Tag: 240718

Treasure Hunt 24/07/25

Dear Donna,

I can’t tell you how this ended up in my mom’s kitchen drawer. It says Jabel and it’s dated 1916. Can you share any information about it with me? Keep it or throw it away?

Thank you, Donna,

Lee

Dear Lee,

I’ve got to say I’m smiling thinking of how many unusual items are found in estates. Would like to know the original story of how it got there!

I remember my mom having a junk drawer in our kitchen. It too had anything and everything in it.

Your piece is a Jabel Rings stone gauge for sizing. Jabel was in Newark, N.J., opening in 1916.

The tool works by placing the gemstones in holes and round flats to determine a size. If you look really close you should be able to see carat sizes on one side and millimeters on the other side. It’s a very neat and helpful jeweler’s tool. How that works and how it got into your mom’s kitchen? Hmm, maybe to use for stripping herbs?

The value of your little treasure is in the $50 range. I hope this was helpful, Lee.

Island funny

Lakes Region comedy show

There’s a limerick from a bygone time that begins, “there was a young man from Nantucket,” but this isn’t that kind of story. Brian Glowacki was born on the island off Cape Cod and found humor via Def Comedy Jam specials on HBO. When he realized there were clubs where comics told jokes, he decided to give standup a shot.

Glowacki soon found his secret weapon: a face that telegraphs mischief. When he pauses with a sly smirk during a joke setup, it’s like watching a Mento dropped into a bottle of Coke; audience laughter builds, anticipating what’s next. This sort of thing also happens regularly in Glowacki’s daily life. While he’s holding a microphone, at least he gets paid for it.

There’s a bit about repurposing his wife’s breast pump when their infant grows out of it, and it feels like he worked it out at the Kitchen, to let’s say mixed results.

“Everybody knows that feeling,” he said in a recent phone interview. “It’s like the next thing coming out of my mouth is either going to get me in trouble or arrested.”

The latter outcome is less likely than the first; his is a mostly “clean” set. That’s one of the reasons comedian Bob Marley picked Glowacki to open shows for him, something he did for a few years. It started when a Rhode Island club hired him to host for the Maine comic. The gig worked out, and he got the call the next time Marley appeared.

“By that time I had different material, and that showed them I could at least try to have a different set each time we came through a place, which was important to those guys,” he said. “It ended up some of their guys dropped out and I moved up the ranks with Marley. I ended up being one of their two main guys.”

These days Glowacki is hitting much bigger targets. He parlayed a successful run at Boston’s Comedy Connection into a pair of sold-out shows at the prestigious Wilbur Theatre. Glowacki attributes the event’s success to his relatability as a comic.

“I don’t scare anybody away, I don’t ever talk about politics or anything like that, I’m talking about things that we’re all living,” he said, adding that a willingness to bet on himself was a big part of it. “I say all the time, I take big swings … I don’t sulk in the failures, and I don’t get too excited over the victories. I just cross things off my list. Things that excited me as a little kid, now I do them as an adult.”

Upcoming on his schedule are headlining shows at Mohegan Sun, and the comedy club in the MGM Casino in Springfield, Mass. The night after he appears at Beans & Greens Farm in Gilford, Glowacki will play his biggest gig yet, headlining at Cape Cod Melody Tent, a legendary 2,500-seat venue.

“I’m the first local that’s ever been crazy enough to even try to sell that place,” he said. “We’re doing it all word of mouth. I don’t have an agent or credits or any of that. We just spread the word from people having a good time at a show, and they tell their friends, which is the best marketing you can hope for.”

The Gilford show offers the chance for him to prepare for the Cape show and “make sure I’m all dialed in.” Fellow comic Gary Marino co-produced the BGlow & Friends event and will serve as its host. It will be Glowacki’s first time at Beans & Greens. “Usually when I do stuff with Gary, it’s been a home run, so I was like, whatever, I’m in.”

Brian Glowacki & Friends
When: Saturday, July 20, 7 p.m.
Where: Beans & Greens Farm, 245 Intervale Road, Gilford
Tickets: $30 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 24/07/18

Local music news & events

• Blues time: Ireland gives way to the South Side of Chicago at the weekly Blues Therapy event. This edition features Brave New Blues, the duo of boundary-pushing guitarist Troy Mercy and Hadley Lloyd. An endorsement of suspicious origin (screenwriter Alan Smithee) dubbed their sound “Lightnin’ Hopkins playing with The Small Faces while Terry Gilliam films it all.” Thursday, July 18, 8 p.m., Wild Rover, 21 Kosciuszko St., Manchester; more at troymercy.com.

