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

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.

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 had the radio on while I was working today, as I often do, and I found myself singing along with some version of "The Christmas Song" sung by a breathy soprano.

And I could never sing soprano but today I found my singing voice more resonant (literally buzzing in my chest!). It was easier to sing and it felt better.

(I am impatient for my voice therapy referral to get to the top of the waiting list. I haven't paid any attention to my voice or deliberately attempted anything with it.)

Maybe something about singing a song I'm familiar with made the change extra obvious?

But I love that trans thing of "this is has never happened before but it also feels familiar and normal." Same thing happened when I started getting the fuzzy little hairs on my arms and torso.

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.

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.

"Last Christmas" is the official UK Christmas number one!

(Only four decades late, but better that than ending up in second place again. I guess Sam Ryder made a good-natured joke about always coming in second but, dude, I think Wham notoriously was stymied in second place before you were born. And they didn't even get to host Eurovision the next year anyway, heh.)

After my multi-year campaign to redeem "Last Christmas," I could not be happier with this birthday present.

(But the t-shirt I got from diffrentcolours, which he picked in the brightest color available (orange) and which has a dumbbell on it and says "chonk & stronk," is my second-best birthday present.)

May this be the death of the mean-spirited, boring, arguably-queerphobic #whamageddon!

This year we got rid of "those sausage roll bastards" (as Lee Chaos called Ladbaby on the Doof last night) and "Last Christmas" being what feels like the first "proper" Christmas number one in many years fits right in with that. Because, as Lee pointed out, you never actually hear any of those Ladbaby songs played. No one likes them as songs. Their job isn't to be good songs. Finally we have a good song again, that people are demonstrably actually listening to.

Enough of this shit -- and I include both whamageddon and Ladbaby-type gimmicks in that. Things are shit enough, let's actually try and let's actually get to enjoy things.

This is, after all, a song about improving on the past!

Fuck whamageddon, let's just never speak of it again.

I hardly slept at all last night -- lethal combination of bad mental health for both me and Gary -- which left me so tired I could barely function today.

But it worked out okay.

• I had a chill easy work day, where I could do some important stuff without spending a lot of time on it.
• This meant I could get some useful stuff done this afternoon: D and I ran errands to the post office, Boots because both Gary and I needed meds (he has hay fever and can take human allergy meds as long as I get the right kind! the vet said I can get them there but they're cheaper from a pharmacy), and Martins for sandwiches for lunch.
• At Martins, we ended up talking to the staff about how people describe the cakes they want in the glass cases. One told us the proper names, the only one I remember is one's a bavarian. Gesturing at another, the other staff member told us "That gets called the square one, the custard one..." They were very genial about it. Just as we left, one told a story about a lady who's come in every week for sixteen years and every time says "I'll have two barbarians." All that time, two barbarians. I love that.
• On the way back home, we stopped at a yard sale we'd seen on the way. I went to so many yard sales with my grandma when I was little. She liked them anyway and I was excited at the kind of stuff that could be bought for a quarter. I've been thinking about her so much lately that it seemed appropriate to visit one. All the dishes and crystal looked like they could've come from her cupboards, or my mom's. It made me so happy to see that kind of stuff again.
• I was really sad about not feeling up to going to see the new Spidermovie like we'd planned (it's so rare that all three of us get to do things together) but I assured the others I was fine with them going without me and they ended up saying it would've been really difficult for me because apparently it's a really flashy/strobey movie. With my nystagmus being so bad already from the lack of sleep today, this is the last thing I needed.
• And I actually had a great time while they were out. I sat in the garden with cold drinks, I made dinner, I walked the dog and played with him, I listened to podcasts because the aforementioned nystagmus meant I couldn't read or look at my phone much.
• Janelle Monáe's new album came out today! Thanks to lovely diffrentcolours buying it and putting it on the file server, I can play it already on my phone. Even though I'd already gone to bed by that point. It sounds like bed is an appropriate place to enjoy The Age of Pleasure anyway!

