This image contains coded patterns which mystically herald the coming of the Apocalypse or some crap.
Island Packet (Stolen Hastily From November 2009) — ‘What do you think about this 2012 madness?” Paul Mitchell asks me via the newsroom’s instant-message system earlier this week. Paul Mitchell is a line of high-end hair care products, but he also is an actual human person who works in the newsroom. At one time Paul, being of a considerably younger vintage, failed to correctly identify Bruce Springsteen on the television. Illogically, we’re friends anyway.
The movie looks like silliness, I reply, but on the other hand, “Independence Day” was a pretty great movie in which many objects were indiscriminately exploded, such as the White House and Lone Star from “Spaceballs,” so it might be fun.
“Not the movie,” Paul says, an icy fear creeping noticeably into his online voice. “All I gotta say is I’m panicking if that mess comes my way in three years.”
Paul was, I surmised, referring to the Mayan prophecy that says the end of times will take place in the year 2012. It’s also the hook of “2012,” a new movie by destroyed-landmark fetishist and director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow”) that stars John Cusack, both of whom, it turns out, appear in a strong percentage of Mayan prophecies. In their lore, Cusack is actually immortal.
Thrilled and honored to contribute to the relaunched — and slick-looking! — official site of Bruce Springsteen, as part of a team that includes such Bruce luminaries as Chris Phillips, editor of the legendary Backstreetsmagazine, Caryn Roseand Glenn Radecki. The site’s a treasure box for Bruce fans and features blurbs for albums, tours and videos, which feature my contributions throughout. If you’re interested, I also wrote a handful of band bios, including those for Springsteen, Stevie Van Zandt, Nils LofgrenandSoozie Tyrell. Check it out!
Twice now, through no appreciable talent or skill of my own, I’ve been lucky enough to fly to New York City— at not very many moments’ notice — to stalk Bruce Springsteen. I did it last year when he performed on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” thanks to the success and unprovoked generosity of an old friend who books the musical talent and is inexplicably gracious to inveterate obsessives. On that first tripa buddy and I found ourselves, suddenly and without adequate warning, in a conversation with Bruce Springsteen about children, parenting and the community of siblings, a three-minute galactic improbability that sort of resulted in the birth of my second son. (Long story.)
I did the same last week (fly to New York, not have a son), due to a second lightning strike of luck and babysitting, and found myself once again in the lobby at 30 Rock swarmed by a buzzing mass of Bruce people and happily dazed tourists. As it turned out, one of the swarming people in our ticket line looked a lot like Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers, a band that I’ve stalked a fair amount as well (my Billboard review of “I And Love And You,” and me interviewing them at Bonnaroo in 2010). You know that thing where you stare at somebody like an idiot, trying to see if it’s really that guy, but you can’t tell, and the wifi doesn’t work so you can’t Google image him so you stand there like a hopeless yokel until someone else confirms the identity for you? You do? Great.
The show, of course, was a delirious joy. Springsteen made a babushka joke, which, as a dutiful Slovak, I’m pretty sure was written just for me (thanks, Boss). The ’80s-bandanna/LMFAO sketchwas a perfect sequel. There was a bit during a commercial break in which the zipper on Springsteen’s black leather jacket got stuck, and the short version is for three minutes off-air two women struggled to free a fake-panicking Bruce Springsteen from his clothes while Jimmy Fallon impersonated Bruce’s preacher-man persona and the Roots laid down what I think was polka music. I very much enjoyed writing that sentence.
GateHouse — For about five years, I’ve struggled in vain to understand why my now-second-grader likes the random, totally disconnected assortment of songs he does. (I have also struggled to understand why he doesn’t like milk in his cereal and how the sentence “JUST GO GET DRESSED” can be so apparently difficult to process.)
In his early years, my Kid Playlist consisted of age-appropriate-enough fare — Bob Marley, Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions record and pleasing old-timey stuff like “Beans and Cornbread” — music suited mostly to circumnavigating the southeastern United States in preposterous and doomed attempts to get him to engage in one of these “naps” we kept hearing other parents rave about. (“Wait, these weird leaking marshmallowpuffs SLEEP?” my wife and I would think, in rare moments of lucidity buried deep within months-long clouds of Folgers-powered hallucinations, “In the DAYTIME?”)
These days, however, it’s a little easier. I can tell if he’s going to like a song if it’s by the Dropkick Murphys.
The Murphys, for the benefit of any non-music-nerd readers (Hi, Mom! He’s fine, please stop worrying), are a group of Boston-based Irish punks that looks like it makes records in the rare moments when it’s not smashing Sam Adams bottles over the heads of bespectacled stick-figures like yours truly and shouting unprintable things at Jeter (pausing now, to cross two things off of my List Of Exceedingly Obvious Boston References). Singer Ken Casey has a voice that sounds like it’s being dragged down a gravel driveway. “This band makes me want to run fast,” my son says. I’m listening to them now in the coffee shop, and it’s taking a considerable amount of discipline to not smash my laptop on the tile floor and pick a fight with a neighbor, which is good, as many of them are old, and this is my wife’s computer.
