn’t deduct points for their decent production quality. Very tolerable. A+

Deep Sea Diver, Impossible Weight (ATO Records)

This album being so good, I think I’ll pass on listening to their last couple of records, as the consensus seems to be that they’re not as ambitious. The quartet is led by Seattleite Jessica Dobson, who in the past has played with a who’s-who of indie royalty (Shins, Spoon, Beck, others), experiences that have helped to shape her into the closest thing to a millennials’ Chrissie Hynde that I’ve heard to date. There’s a palpable grunge edge to this stuff; “Lights Out” sounds like a cross between Yeah Yeah Yeahs (with regard to the vocal approach) and Superdrag (relative to the mashed-potato guitar sound), but she’s obviously got a jones for trip-hop, by the afterparty steez emanating from “Shattering The Hourglass.” So that’s all well and good, and the tunes, regardless of their disparate influences, sound like they belong together, but the killer bit is that Dobson’s songwriting is outstanding. Well worth your stream time. A+

Retro Playlist

Merry corona-mas everyone, as the science nerds like to say down at CDC headquarters! There’s still plenty of time to order holiday music CDs, so today I’ll look at albums this page has covered in the past, but first it’s your reminder of the festive songs I can’t stand in the least, like “Feliz Navidad,” “O Holy Night” and of course Billy Squier’s “Christmas Is A Time To Say I Love You,” which, yes, I already harped on a couple of weeks ago, but wait, go listen to it again, if your stomach can handle it. Isn’t his voice super-annoying, like, doesn’t he sound like some sort of post-punk WC Fields, as though he wants to say “Go away kid, ya bother me” after every line? I mean, sure, I’d rather be subjected to Billy Squier’s dumb song than “O Holy Night” while I’m in line at Walgreens buying some stupid last-minute thing, like my hatred for that song isn’t bone-marrow level the way it is with John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Christmas,” but — oh, you get the point.

For more tolerable holiday sounds, let’s go all the way back to 2006 for til Tuesday front-lady Aimee Mann’s Another Drifter In The Snow. It’s a mellow, very listenable collection, and her choices were all good: Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song”; a bearable “Winter Wonderland” and for (polite) laughs, a rip of “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”

In 2008 there was the charity-driven A Princeton Christmas: For The Children Of Africa album, by Princeton Choirs. Beautiful, reflective stuff for those quiet holiday nights, featuring donated tracks sung by The American Boychoir, The Westminster Concert Bell Choir and several others. Fun fact for cynics: Despite all the holiness baked into the tracks, there nevertheless exists a one-star review on Amazon submitted by someone who freaked out over the fact that the Princeton Theological Seminary Choir wasn’t brought into the mix. I really don’t need to expound on that, I’m sure.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yee hah. It’s a landslide of new releases, vying for your Hanukkwaanzmas dollar! I feel totally blessed this time of year, what with all the new albums coming out on Dec. 11, but honestly, this year I may not have enough snark left to deal with it all! I mean, just look, it’s a double-live album from Belle and Sebastian, called What To Look For In Summer, can you even stand it? Fifty million hipsters totally love dancing their happy irony dance to BS’s gentle, inoffensive twee-pop, and they only dance harder when the song is so boring and unlistenable that all their friends give up on them forever, like all that stuff from Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (they played the whole album during their headlining stint at the Boaty Weekender festival, the famous gathering place for rich people with boats and stock options, and some of those live versions are on this album). The album starts off with a version of the Scottish beer-guzzling singalong “The Song of the Clyde,” isn’t that so awesome? I’m totally going to listen to this album on my schooner as I chase that devil Moby Dick all over the seven seas, with my ironic hipster bos’n mates who all have mad harpoon skills and bunny tattoos!

• Wait, fam, look, we don’t just have young millennial hipster deck-swabs to talk about, because thar she blows, a new album from Paul McCartney, titled McCartney III! I totally can’t remember the name of his old band, something like Herman’s Hermits, or Len, or whatever, but either way, this guy, whose eyelift surgery makes him look like Carol Channing at closing time at an after-hours bash, is at it again, just cold bringin’ the guitar-pop music, to teach you crazy Death Grips listeners how it’s done! Boy, I can hardly wait to dig my ears into the new version of “Coming Up,” any of you boomers remember that awful song? Ah, here it is. It sounds like it’s sung by drunken Ewoks who don’t know how to use their cheap downloadable music-making software. Gack, it’s even more horrible than the original, so let’s put this aside for now and press on.

