Tag: 250522

Chicken Man

Comedy Coop comes to Kettlehead

Like the classic rock song, Joe Fenti has learned to roll with the changes. In 2019 he got his bachelor’s degree and started a consulting job that had him at client sites when he wasn’t in airports. Six months later he was living in Zoom world, as the world shut down, and, he said recently, “we were just trying to figure out what does our workday even look like?”

So he made it funny on social media, creating a fictitious company called Fenti Fried Chicken to skewer corporate life, its Patagonia-vested bros, and guys like Brandon the Intern who responds to demands for Excel reports with, “Sure thing, is Excel the green one?”

It was a pivot from Fenti’s college days, when he thought memes were the best path to comedy success.

“I noticed that the joke wasn’t about something, the joke just became what the joke is. It would be a reference to something that no one had ever heard of but if you got it you knew what it was,” he said. “Humor evolves.”

Fenti’s quick-hit reels built his profile, as did his takes on other topics. His pitch-perfect “Yes, Chef!” impression of The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White got 12 million hits. As the world opened back up, though, he moved from content creation to stand-up comedy. Three years later he’s doing it full time and preparing his first national tour.

His online disposition is still on display, but he’s not trying to translate his TikTok and Instagram humor for a crowd.

“The jokes you can make on stage can be a little more fleshed out, you can build … a story; on the internet you have to be very relatable very fast,” he said. “To work it has to be, ‘Who would I send this to?’ or ‘Who is someone I think of when I see this video?’ With stand-up, I can … bring you into my life rather than trying to make stuff for everyone.”

He’ll still touch on life in the business world.

“Return to office or hybrid work culture, there’s always something for me to riff on because I did experience that,” he said. “But now it’s more like, ‘Here are things that have happened to me … things I’m noticing about being a 28-year-old guy now living with my girlfriend for the first time.”

With hundreds of clips, his online life does pop up. He’ll talk about being recognized as a web celebrity, noting that men often can’t say why his face is familiar. “I’m a stand-up comic,” he’ll explain, only to hear in reply that’s not it, nor is his content. So he’ll say something like, maybe you know me from my job as an actor — in court-ordered training videos.

Building on his stand-up success, Fenti began booking shows under the name Comedy Coop, chosen to reflect his Fenti Fried Chicken social media handle. He’ll be at Kettlehead Brewing in Nashua on May 22, celebrating the opening of Za Dude Pizza there, along with Boston Comedy Fest winner Liam McGurk, Troy Burditt, Ryan Ellington and El Kennedy.

Fenti promises a well-balanced showcase.

“I try to book a lot of different comedians so you’re not getting five Joe Fentis,” he said. “You’re getting someone who does one-liners, someone who does storytelling, someone who likes joking about parenthood or teaching or whatever. I’m trying to give a whole show.”

Fenti’s own comedy is inspired by absurdists like Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg. He has a recurring series of videos with him in sunglasses delivering his own jokes in Hedberg’s style that are hilarious. “If I’m ever in a room, and I don’t want people to talk to me, I pretend to be an elephant,” he says with the late comic’s deadpan delivery.

“I just love comics who do things that are a little weird and a little different,” Fenti continued, citing Demitri Martin and Bo Burnham as other guiding lights.

“People who can tell a story so smoothly and bring weird life moments to the stage,” he said. “I look to Mitch in so many ways. How he perceived the world, like an escalator is never broken, they just become stairs, that’s such a funny way to look at it [and] I try to bring that to a lot of the jokes I write now, and put them into my style. Which is still evolving; I’ve only been doing comedy almost three years. There’s always room to try new things and see what works.”

Joe Fenti w/ Liam McGurk, Troy Burditt, Ryan Ellington and El Kennedy
When: Thursday, May 22, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Kettlehead Brewing Co., 97 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. Joe Fenti. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/05/22

Local music news & events

• Fab Faux: Unlike many Beatles tribute acts, Studio Two sticks to John, Paul, George and Ringo’s rise to fame and all-too-brief touring years. It will feel like a black and white evening in a more innocent time as the group rolls through early hits like “Please Please Me,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Hard Day’s Night” wearing their trademark suits and boots — they’re among the best. Thursday, May 22, 8 p.m., Labelle Winery, 14 Route 111, Derry, $40 at labellewinery.com.

