Tag: 240912

Pick Apples Make Pie

This year’s apple harvest looks (Golden) delicious

This year’s apple harvest looks (Golden) delicious

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

2023 was an exceptionally bad year for apples in New Hampshire.
After a particularly frigid snap in February, temperatures in May across the state plunged well below freezing and killed off almost all the apple blossoms. Without apple blossoms, there can’t be any apples. Many apple-growers lost 80 percent or more of their crop. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen urged Congress to provide disaster assistance to New Hampshire farmers impacted by the weather. The event was later declared a disaster by the U.S Secretary of Agriculture.
But that was last year.
2024 has been as good as 2023 was awful.
“It’s a good apple year,” said Madison Hardy, the president of the New Hampshire Fruit Growers Association (38 Broad St, Hollis, 465-2241, nhfruitgrowers.org). “The weather has been cooperating and people have good crops. We’re looking forward to the fall agritourism since we didn’t have the apples last year; it’s shaping up to be a good fall here.”
In spite of some hail earlier in the summer, the weather has been excellent for apples.This spring and summer were warm, with plenty of, but not too much, rain, and Hardy said the September weather has cooperated, too.
“We’ve had some good, nice, cool weather that’s coming in. That really helps the apples color up this time of year. A lot of people are wrapping up picking Paula Reds and early varieties and we’re starting to get into the McIntosh and Cortland season coming up,” Hardy said.
Dianne Souther, co-owner of Apple Hill Farm (580 Mountain Road, Concord, 224-8862, applehillfarmnh.com), agrees that this year has been a lot less stressful than 2023. Her farm was one of the ones that lost more than 80 percent of its apple crop, but like other apple-growers, she is cautiously optimistic.
“This year’s crop is looking good,” Souther said. “The weather’s been good to us this year. We expect to pick through Indigenous People’s Day in the middle of October.”
Unlike Dianne Souther, Tim Bassett at Gould Hill Farm (656 Gould Hill Road, Contoocook, 746-3811, gouldhillfarm.com) wasn’t badly affected by last year’s weather — at least not directly.
“We did have a pretty decent crop last year,” Bassett said, “and unfortunately I think the news was out that there were no apples and we just didn’t have people coming out. So it just seemed [business was] very off last year and not because we didn’t have apples, just because I think people thought nobody had apples.”
Bassett said that this year is looking good, though.
“We’ve been open for a week for Pick Your Own,” he said. “Our hard cider company is open weekends, and we have a restaurant. I think we have nine varieties of hard cider going. So we kind of try to get people and give them a full day’s experience here,”
As Madison Nelson said, picking has already started on early-season varieties of apples like Paula Red, McIntosh and Summermacs. Mid-season varieties should be ready to pick sometime until the end of September. These include Cortland, Empire, Gala and Macoun apples. Late-season varieties like Mutsu, Honeycrisp, Braeburn and heirloom cider apples should be available through October, and perhaps a little longer.

APPLE FACTS
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), as of 2022 (the most recent year with published data) New Hampshire had 271 working apple farms, covering 1,435 acres.

According to Gould Hill Farm (656 Gould Hill Road, Contoocook, 746-3811, gouldhillfarm.com), far and away the most popular apple in New England is the McIntosh, which was developed from a sapling graft in 1870 by John McIntosh of Ontario, Canada. It is a sweet, firm apple, good for out-of-hand eating or baking.

The biggest apple producer in the U.S. is Washington state, which produces 6.7 billion tons of apples annually, according to the USDA.

Pick Your Own

Here are a some of the nearby orchards allowing you to pick your own apples. Dates and times may change according to the weather.

