Radio nowhere

Al Filreis

The new Springsteen album is very good — Magic. We picked it up this week and listened happily — "Magic" (title cut) and "Radio Nowhere" favorites to this point. Then Irwyn Applebaum, prez and publisher of Bantam, a huge fan, treated us to good seats at the Wachovia Center Saturday night for the third date on the newest E Street Band tour. Fantastic. Here is a quick summary and analysis of the concert and a playlist. Remarkable: 17,000 out of the 19,000 in the building seemed to know all the words to the new songs (been out — what? — for two weeks) and sang them blissfully, eyes closed, hands in the air, fingers pointed upward.

Here are Irwyn's good notes on the night: What a show! One of the best I've seen. After last night, tongiht clearly all concerned were determined to shake off any remaining tentativeness of the new tour and to rip open the Philly bag of tricks to serve up a show "wit'" as they say down at Pat's Cheesesteaks. Banging right out of the gate starting with Night instead of Radio, it was clear that this was to be a shake it up and pour it out night. As in the last night of the stadium tour, there must be some Philly connection that brings Spanish Johnny to meet Puerto Rican Jane on lovers lane. Just gorgeous, epic, soaring with one of the many many fine guitar solos. One of the obvious pleasures for Bruce on this tour is getting to play electric guitar up front, something he has not really done in the last two tours. Town Called Heartbreak was back as the duet, and the arrangement has toughened up even a little more, his vocals are still carrying it, and Patty was able to rise into it a little better so that it's a good number now. The other two happy happy joy joy additions were Cadillac and Dancin' in the Dark, which replaced the singalong of Waitin on a Sunny Day in the encore. During Dancin — the medley of his hit — it struck me that even if you're hardcore, you haven't heard them perform this in four years when it ended the stadium shows and yet I'm hearing grown men sing the harmony parts that the band isn't singing on stage. It was a night to appreciate the dazzling contradictions that make the Springsteen concert experience so unique, at once loose and tight, muscular and subtle, earth-shakin', booty-shakin' — yes, indeed — but what also makes them heart-stoppin', jaw-droppin' are those many smaller moments, listening to each other's musicianship and pushing one another in match-ups like Bruce and Nils during Thundercrack, or as noted the relentless beat-of-your-heart, beat-of-your-heart duet at the end of Devil's Arcade, or Suzie's opening of Magic or Danny's organ intro and outro of Town Called Heartbreak. Not the lovely, extended mannered keyboard solos from the 80s in those marathon days, but condensed to be very effective notes of grace. They pack alot into 23 songs in a little over two hours. One is tempted to say it seems short compared to tours past, but there's almost no talk, no fat, no breaks between numbers and they fire back for the encore like there are fireants backstage, so this is concentrated Bruice Juice. May Jersey rain down such yabba-dabba-abracadabra.

The last time I'd seen Springsteen was November 1978, and here (courtesy again of Irwyn) is the playlist from that concert 29 years ago:

RAVE ON / BADLANDS / STREETS OF FIRE / SPIRIT IN THE NIGHT / DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN / FACTORY / THE PROMISED LAND / PROVE IT ALL NIGHT / RACING IN THE STREET / THUNDER ROAD / JUNGLELAND / HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL / FIRE / CANDY'S ROOM / BECAUSE THE NIGHT / POINT BLANK / NOT FADE AWAY — GLORIA — SHE'S THE ONE / BACKSTREETS / ROSALITA / BORN TO RUN / LOUIE LOUIE / DETROIT MEDLEY / QUARTER TO THREE

Note: He sang "Louie Louie"!

In the middle of performing "Rosalita" that night long ago, he said this: "Are we ready for a flight ? (cheers) ... on the piano and navigation, Professor Roy Bittan ... on the guitar and radar, Miami Steve Van Zandt ... on the drums and (?) crew, the Mighty Max ... on the bass guitar, Mr.Garry W.Tallent ... on the organ, Mr.Dan Federici ... and in the control tower ... the king of the world ... the master of disaster ... is it a bird ? ... is it a plane ? ... is it the Big Man ? ... Clarence Clemons on the saxophone ..."

Thirty years later there was Clarence, oddly a bit slimmer, drastically pigeon-toed, 60-something years old, shuffling to the center of the stage for his sax blasts which were note for note exactly what fans remembered and wanted again.

October 7, 2007

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.