Gary has settled down easily today, but my own mental health is no better disposed towards sleeping than it was last night, unfortunately. I'm so bored of spending time awake in bed. It feels so lonely.

By December first this year, when friends started posting about #Whamageddon, I was already feeling personally offended. I had shown them how to live a life beyond Whamageddon! In posts made just before midnight on Facebook which won't show them to all my friends anyway! How dare they not have seen them, agreed with them, and changed their ways by the next afternoon?!

Heh.

How did this happen to me? How did I go from not knowing about Whamageddon to not caring about it for a couple of years to being vehemently opposed by this year?

Well, some time in December 2020, I think it was strange_complex who I saw saying online that she didn't like Whamageddon. I think I remember that it made her sad, because "Last Christmas" is a nice song and she didn't like missing out on it.

This was the first time I started to wonder about this game.

Whamageddon, for those who don't know what it is, is a "game" that consists solely of people complaining on social media (or elsewhere I guess!) when a nice thing happens to them.

Okay I'm not being fair. Like I said, I've been radicalized these last couple years.

Whamageddon is an attempt not to hear Wham!'s song "Last Christmas" from the beginning of December until the end of Christmas Eve. Once you hear it (on the radio or n a store or because your friend has maliciously tricked you), you lose the game, you are sent to "Whamhalla."

( The Whamifesto gets long. )

Anyway, if you want revenge games to play, I have found two over the last couple of years: #ReverseWhammageddon where it's actually good to hear "Last Christmas," and #Bublévion because if you want a Christmas-song-avoidance game, Michael Bublé provides both a much easier and much more rewarding (it really does feel like an accomplishment to turn off the radio when one of his songs appears!) version. I got the rules of both from social media, and I will include them here.

( #ReverseWhammageddon )

( #Bublévion )

Thanks for reading.

diffrentcolours showed us the trailer for Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls a little while ago and I've been excited to see it ever since.

Much as I wish she didn't have to resort to this gimmick just to find some fat dancers (she does, because they can't get agents or representation so even when she's actively seeking them out they don't have the connections to allow themselves to be found), it is great to bathe in a show full of women, full of people who aren't white...the energy is so different. And it's not really competitive: there are as many slots as there are girls in the "house," people don't get eliminated every week.

We just watched the second episode tonight, and it has a marching band! I never did dance (wanted to, wasn't allowed), I didn't expect to relate to this show but...marching band was the best thing I did in high school. I had a great band teacher and I had such transcendent experiences marching.

I love how Lizzo gets it. She talks about how marching band is just another way to wear a uniform and get sweaty and learn choreography and all that. When I announced that I wanna play "Good as Hell" in a marching band, diffrentcolours showed me this video, which I had somehow never seen before!

Yesterday when he was giving me a lift to work in the sunshine, diffrentcolours said if it's this nice tomorrow, we could maybe go sit outside the pub that I guess is my local now. I never had in the year I'd lived here; we'd only recently ascertained that it has outdoor seating.

It was as nice today, so we did go. And, seeing the place was near-empty (two or three other people who were about to leave as we went to sit down) when we were ordering our pints, and since it was only a couple of degrees above freezing, we sat inside!

Amazing. I think my second time in a pub in the last almost-two-years. I love pubs. I was delighted to see the boring ads, look at a muted TV full of football scores, listen to a very generic playlist I never would've chosen myself. I wouldn't say I like these things, of course, but I feel good around them.

Of course with the whole place to choose from, an old Irish man sat down near us. He asked if we like music, perhaps after seeing me mouth along the words of the song that was playing ("Harvest Moon," and I was just thinking a couple nights ago about how much I detest Neil Young but I still know all the words so...).

We ended up trying to explain Lizzo to him, since I was wearing my Lizzo t-shirt. He's definitely convinced her name is Lizard despite it being in big letters on my shirt and us repeatedly telling him.

I do hope he goes and tells his 11-year-old granddaughter that he's learned about a musician named Lizard. It's just the kind of thing your grandpa should be telling you when you're eleven, I feel.