Bartender tonight I’ve seen around since I first came to Portland, and on the one hand genuine honor and deference to him but on the other like, you’ve been a sempai the whole time but I’m 40 now and I’m here cause it’s the bar within walking distance of my house with the best burgers, what’s your excuse?
You know between the pressure tolerances of dolphins and those delicate “whisker” drones that stood in for sturdier but narratively uninteresting towed sonar arrays, the seaQuest probably had a shallower operating depth limit than modern military subs
While SeaQuest DSV is “what if the Enterprise-D was a submarine”, the 2000s Battlestar Galactica is “what if Star Trek: TNG was based on an aircraft carrier”
when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳
THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW
op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light
Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:
Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.
Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.
It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.
Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.
So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.
Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman
I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and
It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen
It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage
It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own
Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”
I’m having some emotions about it!
“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”
Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!
We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!
God I’m not okay about it
Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.
I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3
Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:
I mean, will you LOOK at this:
This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:
There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.
Love.
@executeness i just need you to know that from the moment i first saw your addition a little over a year ago, “Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world! […] In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!” has rarely left my brain.
“In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!” fundamentally rewrote something in my brain.
thank you.
The American Reagan 1980s represented a successful reactionary reconstruction and anything that originated before them but retained a presence in American culture through to the other side had been largely reinterpreted to fit; I remember in the 1990s Springsteen was understood as a tribune of the (Eastern seaboard) white working class and the tribulations they endured as industrial Keynesianism failed (and Democrats substituted Blacks for The Working Man as the beneficiaries of their efforts)
So today I set up and put finishing touches on my little backyard gym – I think carrying all those plates around (twice! I relocated it to flatter ground) triggered my postexertional effect by itself, but I could swear there was one more thing I did…
oh! In the course of things I got halfway through tidying up the garage.
You know between the pressure tolerances of dolphins and those delicate “whisker” drones that stood in for sturdier but narratively uninteresting towed sonar arrays, the seaQuest probably had a shallower operating depth limit than modern military subs
Anyway, all the testosterone-boosted mulch pitching built my back muscles to the point my borderline shirts were too tight again, fortunately as I lose weight I’m more comfortable in the merely tight ones
Americans making up the weird-ass fake name “Waldo” instead of using the real normal name “Wally” that the rest of the world uses is so strange
It’s German. The early population of America was heavily German – with no overseas colonies of their own, the German diaspora (starting before German unification, of course) spread through the Americas – the thing about Nazis expatriating to Argentina postwar was that was the most advanced Germanophone community outside the WWII combatants – but a serious ethnosuppressionist campaign around entry to WWI has obscured this ever since.
The US and South America had big expatriate populations from all the Axis countries – remember Japanese internment? Remember when Peru was led by a guy named “Fujimori”? – for the same reason they were all doing imperial expansion, which was that they had pulled themselves together as modern countries too late to claim colonies of their own and so they were experiencing huge population outflows as citizens sought opportunity elsewhere
Well, also the Nazi thing because the only European governments with the capacity to even notice what was going on in South America – Spain and Portugal – were fascist-friendly at the time, Israel spinning up the capacity to go after them from scratch was a real testament to the strength of their intelligence community, which drew on tradition and experience dating back to the spymasters of imperial Central and Eastern Europe.
MYTH: Americans set off fireworks on the 4th of July, in honor of our Independence Day
FACT: Americans set off fireworks from approximately June 20th—July 20th, for no reason other than this is the time of year that you can literally buy them at any grocery store
Well, the sting of all these neo-hipsters reviving all the things from my young adulthood I liked not registering me as a peer is softened by the way that after the personality change charisma boost they seem to register me not as a sad aging guy who shouldn’t still be at the bar but as a tribal elder (and I suspect I’m eligible for the girls to register as “daddy” now)
Like I feel like I should pivot this into some sort of “it gets better” takeaway message but no, I can’t realistically promise this to anyone else, this is ridiculous.
Americans making up the weird-ass fake name “Waldo” instead of using the real normal name “Wally” that the rest of the world uses is so strange
It’s German. The early population of America was heavily German – with no overseas colonies of their own, the German diaspora (starting before German unification, of course) spread through the Americas – the thing about Nazis expatriating to Argentina postwar was that was the most advanced Germanophone community outside the WWII combatants – but a serious ethnosuppressionist campaign around entry to WWI has obscured this ever since.
You’re saying that the name Waldo is German, and they called Wally that in the states because there are a lot of German-Americans? Huh, I had no idea.
Why not just call him Wally?
