Tag: 230202

Born to fun

Comic Cory Gee debuts at Headliners

When Cory Gee bounds onstage, he’s almost immediately mixing with the crowd. Learning who’s married, dating for the first time, celebrating a birthday. The rapid-fire back and forth helps the veteran comic size up the audience, but it’s not a call for conversation.

He’s setting up jokes, polished over time. Like the one about why asking a baby-faced cop how he caught him while riding a Big Wheel isn’t a good way to get out of a speeding ticket, or how single men shouldn’t plan bachelor parties, and the reason a VFW hall is a better venue for such gatherings than a strip bar.

Cory Gee really doesn’t want to hear about your day, but thanks anyway.

“In today’s TikTok era, crowd work is a necessary evil,” Gee said in a recent phone interview, noting that shutting down hecklers is a reliable way to get clicks. “I love to engage with the crowd, but what is frustrating for me as a comedian is when the crowd talks to me. Does that make sense?”

Sometimes, though, Gee’s high-wire act leads to comedy gold. “A perfect joke for me is the joke I never intended to do,” he said. Like when a random crowd remark sparks the memory of a long-unfinished bit. “You just start to work it, then it all starts to fall into place … and it’s like this moment. I was not meant to figure out that joke until just now.”

Gee will appear for the first time at Headliners in Manchester on Feb. 4. He’s talked for a while with promoter Rob Steen about playing there. “I pretty much know every headliner he uses on a regular basis, and they were all saying the same thing … ‘You’d do so well in New Hampshire, those crowds would really enjoy you.’ I’m really looking forward to it.”

He began doing comedy in 2002 at Comedy Connection in Providence, Rhode Island. The decision to become a standup was an evolution. He majored in theater in college, left early to find fame in Hollywood, but only got as far as his dad’s home in Georgia, where he got work in a professional theater company.

It didn’t last past a series of grueling rehearsals for Lips Together, Teeth Apart.

“I was just tired of saying other people’s words,” Gee explained. “In comedy, everything sits on you, all of the writing is you, all of the performing is you, every movement you make on stage is solely you, [and] knowing I was in complete control was probably the moment that I realized … this is what I want to be doing.”

It ended in 2013. His employer, a well-known nonprofit, gave him an ultimatum: jokes or a job. With two sons, Gee had little choice, so he quit, cold turkey. He didn’t write a bit, go to a show, or even think about comedy for five years. Then he got an offer at a new company. It was a lateral move; commuting costs actually reduced his take-home.

His wife had only one question. “She said, ‘Can you do comedy?’ I said, ‘Yeah, they told me they don’t care what I do.’ She was like, ‘We will figure out whatever financial impact this will have; you have to get back to comedy,’” he recalled.

He’s ever grateful for the boost. After shows, she helps him deconstruct and decompress. “I took it for granted the first time,” he said. “It has definitely added a wrinkle to our relationship from a support standpoint. Not that it wasn’t there before; I just I didn’t realize how important it was.”

Gee returns the favor by co-hosting a podcast with her. Ready, Set, Disney offers tips for visiting the theme parks. It helps that the manic stage prowler is already a big fan of Disney World. “If you’ve seen my act, you know I can’t stand still,” he said. “So the idea of a vacation in which I sit on a beach and just kinda throw my feet up would not work for me. When we go to Disney, I’m constantly moving.”

Cory Gee
When: Saturday, Feb. 4, 8:30 p.m.
Where: Headliners Comedy Club, 700 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 at headlinersnh.com

Featured photo: Cory Gee. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 23/02/02

Local music news & events

Gothiversary: The enduring twice-a-month dance night Resurrection celebrates its 17th year with double bill of turntablists, including resident DJ Pet and Rev Benjamin Powers, who in addition to making crowds dance hosts a Twitch channel and is, according to his Twitter bio, a “pro wrestling sage” and “walking ball of millennial angst.” That’s perfect for the goth/industrial music event, which has Swedish mysterioso band Priest and similar fare. Thursday, Feb. 2, 6:30 p.m., Belknap Mill, 25 Beacon St., Laconia, $10 at the door.

• Beachy keen: A mainstay at this Londonderry brewery, Slack Tide plays the sixth annual All Summer Long indoor party, laughing at the subzero temperatures. The jam band stretches the genre’s definition and is led by Berklee-trained guitarist Chris Cyrus, who grew up on Jack Johnson and Sublime along with psychedelic rockers like The Doors and the Dead. On Saturday, Supernothing and DJ Connexions finish the fest. Friday, Feb. 3, 6:30 p.m., Pipe Dream Brewery, 49 Harvey Road, Londonderry, pipedreambrewingnh.com.

