Continuing my current obsession with Blu-ray concerts, a new disc arrived today:  A Musicares Tribute to Bruce Springsteen.  About 25 musicians covering Bruce’s songs.

The photo shows Emmylou Harris singing one of my favourites: My Hometown.  Here are some of the lines:

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows
And vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody
Wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill
Across the railroad tracks
Foreman says “These jobs are going, boys
And they ain’t coming back
To your hometown”

I haven’t seen the Blu-ray yet, but one article talked about Bruce being on the edge of tears as Emmylou sang.

How marvelous to have your work appreciated.  Your passion, your commitment to humanity.  Bruce, and all of us, deserve life’s blessings.

I was sitting here reading the liner notes of the Blu-ray, and I came upon this:

Many people to thank.  I began reading the names.

And then I stopped.  I got what I was doing – looking for people I recognized, and ignoring the rest.  I’d heard the name “Jon Landau”.  He’s a record producer.  But the next human being?  “Marilyn Laverty” is a mystery.  And all the way down to “Cindy Zaplachinski”.  Unknown to me … and subtly dismissed in favour of fame.

How sad.  Marilyn and Cindy deserve my respect and love as much as Jon.

It’s time to wake up some more, Bruce.

***

Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Kerr

Marilyn Laverty

Cindy Zaplachinski

Us

I’m a strange duck.  Maybe we all are.  I often get caught in defining something as important, and then obsessing about having that thing.

For example, a sharp screen resolution on my TV.  I yearn to see the details of things, especially faces.  Last week I bought a Blu-ray player and a few discs.

One of my three favourite movies is Whale Rider, the story of a young Maori girl becoming a leader in her village.  I put the disc in the player last night and … Wow!  1080p clarity.  Faces.  The intricacies of carved wood.  And therefore my happiness.  I vote for better.  720p or 480p is definitely worse.

Or so says my mind. 

I make up stuff about good and bad.  I suppose you do too.  Things that I say are true. 

Back in Canada I used to own a great music video on DVD – Bruce Springsteen Live In Barcelona.  In an ecstasy of letting go, I gave it away.

Last week I bought it again.  My memory is that the screen resolution of the Bruce concert was poor – maybe 480p.  And then there was last night …

My new Blu-ray player can boost the sharpness of an old DVD, or so says the advertising.  I slipped Barcelona into the disc tray.  And there was Bruce and the E Street Band in 720p at least.  My mouth dropped open.  No, it wasn’t the quality of a Blu-ray disc … but it was better!

For the last three years, my only contact with the Springsteen DVD was a song from the concert that I found on YouTube – Badlands, which is one of my favourites.  The audience goes crazy … many of them jumping up and down, their hands high.

But last night I watched the flow of the concert: the fast songs, the slow ones, the bouncing people, the chanting people, the people lulled by ballads such as Empty Sky.

It was … better.  One song alone, without the context, is worse.

And so flows my life.  Most likely my betters and worses aren’t yours.  You have others.

So be it

When I realized that I had destroyed my turquoise water bottle with bleach, I went searching on the Internet for a new one.

The Contigo brand is very cool, and I wanted to stay loyal to the company.  What came up on Amazon was not the 1 litre size I had, but 1.2 litres.  With appropriate obsession, I found the dimensions of the bottle, including the width of the base – 10 centimetres.

And then the mind unravelled …

Will this bottle fit in the cup holder on the elliptical cardio machine?

Will this bottle fit in the smaller cup holders on the strength training machines?

Will it fit under the spout of the flavoured water dispenser in the gym?

So my brow furrowed and my skewed research began.

I hoped to find the image of a tape measure on my phone so I could guess the width of the cup holder in the photo.  All I found were apps that took pictures of things.  Then I Googled “dimensions of an S25 Samsung phone”.  Thus fortified, I went over to a strength training cup holder and held my phone over the opening.  Then on to the cup holder of the elliptical.

Conclusions:

1. If I buy this lovely-looking blue water bottle, it’ll fit in the elliptical cup holder.

2.  If I buy this lovely-looking blue water bottle, it probably won’t fit in the strength machine cup holder.

3.  I really like the blue!

Feeling the angst of an expenditure that may or may not produce success, I bought the bottle.

It arrived the next day.  I took it to the gym and walked towards the elliptical.  I stood meditatively in front of the cup holder.  I sighed.  I moved my hand forward … and the bottle slipped into the hole.  Yes!

