I'm David. This is my website, mostly devoted to showcasing my thoughts on literature, music, movies, and anything else that interests me. I'm not paid or professional reviewer. I am merely an enthusiast. Occasionally, my reviews will be from advance copies provided by publishers and through official channels.I will note the procurement of review copies every time

I am a wheelchair user, have cerebral palsy,, use various forms of dictation software to transcribe, edit and revise my thoughts. Every effort will be made to ensure typographical and grammatical accuracy, but mostly I'm here to share my thoughts, to have a place outside of social media to write long formwork – regardless of perfect compositional and typographical precision. My editorial revisions will be ongoing as I continue to catch mistakes, and refine errors here and there. This website  meant to be a platform for polished thinking that strives for excellent quality, not punishing professionalism.

I recognize the value in pristine copy, existing as it does to facilitate clear communication. But when I enumerate all th hours that I spent undergrad, and in my subsequent failures in grad school and law school to achieve that flawlessness, I refuse to allow thar quioxic chase, get in the way of my thinking - and my fun.  

 

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    Tuesday
    Jul012025

    Gaze Upon Western Stars: The comfort, cosmology, and glimmer of Springsteen's contemplative concert film 

     Since the fall of 2019, I have been lingering in the beautifully lit, tastefully festooned hayloft of Bruce Springsteen’s barn in Colts Neck, New Jersey. I am neither a sinister intruder nor a marauding ghoul; I’m simply an invited guest, dropping in to enjoy the resilient twilight of Western Stars.  Western Stars is a constellation: the intricacies of songwriting, live performance, lighting, and revelatory camerawork converge to create a cozy, accessible, and immersive  landmark concert film. Released during the initial waves of the still present coronavirus pandemic, Western Stars offers an enduring opportunity to examine the roughhewn borders between the individual and community, of advancement and rooted contentment.

    Prior to the beginning note of the first album track featured Western Stars. Springsteen harnesses the visual landscape and oratory power afforded him as co-director. His voiceover guides the camera to the stage – to give the viewer a moment behind the mic – before flying into the rafters.  The title card rolls. The first plucked   melody twangs not from Bruce’s big cherry red country guitar, but from the spritely banjo played by one of his assembled cadre of musicians. The attention to detail, the intermingling of visual language and refined song arrangements, form the firmament of Western Stars.

    Consider, for instance, the first four songs featured in the Western Stars film. “Hitch Hikin'" is bathed in cool cobalt backlight. The gradual ascent and gentle decline in the banjo/steel guitar rises and falls with the hopes of the listless traveler about whom Springsteen sings. “The Wayfarer” is cloaked in a deep blue-black stage light – shadows withholding the imminent dawn – as a propulsive chord pattern faithfully conjures the hypnotic rhythm of highway travel. “Tuscan Train” glows under the orange stage spotlight of dawn, as the music, bounds onward, buoyed by strings, produces a rhythmic churn; the clicking drums and spitting twang of Springsteen’s vocals are a perfect fit for an anxious rail worker awaiting the arrival of a lost love. The marquee “Western Stars,“and their diminishing but still present radiance, are bathed in the stage light of golden sunshine. Springsteen sings about departed legends and still dynamic frontiers – the glory of which can't be wholly compromised by nationalistic narrowmindedness-even as many of the giants of the silver screen and horizon are lost to the relentless passage of time. There is anguish in Springsteen’s eyes and voice  as he propels through the quaking existentialism of failed relationships, contentious age, and the regretful sorrow that has always underpinned his most quixotic and memorable lovelorn losers. Even in the shadow of these hues, these anthems of the formidable West retain an irrepressible sense of satisfaction at feats accomplished and lineages invoked.

