A Couple Good Things

Last week I was telling someone how few big-name movie releases this summer thrill me. I have been content to stay at home and stream middling thrillers (so many middling thriller reviews to come), but I also know that’s no way to live. I love watching the new June or July blockbuster in a packed air-conditioned theater in summer and I’m genuinely happy for people excited to see the new “Superman” in packed air-conditioned theaters. And though once I might have been excited for it too, the truth is, the superhero movie boom wore me out and I have yet to recover. (Besides, Superman peaked for me when Parker Posey was stomping around Lex Luthor’s pad.) When Zaslav the Great promotes his 10-year plan and when people who have seen this new movie say it spends ample time setting up more movies, I feel pre-exhausted, already tuning it out. It’s always just the beginning when I’m begging for someone, anyone to simply stick the landing in a cool two hours and ten minutes and then move on to something else. So, yes, I know, Grumpy Gus over here. But. Not more than 24 hours after I was telling someone how few big-name releases this summer thrill me, I learned that a new Kathryn Bigelow joint is on the way. 

How I originally missed the news, I don’t know, but almost a month ago it was announced that in October, Bigelow’s “House of Dynamite” will debut in theaters before streaming on Netflix in October. The logline: “When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond. As the kidz say, SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! While you’re over there discussing how David Corenswet compares to Christopher Reeve, I’ll be over here imagining Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson deliberating about a missile strike. That would have been all I needed to get me through three more months of this brutal summer and yet, on the same day I learned about “House of Dynamite,” Deadline reported that Hailee Steinfeld and Miles Teller are set to star in a romantic comedy called “Winter Games.” Deadline explains: “Set in the high-stakes arena of the Winter Olympics, the film follows a perpetually overlooked skier (Steinfeld) and a self-sabotaging hockey legend (Teller) who collide at their breaking points. Their unexpected connection threatens her chance for a medal and his shot at a comeback as they navigate romance and redemption in the Olympic Village.” As the kidz say, INJECT IT INTO MY VEINS!

I proposed an Olympic Village movie almost a decade ago, and though my pitch was a package deal with Richard Linklater attached to make it a “Dazed and Confused,” Everybody Wants Some!!”-ish comedy, I’ll happily take the counteroffer. I’ll be there opening day with my Milano Cortina 2026 t-shirt. We just have to hope it’s not merely set-up for a standalone sequel called Summer Games in which Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell play, respectively, inevitably, a beach volleyballer and a water polo player. In fact, forget I ever said that.

Monday's French 75: A Week’s Vacation (1980)

Laurence (Nathalie Baye) is being ferried to her job as a secondary school teacher in Lyon, France by her boyfriend Pierre (Gérard Lanvin) when, suddenly stricken, unable to face another day, she jumps out of the car and leaves him idling to walk along the river. There are specific reasons for this emotional disintegration, hinted at before and explicated afterwards, like the increasing apathy of kids toward education, the doubt that she can inspire them to learn, and the little pay she receives for trying to inspire them in the first place (as Pierre points out, only stupid jobs pay well). But there is also something universal in this desire to flee another working day. Who among us hasn’t wanted to pull our car onto the shoulder of the South Mountain Freeway in Phoenix one hot summer morning, and go start a new life, or pull the emergency lever on the CTA in Chicago one grey fall afternoon, climb out the window, and go sit and stare at Lake Michigan for a few hours? It was one of many moments watching Bertrand Tavernier’s 1980 comedy-drama hybrid (on the Criterion Channel though, alas, it has since stopped streaming) where I said to aloud to myself, “Is this my new favorite movie?”