  • Applecrest Farm Orchards (133 Exeter Road, Hampton Falls, 926-3721, applecrest.com) Open 7 days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The orchard also features a corn maze and a sunflower trail. For up-to-the-minute weather and picking conditions, call the orchard’s PYO hotline at 926-3721. Apples can also be ordered online.
  • Apple Hill Farm (580 Mountain Road, Concord, 224-8862, applehillfarmnh.com) Open 7 days a week, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. This year there are 19 varieties of apples available. Different varieties will be ready to pick at different times throughout the season. Apple prices for PYO is $24 for a peck, $36 for a half bushel.
  • Appleview Orchard (1266 Upper City Road, Pittsfield, applevieworchard.com, 435-3553) Open for PYO Saturday and Sunday only, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Enjoy baked treats, ice cream and a petting zoo.
  • Brookdale Fruit Farm (41 Broad St., Hollis, 465-2240, brookdalefruitfarm.com) Open 7 days a week, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. An ice cream stand is open daily from 11 a.m to 6 p.m. Call the Farm for current picking conditions.
  • Carter Hill Orchard (73 Carter Hill Road, Concord, 225-2625, carterhillapples.com) Open 7 days a week, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. An on-site bakery offers a variety of pies, sweet breads and cookies, cider doughnuts and whoopie pies. Visit the Orchard’s website for apple variety descriptions, calendar and orchard map.
  • Currier Orchards (9 Peaslee Road, Merrimack, 881-8864, currierorchards.com) Open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with the last entry for PYO at 5 p.m. Apple varieties include Jonastar, Honeycrisp, Liberty and Empire.
  • Elwood Orchards (54 Elwood Road, Londonderry, 434-6017, elwoodorchards.com) Open 7 days a week, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. There is a corn maze on site.
  • Gould Hill Farm (656 Gould Hill Road, Contoocook, 746-3811, gouldhillfarm.com) Open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. More than 100 varieties of apple are available during the picking season. Visit the website for a description of each variety and to find out which are ripe and ready to be picked.
  • Hackleboro Orchards (61 Orchard Road, Canterbury, 783-4248, hackleboroorchard.com) Open seven days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Pick your own in half peck, peck, and half bushel amounts. The orchard’s owners report having a very good crop this season.
  • Hazelton Orchards (20 Harantis Lake Road, Chester, 490-9921, facebook.com/HazeltonOrchardsChesterNH) Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m Saturday and Sunday. Many varieties of apple, including McIntosh, Honeycrisp, Cortland, Gala and Zestar.
  • Kimball Fruit Farm (184 Hollis St, Pepperell, Mass., 978-433-9751, kimball.farm) Open 7 days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
  • Lavoie’s Farm (172 Nartoff Road, Hollis, 882-0072, lavoiesfarm.wordpress.com) Open 7 days a week, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Apple varieties include Fuji, Spartan Macs, Gravenstein and Sansa. Guests can enjoy hay rides, a corn maze, a corn boil and apple cider, all free with any produce purchase.
  • Lull Farm (65 Broad St., Hollis, 465-7079, livefreeandfarm.com) Open 7 days a week, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
  • Mack’s Apples/Moose Hill Orchard (230 Mammoth Road, Londonderry, 434-7619, macksapples.com) Open 7 days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mack’s Apples is the largest pick-your-own destination in New Hampshire. Driving between picking stations is recommended. Call the Orchard’s hotline at 432-3456 for the latest picking conditions and to find out what varieties are ready.
  • McLeod Brothers Orchards (735 N. River Road, Milford, mcleodorchards.com) Open Monday through Friday, 1 to 5:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Apple varieties include McIntosh, Gala, Mutsu and Cortland.
  • Meadow Ledge Farm (612 Route 129, Loudon, 798-5860, meadowledgefarm.com) Open 7 days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fresh-pressed apple cider and award-winning apple cider doughnuts are available at Meadow Ledge’s farm store. For the most current information, visit the Farm’s Facebook page.
  • Oliver Merril and Sons (569 Mammoth Road, Londonderry, 622-6636, facebook.com/olivermerrillandsons) Open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
  • Smith Orchard (184 Leavitt Road, Belmont, 387-8052, facebook.com/SmithOrchardNH) Open 7 days, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
  • Stone Mountain Farm (522 Laconia Road, Belmont, 731-2493, stonemtnfarm.com) Open Thursday to Monday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. 30 apple varieties are available as they become ripe.
  • Sunnycrest Farm (59 High Range Road, Londonderry, 432-7753, sunnycrestfarmnh.com) Open 7 days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call Sunnycrest’s PYO hotline at 432-9652 for daily updates on picking conditions and varieties available. There is a “Meet the Farm Animals” area, home to goats and sheep along with the occasional pig. Visitors can feed and pet the animals through the fence.
  • Washburn’s Windy Hill Orchard (66 Mason Road, Greenville, 878-2101, washburnswindyhillorchard.com) Open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. There is a corn maze, ice cream and hot apple cider doughnuts.

Making an apple pie is as easy as — well, it’s not hard
Advice from an expert

Lynn Donnelly is the owner of Bittersweet Bake Shoppe (272 Derry Road, Litchfield, 978- 649-2253, bittersweetbakeshoppe.com), a small-batch bakery that specializes in seasonal desserts. It would be fair to call her an apple pie expert.

What makes a good apple pie?
A well-made apple pie has color and texture — the greens, the reds — brown sugar so it’s a little more caramely, and of course a fresh homemade crust.

A top and bottom crust?
Yes, though we do switch it up [at the bakery]. We do a Dutch crust with the crumbs on top, and sometimes we do a lattice crust. Some people just want it like an old-fashioned rustic tart, so to speak. We just fold the edges in. But our typical [apple pie] is a two-crust pie.