    Despite the earnestness and concentrated effort on display in Western Stars, one might be forgiven for thinking that it is the peak of bland Boomer idealism and artistic excess. The film is mostly shot in the barn of one of the last remaining septuagenarian rock superstars, complete with a 30-piece orchestra, background singers, banjo players, percussion, and occasional boisterous brass. The songs themselves are supplemented by sweeping drone shots of horses roaming free in the vast expanses of the California desert. Sonically, these sequences are buttressed by a yearning, cinematic orchestral score composed by Springsteen, and an unseen session orchestra – likely utilizing a synthetic secret or two. Not satisfied, Springsteen adds an additional layer of ornateness by including carefully articulated voiceovers to give context for each song; he underscores the thematic corollaries to his previous work, and to the work of his California pop idols.  Sometimes Springsteen delivers monologues directly to the camera, exercising muscles and sensibilities he honed on the Broadway stage. As such, a certain largesse, and a shimmering illusory exceptionalism of the Great American West are very present. Some viewers might find this wrought presentation to amount to too much finery and too little substance.

    There are certainly anachronistic touchups in the landscape and the soundscape of Western Stars’ celluloid crinkle. These moments do not reckon with – or even engage with – the craven past of imperialism nor the present-day ramifications of that spikiness. There are moments of clumsiness in the filmmaking and songwriting that imbue the work with some staleness. The protagonist in the “Western Stars” song, about whom Springsteen wrenchingly sings, recalls a brief encounter he had with an aged John Wayne. Wayne is certainly a reasonable cultural reference point for the evocated era, but he was also a toxic combative racist.  Wayne expressed this bigotry explicitly and succinctly in his 1971 Playboy interview with Richard Warren Lewis. Of particular interest to the affectionate, bemused encounter that Springsteen’s protagonist recalls in “Western Stars”, is Wayne’s explicit endorsement of white supremacy and the lethal force used to continuously displace and murder the indigenous populations in the land that became the United States.

    PLAYBOY: Angela Davis claims that those who would revoke her teaching credentials on ideological grounds are actually discriminating against her because she's black. Do you think there's any truth in that?

    WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.[1]

    PLAYBOY:  ....let's change the subject. For years American Indians have played an important—if subordinate—role in your Westerns. Do you feel empathy with them?

     WAYNE: I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.2]                    


    [1] G Barry Golson.[Editor] 1981. The Playboy Interview. [Vol. 1]. New York: Wideview, Page 268.

    [2] G Barry Golson. [Editor] 1981. The Playboy Interview. [Vol. 1]. New York: Wideview Books. Page 269

     
    Clearly, John Wayne’s legacy is not one of an unvarnished, sterling silver screen legend whose spotless shine should still be understood as a luminous beacon.  One might hope that Springsteen could have referenced the John Wayne mythos in a way that acknowledged the mirage of halcyon Hollywood, or perhaps as a commentary on the ways in mythmaking regularly requires the resulting flaws in our heroes to be buried for the sake of the narrative nobility. Springsteen opts for simple iconography instead: . The sequences in which Springsteen dons a cowboy hat and engages in rough-and-tumble Wayne-esque saddle work, accompanied by the films swooning orchestral score, suggest Wayne is earnestly revered in Western Stars; he is a diminished, yet remarkable symbol of rugged greatness, etched into the dreamscape through his unyielding audacity.

     So too does the ecstasy of “Sleepy Joe’s Café,” anchored as it is by the post-World War II G.I. Bill, invoke a boon, bestowed mostly upon white members of the American Armed Forces. By contrast the 21st -century G.I. Bills, passed in the still unfolding aftermath of an ambiguous “War On Terror”, are contentious, arguably inadequate, and do not seem to have unleashed the same kind of generational fortune for returning members of the Armed Forces.  Indeed, the jubilant accordion dancehall whirl of “Sleepy Joe’s Café,” tucked into a quaint two stepping corner of San Bernardino, does not spare, time, space or breath for introspective interrogations of its glistening glee, nor for meaningful extrapolations of present-day parallels 

    Western Stars, and its chosen hallmarks, can, in moments, present succinct and sealed up spectacle. These choices might disappoint those viewers who are aware of Springsteen’s more nuanced exploration of cowboys, frontiers and terribly haunting deserts.  Indeed, Western Stars shares some thematic terrain with The Ghost Of Tom Joad and the Devils & Dust albums. The  Ghost of Tom Joad is a collection of songs focused on the grit and grime of  the southwestern frontier; those toiling for generations in the long shadow of the Dust Bowl; the poverty stricken desperation of those living on, working through, and crossing borders of all kinds., Devils &Dust contends with those caught  in arid regions of marginalization; desperate soldiers in the war-torn  fronts of the War on Terror, uncertain and exasperated as they attempt to reconcile their way home. Still, for all its buffered edges, its comparative thematic simplicities, Western Stars is an awe, awash in technicolor.