Another moment when I suspected “A Week’s Vacation” might be my new favorite movie was when Laurence’s doctor doesn’t tell her to grin and bear it nor refer her to a psychologist but simply prescribed, like, you know, a week of vacation. I mean to a jaded American, don’t that just beat all? Ordering someone to go on holiday? Indeed, there is a surprising lightness to “A Week’s Vacation,” evoked in Laurence’s frequent laughter and smiles (and underlined in Baye’s effortless, virtually unnoticeable performance), and in so much immaculate French texture, all of which counterbalances her anguish. And yet, even if its episodic nature, of hangs with friends, a visit to her parents in the country, new acquaintances and unexpected encounters, seems readymade for a journey of self-discovery, the existential underpinnings quietly suggest something else. “A Week’s Vacation” is a slightly more French version of that old Onion article Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results.

Early on, Laurence notices an older woman through her window in an apartment across the way, one she does not know, has never seen, but occasionally glimpses throughout her week vacation, putting her in mind of being a ghost in her own life. And in so many long walks along the river, and in so many dreamy sits on benches where she watches the world go by, and in so many conversations where she proves as content to listen to others expound as expound herself, that’s often what she becomes throughout her mandatory seven-day respite. By movie’s end, the woman through the window is gone, why, where, who knows? It’s not a problem to be solved, and perhaps life might not a problem to be solved, just something to be passed through on the way to whatever may or may not be next.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Jaws (1975)

“Jaws” was a brewing disaster turned phenomenon turned touchstone. Released June 1, 1975, Steven Spielberg’s horror-thriller hybrid based on Peter Benchley’s novel about a great white terrorizing a fictional New England island was a smashing success that recalibrated the summer movie season as fertile ground for the movie industry and in the ensuing years has either been credited with or blamed for, or both, ushering in the era of the Hollywood blockbuster. Its famously troubled production, meanwhile, besot by a malfunctioning mechanical shark, causing cost overruns and shooting delays, became the mother of all necessity is the mother of invention stories. Given all that, 50 years later, it can be hard to see the movie for the movie itself. But in rewatching “Jaws” beginning to end for the first time in, I honestly don’t know, years, maybe decades, that’s what I was looking for, the movie. And what I found was one that for all its immense, over-scrutinized knowns still retains the ability to surprise.

There’s that scene when spunky oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and even-keeled Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) are cutting open the shark that isn’t the shark, which we know because Hooper finds a Louisiana license plate in its stomach. I LLOLd (literally laughed out loud); I had honestly forgotten about the license plate. And I had honestly forgotten that the first time we see the shark is not during the seafaring showdown at the end but much earlier, when the young boy Alex Kintner is killed by the villainous great white and suddenly, we see the shark rolling over in full view of the camera floating just above. This shot is fascinating! It feels so off-kilter, utterly unexpected, as if a stagehand started drawing the curtain open too soon and quickly closed it again, there, then gone, like you weren’t quite sure you saw it, which is probably why people like me literally forget they ever did.

That’s a moment made as much by the editing as anything, the decision to give us this glimpse. And it goes to show why the Oscar-winning work of editor Verna Fields was as crucial to the success of “Jaws” as the also Oscar-winning score of John Williams. Spielberg’s expert blocking within roaming long takes helps imbue a sense of community and establish character, but what really lingered with me was how he placed his camera behind objects and how Fields judiciously pieced those shots together to instill unease between beachgoers as so much oblivious shark bait in contrast to the ominous waters that lie just beyond. These images are unlikely echoes of the one in which Brody and Hooper stand with Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) in front of the looming Amity Island billboard, tourism dwarfing them all, Spielberg’s sun-dappled version of “Blade Runner.”

Indeed, let’s talk for a minute about Mayor Vaughn, and the elected head of Amity’s sport jacket with the patterned anchors (Robert Ellsworth, Costume Designer), and how that in-your-face, disingenuous sort of branding by clothing evokes the current American Secretary of Defense. Too much? Did you not want to hear about politics – egads – in this post about an enjoyable summer movie? Hey, where were you five years ago during the COVID summer of 2020 when Mayor Vaughn leaving the beaches open despite people, some his constituents, being eaten by a shark became the obvious and apropos allegory for an America that insisted the Almighty Economy comes first. And that’s the thing. The way Mayor Vaughn is presented and played, he’s not merely a movie villain moving the plot forward, he’s a satirical embodiment of ruthless capitalism, of what happens when you exclusively see humans as consumers. Viewing it through that 2020 lens, frankly, it hardly feels like exaggeration, though that’s not why the satire ultimately peters out. Spielberg seems to be building toward a knockout punch, but sort of like his version of “War of the Worlds” 30 years later, in the end, he can’t help but pull it.