• Al fresco country: New England Music Awards favorite Annie Brobst kicks off weekend music at Tuscan Village’s Lake Park. Her breezy, pop-adjacent brand of country has led her to some big stages, supporting Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, Hardy and more. Friday, July 19, 7 p.m., Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana Salem. Visit anniebrobstmusic.com.

• Local lights: Three members of JamAntics comprise Lucas Gallo & The Guise: Gallo, bassist Eric Reingold, and Freeland Hubbard on guitar, with drummer Curtis Marden. Original songs from the three old bandmates share rootsy jam band elements, while others are more lyrically driven. Gallo calls the overall mood “good vibes with good intentions.” Saturday, July 20, 9 p.m., Penuche’s Ale House, 16 Bicentennial Square, Concord $5/door; 21+. Visit lucasgallomusic.com.

• Celtic power: Enjoy a fun and musically rich evening from Tartan Terrors, a group of youthful kilt-wearers with a talent for making traditional Celtic music accessible to all audiences. They combine the energy of a rock show with fiddle, bagpipes, pennywhistle, step dancing and humor, like the NSFW joke describing the difference between a Rolling Stone and a Scotsman. Sunday, July 21, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $39 and up at tupelohall.com.

• Teaming up: In their ’70s heyday, a co-headlining tour with Daryl Hall & Elvis Costello would have seemed odd, given Hall & Oates’s Philly soul and Costello’s angry young man pose at the time. However, in 1984 Hall sang backup on Costello’s song “The Only Flame in Town.” Reviews of their current outing, filled with hits from both artists, have been glowing, Monday, July 22, 7 pm., BankNH Pavilion, 72 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford, $55 and up at livenation.com.

The Bikeriders (R)

A buffet of character studies and Chicago-y “da Bears” accents is laid out for your perusal in The Bikeriders, which is based on a real life “living amongst the outlaw bikers” book by Danny Lyon, as the movie and Wikipedia tell us.

The movie is structured around a series of interviews between author/photographer Danny (Mike Faist) and Kathy (Jodie Comer), wife of Benny (Austin Butler), who is one of the core members of the Vandals motorcycle club. The Vandals are led by Johnny (Tom Hardy), who formed the club in Chicago, supposedly after seeing The Wild One. When Kathy met the club members, who she describes as mostly unsavory types, in the mid 1960s, Johnny made a point of telling her he’d make sure nobody bothered her. Kathy was sort of lust-at-first-sight with Benny and fell for Benny and to some degree the “outlaw” life during her first motorcycle ride with the whole club. But she always seems a bit torn between her attraction to Benny’s whole “what are you rebelling against, whaddaya got” devil-may-care thing and her desire to separate herself and her husband from what she sees as an increasingly dirtbag-y group of dudes. As the 1960s wear on, new members with more violent dispositions join up and Johnny — who also has a wife and children — seems eager to find some kind of way out, possibly by giving Benny the leadership position.

These new guys don’t listen, Johnny says to Benny at one point, which feels like the generational lament that all older-guard people in all situations and occupations have toward newbies. Johnny created the thing, but now the meaning of the thing has shifted while he has more or less stayed the same. You stay too long at the party and your cutting edge thing becomes cute nostalgia at best — Johnny trying to deal with that is probably the most interesting element of his character.

The most interesting part of Kathy is Jodie Comer’s whole full-bodied creation of her, all cigarettes and mannerisms and conversation style. It occasionally feels like more of an acting exercise than a character in a story, but Comer is a compelling actress and she creates a highly watchable character even when she’s just, like, drinking coffee from a very 1970s green mug.

For me The Bikeriders actually feels at its strongest when it’s just characters talking — Kathy talking about her opinions of the group, a guy named Zipco (Michael Shannon) talking about his attempts to join the army. You get a sense of real people with backstories and inner lives. When there was plot happening, I often felt like the movie was just giving us goobers making bad decisions without really showing us what held these people together. It’s a movie worth a watch for the acting even if I didn’t feel like it was worth rushing out for. B-

Rated R for language throughout, violence, some drug use and brief sexuality, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols (from the book by the same name by Danny Lyons), The Bikeriders is an hour and 56 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Focus Features. It is also available for rent or purchase.

Featured photo: The Bikeriders.