    Even a film that might be insufficiently radical and interrogatory can serve as a catalyst for critical thinking, a testament to the grasp of the virtuoso, and perhaps (at least) the varnish of verisimilitude. Sometimes, the circumstances surrounding the release of a piece of art, the context of the world into which it is introduced, and the importance that art has for the audience who seeks and finds it, may give that art greater consequential value than its merits and aims would otherwise warrant.

    And for me and the jagged frontiers of my harangued psyche, Western Stars became a place of regenerative solace. The film became a gathering space of sorts; an ode to the hope of a safe, shared simmering live performance; scintillating enough to dare the viewer, to come inside and stay a while. Western Stars was briefly released in theaters in October 2019, just as the whispers of a pandemic started coalescing into an alarmed shout. Eventually, repeated, desperate, unheeded warnings became an unfathomable invitation for some people to engage in the worst kind of selfish and reckless destruction. As public health officials pleaded prudential caution, hampered from the start by the insatiable appetite of the market to marshal everything back into a profitable normalcy, Western Stars appeared on HBOMAX.;A pastiche of bespoke timelessness, released at a much-needed real-world moment

    Western Stars is, as Springsteen’ reminds us,: “a 13 some meditation on the struggle between individual freedom and communal life.” The hitchhikers, cowboys, hopeful songwriters, horse wranglers, stuntmen, and faded background players of burgeoning Hollywoodland are classic Springsteen characters: the freedom of the horizon offers as much dread as it does joy.  Take, for example, “Chasin Wild Horses” or “Stones”

    A fingernail moon in a twilight sky

    I’m ridin’ in the high grass of the switchback

    I shout your name into the canyon

    The echo throws it back

    Chasing wild horses

     

    and

    I woke up this morning with stones in my mouth

    You said those are only the lies you’ve told me

    Those are only the lies you’ve told me

    Loneliness and deception are always out there, on the flipside – and backside! – of imagined freedom. Escaping those boomerangs is not possible, even during the most unrestrained moments of joy. The seductive and unsatisfactory specter of nostalgia offers its shallow escape. Even though a co-extensively flourishing community – that perpetually elusive and unexplored frontier – is a promise guaranteed to no one, the pursuit of love and community remains the worthiest of human endeavors.  Or as a sanguine Springsteen voiceover puts it:

    “Love is one of the only miracles God has given us daily proof of this earth and while we do our best to disprove this idea, love is there to better us. But you must work for its blessings. Love and creative life it births is a small, sweet sign of God’s divinity within us”  

    Within the frames of Western Stars, this kind of love is most present in the camaraderie on display in Springsteen’s duets with his wife, Patti Scialfa. The film transforms the tracks on the closing half of the Western Stars record into an exploration of the affection and afflictions shouldered between two lovers. On the original audio album, “Stones” and “Moonlight Motel,”, are bleak portraits of failure, fatigue and emptiness, in the magic of the movie barn, Bruce and Patti share their lies and trials together. Every member of the crew and assembled musicians continue to weave their own magic. The audience, close by and tucked in by terrific camerawork and sound design, is invited to surrender to the mesmerizing precision and grace of the performance.

     

    Western Stars includes so many of these kinds of subtle, but profound embellishments that the film has become the best way to experience the album. The movie manages to be a standout for an artist who has already released many excellent live recordings, filmed live recordings, and behind-the-scenes documentaries. It’s a monumental achievement for Springsteen – the songwriter and director – to warn the audience of his intention to make some magic and then pull off the trick! He merrily casts a spell, twirls in the trappings of cliché, and still inscribes a new legend into the starry sky.