The last time we see Mayor Vaughn, he is muttering to himself, and I wonder how “Jaws” might have felt had it ended there, like Mayor Vaughn is Jack Nicholson muttering to himself at the end of “The Pledge,” the game-changing 1970s blockbuster reconfigured as “Chinatown.” Ah well. “Jaws” concludes as such a movie must, with some dudes – Brody and Hooper and the vengeance-minded Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) – getting in a boat and going out to sea to kill the shark. This exceptionally well-done extended sequence has some existential notes, but it’s more adventurous in spirit than I recalled, the famously suspenseful Williams score sometimes giving way to an almost rousing swashbuckler sensation. Quint might die, but Brody and Hooper jerry-rig a solution to get their prey, delivering a few pithy lines to top it all off, in a circular sort of way turning the shark into a metaphor of the movie and its makers, despite all the odds finding a way to succeed. 

In Memoriam: Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen had already been on the Hollywood scene for a decade when he figuratively burst onto it in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992’s indie cult classic “Reservoir Dogs” as Mr. Blonde, one of several code-named crooks in a jewelry heist gone wrong. In his most memorable scene, Mr. Blonde gruesomely tortures a cop with a straight razor while Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” plays in the background. It would have been a great moment for any actor, but Madsen made it indelible. He shimmies to that 70s hit, dancing like no one’s watching except for the guy whose ear he’s about to slice off, as nonchalantly as he slurps a fast-food shake, a magnetic psychopath, doing as much as anyone to establish Tarantino’s career of straddling the line between sadism and swagger.

In his obituary for Madsen, who died on July 3rd at 67 from cardiac arrest, Glenn Kenny compared him to Lee Marvin while Peter Sobczynski suggested Robert Mitchum and Alex Williams of The New York Times analogized his air as “a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone.” Yet, even if Madsen was born in Chicago rather than the Deep South, in his unmistakable cool, pompadour, and 6'0" height, I always thought of him as having something like the career the 6'0", pompadoured, unmistakably cool Elvis Presley would have wanted had he not been eternally typecast by Col. Tom Parker. Then again, despite successfully playing something other than villains both before and after “Reservoir Dogs,” in “Thelma & Louise” and “Free Willy,” Madsen wound up typecast too. “I’ve made 145 films,” he told The Malibu Times in 2009, “and the only film that anyone ever really wants to talk about is ‘Reservoir Dogs.’” Many of those 145 films, and he wound up making far more than even that, are ones you’ve never heard of, that I’ve never heard of, that he was barely in. “Some of them I’m only in for 10 minutes,” he would tell The Independent in 2016, “but they bought my name, and they bought my face to put on the DVD box with a gun.” That’s an evocatively grim diagnosis of the industry beyond the searchlights.

Despite a brief apprenticeship with John Malkovich at Steppenwolf Theatre, Madsen was a movie actor, not a stage actor, by which I mean he had a sense of presence, of how to exist on camera, of how to maximize the camera’s effect. The problem with such a style is that you tend to need a director who knows what they’re doing and when you’re trapped in direct-to-DVD dreck, you usually don’t. But it’s why he and Tarantino made such a formidable team. And if Q.T. harnessed Madsen’s cool in “Reservoir Dogs,” he turned that cool on its head a dozen years later in “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” when he deployed the actor as Budd, one-time assassin turned hard up strip club bouncer. The moment when one of the dancers, Rocket, orders Budd to clean up an overflowing toilet could have been cheap comedy, but Madsen renders it truly heartbreaking: “Ok, Rocket,” he says in the voice of a man who knows where he stands on the ladder of life, “I’ll clean it up.” You understand why Uma Thurman’s Bride might underestimate him.

