Book Report
Greensboro did one of those city-wide book clubs that have swept the country--our book being A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines. I read it, then I wrote about it for the N&R.
Art on Paper
Last night was the opening party for the 37th Art on Paper show at the Weatherspoon Museum. It's a good show this year, and the acquisitions committee of the 'Spoon board bought some cool stuff, including a clown photograph by Roni Horn. AOP runs through January 19, 2003. Along with meeting artists who come to town, being on the acquistions committee is one of the most fun things I've done at the museum. Spending other people's money on art never gets old.
The truth is, though, that Lisa and I missed the opening party on Saturday evening, because we were standing with 20,000 + other middle-aged white people at the Greensboro Coliseum yelling....
...Bruuuuuce
Springsteen played for almost three hours, drawing heavily on the new album for the first part of the show, with more old favorites toward the end. Just as there was nothing like a Grateful Dead concert, there is a you've-got-to-see-one-to-believe-it aspect to a Springsteen show. He is the hardest working man in show business--the Boss was onstage for every minute, sitting alone at a piano while the rest of the band took a break--and he puts such passion into his singing and playing that even a big room like the Coliseum ends up in the palm of his hand. The E Street Band seemed to be having fun, and Clarence still rocks.
You know how a crowd always goes nuts when the lyrics refer to their home? For Greensboro, that was the line about Junior Johnson in the woods of "Caroline" during "Cadillac Ranch." Funny how two of Springsteen's best-known songs are widely misunderstood--he introduced the not-actually-jingoistic "Born in the USA" as a call for peace, and blew the doors off "Born to Run," the unofficial anthem of New Jersey that is actually about getting the hell out of Jersey. I found the newer songs--the ones specifically about 9/11 and its aftermath--to be less compelling and sad than some of his older, more personal songs about loss and hope.
It was my fourth Springsteen show, going back to 1980, pushing the Boss past Neil Young on my lifetime concert attendance chart (that's still 20 or so shows shy of my Grateful Dead tally). I don't think I had been to a concert at the Greensboro Coliseum since seeing the Jacksons there circa 1981. The atmosphere at a Springsteen show has never been as counterculturish as those shows I savored at the Coliseum as a teenager in the '70s--Led Zeppelin and The Who, for example, were out-and-out bacchanalias--but last night's crowd (including me and my Jersey Girl wife) was as sober (and old) as any rock-concert audience I've ever seen.
3:23:20 PM 
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