• Continuing our excursion to find musical coolness whilst sailing on board the Pequod, Canadian folkie duo Kacy & Clayton have been around since 2011, doing their part to bring good folkie-fied feels to the hipster whaling community and all young people who watch shows like Archer just to annoy their roommates. Their new album is Plastic Bouquet, a collaboration of sorts with New Zealand musician Marlon Williams! No, I have no idea who that is either, but whatever, yay Marlon Whastisname! The lead single, “I Wonder Why” mostly sounds like Roy Orbison, but it’s mostly an acoustic guitar thing, so there’s a rootsy Hank Williams feel to it as well. It’s OK.

• Lastly, we should probably take a quick listen to whatever’s going on in the new M. Ward album, Think Of Spring, specifically the single “For Heaven’s Sake.” Spoiler: It’s a wispy, dreamy unplugged-strummy-guitar tune with way too much reverb on his voice. I suppose I’d love it if I were a salty hipster whaleboat swab born in 1987 instead of never-you-mind-all-that, and had never listened to Simon & Garfunkel, because that’s kind of what it’s like, except it’s bare-bones. But I wasn’t, so I hereby rudely dismiss this song, with extreme prejudice.

• Finally we have Tucson-based Tex-Mex-indie stalwarts Calexico, with their new LP, Seasonal Shift! Huh, how do you like that, it’s a holiday album! The first single is called “Hear The Bells,” in which the boy-eez sing about drinking mescal and selling something or other by the side of the road, I don’t know. Sounds like a cross between Everly Brothers and your least-favorite pop band from the 1980s, if that helps any.

Mulled wine by the fire

Looking for a winter drink? Warm up with spices

The days are getting shorter and the nights cooler. The holiday season is upon us and the first snow has arrived. Wish to gather with friends? One way to gather with another couple or two is in your driveway or back yard around the firepit sipping on mulled wine.

Hot spiced wine, or mulled wine, has been around forever, it seems. Depending on its cultural origins, it may be known as glühwein, vino caliente, glögg, vin brulé, bisschopswijn, vin chaud, candola, vinho quente, or by other monikers. Mulled wine exists in just about every European culture and the recipes for making it appear to be limitless. In England mulled wine is known as Wassail, a name whose origins are Anglo Saxon. Like Christmas, this hot punch transformed itself from pagan rites to revolve around the coldest, darkest nights of the year. In its earliest form it was a drink made from mulled ale, curdled cream, roasted apples, eggs, cloves, ginger, nutmeg and sugar. It was served from huge bowls on New Year’s Eve and Twelfth Night (Jan. 6). This warm drink took on a significant cultural identity as through the centuries it was used to toast the holidays.

Hot mulled wine can be a simple concoction prepared in a slow cooker or over the flames of that fire pit. In its simplest forms the ingredients consist of a bottle of robust red wine, an orange (or oranges) sliced into rounds, a half dozen whole cloves, a couple of cinnamon sticks, some star anise, honey to taste, and if you want, a measure of brandy. It takes literally five minutes to make and is scalable from two servings to enough for a large holiday gathering (for next year).

For the wine, I selected Petite Petit by Michael David (originally priced at $19.99, on sale at the New Hampshire Liquor & Wine Outlets at $12.95). This wine is 85 percent petite sirah and 15 percent petit verdot. It is large and fruity with aromas of dark fruit, raspberry and plum. To the taste the black cherry “jammy” flavor comes through with some oak on the edges. This wine is perfect to use as a base for this concoction, as it will hold up well with the additions of fruit and spices. It is well-stocked throughout the state, and the price is so attractive! The petite sirah produces a deep-colored, robust, full-bodied peppery wine, with some tannins, that ages well. The petit verdot, used in blending the famous Bordeaux wines, has a dry, full-bodied taste of blackberry. Like the petite sirah, the strong tannins and high alcohol in the wine from this varietal allow it to age beautifully. It is perfectly matched to the petite sirah! These grapes are grown in Lodi, in San Joaquin County, in the center portion of California’s Central Valley. With long hot summers, these grapes are allowed to ripen well to produce a lot of sugar.

Now, how to make mulled wine: Combine your ingredients in a saucepan and give them a stir. Heat the wine until it just barely reaches a simmer over medium heat. Remember, alcohol boils off at 173 degrees (F), so be careful. Reduce the heat, cover and let simmer for 15 minutes or so. Using a strainer remove the cloves, cinnamon sticks and star anise, and serve in heat-proof mugs garnished with the fruit and cinnamon sticks. Remember, this recipe is very flexible. You can include apple cider or orange juice in the mix. You can use sugar instead of the honey for a sweetener, although it is not as rich as honey. Additional fruit can include thinly sliced apples or frozen pitted cherries. Additional spices can include ginger, peeled and sliced, and a vanilla bean cut open from end to end. The options are limitless and the possibilities endless.