What’s the secret to a good crust?
The secret to the crust is a secret.
Actually, it’s a technique. Everybody has one. We have one that works for us, but you have to make sure that fat you choose — whether it’s shortening or butter or a little of both — you have to make sure it’s good and cold so that when you bake it, your layers will explode and pop with the fat and create the flakes.
What kind of fat do you use in your crust?
Do you ever use shortening? The shortening crust can be delicious. But stay with the Crisco because at least you know where it’s been, what it’s doing, and it is non-hydrogenated. They were the first ones to jump into that. I will use shortening in my crust because it adds to the flake.

Do you cook the apples down before you put them in the crust?
Not really. The apples are the last thing to go in. I make my filling, the roux [a thickened sauce], and I put in my fruit last. And then I cook it until it’s just right. The apples aren’t fully cooked. They’re only somewhat cooked. And it’s only because they’ll release some juice and change the texture of the roux. So you’ve got to make sure that all comes together; then you pour it into the pie, and it’ll finish baking in the oven. That way, your apples aren’t mushy. You want them to hold up so when you slice it [the pie] you’ll see pieces of apple.

—John Fladd

Apple pie
This recipe comes from owner Brookdale Fruit Farm owner Cameron Hardy’s grandmother Betty Hardy. Cameron and his wife, Nicole, recommend baking this pie with raw, crispy apples, preferably Baldwin, Northern Spy or Jonagold. They, too, are proponents of a Crisco crust.

1 recipe pastry for a 9-inch double-crust pie
1/2 cup unsalted butter
3 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
8 apples, peeled, cored and sliced
Preheat oven to 425°F (220°C).
Melt the butter in a saucepan. Stir in flour to form a paste.
Add water, white sugar and brown sugar, and bring to a boil. Reduce temperature and let simmer.
Place the bottom crust in your pan. Fill with apples, mounded slightly.
Gently pour the sugar and butter liquid over the apples, and cover with a latticework of crust. Bake 15 minutes in the preheated oven, then reduce the temperature to 350°F (175°C). Continue baking for 35 to 45 minutes, until the apples are soft.

Additional apple reading
To learn more about the long and strange history of apples, Louisa Spencer from Farnum Hill Cider recommends reading The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001) by Michael Pollan. “In a way, I think that’s the best book he ever wrote,” she says. The movie documentary based on the book was partially filmed at Farnum Hill’s orchard.