• Home town: The latest edition of the Locally Sourced showcase has Cozy Throne, a band that would have been right at home in the early ’70s NYC punk scene with front woman Amara Phelps evoking Patti Smith. They also have a fun grunge vibe going; fans of Garbage and Hole will love them. Baby Wah Wah, a student and adult music group led by area history teacher Eddie Phelps, will also perform. Friday, May 23, 8 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $15 at ccanh.com.

• Big sound: The Seacoast-based YellowHouse Blues Band packs a punch, with two female vocalists, a horn section and a pair of guitarists, along with a strong rhythm section and a well-traveled keyboard player. Their material ranges from the classics like Howlin’ Wolf to contemporary artists such as Tedeschi-Trucks and Larkin Poe. They also do a killer version of Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic.” Saturday, May 24, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $30 at tupelohall.com.

• Island music: When the weather gets warm, outdoor shows from area band Reggae Tones return. Check out the first of four this season at a favorite Nashua restaurant/bar, with the final one on the first day of autumn. The group draws from favorites like Bob Marley & the Wailers and Toots & the Maytals.Sunday, May 25, 4 p.m., Penuche’s Ale House, 4 Canal St., Nashua, reggaetonesband.com.

• Golden tone: There are classic country throwbacks, then there’s Melissa Carper. “One of the greatest classic golden era country singers and composers of this generation,” one critic wrote. On the title song from her latest release Borned In Ya, she name-checks everyone from Hank Williams to Lead Belly and Hazel Dickens on a track whose title was inspired by a Ralph Stanely quote. Monday, May 26, 7 p.m., The Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter, $25 at thewordbarn.com.

The Wedding Banquet (R)

Friends contemplate a green card marriage in The Wedding Banquet, a remake of the 1993 movie by the same name which was directed by Ang Lee and yet isn’t available on streaming or VOD as far as I can tell? Get on that, some streamer.

Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) have run through their savings and possibly most of their credit attempting to conceive via IVF for Lee. Maybe Angela, the younger of the two women, should try next, Lee suggests after the second round doesn’t result in a pregnancy. But this idea gets Angela all knotted up in her difficult relationship with her own mother and parenting fears.

Meanwhile, Korean artist Min (Han Gi-Chin) proposes to his long-term boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang), who lives in Lee’s garage and is Angela’s longtime friend. But Chris, already reluctant to commit to anything (Min, finishing his dissertation) takes umbrage at the fact that Min’s proposal comes immediately after a conversation with Min’s grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) where she tells Min there will be no more visa extensions and that it’s time for him to come home to Korea and run his family’s business. Chris loves Min but feels stressed about the prospect of marriage even if it’s the only way to keep Min in the country. Chris also knows that marriage won’t be as easy for Min as he claims; Min’s grandfather will disinherit and cut off the wealthy Min if he finds out Min is gay.

While talking with Lee, Min comes up with a plan b: he’ll give Angela and Lee the money they need for another IVF round if Angela will marry him. Min will get to stay in America, Chris will get more time to figure out where their relationship is going, Min’s grandparents will get to believe that he is married to a woman and Angela and Lee will get a chance at a baby. Even Angela’s mother May (Joan Chen), now a literal PFLAG award winner but once someone who had a hard time with Angela coming out, is willing to just go with the marriage if it means there’s a shot at a grandchild. But can Min convince Ja-Young to let him stay in America (without cutting him off) when she shows up to meet Angela?

The story takes some not entirely unexpected twists, which I won’t spoil but I will say that Ja-Young knows what’s up from the jump and this gives the movie something of a grounding in reality. We don’t have to bother with a bunch of Three’s Company secret-hiding silliness and instead get to spend time with the emotions of this gentle dramady. All the actors here are better than the at times too-pat material but the talents of the core six actors help carry the story off. In a world where actual couple Chris and Min can just legally marry, it could feel like extreme movie logic keeping them from doing so but the emotions of the characters and ultimately the premium they put on family in all its forms help all the movie’s choices make sense. B Available for rent or purchase.

The Art of Winning, by Bill Belichick

The Art of Winning, by Bill Belichick (Avid Reader Press, 289 pages)

It is challenging to approach Bill Belichick’s new book on its literary merits, considering all the news coverage given its publicity tour (sample from the Washington Post: “Bill Belichick, Jordan Hudson and the making of a PR disaster”). There is also the matter of the acknowledgments.

Let’s just say that when the author thanks 4½ pages of people, and the media focuses on one person he does not thank, it’s fair to wonder if anyone is interested in the actual book, except for maybe Tom Brady, who promises in a cover blurb that The Art of Winning will bring out the best in all of us. And who, besides Robert Kraft, doesn’t want that?