Madsen was always good with Tarantino, but he might never have been better than he was in Mike Newell’s 1997 mob drama “Donnie Brasco.” He was second banana to Al Pacino and Johnny Depp – indeed, in 2004 Madsen told The Guardian that those two “got all the money” – but his role as Sonny Black was crucial. In her original NYT review, Janet Maslin compliments Madsen’s turn but, tellingly, limits that praise to one parenthetical – “(just right as an imposing new boss)” – in a way that I can only assume would have caused Madsen a wistful laugh. And though Madsen is imposing, he makes Sonny Black so much more, existing somewhere between Mr. Blonde and Budd, not the littlest fish by any means but also not the biggest fish, bitterly convinced he deserves more. Sonny Black probably didn’t, but onscreen, Michael Madsen did.

The Phoenician Scheme

By the standards of his previous two films, “Asteroid City” and “The French Dispatch,” in which modes of storytelling were the story, narrative layers stacked on top of one another, Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” is straightforward. It’s one more workout of his pet theme, estranged fathers and sons, though this time the estranged son is an estranged daughter. That estranged daughter has spent most of her life in a convent, meaning that Anderson is truly wrestling with faith for the first time since his extraordinary “Moonrise Kingdom” in 2012. In that movie, Anderson reworked the Genesis flood narrative whereas in this one, he draws more from the four gospels and what’s-his-face driving the moneychangers out of the temple. Such themes are eternal, yet despite taking place in the 1950s and in an imaginary nation, reality pervades “The Phoenician Scheme.” Not just in the exultant Stanford ringer tee and Pepperdine sweatshirt that characters played respectively by Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks sport to play a Wes Anderson version of Bird and Jordan’s game of horse so many springtimes ago, but in how Anderson enacts this titular plan of action to weigh belief in something divine with the art of the deal.

Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is a cutthroat business tycoon. He’s so cutthroat, in fact, that he has suffered multiple assassination attempts, including another one as “The Phoenician Scheme” opens when his private plane is sabotaged, leading him to storm the cockpit, eject the pilot from his seat, and take the controls. It’s classic Wes Anderson: a comically deadpan visual revealing a deeper sense of character, a man of impressive self-regard who prefers to go it alone. He sees himself as a king, conveyed in the images from above in which he relaxes in a tub while being waited on hand and foot, and will extract anyone or anything for everything, by violence, if necessary, underlined in the hand grenades he carries everywhere and hands out like party favors. And all of it is wrapped up in a Del Toro’s surprisingly levelheaded demeanor; this is just the way world works.

Ah, but his latest assassination attempt triggers a near-death experience, seen in black and white images of the apparent pearly gates, kind of the Andersonian version of “Defending Your Life” (one guess who plays God) and prompting Zsa-Zsa to summon his only daughter, Liesel (Mia Threapleton), to install her as his business successor. On the verge of taking her vows, she agrees to a probationary period in by tagging along with dad on his location-hopping journey to rally investors for a gargantuan infrastructure project in fictional Phoenicia. The details might be so byzantine that Anderson charts them onscreen for our benefit, but they are also beside the point. As Zsa-zsa is gradually made to see the error of his ways, the convoluted Phoenician scheme proves merely an elaborately droll manifestation of the age-old observation of cowed dastardly men everywhere: as the father of a daughter.

Zsa-zsa and Liesel are joined in this journey by Bjorn (Michael Cera), a Norwegian entomologist first enlisted as their tutor but then morphing into something more like an administrative assistant before morphing again, improbably giving Cera the chance to play, in a manner of speaking, Timothée Chalamet. Indeed, while the character might seem just along for the ride to grant Cera entry into the Wes Anderson Players, he is so much more. He’s not who he says is, as he says, but also exactly who he says he is, as he also says, reflecting the emergent dimension of his travel companions and underlining how all the supporting characters, in one way or another, are there specifically to help spotlight the main ones.