Oh, you mean the striped shirt “find him on this busy illustrated page” guy is called Wally elsewhere? I thought you were just dinging us for naming people Waldo in real life. No clue, I’m guessing there was already an American “Wally” of some sort to confuse the copyright. Also while it does exist in America, “Waldo” is rare enough that it’s more memorable than Wally.
have u ever had a psychotic break i had one a few days ago with 10 mg edible(first time cannabis/weed any kind) and 4-5 drinks, it lasted for a few hours at night after 3 hours of normal just being high. the entire next day I was high but only mildly to moderately pscyhotic, mostly functional. i threw and broke two glasses and apparently pulled out my dick and other shit
Nope, I’ve been kinda fucked up on salvia before in high school, but I mostly just kept forgetting I wasn’t a girl, and when the bipolar got misdiagnosed as depression and I was put on Lexapro in LA I was crazy disinhibited and going around grabbing strangers’ asses in bars (that was really valuable experience for coping with the early Covid-brain, really) , that’s really the most behaviorally out-of-it I’ve gotten.
Also to anyone complaining about countries devoting resources to this sub, the US maintains deep sea capabilities for reasons of state, which includes deep sea rescue capabilities mostly relating to the SLBM leg of the nuclear triad, this was a free practice scenario and like, enrichment for those guys.
Like Air Force SERE and search & rescue, a lot of this isn’t really justified in terms of per-incident return on investment, but by affecting combatants’ senses of the lethality of defeat it changes their payoff matrices in ways that minimize principal-agent problems.
Same as the Great Ghost Dance or General Butt Naked convincing warriors they had magical protection from the enemy, or Japanese, Christian, or Islamic ideas of death at war as an honor bringing afterlife rewards (with chaplains embedded with armies to reinforce the sense of protection against ultimate annihilation), or even a lot of the function of battlefield medics in an explosive age (from a government perspective a multiple amputee soldier is just as much a total loss as a dead one, and costs for ongoing care besides) – shifting some margin of your forces’ energies from self-protection to mission success is huge
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In support of this, the US Navy seems to have known that the sub was lost almost immediately after it happened. Presumably “the sound was not definitive” because they wanted an excuse for a training exercise, but the fact that they used the location of the sound to narrow the search area somewhat reveals how little they were planning on finding anyone alive.
Locating the wreck based on implosion sounds recorded by underwater acoustic sensor networks and then investigating the seafloor with submersibles is the first thing they do.
(Military submarines consist of multiple independently sealable watertight compartments, it’s possible that on sinking some might see damaged ones implode and generate noise while others remain intact and survivable)
Americans making up the weird-ass fake name “Waldo” instead of using the real normal name “Wally” that the rest of the world uses is so strange
It’s German. The early population of America was heavily German – with no overseas colonies of their own, the German diaspora (starting before German unification, of course) spread through the Americas – the thing about Nazis expatriating to Argentina postwar was that was the most advanced Germanophone community outside the WWII combatants – but a serious ethnosuppressionist campaign around entry to WWI has obscured this ever since.
The US and South America had big expatriate populations from all the Axis countries – remember Japanese internment? Remember when Peru was led by a guy named “Fujimori”? – for the same reason they were all doing imperial expansion, which was that they had pulled themselves together as modern countries too late to claim colonies of their own and so they were experiencing huge population outflows as citizens sought opportunity elsewhere
also not manic today, just caffeinated. it’s funny, the anxiety zeroing actually really degrades any value of cocaine (or alcohol!) to me cause the anxiolytic effect is worthless, but by taking away any jitter or nervousness it simultaneously makes caffeine an excellent stimulant
if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality
the lush impenetrable jungles of massachusetts
try driving through the historic part of Boston and you’ll see that this is true
New England was heavily forested, its major utility on behalf of Britain was producing wood (incl. large old-growth trees for unspliced masts) and sap-derived tar for sealing ships (also ashes for lye production!) it was essentially a EUIV Naval Supplies province.
Like, we chalk “Mongols knew how to tap and drink the blood of horses to sustain themselves in desolate terrain” up to Mongols just being a very horse-centric culture, have you ever thought about what it means that New Englanders make maple syrup by tapping and drinking the blood of trees in snowbound winter?
if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality
the lush impenetrable jungles of massachusetts
try driving through the historic part of Boston and you’ll see that this is true
New England was heavily forested, its major utility on behalf of Britain was producing wood (incl. large old-growth trees for unspliced masts) and sap-derived tar for sealing ships (also ashes for lye production!) it was essentially a EUIV Naval Supplies province.
Like, we chalk “Mongols knew how to tap and drink the blood of horses to sustain themselves in desolate terrain” up to Mongols just being a very horse-centric culture, have you ever thought about what it means that New Englanders make maple syrup by tapping and drinking the blood of trees in snowbound winter?
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