Apple by the glass

A look at cider, brandy & wine — from apples

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

When most of us think about apple season, we think of apple-picking, pies and lunch boxes. There is a completely different side to apples, though — one best enjoyed in a glass.
Flag Hill Distillery and Winery (297 N. River Road, Lee, 659-2949, flaghill.com) makes an apple-cranberry wine around the holidays, but its main interest in apples is for making brandy. Brian Ferguson is the owner of Flag Hill. According to him, fermenting apples and distilling brandy from them are important, and taken very seriously, but the key process for making excellent apple brandy is how it’s aged.
“After fermentation, we double pot distill [the cider],” Ferguson explained. “It’s very similar to the way we would make bourbon, but with a very full flavor, very rich. And then we put it in a barrel and it sleeps there for about six years.” He said Flag Hill uses several types of oak for the barrels — toasted, to bring out specific flavors to infuse the brandy — but that it is vital that some of the oak has been aged for at least three years, which allows microscopic strands of fungi to tunnel through the wood. “The mycelium [fungus], as it grows throughout the oak, creates more porosity over that longer period of time,” he said. “So we get more micro-oxidation during this process. These are much more expensive barrels to use, but they result in much more of the exciting compounds that we’re looking for out of the brandy.” The porosity — the tiny tunnels — in the oak provides more surface area to allow the exchange of flavor-bearing chemicals.
Apple brandy and its slightly more relaxed cousins apple wine and hard cider are enjoying a renaissance. It has taken about a century to recover from an involuntary hiatus that knocked the apple alcohol industry back on its heels since 1920. The Volstead Act, otherwise known as Prohibition, was rough on apple farmers.
Up until that time, in the U.S. and around the world, apples were used more for making alcohol than for eating or cooking. Louisa Spencer of Farnum Hill Ciders (98 Poverty Lane, Lebanon, 448-1511, farnumhillciders.com) explained that American orchardists had to rethink everything about their industry. Prior to Prohibition, the vast majority of apples grown in the U.S. were specialized varieties that were excellent for fermenting into hard cider but not very good for eating out-of-hand.
“When you’ve got acres and acres and acres of woody plants that do not produce anything that anybody would put in a pie or a fruit bowl, what are you going to do?” Spencer said. “You can see in these old agricultural journals people talking about in the run-up to Prohibition whether they’re going to stop making cider, and what they’re going to do was disassociate the word ‘cider’ from alcohol. And alone on Earth, we became a culture that thinks of cider as apple juice. That was quite intentional. They distinguished sweet cider from hard cider and it happened incredibly fast.”
For several generations, apples remained lunch-box fruit and cider was a cold, refreshing, alcohol-free beverage. That changed in the 1980s. Woodchuck hard cider, made from Vermont apples, was the first mainstream commercial cider, and Farnum Hill led the way with artisanally made cider from heirloom varieties of apple.
“So the decision was made here at Poverty Lane Orchards to plant a whole lot of apples that no one in the States had ever heard of and no one would be able to eat even if they had heard of them,” Spencer said.
Since then, apple-based alcohols have become increasingly popular, especially in apple-growing regions like New England.
In addition to making traditional red and white wines, Sweet Baby Vineyard (260 Stage Road, Hampstead, 347-1738, sweetbabyvineyard.com) produces eight different fruit-based wines. Lewis Eaton is the vineyard’s owner; he has made apple wines for 16 years, making his vineyard one of the pioneers in New Hampshire apple wine. “You know it,” he said. “We’ve been around a bit.”
Sweet Baby makes two apple wines: a cranberry-apple wine, and one with apples only. Their complex flavors come in part from the number of varieties of apple used to make them.
“[We use] 13 different kinds of apples,” Eaton said, “heirloom and standard varieties. The heirloom apples are old English-style apples.” Sweet Baby starts with a proprietary blend of apple juices from Applecrest Farm Orchard (133 Exeter Road, Hampton Falls, 926-3721, applecrest.com). “It’s what they call their holiday cider,” Eaton said. “So it’s the best of the best, in that it has all those 13 or so different kinds of apples. Obviously they adjust the blend, depending on whether it’s too sweet or too tart, and then we take it in as fresh pressed cider. We remediate it to get up to 12 percent alcohol.” Eaton and his team use Champagne yeast, which tolerates higher levels of alcohol than traditional cider yeast, which normally tops out at 4 or 5 percent alcohol by volume.
Sweet Baby Vineyard makes about 400 cases of the straight apple wine per year, and 200 cases of their apple-cranberry.
“We sell out of it every year,” Eaqton said. The apple-cranberry wine is extremely popular around the holidays. “It goes bonkers and we never seem to make enough,” he said. “People get a little mad, but whatever. It is what it is. Maybe that makes them want it more, I suppose. If we made too much of it, then they wouldn’t want it so much.”
By contrast, Pete Endris, the owner and cider-maker at Bird Dog Farm and Cidery (150 Bayside Road, Greenland, 303-6214, birddogcider.com), has been in business for two years. He, too, is a firm believer in using juice blends from different apples to make a complex cider.
“At Bird Dog we focus on making ciders using traditional methods,” he said, “and definitely paying attention to the right cider varieties. So what I like to tell people is much like with wine, you don’t make the best wine from table grapes, and it’s usually the case that you don’t make the best cider with just any old apple.” He credits the popularity of hard ciders to the resurgence of bitter-tasting heirloom apple varieties. “They tend to have more tannins, which are usually associated with bitterness or complexity, and they have different flavor compounds that, honestly, over the years have made them maybe less desirable for eating, and some of these apples have fallen by the wayside. And the traditional cider movement is bringing some of these apples back to the forefront.”
As a small cider producer, Bird Dog Farm is just getting started. “We’re just getting kind off the ground,” Endris said. “We make around 2,000 gallons of cider a year, but alongside the cider we’re growing out our orchard, so we have nearly 1,500 trees planted. My wife and I bought this farm, which for most of its modern history was a working dairy farm, but it hasn’t been a working farm for about 50 years. And so we have planted all these trees, and we’re growing them in a high-density fashion, like a vineyard, basically. They’re on a trellis, they’re dwarf rootstocks, the trees only get to be about maybe 12 feet tall, and they’re kept within about a 3-foot space.”
Endris is in the process of opening a tasting room where customers can compare Bird Dog Farm’s eight varieties of cider.
“We’ve been spending a lot of time renovating an old dairy barn built in the 1950s,” he said, “and it now houses our cidery. Recently we’ve been focusing on the tasting room part of it, which we will be planning to open up here in late September.”

An apple vocabulary word to make you look cool
Under certain conditions, apples can develop rough, brownish skins. This is called “russeting”. Some varieties that are particularly susceptible to russeting have the word “russet” in their names — golden russet or English russet, for example. Russet potatoes are called that because they are entirely covered with russetted skin.