Costumed severely to start, without a word Liesel begins applying lipstick and wearing colorful tights, embracing rather than rejecting the material world. At the same time, Liesel argues for her father’s rejection of that very world’s scruples, conveyed in Anderson’s preferred flattened dialogue, turning every conversation into a kind of negotiation of ethics and morals as the epic convolutions of the business deal are neatly contrasted against Liesel’s plain-spoken explanation of faith. When Zsa-zsa asks if the Bible condemns slavery, Liesel replies that she does, a remarkable line-drawing bit of dialogue that rejects using Scripture as a get out jail free card. I’m pretty sure that’s not twee. And near the end, when Zsa-zsa’s plane has gone from going virtually unpopulated to chock full, it’s another one of those visual jokes communicating a heartless man who has, in his own way, in his own time, opened his up, at least a little.

If “The Phoenician Scheme” is a spiritual movie, in the end, it proves a transcendental one too. It might not meet all the criteria of the transcendental style, not as Paul Schrader defined it anyway, not least because Anderson’s camera movement remains maximal, not minimal, even in the concluding scene. That concluding scene, though, which I won’t give away, feels like the end point of the transcendental blueprint, nonetheless, taking the film’s ornate world, building to a moment where it throws that world in flux, and then coming out the other side with something so intimate and quiet that it feels holy.

State of the Union: Meet Me in a Land of Hope and Dreams

On record, Bruce Springsteen’s “Prove it All Night” was just a dude making a raw paean to the girl he loves. On the 1978 tour for the accompanying record, his introductory rap and stinging wind-up guitar solo turned it into a song of nigh religious fervor for the hard, endless work that goes into living. On the Reunion Tour of 1999-2000, it morphed again into a statement of forward-looking purpose: The E Street Band was back, and they were going to prove it all night. If reunion tours are typically cheap nostalgia, a craven payday, or lack of a better idea, this one felt different. Indeed, Springsteen closed most of those reunion shows with a new song, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” borrowing from Woody Guthrie and deploying the might of his backing band to imagine something like Walt Whitman’s America in the form of a heartland rocker. There was fear and uncertainty in the air at the turn of the century, and I always found it fascinating that Springsteen, no stranger to fatalism, shrugged off apocalyptic anxiety to envision utopia. I saw the last show of the Reunion Tour, July 1, 2000, with my friend Rory, and when we left Madison Square Garden that night, I almost felt like I could see it too.   

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Content on his first few records to reconsecrate rock and roll and broader American myths, Springsteen transitioned on his next couple to sharply puncturing them. But it wasn’t until the 80s that his music became truly political even if his politics often still felt like work in progress. In a 1984 interview with Kurt Loder for Rolling Stone, Springsteen confessed to being a registered voter but not registered for one party or the other even if subsequent scattered thoughts on his belief system undoubtedly put him to the left. It reminds me of my own brief dalliance with being a registered independent, which was mere self-righteousness at staying out of the fray. But, of course, that’s where politics resides, like it or not, in the fray. And when President Reagan tried to co-opt Bruce’s masterpiece “Born in the U.S.A.” with his inane reading of it, Springsteen spoke up and hit back, and when Oliver North accomplice Fawn Hall asked the Boss if she and beau Rob Lowe could visit him backstage at a concert, he told her to take a hike. Innately, he knew the difference between right and wrong. 