So I began the book with an open mind, right up to the point where Belichick started yelling at me.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to, at the end of each chapter, have two pages of all-caps commands barking at the reader in white type on black pages, but it is shocking the first time you come across it, and each subsequent time it’s just annoying. (Wondering if I was overreacting, I showed a couple of pages to my college-age daughter and said, “Don’t read the words, just tell me how you react to this.” She didn’t know anything about the book or author. “Scared,” she said.)

This effect is not mitigated even when Belichick is screaming at us on the page to “TREAT PEOPLE WITH KINDNESS, RESPECT, AND DIGNITY WHENEVER YOU ARE MAKING A DECISION THAT INVOLVES THEIR LIFE OUTSIDE OF WORK.” Or “HONESTY IS GOOD. THERE IS A PLACE FOR SPEAKING SOFTLY, AND A PLACE FOR SPEAKING FORCEFULLY.”

OK, Yoda.

This is, at times, a book of platitudes, albeit platitudes written down by the winningest coach in football when he was between jobs. We were warned of that by the title, which is not especially original. (See: Amazon.)

That is not to say that there are not interesting stories in the book; there are plenty, including one involving the bromance that developed between Tom Brady and Antonio Brown when the troubled wide receiver was a New England Patriot for 13 days in 2019. Belichick reveals that AB sent TB12 a gift of bison and some sort of special milk that was $500 a bottle and was shipped in from the West. Though nobody apparently was at fault, it got left outside Brady’s locker for a night, and as Belichick tells it, on the eve of a big game, “we were all crying over spoiled milk” and management wound up reimbursing Brown $3,500.

“Think about it this way: Would you spend $3500 to ensure the best person on your team gave their best performance when it mattered most? Would you pay twice that to immediately relieve your star employee of a depressive episode, no matter how head-shaking? Absolutely, and you know it. Your job is not to psychoanalyze. Your job is to put people in a position to win.”

Anybody who followed the Patriots under Belichick for even a few years recognizes the patterns he lays out here. Practice matters. So does consistency. The process is king. (“Every day does not revolve around closing a big deal or scoring a big new client. But those days when the stakes are very high should feel exactly like every other day.”) All this is fine, and yes, might be helpful to some. There are worse self-help books out there, for sure.

It’s just we can’t help thinking, is this really all he’s got for us?

Like a Belichick press conference, even the big stories seem brusque. This is disappointing, especially when he begins with a line like “Falcons fans, you have fair warning. I’m going to talk about 28-3.”

That refers, of course, to the 2017 Super Bowl when the Falcons led by that score in the third quarter. The Pats went on to score 31 unanswered points. Surely, this will be a great story? Nope. It’s one page describing one play; then he’s on to the importance of preparation. (PREPARATION IS NEVER WASTED, REGARDLESS OF OUTCOME.)

Also, he never even tells us what animal or plant that ridiculous $500 milk came from.

He does give us some insight into the men who were influential in his life, including father Steve Belichick, who was also a football coach and a scout and passed on to his son the importance of working every day, not just to get a paycheck or even to win football games, but to improve at everything. (“Am I working toward something? Or am I just working?”)

“I suspect that the quest for improvement is not not quite so ubiquitous in the world outside sports,” Belichick writes, explaining how being laser focused on improvement is the crux of his famous phrase “On to Cincinnati,” which was uttered after a tough loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football.

To be fair, there are some parts to this book that are genuinely funny, including Belichick’s “free motivation trick” involving Rob Gronkowski: “Whenever you feel lazy, close your eyes and imagine Gronk walking into your office and swatting you aside and taking your job. What’s he doing? How hard is he doing it? Does he seem depressed to be working hard? Or did he just spike your coffee mug on your head after sending that email you were too overwhelmed to type?”

He also tells a couple of revealing Tom Brady stories, which help to explain why Brady was so magnanimous in the blurb.

The Art of Winning is insider baseball, so to speak, in that the Gronkowski story means nothing at all to anyone who knows nothing about Gronk. Many of Belichick’s stories won’t mean much to anybody who doesn’t speak football, and they will appeal even less to anyone who doesn’t love the New England Patriots (meaning much of the country). As inspirational books go, even at its best, it’s self-limiting in its reach. And Jeff Benedict and Michael Holloway have written more engagingly about the Patriots.

