Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I had a fun time tonight watching D play a very silly round of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, which then got surprisingly stressful and harrowing for a game about taking spaceships apart, and then had an eventful and actually sweet cutscene.

I didn't think I was going to get to see Sinners before it left theaters, but D has found like one showing an evening this week so he and I went today! Sadly V wasn't feeling up to coming along, but otherwise it was great.

I enjoyed the hell out of the movie, if not as much as I would have at like 16 when I was obsessed with that music.

All the performances were so good, and I loved the soundtrack and it was just a joy to watch.

I told V that if they were up to it I'd happily go see it again with them tomorrow. I so badly want to Check on some things. (Also I saw it with no audio description so I'm certain I missed a ton of what's actually on the screen.)

By lunchtime I was thinking: it feels like I'm getting a migraine...and the massive sudden change in weather would back that up...but... I can't have a migraine! I just had one on Friday!

Yeah that's not how it works. I do feel like it's "not my turn yet," though. Hmph.

And yet here I am to tell you that my favorite musician is being threatened by the administrator of the country he and I are both from, for what Springsteen said in the city where I am now.

I refuse to read any more about this but D, who sent me this link, has been updating me since on it. The Boss keeps saying the government of his country is a threat to life and liberty every night on stage and Trump keeps insulting him on Truth Social: apparently now his skin is like a wrinkly prune.

Today D told me that Springsteen and the E Street Band have released an EP of what Bruce said and a few relevant songs from that first gig outside the U.S.

I listened to (most of) it while I was trying to work this afternoon. I'm just so delighted that it was in Manchester, which prides itself on being a city of rebellious and momentous music. (If only the gig had been at the Free Trade Hall instead of Coop Live! but it still makes me think of Bob Dylan and the Sex Pistols...)

I listened to the introduction, some of the lines I'd read about, and then the song and it struck me that "Land of Hope and Dreams" is a song closely connected to Clarence Clemons's death. It couldn't be as good a song as it without stemming from a profound lifelong love that Springsteen talks so movingly about in his autobiography and in Springsteen on Broadway, and that love existed between a Black man and a white man, about whom a Springsteen biographer said "They were these two guys who imagined that if they acted free, then other people would understand better that it was possible to be free."

I thought about the intense and unashamed love between these two men -- a pinnacle of what platonic love between men can be like -- and how annoying that is gonna be to the people who've suddenly realized that Springsteen is "political."

And the song has taken on this whole new life, which I'm glad of even if I'd rather The Big Man got to live a longer life.

I listened to the intro for the other song, I was trying to eat my lunch and I ended up with my eyes closed, unable to do more than listen and breathe. And after talking for a few minutes, he quotes James Baldwin -- "There isn't as much humanity in the world as I'd like. But there's enough" -- and then says "Let's pray." And for some reason, the next track didn't start. And that was the end of that one. So I just sat there, over my bowl of leftovers, imagining this happening a few miles down the road and a few days ago, I felt like I was there.

But suspended in this weird silence that went on for a long time before I realized that something technological had gone wrong.

I read all about his Catholic childhood in his autobiography and recognized a lot of it myself, but neither of us have retained it. Silent prayer isn't his style. Going right in to the next song is. And that's what he did.

All of a sudden this evening I'm not going to yoga, I'm going to see Skunk Anansie, a band I know nothing about beyond how cool Skin is.

Three people who should be going instead of me are all too ill, so I'm here having an immune system that works but also I spent the 90s listening to John Coltrane and Muddy Waters and shit, I don't know anything cool. I'm just going because D said "we can snuggle!"

He did deliver on that promise! Lots of snuggles, even though it was way too warm in that venue (even if there wasn't a deadly and disabling airborne pandemic, places should have better ventilation!).

I recognized exactly one song, and I had to keep my eyes closed almost the whole gig because the lights were like perfectly designed to make my nystagmus flare up, but I still had a very fun time!