Featured Photos : Brookdale Fruit Farm. Courtesy photo.

A journey in music

Stephane Wrembel brings Triptych to UNH

By Michael Witthaus
mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Triptych is the latest album from French guitarist Stephane Wrembel. The expansive 20-song collection is a meditation on life, represented in three musical movements. It’s a collaboration with pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, which came together after Wrembel’s manager suggested that the two connect. Initially, Wrembel was reluctant.

“Piano and guitar are very difficult to marry,” he said by phone recently. “It’s a difficult match because we kind of occupy the same space, and it’s very easy for tones to clash.” He decided to give it a try anyway, and quickly became enamored of the pianist. Pilc is renowned for his improvisational skills and has an impressive resume. His credits include time as music director and pianist for Harry Belafonte.

At the time, Wrembel had a concert series at Joe’s Pub in New York City coming up to celebrate the release of Django l’impressionniste, a collection of 17 preludes for solo guitar.

“Django is also influenced by Claude Debussy, so I wanted to do something around him,” he recalled. That’s when Pilc’s name came up; the two had not yet met.

He was recruited for the shows, and “the chemistry was immediate and so powerful that we decided to record together,” Wrembel said. “I had the instinct that we needed to go to the studio and record a triptych. I had the vision of a triptych. I didn’t know why, but I could see that it was the right thing to do.”

It’s a true collaboration, with both Wrembel and Pilc contributing new songs. Overall, the album is anchored by selections from Django Reinhardt like “Douce Ambiance,” which is transformed by Pilc’s piano flourishes in the intro before settling into a joyous jazzy rhythm familiar to fans of Reinhardt.

Wrembel is a devotee of the legendary guitarist. As David Fricke wrote in 2009, he “studied Reinhardt’s fleet precision and soulful swing the hard way — playing in actual Gypsy camps.” He lived in the Paris neighborhood where Reinhardt spent his final years and considers him an essential musician.

“Django is to the guitar what Bach is to the keyboard,” he said. “When you practice Django, you become a better guitarist; it’s automatic. You will understand the guitar better, you will see things better, you have a better technique, so everything about your playing is going to be better. Django is an archetypal source like that.”

Triptych’s first movement begins with “Ecco Homo” — an introduction, Wrembel explained. “It means ‘here is the man,’” he said. “It’s the birth of the triptych.” The next section starts with “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” a Wrembel composition that provides insight into what informs him beyond gypsy jazz.

The first song Wrembel recalls hearing as a very young child is Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” He’s progressed past rock, but “those sounds are still there, I make no difference between Debussy, Pink Floyd, Chopin,” he said. “All that’s the same for me.”

There’s a link to the ’70s literary touchstone in Floyd’s song “Echoes,” Wrembel continued. “It’s about an albatross hanging motionless upon the air,” he said. This led him to Richard Bach’s novel, and “the idea of a floating seagull that tries to find what’s noble in its own nature rather than just finding food. It’s a beautiful tale.”

The third section of Triptych is its most ambitious, beginning with “Life In Three Stages Part I: The Child and the Desert,” continuing with “Part II: Building a World” and concluding with “Part III: Old Age, Grace and Wisdom.” The last offers an elegiac cadence that’s gorgeous and haunting, with Wrembel and Pilc the only musicians.

The final movement’s tone reflects Wrembel’s own sentiments.

“I’m 50, I’m entering old age,” he said. “That’s the third stage, where I believe that as an artist, if you keep working and concentrating and studying philosophy, it’s possible to reach very high levels of consciousness. You don’t think the same when you are 50 than when you are 20, and probably you don’t think the same when you are 80 than when you are 50. Every time there is more and more wisdom coming.”

Triptych – Stephane Wrembel Band with Jean-Michel Pilc
When: Friday, Sept. 13, 8 p.m.
Where: Johnson Theatre, 50 Academic Way, Durham
Tickets: $10 and $12 at stephanewrembel.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 24/09/12

Local music news & events

• Storyteller: A singer-songwriter who rose to prominence during the ’90s folk boom, David Wilcox is a consummate performer, spinning tales and playing heartfelt songs. His latest album, last year’s My Good Friends, is full of mini movies like “Dead Man’s Phone,” “This Is How It Ends” and “Lost Man.” It showcases the tenor of his live shows, as it’s mostly stripped down. Thursday, Sept. 12, 7 p.m., Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road Exeter, $12.50 and up at thewordbarn.com.

• Debauched: Raucous and irreverent, The Gobshites are frequently called “the only Folk ’n’ Irish band that matters” and on their current U.S. tour, the merch table includes Make America Drunk Again stickers. The Boston-based acoustic punk rockers are the perfect fit for a show at a venerable downtown pub as the halfway to St. Patrick’s day mark approaches — which is Sept. 17, by the way. Friday, Sept. 13, 9 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $10 at the door, 21+.