• Double down: Boston soul powerhouse A Band of Killers completes a two-night run that features both versions of the group. The Friday night set has ex-Soulive leader Toussaint the Liberator; Tim Gearan is out front on night two, with the elegant duo Dwight and Nicole opening. The regional “all-star rock ’n’ roll soul circus” supergroup has been busy of late making new music, with two albums due out soon. Friday, Feb. 3, and Saturday, Feb. 4, 9 p.m., Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket, $20 at stonechurchrocks.com.

• Boys to men: In 1999,Making The Band created the formula for reality TV talent contests and gave O-Town its start. They rode the boy band wave until it crashed; along the way they fell in with serial crook/manager Lou Pearlman, who fleeced them just as he’d done to N’Sync and Backstreet Boys. That spurred singer Jacob Underwood to earn an MBA and get better at the music biz. In 2015 the act reunited, and they continue to tour. Sunday, Feb. 5, 7 p.m., Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $35 at ccanh.com.

• Broadway folk: NYC-based singer-songwriter Eleri Ward blew up TikTok with her unique take on Stephen Sondheim, A Perfect Little Death, an album released in 2021. Critics hailed the effort; American Theatre called it “incandescent” and Forbes praised its “harmonious marriage of musical theater and indie folk music, with hauntingly beautiful arrangements.” Ward attended Berklee on her way to graduating with a BFA from the Boston Conservatory. Tuesday, Feb. 7, 8 p.m., 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth, $20 at 3sarts.org.

The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams

The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (268 pages, William Morrow)

In the windswept snow-packed emptiness of a place so remote it can only be accessed by helicopter is the Northern Institute, an abandoned research facility. Its staff has suddenly left under mysterious circumstances, requiring the employment of three caretakers tasked with keeping the six-story building functional.

Sound like your job? No? Keep reading. It will.

The light-hearted novel is a satirical take on the modern workplace, from the mind-numbing and largely unimportant tasks that can disproportionately consume a workweek, to the multitiered and often useless health plans offered by large employers, to mediocre supervisors obsessed with maintaining control.

The supervisor here goes by one name, presumably his surname, Hart. Like his two-person team, Gibbs and Cline, he seems to have come to his job with little information; he doesn’t even have a good sense of where he is, having fallen asleep during the helicopter ride.

All Hart knows is that provisions and instructions will be delivered once a week by helicopter, and that while the work is simple, he has a protocol to follow, and follow it he will, even though he often feels disrespected by underlings who aren’t appreciative enough that he provides them coffee and the opportunity for “light socializing” each morning before getting down to work.

Calling their tasks “work,” however, is a stretch. It is more like busy work — things given a person to do only so they have something to do. One week, for example, they are tasked with sitting in all the chairs in the building, ostensibly to test their structural integrity; another week, they measure the flatness of the tables by seeing if golf balls roll across them. The work is so boring, as are the surroundings, that Hart has trouble keeping up with the passage of time; he doesn’t know how long he has been there or what holidays have passed. The only remotely interesting thing that happens is when one morning Cline looks outside the window on a particularly windy day and spots it: “the thing in the snow.”

It’s unclear what the thing is as, like everything else, it’s covered with snow. But Hart, Gibbes and Cline all agree that it hadn’t been there before. And because of some mysterious “snow sickness” that had befallen former employees at the facility, they have been instructed not to go outside. So they have no way to check it out.

There is only one other person on the premises: Gilroy, a researcher who was part of the previous team and for reasons unknown got left behind to continue working on some project regarding “the cold.”

“Condescending, pretentious, and often outright batty, he’s the kind of person who eschews empathy with such vigor that distaste is not just warranted, it is the correct evolutionary response,” is how Hart, the narrator, describes him. Gilroy knows nothing about the thing in the snow, either.

Nor does the “health specialist” who arrives to administer the team’s regularly scheduled checkups (and haircuts) later. In one of the more hilarious sequences of the books, the health specialist informs them that they are all on the “basic” health care plan, as opposed to the premium or platinum. The eye chart, therefore, only contains five letters, whereas the premium plan has 15 and the platinum plan the whole alphabet. Also, “The thermometer’s readings come only in multiples of three, but we have the option to upgrade to the premium option of whole numbers or the platinum level, which includes decimals.”

But that is just a comic aside. The mystery before our caretakers, of course, is what the thing in the snow is, and how they can find out.