What a funny introduction to a classic 90s band.

I wanted some Springsteen to help get me through another day of writing a lot (another almost-thousand words today brings me up to almost-6000 in my last five days at work). But it went wrong and gave me a lot of emotions instead.

The Springsteen song "Wrecking Ball" (not the Miley Cyrus one) is perfectly designed to stir the hearts of middle-aged white guys (it's the only song of his I can think of that actually mentions football!) but it also still gives me goosebumps when I hear it, goddammit!

Yeah, we know that come tomorrow
None of this will be here
So hold tight to your anger
Yeah, hold tight to your anger
Hold tight to your anger
And don’t fall to your fears

His early-21st century albums are a balm to my soul these days.

He's of an age by that point to see patterns, the cycles of things ("hard times come and hard times go..." repeated over and over again). Not getting lost in despair, instead keen to bring people together, speak out against what is wrong ("American Skin" feels like the start not the end of this), eyes on the prize which is still ephemeral hope and dreams. But he's got high hopes.

And somehow I forgot, until it came up on shuffle, "Shackled and Drawn." I love "Shackled and Drawn"!

Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bill
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill
Up on banker’s hill, the party’s going strong
Down here below, we’re shackled and drawn

Shackled and drawn, shackled and drawn
Pick up the rock, son, carry it on
I’m trudging through the dark in a world gone wrong
I woke up this morning shackled and drawn

And its little gospel outro... This is definitely a "blues in the verses, gospel in the choruses" Springsteen classic.

I got through an impressively annoying day at work, filled fridges and freezers with groceries for Christmas week, and got in a car to be driven to D's sister's for Christmas with his family.

Radio 1 on in the car, as usual, so we heard most of the chart show which was delightfully Christmasy: from Andy Williams and the Ronettes to Laufey and the exciting news, just as we pulled up at D's sister's place, that "Last Christmas" is once again Christmas number one.

Even with his annoying sister, even with another email about drama from my mom's annoying sister that has managed to ensnare me from four thousand miles away it's lovely to here: to be handed a gin and tonic (I had the pink gin and it did indeed taste vaguely Pink), to read a book while the others played a card game my eyes weren't up to (of course I started re-reading Hogfather again) and to finally have metaphorically collapsed over the finish line in to a much-needed break for the next week.

After thinking we'd missed out on tickets to see Public Service Broadcasting, D heroically managed to both secure them and register us as a disabled person and carer so we could get to the crip section of the venue. He'd been there before and I hadn't, so he really was a carer.

The most exciting thing for D was that the venue which had previously been notorious among my friends for its terrifying stair-climber to get wheelchair users up its many many stairs now has a lift/elevator! (We were able to get out much more quickly and easily than fighting through the whole crowd by going down those very stairs so I still got to see them and, yep, would not like to navigate them as a wheelchair user in any way. I was very glad I didn't have to walk up them on my dodgy ankle!)

The most exciting thing for me was that the crip area had a drinks runner! Each pair of seats had a little leaflet on it with a few accessibility basics and a menu of what we could order from the bar. co2 numbers were high enough that we wanted to keep our masks on generally but okay-ish enough that we could just about feel okay getting one drink, so we did and it was super cool. Of course I usually have a similar system that involves just sending D to the bar! But it was so nice that he didn't have to do it either. Ethan the drinks runner was quick and cheerful and graceful carrying liquids around in the dark and didn't seem at all perturbed by his job, which helped me feel good about asking him to do it for us.

I tried hard to learn the two most recent PSB albums in about a week (and a week when my phone wasn't working well at anything, including playing music, and also one where I had too many work meetings to listen to anything) and I'm glad I did because very reasonably we heard more of them than we did the three I know -- which I think got about five songs between them.