• Believable: Well-regarded Fleetwood Mac tribute band Silver Springs performs in Manchester. Named after the song that Stevie Nicks memorably sang while staring holes into Lindsay Buckingham on VH1 — which they replicate in their shows — the group sticks to the late ’70s and later version of Mac, though they do unearth a scorching “Oh Well” from the Peter Green era. Saturday, Sept. 14, 7:30 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $39 at palacetheare.org.

• Familial: After years of sticking to his own solo music, A.J. Croce began doing Croce by Croce concerts, paying tribute to his songwriter father. Fittingly, the first song of his dad’s he recorded was “I Got A Name.” Jim Croce died in a plane crash when his son was 2 years old. Later, he found a musical connection by studying reels of tape for clues about his artistic process. Sunday, Sept. 15, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $67 and up at tupelomusichall.com.

• Legitimate: When the Byrds recorded Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” in 1965, Roger McGuinn was the only band member in the studio; the rest of the musicians were the famous Wrecking Crew. McGuinn’s scripted one-man show is both acoustic and electric, a look back from his folkie days to his time in the Brill Building, and his role helping shape folk rock. Wednesday, Sept. 18, 7:30 p.m., Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord, $45.75 at ccanh.com.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (PG-13)

Winona Ryder brings Lydia Deetz back to the infamous ghost house in Connecticut in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a Tim Burton-directed sequel to his 1988 movie.

Lydia (Ryder) is now grown up and trading on her teenhood in the ghost house by working as a talk show host/psychic medium who visits other haunted houses to commune with their ghosts. Across town (New York City I think), her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) has transitioned from sculpture to video and performance art. At a fancy girls’ school, Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) is enduring taunts due to her mother’s ghosty fame. The three Deetzes come together when Delia learns that her husband, Charles, has died (from a decapitation, which is helpful for reasons you’re free to Google). They return to the family’s legendarily haunted country house to bury Charles and clear out and sell the house.

Delia’s artsy-chic funeral is interrupted by Lydia’s sorta-boyfriend/sleazy manager Rory (Justin Theroux, doing an excellent job at being very slappable) proposing to marry Lydia two days hence, on Halloween. Astrid and Delia do not like Rory, Lydia even seems to not like Rory. But he bullies her into saying yes. And perhaps she’s vulnerable from the loss of her father, from the death of Astrid’s father and the subsequent difficult relationship between mother and daughter, and from the disturbing Beetlejuice sightings she’s been having lately. Meanwhile, Astrid storms off and meet-cutes Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a local boy reading Dostoevsky.

And then meanwhile meanwhile: Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) is working a desk job in the afterlife. His ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), who had been boxed away in multiple pieces, reconstitutes herself with help from a staple gun and goes around sucking the souls out of the dead, making them, uh, deader. Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), an action star in life, has become some kind of detective in the afterlife and is trying to find Delores. And a headless Charles Deetz wanders around, trying to get to the great beyond.

“More things!” feels like the approach in this movie. Astrid’s dad was a constantly-on-the-go activist! Astrid is also socially conscious maybe! Lydia’s crappy boyfriend won’t let her take medicine! Deliah has to postpone her art show! Astrid wants to travel! Lydia has no confidence for no particular reason! I feel like we could have gotten to the Beetlejuice factory faster and with more impact if we had sliced some of these characters (Delores, Wolf Jackson) away and given the remaining characters, Astrid in particular, more depth and personality. Astrid pretty much begins and ends at “surly teen.”

The movie’s climax features a musical scene that feels like it was created by somebody who was told about the “Day-O” scene in the 1988 movie and then made their own aggressively “look at how wacky this is” version with a different song. I found it flat and sparkless in a way that very much mirrored the movie overall. We’re getting a kind of second-hand, recreation-of-the-original version of the Beetlejuice story, not one that feels like a new adventure with familiar characters. Actually, Lydia in particular doesn’t even feel like the same character. In 1988, Lydia was a proto-Daria gothy teen with opinions and spunkiness; here, she’s kind of a mushy drip.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has moments of visual cleverness but the weirdness, silliness and fun of the Beetlejuice universe feels muted. C+

Rated PG-13 for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Tim Burton with a screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed by Warner Bros.

Featured photo: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil (Viking, 312 pages)

If there is anyone who can envision how artificial intelligence will change our lives in the next few decades, it’s Ray Kurzweil, whose title at Google includes the words “AI visionary.”