Gradually, his politics became more precise and pronounced. He partnered with and made substantial donations to anti-hunger and veteran organizations. On his post-E Street Band acoustic record “Ghost of Tom Joad,” he dared to empathize with the plight of immigrants, nay, illegal immigrants. In 2006, Springsteen and his Seeger Sessions Band turned the fun, frivolous Late Night with Conan O’Brien into a platform to protest the endless war into which we were lied. In-between, at the end of the Reunion Tour, Springsteen debuted a new song, “American Skin (41 Shots)” culled from the real-life story of unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo being killed by four NYPD officers in early 1999. Even-handed and startlingly humane (and sadly, still as relevant in its righteous fury as ever), it also put him “at odds,” as the rock critic Steven Hyden would write, “with segments of his audience.” Like the Police Benevolent Association of the city of New York and Fraternal Order of Police, both of which excoriated the Boss in no uncertain terms. Still, each night for the 10-day NYC stand, Springsteen took the stage at MSG and played “American Skin.” (He also appeared in a 2021 Super Bowl spot for Jeep making a plea for America to meet in the middle that in its marriage of centrism and commercialism felt like the moving picture form of his podcast series with President Obama. Nobody’s perfect.)

 

In playing “American Skin,” Springsteen was content to let the music speak for itself. And maybe that’s the way it should be with music, with movies, with plays, with art, even if that art is going to be misinterpreted, whether by the head of the federal government, or a ballpark DJ on the 4th of July. But maybe, sometimes, in extreme cases, at extreme moments, letting the music speak for you just won’t do. And so, at a concert in Manchester, England in May of this year, Bruce Springsteen said this:

“Now, there’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers, they’re rolling back historic Civil Rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society, they’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”

 

In the video, you can see Springsteen is not reading a teleprompter. He even begins by sitting on the edge of the stage, as if inviting the audience in closer. It underscores how he takes what has been transpiring personally. These are his words. And he says them with an exact cadence because he wants to get them just right because he understands their weight. But it’s more than just the exactness; it’s the repetition; it’s the phrase “this is happening now” repeated three times, the last one with great emphasis.

Present-day America is one that collectively decided over one million dead from COVID-19 wasn’t that bad and just moved on. Present-day America is one that collectively decided January 6th and a sitting President (and appreciable buffoon) seeking to overturn a free and fair election wasn’t that bad and voted him back into office. “I have this creeping feeling,” the esteemed Charles Pierce wrote last October when it was starting to become clear America was steering itself right into the iceberg, “that reality is no longer enough.” It feels as if we are on the other side of something, what, I don’t know. History will have to make sense of it. And because I won’t be here when that happens, I find it deeply important to take the time to impress upon myself the truth of what it feels like to be here right now. 

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Springsteen’s monologue functioned as the intro to a performance of “My City of Ruins.” He originally wrote the gospel-influenced ballad in 2000 about the decay and decline of his adopted hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey, imploring it to rise and rebuild. After 9/11, however, when he was called upon to open the America: Tribute to the Heroes telethon 10 days later, he played “My City of Ruins,” forever altering its meaning and linking it to New York and Washington and the deadliest terror attack in American history. By playing it here, now, and providing that foreword, he was effectively altering its meaning again. “Make no mistake about it,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in the wake of September 11th with eerie prescience. “We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”

That mysterious Enemy has morphed in the last 25 years. The President now calls it The Enemy Within, a phrase copped from Senator Joseph McCarthy during a dark period of American history that you might have thought this country wasn’t stupid enough to repeat. And that phrase was just a variation on the phrase Enemy of the people, one put to significant use by the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. And Stalin instituted loyalty tests of government workers, transformed art and culture into an extension of his cult of personality, sicced troops on his own people, suppressed free speech and academic freedom, and rewrote history. That all sounds like what is happening in America right now. A day before an American ballerina was brought home from Russia after being falsely accused of high treason, the President accused former government officials of treason for not signing off on his lie that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. My God, even George W. Bush defended the erstwhile Dixie Chicks’ right to speak their mind in 2003. When Springsteen spoke his, on the other hand, the current President offered a harebrained variation on that classic juvenile taunt If You Don’t Like It, You Can Leave and blustered about investigating him on some dubious charge extracted from the pudding where his brain should be. Springsteen answered by releasing an EP from his Manchester show including the speeches so everybody could hear. 