The limitations of the characters and their surroundings necessarily immerse the reader into the blandness of their days; we’re redeemed only by Hart’s occasional dry wit and sardonic observations. But then there are small, strange mysteries that unfold, like cryptic messages Hart and Cline find written under tables. It’s as if the most trivial dialogue from the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was inserted into the TV series Lost.

Meanwhile, because the Northern Institute was a thriving research facility at one time, surely it’s possible that the caretakers are themselves being studied as they numbly perform the assigned rituals this week. Maybe the thing in the snow is a test of their compliance? Or is it something more sinister?

It would be wrong to classify The Thing in the Snow as a mystery or a thriller; it’s much too sly for that, and the author, unlike his narrator, doesn’t seem to be taking any of this too seriously, even when he’s skewering the modern workplace.

What he does take seriously is the cold. A resident of Des Moines, Adams is as acquainted with the miseries of cold as New Englanders are. When at one point the characters are asked if they’d rather have a pay raise or the temperature in the building elevated a few degrees, they opt for the warmth, which is entirely plausible this time of year. The book is droll like that and doesn’t ask much of the reader but to come along for the ride — under a blanket, of course. It’s a pleasant distraction for a couple of winter evenings. B

At the Sofaplex 23/02/02

All Quiet on the Western Front (R)

A group of very eager, very naive school boys sign up to join the German army a few years into World War I in this most recent, German-language adaptation of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Paul (Felix Kammerer) and his buddies sport goofy grins as they listen to a local official charge them up, all fatherland this and manhood that. When Paul finds another man’s name on the uniform he’s handed, he accepts the army official’s story that it probably just didn’t fit that guy — even though we’ve seen, in one of the movie’s best sequences, that uniform go being worn by a young German soldier when he’s sent over the top of the trench to the laundry where his blood is cleaned out and the factory where bullet holes are patched up.

It’s telling to watch all the older soldiers just sort of “yep” with their eyes as these eager new soldiers get to the Western front, cheering and ready to shoot their French enemies. After about 24 hours — of mud, of shelling, of collecting the dog tags of freshly killed comrades — Paul seems to let go of his childhood ideas of military glory and adventure.

We catch up with him 18 months later as he and the friends he has left are just surviving in roughly the same spot where they’ve been dug in for years. Intercut with this are scenes of German officials (including one played by Daniel Brühl) trying to negotiate an armistice over the objections of the military.

This movie — nominated for Oscars for Best Picture as well as extremely well-deserved cinematography and score nods, International Feature Film, Makeup & Hairstyling, Adapted Screenplay, Visual Effects, Sound and Production Design — really does wow with its visuals. The trench warfare is an impressive blend of absolute horror and surprising beauty, particularly in the long shots of the forests and fields around the battlefield. The score is impressive too — there’s a kind of machine-like quality that helps underline the idea of the soldiers as just raw materials for industrial-scale killing.

I think the movie’s greatest strength — that it takes the time to show us the nature and the small details surrounding these men at war — can also be a weakness in that it leads the movie to underline and repeat itself on the futility of what’s happening. At two hours and 27 minutes, this movie could have afforded to slice some scenes and still get its message across. B+ Available on Netflix, where you can watch it in German with subtitles or with English dubbing.

Triangle of Sadness (R)

Woody Harrelson, Harris Dickinson.

Director and writer Ruben Ostlund, also known for The Square and Force Majeure, presents this satire of wealth, class and status with just a bit of gender roles and colonialism thrown in. It’s a lot. It’s a whole college freshmen discussion about “the system.” It can charm in moments but also wear on you. And there’s an extended puke and poo situation that is — well “on the nose” feels like a very “ew” way to describe it.

The movie takes a while to get going as we see models Carl (Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and their relationship, which is at least 50 percent about building their social media presence. They go on a cruise — influencer perks — where all of their fellow guests are fabulously wealthy, sorta nuts and some kind of a caricature, such as the polite British couple named Winston (Oliver Ford Davies) and Clementine (Amanda Walker) who used to manufacture land mines but now focus on hand grenades. The crew, managed by Paula (Vicki Berlin), has been told to smile through all the insanity in hope of a big tip. But perhaps they should have “no, ma’am-ed” a request by Vera (Sunnyi Melles), wife of Russian fertilizer magnate Dimitry (Zlatko Buric), for all of the crew members, including the kitchen staff preparing the raw seafood, to go for a swim.

At one point, the ship’s oft-drunk captain (Harrelson) and Dimitry trade quotes about communism — the captain presenting himself as sort of a half-hearted Marxist and Dimitry as a capitalist. It’s cute, they have a chummy conversation as the guests puke and the ship is cast about on the waves; it’s also, you know, “yeah, OK, movie.”