Kurzwell has been working in the industry for more than six decades. So when he tells us that “the singularity” — the merger of humans with AI — is likely to occur by 2045 and will be “utterly transformative,” we’d best pay attention.

Building on his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil examines the developments in AI since then, as well as its impact on jobs, health, longevity, and the risks that technology poses. It’s widely believed that AI will soon pass the “Turing test” — the point at which AI’s response to questions is indistinguishable from humans’ — which Kurzweil expects to occur by 2029. That milestone, he believes, will launch us into the fifth epoch of development, connecting our brains with computers that “will allow us to add many more layers to our neocortices — unlocking vastly more complex and abstract cognition than we can currently imagine.”

Augmented in this way, the enhanced human brain will eventually “become more than 99.9 percent nonbiological” in two ways, Kurzweil says: “One is the gradual introduction of nanobots to the brain tissue itself. These may be used to repair damage or replace neurons that have stopped working. The other is connecting the brain to computers, which will both provide the ability to control machines directly with our thoughts and allow us to integrate digital layers of neocortex in the cloud.”

As AI is advancing even quicker than many futurists initially believed, it seems the digitization of the human mind will likely happen within the lifetimes of many people who are alive today. Kurzweil, who lives near Boston, is 76 and he believes he will live to see it.

“As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized human body at will: we’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them,” Kurzweil writes. “We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”

There’s another, controversial word for all this, which Kurzweil doesn’t use: transhumanism. And much of what Kurzweil envisions is dependent on nanotechnology, the development and implantation of nanobots, almost unimaginably tiny robots that could roam our bodies, repairing or removing malfunctioning cells. (To give you an idea of scale, there are more than 25 million nanometers in an inch; Kurzweil describes a nanobot as about the size of a human cell.)

While some forms of medical nanotechnology are already in testing on animals, the life-changing nanobots that Kurzweil is talking about don’t actually exist yet. He’s largely talking about what could happen, and the future may not be as rosy as he thinks.

He acknowledges as much in a chapter titled “Peril” in which he examines scenarios where AI doesn’t help us but leads to the mass extinction of anything carbon-based. He nods at Bill Joy’s famous essay “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” published in 2000 in Wired magazine, and the “gray goo” theory, which posits that self-replicating nanobots that consume or otherwise destroy living things could wipe out the Earth’s biomass within a matter of weeks. Nanobots could also be used as military weapons, delivering virtually undetectable poisons to whole populations. But the technology can also be used for defense systems, and technology companies are taking these sorts of doomsday scenarios seriously and devising safeguards.

While Kurzweil is trying to write for a general audience, and largely succeeds, the book at times descends into college-textbook dryness when he explains various technologies. But he turns out to be a surprisingly engaging philosopher as he navigates the ethical issues surrounding AI.

A chapter titled “Who Am I?” examines subjective consciousness, or qualia, and the trouble with assuming AI can never acquire it, as well as the issues that arise as we get closer to “resurrecting” the dead with avatars or replicants created using photos and video, texts, interviews and other data about loved ones. (Kurzweil has done something like this with his own father, collecting everything his father had ever written, including love letters to his mother, and then using AI to have a “conversation” with his deceased father, or as he put it, his “dad bot.”)

Another question he delves into is how much of our essential selves we might lose as our body parts — even the brain — are rebuilt as Lee Majors was in the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.

Kurzweil recalls the thought experiment of ancient Greeks who pondered what happens when an old ship is gradually rebuilt using new planks. If the old planks are stored and then reassembled into a ship again, which is the original? The stakes are higher when it comes to human beings. “For most of us, it matters a great deal whether the person standing next to us is really our loved one or is just a Chalmersian zombie putting on a convincing show.”

For those of us who can live long enough to take advantage, Kurzweil assures us that “radical life extension is close at hand.” That may make you want to start exercising and eating right, or to take up drinking and smoking posthaste. Either seems a rational decision, given what is headed our way. B

—Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/09/12

Slowdive, “kisses (Daniel Avery Remix)” b/w “kisses – sky ii” [Grouper remix] (Dead Oceans Records)

I haven’t given much love to this English shoegaze band over the years, mostly owing to there always being enough shoegaze bands around to fill a football stadium, and besides, for a time there I thought the genre had peaked with Raveonettes. But sure, they’re fine, despite the fact that they were broken up for 20 years (1995 to 2014), and nowadays they have a sort of hallowed status among Gen Xers and pan-goths in general. The band’s 2003 album Everything Is Alive resulted in crazy levels of love, with the Pitchfork writer padding his review of that album’s single “kisses” with something about how it’s easy to write a good shoegaze song but difficult to write a great one. What a world-smashingly generic utterance; all he really needed to say was that he liked it, with its Cure guitar line and haunting-in-a-good-way, New Order-nicking vocal line (on Neil Halstead’s part anyway). Techno producer Avery’s remix turns it into a spazzing drum ’n’ bass rinseout that’s completely unnecessary, and meanwhile Grouper’s version is drowned in processing. Just stick with the original, folks. Ahem, the thing that’s missing from all this is the fact that the tune borrows a lot of its melodic steez from U2’s “Beautiful Day.” Ahem. C— Eric W. Saeger