    Western Stars includes so many of these kinds of subtle, but profound embellishments that the film has become the best way to experience the album. The movie manages to be a standout for an artist who has already released many excellent live recordings, filmed live recordings, and behind-the-scenes documentaries. It’s a monumental achievement for Springsteen – the songwriter and director – to warn the audience of his intention to make some magic and then pull off the trick! He merrily casts a spell, twirls in the trappings of cliché, and still inscribes a new legend into the starry sky.

     As I conclude this reflection, it is July of 2025. The widespread aspects of the coronavirus pandemic have receded somewhat, – for some – for now. The long-term consequences of so much disruption and hostility are unknowable. Newly appointed public health officials have rejected long-standing, effective methods to treat public health crises. These officials seem to value individual autonomy (for some) at the expense of emphasizing the shared responsibility to mitigate health crises through evidence-based public conduct, vaccines, and other medical interventions, that best protect high-risk populations. Simultaneously, an eagerness to extend the dominion and domination of the United States in every conceivable direction has emerged.

     Given these trends, I am reminded that art is not – and cannot be – the sole corrective to the shortcomings of a restricted, reckless, and corrosive national imagination. Nor is transcendent artistry a replacement for concrete political aspirations and action. Those who are most complicit in oppressive violence will always find a way to see themselves as the noble, downtrodden heroes of the songs: they are justified in whatever they deem necessary to combat anyone who threatens their perceived providential liberty. 

    While Springsteen certainly produces work that has interrogable political dimensions and prodding, America is a group project; a nation that cannot be salvaged – or doomed – through the efforts of a single seductively charismatic figure. America is actualized by everyone living within it. Voters, activists, elected officials, and government workers shape policy. Everyone else contends with how to treat those in their chosen community, to whom they might render aid and affection, and those who might fall outside of that scope. The parameters of political prioritization thus emerge. Who matters? Which group of citizens and noncitizens living in America deserve attention, care, protection, and access to the resources that make life enjoyably livable?

    Springsteen’s songcraft endures precisely because his flawed characters and memorable settings are so vivid. Perhaps this descriptive vitality can sustain attention and investment amongst his splintered listening audience. Springsteen can only control his craft, intentions and actions, the misappropriation of which is always lurking. So too is the danger that Springsteen could become convinced that he is, in fact, the salvific troubadour of the American soul.

    Still,Springsteen has returned to the stage and made his personal dissatisfaction with the current administration and political moment clear. He routinely unleashes pre-song speeches contextualizing his choice to perform certain songs as a direct commentary on the corrupt cruelty of current political leadership. In person concert attendance has also returned to a manageable level of pandemic safety and risk for me. I saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band live in concert on March 23, 2023. It was magnificent.  As I expected, none of the Western Stars songs were played. The concert film remains the only performance of the album. I hope it stays that way. 

    Nothing can supplant in-person concert experiences, but through exceptional skill dedication – and the harrowing real-world circumstances of its release –, Western Stars proves that there can be innovation, profundity, and magnificence in the concert film. Concert films can extend metaphysical community, create accessible sights, sounds, and memories that cannot be replicated through in person experiences.

     Yes, the nature of the concert facilitates an insular and individual experience, but that doesn't make this type of concert any less remarkable or precious. As a wheelchair using person, the frontlines of concerts – replete with the frenzied ecstatic standing room stalls, and impenetrable waves of outstretched arms –have always been, and will likely remain decidedly inaccessible to me. The Western Stars film provides the straightforward immediacy I've always craved in my concert going. Close encounters of the agape kind. I pe artists use the concert film as an opportunity to make an artistically arresting presentation of filmed performance.  The afterglow of Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars will remain a kaleidoscopic orientation for my future concert film experiences.

    If you have never watched Western Stars, make a rental or purchase. I'll save you a seat in the barn.