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All these reinventions of his own work underline what the esteemed Greil Marcus wrote about the Reunion Tour in 1999, noting that what set Springsteen apart from his peers was that “(he could) still fail.” In other words, Springsteen might have been frequently performing his greatest hits, but he and The E Street Band were not a greatest hits act. He was not checking songs off the setlist to satisfy fans so much as he was seeking an active connection with fans by making these songs live and breathe again, or to live and breathe in whole new way. Some were bound to fail measured against those that did not. “In a decade,” Marcus wrote, “the songs you cherish most today may be discredited by the person singing them.” And though Mr. Marcus and I probably disagreed on where Springsteen failed, and how often, I understand what he meant. “Born to Run” sung by a 50-year-old Springsteen, and a sixty-something Springsteen too (the last time I saw him live), discredits “Born to Run” sung by twenty-something Springsteen.

“Land of Hopes and Dreams,” on the other hand, was one only 50-year-old Springsteen could have sung. A song of such blunt optimism required his weathered voice, one that had endured hard times both personally and professionally, that had long since lost its innocence, paraphrasing the Boss himself, but maintained its idealism. And though it might stand to reason that the voice of 75-year-old Springsteen looking back at the last quarter-century of American life between his Reunion Tour and now, some steps up, so many steps back, would discredit it, as his Manchester performance of the song goes to show, it doesn’t. Granted, this is a different version than 25 years ago. Max Weinberg’s beat isn’t quite as big, less heartland rock, more rock and roll spiritual, inviting additional horns and voices and interpolating Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” at the end in a way that feels profound. In fact, Springsteen contradicts his own opening lyric, “Grab your ticket” giving way to “You don’t need no ticket,” as if imagining a future where his mythical train will melt all borders. And he still makes you believe that once this storm passes, the land of hope and dreams will be waiting at the end of the long, long arc of moral justice.

Sweet Home Chicago

Like any kid growing up in the late 80s, ABC’s TGIF anchor “Perfect Strangers” was appointment television. It was filmed in Burbank, but it was set in Chicago, just as “Friends” was filmed in Burbank but set in New York. The latter’s establishing shots skewed conventional, but I enjoyed them, especially when it would start wide and then zoom in on its Greenwich Village apartment building exterior. I liked imagining it that way, all these friends and their antics occurring amid so much NYC hustle and bustle just as I liked imagining unlikely cousins Larry Appleton and Balki Bartokomous getting up to their ample hijinks in real live Chicago. Indeed, the “Perfect Strangers” opening credit sequence employed actual Windy City locations, like Larry buying a newspaper (buying a what?) on Washington Street just outside the Cultural Center, and both he and Balki exiting the Red Line underground station on State Street across from the Chicago Theatre. When I moved to Chicago and eventually found a job, it was on Michigan Avenue, right around the corner from the Cultural Center, and on mornings when the Brown Line was moving slow and I’d change to the Red, if I remembered, and even though it made little sense because it was on the wrong side of the street for where I needed to get, I would use the same exit as Larry and Balki, imagining myself tuxedoed as I did. Here I was, that same clueless kid watching “Perfect Strangers” all those years ago, in Chicago, standing tall on the wings of my dreams. 