Capilla Ardiente, Where Gods Live and Men Die (High Roller Records)

Ah, a doom metal album from a Santiago, Chile-based band. In case you weren’t aware of it, Black Sabbath’s 13 was a terrible album, but unfortunately a lot of young whippersnappers have mistaken it for a worthy template, which seems to be the case here: a lot of slow, meandering grinding signifying not much. To the band’s credit, the singer does as good a Chris Cornell imitation as the guy from Wolves In The Throne Room used to, and boy, the album cover would be as awesome as the one for Nazareth’s Hair Of The Dog if it weren’t for the stupid golden castle in the background. For what it is, it stands as further proof that Chile really rocks, or however the kids say it nowadays — ah, it’s “based,” that’s it — so there’s that anyway. Closeout track “As I Lie on the Summit” is their push single, and it’s OK, but if it isn’t epic metal as opposed to doom, I’m Granny Clampett. B — Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hey, guys, do you know all the things that have happened on Sept. 13, I mean on that particular calendar date, through the corridors of history? Well, for starters, on Sept. 13, 1899, Henry Hale Bliss became the first recorded person to be unalived in a motor vehicle accident in the United States, specifically in New York City, where else! That’s a very portentous thing, because as for the 2024 version of Sept. 13, we have new albums coming our way to mark the occasion, and the list is pretty freakin’ big, because it’s already holiday gift-buying season, according to, you know, the people in the C suites who want you to buy stuff! If you’re a millennial hipster who hasn’t sold out to The Man and gotten a job (or five) yet because you’re quite comfortable sponging off your parents and eating their chicken tendies, you’re officially still cool and relevant, so I assume you want to know about the upcoming new album from (formerly?) tuneless indie band Snow Patrol, The Forest Is The Path! This band is from Dundee, Scotland, which is basically the most horrible city in the country, and that makes them relevant, so let’s see what they’ve been up to since their Aughts heyday, back when I didn’t quite hate their music but had no idea how anyone could possibly like it, because it was like a Loot Crate version of Lifehouse or whatnot. Of course, they started doing a lot better in the mid-Aughts, with albums like A Hundred Million Suns, but in those days I was really only paying attention to trance DJs and goth bands, so I don’t know. And so, fam, that’s where we stand with Snow Patrol, with me having no idea what I’m even talking about, because for all I know they were as faux-important as the Killers until their 2018 album Wildness, which Pitchfork sort of laughed at, but not cruelly. I have no desire to play catch-up with these fellers; instead I’ll just listen to the new single from this one, the title track. Wait, why does this tune sound like a cross between Sigur Rós and M83, what are they even doing? It’s got a mopey-epic-mopey structure; are the Aughts coming back already, like, am I going to have to start preparing to hear nine million bands that sound like Spacemen 3 and Franz Ferdinand? Why is this being done to me?

• Indie-electronic producer Trentemøller is back again, keeping up the pace, even though he’s 51 now, don’t you feel oooold? Dreamweaver is his first LP since 2022’s Memoria, which barely rated in the U.S. at all, but he’s still big in Denmark and such, mostly because he’s influenced by actually relevant ’80s bands like Joy Division and Siouxsie. The sort-of title track, “Dreamweavers,” is slow, deep shoegaze stuff, with plenty of My Bloody Valentine going on, except quirkier and more electronic. All set here.

• Huh, will you look at that, it’s a new album from well-adjusted 1980s alt-rock figure Nick Lowe, titled Indoor Safari! Ha ha, any of you fellow old people remember when he was relevant, in the ’80s, with the soapy alt-rock hit “Cruel To Be Kind?” Right, I’m trying to forget it too, but the new singles “Trombone” and “Went To A Party” are like Roy Orbison redux, picture Eddie Cochran on sleeping pills. Right, OK, so he had his dumb hit 40 years ago, I really don’t have time for this.

• Lastly it’s Miranda Lambert, the second Mrs. Blake Shelton, i.e. the one before Gwen Whatsername, with her newest LP, Postcards From Texas! The single “Wranglers” is a slow-burn thing combining Dolly Parton and ’80s hair-metal, it’s actually not all that bad, and she’s a real-life nice person, so let’s leave it at that.

— Eric W. Saeger

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!