On to a strength training machine.  I stood meditatively in front of the cup holder.  I sighed.  I moved my hand forward … and the base of the bottle was too big for the hole.  (Oi!)

And then to the flavoured water dispenser.  I slid the bottle forward.  It banged into the spout of the machine.  Not enough room.

So … I worked out on the strength training machines, placing the bottle on the floor each time.  The blue shone so nicely!

I later discovered that if I tilted the bottle a wee bit at the water dispenser, and then straightened it, there was just enough room for it to sit straight under the spout.  Yay!

I asked Kimberly, a gym staff member, to walk around with me as I re-created my bottle adventures.  She even seemed interested!

See the photo?  As I bemoaned the bloated base of my bottle, she pointed at something.  “What’s that beside the cup holder?”  I looked.  And lo and behold, there was a … hook.  “No need for the floor.”

***

Another humbling of Bruce

And the blue is so pretty!

Who was it that wrote about multiple intelligences?  I can’t remember.  Her or his point was that there are many areas of life where we can be smart, and other areas where we’re far from it.

I think I have interpersonal intelligence.  I connect easily with people and am often successful in drawing out their soul, what’s important to them.

I believe I also have musical intelligence, feeling and expressing the subtle flavours of a song sung or a cello piece played.  And often touching the audience … again drawing forth the best from many of them.

Now it’s time for a “but” …

I love my water bottle.  It’s beautifully turquoise.  And it works great in the gym for cardio and strength training.

Recently I noticed that the inside of the drinking spout was dirty, and soaking it in hot soapy water didn’t help.

So the glory of my mind created bleach.  I soaked the top of the bottle in a bleach/water blend for two hours.  “I’ll clean it off really well afterwards under the tap, rinse it some more, then immerse it in a bath of clean water for a long time.”

Whew!  I remain fascinated with my brain.  In what universe would this procedure be considered benign?  But I remained cheerfully ignorant, trusting that the gods of cleanliness would protect me.  Silly, dangerous Bruce!

It was time for the first sip in the gym.  Metal!  Toxic!  Stupid!  My trust in the universe had neglected the fact that, while the body of the bottle was hard plastic, the drinking spout was rubber.  As in easily absorbing what it’s bathing in.

Not being entirely dense, I stopped drinking after two sips.  I passed through a vague nausea as my arms and legs did their thing on the elliptical machine.

Then I spent a few minutes shaking my head.

Next I sat in a gym chair and searched for a replacement bottle from the same manufacturer – Contigo. 

It arrived today.  The observant among you will notice not turquoise but blue … my new and improved bottle.  Which goes nicely with my new and improved Bruce.

There’s a second part to this story, which I will reveal tomorrow.  It involves a quirk of mine, and delightful OCDness, which my dear wife Jody used to call “a Bruce idiotsyncrasy”.

Stay tuned

I love trains.  As a 20-year-old I crossed most of Canada to reach my first away-from-home job.  There was a dome car, and I saw the world from up high.  Even the Northern Lights.

I remember another overnight trip.  I left my seat, seeking the bathroom.  And I passed all these sleeping folks in the dark.  It was a privilege to see human beings at rest.

Now that I live in Belgium, the train has become larger in my life, with trips to London, Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Lille and Leuven.

For the last few months, an old loved song has re-emerged, bubbling up in my soul.  And what bubbles needs to be expressed.

So I’m learning the lyrics for “City of New Orleans”.  The title is the name of a train in the USA.  It travels 1455 kilometres (904 miles) from Chicago south to New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico.  Twenty-five hours.

Steve Goodman wrote the song in 1971.  He died in 1984 but his poetry of the train lives on.  And, God willing, it will live on a few Fridays from now at an open mic session at Salvatore’s.

Here are the lines I love:

Along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out of Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields
Passing trains that have no name
And freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of rusted automobiles

Dealing cards with the old men in the club car
Penny a point, and no one keepin’ score
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin’ ‘neath the floor

Mothers with their babes asleep
Are rockin’ to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel

Halfway home, we’ll be there by mornin’
Through the Mississippi darkness, rollin’ down to the sea

The conductor sings his songs again
The passengers will please refrain
This train’s got the disappearin’ railroad blues

***

O my goodness

I’m going to sing these fine words

And may the audience ride the City of New Orleans at my side

The film “explores the precarious lives of two migrant workers, Reginald (a Romanian construction worker) and Niki (a Greek bicycle courier), in Brussels, Belgium.”

Last night I was there, in the Sphinx movie theatre.  And so were perhaps a hundred other cinema lovers.