I moved to Chicago 20 years ago this June, a few years after retreating to Iowa when my Phoenix move didn’t take but still knowing I wanted life in a big city. I had a couple friends in Chicago who offered to let me sleep on their (broken) couch while I got myself settled in the couple months before a three-bedroom apartment would become available atop their current place. I arrived on a Saturday afternoon and strolled right into the backyard where my pals and a host of others that would also become my pals were drinking beer and playing Bocce Ball. Looking back on it, I was essentially walking right into a new community. I lived for a long time in a classic Chicago three-flat where everybody knew each other, a co-star in my own “Perfect Strangers”-ish sitcom, just one with a wood-paneled old man bar down the alley. I watched the 2006 NFC Championship Game there when the Bears made the Super Bowl, eating the cocktail wieners from a crockpot provided by a regular, listening to The Blue Brothers’ “Sweet Home Chicago” when another regular played it on the jukebox at game’s end. It was snowing outside and despite the dim lighting inside, the whole place seemed to glow like Valhalla. I remember thinking something like, “If ten-year-old Nick watching a Bears game in the basement could see me now.”  

Almost instantly, I knew moving here had been the right choice. That only made it more ironic when at the end of 2005, my health nosedived. It was strange, being so emotionally happy but so physically miserable, and though 2006 was one of the worst years of my life, I survived it because it was also one of the best. And once I got my health under control in the twenty-tens, that’s when all the pieces of me finally began to coalesce and settle into place in a way that I didn’t even realize was possible until it happened. That correlated to meeting My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, the two best decisions I have made in a life that has been jam-packed with dumb ones dovetailing. In 2012, when Tift Merritt, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, was promoting her album “Traveling Alone,” she told NPR that she had to realize you don’t just arrive in a place where things make sense; “you have to build that place for yourself.” And though I think she’s right, I also know that I might never have built my own place if I didn’t come to Chicago. 

Sydney’s first apartment in Chicago on The Bear that may or may not have also been my first apartment in Chicago.

When I originally moved here, I really only had one goal, and it wasn’t to find a job, though I grudgingly did, but to see as much live music as possible. After all, I came from a middling music scene to one of the best in the world, as evinced by the Chicago Reader concert lists I would pore over each week. Boy, did I. For my first few years in Chicago, I was seeing a show once a month, and some months I was seeing two or three. Though this might have exacerbated my seeming hearing loss, I have no regrets. It was a glorious time. I saw so many singer/songwriters and bands I had longed to see, like Tift Merritt, as a matter of fact, and Kathleen Edwards, and Rilo Kiley, and I saw so many more that I did not even know until I saw them, like Adrienne Young, and The Avett Brothers (who were opening for someone else), and Ra Ra Riot, back in the aughts when onstage they were an explosion of youthful joy until they got older, alas, and became something calmer and comfortable (and boring). As Lisa Bonet wistfully observed in the Chicago movie classic “High Fidelity,” “Ah, and so it is.”

The first show I saw as a Chicagoan was the blues and roots-inflected rocker Shannon McNally at Schubas Tavern, a place I would come to know as well as the Music Box Theatre or the Landmark Century Cinema. Back then, Schubas got all the shows that Lincoln Hall or Thalia Hall would get now, and Schubas was only a couple train stops away. It was only some years later that I realized McNally had cut a live album of that concert called “North American Ghost Music.”

 

Well, there you go. That’s Shannon McNally, alright, standing in the middle of the empty Schubas floor. That table up there along the right wall in front of the stage is where I posted up with my friend Daryl right in front of the dude playing pedal steel. McNally appears to be wearing the bootcut jeans that my mind remembered her wearing, because those were trendy in those days, and then weren’t, and now are again, and I have lived here long enough to see that glittering view of the Chicago skyline from the Brown Line when it curves around from North Avenue toward Sedgwick become obscured by tree growth in the spring and summer, and the wood-paneled old man bar rehabbed into a cooler young person’s bar (and it’s always been burning since the world’s been turning). And that song, “Pale Moon,” that’s the one I remember most, the sort of live music moment where all of a sudden you seem to ineffably leave your body. I have seen so many great shows in Chicago, and I saw more shows in that three-year span of 2005-07 then I think I can even remember, and even the ones I do remember, well, they’re gone, ephemeral, as is generally intended with live music. But what a fortunate cosmic coincidence to have my inaugural show in the city that changed my life documented for the historical record.