Bruce Springsteen, Copenhagen busker - I’m On Fire, 1988 (via fuckyeahtheboss)
Posts tagged with “bruce springsteen”
Posted 1 month ago
Posted 6 months ago
Bruce plays drums while Max dances during “Dancing In The Dark,” Omaha
Damn, I left my “Can I dance with Max?” sign at home back in July and somebody got there before me.
Posted 6 months ago
Posted 10 months ago
Three years ago today BT and I walked down the aisle to If I Should Fall Behind by Bruce Springsteen (the Seeger Session version).
As we grow and love, and fight and work it out every single day of our lives, the words of this song formulate what is for me still the most mature, brilliant and true declaration of love a marriage can give: a good, honest promise to keep.
We swore we’d travel darlin’ side by side
We’d help each other stay in stride
But each lover’s steps fall so differently
But I’ll wait for you
And if I should fall behind
Wait for me
(Source: youtube.com)
Posted 10 months ago
When we are children, we invent these detailed imaginary worlds that the child psychologists call “paracosms.” These landscapes, sometimes complete with imaginary beasts, heroes and laws, help us orient ourselves in reality. They are structured mental communities that help us understand the wider world.
We carry this need for paracosms into adulthood. It’s a paradox that the artists who have the widest global purchase are also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes. Millions of people around the world are ferociously attached to Tupac Shakur’s version of Compton or J.K. Rowling’s version of a British boarding school or Downton Abbey’s or Brideshead Revisited’s version of an Edwardian estate.
Millions of people know the contours of these remote landscapes, their typical characters, story lines, corruptions and challenges. If you build a passionate and highly localized moral landscape, people will come.
We carry this need for paracosms into adulthood. It’s a paradox that the artists who have the widest global purchase are also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes. Millions of people around the world are ferociously attached to Tupac Shakur’s version of Compton or J.K. Rowling’s version of a British boarding school or Downton Abbey’s or Brideshead Revisited’s version of an Edwardian estate.
Millions of people know the contours of these remote landscapes, their typical characters, story lines, corruptions and challenges. If you build a passionate and highly localized moral landscape, people will come.
The Power of the Particular - NYTimes.com
David Brooks of the NY Times thinks this is why I know most Springsteen songs by heart, and I could tell you exactly where to find a ballroom that’s Open All Night, or which turn you should to take to go down to Greasy Lake, or find your way out of Jungleland over the Jersey state line.
Certainly, Springsteen’s detailed landscapes helped me to imagine his world, but the universality of his themes - love, work, growing up, failing, getting up and carrying on, leaving home, going back - is what really spoke to me when I didn’t even speak English and could recite all the words of Thunder Road.
When I went to New Jersey for the Glory Days Symposium and did the Springsteen tour of the Jersey Shore (under the expert guidance of Stan Goldstein and Lawrence Kirsch) I marvelled at just how much these places looked exactly like I had imagined, as though Springsteen had photographed each one and sent them to me in private correspondence with a map and a mission to find them.
It was a nicer version of what I experienced the first time I went to New York City and found it exactly as it was in the movies, a mixture of disbelief and disappointment (and, ultimately, rejection: New York City is amazing in so many ways, and yet a place I never warmed to in the way I did with New England, where I felt as though I had found some sort of ancestral home, or San Francisco, a city that truly filled me with wonder).
New Jersey reminded me of home, and I’ll never know the extent to which this is because I grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen in Italy, or because Bruce Springsteen’s America (a place that doesn’t really exist, a place of the imagination as much as it is a real, traceable, geographical place) is really not that different from my homeland (a place that I can only experience filtered through memory and other kinds of distorting mirrors).
But the devil’s in the details, a Jersey devil, no less: the time I got lost driving in Asbury Park I found my bearings by a road sign announcing Kingsley Avenue - and right there where I was chasing something in the night, at the end of the road, I found an Italian restaurant.
Posted 11 months ago
Everything is everything, but you’re missing.
(photo: Backstreets.com via fuckyeahtheboss )
Posted 11 months ago
We carry the fire « Byron on JunkiePop
Ogni volta che sento il ritornello di Wa Are Alive penso a The Road di Cormac McCarthy. Nel libro il mondo sta morendo, è finito tutto, si giocano i supplementari dell’apocalisse e in campo sono rimasti solo quel padre e quel figlio, e il padre dice al figlio “we’re the good guys. We carry the fire” e il figlio ci si aggrappa e si ripete questa frase sempre, come se il ritornello fosse l’ultima cosa rimasta. Ti ricordi? Ecco, la promessa che fai a te stesso quando diventi Springsteeniano, quando Bruce ti attacca i cavi della batteria al cuore e all’anima e poi mette in moto, è questa: è la promessa di restare vivi, di portare il fuoco, di alimentarlo. Il fuoco che ti si accende dentro quando arrivi a capire Bruce è un fuoco che scalda, un fuoco che mette in moto dei macchinari giganteschi, un fuoco che anche quando distrugge lo fa per rinnovare, come le piante del bush australiano che vanno in autocombustione prima di rinascere.
Perché quando ormai hai visto Bruce Springsteen in concerto 9 volte la prima cosa che fai quando torni a casa è comprare il biglietto per il prossimo concerto? Perché Bruce ti accende un fuoco dentro. Te lo racconto su JunkiePop.
Posted 11 months ago
My brother gets his second Springsteen tattoo after his second Springsteen concert.
Posted 11 months ago
Frenzy in Firenze: Yes, that’s exactly where I was last night (a couple of rows in front of the photographer’s spot). As the dude says in the Backstreets review: “This is not a singer. This is a religion.”
Setlist:
Badlands
No Surrender
We Take Care of Our Own
Wrecking Ball
Death to My Hometown
My City of Ruins
Spirit in the Night
Be True
Jack of All Trades
Trapped
Prove It All Night
Honky Tonk Woman/Darlington County
Burning Love
Working on the Highway
Shackled & Drawn
Waitin’ on a Sunny Day
Apollo Medley
The River
The Rising
Backstreets
Land of Hope and Dreams
* * *
Rocky Ground
Born in the U.S.A.
Born to Run
Hungry Heart
Seven Nights to Rock
Dancing in the Dark
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
Twist and Shout
Who’ll Stop the Rain?
BA | MA | PhD
Italian, Londoner.
Ex theatre director.
Lecturer in film, literature, and cultural studies.
Beginner in the film industry.
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[bai'ra:-nik] 1. Characteristic of, or after the manner of Byron or his poetry. 2. quasi-n. pl. [after Philippics.] Declamatory utterances or invectives in the style of Byron. 3. Byronic hero: prominent literary character type of the Romantic period, whose characteristics include: extraordinary intelligence and perception; high level of education and intellectual prowess; arrogance; cunning and manipulation; emotional conflictedness; moodiness; self-criticism and introspection; self-destructive behaviour; aesthetic sophistication; dark mysterious beauty; powers of attraction; seductiveness and sexual perversion; world-weariness; distaste for social institutions and norms; disrespect of social ranks; being an outcast, an outlaw, or an exile.
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I worship at the Church of Springsteen.
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