Don’t let the cold, dark December days (and Covid) get to you. Invite a couple or two to gather around the fire pit and share the warmth of the holidays with a steaming mug of hot mulled wine. Savor the moments and cherish the memories of this time when we must be ever so creative in how we can remain connected.

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo

The Blue Train

Shortly after the end of the First World War, it became fashionable for wealthy British to spend at least part of their winter in Southern France. Their money went further there and the Riviera had been spared the worst of the destruction during the War. They could see and be seen by their peers, while sitting in the sunshine and pretending to be bored by their privilege.

This was so common that a train service developed to pick the Smart Set up in Calais, on the other side of the English Channel, then take them, via Paris, to different stops along the Mediterranean. Because the sleeper cars were painted blue, this train became known as The Blue Train.

One interesting aspect of this was that upper-class British adventurers started challenging each other to race the Blue Train across France in their cars. For a brief period of time this became a standing challenge, like swimming the Channel, or shooting leopards — a chance to show off for their peers and look good doing it. Because, of course, the other members of their social circle would be on the Blue Train itself.

“I say,” one of the passengers might say, pointing at a cloud of dust in the distance, “do you think that is Waldo and Reggie?’

“I believe it is! Oh, jolly good; we must drink a toast to them! Waiter!”

Which, theoretically, is where we get The Blue Train Cocktail.

If you go searching for a recipe for a Blue Train, you will find dozens, which vary wildly in their ingredients and methodology, but the oldest ones are extremely simple:

• Three parts brandy

• One part pineapple juice (Pineapple juice? Where did that come from?)

• An unspecified amount of Champagne

I like the romance of this drink and such a simple formula seemed extremely flexible, so I decided to try various riffs on it. Instead of Champagne, I substituted prosecco – because what am I, fancy? – and several different types of brandy:

• Several sources suggested using apricot brandy and that seemed promising. As it turns out, not so much.

• Ginger brandy was even worse.

• Then I decided to return to the fruit theme and made a batch with blackberry brandy. Please, for the sake of everything that is good and wholesome, do not do this.

After a great deal of experimentation and heartache, I was able to fine-tune this recipe to its ideal proportions:

• Three parts brandy

• One part pineapple juice

• An unspecified amount of Champagne

(1) Shake the brandy and pineapple juice over ice.

(2) Strain into glasses

(3) Top with Champagne

This is not a drink that is meant to be sweet. If you use prosecco and a sweet brandy, it ends up tasting like cider, which is fine, but then, why not just drink cider? This drink calls for a drier, more bracing, more refined set of ingredients. I am a big proponent of using bottom-shelf alcohols; when you are making cocktails with strong-flavored ingredients, the subtler nuances of more serious, expensive labels can easily get overwhelmed and covered up.

Not in this case. If you’ve got good brandy, self-respecting brandy, this is a good time to break it out. The same with the Champagne. I’m not saying to buy the best Champagne, but this is a good opportunity to use a dry Champagne that isn’t afraid to look at itself in the mirror. This is not a drink that was developed by people who cut corners.

Serve this with something salty, like caviar.

Or Cheez-Its.

Cocktail-inspired gift suggestions

• Truly excellent cocktail cherries — Bada Bing Cherries from Stonewall Kitchen ($7.95 for 13.5 oz., or $34.95 from 72 oz., if you’re really serious) A good cocktail cherry can save a cocktail. A good cocktail cherry can bring a moment of sunshine and contentment in a gray and sullen world. These are very good cocktail cherries. They are rich and deeply flavored, with the slightest hint of muskiness, like a half-heard whisper. And they fit in a stocking.

• A proper kitchen scale — KUBEI Upgraded Lager Size Digital Food Scale ($23.99) Like many people over the past several months, I got sucked into the fraught world of sourdough bread. In theory it’s pretty simple. There are few ingredients. Peasants have been making it for centuries. In the trenches, though, sourdough is a cruel mistress who will toy with your emotions and leave you a spent, whimpering husk.

The secret to establishing detente with her is a good kitchen scale.

Weighing – especially by the gram – gives you freedom and power in the kitchen. Your measurements become precise. You use fewer dishes. You start writing weight-equivalents in your cookbooks.

This is an excellent, affordable scale. It switches easily between grams, ounces and pounds with the press of a button. It is battery-powered but can be plugged in or even recharged. It measures to an accuracy of a hundredth of a gram. It has a tare button.

A tare button!

If you don’t know what that is, you will. Oh, you will…

Featured Photo: A Blue Train. Photo by John Fladd.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!