And that for me was the movie — cute moments, some fun performances and a whole lot of “OK, calm down.” I get how this can be a better-than-OK viewing experience (except for the puking) but for me this wouldn’t have added up to Best Picture, Best Director and Original Screenplay Oscar nominations. BAvailable for rent or purchase.

Women Talking (PG-13)

The women of a rural fundamentalist community must decide to stay or leave in Women Talking, a captivating exercise of storytelling through conversation directed by Sarah Polley and based on the novel by Miriam Toews.

After years of the women of the colony, as they call their settlement, waking up to find themselves bruised and bleeding, the rapists who had been drugging and violently assaulting female community members (ranging in age from little girls to their grandmothers) have been arrested. They are imprisoned in the nearby town and all the men of the colony have gone to bail them out. The leaders have told the women that when the men — rapists included — return, the women must forgive them. The alternative is to be cast out — of the colony, of the religion, of the eternal kingdom of God.

Before the men return, the women all decide to vote on what to do. Their options, as laid out with sketches for these women and girls who have never been allowed to learn to read and write, are to do nothing, to stay and fight or to go. “Do nothing” is a first-round loser but “stay and fight” and “go” are in a dead heat with a smaller committee of women being tasked with discussing the two options and deciding for all the women of the town.

All of the women are angry, a deep full-body anger. Salome (Claire Foy), mother of a 4-year-old girl who had recently been attacked, attempted to kill the accused men and vows that she will finish the job if she stays. Ona (Rooney Mara), pregnant from her attack, has some elaborate ideas about what a post-colony egalitarian community could look like but her ideas sound very pie-in-the-sky to Mariche (Jessie Buckley), who is stuck in an abusive marriage. Mariche is so rage-filled that she’s sort of firing indiscriminately at the other women and girls gathered in the barn, as likely to yell at a woman having a panic attack or wonder about whether really all the accused men are guilty as she is to rail against the injustice of what’s been done to them all.

At the beginning of the movie, a title card describes the story as a product of “female imagination,” which I think you can kind of take how you want in this movie written and directed by a woman based on a book by a woman and performed almost entirely by women — the only two non-female characters with significant roles are August (Ben Whishaw), the school teacher asked to take minutes of the meeting, and Melvin (August Winter), a young trans man who was also attacked. The discussion spreads out to all the edges of dealing with gender violence and with the general oppression under which the women have lived their lives. They come from a place of very strong core faith and an organization of their lives around God and it’s from that point of view that they argue about the right decision, what their duty is in terms of forgiveness, their duty to keep their children safe, their place in the community and what they deserve as humans. They worry about their sons — how do they keep them from becoming these kinds of men. In some ways it is a very stagy discussion and I feel like you have to decide to go with the conceit of what’s happening — what and how these women are arguing, August’s role as meeting note taker, the way we learn everybody’s stories. I could see this movie not working for some people (I read some commentary on Jezebel that seemed to suggest the staginess got in the way of the writer’s really enjoying it). But for me, this sort of bottle-episode thought-experiment worked — and was boosted by some extremely strong acting talent. Not only is Foy absolutely magnetic throughout, Mara gives what could be a drippy character some roundness and humanity. Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy, playing the mothers of Ona and Mariche respectively, are also great, showing us how these two people who haven’t been given much can use the tools that they have to fight for themselves and their children. And, for all that it dives in to some awful places, Women Talking is filled with some lovely imagery of the farmland where these women live and shot with faded colors that help to put you in this alternate reality.

Women Talking received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay, both well deserved but I would have added more — a few supporting actress nods, definitely a directing nomination — to that list. A

Rated PG-13 for mature content including sexual assault, bloody images, and some strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Sarah Polley, who also wrote the screenplay from the novel by Miriam Toews,Women Talking is an hour and 44 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

Featured photo: Women Talking.