So the greatest coach of all time (which actually remains to be seen — we’ll see how he does in North Carolina) isn’t the greatest writer of all time, nor should we expect him to be. It’s just Belichick on paper: Billy GOAT Gruff. C

Album Reviews 25/05/22

Sparks, MAD (Transgressive Records)




The press notes for this nearly 60-year-old band’s 26th album start with this: “If the world is a cafe, its ridiculous patrons babbling ridiculously all day long, then Ron Mael is the guy on his own in the corner that you don’t notice, quietly sipping his coffee.” From there it proceeds ad nauseum, painting the two Mael brothers (Sparks’s only constants over the decades) as geniuses of postmodern pop music and stagecraft, largely owing to their yin-and-yang hyper/reserved stage personas. To be embarrassingly honest, I came to them from the 1985 seriocomic vampire movie Fright Night, which I’ve seen approximately 2,825 times, a film whose soundtrack included their song “Armies Of The Night,” a technopop bauble that was so naïvely upbeat and European-sounding that I had no idea the brothers are American until, well, an hour ago (the band has gone to some lengths to make the world forget that song ever happened; it’s not mentioned on their Wikipedia page for one thing). This album, coming on the heels of their winning an AIM Outstanding Contribution to Music award, is mostly a mixed patchwork of subdued, not-really-danceable messaging but it does have its moments, for instance “Do Things My Own Way,” which is quite a bit like “Armies Of The Night” in its silly Pet Shop Boys-ish accessibility (translation: it’s fun). They do have their fans, obviously, who’ll be glad to know that they’ll be at Boston’s Berklee Performance Center on Sept. 11. B


Cautious Clay, The Hours: Morning (Concord Records)

Impressive third album from Clay, real name Joshua Karpeh, a native Ohioan of Kru (Liberian) ethnicity, whose breezy indie/R&B sensibilities tend to read as a form of yacht rock; for example, if the Weeknd were more AOR-minded, “Father Time (10 am)” would be something you’d hear from him, and if that’s not clear enough, I could certainly suggest Seal as a similar artist (it’s really time for people everywhere to admit that nearly all of us have a favorite yacht-rock song, isn’t it?). The record label’s bots have been busily boosting that particular song on YouTube, although one oddly cynical human stumbled upon it and remarked that it sounds like Big Wreck, which is completely false; “Tokyo Lift (5 am)” is proof positive that this guy is aiming for Seal’s happily contented bedroom-pop space, but with a deeper (and quite a bit more resonant, honestly) vocal range, so I’d urge you to find out for yourself. It’s seriously listenable. He’ll be at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 30. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Here come the new CDs of Friday, May 23, annoying everyone in sight with its springtime vibe and happy bunny rabbit face, don’t you just hate May? We all know where this is heading, soon enough it’s going to be hot and roasting with no end in sight, someone get these happy springtime bunnies off me before I love them and pet them, that’d be great. Ohh, what have we even got today, let’s see, we’ll start with a blast from the past, our old buddies from the U.K., Stereolab, who’ve been around since — gulp, holy crow — 1990, fun-time’s over, late-born Gen Xers, enjoy grandparenthood! Yes, you old fossils remember Stereolab, mostly from back in college when you had to explain to your dorm-mate why you thought they were awesome and played them one of the band’s motorik-driven milquetoast hits, then watched in horror as your dorm-mate fell asleep out of boredom, you remember those days, right? Well, we are gathered here today to see if Stereolab is still trying to revive their preferred sound, 1950s French mall-shopping music, and pass it off as something even vaguely relevant, let’s do the searchy thing in the YouTube box and see what’s on the band’s new album, Instant Holograms On Metal Film! Right, here’s something, a tune called “Aerial Troubles,” which begins with a pseudo-Sigur Ros part and then becomes — I don’t know what you would even call this, Supertramp as a lo-fi band? The boy-girl harmonizing is deliciously amateurish and off-key, what more could you ask for? Now may I go?

• Wait, I know, let’s try something interesting, wouldn’t that be novel? Chances are you’ve never heard of British post-rock band These New Puritans, an act solely operated by Jack and George Barnett, twin working-class brothers who taught themselves to play musical instruments. Their sound was once described by someone at Another Man as an attempt to blur “the distinction between rock, classical, electronic and experimental,” which sounds like half the bands on Earth at the present moment, but suppose we just belay the snark and check out their new album, Crooked Wing, and its single “A Season In Hell,” are y’all down for that? OK, this tune is quite nice, undergirded by military snare-drum patterns over which a slow-burning psychedelic trip starts to take shape, with some from-the-mountaintop effects on the vaguely Pink Floyd-ish singing. It’s all more vibe-focused than eventful, which (all together now) sounds like half the bands on Earth at the present moment, but the old-school organ does provide it with a lot of casual gravitas. It’s the kind of thing that’s too cool for American bands, let’s just say that.