Metromix — Usually, it goes like this: An actor has a hit movie, gets famous, surrounds himself with parasitic hangers-on who can’t say no, eventually asks one of them, “Hey, so I should start a band, right?” and waits for that person to not say no.
Swarm of the Plaid People. From left: myself, Ben French, Bruce and Jonathan Cohen.
On about a dozen occasions in just under five minutes, it becomes clear that the person talking to me is Bruce Springsteen. This, in case you are wondering, never stops feeling like getting walloped by a large rolling boulder, or shoved into an above-ground pool filled with half-melted ice cubes. You would think that after some time your brain would become used to realizing it’s maintaining eye contact with Actual Bruce Springsteen while simultaneously attempting to convince your hands to stop shaking like that, but curiously this never occurs. The net effect is that every few minutes I realize, for what seems like the first time, that I’m engaged in a real conversation with Bruce Springsteen and it would be best for everybody if I didn’t throw up or try to hug him.
Currently, Bruce Springsteen is talking to my friend Ben and I about parenting. I was introduced as having come to New York City from South Carolina, and Springsteen mentions how he just moved his daughter to Duke, and as someone who has equated Duke with cartoonish supervillainy since the early ’90s, I note that in talking to Bruce Springsteen for 14 seconds we’ve stumbled into the only topic on which I’ve ever really disagreed with him.
Ben (who is executive producer at RollingStone.com) mentions the pocket-sized baby girl his wife delivered two weeks prior, and this redirects the conversation into the kind of small talk you might have at the play gym, about how one day they’re newborns and the next day you’re moving them into a dorm and sweet weeping Jesus I’m talking to Bruce Springsteen about children and family units and how he and Patti — it’s strange the conventional role she plays in this particular narrative — enjoyed and facilitated their kids’ closeness. I should make clear that I’m completely paraphrasing this part, as obviously I have zero recall of the words Bruce Springsteen actually used when he was talking to me — for all I know he could have been reciting detailed schematics of the Starship Enterprise in Farsi — but I got the gist of it, or at least more than I would have thought I could while concentrating on not babbling like a drugged maniac.
Paste — Bruce Springsteen’s most recent eyebrow-removing live documentary is evidence that the aging process may be purely theoretical. “IS THERE ANYBODY ALIVE OUT THERE?” he shouts all of 12 minutes into the show, throwing down the gauntlet to the behemoth Hard Rock Calling Festival audience with a crazy-eyed boxer’s glare that’s part statement of purpose and part f*#&-you to the AARP Magazine cover. London Calling: Live at Hyde Park then explodes open with its ace in the hole: Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt tearing into the Clash like two scuzzy-looking punks thirsting to prove themselves, which is, of course, profoundly insane: By the time London Calling was shot in June 2009, Springsteen and the E Street Band, most loitering around the parking lot of 60, were firing on all cylinders, inventing more cylinders and then firing on those too, laying waste to festivals and towns huge and small with three-hour sweat-fests highlighted by nightly Stump The Band requests delivered via creative poster boards (the DVD’s: the Young Rascals’ fest-ready “Good Lovin’”).
GateHouse — A Gallup poll has found that professional men today are wearing fewer neckties than ever, which is, more than anything, a shocking commentary on the state of American polls, which are evidently more boring than ever. Really? Neckties? Did you guys already ask everything there was to ask about sex?
But in even more damning news, after 60 years, the trade group of American necktie makers Men’s Dress Furnishing Association shut down, having seen its membership dwindle from 120 to 25 in recent years, which is both a response to the industry downturn and the main reason their pot-luck dinners have gotten so awful.
To stop those monsters, 1-2-3 / Here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free / It's got Paul Anka's guaranteeeeeee
Island Packet — So they opened a Dunkin’ Donuts in Beaufort. I know they opened a Dunkin’ Donuts in Beaufort because I have been pleading for it, because I have bothered the business reporter about it for months with the fierce relentlessness of the tiger, because I lived for a short while at the work site, having built a lean-to out of whatever discarded items I could scrounge up — tires, playground equipment, THANK YOU VERIZON FOR YOUR ROCK-SOLID SPONSORSHIP signs — and waited patiently, living there for months, like the “Into The Wild” guy except less in search of pure personal revelation and more of things filled with jelly that leave your face a swamp of icing.
I did this not necessarily just for the donuts, but also for the majestic moment when I could walk through that door, into that breathtaking wonderland of dough and sprinkles and future heart concerns, and order a Large Coffee With Cream And Sugar, which represents the pinnacle of human achievement as it pertains to coffee and, as a bonus, arrives in a cup the approximate size of a container ship (with a Large Coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, one could, very easily, caffeinate a horse).
Now, I understand that some of you may be wondering what could possibly be worth getting this worked up about, but you are wondering this only if you’re the type for whom coffee is a fleeting pleasure, rather than something required by your addicted, shattered DNA if you hope to consider getting out of the bed in the morning. If this is the case, we have little in common.
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, South Magazine, Nickelodeon's NickMom.com, Billboard, brucespringsteen.net and Paste, a syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse and a father of two (the younger of whom has been personally approved by Bruce Springsteen) on the coast of South Carolina. Even longer bio/clips.
Paste
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, South Magazine, Nickelodeon's 