Album Reviews 23/02/02

Meg Baird, Furling (Drag City Records)

This singer and drummer is well-known in the indie/retro-folk scene, having helped to form the psychedelic rock supergroup Heron Oblivion after a several-album stint with Espers. The New Jersey-born, San Francisco-based hipster has other projects on her resumé, too, including three albums with her sister Laura as the Baird Sisters, and one with harpist Mary Lattimore, titled Ghost Forests, that reached No. 3 on the Billboard New Age chart. This one starts with “Ashes, Ashes,” an appropriately titled tune recalling Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd in its somber, piano-driven, slow-march-to-oblivion po-facedness; thankfully layered with cool things, it’s made quanta more fascinating through Baird’s use of ghostly, wordless warbling. “Star Hill Song” carries on similarly but on a more folk-pop bent; it’s here we first encounter her Joan Baez-ish soprano, a thing that’s about as folkie as it gets. This stuff is great Coachella bait, but it’s a lot more compelling that what one usually gets from that crowd. A+

Scott Crow, Of Everything and Nothing (Emergency Hearts Records)

This Texan is becoming something of a Hunter S. Thompson of the alternative politics scene. A long-time anarchist author and activist in the anti-fascist, environmental and mutual aid movements, Crow presents here a mishmash some of his first musical recordings since 1992, a collection of recent collaborations, some of which feature guest appearances from other artists and producers recorded in 2016 and up through the present. He’s had several projects over the years, ranging from darkwave to noise rock, but this one opens with a surprisingly melodic New Wave/art-rock tune, “Stardust Supernova,” that recalls New Order’s late-’80s recipe. “Crown Slow 2.0” is a dirgey drone-a-thon that’s more in a Swans vein; the very pretty “R34L Falling Into Sleep” is super-refined krautrock if you ask me. Really impressive, nearly all of this, save for several remixes tabled by Portland, Oregon-based producer Televangel, whose technique is a bit messy-muddy for my tastes, even if many would probably hear a lot of Throbbing Lobster in them. A

Playlist

• It’s your boy here, takin’ a jaundiced look at the stinky batch of music CDs coming out on Feb. 3, regardless of whether or not they should! Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante is releasing two albums, but it’s complicated, ready? The albums are different versions of the same album, one for vinyl and the other for CD and digital. The former, . I : (pronounced ‘one’), spans seven tracks, while : II . (pronounced ‘two’) spans 10. OK, did you get all that? He wrote the music while he was listening to experimental artists like Oren Ambarchi, Klara Lewis and Ryoji Ikeda, and the melodic parts take inspiration from John Lennon, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jimi Hendrix and Brian Eno. I say all this only for the interest of RHCP fans, who wouldn’t care if the tunes were all inspired by the background music to Pac Man Cereal commercials (did you know that one of the Batmans, Christian Bale, was in one of those?), because as long as it’s RHCP, with the real Flea actually playing bass and the music is sort of like Frank Zappa but not actually funny at all, forget it, it’ll be a huge album for RHCP completists to buy and put away carefully without ever listening to. Just my luck, of course, there are no advance singles to listen to, but it’ll be ambient stuff, according to what I’m reading on the internet, and it’s likely there’ll be some jungle rinseouts, because he’s into that kind of thing these days, literally for no reason whatsoever.

• So you thought Shania Twain had given up singing goopy Top 40 songs and retired to some 50-acre horse farm to grow petunias and count hundred-dollar bills, did you? Well you’re wrong, those petunias and horsies cost a lot of hundred-dollar bills, so she’s putting out a new album this Friday, called Queen Of Me! Her 1990s heyday is over, so she’s been playing at Caesar’s Palace for mobsters and all those kinds of people, then she went through a horrible divorce with her producer, Mutt Lange, so the producer for this album is not Mutt Lange. But before I run out of room, let’s go take a listen to “Waking Up Dreaming,” since it’s probably the push single, given that it already has 2.5 million YouTube views from bots and people who accidentally landed on the video while searching for “We Will Rock You” or whatnot. The song starts off with a “Footloose”-style drumbeat, and then Shania starts singing, sounding kind of bored, for which I wouldn’t blame her, because as feisty and catchy she wants this song to be, it isn’t, it’s just kind of phoned-in and limp, which means she’ll probably sing it on some daytime TV show, causing IQ levels to drop worldwide, and that’s the only time you’ll ever hear it again, not that the song is completely worthless. OK, it is, but where would we be with hilariously disposable pop art, you tell me.

• British six-piece indie-rock band The Go! Team are releasing their newest full-length, Get Up Sequences Part Two, this week. The entire album is available to listen to on YouTube right now in one big lump without separation between song titles, and the first song is kind of dumb, like Flaming Lips but with a full brass band. I hate it, but your mileage may vary, lord help us.

• We’ll call it a column by checking out British pop songstress Ellie Goulding, whose new LP, Higher Than Heaven, has a single, called “Let It Die.” It’s an OK tune, like Avril Lavigne for soccer parents, not too energetic or listenable, just right for cranking in the minivan while you drop the kid off for practice, where the other kids will give you funny looks for being cringe.

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).

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