Reginald and a friend didn’t have Belgian work permits … but they had to eat.  A building owner hired them to renovate an apartment.  They worked for two weeks – ripping down and then building up.  When the job was done, the owner threw 300 euros at them and started phoning the police when they protested the ripoff.  So much anger, so much despair.  We the audience felt it with them.

During the 90 minutes, my mind flowed between the story and the people sitting before me – black figures with hints of grey at the edges.  I fell in love with these ghostly human beings whose lives I didn’t know.  And then the story returned …

Niki had a bicycle that didn’t work well, but it was the lifeline for her to survive.   When the chain came off, she knelt down to get it back on, wiping the grease off on the leaves of weeds.  At one point she had the food order, and stood in front of a sprawling complex with no idea of how to find the person who did the ordering.  And no answer on the phone.  More despair.

Towards the end, Niki and a fellow bicycle courier sat on a wall, talking about their lives, their struggles, their dreams.

I was with Niki and Reginald

I was with my fellow audience members

***

After the screening the lights came on, and four men took a seat facing us: the director of the film, a fellow who advocates for people who don’t have a Belgian work permit, a union rep for bicycle couriers, and the interviewer.

The conversation was in Dutch.  The commitment of the four was vivid.  And so was the kindness of the young man who sat beside me.  He translated a lot of the panel’s comments.  “Thank you for translating.  That was nice of you.”

It was a fine evening

***

This post was to be about trains.  Maybe tomorrow!

“Loose in the vowels.”  I love that phrase.  I’ve said it for forty years or more.  Some people laugh.  It makes them happy.

My writing feels different – oozy, without a structure.  I wanted to talk about a train today, and maybe I still will.  But perhaps not.

I just lingered for 45 minutes in Panos Langemunt, eating my sandwich.  As I sat down, I made eye contact and smiles with four oriental women – one older and three younger.

As I savoured the tomato, cheese and ham, a flowing language wafted over me.  Lovely.  Eventually I asked “Are you speaking Mandarin?” 

That’s all it took … a simple question.  And we were off to the races about life and living.  Topics appearing and disappearing, carried by the flow of the moments.

The older woman didn’t appear to speak English but one of the younger ones translated.  “She wants to know if you’d like a Chinese girlfriend.”  I leaned towards the curious lady, professing my eternal love.

“No, no … she’s talking about her friend, who lives in China.” 

Oh. 

“Hmm.  I don’t think I can afford the flight.”

Etcetera

I love trains too.  That story will be born tomorrow.

Yesterday I started writing again on Jetpack.  It felt good. 

For years I’ve followed the same procedure to transfer posts to Facebook.  What happened each time was what I wanted: the Facebook user saw the title of my post and usually a photo, as long as it was in landscape mode, not portrait.

And then yesterday … no title, no photo – just brucearcherkerr.com.  Clicking that would give people my full post with a photo, but I want the impact immediately, not after a click.

So, after all of that, something is different in my mind:

1.  It’s not important that the first view shows a title and photo.  I smile at the lack of something, rather than furrowing my brow.

2.  I don’t know how to fix this.  I Googled my problem and the AI on my new phone gave me a long procedure for how to have my Jetpack posts automatically transferred to Facebook.  Maybe I’ll end up following those instructions, but I’ve enjoyed transferring the file manually and adding a second title for Facebook.

3.  Maybe when I finish writing this post, the problem will have magically disappeared.

4.  If it hasn’t, I’ll write a P.S. post, looking for someone out there in cyberland to help me.

5.  Arching over everything is a sweet “All is well”.

***

Okay, enough of that.  Let’s see what happens when I post this.  Fingers crossed.

From August 4 till August 13, I was at a silent meditation retreat in the United States.  When I left Barre, Massachusetts, I had no interest in writing.  Something had changed.

I wrote one more post, and since then … silence.

Until this morning.

I’ve written 2,289 posts on WordPress/Jetpack and Facebook over the last eleven years.  And now … perhaps I have nothing left to say.

But I don’t think that’s true.

It’s a mystery why I picked up my phone a few minutes ago and started tapping.  There were no thoughts, such as “You really should do this” or “Some people miss your writing.”  The body knew it was time.

At one point last year I wrote for 120 days in a row.  And now I essentially haven’t written for a month.  Ahh … the rhythms of life.

I’m very loose after the meditation retreat.  There are spaces everywhere, such as in my body.  Life feels slow, like a slow-motion dance.  If there’s a destination, I know it not.

***

Hmm.  I wrote.  How ’bout that