• The good news continues, with a collaboration between Taj Mahal & Keb’ Mo’, titled Room On The Porch. If anyone still takes blues-guitar music seriously, this is about as important as it could possibly get, a meeting of the minds between two of the genre’s all-time masters, 82-year-old Mahal and 73-year-old Keb’ Mo’ (Kevin Moore). Given all that, we need to investigate how self-indulgent (or, conversely, how nauseatingly commercial) this is, so let’s. Nope, the title track is harmless and delightful, featuring the Randy Newman-like voice of Ruby Amanfu. There’s plenty of bluegrass vibe and a bottomless supply of innocent positivity, very nice.

• Lastly it’s grungy Britrock band Skunk Anansie (just so you know where you are, they covered The Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” for the soundtrack of the movie Sucker Punch), weighing in with the seventh studio LP in their 30-year history, The Painful Truth, featuring “Lost and Found,” a quiet-loud-quiet song that switches back and forth between dub/trip-hop and nu-metal. It’s neat, if self-indulgent.

Featured Image: Malphas, Tales from the Olden Realm (self-released/Bandcamp) & Ches Smith, Clone Row (self-released)

Hydrangea Daiquiri

There’s a trope called “The Ninety-Dollar Tomato.” It describes an all-too-familiar situation that many of us frustrated gardeners go through: working diligently on a tomato plant, pruning it, fertilizing it, trellising it, surrounding it with companion plants, rushing out to cover it with a sheet if the weather forecast calls for frost, and manually picking off any bug that looks at it wrong, only to end up with one medium-quality tomato at the end of the summer.

There is a certain competitiveness that can spring up throughout the growing season. It might not be as in-your-face as the Lawn Dads’ battles for sod-based superiority, but we all know somebody who is a master of the passive-aggressive comment about the state of your roses, or faux-commiseration when the deer take out your hostas.

May might be the most soul-crushing month of the year for hopeful gardeners. Anything that blooms this early in the season is out of our hands; the state of our tulips was due entirely to things we did last year but can be glossed over. “Oh, the tulips?” you might say breezily. “You should have seen them last week!”

But May is the month of flowering shrubs that can’t be swept under the rug so easily. Lilacs are going to do what they’re going to do, and display it to the world. Two scraggly heads of blossoms? The lady next door is going to have something to say about that. A crab apple tree that only flowers on one side? Oh, man, that jerk down the street is going to make some joke, asking why your tree has a comb-over.

And then there are the hydrangeas. Even if you do everything perfectly each year — prune, fertilize, check the soil pH — you still never completely know what color the poofy blossom heads are going to be, how big they’re going to be, or how many there will be.

On the other hand, there is a fantastic porch-sitting cocktail that is the same color as hydrangeas, so there is some consolation in that.

  • 2 ounces white rum
  • 1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
  • ¾ ounce rhubarb syrup (see below)
  • Blue Curaçao

Add rum lime juice and rhubarb syrup over ice to a cocktail shaker.

Shake enthusiastically, until you hear the ice start to splinter inside the shaker.

Strain into a cocktail glass. Pour a slip of blue curacao down the side of the glass. It will pool in the bottom, coloring the bottom half of the daiquiri blue and violet. Ideally, there will be tiny ice shards floating on the surface.

The rhubarb — which has just come into season — gives this daiquiri a beautiful pastel pink color and a background taste that is both floral and sour, which plays well with the lime juice. We don’t often actually taste white rum, which is a bit of a pity; it gives this particular drink an alcoholic spine that brings everything together.

Rhubarb Simple Syrup

  • Equal amounts by weight of rhubarb stalks and sugar
  • A lemon

Clean the rhubarb, then chop it into medium-sized chunks. Put it in your freezer until it has frozen solid. Place the frozen rhubarb chunks in a small saucepan with an equal amount of sugar, and stir together.

You will look at the mixture and realize that it is way too dry to turn into anything like syrup. You’ll be tempted to add water. Don’t.

Cook the mixture slowly, over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally. The rhubarb will suddenly collapse, and the next thing you know the pot will be full of liquid. Bring it to a boil, to make sure that any remaining sugar has dissolved completely, then strain with a fine-mesh strainer. Add lemon juice to taste.

This will last about a month in your refrigerator.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

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