This Ordinary Stardust, by Alan Townsend

This Ordinary Stardust, by Alan Townsend (Grand Central Publishing, 261 pages)

The most nourishing soil in the world, Alan Townsend writes, starts with disaster:

“Pyroclastic explosions of ash and lava slam into hillsides and streams, obliterating trees and boiling fish alive in their water. Or massive glaciers suddenly pulverize everything in their path … then unleash a catastrophic flood for good measure. The aftermath is a horror — a moonscape of ruin. It is also a beginning.”

That’s all well and good when talking about geological processes, but what of more personal kinds of disasters, the kind that explode your life, as when both your wife and your 4-year-old daughter get diagnosed with brain cancer within the same year?

Townsend, a tattooed scientist and dean of the college of forestry and conservation at the University of Montana, is much too intelligent to offer platitudes in such a situation. This Ordinary Stardust is no ordinary memoir of a health crisis, as Townsend and his wife, Diana, are no ordinary people.

They are both brilliant scientists who have traveled extensively doing interesting work — when we meet Townsend he’s doing research in the Amazon on how to prevent deforestation, Diana is planning an excursion to collect bacterial samples in Antarctica when she gets sick.

But with the twin diagnoses, the couple is thrust into the strangest world yet, going from the world of the healthy to the world of the sick with frightening speed.

Little Neva’s diagnosis came first, and Townsend writes movingly of how hard it is to watch your child endure MRIs and IVs and CT scans at Colorado Children’s Hospital. At one point, her parents take Neva to a hospital cafe for ice cream, and the child asks if she can have more. “Hell yes, I thought,” Townsend writes. The child, like her parents, is stoic and tough, and a scene where Diana takes a team of residents and medical students to task for their callous treatment of Neva is a Tiger Mother master class in assertiveness.

Diana brings the same defiance to her own treatment. We already know the kind of woman she is from a story Townsend tells about how she badly injured her ankle while the two of them were running on a trail together in Costa Rica, where they were working. The next evening, though her ankle was still badly swollen, Townsend found her wrapping the ankle with strips of an old T-shirt and duct tape. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Going running,” she replied. He writes, “She had a look that challenged me to say more.”

This is also a woman, as Townsend says, who “couldn’t stop talking about bacteria,” who loved science so much that it was all she wanted to talk about on their runs.

When Diana starts having strange symptoms and is ultimately diagnosed with two tumors in her brain, she grumbles that they’d better not stop her going on her expedition to Antarctica the next year. She continues to run throughout her treatment, and even wins her age division in a road race. But glioblastoma is almost always deadly; just 5 percent of patients survive five years. It is not a spoiler to say that Diana is not among the 5 percent since the book jacket blurb reveals that she dies. By this point, we love her as much as her husband does, and the story of her passing is gut-wrenching, but also oddly beautiful.

Townsend writes the book at his wife’s request — she wanted others to learn from their story — and although he confesses up front that he is not a Christian or a church-goer, the story is wrapped in spiritual themes. Science, he writes, can nurture the soul; it offers hope “that life on earth can make its way through the eye of any needle, that our individual choices matter, and that love can bring us back from the brink of annihilation.”

He does not address any issues related to the possibility of an afterlife except in terms related to the title. It’s said that our physical bodies are composed of primordial atoms, elements formed in stars and possibly dating to the Big Bang. Townsend has been fascinated with this idea since he heard a professor talk about how we exchange this “stardust” with each other continually.

“When viewed in our most elemental form, people are trillions of outer-space atoms, moving around temporarily as one, sensing and seeing and falling in love. Then those atoms scatter, joining one new team for a bit, then another. Far from depressing,” he writes. In other words, we might only exist in this form for a short time, but “No matter what happens, we’re still here. And we will always be.”

That’s a far cry from the eternal life promised by some religions, but is still, as he writes, “profoundly comforting.” Grief can co-exist with wonder, Townsend finds on his family’s journey, and his memoir is both poignant and thought-provoking. B+

Album Reviews 24/07/18

Phish, Evolve (JEMP Records)