After a few songs from The Last Flight and at least one or two from Bright Magic, a familiar chord filled my ears and my heart and transported me back to 2018, seeing them at Blue Dot with my friend Bethan and then buying myself a t-shirt as a treat to myself after finishing my first year of uni. The t-shirt has "I believe in progress" written above the three versions of their increasingly-abstract logo from the first three albums -- very clearly a radio telescope at first, it because a sufficiently abstract series of lines and angles in the same shape that it could be animated as pumping water out of a mine in the video played at their gigs when the Welsh coal-mining album was new.

When I wrote about their music like this and looked like this:

So, so many things were different then.

But some of the changes really have been progress.

I've gotten Facebook ads pretty well trained (okay last week it spent a couple of days showing me ads for Armenian citizens living outside Armenia and I'm only one of those two things, but at least that's harmless enough) so I still get a lot of surveys (I did a really interesting one yesterday that I'm hoping will actually help me at work!) and I also get a lot of arts/theatre stuff: dance, museum exhibits, modern opera, a play about the history of labor rights, etc. Mostly it's either things I don't want to do (I'd love to see music performed at Manchester Cathedral, but not "Illuminated Orchestra performs the music of Hans Zimmer") or that I am half interested in but not enough to either go along or subject anyone else to.

But a couple days ago I got an ad for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Live In Concert:

the film presented on a huge HD screen, accompanied by a range of musicians and instrumentalists performing music from the film’s score and soundtrack live to picture. This will include a full orchestra, a scratch DJ on turntables, percussion and electronic instruments.

I've seen a few movies with live music before -- a Charlie Chaplin movie (Modern Times I think) at RNCM, and something at the Bridgewater Hall itself (I remember writing about this and, sure enough, but in all the metaphorical ink I spilled there I never named the goddam movie!). So I both could imagine how this might go but also couldn't, considering it's so much more modern and flamboyant a soundtrack that isn't meant to be performed along with the movie.

I half-jokingly said to our household group chat that this was a good way to get D to see some classical music. We have this running joke where he asks me if everything is Mozart (occasionally including stuff that very definitely is not, like 90s one-hit wonders) and then cackles like a goblin. He's interested in western music theory and history but has consumed these things mostly via YouTube explainers and occasionally choosing the "classical music" option on video game soundtracks (though I have supplemented the latter with "here's why I'm pretty sure this isn't Mozart even if I'm not sure what it is" and like "here's how a symphony tends to work" and stuff like that).

It's because he's been playing video game classical music again recently (with Fallout 76) that I thought to mention this event at all.

And it ended up appealing to him enough that I got tickets yesterday and we went along tonight (V needing to conserve spoons for later this month stayed home with Gary, who luckily was extremely well-behaved and easy to deal with).

I'm used to things I go to at the Bridgewater not being overly popular, but this one was! There weren't many empty seats in the house, and it was not only the first time I'd seen merch being sold there but a very long line beforehand of people wanting to buy it! It was also easily the youngest audience I've seen there, with even little-ish kids accompanying their parents and teenagers attending in pairs or groups. It was baffling but it was also great to see of course.

It was also great that even with so many people, co2 numbers were very low so we could take our masks off, a particularly helpful thing for D who has sensory issues around them. The Bridgewater is never going to be a venue we frequently attend, but knowing it's relatively safe certainly makes me more interested to pay attention to what else is happening there.

We had good seats, only two rows back on the side. The row in front of us had two wheelchair spaces and two ordinary seats (none of which happened to be used on this occasion), so we wondered if we were in a kind of unofficial crip section. The orchestra was set up so we were near the tympani and the chimes and stuff, which I was glad about because it's all the big flashy percussion that takes up a lot of space and is fun and dramatic to watch people play.

D was particularly taken with the tympani. And he said he liked being able to look over during an interesting bit of the music and see the violinists playing frantically or whatever. I think being able to put instruments and motions to the sounds we're accustomed to hearing in modern movie soundtracks is so cool and was definitely part of what I hoped he'd get out of this. We talked about the conductor too, which he noticed giving cues and things rather than just marking time; he said it was the first time he'd observed that.

