Tramps Like Us

I’ll be doing a virtual event next week with Carvell Wallace, presented by Green Apple Books in San Francisco. It’s free to attend, login info is here

There should be a German word for having never wanted something, but needing it to feel good all the same. There very well might be, as the limited German I have picked up over the years has only ever allowed me to order breakfast, coffee, cigarettes, and currywürst. If there is such a word, one that is long and beautiful and littered with consonants accented by umlauts, I hope it feels good off the tongue. I hope it feels nice to watch the trailer for the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere and feel the satisfaction of a single word that describes the rythm in the heart when the credits hit the screen.

I didn’t really want this, but I kind of need it. It’s not because I don’t love Springsteen — I wrote about my love of the Boss and “Dancing In The Dark” in my book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman (subtle plug) — it’s because the work is already mysterious and important. What happens when we take a man's life and turn it into an open book test, where myths are allowed to run wild as spectacles? I love Springsteen, as many do, but I worry that the biopic industrial complex strips part of it away. I worry that, when I do see it because of course I will, it won’t feel the way I need it to. This need, this ravenous desire for validation, makes me part of the problem.

There’s a line in the trailer, where Jeremy Strong’s Jon Landau says of Springsteen — “Bruce is a repair man…what he’s doing is repairing that floor in himself, and once he’s done that, he’s going to repair the entire world.” Which sounds like Hollywood hyperbole until you remember that Landau — who worked closely with Springsteen as manager and producer from the mid-70s through to the early 90s — wrote this in The Real Paper in 1974:

“But tonight there is someone I can write of the way I used to write, without reservations of any kind. Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theatre, I saw my rock'n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”

“Every gesture, every syllable adds something to his ultimate goal — to liberate our spirit while he liberates his by baring his soul through his music. Many try, few succeed, none more than he today.”

It all works on me. The trick played by a tone-setting monologue read out over images of Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce tenderly moving through the world. Looking for something in himself. The film, based on the book of the same name that explores the much-mythologized Nebraska is that perfect kind of Bruce bait. The boss at the head of a pin, looking for a place to leap to, or maybe from. Nebraska as the moment before Born In The U.S.A. Before the world changes around Bruce and he within it. Where he would write the line “check my look in the mirror, want to change my clothes, my hair, my face” that would change my life alongside countless others. And I want to know what happens, despite knowing that when I see what story behind the curtain they want to tell will never feel as good or as real and life-changing as hearing the songs sing out from their well-worn treads on my turntable.

I want to know more because maybe there’s still some secret to learn that will make the work and the songs and the stories feel all the more real and life changing for me. I want to see this man look for answers about himself while everyone looked for their own in him. At the opening of the trailer, where he sits in a car in a lot the salesman says, “I know who you are” to Bruce, who responds in kind with affable, self-defeating charm “that makes one of us.”

I don’t know if I think Jeremy Allen White is the man for this, but maybe that’s why he is. He doesn’t really look like a young Bruce (I told someone the other day that Diego Luna would make a helluva young Boss and I stand by it.) He might not always look the part, but he feels like he’s got the spirit I want him to have. Unknown, searching for something, looking for words that feel like home. Falling in love with falling apart. Writing about the fateful end met by the Chicken Man. I want him to feel all these things because that’s how I feel when I listen to those songs and this is always going to be the problem. The need and the desire are always going to be there, somewhere in me in a room I swear is closed and locked forever.

I’ll see the movie, same as some of you, and have thoughts and feelings and deep critiques. It will never feel the way I want it to, and no matter how many times I tell myself this now, it’s still going to sit in my heart a little heavy when the day comes. Maybe that’s okay too. Maybe it’s okay for the things we need a little too badly to hurt a little too much. That’s how you know you’re alive, that’s how we get repaired.

If you want to read more about Bruce, I highly recommend checking out Caryn Rose’s work at Radio Nowhere

Reading Pile

My friend Maris Kreizman, who I did an event with at Rough Trade in NYC, has a new book coming out next month called I Want To Burn This Place Down. It’s a beautiful and incisive collection of essays that drilled right into my heart. It’s clarity of purpose in muddy waters, and I couldn’t stop reading it. Get this one.

Also in upcoming books you’re gonna need on your pile: Rax King’s upcoming Sloppy is a goddamn bombshell. It is, like Rax, wildly funny, challenging, insightful, and full of sentences I will wish I was clever enough to write until the day I die. I admire her innate ability to make the dark basements of a life come alive, and this is gonna be one I turn back to again and again.

On the table

I haven’t been listening to much lately. I’ve been a little under the weather, and tired from a lot of travelling, interviews, events, promo. The list drags into the abyss. So, I did what I would recommend anyone do who is feeling themselves held down by the weight of all things: I went to the café, made idle small talk at the counter, went for a walk to take photos of flowers in my neighbourhood and listened to this Mavis Staples of Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed”. That she finds so much soul hidden away in work that was already rich in it speaks endlessly to her talent. I don’t want to give too much away, only to say that taking a little time to listen to something beautiful and tune anything out for a few minutes was enough to make me feel alive again, even just for a moment, and there’s something to be grateful in that.

Other places

Alex Steed and I just started a Patreon for our podcast, The OC, Again (listen at all your podcast haunts), where you can support our work and also get access to our bonus feed! Find that here: https://www.patreon.com/ocagain