If you’ve ever read this column for comprehension, you know that I detest fedora-hat bands in general and jam bands in particular, but I’ve had a change of heart of late. This happened after I discovered that my favorite acid-jazz-fusion wingnuts Weather Report took in a lot of guys from Frank Zappa’s bands, which caused me to reassess my prejudgments about Zappa (most of which were based on listening experiences). No, I’m not saying the Mothers or Weather Report were jam bands, but they incorporated extended stretches of improvisation in their tunes, and since I’m looking to expand my listening sphere I figured I’d see what’s going on right now with this Vermont crew of Grateful Dead lampreys (no, I will never give the Dead another chance, no worries). In brief: This LP is, of course, about white-guy groove, pseudo-funk in desperate need of a jolt from cardiac paddles. “Hey Stranger,” for starters, is a politely bouncing, listenable-enough thing that had me going “OK, OK, I get it” 30 seconds into its uneventful five minutes (the drum sound is good, at least). “Everything’s Right” is 12-count-’em minutes of (I swear) the same tiresome ’70s-blaxploitation beat as “Hey Stranger,” and that’s where I gave up. There’s some decent noodling from guitarist Trey Anastasio, which I’m sure seems highly impressive to people who have no guitar player friends who insist on giving impromptu living room concerts to their unhappily captive audiences. B

IDRIS & Una Rams, “Go Deeper” (Defected Records)

Wow, I’ve been unplugged from the velvet-rope circuit for so long (no thanks to my local Manchvegas music scene — will we ever get a proper dance club in this town or what?) that I wasn’t aware that actor Idris Elba was a DJ of significant note. In fact, his music is, I’m told, dominating the scene, which is just another notch in the belt for the guy, who was voted People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2018 and starred in such movies as Pacific Rim and Prometheus. OK, granted, anyone, even the sexiest guy in the world, could futz with ProTools and make a dance beat, so what’s so special about this, his latest track? Well, it’s the authenticity, really. Maybe you’re already used to the tribal house of DJs like Oscar G and whatnot, a sound that kept me interested in covering the beachside club beat for a couple of years, but this is definitely a step beyond that. Rams, Elba’s accomplice here, is a Grammy-winner from Makwarela, South Africa, and he adds some thick vocalizing to a track that would have been a bit pedestrian without it. As is, it’s otherworldly and completely immersive. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like a relentless tsunami of cultural inertia, a fresh storm of music-albums will bum-rush our cockeyed zeitgeist on July 19, scrabbling and shrieking for attention from a citizenry that’s no longer paying any attention whatsoever to “what’s hot” in the milieu, since the only thing that’s generated any mainstream rock ’n’ roll headline activity for months has been people arguing on social media over whether or not Taylor Swift’s last album, Whatever-its-name-who-cares, is a good thing. The weighing-in continues unabated; the other week, Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters told insinuated during a concert that Taylor lip-synchs during her shows, according to assorted media.

Past all that, like I said, there are new albums to deal with this week, including one from mummified ’70s arena-rock band Deep Purple, which uses an actual church organ in their heavy metal tuneage for some reason, don’t ask me why. The title of this new album is =1, which is funny, because =1 has never been recognized as an official internet emoticon like 🙂 or =^). I can guarantee you it’s not, because I asked Google’s “artificial intelligence” if =1 is an emoticon and it told me to go jump in the lake. But whatever, let’s keep in mind that the fellas in Deep Purple are all in their 80s and thus probably all have Earthlink email addresses; let’s just proceed to listen to “Portable Door,” the band’s hot new single! Wow, drummer Ian Paice, bassist Roger Glover and singer Ian Gillan are still here! Ha ha, Gillan looks like Bill Murray does today, but belay all that, ya swabs, this isn’t a bad song at all if you ever liked Deep Purple, like, the main riff does have a pulse. I give it a =) emoticon reaction and want to remind you that Ritchie Blackmore hasn’t been in the band for decades now because he is literally one of the worst people ever born.

• Rapper Childish Gambino initially earned his fame for his tertiary role on the endlessly irritating TV show 30 Rock, do any of you people even remember when network television was relevant, do I really even have to talk about this dude? Fine, whatever, his new album, Bando Stone & The New World, is the soundtrack to an upcoming same-named film. It is the final Childish Gambino album, because Donald Glover (his real name) is as sick of the joke as everyone else and hence he’s retiring the moniker. I don’t know, the movie trailer seems fine, it’s an apocalyptic comedy that I’d watch, and his joke hip-hop songs aren’t any worse than recent serious ones.

• Los Campesinos! (remember 15 years ago when indie bands used dumb punctuation in their band names?) are back, with a new LP, All Hell. The single, “kms,” sounds like a drunk Aubrey Plaza singing with Pavement. Yes, it’s literally that awful.

• Finally we have Glass Animals, an English indie band whose 2020 boyband-chillout single “Heat Waves” went viral on TikTok. The guys’ new album I Love You So F***ing Much features the wistful “Creatures in Heaven,” which reads like an Imagine Dragons arena-ballad, not that I’m trying to discourage you.

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