And it turned out that despite my assumption that I'd seen this movie before, I absolutely had not. So, uh, this was a fun way to watch it for the first time! I did enjoy it but a whole movie starting at 7:30 with an intermission for the musicians to have a well-deserved rest meant we didn't get home until almost 11 which is way after my bedtime. It was a very fun night though, I'm so glad we got to do it.

Well, now I've seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band!

Here's the notes I made on my phone during the show.

1) And is the second song of the concert a (minor) favorite of mine that I haven't been able to track down for the playlist that I made for D to "study" from??? Yes. Yes it is. (The song is "Lonesome Day.") ["The Promised Land" is also missing despite repeated attempts to acquire the rest of that album after only half of it made it over from Andrew's hard drives, and that also annoyed me when it got played tonight!]

2) I'm so excited to hear "No Surrender" too. The song that -- when I was finally escaping the feeling we'd now call cringe about having liked him when I was a kid too young to care about taste -- was my way back in to fandom. "We learned more from a three minute record than we ever did in school."

3) I know there are orchestrated E-Street Band versions of songs from Nebraska but I'd never listened to any. Hearing "Atlantic City" now, I'm struck by how the horns and etc. evoke that carnival/boardwalk feel, which is a nice touch. Makes the lyrics even more incongruous.

4) I was not expecting to hear "Darlington County"! I am delighted to hear "Darlington County."

5) At the end of "The River" it just devolved into "ooo"s, sung at the top of his register so sounding unearthly. The melody disappeared, the song disappeared, it was just ooooo. Like it was haunting us(here "us" may be especially those afflicted by catholicism in childhood like I was and like he really was). It sounded a bit like a hymn but maybe more like a Gregorian chant: language I'll never know describing an experience I'll never come closer to having than I am by listening to this description of it.

6) Wow its so funny I never realized its just the Bo Diddley beat under "She's the One". There's so much else going on that I never noticed it!

More later, probably.

I can't remember if I even said here but D's Christmas present for me was finding out about and arranging for us to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert in Sunderland at the end of this month.

When he told me about this, it felt like a million years away but now that it's May, it's "the end of this month."

Wow.

I'm the one who's been a Springsteen fan since I was three and D has very little idea about what his music is like. So I've been saying I'd educate him, but I hadn't started yet. Finally tonight we commenced, with what I always new was going to be the first lesson: Springsteen on Broadway.

When I first saw that, I described the effect it has on me afterwards: "I cried a lot and by the end of it I felt like my soul had been wrung out, washed clean and replaced better than new."

Being solo and acoustic, Springsteen on Broadway doesn't give you a good idea of what Springsteen's songs famously sound like, but I think it should give a person a pretty good idea of what Springsteen is like and I wanted to start there.

We got two-thirds of the way through it before we wanted to call it a night, it's past my bedtime and after "Born in the U.S.A." I was feeling such heavy feelings and then he starts playing "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and I'm like oof... To translate: you're going straight from a song about the misery Vietnam veterans and their loved ones experienced in the aftermath of their time in the war, to a song about a dear friend who died and who Springsteen loves in a way that displays the most wholesome masculinity.

Yeah I need either sleep or more beer after that one-two punch. And it is a school night.

But before I left to have a pee and recycle my empty beer bottle, D wanted to show me what he'd written on Discord:

Fuck, I'm watching "Springsteen on Broadway" on Netflix, and he's just such a good storyteller. He's doing "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and telling the story of how he met Clarence Clemons, and there are tears in my eyes.

I knew basically fuck all about Springsteen before I watched this and I think I'm in love with him.

I beamed and gave him a double thumbs-up after I'd read this. I told him is the best reaction I could've hoped for. Exactly this.

I've been in love with D for what feels like a long time but I've thought I was in love with Bruce Springsteen even longer, so I'm delighted to see this connection being made.